Personality and culture: sometimes opposites are just opposite

Peace Corps is a two year experience of living, working, and integrating into communities of other countries and cultures, but it's also a long-term introspective study into our own personal beliefs, behaviors and perspective.  I've been living in Thailand for a year and a half now with most of that time spent on my own, attempting to get to know and integrate into a community that was completely foreign to me.  I've met a lot of people and integrated myself into a community that I now consider home.  I've also gotten to know myself in a much different way than I've ever been able to as I'm faced with new situations, environments and challenges.  I've had my fair share of down time, which more often than not means some quality time to get lost in my own head and ruminate on all sorts of things that I might not otherwise spend much time thinking about - like my own personal nuances and strengths and flaws and all things in between.

I've known for a long time that I'm more of an introvert than an extrovert.  I don't talk just to say things and I spend more time taking things in than I do talking about them.  There's a whole lot more going on in my head than ever comes out of my mouth.  I process things internally before ever beginning to verbalize them.  My mind is constantly on the go, processing, analyzing, interpreting, assessing, and asking questions.  I not only relish alone time, I need it for my own personal mental health.  I’m not good at small talk and would rather have in-depth conversations.  I hate being the center of attention and try to sneak toward the outer edges of big groups.  When faced with the prospect of public speaking, my mind immediately goes blank and I’m incapable of forming thoughts, let alone verbalizing them.  I need to be able to think through things before talking about them; I need to process things in my brain to come up with a well thought out response that might actually come out of my mouth.  I don’t prefer big groups and I’m totally comfortable doing just about anything on my own.  While these parts of my personality have certainly contributed to challenges and difficulties throughout my life, I’ve learned to appreciate and embrace them. 

My time spent in Thailand has proved to be a constant challenge to all of my introverted tendencies.  Small talk is an integral part of my daily life and rarely do I engage in deep discussions.  I’m usually the center of attention no matter where I go because I’m the only non-Thai person around.  I’m often forced into the center of large group gatherings, put in a position for plenty of people to stare at me.  I’ve been handed a microphone too many times to count while being put on the spot to introduce myself, talk about something or answer questions.  People accompany me as often as possible, sometimes just because they don’t want me to be alone (people ask me ‘are you scared?’ on a regular basis – regarding anything from running alone in broad daylight to taking a bus by myself).  While I’ve adapted and learned to deal with these things with a decreased amount of inner anxiety and loathing than usual, the idea that these things are all directly contradictory to the core being of who I am never escapes my mind.

Peace Corps is a myriad of challenges: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, personal, and everything in between.  I knew coming in that it would be hard in any number of ways, and I expected to be challenged.  But facing challenges that go against my personality and the very essence of who I am?  I’m not sure I knew what I was getting myself into.  Sure, I knew I’d be thrown well out of my comfort zone in a country that's much different than the one I was coming from and I was willing to deal with that.  I didn’t realize how hard it would be sometimes to force myself, against all my natural instincts, to do the things I usually shy away from – the things that generally terrify me.  Introducing myself to strangers in a foreign language on a daily basis?  It happens.  Engaging in small talk about what I ate, what I will eat, or what I will buy at the market to eat later?  It's part of my daily routine.  Having a microphone shoved in my face and being told to talk about myself?  I can't say I enjoy it, but I've learned to become a little more comfortable with it.  Dealing with my daily language struggles and mistakes, often getting laughed at for some error in tone pronunciation that turns an everyday word into a dirty one?  It's happened, probably more than I even realize.  

Living in Thailand hasn’t transformed my personality, nor did I expect or want it to.  If anything I often speak less, either due to inefficient language skills to contribute to a conversation or because the people around me are speaking the local dialect in a way that makes my head spin if I listen to it long enough.  I’ve realized, through conversations with and side comments from Thai people, that they often misconstrue my silence as lack of understanding or lack of interest.  My mind here works in many of the same ways it did in America, only now I do it in two languages instead of one.  If I’m not running through a list of questions that constantly badger my brain here, I’m mentally repeating the sentence structure of someone speaking because I notice I’ve been saying something wrong – or I’m formulating my own response in my head to a question in the local language.  I’m not totally sure how this comes across to Thai people all the time, and I’ve questioned it internally many times.  I often explain to people that my understanding of spoken Thai language is more developed than my verbal abilities and that sometimes it takes me a little longer to formulate a complete, verbal response to something, meaning that keeping up with a group conversation while also being able to actively contribute to it can be seriously challenging.  I've explained a few times that even in America I’m a generally quiet person; I’m ok with silence and I don’t feel the need to talk just so something is being said.  I'm not sure they really understand this, but it's important to me for them to see these parts of me and accept them while potentially altering their preconceived notions of farangs or Americans - so I try to explain anyway. With all the cultural and language differences and challenges I’ve faced in the last year, this often just adds an extra struggle to this already challenging experience.  Despite that, it's important to me.  While I want to integrate and get to know people and be respectful of cultural norms, I also want to be free to be myself in a way that allows my community to get to know me for who I am, not for who they think I might or should be.  

I’ve tried to adapt to these unique challenges like I’ve had to adapt to so many other things here, both physical and mental.  I push myself to engage in the small talk that's always been challenging for me.  I try to remember my name when a microphone is shoved in my face.  I smile when there’s hundreds of faces staring at me and try not to let my entire face show my internal anxieties.  I try to say things out loud sometimes instead of keeping everything in my head, at least so people will know I’m always interested.  Even with all the effort, it’s still hard.  Like any self-proclaimed introvert, I take plenty of time to myself.  I relish the weekend days I can spend at home with nothing to do.  I've often wondered if I feel a more pressing need for 'alone time' here because of the added mental efforts of hearing and speaking another language every day and constantly feeling like the center of attention and have often taken a bit more time to myself on the days I feel like I need it. 

I know I've changed in the 17 months that I've been in Thailand, in many small ways and probably some bigger ones that I won't truly realize until I'm far removed from this environment and experience.  Even considering that, I'm still going to go back to America as fundamentally the same person (with a lot of great/awful/gross/inspiring/heartwarming/terrifying stories).  Thailand won't make me an extrovert, no matter how many times they put me on stage or make me the center of attention; but it has made me more aware of my introverted nature as it affects other people, and I think that's something valuable that I can take with me from this experience.