I’ve been home from Nicaragua for over three weeks now and there is a sort of jet lag that lingers over me. As I type the draft for this blog even my phone drags. I realize that what I’ve been needing to put into words about my trip is the fact that I am shocked more about American culture than I am Nicaraguan culture. While I was there I felt no external or internal pressure to be anything other than myself.
I came home and quickly began to set back into the mindset that my life is a stage and my performance is being rated all of the time. This is a concept that our narracistic culture has created for us.
Everybody wants to be seen and everybody is striving to get noticed and passing it off as being confident and positive. We are at war with one another in the quest for likes and followers. I’m sick and tired of it all. To be honest if I did not know that my purpose was writing and blogging in this season I would delete it all. What I experienced in Nicaragua was freedom, from the bondage technology had cleverly slipped us into. It’s like a sick joke. I look back at the time I spent in middle school perfecting the myspace profile trends and the countless times I updated my Facebook status in high school just to get a response from my peers. I think about my Instagram layout and the anxiety I get when my color scheme looks off and I am infuriated by it.
I get likes and comments for being perfect or at least looking like it in America. I went out of the country and I jumped rope and played soccer and threw a frisbe and stumbled over the little bit of Spanish I knew for a whole week. God allowed me to experience community and freedom in a capacity I had never seen before and to have had to come back home to the same old mental shackles was traumatizing. I honestly do not know how to acclimate myself.
I pray for strength and wisdom in this season as I work towards a more balanced life. The biggest thing I learned on this trip is that there is a lot of time in the day when you leave your phone behind. So I’m racing the clock figuring out how to get time back with my phone in my hand.