Fitting In

 

The other night I went to a bar, for the first time in Tajikistan. Context: this is a conservative country, and women don’t tend to go to bars. I’m not much of a drinker even when not breastfeeding, so bars aren’t something I tend to seek out. I’m not opposed either, though, so when some friends invited me out with them last weekend, I went.

I was there with four other Americans – one woman and three men. When we arrived, the other American woman and I were the only female customers in the bar.

And I totally froze up. I wasn’t scared exactly, but I felt wrong. It was exactly the kind of bar I liked back in DC, but here in Dushanbe it was all I could do not to twitch. It took me maybe thirty minutes to relax and begin to enjoy myself.

Overthinker that I am, I spent the next two days wondering why. Dushanbe is a pretty safe place, and nothing all that bad is going to happen in an upscale bar aimed at people who like soccer. Here’s what I came up with:

I’ve spent a decent amount of my life in situations where my physical safety depended on fitting in to local culture. In Cairo in particular, but also in Pakistan and the rest of the Middle East and rural Central Asia. When I don’t fit in, it is generally by deliberate choice. I don’t want it to happen by accident, and the bar was an accident. I hadn’t thought enough about it to make a choice.

All of that being said, deciding how I fit into the culture of the country hosting me isn’t a one-time decision for me. It’s a process, all the time. I can’t just pick a spot and stay with it. I choose over and over, every moment. Other people seem like they have this all worked out. They figure out how they want to approach it and then they do. But I don’t. I just make it up again every day.

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(photo credit: The Cable Show)

The actual bar was darker and more leather-y than this picture.

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