Whilst I was living in Zimbabwe, it had been okay for me to show little or no emotion. In fact, that was what was necessary for me, in order to get along. In Australia, it was the opposite. You had to show a lot of emotion to be accepted. The thing was, I couldn't. I had too much of a backlog of feelings about encountering strangeness and dealing with loss. So, I couldn't express my any of deeper feelings and I choked up. For ten years, I couldn't speak too clearly about myself or my reactions, and then when I did start to speak again, I'd learned from books, and my words came out in a stilting fashion much like academic jargon.
I knew it was wrong for me to speak of the past, for I was deemed to be celebrating it rather than mourning it. Yet without speaking of the past, I was doomed to a life of ever more increasing stoicism, a stiff upper lip and an inability to be done with whatever it was -- I wasn't sure -- I'd left behind.
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