An old friend of mine recently moved back home to the UK. She had expected to slot right back into her old network of friends and family but found that she had changed more than she had thought whilst away. She felt that she wasn’t quite the same person she had been when she left. Her worldview and her values had become subtly different. A new friend told me that one of the hardest things about moving to the UAE is the feeling that she doesn’t quite know who she is anymore.
When I looked at my residence visa for the first time and saw myself described as a ‘housewife,’ thirty years of earning a living and feminist beliefs rose up and grabbed my throat and screamed ‘nooooooo…’ That’s not to say there is anything wrong with being a ‘house wife,’ it’s just that I had never defined myself that way before. It wasn’t who I was. I was a wife and a mother (albeit at long distance with my children at university) but now, what else? I started to ponder on how I was going to reconstruct my sense of myself in this new and very different place.
Research in this area suggests that it is our memories and the reactions of others and their expectations of us that are two of the central planks on which we construct our personal identities. Old friends have an established sense of who we are, and so help us to maintain our identities when those identities are under threat from new experiences.
Moving to a new country implies that old friends are in short supply. Facing everyday challenges can leave us feeling less competent, less useful and more dependent on our spouses than ever before. And no one’s around to remind us that this is just a passing phase that most expats go through. Not knowing the rules result in our feeling foolish. Not knowing how to do ‘simple’ things like understanding people talking on the phone, and trying to get a word in edge-wise can lead to frustration. Remember that sense of incompetency, which overtook you when you passed the phone to your husband to get him to deal with it? Add to that is the discovery that his phone pings every time you spend any money on a credit card and you start to feel that, like Alice, you have fallen down that rabbit hole. What happened to that competent independent woman you used to be?
We project our identities in many different ways, through our dress, our language, our behavior and our choice of space. These decisions are guided by our values and help to create the boundaries that demonstrate similarities or differences between us and other people. Our behavior is the keystone that at the end of the day defines who we are. So take some space, think about what your values are and ask yourself how you are putting them into practice in the different areas of your life. Identify any discrepancy between what you believe and how you act and start to bring them in line with each other. I still have a long way to go, but the journey keeps me in touch with who I am, and that seems like a good place to start.
By SUE PARTRIDGE
ABOUT SUE PARTRIDGE:
Sue Partridge is a 56 year old British clinical psychologist at the American Center for Psychiatry and Neurology in Abu Dhabi.
