As much as I love living overseas, there’s a part of me that aches for permanency, normalcy, security. They are feelings I have stuffed down and suppressed for most of my adult life. Now that there’s a possibility of fulfilling them, they have risen to the surface. I never realized how much I longed for a homeland until it was finally at my fingertips. The appeal is strong. Which is exactly why I must push back against that feeling and remind myself that America was never meant to be my homeland. 

I’ve been a foreigner for so long that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to live as a citizen.

It’s now normal for me to stick out in a crowd, to get gawks, stares. Every two years, I apply for expensive visas for permission to live in Tanzania. Even though I’ve lived here sixteen years, I’ve never voted in a Tanzanian election, or even felt like I have a right to a political opinion. I’ve never owned a house. I know that just about everything I own will one day be owned by someone else, so I better not get attached to it. I have the uncomfortable feeling that some of those around me are in awe of my foreignness and unnecessarily defer to me, but others resent my very presence in their country.

Either way, I am an outsider.

It’s become so normal that sometimes I forget how exhausting it is to live as a foreigner. It’s like playing a card game, every day, where you keep discovering new rules that everyone understands except you. Just when you think you’ve finally got it all figured out–surprise! You don’t. And you find yourself feeling like a two-year-old or a hard-hearted wretch or just a plain idiot.

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