Me: At the risk of sounding sentimental…I think I’ve discovered something in myself here in Hong Kong that I never quite understood before.
Friend (back home): That’s the beauty of traveling. Good for you.
– Excerpted from a recent Facebook status.
Stress: it’s a funny thing, really. Most people would rather do without it, or at least minimize its presence in their lives as much as possible. In the realm of physics and engineering, stress is a measure of a material’s resistance to “breaking” or falling apart. Materials that are near this breaking point are said to be “tense.”
Different materials, of course, can handle different loads of stress before they begin to deform in shape. At the molecular level, their bonding arrangements become distorted; no longer an organized lattice (i.e. three-dimensional network) of atoms, they stretch into awkward arrangements, often to the extent that they can’t be driven back to their more orderly, more ‘natural’ layout.
Today I discovered – not intentionally – that my upper limit of tension is not as high as I’ve always thought it was. In effect, the “culture shock” I received today didn’t come from a miscommunication with a local Hong-Konger, or an awkward moment with a mainlander, or even a mistaken assumption of another international student.
None of those. Instead, I realized that my vision of myself, particularly at the extremes, was starting to blur. What seemed clear and organized…had now begun to unravel.
It was the unraveling that made me feel afraid of myself.