This is me, trying to be a real person

“I have something like imposter syndrome, the inability to accept that this life, which I have coveted for so long and truly made happen, is my own. It’s all so un-permanent.”

One month ago, I packed up my cat and three suitcases. I dragged them all onto a plane at 6AM, endured a Miami layover, and landed in Carolina, Puerto Rico. From the plane, I could see the small peninsula of Old San Juan, the buildings that made up Santurce, the tiny highway going between it all, and wondered which of those streets I’d been down before and which of those streets I’d come to know by heart. The water was so blue and the cars were so tiny; when I had visited in the past, the ground was like a playset, a toy version of a tropical city that I could loom over and enjoy, shaping my experience with my own hands. The vision of the island on the plane still felt like that, like something that I would have selfishly instead of something that would have me.

It was hot when I landed, mid-afternoon, and it was hard to carry those three suitcases by myself. By the time my father picked me up, I was sweaty and I was overwhelmed, and I was happy because I’d been saying for so long that this was what I wanted: to move to this place that I felt I knew intimately but only in fleeting weeks once a year. I went into Old San Juan the next day to find a job and didn’t have the nerve to pass out any resumés. I couldn’t fit my dad’s yellow jeep into any of the parking garages. I was too scared to go to the Walmart by myself even though I needed tampons, like desperately. I cried on the drive home. I went to the beach the next day and got sunburned on my shoulders. We stopped at a food kiosk on the drive home and I ate two pastelillos con pollo, and watched a chicken peck around in the dirt next to me. I felt so stupid for crying the day before. The island was a place immovable that I’d been so naive to think I could squeeze what I wanted out of. 

And then I turned twenty five. And then I got a teaching job, and then I found an apartment, and then, now, it’s been one month. I have blinked, and my life has transformed into something that I don’t recognize as mine. And I am a pretend person doing these things.

Logically, I know that I’ve only ever been to Puerto Rico as a visitor, technically. I’d do what I wanted, whenever I wanted. Real things never touched me here. I could send home videos and pictures of perfect beaches, lush mountains, haggard and picturesque lines of houses on streets. I would take time off of work, I would ignore school, I would stop having to be anything except a Puerto Rican daughter for days, weeks at a time. The rainforest on a Wednesday, the beach on a Thursday, drinking and partying on Fridays and Saturdays.

Routine has never been a part of my life here, and now that it is my brain has yet to catch up.

I wake up at six in the morning to drive to a tiny school, where I teach English to tiny children from 7:30 until 2:30. I sit at my desk quietly until 3PM when I can go home, and you’d be shocked at how quickly I have learned each pothole in the road, how I’ve come to recognize some of the cars also making their daily commutes. The man in the apartment next to ours waves at me in the mornings when I leave. The billboards on the drive haven’t changed all month. The woman who serves coffee at the grocery store across from the school recognizes me now. But it’s not me asking for black coffee, two sugars in Spanish. It’s a version of myself that doesn’t really exist. It’s the version of me that goes to the beach on the weekends, which isn’t the real me; it’s the island, Puerto Rican me. It’s the version of me that does inconsequential things because things here, for me, have never been real. Things here have always been things that I leave behind. 

I have something like imposter syndrome, the inability to accept that this life, which I have coveted for so long and truly made happen, is my own. It’s all so un-permanent. I can’t help but feel like I have created the person that I am in order to avoid larger things, things that I don’t want to deal with. At some point, this must all come crashing down because I’ll leave, because I always leave this place, and I must become a real person, and I don’t know what that real person looks like or what she does. But I have created this person. I have carved out a life for this version of me, a version that I don’t have to think about leaving. Why do I refuse to let it be real? Why is it so hard for me to consolidate my internal self with the external self that I have provided all these opportunities to? At some point, I hope, this will solidify. At some point, I will let my external self inside and this feeling, the vulnerability of everything I have built around me in this short time, will disappear. 

I am a real person and this is a real life. I don’t need to expect anything more for myself. There’s nothing I’m avoiding, not really. I have a real job and a permanent home. Everything I’ve ever avoided can find me here if it wants to. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’m really avoiding anything at all. This is perhaps one of the harder things I’ve ever done. And just as other hard things before, it will likely all be very worth it.

I am a real person, and so is the woman who serves me coffee and the little boy who has a hard time pronouncing his H sounds. The man who lets me into the school every morning and speaks in stilted English is a real person, and so is the boy who bought me a bottle of red wine and drank it with me on the beach.

I have contorted to fit into this playset instead of the other way around, which is how it should be. And actually, up close, it’s not a playset at all. We are all real people with real lives, and none of us can run away from anything. I have to trust, and I think that I do, that I will soon settle into my own body and my own life.