dancing at sunset

Last night I went out for my nightly xhiro, and I ended up at the Kasabashi Bridge with a friend of mine. As the sun set over the bridge and the mountains in the distance, we ran to catch the final glimpses. Walking back, I heard one of my favorite songs from a car blasting its speakers nearby and stopped short to show off my mad dancing skills. As I walked home two hours later, sad to leave the dance floor that was now entirely moonlit, and exhausted from the cardio, I looked over at Niku and thought about how different I am now.

Lost: Sunglasses (pictured). Last seen: Near Mike's tent. Reward: 10 Lekë. Note: The owner's life is just not the same anymore, and really she is having trouble functioning. Please consider helping to reunite this dynamic duo.

See, Albania has removed my ability to be embarrassed. I fall, I dress exactly how I want even if I don’t think I can pull it off, I sing, I dance, I sweat, I try to speak. It doesn’t matter because I’m already weird. I’m already a mess. I’m already constantly being looked at. I’m already a fish out of water. I’m already sticking out like a sore thumb, so what is stopping me from doing it my way?

I love that I got to start over with being socialized. I got to relearn normal, and I got to do it knowing how much I struggled with image in America. I got to start over knowing that I spent years yearning to show the raw, unfiltered Mohri to the world, but knowing that if I walked outside without donning my protective shell, I wouldn’t necessarily turn heads, but I would spend the entire day turning my own in search of the people that I was certain were scrutinizing the person that would normally be hidden, then breathing a sigh of relief when I finally returned to the safety of my home.

Taking refuge under the oasis tree.

Some things were easy, things like dressing how I want. Even my normal is different though. It is more comfortable, boldly colorful, and less carefully put together than everyone else. I stick out even when I'm at my best. Beyond that, people just know me. I'm in a small town, so of course they notice the new girl. They've all heard of the American. I've been told I have a different walk, that I carry myself differently, that I have different facial expressions, and I use them often. It's somehow freeing to know that not matter what I do, I will never blend in.

This actually has nothing to do with anything except that these people, right here, are all my best buddies, but this, this beautiful work of art with photoshop, is the only pic we have of us all together. Feels right.

That fact has such potential to be terrifying, to cause a person to build up even more layers of protection in order to blend in. I think that's the difference between celebrating differences and denying that differences exist, something I think we struggle with every day in American culture. But I think as soon as I recognized that my "American is showing" all the time, regardless, I realized that blending in is not the point. The point is to coexist, to just relish in the fact that I'm a human first, and to be that human, existing alongside other humans.

Sometimes it’s still hard for me to get up and dance. It still takes a little while before I break out in song, and even then, I have to be with someone I am at least marginally comfy with. But every day I pull back another layer of the protection I built up. The comfiness takes far less time.

Views from the dancefloor.

Maybe it’s just an Albanian thing, but I feel celebrated for expressing myself in these ways. They dance all the time. I dance differently, but they appreciate the fact that I’m dancing. They sing constantly. I do too. The people here know me, perhaps they know the true me better than most people. They will tell you that I love to dance, that I’m always singing, that I fall spectacularly many a times a day, laughing as I tumble, that I paint by the river, that you can find me on a particular perch once a day when the sun is getting low, that I have a “unique, Mohri” style, that I’ll talk for hours in broken Shqip to anyone who is willing to listen.

Do I look like a professional camper yet?

This past weekend, a group of volunteers went to the beach to camp out in tents. For those of you who are wondering, I absolutely did not prepare for this. I'm talking, no sleeping bag, no pillow, no nothing. I'm also talking, I bought a pack of sausage to roast over the fire and 2 beers as my sustenance for the 24 hour beachventure. It rocked, but that's beside the point. So this weekend I was just out there eating a sausage skewered on a piece of bamboo and roasted over a bonfire, watching the sunset, and dancing around in the sand to the music blasting from the speakers. Thinking back, it's incredible to me that that was the reality of my weekend. That I just got up to dance around people, Americans, some of which I had never met.

I feel incredibly lucky to be here. To be here as the human I want to be. To have had experiences and thoughts over a lifetime in America that formed that human just below the surface. To have been a person that relishes in the freedom to express who I am, but never quite had the courage to do it fully. So, if there's one thing I hope for you, I hope you have the courage to dance.