Fences

I’ve never felt like I belonged in the world. I’ve never felt at home in my own skin, never quite felt like I fit in. During high school, it was for the usual teenage girl reasons: I wasn’t thin enough, pretty enough, or perky enough. In college, I was a creative writing major, complete with the requisite melancholy score that played in the background of even my happiest moments.


After a period of unemployment and then some time spent working in the financial planning industry, I went to graduate school to study international relations. It was immediately clear to me that I was out of my league among my classmates. Some of them had been missionaries overseas, some had done stints in the Peace Corps, and others had diplomats for parents. I must have gotten on the wrong bus; I was a novice compared to these seasoned veterans of international cultural and educational experiences.


My school was in Washington, DC, just a few metro stops away from the Pentagon. Going to evening classes, I saw members of the armed services on their commute home. I stared unabashedly: the uniforms, the meanings I imagined behind the ribbons, the air of competence, of confidence those men and women radiated. I wanted the same aura to surround me. As an added bonus, the military was someplace I was sure to fit in. Someplace where being part of a team would be drilled into my mind from the first frenzied moments of basic training.


Three years after I enlisted in the Air Force, I found myself on a six-month deployment at the largest military base in Iraq. I saw the time away as an opportunity to shed the couple of pounds I’d been trying to lose since those awkward high school years. My efforts were successful, thanks to a rigorous exercise routine at the base’s well-appointed gym, and a nearly religious avoidance of sugar and starch. After a long day, while my brothers and sisters in arms rewarded themselves with French fries, fried rice, and chocolate cake, I would bypass the main entrée line and go directly to the salad bar, where I would fill a to-go container with mounds of iceberg lettuce, dry tuna, sliced cucumbers, bell peppers, olives, and carrots.


After a while, I began to wonder if the employees at the dining facility—mostly third country nationals from South and Central Asia, where, presumably, they had signed on for jobs in a war zone because they could make more money there than they could at home—thought I was snubbing them, turning my nose up at the food they had painstakingly prepared, refusing to partake of the kind of bounty some of their countrymen could probably only dream about. That certainly wasn’t my intention. Avoiding the corn, pasta, and warm biscuits wasn’t an insult to their cooking; it was my way of blocking temptation, even as those savory wonders called my name with their sweet, buttery aromas.


The male employees at the dining facility—I don’t think I ever saw a female—were friendly, outgoing, and eager to practice their English with the female service members. Even in the digital age, where images from around the world are at our fingertips, it seemed that fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and blonde women were a bit of a visual draw for them. We were anomalies. Fascinatingly out of the ordinary. They saved us the best fruit: the sweetest, juiciest watermelon hearts; the ripest chunks of cantaloupe. After several weeks of watching me eat nothing but salad, and taking notice of what I put in it, one particular worker would fill a container, piling it high with my favorites, and set it aside for me, if he didn’t see me come in at the usual time.


In spite of all the training I’d been through, all the times when, indeed, I was part of a team, the military had not cured me of my chronic out-of-placeness. (In retrospect, I should have known I wasn’t cut out for the military; I look ridiculous in hats.) Feeling like an outsider in everything I’ve ever done has led me to retreat into myself. I don’t talk much. I avoid eye contact. In the service, I often walked with my head down, and my eyes attuned upward only so I didn’t miss a passing officer and fail to salute. I worry that people mistake my shyness and introversion for coldness. For standoffishness, or—worse—for arrogance. Nothing could be further from the truth. I want to be cordial. I want to be friendly and outgoing. But I’m not. The burden of my perceived flaws causes me to close myself off from the world. If I can barely stand myself; how could anyone else possibly stomach me?


Despite my avoidance of most of the foods they toiled to prepare, the workers were always friendly and seemed happy to see me. Maybe it was my fair skin and blue eyes, but I like to think they somehow sensed that hiding underneath my scowl, buried behind my cold expression, was someone who could use a kind word and a smile. I was touched and grateful to receive both of these on the rare occasions when I braved the main food line to get broiled fish and steamed broccoli.


I started to wonder if the men at the dining facility had a nickname for me. Maybe it was Seinfeld-esque: instead of a "low-talker," I was a no-talker. Or, maybe they had dubbed me, simply, The Salad Girl.


When I wasn’t eating or exercising, I was working. In month after month of combat sorties, looking out the aircraft window at the country below me, I never grew accustomed to how stunningly green the landscape was. Not all of it, of course, but parts of Iraq were far more verdant than I expected when, in my ignorance, I had departed the United States with images of nothing but tan, dry, lifeless earth as far as the eye could see. From the concrete jungle that was the base, I would never have guessed there was fertile soil all around me.


From my limited perspective on the ground, all that separated “us” from “them” were concrete, chain link, and barbed wire fences. Once airborne and ascending, however, those barriers got smaller and smaller, until the landscape struck me as unified and unfettered. Like an astronaut gazing back upon Earth, I was awed by how idyllic it looked. By how the dirt, the noise, the cacophony of seemingly insoluble conflicts disappeared, and what was left was simple terrain, free of political borders and cultural boundaries.


Now, safely back home, I regret that I wasn’t more friendly toward the men who prepared our food. I regret that I let my own self-consciousness and lifelong self-doubt close me off from other people. Most of all, I regret that the emotional fences I’ve erected in order to keep myself in are far more insurmountable obstacles than the physical ones anyone could ever build to keep others out.