Finding Myself

Sometimes when I read or talk to people, I come in contact with the phrase “I found myself…” For instance someone will say, “When I graduated from college, I found myself jobless.” I always thought this phrase was dumb. Like, what, you just woke up one day and realized you don’t have a job? Like, oh hey! Here I am! And look, I don’t have a job!

You didn’t see that one coming? The whole idea of “finding oneself” in a situation out of the ordinary seemed stupid to me.

Until now.

The longer I’m in Jerusalem, the more this phrase is starting to make sense. I get on the bus, I go where my teachers tell me to go, I follow the guides where they take me, and suddenly I look around and ask myself, ‘How on earth did I get here?’

This happened to me a few weeks ago when we took a field trip out to the Negev Desert and visited a Bedouin village out in the middle of nowhere. These villages are unrecognized by the government and the people live in crude conditions under aluminum roofs in sandy wastelands.

As the bus drove down the dirt road, we passed small shacks and barbed-wire fences, and we waved to school children smiling at us through the cracks in the walls. When the bus came to a stop on the side of the road, we hopped out to see a family of camels walking across the desert, and we squinted as the sand blew in our eyes. We then began our trek up a rocky path clear of vegetation as a little girl passed by, running across the sharp rocks and broken glass barefoot. Finally we came to a concrete building with slatted windows. We went inside and sat around the edges of the open room on cushions as a woman covered in a long black coat and a head scarf (despite the blistering heat) told us about the village, translating the Arabic to English.

After a few minutes of sitting in there, the battery to my headset died. I couldn’t really hear what she was saying anymore, I was hot and hungry, and the lighting wasn’t even good enough for pictures. I looked around the room and felt the warm wind blow through the windows, and that’s when it hit me.

I found myself.

Without quite knowing how, there I was sitting in the desert in some unnamed village in the Middle East. It struck me all at once. ‘How the heck did I get here?’

I mean yeah, I got on a bus, it drove down some roads, and then I walked to this little building, but really, how did I get here? I honestly couldn’t say.

After a little while, we visited a little school next door where grown women were learning how to read for the first time in their lives. They were using tables and whiteboards donated by the church and were struggling to master something I’d learned and taken for granted years ago. That’s when something else hit me.

It’s just not fair.

It’s not fair that I know how to read, that I sleep on a bed, that I have an actual roof over my head, and that I have a right to be taken seriously in society despite the fact that I’m a woman. It’s not fair that I have an education, that I get to wear what I want, that I’m allowed to go after my dreams, and that I get to choose what I want to do with my life instead of doing what somebody tells me I have to do. It’s not fair that after visiting that little village, I got to hop back on the bus and go home to dinner, while they had to stay there and keep on living their lives.

My heart broke for them that day. As I sat on that flat cushion in that dark building, I no longer felt hungry and I no longer cared about optimal lighting for photographs. I wished there was something I could do. I wished there was some way I could give those children real homes and a real pair of shoes. I wished so much and yet I felt so helpless.

I realized then, that maybe finding myself isn’t so bad after all. Maybe in order to find myself, I first have to lose myself. And maybe it’s when I lose myself, that I can really see the world how it is.