So, a few days ago I aired the idea of using Hive as a place to serialize some of our personal stories.
What is to follow in the course of an unspecified period of time is essentially the tale of myself as a relatively naive 20-year-old from Denmark packing everything he owned up in a couple of suitcases (and a golf bag) and traveling halfway across the world to attend University in Austin, Texas.
My current intent is simply to tell the story of the journey itself and my experiences encountering and managing radical cultural change and with the opportunity to authentically be myself, by myself, for the first time in my adult life... in a place where I was far from family and didn't know anybody.
That said, I'm not sure how far I'm going to take the story. That is, I'm not sure it has a natural "end point." We'll see...
As storyteller, I tend to let stories tell themselves. That is to say, they don't get to be of a specified length nor cover a carefully mapped outline of talking points... I just begin at one end and keep going until the story lets me know that it's done.
At this point, I expect my end point will happen at the juncture where I feel like the majority of the "acclimatizing" and culture shock has been navigated and I reached the point of having settled into a tenuous routine in my new surroundings... which would probably describe my first 2-3 months of my life in Texas and then end the story there.
Of course, the entire Texas Chronicle Actually lasts from January of 1981 through September of 2006 so there's definitely no shortage of material and there are definitely some good stories in there!
I'm just not entirely sure how interesting those stories are and how much relevance they bear to the initial focus on a young college student traveling halfway across the world.
I guess how far I take it will let itself be known as we go along!
Writing from memory — especially after 40+ years — presents its own challenges, but I am enlisting the "assistance" of a number of photo albums and boxes of photos from the time of the actual experience.
Much like I am today, I was a fairly dedicated "photo documenter" of people and places... even at a time when we were still using film and prints, rather than the digital technologies we have today.
I'm giving myself the grace to go slowly with this, because there will be extra time involved in locating the source material in my many files and storage boxes in my closet.
As I implied in my original exploration (link at the top of the page) this is not born out of some ambition to write a great autobiography, but rather a desire to leave a story (perhaps?!?!) for our grandkids, for a time when my own memory of those days becomes even foggier than it is today.
Don't mean that to sound fatalistic, just realistic!
And so, I set forth, along no particular schedule.
Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!
(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly and uniquely for this platform — NOT posted anywhere else!)
Created at 2024-01-25 15:42 PST
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