In college, I had a roommate who once told me, “I thought you were dumb until I was in your study group.” So I straightened my back. I straightened my gaze. I walked indoors with same purpose I had outdoors, hurrying through the city as if I knew where I was going (when half the time I didn’t).
Growing up in the gardens of Israel
I took that new stance into my first meeting for study abroad. We had a few days in January to meet in New York before traveling the world together. A lot of the girls showed up in quick-dry gear, ready to live out of their backpacks. I thought, “This isn’t camping. We’re going to cities!” So I clamped in with heels and my newly-straigtened gaze. I came in fashionably late and invited everyone back to my apartment later as a kind gesture.
Heels, a hat, an apartment in New York, I had already lived in several countries – Israel for five years, Niger for one — when most hadn’t left the U.S. before.
By May, when the semester was ending and we’d seen each other through the best and worst of times, we wrote our goodbyes. Several friends left me with this message: I was intimidating, and it took them almost the entire program to get over that (funny, since they were and are independent-minded rock-stars in their own right).
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