I’m getting ready for moving day.

It sounds needlessly morbid, but all of this giving away business is quite reminiscent of a preparation for death. You know- the plotting, misguided suicidals who show their cards by giving stuff away to those who might want inert objects more than they want to have you around? My porcelain swan that’s got a music box in its base? I am entrusting that to your care. I no longer need it.

Here though, the items that I find myself passing on are hardly ones to raise alarms: a half empty bottle of vanilla extract, the new yet slightly expired jars of foodstuffs that you bought back in America but had never consumed while living in the States. Still you bought them  because you were moving to a different continent and you never know. I might suddenly have a hankering for apple flavored vodka. 

Funny how we always budget for ourselves a measure of self-doubt when it comes to moving to a new locale. No matter how old we are, we always prepare ourself for the possibility that this next place will be the magical threshold that will transform us into something different. Something hopefully new and improved. It’s just a matter of changing our surroundings.

What crap.

Before I came here, I kind of wondered what shade of African boubou I’d find myself posing in by the time I departed Senegal. That is to say, I wondered how this country would transform me. I had similar musings before I left to live in France as a sixteen year old too: Maybe I’ll come back looking stylish, maybe my whole outlook on life will be different. But fast-forward through eleven months of French countryside and I was spit back out into Logan airport looking exactly the way I did when I left.  Well, maybe I did return with an overhauled way of looking at things, but no one was going to take note of that. Instead I just wove my way back into high school and felt just as out of place and clueless as I did when I left.

Megan’s Second Year Abroad? That was a bit more of the same. I imagined that my immersion in the grit and literary prestige of Dublin would imperceptibly cause my constitution to undergo a few whiskey-colored variations that would give me a bit more insight into myself. I was looking for enlightenment that would (hopefully) be attached to a lightning bolt kind enough to strike the ground just in front of me. But that didn’t happen either. Instead I was left staring down student loan debt and I had no better idea about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

So I went back to America and jumped into the Navy. I still held the same values and aversions that I always possessed, and it was as though my years of flux had done nothing to change who I was. How annoying! Through all of my wicked cool travels, I never managed to experience a Hollyood-concocted epiphany that would tell me what this great life was all about. Instead I was a custodian of a few rich collections of anecdotes that would be strung together inside my head forever like imperfectly blinking Christams lights.

And now I’m here and pretty much ready to move on as I finish up the last-minute details and bring to a close this most enjoyable Dakar chapter. I’m giving away the last bits of unused kitchen contents, and in doing so I’m once again taking stock of this entire experience. What has changed? I never did don that boubou- nor did I learn to dance the Sabar or learn to speak more than fifty words of Wolof. But I don’t really want to do any of that either. I’m me. Same as I ever was- at least for the most part.

You don’t need a traveling salesman type of job to experience these kinds of sentiments. I imagine that having kids, changing occupations or even coming out of the closet would stir up a certain amount of trepidation in terms of facing the “My former life is gone forever” reality. Sure I think that each of life’s chapters have rounded my edges and have made me a better person, but I also kinda believe that we all remain fundamentally the same no matter how much we might hope that a magic pill or new zip code would advertise differently. 

If you’re looking for change, I’d stick with the old cliché that says that this must come from within. And it can be done right now, wherever you are. Maybe not for me right now as I scribble this into my notebook in the back of a taxi sans shocks- but I’ll try to remember this the next time I find myself standing on the threshold of something new and kinda intimidating.