Seven With a Line Through It...

I write my sevens with a line through the middle of it. Like so…

I never once thought about why I do that or that anything was wrong with it until I became a bank teller.

When I was a bank teller in TN, a lot of older people liked for their registers to be balanced. As I was kindly doing so for an older lady, she abruptly stopped me when she saw the way I had written my seven. “What is that?” she snarled. I was confused and it could be heard in my reply.

“It’s the number seven, ma’am.”

“No it’s not. Why are you writing it like that??”

“Because I lived overseas and that’s the way I learned to write it”

“Well, you’re in America now and that’s not proper.”

I’m sure you can imagine how her answer made my blood boil. Why isn’t it proper? Because most Americans don’t write their sevens that way? At the time I wasn’t sure why I was so upset, but I couldn’t show it for several reasons. 1. I was conducting business and in customer service, the customer is always right. 2. I wasn’t exactly sure why I was so upset.

So, here I am, six years later thinking about that incident. Why was I so upset?

Because I was expected to be one way and that’s not fair. Because I look American, I speak English like Americans, but other than those traits I have experiences that contribute to my being that have made my story unique. As a child, I picked up things my classmates and friends did from their own culture and incorporated it into my own life without even realizing it. It wasn’t until this lady pointed out so brutally that I was wrong for writing my number the way I did. It’s so simple. Why not just change and write it without the line through it? Because that’s not who I am.

I made a terrible mistake, unbeknownst to me at the time, when I moved back the states. I so desperately wanted to be a part of the American culture and wanted to fit in. So, naturally I tried to become like the fellow Americans around me. However, my expectations were sorely disappointed.

Growing up, specifically in the Azores, people came in and out of my life on a consist basis. Every year and a half to two years people were going as often as they were coming. I loved meeting new friends and that excitement overshadowed the loss of saying goodbye to old friends. Living this way constituted the need to welcome people into your group. To be open. To be social and to quickly get to know each other because you didn’t have much time together. This was my norm.

Due to this being the norm, I expected people to welcome me with open arms when I went to college, but that wasn’t the case. The majority of them came from big church groups together. Or if they didn’t come from the same state, they had gone to church camp for years upon years and knew each other or at least people knew who their parents were in the church.

Ok, no big deal. Church people are loving and accepting, right? Just because they have the label “Christian” didn’t make them loving and accepting. They were teenagers set free to explore the world on their own without mom and dad hovering over them. All the girls looked the same to me. Wearing heels and tons of makeup…even to their 8 a.m. classes. I rolled out of bed with my PJ's on with barely enough time to brush my hair and run to the dining room to grab some food.

People took an interest in me when it benefited them. At my first college, we all had to participate in a global experience before we could graduate. I loved the concept! Obviously, I didn’t need to since I was practically an international student. (I even had to pack up my stuff and put it in the dungeon with the rest of the international kids’ stuff when I went home for the summer. ) Classmates were suddenly coming out of the woodwork to ask me questions for their paper about how international students view the world. I was an easy target. “You lived overseas, right Megan?” So, you’re practically an international student. I was so excited that people began to realize who I was and where I came from, but it was very short lived. They were only interested long enough to complete their paper. And that only occurred in my freshman year. By the time I was in my sophomore and junior years, people had forgotten where I came from and I contributed to that lack of information.

I became very good at focusing on other people. I became very good at learning other people’s stories and who they were – what they were all about. While doing this, I slowly began to forget who I was and my own story.

So, yesterday, I started to write the date the way Europeans do. Date first, followed by month, and lastly the year. I haven’t done that since I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I’ve also started to have dreams. Dreams about my past. Pieces of a puzzle that I thought I had forgotten. I understand not everyone or most people don’t talk about cultural things. They just exist in it, but this is who I am. I write my sevens with a line through it and I’m not wrong for doing that.