We are not adults here.

I live with an older Spanish woman who hails from a culture where, because of the high cost of living, children live with their parents until they are in their 30s. It is obvious that my mere 21 years are some laughable imitation of adulthood; occasionally, she will remind me the best way to pick fruit out at the market, that it’s too cold in the morning to wear shorts and exactly how to make my bed.

In Spain, I am a child again. The lessons I learned about rugged American independence from Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac are appreciated about as much as Franco. The idea that I can do things for myself, that I don’t need help because I’ve been living on my own by myself for a while, is regarded as foolish and irrelevant.

It bothered me, this largest of the culture shocks. But was this true? Did the Spanish have a point?

In the beginning of the semester, I wanted nothing more than to be back in my small apartment in St. Louis where I could come home to a blissfully empty space, cook dinner and leave again without anybody seeing or knowing; I wanted to be unobserved, to make all the mistakes on my own and to revel in the pride that comes with accomplishing those new adult tasks without having to share the accomplishment with anybody.

In the United States, there exists this concept that we should be able to do everything for ourselves. We have ideas about a brutal type of independence, a cultural remnant from our frontier days when Lone Ranger-esque figures roamed the expansive deserts of the West. There is something about that landscape spreading out all directions that begs people to take as much space unto themselves as possible: I’m sure when the first settlers, hailing as they did from crowded English towns, came to the shores of this New World, they marveled at what they thought they could have for themselves, at the apparent unpopulatedness of it.

We come from this mentality. We have not lived as Europeans have, among one another and histories for millennia. We broke away from Europeans, left that crowded continent to conquer new territories and uproot new people so that we might span our arms out in front of us and claim our spaces.

Those ideas don’t exist here. There is no Lone Ranger. Maybe it’s not even a Spanish thing, but a phenomenon that comes from living in a big city and being around other people all the time; the closeness impresses upon a person the ties they have to another. Maybe privacy is a luxury I’ve been spoiled with, and human closeness is more real to the way we’ve had to live for most of our existence than some greedy obsession with keeping ourselves separate and moving through life using only our own wills.

I am not an adult here. Or maybe I am just a different type of adult, one whose concept of itself is not so brutally do-it-alone. It still will bother me when I am given advice that assumes I don’t know everything about everything: I will still, until the end, be irked by imposition.

I am myself, and the daughter of Dylan and Kerouac. However, at least now I can appreciate the other culture and start to see myself as more integrated than before.

Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and
Sciences, studying in Madrid.