I was raised to believe that the pursuit of my dreams was the path to fulfillment.
I believed that as long as I was true to myself and others, and worked in earnest toward my goals, success would follow. This mindset is a pillar of our culture in the United States. It is the foundation of what we call the American Dream. I followed my dreams from childhood into college because, in my mind, to not pursue all avenues of possibility was failure in and of itself. To not do so would be a rejection of the life I was afforded. In college I studied Political Science because I aspired to work in international relations, because I wanted to be involved in the opening of cultures and breaking down of ideological barriers. To achieve this dream, I did what society had encouraged me for my entire life: work hard, graduate college, take opportunities as they arise. That’s not to say it was about doing the easy thing. No. It’s about having the opportunity to be challenged, and to be rewarded for meeting that challenge. But by the time I graduated college in 2010, this social contract had turned upside down. The United States, and the global economy at large, was stricken by the worst economic times since the Great Depression.
And so, like many people in my generation who graduated college with low prospects for fulfilling employment, I became disillusioned with my higher education experience. I was disillusioned with the fairy tale people called the American Dream. I had believed that by doing extra-curricular activities and holding a job through college, I would be a competitive candidate for a well-paying career once I graduated. I wasn’t. Not because I was unskilled and unwilling to work, but because the job market was dismal, quality prospects were low, and the market was saturated with fresh graduates like me and, worse yet, newly laid-off professionals with years of experience. Instead of launching a lifelong career after graduation, as the previous generation had done, I moved back home with my parents. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself and my middle-class woes, since no one else would. Under this pressure, I decided that I couldn’t rely on the false guarantees of failing institutions. I would have to carve my own path.
To understand why Jordan of all places, why the Middle East in general, why, when I had wholesome upbringing in Southern California, I have to go back to the beginning.
In July 2001, I was two months away from entering high school. That summer, my middle school history teacher took forty students on a two week walking tour of European cultural capitals like London, Paris, Florence, and Rome. It was my first experience outside the U.S. and first opportunity to see the wider world. I rode the London tube and overlooked Paris from the Eiffel tower and drank Alpine water from a Swiss fountain and hiked the seven hills of Rome. Europe was brimming with adventure. I would have to come back some day, I thought. I returned home to Southern California where I started high school with memories of European architecture and hustling street vendors fresh in my mind.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, nineteen men hailing from the countries of Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates hijacked four airliners and destroyed the symbolic pillars of American economic and military strength. That day, a certain innocence, and ignorance, in our society was irreversibly shattered. The day was a national trauma that we have collectively memorialized through war, political grandstanding, architecture, film, music, literature. America wasn’t invincible—and we as a nation could no longer ignore our place on the geopolitical stage as willfully as previous generations had done.
The War on Terror started in Afghanistan. During the 88 days it took for U.S. Special Forces and the Central Intelligence Agency to take the Taliban capital of Kandahar, I played saxophone in the high school marching band. Travel policies in America changed as security tightened. We were secured under the Patriot Act, without thought to the implicit mission creep. All I cared about was making friends and hatching weekend plans. In 2003, our political leadership led the United States into a war with Iraq. I carried on with my life while a few of my friends went to war — at least one would never come home. I played football and went to high school parties, focused on the only important thing to a self-absorbed teenager: me. I graduated high school and set my sights on traveling Europe. After my first year at community college, in the fall of 2006, I studied abroad in Florence, Italy for three months. I was back in Europe and reveled in the experience. I made friends and learned culture—which really means that I got drunk and stumbled in public with my friends, performing the litany of obnoxious things 19 year old Americans do when they’re unleashed on Europe for the first time. My takeaway education from that trip was that Europeans drink wine with lunch every day and then take a three hour nap afterward. I absorbed so much culture. I even learned a few sentences in Italian.
I was in Italy during the height of the war in Iraq. At that time American tourists were known to travel with Canadian flags sewn into their backpacks, fearing reprisals for traveling as Americans. My friends and I took the opposite approach. We were so self-assured of our American Exceptionalism, it begged the question: why would we want Canadians to get credit for our antics? However, one thing while traveling in Italy I remember well was the vitriol a group of Canadians held for my friends and me, solely for our nationality.
My friends and I met a group of Canadians one night while we were bar hopping Florence. The conversation started pleasantly enough before the Canadians began throwing accusations that our war mongering culture was destroying global stability. They treated my friends an me as though it was directly our fault for the wars in the Middle East. We were just a bunch of college kids—what power in deciding whether or not the U.S. went to war did we have? Yet this incident, among many others of seemingly minor significance, ultimately shaped my decision to study global political economy so that I would someday be able to return to the international game and have an influence on America’s foreign policy.
When I returned home from Italy, I applied to a year-long study abroad program through the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). The admission requirements were as lax as my effort to absorb Italian culture in Florence. Since the university received my application on time, I was accepted.
I was 20 years old when I moved into a roach-infested studio apartment next to UNLV in the fall of 2007. My neighbors consisted of gangsters, call girls, drug addicts, an aspiring Playboy model, kind-hearted working families, and a few people who worked in the service industry. I was an outsider. I took 18 units at UNLV and worked part-time at a chain grocery store to save money for the next study abroad program. During my first semester I was invited onto the UNLV Debate Team and won a small regional debate tournament. Using this experience, I won a couple of scholarships for the study abroad program. My dream of going back to Italy was going to be realized.
But it was not to be.
When I turned 21, I became consumed by the bright lights and empty promises of Las Vegas. I thought I was going to become a millionaire playing poker at the casinos. Poker was going to fund my year abroad. I was not as savvy as I believed, and I went broke instead. At the same time, the 2008 global financial crisis was in full swing. I wasn’t the only person going broke by gambling on pipe dreams. I dropped out of the study abroad program three months before I was supposed to leave for my year abroad, then switched majors from international business to political science. I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. But I still wanted to do the things that I talked about doing. I was still ambitious.
Two years later, I was trying to figure out what I would do with my life once I graduated, since all that I had my resume was five years of experience in the grocery business and a year on the UNLV Debate Team. Three months before graduation, I took the State Department Foreign Service Officer Test, confident that a 23 year old grocery clerk who had yet to earn a college degree was an ideal candidate for advancing the foreign policy interests of the United States of America. I passed the written portion of the test and was asked to submit five personal narratives on what would make me the aforementioned ideal candidate. I wrote on being really fast at stocking canned goods, surviving the hilarious intercultural hi-jinks of studying abroad in Italy, and befriending tough guys and call girls in Las Vegas. The day I submitted those narratives I knew I had to make a drastic change if I was ever going to be competitive. The State Department did not invite me for an interview.
To say that 2010 was a bad year to be in Las Vegas is a gross understatement. Las Vegas was ground zero of the housing crisis. By the time I graduated, the crisis had peaked, and approximately one in eight homes in the city had been foreclosed upon, and the city’s tourism-centered job market was in shambles. Worse still, the graduating class of 2010 was the largest in UNLV’s history. As I walked behind my fellow Bachelors of Arts during the procession ceremony at UNLV’s Thomas and Mack Center, I realized that the thousands of us, along with tens of thousands more graduates from more prestigious universities around the country, would be competing for the same jobs in the worst economy since the Great Depression. In that moment, while looking up at the rafters of proud parents and down at the floor at waving graduates, the impulse struck me. I had to do something to set myself above the crowd. I was moving to Amman, Jordan.
Why Amman? Ambition. Boredom. Desperation. I had taken a few classes on Islamic politics and the Arab world which I enjoyed. A flurry of rationalizations appeared in my mind: Arabic was a hot-ticket language for the Foreign Service, and Amman sounded like it would be a good place to learn it. Once I was there, I would get the experience I needed to get hired at the State Department. This leap of logic was the most reasonable thing I could think of in those days. I had one class to finish over the summer session and then I was done. I would be free to do whatever my degree would allow. Saving money by working in retail was my best option for a while. I spent the summer at the gym, running six miles in the mornings and lifting weights in the evenings. I was mentally preparing myself for what would come next. I was going to Jordan. I didn’t know when, or how, or what I would do once I got there, but I was going to make it work.
In those days, I may have been posturing, just so when people asked, I had a bold response. So I could tell people that I had a plan for my life—that I wasn’t wandering aimlessly. But the reality of adulthood began to settle in. I couldn’t just go. I had bills to pay. Despite being under-employed, I was employed. I also had a good network of friends and family in my life. I wasn’t some misanthropic societal outcast who couldn’t fit in. Shucks. People like, like me—and I like, like people. In all likelihood, I would not have gone through with it.
That was before I met her.
This is One Way Ticket, a newsletter about Life, Humor.