My Family Thinks I am Sad

So I only have a brief story to tell about life here in training.  As you can imagine the initial excitement about being in a new place is naturally wearing off after a few weeks of being here, and my host family has found this very alarming.  To add to this, the constant language classes are very tiring, so I come home at the end of the day very beat and frankly not ready to interact with people in my family right away.  I’ve going off and playing soccer most days almost right after coming home, and after soccer I am usually rejuvenated and ready to handle everything.  Sometimes though, I am just not interested, and want to be left alone.

Anyways, I’ve had several family members come up to me and ask me what happened, and I had no idea what they were talking about.  My host sister-in-law walked up to me once and told me, “Ethan, your face is SO sad.”  I felt worse for her than I was feeling.  I wasn’t particularly sad, just tired.  Then my host cousin, who speaks English quite well, told me that everyone was concerned because the first week I was here I was super enthusiastic and laughing a lot, and now I just look really sad all the time.  Again, I just said I was tired.  Of course, I miss home sometimes, but I didn’t really know how to explain that the first week I WAS super enthusiastic and excited about being somewhere new.  But now new has become normal, and I’m still enthusiastic but I’ve just leveled out.  Also, class is REALLY tiring.  To be fair, I get asked if I am sad in the states a fair amount 1) when I am tired and 2) when I am super content and relaxing.  I think when I am totally relaxed my face relaxes, and I guess most people interpret my lack of smiling or other facial expression as sad.

I felt sort of bad that they seemed to be taking my leveling out like they were personally doing something wrong.  They kept saying I could talk to them, which I appreciate, but they just wanted to fix a non-existent problem so badly that it was on the verge of being…cartoonish.  Occasionally they would hover over me for about 5 minutes just waiting to see if I needed or wanted anything.  This of course didn’t really help when I was not up for interacting with anyone.  I think they’ve accepted the change finally, and also I’ve made an effort to smile more at them even when I’m tired…or maybe I just played more soccer this week and since I’ve sort of established a semi-routine I’m able to deal more easily with not understanding what is going on around me, and my host-mother’s obnoxiously loud voice at 6 AM.  Anyways, my fellow volunteers and I had a pretty good laugh about how sad my family thinks I am.