Reflection

I was flying home from a work trip recently, connecting through the US to a country where I live legally. My residency card had expired a few days before, but it is valid for another three months according to that country’s laws. During my stop in the US, an airline officer calls me over the intercom to come to her counter. She informed me that I cannot travel with the expired card and need either my supporting documents of the renewal or a flight to the country of my passport.

I explained, calmly that my lawyer had confirmed with me exactly this: the expired card is valid for three months after the expiration date, and I don’t need an onward ticket. She didn’t want the explanation. She wanted me to be the person she’d already decided I was: suspicious, dishonest, and trying to game the system.

I stepped aside, messaged the lawyer and bought the onward ticket, one that I needed anyway (and not to the country of my passport). Her claim that my ticket had to be bought to fly to the country of my passport was meant to do the work of putting me back in my place. I knew better. I came back to the counter with the new ticket purchased and she waved me on toward her colleague. After he reprinted my boarding passes, I thanked her as she scanned me in to the flight, but she dismissed me with a grunt.

The requirement could be explained but her contempt could not.

At the immigration counter for my final destination and where I call home, the officer asked me about the expired card. Upon explaining that I was waiting for documents in order to file it, he quickly and cheerfully said “Okay.” No drama. No interrogation. No attempt to make me feel illegitimate. The authority whose rules actually mattered didn’t need me to prove anything further.

On one of my flights in that same travel day, a man and his son sat on the inside of my seat. Once he learned I could speak Spanish, he started asking about me. I was happy to practice my Spanish, but at a point I realized he wanted me to perform a caricature of myself, the dialect and personality he envisioned for someone of my nationality and heritage.

I just politely endured it, amused by his delusion.

As you drift through the world, these projections can be fought or accepted. I’ve found peace in a third position: you remain yourself and decline to participate. You let them interact with themselves.

The airline officer in the US and the man on the plane were reaching for the same cardboard cutout. Two sides of the same projection. Yet I was the one holding the mirror from my seat in the wings of the theatre.