Returns

Lately, it seems I've been obsessed with a topic that, strangely enough, is very hard for me to write about: the notion of homelands, mine in particular. Like the most basic version of a crazed Odysseus, after having been swept away from home by the hand of fate [academic convenience], I've started holding on to this ideal of the homeland, tentatively at first, then with increasing fury and obstinacy, as though my previous lack of inquiry into the concept of a native land was obviously the source of all my discomfort and awkwardness on my way through life and the world, as though the act of returning to a homeland, emotionally and intellectually at first, then possibly someday physically, would bear as fruits the precious answers and keys to questions and locks that have plagued me along with portions of humanity in its existential quests since the dawn of things. [If you were wondering, I consider the current step of the process (or obsession) to be the one dealing with the emotional or intellectual side of re-approaching and re-investigating the homeland, as well as the myth thereof.]

However, every time I embark [odyssean jokes, fuck yeah] on an attempt at writing about my own country, I have to realize that I am hitting a wall. A wall spray tagged with the following revelation: I know very little about my homeland. Though it might have contributed to it, this is not due simply to the fact that I haven't lived in it for over 6 years; looking back, it doesn't feel like I exhausted the [then more defined] limits of what is available in this country in terms of entertainment, culture, and, well, debauchery [I was a good teenager, mostly] before I left. So now, whenever I return, with this image of "how things used to be (but most likely never really were)", it is as though I've regained consciousness after a long sojourn in slumberland, or any other place filled with fog. I recognise things visually, I know where to go, which route to take, I remember street names [the few I ever bothered to learn], I'm even more or less informed as to what a handful of individuals who may or may not have frequented my old high school are now up to. Yet it feels like I can never be fully sure whether I am actually in the right country, the same country I left  a few years ago with the certainty I was ready to put an end to our relationship, I can't tell if I'm speaking the right language, making the right gestures, if I want the right things. The thing I was not expecting, no matter how facepalmingly inevitable it was, was that things would continue to change, to evolve, after I was gone.
Causing me to skip a few stages of grief, this realisation is [proverbial firecracker that I am...] immediately met with outrage: What?! How dare the fluffy womb-cocoon I left all these years ago to find myself [in the arms of a pretty drastically shape-shifting Calypso] and collect a few degrees along the way continue to evolve without me? How did it not fall into a hibernating slumber to unthaw in pristine condition only at my return, and present me with a scene and atmosphere unchanged, still fully familiar and accommodating, instead of being littered with question marks? If I were indeed the crazed Odysseus figure I claimed to be just moments ago, I would have swiftly murdered and impaled all those new suitors lined up to claim the hand of my mourning bride, but I'm not a fan of bloodstains, even less partial to prison cells [the olden days of slaughtering for dignity are over, plus I'm remarkably claustrophobic as a person], and, if "bride" is even an appropriate image in this context, this "bride" is one I share with +/- 500.000 other people anyway, if my airline's inflight magazine's sources are anything to be trusted.

So how do I write about something I've been divorced from [again with the marital analogies] for so many years that I find myself almost alienated from its general socio-cultural climate whenever I return to what I still believe to be my roots? An what do I write about when there is nothing, of the things that occur in this country, that I can review without there being someone else more immersed in it who could review it much better? How can I make remarks and claims about my home country that are somehow socio-culturally relevant when all I sense here, all that's still evident to me, is the country's atmosphere, and such things are desperately subjective and personal?
On the other hand, if I throw in the towel and step away from my claim to a place where I belong and thus give up the notion of this country as my homeland, then what do I have instead? There's always the grand tradition of purely nominal emigration to an honorary step-homeland – electing their substitute nationality of choice is something a lot of my peers are notoriously good at. 2.500 square kilometers are just not enough to hold all of us, especially with those whose life-dreams taking up the kind of space only a larger country can comfortably provide, and still, for those who choose to stay within the clog-shaped borders of this country, our ambitions only fit if we can compress them to an innocuous size, or float them above our heads on a string.
But then again, this could just be the impression I had when the air was getting thick and I was happy to leave. Maybe now, things are different, and opportunities grow plushly, and the increasing number of those who seize them thrive in this new environment that has sprung up overnight, if "overnight" can be used to refer to a time bracket of half a dozen years. Maybe that's what things are like; to my nowadays pretty untrained eye this is what it seems like. Then again, the opportunities given to others often seem more notable than one's own because... just because. Look up "facebook", the bible of feeling like everybody else has a life except you. Anyway, tangents, tangents are bad. Where was I?
For me, there doesn't seem to be the option of letting go of something that has embedded itself in my daily trains of thought as much as this homeland idea – uprooting this obsessional notion would not do much good; if anything, it would contribute to my mind [and the personality attached to it] floating around even more in want of an anchor or a set of landmarks than is already the case. Not a viable option, then. A less drastic method would involve gently channeling this obsession into a few different areas, one of them being verbal creations, in the form of, gee, I don't know, articles or fiction about whatever it is that bugs me about "belonging" and my lack of confirmation in that department. Another area the energy otherwise wasted in unhealthy obsession [as opposed to so-called healthy i.e. productive obsession] could be conducted into is working at finding a sense of fulfilment in this [seemingly inevitable] state of "homelessness" I find myself in these days – when small birds, too young to fly off on their own, fall out of the nest, or, worse, are removed by alien hands, they no longer quite fit in with the rules and regulations of the nest the sat in in perfect contentment only a few moments ago. I suppose this is the tacky analogy to attach to the feeling I'm trying to explain here: an attachment to the limbo of a conceptual no-man's-land, in my case, is the thing I need to become conscious of, not as a tragic balancing act that will inevitably end in a vertiginous inner fall, but as a freedom that allows me to find my attachments elsewhere, in an area that has nothing whatsoever to do with geography. The fact that I don't quite feel comfortable or entitled to feeling at home anywhere doesn't help, but certainly adds to the amount of energy that will be devoted to this particular internal adjustment.
Meanwhile, this distance might enlighten me as to whether there is anything of note I can formulate about the one country I should have a certain insight into, or whether this task is better left to other people who actually bother with the country's political and historic intricacies. Perhaps the geographical, purely physical distance I opted for a few years ago was not the right kind of distance; it was more of a rebellious, contemptuous attempt at ignoring everything I'd dwelled in from my birth up until that time, something pretty common in the ready-for-college age group I guess. The distance I need might be one that is focussed, not on comparing whatever place I live in right now to an idealised and [time-]warped version of my childhood and teenage impressions of "home" and thus tearing my current habitat down, but on adapting, if only in parts, to where I live, and adding to my collection of experiences and personality traits whatever the chemistry between that place and me happens to conjure up.

If you take Ulysses' word for it, being sedentary is totally overrated anyway, and adds nothing to the feeling of being "homebound"; if anything, the yearning for the native land, falls under the category of those feelings whose satisfaction is fleeting, and as soon as you've taken in what you missed, the restlessness kicks in again and it's time to set off for another arrangement of loops around the Mediterranean Seas for a while. In terms of animal analogies, I suppose a bird's eye view of the nest, as you're spiralling high above it in the air, is more fitting, and perhaps seeing it all from a certain distance makes it all so much more bearable [because so much less real. We all love our phantasy]. Or, perhaps, the frog's way with a recurring return to where ever it was you came out of your egg [added to this is the benefit of the following analogical extension: upon your return, the pond will seem much smaller than it did when you were a tadpole. You will also have a set of nice, muscular legs to go with your new, demandingly itinerant lifestyle. Just saying.] It seems that, rather than making camp somewhere with permanence in mind, the lifestyle that comes with this particular limbo is cyclical in its nature. Cyclical. You'd think, what with my gender and all, I would have figured this out sooner.

Speaker's Block

There are things that are close to me, very close to me, like, blood-related, and that I still know virtually nothing about. When I say nothing, I mean very little besides the narrative threads my brain has spun between the scattered bits of information I managed to extract from fellow family members by tricking them into reminiscence. One of those things, the one I'm referring to here, in my usual non-pushy way, is my grand-mother; she died long before I was born and I have therefore never been able to meet her in person, which resulted in her creating, on my impressionable mind, an imprint that slowly degenerated into the kind of obsession elusive dead people can sometimes engender in the living. Anyway, because I've been good lately and haven't pestered my parents with questions about her as much as I used to, they probably figured I was finally mature (yah...) enough to handle a more up-close-and-personal encounter with my deceased ancestry, and gifted me with two documents that are witness to her sojourn on Earth: a correspondence article she wrote for a magazine in the sixties, and a graphological study of her temperament and emotional composition, a service she probably called upon in a hope not at all foreign to me, namely that of having someone else determine what kind of person she was – it seems easier, doesn't it, to have someone else, someone with a kind of authority in that field, look upon you and read the signs that compose you so as to tell you who you are and what you need, someone who will have a view less cluttered by the emotions and constantly melting and recomposing masks you have donned over the years of your life, less hung up on all of the different definitions you thought applied to you now and forever. There is no "me" that lasts forever. But still, we expect to always be able to read ourselves clearly, to understand what we need, and for those that are close to us to do so too. In fact, there is one social situation where we expect this kind of non-verbal understanding more than anywhere else: romantic relationships.

There is one thing, however, that relationships, the good ones as much as the bad, have all, up until this point, served to collectively teach me: instinctive trust, a kind of 'clicking' in respect to personal preferences and outlooks, is not that common, nor even necessarily required. Sure, in a good relationship there will be the occasional instinctive epiphany about the other person, but why should it be necessary for our partner to function the same way we do, or with nothing but us in mind? In fact, I've had relationships where such a close similarity of internal operation proved to be a bad thing, simply because not all of my actions and quirks make sense, even to me, and finding them mirrored in the other's behaviour made them all the more irritating. Also, after a while, the feeling settles in that there is very little about the other's independent being that has the capacity to genuinely surprise you. Where movies tell us a "boyfriend" is supposed to know, instantly and instinctively, from the gut (rippling with abs, of course), what is wrong when our smile turns to sad, or what to do when we're upset, in real life, we have to get over that ideal of someone who can, without fail, decipher our reasons for acting and feeling a certain way, often even better than we can.
We have to allow the other to be as clueless and scared as we are, though hopefully a bit less scared because one of us has to keep a clear head and a less than psychotic grasp on things once in a while. And where we feel that certain intuitions about our innermost mysteries are missing, they can always be taught, explained to each other with great care. They might not always be understood perfectly, we are different people after all, and they might not be applied as solutions every time, but it's a start.

How did I deduce all this from a graphological analysis made 50 years ago, and about someone else? It might be that the whole idea of roots as an indicator of who you are in the social, temporal, and spatial net you were born into is still sticking to me like it has for the past few months. The weird thing is, when I read the analysis, the descriptions the graphologist (for some reason I feel like it was a woman, but what do I know) gives of my grandmother's personality struck me as very similar to my own, but expressed without so many of the negative connotations and undertones I so often weave into my own evaluations of myself, and for once this didn't send me off on a tangent about how weirdly hereditary some personality traits can be. Nor did it particularly baffle me how similar I apparently am to my paternal grandmother – if graphological analyses are to be trusted; a doubt I choose to suspend for now. What it did, rather, was pierce my bubble of stubborn egocentrism and social autism for a while, so as to make me realise that perhaps the view others have on us is less cruel and less intolerant than we assume, and – this goes for some of us – maybe even less so than the judgment we make about ourselves. Of course, I won't know how accurate this reading felt to the person it set out to define – my grandmother; all I know is that the charming part of this particular way of being analysed seemed to happen without requiring an actual attempt on the part of the subject to describe herself, or her own image of who she was. When asked "What kind of person are you?", some people reply with confidence, they deliver set little verbal vignettes of "the kind of person" they are, and they don't find the question of what they want or need at a particular time particularly tormenting. Others will not know what to reply to such an enquiry and wish they could just be figured out through osmosis or something. The idea that someone could read your handwriting and understand, not just make unfair or cliché-ridden assumptions, but really understand what you are about at this moment in time, seems like such a load off one's back. Not having to constantly brief one's social relations as to the status of the perpetual investigation into what it means to be "me" that, for some of us, constitutes our life – yeah, it would be a relief. Especially as it would mean only having to "communicate" oneself when one truly feels ready. But, as not everybody is a certified graphologist or clairvoyant, or other paranormal semiotician, I suppose there are only occasional bursts of intuition we can depend on with our peers, and we can find relief in the fact that some feelings are more easily conveyed than others. And, perhaps, that some things just don't need to be expressed so as to conjure up a 1:1 scale replica of the original feeling within the other person; those things are ours to deal with and to figure out for ourselves.

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I have speaker's block like one has writer's block.

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When you ask me what is wrong and what I feel, you are asking me to poke around in the dark; it is as dark to me as it is to you. How should I know how I feel, when I feel so many different things at once, some good, some neutral, some upsetting, all chattering away at once inside me, how am I to know which one speaks the loudest at this particular moment in time, which one is bobbing at the surface when what it's swimming in is a loud pool of thoughts and needs? I feel as though too much is within me, too many things undealt with, unclassified impressions and moods, like I am a hoarder of sensations and none of them have their proper place, resulting in a right mess; I have accumulated them without scrutiny or afterthought for too long, much as I do with more tangible things, but unlike tactile collections they cannot be categorized later on, because I can no longer tell them apart, they are all just caught in an internal whirlpool that is heterogeneous only as far as I can deduce from the mood swings I suffer, but otherwise homogeneous because there is no way for me to discriminate between what exactly it is that grips me at any given moment, as though I was experiencing all of my moods at once.
All there is to do in terms of cleanup is to hope that, at the right moment, when they are ready to be dealt with, the thoughts will pop up and make themselves known, or just fade away with time.
That is why, when you ask me what I feel, what I need, I listen to this constant buzzing inside of me, inspect the murmurs for something that stands out, and wait for a feeling or need to make itself known, so I can at least pretend that I know myself just a little bit. At best, what I end up telling you will be a guess, at worst a lie. How should I expect you to know what I need and what worries me exactly, why should I hold you to the standards of stereotypically elementary movie romance when even I don't really see through myself all that well? What I cherish, however, is that most of the time you try. 

Advice

Edit: This was meant to be posted earlier this week, but it just never seemed to happen. Either way, have some sleep-deprived rambling.


It is nighttime, I am sprawled on the couch, and embedded in the majority of my muscles is a taut, biting pain. I try not to move too much, as even the weight of my near weightless laptop on my thighs generates discomfort. The source of all this soreness? A few days ago (yeah, I stay sore for a long time) I climbed a mountain. Mount Si. To get up there, you walk a 4-mile (6.5km) trail until you reach a drizzly, icy summit plateau with a stunning view of a fog-veiled valley surrounded by trees. By the time you get up there, you're grateful for the cold; most of the trail is pretty steep and rocky, and by the time you're 4000ft up in the air, your feet, legs and abs are burning. And then there's the way back down. All in all, that's 4 miles of climbing, being out of breath, and pouring sweat, a sandwichy lunch on a rock 4167ft up in the air, surrounded by mist, and 4 miles descent that shifts the weight to your knees and the balls of your feet, and you can feel the latter rubbing against the soles of your shoes so much you can almost see sparks.
During said descent, my mind, which had up until then been busy dealing with the physical strain and subsequent pain via meditation and the processing of the natural splendour that was surrounding us, was ready for a more introverted type of distraction. The pain in my knees made me think about my mother, who has been an avid jogger ever since she was my age, and her advice about taking care of one's joints, especially the knees, as the natural cushioning that makes movement comfortable in one's youth tends to decrease with age, to the point where even walking isn't fun anymore. My mum's knees are fine, as far as I am aware, yet the discomfort I felt in my own knees during the 2-hour-long descent, and even afterwards as I was unwinding in the car on the ride home, made me wonder what I had possibly already damaged in my own body at only 25, and what I could have done differently had I known, a few years back, how certain things affect me now.
In an attempt to get to know more about you, I suppose, some people ask you, if you had to choose one super power, which would you choose? Or, more popularly, if you had one wish, what would it be? Some people choose invisibility, or the power to control time. If asked, I would choose to travel back in time to visit my 17-year-old self, invisibly, and for a month only. Plus, there'd be a bunch of conditions applying to this time travel, because I can't ever do anything simply: on top of being invisible (to everyone but 17-year-old me), I would have to have the ability to "change" things about myself without changing the experiences that I will end up having. Convenient, right? Basically, that would mean that the only thing I have an impact on are things like the mental and emotional perspectives (and reactions) I have to what happens to me: I do want my 17-year-old self to go ahead and have the experiences I had, but I want her to be more apt at dealing with them. Really, what this inconsistent and somewhat contradictory wish boils down to is that I want to be able to give advice to my past self, comfort her, as well as ensure that she sees, in activities she will be tempted to give up at that age, the value I clearly missed at her age. For instance, I would like to tell her to keep working out, and to stretch. At 25, I can easily blame the more consistant than occasional stiffness and cracking of bones on my sedentary student lifestyle, but I wish I didn't have to. I would tell her that what others think of her matters very little, and that, in fact, they judge her much less than she thinks they do, and that, in the end, whether they do or not shouldn't affect the worth she ascribes to herself. Or that she should not try to stuff holes in this sense of self-worth with other people; others don't make for very good band-aids, at the very best, and especially at that age, they make for fickle and undependable ones. I'd tell her that it's ok to show her legs, and that even if hers seem so much less perfect than other girl's, it doesn't matter, that although she's scared of putting herself out there, out there isn't as scary as she thinks it is, and that it won't be once she tries it.
Maybe I've just always wanted to be on both sides of the advice-machine. To be the one giving it and receiving it at the same time. Now that I've managed to sound sufficiently dirty, let me explain: being an only child who's still oblivious about how to act like a real adult (the ones you see in movies), and who's baffled as to how she's 25 already 'cause on the inside, she feels like a teenager most days, I feel that giving advice often amounts to feeling like you're throwing all the deep, painful truths it took you years to figure out into someone else's face, wrapped in unremarkable, poorly chosen words, and it just doesn't stick. Plus, why should they get to take the steps of life faster than you did, why should they get to take a shortcut when it comes to making experiences? Oh good, throw some jealousy in there, why don't you. That's your only child, right there. But all of this would be different if it was yourself (your past self, rather) you gave the advice to, right? You'd be the mature (erm), grown-up (sigh) one, the one who's gone through the crap you go to in your late teens and early twenties, and who can tell you that in the end, it's not all that bad, even though it isn't good; that you're going to cry a lot, but that cooling your swollen eyes with ice cubes before you go to bed is a good way not to wake up with a tear-encrusted, puffed-up piggyface the next day and make it totally obvious to everyone you didn't get your share of peaceful sleep. You'd tell your past self all this, and the past self would be understandably worried, and then probably call you a pansy and vow never to turn into you. Except they would. Because that's part of the contract attached to my wish: everything needs to turn out the way it is now, except I would have taken more chances, experienced more things, learned more about myself and my hidden resilience, etc. Yes, conveniently incongruous, we've been through this.
And then there'd be me, 17 years of age, on the listening side. I'd get advice from someone older, who actually knows me and knows what's good for me because they are me. Win-win. Or maybe not, we'd have to ask 37-year-old me, but I don't have access to that person yet. Not that I'd want to. That being said, this side of the advice-machine (why did I make that word combo up? Oh well, I'm tired) is as precious to me as the other one, because this is the side that gets to put the advice to use. So does my present side, but how nice does it sound to be 17 again and go through life with the advice and support from an older you? Basically, to get to do some of it over? To be younger, more energetic (except for when I was lethargic by choice – my interpretation of goth), to face a future that is now my past and get to play around in it some more.
I suppose that's what I've wanted for a while, and what triggers a lot of my regret-related anxiety (not that I need to tell the world about that, but while I'm at it...); advice is meant to make the recipient's life easier, or to soothe whatever part of them is hurting at the time. At best, it forges intimacy between two people, as well as trust. I find that the more I start listening to other people, and even looking to them for guidance, (that's the tricky part about my wish: I didn't listen to people much as a teenager – low blows that somewhat affected my self-esteem aside – ... didn't make me too popular with teachers, as you might imagine. Good thing there's no such thing as time-travel, not to visit your past self, anyway.) the more I turn to people older than me. In my mind, this makes total sense: I used to take advice, say on how to take care of my skin, hair, diet, from people my age, sometimes younger. This was due mostly to the fact that I had no idea people over 30 dabbled in things like the internet. Good thing I was wrong. I figured, who better to tell you about what to look after in your youth so it functions smoothly throughout the years and accompanies you soundly into age than people who've been through what still expects you? Though my mother doesn't share some of my views on beauty and health, I still trust her whenever she tells me to take care of my knees, my posture, my skin, and to wear sunscreen. I find that, in general, I trust women older than me more, and seek their judgment more than that of girls my age.
Climbing up and down Mount Si and feeling exhausted most of the way, until the point where my knees hurt, made me feel like I shouldn't have given up dancing, or running, and like, if such a thing were possible, I'd like to tell my past self to keep at it for our common sake. Then again, maybe this is just yet another expression of the fact that I need something to bump me into the present, and that I what I have now is the only basis for the future I will have.
What is the point of this post? I'm not sure. It's a lot of self-exposing jabber, but maybe there will be some sense to it. Really, I just wanted to talk about climbing a mountain and how it put me up to date on the status of my body. It's not awful, it's not even bad, but it's not 17 anymore, and the fact I trust a 40-year-old woman telling me what part of my bodily structure to take extra care of more than a 19-year-old girl doing the same, is simply due to the (sobering) realisation that, though I'm not a 40-year-old woman, I will very probably be one some day, whereas I will never again be 19.
Apparently, mountains, whether you're chained to the top of them with an eagle whose recurring visits serve to feed on your liver, or whether you're infinitely pushing a boulder uphill just to watch it invariably roll back down, have a way of making you reflect on your condition. Ours may be to decay, but at least we're not alone in our suffering of it; knowing that everybody goes through what you go through may not be sufficient consolation, but at least we get to ask one another how we get through it. Pretentious enough? I think so.