An introvert abroad - day 5

Day 5.

Today was a day of scents.

The damp earth after all-night rain.
Stale cigarette smoke wafting out of the car upholstery.
The after-scent on my clothes after sitting in a restaurant with an open kitchen.
The peculiar, distinctive dry-damp odour of caves.
The changing quality of the air from green inland valleys to wooded mountains to salty coast.
Passing livestock trucks.
The homely smell of frying onions.
Fresh nail polish.

Inside an inky black cave, galaxies of glowworms. They are actually considered maggots when they are in the phase of development where they glow. But, as our guide eloquently summarised: "we didn't think anyone would pay to see glow-maggots". I tried to not breathe the unwashed odour of the backpackers shoulder-to-shoulder with me in the boat, and wished I could stay under that miniature night sky much longer.

In half an hour on this beach, so many sensory delights that I can hardly catch them all. Black sand, sprinkled with spectacular driftwood of all sizes. The shading of the clouds and the water beneath them, from storm-backed grey horizon to hidden golden sunset. Drying seaweed wafting its sticky stench over the beach.

The sound of rounded stones clattering over each other in the waves takes my mind into the past. Last year I briefly dated a man who was blind. Deprived of the option of sharing images of the quirky things I notice in daily life and the beautiful places I experienced, I started recording sound bites to share instead. I found myself listening to the world differently, finding unusual landmarks in the constant landscape of noise. It was almost 6 months ago, and I still haven't lost the habit, or a lingering kernel of sadness at how it ended.

Then, as I'm sitting on a rock overlooking the waves, two bull mastiff pups run to me. Ignoring the urging of their gap-toothed owner, and my nudges, they sit their warm flanks down against my thigh and lower back, and push their heads under my hand and elbow. The next person to walk past comments that I have "the best seat in the world". I agree. On the walk back, two young black cats with white bibs scamper under the boardwalk. A cluster of surfers whoop and holler further out from the beach. And I walk back to the house smiling.

Life in an angry city

Sydney is an angry city. And today I feel angry too, because it doesn't seem possible to live here and not be impacted by other people's rage, impatience, and lack of consideration.

I lost hours of sleep last night because once again my neighbours put their own comfort and entertainment far above anyone else's needs on the early hours of the hot morning.

On the way to catch a ferry I saw that someone desperate or angry (or both) about getting a park had somehow forced the rear of my car out about a metre from the curb. I almost cried.

It's just a car, just a thing, but it's hard not to feel something about it. To not sense the acrid aftertaste of whatever emotion or intention those now absent people leave on my property, in my little cluster of spaces that are my own.

Travelling anywhere in this city calls for a constant balance between the necessity of leaving the house and avoiding an experience that frays my nerves. Even travelling one suburb over to go to a yoga class is an exercise in stress management. Sometimes just getting to and from the class undoes the benefit of the practice, pulls me harshly out of the post-meditation ease.

I understand that it's possible to choose another reaction. To try to shrug it off, or sink into a numb complacency that "this is how it is". Perhaps even choose to believe that this is a lesson, a gift from the gods to teach me something I lack right now.

Of course it's not everyone. There are other experiences sprinkled in between the bitterness. Sometimes the convenience store cashier will make a point of catching my eye and smiling as he rings up my purchases. Sometimes the bus driver will say "good morning", or "have a nice day", and mean it.

But those who doggedly follow and spout the mantra of 'focus on the positive' have yet to give me a satisfactory solution for what to do with all those grating, very real experiences. Even if I distract myself with other things, other reactions, happy thoughts... they accumulate like sand under fingernails.

I've been here for almost ten years, and only in small pockets of time have I felt like I was truly home. There's been an undercurrent of unease the whole time, a feeling of not quite belonging. I've often said that I want to leave, only I don't know where to. That home is where family is. And it was true, for a time, that was what anchored me here.

But now some of those knit to me by blood have left, in physical and relational ways. My sister is married and lives an hour's drive and $18 in tolls away. My brother has kicked me out of his life. My closest aunt moved interstate. My grandmother is dead. My cousins are all in relationships or marriages and live far away. The family gatherings that once happened regularly have dwindled. Nobody has time.

What is left is an abiding loneliess and quiet grief exacerbated by how disconnected I am from the thousands of people I cross paths with. By all the "we shoulds" that are never followed through.  What I am left with is memories and a few close friends and a lot of sand under fingernails.

So what am I going to do with all this? Write it (I feel calmer already). Speak it (to my friends who understand what it is to be sensitive in this world). Dance it out (I'm on my way right now). And plan, search for a place that will feel like home.

~~~~~

Photograph of an artwork by Tatsuo Miyajima

How to open a closed book

Don't tell me I'm too serious, that I need to have more fun. Don't shame me into trying to change, to be different to what I am.

Show me.

Share it with me.

Take me dancing until our breath runs away from us... then we'll chase it down and start again.

Let's buy popping candy buried in chocolate and eat it all, listening to the sound of rain exploding in our mouths.

Talk to me with irresistible curiosity, ask the questions that no-one has asked me before. Savour the answers.

Take me walking under the full moon, with our hands touching and tenderness in your eyes.

Show me the funniest movie you know and hold your hands lightly on my ribs while I shake with laughter.

Kiss me out of my moods and dive with me into small happinesses.... the sun on bare arms and the smell before a summer storm.

Let me rest when the world gets too much. Watch me sleeping because you can't help yourself.

Show me what it means.

Share this with me.

A minute in the life of a HSP: nightclub

A man may throw his arm around me in a nightclub, and I will be paralysed with indecision for a few moments. There is so much to observe in those few seconds, and it takes time to process.

There will be the way he smells, and not just the dominant scent he's chosen to spritz himself with... there are so many to notice with that kind of proximity to another person. His cologne will probably be first, the smell of his drink on his breath, and cigarettes if he smokes them (no matter how much gum he has chewed to try to cover it up – I can smell that too). Then an undertone of sweat, a trace of his shampoo, his underlying body odour. What he washes his clothes with, what he has had on his hands during the day. And then for each scent that I catalogue, reactions that I cannot catch, human chemistry doing what it does. At best I can perhaps note whether I like it or not.

Then there's the pressure and warmth of his arm, where he chooses to place his hand (does he flop it over the top of my arm, or curl it around towards my breast? What is he trying to communicate?).  Whether his armpit connects with my shoulder or not, what my shirt will smell like when he moves away, whether any part of his arm is touching my bare skin.

My body reacting to being touched – usually for the first time in quite a while. It usually startles me. The sensation of my heartbeat accelerating, the quiver in my stomach, the warm twitch in my groin, my posture softening to accommodate the weight of another body, my skin crawling or raising goosebumps or warming under his flesh.

The feeling of the intention behind the touch. The differences between I-want-to-take-you-away-and-plunge-myself-into-your-body and I-am-touching-you-because-I-think-you-were-asking-for-it-with-the-way-you-dance. Or I'm-just-drunk-and-have-lost-my-sense-of-appropriate-personal-boundaries. All very different to excuse-me-you're-in-my-way-stop-dancing-for-a-second-and-let-me-through. 

The reactions of the people around me. The friends wondering why I'm still standing there with this man draped over me when they can clearly see he's a waste of time. The other men waiting to see how I'll react so they know how they can approach me when they have a go.

And all of this sometimes before I've even seen him, before I've had a chance to take in anything about this person. Before I've seen his face. Before I've been able to make the choice about whether I want this person to touch me, and then whether I want to do anything about it. And then what it means, not just for me, but the meaning this stranger will attribute to my choice, my behaviour.

The quiet question of danger, of whether I'll be able to convince him that I mean no, of whether he might try to take something from me that I don't want to give. The constant feeling of being prey, of the only choice being to accept or reject what is offered to me. That my choice is to be here and to subject myself to this peculiar intimacy with people I don't know, and to learn the myriad unspoken rules as best I can... or to go home, to not dance, to not raise my eyes to the twirling lights on the ceiling, to not spend time trying to fit my social oddities into the rituals of others.

I question my own motives. I will wonder if I really am here just to dance and spend time with people I am trying to make my friends. Or, if I know the nature of these places, the nature of what happens here, and I go in willingly, am I inviting it? Am I placing myself in the path of temptation? Do I enjoy the attention more than it repulses me?

Eventually I will push him away, pick up my drink and settle my nerves again. I'll return to dancing with my elbows swinging around me or huddle closer to my companions. And no-one will be the wiser about what has happened in that one chaotic minute.

Highly sensitive happiness

Happiness is having the senses sated. That hunger that can only be filled by experiences of beauty. Exquisite tastes on your tongue. The incomparable sensation of the sun on your skin. Breezes untainted by the stink of the city. The sound of the ocean bringing you back to yourself. Music that rubs you the right way, wakes up your heart. Gentleness, delicate pleasures, comfort. It isn't that hard to find: I just forget sometimes.

Life in a mechanical age

I saw this quote while wandering the NSW Art Gallery this weekend. It was written in 1927 but it could be about now.

Our time is just electronic and wireless rather than mechanical. It surrounds us and influences much. It affects our sleep, relationships, thoughts and health.

I see commuters with their heads bowed over screens, those ubiquitous white wires trailing from their ears. Sometimes I am one of them.

Regina Spektor sings "you're using your headphones to drown out your mind" and I know it to be utterly true.

It's like the Matrix. We're all jacked in, more connected than ever. And more lonely than ever. I wonder why I was born to feel it all.

Assessment and poetry don't mix

A little while ago I paid for a poetry assessment through my local writer's centre.  $75 got me half an hour with a renowned poet who is also an editor and well involved with the 'academic' poetry world.  I had been to a poetry reading by this particular person before, and loved her work.  I thought of all the professional wordsmiths to show my work to, she would be a good fit.

I knew it was a mistake as soon as I stepped in the door.  The person I was getting was not the sensitive soul with a skillful pen I had observed elsewhere.  The person I was getting was friendly but business-like.  I was getting the poetry critic, the professional, the lecturer.  In short, I was getting what I had paid for.

I was prepared for my poems to be critiqued.  I anticipated constructive criticism.  She told me that my line endings were predictable, that I should use more metaphor and simile, less abstraction.  Essentially that the little collection of poems I had presented were not bad, but could be better. It made sense, I could see her points.

What I forgot to allow for were my feelings.  I've always been emotionally attached to many of my poems.  They are my life story, in snippets. They are my impressions, my thoughts, my experiences distilled into brief lines. So, logic aside, criticism of my poetry has always felt like criticism of me, in some way.  Though I tell myself it is not, it is.

Critiquing poetry has always seemed sacrilegious to me, from an early age.  I remember stuffy high school classrooms; being hunched over my desk trying to analyse and pick apart famous poetry.  Trying to guess the poet's intention and meaning, talking about their use of language, rhyme, pace, alliteration.  I've always hated it.

Now I find that I haven't written a single poem since that fateful half-hour in an upstairs room with yellow walls and a sloping ceiling.  In and of itself, this is not an extraordinary thing.  I often have long dry spells, usually accompanied by an overindulgence in working too hard, doing the things I like least.

But the difference is that I am shying away from it now.  I don't want to try, don't want to write more "not bad" poetry.  I don't remember feeling this way before, not this particular strain of wordless-ness.  Perhaps it's fear.  Perhaps it's a bruised ego.  I'm not sure.

The one thing most likely to pull me out of a slump is to spend time in the presence of poetry, and poets, those who see the world in a similar way.  So for now I am reading, soaking up what I can.  Hoping that I can fill myself up with enough lovely, piercing, elegant words that some of them will start to spill over again.