Who, me? Couldn't be!

I realize (and have realized for a while) that my blog provides very few, er, rather no details on what it is im actually doing here. Some people might read and say, “wait, what, Paige was there??” And others may ask if I’m even, like, working anymore? Since many have pointed out the annoyance of this, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for me to stop unintentionally keeping you in the dark.

I left FED over 3 weeks ago to meet my sister in Bangkok, with whom I traveled for 2 weeks. After she left I spent some time in Chiang Mai by myself before meeting up with Danielle, who I then joined for a “honeymoon” in Koh Samui. I learned a lot from these few weeks spent living out of my backpack. From how to travel with others to how to keep your cool in the face of obnoxious tuk-tuk drivers, many lessons were learned and I hope I can somehow share them in all their glory and exigencies in the next few blog posts.

Now I am staying with Sandra (ever the gracious host; she has honestly gone above and beyond to help me out, but more on that later) for a week while I look for a place to rent a room until I leave FED and head home. I have had trouble sorting through my feelings about when I am going home, but showering post-jog on the beach I realized that if I’ve made “when I run out of shampoo” a reason to go home sooner rather than later then maybe there are actually some reasons deeper than lather to which I should give my attention.

In only one day back at FED it’s grown clearer to me that, regardless of what’s going on at FED, at home, etc. I would benefit most from listening to what I want to do. This aspect of listening to myself is actually much more difficult than I would like to think and I have a much harder time parsing what I want from what “others want” than I wish I did, but one thing that I constantly need to remind myself of is this: you won’t please others by doing what you think they want. Generally speaking, they like you better when you’re yourself anyway.

OK, cool. Just be myself. Oh wait, who dat be? Hm, well, I actually don’t know. I think I am probably someone in between who I think I am and who others think I am.

After reading a review of psychologist James Pennebaker’s new book about what our use of pronouns can say about us I took one of the quizzes on his website. Upon completion of the quiz I learned that I had used more than double the average number of self-referential terms for that given picture. His studies have correlated the use of self-referential pronouns (I, me, and the like) to higher levels of insecurity. Oh. Grand. I could make up excuses about how I messed up, leading to a higher number of ‘I’s than I would have put otherwise (well, I did), but I could also take this finding not only with a grain of salt, but also as a bit of a wake-up call as well. ‘I’ is scattered copiously throughout this paragraph, and while it is a blog post, there still is something to be learned from that. Perhaps I am more self-centered and less confident than I would like to believe. Perhaps it’s possible that not all people with gaping insecurities are actually aware of these insecurities.

How I perceive myself and how I act are actually two very different things (and both are different from how others see me), and I could benefit from stepping back and trying to look at myself from the outside. This involves being honest with myself, something I didn’t even realize I wasn’t fully being. How to be that kind of honest is still foreign to me, but like all things, it will become clearer with time as long as I am putting in the effort to understand it.

While traveling I started many blog posts, and many interesting thoughts have appeared. Too many were lost to distractions, too little time at the moment, and the passage of time overall. However one particular thought that keeps recurring is my view on honesty, and questions I have about what it means to be honest. Most recently I have been obsessed with this idea of honesty, not the self-reflective kind I mentioned above—but about how honesty (and the lack thereof) plays out in social settings. Tune in next time for: the thousand ways Alyssa’s been duped!

Checking in, checking out

Standing in line for the skytrain, formulating my next blog post in my head, already feeling better just from thinking about writing, I suddenly step away from myself enough to realize that there are many people on the platform, and I am the only one standing where I am standing. Everyone else is qeued up in lines behind the yellow arrows pointing towards where the doors will open (ahh Asia). Ohhh!!! Feeling almost as sheepish as when I kept walking to the exit while every other soul stopped in their tracks for the 6 PM singing of the national anthem (I didn’t even notice until I started looking around for Paige, and still didn’t notice that everyone else was stopped until I saw her standing still, her shocked face mixed with embarrassment at her ignorant and disrespectful sister), I swallowed my sense of entitlement and got to the end of the line that had created around me as I stood, lost in my mind.

My skytrain oblivions are perfect examples of what I am motivated to write on today… my lack of “here”ness, my distractedness, and this gaping inability to settle my mind. I started writing earlier about Paige’s and my time at a little beach in Koh Samet called Ao Nuan. The resort was a little hidden away nook on the island, which we trekked through the jungle (snake sightings included) to arrive at a number of bungalows set back in the trees yet still within tumbling distance of the ocean. As was fitting for this off-the-beaten place hideaway, I settled down with one of the two decent books on their share shelf, Into the Wild.

I was wondering if my mind would settle here where there was no internet or even any distractions, leaving me with nothing to do but lie on the beach reading the book, but I found myself engaging in another type of escapism. Into the Wild was a really enjoyable read and I definitely lost myself in it, never truly leaving the beach, but not getting swept away by any wilderness idealism either (though reading it combined with trekking with my big backpack over trails for twenty minutes did have me longing for the High Peaks and October leaves). Yet it left me asking, what role did reading that book play in my time at Ao Nuan? I wasn’t present for the waves or the sand, at least not holistically. Sure, I felt the ants crawling up my shorts occasionally and I appreciated the poached bananas in coconut milk our interesting host suggested we try, but even in my conversations with said host… was I ever that present?

This consternation has plagued me since I first became settled at Pakarang over a month ago. After the newness of the place wore off, I found myself looking for the next place. I’ve already mentioned this view of my time in Thailand as merely an in-between phase, and my mind is definitely looking forward to something more long-term where I can commit myself knowing that with time I will reap the benefits that come from such commitment. Seeing my time in Thailand as a bridge of sorts, exacerbated by my current homelessness (I have been living out of my backpack and traveling all over Thailand for over two weeks), it has left me incredibly antsy and unsettled. This antsiness manifests itself in many different forms-- from realizing that during a massage I cannot calm my mind at all, regrettably unlike the ease with which I could do so in the past, to being unnecessarily indecisive about guesthouses, to noticing that my conversations with people leave me feeling embarrassed and empty.

Empty is a strong word, but it is definitely how I felt after my conversation with our personable but distracted Ao Nuan host. Perhaps it is just that we were both interested in talking about certain “deep” things, but lacked the intimacy to do so having only just met. And because we were not imbibing we did not create an illusion of intimacy either. This may well be the case, however I have known individuals with whom I can have a connecting and somewhat intimate conversation with without much previous interaction. Where does this “present”ness come from? Why have I lost it, and furthermore, did I ever really have it? Traveling leaves me with little time to reflect on this (thought I am incessantly reminded of it), and I am sure more blog posts will be written on it as my thoughts slowly come back together.