On being kind.

I’m swallowing a pint in the overhead lights of the pub we regularly go to. Wedged into a corner, I can’t help to bite the inside of my cheek. I struggle with my place here- I had spent the last year here in Glasgow, lamenting down the phone to friends and family about how I felt like a fart on the wind of a sky I couldn’t comprehend. My apparently crass, les a faire attitude was stand-offish, my fiercely defended eccentricities a sign of sure-headed instability. Anything I said was spoken in tongues, my humour deliberately misunderstood, my voice inescapably grating.

I settled for anger. Firstly, I was angry about the nationalism- which I knew was valid but appeared to me like it was always growing heads, heads that I needed to answer to. I needed to answer to my claws dug into the fabric of a UK citizenship, my craven desire to be welcomed and stable in a country that had rejected me, and was now finding new ways to reject me once again. How could I answer to that? How could I explain that I had a love for London that far exceeded my drifting satisfaction with my time in Scotland? I hated the place most of the time. At this point in my life it was cold and loveless, frustratingly familiar to the city I was from in Australia and aside from freezing nights hanging above the motorway with a cigerette in my hand, it was lonely too.

There was another thing to be angry about. I was left with all this time, and with all this time I had no way to come up with a marketing campaign for myself. Who was I? I had absorbed and been absorbed by the pain I had escaped from when I came to Scotland, and now there was nothing left but a set of glaringly obvious set of insecurities and the inability to be tight-lipped about anything. I had this deep, burning, unused energy inside of me that threatened to announce itself with ill-timed jokes and phrases that- for reasons that confused myself- seemed to be absurd to those who recieved them. Perhaps my frame of reference was absurd, and therefor anything below that line was far above the norm.

Whatever, I thought. Who wants to be accepted by a bunch of scoffers, of ping-pong-table-in-the-office grifters? I had nothing in common with them and they had nothing in common with me. By this time, the social exclusion had turned from turning one’s back away from me to outward aggression. I hadn’t felt this way since I was flat-chested and unmarketable to the boys in my Year 8 class, and yet I couldn’t summon the courage to just stick it to em’ and keep rolling onward.

Like most moaners and self fulfilled down-and-outs, I began to sift through all the glaring signs of my childhood. Ah yes, that old chestnut, that’s why I can’t help but prostrate myself- it all ties back to that very seed! Grinding my teeth to dust, I would attempt a funny kind of dance- one of submission and humiliation, peppered with a deep pang of fury in my gut that I was doing myself a great injustince… What was the point of it all? I had word-vomited all of that unused energy out of me, not spent it on anything useful or in any thoughtful way. I had spent countless fruitless pub sessions trying to believe that I could be anything less than what I was, which was boistorous and undeliberate and clunky and unaware. I had brought my visiting friends from London to bars I knew they’d be at, I took prococious phone calls aloud in hopes they’d be overheard. I turned up at gatherings I hadn’t been explicitly invited to, and smoked cigerettes I didn’t want.

In the new academic year I was no longer fresh meat. They all more or less let me plod along with them and I toddled after like a child, arms outstretched. I told myself that it was because I had taught myself self-respect that they had all accepted me, that I had gained a new self determination and no longer flaunted my vulnerabilities. I had been overdramatic, had mistaken aloofness for hatred, and hatred for an ever blinking sign plastered across my forehead that said “BEWARE, SOMETHING FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG”. I came to their parties and I referred to ‘last night’ with them all the next morning. I listened to stories about black out sex on a weekday, but with none of the real vulnerability mixed in. I found out who had been fucking who- when, where, how- and sometimes they all bitched about each other to me.

I was accepted. Or maybe I was tolerated. Whatever the reasoning, I finally had a place at the water cooler in the morning. I still wasn’t satisfied. I sought out the exchange of private glances and I took backhanded comments too personally. When I sat at the bar, I made myself as small as possible, opting for total silence or fervent chatter. I would daydream about communities I had built back home in London, ones from the past or ones that are drifiting, occuring only when we happen to be in the same city at the same time.

I’m not here to say anything interesting or revolutionary. I just want to underline how important it is to allow space in our communities. In a society that awards loneliness, individualism and steadfastness in the face of this crazy sparseness, by creating walls around our psyche, and then walls around our spaces- in schools, in sports, in digital realms- we create an ever-expanding bubble around ourselves. When a friend visited me in Glasgow and saw the circumstances, she held onto my hands and told me that it is free for them to be kind. I knew it to be true, and I felt a desperate flicker of desire for the communities I felt free to occupy, but I also knew that I had ostracised myself here despite my efforts to be accepted.

I had been angry and bitter and seperated myself culturally from this city that I had imposed myself onto. While I find it deeply difficult to hide my neurosis or shade the world from the things that make me a susceptible member of society, I definitely have the ability to open myself up to new experiences and ideas. I had blown in from this eternally space sucking, soul sucking megatropolis to be educated in a place that was handing university places off to people like me rather than born-and-bred Scots. Sure, it isn’t my fault, but wouldn’t I be wary in the same position? And in addition, I had become bitter and guarded. I had come in with the shadow of my past experiences, and closed myself off from real connection and vulnerability.

It was wrong of them to isolate me. But it, in some weird way, I should have shown myself what I can contribute to this city, and made a commitment to serve it in the same way it will serve me. I have a complicated relationship with Glasgow, but isn’t that the way with every place you live and exist and face hardship in?

Musing thoughts… Today I feel one way, the next a different way. But we have to keep on keeping on, I suppose.