Shadows and Dust

So I went to the British Museum, because that's what I do.  When my brain is ticking over so manically it hurts, or when I need to get my head straight, or when I want to feel less, or feel more, I go to the British Museum.  My friend Liz has called it a "touchstone" for me, and she's exactly right.  (Not having access to that touchstone for two years is a little unnerving, but let's leave that aside for the moment...)

Mapping Exercises

I just dug out the “Me-Map” (yeah, I know) that I completed as part of my initial VSO training, lo these many eons ago.  It’s a map (well, a kind of circular bar chart) of my material, emotional, social, and professional needs in my placement.

It’s strange, how things that felt so essential nine months ago can seem so quaint and unnecessary now.  “Nice soap” was on the list.  Not prominently, but still.  I listed eleven material needs, and “nice soap” was one of them.  The hell was I on?  “Spices” was another; of course, this was before I knew I was going to be posted in Thailand.  (A fair few of them were food-related, actually.)  “Exercise” was on the list, in a fit of self-delusion.  “Painkillers”.  (Surprisingly, not a bad idea; VSO recommends that you bring your own.)  “Hot showers” wouldn’t make the cut now; I don’t think I had a single hot shower while I was in India, and god, I didn’t miss them for a second.  When it’s that hot out, cold showers are gorgeous.  “Tea” is still pretty high up the list, as is “lack of bugs”, but I think I’m going to have better luck with the former than the latter. :)

Other needs have shifted as well in the – whew – nine months since I did my initial course.  When I first created the map, I was living with my best friend, and had been for six years.  One of the most mind-bending, but still comfortably distant and abstract, thoughts about working abroad was that I wasn’t going to see her every day.  Well, now that I have my own place, I don’t see her every day.  It’s actually made me realise the importance of being able to keep in touch with her – she’s still my first phone call when anything happens, good or bad, and somehow, the fact that I don’t take her daily presence for granted anymore makes the panic at the thought of not being able to reach her a little sharper.  But I’ve also learned that we can do this – we can seek each other out and make time for each other, even when we’re not in each other’s immediate orbit.  The fact that my orbit is now spinning out to somewhere around the Andromeda Galaxy will make that a lot tougher, but it’ll be a tougher version of something we already know how to do.

Since that time, I’ve also really come to value having my brother in the same city, available to meet up for Indian food and cheap wine and long, awesome catfights over ethical traditions.  To be honest, I didn’t think I’d have to make this much of an adjustment where he was concerned, since we haven’t shared a hometown since I went away to university.  But now that we do, it’s going to be hard to give up.  And there are friends here I’ve gotten closer to, or rediscovered, in the past year.

A lot of the map has stayed constant.  Writing, books, the internet, museums, DVDs – the need for intellectual and emotional stimulation, the need for stories, is always going to be there.  (Yeah, part of me feels like, if I were a real traveller, I’d be able to get by on a beat-up copy of Down and Out in Paris and London from a secondhand English bookshop.  But honestly?  I don’t work that way:  I need good stories in order to make any sense out of my life and my feelings.  And I’m going to take full advantage of the fact that I live in an era of Kindle and digital comic book subscriptions. :))  Private space, too, is a pretty fat bar on my chart, and that’s going to be essential no matter what.

What I’m realising is that, while the physical stuff is going to feel important (especially at first), it's primarily important as a proxy for the emotional stuff.  Sure, I'm going to be battling some pretty ferocious cravings if I go without cheese for two years, but that's only really going to sting at those times (and I'm sure there will be times) when familiar food feels like a desperately needed bit of comfort, or like a scrap of consistency in a new and disorienting world.  And maybe that's an important part of creating the map - not just working out whether and how you can source a bit of Boursin in Chiang Mai, but figuring out what your needs actually mean, and when one need is really code for another.

It's still kind of daunting to look at, this little circle of crucial things that I might have to cope without for two years.  At least I feel confident of my macho ability to grit my teeth and deal with even the most ugly and brutal of soap.