Just as many schools of thought as there are on both the topics of anarchy and perspective, so are there as many impressions and shifts in mental acuity that happen when you travel and come back to the place that, for all intents and purposes, for better or worse, is your new home.
And not only my ability to be a bit more flexible in my daily views is the sole benefit. There is also the disturbing realization that I have been sleepwalking through most of the last couple months of my life in a fairly anarchic place and I'm still in one piece, actually more mentally healthy than I was when I first got there.
This means that people are looking out for me. I have good luck, generally, in not encountering too many assholes since my sense of smell is really keen and I move in the opposite direction post-haste. I hate bad smells.
But this surpasses mere good luck, I think, the daily encounters I make and the people that are stepping up to become my friends. For some reason, all of this sassy hoopla became clearer to me once I left Tirana for some days and switched up my environment--a privilege that never ceases to escape me, trust me, airport security fuckwads, notwithstanding.
My recent stupor is due to the bends, pure and simple. I have never lived anywhere where I feel more uncomfortable and lonely. And the longer I stay here, the more obvious it becomes to me, that these perceptions, these perspectives, lie well within my core, not anyone else's. And they lie really deeply is the other surprising thing I find. How did I learn to submerge things so much that I literally forget that they're there? It's a rude bump on the shoulder when these things surface, depending on how secure I feel at that given moment in my life. I've been feeling incredibly insecure lately.
When you're off-kilter, disoriented and really wondering what the answer might be to what the hell you're doing in a particular place, this is the time to just completely relax. Not the opposite, as I thought. Being in overdrive when you don't have a clear road map might be mysterious and exciting, but in random wandering comes the danger of encountering deep truths about yourself in an atmosphere that doesn't want to see you do particularly well. It's not a malicious thing, really, it's just ingrained modes of reaction, I guess. It exists in every culture to some extent, of course, but in the one in which I'm residing at the moment, the ways in which people keep one another down. . . well, it sucks. So we always must seek higher ground. That's all. Just climb a bit higher.
All of this comes on the day after having a new friend come over to my flat last night (the first night home in a week) and sit around and drink wine and talk. Just talk about anything that comes to us. It was so inspiring and felt so fresh and I realized during these hours that this was happening because I was ready for it.
I really want to connect to the environment around me but am intimidated and worry about what I perceive are the questions being asked about me. What does she want? What is she doing? Why is she here? Well, let me answer those questions for you right now because it won't take long: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And then the thought of, how do you know anyone even gives a shit or notices, comes fast upon the heels of that. And so on.
I'm looking forward to meeting the people that can, perhaps, help answer these questions. Maybe not just for me, but for themselves, as well.
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