Young Lady in the Darkness (#4)

Young Lady in the Darkness

As my parents and younger sister slept through nights that converged into one inky smear of darkness, I would ponder why I had chosen this; why did I enjoy being at home so much?

All my teenage years I’d been running from this inhuman stillness, this essence underneath the traffic light activities of society. By way of conscious decision, my past self had crafted a very social, very normal fishbowl. You would’ve found me at weekend parties with an alcoholic drink in my hand, laughing in company about something so foreign to this stillness I had now sunken into. I was once that normal girl – friendly and bold and agreeable.

In a materialistic, capitalist society, stillness is abnormal. We no longer live in simple times, but in a fast onslaught of stimulation. Most of us reside within entirely human fishbowls, oblivious and indifferent to other perspectives of living. We see the stillness inside the eyes of animals and the sluggish growth of trees as inferior to ourselves. And we bustle along, chasing after invisible desires of collective imagination – money, cyberspace, brands, social status, exam scores, fame etc.

Overtime my façade faltered, my composure weakened. I had become weary of this normal girl who pretended this underlying stillness didn’t exist. I had become weary of shoving myself into molds to feign belonging within this busy, busy world.

For once, at least once, I wanted to belong honestly somewhere. Even if only to understand more about myself. Even if only to know who I wanted to be for the rest of my life.

That somewhere happened to be my rural family home embraced by forest all around, distant from any main roads or neighbours.

I stayed home, night after night, because it was a place to be fundamental and true. I became like the garden and the house – quiet and peaceful and a little less human every day. The behaviours I’d once reflected bled out of my identity as if washed and faded on a clothesline season after season.

And it felt inspirational.

A regular person would look at my quiet lifestyle with patronization and confusion. To them, I’m just another abnormal person with strange values and an even stranger perspective, who should quit all this home nonsense and go get a real  life.

But when regular people are far, far away from my peaceful fishbowl, the only consequential opinion is my own.

Young Lady at a Desk (#3)

Young Lady at a Desk

Boredom. Not from staying home, but from sitting at a work desk with contract papers and a computer in front of me.

The desk, to this very day, is situated in the house living area against a tall window overlooking the garden. For four days a week a nineteen-year-old young lady would glance out that window between solar technology pricing lists and client emails with a wishful look, aware of the subtle irony; I had chosen to work from home so that I could enjoy the garden, not stare at it through a panel of glass.

I could hardly complain, of course. Sleep clothes had become my new favourite fashion attire – specifically oversized cotton T-shirts and tracksuit pants. I wasted no effort in taking advantage of the many benefits of working from home. Being left to my own devices while my dad drove around seeing clients and solar electricians was enough to consolidate the fact that, well… I didn’t need money.

I had worked part-time at a local bakery most of my high school years, and had saved up a few thousand dollars. I wasn’t interested in travel, and I already had my own car at this point. In a house isolated from the society encompassing it, money had no real value. And that house, with its chapel-like high ceilings and polished timber floors, was the only place I intended to invest my life into at this stage.

Work became a sacrifice to keep my parents happy.

I would imagine all the people of the world who worked sixteen-hour shifts and lived in tiny, run-down apartments while tying to afford living expenses alongside their crippling debts. I would imagine starving families in Third World countries risking their lives for basic needs, praying that an air strike wouldn’t land on their flimsy shack roof. I imagined all these horrible realities – these fishbowls – I didn’t happen to have, as I sat in my desk chair filling out Excel spreadsheets. 

Who the hell was I to be complaining about boredom?

But the thing about fishbowls is that you can only live in one at a time, and typing out solar energy contracts for client names I had no face to pair with was about as exciting and fulfilling as it sounds. I couldn’t help but think I had so many better things to do while at home, things to make me wiser and stronger and more equipped in this new adult galaxy I’d warped into.

Why do societies drain away decades of our life as if they own us? Why is it that Australian school systems demand six hours each weekday, when many schools in Norway only demand four? These are the questions I asked no-one-in-particular as I sat at that desk. When I reassess these bohemian musings now, I realise I’d put a lot of worth on human time and effort… more than it deserves.

This is a question I ask myself now: What would happen if every person in the world was allowed to do whatever they wanted with all their time?

Back then I might have said, with naïve optimism, that everyone would start studying philosophy and planting trees and loving each other more and plucking their dreams from the starry sky like berries… and maybe they would, for a temporary period.

Having become a person who is allowed to do whatever I want with my time, I answer this: Humans are creatures of habit. Once freedom of time becomes a normal experience, its value becomes like air; we breathe air without much conscious appreciation, despite knowing we will suffocate without it. I treasured every moment in that peaceful house for the first six months out of school, and I used my moments well…

Until one winter night at two in the morning, when I found myself staring at the geometric shadows on the high ceiling from the living room rug. I stared at the ceiling for almost an hour, reflecting on the past few weeks gone… which amounted to nothing. In that numb moment, I was another shadow in the house, barely existing in the stillness.

The only sound that night was the ticking of the clock on the wall – but it meant nothing to me anymore.

Young Lady in a Garden (#2)

Young Lady in a Garden

I suppose I should go about this chronologically, in hopes to make my indistinct experiences and emotions of the past year and a half somewhat coherent to human beings… perhaps even to myself. This style of recounting seems a little too elaborate for a blog, yet too casual for an autobiography… however not everything will naturally fall into society’s norms and expectations, as you will soon have demonstrated. Sometimes there are outcasts – obscure and inconvenient bodies with minds like dissonant music, who explore fishbowls shaped like Postmodern sculptures.

The first three or so months after graduating high school were the happiest days I have memory of. I would sleep in and watch the summer nature outside my bedroom window for endless minutes. Both my parents worked the usual nine-to-five hours, and my younger sister attended school weekdays, so during the daylight I had an entire house – no, an entire universe – to myself. I was the empress of my sunny, sunny fishbowl.

If only you could have seen the garden that summertime. The colours and textures and smells and sensations of that vibrant outdoors… as if all the Impressionist painters of art history had flourished their heaven-sent brushes at once. I lay on the garden’s brick pathway with a coffee mug in one hand and a book in the other, soaking in the sunlight and blue skies like a love-drunk hippy.

I had all the time in the world.

One day I did nothing but watch back-to-back science fiction movies. Why, you wonder? Because I could . Because I hadn’t been able to do so before. I was free spirited and in love with life. Gone were the abhorrently decorated classrooms and repetitive lunchbox food. Gone was my friend group of half-hearted co-dependency. I had reclaimed the fishbowl of my simple, nostalgic childhood, and I was not about to let go.

So naturally, when the summer ended and my dad gave me two options: work for him in his home solar energy business or go out and find a part-time job, I chose the former. Not because I was ready or willing to work, but because it was the closest thing to staying home. And oh, how I adored staying home!

You see, I thought that dramatic tension could only occur with more than one character involved, but I was soon to discover that life is perfectly capable of dishing out drama without extra cast members.

Summer slipped away, and I am reminded of a quote from the science fiction movie Blade Runner , of which I watched during this time:

“I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."

Young Lady in a Fishbowl (#1)

Young Lady in a Fishbowl

It is almost a survival instinct to deny personal life regret, but when you emerge from a bedroom in a house in a small town to a world of strangers who swoosh by without a second glance, the regret starts to laugh at you. It laughs and laughs and laughs from all around, until the intensity of it burns like ice pressed onto bare skin.

Am I too young to regret? I think that’s a remarkably unhelpful question.

At one ambiguous point in time I possessed enough pride to misidentify this comfortable trap as “reclusive soul-searching”, and in some sense it was, but I have since been stripped down in the most gentle of ways. No one warns you about the kind threats, the maternal thoughts that console and forgive and offer sweetness instead of personal power.

My wavering female palms reach out to the world – the smiling people before me, the lights, the noise, the things I don’t understand, the tall buildings, anything “out” – only to grasp a mirage of closeness.

I never fathomed how unfathomably lonely a single existence could be until now. Really. This face of loneliness is immortal, and it is terrifying.

I am twenty years old. Something about that number has changed me, as if I have become a puzzle space reshaped to fit the piece marked with that represented age. I didn’t feel this way at nineteen, nor eighteen… especially at eighteen.

My past is dull like the stairs I wore out between high school classrooms, floating back and forth until I forgot who I was and where I was going. My eighteen-year-old self wriggled impatiently within her private school uniform, longing for the horizon at the end of the graduating year.

This longing was not all good, I’ll have you know. In many aspects this horizon looked awfully similar to the edge of an impending waterfall, and what came after it was either resurrecting hope or doom in descending slow motion. Either way, it was something new and destined, and I longed for it the way Shakespeare characters long for a noble yet tragic death.

But this is no angst-ridden tragedy. It is a story of contradictions and consequences of all flavours for being a young person who is alive and who makes choices… even if that choice is indecisiveness.

Because I got out of that place. I graduated from the mandatory school fishbowl I’d known for most of my life – not spectacularly, but enough to pass. For right or for wrong, I busted out of there and seldom looked back – and here is where this adult story begins.

This is a story about a young lady of the 21st Century who likes to stay home a lot. Some may say a little too much… however that is but one fishbowl perspective. It took me a couple of years to realise we all live inside unique fishbowls, even in adulthood. These fishbowls are constructed out of habit and commitment, and can trap us for years and years – potentially our entire lives. This makes us all very much the same and forever amiss from each other.

Not to put the blame on fishbowls, but they can drown you with regret and make you mindless, until one of your attempts to escape flails outward and latches onto something else.

Or fishbowls can be so beautiful at times that all you can do is cry in bright, sparkling colours.