Questions I ask myself

When I wonder if I'm too weird

Every now and then I think to myself: I lead an odd kind of life. (Although really, the sentence should go “an odd kind of life leads me.”)

I found myself thinking this last week when I excitedly showed a colleague a video, taken near our house, of a leopard crossing the road. Yes. A LEOPARD crossing the road. To which my colleague reacted with abject horror. We were having a furtive cigarette outside Parliament’s marquis tent (they meet in a tent now, it’s a whole thing), dusk and drizzle descending on our heads. Running out of talking points, I was trying to explain my life to him. Inside the tent politicians were sputtering offence at each others’ points of view, police officers were shivering at every entrance, and our colleagues were talking a mile a minute inside their interpreting booths. The atmosphere, if not quite electric, at least had a certain gravitas to it. Big Decisions Are Being Made Here.

Into this stumbled I, with my stories of leopards and chameleons and funny birds. I tried to explain to my colleague how I sit on my balcony and watch the forest unfold slowly over the course of the day. About the boomslang I saw near our front door once, and how surprisingly noisy it was, crashing confidently through the undergrowth a few metres from where I stood. Each story, source of such joy to me, upset him further. “I am NEVER visiting you,” he kept repeating. The more I spoke, the more I saw myself become an oddity in his eyes.

Screenshot of the video of the leopard in question. Taken by an anonymous neighbour to whom I will forever be grateful.

This has been happening to me all my life. I never set out to be weird, but people keep responding to me as to a lovable eccentric. In my varsity years my cooking habits were a running joke: My fridge smelt famously of garlic, I made coffee in an enamel pot on the stove, I ate fermented food before anyone else knew what that was. When I started working, my colleagues would routinely ask me to regale them with stories of my confusing love life, my newest experiments with psychedelics, the unusual parties I’d attended. Weird things kept happening to me, too: Getting accidentally drunk and falling asleep in an orchard. Taking a minibus taxi without checking and ending up in the wrong town, without any money. Almost becoming a middle-aged millionaire’s mistress (and getting a free flight in his Cessna out of it, before I realised the move he was trying to pull). Getting a flat tyre on the isolated banks of the Kunene river in Namibia, and discovering we didn’t have a spare. Falling asleep on the toilet at a wedding, causing my date to have to scale the wall to wake me. The list goes on. I didn’t set out to do so, but I must admit I sometimes lead an odd kind of life.

Also last week, I was browsing at a grocery store when a man walking past said, “Wow, you have intense eyes.” This is the most common feedback I get from strangers, although to be fair, on this same Cape Town trip I also got told I have a ‘nice smile’ and that I look ‘very excited’. Based on this, I imagine I must look half-deranged to those who don’t know me, stalking the streets with my frizzy hair, incomprehensible grin, and crazy eyes.

In reality, it’s just that new experiences make me very happy. Going to Cape Town for the odd freelance job, so far removed from my usual life, makes me feel like a three-year old about to blow out the candles on her unicorn cake. I imagine this does make me appear odd, surrounded as we are by serious people doing serious things. Usually I’m okay with that, but every now and then, such as when I am explaining my life to an incorrigible city slicker, I am struck by a sudden wave of self-doubt. Am I actually actually weird, in spite of how sane I feel?

Worse: Am I irrelevant?

For context: I am a linguistic odd-jobber, usually paying my rent through a combination of transcribing and editing. But every now and then I get a call about an interpreting opportunity, which is my first love and the thing I did full-time for ten years. Back then I worked for a university, now I do interpreting for SA’s parliament, when they need extra hands on deck. It’s fun, it’s tiring, it’s fascinating, it’s existentially unnerving. Basically, a unicorn cake designed just for me. But leaving the safety of my forest home for the big city, and for politics, does cast an awkward light on some of the dustier shelves in my life. I barely know who any of our ministers are. I catch speakers’ references almost too late, and in-jokes fly far above my head. I ran into an old varsity friend while in the city and after some chit-chat found out what he was doing there: He’s an MP. People MY AGE are members of parliament. (Mark, if you’re reading this, killer maiden speech.)

So when I came home from this job I decided that I should make an effort to read the news more often. A few years ago I consciously stopped doing so, because my sadness and concern about the world was starting to consume me. I have a New York Times subscription, but I mainly use it for Wordle, recipes, and the odd opinion piece. I have avoided South African news in particular, because I love this country so much, because this is my home, because I’m so worried about it. No need, I’ve been telling myself, to make myself any more anxious than I already am.

But one should know at least a little of what’s going in the world. Right. Right? That’s what people say all the time, at least. I feel duty-bound not to check out entirely from current events, as if doing so would make me not only irrelevant but also unethical. When people talk about the UK election results, details of South Africa’s Government of National Unity, or the newest conflicts in Ukraine, I always feel a vague sense of guilt when I don’t know exactly what they are referring to. Even writing this, I feel the need to defend myself: “But I’m not ENTIRELY clueless,” I want to tell you. “I watch a ton of informative Youtube videos. And I read about climate change quite a lot. I’m not a bad person, I promise!”

Anyway, so to ease my guilt I got a Daily Maverick subscription. And spent a morning deep-diving into political analyses, Olympic Games commentary, and science discussions. I only stopped when my body abruptly demanded that I lie down in a puddle of sun and stop moving for at least half an hour. Even lying there, though, my head was giving me an incessant highlight reel: ‘Okay but what if Donald Trump wins the American elections?’ and ‘It really bothers me that South Africa’s only viable opposition party is a bit right-wing,’ and then ‘But ARE they right-wing though…?’ And on. And on. And on.

Featuring again and again in this highlight reel was the one thought my mind seems to have particularly latched onto: One should stay aware of what’s going on in the world. A good person would. A relevant person would. And being relevant is very important, for some nebulous but Definitely True reason.

Okay, said another part of my mind suddenly, but should one really? SHOULD?

Is knowing what’s going on in the world helping me live a good life?

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. It depends on what you mean by ‘good,’ I guess. Right now, for me a good life means one where I pay attention and stay curious, without overwhelming my nervous system. Where I live compassionately without burning out. Where I keep asking myself what I can change and what I can’t, and act accordingly.

Ah, and if I ask this question, instead of bombarding myself with other peoples’ shoulds, then suddenly the answer is clear (but not simple):

Is knowing what’s going on in the world helping me live a good life? Up to a point. Every day that point shifts. Some days I can handle reading about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Other days I am doing no one any favours by learning more about it.

I can test this point every day by my energy and by how much space I have inside my heart. Am I anxious for no apparent reason? Am I grumpy with my partner? Have I forgotten to notice the sunbirds at my window? Okay, step back. Put down the phone. The goal here isn’t to impress the audience in my head, but to live well.

***

This is what good questions do: They jolt us off the tracks our anxious minds are riding like hysterical trains. They refocus us. So here are two more questions I’ve been asking myself lately:

Do my dreams and goals make me feel excited or anxious?

It starts like this: I have an idea. The idea makes me very excited. Two weeks later, or two years later, I wake up to the fact that said idea has now become a ball of lead in the pit of my stomach, and yet I am still toiling away at it (or avoiding it at all costs, even though this is supposed to be my dream). Somewhere along the road the dream became an obligation. Maybe I just changed, and forgot to update my dream along the way. Or perhaps the dream became infected by other people’s timelines, by the capitalist notion that dreams should make money (I blame capitalism for everything), by the fear that other people will judge me if I quit.

This little newsletter, this very thing you are reading now, took me a year to get up and going, because I was fighting the urge to just launch it in a frenzy of short-lived enthusiasm. I also refuse to work on this at the cost of the other things I like doing, even the silly ones like watching series. Even so, I felt some anxiety creeping in last week when I fell behind and didn’t post something. I’d told myself once a week was a realisable goal, then immediately fell short of it, and I felt briefly ashamed of that.

Well, screw that. No one is thinking about me (and I mean that in the happiest way possible). No one is lying awake at night waiting breathlessly for my newest instalment to appear. And I refuse to let this happy thing make me feel anxious.

Do I just need a break, or am I in freeze-mode?

When I am overwhelmed, my nervous system always gives me the same solution: Run away. Most of my fantasies revolve around dramatically quitting my life/relationship/obligations, walking off into the forest never to be found again, or reinventing myself in a different country. Alas, real life will not allow this. Also, I actually like it here.

Without the option to run away, my body supplies its second-favourite solution: Freeze. Now that I’m aware of it, I find the process almost ridiculously predictable: Conflict/stress happens. Brain scrambles to find a solution. Cannot find one. Body attempts to run away. Brain stops body from doing that. Body gets suddenly very very heavy and needs to lie down on the nearest available surface. And the day’s to-do list dies an agonising death.

Freezing is really annoying because it makes getting anything done exponentially harder. Once I am in freeze-mode I might as well kiss any other plans goodbye, because trying to actually do those things will feel like trudging through sludge, and will end up making me more anxious.

Freezing is also really useful. Taking a time-out from life allows one to reset mind and body; it is a normal nervous system response. Accepting it, learning to work with it, is really the only reasonable thing to do. So when I ask myself this question and I realise that I am actually in freeze mode, I know what I am working with. I cancel my plans. I take my body outside to be in freeze-mode near some trees at least. I put my phone away and look at green things. After a while, even if I still feel really heavy, I do small movements, like wiggling my toes, like stretching a bit, like walking. Like making myself a cup of tea.

But. All these bits and pieces I have learned about the nervous system have sometimes meant that I problematise even my most mundane of moments. I feel a bit tired and my mind yells: “Oh, I’m in freeze mode again! Hurry, hurry, find a blanket! Deep breaths! Cancel the afternoon!” When actually, the activity I had been doing was just starting to bore me, and I needed a ten-minute break from it. A change of scene. A snack. Today I was working in the garden when suddenly I felt overwhelmed and very tired. I wanted to sit, and stay sitting for a long time. I was racking my brain trying to figure out what had put me in freeze mode when I realised I hadn’t eaten yet. There was no problem, no grand lesson here. I just needed some eggy toast.

If I do go mysteriously missing, I’m probably hiding out here somewhere…

In my mind, Bill Hicks pipes up often: “It's just a ride.” Nothing is the end of the world. Except the end of the world, and that is coming regardless of whether or not I read the news, fulfil my dreams, and master my nervous system. In the meantime there are cheeses to eat, people to love, Youtube videos to watch. Odd lives to lead.

***

Speaking of Youtube videos, I thought I’d do this thing where every week I share some things with you that I loved or that made me think interesting thoughts. Read/watch them only because you want to, though, not because you feel they will make you a smarter/more relevant person.

• This video, Prison Abolition: What About the Rapists and Pedophiles? is just so good. If you’ve heard of the concept of prison abolition but wondered how that could even be feasible, or want to learn more about transformative justice, start here. Youtuber Kathrin shares vulnerably about her own experiences, infusing this topic with raw compassion. She also did her research, though, and answers many of the questions people ask about this topic all the time, such as “but what would we do with all the bad people if we didn’t have prisons?” and “how else can we give victims justice?” Here’s one of many quotes I plan on using the next time I have this conversation: “People call me naive and idealistic for my compassion, but I think more idealistic is the idea that we can heal violence with more violence, treat trauma with more trauma.”

• Since, after all, I have a Daily Maverick subscription now, I might as well put it to use. Here is a fascinating article about hybridisation – i.e., the thing living beings do when they are in danger of going extinct. It’s not too long, not too scientific, and it has polar bears in it. Also, butterflies, and existential questions about climate change. (The newspaper isn’t behind a paywall, although it might ask you for your email address.)

• Clementine Morrigan has changed my thinking about more things than I can keep track of. Her words are always ferociously on-point, and this article, Monstrous Daughters, in particular resonates with fierce conviction. Be warned, it’s about childhood sexual abuse, so not light reading. But it’s also about the mixed bag of trauma and love we inherit from our parents, about speaking the truth, about compassion and healing.

• Something lighter: Richard Osman, author of the Thursday Murder Club book series (which you absolutely should read if you even slightly like mystery novels), is back with a new novel, We Solve Murders, which is also the start of a new series. This novel is funny, it’s surprisingly kind to all its characters, it is suspenseful, and it has a very satisfying ending. I read it last week and that’s probably half the reason I walked around the streets of Cape Town grinning like a weirdo.

If you have any favourite questions to help jolt your mind from its anxious tracks, please do share them below. And if you read or watched something you really loved recently, I’d love to learn about it. Thank you for being here!