I am aware that by being quite
this honest you are all going to be either worried about me or have written me
off as a complete nut job. Do other people have this sort of experience? Do
other travellers, with their 19 years and enormous confidence, their shiny skin
and devil may care attitude, also have these wobbles? Do normal people, from
time to time, have massive crises of confidence? I don’t know. I am running the
risk that nobody else does and it really is only me and I am justifiably
certifiable. But somehow I don’t think I’m on my own here. Maybe I’m just
revealing it a little more than is usual.
Either way, I have started and so
I will finish. Today is the pinnacle of my own personal meltdown, and, though I
don’t know it until later, the peak that marks the end of it, and reveals the
solution. And for once it is a rather simple solution. If a little dependant on
how firmly I can stick to it.
We decide, somewhat belatedly, to
mark today as a ‘Red Tent Day’, (see “Red Tents and Big Tops”).
It doesn’t really work as well as
it did last time, mainly because circumstances compel us to do quite a lot
together, and restrict or predict our choices of activity. It’s Sunday market
day so we need to go to that as it can be hard to get vegetables and,
especially, tofu, in between. It is also a day that has been previously marked
off as ‘The Day When I Make Dinner’. M has raised concerns that whilst he loves
cooking and would rather do it himself, it has been a long time since I cooked,
and it might be nice for me to have a go. I accepted this, worried that it
might be a carefully concealed feeling that I am not pulling my weight. It’s
actually a really bad (and as we shall see later, a really good) day to pick.
But we didn’t know that when we picked it.
We go to market and then settle
into doing the sorts of things one does on red tent day, separate books to be
read, separate wanderings around in town, and so on. The trouble is today I
actually feel much brighter, and have
somehow managed to self absorbedly
forget that red tent day works both ways. I feel fine so I chatter to M about
this and that, starting conversations and generally invading the mental space
which Red Tent Day is supposed to be all about.
I wander into town, and get
talking to a Thai shopholder named Jin. (That isn’t her name but the usual
privacy rules apply.) Jin talks happily away to me, she in her headscarf, me in
my shorts and vest top, and discuss Cambodia, what M and I have seen and done
there, Jin’s shop, Thailand in general, and the beauty we fail to see in
ourselves but can see in each other. I rave about the Thai golden skin, she
about my pale alabaster (splotched with red from the sun). We both, I think,
feel good for it, and I, somewhere in the middle of this, choose and buy a
dress from her shop, to wear on Christmas day. We discuss peacefulness and
tolerance and she wishes me a happy Christmas in my new dress.
When I get home I am floating. I often
find that nothing does better for my general sense of bonhomie than chatting to
somebody, anybody really. If they are someone new that’s exciting, if an old
friend, it’s precious, and there’s a lot of good in the in-betweens. In this
case I am especially pleased because, aside from Boris, she is the first actual
Thai friend we have made. Everyone else we have become friendly with lives
here, is essentially and culturally Thai minded, but come from a multitude of
other places which are not Thailand.
I burst into the house and begin
excitedly to tell M all about it. His response, to gently remind me that this
is meant to be red tent day and I could tell him later, maybe, bursts my bubble
like an arrow. I plummet to the ground in an uncontrollably swift and sudden
change of mood.
Looking back on it, this is
something that exemplifies why traveling is such a roller coaster, somehow you
are always raw with something, mostly excitement, happiness or absorption, but
also disappointment, self doubt, uncertainty. It is possible to be swanning
about believing you are God’s gift because somebody said you were good looking,
but be only a day away from absolute self disgust. In this instance I think
there was a self esteem issue which needed dragging out into the open,
examining ruthlessly, and cleaning out, in order for me to get on and live this
without battling a dark and feverish demon, constantly informing me that I am
inferior and/or doing it wrong.
I set about cooking. The plan had
been for me to make several Thai dishes, which could be made ahead this
afternoon and then eaten after our planned ‘virtual beer’ with some good
friends from home over skype. This way,
we had reasoned, we could have a couple of nice beers and some fun with the
guys, and then the food, when we got the inevitable munchies, would simply be
there, ready for us to fall upon. I had selected the dishes, planned them
myself and was now embarking on preparing them.
Trouble is, rather as M had
predicted, somewhere along the line, because M is so very very good with a
knife, a hob and some foodstuffs, I have sort of convinced myself that I can’t
cook at all. This is a tradition long and bitterly observed between couples I
think. If you begin with both of you having a reasonable ability at something,
and one of you happens to be outstanding, the other one manages, somehow to
believe, not simply that the other person is better at it, but that this in
some way makes them useless. M does
it himself sometimes about writing, sometimes about socialising. I do it about
cooking, about making things, about cycling. I know couples who do it about the
ability to learn languages, about earning potential, about how they look.
Newsflash – it is utterly irrational. Because your partner is great at it does
not mean you have no ability whatsoever. You are not ugly because they are
beautiful. You are as averagely attractive as you were when you started. If
they are mensa level intelligent this does not mean you are mentally impaired.
And M being instinctively brilliant with food, does not make me unable to boil
an egg.
Rationality, however, is not
something, which, in this particular moment, I am possessed of much of. I begin to cook. Nothing goes wrong but I
find it hard. I don’t have the touch that M has, the ability to throw something
perfect together in half an hour, to chop things without even looking, to
manage to dice everything to perfect geometric cubes of exact equal size
without spilling a pip, or a drop of juice, or getting eggshell in it. It takes
all afternoon. It has taken about 3 hours and I am three quarters of the way
through when the whirl of spiralling self doubt – now turned to definitive self
loathing, peaks, and I stop my silent seething, turn off the heat, lock myself
in the toilet, and cry.
It’s a lonely experience, crying
alone, especially when you are being deliberately quiet because you don’t want
the other person to know. I am aware, rather alarmedly, that I seem to be going
crazy, and I reason, probably correctly, that M really doesn’t need to have to
deal with any more of it. The tears are bitter and biting, though in that
rather beautiful way, also gradually calming, but before they calm, they
convulse me, and all I can think is that M should be released somehow from this
awful marriage to this awful wife who has changed so drastically and become so
horrible, so that he can seek the woman he really deserves – a much better one
who is not so devoid of talent or sense.
As the sobs begin to ease
naturally, I list, brutally, what I have discovered about myself since
travelling:
·
I am afraid of everything
·
When I am afraid I am nervy and then narky
·
I am unable to accomplish even a simple thing
like cooking a meal
·
I am not as nice as people think – in fact I am
not patient, I am short of fuse
·
I am no longer an easy person for M to be with –
I have become high maintenance
Somehow in this listing, I move
from being miserable and self pitying, to cold and clinical. If I am not worth
much, I reason, as the above list would appear to demonstrate, why am I scared?
What am I ultimately scared of? Clearly fear comes from self preservation. I
must, therefore, have some interest in preserving myself.
This reasoning moves quite
quickly to a sense of grim determination. I deserve to suffer the small difficulties
involved in cooking a meal for the person I love. I should bite the bullet and
just get on with things I am afraid of.
And as the initial fervour of
misery starts to dye away, I can see that I am not short of fuse unless afraid
or self punishing, and that I am not as high maintenance as a lot of girls
might be, in the same situations. I can see also, as some very good friends of
mine will point out to me later, that really this is an extension of the issue
of unreasonable comparisons in couples as discussed above. M is, genuinely, one
of the most calm and unflappable people I have ever met. He is one of the most
calm and unflappable people anyone has ever met. Comparing myself to M, of
course I will come off as an utter maniac, thus fuelling the fire for greater
maniacal behaviour, and so on and so forth. If I compare myself to any number
of other people, which I now begin to do, I find that whilst I am not the most
easy going of them, I am up there in the top quartile.
And as I move, rather more
determined now, to the mirror, to remove the evidence of my random hysteria (M
is of course much too thoughtful not to have noticed, but he allows me my
deceit for the relevant period of time, before later, gently asking me what
happened), I can see that the first two things are the key – fear and not being
able to do things. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Fear and Self Loathing in
South East Asia, a lesser known film than its Vegas counterpart, but no less
trippy.
Fear is another matter, and not
one I am strong or clear minded enough to tackle now. But self loathing, I
realise, can be pragmatically assuaged. The best way to prove I am not
incapable of cooking, is to get back out there, get on with it, whip my rather
pathetic ass into shape, and COOK.
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