In which I'm going a little peculiar.

[raven]

So, I'm supposed to be writing right now. Why else would I be awake at two am? But I can't, simply because I'm in an utterly foul mood. In an attempt to exorcise it, I'm going to talk about it. Sorry. I'll get interesting a few paragraphs down, I promise.

Okay. Things Wot Are Bad.

Firstly, and most importantly, my cousin from America is here, the one I ranted about a few weeks ago under friends lock. Because, oh god, I can't stand myself when I'm around her. Note, it's not her I can't stand. It's me. She is older than me, she is doing an overseas placement as part of her undergraduate social work, and she comes from Connecticut and goes to school in Spanish Harlem. She is sweetly naive, very fond of the older-and-wiser sister act, is shocked by my habits and behaviour, you all remember it. I think she's okay. I mean, I think she's nice, but quite dull. Which is all very well - it doesn't really matter, because whatever I personally think, it doesn't change the fact she's alone in a foreign country and my parents and me are her only relatives close at hand, however distantly related we are. So it's right that she should be here for the weekend and be looked after a bit.

But one of my uncles is also here - one whom I am actually really fond of; it was he who I was visiting in Darwin a year ago - and that makes it so much worse. Because he, and my parents, and her, are together, a little support group who have this one specific thing in common - they're Indians abroad and sharing a common bond because of it. And I don't share it. I am not an Indian person abroad. I sit, mute and smiling vaguely, unconsciously left out of every conversation, every joke that I barely understand and wouldn't find funny even so.

[And I had to break off there because she came in. It's two twenty am, it's supposed to be my time now. Moving on, anyway.]

I am British. I don't like Hindi films much, and I don't feel like I live in a country not my own, and I've complained about this so many times I must have bored you all senseless, but goddammit it rankles. Why don't I belong anywhere? Why don't I have somewhere that's only mine? I'm Indian, but, and I'm British, but. But. Always the qualifier, the explanation, and I couldn't surrender completely to either culture without losing something of myself. Why don't I fit in? I remember asking that when I was four, and I still feel it so acutely, especially at times like this. Why can't I belong anywhere? Why must I be the other that people define themselves against?

My parents really like her, of course. And I know my mother wishes I was more like her, more like all the other cousins I have, because she wants me to be strictly, suffocatingly, conventional. She wants me to be normal. And I can't ever give her what she wants. I can't ever do something she'd be proud of, because I am not the person she wants me to be, and I never have been, and yes it is all cultural because I'm not a good Indian.

Maybe I'm just being childish, maybe I should make more of an effort, maybe I'm just rubbish. And maybe I'm just still feeling panicky and agoraphobic, because there is that. Sitting there round the table, at two in the morning - the time at which I'm usually the only person awake, so I have the house as a still, comforting silence around me - feeling out of the raucous surrounding conversation, I started feeling like I would start screaming if I sat there any longer, and that it'd be the end. I don't know, oh god.

Talking of the agoraphobia, and other varied symptoms I seem to be manifesting, I went to see my GP and tried to explain to him that I am a wreck but using words of more than one syllable. He was vaguely nice, shared reminiscences of having once passed out under the pool table in Balliol's bar, and drew three large dark vials of my blood. He's testing for anaemia, diabetes and thyroid, and says he thinks it won't be any of those things. I hope so. I just feel tired, and scared, all the time, and this latest family development isn't helping any. She's going to be here until Sunday night, and I may have lost my mind by then. And the problem is of course is that she's perfectly nice, it isn't her fault that she does what she does to me, and I don't know.

But I did go to work today, and that was all right, so maybe I'm feeling better. Or maybe I only feel like I fit in when I've created the gap myself - my job is my job, where I applied and made friends with my workmates and got to enjoying myself, and similarly, I fit in in Oxford because there it doesn't matter about culture and rubbish. I identify myself. I am a PPEist and a geek and a writer before anything else.

I need to get out of here. I need to get out. Surprisingly, this may be happening ahead of plan. Michaelmas isn't until the first week of October, but to all intents and purposes, I will be out of here on September 1st. That's the day I fly out to the States, first to Indiana, which may hurt my head quite a lot, judging from this weekend, but I will bear it for the sake of September 4th, which is the Visit of OMG with gamesiplay and the_acrobat in Chicago. On the ninth, I'm going to Boston, which will not be a family reunion and thus much better, and when I get back, there's something else.

Well. Claire Curtis-Thomas called me last night. She wants me to work on her magazines crusade during the last two weeks of September. I have somewhere to live, in Hammersmith, sharing a flat with the son of a family friend, and I hope to be working in her Westminster office. If all goes to plan, I'll have a parliamentary pass and everything. I'd love that. It would feel like something real, rather than staying here and feeling like a ghost. I won't come back here again. I'll move from London to Oxford and get straight into the swing of Michaelmas and hopefully it will all be okay.

ARGH. I don't know. I am just feeling bad and weird. But I feel better for having written it down. I'm watching season four of The X-Files, and writing a quasi-five-things fic, which I will write more about later. (It has actual sex in it. I'm not entirely sure how on earth this has happened.) In fact, I will write lots about fandom later. I just want to feel better.

Comments

[pinkishmew.livejournal.com]

Family is really tough. You go away, you're around friends and you know who you are, and suddenly you're at home, there's all these people who knew you a year ago - just - and now they don't understand you at all, and you can't be yourself any more. Suddenly parents are two people, and not just Mum and Dad, and you can see them for people with faults and foibles and it's - weird. Well.. that was what happened to me, anyway. Adjusting to "this is me, I'm an independent adult" when it's still "Oh actually, could you give me a lift here please, and some money?"

Compounded with anxiety? Doesn't make for the most fun holidays.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

No, definitely not. It hasn't been a good week. And nearly all the time I understand my parents and they understand me - it makes it worse that there are times, like this time of cultural angst, where they're so far from my headspace that we can't connect at all.