I'm hungry.
I was en route for the past few days, busing from Portugal over to Malaga, Spain, and thence down to Tarifa and across to Tangier. I ate once a day during that time, typically a loaf of fresh bread and an entire block of cheese.
Fasting every now and again doesn't bother me, and I liked not fussing much with food logistics. I was able to more fully focus on seeing and experiencing the world I was moving through.
But now I'm hungry.
I'm in Tangier, Morocco, at a hostel in the medina, with two weeks to kill until my next workaway. I'm surrounded by amazing food, I have nothing else to do, no bus to catch, and it's been 24hours since I ate last.
Okay, yes, right, I'll just get up and go out and... get some food. But suppose they don't speak English? I haven't learned enough Arabic yet to ask for what I want - hm perhaps I'll study a bit more Arabic first. Ah, the wifi is down.
Okay, fine, I'll just get up and go out and... but it's Ramadan now and the sun is still up, and maybe they'd be terribly offended if I asked for food? Is that how it works? I'm not sure. No, certainly not - I read that they're pretty okay with tourists being tourists, so of course it's fine. Duh.
Right, okay, I'm walking now through the streets, the souk. No, thank you sir, I don't need any hash right now, la, shukran. I know how to do this, just smile and say no thank you and keep walking, if you stop then they've got you, oh, hey, that place looks like a little food shop, I wonder if -- well, I didn't stop, so it's too late now, and it'd be weird if I doubled back, so let's hope there's another one up ahead and I'll try to think faster this time, all right, here we go
Damn, I'm not sure what was on sale there, but it looked and smelled tasty, god I'm hungry, too bad I got a few steps past it before thinking to stop, it's all right, there's lots of shops all around
Okay, well, hell, now I'm walking down a street and the shops have all petered out. It'd look extra weird if I just turned around right here, it'd look like I didn't know what I was doing (what am I doing?).
I'll act like I'm out for a stroll, to see the sights and explore the neighborhood without a care in the world, and meander around and make a big loop and hit the souk again from the opposite side, and while I'm wandering pretending not to be ravenous I'll plan out which little shop I'll go to.
This is ridiculous
Cities terrify me. I don't know the rules. I grew up out in the desert with not another soul around for miles, I'm comfortable there, not here. Well, that's not quite right, I lived in San Francisco / Oakland / Berkeley for seven years and got comfortable enough there, didn't I?
Yes, but I got comfortable at the places I knew. Every time I walked in to a new shop, cafe, restaurant, store, subway station, my mind was on fire and all of my muscles were tense, my breathing short. No, not a panic attack, not at all, it was more like... overclocking? When a GPU is intended to go to 100 and you go in there like a nerd and fix it to go to 110, 120, to get more processing power out of it.
No, it's not cities that terrify me. It's being in social territory where I don't have the map, and by map I mean the rules of how to act. If I know the rules, if I have the expected behavior committed to my mental model of where I am, I'm perfectly comfortable. I go up to the counter, and then I pay there, and then I can sit for 20 minutes, 30 max, before they want me to leave or buy something else.
Or: here, they don't mind if you sit as long as you like, and they won't bring you the bill till you ask for it.
Or: here, look people in the eye and smile and do the nod.
Or: here, don't look anyone in the eye, but give off the vibe that you are peripherally aware of everything around you and are dangerous but not aggressive.
Or: here, smile like a huge dope, say anything that comes to mind, it literally doesn't matter if it doesn't make any sense, and actually if it does make sense it might confuse people and make them think you’re sober, so just say something happy and meaningless, but whatever you do don't say nothing. Got it?
I have a hundred, a thousand of these maps or rulesets in my head. They keep me safe. As long as I can follow the script and no one notices that I'm an outsider, that I don't actually belong here, that I'm an undercover agent, a spy, a saboteur, an infiltrator, an alien, a runaway, I'll be all right.
When I walk off the map and find myself in a place where I don't know what the expected behavior is (shitshitshit do we sit down first and they come to us or do we go to the counter and order first? Is this the sort of place where you get in a que or where you just elbow up? Do they smile or do they not smile here? Can I look women in the eye? Is this the sort of culture where it's best to ignore the people asking if I want to buy hash, or to say no thank you and smile, or to say no thank you and NOT smile?) my mind explodes like those fireworks that crackle like a thousand drops of fire rain on a tin roof.
My maps and models are built from relentless observation. That's why I'll run one, three, ten laps on a place first before going in, attempting to absorb every detail. I'll watch someone else ordering, I'll notice every single thing about the interaction: I'll notice where they stand, what kind of eye contact they make, I'll notice when and how they reach for their money, whether it's coins or bills, if they point with one finger, the whole hand, which hand, or if they point with their chin, or eyes, whether they smile or not, whether they take the thing and put it in a bag or just hold it.
And I'll take all of that information and note that the person doing the interaction was a local, and so maybe none of that data applies to me. I'll do another lap and hope to observe a foreigner like me, I'll compare and contrast all columns of the foreigner’s observation data to the local's interaction, then note that that foreigner was a woman and spoke French, so I still don't have a high fidelity mental model for the rules that will apply to ME, a long-haired male English speaker, and so for another lap we go, and--
I'm still really hungry.
And I’m mad at myself because I’m perfectly aware of how stupendously ridiculous I’m being but when I try to force myself to just dive in my muscles lock up and my mind freezes.
Eventually I spot a little shop that sort of matches my mental model of a gas station minimart, and it's got a pile of flatbread right there on the counter, and so I walk up and say hello and ask for two, and he speaks perfect English and gives me two flatbreads and I pay him and he doesn't start shouting that I don't belong here and so I walk back to the hostel, flooded with relief, and eat two massive pieces of bread.
And think,
what am I doing here?
and
what in god's name is wrong with me?
The two questions are each other's answer. I’m here here to figure out what in god's name is wrong with me, and what to do about it. It's easy to forget this whole thing about myself when I'm in a place where I know the rules.
I am here to observe myself in a foreign environment, build a mental model about the rules I use to develop my mental models, and analyze why my mind works this way, and come up with some rules for how to act in such a way to have experiences that prove to myself that I belong on this planet, that I'm not an outsider, an observer, a runaway.
I've been advised by well meaning people that I ought to just drop all that mental model building and act intuitively, to just be myself. I derived some sort of weird pleasure when I followed their advice and acted and said whatever came to mind and people's faces turned to stone, to confusion, turned away. (What is he doing? What is he saying?) See, smartass? It doesn't work for me. If it were that simple I'd have done it long ago, so just leave me alone to figure it out for myself, like usual.
It's not so simple, you see, for one such as I to just be myself. MySelf is buried under a stack of maps, charts, reams of data, piles of old hard drives, textbooks on cognitive model building, various printouts of peer reviewed articles on theories and experiments. MySelf hasn't been let out much these past few decades, and I think the well meaning people don't understand this. These people's selves have been out in the sun this whole time, it seems to me, and mine
has been hiding.
My reality is that I'm more comfortable hanging off the side of a mountain, twenty feet above my last piece of gear, eyeing a fiddly little overhanging crack that I'm not sure precisely what to do with, than I am attempting to walk up to a shop where I don't know the rules and buy groceries. They both scare me, but only one makes my skin crawl. Only one feels like a kind of mortal threat.
This doesn't sound like fun, does it? You're right. It's not. I hate it. I am so uncomfortable I can barely stand it.
Yesterday a guy came up and started asking me the sorts of questions it's rude to say no to, like where you from, how long you been here, hey you have a nice beard, and all the while I'm thinking, oh no. Oh no.
An hour later I've bought a rug and a tunic and a pink scarf, and then spent the rest of the day reeling from the blow of extreme cognitive dissonance. I blog about postconsumer praxis and I just spent over a hundred dollars on things I didn't want and don't have room for.
Who am I? Who is this person I’m living inside of?
So what am I doing here? Well.
When I'm in a place where I know the rules, it's easy to tell a story to myself about who I am. I'm calm, suave, I'm grounded and firm in who I am, I don't panic over stuff, I’m a high functioning adult in all circumstances, I believe that I belong in this world.
And it's all basically a lie, and I know it is, but most of the time it's easy to not think about how my story about myself is a lie because it looks like my actions match my story. It's only when I get out here, off the map, in a place where I don't have the rulebook, that it's obvious how much my idea of myself is a fragile story.
I'm here to figure out how to be who I want to be, who I know is within me, without the map, without the rules, because I can't think of a way to become that person back where I'm comfortable. I’m fragile back home. Only here beyond my comfort zone do I have a chance of becoming durably myself.
Claiming I'm some certain kind of person where I know the rules is like building a boat and saying it's a great boat, except you've never put it in the water. Maybe it is a great boat, who knows, but until you sail it over the horizon it's just a pile of wood, a bit of canvas, and a nice story. You've got to actually put the boat in the water and see if it floats, if it sails true.
That's what I'm doing.
And, uh, there seems to be some little problem with the jib, or something.
But that's all right, that's actually what I'm here to discover and be forced to deal with. I'm dropkicking my own ass into the deep end of the pool and saying swim, or don't, up to you pal. At the end of this we'll know if you can swim or not but no more stories.
I'm sick unto death of listening to my own fragile stories. I can't stomach them any more, and so this discomfort and pain is delicious, because there's nothing more worth doing than scraping the things off of ourselves that aren't ourselves and seeing what’s underneath.
I want this more than I want to be comfortable, I want this more than I want to not experience pain, I want this more than I want other people to go on believing the story I’ve been telling them about myself.
I'm here because I'm hungry.