Sometime this afternoon I will be standing before my stove, manipulating my pan hence and forth, shaking sizzling butter under layers of eggs, milk and flour. This cheerful self-entertainment, supported by adequate music, will further brighten my day already much enlightened by rest and peacefulness.

On my way to the kitchen, I will shed the last shadows of uncertainty about how to handle the drama evolving in my close environment in the past few weeks.

Off will go the worry that the neatest self-balance may hide a decreasing self-confidence and increasing loneliness, possibly exacerbated by a recent life event; off will go the worry that frustrated ambition and unshared social and cultural moral codes stand in the way of mutual understanding and cooperation; off will go the worry that distance and an idealistic longing for reduced world misery and inequality are creating heart ache otherwise sootheable by good company; off will go the worry that lack of “outside” experience and first-hand knowledge of social diversity may be active cause in uncertainty and procrastination; off will go the worry, lately acute, that limerence may impede constructive social development and life progression…

The cost of loving is empathy and shared aches; but why is it that I should feel as if I had a role to play besides acknowledging their personal situations? There is no problem in need to be solved, only individual life experiences to be supported — as time and opportunities allow, and not through the darkness of worries and stress. After all, the moral pressure I feel is my construction, since I am the only one to consider “us” family.

This was today's enlightenment. Drama has quickly followed television on the list of things I have decided long ago to do without. Now behold, here come the pancakes!

Disclaimer: this is a post about its author. If you just want to be entertained, you can skip reading.

One more page turning. While I have spent the official “big party time” of the year quite comfortably lying on a couch, watching TV and playing video games, the occasional greeting SMS compounded with heavy fireworks and an yearly summary e-mail from a close friend reminded me this is the time of the year to contemplate the time passing and make the best out of transitions.

So here is my summary.

The year 2009 was about growing up. I am officially an adult now. During this year, I have started: considering an actual career, caring for retirement plans, comparing health insurance plans, caring about world politics, contracting a mortgage, planning for future savings, considering the financial well-being of my family before making big spending decisions, planning to care for kids in a somewhat near future and — biggest one among the rest — contemplating and actually enjoying the prospect of getting older, especially turning 30 in the coming year. If I told myself how comfortable I would be with these “accomplishments” a mere 5 years ago, I would not have believed myself. 5 years earlier, I would have been down right suspicious and would have showed contempt. Time does wonders!

At the same time, I have been somewhat unsatisfied with the way I take care of the people who are more or less regularly part of my life. Many times per week, if not every day, I spend a few moment thinking about how much I respect / like / love / admire / am grateful towards the people I know, wondering how to inform them of my feelings. All my acquaintances have contributed in one way to another to the person I am, and for this I am routinely and genuinely grateful. I try to smile, interact socially and positively, send friendly words on cards, e-mails or facebook messages, be supportive. But I realize I have not taken the time to really get to know my entourage better and understand their existence as human beings outside of the pleasure I have interacting with them. In short, I often fear that I appear to act as if I was using my friends to entertain myself or acknowledge my own existence, and that I do not show them (often) enough how much I care about them. At the same time, I feel childish at the thought of more frequent tokens of appreciation; I fear I would come across as “bizarre” or “creepy” by overwhelming friends with tokens of affection, or come across as flirtatious or romantic instead of genuinely happy to know them.

And 2009 was also the occasion to take on bad habits. I have become cynical; I tend to see either stupidity or malice in all aspects of the world that I dislike, instead of considering that my expectations have become distorted by a lack of diversity in my channels to the outside world. In my efforts to move forward dutifully and fight procrastination, I have set up a routine where I pursue small goals one after the other — often losing sight of the big picture and overall direction I would like to go. And I have let work take away a lot of my free time, reducing greatly my opportunities for social activities and self-development. All these changes impact me negatively.

My own resolutions for 2010 area bout sharing and improving my contact with other human beings. I will try and learn to trust friends. I will interact more emotionally with the people I meet and try to understand who they are and what is important to them. And I will exercise more at enjoying my immediate surroundings, instead of worrying about remote issues that I have little impact over.

Last sunday my mind decided against the will of my body and despite one night dancing out I was ended up biking from Amsterdam to Marken and back. Fifty kilometers and a few sunburns later, I felt strangely relaxed, surprised again by the merits of exercise on my psychological sanity.

Besides the experience of serotonin, a quite distinct memory lingered after my stride around North Holland: the acute realization, twenty kilometers down the way and after crossing a few bakfietsen full with children, of the psychological imprinting that riding bikes has on most Dutch people, at the same age where I was spending most of my time building lego sets or playing around in a fine dry sand, a shy six hundred kilometers from the equator. I found it interesting to note that while the first memory of a lower water level at one side of a dike than the houses on the other blurs here with those of the first playground, my first memories often bring up the ruins of days long gone by. (And yes, I still recognize what's on that picture, although it has been nearly twenty years…)

There is a lot to recall and to tell about growing up as a third culture kid, especially when the only “consistent social unit” ends up imploding with emotional abuse — although deprivation may suit better the situation here — at the most unfortunate point in time, that is, the narrow window where one should learn models for a social identity. That's a quiet story I usually keep to myself, since demons of the past are best left lurking at the back of one's consciousness, carefully acknowledged regularly during the day so that they can stay reasonably quiet at night.

And yet, I was lucky and I could rejoice when fate, in an ironical twist, kicked me out of my own ignorance onto a world where I had to shed the scales I was given previously and grow my own. It was an unexpected but invaluable opportunity to deconstruct, and then reconstruct — a much-needed second adolescence during which the emotional turmoil proved to be a fertile ground for a new self: while I was fed vodka in nursing bottles by the woman who first handled me as a real person, I would imprint durably — like an inside tatoo overlaid on a fading pattern — the combined effects of friendship, ethanol and melodious rythmic sounds and let them replace gradually my fears of an autonomous identity in society.

Alas, location-based friendships built during the final period of a cosmopolitan education system are due to disintegrate when individuals go on with their personal development, often at very different locations at the surface of the globe. What survives is indeed invaluable — those few friendships that span frontiers, oceans and continents — but their distribution is precisely what prevents them from pushing a missing sense of “geographical belonging” into the unrooted, floating young adult now mostly out of the common flow.

But this is merely a minor concern. While some rawness makes me sensitive, it also makes me more receptive to certain feelings.

Tonight, I watched Shelter.

Today the read box from irrepressible.info was quoting a paragraph from the Iranian Gay & Lesbian Healthcare Providers Association; this prompted me to discover more about this group, and I read some of their articles.

In one of them the following sentence rung a bell:

My family, like most Iranian families, centered on worrying about people's judgment. I learned from my family that my purpose of life was to earn people's respect by becoming educated and successful. Provoking envy in people meant I was on the right track. — Dr. Payam Ghassemlou

This idea disturbs me, for it describes accurately some of the feelings I have now about the way I was educated — although I have no (known) Iranian origins.

This accurate match does not seem to fit with the idea that the driving line of thought behind my education was socialism, not Islam. So I was told.

Or does it?

There are several ways to describe socialism; the following is relevant:

Socialism as a political system of communal ownership: a political theory or system in which the means of production and distribution are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles — Microsoft Encarta

This raises the question of who decides what is equity and fairness. If I understand correctly, that would be the very same people who decide how to redistribute the wealth. Threfore, assuming that attribution of wealth to a person is decided not based on their innate capabilities but rather by their perception by society as a group, the way to attract (more) wealth to a specific person is to ensure that they are judged positively by society.

There we are. Islamism and socialism as backgrounds for family life have different goals, but some of their effects on the education of the young are the same — namely, preventing the blooming of children when it doesn't lead to "success" as defined by society.

I once thought that all families were doing that. How naive.

At 6 this morning I woke up panting and sweating from a terrifying nightmare.

It all started with a quite long dream with an intricate story. The dream was about me being on a road trip to reconnect with old friends, and I was on my way back with the updated knowledge that my friends' families were not doing well, and that I should start taking care of my own family to avoid the bleak future my friends are facing.

Not a meaningless dream, but not a nightmare either.

The creepy side of the story started when I arrived at a place were my mother, brother and I were to take tea with an old friend of my mother. The place was this friend's house, on the seaside, with a veranda just above sea level.

While the other people were merrily chatting on the sofa, I approached the window to look outside. Then it struck me that the veranda was flooded where I expected to see dry planks. When I realized that the water level was steadily rising and the house was tilting on the side towards the water, I shouted “everyone outside, now!” and jumped out of the window into the water.

As dreams allow, I was then seeing myself and the landscape from a different perspective. The house I was in was at the top of a dyke which was slowly crumbling. My brother was already out swimming but my mother was painfully trying to push herself out of the window while the water was pouring inside.

The current was intense. Water was flowing freely into the valley behind the dyke. My mum started crying that she was not strong enough to swim. My brother and I swam to her side and held her by her arms, trying to accompany the flow towards the valley.

Then my perspective changed to show me how the landscape was slowly and strongly replaced by the flood. I could see people trying to get out of houses from the windows in the roof, imagining the fate of those people in houses already below water level.

Somehow my family and I managed to land on a dry piece of land. We were in a part of an urban area above water level, but I had no idea of the precise location.

At that point I started to decide that I had enough and that it was time to wake up. But before it happened, I could dream my mother complaining how she needed some medication and food and me having no idea of how to get that in a flooded city.

Waking up was painful : I did not sleep enough and the nightmare left me shocked. I fixed myself a glass of water and a piece of bread, and I tried to sleep again while brooding over how relationships between civilians in a flooded country would be affected by such a precarious situation.

The main reason behind my receiving my mother and brother at home for the two Christmas days was to take a point across to myself (first) and to my family (next).

It has to do, of course, with emancipation. I needed to make a statement, make it clear that the place I call “home” is now the place I am living in and not anywhere else. That I am fully able to be in charge and host an elaborate family event. And allowing them to peek around freely at the various queer items laying around my place was part of the story, too.

And all went well, much too well.

They made me feel that I was doing well, but exactly as good as they were expecting me to do. And I knew it. I did my best for the event, knowing in advance that it was expected, would be “appreciated” but would not create any feeling that I was treating them in a special way.

When I think about it, I see either that I was raised with insanely high standards of making other people feel at ease without them even noticing, or that my family was totally insensitive, as if we had no ability to be positively surprised, or acknowledge with genuine gratitude as special token of attention.

Either way, it is quite a disaster for my mood and my ego, and a serious drawback in my social life. I come to be very careful with all guests, whether I like or dislike them, and provide a level of attention and service usually unexpected from them; although it is totally "natural" and un-exceptional for me.

I've been explained once that if I was a woman fifty years ago, I would be considered “ideal wedding material.”

But!

The first issue with this situation, now, is that I have absolutely no idea of how to make someone who is special to me, feel special with me.

The various attitudes displayed by other people, used for seduction purposes and considered as “attentive” or “caring,” strike me as totally obvious and common. I do that all the time, and not for seduction — so then, if I want to do “more,” what's left? Besides, I tend to show very publicly that this behavior is automatic for me; with time, people who become closer to me get used to it and their expectations raise, too.

The other issue with this situation is that I become gradually “out of reach” for the other way around. This behavior of mine tends to make people believe that I also have high expectations, that I need a lot of display of attention and care to become impressed and notice. Although it is not true (I am really easily impressed) it comes through this way quite often because I tend to keep my feelings for myself — another habit carefully learned from the family environment.

Hence comes another resolution for 2007: actually show that I am happy instead of keeping it for myself.