Unsettling, surprising ways to learn about oneself.

As I am sitting here, a black ball of purring fur in my hoodie deciding whether to take its chance at staying on my lap in such an uncomfortable setting, I still wonder about how I will crystallize the train of though that brightened my return home since yesterday.

Much thoughts are pressing in my mind now and they are pushing to get out although my language processing nodes are crying to try and make a story, if not a rational ordering, out of their intricate web of cross-dependencies. The music helps, as it always does, and I may as well take a go at this without the hint of ethyl spirits that I used to involve in such circumstances…

I was invited in Scotland last Monday.

Scotland is a peaceful area, sparsely populated and truly beautiful. My hosts rented a house on the borders of the Loch Ness, with a breathtaking view on the waters, and more so on the cliffs that border the lake and carry, at this time of the year, autumn colors that I only ever dreamed to encounter in an hypothetical trip to Canada. So much for my irrational impressions that Europe had little aesthetic secrets left for me to discover. And While this was never a topic of discussion in our group, I couldn't help but think about the immense forces that created the characteristic features of the Great Glen Fault, and the humbling thought that a mere geological tremor could mean a dire shift in our altitude and the utter destruction of our house and its surroundings.

Yet Scotland left me remarkably cold despite the mild weather. While I was acutely aware of it, the beauty of the Highlands merely stirred my heart and didn't get hold of it. I didn't dismiss it though; for one I do feel a deep understanding for the member of our company who delivered an awkward yet inspiringly sincere account of his love for this environment; but as I thought about his feelings on the way back to the Inverness airport, the clarity of mine dawned on me and left me dazzled for the next few hours.

Childhood memories, childhood experiences in general, are like deep scars: one can see them as impediments to external perfection, one can remember them as painful memories, one can try and hide them with layers of make-up or chisel them away using a scalpel and skin grafts; but they are bound to stay forever, carved in the flesh that was modified, if not visible from the outside. Accept them, and move on.

One cannot feel whole and consistent without including all the facets of ones presentness, even those due to unwanted causes.

Slopes covered by trees and waterfalls. Beautiful autumn colors. I am familiar with those, how couldn't I remember? And yet the feelings that they stir for so many others are dead for me. I will never look back warmly at these countless occasions I was brought to hike in countless mountain ranges, with nothing else to do than stare at the purity of large spaces, the beauty of undisturbed biology, skies and geology. The pain from wounds opened and forced open so long have left me scarred for life, and have forever tainted my appreciation of the beauty of natural landscapes.

Until this week, I feared them, I loathed the memory and the pain they would stir every time I lost sight of a flat horizon — unless their surface was mostly covered in white, for the color white has become a safe harbor ever since the count of blissful experiences with snow has largely outnumbered a few early mishaps — and I am now soothed to discover that this pain has mostly subsided and left place to a peaceful indifference.

Indifference is a feeling that is difficult to justify to others who would dream to enjoy this environment every day of their life.

In general, indifference is a feeling that I also used to fear as a token of perceived lack of emotion. It is not socially acceptable in many contexts to stay indifferent especially in matters of enjoyment and entertainment. Staring at the Scottish reliefs, wandering around and breathing the cold air, I could not state my lack of feelings at this purity without risking being perceived as senseless, a freak; how then can I share how I feel that my indifference was a major achievement, at least to me? I guess I won't, and I am satisfied that I avoided the situation by staying indoors for the entire duration of my stay.

A season has passed and I wasted most of it. My days have been relatively bleak since I started doubting my aspirations in the summer. As September moved by and my mood at the end of each day became broodier, I slowly lost appetite for the thrill of new experiences and the drive to move forward.

I didn't know exactly why. In fact, the last three month have been full of discoveries, encounters, and otherwise happy experiences that have established warm memories and (hopefully) lasting bonds. I would have otherwise much to say about the exciting thrill of meeting interesting people, feeling part of a group, and getting slowly but surely confident about my surroundings.

Yet I felt nowhere near myself whenever I was alone, and I became increasingly aware that what was left of my drive everyday was mostly remnants of habits, and that its fuel was merely my automatic tendency to do whatever it takes to please those whom I respect and who protect me. The pride on which I was riding until two years ago like a surfer on its wave, the pride I had in establishing my new home and self-motivated independent life was wavering and I was slowly leaving room to a gloomy fog of weakness to the uncertainty of life. It was unnerving, as I was and still am a proponent of claiming the uncertainty as a realm of opportunities to be taken, not to be feared… And yet, I felt increasingly estranged to myself, wandering in self-doubt, not sure where to look for a key to the feelings I knew — from memory — that I was able to harbor in my more sunny days.

Of course, I am growing older. With this comes the useful toolbox of past experiences to deal with everyday challenges. And so I perused the recently learned the trick to drill the shadows of my conscience for the few unhandled feelings that hide in its corners. Like icebergs, the tip of a repressed uneasiness may hide a larger issues with many side-effects. After all, it was this way that I discovered that a tiny loose point at the tip of my tongue was the opening to a nearly deciliter of infected pus that kept my tongue uncomfortably inflated for two weeks — a longer time that a sane person would way before showing the clear signs of an infection to an authorized doctor! And it took only a few seconds of prodding to release the pressure, clean the wound and start the healing process that completed in one day. Ah, the wonders of self-introspection. But enough with the gore.

I first looked around and see whether I was repressing an attraction to someone in particular. And with it, how much the so far desired lack of a “specific someone” was affecting me. And so I went, looking at one and another in turn, checking each time how my heart and libido were reacting, and which opportunities my feral instincts would be tended to catch. I made some discoveries in that direction, some of which I might explore in the future, but there was nothing there that caught my attention with its intensity… And so while it was tempting to attribute part of my gray mood to the frustration of a lack of companionship, I could not convince myself that moving in that direction would address the root of my concern.

I then considered other things; in no particular order, friendships, surrogate families, and career choices. I have complex situations to tread with, and a lot of thinking to do in the coming year, but again I didn't find anything unsettling in there either.

The most obvious and simple alternative was physical fatigue. After all, I haven't given myself a chance to relax a lot lately. Late nights at work, very little environmental shifts, few hours out, and yet a lot of running around with logistics, all this would certainly support a healthy weariness that only true rest could lift for a while. This was my state of mind two mondays ago, and I warmly accepted the invitation to an unexpected vacation abroad this week.

Of course, it wasn't vacation of the mind, as we have worked many hours and slept little at night; still, the complete change of surroundings and totally different life rhythm was plain relaxation to my body, and I slept soundly enough at night that my body is certainly not tired any more.

And so was I acutely disappointed, in Gatwick's North Terminal, when I recognized despite my healthy body that the uneasiness I was trying to cure was still fresh. My impatience with myself was growing. I felt irritated, agitated out of frustration to not recognize the cause of my misfortune. Even music did not soothe me reliably any more!

In the airport, pockets full of foreign change, there were not many ways to achieve a temporarily release for this pressure: I indulged myself in a spending spree, despite my tight budget lately.

Oh boy, how did that help! My face now shines with glee at my reversed fortune!

Fortunately, I did not find joy in the mere process of spending money. The action itself was quite innocuous, not even worth a memory: I merely acquired a few books to keep me company during a long travel… And still, it took only a few pages — a few paragraphs, even — to realize how stupid I was, how blind I was to not have recognized the obvious, some of it even trustfully standing in my own living room!

I cannot share too many details in public writing about the keys to my heart and my creative self. Faithful readers and careful attendants of my library might get a glimpse of them, but I will not need to refer to them literally for my own future reference. I am simply happy to share the diverse flow of feelings that poured out of me in a few hours, or more exactly that the author squeezed out of me — relatively easily even, since they that been building up for a while… I laughed, I cried, I sobbed; I felt jealousy, I emphasized with bonding, with longing, with frustration; my breath stopped with fear and surprise, I felt both tension building up and relief. And I smiled a lot. I grinned several times for so long that my jaws and cheeks burned with stretching, while I was thinking that anyone who would see me in this situation would immediately think I am seriously mad.

I was also, for the first time in a few trips abroad, very happy to come back home. And I finally slept soundly in my bed. And now I feel happy and autonomous, once again. What a relief! A bust in self-confidence, I feel stronger now.

Another healthy night is now calling me and I will now close this account with an epilogue.

After a three-month-long fruitless process of trying to figure out the obvious, I realized a few other things in a short succession.

One is that the reason why I only release the intensity of my feelings — and my lack of self-control when I indulge in them — with books and music is that I see them as a vulnerability and that music and books are easily fended against. They can be muted and closed fairly easily. Entrusting other humans with the ability to hurt me from the inside is something I should learn to do, at least moderately, as it would allow me to truly bond instead of merely socializing and allow me to enjoy emotional satisfaction more often than with the occasional few hours of reading.

Another is the answer — or at least part of it — to a question I was asked by a dear friend among the dearest recently, in some underground restaurant in Central Europe. I think I know what I am looking for, and I am now able to make verbal statements to that effect. This will certainly open new opportunities in the near future.

And then there are a few other points that I am now free to consider, now that the more urgent matters have been resolved.

Scotland wasn't quite a bad vacation after all.

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.

As far as the stereotype about urban gay men approaching their forties goes, Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren do not deceive while adding a pinch of seriousness to their worldly concerns by means of glasses with thick black frames.

I have never been a fashionista myself, and will probably not become one. The thought of spending any significant amount of my time hunting new designs and attending the mass leaves me totally unphased. Yet, a one hour excursion on the third floor of the Barbican Arts Centre in London proved to be both a refreshing and enlightening experience.

A friend, dear among the dearest, brought me to a fashion exhibition in the City of London. He intended this experiment both as an initiation and as a test for my taste — I would hear “I wonder if you will like it” at least thrice before we eventually squeezed the last hours of our trip together in the Barbican Centre.

The key works of Dutch fashion designers Viktor and Rolf were on display in a two-floor exhibition hall. Visitors are there invited to follow a sequence of rooms around a central doll house, where each of the hall's rooms would match a room in the doll house and contain a couple models and a projection screen.

Describing the collection and its qualities would far exceed my vocabulary skills, so I will not dwelve into details here. However, the purpose of this note today is to stay as a reminder of how touched I was by the amount of creative work and creative diversity that was concentrated in these fifty-something models. Unexpected in a fashion exhibit, I felt more respect and admiration for these tailors than I have for many painters in art musea.

Add this to the brutal style of the estate of which the Barbican Centre is part, its stained grey ragged concrete walls and columns contrasting with the lush and lively yet constrained small lake that it contains, and you get a picture of a foreign urban world of sorts — obscurely pure and devoid of irregularities, where nature is enclosed, and where the only form of art is worn somptuously as unique and breathtaking clothes.

I discovered a world of dreams, made for and by them. London is a city of many surprises.

The wagon was nearly full. As my head was crossing the door to the cabin, I could see complete columns of heads stretching from the first row of seats to the next door on the other side. Only a few seats were unoccupied, and I glanced from side to side to choose where I would settle.

The first seat available next to the entrance looked unavailable, due to a pair of legs extended straight under it. My eyes swept over the next few rows, only to discover that the few seats unoccupied by people were mostly occupied by their belongings, and ended back at the initial position.

Invoking the power of the human voice over things, I asked the person sitting next to the pair of legs if the seat was available, with my line of sight crossing briefly the attention of the owner of the legs as a token of dual addressing. Instantly, the legs retracted and I could let myself fall into place.

A sense of awareness immediately dawned upon me, unforeseen after two hours of flight. Instead of falling asleep quietly, as I usually do in trains that bring me home, my attention was caught by my two immediate neighbors.

The legs were probably the first item to establish contact with my subconscious. Now retracted, their leather would wrinkle at the fold of the knees; and with the crotch these were the only two areas where the black fabric was not faultlessly smooth, down to the limit of the boots, at the edge of the calves. The pants, like the boots, were faultlessly following the curves of the flesh underneath — only the two buttons at the top would give away that this skin did not belong to the human being it protected.

As my line of sight was raising again, I was expecting to follow the path to the typical traits of a character used by time, hardship, life obstacles and an overall lack of self-care that I already met fitting in similar pants. Instead, my awe blossomed.

Two simple pieces of clothing were fitting a lean torso and the material was not loose enough to hide a toned layer of muscles and little body fat. Two large hands with healthy and perfectly trimmed nails were folded together on top, and their rosy skin appeared smooth and clean. Despite the absence of hair on the hands themselves, I could see clearly and without any doubt that their hue was belonging to a blonde blue-eyed dutch or german man.

Although my curiosity had become acute, social protocols were still applying; my first look at his face was short and going sideways, as if I was on my way to look through the window.

Short, but rich. His eyes were scrutinizing sideways my ring, as mine had been doing a few seconds. His face and head were shaved short but not bare, revealing the hair pattern of a man in his early thirties. The shape of his jaws was perfect, and the combination of his jaws, mouth, nose, eyes and eyebrows were a display of well-tended manhood and assurance. He was definitely hot, albeit calm and seemingly laid-back.

A few seconds passed, during which I was registering this vision and trying to focus on the trees outside the window; and then he started to address my immediate neighbor, commenting on the sight outside.

His voice was soft. This, together with his concise clarity in his use of the Dutch language, finished to convince me that I was in the presence of someone special. He was explaining our geographical surroundings to his friend on my side, with the patience and preciseness that would be appropriate for teaching. His friend was far more quiet, speaking a few words every now and then. He would speak Dutch as well, but with an accent that I would consider German.

Who were they? I soon understood that they were on their way to Brussels. Did they meet in Amsterdam? Why would they take the train, since I was convinced that they would rather use a motorbike?

In the mist of building a number of scenarios that would explain their presence next to me, an idea struck me as exceptionally significant: they looked free.

Leaving for a land so close and yet so remote is an exciting prospect.

The idea came a few days ago from a pair of friends, who intend to visit several cities as part of a small scale version of Flickr's Jumping Project; besides the pictures, they intend to have fun and party and that was enough for me to join them.

And now that accommodation and travel are all set, comes the question of what to do there. Having fun is an excellent plan; however, I would feel foolish if I was coming back afterwards without any insight on Warsaw. And there I am today, researching facts and hints about the city, its culture, people and history.

I realize I know next to nothing about Poland.

The name “złoty” sounds fun, but I have no idea of what is its value. Besides Chopin, I know no one originating from Poland. There are 20 theaters in Warsaw, but I do not know the name of any of them, nor what shows are produced there. I knew that Poland was a republic, but it wouldn't have crossed my mind that there was a President of Warsaw. So much to learn!

And yet at the same time I know that the country is ruled (or has been, until recently) by two very conservative parties and their friends, and I fear in advance the feeling of staying in a world of roman catholics, albeit for a short time.

We shall see.