Is it really true that the older you get, the less resilient to change you are? I don’t know. I didn’t think the rule applied to me, but maybe it does. I have all these memories of unflinchingly bouncing from one place to the next, and not that much memory scar tissue around struggling to adapt to wherever I was.
I remember the first day starting 7th grade in a very large and disorientating school in Berlin, a teacher in our homeroom pairs me with a classmate tasked with showing me around. After a quick sizing up my ‘buddy’ it seems clear (to me, at least) that he’s not exactly thrilled by the task. So I ditch him and figure out my way around myself. Soon enough, doing my own thing, (stuff that, for the most part, involves books or woodwind instruments) I find my people. Yes they were all nerds and I loved them. This time round, I’d kind of underestimated how exhausting big changes are. Or, put differently, I hadn’t expected how tired, disorientated and frustrated I’d feel changing the last three digits of my postcode while simultaneously making another one of my career pivots. And it was nothing particularly *big* that got me, it was the little labours involved in change. Not having found my designated spot for my keys, yet, so I’m spending far too much time looking for them, getting cross with myself for my scattiness. Not knowing my way around my local supermarket, walking in dizzying circles around myself in search of the ever elusive cottage cheese. Not having quite figured out the implicit dress code in my new industry, which, just like any other industry, comes with its own tribal elements. Having to switch out my ‘yes, I have the face of a child and the ass of a stripper but please take me seriously’ corporate attire to outfits that say ‘I am a professional who professionally dresses unprofessionally in a way that looks effortless but which is actually quite effortful’. If the journalism world asks ‘are you smart and worldly enough?’ as we enter the fold (and gosh, will we hear about how smart and worldly everyone is), the corporate world asks ’are you serious enough? (and how serious and gray and gaslit everyone has to be) and the tech world asks: “are you insane enough (bro)?” Naturally, the advertising world whispers: “are you cool enough?” Kind reader, I have been told a number of times that I am “cool”, in spite of the many desperately uncool facets of my identity, most of which can be traced back to the moment in which I agreed to skip across the stage at a primary school production of Oliver Twist dressed as a street urchin playing the flute solo to ‘Be Back Soon’. Luckily, social media did not exist at the time, and all evidence of such an event taking place has since been destroyed. In fact, just this weekend, an old friend from university who is here for the summer told me he had journalled that he was looking forward to seeing me, because I am ‘cool and strange’. Cool, and strange. Here is a verbal scab for my self-conscious, overthinking brain to pick at! What did he mean by strange, and how could he so casually throw out a word and not expect me to be a bit uneasy about it? I grilled him a little bit. Luckily, this is a friend who doesn’t get super uncomfortable when I put on my unbearably analytical ‘this is something I have to get to the bottom of’ hat. ‘Strange how?’ I probed. ‘Kooky manic pixie dream girl strange, or strange old aunt in love with her taxidermy collection strange?’ A pause. ‘Or maybe confusing foreigner strange?’ Now I know I’m making him a bit uncomfortable. This is a person who has genuinely woken up in a sweat after a dream in which he ran over his neighbour’s shrub. What other associations come under ‘strange’? Elusive, strange. The kind of strange that disappears to Asia for seven years without saying much strange. The kind of strange where they have all sorts of quiet lurking dramas that mean you’re stuck with a couple of boxes of their things because they won’t leave them at their family home and yes that includes one of their passports strange. Close to elusive strange we have outcast strange. “You know, strange sits closely to ostracism,” I say in the playful way that I do when I’m prodding my hyper-aware cerebral friends, maybe because I’m still a little bit insecure around them. He flinches. “I am sorry if it felt like I was othering you” he says, sincerely and a little bit crestfallen. I was winding him up, to be honest, but a nerve did kind of get struck, especially as it came from him. My ‘woke’est friend. And I’m not using that word sardonically at all. This man is about as much on the right side of history as a British cis white middle class man can be right now. A tireless academic who applies Marxist thought to his study of early modern history, he spends whatever free time he can reading and meditating on the world’s many woes, volunteering for his university’s union (which is tantamount to a second full time job), cycling everywhere in a masochistic oblivion fueled by plants and, er, more plants. He’s loyal and good to a fault. When everyone else at college leaned into my insecure habit of playing stupid so they could feel more secure in themselves, he would actively discourage that behaviour in me. He embraced me as his intellectual equal. He saw me, at a time and place when everyone else was too wrapped up in their own insecurities about whether they actually belonged there to be generous enough to extend a hand of genuine equality to someone conditioned to accept their ‘lesser’ status. So why did it feel so strange to be described as strange, specifically by him, and specifically having been followed by that word of approval so many of us hanker for. ‘Cool’. “I guess some words just rub us up the wrong way,” a friend who was sitting with us helpfully chimed in. “Like my boyfriend recently described me as his comfort zone, that actually kind of upset me,” she said. What he was trying to tell her was she felt like home. What she had heard was that there was something boringly familiar,-- ‘homely’-- to her. For me, one of my best and oldest friends tells me I’m enigmatic, and all I hear is that one of the few men in my life who has been around long enough and has always had the sensitivity to actually see me, still finds me somehow kind of alien. And what does that say about how I interact with the world, and, specifically, men? “Cool is as cool does,” said another friend, a couple of years ago. Like approval, it’s coloured so much by our own biases and approval systems as to be as nutty as. I don’t know, the stock market. Our increasingly volatile climate. Whether or not that bitchy but beautiful cat your friend has will hang out with you this time or treat you like a leper. And that kind of makes the whole thing that is human behaviour reveal itself for what it really is: kind of strange.
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Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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