I don’t like breathing techniques. Probably means that I’m doing them wrong.
Focusing on your breath is one of the first things that seem to get recommended for those with anxiety or those who are inclined towards meditative activity. However, whenever I’ve tried it it’s just felt uncomfortable. Often I can put it down to my being a bit stuffed up with a cold, but sometimes I’m not ill and I can’t put my finger on what the real issue is.
The reason I’m going on about this is because I’ve been feeling more anxious than usual lately, anxious to the point of thinking “God this would be so much easier if I was literally invisible”. It’s strange because normally I experience that struggle the other way around, wanting people to notice and listen to me when I say things, but recently I’ve wanted to melt into the background and appreciate what’s around me without feeling the weight of social expectation on my shoulders.
For whatever reason, my cringe response has been turned up to 11. I want to be able to walk away from things that make me cringe without feeling guilty, ashamed or embarrassed for doing so; I want to wince or grimace without having to take my family’s reactions into account, but I can’t because I am stuck in a foreign country with them.
My cringe response will probably be a bit less extreme after I’ve gotten some more sleep. I know I’m overreacting. I know I shouldn’t want to hide every time a nice person attempts to make conversation with me or a family member or vice versa, but I can’t shake it off.
I’m afraid that I come across as this rude, cold bitch sometimes when, in reality, I’m just too afraid to say anything for fear of fucking it up. This is especially true when I’m abroad. I thought mum was going over the top starting to teach herself Spanish on Duolingo a year in advance for a 12 day holiday, but a part of me regrets not doing the same.
As usual, dad’s the opposite. He talks English at most people that he meets, throwing in the occasional “thank you” or “hello” in the local language. It always makes me feel embarrassed. At a bare minimum, I have to know the words for “hello”, “goodbye”, “please”, “thank you” and “sorry” before I start to feel even vaguely comfortable spouting English at people in non-English speaking countries. I feel like it’s rude not to try and learn something to make myself understood in the local lingo.
The language I’m probably most comfortable with outside of English is French. I practised my French on Duolingo before going to Paris with my A level friends and was the only one out of us who tried to speak it. The one place we went to where they didn’t seem to speak much English was a random sushi restaurant so my friends turned to me. I tried and we managed to make ourselves understood (in combination with a more English-familiar waiter), but it would be a lie to say that I didn’t panic a little when everyone’s expectant eyes fell upon me.
It’s one of those things where the attitudes of the locals matter a lot. When I was in Iceland nobody expected us to speak the local language; similarly, I distinctly remember a conversation my family had with a waiter in Morocco where we ordered in French and he repeated everything back to us in English; but there have been instances where I’ve just felt bad for not knowing more, or anything, so to speak. I felt like that in Prague and in Germany at times. It’s all too easy to get completely stuck in an awkward inability to communicate where you’re forced to rely on hand gestures, context and Google translate. Thank God for Google translate.
Also, it’s just nice to greet someone in their own language. I remember my ex telling me about how he tried to ask how much a postcard was in Turkish and the shop guy’s response was “For you my friend, it’s free”.
You can go to a restaurant in Belgium and get seated and greeted in 3 different languages by the same person, but come to an English speaking country and you get shamed for speaking anything other than perfect English to other people. It’s stupid considering how crap English people are at English.
Plenty of people are nice when you try to speak their language, but I feel like that only seems to apply to places that aren’t the UK or America. My home country makes me mad sometimes. It’s a stupid, empire building, xenophobic, dump of land. And yet, I’m quite happy living in the UK.
I’m sure we must’ve done something worth being proud of at some point (chicken tikka masala anyone?). It doesn’t erase the shit people have done in the name of Queen and country but it makes us feel less guilty about it. Hopefully our history will not define our future. People are supposed to learn from their mistakes.
This is probably the perfect opening for a Brexit rant but honestly I’m trying not to think too hard on that one. I try not to get political because I find politics generally depressing. I’ll read party manifestos and vote, because it’s important for my demographic to be represented, but that’s about as far as my political engagement goes.
It’s a different story for other parts of the family. One of my cousins stumbled into being the labour representative for her extremely conservative local area, and my dad takes the ferrets out when he does leafletting in the market square with the local Lib Dems (dad repurposed a refrigerator bag so it could temporarily house the ferrets and could be hung from his neck to rest against his chest). The ferrets draw in curious families. One of them also bit a curious dog on the nose. Poor creature. It squealed very loudly, apparently.
Hm. Fuck knows where I’m going with this post. Here, have a pretty picture of an unexpectedly large slice of cake I had in Peru the other day.
randomsongwriter 