The other

As suspected, it’s much harder to write now I’m home.

At home, there’s no “other” to spark a thought which can turn into a story or a poem. At home there’s laundry and cleaning and cooking. There are two demanding cats who, while adorable are not especially newsworthy. I have the fence I need to fix and the courtyard I need to landscape but nothing that I think anyone would like to read about.

Until I realised that with my collection of experiences, history, thoughts and opinions, to anyone who may stumble across this page, I am the “other”. Maybe I’m not so interesting to me, but I might have just the combination of otherness that will catch the imagination of a reader.

I have always been the other, and felt it so painfully as a child, when my experiences weren’t valued by my peers, and therefore, so desperately wanting to fit in, weren’t valued by me. I did not grow up in the same house, with the same neighbours, and the same school friends. I know now how hard it must have been for those young neighbours to understand, me landing as if from another planet, with a funny accent and unfashionable clothes.

Self acceptance is difficult for anyone, I imagine. Even living in the same community your whole life, with the same values and customs and shared experiences, everyone is the other to everyone else, for even with a shared understanding, thoughts are individual.

Maybe, once I have accepted that I will never be an integral part of a community, I will have an easier time accepting myself.  I am lucky. I am free enough of a strong external cultural bias to accept my own thoughts, as I allow them to exist but especially evolve. My thoughts can be influenced by bright ideas, or beautiful scenery, or a radical cognition which might not have been possible if I fit in somewhere.

In Suzhou, I was drawn to descriptions of the lifestyles of ancient scholars, and their pursuit of fine aesthetic pleasures in addition to study and writing. Maybe it was this allowance of leisure which gave them the space to formulate their ideas.

At home, in the 21st century, I am too tempted to veg in front of the TV, the programming programming me to be a part of the gogglebox generation, and inhibiting independent thought. Only once I turn off the TV can I focus on my own ideas.

Maybe one of them will be interesting to another.