margaritas and mirror images
amarah, on trying to pin down the self when nothing else is the same
Dear Bohmee and Tess,
Our time difference is officially eight hours. Up from three hours, which was honestly not even that noticeable, except for when I (frequently) accidentally called Bohmee during her work day. Compared to that, eight hours is huge. It creates the circumstances for the three of us exchanging a few brief texts when it is midnight for you and 8 a.m. the next day for me.
I am quite alone here.
Several days have elapsed since I wrote those opening words, and I am far less alone here than I was. Broadly speaking, I am happy here. But the point stands. The most intimate connections in my life, the ones I have spent years fostering, are nowhere near me anymore. I am far away from the people who know me best.
There are some very obvious outcomes of this, like missing the people I love. But there’s also, perhaps less obviously, the challenge of holding onto a sense of self when there’s no one around me who can confirm it.
It’s funny. A lot of people I know have fantasized about moving away as a means of reinventing themselves, with an arbitrarily selected other country acting as an escape hatch for the life they’re currently living. This has never resonated with me. My fantasies about living abroad have always been additive – wanting to become something more, rather than something different. But now that I’m here, actually doing the thing, I feel a bit like I’m playing catch-up with the person I already am (already was?). Everything I already feel to be true about myself must be re-proven.
The other day, I was out for a drink with some people, and we arrived at the subject of margaritas. I immediately interjected – I hate tequila! This is common knowledge to the people close to me at home, and I felt as though it might cease to be true if I didn’t find a way to shove it into the conversation. Had I simply nodded and listened, my peers might have come away with the understanding that I like a good margarita as much as the next person. And we could not have that!
A day or two later, I had the opportunity to make margaritas with a couple new friends of mine. It was somewhat spontaneously suggested as an after dinner activity. I do typically hate tequila, I said cautiously, but, if you don’t mind wasting some tequila on someone who doesn’t like it very much, I think it would be fun to try.
Fun to try!? Who are you!? Certainly not the staunch tequila-hater I left at the Toronto airport.
And it was, in fact, fun to try. We were short a few ingredients, as I don’t know any students who regularly stock their shelves with simple syrup and cointreau. In our case, agave syrup was a perfectly fine substitute. We juiced several limes, salted the rims of the glasses (perhaps to the detriment of the drinks, but they looked pretty), and took turns shaking that silver contraption of which I do not know the name (is it just a cocktail shaker?). Moments before the margaritas were ready to be poured into the glasses, the shaker was, catastrophically, dropped on the floor, creating an aromatic sea of makeshift margarita all around our feet. Lucky I still had my shoes on!
At the bottom of the cocktail shaker was a tiny bit of unspilled drink, just enough for each of us to have a little sip. And, you know what? It was kind of good.
Maybe there’s something beautiful about being in a new place and not being bound to the things you’ve established about yourself. It’s not as though my friends at home are all having margarita-making parties and excluding me on the basis of tequila-hater-discrimination. But, when I’m with my friends at home, we know what sorts of things we enjoy – separately and together – because I know them and they know me. But here, in a new place, the “me” is not yet established. And, in the process of establishing it, I can discover that the occasional margarita is perhaps not so bad.
I do typically hate tequila, but, if you don’t mind wasting some tequila on someone who doesn’t like it very much, I think it would be fun to try.
This is the balance I am trying to achieve. On one hand, I want to be true to the self that I’ve spent the last twenty-one years constructing (I do typically hate tequila). On the other hand, I want to open myself up to the new possibilities that emerge from being relatively unknown to the people around me (but, if you don’t mind wasting some tequila on someone who doesn’t like it very much, I think it would be fun to try.). This is, perhaps, easy enough in the context of homemade margaritas, but I’ve found it difficult to apply this general principle in other contexts. Likely this is because I know I don’t like tequila, but there are a lot of less concrete facets of my character that I have more trouble pinning down. And, as it turns out, even something as simple as disliking tequila might not be entirely true anymore. If that’s the case, a million other simple ways of identifying myself are coming loose right now.
When you get to know people, all sorts of surface level tell-me-about-yourself questions are bound to emerge. I love hearing the answers to these from other people, but I struggle to answer them myself. Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Do you identify with your birth chart? Are you excited for school to start? Are you planning to do a PhD? What are your research interests? Do you like Toronto? Are you homesick?
It’s hard to answer these questions in a way that feels honest. Am I an introvert or an extrovert? Well, I was an introvert for the first fifteen or so years of my life, then I was an extrovert for the next four or five, and recently I’ve been an introvert again… That’s what I think, anyway. At the moment, I might be the most extroverted I’ve been in a while, trying to get in as much socializing as I can before the grad school workload takes over. At the same time, I am perhaps more introverted than I’ve been since childhood. I return from social outings and lie on the floor.
There are two sides to every coin, of course. Not knowing who I am here means that, to some degree, I can invent it, in sort of a postmodern, nothing-is-real way. But I don’t know how to find the line between invention and pretence. I believe, of course, in a creative and additive potential of the self – I don’t think who you’ve been needs to (or even can) define who you are. But I also think there is some sort of truth of the self, even if it is relatively insignificant, relatively flimsy. How to explore that ‘creative and additive potential’ while still honouring that truth, I don’t know.
I want to share one final image.
I have been reading a lot of Maggie Nelson this year, and her 2007 book The Red Parts has been my current read over the past week or so. I brought it with me on a twenty-minute bus ride the other day, thinking I might read it to pass the time. I made it through a page or two before my head started to hurt. I stubbornly persisted for another few paragraphs, but my head began throbbing with more and more urgency until I had no choice but to shut the book and close my eyes.
I used to read in the car as a child, but, over the past several years, I’ve become too prone to motion sickness. Even if I’m not reading, car rides involving bumps, winding roads, or excessive starts and stops can be expected to produce pounding headaches for me.
Why did I try to read on the bus, then? I think part of me felt that, as a new version of myself in a new country and new stage of my life, maybe it would be different. Maybe motion sickness is something that happened to a former self, maybe the self I’m constructing here and now is immune to it.
Turns out that no amount of identity crisis, confusion, and overthinking can rid me of carsickness. I found this frustrating at first. Then, strangely, grounding.
Amarah i can’t wait until the two of us, the same but grown somehow, can share a silly little drink—maybe even one tequila based !