May Musings - 21

Today is the 22nd of May, the anniversary of my London-Family, Habibtown (most commonly referred to as H-Town).

Remember a while back, I wrote a post on loneliness? Many of y’all responded, with stories about moving to a new city, and the unique, acute loneliness you felt. It seemed an burden that was hard to shake.

I felt that deeply. I’ve moved to three different cities in five years (Alhamdulilah), each time learning a new neighbourhood, finding new hang outs, searching for new people. It’s not an easy process, especially if you move as a single unit and a freelancer, without the structure of a regular work environment and team to show you the ropes.

That’s what makes H-Town even more special to me. We’re an unlikely group - covering almost all the continents, all with different interests and career paths… but we found each other in a time when we all needed one another. Subhanallah - in a way, I think this group of people - and the extended family that we have around us - has made London feel like home in a way no other city in my adult life has done. This city feels like a place that I will keep coming back to, time and time again, inshallah. It has a special place in my heart, as do all of H-Town. Here’s to many anniversaries, habibs. Inshallah xx

May Musings - 11

Even the ancient ruins of Petra in Jordan have wifi. 

Lots of thoughtful responses to yesterday’s post on loneliness; it seemed to resonate with many of y’all! Thanks for your comments, questions and open-hearted sharing.

Someone asked about why I thought the way we ‘organise’ was conducive to a lonely society. In brief, I think it’s about what we center in the design of our workplaces, families and culture, as well as what is given priority in our social fabric. For example: in work, for one to be successful, the expectation is that your career must come first, ostensibly at the expense of all else. This is implicit in the ‘hustle hard’ messaging we are surrounded by, both in the traditional corporate world and in the gig-economy. Those who are celebrated aren’t those with balanced, healthy lives, they are those who have sacrificed everything to achieve some business or financial success. There seems to be little tolerance for any other priorities except perhaps a certain type of ‘self-care’, which again centers the individual rather than the communal. I’ve not seen posters emblazoned with ‘Hustle Hard but Remember to Make Time For Your Family, Friends and Regular Volunteering Work’ in any workspace I’ve been in… Now. This is not a damning criticism of either the hustling hard attitude or the push towards self care, but a comment on how these ways of life, in absence of all else, are more likely to leave us estranged from our community than anything else. It’s up to us to decide if that’s what we want, I suppose.

Another reader pointed out the strange reality where living with family is disparaged, and living alone is valourised. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I’ve fallen into this bias and trap, and it’s interesting to question why we again, seek to raise the individual who is on their own rather than connected to others, and what that does for the society we are all a part of.

Thanks all for your feedback and conversation, and keep it coming!

***

Today’s piece I’m musing over is on language, the author reflecting on the limits of hers.

…fluency is more than merely knowing the language. Fluency is seeing past the hard edges of definitions and vocabulary to the softer, nebulous contours of conceptualisation. Fluency means living in a language fully.

The short article is opening a series I am excited to follow, called Living in Translation, ‘a new series of articles, guest edited by Nanjala Nyabola, exploring the worlds our languages have built across Africa.’

The piece made me reflect on my relationship with language, especially as a member of the diaspora. I have a complicated relationship with Arabic. I can speak, read and write it Alhamdulilah, but nowhere nearly as fluently as I can in English. I’ve spent time in Sudan in an effort to improve my linguistic skills, and that worked for a while, but in the years since, living among English speaking peers, my tongue has again gained weight. Lisaany tageel, as we would say in Sudan. My tongue is heavy, unable to lightfootedly flit across the syllables like someone for whom Arabic is home. Alas.

Speaking of the diaspora, I enjoyed reading this piece on the hidden worth of the global African community.

Diaspora-ness is a tricky state of being. In their adopted homes, diasporas are referred to as ‘immigrants’, a term that often elicits a sense of unwelcomeness. In their original homes they are thought of as ‘runaways’ who want the best of both worlds – the first to trace their roots when it’s convenient and exotic but also the first to pack and leave when the going gets tough.

But these same diasporas, by some miracle, are expected to make a contribution both in their adopted and original homes. Hypocrisy arises because no matter how much their adopted homes look down on them, for instance, they do not waive their taxes. And even when they are referred to as ’them’ in the third person, the original homes do not refuse their remittances. By their adopted and original ‘homes’ alike, diasporas are treated as resources that should be carefully tapped rather than embraced.

Indeed! I’ve often thought of myself as a ‘resource’ for my land of residence to tap into, rather than as a human being with an inherent right to exist comfortably in a space. That is in no small part due to the lived diasporic reality, but it is also a frame of mind that I haven’t found the courage yet to challenge. Perhaps because it hits right in gut of an insecurity many of us share: where do we actually have the right to belong?

***

May Musings - 10

Today’s been a quiet day, well suited for the pace of this break and allowing for moments of reflection. It reminded me of the idea that the way we perceive time isn’t in the discrete seconds, minutes and hours of a clock, but in ‘experiences’. This explains why a holiday in a new environment can feel like it goes on for ages, while we can barely remember the discrete days of going to work, or school - they all blur into one ‘general’ memory.

***

Connected to the piece I shared yesterday referencing men and their lack of close friends, I found this article on Venture Capitalists backing companies that purport to have a mission around ‘creating connection’ and battling loneliness. Capitalism hates a vacuum, indeed.

As someone who has moved to three different cities in the past six years, I’m familiar with the challenge of moving to a new environment, and the difficulties associated with building close friendships, the kind that truly sustain you. To think that one could monetize that process seems… not only concerning, but in some ways missing the point of what friendships are built on: vulnerability, authenticity, respect.

The piece does differentiate between those who are temporarily lonely and those who are chronically so. Those who are temporarily so are looking for jump-starts to connections (something that is truly helpful when relocating to a city, especially as a freelancer without a pre-set social group to join), while the chronically lonely may find the process of overcoming social pain excruciating.

Placing someone whose brain is in overdrive into a social setting with strangers “could actually make things worse,” Cole says. These companies are attempting to address a clear societal need, but “we get confused by the hunger and what it’s for.”

Reading articles like this often deeply saddens me, as it seems like a uniquely unfair affliction in a world full of people. I often wonder how we can better design our societies so folk do not find themselves chronically alone, and question how such a cultural change would occur: is it about legislative change (don’t think so), economic change (potentially, given captialism’s role in our obsession with productivity above all, including relationships) or even changes in the religious institutions and expectations in a society? Bear in mind that these reports are often Anglo-centric. A cursory look online unearthed a few interesting reads on the capitalistic and Western nature of this ‘modern’ day phenomenon:

One of the more insightful pieces was on a favourite website of mine, Aeon:

The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialisation, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasise that the individual was what mattered – not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.

The author raised an interesting point though that I hadn’t really considered (highlighting my own blind spot!)

Presuming that loneliness is a widespread but fundamentally individual affliction will make it nearly impossible to address.

…loneliness can exist only in a world where the individual is conceived as separate from, rather than part of, the social fabric. It’s clear that the rise of individualism corroded social and communal ties, and led to a language of loneliness that didn’t exist prior to around 1800.

It would appear that ultimately, the way we currently organise ourselves in the West will continue to produce chronically lonely people. The focus on the individual is damaging us: the individual as separate from the social fabric, as wholly responsible for and focused on themselves alone, and as primarily economic-value-producing assets - this individual is not set up for success.

Ah. It makes me grateful for having grown up in a household of religious and communal obligation (despite my grumbling at the time!) for at least I understood I had a place.

The question becomes, how does one maintain that place when you move? When you leave those bonds of community and obligation to a place nobody knows - or cares - who you are?

A question for another day, perhaps. In the meantime, enjoy this pic of me in my new hijabi hat: the Papakhi, the woolen hat worn by men in the Caucasus. Whaddya reckon? ;)

Not my actual hair.

The FIFO Life: Out of a duffel bag

I dumped my oversized waterproof sports bag on the tiles next to the door as I walked in, waving at the taxi.  Off came the steel capped booted, the long socks.  I breathed in deeply; it was good to be home.

Could I really call it home anymore though? I am not too sure.  I don't spend more than a week at a time in this house, and my parents have already appropriated the spaces I used to call my own. The study desk I painstakingly built in high school and lived at during my university days has been taken over by my younger brother.  My room is unrecognisable.  The bed has been moved out, replaced with the spare single.  All signs of life are packed away in cupboards and boxes by a mother who cannot abide clutter.  I don't bother unpacking my work bag anymore as it will only be a matter of days before I head off again and it sits at the foot of my nightstand, disrupting the clean lines...

Working on the oil and gas rigs as a fly-in fly-out worker is an interesting lifestyle, and that of a service hand is slightly more erratic.  Due to the nature of our employment, we don't have regular rosters and are constantly on-call.  Rig crews often gasp in shock (or grunt, because 'men don't gasp!') when we explain how we have no roster: no idea of when we will be needed or how long we will stay in the field for, a life lived by the phone.  It is the nature of the game and we are clearly told so when we start, but it only hits me on moments like this, moments when I realise I don't live at 'home' anymore.  It seems that I have moved out, but it happened without fanfare and anyone really noticing. I didn't move into another home, rather a to a life out of this 18 kilo duffel bag.

You learn what is essential and what you can live without, you learn to take small bottles of shampoo and fewer changes of clothes.  On my first hitch my bag weighed in at 23kg, the maximum QANTAS would take. Now, I am at a comfortable 18kg - and that 5kg makes all the difference when you haul your life around on your shoulder.

You become accustomed to wearing the same two sets of clothes to work for weeks on end, having one set washed for you every night and folded by the morning.  You get used to having your food made for you, because most camps have a 24 hour kitchen to serve the 24 hour rig operations.  Some might consider it a luxury, having your clothes washed and your food cooked, but when after working over 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for weeks on end, you will take any luxury you can get.  It says something about a place when lollipops and stickers are like gold and anyone taking a trip to the nearest town is inundated with requests for packs of red bull, cigarettes or eclipse mints.  It's the simple things that keep you going.

---

The FIFO Life is a series of moments experienced during the Fly-In, Fly-Out (FIFO) life of working on the oil and gas rigs.  Amorphous, random, and usually written on a whim, these are moments that encapsulate the emotion of a strange sort of a life.

The FIFO Life: Part 1

 

My feet crunch on the gravel as I slowly make my way up the hill from the rig.  It's been a good 12 hour shift, a standard 'tour', as we call it.

It's a Saturday night, the last slivers of sunlight fading away over the horizon.

I left my heart to the sappers round Khe Sanh  // And I sold my soul with my cigarettes to the black market man  // I've had the Vietnam cold turkey  // From the ocean to the Silver City  // And it's only other vets could understand...

The almost-tinny tunes of Cold Chisel rise and fall with my step as I clutch my phone in my hand while I run.  I really need to get running pants with pockets in them...

As I look around, it strikes me that I really truly am, in the middle of nowhere.  As the hum of the diesel generators of the rigs fade away, I put my finger over the speakers on my phone to muffle the tune.  Sounds of wildlife - birds, crickets, cows - emerge from the paddock around me.

The land is far from silent.

It occurs to me that I travel on these dirt roads every day yet fail to notice, isolated as I am behind the wheel of a 4WD...

I'm not an amazing runner - that was always my brother's domain in the family - but I trudge on, eventually switching on my very-fashionable headlamp to illuminate my path.  I look up and the light glints in the eyes of the herd of cows ahead.

They are startled and confused, freezing in the light.  'What is this biped doing in our midst?' I read in their eyes...

The herd runs with me, and there is a moment of random, pure joy.

It's an interesting feeling, running with a group of animals.

***

I make it back to the camp eventually, breathless but energised.  It isn't until a few hours later that I am told running in the paddock is explicitly forbidden.

The Health and Safety Officer delivering the news is contrite.

'Don't shoot the messenger darl, rules are rules.  Trust me, if it was up to us - well, it's nice having a girl run around here I'll tell you that! It's just the way it is. You might roll your ankle or get bitten by a snake.  Can you imagine the paperwork?'

The rules and regulations of occupational health and safety, and the concerns of liability, compensation and duty of care strike again.

***

It's Saturday night, and I'm sitting outside my 3 x 4m room on the cement step, making a few calls.

Friends and family answer, and their news is either non existent ('How was your week?' 'Oh, fine, nothing happened'), or awesome ('OMG-I WISH-YOU-WERE-HERE-IT-WAS-AMAZING' delivered in one breath).

Both are bittersweet.

Because you do know things happened that week, but the daily motions of life don't always translate over the phone.

Because you know that whatever it was, it was probably amazing.

But you spend more than 80% of your time living with strangers...

---

The FIFO Life is a series of moments experienced during the Fly-In, Fly-Out (FIFO) life of working on the oil and gas rigs.  Amorphous, random, and usually written on a whim, these are moments that encapsulate the emotion of a strange sort of a life.