Things Seldom Openly Admitted

I’m going to deviate a little from the norm here and not talk about myself. Okay. I will talk about myself, but mainly, this is about my sister. Explaining exactly how she is my sister is too convoluted, so just take on fact that magpies collect their families more than they are born into them.

            I have always admired her – her strength, her generosity of spirit, her energy, and, probably most of all, the ever-present grace she exudes (I know she’ll laugh at that one, but it’s true). She’s the princess of the family – and by that I don’t mean some helpless girl in a puffy pink gown. No. She is the princess who can charge in and fight when she needs to, but sees the wisdom in diplomacy first; she is benevolent and just. She is the leader you would have complete faith in to make the right decisions.

            Those things I learned about her very quickly, and they’re all qualities I hold in high regard. Truth. Loyalty. Fairness. Compassion.

            I also knew, on a cognitive level, that the things she was doing and achieving were not easy things to reach, and I admired that, too.

            Over the past few months, though, I have gained a whole new perspective on exactly how challenging those things are, and how remarkable she is – as a writer and as a person.

            Native English speakers take a lot for granted. We very rarely have to worry about not being able to communicate in our own language, even if it’s at the most basic level. Our cultures are pretty well dispersed throughout the world through media, food, the internet. Our names are generally pretty easy to pronounce (says the kid whose names are constantly mispronounced just because they’re spelled a little funny). I think most of us learn one or two other languages at some point, but very few of us bother to stay fluent (or even get to that point) once the obligatory educational demands are met. We meet non-native speakers and are astounded that they can interact so easily in a foreign language.

            (I’m sure there’s going to be some (English-speaking) person out there reading this thinking, that’s not true. I know 47 different languages and am fluent in all of them. Good for you. I’m making a point so shush. And yeah. I did just do a parentheses within a parentheses. Deal with it.)

            My sister has done her MA and is doing a Ph.D. both (and did quite well at that). And that really isn’t even scraping the surface of all the projects, networking, and creating she’s done alongside those things. And, over the years, I’ve looked at all her accomplishments with a sort of envy at the amount of energy she has to put into all of them. I knew they were hard-earned, and results that I (because ‘I’ is always the main reference point; I’m allowed to be egocentric in my own blog) would have to work equally hard to earn.

            I did not once take into consideration the additional challenge of accomplishing all these many and amazing things in a foreign language (because her foreign language is my native one, give or take some vowels), which is exactly what she did.

            A while ago, I was sitting with a group of people discussing the experience of being living abroad (which most of us are and/or had been doing), and (I’m going to paraphrase and it will not be as eloquent or succinct as it was originally said), one person said that as great as being abroad is, it’s nice to go home, because home is easy. No matter how long you live in another country, you always have to work a little bit more, you always have to be on. At home, you can just stop and go with what’s happening because it’s familiar, you know it. You don’t have to think about it. When you’re abroad, some days you just want to not think because it’s tiring.

            And it is. I don’t say that very much, because I’m an English speaker living in an English-speaking country, and for some reason people (of all sorts and cultures and languages) seem to think that that alone nullifies the foreign element.

            It doesn’t.

            Anyway, moving on. Living abroad is tough, and my sister and I had talked about this. My first year in Newcastle, actually, I’m pretty sure she saved me. Here I was this naïve little Southern boy thinking it was the thing to do to smile and say hi to everyone, and not understanding why I kept getting met by looks that indicated I might be a crazy person. I felt isolated and self-conscious, and presumed the problem was me, because no one had told me exactly how big the culture gap between the North East of England and the South-east US really is (it is a wide, gaping chasm that you will never find the bottom of, in case you’re wondering). And then she told me. No, no. I had the same experience, and this is what I learned. And suddenly, while I wasn’t necessarily happy with these new social rules, I no longer felt like a pariah. Which helped.

            This summer I broke out of my rainy little island and went to check out some other parts of Europe. Like the other aforementioned native English-speakers, I used to be fluent in French and German, but the ten years of not using it for anything at all reduced my knowledge to a smattering of basic (but useful) phrases that, coupled with the reflexive Southern smile (try it; go find a Southerner, make him/her uncomfortable and see what s/he does first) and an incredibly nice man in Paris who translated a lunch order, got me through the trip unscathed. About the third week, though, I had a mini break. A lot of the trip responsibility (namely navigating cities like an expert off-the-cuff) had fallen on me, we had a lot of long days and early mornings, and I was starting to get sick. We came back to the flat after a particularly long and very hot day, and then we had to eat dinner. No big deal, right? Food is food. But that day, the idea of going outside and fumbling my way through what was and wasn’t vegetarian-friendly seemed like an overweight behemoth perched on my shoulders. I couldn’t do it. We had to eat, obviously, but I could not make myself go back out and face that. I would have cut off limbs for something familiar and easy, even just five minutes of not having to think about everything.

            And I thought, in that moment: this must be what my sister feels. It was such a simple thing, such an obvious thing, but it had never occurred to be before because I’d never experienced it to that extent. With that little epiphany, all the respect and admiration and love I have for her just magnified. So I asked myself what she would do, then I pulled myself together and went out and fetched dinner because it needed to be done. I spent quite a lot of that trip attempting to channel her (I say attempt because she’s much more patient than I am, and nicer, and generally positive).

            Last week I had another one of those moments. I’m starting a new thing, in a new place with new people. I expected it to be harder, but the truth is, for most of my life, quite a lot of (academic) things have come easily to me, and, generally, more easily than to those around me. So I’ve done a lot of coasting. A few teachers have called me out and demanded I actually work to my full potential, but most were too busy helping those who needed it to come up with extra challenges for the kid who was already doing above average. Basically, it’s made me lazy. Yes. I am a lazy perfectionist. It is possible.

            I don’t write standard fiction. I like playing with form and structure; I’ve never been happier than when my supervisor gave me free reign to dive headfirst into experimental writing. And I’m a huge advocate of the genre-and-literary-fiction-aren’t-mutually-exclusive-camp. Which means that 1. I do still feel embarrassed when I talk to “proper” literary people about my work because their eyes sort of glaze over and you can see them just writing you off before you’ve even finished your first sentence and 2. Because of 1, I also have to work that little bit harder to be taken seriously; I have to fight for my monsters and nonlinear narrative and multiple tenses and perspectives.

            And I’d gotten comfortable. In my last life, I’d won that fight already. I could babble on about alternate timelines and supernatural powers and zombies (I don’t write about zombies, oddly, as frequently as they feature in my every day discourse) and no one questioned the least bit whether or not I could pull off a literary anything. I’d proven it multiple times so it was just taken as standard.

            In my new life, I have to go through all of that again. And I did/am. And when it happened, I felt that pudgy little behemoth climbing up my back and just the idea of waging another battle in the name of literary genre fiction made me want to just sit right down in the middle of the path and not move (I didn’t; I do know how to fake at being a grown up sometimes).

            But on that excruciatingly long walk back, I thought of my sister, who has had to fight for her work to being taken seriously every step of the way because. She doesn’t do normal things, either. She does different not-normal, but it’s outside the status quo of the literary canon, so that’s enough. I thought about how hard she’s had to fight for her work, and that she’s had to do it without anyone physically in her corner to fight with her.

            I have no idea how she does it.

            I came home and promptly called my mother (I only have to pretend to be a grown up in public) to tell me I was being ridiculous and that I am, in fact, capable of doing this thing I’m trying to do, and she did. And then my neighbour came over and did the same. And I felt better about it. So I have to prove myself a little more than the standard guys. It’s okay. I can. I will. I’ve done it before.

            But I kept thinking about my sister – every achievement she’s made, every fight she’s won, every bit of progress she’s accomplished when everything else is pushing against her – and I felt that same encompassing awe at the person she is. I know that, in her place, there would have been many times I would have just given up.

            I may never have the same patience, wisdom, and certainly not the grace that she has, but she is, nevertheless, someone I aspire to be like. I will keep trying, even if I don’t ever fully succeed. Watching her these past few years, the perseverance she has and her ability to remain undefeated – and this isn’t there haven’t been hard struggles or close moments, but, for me at least, going on through those times takes a lot more than being able to skip them – shows me that it can be done, whatever else is saying no. And, here in Zaleshkaland, all that’s needed is the faintest glimmer of a possibility to take off running.