Heat

One of the recurring themes in this blog is my awareness of shame in social situations. I’ve written of the humiliation of falling off my bike into the mud, of faltering attempts to make conversations with strangers, attempts that were not well received, of seeing someone publicly chastise a couple of young boys, and, repeatedly, my failures in learning and speaking German.

There are many more revelations I’ve made that should—that do—invoke in me, when I consider what I’ve written. I feel shame, that shrivelling warmth, that intense heat-induced drawing up within the gut similar to the effect of putting a flame to flimsy cellophane.

This is conscious. I don’t seek humiliation, but I find shame interesting and important to consider. I’m one of those recovering-from-stuntedness individuals who finds it necessary to make conscious choices about my feeling states, choices that others seem to find natural. I work to control my emotional reactions in order to remain sane or at least not to whirl off the edge of the spinning universe into the void.

To keep from spiralling out of control when I hit problems and frustrations, I find it helpful to be aware of the effect of shame on my reactions. Rather than trying to push away the awful feelings—and shame really is a black, burning writhing—I try to say to myself, ‘Yes, this is shame. It makes me feel as though I’m too stupid, foolish, ridiculous to live. But somehow we’ll manage to hang on and survive it.’

That self talk, the deliberate recognition of the shame I’m immersed in, is my strategy to keep from reacting with more self-defeating behaviours. Which is what happens to many when the trauma of feeling shame leads people to stuff the awful sense of failure or project it onto others or to react violently. Or any number of ways we use to avoid the slow intense withering of self regard.

And so I end up exploring the experiences here. On the most basic level, I suppose, it’s the writer in me looking something to write about. On another level, creating a narrative helps me make sense of the experience. And, ultimately, I believe that the acknowledgement of our common frailties strengthens the connections that unite us. Which seems to me to be one of the functions of writing. (I’ll leave it to another time to address this circular logic.)

I raise these issues today because of a small incident last week. I was working on deadline, trying to finish a project proposal, when an email from our Robert, our landlord, came in. He was scheduling the delivery of heating oil for the winter. And he had, very kindly, written the email in German.

I say kindly, because we are making progress, albeit slow, in German. I can now have basic conversations—over the phone, in restaurants and shops, with receptionists—entirely in German. These are simple conversations, of course, and faltering on my part, but I consider it an honour when the other party respects me enough to continue in German when, frequently, it would be as easy for them to switch to English. ‘Ich muss üben’, I tell them if they offer to continue in English—I must practice.

Robert’s English is excellent. In fact, he and his family have recently returned from New Zealand, where they spent a year working and going to school. So I saw his German email as a respectful gesture to allow me to practice. But, as I say, I was on a deadline. Nor could I, as I tried to reply in German, remember the spelling of the most basic words, words I should know.

I sent off a hasty answer, poorly spelled, and he replied with small corrections, reminding me of a forgotten Umlaut, suggesting a better way to put a clumsy construction. His tone was playful, almost teasing, and I appreciated what he meant to do.

All the same, I wanted to cry with frustration. The message was so simple, and still I couldn’t do it right. I had hesitated before leaving off the Umlaut, but I was too rushed to look it up. What would have been the simplest note in English dashed off without thinking because was a time-consuming chore in German. I couldn’t engage in with a playful tone because I could barely engage even grammatically.

And I thought again about shame. I felt the loss of dignity in being reduced to child-like communications, poorly spelled, words ill chosen, when I am so fluent and confident in English. I thought too of how the posts about shame have to do, one way or another, with the loss of dignity, real or imagined.

We long for dignity in life, that sense of personal integrity that comprises autonomy, competence and self regard. We feel the sting of its loss when our wholeness is revealed as defective. Yet in moving forward, in trying to progress, even going out the door to meet the world, we risk it loss. 

Some of us are more absurdly invested in preserving it than others. I probably fall roughly in the middle of the continuum, having through my own actions and those of others been robbed of dignity many times and yet survived to feel the shame, perhaps even growing stronger for having done so. The humiliation and frustration of finding myself as inarticulate as a child is another exercise in feeling life’s indignities and carrying on. 

A Question of Settling

I suppose the logical question is what did we do for the Fourth of July yesterday.

Nothing.

I worked, trying to finish a rambling, disjointed post (see above) before moving on to my German lessons. Himself was at the office, playing mediator between his European team and the expectations of their American counterparts who, of course, were all out of the office. We roasted potatoes and a sea trout for dinner and afterwards took a walk in the fading light, walking first under the trees along the pale green-blue River Saalach as it tumbled northward toward its convergence with the River Salzach, then turning back along the Salzach to home.

There were no fireworks. There will be a splendid display during Salzburg’s Rupertikirtag festival in September. We’ll wait for those. Nor I did not pull out the U.S. Marine Corps Band CD. No Stars and Stripes Forever for me, not this year. It was day like many others, a day on which we were grateful for dry weather, a comfortable place to live and loving companionship.

All this seems to answer another question, one that was put to me all the time while we lived in Ireland: ‘Are you settled yet?’

An unsettling question, that. A question that’s nearly impossible for me to answer. I suppose I’m a kind of unsettled individual, at best. I’m a drifting sort of person, unsure and aimless at the best of times, a girl who is still waiting to grow up, fighting all the same growing old.

An American acquaintance in Ireland, someone I knew causally over the two and a half years we were there, told me as we were preparing to leave that it was just as well. ‘You’ve never settled here,’ she said.

When I told him, Himself was indignant on my behalf. After all, we had our house, which we had designed and furnished with care. We lived among a network of a large extended family. We attended weddings, christenings, First Communions and, particularly, funerals. We voted. We had gym memberships and were greeted on the streets and when we went into shops. Who was to say I had not settled?

Yet, in a way, she was right. Such intimacy as we developed with others remained within the family. In some ways, we were waiting for life to begin. And then, almost suddenly, we uprooted and moved to Salzburg.

Have I settled in Salzburg, then? Can I even define what that would be?

Skirting the question yet again, I think back to when we moved to our house, our first house, in Thousand Oaks. Himself envied me, he said, because I seemed to take to our new neighbourhood at once, in a way he never did. It was the archetypal California ranch-style neighbourhood of irregular blocks punctuated by cul-de-sacs, neat sidewalks bordered by grassy ‘parking strips’, a neighbourhood very much like the Sunnyvale, California, neighbourhood I grew up in. It was so like our childhood home that my sister said on seeing it for the first time, wonder in her voice, ‘You live in Beverly Cleary’s house.’

That suburban community with it tidy, mid-century stucco houses surrounded by rectangular lawns and patios was far from the dwellings in the small Irish towns where Himself spent much of his youth. It was further still the rolling farmland where he spent the rest of it, the same countryside where I, apparently, failed to settle during our time there.

And now we live in a flat at the edge of a central European city, in a neighbourhood that cannot be termed urban, rural or suburban, having elements of all three. When we arrived, we had few reference points, architectural, social, cultural or familial. My circle of acquaintances is small; it is through good luck or magnanimous fortune that we have wonderful neighbours who speak fluent English, else I would have been cut off nearly completely.

And, yet, oddly, I have settled, if by ‘settling’ one means a sense of feeling grounded in my surroundings. More and more, when I look out the window of the flat or of the bus, or take in the landscape as I cycle to the market, I feel at peace with the scene around me.

I struggle, naturally, with learning German. Even though I make my way around the city comfortably, being unable to speak fluently affects me at odd times. When the phone rings – which it does rarely – I answer wondering whether I will be able to understand the purpose of the call. If it is Himself on the other end, my tension immediately relaxes. I put off making appointments, wanting to avoid those awkward exchanges in stumbling German with the receptionists who answer the phone. (Once one woman, frustrated with my incomprehension, hung up on me. I took a deep breath and called back to begin again.) I worry about what could happen if I found myself in a real emergency.

Sunday I participated in a 5K Frauenlauf – a fun-run – as part of a team from The English Center, an English bookshop and language school. Standing in line before the start of the race, I asked the woman in front of me, in German, the time. Disconcertingly, she answered in German, and I was too ashamed to admit I didn’t understand what she said. I am used to hearing German over loudspeakers, but I long for the day when rather than sounding merely interesting, it will be also comprehensible.

But still, simply participating in the race, albeit as part of a team of English speakers, created another tie between me and the community. All along the route, Salzburgers stood and cheered as we passed.

‘Bravo, bravo’, an old man shouted as I turned the corner on which he stood. That I certainly understood.

I’m not suggesting that by doing the Frauenlauf I am now settled. It was a single morning; afterwards I came home and slept, nursing the hip I’d thrown out along the way. I rose the next morning – the morning of the Fourth of July – and went about my business. Alone, as usual, for most of the day, I limped, my hip still sore, and wondered how I will manage the medical system here to have it adjusted. In America, in Ireland, I would know how to find a chiropractor and how to make an appointment. It’s not so simple here. It’s an example, however small, of how I have not ‘settled’.

All the same, that the Fourth of July, a date that should have resonated and made me homesick, passed without much more than a ripple in my awareness suggests an important, if subtle, shift in my consciousness. Being settled, like being happy, is a fluid state. I can’t define or describe it; I’m not sure I even know it.

All I can do is refer to the lightness in my being when I see the sun brighten behind the green wood outside the window. Feel the rightness in the sight of the corner of a familiar door reflected in the wardrobe mirror. Or know comfort in hanging heavy clean towels on the line. Sometimes, this simple peace is enough.