Who Am I Going To Be?
My first day in Lisbon, I was a little wobbly. I am staying at a co-living space, and although I have my own room and bathroom, the kitchen and living space is shared, and there is just that dominating sense of there being people around, which I am unused to. My first morning as I hear the sounds of breakfast spoons on bowls I feel so self-conscious I don’t even want to blow my nose. I wonder why I ever thought I would like this. I know why, of course; I was lonely when I booked it, but why that version of me thought I’d enjoy the extrovert’s utopia I don’t know. I lay silently still and look how much an Airbnb would cost me.
An Airbnb would cost me, it turned out, £2000, so upping and leaving (running away?) was out of the question. I had to have a talk to myself.
The previous day, as I sat eating a late lunch/early dinner (linner?) of egg and cheese on toast in a Portuguese chain health cafe, I tried to steady myself. I had checked in and been hugged by the community manager before she told me about all the activities I could look forward to and it just felt like a very real danger that I might have to join in. I opened the Notes app on my phone and wrote “who am I going to be in Lisbon?”.
This is what I answered:
“I am here to be a writer. A writer who sits in cafes and squares to people watch, who reads with a coffee. I am here to be a flaneuse, walking around and following different streets. I am here to immerse myself in a different life - of markets and galleries and ‘just popping in here’. I am enigmatic, in my circle, not available for anything I don’t want. I am thoughtful, not overthinking. I am doing what I want.”
That was what I had booked this trip for. To be somewhere else, to remind myself of how capable I was, to broaden my perspective, to punch through the comfort zone of my life where I was so stuck in my ways I only ever used one mug. And that meant being brave and leaving my room.
So on that first morning, this is what I reminded myself of. What was pressing most heavily on me, I realised, was expectation. That the people who run the space and the people in the flat would expect things of me. Expect me join in with activities, expect me to cook dinner, expect me to be chatty and expect me to be what they wanted me to be. I reminded myself that I was here to do what I wanted and that if that meant I didn’t fulfil the expectations of others then that would have to be that.
But of course, these weren’t their expectations, they were my assumptions. I had no expectations of the people I shared the flat with and therefore, neither did they of me. My comings and goings, my joining or not joining, would not have the merest butterfly-waft impact on their days. I had to believe they didn’t expect anything of me just as I didn’t expect anything from them. I left the room. A nice girl from Brighton said good morning, I said it back, and then I went and did what I wanted.
Once I’d got past that first half an hour, which really was a fear or worry about the unknown more than anything else, I have been so so surprised at how wonderful I feel here. And it all starts with the characters I’m wearing.
I have been deciding to embody different characters here. There are the ones I jotted in the Notes that first evening. There is the writer, who bought a little notebook and who writes little observational sketches in cafes and plonks down on a bench in a square to scribble down the train of thought she was just having. The writer is having ideas for new books, for new content, but mostly she is playing with metaphors and similes and really seeing, really looking.
There is the flaneuse. Before I left I was recommended the book of the same name and have been enjoying it immensely. The flaneuse is the female version of the flaneur, one who wanders (or saunters) around the city observing the people and the culture. I have been wandering and wandering, making a map with my feet, joining up the squares and the cascadas, relating that green house to where I am staying, orienting myself and, in so doing, beginning to feel if not quite a belonging, a knowing. The flaneuse stops for coffee when she feels like it, wanders into a bookshop because it looks interesting, pulls up a stool at a bar and asks the barman to tell her about the revolution.
The writer and the flaneuse feel symbiotic. They allow me to be curious, to observe, to be brave and just do what I want. But so too, does the tourist. I have always wanted to try so hard to not look like a tourist when travelling. I still have that impulse now, but perhaps it’s age or perhaps the fact that I’m kidding no one with my typical Norther European-ness that I’m a local, but I am finding that being a tourist is a very supportive character. The tourist doesn’t care when someone watches her take a silly photo because the silly photo makes her happy. The tourist asks for help in restaurants, the tourist takes up space and the tourist gets her needs met. I didn’t think I would try to be her, but she has become one of my great allies in confidence.
All these characters might seem that I am not being myself, but the opposite is true. I feel serene here, and comfortable inside my skin in ways I am not always at home. All three characters feel like outward reflections of my best self – one that is creative and does what she wants and is brave and indulgent and centred. What the characters are doing, in fact, is supporting me to be that person, to live as that person.
It is beautiful to notice how easily I can support myself. My tendency, here and at home, is to overthink and for that to cause me to dither – about whether to go get coffee or not, about what to do. I can lose hours to dithering. Here, I let the flurry rise and then settle, giving myself the seconds needed for it to pass standing quietly outside the café I’m thinking of going in. I can tell myself that I need food and a sit down and able to give myself that without dithering about what and where for two hours.
I am not only capable of doing this but, in this place where there are no stories of who I am and no routines or habits, it appears, in fact, to be my default. I do not consciously tell myself to have a little sit down on this step while we figure out what we need next, I just do it with great gentleness. When you strip away all of normal life, all the furred up and congealed apparatus of everyday what is left is the peaceful, nurturing and organic knowing of how to look after yourself. What is left is serenity.
