I was eighteen when I left home (being Brisbane, Australia) for the first time. After struggling through childhood, by being the youngest of four children, with wanting space and a chance to find my individuality, it did seem, in retrospect, strange that I would head to London, England where both my sisters were living. Although perhaps not too strange as it had been almost three years since I had seen my eldest sister and over a year since I had seen my other sister. The fact that my brother and his new girlfriend decided to plan a trip to the UK at the same time and end up on the same flight as me was just atypical of my life up to that point. Or perhaps, it was just a preview of things to come. Irony is a constant companion of mine.
As much as I might have believed I knew it all at eighteen, and really do not all teenagers believe they know better, I was a particularly immature, naive and an oblivious one at best. London was quite the eye-opener for me. From Big Bird walking down the street (yes I really did see Big Bird and no I was not on drugs), to train announcements about suicides, to the appalling conditions of shared housing, to learning to cook (for survival) and many other life-altering moments. The amount of "growing-up" that I experienced in London during the time I lived there was quite astronomical. However, if one had known me then one would agree that there was a lot of growing up to-be done.
I still remember to this day my state of absolute shock and terror the first time I heard an announcement while riding the tube that there was going to be a delay due to someone jumping in front of the train (not the train I was on, but the one in front of us) at Charing Cross. Shock that such an announcement was made so matter-of-fact and terror that no-one on the train seemed to be paying attention. The businessman in the suit was still reading his newspaper, the elderly woman across from me was continuing to knit some god-awful item of clothing (it was far too difficult to figure out what she was attempting and the colours she was using were hurting my eyes just to look at it), and the young guy sitting uncomfortably close to me continued to doze and make disconcerting grunting noises. Were they deaf or just so indifferent to the tragedy of death - I can only speculate that it was suicide and not murder/manslaughter? It turns out, that after hearing similar announcements over the coming weeks such behaviour by my fellow companions became the norm for me too. One is forced to disassociate just to live in London. Which says quite a lot about society, but also about the person I was at eighteen.
Certainly growing up I would not have described myself as a sheep. I was far too opinionated to be one (one had to be opinionated in my family otherwise I am not sure if one would have survived - more likely left behind somewhere for not being "tough" enough), but I had learnt a lot about pretending to blend in. But that is a topic for another blog. The point that I am trying to make is that in order to survive London I almost had to block out all the external negativity - which included death by train announcements - and accept that the norm was that nothing ever bothered you regardless of how strange, ridiculous or scary it appeared to be. It helped that I had a discman (yes this was back in 1995 where there were no iPods or mp3 players) and could listen to music while riding public transport. Even today I would not hear the announcement were I to be on the tube as I am almost always plugged in. By that I mean that I constantly listen to music even while working my nine-to-five job.
But again all this reveals is my disconnection from society, from people, and I can clearly see that I use music to maintain this barrier to a certain extent. I live in a world where connecting with people is increasingly difficult - and I do not mean social networking sites (although I do see the irony of this post on Blogger - but it is not like you were not warned) - and this lack of ability to connect was something I learnt due to my environment (London). Is it something that one can unlearn?
More to come ...
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