Humanity Pt. 2

I think one of the first indicators of being separated from human kind was when my relationships with other people, unsurprisingly, began to loosen at the seams, and when my identity stood challenged and exposed in front of those I loved the most.

Upon reflection, this realisation coagulated piece by piece like one of those puzzles you almost complete, bar one or two missing pieces which force the puzzle to remain painfully incomplete. The missing pieces turned out to be quite a distinctive few, manifesting as the missing language that failed to connect the spaces between my life and the lives of my friends.

I certainly noticed as time went one, I became less impassioned by the intimacy which coloured my relationships with my closet friends in Canberra. Whether it was my lack of enthusiasm for life as it was, or their preoccupation with careers, relationships, trips, getting on with it, I do not know.

I just know that it was as if one day I resonated with the fact that we were no longer speaking the same language and that my friends and family no longer possessed the language that supports the

interaction with someone who is struggling to find work for as long as it appeared I was.

The loss of language is a phenomenon not often explored in the context of job hunting and financial security so let me explain. First, I shall begin with how I created a new language of my own.

Living on my masters/ANU cloud that I had cultivated as the dream, was the first way I disengaged from with my humanness. It certainly felt like I had become and was finally evolving into the entitled white middle class success story that was finally moving and shaking her way through her twenties, after years of really having no clue as to what I wanted to do with my life. Nevermind the fact I wasn't white.

Further, with my ego as enlargened as it had become, by acheving a personal dream and yet in failing to allow this to manifest as faith in myself, I let it overcome the better parts of myself, which connected me to the rest of the human race. Invincibble, in my little anu bubble and perfect little gang I concocted and thrived in, I thought that I had evaded a brush with reality, brought on by the common experience of moving interstate and forging a life beyond childhood and university relationships.

And in this bubble I sat, for many years on end, never questioning my values and the ideals I held about a successful life and career. It is true that in the absence of childhood friendships I was lucky to find instant connections with people of diverse ages, life experiences and cultures in a city as challenging as Canberra is for any new inhabitant to break into.

However, as the months and years took flight, it felt that I was constantly facing little obstacles that were adding up to an unwarranted and nonsensical personal trajectory. Though, as I continued to deny the impact of this on my overall sense of entitlement, my thinking became more reclusive and less in touch with the social values I had tended to during my community engagement days at St Vinnies, at the Magdalene Centre.

So when the buck stopped and the application progress came to an abrupt halt, I noticed ever so slowly, the safety and protection inbuilt into myriads of friendship unravel at the furl. And not once did the process of natural progression in oposite directions feel natural to me. Quite the contrary, it felt like an assault on my identity, which had become entirely ingrained in the love, connection, energy and potential of such an incredible group of unique individals.

However, as a person whose life is built on an adoration for words and language and the connections enlivened in etymological choice, the absence of questions and discussion around my hopes and dreams, however abstract, beat down like a wooden drum played by my next door neighbor when he was three.

Right before me, the changing nature of my friendships, fraying at the edges, depicted a significant sense of failure in myself to be the person that brought me into the fold on the first place and brought me to the nation's capital. In my head, I began penning the story of human weakness in place of personal incompetency, a narrative which only served to separate me from my own.

True, I was toppled over by the hope that these friendships and relationships would resist the force of time and life, and that they were vulnerable to the same process of change and circumstance that life incites in its tendency to onward go, baffled me into a sprial of despair about humanity at best.

Little did I realise that it was not a loss of faith in others which bound me to the fate of human disconnect, but the resounding story I had played on repeat, for reasons I scant yet understood.

Worse, unbeknownst to me, it did not occur to me that my quest in search of my identity meant taking me away from these relationships, and actually having to do the hard work on my own.

And without the resounding support of my political and social backbone that I found in Canberra, my colour, my upbringing, my political views and my dream of marrying the trifecta into a perfect story in which I would be the hero, took a solid erruption n the same way as my friendships. And when blasted open by my friends

Was my anger or bitterness separating me from my fellow humans? Was my story simply a failed attempt at neoliberal existence, in the face of a pre-written success story which shaped my critical outlook?

During these years, that I was too weak to argue reasonably and too resentful to speak compassionately, are no small truths. Only when I allowed myself to be unfurled by the chaos inside my head and the conflicting views about what the good, meaningful, successful life looked like, that I began to drift away from the obliged narrative, from the misunderstood part of me that enabled me to string along as part of the chorus in someone's play.