The (mis)adventures of Super-S

Will has inspired me to write a proper post. He’s been doing that a lot lately. Good lad, that Will.

In any case, in the post I linked to above Will talks about a few things, but namely continuing to feel bad about something long after it’s over. Maybe it’s a Gemini thing - we tend to be all up in our heads - but I absolutely do the same, and I was reminded of this during last weekend’s trip to Dublin.

Well, actually it started the night before. SuperM and a couple friends and I had gone to see a great documentary. On the way home we decided to stop in at a Chinese restaurant  for some dinner. On the walk to the Chinese restaurant, we passed by a couple that was in the middle of a fight outside a pub. I heard the woman say to the man, “You better not touch me!” But he actually seemed pretty tame, so I kept walking and talking to my friend, Bryn. The Chinese restaurant we were going to was about 50 meters down the road, and is a tiny place with a huge glass window overlooking the sidewalk. We all placed our orders, and then sat down in a booth. This particular restaurant is frequented by cab drivers, and as we’re sitting there waiting for our food we notice a commotion among the cab drivers at the front of the restaurant. They’re all looking intently out the window and down the street a bit. And then what they’re looking at comes into full view - it’s the couple we’d seen earlier outside the pub except now they’re in full fight mode.

A cry goes up among the cab drivers. “She threw the ring at him!” we hear one of the cabbies say. And then the couple storms off out of view. Only to come storming back in. At this point I’m getting pretty uncomfortable and start telling SuperM, “Listen, you’ll probably say it’s none of our business, but if he hits her, I’m going out there.”

At some point, he does shove her, but not hard and it was in response to her shoving him first, and I’m not one of these people who thinks a girl can shove a guy, but a guy can’t shove a girl (especially when, like this couple, they are pretty evenly matched physically). Anyway, SuperM can tell I want to go out there, but he’s worried about me because my arm is still messed up. But before either of us can do anything the couple has stormed off again. I think the girl got into a cab, but I’m not sure.

Point is, I felt bad about it the rest of the night.

And then the next day (still thinking about it a little) SuperM and I get on the bus to Dublin, and right after we cross the border from Northern Ireland to the Republic our bus gets stopped and inspected by a garda. One poor Malaysian kid - I guess not realizing that technically going from Belfast to Dublin you do cross a national border - has not brought his passport, so he gets pulled off the bus. I turn and look at SuperM and he can see the panic in my eyes. “It’s okay baby,” he reassures me. “He’ll be fine. All he had on him was a student ID. They’ll probably just send him back to Belfast.”

I start worrying - what if he was supposed to be flying out of Dublin Airport? (I later realized that if that were the case, uh, he woulda had his passport on him.) What if he spent the last 10 pounds he had on a return bus ticket? (Again, unlikely.) What if they took him and threw him in a cell and charged him with, I dunno, suspect activity? (Look, I just watched Rendition a couple weeks ago. You can forgive me the alarmist theories, no?)

Needless to say, again, I spent a good time after that worrying about that kid too.

But my point in the above two stories is this - I felt bad about those situations, in which, really, I guess I had no place doing anything, due to situations in the past, where I had an opportunity to do something.

In school I used to witness one of my closest guy friends - Christo - get beaten up on occasion.  This was in early high school, say, 13 years ago. I don’t know why none of us never intervened to stop it. I mean, it’s not like he was getting his ass kicked, because he was a large guy, and could take on the puny spoiled shits who used to pick on him for god knows what reason. But the point is - he was (still is) my friend, and someone I really care about. Why didn’t I stick up for him, or at the very least try and break up the fights, even if the harm to him was almost never physical?

I don’t know why. And I still feel bad about it. And I’m sure Christo doesn’t remember or care anymore, because he is and always was way too cool for any of that shit, but I still can’t help feeling like I should always step in and try and do something, because…well, you never know.

I tend to avoid going on too long about Egypt and controversial issues related to my experience there because I am paranoid. I even tend to avoid reading the blogs of other Egyptian women lest I be tempted to link to them, leave comments, and then - horror of horrors - be found out by them somehow.

But today I am throwing (over)caution to the wind. Yesterday, I stumbled across this blog entry in which the author discusses the culture of falsehood that is pretty prevalent in Egypt (and, I assume, any conservative society), particularly among young women. “Spaz” writes:

Now everyone in the entire world hides things from their parents. But what I am talking about is not just a few lies here and there, but the existence of an entire life which is hidden from them, as if occurring in another dimension. Places, activities, people that they never know about.

My good friend, Artemis, and I used to talk a lot about the exhaustion of leading our double lives. I hated it. I hated having to sneak around my family (not just my parents. I have a HUGE family, and they like to talk a lot). And I still hate that on some level I feel very close to my parents, but then I am left wondering how true that can be when I am hiding a whole other life from them? I particularly dislike not being able to tell my sister, who is one of my closest friends, everything thanks to the “Please don’t tell me everything so I don’t have to keep secrets” Pact of 2001.

Spaz also mentions sitting down with her mother once and for all and telling her everything, so that there would be no more secrets. In a similar effort, I tried this once a few years ago. Actually, I attempted to try this. I wanted to come clean about everything - my religious beliefs (or lack thereof), my expectations for my future, and maybe, maybe even tell her about the man who had just dumped me because he realized there was no future for us if I didn’t come clean with my parents. (Well that was one of the reasons he gave anyway.)

I decided to ease into it, be as sensitive and diplomatic about it as possible. I got as far as “Mom, for a while now I’ve entertained the idea that there is no such thing as hell -” when all hell (har har) broke loose. There were tears, there was fervent praying, there were threats not to let me get on the plane that was supposed to take me back to my life in America which was leaving in 12 hours. And there were the 4 or 5 months where my father refused to speak to me. It was not a good time, but it was a valuable experience.

Years later, I cannot say my experiment with brutal honesty was either positive or negative. I have gone back to my quiet lying.

Maybe I’m making excuses, but eventually I came to the conclusion that the only person who was set to benefit from my coming clean was me. I had been living under years of guilt and the fear that I’d be “found out”, and in coming clean I hoped to put an end to those anxieties at least. I came to realize (or I’ve managed to convince myself) that all my parents have ever wanted for me is to be sure that I’m okay, that I’m not going to end up dead in a gutter. And, well, that I’m not going to end up in hell, but that’s another matter.

And while I am still sometimes racked by guilt and fear, mostly I’m okay with the way things are for now. Maybe it’s because SuperM and my friends in Egypt comfortingly tell me, and quite often, that I’m a terrible liar. Like Spaz says, I insist on honesty and genuineness in other aspects in my life, as if it will balance things out. And it does make me feel better to know that perhaps I am not a full-blown liar, just a circumstantial one.

I also feel certain that when the right time comes to really come clean, I’ll be able to do it properly. The last time I tried I was just on the border between being an angry teenager and an adult. I harbored so much resentment towards my parents for “always ruining my life, man.”

After living with them for over three years (after having not lived with them for 5) I think they’re learning to accept that I am an adult. An adult with a good head on her shoulders. An adult who loves them and would never intentionally hurt them. But an adult who is not like them and not like how they’d hoped she’d turn out nonetheless.