Itinerantdaughter's Blog

There’s some weird noise––probably associated with construction––that goes off outside my window every 2-3 hours during the day, and it sounds like the alarm triggered whenever an idealistic young upstart escapes from a dystopian commune in the future.  I should be annoyed when my concentration is broken but instead I just think, “Run, XTC-619!  Run toward the Technicolor wheat fields of freedom!”

Back last year when I was researching a piece on Amish converts, I read Called to Be Amish: My Journey from Head Majorette to the Old Order by Marlene Miller, which is, as the title describes, Miller’s memoir of becoming Amish.  She fell in love and eventually married a man who was born Amish but hadn’t, during their courtship and marriage, chosen to join the church (important note: the culturally popular notion of “rumspringa” isn’t always a year.  Because Amish aren’t eligible for baptism into the church until maybe fifteen or older––varies somewhat from community to community––a teenager can put off joining the church for years, during which time he or she could feasibly explore the world.  Shunning, as a postscript, really only happens when someone has joined the church and then reneged on his/her vows.)  After they had their first child, the couple joined the church together.

Anyway, back to Miller: now that I know I don’t need her participation for said piece, I can say without fear that the book isn’t good.  I mean, it is good in that the story is interesting and the perspective rare, but the writing isn’t going to get your blood flowing, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say she shouldn’t write because she isn’t a writer (like I would with many celebrities who pen memoirs) but high art, this ain’t.

And yet––there was a moment in her prefatory acknowledgments that made me jealous about my lack of involvement with the text.  Here it is:
“I’d like to thank Elsie Kline for typing my first draft.  Because I wrote everything longhand, I’m sure she had a very difficult time.”

Now there is a job for me: typing up the memoirs of an Amish convert.  Who is this Elsie Kline, and what kind of bribery does she accept?

The title is a bit of a misnomer, actually, because I did basically find a home for this, but then decided it wasn’t really a smart placement, for political reasons (how coy!)  But I decided I like some parts of it, so I figured you might too.  ENJOY!

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In the weeks leading up to our move from Brooklyn to London, I told anyone who asked (which was everyone) that I was not nervous one bit about relocating to a foreign country. What was there to be nervous about, I argued. Globalization had ensured that basically all major cities are the same, and in this one, they spoke English, to boot. If anything, it wasn’t going to be different enough, I worried privately. Perhaps we should have lobbied my husband’s company for Hong Kong, or Paris, or Sao Paolo.

But then, the moving debacle happened: about an hour before we were scheduled to move into our new apartment, the broker called us. Our landlady had had to return to Dubai on an emergency, and hadn’t been able to get all of our personal stuff out. Perhaps we could move it to a storage unit and send her the bill? Upon arrival, I surveyed the scene. Her personal stuff was everywhere: mothy wool sweaters packed into closets that we’d been promised would be cleaned out, children’s drawings stacked in cupboards, half-filled bottles of spices lining the shelves in the kitchen, a bucket of dirty water in the bathroom. The landlady herself was unresponsive, and when we expressed our concern to the agents they seemed eager to wash their hands of us, explaining that it wasn’t their job to do x or y (what it was their job to actually do, I have yet to fully understand.) The bottom line, we were told, is that there was nothing we could really do but pay to have her stuff moved out.

I’d dealt with my fair share of shady people throughout my adult life, realtors not least among them, and though the experience was never enjoyable, I had always been able to speak up for myself and then go on about my day. It’s understandable that a dismal start in a new home would throw anyone, but I was surprised by how totally powerless I felt in the situation. This sense of paralysis trickled down to even the most basic tasks, including those I was accustomed to and which I’d executed easily back home. For example, grocery shopping. Where was the nearest grocery store? Did I need to tip the person who packaged my groceries? For that matter, did one tip anyone here? If I bought a bunch of apples and found a human finger inside, could I take it back, or was there some secret British law that protected the apple farmer over the consumer? For that matter: what was an apple, and what was money? Too embarrassed to ask questions that would surely be seen as elementary, I found myself wandering aisles examining bottles of olive oil, wondering to myself if perhaps “olive oil” didn’t mean something completely different in England than it did at home. Because after all, if “I’ll move out my personal stuff” meant “Please watch over the leather handcuffs in my nightstand drawer” here (you read that correctly), then what fresh hell was this, anyway?

The pall began to shadow every aspect of my new life, and I spent increasingly more time aggravated with myself for being so thrown, for taking on this new persona that was so resigned in private and timid in public. I began to wonder whether or not I would have reacted the same way in New York. Would a spat with a landlord there, for example, have rendered me incapable of buying a book, or receiving a package, or finding the closest dry cleaner and actually bringing my clothes there? And that’s when it hit me that I had completely underestimated the sense of vertigo one develops after moving far away from home. I had expected to adapt seamlessly to this place, but I hadn’t given the place credit, or myself leeway for being human and, ergo, struggling with change. Even when your new city seems on the surface to be practically identical to your old one––a sprawling urban center with subways and Starbucks and beer-drinking yuppies––there are these tiny discrepancies, sometimes virtually unnoticeable, that can make you feel like you’re no longer the master of your domain, and not in the Seinfeld-ian sense (no one gets Seinfeld references in London, to add to the opportunities for miscommunication.) Your foundational knowledge begins to feel sieved, and your confidence can crumble as a result. And without a network of trusted resources, both human and bureaucratic, to help you navigate the new landscape, it’s easy to start to feel like you just can’t do anything, and couldn’t recruit any allies even if you wanted to, your cultural and linguistic fluency so desperately lacking. I remembered an essay I read some years ago by Olivia Laing, a Brit out of place in New York, on the way the socially adrift tend to become “less adept… at navigating social currents.” Upon re-reading, I nodded to no one.

I wish I could say that the epiphany renewed my tenacity in an instant, but I’m thinking that’s something that’s built up over time, with every bottle of olive oil purchased. But for the record, olive oil means the same thing basically everywhere, and leather handcuffs are never your responsibility.

I have a few big pieces I have to really stay focused on, which means I can’t write smaller things––except for that piece about learning to walk a tight-wire I’m trying to finish but nobody seems to want to publish, which is nuts––but if I did have time, I would write about this chick Rebecca, who vlogs about her trichotillomania.*  This video, which shows her shaving her head, went mini-viral a few weeks back.

One thing that’s been gnawing at me since I fell into Rebecca’s TrichJournal clickhole is: if one’s emotional state while pulling is anxious––i.e. the impulse is, like for many OCD and self-harm sufferers, to relieve indiscriminate anxiety via a concrete action/visceral sensation––then post-shaving, does the anxiety remain, or dissipate?  I see in the comments that the urge to pull is transferred to other hair––eyelashes, pubic, etc.––although that might be only for some sufferers.  If the anxiety remains, then generally, is treatment geared toward anxiety sufferers (medication, meditation, CBT, that kind of stuff) the standard option for those with trich?  Is it shown to be effective?  I guess what I’m trying to understand here is if trich resembles in its pathology a generalized anxiety disorder that becomes, through reinforcement, focused on cilium, or if the neurological origin of the obsession is more enigmatic, i.e. a fetish or Morgellons Disease?  (“Disease.”  I have no dog in that fight, just acknowledging that there are many beliefs about it.)

*Yes, I do realize how often I talk about how I don’t have time for small pieces anymore because I’m working on big pieces, and yet how rarely my whining seems to correspond with actual working-on-big-pieces.