Jóga

In every litter of piglets, there is always a runt. In Sydney, I am that runt… and I couldn’t imagine having it any other way.

Sydney has become a home away from home this last year. I have friends who live here and I know this city – in the last four months, I was here four times and I’ve visited more often than I’d like to admit. But I am acutely aware that there is a certain type of person who can exist comfortably here, particularly in the gay community. I am not one of those people. I love Sydney precisely for that reason: Black Sheep Syndrome.

What happened yesterday was interesting. Not two hours into my arrival in Sydney and I was a wreck. Silent breakdown? Preemptive separation anxiety? A ball of confusion? Whatever it was, it was not pretty. (And to the handful of people who were subject to my calls of distress last night, I apologise but thank you!) I remembered Meryl Streep on Inside the Actors Studio a decade or so ago talking about the first time she felt her confidence as an actor unravel. I understand that precariousness. It sometimes just takes one thing… but when that one thing hits, it hits hard.

The distance from intellectual comfort is also something to contend with. For some people, adaptation (at least in a social setting) is easy. For a neurotic (doing double duty as a functioning social retard), it is not. I never expect anyone to be interested in anything I have to say. Truly. I’ve often been mid-way through a sentence and have had to interject and say aloud, Okay, I’m boring myself (because the person sitting across the table can’t wipe the look of boredom off their face but is too polite to say anything). I am far from being the most interesting person in the world (quite the contrary!)… but I can honestly say that when my brain feels like it’s just been molested by mediocrity, it’s quite a challenge to remain invested in the conversation.

The dynamic of simply walking down a prominent street is always fascinating to me. Consider: I took some friends out to dinner not so long ago at a restaurant along Victoria Road in Darlinghurst. After our meal, we went for a stroll and it was like sitting in the stands of a livestock auction. My friends, like the men frequenting this strip, are very good-looking and attract attention – the head-turning, up-and-down inspections were reciprocal. Enter me. I’ve said before: I depend on my personality because God knows I don’t have looks to fall back on (Diane Keaton gets me)! A lifetime of being plain Jane has been one of the cornerstones of my existence and in a situation like that, I always feel like Dian Fossey with the gorillas. You would have to ask the people who know me best, but perhaps my behaviour is akin to Tina Fey’s, summed up best in Maureen Dowd’s Vanity Fair feature story “What Tina Fey Wants”:

S.N.L.’s Amy Poehler has described Fey as “monastic,” the type who sits on the side and watches everybody else belly-flop in the pool, and then writes about it.

My friends Carmel, Katie and Mignon were a great comfort through those first hours. It’s the wall I hit. Fourteen years of thinking about it piled up into a reality yesterday. As my friend Phil advised me those months ago: “Make this year 2000-and-mine!” More to come…

Björk soothes in the meantime. Fade to black.