Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Comfort Zone


Brighton 

Although on many occasions, I would rather stay home and read my books as I  love to read and cannot have enough hours to do so, I regularly meet up with friends and family members and I  participate in local events to interact with other people and spar thoughts and  ideas. I do not like meeting acquaintances as it can be quite tiresome to have to exchange pleasantries but I enjoy meeting new people as I am curious about strangers as one may get some surprises after going beyond the introductions.

If you ask me how I would describe myself, this is  how I perceive myself. A bit of perfectionist, honest ( though not entirely true), imaginative, trusting, adaptable , sensitive and empathetic. Affable though some people may not agree. I can also be stubborn, overly sensitive and inconsistent in my behaviour. There are times I am comfortable appearing in public while there are also times when I feel like hibernating. I imagine it could be liberating to visit a foreign place where you hardly know anyone but it definitely takes a lot of courage for some people to leave behind their old life  and start a life in a foreign country.  I am not one who can lead a nomadic kind of life so I stayput in one place for decades. Sometimes I wonder if I could have ever done the kind of  travelling Elizabeth Gilbert  described in her memoir Eat Pray Love.

Untold Story by Monica Ali is a fiction premised on the demise of a  princess and about Lydia, an English woman  who had wanted to escape her past and  reinvent a new  life in Kensington, Midwest America. The question was : Could  Lydia ever run away from her home, her children, her family and her heritage? Some part of the story was told by reading the journal kept by her personal assistant, Lawrence who had been extremely supportive of Lydia and a great admirer of her. Lawrence wrote about Lydia in his diary : “ Press exposure and public scrutiny-I hardly know where to begin. She had lived with it for such a long time, why not carry on indefinitely? Perhaps that question is built on the premise that one eventually becomes immune to these things. I wonder if anyone does. We rather assume it when we see the magazines and newspapers full of personal comments on the starlets of the day. It’s the price of fame, we say to ourselves, and loose change at that.”  Lydia  reminds me of Holly Golightly in  Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a novel by Truman Capote although the two characters are very different in that  Lydia is a royal princess who wanted to live an ordinary life while Holly Golightly escaped her homely life and ended up a socialite in Manhattan. Even though both women are vulnerable and insecure, they are determined to break free from the circumstances they were trapped in and take steps to find their own place in the world. 

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