The Witch in the Mirror

Whether you want it to be or not, travel makes you introspective. From the amount of time you spend alone to the people you meet, you have no choice but to evaluate the person you have become or worse, the person you wish you were.

There is one thing you have when you really travel that you don’t have when you are at home living the life that falls in front of you, and that my dear friends, is Time. When you are on ‘holiday’ for a week or even two, and in our case sometimes even six, you only really begin to relax before the life you lead takes over one more time. When you are away, there is time to reflect and examine the inside of who you are as a person. The only thing we can hope for is that when we look in the mirror after such a brain explosion, is that what we see is not the deformed grotesqueness of the monster from The Goonies, but hopefully a shimmer of Glenda the Goodwitch staring straight back or at least in our peripheral vision.

For the first time in a long time I’ve had time to listen to a lot of things. Really listen. Listen to my body, my own head, the people around me and the stories of others I never really had time to listen to. Podcasting was always something I thought was a bit, well, wanky. That only people who wanted to appear ‘abreast with the world’ would listen to them. And that only people who would use the phrase ‘abreast with the world’ would find them of any value. I had heard stories from the literaries I had encountered that podcasts like ‘This American Life’ were good ways to find story ideas. That I should be using these in order to create my own version of events if I really wanted to be a writer. With a sigh and mental eye-roll my inner Nina voice went ‘whatever.’ You like to write frivolous sexy stories not intimate portrayals of true stories ready for the Weekend Australian or some other high brow magazine I would never know the name of. In one of these times of self reflection, I will say it was immediately following the tears of a story I heard listening to a wanky podcast, I realised that I do write about characters.

One of the criticisms about my stories, from an anonymous reader, is that they are too long. “They take so long to get to the point Bauer. Do I really need to know all that shit about them?” While at first I put his criticism down to the fact that he was an uneducated, illiterate who obviously wouldn’t know foreplay even when it smacked him in the face (not forgetting the pure physical fact that he is male) I was immediately defensive of my characters. One of them needs a reason to have sex. They can’t just jump to it and then it’s over regardless if that’s how it occurs in real life sometimes. My characters were people, and I needed them to have a reason or what was the point in writing about them at all?

In this moment of pure reflective genius, I raised more questions than I could actually answer. (Always the way with reflective genius) Was it the frivolous sexy time that I actually liked writing or was it the characters themselves I loved to create? Since forever, I have not liked true stories. I don’t like reading them (biographies in grown up land) and I don’t like watching them. They make me feel like I am intruding on someone’s life and that any moment someone scary is going to walk around the corner and tell me off for eavesdropping. While that reason sounds incredibly implausible (afterall I have told you all stupid things I would never have had the guts to tell my best friend face to face) I think the real reason is that for so long, I was just scared of an unhappy ending.

Have I spent my life hoping that I am actually Dorothy and that with enough luck, non-Jewish hutzpah, and friendly masquerading helpers that in the end all I will have to do is tap my red shoes together three times and my happily ever after will come? That’s certainly not the case for all of the people whose stories I have listened to on ‘This American Life’ and ‘Snap Judgement’ over the last three months. Some did, but some didn’t and it is then that I realise, it’s not the end of their stories. The happy ever after hasn’t come for any of us if we are all still breathing.

There are moments in reflective genius that are a lot like riding a roller coaster. There’s the initial dawn of realisation about yourself that gives you a little kick about how much you’re growing emotionally, then there’s the frantic fall of ‘Holy fuck, if I didn’t realise that before, how many other people did realise that about me and thought I was dick?’ followed by a slight upward turn when you realise that they too have these moments and at one point in your life, you’ve probably thought they were a dick too and then the final backward flip with ‘Well what the fuck am I supposed to do about that now?’ And it’s that last one that is my favourite and yet the worst.

While I’ve got time to listen to myself, the world, the people I meet (it’s amazing what you’ll divulge to a random stranger when you spend some time with them – Megs, if you are reading this, I will be eternally grateful) and the stories of others, but will I actually take the time and remember to look for Glenda in the mirror every morning when the work routine continues?

When there is time we make the solemn vow to work on the Goonie deformities and focus on our inner Glenda even when the time is short and the daily routine of life picks straight back up the moment we finish the last load of holiday washing. Until then, I will pretend that the reason I travel is to see some Moon Temple pyramid hidden in the heart of Mexico and not to find time to remind myself that there is a little bit of Glenda in everyone and sometimes I just need some time to find her face in the mirror again.