Earlier in the chapter I quoted in my previous blog post, the protagonist says something that I found fascinating, sad, and immediately recognizable:

“I don’t let my thoughts touch the sides as I take the crowbar out of the toolbox . . .”

“I don’t let my thoughts touch the sides”: I get that; I have felt that way before.

Do you; have you?

Later in the novel All the Birds, Singing, the author, Evie Wyld, has the protagonist say something similar, expanding upon the idea:

“I walk down the corridor of my brain and don’t even look at the doors either side.”

Wow, what powerful imagery: a picture of numbness. Why doesn’t the protagonist want to make contact with the sides, look at the doors, or—God forbid—walk through those doors? Why does she endeavor to go straight down the middle, focusing only on stepping cautiously forward?

Wyld expands on this idea even further, later in the novel, but the idea is understandable even after reading just these two short passages. When something bad has happened in your past—an event, or many events, so horrifying or shameful or depressing or otherwise traumatic that you can’t bear to think of them—the memories continue to reside in your brain, whether you want them there or not. Sometimes it is more comfortable and less anxiety provoking to avoid thinking or feeling at all, so as not to risk touching upon one of the danger areas.

If you have never felt this way—felt so paralyzingly numb that you could not bear to let your thoughts touch the sides—count yourself lucky, young, otherwise blessed, or more than one of the above. If, like me, you have? Well, we’re only human.

And maybe, one day, letting your thoughts touch the sides will feel not so bad, and walking through the doors will feel not so awful, after all.

Know what I mean?

My brother and his family recently moved to my area, which has been a wondrous and unexpected blessing. For the first time in my adult life, I am living near relatives.

There’s a part of me that wants to say, “Go away—you’re encroaching on my territory!” but that’s my self-destructive side. I am not used to having family nearby; I am used to the grittiness of going it alone. I have learned that I am fully able to tough it out . . . but life is tough enough without imposing extra, unnecessary hardships upon oneself.

The better part of me—in both senses of the expression—are thrilled, thrilled, thrilled at having family nearby. And so, I appreciated the early scene in Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire in which one of the protagonists, having recently moved to another country—and continent—to further her education and career, reflects on the fact of her family being so far away . . . as well as on the word touch:

“She touched her shoulder, muscles knotted beneath the skin. Pressed down, and knew what it was to be without family; no one’s hands but your own to minister to your suffering. We’ll be in touch all the time, she and Aneeka had said to each other in the weeks before she had left. But ‘touch’ was the one thing modern technology didn’t allow.”

Of course, it’s not just modern technology that doesn’t allow touch. The word touch has been in use for at least 700 years; however, its meaning of “communication”—as in “let’s stay in touch” or “we fell out of touch”—is more recent, having originated in 1884. In the late 1800s, people presumably used the word to refer to (among other things) communication through letter writing: a more ancient form of technology than digital devices, but a technology nonetheless.

Whether you’re in touch with your family through Skype, as in the novel, or through older forms of remote communication (text . . . email . . . landline . . . snail mail . . . telegraph . . . smoke signals . . . carvings in trees . . . rock arrangements in strategic locations), no technology can replace a shoulder massage, hug, kiss, pat on the knee, or gentle and playful kick in the butt.

When was the last time you were in touch with family, not just in the communication sense but literally?

After years of floundering through life, she finally finds herself! She figures out exactly who she is . . . upon being hired as a convenience store worker. At last, to her relief, there is a place on earth where she is needed, where she understands what to do in every situation that arises.

Whereas in her personal life she is silent and obedient so as not to say or do the wrong thing, in the convenience store she is busy, proactive, loud, and assertive. She knows how to organize shelves, speak to customers, order supplies, and handle transactions. She even knows how to respond in unusual situations.

How was it possible for her to learn to be a convenience store worker, when learning to be a daughter, sister, friend, and partner had always been so insurmountable?

“When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.”

The protagonist of the novel Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (which I read in the translation from the Japanese) would love to be given a manual for everyday life. Alas, no one seems to have written one. So she dedicates herself to the one place that she finds clear and understandable:

“When I open the door, the brightly lit box awaits me—a dependable, normal world that keeps turning. I have faith in the world inside the light-filled box.”

The convenience store thus becomes a symbol for security, understanding, and light. These are things we all need. What is your convenience store—the place or circumstance that you fully understand, that you can depend on for consistency and comfort?

Hair styling. Nail painting. Clothes and accessories shopping. Laser treatments. Balancing on heels. Cosmetic surgery. Shaving. Tanning. Dermal fillers. Walking up stairs in a long skirt without tripping. Dieting. Make-up application. Botox. Walking down stairs in a short skirt without flashing anyone. The list of things people do for beauty goes on and on.

In the book Perfect Me, Heather Widdows argues that both women and men worldwide are experiencing increasing societal pressure to do more than ever for the sake of exterior appearance. She notes that women are expected to do more, more costly, and more time-consuming beauty tasks than men. But she also points out that the problem does not end with inequality:

“The problems with the increasing demands of beauty are not just that they are demanded more of one gender than another but the nature of the demands.”

In other words, keeping the beauty standards of women the same while ramping up the beauty standards of men will not result in a better world. The beauty standards are already troublingly high, Widdows says. She calculates that if a person spends 20 minutes a day on beauty between the ages of 15 and 75, that adds up to almost a solid year of beauty-related tasks over a lifetime. Furthermore, she notes, studies have shown that the average woman in the U.S. and U.K. spends about double that daily amount of time.

And then there is the monetary cost of all this beautifying, as well as the opportunity cost of all the things people could spend their time and money on instead. So we’re all on an accelerating roller coaster, unable to jump off without real-world consequences, but also struggling to hang on.

In what ways do you bend over backwards for beauty? Is it worth the time, money, and opportunity cost?

I don’t often buy books without consulting online reviews or a friend. When I do, it feels like I have a delicious secret.

Having confronted no direct evidence that another human had encountered the book Perfect Me by Heather Widdows, I felt like a voyager alone, making a profound discovery that I hoped to one day share with the folks back home.

My feeling of secrecy was compounded by the fact that the book’s introduction launches into a discussion of philosophical concepts that don’t usually arise in ordinary conversation. And so, like an intrepid explorer, both exhilarated by and afraid of marching into an exotic place, I read this passage:

“It is important to remember that one thing worse than locating the self in the body is locating the self in the mind and neglecting embodiment . . . (the ghost in the machine). . . . As embodied beings, appearance—beauty—should matter, but it should not be all that matters or what matters most.”

Thus Widdows begins her book by reminding her readers (or, for all I knew, just me?) about Descartes’ philosophy declaring a dualism of mind and body. Today, this idea is often referenced through the term the ghost in the machine. Is the ghost (a.k.a. the mind or consciousness) a separate phenomenon from the machine (a.k.a. the body and brain)?

Sidestepping that debate, Widdows reminds us (or only me?) that, just as it’s not a great idea to live in your head and ignore your body and everything else in the world, it’s also not a great idea to focus solely on your body and what others think of it, to the exclusion of your intellect, emotional strength, values, and so on. She fears that, in the age of the Internet, appearances matter too much: that the primacy of machinelike attributes is making ghostlike attributes increasingly irrelevant.

Widdows declares, sensibly enough, that we should strike a balance when it comes to beauty. A machine without any hint of a ghost is like a doll. She may be beautiful . . . but she’s lifeless.