About me

I learnt an interesting thing the other night. Apparently, I had significantly changed for the worse when I first got back from Japan, according to an expert on my character (Mum). This came as news to me - I just thought I was hideously depressed. Which I was. But to the world-outside-Doug, it was more than that - I was a harder person, less forgiving, less pleasant. When I remember back then, it was probably accurate. I didn't like being trapped with Kiyono; I didn't like becoming temporarily dependent on alcohol, and I didn't like life. I remember my thinking changing to become more and more despairingly scientific, evolutionary-deterministic; reading John Gray's Straw Dogs and wondering at how we ever convinced ourselves we were more than flesh constructed from a billion billion generations of bacteria. How centuries of progress wound up confronting Auschwitz and the fact that the problem and the wonder of humans is that we are human, built of thoughts papering over emotions papering over urges and that until science enables us to modify the deep animal, all we'll be is this flow of genes saying the same thing in slightly different ways.

Thinking back, I realised again how relative and temporary our personalities are. We think fixed and unchanging, but the person I'll be at 80 will undoubtedly be much different to the way I am now. I like to think my personality is quite strong, but Japan and all that came with it exerted different pressures on me than Australia. A lot of cultural force and personal issues were exerted on a small indeterminate blob: me. Needless to say, the something that gave was me.

It's interesting to look back now that my Australian personality has reasserted itself (slowly, like a mushroom shifting back into place) and think about things like learned helplessness, the victim mentality and cultural difference.

I was watching a family of bogans last Friday night, coming home from work on the train. They got on at Heidelberg and sat down across from me, to my slight shock. The trio were tattooed, drunk and loving. Mother bogan was swearing and swaying until her son calmed her down. She became merry and insisted he bounce on her knee. "He hasn't done this since he wuz four," she confided in a beerily loud whisper to her son's pregnant fiance. It was a really cute episode, despite my middle-class hackles rising at the possibility of A Scene. I thought afterwards about how much of a blank slate humans are and how much can be written that is different. Apply a veneer of tough upbringing, little education, low aspirations and low income and that would be me. Apply a middle class background, reasonable parental expectations of return on their private schooling investment, and a comfortable life and you might approach me.

It seems like even though I've bounced back, the hatred of self and other I built up for the first time in Japan has still left a residue. I suppose this is how personalities secrete and warp and change.

If I was an idiot when I first got back, forgive me. I'm better now.