Hagintha Woods

Part 1 of a series on community, with a prologue of sorts.
Part 2, part 3.

Previously, Murata prompted a reflection for me on the pressures of community, and the different ways in which one might choose to cope with them. Interacting with her work, I feel that the best way to deal with the fact that conventions are both man-made and yet very real would require two things.

Firstly, to be aware of the rules and conventions. If one is not aware of the forces that society exerts upon them, then whether one changes or stay the same is not within their locus of control. Though it could be said that not being aware does lessen a person’s own consternation and feeling of helplessness- if one doesn’t question, one doesn’t feel the doubt, nor the powerlessness- it leaves a lot of one’s choices to the mercy of the community one happens to find themselves in.

Secondly, to have a way of handling this awareness, whether it is through finding a way to hold steadfast to one’s own values, or a way to make one’s peace with said rules and handle it their own way.

As I personally feel that each person is individualised and varied, I cannot proclaim how someone would choose to do that. However, thinking back to my own life, I can think of one thing that has consistently helped me.

For those who find themselves surrounded at all times by people and expectations, it can feel like you are cornered on all sides, with no spaces to breathe.

The common advice, often given out in a way that makes sense yet sounds wildly out of touch, is to find yourself. To hear your own voice and know what you stand for.

If only it were so easy. With the clamour, it is a little difficult to magically hear yourself when you don’t know what can be different, when you don’t even know what you sound like.

As such, in my way of looking at a problem in a slightly different way, perhaps just slightly to the left. I suggest finding new communities (when you have the energy, of course).

You do not need to travel, nor go on some great quest for this. I’ve found different communities by going to public spaces I’d not gone before, interacting with people of different age groups, or just by luck.

I can see the imagined person I am speaking to scratching their head, doubting whatever whim they had that led them to believe that I might have some wisdom, that I might be worth hearing out. When you are overloaded with the expectations of one group of people, it can sound ludicrous, even downright mad to join another-to face yourself with yet another set of differing values.

I cannot even profess that it will be a great experience.

Sometimes when I’ve embarked on quests like these, I find wonderful people who expand my world, make me feel like the world is full of comfort and promise. Other times, I find people whose presence results in me feeling restricted, stuck in place and pessimistic about the future. Often, I get an experience somewhere in the middle.

And yet, it works.

There is a magic in living your whole life doing things a certain way, in feeling and seeing the same lives and thoughts reflected by the people around you, and then going somewhere that flips that notion on its head.

To step into somewhere else where you are expected to behave differently, feel differently, and yet for this new set of rules and conventions to be seen just as infallibly by the new community as you see your own.

Somewhere within that experience, in the whiplash between their rules and your own, your world expands to accommodate two realities, and between both of those realities, there is wiggle room.

If you manage to accept that the other community is not necessarily wrong, and people can exist in different truths, your lived experience suddenly grows more layers.

You recognise that your society is its own pond, and its found its own way to be and survive that is real to them. You start to form the truth that be that as it may, that pond is not, and never was, the ocean.

Collars start to be loosened, pins taken deftly out of tightly woven hair as that realisation leads to one truth, and then another.

Walls that were thought to be concrete were really just plaster, and when they press up against you the way they did before, you are able to hold your ground. Even if you do not know where you stand, you know that whilst they are strong, they are not impenetrable. They aren’t what they claim to be either. You stick your hand out, and watch the pillars curve around your hand. It’s electrifying. It’s terrifying. It’s comforting.

And even if all you do with this knowledge is to sit exactly where you were, you do so fundamentally changed, with a consciousness to your actions.

This is no longer something you have grown up with and thus continued, a straight line extending on into perpetuity.

Instead, this is something you’ve paused, taken the time to visualise alternative routes, and considered. Your part of the line, at least, becomes a conscious step forward, an aware movement to preserve what you have looked at and determined to be good. Your step forward is no longer routine, but conservation and intention.

No community will ever be perfect or contain no idiosyncrasies. But by experiencing different ones, you are given the opportunity, no matter how temporarily, to be a part of them, and choose to be different.

And even if you do not or cannot stay, you’d be able to carry some part of that community inside you, held between your toes, slid quietly under your ribs. You can let it grow inside you, guide you, and as you return to your community, you can decide what you want to discard, adapt or create anew.

This was the way it was for me and doing chores.

As two working parents with younger children, my parents had decided to employ a maid to fill in the roles of both housekeeper and babysitter. Unlike some of my female friends, I did not have to struggle with a gender gap in expectations regarding housework as I grew up- those I learned secondhand from their tongues, the way a child at camp is fed tales of bogeymen.

It helped in some ways- I was not desensitised to male incompetence, so what others might have let go I had enough energy and righteousness to fight for.

But it solved the commonly sexist division of labour the way a battering ram solved a locked door- I didn’t have to do the housework because none of us did, and the one who did it, whilst being a woman (no one truly escapes untouched, do they?), did so because she got paid.

In accordance with the analogy, however, that meant we had no more door. Whilst it was not the takeaway my parents would have liked me to internalise, as I grew up, there was the feeling that everyone who did cleaning needed to get renumeration for it in some form, and those who did it for free or of their own volition were being exploited.

In the periods where we did not have help, chores were a necessary evil, something no one liked, but something to be done and gotten out the way, if only to avoid a scolding.

We bartered with one another, delayed, and did the minimum of what we had to do, ensuring that we wouldn’t be taken advantage of. I’d do the dishes if someone else swept the floor, and we after we were done with our respective tasks, we would gloat and watch each other stumble around chores the way a foal finds its legs.

It wasn’t like we particularly had to be miserable- I found out quite early that I found washing the dishes quite enjoyable- but that we would have less work if we did.

Amongst us all, chores were seem as an equaliser in their shared suffering. Therefore, if it didn’t hurt you as much as it supposedly was a pain for others, then you should do it because it was only right. Say that you don’t mind doing the laundry one time, and you’d be in charge of it for the next time, and the next. The next thing you knew, somehow, though it was never said, no one touched the clothes anymore, because “Oh, I hate it. Won’t you do it?”

And so, even though I naturally preferred some chores to others, I would dig my heels in, negotiate, and barter all the same. To accede would be to show weakness, and I’d had both enough experience and heard enough horror stories from my friends to know that when you give an inch, some types of people would see it as permission to take a mile.

As I grew up, however, I grew more and more convinced of the importance of housework.

At its core, chores consisted of the everyday activities one needed to do to continue to live both comfortably and respectably. After all, what kind of life was it, to require someone just to live, to be unable to support one’s life on one’s own?

It seemed to be that to live a life, one should be able to survive on their own, which meant that I should be able to at least keep a house functioning, even if it was not sparkling. I should be able to have clean clothes, even if they weren’t immaculate. I should be able to cook something that would be edible and non-toxic, even if it was not delicious.

Still, I couldn’t let those at home know of my budding interest and views, for I knew even mentioning being curious would entail the tasks being hefted upon my shoulders, with no way for a graceful retreat. That I would be asked to do everything, with the excuse that it would ‘help me learn’ what I was curious about. That it took said chores off their own shoulders would be a boon, but not the main reason, obviously. Who did I take them for?

Of course, I’d be able to put it down, but it would require kicking and screaming on my end, a complete rejection of what I’d been curious about before I’d be allowed to set it down.

With what I know now, I know I could have protested this, that if I stuck to my guns I would find the community, just as malleable as I myself was, in this strange little push and pull we call society. However, back then this seemed to me to be a fate set in stone.

And so, I resolved to learn in secret.

Wikihow was a large help in learning how to take basic care of my room, to get a benchmark of how often towels and bedsheets had to be changed. I went to watch the maid as she cooked, trying to learn the foods that I loved so much.

As I was in the process of this, I had the opportunity to meet others who were as fortunate as I was, but whilst I could talk to them of shared experiences easily enough, I felt like they existed at the opposing pole to the other friends I’d made.

They thought chores to be beneath them, unnecessary, that there would always be someone to help them settle the day to day minutiae of living so they could set their sights on whatever they seemed to be more important (aka whatever they had their interest on at that time).

That wasn’t to say they were all arrogant or selfish. They did not think they were bad people, and some were generous, giving, and opinionated about how to make a better world. There were some who were cognisant of how the help afforded them more time and less mental fatigue, but never enough to supersede what was more pressing to them at the time. And really, how was that different from me, who kept my learning in secret?

It was a worldview I did not approve of, but one whose language I was a native speaker within, and the other world, whilst sounding more fair, had its own insidious pitfalls.

My reluctance was selfish, yet thought out.

I didn’t want to get exploited by men or people older than me. I liked that I currently had more free time, and I wasn’t about to start taking over the family’s laundry or vacuuming the floor entirely, especially if no one was going to be doing it with me.

However, I didn’t want to be incapable either, getting in messes and expecting others to pick up the pieces behind me as a matter of course.

But there was only so much I could do in secrecy. The internet provided me with the theory, but there was only so much I could do without putting it into practice.

My maid was a spectacular chef, but she was not the best at teaching. To someone like me who was both unknowledgeable and the furthest thing from intuitive to cooking, telling me to salt something till it ‘felt right’ was like handing me an invisible map and then expecting me to start moving.

I felt frustrated, turned around, and honestly, some entitled part of me expected to be rewarded for the very fact that I attempted, waiting for karma to come and anoint me a good person, to tell me I deserved the world.

But I held that last part to myself (I am not usually self-conscious, but I do have some degree of conscientiousness and awareness of my own hubris).

I cultivated a deep respect for those around me who could do it, the effusive admiration of acknowledgement that someone could do something that I couldn’t (wouldn’t?). I deferred to them naturally, especially when it came to logistics and details. I could my maid ‘Aunty’, a title of respect for older women, and with that, I held my ego intact, telling myself I wasn’t like the other spoilt kids.

I appreciated what I was given. I wouldn’t ever bite any hand that fed me.

And yet, my neck was bent from the carrying of its guilty crown, my grip on it tight with the fear that an equalising would lead to loss.

I was so tired with my life already, felt so much, was barely keeping myself afloat with the privileges I’d been afforded.

If the right thing to do was loosen my grip, what would it mean if I drowned once I did? Would that drowning be righteous, proof that I was never fit to swim at all?

Overthinking as was in my nature, there was a part of my subconscious that worried, nursed a thought constantly.

If not positive, was my presence in this world at least a net zero?

Surrounded by the things I ate, the people around me, the relations I broke, I couldn’t answer a confident yes, despite my- admittedly paltry- attempts to even the score.

And yet, for all that worry and guilt, what finally unblocked my own contentious relationship with chores was a week long girls’ trip to Phuket.

(to be continued- if the start and end of this piece was abrupt and truncated, this is because there are at least two more parts and it was a little difficult trying to find portions where they broke easily into bite sized pieces. Hopefully it wasn’t too jarring, but have faith. This will all come together soon.)