Having been back in the UK some 250 days now, it is safe to say that the repercussions of a two-year long Latin existence have not failed to attack.
It came to my attention recently that a sensation of pain or molestia (annoyance/nuisance) had been chipping away at my mind ever since I landed back in London on December 14, 2011.
I decided it was a headache. Every man and woman in his or her life suffers from a headache from time to time. I am also one of these women who is often guilty of forgetting to use reading glasses when necessary, one who is guilty of replacing water with coffee at work and also frequently guilty of having less than the recommended seven hours of sleep per night.
It could have been any number of things, I told myself.
However, a headache cannot last eight months.
For this, the eight month qualm I have had can only be explained as an eight-month-long hangover from machismo.
My theory was somewhat proven correct just by the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the word.
Definition of hangover:
1 a severe headache or other after-effects caused by drinking an excess of alcohol.
2 a custom, habit, feeling, etc. that survives from the past: this feeling of insecurity was in part a hangover from her schooldays
Whilst I have often been guilty this year of Oxford’s number 1 definition for the noun in question, the second use of the word is what caught my attention the most.
A custom, habit, feeling, etc. that survives from the past.
I then chose to re-write Oxford’s example.
This feeling of insecurity was in part a hangover from machismo.
As part of keeping peace of mind in the beautifully chaotic city of Buenos Aires, Argentina for two years, I embarked on a study of what it meant to be male and female in a city so dominated by machismo, or, what some like to call strong or aggressive masculine pride.
My study ended abruptly. It turned out that analyzing such a matter was even more exhausting than seeing it and living it on a daily basis. I ran instead and left to be home with my family and friends.
Running however, as the wise will always preach, is never the answer. What you run from eventually catches up with you and manifests itself in the most extraordinary and deceptive of ways.
A female friend who had also had the porteño experience chose to run too. Except, she did not call it ‘running’. She called it ‘moving on.’
It later to came to my attention, that despite my friend’s efforts to ‘move on’, it was impossible. Well, temporarily.
Whilst most painful things get better with time, a hangover from machismo takes a lot more patience and willpower to cure than one might think.
My aforementioned friend discovered that upon leaving her querida Buenos Aires, she felt even more empty than she had before. Out of the vacuum, where the space had once been filled with pressure, she now felt nothing, and this made her panic even more.
No hyped sexual tension to cut with her knives, no fraught expectations to perform as a typical female, no questions and no demands to answer to, she exploded.
What would she do with her time now? How would she replace all the melodrama created by cultural difference with calm, and the familiarity of her own roots and surroundings in England?
Well, an English partner was not the answer. But this she tried, for a short while, until it fell apart and it became clear to her that she had not taken the appropriate amount of time to accept and digest the alluring blur of her last few years in Argentina – the country where she had, quite convincingly, transformed herself to fit the porteña mould. The mould that, does not apply here, to English life in 2012.
England has far since moved on since the pre-feminist movement years. But if anything, my friend had not, and had only regressed in her mind into those early years, when social and political circumstances had not allowed women to do what they are free to do today.
Upon hearing my friend’s epiphany, I offered her the only thing I felt I could offer at that moment in time: two paracetamol and encouragement to endeavor in the practice of patience.
Time (and pharmaceuticals) really can heal even the most cracking of hangovers.
