As it were, my time in the gay hotel is coming to an end after seven months of intrigue and boundary-pushing, and I find myself moving into a new apartment with different conditions at the beginning of April. It got me thinking about the reality of a living situation versus our expectations of how it should or will go, since this will now be the fifth place in which I've lived in Lisbon, not including staying with friends when I didn't have a room of my own.
Often when we think about moving, changing our lives, or just going somewhere temporarily, we form a mental image of what it will be, should be, must be like in order to accept the unknown and dive into it. We base our expectations on an already-familiar reality that may not have much to do with the way things work elsewhere. The details of new places, different social environments, different expectations, and different lifestyles get lost in mental translation, so the image of the new becomes an idealized picture of what we'd like for the present surroundings. The new apartment will solve all of the problems that exist in the current one. The new city will be just the change of pace I need to get on the right track. The vacation will be the getaway that will finally clear my head of all the thoughts that run through it at a million miles per hour.
Reality, of course, happens differently.
When I first came to Lisbon, I had no conception of how to live on my own. I had never dealt with the necessity of buying my own groceries and comporting myself well with roommates on a daily basis, because I had lived with families on prior study abroad experiences, or not on my own for long enough to count for much. The lessons learned from cohabiting with others come quickly and with force: respect for boundaries, personal belongings being sacrosanct, how and when to step all over the aforementioned, and how to react when others do just that. The combination of the latter two points is perhaps the hardest to digest and get right with any given other person, much more so when you live in houses with three, six, nine other people. People eat your food and you have to fight the urge to turn your room into a pantry, you learn to what extent you can put up with music you don't enjoy played at levels that seem designed to personally offend, you begin to understand the nature of commenting passive-aggressively on social media about your roommates.
The main point, however, is that regardless of how you think the experience of somewhere is going to be, there will always be something that surprises. Perfectly reasonable people can go unhinged at random, there can be defects in the apartment itself, you can make friends where you never expected to. I realize that although I expect where I'm moving to to be more impersonal owing to a greater amount of private space and fewer to the house, there will also be downsides I could not think of after seeing the apartment for half an hour on a sunny afternoon. That friction, if dealt with correctly, should serve as a lesson in being a more complete person and is certainly a microcosm of diplomatic behavior elsewhere, the value of which can not be understated.
I'll take away all of the stories of intrigue that come with living among a flock of gay men and will almost certainly save away the stories to be expanded upon in the future, but the more important thing to come of the whole experience is a changed perspective on how to live more adequately for myself, how to share space despite shortcomings, and how to pick battles so as not to feel inhibited in a space that should feel like home. I also look forward to a big, east-facing window.
Often when we think about moving, changing our lives, or just going somewhere temporarily, we form a mental image of what it will be, should be, must be like in order to accept the unknown and dive into it. We base our expectations on an already-familiar reality that may not have much to do with the way things work elsewhere. The details of new places, different social environments, different expectations, and different lifestyles get lost in mental translation, so the image of the new becomes an idealized picture of what we'd like for the present surroundings. The new apartment will solve all of the problems that exist in the current one. The new city will be just the change of pace I need to get on the right track. The vacation will be the getaway that will finally clear my head of all the thoughts that run through it at a million miles per hour.
Reality, of course, happens differently.
When I first came to Lisbon, I had no conception of how to live on my own. I had never dealt with the necessity of buying my own groceries and comporting myself well with roommates on a daily basis, because I had lived with families on prior study abroad experiences, or not on my own for long enough to count for much. The lessons learned from cohabiting with others come quickly and with force: respect for boundaries, personal belongings being sacrosanct, how and when to step all over the aforementioned, and how to react when others do just that. The combination of the latter two points is perhaps the hardest to digest and get right with any given other person, much more so when you live in houses with three, six, nine other people. People eat your food and you have to fight the urge to turn your room into a pantry, you learn to what extent you can put up with music you don't enjoy played at levels that seem designed to personally offend, you begin to understand the nature of commenting passive-aggressively on social media about your roommates.
The main point, however, is that regardless of how you think the experience of somewhere is going to be, there will always be something that surprises. Perfectly reasonable people can go unhinged at random, there can be defects in the apartment itself, you can make friends where you never expected to. I realize that although I expect where I'm moving to to be more impersonal owing to a greater amount of private space and fewer to the house, there will also be downsides I could not think of after seeing the apartment for half an hour on a sunny afternoon. That friction, if dealt with correctly, should serve as a lesson in being a more complete person and is certainly a microcosm of diplomatic behavior elsewhere, the value of which can not be understated.
I'll take away all of the stories of intrigue that come with living among a flock of gay men and will almost certainly save away the stories to be expanded upon in the future, but the more important thing to come of the whole experience is a changed perspective on how to live more adequately for myself, how to share space despite shortcomings, and how to pick battles so as not to feel inhibited in a space that should feel like home. I also look forward to a big, east-facing window.
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