Sometimes You’re Toopy and Sometimes You’re Binoo: Relativity of Grandeur
Listening: "Peephole" by System of a Down
Reading: Not enough at the moment
Watching: Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead
Wanting: Pickle Pepsi
I just love to keep you guys waiting. Certainly no other reason for my near-month-long absence...Anyway, imagine a children's cartoon about a tiny cat and huge mouse. Doesn’t sound natural, does it…?
When I was in kindergarten or the first grade, I remember a school trip to the Food Basics just down the street, my whole class shuffling single-file and silent, having been thoroughly prepped for the walk and the dangers that came with existing on a sidewalk a few feet away from the road in our quiet part of town. Once in the store, we continued to move as one long snake, slipping down each aisle and learning about, well, groceries: prices, budgets, ingredients. With only a few grocery stores located at separate ends of our small town, it was guaranteed that each of us kids had walked these aisles many times before, tagging along for the weekly shop with our parents or trailing behind older siblings sent to pick up a last-minute item for dinner. In the setting of a “field trip,” however, Food Basics appeared as something novel: shelves of cereal boxes and canned goods provoking amounts of wonder inconsistent with their commonplaceness. Following the thorough tour, each of us received an unfrozen "freezie" as a parting gift. Clutching our flaccid tubes of candy-coloured liquid, we snaked through the automatic sliding doors and back towards the sidewalk. A couple of children, against the instruction of the supervising teachers, tore through the plastic with tiny molars, sealing their mouths around the hole and guzzling back the juice, room-temp and sickly-sweet. What a treat that mundane trip felt like. Those invisible rose-coloured glasses perfectly fitted for our mini heads.
Writing about this experience now, I am reminded of a Tweet from 2022 by the user @boywaif : “I had a french professor who once said if you just did something like going to the supermarket and experienced it fully without the goggles of habit and catégories you would go crazy with pure sense and joy. I think about it all the time. In a way this is all for him.” When I discovered these words reposted on Pinterest, it felt like my innards physically compacted to make room for the philosophy contained in its lines. I think about the “goggles of habit” multiple times a week to this day. Whenever I’m struggling to will myself out of bed and out of the house, I think about how incredibly wild it is that I am able to do anything at all. See anything at all. Imagine seeing everything you see throughout your day for the first time. Imagine studying every piece of your surroundings, spending an entire 24 hours on one tree before moving on to the next. You could easily lose weeks to just one squirrel or raccoon who passes you on your way through somewhere to somewhere else. I’ve been trying to think more of everywhere as somewhere. The bus stop or the hallway outside of the lecture hall, the places where I wait are places, too. The houses and businesses I pass on the way to my destination aren’t backdrops. It’s obvious of course, I’ve just noticed that I need to remind myself of the obvious, too. How lucky I am to be anywhere at all.
The day that Food Basics felt anything but basic, felt huge, reminds me that objective reality is the biggest joke. My university campus that felt intimidatingly sprawling four years ago now feels like a smallish cluster of buildings that I can navigate with unconscious ease. The basement of my childhood house which once felt like a never-ending Barbie-and-Littlest-Pet-Shop-filled-jungle now feels like a modestly-sized storage room, barely long or tall enough to cartwheel across without hesitation.
Sometimes, when I'm anxious (which is more often than not, unfortunately), I feel huge. I feel like the problem, the obviously wrong thing in any space. Of course I get the feelings of "everyone is staring at me!" but more specifically, these thoughts manifest as: "I'm making too much noise," or "I'm in people's way." I feel like a mouse who grew a hundred sizes. It feels like it is in my nature to be quieter, to be smaller, but there is something physically disallowing this from being my reality. As hard as I try, every action feels too big. Too much. (Toopy).
Other times, my anxiety manifests as smallness. Small fish big pond problem but worse. In group settings, I can feel like something that is meant to be much larger than I present. No matter how many ideas I have, how many hypothetical contributions to the discussion, there is something physical which bars the words from leaving my mouth. It feels like I am giving a TEDTalk on a topic that is very near to myself and I can only choke out a few words, and even those aren't the words I mean. It feels like people are expecting more from me than I can possibly give. Like an adult cat the size of a kitten, stunted in a physical sense but with the mental scope of any of its peers. (Binoo). Unobserved. It's interesting that you can wish to be invisible one day and beg to be heard the next.
I'm sure there exists a balance between the small-feeling-big and big-feeling-small, somewhere. In some reality I feel exactly myself around others. Measured. The Toopy and Binoo of it all is illusory of course, but that doesn't make it less practically real, for me at least. Maybe one day I'll go to the supermarket and feel its expanse for what it is.
Abby