7. The Something
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
Listen to this post
Do You Speak Georgian? is a narrative podcast and serial memoir set in the Republic of Georgia. Join your host, Alicia Michelle, on a whirlwind adventure in the South Caucasus, where you’ll hear about the dark side of international travel – the side mainstream travel bloggers don’t share on Instagram.
Do You Speak Georgian? reflects the author’s recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been recreated from memory.
From the day I popped out the womb, I knew I was different. Like the color of my skin, I was born with it. Also like the color of my skin, it was inseparable from me.
I called my difference the Something, because I spent my youth not knowing what it was or if it even had a name. It made me fixate on strange things, like population figures and rotating ceiling fans. It made me hypersensitive, to the flicker of fluorescent lightbulbs and the rub of clothing against my skin. Visible and invisible at the same time, it made me feel alone, like I was an alien marooned on the wrong planet.
For those who couldn’t see it, the Something was merely a set of charming eccentricities. Endearing, with the way I took everything literally. Amusing, with the way I could imitate the cadence and intonation of every voice I encountered. Cherished, because I was honest, even when I shouldn’t have been.
For those who could see it, which was most people, the Something invoked revulsion. From the romantic interests whose faces twisted when I confessed my feelings, from the college rowing team who bullied me for being skinny, and from the countless peers who suddenly and inexplicably shut me out from budding friendships.
On rare occasions, however, I’d meet others who had their own version of the Something. Elementary school playmates with ADHD. Closeted queer youths at my middle school’s art club. An immigrant political science professor who asked his students to psychoanalyze Muammar Gaddafi’s clothing…
One notable alien encounter involved an impossibly cool friend I met during my undergraduate junior year, the kind of girl who wore Doc Martens and who hung posters of Grace Jones on her dorm room walls. Upon noticing her Something was the same as mine, she gently informed me that it had a name.
It was called the autism spectrum.
The same friend also emailed me a resource, a detailed list of autism symptoms in women. She explained that due to how women are socialized, the condition presents differently than it does in men.
“We hide it better,” she said. “And because autism predominantly affects men, neuro-atypical women fly under the diagnosis radar, often for their entire lives.”
Ever thirsty for new information, I devoured the symptom list. My friend didn’t know it, but I kept it saved in my browser’s “Favorites” tab. It became my virtual security blanket, comforting me whenever I felt sad, a permanent reminder of the first time I truly felt seen.
Unlike my friend, however, I never arranged a screening for an official autism spectrum diagnosis. Because by the time I met my friend, the shame from decades of interpersonal trauma was so pervasive that nothing, not even the power of visibility, could dispel it.
My Something had a name, but my shame lead me to denial. My friend told me there was nothing wrong with me, but the world told me she was a liar. My Something had a name, which meant I was broken. It was a curse, one that doomed me to a lifetime of loneliness and pain.
All I wanted to do was get rid of it. And if I couldn’t get rid of it, all I wanted to do was run away from it, to somewhere I hoped it wouldn’t find me…
August 29, 2014. 11:30 PM. Ataturk International Airport.
The midnight plane to Georgia boarded on time.
Upon hearing the gate agent’s call for first-class passengers, all passengers – Georgian men and women clad in tight jeans, leather jackets, and clouds of gourmand perfume – leapt up from their seats and clustered into a disorderly queue before the gate agent’s desk.
I was not among them.
Because I didn’t want to move any further. Because I couldn’t move any further. 10 minutes passed and the queue dwindled, but I stayed glued – frozen – to my thin, crumb-filled leather seat by the window.
Not even one day into my journey, the Something worked its black magic once again. A man, a stranger, had assaulted me. He had targeted me. Because of my Something. Because he saw it.
The memory kept repeating. My emotions kept spiraling. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Travel bloggers and magazines and journalists said this wasn’t supposed to happen! Yes, travel meant being vulnerable. And yes, vulnerability can lead to accidents and people who wish to exploit it, but accidents weren’t supposed to happen. Not like this. Not so soon.
My intuition sounded the alarm bells and I had no liquor to drown it with this time. My shaking limbs, glazed with cold sweat. My pounding, racing heart, even as jetlag’s disorienting tendrils snaked around my consciousness. I fixated on the middle distance, past the glass barrier between sleeping Istanbul and me, beyond the idle Boeing 727 I was supposed to be boarding.
Darkness.
The abyss.
The edge of the map where monsters lay.
“Miss?” the gate agent called. “Miss! Last call for boarding!”
I was going to Georgia, but I didn’t want to go anymore.
I didn’t want to go, but what choice did I have?
I didn’t know what awaited me beyond the edge of the map, but I was well-versed in what awaited me had I chosen to end my journey prematurely. And since the pain of knowing was greater than the pain of the unknown, I heeded the gate agent’s call.
I paused once more after entering the jet. And I glanced behind me one last time, to take in the empty gate bridge, the known world’s death rattle before the flight attendants closed the cabin door.
Once again, I didn’t get to sit by the window.
The wheels went up and my eyelids went down. Higher and higher we climbed. Deeper and deeper into the unknown as we sped into single-digit hours. I had no dreams as the midnight plane passed over strange mountains and strange seas and strange cities. Ankara. Ordu. Trabzon. Batumi.
I told myself my Something wasn’t all bad. Sometimes it opened doors to great things. It gave me the gift of synesthesia, where every sound felt like physical textures and sensations. As an adolescent, it helped me breeze through a piano repertoire of Chopin and Beethoven. As a graduate student, it helped me befriend other cultures, with Ukrainians and Libyans and Salvadorans, aliens of another color who had nothing in common with me.
If my Something worked its black magic in Istanbul, then my Something worked its white magic on the midnight plane to Georgia. Somewhere between Batumi and Tbilisi, the flight attendants made their rounds, to check for fastened seatbelts as the pilot provided landing announcements.
Our projected arrival time? 3:33 AM. The weather? Clear, with moderate winds from the north. The temperature? 65 degrees Fahrenheit.
I used the last of my willpower to pull myself back from what felt like the dead, to be alert for just a few hours more before I could unite with a horizontal surface. The jet engines changed their tune and my seatmate raised the window blind.
Outside, the crescent moon had thankfully returned, racing along with the wing as the finish line, Tbilisi, crept closer.
Inside, someone began to sing.
Two men, a bass and an alto, set the song’s backdrop as they filled the cabin with a slow, deep drone. Another two men, a tenor and a soprano, set the foreground, a lyrical conversation made of independent, rhythmically contrasting vocals.
The combination of forewarned winds and residual heat from the dry rolling foothills below jostled and rocked the fuselage. The fasten seatbelt sign chimed as the flight attendants rushed to secure themselves. Trays rattled and stomachs did too, but the singers unaverred.
I couldn’t understand the words. Nor did I know the title of the song. I did, however, understand that I was hearing something very special.
Georgian polyphonic singing.
Even as she passed through the hands of Armenian, Persian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, rich folk traditions developed and flourished in Georgia. Thanks to geographic isolation granted by the Caucasus mountains, Georgia developed her own unique oral traditions in the form of polyphonic singing. So unique, that the song “Chakrulo” was literally launched into space from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft in 1977. And so diverse, that UNESCO recognized Georgian vocal polyphony as an intangible cultural heritage in 2001.
Georgian polyphony operates by its own set of musical rules; uninitiated Western ears might find that it sounds odd. Unpleasant, even. With time, this initial discomfort will fade. And when it does…
Thanks to Soviet-era repressions and post-Soviet rural exodus, many traditional Georgian songs are forever lost. Despite these setbacks, Georgian musicologists, historians, and the wonders of soft power, worked to resuscitate and preserve Georgian polyphony in the 21st century. A plethora of opportunities to hear this rich vocal tradition are available for visitors in the form of arranged concerts, and the luckiest visitors among them may even get to hear polyphony in the wild if they happen to be in the right place at the right time…
Georgian polyphonic singing invokes all kinds of feelings, and as the passengers rested their weary ears against the impromptu chamber concert, my skin wracked with shivers, with Grace, once again. I felt them, someone’s invisible hands stretching across the cosmos to caress me, to cradle me, to comfort me.
It was then that I understood. I wasn’t just going to Georgia. I had to go to Georgia. It was written in someone’s master plan, a valley of hope between the abyss that was my past and future, a fixed point in my own personal narrative.
I also understood that if I wanted to move through the world, in the body and mind that same mysterious someone had granted me, I had to accept that sometimes bad things happen. Bad things were what built character and made one stronger, after all.
“Think,” the invisible hands’ owner asked. “In light of the 20-odd volunteers who had also been accepted by TLG, what kinds of people sought out a place like Georgia?”
Other people, arriving from across the globe, carrying their own baggage, their own vulnerabilities, their own dreams.
Other people, with their own version of the Something.
Other people.
Like me.
Podcast Show Notes
Intro/Outro Music - Vchera by AL-90 - some rights reserved
Gate crisis music - Melancholia Staroy Pornozvezdy (with Spurv) by AL-90 - some rights reserved
Air cabin ambiance - "Airplane, Seat Belt Beep" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org
Georgian polyphony - Chakrulo by Georgian State Folk Song and Dance Ensemble - creative commons