Echoes of Belonging and Identity on Stolen Land

I was kicking goals in my career, learning the ropes of running a high-acuity ward and simultaneously completing postgraduate studies. I was becoming a good nurse and felt rewarded going to work. I must admit a part of me enjoyed feeling important. I was thrilled how most ICU Liaison nurses knew me by name and often came up to chat to me about life. The ICU Liaison nurses warmed up to nurses they saw good qualities in, and I felt elated to have received their trust. I was pleasantly surprised whenever they taught me new skills or got me to do something I’ve never done before. I will always remember the first tracheostomy decannulation I ever did. It was a surreal experience to have a more experienced nurse believe that I was able to do it safely. I was beaming with energy for my career and taking any opportunities to upskill and improve my nursing. I didn’t know this then, but the effect of being a COVID-19 nurse in Naarm will lead me to a terrible burnout. Yet, at that point, I stood tall with confidence and knowledge when I stepped foot in the hospital. I felt good going to work every day, yet I didn’t feel so good seeing my boyfriend. 

I led a busy lifestyle, often always had things pencilled in my calendar, and went away camping almost every set of days off I had. Despite this, when I clocked off work, I was consumed with incessant thoughts of doubts about my relationship with my white boyfriend. The thoughts weren’t about him being white, although I do now think that a lot of his behaviour may be because he was a white man dating a brown woman. It felt like entering uncharted territory when I engaged with my boyfriend. It was like winning the lottery when I managed (or begged) to find time to spend with him. He seemed to always be busy and only able to see me once or twice a week for dinner. There was a lot of contention between the time I craved and how much time he had. I was always made to feel that I was asking for too much and that I was needy. I had been dating my white boyfriend for close to a year now, and the push and pull dynamic created a sort of addiction within me. I got highs from seeing him, and just as quickly withdrawing from him after every encounter. I would only want more of him when he said he didn’t have time for me. A year of frustration, disappointment and stress on my nervous system will eventually lead me to break up with him. He consumed nearly most of my thoughts, I found it hard to focus on university, and I was irritable and restless whenever we parted. I was addicted to my white boyfriend.

He managed to find time in his busy schedule one evening during the week to see me. Gone were the days where he spent Friday nights or weekends with me, I had been silently demoted to weekday nights. There weren’t elaborate romantic dinner plans as he picked a cheap restaurant in Brunswick. I quickly made my way home from work to freshen up and drove up to the restaurant. I got there first and it was then that I realised it was closed. I sensed annoyance bubbling within my chest, that he was running late, chose a cheap restaurant, and it was closed. Doesn’t he get that I too lead a busy and important life. I felt frustrated because somewhere along the track of the relationship he stopped respecting my time, perhaps it was the same place where I unconsciously handed him my self-worth. My white boyfriend treated me like no one ever did within my social circle, and I let him. I moved aside my disappointment to the corner where there was now a giant pile of disappointment caused by my white boyfriend. We decided on an alternative (still cheap) restaurant in Carlton. 

The alternative was at least open, but it was depressing. It was nearly empty for starters, with no music, and had ghastly lighting. It was one of those depressing restaurants where customers looked up intently when you entered. Immediately, I wanted to leave. Instead, we walked in and got a table for two. I attempted to create dialogue with my boyfriend as I looked through the menu. He wasn’t hungry so he didn’t order food. I thought it was odd that we hadn’t seen each other in over a week, he had suggested dinner, and now he wasn’t going to eat. Once again, I could feel bubbles of disappointment climbing up my chest, threatening to suffocate me. I moved them to the pile of disappointment. The rush of happiness at seeing him quickly dissipated as I read his energy and sensed he was only half-heartedly with me. 

I continued to mull over why he wasn’t eating, as I was hoping tonight would rekindle our connection and allow all my doubts to dissipate into thin air. Talking to him felt like talking to a brick wall. He was boring, disengaged, and monotonous. He replied in clipped and short sentences. I was able to speak in more elaborate ways in English than him despite learning English at eight-years-old. My after-school English tutor would have been very proud of me. I had been living in this cognitive dissonance for a year, so at the cheap restaurant in Carlton, I began to convince myself that it must be me who was shit company. It must be me that wasn’t good at conversing. I forgot then of the videos in my girlfriends’ group chat of me walking away from my main group to talk to strangers for the rest of night. Arabs are very easy to talk to, we love to talk, but I forgot that. My white boyfriend made me forget who I was before him. 

So, I ate my noodles awkwardly as he watched me. He didn’t ask me questions about myself or the week I have had. We looked like those couples who had been dating for so long and didn’t want to be together but are still together and when they are in public don’t speak to each other while they ate at a cheap restaurant in Carlton. How did I let this happen to me? Despite this, I attempted to fill the silence as best as I could through each bite of noodles. I noticed I was rambling, but I couldn’t stop myself. I was jittery with unsettled nerves as I thought how peculiar this encounter was. I was so confused because I never have awkward cold encounters with anyone. Yet here I was having a less than average time with my boyfriend. My whole body hated being there in the cheap restaurant in Carlton, I couldn’t stomach finishing my meal. That was happening quite a lot, being so ill about my relationship that I didn’t want to finish my meals. I will break up with him and find my love for eating again. I wanted to finish this interaction quickly so I could call my best friend and cry to her. 

We asked for the bill shortly. We had spent a total of thirty minutes together. I hadn’t seen him in over a week and I was lucky enough for thirty minutes of his time. He was busy, he was telling me. How could someone be so busy that one night a week to spend with their girlfriend was near impossible. I felt like I was boring, so I blamed it all on myself. I had been focusing too much on my career, and I was not the fun brown woman he had met. It was a classic it was me, not him. He chose to walk me to my car, he didn’t say it, but I knew that he wasn’t going back to my place with me even though he had been semi-living at mine for some months now. It was weird that he wasn’t coming home with me, but I was relieved. We said our goodbyes, but I was so dazed with feeling shitty that I didn’t remember much of it. I got in my car and started driving, and before I got through to my best friend’s phone, I was wailing. The heaviness and tears I had been holding back poured out. I was crying so heavily that I was no longer able to see the road, so I pulled over. My best friend answered the phone, she didn’t understand me through my wailing, so she had to calm me down for several minutes before I was able to recall the events at dinner. She had been getting a lot of calls like this lately whenever I spent time with my white boyfriend. She told me that this guy wasn’t a good guy, that this wasn’t normal, and I needed to break up with him. I heard the worry laced in her voice. 

He sent a half-hearted apology text. Throughout our relationship, he was good at apologising, but very bad at being just good. Good to me. He was a guy with words (albeit little) and little action. I didn’t break up with him then, or the next time, I let him treat me like shit for a few more times before I eventually ended things with him. He had stolen my self-worth and crushed it to a thousand pieces and spread it in the ocean, so it took me a while to locate all the pieces and find myself again. I did though. He did the classic guy thing where he treated me so poorly, cornering me into doing the breakup for him. It involved a lot of mistreatment and distancing from his part. It was a deeply sad and lonely thing to go through. Those months where I barely saw my boyfriend were incredible months for this brown woman to blossom and flourish back to the self she was before she had met him. Life glistened brighter, I was going out with friends and feeling a little less miserable. I am a firm believer that when you lose something, God and the universe replace it with something else almost immediately. And this was true with losing my white boyfriend, my world expanded, and I felt warm and confident again. I started feeling beautiful and sexy again. I noticed how wanted I was by being around people who appreciated me. I also spent time around healing powerful feminine energy that built me back up. I became more than the needy anxious asking for too much girlfriend. 

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I got a call from a female dog called it’s not worth it. She phoned me the minute I broke up with my white boyfriend. She told me she knew that I had eaten her puppies. I told her I’m confused; I don’t quite understand her. She repeated that I had been eating puppies desperate for attention. I didn’t believe her, so she sent me CCTV footage from the cheap restaurant in Carlton. I watched the video a few times, I didn’t notice the puppies immediately, I noticed the desperation in my eyes to keep the attention of a white man. I noticed with disdain how warm and inviting my body language was towards him, and how stiff and cold he appeared. I watched the video again and noticed the screaming puppies on my plate. They were shouting it’s not worth it, he’s not worth it. Do not harm yourself by eating puppies to please a white man. You won’t get his attention. There were five of them screaming loudly. All the customers at the restaurant were looking our way, watching me eat puppies for attention. The trick seemed to work on them, but not on my white boyfriend. 

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The break up will teach me a lot of things about what it means to be a brown woman searching for love on colonised Australia. Where did it all start? Did it start with my teenage crush on Chad Michael Murray, or white women being chosen by the (white) man in Hollywood movies, or BIPOC women never being a love interest on TV? Is it from all the ‘where are you from’ questions that made me want to fit in, be less of an Arab brown woman, and more of a white woman, so that a white man will choose me? Is it from the way I look, no one able to pinpoint my ethnicity, and thus my desperation to belong to someone in this land, even if it was a white man who didn’t treat me very nicely.

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Stay tuned for the analysis of this encounter in the next post . . .