I long to learn things about myself that only travel can teach

Making my way through the streets of Istanbul pre-COVID, I was shocked to hear my cousin hissing at me to stop acting like “such an Australian”. I couldn’t understand it; not only does my face betray my Turkish heritage, but I wasn’t carrying on in any kind of embarrassing manner.

“What are you talking about?” I hissed back. “I’m just walking next to you.” This apparently was the problem. “Yes, but you walk like a Westerner – like you’re always strutting on some runway invisible to everyone else,” he said.

Not only did I stand out from the local women who were more “gentle” in their gait (according to my cousin), it meant we were being ripped off everywhere we went. “Just try looking less… spirited and follow that feeling through with the movement of your arms and legs, that’s all.”

As a writer, there’s very little I haven’t mused about, but it appears the relationship between the way we move and how we’re perceived is a topic I’ve overlooked as I’ve aged. Yet, when I was a child growing up in a rough housing commission complex in Sydney’s western suburbs, it was actually something I put a lot of thought and effort into, ensuring I always looked like I was either on my way to glass someone who “had it coming” or had just come back from that very bloody task.

American serial killer Ted Bundy reportedly said he could always “tell a victim from the way she walked down the street” and I never forgot his words; preferring to aggressively stomp like a rage-filled sumo wrestler rather than float with the grace of a ballerina lest I end up becoming someone’s victim. Where I came from, looking as though you were constantly reaching for butterflies was a very bad thing. This much I knew from instinct – and an age-inappropriate documentary on killers of the 20th century.

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The musings of Bundy are enough to disturb anyone, but am I overstating things? Consider the 2006 Japanese study which looked at the link between gaits of female students and perceived personality types and discovered men were more likely to make uninvited advances or inappropriately touch women who were depicted in point-light displays which respondents (and would-be attackers) said made them appear more introverted and emotionally unstable. Or what about the study published in Social Psychological and Personality Science which found walking at a brisk pace is linked to higher levels of extraversion, conscientiousness and openness and lower levels of neuroticism?

Today, I’m much, much older and a little more refined than the scrappy kid I used to be, but I still have an angry-looking “don’t touch me” walk that years of walking with books on my head in the beginning of my media career couldn’t divorce me from. Sure, I did the whole “heels in the office thing” throughout my 20s and early 30s, but somewhere around 35 I entered a Converse store in the States and caved. I was so fed up with feeling powerless in heels, a form of footwear I felt made me look and feel vulnerable, that I bought a pair in practically every colour and style and went straight back to stomping, or walking as my cousin called it, “Like you own the place and you’re not happy about the uninvited trespassing”.

For a long time I believed the way I walked was the product of my “eat or be eaten” childhood, but standing there in Istanbul’s old city, I realised for the first time that there was so much more at play. We may not realise it, but the way we hold our heads, move our arms, stick out our chests and place our feet reveals far more about our background than you might have liked to reveal.