Let’s talk about doors and shame

Discomfort is a fundamental part of travel.  You’re going to be in situations where you’re the only one that doesn’t understand how things work or how to behave.  As a person who vacillates wildly between gregarious and self-conscious, this is a good exercise for me, as I’m forced to suck it up, engage my better self, and deal with people from a position of vulnerability.

Sometimes, this can backfire, and I can end up truly shamed.  For example, the most embarrassing moment of my life came after a series of reasonable but ill-informed decisions in the Cook Islands, as I found myself poorly performing what turned out to be a highly sexual dance with a ten-year-old in a circle of uncomfortably murmuring natives.

This post today isn’t about anything that bad.  But I would like to unburden myself of my most consistent and recurrent source of anxiety in this whole international travel experience: there’s something wrong with the doors in this country, I don’t know how to walk out of them, and asking strangers for help on something so stupid is really, really embarrassing.

At this point, I imagine that you have some questions.  I’ll try and anticipate many of them in the below Q&A.

Q: What?

A: I don’t know how to walk out of doors.

Q: You mean, like, the social protocol of leaving?

A: No. I mean I don’t know how to physically open doors so I can leave.

Q: Don’t they just open?

A: No.

Q: Are you sure?

A: No.

Q: Do other people seem to be having this problem?

A: No.

Q: You keep talking about walking out of doors.  Do you have the same problems walking into buildings?

A: Not really.

Q: Why don’t you just walk out the door you came in?

A: That’s what I’m trying to do.

Q:

A:

Q: I’m out of questions, but I still don’t understand.

Fair enough.  Look, below is a door that I recently had to ask for help using at the gym.

Now, despite the fact that I walked in through this door about 45 minutes earlier, this door does not open.  Surely, you’ve noticed it’s surrounded by buttons, and you think I’m an idiot for not finding the relevant button.  But!  Every one of these buttons is emblazoned with an “emergency exit only” sticker.  One of them is the secret not-really-an-emergency emergency button, which all Norwegians know to press (the gym worker with kind but concerned eyes told me, slowly, that it was the beige one on the lower left).

Below is a bank of doors at the building where I work.

The door on the right opens on a motion sensor, and is my friend and comfort.  If the power went out, and the motion sensor stopped working, I would be locked in this building.

Encountering doors shouldn’t be a source of stress, and the inability to leave a building seems self-evidently unsafe.  I’m 33 years old, I’ve spent my entire life in institutions of learning, and this shouldn’t be hard!  Yet, here we are, staring at the inside of a closed door, mentally gathering our will for another humiliating round of questions.

Norway!  Just let the doors open!