I was reading a book on the bench seat of a train when a lady sat next to me and began talking loudly over the phone about her aunty who had a rectal prolapse. I kept reading at first, believing that if I focus hard enough her talking would fade into the background like white noise. I couldn’t concentrate, though, because white noise doesn’t blurt out word pictures of a swollen rectum at 150 decibels.

“Oh my gawd, the poor thing. She couldn’t even sit down on a chair,” she went on.

I would’ve been more sympathetic had the woman spoke with a more sombre tone. But she clearly wasn’t gloomy or upset — quite the opposite.

She spoke as I did during a train ride home after the first day of middle school where I’d learnt about Pythagoras Theorem. I attended an all-boys school that hadn’t changed the uniform since the 1920s. So I was wearing a collared shirt, tie, black leather shoes, as well as shorts to the knees and socks pulled up to the knees. The combination of dress and knowing a fancy Greek term caused me to feel as if I was part of an elite group of academics. On the train home, I wanted others to know about my new status, so I kept pulling up my socks and weaving the topic of Maths into casual conversation. Not very successfully, I might add.

“What did I do today? Not much,” I said to my friend. “Had football training this morning. Ate a curried egg sandwich for lunch. Oh, and I studied PYTHAGORAS THEOREM.” I made sure to emphasise it. Then I’d look around with a sly grin that said: Don’t act like your not impressed.

I know Euclidean geometry is very different from a prolapsed rectum. And I really have no idea why she was motived to speak so loudly. Maybe she thought the crowded carriage could learn from her pointers on anal health.

But what she and my 12-year-old self had in common was a lack of awareness which inevitably led to public humiliation.

“Yes, mum, I gave her the cream. But she needs proper help. Like professional help. I mean, it looks like half an intestine is hanging out.”

I redirected my focus from trying to read to trying not to throw up. I found myself judging the lady—quite harshly actually—under the assumption that she was continuing to ramble in spite of being well-aware of how unwelcome it was. But the longer I reflected, the more I could see she was completely unaware, even though she’d attracted malign stares from almost every member of the carriage.

Awareness, as a concept, is difficult to grapple, the state of being conscious of something. The late David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech to a graduating class told the following story about it:

“There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

I imagine the lady on the train may have had a similar reaction if I said, ‘Shut up. We don’t want to hear about your aunties anus.”

“What?” she’d say, shocked and blushing. “You can hear that?”

I’m speculating, of course, which is why this isn’t really about arguing whether the lady had self-awareness or not. I mean, I could create a strong argument but, in the end, I’m the one in a huff writing about her. While she is carrying on with her life, possibly on another carriage talking over-enthusiastically about her father’s colonoscopy. So who’s losing, really?

The most unsettling thing about adulthood, I’ve found, is discovering how the same experience can mean two very different things to two people, given the different belief templates, and that there is no objective yardstick to measure what interpretation of the experience is right. Who said talking graphically about certain ailments on the train was a terrible thing to do? Was my critique of her justified? I have no such yardstick which is probably why I—and perhaps you, too—cultivate my version of a measuring tool in the form of past beliefs and opinions so I can feel I’m in the right.

I was told to be considerate and self-aware in public which means the lady is doing the wrong thing which means I’m annoyed at her which means I’m going to harbour this secret resentment and then finally write a story about her.

I believe I’m relatively self-aware, compared to people who talk about haemorrhoids on a train at least. And as an aware person, I feel justified in critiquing another’s lack of awareness. But that certainty, I’m beginning to believe, is merely another blindness. And maybe I should learn how to put down the measuring tools to rest. You never know, after all, when knowing what brand of cream to use on a rectal prolapse and the intricate steps of how to apply it may come in handy.

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