Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 27

Strength

What does it mean to be strong in the face of your own weaknesses? I thought this whilst on the phone to a friend, called once again in the midst of crisis. I oscillated between reading my own thought in two different ways. On the one hand, there is no other strength we can self-possess. […]

Wounds

I keep finding dead baby birds. Last week there was an egg cracked on the paving slabs in the yard — two porcelain halves bracketing the smallest puddle of yellow yoke. Yesterday, on my way to the shops, I found another. This one was quite large, spherical, with little stumps for wings, their shape barely […]

Coming Home to Self

I crashed at a friend’s house and, at first, struggled to sleep. Staying up late talking about life’s difficulties, I nonetheless found myself waking up at intervals. At 4am, I came to in a cold sweat. I could immediately smell myself. I felt calm on waking, but could taste the cortisol in the air, flushed […]

Transitions

A comment on my recent post, “The Maternal Return”: I’m a trans woman. Some of the things you’ve been saying in the last few blog posts really sound like things a trans woman would say, shortly before admitting she’s trans. Things I would have said. In particular, I absolutely would have said that I feel […]

Burn the Diaries

Trigger warning: mental health, self-harm, suicide. The murkiness and ambiguities of a life take on weight and authority by virtue of the published document”, suggests Moyra Davey at the start of Burn The Diaries. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Every morning I am waking up with the […]

Nomads of the Deep: Notes on Palestine and the Orphan-Unconscious

The words sailors use were probably arrived at quite naturally; but what a strange language they spoke when they were lost. They weren’t yet poets — landsmen moving over and resting on peaceful earth, with plenty of time to imagine the wide expanses of ocean and its abysses and whirlpools. They were just simple mariners […]

Masculinity, Patriarchy and the New Tenderness

“There is no alliance programmed once and for all”, writes Félix Guattari in his “Instructions for a New Psychoanalysis”. Nothing is felt more acutely by the adoptee. But this is precisely a source of discomfort; a difficult thing to affirm. The lack of a secure base makes the establishment (and natural disestablishment) of bonds a […]

The Problem of Love Unregulated

In the first of his introductory lectures on attachment theory, published under the title The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds, John Bowlby attempts to pay his debt to Freud. Though much of his work emerges from that which Freud’s lacks, particularly with regards to a child’s psychological development, he notes nonetheless how Freud identified […]

The Maternal Return

Some 36 hours after my initial call to the crisis team, two nurses showed up at my door. They had attempted to come round during the night shift, first scheduling a visit at 1am, then waking me up after I fell asleep to say it would be 2am. I said, don’t bother, I can wait […]

What Crisis?

Trigger warning: discussion of mental health and suicide. This morning I had a crisis team call back 16 hours after a further onset of intrusive suicidal thoughts. They are, of course, deeply irrational and staving them off is an exhausting process. In the meantime, I hid away at friends’ houses until I was too tired […]