Nimue Brown's Blog, page 358

The power of the past – a dog story

Guest blog by Issy Brooke

���Imagine a woman in her late thirties,��� said Martin, ���who has never mixed with human beings ever in her whole life. Now imagine she���s walking down the street and she sees another human but they shout at her. The next one she sees ignores her. Another one shouts. One tries to hit her. Imagine how her life is������

It���s a horrible thought experiment.

���And that���s how it is for Stella,��� he said.

Stella is our dog. We adopted her from an animal shelter last November. We don���t know her past. We don���t know her previous owner. We don���t even know how old she is ��� maybe somewhere between four and six.

We do know ��� now ��� that she���s very, very damaged.

We were na��ve. I���ll hold my hand up, right now, and say that if I knew then what I know now, I would not have taken this infuriating, problematic, neurotic dog on. She���s changed our lives.

But honestly? She���s taught us so much that I couldn���t bear to give her up now.

The shelter simply said: ���she���s fine with people but not so good with other dogs. She can be socialised. Bring her back for some training.���

So I did. The trainer at the shelter was optimistic. ���She���ll soon learn.��� When she saw another dog, she would pull hard, barking and snarling to get to them.

The trainer dragged her back. ���Get a half-choke collar,��� he instructed, ���and snap the lead to correct her. If she���s really going for it, get some lemon juice and squeeze it into her mouth. She won���t like the taste, but it will do her no harm.���

Not like electric collars, not like prong collars ��� lemon juice will do no harm. Or so he said.

I knew I didn���t want to use physical force on the dog. I think most people agree that���s not productive. Did lemon juice count as physical force?

I soon learned that it did.

I was walking her in a deserted car park, practising our heelwork. Heel. Back. Round. Wait. Sit. Stay. Good girl. Then a man walked past with a terrier, and she hurled herself towards him. I was mortified. Once more, I had become ���that��� dog owner. You know the one ��� you���ve seen me, or those like me, struggling to hold a dog back as it foams at the mouth and tries to attack another dog. Stella is half Labrador and half Rottweiler. She looks intimidating.

I tried the lemon juice.

She hit the deck, throwing herself to the floor, cowering away from me, terrified.

Terrified of me.

���Stella, Stella, it���s okay, come here girl, come on.���

She wouldn���t.

Of course she wouldn���t.

I didn���t go back to that trainer, and the lemon juice got used up on pancakes. Instead, I turned to the internet, and soon discovered that there are a hundred different ���methods��� of dog training, and each has its vocal and passionate adherents. And my goodness, but they cannot agree on what is ���right.���

I threw the half-choke collar out, and bought a headcollar. I looked at all the training advice, and one stood out: a website called ���CARE for reactive dogs.���

By now I knew that Stella���s reaction could be caused by fear. We can���t always judge on what we see. You might see a dog barking and snarling ��� yet it might not mean anger. In many dogs, their instinct when faced with something scary, is to make that scary thing go away.

Therefore, the website argued, the trigger ��� such as the sight of another dog ��� needs to be paired with something delightful, and for most dogs, this means food. Specifically, amazing treats that they don���t usually get.

The progress, they warn, will be slow. You have to work at the dog���s pace, and that might be infinitesimally slow. Your dog might explode when it sees another dog four hundred metres away. You can close that distance metre by metre over the weeks. A friend sent me a message to reassure me ��� and to tell me that her dog had taken nearly a year to become settled.

I found another trainer, Martin, who worked with rescue dogs. His patience and his hope lent me strength, as day after day I���d come home from a walk in tears, both my stress level and Stella���s up through the roof. He believed in me, and more importantly, he believed in Stella.

She can���t tell me why she reacts to other dogs. We can guess but we���ll never know for sure. Working with Martin has led us to the uncomfortable discovery that, in her case, she���s not reacting as much out of fear-aggression as other forms, more intractable forms: interest-specific aggression, for example. She doesn���t want to make the other dog go away. She wants to kill it. She may have been bred for fighting; she may have been abused in other ways.

As we will never know, all we can do is work on today. He���s referred us to a behaviourist. Now we have to find ��1000, and we will, somehow, because none of this is Stella���s fault.

Triggering. It���s a powerful thing. Stella doesn���t enjoy lunging at other dogs. She doesn���t do it for fun. Her adrenaline spikes, she stares, she shakes, she pants; we have learned how to help her to calm down. I mimic dog body language. I sit on the floor and I yawn: I send her ���calming signals��� and I might look stupid, but it works. We know this will take months to cure, maybe longer, and it will never fully be gone. And for the moment, my husband takes her on the evening walk, and endures the stares of the general public, who mutter about dangerous dogs and wonder why she is muzzled. I take her for hours in the morning on the moors, miles from anyone, and she is finally able to be the dog that she ought to be.

And I think about people. Us. Our emotions. Those visceral reactions to things half-seen and barely remembered. How a smell or a sound can take us to the brink of chaos and we don���t know why. And our reaction might not look like fear, but it often is.

And I think about how other may judge us for it. ���She���s neurotic,��� they might say, and ���he���s attention seeking, so just ignore him.��� They think that all we need is a half-choke collar and a good squirt of lemon juice.

So we���d hit the deck, and cower down, and they���d think that their methods had worked.

***

Stella was the inspiration for the dog Kali in my cozy mystery stories, Some Very English Murders. I know I���m writing from a wish-fulfilment angle. If only Stella has made the progress in real life that Kali has made in fiction! They are light, traditional cozies with an idealised and fluffy tone.

Book One, Small Town Shock (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VGQXDWE), is 99c/99p or free to those with Kindle Unlimited. Book Two, Small Town Secrets (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W5RIJTK), is also available. You can check out my website, and see more pictures of Stella, here: http://issybrooke.com

 

 

A history of Fast Food

If you found the magical centre of the world, what would you do?

Fast Food at the Centre of the World first existed as a small number of instalments written and drawn by Tom Brown. It was part of the work he was doing, alongside New England Gothic back when we first ran into each other online. The second title I took on writing and that became our joint creation, Hopeless Maine. Fast Food languished in the background because there���s only so many pages of comic a person can draw in a week. (7, if you were wondering, but fewer than 7 if you also want to have a life and stay passably sane.)

The second time I flew to America, I took a big notepad with me. I spent the long hours of flight, and the dull hours at airports, scribbling frantically into it, much to the amusement/bemusement of the people sat next to me on the plane. I wrote sat on Tom���s porch, with him drawing, and we decided this was a way we could be and that we liked it. Most of my work now happens with me typing at one end of a table and him drawing at the other, and this is good, and suits us both well. In Portland, I read Tom what I had so far ��� because these were his characters in his setting. I had previously been very wary of sharing work in progress, but since then, Tom has listened to everything as I���ve been developing it. I find his insight and feedback invaluable.

Life threw us a lot of challenges, and the novel took a back seat. I eventually finished the first handwritten draft, and then, when I could get enough electricity to run a notepad computer, I typed it up on the narrowboat, and then it languished again. Last year I got it out and polished it up.

Since rejoining the land of electric, I���ve done a number of short audio stories over at www.nerdbong.com and decided to offer them Fast Food at the Centre of the World as an audio serialisation. I recorded it myself, at home, with limited technical gear such that I could do very little editing. Most of it went down in one take, and I did not find that easy. It wasn���t written for audio so there were a lot of voices to find, and as I can���t pull of the New Jersey accent that was in my head when I wrote some of the characters, alternative solutions had to be found for my jazz gangstas. I had to work out what Gary sounded like. That���s Gary, in the picture. He���s voiced entirely on the inbreath, which was tough on the throat, but gives him a distinct sound. I���ve never done any serious acting ��� only mumming, which is largely about shouting your lines, not nuance. Apparently I have scope for using my voice.

The first two episodes are now up, and more will be along, and hopefully they will amuse you…��http://nerdbong.com/category/podcast/...

Music by Cormac Brown – Tom’s awesome son, who has been with Fast Food since the beginning.

On a dark journey

I broke about three weeks ago (this time) long before my public facade broke online. It happens, and it happens superficially because of burnout, exhaustion, being over stretched and needing only a small and careless poke from someone to drop me off an edge and into dysfunction. I have never managed to break this cycle before, for the simple reason that I am actually using my utility and acceptability to other people to ward off things that are a lot more dangerous to deal with. If I can be useful, and accepted, I don���t have to deal with what lies beneath that thin layer of near-viability. I can���t be flat out useful all the time, my body cannot sustain it, and I make mistakes, and so every now and then the thin surface cracks and I get a run-in with what lies beneath.

In the days that follow breaking, normally I do all the right things around resting and moving gently and I patch myself up, tidy away all the many parts of me that do not work, and get back into my well worn rut. It has always seemed like the less scary option and up until the last few weeks it has been my belief that I could not do anything positive with the 90% or so of me that exists beneath the surface. It���s been a survival issue, because what I carry, if it gets out, has left me fighting suicidal inclinations on more occasions than I can count.

We are all shaped and informed by our environments. For the last four and a half years, I have been living with someone who accepts me. This is the first time in my life that a sense of acceptance has dominated my living arrangements. For much of my life, I���ve not had that at all. Apparently I���ve had enough time to trust that feeling of being held and supported, and it���s allowed me to make a choice over the last week or so.

I am not patching up and going back to normal. I am instead sitting with the depression and letting it run, and letting myself look at all the things underpinning it. I���m finding I can think things that literally were not ever, at any previous point in my life available to me as thoughts. These are not easy thoughts to explore, and the implications on a personal level are vast. It is going to be a long, challenging walk through a dark place.

Mostly I���m not going to be talking about it while making the journey, because I need to focus on doing it for me, and not yet processing it into something anyone else might use. Hopefully later, when the path is walked, I���ll be able to say things about it.

I need an entirely different reality and a new story, and I have to create something that has not been in my life before, think things that were previously unthinkable, and let go of understandings that have defined my sense of self for my whole life. This is probably going to be slow and messy, but I am working out how to ask for help and support where it makes sense to do that, and for the first time in my life it is feasible to walk into the heart of my own darkness and not have it kill me.

Sexual Initiation

I���m hearing rumours of a man who takes young women out into the woods having convinced them that sexual initiation is a good way to go. Of course it isn���t, because like any shortcut to magical insight, spiritual understanding and personal growth, it doesn���t work. Short cuts don���t work, and anyone offering them is mostly interested in something else ��� sex and money being high on the list.

That said, sex has huge potential to be magical and transformative, intensely spiritual and sacred. It���s important to talk about when to say ���yes��� to such an experience not least because this also makes the ���no��� situations easier to recognise.

The reason that people use sex for magic, is the energy involved, and the openness. That energy depends on lust. You���re looking for something hot, intense and with enough trust to allow you to be open so that the second source of magical energy ��� pleasure- is also available to you. Without desire, a sexual encounter can feel sordid and mechanistic, and that will not deliver you any kind of transformative experience that you want to have. It will instead rob you of joy and dignity. Passion can have all kinds of interesting effects, but anyone who claims their genitals have special magic powers should be treated sceptically.

In a one off sexual encounter with someone you barely know and do not desire, you are not going to achieve the trust, intensity and depth of connection necessary for anything that could be of value to you, to happen. There is no Pagan path that requires you to have lacklustre sex with a stranger to get started. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply looking to get laid and no matter what mystic nonsense they claim, there is nothing of value in the mix for someone new to their path and seeking an awakening.

Sex magic and sexual initiation in the context of an established relationship can be powerful, magical acts. Love is a form of magic in its own right, with incredible power to open, inspire and transform, regardless of whether you end up shagging the object of your affections. If you want to say yes to sexual initiation, sex magic, physical intimacy for ritual purpose or anything of that shape with someone you know and love, that���s no one���s business but your own and the odds are good things will come of it. The only reason to say yes to sexual initiation from a stranger is because, having seen them in person, you fancy the pants off them such that rolling about in the woods seems very attractive indeed, with any other aspects of that experience coming a happy second.

No lust, no magic.

Faeries and Goblins

By Halo Quin

Everything I do comes back to Faeries. I can’t help it. They’ve been my obsession since childhood, possibly longer. So when I started my own business I tried to do things with Faeries. I say tried. I was quite successful in terms of writing about them, but when it came to my art… brick wall.

I turned my hand to modelling. Nice, flesh coloured polymer-clay. Some sweet music. Cute little pixies on the brain… What did I get? A very particular type of Fae, and not the cutesy kind. Not the pretty-sparkles-with-bells-on that seems to appeal to the market I was used to.

Goblins.

I’d spent years getting annoyed at the flufficisation of the Fae and here I was, trying to do it myself. So they put me right. But what on earth was I to do with a tribe of Goblin heads? Put them in a box for a while, unfortunately. I wasn’t ready for them.

I kept working with the sweetling Fae of the green world. They kept teaching me and encouraging me to write. The Fae guided me through some basic logic;

“We are the spirits of nature,” they said.

“And you are a natural beast, right?

So what does that make your magic, your spirit?”

I couldn’t fault them. So why was it that they’d give me things to write and then slip away, shaking their heads and laughing, saying “Keep digging.”

I’ve learnt an important lesson: your guides are not necessarily your tribe, you may be pixie led but that doesn’t mean they’ll stay for tea. At least, not until you reach your destination and turn around to find that they’ve followed you in, pulling faces at the back of your head all the way!

Last September I was writing about power and niceness. I was wondering what it was about being seen as ‘nice’ that I was so focussed on to the point where I’d let myself down. Why was I scared that people would think I wasn’t *nice*? To be honest, I am nice, generally speaking. And goblins aren’t necessarily nice. They’re not necessarily not-nice either, to be fair. They played on my mind. They poked my brain. They reminded me that sometimes it takes being seen as not-nice to take back one’s power.

That November Thought Bubble, the comic con in Leeds, rolled around.�� And I met Dr Geoff. In particular, I met his tea museum. His awesome, fictional, steampunk, tea museum.

The Goblins liked this. They liked it so much they started jumping up and down and would NOT be QUIET! They told me a secret. They told me that “The Goblin Circus” was coming to town. And that I was to present it to the world like Dr. Geoff presents his tea museum. In tangible, physical form. And in the way I do best, through stories.

I’d come home. I’d found the treasure that is my Faery Magic in the core of me. A creative performance full of colour and stories and laughter and inspiration. I turned around with my treasure to carry it back into the world so I could share it. There they were, all the Fae that had led me this way and then slipped into the shadows. They’d followed me all the way into the Goblin’s home, and now we were going to take that wilful playfulness out into the human world together.

The Pixies laughed and said they’d come dance in the circus. The nymphs started singing songs for us to learn. The dryads gave us lessons in how a Big Top grows. They all started bringing me stories to play with, to model my Circus tales on. The Goblins and I got to work. I began drawing a comic. That didn’t quite work, so I did as they’d suggested and worked on my oral storytelling instead.

Imbolc dawned and I found myself on stage in a top hat, with an audience of about 75 humans, for the Goblin Circus’ opening night. A one-woman-many-goblin circus was born.

So far it seems to be going well. We have a 30 minute storytelling show, a website, local performance gigs lined up for the summer, a rapidly expanding human crew… and that comic has reinvented itself. Six inked pages finished today. When I stopped focussing on what I thought I wanted and who I thought I was, I found my stride and it became clear.

Everything I do comes back to Faeries. It just so happens that the kind of Faeries that were holding onto my power were Goblins, rather than flower fairies I’ve been shown by the world since I was small.

Oh, and not only that but as the Circus took shape my writings on the Fae, on their logic and our Faery hearts, was picked up by a publisher. I got a book contract to share with the world the magic the Faeries gifted me with. That magic lead me home to the ever-evolving Goblin Circus, I wonder where it might lead you?

***

 

Halo Quin is an Enchantress. The Faeries made her so. The Goblins then declared her to be their Ringleader, so between writing and painting Faery Books and Oracle decks, researching for a PhD in philosophy of Art and a storytelling career, Halo founded a circus. Find her, the circus and her upcoming book here: www.AWorldEnchanted.com

 

Eerie Nature and the Druid

Reading this amazing Robert McFarlane article recently has left me pondering a lot of things. Do go and read it ��� it���s a beautiful, inspiring piece about representations of landscape. Eerie landscape, specifically.

It made me realise that as a Druid author, I talk a fair bit about connecting with nature, and yet as a fiction author, I am much more drawn to writing nature as a hostile, creepy, dangerous place. www.hopelessmaine.com would be a case in point. Is that contradictory?

Looking at the narrative landscapes McFarlane references, I realise these are places I am deeply attracted to. Mythago Wood could cheerfully join the list, too. I think this is because I want nature to be a scary place. I want it to be dangerous, unpredictable, wild, and full of things that might kill you. The sanitised, safe ���nature��� that is just pretty to look at and poses no threat at all has, in the absence of its teeth and claws, far less scope to inspire awe. Creepy and malevolent landscapes put people back in their place, and take away the illusion of control that has made us so damaging to every living thing.

Heat and Healing

This is a reblog from��http://seeingthroughtheguru.com/ reproduced with permission and my thanks. I’ve never done and never expect I would be equal to doing a sweat lodge, so I find the insight fascinating.

 

A sweat lodge is a time-honored ceremony to cleanse yourself of nearly anything that plagues you. The purpose is to heal via the physical body. Except that I didn���t know that when I attended my first sweat lodge.

What I did know was that my new boss spoke in passionate terms about attending a Lakota sweat ceremony in the hills a few hours away from where we both lived and I immediately wanted to attend.

As the time approached for the event, my boss informed me that she wasn���t able to go due to a change in her schedule. Did I want to drive out to the location of the sweat and attend by myself? She would be happy to inform her friends that I would be coming. They���d look out for me and assist me during the ceremony.

Yes! I didn���t hesitate and the following Saturday, I was careful to follow the directions to the lodge (pre-GPS devices) scribbled on a piece of paper as I drove east into the hills towards Riverside, California.

What was I getting myself into? I was nervous as I made the two-hour drive. I knew little about the Lakota tradition of sweating inside an inipi or womb like structure heated with stones called ���Grandfathers���. I was curious though.

Recently divorced from my husband of twenty years, I was a new psychotherapist fresh from a graduate program. My job as the therapist to a group of adolescents in a residential treatment program was to practice the theory of ���talk therapy���. However, in my short stint as a therapist, talk therapy didn���t appear as effective as I thought it needed to be to assist these young people. I was soon to learn how powerful healing is when it involves the body.

Let me emphasize, in the telling of the experience here, that despite not knowing a lot about the Lakota tradition, in the end, cleansing took place that impacted my life immensely. Without understanding or thorough knowledge of the sacredness or spiritual nature of the experience, in the end, I was profoundly transformed.

Cleansing is like that: it comes about because the participant intends for healing to take place and inside of that intent is the will and the power to manifest the healing. Whether cleansing takes place via speech or via the body isn���t the sole criteria for healing to occur.

Often healing takes place outside of language, just as it did for me, on the level of the body.

Participants were invited to crawl into the lodge and seat themselves around a small pit. Once seated inside, the ceremony commenced. Those outside the lodge would transport stones from amidst a red-hot fire into the lodge in a series of four rounds.

Once inside the pit the stones were sprinkled with water and the resultant steam would saturate those seated in the pitch black of the lodge itself.

Asking if the lodge was hot is like asking if it hurts to get a tattoo. You bet it���s hot! You bet that needle hurts tender skin! But the greatest significance is the results. I never anticipated the power in those stones!

Picture in your mind: Participants are seated on the ground with legs crossed. Inside the inipi it is pitch black. Unbearable heat crawls over your skin as the steam from the stones are sprinkled with water. You are dripping from sweat by the end of the first round. When the round ends, the canvas ���door��� is opened and the cool of the evening rushes over your feverish face.

The sweat lodge leader asks that you direct your focus onto what you want to let go, what you want to cleanse from your body, what toxins need to seep from the pores of your skin as perspiration trickles endlessly down your nose.

He instructs you to pay attention to the images that arise within your mind���s eye. They will inform you as to what needs cleansing.

Suddenly, images of my mother appeared. My mother! She was not the best of maternal figures. She was capricious, cruel with her words, and lacked empathy. Suddenly, I was full of childhood connections that only a daughter can have, except that my memories were painful and filled with shame.

I squirmed. I looked in the darkness for those seated next to me. Were they agonized, as I was? Lifting the small stem of sage to my nose, I breathed through it. ���The sage will cool you if the heat becomes too hot,��� the sweat leader had said. Tears rolled down my eyes mixing with the sweat from my brow.

���Pay attention to what the stones are saying to you. Don���t allow distraction to cross your path. This is your journey, and no one else can take it for you.��� The words of the sweat leader came back to me.

Ah! This is what he���d meant in my sudden interest in those seated next to me. I focused onto the darkness, not the darkness of the inipi, but the darkness within me. The darkness of a relationship that had been hurtful and damaging to a young girl���s body and spirit so very long ago. I sat still as a statue and cried silently.

Time disappeared. The singing from the first two rounds was over. We were in the third round, the shortest, but most intense round of the ceremony. Inside the inipi it was quiet. In the extreme heat of the lodge, I sweat from my body and soul those images that held me captive to my mother���s negativity and the squelching of my spirit. I let ���her��� go from a memory full of excruciating experiences. My body released ���her��� in an abundance of tears.

Sweating profusely, I allowed the heat, the stones, the songs, and the fire to cleanse what no amount of talking had been able to. Cleansing and healing became entwined, especially where pure intent, the mind, and body joined together inside the very practical, but sacred, Lakota Inipi ceremony.

Never Not the Neophyte

Nimue Brown:

I love this line of thought…

Originally posted on The Poet Priestess:

At some point on our journey we have all been the neophyte, the newbie, the wide eyed seeker. As children or adults we have come to our paths with tentative footsteps or joyful bounds, absorbing all the wonders we experience, discovering secrets of our Gods, our world, and ourselves. Over time and through experience, those who have walked the path with purpose and passion become known as the Priests, Priestesses, Shamans, Magicians, Teachers and Elders of our communities. However, here lies the paradox: An adept is never not a neophyte. No matter how skilled, how experienced or how knowledgeable a person is in their chosen area of expertise, there is ALWAYS something new to learn.

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On not meditating

Nimue Brown:

one of the reasons I don’t go in for clear the head meditation, is that like Yvonne, I can’t do it….

Originally posted on Solitary Path:

Meditation came up in discussion with one of my blog followers recently and I was saying that I don���t meditate at all. I find that this often causes people to be surprised for there is a common assumption that anyone who is in any way spiritual must meditate.

It is known that practicing meditation brings great benefits. The studies that have taken place on the effects meditation has on the brain and therefore on mental health all support the benefit of daily meditation. I have no idea on a personal level though as I have never been able to meditate at all.

Instead of meditation I practice Reiki. Studies have also shown that Reiki has a similar effect on the brain to meditation but although it makes me be still and focused I am aware that it is not actually meditation. I also spend time in light trance when working���

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Crisis and gratitude

Huge thanks to everyone who posted here, and on facebook, and emailed me with words of warmth and encouragement, stories of journeys taken, suggestions about things that help… It is all appreciated, and it makes a considerable difference. One of the things I have been learning, and struggling with is that if I keep silent when I am in difficulty, no help is forthcoming, because people who would help do not magically know. Exposing the wounds is alarming and vulnerable, and healing, I recognise, is not always a clean and tidy process for any of us.

It���s been a tough month in a number of ways. Big projects on the move can be exciting, but also exhausting, and like a lot of people I get thrown into gloom if I get too tired. I���ve also had some really painfully and challenging things involving people to deal with. A number of people, in a number of contexts, and experiences that have shredded my confidence around my ability to deal with others. It���s been educational, to say the least and has raised a lot of questions for me about what can be reasonably expected of me, my right to say no, and what I need from the people around me.

Some of the contact I���ve had with people this week has made a huge positive difference around how I’m seeing things. Conversations have left me questioning what depression is, and what the right approach to it (for me) would be. At the moment I have very little clarity on any of these issues, it���s going to take time to face it all down, and make enough sense to be able to talk about it. I have become clear about this one thing, though. I will push through and come back and talk because I want to live in a world where it is possible for people to talk about difficult things. I want it to be socially acceptable to express pain and need. I will keep talking, simply because my random spouting of bollocks might, just now and then, make it a teensy bit more feasible for someone else who needs to talk to feel able to talk. And you can always share stories here, or email me, or tell me on facebook. Those who feel the breath of sadness, sit down next to me… those who find they���re touched by madness, sit down next to me…

I will probably focus on reviews, reblogging, guest blogs (yell if you want to do one!) and other easy things for a little while, because I have a lot to process. I think it���s worth processing, and I think, if the glimmers that I���m getting now are anything to go by, there will be things worth saying by the end of it. It���s not quite hanging on the world tree for 9 days (I hope) but some insights come at a price, and on the whole I think I���m willing to take that.

In the meantime, if you can accept me as a person who is often raw, sometimes fragile, overthinking, intensely feeling and decidedly messy, please be here and be part of my life. If you need me to be nice, if you want me to hide my bad days, please find a space more suitable to your requirements, because I���m not able to keep being that for people. In the aftermath of Tuesday, I am encouraged to think there are plenty of you who will stay.