Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself.

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling. It isn’t. When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

I had styled myself as the Lone Ranger not Lassie. What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed. We’re back to the complexity of life that isn’t this thing or that thing – the boring old binary oppositions – it’s both, held in balance.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus, for all his adventures and far-flung wandering, is always urged to ‘remember the return’. The journey is about coming home.