Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

If you drive along the M62 from Manchester towards Accrington where I was brought up, you will see the Pennines, shocking in their suddenness and their silence. This is a landscape of few words, taciturn, reluctant. It is not an easy beauty. But it is beautiful.

‘What I want does exist if I dare to find it …’ Yes, it’s a young person’s melodrama, but that attitude seems to have had a protective function.

We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear … Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

I’ve spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. It is better to know it. Better to know who you are, and what lies in you, what you could do, might do, under extreme provocation.

‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’

Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and a loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground.