Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’

I was reading his plays and sonnets the way that you get dressed every morning. You don’t ask yourself, ‘Shall I get dressed today?’

Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible, unseen except in its effects.

I had no idea whether any of what I was doing was the right thing to do. I talked to myself all the time, out loud, debating with myself my situation.

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

Everybody else seemed relaxed, though I am sure that was not true. They certainly had better clothes and different accents. I knew I was not being myself, but I didn’t know how to be myself there. I hid the self that I was and had no persona to put in its place.

The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

I love coming home – and my idea of happiness is to come home to someone I love.

The psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.

But what is really your own never does leave you. I could not find words, not directly, for my own state, but every so often I could write, and I did so in lit-up explosions, that for a time showed me that there was still a world – proper and splendid. I could be my own flare to see by. Then the light went out again.

I was safe. I was surrounded by books. My breathing became deeper and steadier and I was no longer haunted. Those times were temporary but they were precious.

I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.

And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it. Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. My violent rages, my destructive behaviour, my own need to destroy love and trust, just as love and trust had been destroyed for me. My sexual recklessness – not liberation. The fact that I did not value myself. I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life. Didn’t that have a romance to it? Wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded?

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

Planting cabbages and beans is good for you. Creative work is good for you.

I was lonely and alone, but I was calm, and I was saner than I have ever been, insomuch as I knew there was a part of me that was in madness.

I sat on the back step looking at it over and over again like someone who can’t read. My body was slight-shaking all over in the way that you do if you get caught in an electric fence.

You don’t trust me to love you, do you?’ No . . . I am the wrong crib . . . this will go wrong like all the rest. In my heart of hearts I believe that.

The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don’t have to be alone. I don’t have to fight for everything. I don’t have to fight everything. I don’t have to run away. I can stay because this is love that is offered, a sane steady stable love.

And I am reciting in my head the Anne Sexton poem – the last one in her collection The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). It’s the one called ‘The Rowing Endeth’. She sits down with God and . . .

I didn’t know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.

What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed.

And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

As I get out of the cab I feel trapped, desperate, desperately frightened and physically sick. Susie has always said to me to be in the feeling and not to push it away, however difficult.

enough time has passed from the happy/normal moment. That’s what I think, but I am learning that time is unreliable. Those old sayings about Give It Time, and Time is a Healer depend on just whose time it is.

There I am, leaving her body, leaving the only thing I know, and repeating the leaving again and again until it is my own body I am trying to leave, the last escape I can make. But there was forgiveness. Here I am. Not leaving any more. Home.

I don’t remember but in truth we remember everything.

Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love.