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She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.
There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.
I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.
what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary. In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out.
But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream .
Which brings me back to happiness, and a quick look at the word. Our primary meaning now is the feeling of pleasure and contentment; a buzz, a zestiness, the tummy upwards feel of good and right and relaxed and alive . . . you know . . . But earlier meanings build in the hap – in Middle English, that is ‘happ’, in Old English, ‘gehapp’ – the chance or fortune, good or bad, that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play. How you meet your ‘hap’ will determine whether or not you can be ‘happy’.
It seems to me that being the right size for your world – and knowing that both you and your world are not by any means fixed dimensions – is a valuable clue to learning how to live.
Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.
When we move house, we take with us the invisible concept of home – but it is a very powerful concept. Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside – and that structure is built in part by what has happened on the outside. The inside and the outside of our lives are each the shell where we learn to live.
I know now that we heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by obsessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment.
It is of course the basis of romantic love – you + me against the world. A world where there are only two of us. A world that doesn’t really exist, except that we are in it. And when one of us fails the other . . . And one of us will always fail the other.
Looking at women was not really sexual for me. I loved Janey and she was sexual, but looking at women was a way of looking at myself and, I suppose, a way of loving myself. I don’t know how it would have been if I had wanted boys, but I didn’t. I liked some of them but I didn’t desire any of them. Not then. Not yet.
I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
We were not able to resolve that difference and what I didn’t know was how something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown. The sudden unexpected abandonment, constellated as it was around the idea of/impossibility of home, lit a fuse that spat and burned its way towards a walled-up opening a long way back inside me. Inside that walled-up opening, smothered in time like an anchorite, was my mother.
had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it. Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture. This is one moment . . . know that another . . . Hold on, hold on, hold on.
It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable? I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.
And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and steady way
I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to 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 . . . ‘On with it!’ He says and thus we squat on the rocks by the sea and play – can it be true – a game of poker. He calls me. I win because I hold a royal straight flush. He wins because He holds five aces A wild card had been announced but I had not heard it being in such a state of awe when He took out the cards and dealt. As He plunks down His five aces and I sit grinning at my royal flush, He starts to
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I guess that over the last few years I have come home. I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I have worked hard at being the hero of my own life, but every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn’t know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.
