Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time.

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.

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

Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation – wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent.

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

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.

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.

Remember the princess who kisses the frog – and yippee, there’s a prince? Well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.

‘Lost loss’ is unpredictable and not civilised. I was thrown back into a place of helplessness, powerlessness and despair. My body responded before my head. Normally, a pompous obfuscating letter from the legal world would make me laugh and I would just deal with it. I am not scared of lawyers and I know that the law is grandiose and designed to intimidate, even when there is no reason for it to do so. It is designed to make ordinary people feel inadequate. I do not feel inadequate – but I did not expect to be six weeks old again either.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.