Notes to Self

by Emilie Pine

Like all children of heavy drinkers, we developed a particular kind of watchfulness. We learned, through experience, not to trust. We learned to cope with crisis.

It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they’re not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between endless ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis. I used to push myself to reject him, to walk away, failing each time. I oscillated between caring for the man who was afflicted with this terrible disease, and attempting to protect myself from the emotional fallout of having an alcoholic father. It took years of refusing him empathy before I realised that the only person I was hurting was myself.

As he talks, I am incensed that instead of asking how we felt – perhaps through shame, perhaps through the same narcissism he has always manifested, or perhaps because he just wants to move on – Dad has chosen to remember a different version of events.

writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of processing – of possessing – thought and emotion, a way of making something worthwhile out of pain.

Most of all I worry that by writing it, by sending it, by hoping to publish it, I will break the fragile calm that we have built between us, in the years since he stopped drinking.

These days, sometimes he’ll call and I am busy and he is self-involved and I snap and he snaps back and I hang up. I text him that I will phone later but, often, I forget my promise. Sometimes he’ll call and he’ll tell me his news, some village gossip that I can barely follow but I listen anyway, and when I yawn he laughs and I laugh too. Sometimes he’ll call and I don’t feel like talking. Sometimes he’ll call and it is just so good to hear his voice. And every time he calls, my heart races. My heart will always race.

In the early hours of the morning, unable to find sleep, I realise that what I’m trying to be cured of is being me. Maybe my late thirties is the age to admit I’m never going to change my personality, or my body. Because I may not be pregnant, but I don’t hate myself, even with my too-much-yang nature. I like that I have ten things on the go, all at once. I like that I’m always planning for the next thing. I like that I bring a high energy to my life, that I see it as a challenge. I like that my favourite thing to do on the flight home is to look at the airline route map to pick my next destination. But then I remember the baby photos, and all the ‘thank you for getting me pregnant’ cards on his shelves. In the morning I text the acupuncturist to wish him Happy Christmas and to say I’ll see him in the new year. I

Either do it, or don’t do it, he said, but don’t lose yourself in the limbo of maybe doing it. Now, I understand the wisdom of this. Making a decision is incredibly empowering.

But the truth, what I have accepted, is this: I can try to have a baby and I can fail every month and be unhappy. Or I can not-try to have a baby and not-fail every month. The total number of children I have had remains the same either way, a big fat zero. But the outcome is totally different. I choose to be happy. This happiness is not perfect, or pain-free. It carries grief within it. It is all the stronger for that.

It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic – raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding – but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed.

I wanted that life and yet was also terrified of it. I wanted the freedom of feelings that did not involve them, though I was also overwhelmed by the shape and scale of those feelings. Who was I, really, without the defining boundary of my family? What stories would I tell now?

As I step away from the page, and I look at what I have written about myself and my family, this family, our family, I see that in the end it is always going to be both a complicated and a simple story. In this story, which I may never stop telling, I try to remember what it was like for me as a child, and what I did and what I could have done differently. I try to imagine what it was like for my parents, and what they did and what they could have done differently. I remember us happy, and I remember us sad. I remember us divided and I remember us together. I remember everything, and I remember only fragments of a whole that will always be beyond me.

Because, of course, this paranoia, that I am not feminine enough, not desirable enough, not good enough, is the ultimate performance of femininity. This paranoia is a crucial part of how women are policed. And of how we police ourselves.

Perhaps the most corrosive aspect of a lonely life is not the time spent alone, but the time spent in a crowd, feeling left out.

Recalling the hurt and confusion in my sister’s voice at that moment, I realise that we both needed the same thing: some promise of unconditional love, some security, unavailable to either of us. And I think that maybe, in the end, we got it from each other.

But what it really meant was that I put no value on myself at all. And so the separation of body and self that I engineered, which began years earlier when I stopped eating normally, was made complete by these encounters.

I maintained a happy-go-lucky façade, but inwardly became cold, sensationless. I distanced myself from anything emotionally problematic. I basically shut down. Instead of talking to the people I was with, I continued the internal dialogue I had begun as a sleepless child, in which I would witness, as if from a great distance, my own actions, accompanied by a relentlessly fault-finding commentary. Though I have managed over the years to get away from most of my self-destructive traits, that particular dialogue is still with me. It is still what keeps me awake at night.

It’s funny to describe myself as silent because I’m actually pretty loud. I get asked to make announcements at events because I can be heard above the din. A friend of mine once told me I barely needed a mobile phone because I could just shout and be heard from miles away. And I’m loud in other ways too. I speak up at meetings, I contribute to discussions, and hey, get this, my job as a lecturer means that I talk for a living. But you can be silent and loud at the same time, it turns out.

I may not have much empathy for others but, in fairness, I have none for myself either. I knew I was taking on too much and, at some level, I knew I was miserable. That’s not to say there weren’t plenty of times in the last two years that I was happy. But when you’re exhausted and depressed there is a strange divide. You know you should be feeling happy, you can tell yourself, ‘Now I am happy,’ but the experience is somehow artificial, unreal. I stood on the edges of my emotions. And I stood on the edges of myself. And I couldn’t tell anyone. Because to have told anyone, to have said the word ‘depressed’ out loud, would have been the ultimate failure. I knew something was going to break. And I didn’t care.

But my mental health, it turns out, is my responsibility. I probably don’t need to tell you that, but I did need to tell myself. And once I realised that, I wondered why I would ever leave it in the hands of strangers to decide my value.

And I will ask my students what they would do, if they were not afraid. And I will listen to what they say. And I will remind them, with compassion, that the real failure is to not try.

I am afraid of being the disruptive woman. And of not being disruptive enough. I am afraid. But I am doing it anyway.