Other people’s words about … the way we feel

She did not adopt the persona of a lawyer, which was the only thing I’d learned to do. Instead, her own innate mannerisms, her seemingly authentic and unrehearsed responses, were more effective than any behaviour she might have acquired through practice and effort. She knew this, she used it and we won. I left the courtroom feeling slightly different about myself. I vowed to be less afraid to talk in my own voice, or to follow my own line of thought, though I had no clear sense of either of these things. I wanted to learn how to be myself again, having been carefully unlearning it ever since I was born.

from ‘Chrysalis‘
by Anna Metcalfe

It’s funny how you can be struck by a single passage in a book even when the book itself — its story, its characters, its voice, its narrative arc — leaves you cold. That’s how it is for me today, in quoting the passage above. My feelings about Anna Metcalfe’s novel Chrysalis as a whole are ambivalent, but this passage, particularly the last sentence, will never leave me. I wanted to learn how to be myself again, having been carefully unlearning it ever since I was born.

Groundsel flowers, Taperoo dunes, July 2023.

Another way to say what Metcalfe says is: All my life, I have felt as though there is something wrong with me. This is something I’ve written about in blog posts before, this feeling of wrongness, of inner wrongness, essential wrongness. I understand that it’s not unique to me — we probably all feel this way, to some degree. We live in a social world, after all. My life is jumbled up in yours, and yours in mine. Still, this feeling is one I’ve always experienced very strongly.

Something about Metcalfe’s way of putting it, though, particularly resonates with me. It’s the concept of learning and unlearning, I think. Can we unlearn this feeling? Maybe.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• • I loved those letters. One of the best things about our decades-long correspondence: it was leisurely and incremental, enriched by delay. Typically, a month or more elapsed before one of us answered the other. We wrote back when the epistolary impulse struck: I am a big fan of Melissa Bank’s The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Here, Bank’s friend Julie Schumacher remembers her a year on from her death.
  
  
  • Now that I am older it feels less challenging to turn away from accepted practice and give myself the time necessary to find and develop my own voice on the page. In my view it is not the thinking which makes the difference but the doing, the daily custom of seeking meaningful expression: Yes, yes, yes. This is why I write, too: Jeremy Cooper, on publishing a novel at 72.
  
  
  • I’ve really struggled with happiness, most of my life. But purpose [I] can do: Emine Saner quoting Joe Yelverton, who survived an avalanche. Later, struggling to survive the PTSD that followed his accident, Saner turned to Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning for succour.
  
  
  • Our bus showed up, but we were further delayed while passengers on it waited for their luggage. Apparently, its faulty hold had opened and bags had scattered along the highway – or so the story went. You never quite know on a Greyhound. The rides can take on a mythical dimension: Joanna Pocock, on crossing the US by Greyhound Bus, and on the ‘appification’ of travel.
  
  
  • Jonathan Franzen, at least, is really great. His nonfiction is pessimistic and snobby, but his fiction is passionately inclusive. His main trick, which never gets old, is to reveal his characters’ inner lives at the moment of their most visceral humanity: Emily Gould, in an intriguing piece on the state of fiction today, in which she bewails the unfair success of male white writers and yet still manages to be fair about one of them whose writing she loves.