despair – Page 2 – twenty-one words

My body, my self

March 14, 2025Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, My published writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the seaTagged anorexia nervosa, books, despair, Emma Copley Eisenberg, fiction, Housemates, reading, writing1 Comment

Other people’s words about … other people’s writing

Most of the articles that Leah’s housemates were reading and talking about in the kitchen were also clearly a product of this system. Either they made arguments about ‘justice’ and ‘representation’ that were so flatly predetermined and simple as to make Leah want to crack a pencil in half or they were written in gesturing and floaty theory-ese that was outrageously divorced from the relevant concerns of being a person. Either they purported to know everything, tacking all the problems at once and offering vague, useless answers, or they tackled nothing, risked nothing, tried for nothing.

But books were no better. Most of the books that lined the front window of the volunteer-run bookstore on the avenue were either practical guides to overcoming compulsory monogamy and white supremacy or neatly contained novels about pretty people struggling to fall in love, or stay in love, or have a child, or lose weight (a shocking number of the books lefties loved revealed a plain hatred of fatness), or lose weight after having a child. The viral book reviews, shared in their housemate group chat, were almost always written by viciously smart Brooklyn-based writers who panned any book they deemed too ambitious or emotional — offensive on principle it seemed — in clipped, sarcastic prose. Only smallness of scope and affective numbness were aesthetically acceptable.

From ‘Housemates‘
By Emma Copley Eisenberg

I think this is one of the best critiques I’ve read about the written world today. How do we escape the aesthetic smallness of scope and affective numbness? I don’t know, but I think Eisenberg is onto something here.

Taperoo Beach, March 2025.

Leah, one of the two main protagonists of Housemates, is fat and queer and in love with her housemate Bernie, who is attracted to Leah but not driven to pursue the attraction, or at least not initially. And here again Eisenberg questions our social mores, the platitudes we repeat to ourselves and to others, this time about the discourse of sexuality. Was she more or less comfortable among queers than she was among everyone else? Bernie asks herself. About the same, came the answer. But if she really listened, really paused, there was another answer, which was: less. The style. The discordance, the mismatching, the pride, the attracting of attention and the comfort in that attention, the physicality to dance, to fuck, to march. The physical in Bernie felt meant for other uses.

Leah and Bernie move in a world where people pride themselves for being other, for not living according to the usual socially accepted order. And yet their world, too, demands acceptance and conformity to certain philosophical and sexual tenets. I love how Bernie has the courage to question the over-sexualised expectations that she perceives the people around her to have of themselves and others. The physical in Bernie felt meant for other uses. Now that’s a celebratory sentence if there ever was one.

Taperoo Beach, March 2025.

Lately I’ve been reading …

Styron’s disconsolate characters live in a world which is itself afflicted with melancholia, an entire existence clinically depressed: Greg Cwik remembers the works of William Styron, whose memoir, Darkness Visible, I remember reading in my very early twenties.
I am, to date, a slow writer—my debut novel took ten years. My second, nine. There was overlap between those years, but still. Upon finishing a book draft, I feel no sense of accomplishment: there are so many more to go. Meanwhile, as is true for any number of artists, my well-being is predicated on that of my writing. The first depends on the second. I think sometimes of what Honoré de Balzac said when he ran into his writer friends at the end of a day. He didn’t inquire how they were doing; instead, he asked if they’d worked well that day, since, if they said yes, it necessarily followed that his friends were thriving: R O Kwon on the benefits of powerlifting and how it helps her cope with writing … and with life.
I wish I could tell you in simple terms what it is we make together, she and I. The names there are tend to be a bit off-key. We’ve cared for each other, durably and devotedly, for decades, but we are not ‘family’ in the eyes of any relevant authorities, and certainly not a couple. (She’s a lesbian; I’m a straight man.) We’re not roommates or lovers or coparents. We are not co-owners of a condo, a couch, a dog. It’s true that we’re both professors and so maybe, on somebody’s HR spreadsheet, we go down as ‘colleagues’: Peter Covellio, on indefinable friendships.
Medicine knows one thing about you and decides it therefore knows everything about you – or, at the very least, it has a single frame within which it pictures every single thing about you: Fiona Wright, on how her late-stage diagnosis of autism affected her anorexia.
While eating disorders can (and do) develop on the basis of body image, they are often adaptive, which means the person engages in those behaviors for reasons other than weight loss: While we’re on the this theme, Maggie Slepian explores the long-term course of eating disorders and comes up with the conclusion that recovery is often out of reach. I’ve linked to this article because I am interested in eating disorders and have written about them myself, both on my blog and in my fiction. But this piece troubles me for many reasons. In the first half, Slepian details all the strategies she used when she was severely anorexic to lose weight — there are so many triggers here, I don’t know where to start. (The only thing she doesn’t do is list her lowest weight, but that seems tokenistic.) Beyond that, though, I am tired by Slepian’s conclusion that recovery — by which she means mental recovery as well as physical recovery — isn’t possible. I have read numerous pieces by former anorexics who say the same thing, and I disagree My belief is that, at least in some of these cases, the writers of pieces like this simply haven’t lived long enough (yet) to outlive their eating disorders. In my case, I continued to experience mental symptoms for twenty years after I was initially diagnosed, which was a long time after I had physically recovered. But twenty years in, the disordered, depressing thoughts did fade and within twenty-five years they were gone, and they have never returned. Recovery is possible, at least for some of us. It just takes a long, long time and it doesn’t look the way people expect it to.

Mirror

January 29, 2025Posted in a thought, anorexia, anxiety, books, depression, eating disorder recovery, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, writingTagged anorexia nervosa, Body Friend, books, creative-writing, despair, fiction, Katherine Brabon, reading, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … hunger

I aligned my body with Tomasz’s in the early days, when we first met. When he would move his body, ride his bike, commute to work, I would join him. If he slept in, then I would try to do the same, even though I’ve never been able to sleep through any morning. And I aligned my body to his hunger. Hunger as perhaps our original pain. Though conscious of participating in clichés of gender, I would not say I wanted to eat, was embarrassed, needing too much, was sure of it. And so we would have coffee first thing and only later, hours towards lunch, would we eat. Often I didn’t know if I was hungry and yet I ate at the designated times. Hunger by the minute hand’s salivation. There was some murky shame behind this, some inkling that our capacity to eat when we are not hungry is our greater hunger, our great undoing, danger and sadness, our signifier. Only some animals do this, become gluttons when they live with us. The birds who cannot stop pecking, pecking at their seed because it’s there, all there in front of them. The cats who eat until they vomit. They need us to stop them eating and they need us to feed them. We are the same but we are the hand that feeds us.

Perhaps I aligned myself with Tomasz’s body because his seemed to me to be good. As though I wanted to find another body to live by, because mine could only do wrong. Doctors were surprised at the tenacity of [my] illness. ‘It’s aggressive,’ they would say, and then they’d write the same in my file: ‘a severe and aggressive manifestation’.

From ‘Body Friend‘
By Katherine Brabon

The narrator in the passage I’ve quoted above from Katherine Brabon’s novel Body Friend isn’t anorexic — her illness is of another kind, some kind of autoimmune illness that Brabon leaves unnamed throughout the novel. Still, I’m fascinated by the way the narrator’s thinking in this passage aligns itself with a kind of anorexic thinking pattern, a pattern that Brabon identifies instead as a cliché of gender. The thoughts the narrator expresses here, the murky shame she feels, remind me of the way I used to think about my body, my hunger, my appetites, my eating patterns when I was still experiencing the symptoms of anorexia (both before and after treatment — indeed, for years after treatment).

My first boyfriend, when I was in my early twenties, was a tall, naturally thin guy (very thin) whose appetite waxed and waned; he would eat nothing for hours, opting to smoke cigarettes instead, and then he’d suddenly become ravenous and eat his way through what seemed to me vast quantities of food, the equivalent of several meals at once. He didn’t exercise much, perhaps because he wasn’t a natural athlete.

My second boyfriend, meanwhile, whom I met in my late twenties, was a slow eater, someone who put his fork down between bites, to talk, to smoke, to drink. He didn’t always finish what was on his plate; if he’d had enough, he stopped eating, which seemed miraculous to me, evidence that he felt a freedom from compulsion around food and eating that I couldn’t imagine ever feeling myself. He loved exercising — he had been a runner in his twenties, until injury forced him to stop, and he shaped his days instead around surfing and cycling and swimming.

With both of them, doubting my own hunger, suspicious of my own greed, I would, like Brabon’s narrator, mirror their eating patterns. I would skip breakfast, even though doing so made me feel faint within a couple of hours. I would try to leave some food on my plate, even if I wanted to eat it all. I would try to slow down the speed at which I ate. When I was with my first boyfriend, I didn’t exercise much at all. Moving in with my second boyfriend, though, I took up cycling and swimming. I did these things because I knew instinctively that they, my boyfriends — the habits they had formed that determined the way they lived their lives — were right, whereas I was inherently wrong.

Native pelargoniums on the beach path, Taperoo, January 2025.

What drives this kind of thinking — or what drove it for me, anyway — is self-hatred and fear. I had believed for years that my appetites were out of proportion, that they needed curbing, taming; it was this belief that had led me into an eating disorder in the first place. I didn’t yet understand that appetite is a tricky word (a signifier, to borrow Brabon’s word), and that it can refer to things beyond food, things like desire and longing and hope, so that in trying to tame my appetite for food, I was also trying to tame those other appetites, the ones that truly frightened me.

Brabon’s narrator is experiencing other fears than the fears I experienced, and yet I think her fear has a similar source to the fear that I felt — fear of her own body, of what it can do if left to itself. Fear of its inherent faultiness. Its inherent gluttony. Fear that, if left to our own resources, we are like the cat that eats until it vomits, no better than that, equally repulsive.

Even today, I still feel those same fears sometimes (perhaps, after all, that’s where the gender cliché comes in), but I no longer feel the compulsion to mirror myself in someone else’s habits. And I am deeply grateful for this.

Lately I’ve been reading …

People sometimes treat my fiction, which often uses material from my life, as though it were a transcription of my experience. It isn’t. It has always been clear to me that my books are, and that I want them to be, fiction; all three of them are full of invention. When people ask me, as they sometimes do, how much of a novel is ‘true,’ it feels like a category error. The ideas of true and false don’t map onto the literary object we’re supposedly discussing. Lived experience has been utterly transformed. It’s like looking at someone’s oil painting and asking, ‘How much of that is flax?’: Garth Greenwell in conversation with Meghan O’Rourke about his third novel, Small Rain. I am a huge fan of Greenwell’s writing; his ability to write about the experience of embodiment, like Katherine Brabon’s, floors me.
But this week the third independent publisher in less than six months has merged with a multinational: Alice Grundy explores why Australia’s independent publishing scene is in dire straits.
In theory, this could amount to nothing: an order to look into something that quietly fades away: Zack Beauchamp explores Donald Trump’s first day in power, and the resulting threats to democracy. I try to avoid writing about Trump and politics in America today in general in my blog; frankly, they sicken and horrify me in equal measure. But here’s a start.
The air was so hot and the winds so powerful. The fires just spread and spread: Carolyn Kellogg describes evacuating her house in Los Angeles during the recent wildfires — and the books she chose to take with her.
I had few friends. I had a huge following. The balance was not sustainable: August Lamm, on how to give up your smart phone. I don’t consider myself addicted to my smart phone – many of the strategies Lamm suggests are ones I already use – but even so, I found some things to think about here.

Disappear

January 17, 2025Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, writingTagged anxiety, books, creative-writing, despair, Evenings and Weekends, fiction, Oisin McKenna, reading, writing2 Comments

Other people’s words about … identity

Ed is never sure if he is a man anyway. Sometimes, he’s certain he’s a woman. Other times, he feels like nothing at all. When it comes down to it, Ed isn’t sure if he wants to belong, not to gay clubs, or queer spaces, or straight bars. He doesn’t want to decide on his pronouns with confidence and clarity, and he doesn’t want to announce them to the world via his Twitter bio or email signature or when introducing himself at parties. He doesn’t want his identity to be valid. He doesn’t want his feelings to matter. He doesn’t want to change his name, or his life, and to say, ‘I feel so seen,’ because Ed doesn’t want to be seen at all. He doesn’t want to be seen as a man, or a woman, or a non-binary person. What Ed wants is to be invisible. What Ed wants is to disappear entirely. He wants to be nothing, by which he means not only that he wants to die, but that he wants to have not ever existed at all, for his body and every person’s memory of his body to be instantly and utterly erased from the world.

He can feel himself start to wheeze again. He struggles to catch his breath.

From ‘Evenings and Weekends‘
By Oisin McKenna

I grew up as a member of a generation that didn’t recognise people who have the kinds of feelings that Ed expresses in the passage I’ve quoted above, a generation that didn’t have the words that a person like Ed — a person who feels that the body they were born into doesn’t reflect their true gender — might need to reach for. That is to say, the vocabulary that Ed and his friends use in Oisin McKenna’s novel, Evenings and Weekends, isn’t a vocabulary that I or my contemporaries used or even had access to. As a corollary of this, the space that Ed and his friends occupy in the world isn’t a space that many people knew how to occupy when I was in my teens and early twenties.

This isn’t to say that people didn’t question their gender identity in those years, only that the conversation around gender identity barely existed. As a consequence, many people — many, many people — didn’t recognise that it might be a conversation they wanted to have, either with themselves or with others.

And yet when I read the passage above, I am moved less by Ed’s uncertainty about his gender than by his unwillingness to be labelled. In theory, the language of gender identification that’s available to him, which wasn’t available to people of previous generations, should free him to articulate his identity, but in practice he finds the labels as constraining as they are freeing.

For better or for worse, this is the power of language. It gives us the tools to express ourselves, but in doing so it determines the way we experience the world. I’m no discourse analyst but this, I think, is what Ed is struggling most deeply with. Kudos to McKenna for finding a way to put it so succinctly and movingly in fiction.

Still, for me the most devastating thing about this passage is that even though Ed has the language to express the way he feels, he remains ultimately so unhappy, so desperate, that his deepest, truest, most instinctive response is to wish to be obliterated.

The language may have changed, but the sadness, the desperation, hasn’t. What Ed wants is to be invisible. Indeed. I don’t have any answers, but I’m glad that novelists like McKenna are brave enough to explore these ideas, because they matter. As language changes, so does the world, and if fiction can help us to explore the consequences, then fiction, too, matters.

Lizzie, January 2025. (Okay, so, unlike Ed, she may not have words or language to express herself … but she is still a very effective communicator!)

Lately I’ve been reading …

Within certain suburbs of Melbourne, you’re increasingly the odd person out if you aren’t queer and ethically non-monogamous : On the topic of the changing world of sex, gender and sexuality, Mx Sly describes their experience of living as a non-binary person involved in polyamorous relationships.
In these books, the settler child is positioned as inquisitor and mini colonialist. Their discovery of the landscape through fictional encounters positions them to craft the nation in their image : On the subject of language and fiction, meanwhile, Lauren A Weber and Sara Fernandes explore the legacy of Australian children’s book writers and illustrators like May Gibbs.
The band became a vehicle for a kind of wholesome perversity, a nonconformist conformism: two picture-perfect couples shattered by divorce; four unimpeachable heterosexuals beloved by multiple generations of gay disco dancers; a gender-balanced quartet where the men put words in the women’s mouths : Chal Ravens discusses ABBA’s legacy.
In 2013, a highway project was halted until Iceland’s Supreme Court considered its impact on elves and the environment : Kaja Brown explores the Huldufolk of Iceland, elves in whom 62% of the population believe in.

Only connect: Reunion

May 8, 2022Posted in a thought, Australian bush, Autumn, books, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, native coastal vegetation, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., resilience, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, walkingTagged despair, Only connect!, solaceLeave a comment

Other people’s words about connection

Maude cranes around to look and Cormac looks too, close enough to see them, all quite young and glacially made up with one man of height and handsomeness towering over the rest and another, a man to the tall one’s left, cocking his head and nodding in Cormac’s direction meaningfully.
It is Senan. Cormac waves …
He hasn’t seen Senan in person for months and yet his vision still telescopes in, urgent and unreconstructed, so that Cormac sees and knows again he loves him with a scratchy passion that returns as reliably as a rash. It is not a nostalgic feeling and casts no shadow, existing always in a self-sustaining now.
How acute it is: immediate deja vu.
From ‘We Were Young‘
by Niamh Campbell

I love this passage from Niahm Campbell about a man reuniting with someone he loves after the two of them have spent some time apart. Cormack, the character in Campbell’s novel, seems unable to commit to one person, whether man or woman; he moves from one relationship or liaison to another. But as a backdrop to all his attempts to remain unfettered there is his love for Senan, a man who is smart enough, perhaps, to keep himself unavailable and therefore always desirable and lovable.

Sunlight and trees, April 2022.

Who hasn’t at some time in their life loved someone who was unavailable? Or, moving beyond relationships and intimacy, who hasn’t wanted something that was eternally just out of reach?

Grasstree, May 2022.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I’ve learned not to fear those little one-and-a-half moments of boredom: Ashley Moor on why deleting her Instagram account changed her life for the better.

It was not who he was —- I now see our striking differences, how often we fought, the way we tore open old wounds, our ruthlessness with each other — but rather a belief I had absorbed during our time together, that I was worthy of no one else’s love: Sanae Lemoine on heartbreak and chocolate cake.

Hope for Planet Earth: The citizen’s guide to climate change: A curated reading list on climate change.

I had no words for what I was going through. I felt like the lone survivor of a shipwreck no one else had experienced, and I was afraid of infecting other people with my newfound darkness. I continued to hide it even as I longed for someone to see it, save me from it: Amanda Bestor-Siegal on the wordlessness of grief.

A very ugly future: Oliver Milman on why investment in primary pandemic prevention, not in vaccinations, is the way forwards as the likelihood of further pandemics due to climate change increases.

Absolution

April 6, 2022Posted in a thought, anxiety, Australian bush, Autumn, books, depression, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Only connect!, Other people's words about ..., reading, resilience, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the sky, What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged anxiety, despair, mental health3 Comments

Other people’s words about … being loved

We were sitting on a cushioned bench [in the pub]. Eddie had one thick thigh crossed over the other, and he was wagging his right foot gently. He was wearing beautiful Italian brogues and talking to the man next to him, laughing at something a little too loudly, and then suddenly he turned to me, rested his hand on my leg and asked softly was I okay.
‘You okay there, pet? Can I get you something?’
It was there in the tone. I knew that I was loved as I had never been before. I don’t mean that Eddie loved me with remarkable passion or insight. I don’t mean that I felt most fully myself with him. I mean that, in the strangest way, I felt forgiven. For as long as I could remember there’d been a vague disquiet in me, as if I lived in the shadow of some humiliation whose particulars I could not recall. Until Eddie, until he absolved me, I hadn’t known there was any other way to feel.
From ‘When Light is Like Water‘
by Molly McCloskey

In the last few years I’ve noticed that when I’m reading a book or watching a movie the two kinds of scenes that most move me are those where two people connect for the first time (mostly, though not always, through falling in love) and those where someone forgives someone else.

Both kinds of scenes make me cry. I’m still not sure whether my tears come from a place of catharsis or from a place of yearning.

Port Adelaide, early April 2022.

I particularly love how Molly McCloskey’s narrator, Rachel, elucidates her experience of falling in love with her first husband in the passage above: how she moves away from romance to something gentler, and kinder, and deeper.

Like Rachel, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t live with a sense that I was inherently wrong, flawed, in need of forgiveness. I sense that my experience is a relatively common one, but I also sense that in me the feeling is perhaps particularly strong.

Aldinga wetlands, April 2022.

How to manage anxiety: Be kind. Be curious. I read these words somewhere once. I remind myself of them from time to time. In their simplicity and compassion, they are helpful. What McCloskey’s narrator Rachel understands in the passage above is that kindness is inherent in true love. I think that’s why her words move me so much.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I felt a wasteland of sorrow. Too much of my own life had been spent wondering if what was wrong with me was a deficiency of character: Meghan O’Rourke on the Self-Dissolving Difficulty of Chronic Illness.

It’s the rhythm, I say defensively: Sarah Moss on why she likes to knit and run.

Chasing clouds

June 25, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, hope, Lately I've been reading about, native coastal vegetation, native flowers, nature, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, Running, solace, South Australia, staying humble, staying true, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about running, WinterTagged despair, gratitude, running, solace2 Comments

Other people’s words about … getting lost

I said earlier that I have no special running talents. In fact, I have one: getting lost.

No-one gets lost like I do. It’s not just a running thing. It’s a getting lost thing.

I’ve been lost when running, walking, driving, cycling, sailing, using public transport, even (once) taking a taxi, on at least three continents, since I first ventured out into the world as an unaccompanied teenager. I’ve temporarily abandoned a car in Milton Keynes, and once phoned [my wife] Clare from the outskirts of Northampton to warn her that I might not find my way home for days. I’ve never been lost on a running track (yet), but I have been lost indoors — not just temporarily disoriented, but properly, sit-down-and-cry-and-wait-to-die lost — on a disastrous visit to the Birmingham branch of Ikea.
From ‘Running Free’
by Richard Askwith

I am someone who gets lost as easily as Richard Askwith. I live in Australia, not England, so I’ve never got lost in Milton Keynes or Northampton, but I have certainly been to the Adelaide branch of Ikea and experienced that sense of utter lostness that he so delightfully describes as sit-down-and-cry-and-wait-to-die lost. (Though, actually, I would call that particular kind of ‘lost’ an Ikea thing rather than a getting lost thing. Just saying … )

Dune’s counterpane:
How can you ever feel lost when these are the things you see along your way?

I don’t just get lost physically, either. I frequently feel lost in a metaphorical sense, too. I admire anyone who seems to know (or who feels as though they know) where they are going in life. I don’t. I never have. The older I get, the more strongly I become aware of my inner sense of lostness.

Often, this innate sense of lostness feels like a burden. But not always. Because the thing about setting off towards one place and ending up somewhere else entirely, somewhere you hadn’t planned on and don’t recognise at all, is that you get the chance to explore.

Lizzie the garden cat:
A lost cat, but also a found one.

I’m talking metaphorically here again, of course. But the older I get, the more strongly I also come to understand the importance of being willing to explore, willing to wander, willing to wonder. And sometimes, in hopeful moments, I see many years of exploring and wandering and wondering ahead of me.

I like that thought.

Lately I’ve been reading …

As I write this, I’m between my first and second [Covid] shots. I miss everyone I know and don’t know. Yet I’ve caught myself fearing that things will go back to normal too soon, and I won’t be ready: Elissa Gabbert in an essay on Covid and loneliness in all its contrariness.

[Benji the blue heeler]’s gaze is polite but frank. It is the look of someone utterly at ease in his own fur, confident that wherever he goes, everyone will be thrilled to see him: Madeleine Aggeler in a light-hearted look at why canines are the latest celebrities.

That dark ocean

June 4, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the sea, the sky, Winter, work, writingTagged despair, life, mental health, Winter1 Comment

Other people’s words about … rescue

A look of doubt came across my mother’s face. It was all there in her expression. The knowledge that a person can become lost in their life, how you might swim in the waters and reach for the lifebuoys but never be rescued, might drown out there in the dark ocean of your choices.

From ‘The Inland Sea’
by Madeleine Watts

When I was a young woman receiving treatment for my eating disorder, I used to agonise over every decision I made, whether the decision was a tiny one (like what percentage of fat the yoghurt I ate should contain) or whether the decision was a life-affecting one (like what career path I should follow, or whether I should follow a career path at all). For a year or so I saw a community mental health nurse who would say to me over and over, whenever I ruminated over my decision-making processes, ‘Rebecca, there are no wrong or right decisions, no good or bad choices. There are just better ones.’

At the time, I found this woman’s words comforting. Certainly, her counsel helped me to dither less — and dithering less, for someone who had spent all her life dithering and equivocating and stalling, could only be a good thing.

Path to the horizon.

But now that I am an older woman, I wince slightly when I remember the words of that community nurse. First, like the mother of Madeleine Watts’s narrator in the passage I’ve quoted above, I am only too aware that the decisions we make in our lives can lead us down paths with destinations that are not at all what we thought they would be when we set out on them. And sometimes those paths we follow are paths with no return — paths we can only keep on walking down, no matter how lost we may feel while we walk down them.

Path through the clouds. (Look closely!)

Second, I’m even more aware that the concept of choice itself may be illusory. For a variety of reasons, those of us living in Western societies are sold the idea that we can choose how to lead our lives, choose the outcomes that lie ahead of us.* But the older I become — the older I am lucky enough to become, I should say — the more I find myself acknowledging that there are many things over which we have no control at all. You can make as many decisions and choices as deliberately or spontaneously as you like, but life often happens anyway — in its own way.

I’m conscious of talking in clichés here. Still, it’s clear to me, at the ripe old age of fifty-one, that in the end the most important decisions we make in our lives are not about what we will do but about how we will choose to respond to the cards that life has dealt us.

* I use the word ‘sold’ deliberately.

Lately I’ve been reading …

CBT teaches us that we need to spend time on our thoughts and beliefs in order to challenge them and transform them into more realistic or compassionate versions. When I was introduced to metacognitive therapy, in which the focus is on simply letting go of your thoughts (Wells jokingly calls it ‘lazy therapy’), it radically changed my understanding of mental illnesses: Pia Callesen, on an alternative to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) that sounds to me a lot like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — which, in my book, isn’t at all a bad thing.

My main problem, it seemed, was that I’d invested too much of my identity into what I thought a writing career should look like: Joy Lanzendorfer on how she managed to give up an illusory sense of control over her career as a writer (a topic that is coincidentally particularly relevant to my post today).

We think of fitness as an expensive endeavor both in terms of money and time: Allison of Sweat Sweetly blog on the financial case for fitness.

Chasing clouds

May 20, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, coronavirus, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, Other people's words about ..., out & about, Paths, reading, resilience, rituals, Running, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, the sea, the sky, What I love about ..., What I talk about when I talk about runningTagged COVID-19, despair, gratitude, mental health, running, solace3 Comments

Other people’s words about … running

Once he warmed up, once the tension was gone, once the sweat had properly broken and his breathing was rhythmically heavy and every twinge of stiffness and pain from previous workouts had been obliterated by adrenaline and endorphins, when all of that had happened, there was almost nowhere on earth he’d rather be, even on up-and-down back roads with no shoulder or, as now, on the old railroad path too crowded with entitled cyclists or groups of power-walking mums in their pastel tops and self-crimped hair.

For forty-five minutes, or an hour, or an hour and a half, the world was his, and he was alone in it. Blissfully, wonderfully, almost sacredly alone.

From ‘Release’
by Patrick Ness

One of the things I think I most love about running is that the act itself is so full of mysterious contradictions. For example, it’s hard work, and yet I look forward to it as a luxurious treat, in much the same way I look forward to eating an oversized piece of decadent chocolate cake. Similarly, when I’m running I feel as though I’m moving purposefully forward, following a path to something new. And yet it’s obvious that, unless your plan when you set out is to run away and never return, any run is circular, ending right back where it began.

Even the sense that I am on my own when I run — blissfully, wonderfully, almost sacredly alone, as Patrick Ness puts it in the excerpt above — is unreliable. I am never alone when I run. I run on roads, on shared paths, on trails, on beaches. There are always others inhabiting the space with me, running or walking or cycling or just sitting on a bench enjoying the view (like the views you see in the photographs I took for this post). Running, even for a lone runner like me, is an entirely communal activity.

Another contradiction: sometimes, when I feel unwell — headachey, perhaps, or queasy or tired or sleep-deprived — I know that from the moment I step outside those symptoms will leave me for the duration of my run. Probably, I’ll feel unwell again afterwards; running isn’t ever, in my experience, a cure. But for those fifteen or thirty or forty-five minutes when my feet are drumming the ground in the old, familiar rhythm, I know I’ll be symptom-free.

I have no explanation for this. It’s just part and parcel of this beloved thing I know as running.

Maybe that’s why running appeals to so many different kinds of people — because the concept itself, what it involves, what it means, is so flexible, so all-encompassing. Some of us run to lose weight; some of us run to get fit; some of us run to break records; some of us run to find joy. Whatever the reason, those of us who are physically lucky enough to be able to consider running for the long term, in whatever fashion we can manage, have one thing in common.

We know it makes us feel like a better version of ourselves.

Lately I’ve been reading …

‘I don’t feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body,’ Jess tells a butch buddy, before her transition. ‘I just feel trapped’: Eliza Koestelanetz Schrader, on embracing butch in a post-pandemic world.

During the pandemic I have had less and less of a body, and my physical life has increasingly taken place in my head: Marie Mutsuki Mockett, on learning to reinhabit her body after her mother’s illness and death.

‘I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability. I’ll just have to work from a background of these’ (John Steinbeck): Stacey Swann, on taking encouragement from sharing her ‘writerly self-doubt’, ‘whiny pessimism and overwrought fears’ with a great writer.

Perspective

May 14, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, Autumn, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, nature, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, the beach, workTagged despair, mental healthLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … the way we look at things

In the sky [above the garden] a plane glints, tiny as a metal cracker toy, and draws a roar reduced to a whisper after it, as it follows the flight path over Bexford Hill towards distant Heathrow. There’s always a plane up there if you look, near or far, visible or only betrayed by a line of vapour, but always moving westwards … It’s as if the aeroplanes were part of the mechanism of the garden; a necessary part. As if this tidy patch of lawn surrounded by its fence, with its brilliant blossoms too many to count and its coiled yellow hose, together formed the bottom half of a machine of bliss, which required for its complete working the dome of sky above, and for the furthest component of its clockwork the timekeeping planes on their celestial track. Patiently they tick from east to west. Or perhaps they are joined to the sky, and it is the sky that is moving, a blue sphere studded with occasional silver that cranks around, and around, and around.

From ‘Light Perpetual’
by Francis Spufford

I love the way Francis Spufford, in the passage above, turns on its head the way we usually look at a place that is deeply familiar to us to create a whole new way of looking at it.

Sometimes maybe that’s all we need, right? A new perspective.

One day this week: A blue world.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been busy editing and working and making, meanwhile, small decisions about the way I plan to work from now on. I say they were small decisions and they were, really, but in some ways — the best ways — they have transformed the way I feel about how I live my daily life.

Over the years I’ve read a great deal about the benefits of cognitive behavioural therapy, which in essence is a therapy that aims to help a person change the way they think so that they can overcome their own particular mental obstacles.

Another day the same week: A grey world.

But I’ve never found much resonance in cognitive therapy. For me, it’s less about changing the way I think about things than it is about changing the way I see things.

Semantics, you think? Maybe. But it works for me.

Lately I’ve been reading …

I thought, but what if you just keep going? What if it doesn’t end? And it doesn’t. Vulnerability never ends: Madeleine Watts in a wonderful conversation that ranges over topics as diverse as climate change and the difficulties of writing an anti-coming-of-age novel and the problems of writing about being a woman.

Memoir writers have often been seen as baring too much, and as trafficking in their hurt: Katherine Angel on women who write about their pain.

How you receive the world

February 18, 2021Posted in a thought, anxiety, blogging, books, depression, favourite quotes, gratitude, health, hope, Lately I've been reading about, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., Paths, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying true, summer, the sky, work, writingTagged climate change, conversation, despair1 Comment

Other people’s words about … being vulnerable

But still she couldn’t sleep. The window was open and bare. The curtain had fallen down and no-one had bothered to put it back up because it always fell down again when you tried to pull it across. Ada was afraid that something bad was in the garden. The trees creaked. The night swam through the window and came into the room like a river.

From ‘The Last Summer of Ada Bloom’
by Martine Murray

Sometimes things are not as they seem. Sometimes the world outside seems dark and threatening, as Ada perceives it to be in Martine Murray’s gorgeous words quoted above — even when it is not.

In my last blog post, I wrote about some bad feedback that I thought I’d been given about a project I’ve been working on for a very long time. It turns out that that feedback wasn’t what it seemed at first to me, and that I’d been wrong in my interpretation of it. It turns out that there is hope for that project, after all.

Sometimes it depends on how you look at things, and on how you receive the world.

How you look at it: Darkness or light?

The project I was referring to was one I’d worked on for a long time, although over the years my commitment to it had wavered and waxed and waned. Sometimes I’d tried to run away from it, but every time I did, I would find myself returning to it, unable to abandon it until I knew that I had seen it through, no matter what the outcome would be. Towards the end I lost all sense of joy in my work on that project. It became a self-imposed duty, something I had to do regardless of the outcome, regardless of how I myself felt about it, regardless of how much time or energy or wellbeing it demanded of me. That’s why, when I thought that the feedback I’d received on it implied that I might have to do some more work in order to get it across the line, I wrote: And I do not (yet) know if I have the energy or the moral courage to do that work. I truly do not know.

In the days after I received that feedback, as I tried to work through my response, a kind friend asked me if I had ever listened to Brene Brown’s TED talk on the power of vulnerability. I had heard of Brene Brown but I had never listened to her talk, nor I had I ever read any of her material. Without knowing anything about her, I had written her off as some kind of New Age guru or self-help profiteer. But I respect this friend a great deal, and in addition I was feeling so vulnerable that I figured listening to someone else talk about vulnerability might not be such a bad thing. So I sat down and listened to the talk, and within the first two minutes I found myself weeping.

Have you listened to it? If you haven’t, I can only recommend that you do. It is a humble speech, filled with common sense and humorous insight. It is a talk about how we long to connect with each other, and how important it is for us not to be afraid to connect, and what it takes to do so. For me, listening to Brown was a lightning moment. I wish a lot of things, but in relation to this project one of the things I most wish is that I had reached out earlier while I was working on it. I wish I had been unafraid to ask for feedback or advice right back in the early stages. I wish I had been willing to say to someone: This is what I’m working on, and it’s not working, and I don’t know why.

I didn’t, because I was seeking perfection. I didn’t, because I felt too vulnerable. But there is no such thing as perfection. And sometimes you have to be willing to feel vulnerable to move on.

This is Brene Brown’s TED talk, if you want to listen to it.

How you look at it: cute or wild?

In the aftermath of all of this, I feel exhausted and fragile. I still don’t know what will happen now that my project is out in the world (although I promise that I’ll tell you when I find out). At the same time, I feel as though I’ve learned something that I needed to know — not just about that project, but about myself. That’s another reason that it’s important to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. It’s the only way we can learn.

Lately I’ve been reading …

But as I wrote, the fires burned on: Australian writer Robbie Arnott on last year’s apocalyptic bushfires, climate change and species extinction.
But if justice failed, democratic self-preservation is working: David Frum on why, even though Donald Trump was acquitted of his impeachment, there is still hope for American democracy.