Jamifesto 2018

I'm way, way too late to the New Year's Resolutions Party, I know. But that's OK; these aren't new year's resolutions! This is my Jamifesto for 2018: a document stating my priorities for this year.

The arbitrary nature of the linear progression of time (and... all things) is something I think I've grumbled about here before, but 2018 feels pretty significant. In the summer it will be ten years since I left an unhappy, chaotic marriage (a good decision!) and entered (young, stupid, vulnerable) into what turned out to be a miserable, controlling relationship, which ended two years ago this May. Although this brought me to a city I am happy in, and led to me meeting lots of wonderful humans, I do look back with frustration at all that time lost. And it will also be three years in June since my lovely, stupid, genius idiot of a father died of a heart attack at 58. And two years in March since my mother's suicide. The years have looped round indifferently, while I've been sat with the pieces of my life scattered about me. It feels as though now is the time to put them back together.

I'm still grieving, of course. Still ill with a pain disorder and CPTSD. But that doesn't mean it isn't time to get unfucked.

So, I present the Jamifesto 2018. And if you're reading this, I hope that you achieve whatever it is that you want this year.

Jam XXX

Deleting mutuals-with-the-ex: jumbled thoughts on finally beginning the process.

I've made a decision. Or, rather, I made a decision. Months ago. And finally I'm ready to act on it. Almost.

I'm deleting the Facebook friends I have in common with my ex - our "mutuals" (a perfectly good adjective gruesomely nouned by the internet!).

That I am writing (and you are reading) this may seem unnecessary. Not so. I have realised recently how therapeutic I find the process of writing out my thoughts; forcing my brain to process them as I type can give me clarity and calm on stressful or distressing topics. And I'm posting it on this blog because it's true, and therefore I feel it deserves space. 

The fact that I am giving this process more than the seconds it would take to click-click-click unfriend them all may seem the epitome of millennial self-indulgence. So, why? Why does the allegiance of my friends list give me such pause? I have a pain disorder which is disabling in terms of its impact on my mobility and energy, and I'm currently experiencing a flare up of my mental health issues which are rooted in complex trauma. The combination of these means that I'm stuck in my bed or on my sofa a great deal of the time, which makes Facebook (the only social media I really use) something of a lifeline. It needs to feel safe. I write candidly on Facebook about what's happening in my little corner of the world: my health, my grief, my politics. But recently there's been a topic which I've avoided: my last relationship.

The relationship lasted almost eight years, and its confusing, messy end broke my heart at a time when I could ill afford it. I so desperately wanted him to change his mind. In the year and a half since then, my perspective has changed: I look back on what he called love, and I see emotional abuse. Through his quiet, reserved Nice Guy facade, I now see the man who controlled me, isolated me from my friends, and gaslit me. And I wonder how it could ever have felt like anything else.

I remember the words which he spat at me, in those awful weeks after we'd split up, when I was begging him to leave, but he wouldn't: "If I'd known how crazy you were, I would never have fallen in love with you!" And I remember how deeply those words cut me, how ashamed I'd felt. I wonder if he said that to his other "crazy ex girlfriends". I remember him talking about the mental health of his new girlfriend, and I wonder if he'll tell her that one day. I remember the allegation made by another "crazy" woman: that he fetishised and preyed upon women with mental illness. I remember him telling me about this, in the very early days, before we were a couple, and I was 23 years old, being spooled in. When I was the one on the other end of surreptitious online chats, kept hidden from the woman who shared his bed. I remember my certainty that it couldn't be true, and I remember that my certainty was based on his bumbling charm and nothing else. I remember the words of a friend after our break up became public: "he made you crazier than you would've been". I remember changing so much about myself, to please him. Minimising aspects of my personality that he didn't like, and slowly, slowly becoming so much less, just to be loved. I wonder how much his new girlfriend has changed already. Sometimes I wonder whether he ever recognised his behaviour as abusive, or whether he ever will.

I don't want to censor myself on my own Facebook, and I don't want to retain any connection to him. So, it's time to start deleting.

At first glance, these mutuals fall into three categories - for simplicity: his, mine, and ours. 

Those who are "his" begin simply enough: nobody related to him would believe my word over his. And I never expected to be able to maintain a relationship with any of them. I cried over that, and accepted it. And ditto, I suppose, his friends from school. This is harder. Among his oldest friends are people I came to genuinely adore. (Although we never saw enough of them - he didn't feel comfortable with them, he would complain.) No longer seeing their updates in my Facebook feed will be a loss, and I feel horrible about the idea of their disbelieving me, but realistically it is inevitable. Unless I want to continue to pretend that the relationship was A Good Thing That Sadly Ended (and I simply cannot, any longer) the only choice is to lose these people. They are kind and hilarious and talented, and I will miss them.

The friends who are primarily "mine", I obviously hope to keep. But if they don't want to delete my ex, what then? I suppose that if my explanations are not enough, then perhaps I have categorised them incorrectly...

And the friends who were "ours"? 

Having spent a lot of time reading and thinking about sexual violence, and reading and listening to the stories of those who have experienced rape, assault, and abuse, I came to a conclusion: I could only ever believe these people. Perhaps this is an example of my autistic tendency to think in a binary way, but I'm always, always going to be with Desmond Tutu: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."

I have a lot to lose here, but I cannot stay silent any longer. So I hope there are lots of Tutu fans out there.

Sui Caedere Vivus - Learning to Live While Wanting to be Dead

17 days ago, I wanted to be dead.

This is entirely unremarkable, in truth, as 19, 23, 37 days ago I also wanted to be dead. And in the days since, its lure has remained. But, 17 days ago, I filled a bag with drugs* and two bottles of rum and got in my car: finally, it was happening.

That I am writing these words demonstrates that my attempt was thwarted. The police were alerted; my car was spotted and followed, sirens blaring, lights flashing; when I refused to pull over (think psychologically distressed Penelope Pitstop) a “stinger” was hastily laid across the road to burst my tyres. After being interviewed by a police nurse in the back of a car**, I was detained in hospital for assessment, under the mental health act. Around 26 hours later, I was allowed to go home.

On a number of these 17 days, I have looked in the mirror, at a hopeless, tear stained wreck, and wondered whether the doctors made the right choice, in allowing me to leave. I flatter myself that it was my cleverness, my hyperlinguistic, austistic skills in passing for “normal” that got the paperwork signed in my favour. By the time the two doctors and the social worker were available to assess me, very late on Saturday night, I had had more than enough of windowless, CCTV’d captivity, with its melt in the mouth boiled vegetables, and unrippable, plasticky bed linen. So I knew not to repeat to them such gems as, “Why do humans make such a big deal about staying alive?” and, “If they’re worried I’ll kill myself today, it’s illogical to think I won’t just wait until after 28 days confinement”. I did my all to present as earnestly penitent and optimistic. And they (to my mind) bought it.

So, I’m at home. Have been for 15 days. But I’m still (in the words of my wonderful therapist) Not Very Well at the Moment. Officially I am under the care of the Crisis Team, but in reality there is no ongoing package of NHS care; I am seeing aforementioned wonderful (but sadly expensive) therapist twice a week, and I have the most fantastic friends, and a boyfriend whose love and support you would not believe. Keeping me alive is a group project. The general consensus is that, all things considered, wanting to be dead is understandable. I am tired, tired, tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally. I’ve been demanding too much from myself, and allowing others to, also. Illness, grief, complex childhood trauma – the mental health nurse lists my life, neatly bracketed – any of these things alone can push a person to the brink. I nod, and nod, and nod. This is not new news. I suggest that, considering how many times I’ve wanted to be dead, only putting it into practice once is a pretty good hit rate. The nurse laughs nervously, and continues his spiel.

What I do not do is describe to the nurse on my sofa how it feels to want to be dead: a bone-deep yearning, as if for a lost love, that I have carried silently over the past 18 months. Shortly after my mother’s suicide, overwhelmed with things to be done, and feeling entirely alone and deprived of love and touch, I sat on the riverbank in the darkness. It would take so little to make it all someone else’s problem. Since then, this feeling has ebbed and flowed, at times drying up entirely. Those days are glorious days. But it’s not a feeling I can tap into at will.

I cannot expect these feelings to simply go away. And I accept that sometimes I do truly love my life. (Even at the darkest, coldest times I love the people in it. But one cannot spin a will to live merely from other people.) It is for that iteration of myself, The Me Who Wants to Live, that I must keep myself alive. It may sound like the height of selfishness, but it is the model that is working for me. And as days and weeks pass, and I’m getting more and more of what I need (rest, mainly***) The Me Who Wants to Die will be here less, and The Me Who Wants to Live will hopefully return. Until then, I’m learning to live while wanting to be dead.

Let me know if you are, too.

*The joys of living with a pain disorder: copious quantities of amitriptyline, napropxen, codeine, diazepam, and citalopram in a kitchen cupboard. Not especially safe.

**When I commented that a car was far from an ideal setting for a three person conversation of such importance, and asked whether a horsebox couldn’t be commandeered for the purpose – well. As my boyfriend put it, “You’ve not met one of me before, have you?”

***I’ve been cutting out all of my responsibilities. I won’t be returning to my degree in a month’s time. My incredible ex husband has taken over primary parenting of our son. I’m learning to say “no” when I don’t have the energy to do something. As a friend who always has the right words puts it, I must “rest until I don’t need to rest any more”.

Good Grief

I remember, in the first couple of days after my father died, being very aware that everything felt different - as though I was experiencing consciousness in a new way. I remember thinking, "I should be writing all this down", but of course I was far too busy to record any of my thoughts at the time. And the surreal, unreal, hyper real feeling (the result of adrenaline keeping me going) subsided, and I missed my chance to accurately capture it. 

"Next time," I thought, with certainty, imagining grieving for some future loss, years away, "I'll write it all down." And then, nine months later, my mother died.

It felt different, for lots of reasons, but again reality was altered, and again there was no time to keep a record of it.

I regretted missing my chance to write about my grief; then I realised that I hadn't. I couldn't write about it in real time, but that didn't mean that writing wouldn't be useful. And it's not as though the grieving process was over - it takes years. I'd previously written a blog about sexual violence, and I'd been surprised by how much I benefitted from processing my experiences as I wrote about them. Even more surprisingly, other people got in touch to say that my blog had been helpful for them. So, it was decided: I would write a blog, some posts hidden, others visible, and maybe share it with a few close friends. 

But a blog needs a name. 

I knew that I hadn't handled my grief well, after my father died, which resulted in me falling apart entirely when I tried to "get back to normal" a few months later. I desperately wanted to avoid making the same mistakes again, and after my mother died I thought a lot about grieving well, without negative repercussions. Good grief, if you like.

And those words, "good grief", always make me think of my mother. She was a very religious woman, who swore very rarely, and possibly blasphemed never. So, neutral expressions of frustration, like "good grief", were well used! I occasionally hear myself (a very different, sweary, blasphemous woman) say, "Good grief!" in a voice not quite my own, and it always makes me think of her.

And, of course, of Charlie Brown. 

My parents met at grammar school, after my mother moved out of London, with her family, in her early teens. Because of an eccentric gender-based form system, the two of them only really got to know each other in the sixth form, where a mixed group of friends formed. The group scattered when they went to universities around the country, but the friends all kept in touch via letter. It was then, 200 miles apart, that my parents fell in love. And along with love letters, they sent each other Peanuts paperbacks, inscribed with in-jokes and promises. I grew up with these books, understanding - even as a child - that Charlie Brown had played a small role in the story of my family.

I know it's cheesy, but when I decided to write this blog, there really wasn't any other name it could have. So, Good Grief: a blog about trying to grieve well; a blog about who we were and are; a blog about this new chapter in the story of my family.

Him

(Content warning: rape)


I have lost a lot over the past year. My mother, my father, and him.

Regardless of their own experience, everyone seems to understand the enormity of the death of a parent: it is life changing; it is beyond words. 

But words are what we humans reach for, to comfort each other: "Too young!" people cry - they were in their late fifties - and, "Too close together!" - just nine months apart - and, "Too much for you to have to go through!". And, yes. They were, and it was, and it is. And then (as I smile stiffly, and hold back the tears) people tell me, unbidden, about how much they love their own parents, about how happy they are that their parents are healthy, and quite how incapable they are of imagining losing them. It is understood that this is a loss which I will take time to accept, to grieve for, and to move on from. 

But the end of a relationship? I do not feel that same generous understanding from those around me. Parents are irreplaceable, the logic seems to go, but partners are not. Give it time! And anyway, it's not as though he's dead. 

And no, he isn't. And I'm so glad. So glad that he gets to keep living his life - hopefully more happily and healthily than he has been. So glad that the world gets to keep him.

But that doesn't mean it's not a loss: the person he was to me is gone. Run away with the person I was to him?

He has been my best friend, my lover, and my family. For one quarter of my life, I have slept beside him. When we met, he was the brightest, most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had no idea the universe had produced something this wonderful. And we fell in love so fast and so hard. 

He used to kiss me on the chickenpox scar on my forehead, so gently but so intensely. And touch me on the nose with such tenderness. We would hold hands, squeezing tightly, fingers intertwined, and he would say, "I love the way we fit together." He would tell me I had perfectly ear-shaped ears, a perfectly nose-shaped nose. His was the truest, most unfailing love I had ever, ever known. 

But now it is gone, and we are caught up in the cruellest limbo. Living apart together. Waiting for the practicalities to catch up with reality, every day hoping I can bear more than I think.

But... when my phone beeps, my heart says his name. When I'm sad, I want to bury my face in him. When something is funny, I want him to laugh, too. I want to travel back in time to all those mundane little moments of quietly loving and being loved, to live through them again, to soak them up and keep them forever. 

Being in the same place as him is agony. Hearing his voice not saying "I love you". Watching his hands not holding mine. Wanting to press my face into his chest, and breathe him in, feeling safer than anywhere else in the world. But I can't, because the space he inhabits is no longer my home. 

On Tuesday, it would have been eight years. On Wednesday he moves out. 

And then I can fall apart entirely. And then start putting myself back together again. Without him. 

...

EDIT (21/07/2017)

It is now 13 and a half months since I wrote this post, and it is like reading someone else's words. The day after I wrote this, he and I were arguing. (I so desperately needed him to leave, as soon as possible, as his continued presence, and flaunting of his new relationship was unbearably painful, and making me lash out, criticising both him and the woman he was leaving me for - which he denied, but was proven almost immediately.) He was telling me, with vitriol in his voice, what a "nasty" person I was. Winded by this, and incredulous at his double standards, I said: "you raped me". Because he had. Years before. And then (as I lay, head turned away, sobbing silently) apologised, apologised, apologised. And I, in the middle of a spell of treacly, black depression, self worth already bruised and broken from the sexual violence in my chidlhood, silently accepted his apology, absorbed all my feelings about it into numbness, and never spoke of it. I literally never mentioned it. But I did not expect that he would forget it. But he did: raping me did not matter to him, because I did not matter to him. I can reach no other conclusion. 

So, as horrible as it felt that evening, to have his brutality laid bare, it helped. And from there I was able to look more closely at the ways in which he had controlled me, gaslit me, made me quieter and smaller and less. Realising precisely *what* I was losing (and what I stood to gain. Myself, for one) changed the grieving process, fundamentally. 

Today I am in love with someone who actually likes me. Who does not wish to change me. And whom I feel able to trust with my entire self. It is fucking glorious. 

Unlived Life

My mother died, of suicide, on the 18th March 2016. This post was written during the days before her funeral.

_____________

A week after my mother died, I read an article by the single, career-focused, forty-something daughter of a regretful housewife, exploring the generational ebb and flow of female priorities and choices. For these two women, the dichotomy was clear: family versus career - cultural expectations as they entered adulthood leading each woman down a different path. 

This is far from my own experience, but I am keenly aware that my life has not paralleled my mother's. She was the first in her family to go to university; I am studying for my BSc in my thirties. I was born - the first of four - to a pair of married, mortgaged 27 year olds; I gave birth to my only child in my chaotic teens. So, while I certainly found the article enjoyable and thought-provoking, it did not resonate with me in the same way it surely would have with many of my generation. 

What has stayed with me though, looping through my mind in the days since, are the words of Gloria Steinem (from this recording of Desert Island Discs), quoted by the author: “I suspect, like many women, I'm living the unlived life of my mother”. 

The unlived life of my mother. My mother's unlived life, left behind, unwanted. Not figuratively, but literally. The life that my mother elected, irreversibly, to cease to live. 

I find myself, now, drowning in my mother's unlived life. It hangs in the air of her home, syrup-thick, filling the space where she is not. I open the wardrobe of clothes she will never wear again, and more spills out, drenching me in spent possibilities and tears. I am cooking in her kitchen, sleeping in her bed. I am running her errands, fulfilling her responsibilities. Hers, not mine. Although inheritance and circumstance dictates that they now are. I open my eyes in the morning to her favourite photograph of my recently dead father. Am I crying her tears for him, or are they mine? 

The boundaries are blurring.

But can I live her life, and at the same time my own?