Retreat, retreat - just a treat actually

I have been on a writer’s retreat. I’m not sure whether retreat needs a capital R. It feels like something actively verby but simultaneously passively and solidly nouny. I just don’t know where I am with it as a word. What I do know is that it was perfect. I have literally no notes and I am the most notey person I know.

It is absolutely, hands down the best thing I have ever done for myself, and I include my hysterectomy in this, which has reigned supreme at the top of the Good for Me charts for years now.

I don’t really want to write too much about it, because it feels like something deeply and profoundly sacred that words will be a woefully inadequate vehicle for. When you figure that I am a woman who happily talked about her vagina to Jeremy Vine on national radio and who has an extraordinarily porous sense of privacy, you will know what a shift it has enacted in me. It has been a blessing and a gift in all kinds of ways.

What I am happy to share is that it has been a lesson in both trusting my instinct and in clearly articulating what I want. I was offered the opportunity to do this at a moment when I had both the time and the money to attend. I was immensely attracted to the idea of it and felt a strong, almost physical pull towards it. I wanted it and yet I prevaricated. I felt that wanting to do something was not enough of a reason to allow myself to do it. I felt like the only way I could say yes was if I could somehow produce a report with graphs showing how if I attended I would become fiscally attractive and turn into a female Gordon Gecko on my return.

Driven mad by the push me, pull you of conflicting desires and beliefs I went for a walk to process it. Firstly I realised that there are lots of situations where we need to go in blind in order to come out seeing. We do not know if we will love something, if something will sustain us or we will turn out to be good at something, if we never try or never give ourselves permission to have a go at it, even when all we have to go on is desire.

Then I thought about Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. In one essay, Walker talks about the lack of opportunity to explore even the possibility of living a rewarding creative life in the lives of black women. Banned from learning to read or write, these women were forced into an ignorance that kept them in slavery not just of body but of mind. She talks about the suffering of the women who came before us, that makes it vital for us to thrive as an act of political and creative freedom:

“We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own.”

What saves one of us, saves all of us.

Walker believes it is critical to live a creative, nourishing life however it appears, particularly when it has lain dormant by force in the women that went before us. She talks about how, for black women, their mothers carried the seeds of what their daughters could only bring to fruition.

“And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see; or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”

And it spoke to me. It reminded me of what my mother could not do and what I now take for granted and sometimes waste. It reminded me of my grandmother, a woman outside of her time who struggled with the life she was given and had a world war to thank for creating even the smallest possibility for change. It reminded me to not only count my blessings but accept my gifts and use them as I want.

It also led me to question where I got the idea that I didn't have the right to take the things I wanted. I heard the words:'because it would be greedy’. I dug about in this sentence and came up with the three, underlying, interconnected beliefs. One was that if I had what I wanted I would be spoiled in every sense of the word. Allied to it was that if I took what I wanted I wouldn’t be able to stop, and I would make myself fat. Finally, if I took what I wanted, I would be taking it from someone else who deserved it more than me, and everyone except Donald Trump and Boris Johnson deserved it more than me. To stop myself tipping into this gross excess, I had decided that I could only have things I could prove that were good for me, or after everyone else had finished, or I could make do with the things nobody else wanted, including me. It was a very efficient way of keeping myself small and sabotaging any meaningful growth.

For a long time I physically starved myself within socially acceptable guidelines. I did it in a misguided attempt to fit in with the world. When I still didn’t feel that I fit, I decided that I probably needed to make myself smaller. The real me had other ideas and routinely went about the work of exceeding the limits I set for myself in all kinds of ways. Hence the porousness and the tendency to inconveniently leak all over things. Last year I stopped policing my physical presence, which has been a very good thing. Until I started thinking about why I wasn’t allowing myself to go on retreat, I hadn’t realised that I had been policing other kinds of borders too.

I accepted the invitation. It felt really frightening until it didn’t and then, being there with those women felt like the most natural and beautiful thing in the world. I experienced a true communion of all the women I have ever been, amongst all the women who got me here, all the women there with me and all the women I will walk forward with in future. It was magical, it was creative and it was a time of great care and great healing. I was fed and nourished in a way that reminded me to trust that I know what I want and need and it is always exactly enough.