Bad Trip, Man

Recently we have been wrestling with one of those ‘nice problems to have,’ which is the verbal equivalent of getting out a tiny violin and sawing away while someone tries to tell you what a chore it was to have to go out for dinner five nights last week.

I am trying something new though. Much like I’m trying not to turn every tragedy I experience into a laugh riot, I’m also trying not to minimise every problem or anxiety I feel into a ‘Gee, I’m so lucky I feel huge anxiety about this.’ These are the emotional Mexican finger traps I so often end up ensnared in and it is not healthy. Trying to feel happy about something that truthfully makes me feel dizzy with stress is a sure fire way to short circuit my brain and leave me feeling powerless. Sometimes these oxymoronic feelings can’t be avoided. A big one for me is terror alongside glacial boredom. This always happens when I am faced with some medical fuckery or other and I almost always have to just endure it, but there’s no need to start signing up for that kind of thing on the daily, just because I’m too British to acknowledge that knowing which spoon to choose at a dinner party brings me out in a sweat.

The big thing that we are intermittently wrestling with is that our life on this boat is finite for all kinds of reasons. Even though we own the boat, mooring fees in London are insane. If they go up as much next year as they did this year, it will be on a par with renting a house while we live in another house, which makes no sense. Oscar is eighteen in a month. He will go to university next year and has already made it clear that even though he wants to stay in London, he wants to move out (understandably). That’s an added cost to London life that poses lots of gnarly financial questions for us. Fiscal responsibility - two words that strike dread into my heart.

Boats also depreciate like cars. If we sell next year, we won’t have to have the boat taken to dry dock for an MOT and we will still recoup a fair bit of what we spent. We love living on the boat, but we bought it as a practical solution to a problem that, as of next year, will no longer exist. We will be a couple living alone for the first time. When Jason took me in, I brought the girls with me. We came as a unit and were a family from day one. Now though, we have to think about what we would like to do, because we can do that, whatever that is. It’s a singularly unmooring experience.

We have been prodding at the issue for some time now, kicking options around. Every time we think we are closer, something happens to widen the frame and there are more discussions. Jason is good with this. I am not. I am terrified of most things and the way I get through them is to fixate on what scares me most, charge towards it like a berserker and shoulder my way through it as quickly as possible. It’s got me this far, not always wisely or well, but alive. I find it really stressful to relax into things and feel my way forward. Even though it is almost always entirely the best way to do this stuff.

What we have learned though is to check up on the dreams we once had. Bitter experience has taught me that even though I was pretty sure I was going to grow up and be married to George Michael by the time I was twenty one, the universe had other plans. Also, old dreams have a habit of becoming a bit nightmarish if you realise them forty years later than when you first had them and haven’t bothered to update your records since. Constant testing is required.

Once, a few years ago, we had a vague idea that we might like to go off to Scotland and buy a smallholding near the sea. We would keep bees and plant trees and walk by the shore every day with some kind of dog. We recently watched a film about rewilding and got very enthusiastic about it all over again. I imagined myself as the female Chris Packham, getting up close and personal with lichen and knowing the name of more than five birds. We talked about it and decided with family stuff as it is, Scotland was too far, but maybe Wales would be good. We looked at properties on Right Move and decided we would have an anniversary weekend away in mid Wales, and see what we thought.

We booked an idyllic cottage up in the hills behind Aberystwyth. Jason took an extra day off work, so we could properly relax. I know the area well and we planned a couple of lovely days going up towards Snowdonia one day and over towards Cardigan the next. We were excited.

Jason’s work meant that we didn’t set off until half three on Friday, when traffic was at its gnarliest. Also Wales is a fucking long way from London. Six hours later we arrived. The last hour of our journey was across the hills with only a handful of houses lighting the darkness. The road dropped to a ravine on one side, was only wide enough for one car and was festooned with sheep. When we rounded a hairpin bend in the blackness to find a sheep asleep in the middle of the road, I may have screamed. Thankfully there was nobody around to hear it. The only other sound was the constant dripping of the rain, running in rivulets down the lanes and plocking from the trees.

We headed down into a valley where the lanes got thinner and thinner and the hedges got higher. Turning off the metalled road we proceeded down a farm track which forked deeper into the valley until a mile down a twisting dirt path we found the cottage. It looked beautiful. A converted mill, cut into the side of the hill with the mill race running by in the darkness, it twinkled with welcoming fairy lights and a wholesome Instagram vibe.

The problems began when we stepped inside. It smelled damp. Properly, old building, in it for the long haul, damp. The house was beautiful. Lots of old beams, thick, whitewashed walls, beautiful old furniture, roll top bath. If you had a tick list of all the things you would expect, they were there in spades. Eggs from the owner’s chickens, wild flowers artfully arranged on the dining room table. A bookshelf full of interesting books, vintage china. Real coffee. Tick. Tick. Tickety. Tick.

On paper I loved it. In reality I was beginning to feel super stressed. Everything I touched had that film of sticky dampness to it. All the soft furnishings were clammy. As I sat on the chairs they simply became warm and moist. One of the words that strikes horror into my heart. I wasn’t loving it in real life. In real life I was beginning to feel like I’d walked into the living embodiment of a Mexican finger trap. Because what could I say? We had travelled all this way. Jason had done a full day’s work and driven for six hours to get here. It had cost money. He had taken a day off work so we could properly relax.

I did the thing I do in these situations. I started to rationalise it all. I did the AA tick list in my head. Was I hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired? I was definitely tired and although I had eaten, it was weird food at at weird time because motorway services etc and I am never great if I am not fed wisely and well. I said in a too bright voice: ‘It’s not too bad. I’m sure I’ll feel a lot better about it in the morning.’ We went to bed shortly after that and that’s when I started to unravel.

We had taken our own pillows, because that’s what civilised middle aged people with neck situations do. I whipped the house pillows off the bed and dislodged two, huge spiders. I tried to be calm about this because I’m not five anymore, but it took a lot. Then, when I climbed into bed (after checking for more spiders), I began to lose it. The sheets were wet with damp. Cold and clammy and sticking to my skin. There have been a few times in my life where I have had to live in damp houses. Some of those times things were more than a little bleak and mentally challenging for me. Because I haven’t had to live in a damp house for many, many years, it never occurred to me that the feeling of being encased in wet sheets might be a massive trigger to a lot of old, dark, bad things in my mind, but it turns out they were.

I laid in the dark, trying not to have a panic attack, or if I did, to do it very quietly while Jason, who can fall asleep in ten seconds on the head of a pin, snored beside me. I realised at one point that I was curled up in the foetal position and that I was desperately trying not to move, something I did a lot as a child plagued by night terrors. I really didn’t want my skin to touch any more of the fleshy sheets because it was making me want to cry. Eventually, at some godforsaken hour I must have fallen asleep. I can’t say I woke up rested. I woke up feeling like I was made of glass and that one false move from me or anyone else would shatter me into a thousand bits.

When I went into the bathroom, my medication boxes had stuck to the shelf because everything was so wet. I sat on the loo, next to the crinkly toilet paper corrugating on the roll and looked at the vintage paintings on the wall, edges curling with damp and doom. I felt like I was living in a nightmare version of Jeremy Fisher’s house. If I had gone outside and found a giant pike eating one of my galoshes, I would not have been at all surprised.

I staggered to the kitchen where Jason greeted me with the news that the fridge was broken and the milk had gone off during the night. I made black coffee and perched on a wooden chair, fighting to remain calm. In my mind I had decided that I mustn’t explain how I felt or give into it, because I would ruin things for everyone else, i.e Jason, but clearly all the ghosts of the people I have previously ruined things for by having big, inexplicable feelings and making everyone feel awkward.

Jason, who knows me, sometimes better than I know myself, said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I said: ‘I could stay here.’ He said: ‘No. Tell me what you really want to do.’ At which point I burst into tears and he said: ‘Come one. Let’s go.’ And that’s why we have been together for twenty years. He makes the hardest things so easy to do and he doesn’t get mad about them.

As we were packing the car, the owner came out from her house to say hello and ask what we were doing. Jason took the rap and told her that the damp had given him asthma. She was lovely and apologetic and pointed out that, old, stone mill houses do get damp and there wasn’t anything she could do, but would we take some eggs from her chickens, which we did.

We went down into Aberystwyth where we had a cracking breakfast from Little Devil’s Cafe, which turned out to be the highlight of the trip. I love anywhere that serves deep fried halloumi for breakfast. Despite a good meal and the knowledge that we didn’t have to go back to Jeremy Fisher’s house, I was still feeling terrible. The damp trigger had done a weird number on me and I was by turns, completely numb and in floods of tears. We drove about a bit, taking a gorgeous walk along Tresaith beach and watching lunatics swimming in the waves, hoping that things might improve, but I was far away and really hurting. In the end we cut our losses and came home to the warm, welcoming boat and talked everything through.

We decided to stop calling it an anniversary trip. We would call it a research trip. We still have an anniversary trip to take and it will be very different, i.e. nice.

On our research trip I learned a lot. I learned that I’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about the next time I have therapy. I also learned that as a grown up, I can talk about how I feel and what I want and not everything will be ruined and not everyone will automatically hate me for being weird and mental. I learned that I do not have to constantly downgrade my own feelings or herd them like sheep into safe spaces where I just shut the gate on them and don’t revisit them until something triggers the ever living fuck out of me. I learned, yet again, that my feelings are just my feelings and that it isn’t bad to have them. It’s bad to lie to myself about them and put myself in a double bind where I can’t do anything about them.

We also learned a few things. I was inspired to write this post after reading

Sarah Knight

latest post on the power of negative thinking. Sometimes it’s good to move away from the things you don’t want. Sometimes it’s the very best thing you can do. We learned that we do not want to live in Wales. We learned that we do not want to live in the country. We learned that we do not want to live in an old house full of spiders and olde world charm. We learned that a dry house is paramount and that much like a Gremlin, it is not a good idea to get me too wet.