Grouching Towards Bethlehem

Derek here, going strongly into January the way she means to continue.

I sat down to write my first substack of the year numerous times this week and then stopped myself. My prevailing mood has been grouchy with a light dusting of pure irritability. If I were not a woman who eschewed gynaecology with a firm hand in favour of ongoing desiccation I would say my period was due. I am at those levels of dissatisfaction.

My porridge is too hot. My porridge is too cold. I don’t know why I have to cook my own porridge. I have always hated porridge. What do you mean, we could go out for breakfast? Don’t be nice to me. How very dare you?

I was waiting for it to pass before I wrote something wise and uplifting, but that didn’t happen, so please accept this basket of prickly pear instead.

Change is afoot. Although this is undoubtedly a good thing and makes a nice change from the onslaught of terrible things that have dogged me over the past five years, it is actually quite daunting. I re-posted a note this week where a therapist had said to a client something along the lines of; ‘it’s not our job to teach you how to manage trauma, you can do that. It’s our job to teach you how to accept joy.’ I felt that. I excel at triage, and managing one catastrophe after another. I am far less confident when things are going well. I keep waiting for the catch.

And the boom.

I worry. I worry about everything. I worry that all this good change is a Trojan horse in which ride all the fears and fuck ups and things that previously lived in the woodshed but have decided to come on a nice trip out instead. That might be true, but two years of breaking down and growing up are nearly done, and whether I like it or not, 2025 is all big shifts.

It has been an excellent mother to me, this boat. It has lifted me up when I couldn’t lift myself. It has given me a place of quiet and safety where I could begin to unpack some of the heavier parcels I have been carrying around since the dawn of time. It has taught me a lot of things. It has, I am sure, saved my life. Now though, it’s time to live it.

Last week I had a Zoom call with some friends to welcome in the New Year. One of the things we talked about was whether we had a word for the year to come. You know the drill. Some kind of word loaded with magical intention. My inner cynic, who is Les Dawson in drag, sniffed and shifted her bosom, because that’s all nonsense when you could just put another bloody vest on and get on with it.

I listened to everyone else, who I love and trust and who do frankly marvellous things in life and I thought: ‘Shut the fuck up, Les Dawson. You could learn something here.’ I grudgingly allowed the idea that I might have a magical word for 2025 and it could be something other than cheese. Although I’m not knocking a year consisting of an endless conveyor belt of raclette, no matter what my sinuses think.

My word then, for 2025 is slow.

Historically I am a person who has gone for everything at warp speed. I find so much of life confusing, frightening or terrible, I learned that the best way to get through it was to put my head down and run. Sure, it would hurt, but it would be over quicker.

If I thought about things for too long I went into overwhelm and stopped dead in my tracks, which wasn’t helpful for a person who had so much to do. I coded this inertia as laziness. A lot of the time I was afraid that if I stopped, I would never do another thing, ever. Someone would just find my wasted body in a lay-by covered in leaves and that would be that.

What the last two years have taught me is how to let go of things that no longer serve me.

When we moved here, we had too much stuff. I had to go through everything we owned and let the majority of it go. As a person who loves things, that was hard. We hired a storage unit for everything we were not ready to part with and put the rest on the boat. Living here has meant that every new thing that I buy has had to be considered really carefully, and that has changed the way I think and feel about stuff at both a physical and emotional level.

I am not a minimalist. I type this sitting at a desk littered with things that I could 100% live without. The scented candle that smells of £40 going up in smoke before my eyes. The Swedish glass lion that I found at an antique fair and whose face told me he was lonely and needed a new home. The hag stones I keep collecting which render the world beyond visible, like seeing heaven through a colander.

But everything here is here by design rather than by accident or thoughtless acquisition. It is, for me, a space of creativity and one which reflects who I am in the things I consciously choose to keep. It has taken me a long, long time to get here and not feel that I am shameful, greedy, wasteful, frivolous and financially incontinent.

Learning to let go of actual things has also been vital in allowing me to let go of other, less concrete things; some friendships, some beliefs, my tight grip on mothering, Les Dawson. I didn’t have the room for these kind of changes before, my life was full of stuff. I created space and that allowed me to shift my perspective, to spread out, to take up room. It allowed me to use some of that space to grieve, because even when something is good, or necessary, it can still be sad.

It has taken me a long, long time to get here. Fifty-two years altogether. Two of those spent on this boat, riding the swells, learning to float, learning to let go, learning to accept that change can be a gorgeous thing, even when it’s scaring you half to death. Learning to slow the fuck down and think about what I’m doing and why. Re-learning it, over and over again.

Soon, I will be picking things up again. Some of those things are already here. Usually, by now I’d be running around, tiring myself out, pushing on the door that says pull for an entire afternoon because I'd be far too busy to actually look at what I’m doing. Far too busy to even question whether I wanted to go in that building in the first place. Thinking about how I could get out before I even went in.

Now I am grumpily doing something different. I’m not doing it with good grace or charm. I’m not doing it nicely. I’m doing it slowly and furiously. I’m on the verge of a tantrum most days. I’ve had dark thoughts about the woman on the bus playing her transistor radio as if she was at home in the kitchen. I’ve been livid that I can’t find any blood oranges when that is all I want to eat. I have been deeply annoyed by the fact that my husband borrowed the matches from my desk and then let them blow into the marina.

It’s fair to say I’m not a natural at this stuff, but I’m learning to sit with the discomfort. Although I think it’s fair to be annoyed about all of these things, with the possible exception of the oranges, the sitting rather than reacting has taught me to dissect the feeling more deeply. I know that my annoyance is disproportionate. I know that I have used the things I have allowed myself to get angry about to be a different type of Trojan horse, to siphon off some of the fury at the changes I am making and the changes that are coming. I have sat with that fury and realised it is not anger at all, it is fear.

I’m not sure what, if anything to do about that fear. What I do think is that whatever it is, I don’t have to do it now, even if I did once live with ‘feel the fear and do it anyway,’ as my mantra for everything. Maybe the answer is: ‘that is really frightening, perhaps you should think about eating a blood orange and having a good cry.’ I’m going to wait and see.