Marsh Thoughts

With the exception of one, extremely long day spent in London, I have been living in my house for an entire week now. It feels like a radical act, and I have been taking it as slowly as time and tide allow, making room for all my thoughts and feelings. I am practicing sitting with them rather than attempting to tidy them up or move away from them as fast as possible.

Now that I am ensconced, I have more time for work that pays the bills, so if anyone is interested in swimming in the waters of tarot reading, you can book an appointment with me here.

What I have noticed most about this week is the desire to be still. There is a whole new world out there to explore but I have barely set foot outside, except to do errands. Jason went off to a gig at Finsbury Park yesterday and was spending the night with Oscar, so I had a whole day to myself. I had thought I might go for a walk, but when it came down to it I didn’t want to. I wasn’t tired. I just really wanted to be here and present for what that meant.

I’ve noticed that in the beats between failing to learn how to plaster walls and sanding down skirting boards, I gravitate towards the back of the house, where I sit on the door step and let the vastness of the marsh unfurl before me. The power lines march to the lip of the horizon, threaded through by busy clusters of Oyster Catchers, which sound like the perpetual squeak of a dog toy. In the day, a lone dredger pulls up marsh innards, creating a lake I can see out of my landing window. It acts as a giant mirror to the weather above. As above, so below.

Like the first time I visited the desert in Arizona, I am struck by how colourful the landscape is when you take the time to really look at it. You have to work at it. It’s not a place that declares its beauty. It’s subtle and shifting, like the narrow, angular foxes who live here, who you see outlined and sharply beautiful and then ten seconds later they’re gone, merging into the pebbles and grasses with a flick of their stringy tails. This beauty can be elusive.

Flashes of scarlet poppies punctuate the dusty ochres and rusty greens of the marsh. The pink of some ubiquitous plant that grows like fury amongst the hills of shingle clamours to be looked at. While the skinny strips of some rangy purple plant that peeps between the fanning grasses, frothing cow parsley and bronzey fennel tops is shyly vibrant. Out in the dunes, something gaudily YELLOW shouts, but there’s none of that brashness back here. The gorgeous bruised sage of some kind of sea cabbage is my favourite, its leaves look like a rococo depiction of a dusty brain. Once you get your eye in there is a wealth of colour and shape to reward you if you stay still long enough.

During the day, butterflies dance among these riches and dragonflies dart above the pond, sweeping by in their electric blue, like Eighties eyeliner with wings. As the sun sets, a family of wood pigeons so fat they seem unlikely to be able to fly come to coo and wobble about on the garden fence like sentient Weebles. Magpies skirmish along the ridge of the roof, enacting their family squabbles for my entertainment. With all this and the soughing of the perpetual wind calling new notes for me to hear, there is plenty to keep me busy.

And the sky, always the sky painting itself in countless shades throughout the day, rolling out its light show just for me. It shows me how big this space is and gives me permission to take up the room I need.

I was thinking about whether this desire for stillness was because of age, and to a certain extent I think the answer to that is yes, but just not in the way that people generally think. It’s not that I’m so knackered I can’t, although I am knackered a lot of the time but that’s for entirely different reasons. It’s that age has radically changed me and changed my relationship with what constantly moving means. I’m old enough and possibly wise enough now to start asking questions about the difference between doing and being, and where I fall on that spectrum. Moving is just a type of doing after all, and sometimes stopping helps me see that more clearly.

If you read this post about my first introduction to seeing and feeling the world differently, you will know that I learned pretty early on in my life that it would probably be better for me to disconnect from my true self and build a more socially acceptable version of me if I wanted to survive. I did this for various reasons and for decades of my life.

At times, the gap between me and projected me would get so wide and holding the acceptable me up to the light would get so heavy, that I would fall into the gap between the two mes and break down. It was a cycle of boom and bust, and it was often difficult for me to tell which was boom and which was bust. I was told that I should want what everyone else wanted, that the good stuff was ‘out there,’ but the more I went towards it, the worse I felt. When I was just myself, there seemed to be no comfortable place for me to rest, so the only option was to be in constant motion between the two until I dropped.

Part of this cycle was about thinness. It was about being physically thin but more vitally of spreading myself emotionally and socially thin to try and paper over the gaps of my strangeness and also to chase that bullshit that modern women are told, that we can have everything. Everything always seemed to be disappearing over the next horizon line. I mostly just wanted something, and that seemed fairly elusive. The truth is, we can’t and now I wonder why should we want to? I notice that men do not get told this and the ones that look like they have everything just have staff.

This thinness becomes problematic when, like me, you are holding up a version of yourself to society that is increasingly weighted with responsibility and activity that is further and further away from your comfort zone and/or your true self. The fault lines set in, arms start trembling and things drop. The less stable and more stretched the you that is anchoring everything, the more things start to break down. If, like me, you felt obliged to keep going, you then have to factor in all the scurrying back and forth repairing the cracks on top of all the smiling in tights you have committed to. People used to congratulate me on how physically thin I was considering how much I ate. What they didn’t factor in was the toll on my body that being in constant emotional and energetic movement 24/7 took. That’s a lot of calories expended to make things look ‘easy’ and appear ‘normal.’

By the time I arrived at the boat I was vapour held together by exposed nerve endings. I could be no thinner. There was no more stretch. What I could be was smaller. The world of the boat was of necessity small and confining. A lot of jobs and responsibilities fell away and in the space left behind, I shrank my world down to something I could reach without falling.

In that space I did a lot of therapy. I was lucky enough to reach a crossroads where I knew that my life had become unmanageable and I was able to take steps to change that. I no longer wanted to be thin. I no longer wanted to be so dissociated from how I really felt about the world that feelings would arrive in flocks, months after a traumatic event which I would be praised for handling so calmly. I wasn’t calm. I was just disconnected and I knew that even though life going forward would be messier if I reconnected myself, it would also be healthier and more crucially, real. I wanted to be myself, truly myself for the first time in my adult life. I wanted to understand who I was and make friends with who I am.

I learned a lot of surprising things about myself in that time. I learned how much I like solitude. I learned how uninterested I am in making myself nice or palatable for other people. I learned how careful I have to be to protect my boundaries, which were the thinnest things of all about me. I learned how little I care about what the world thinks of me or what it expects me to do. I learned to stop fighting with strangers I wouldn’t invite through my front door. I learned to stop justifying myself. I learned to say no when I meant it. I learned to stop explaining why it was ok for me to say no, even if I had said yes a thousand times before.

I did not learn these things neatly. I do not always apply them successfully, but I am getting better at all of it and trying to give myself grace where I fuck up. I was genuinely shocked at how little I wanted the life I had left behind back.

I learned to be (mostly) ok with taking up more physical space in the world. I got rid of the scales. I purged clothes I hoped I might get back into. I started work on accepting the physical reality of myself, which is hard and ongoing for all kinds of reasons, but which to me is absolutely worth it. I don’t love my body, but I have at least moved back into it from the hungry cloud I once allowed myself to exist on. Like this house, I am learning to be still in it before I start moving again.

Moving back into a house has been a big part of my recovery. I rebirthed myself in the water and now I’m back on land. I’m living evolution, which is another big surprise. Towards the end of my time on the boat I realised I was getting too big for it. Where once it had contained me and the space for me to grow, now I was spilling out of it. I needed room, and now I have it. I don’t need room to build or extend myself again. I need room to unfurl, like the marsh in front of me.

I’m unfurling myself from that tightly packed bud that I’ve stopped from blooming into something and someone that has been patiently waiting for me for so long. She deserves my time and attention, and what she wants right now is to sit still and decide for herself when the right time to move is.

She feels right at home in this alien landscape. She fits into this strange desert where life goes on despite the salt and the sand and the hurtling wind. Despite scandals and weight loss drugs and the casual acceptance that this genocide is different than the old one we said would never happen again, she persists in liberation.

She finds beauty in otherness and it reminds her to honour the beauty in herself too, however it decides to bloom.