The Reassurance

Thom Gunn is saving my life

In my last year at university I did a course on the poetry of Thom Gunn and Sylvia Plath. I was obsessed by Plath. At that age, and for many years afterwards, her words were a lifeline. They showed me that someone else existed who felt like I did.

Plath’s voice gave me the language of suffering. It was the first time I had ever thought consciously about the fact that you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be. She gave me permission to accept that life was painful and that I didn’t have to know what to do about it. Sometimes it was alright just to feel things without resolution.

This stanza from The Moon and the Yew Tree is still a beautiful evocation of the darkness my mind inhabits:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

When I broke down, aged seventeen, I had a lot of pain I felt I had to ‘do’ something with. I have carried that pain in various iterations all my life since. Sometimes I still cannot see where there is to get to with it.

The people around me were driven by love and worry to help me ‘fix’ this. With mental health, a lot of the emphasis is on ‘doing’. From exercise to changing your diet, from meditating to taking vitamins, from therapy to faking it to make it. You are led to understand that if you’re not getting better it’s because you’re not doing enough or you’re not doing the right thing or you’re doing the right thing in the wrong way.

Being mentally ill is exhausting. Not bursting into tears at work, not staying in bed, not rocking in the corner, not giving up, remembering to eat, keeping in contact with people. All these are ‘doing’ things that run alongside the mad thoughts and behaviours, which are so much ‘doing’ in themselves.

Normal people don’t consider these things to be ‘doing’ because they are well and don’t have a constant inner voice reminding them that everything is largely pointless because the biggest thing we’re all doing is dying. That voice makes it hard to get excited about doing anything at all. So when people suggest that you try doing downward dog for twenty minutes a day they don’t really understand what they’re asking of you, or why you might burst into tears at the mere thought of it. It’s one more exhausting thing on top of all the other exhausting things and you are full up. Mental illness might look like inertia from the outside, but it’s more like a Parkinson’s tremor that has you shaking so fast you look like you’re not moving at all. At least that’s how it is for me.

I was brought up to do what I was told. I was brought up to think that because people were my elders, they were automatically my betters. I was brought up to believe that age goes hand in hand with wisdom. I was brought up to believe that doctors knew how to help you get better.

And all I knew was that I was mad and I didn’t know how to make the mad go away.

So I did what I was told. When I did all the downward dog and took all the vitamins and went for walks in the country and took up new hobbies and went to doctor’s appointments that made me shake with fear in case they put me in an asylum, I trusted I could get better. I trusted that this was the medicine I needed because the sane people told me it was. I told myself that the reason it was all horrible was because taking your medicine is always awful. When it didn’t work I figured it must be because I was now broken to the point where I could no longer be fixed.

I came out of treatment still mad but with an added huge and crippling shame that I was letting people down by failing to get saner and a massive distrust of people who said they knew how to help me. I also had the weird urge to push myself into dangerous situations in an attempt to prove I was still alive by flirting with situations that might kill me. This felt like living, because danger was a very energising experience that made a change from hanging over a pit of nihilistic despair by my fingernails, which is what I had been doing for a long time. I started hiding the more extreme risk taking because the shame and failure of not being well caused me to live a lot of my life like an iceberg. 95% of the time I was underwater.

Because the new phase I was in looked a lot like ‘doing’ from the outside, most people thought I was better. I would say with hindsight that I had just moved into a more active form of madness and certainly a deeper nihilism.

When I finally came across Plath, what I took from it was relief that I wasn’t the only one, and I wasn’t the only one who had failed at being mentally well. The problem with Plath’s pain was that she was excellent at describing it and the worst at dealing with it. After finishing Ariel, she dealt with things by ending her own life.

That was never going to be an option for me so I have just learned how to ping back and forth between survival and existence, between living a good life and living a good life but feeling terrible about it. That voice? It’s still there. It talks to me every day. Some days I can drown it out. Other days not so much.

I’m not a quitter. I’ve done all kinds of therapy over the years but this is not something that gets sorted with a couple of sessions of hypnotherapy or a blast of CBT. What has helped best over the years is unconditional love, a listening ear, a lack of judgment, longevity, a lot of writing and talking and art in all its forms, which is where Thom Gunn comes in.

In recent months I have been thinking a lot about Gunn, the other poet on the course.

Gunn was a gay man who moved from England to San Francisco and who survived the AIDS epidemic to die of old age after a long and fruitful career. I felt that I appreciated his work, but that it had nothing to say to me about my own life when I was a teenager. But Gunn was a survivor and it turns out that I am too, and now he has everything to say to me.

When Gunn first started writing poems in England in the Fifties, it was still illegal to practice homosexuality. Gunn could not write poems to and about the men he loved, so he hid in plain sight. A lot of his early poems don’t have a gendered subject, particularly his love poems, and there are often themes of hiding, of capture and evasion such as this from Tamer and Hawk:

Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds—
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.

You feel that he is compelled to write, to find a way to express who he really is, but it is always constrained by form and the rules of both poetry and society. His true nature is hidden amongst the words. In the poems you feel him ‘doing’ all the right things but ‘feeling’ and ‘being’ all the ‘wrong’ things. These poems are a beautiful exhaustion of hide and seek. They invite you to look beyond the surface to the truth within.

I have felt that hide and seek exhaustion all my life. Who I present as against who I am, who I try to be against who I am, who I try to please and how that ends up imprisoning or freeing me. I see myself in these poems. I feel the truth and the lesson of them rolling around my rib cage. I peep out amongst the words, constrained by my upbringing, my sex, my role in society, my role as a wife and parent.

I am here, but I don’t feel free and I am exhausted, rattling against the cage bars.

Gunn’s writing changed when he moved to San Francisco and began living as an openly gay man. It became far more personal in content and style. He began to find his true place in the world, to spread his wings and find his freedom. Eventually he wrote a book about the AIDS epidemic called The Man With Night Sweats. It is my favourite collection of his work. It’s wry, funny, tender and devastatingly sad. It’s such a beautifully honest work about what it is to lose those you love but also what it is to survive and what that does to your mind. I think about this poem so often at the moment:

The Reassurance

About ten days or so
After we saw you dead
You came back in a dream.
I'm alright now you said.

And it was you, although
You were fleshed out again:
You hugged us all round then,
And gave your welcoming beam.

How like you to be so kind,
Seeking to reassure.
And, yes, how like my mind
To make itself secure.

Gunn learned to live with the intolerable, the unbearable and the unsayable and then he learned to leave them behind him. He did it by making art, just like Plath. His words reassure me. They remind me to hope. They tell me that I can do more than survive. They tell me that there is a place for people like me. There is a place for everyone. They remind me that I can find a way to be seen and heard and that my existence, even though it isn’t ‘normal’ is as valid as anyone else’s. They remind me that art is always balm for my damaged soul.

They remind me that sometimes the things I need aren’t obvious, but in time, they might save me and that what I do for me, on my terms and in my own way will always help me more than twenty minutes of downward dog.