Category: Blog posts

We are the fireworks

It’s all symbols and metaphors, performances and rituals and spells and invocations. Like weddings and funerals; like wiping the day off your face before bed each night, and taking your antidepressant pills – religiously – first thing each morning. Like going to church on Sundays, kissing the glass-fronted icon of a saint, lighting a candle and sealing your prayers with the sign of the cross; like smudging your house with sage to clear the energy, holding a crystal up to the full moon, or branding your skin with an image of Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, lest you find any in your path that you can’t remove yourself. Like saying good morning before anything else; like saying I love you, after. Like pandering to an arbitrary calendar event that declares the end of one thing and the beginning of another, sending fireworks up into the sky to mark a change in numerals.

Which brings us to New Year’s Eve, at precisely one minute to midnight. Am I pandering? I had no intention of staying up for the changing of the year; I’m often in bed by nine, and asleep by ten or eleven, depending on how interesting the book I’m reading is. The sun sets at five thirty, and night comes thick and determined, here; there are few electric lights to challenge its dominion over the hours of darkness. I get up at dawn. Sunrise and sunset, the spectrum of daylight, rain, sleet and muddy fields, and winds that knock you off your feet, the seasons: those aren’t arbitrary; they can be named, but never tamed. Clocks and calendars and omnipotent gods, those are the things that we’ve invented, the boundaries we’ve set for ourselves. We are both their creators and their subjects, and we pander to them compulsively, religiously, with our rituals, adhering to invented timelines to establish a measure of control over our lives, while we put our faith in invented deities, so that it’s all ultimately someone else’s responsibility. And when the clock strikes midnight on December 31st, we must wear our best clothes and send light and noise up to the sky, and kiss whoever’s standing next to us when the countdown ends, and wrap the year up neatly, tightly, so that none of it spills into the next, and start anew – in this brand new year, unblemished except for the judgements we carry on our backs, and the resolutions – remedial measures – that we send forward to greet us.

I didn’t intend to stay up, nor did I intent to not stay up, exactly – though a part of me wanted to make a point. I was getting ready for bed, just gone ten thirty, when my friend Ela rang from Sheffield, so we chatted for a while. Until she said, ‘I’d better let you go, I’m sure the fireworks are about to start,’ and I laughed and said ‘Yeah, all four of them,’ and wished her a happy Greek new year. Midnight found me in my pyjamas, in the company of my cats, who were largely unaffected by the celebrations except they didn’t like the fireworks (all four of them) and it took me ten minutes to coax them out from behind the washing machine so I could give them New Year kisses. Then I went to bed, and ate some crisps, and read for a while. I woke up at dawn, to a message from another friend wishing me a happy new year. ‘Peaceful,’ he added, and it was exactly what I wanted, what I wish for him and for myself. As the arbitrary numbers of age add up, I find more and more that this is what I crave: peace. The kittens purred outside my bedroom door.

Nothing has changed, you know. You know it; we all do. But we need our rituals and our symbols, we need the semblance of control and the lack of it. We need to believe in things bigger than ourselves, because to realise we’re the biggest thing there is, to realise our power, might send us all cowering behind the washing machine. Power is both a blessing and a curse, and that wise, ancient part in all of us, the part that knows, invented the gods to assign it to, to place it outside of ourselves, and the rituals to invoke it and draw it back in. We cannot tame the darkness, but we can call it “night” and get through, so we can rise again each morning and take our pills. That’s how we survive, with our metaphors and our symbols and our performances, while the ancient (divine) part looks on with a knowing smile, pandering to our humanity. And if New Year’s Eve is the spell by which we invoke the imperative to begin anew, so be it. I only hope, I only wish for all of us to remember, sometimes, that we are the fireworks and come out from behind the washing machine, and not to wrap ourselves too tight, too neat, too small, in judgements and resolutions, but to allow our essence, our power, to spill messily out of the timelines and the boundaries and into everything we cannot control, and, there, find the peace that each of us craves.

A happy new year to all of us. Peaceful.

A peaceful new year from 100 days of solitude

The drugs don’t work

Zoloft for depression

Three decades ago, in the mid-90s, my friend and I managed to get our hands on a prescription for Prozac. A single box, I don’t remember how. We were giddy with excitement, sweaty-palmed and flushed-faced, and trying to arrange our features in a suitably sombre/casual expression as we handed the script over to the pharmacist; we had a whole elaborate backstory ready to deliver if challenged – but nobody paid us any attention. The reason being – apart from a slightly liberal attitude to the dispensing of drugs – that a single box of Prozac, even in the hands of impressionable and rebellious teenagers, could do no harm. No harm and equally no good. It was the stuff of legends, pain-ridden songs and cult movies and cutting-edge literature; it was the wonderdrug that defined our generation – Generation X, generation Prozac Nation – but it wasn’t a drug in the sense that we imagined, and a single box of Prozac, especially split two ways, could have absolutely no discernible effect on our psyche. We split it, regardless, and swallowed a couple of pills.
    Perhaps we thought we were depressed, perhaps we aspired to be: depressed was synonymous to interesting, in those days, and a happy disposition clearly meant you hadn’t understood how heavy a burden this life truly was. We idolised the troubled souls of the grunge and indie rock music scene, and our own souls were reared on complicated emotions that we weren’t yet ready to understand, but we knew all the lyrics by heart, anyway, and the pain we felt was real enough as we sang them, as we swayed clumsily in damp, sticky nightclubs. When Kurt Cobain killed himself, we mourned him as a hero; nevermind the example he set, nevermind the wife and daughter he left behind: that devastated, heroin-chic look was made for Courtney Love. She was a style icon to many of us, nevermind that she was actually a junkie. There was glamour in that, the dark lure of really terrible lifestyle choices, scary-attractive, because the world was fucked up anyway and, as Cobain put it in his suicide note: “it’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Also: Trainspotting. Also: Pulp Fiction. I mean, come on.
    While all this was taking place in LA and Seattle and the mean streets of Manchester, in middle class Athens we had to make do with warm vodka and orange, cans of Heineken, and rumours of ecstasy tabs with the original smiley face stamped on. We gathered in parks and smoked Marlboro Reds and bad weed that made us throw up in the bushes. While teenagers in the enlightened land of America had therapy to deal with their existential angst, we had curfews. While they bravely bared their souls and got prescribed antidepressants, we got a slap around the face and told it was our hormones. Nobody understood and it was all so unfair. So to get our hands on an actual box of Prozac was really something. It would have been better, of course, to be prescribed the thing, to have a professional acknowledge our pain, legitimise it with his signature, but failing that, fuck it, we would self-medicate. So we took a couple of pills each, and told each other we felt changed. And, being slightly nerdy rebels, we had studied the enclosed leaflet of side effects, and reported a few of those, too. Our serotonin levels, I am certain, remained blissfully unaware.
    The point is, as The Verve sang over and over again and nobody listened, the drugs don’t work. Not the way we imagine. Not the way popping an ecstasy tab works, or even drinking a cup of coffee. They do work, but in their own, slow time, and there is nothing you can do to rush them. What I found out, three decades after swallowing 40 mg of fluoxetine and expecting it to change my life, is that when you’re prescribed antidepressants, you are also prescribed patience. And if you’ve ever been depressed, you know that patience is one of those virtues you don’t have a lot of. When you come to a psychiatrist begging to be saved, when you submit to taking a pill to make you feel like yourself again, even though that sounds inherently, fundamentally wrong, you do not want to wait. It’s a fucker. But then again, no one – except teenagers in the 90s – said depression would be fun.
    My teenage self would be delighted: she’s finally had her wish. Three decades on, I have been prescribed antidepressants; I have been found, legitimately, in need of medication. Funny that I don’t share her joy. Not funny, no: I can’t find joy in anything, hence the drugs. But I’ll admit, there was an echo of her when the doctor told me I’d be taking Zoloft, and I felt a tinge of disappointment that it wasn’t Prozac. I allowed myself a small, ironic smile at the thought, before it fluttered away to be replaced by the thump of gravity: this is serious. But I am grateful, really – or I would be, if I could access that function (time; patience). I am grateful that it isn’t more serious, and that Prozac – shimmering magical wonderdrug – isn’t called for, because Prozac is a much stronger medication, whereas Zoloft, I am assured, is just like taking painkillers for a headache.
    If the headache were a black, swirling void that kept growing until it swallowed you whole. And the painkillers took two weeks to work.
    I have been prescribed patience, and 50 mg of sertraline daily. This is day seven, and it’s clearly a case of things getting worse before they get better. I didn’t read the side effects this time. Being depression’s plaything is hard enough; I have no interest in adding hypochondria to the mix. My survival instincts may be dulled, but they are still capable of sidestepping a trap as giant as that one. But experience quickly makes up for lack of knowledge, and it seems depression is just as eager to survive, if not more. It’s come under attack, and it is fucking angry. It would amuse me, if that function were available to me, to imagine the battle taking place inside my brain, depression growing darker and thicker and more monstrous and roaring with rage as the noble (if unsung) Zoloft builds its army of sertraline soldiers, one 50 mg dose at a time. It would amuse me, if it weren’t for the devastation it causes. But the landscape of depression is actually very mundane, and I won’t bother describing it. Suffice to say, yesterday I congratulated myself for putting on clothes.
    The drugs don’t work – until they do. And it is slow, it is relentlessly slow, when you’re desperate to be saved, when you’ve just about accepted, so reluctantly, that you need to be. But I have to hope – though hope is another thing depression doesn’t hold with – that they will. That by day twelve, thirteen, fourteen, my sertraline army will be strong enough to make its presence felt, and the black, swirling void will subside, and I’ll be able to see my way to getting better. And that I’ll know, once again, that smudged mascara might look good on some people, but there is nothing heroic about choosing to die, and that, actually, Kurt Cobain’s iconic last words make no sense, because both options are just as bad and living is the only possible choice; once I know that for a fact, only then will I begin to contemplate the implications. Of balancing my brain’s chemistry from the outside, of needing a pill to bring me back to who I am. The fundamental wrongness of it, and why, at times, it may be right.
    I have to hope.

P.S. For the sake of clarity, and so my parents don’t get blamed, retroactively, for neglect: my teenage self was not depressed. She was a teenager. And she grew up to be an adult of a (mostly) happy disposition, despite being aware of the heavy burden of this life.

We are all hypocrites

A few years ago, my boyfriend and I Acknowledged Valentine’s Day. And before you skip past my deliberate capitalisation of the event and miss its monumental implications, let me tell you this: we were the sort of couple who had relegated terms of affection to acronyms and shorthand, declaring magnanimously, but not too frequently, LY, lest the expanded version, I love you, placed shackles upon our unconventional souls and tainted the purity of our connection. Which, actually, words often do. But anyway.
    I use a sarcastic tone in the telling of this because I am a hypocrite, but I liked it. It was who we were, together. He was M, I was D, and we L(oved)E(ach)O(ther). We still do. But for all the love that was never in doubt, we quite categorically did not acknowledge Valentine’s Day. We didn’t need to. We LEO every moment (we broke life down in moments, not hours or days) and what was V-Day, anyway, but a grossly commercialised blah-blah designed to create feelings of inadequacy in the non-conventionally-coupled and paper over the cracks of millions of broken relationships with loveheart-adorned sticky tape while generating profits for the cold-hearted capitalists who care nothing for our actual happiness, which, no matter how nicely your wrap it, will never be found in a box of chocolates and a mass-produced card stating, boldly or calligraphically, “Be my Valentine”. FFS.
    And yet.
    Sometime in the late afternoon of that particular Valentine’s Day, which I was actively Not Acknowledging and very deliberately expecting nothing, I received two photographs on Skype. (M and I were living in separate countries at the time, and conducting our non-shackled relationship entirely over Skype.) I opened them up and I cried and I had to sit down for a moment, because nothing in all the years I had known M had prepared me for this. Because the man who had once felt the urge to buy me flowers and found it so alarming that he practically threw them at me, had on this day gone to his local café and spelled HAPPY VDAY DAF in sugar sachets. And got the barista to draw a heart in his latte. Because we are all hypocrites. All of us.

So I cried, and typed WTF into our Skype chat, and waited for the dizziness to pass, and then I drew a little V-Day themed comic strip, acknowledging our acknowledgement of the occasion, and admitting defeat. I took a photo of it, and sent it on its way, and imagined the ping on M’s side of the connection, imagined how he reached for the mouse and clicked on the image to enlarge it, how he looked at it and smiled and looked away and looked back and smiled again, how his shoulders sagged with something like relief, a momentary letting down of his guard, and how he felt, how much time he gave himself to feel, how long he allowed that moment to last, before unfolding his long body slowly out of his chair and walking away, into the next moment, into yet another day where there were things to be done, just another day in the month of February, as significant and insignificant as any other.

I imagined all this, because we never talked about it. We never said, hey, that was weird. We never said, perhaps we’re a little more conventional than we’d like to think; perhaps we’re defining ourselves more than we know with our lack of definitions. We never said, perhaps all those acronyms aren’t really protecting us from anything, after all. We never said, fuck it, I fucking love you on Valentine’s Day, you complete fucking hypocrite that I chose for the love of my life. We never said. And I can only imagine what might have happened if we had. What sort of story I’d be writing now, and whether I’d be looking forward to tomorrow, to a Valentine’s Day that I was free to acknowledge, albeit with a knowing smirk to indicate my awareness of the grossly commercialised blah-blah. I’ll never know what might have happened if M and I had been brave enough to step through the door we’d opened on that day, because, just like that time with the flowers, many years before, we pretended it hadn’t happened at all. And it didn’t protect us, in the end. In the end, things happen, whether we acknowledge them or not.

We are all hypocrites. And not saying I love you because it’s Valentine’s Day is just as hypocritical as only saying it for the occasion. Not giving a card when you might want to just as empty of truth as giving it because it is expected. Not spelling your feelings out in sugar sachets, not buying flowers when you have the urge, not expecting anything, not crying when you get it, not letting your shoulders sag with relief when you take a risk and it’s reciprocated, not acknowledging your most basic, most conventional need to be loved, fully and openly and in so many words, on any day and every day – none of it will protect you, in the end. Squeezing your feelings into acronyms does not make them any smaller, and not speaking of things because they are implied has implications of its own. And admitting to all of this doesn’t make me any less of a hypocrite because, I can promise you, if anyone asks me, even now, how I feel about Valentine’s Day, I will assume a carefully cynical expression, half-amused and half-offended at even being asked, and dismiss it as grossly commercialised blah-blah that I have no need of. And I will not say how the man who was once the love of my life is now someone whose everyday life I can only imagine, and how little it bothers me, and how strange that feels, how it is both sad and liberating. I will not say how I wish that my own everyday life was such that I could be looking forward to tomorrow as a day that I had expectations of, or that I were in a position to climb to the highest peak of this island I live on and scream, fuck it, I fucking love you on Valentine’s Day, and on any other fucking day in February or any month you care to name, for everyone to hear. I will not say how my careful cynicism did not protect me from feeling this way again, or from making the same mistakes. I will not say how my unconventional soul longs to be tainted by the most conventional simplicity of a love that’s so clearly defined, so straightforward as to be spoken of openly, in all the words. I will not say any of this, and tomorrow will be yet another Valentine’s Day that I do not acknowledge.
    But maybe next year, maybe next time. Maybe next time someone brings me flowers, I will graciously, gratefully accept; maybe I’ll let him see me cry. Maybe I will step through the next door that is opened to me; maybe the next time I find myself in a position to spell my feelings out for all to see, I will. Maybe I’ll bring someone flowers myself, or a card with lovehearts on, on Valentine’s Day. Not tomorrow, but maybe next year, I won’t give a shit about being unconventional, only about being happy. In whatever wrapping it comes.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.


And because I am not immune to the grossly commercialised capitalist blah-blah, let me just mention in passing that both the above books are love stories. And available to buy on Amazon, if the urge takes you. On this or any other day.

New moons and minotaurs and what it all means

New Moons ans Minotaurs

There’s a new moon tonight, and a partial solar eclipse in Capricorn. I don’t know what that means. I know that the moon waxes and wanes and affects our waters; I know that new moons represent new beginnings. I know that eclipses are meant to be mystical; they pull the curtains on that which is no longer needed, and show us the darker side of ourselves. I know that there are a lot of Capricorns in my life and that where there’s a lot of anything, it’s generally been invited. I know a lot of stuff, but I don’t always know what stuff means, and I can only guess at the meaning of moons and eclipses in Capricorn.

I am advised to burn sage and set intentions. Harness the energy of the eclipse and the new moon. The energy of Capricorn. But I don’t know what that means. How can I, timid Gemini, ever get a grip on those mad, wild goats? They trot past me on their Capricorn missions, while I wander in their wake, trailing questions, dreaming up the words to explain them. I get lost in the labyrinth of my emotions that they have no patience for, and all the minotaurs are Capricorns in disguise, bull-headed bastards that they are, guarding the secret of their souls. I, crafty Gemini, hold the thread, I am the one who weaves the tales, but the endings always lead me back to the minotaur. And you’d think I’d know about circles and cycles, the moons and the stars, and that karma is basically a loop, but I don’t know what any of it means.

They scare the crap out of me, these Capricorns, but it’s obvious that I need them. I, flighty Gemini, need something of their firmness so I can learn to stand my ground. But firmness is one thing when it comes to standing, and yet another when you’re throwing yourself against a wall: they can be hard; they pride themselves on being hard. And I, mercurial masochist, am drawn to them like a moth to the flame. Except the flame is a cold, hard wall, with horns sticking out, and I am the words shattered, scattered on the ground by their feet. There’s a lot of collecting yourself when you’re around them – and I, all-over-the-place Gemini, choose to be around them, time and time again. I keep inviting them in. I collect them, like butterflies in a book – but listen to this: they only stay pinned down because they want to; have you ever tried to keep a goat captive? They roll their eyes at my stories, demonstrating their impatience with the labyrinth of my thoughts, but they’re always there, at the end of the thread, and they tug on it as much as I do.

Whatever’s there once the light returns after an eclipse is what is meant to be there; eclipses, I am told, will never take away the things that belong in your life. The rest, however, under relentless Capricorn, is fair game. I’m not sure how I feel about Capricorn taking my things away, or dictating what’s worthy enough to keep. They’re always judging, these Capricorns, and I, insecure Gemini, keep submitting myself to their judgement, to their impossible, implacable rules. But listen to this: even as they dismiss me, they keep a firm hold upon the thread. And for all their eye-rolling, once the darkness clears, they’re always there; impatiently waiting for my meandering explanations, for the tales I unfold to reveal the secret of their souls. We need each other. They teach me how it feels to stand my ground, and I teach them about falling; they learn how to crack, sometimes, if not shatter, while I learn that it’s possible to stay in one piece. To stand before them is to learn I’m not so timid, not so flighty, not so insecure after all; to crumble at their feet is to teach them they don’t always have to be hard. And on it goes, in the endless loop of our karma, or whatever.

What does any of it mean? We’re all just guessing. We’re all just as lost as each other, and looking for explanations in the stars, navigating labyrinths of our own making, following threads that always lead us back to the minotaurs of our personal mythologies, our darker sides, the lessons we have still to learn. And if you’re reading this as neither Capricorn nor Gemini and you’re wondering where you might fit, don’t worry: none of us fit. We’re all just as messed up as each other, regardless of what particular configuration of planets we were born under. We’re all just going round our circles, our endless karmic loops, guided or aided or hindered by the stars, orbiting planets of our own making, whomever we’ve chosen to set up as the sun in our skies, whomever we’ve given the power to eclipse us. But when the darkness clears, each time, every time, we’ll still be there. Capricorns and Geminis, Libras and Virgos, and the full moon in Aquarius, and Venus opposing Saturn: none of it means anything. None of us fit, but we all belong. We all need each other.

P.S. This piece was five days in the writing because what’s also happening right now is that Capricorn has stolen Mercury, planet of communication, and the goats are expressing themselves all over the place while the rest of us are struggling for words. Dudes, kindly: I want my planet back.

Photograph by Paul Rysz on Unsplash

Identity: the stories we tell ourselves

St. Paul's Cathedral

The first time I wore a pencil skirt, my boyfriend ran away from me. But that was after I misplaced St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Identity. The stories we tell ourselves. I am a Londoner therefore of course I know where St. Paul’s Cathedral is. Except, when I came out of the tube station, I didn’t. I stood amongst the crowds of map-happy tourists and miserable City dwellers combined, exuding an air of “I know exactly where I’m going” while squinting, as nonchalantly as squinting will allow, at my baffling surroundings which – inexplicably, impossibly – did not feature a giant dome. But I’m a Londoner and it’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. Of course I’m not gonna ask. I spotted a churchy-looking building in the distance and, to the tune of “Feed the birds, tuppence a bag” and flashes of pigeons and Dick Van Dyke serving as the only images my brain could supply of the landmark in question, I set off confidently in the opposite direction. After reaching the impostor (a tall, rectangular thing, the opposite, perhaps, of a dome) and establishing, firmly, that I was an idiot, I laughed at myself and surreptitiously checked Google Maps on my phone. And then, as my blue dot made its way back to where I’d come from, I used the phone to call the person I was now late meeting: Pencil Skirt Catrina, in town for a few days from Liverpool, who’d managed to find St. Paul’s Cathedral without any trouble at all.
    ‘I have to confess,’ I told her, half-hysterical, in the first conversation we’d ever had, ‘that I’ve lived in this city for 20 years and I don’t actually know where St. Paul’s is.’ To my immense relief, she laughed, this stranger who now knew me to be an idiot.
    ‘It’s a giant dome!’ she pointed out, as the thing itself finally came into view. A giant fucking dome. And I walked straight past it, because I am a Londoner. Do you see where I’m going with this?

I didn’t see it, to begin with. I was meeting with Catrina to talk about pencil skirts and writing. Specifically: I was going to write about pencil skirts. And though I was intrigued, I just couldn’t see it. I’d never worn a pencil skirt; I had no pencil skirt stories in me as yet. I didn’t see what these pencil skirts were all about. I saw Catrina, tall and imposing and elegant in hers – fittingly – but warm and funny and unconventional, the kind of person who is amused that you stood her up because you misplaced St. Paul’s Cathedral. My kind of person. In a pencil skirt. What does this say about her? What does it say about me, late and flustered in my uniform of jeans and All Stars, questioning my credentials as a Londoner and trying not to jump to conclusions?

This happens all the time. We learn things, important things, and then we forget them. And I forgot the most important lesson of all: that you can be exactly who you want to be. I learnt it bit by bit, day by day, by being all sorts of people I’d never been before. By doing things I’d never thought I’d do, simply because I hadn’t done them. But that’s where our stories come in. The preconceptions that we write ourselves into. I am a Londoner. I am never late. I always drink my coffee this way. This is who I am. And then: I’ve never worn a pencil skirt becomes I don’t. I’m not that kind of person. But which kind of person is that, exactly?

Identity. The costumes we put on. I have a ring in my nose and ink on my skin. What does that tell you about who I am? I used to wear a lot of jewellery but it began to weight me down so I took it off. Life is a lot lighter when you have less to prove.
    There was a time when a man who had been flirting with me all night insisted that I was a lesbian. We had just met at my work Christmas party, and happened to catch the same tube home.
    ‘I’m not,’ I told him, ‘but what made you think so?’
    Was it my boy-short hair, I wondered? Was it the big, chunky boots? Was it the fact that I spent most of the evening smoking with the boys in the garden? Was it that I swear a lot?
    ‘No,’ he said. It was none of that. It was my nose ring.
    My nose ring: an item I have never associated with any particular type of sexuality; a relic of teenage rebellion; a thing I barely know is there.
    Which goes to show that it really doesn’t matter what you say or do or what costumes you dress yourself in. People will draw their own conclusions anyway. Sometimes stereotypical, sometimes completely inexplicable but always theirs, not yours. You might as well do what you like. You might as well have fun with it. It’s how you see yourself that matters and even that, arguably, matters very little at all.

‘I’ve never worn a pencil skirt,’ I confessed to Catrina over coffee. ‘It isn’t me.’
    And Catrina smiled and explained why pencil skirts were everyone, and as she talked I began to see it, the thing that I’d missed: this wasn’t about an item of clothing; this was about a symbol. And symbols I understand; symbols I can get behind. And this particular symbol was one that I could wear. I could put it on and see what kind of person it made me. What stories she would tell. This is the story I’d write.

I came home and gave my boyfriend the long version of losing St. Paul’s Cathedral and finding Catrina and blah-blah, something about skirts, and he did the nodding and the making of appropriate sounds but I could see that his eyes were glazing over until I mentioned that I was going to buy a pencil skirt, as an experiment, and the light came back on.
    ‘Oh yeah?’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘And I will wear it!’
    ‘With heels?’
    ‘Oh. I don’t have heels. You think I need heels?’
    ‘You’ve gotta have heels.’
    So we went online and looked at pencil skirts and heels.
    ‘But I just can’t see myself in this thing,’ I argued, hesitating over the “Buy now” button.
    ‘I can,’ he said, and smiled, this man who has loved me in my jeans for many years.
    I think this counts as a pencil skirt story.

There is power in symbols, and costumes. I saw it, when I first put my pencil skirt on: I saw what Catrina was talking about. There was something about it that made this tomboy soul of mine long for things it doesn’t quite understand. Swinging hips and mysterious half-smiles. A level gaze, not arrogant, but exactly as tall as you are. Elegance. A sort of power that is exclusively, inherently female.
    And terrifying, as it turns out.
    My boyfriend walked in as I stood in the middle of the room, swaying gently as my centre of balance tried to compensate for the heels, and staring at myself in the mirror in utter bewilderment.
    There was a pause, a moment of silence.
    ‘Oh my god,’ he said.
    ‘I know!’ I took a step towards him; he took a step back.
    He made a strange sound in his throat. And: ‘You look too sexy’, he managed. Followed by: ‘I’m getting out of here.’
    He backed away carefully as I tottered uncertainly towards him, spun himself around on the spot and literally ran out the door.
    ‘Um,’ I said to his retreating back. ‘I don’t think this is the effect I was hoping for.’
    I didn’t go after him; I couldn’t, in my heels. So I stood in the doorway for a while, leaning against the frame, smoking a cigarette and channelling the femme fatales of all the ages, staring wistfully at the spot where their lover once stood, and blowing smoke rings that, when you wear a pencil skirt, look sexy and defiant. Nobody saw it, but it happened. I was that girl, for a time.

I have a friend who tells me I’m clumsy and, around her, I am. I perform that role for her. But I was a barmaid for years and never dropped a glass. And there’s no contradiction in this, after all. Do you see where I’m going now? Identity; the stories we tell. It’s just a script, a performance, a game that we play. And once you realise that, there is no greater freedom. That’s the lesson we mustn’t forget: that we have the freedom to choose who we want to be, at any given moment.

And if it takes a symbol to remind us, then so be it. If I can wear a pencil skirt, if I can be that girl and tell that story, there is no end to how many other people I can be. I can perform competent barmaid as well as I can perform hopelessly but endearingly clumsy friend; I can blend into the background in my jeans or I can stand in the middle of the room in a pencil skirt and terrify a man with my sexiness. And I don’t know if I’ll be adding more pencil skirts to my wardrobe, but as a symbol, I’ll be putting one on every day and channelling Catrina, immaculate in hers. Pencil Skirt Catrina, who is several other people, too, untouched by my preconceptions; who is a mother and a wife and a daughter and a kick-ass businesswoman and a brave entrepreneur and a former Londoner who can locate St. Paul’s Cathedral in time to meet me for coffee, and a stranger who helped me remember who I am. And maybe next time we meet she’ll be wearing a pair of jeans and I’ll stand her up again because I’m still learning to walk in my heels. And that’ll be another story.

And to draw this one to a close: if I can wear a pencil skirt, then so can you. Wear it figuratively or literally, it doesn’t matter; but wear it proudly and defiantly, and lightly, so that you can take it off anytime you like.
    A word of warning, however: if you pair it with heels and your boyfriend runs away from you because you are too sexy, you won’t be able to run after him. A lot of good men have been lost that way. Better start practising your smoke rings.

This piece was commissioned, almost three years ago, by the wonderful Catrina, for the first issue of her Perfect Pencil Skirt magazine (online). I’ve no idea if it was ever published. But I’ll never forget her, or my pencil skirt moment, though I have never worn one since. And that boyfriend ran away from me for good.

Photo by Domantas Klimas on Unsplash

Babysitting fires

There was little light by the time we finished. The dullness of the overcast day, another day when Southern winds brought clouds of desert dust to settle over us from the Sahara, now gave way to the thickening darkness of dusk and made the bonfire glow even brighter.
    ‘I have to go,’ Yiannis told me, gathering up his chainsaw and his knife and a plastic tub of petrol, and shaking the ashes off his hat before putting it on. ‘Stay a while. Have a cigarette. Watch the fire; make sure everything burns away.’
    Babysitting the fire, I thought, but I didn’t say it. There is no word for babysitting in Greek. I nodded, instead, from a small distance away, still collecting loose twigs from among the nettles, which have grown to gigantic proportions and sting even through your clothes. Underneath, livid skin and deeper down feelings to match: irritated, raw, unprotected despite the layers. Stung. But this work we’d just done helped. It soothed. The burning of things helped. The flames.
    Before he left, Yiannis kicked a few smouldering branches that had escaped to the perimeter of the bonfire back into its centre; he had his work boots on, that allow for such actions. Mine would have melted: Pull & Bear do not make boots for stomping on fires. I was envious, once again, as I often am, of Yiannis’ gear, of his preparedness, of how he knows what he needs to navigate this life, this wilderness, the tall grasses and the rocky, treacherous hills, these fires that we set. Aware, once again, of how ill-equipped I am, in comparison. How I’m just winging it, in high-street boots and too-thin jeans, and clumsy in my eagerness to fit in.
    ‘There,’ Yiannis said.
    I picked up another twig and tossed it onto the fire.
    ‘Thank you,’ I muttered. I didn’t watch him go. Yiannis may burn bright in my world, in his own way but, by now, I was all about the flames.

We’d started pruning this almond tree months ago, before Christmas. It was old and overgrown and dead in places, draining itself to support too many branches, too many possibilities reaching up and out and coming to nothing. Uncared for, untouched for years. Yiannis had shaken his head and sighed. The state of the tree almost a personal affront.
    ‘Look,’ he’d said. ‘Just look at it.’
    I looked as instructed, while he climbed up its trunk and motioned me to pass him the chainsaw. Ruthlessly, he pushed the blade into the flesh of the tree, and sent branch after branch, whole trees in themselves, crashing down with a thud and a sprinkling of woodchip confetti. Ruthlessly, but not mindlessly: every now and again, he’d stop and contemplate another branch, tilt his head and sigh, and then shift up or down or sideways, maintaining a precarious balance that makes me hold my breath every time, and apply the chainsaw again. Reducing this giant to a collection of stumps. A desolate sight, if you don’t know.
    I’d always thought of pruning as a cosmetic procedure. But it’s surgery, it’s critical; on this scale, as devastating as it looks, it’s saving a life. It’s the toughest kind of love, love with a chainsaw, but it’s exactly the kind of love that’s needed. I never knew; I’d never had cause to think about it before. Yiannis says plants and trees direct twice as much energy to dead branches as to living ones: think about that for a moment. Think about how much energy we expend to keep dead things attached, how much of ourselves we put into sustaining them. Perhaps we all need a man with a chainsaw to come along and ruthlessly rid us of the dead weight. Perhaps, for all our romantic notions and our greenhouse-grown flowers, we are all crying out for a tougher kind of love.

My task begins when Yiannis jumps down from the tree and takes the chainsaw to the felled branches, separating the ends, the bonfire fodder, from the sturdier parts that we’ll keep for firewood. We already have the fire going at this stage, and it’s my job to feed it, pulling the gnarly branches away from the tangle and tossing them onto the flames. I’m slower than I could be, although I’ve gotten better with practice, because of my pyromania. I say that as a joke, between us, and Yiannis laughs when he’s in the mood for my jokes, but there is something in it: a compulsion, a draw, something that has me stopping and staring at the fire every time I feed it another armful of twigs. I cannot turn away, not easily.
    We couldn’t get the fire going that time, before Christmas. It happens: not all fires want to be lit. It was weird weather, uncooperative, undecided. The wind kept changing direction, then dying down completely before raising violent gusts that had us running away from flying embers, but did nothing to stoke the flames. And almond wood is notoriously hard to burn. We gave up, halfway, intending to return the next day, but we never did, until now. When we were greeted by the result of our neglect. Bits of tree everywhere, half buried in the giant nettles, and the pruning itself not quite finished.
    ‘Oh, fuck,’ said Yiannis. ‘Is this the state we left it in?’
    ‘Yep,’ I confirmed. ‘Apparently it is.’
    But the fire gods were on our side this time around. And soon, after some breath-stopping rearranging of burning wood on Yiannis’ part and scavenging of flammable materials on mine, we had a beautiful raging inferno, ready to consume all of our offerings. To reduce all of our troubles to ash.

They used to frighten me, these bonfires. The recklessness, the absolute insanity of starting a fire in a field, on a dry, windy island; the illusion of control. The infinite possibilities of losing an entire village to one false move, one gust, one flaming twig blown the wrong way. I’d never have the audacity to start one myself, even now, all these months and all these fires later. I always stand aside, respectfully, and let Yiannis do his magic. And even when it comes to stoking it, I take my cues from him, two steps back and clutching handfuls of straw, watching him and the fire for clues, waiting for a nod or a shake of the head, never approaching until he bids me forward. Respect where it is due, and knowing where your place is: neither is small or easy to learn. But my place has never been on the front line, and not all of us can be firestarters. I have a different role to play and once those flames get going, they are all mine.
    The illusion of control, coupled with the absolute knowing that it is only temporary, that it is only until the fire decides otherwise. The mesmeric proximity to a force so primal, so powerful that it can reduce your entire world to nothing on a whim. Respect that’s very close to fear, and the new-found courage to stand in front of a fire that’s almost twice your height, and throw half a tree onto it to make it grow taller. It used to frighten me, too, this process, this task that I knew I wasn’t equal to. Nothing in my former life had prepared me for this one. But I know what I’m doing now; I’ve worked out the jigsaw quality of this game, the mad game of flaming Tetris that we play. I know how to angle the branches and how much force I need to put behind my throws; I know how close I can get and when to stand back, when to wait and let the fire settle and how to watch for changes in the wind. All these months and all these fires later, and I can do it unsupervised, and Yiannis can keep his eyes on his chainsaw and only glance over occasionally to make sure I haven’t set myself alight. Because I, too, can be dangerous if left unattended, thoughts instead of flames consuming me to the point of destruction, reducing my entire world to nothing on a whim, subject to even the smallest changes in the wind. Or I can burn, bright and steady and beautiful, light and warmth for those who know how close to get and how to stoke me right.
    That’s what we all are, that’s all we are: fires. Forces of healing and of destruction, primal creatures that contain all the possibilities and all the dangers. And firestarters, too, pyromaniacs, and guardians of the flames, babysitting the fires that we set to light up our lives, not controlled and not in control despite the illusion that we live by, the tacit agreement that we will set each other alight but not be consumed. Mesmerised by the flames. Gentle in love and tougher in love and devastating, at times, when we need to be, to save our own lives. Unprepared and ill-equipped despite all of our gear, playing a game that we don’t quite understand, playing with fire, literally, and getting burned, sometimes, when we get too close, or letting the flames die down because we didn’t have the courage to approach: clumsy in our eagerness to find our place. That’s all we are, that’s all we’re doing: winging it. Babysitting fires that we set ourselves and hoping that someone, somewhere, is glancing over every now and again, to make sure we don’t go up in flames.

Refusing to be drawn

That strange twist in my gut today: that’ll be the moon, I presume. That subtle weight that makes my breath come out in sighs: the moon. My restless sleep last night: the moon; the anxious dreams, the thoughts – unbidden – that unsettle me, the silence that I fill with fears: the moon. And if I draw my curtains aside: too bright, too eerie, too many shadows cast where there should be just night, too many details picked out in the negative space – the moon.

Ostensibly, we strive for balance, and yet we give ourselves up to the mercy of the planets and the stars and the whims of heartless constellations. What equilibrium can we hope to achieve when we are tidal creatures, controlled by the moons and the spin on the earth? All those cosmic events, all that planetary action to explain, to justify, to forbid: and we are rendered helpless by our own choosing. Shadow puppets to those cold, distant bodies, our astral hegemons, dictating when and how. Full moon: review; new moon: now start again; when Mercury’s in retrograde don’t even think of trying, but make the most of Venus in your sign. Whenever you feel slightly askew, it’s probably something cosmic.

It is now the day after the Super Blue Blood Moon Eclipse. Last night, in defiance, I refused to be drawn and to draw my curtains aside; there were enough photos of the thing on facebook, anyway. Did it affect me, regardless, sight-unseen? Probably. Would I have acted differently, chosen different words, swapped one set of feelings for another if it had been another day in the cycle of the moon? Probably not. We cannot control our waters: we are tidal creatures. We cannot control the spin of the earth or how the planets move across our solar system. We cannot let those things control us, either. It isn’t Mars that causes conflict; it isn’t indecisive Libra that makes us put things off. It’s not the heat of the sun or the cold glare of the moon; it isn’t the eclipse that brings the darkness. We are not helpless; we don’t have to be.

Perhaps our balance can be sought in remembering that we’re equally part of this earth that spins as of the cosmos that surrounds it, subject to both its gravity and the magnetic pull of those twinkling, meddling stars; that we are earth and water, fire and air as much as any other body in our skies. Acting the way we would, flighty Geminis or stalwart Capricorns regardless, and letting the moon rise and fall, letting it wax and wane without casting ourselves in its shadows. Perhaps our balance can be found in refusing, sometimes, to be drawn. Whatever the moon brings out in the negative spaces is there anyway, whether we shine a light on it or not. We’ll draw our curtains aside when we are ready to see.

Image credit: Business Insider

Fuck being strong (this once)

Do you ever feel like that? Like, just fuck it? Like you don’t want to improve, you don’t want to evolve, you don’t want to better yourself, you don’t want to learn? Like you’re done fucking learning and gaining experience and getting over things and coming out the other side, stronger and wiser? Like you don’t want to be stronger or wiser or more patient or less of a mess? Like you just want it fucking easy, this once?

I am a mess. I want it easy. I want love, easy and uncomplicated; love strong enough to be easy and uncomplicated, this once. I want a love I can trust to be easy and uncomplicated in a life full of difficult and complicated things. I don’t want a love I need to be strong for, a love that needs to be talked about and defended and understood and fucking vindicated; I want that simple understanding that I am for you and you are for me and we’re in this shit together – bring it on. I want to find myself in the same place as someone and just stay there, with his arms around me, with nothing to do. With nothing that needs to be done.

I don’t want vindication. I don’t want a love that gets written about. I don’t want to hear another person praise me for my strength, for my wisdom; I don’t want to be brave or inspirational for the things I’ve gotten through. I don’t want to get through another thing and come out the other side; just this once, I’d like to be a little weaker, a little less wise, and hear one person tell me that he loves me, that I don’t need to be brave, that I’ve been patient enough.

I am aware of the value of learning. I am aware of the lessons we’re taught through our pain. Every wrong turn, every wrong move, every disappointment; every time our hearts get broken: an opportunity to learn. To build resilience, to build our strength, to grow our wisdom. I have learned this, but fuck it: I just want a shoulder that’s mine to lean against. And yes, to turn our pain into art is consolation. It’s redemption, that I can take my pain and turn it into beautiful words. But the beauty of that shoulder to lean on, those arms to fall into: just once, can I have that instead?

And right now, do you see what I’m doing? I’m turning my pain into art, into literature, into words that might reach other people’s souls. Into words that might touch another person who needs touching, and that’s incredible, that’s a gift to me – but I need touching, too. It’s a gift that heals my soul as much as anyone else’s but I long, sometimes, to be reached rather than to be the one who’s reaching. I long for a time when my soul doesn’t need to heal. And right now, for all the value these words might have for me, for other people, I would rather be in somebody’s arms, giving nothing but the warmth of my body; I would rather be held and be loved, quietly, simply, having nothing to give but myself in this moment. And I don’t know if that’s possible for me, now, this once, or ever. I don’t know if this simple thing is out of reach. For all the lessons I’ve learned, for all the strength and all the wisdom, for all the patience and the trust, I just don’t know. Right now, for everyone I’ve ever reached, for all the pain I’ve written into love, there’s no one here to hold me. And I’m done being brave. And I’ve been fucking patient enough. And fuck.

Fuck.

Fuck.

I am my own weather

The hope is that we learn. The hope is that, each time we go a little crazy and then learn we needn’t have, we put some of the not-crazy aside for the next time. The hope is that, when the next time comes around, the things we’ve learned, the reserves we’ve built of the not-crazy will kick in and hold back the waves. So that we don’t go under. So that we learn.

I am learning how damaged I am. I am learning how blind I was to the damage being done. Instead of building reserves of strength, of calm, of the trust that would get me through the fear, I was building reserves of crazy. I was collecting instances of crazy – proof – and adding them to my reserves. Oceans full of crazy, stormy fucking waters where no ships can sail. There was a man who stirred my waters up; like Poseidon, he held a giant fork and stirred and whipped them into crazy. He was my own private storm and I loved him, but when I left for other shores, I didn’t leave the storm behind. I left the man but not the storm; the storm is mine, it’s in my waters that I keep it. And I don’t know how to cross these seas when the waves come.

You see, the problem is I’m right: that which I fear is justified. I’ve seen calm waters turn to storms from one moment to the next, and I have drowned in them on several occasions. I’ve fought the waves and come up breathless, spluttering fear and promising I’d learn, and gone into those waters once again. But that is not the crazy part. What’s crazy is letting these storms into waters where they don’t belong, what’s crazy is letting another man’s fork make waves. I took myself away and found a port; I found an island, a safe haven that the storms couldn’t breach – that’s what I thought. But just the memory of the storm is enough to cause ripples, just a spark is enough to ignite the lightning and rip the sky in two. Like Odysseus trying to find his way home, I carry with me a sack of winds, and there’s no telling which direction they will blow me in when I release them. The weather can turn in an instant: that which I fear is justified. And it has followed me home.

An island, literally, but metaphorically there is no place that’s safe, no place the fear can’t breach; not in itself. Memory travels just as well as storms. That man and his fork are miles away, thousands of miles, but I can whip up a storm all by myself. We bring them with us, all of us: our cans of worms, our reserves of crazy, our sack of winds, and we cannot help but let them out. A storm in a teacup and then we drown, as they say here in Greece, in a spoonful of water. Why don’t we learn? No place is safe, no distance is protection in itself, there is no barricade to hold back the storm. The more defences you put up, the more debris will hit you when the waves come. We ought to learn.

I do it to myself, that’s the crazy thing. I let the winds out of my sack, I let them rip my world in two, and then I drown in a spoonful of water. I come up, spluttering regret and promises, and then I do it all again. I run away from the things that hurt me, but I never get very far – not far enough. Even on my island, I can’t cut myself off. I may be hard to reach, but I am not unreachable: there are boats, not frequent, but more than none. Even here, in my fair-weather haven, the waters aren’t still. There is no place that’s safe, there is no shelter from yourself – except yourself.

I found my way home; I crossed the seas and found it. So fuck Poseidon and fuck that sack of winds: I made it this far, despite them. Not running away, but arriving, and maybe I can stay, this time, and go further. Far enough that I can see the storm coming, and choose not to sail on that day. Maybe I can go further, this time, by staying put, and watch it happen, the storm, the lightning, the stranded ships, without having my world ripped in two. Maybe I can stay indoors, like I did this morning, and let the weather happen. Let it turn, like it does. No matter what storms are brewing, I don’t have to drown in an ocean of fear. Just a spoonful, a teacup, a sackful of nothing: I don’t have to let the crazy out. I don’t have to be blown away by the winds. I don’t have to take on the waves.

Ultimately, that’s what I’m learning: I am the storm and also the haven, I am both the turmoil and the reprieve. I am the fear and I am the trust, I am all that I lost and the love that remains. I am the crazy, I am the sanity; I am the damage and the repair. I am the spark that lights up the darkness and I am the lightning that splits the sky in two. I am the stillness and the distant rumble; I am the only one who can decide what sort of weather I want to be. Each time, every time: just me. I am the one who needs to learn, and I am the lesson. Maybe I can be the hope.

Moving mountains

It’s been a rough couple of days. I found myself in crisis with a person that means a lot to me, a crisis mostly of my own making, and I couldn’t see my way out of it. It began with a misunderstanding, a small thing that we’d both brush over and laugh about later on any other day – but on this particular day, something about the situation triggered all of my fears, all of my insecurities, all of the worst, most desperate, most terrified parts of me, and I lost it. I completely fucking lost it. I lost my grip on reality, on everything I know about myself, about this person opposite me, about the way we relate to each other and live our lives. I took a load of crap from the past, whole armfuls of crap that was borne of other situations where those fears were valid and justified, and threw it all at his feet, and then pleaded with him to clean it up. And when he wouldn’t, because he couldn’t, because that crap did not belong to him, I panicked. And panicked people do not make good decisions. I made one bad move after the other, and dug myself deeper and deeper into a dark, airless hole, and I couldn’t breathe. “You’re drowning in fear,” my sister said; I was. And I was waiting for someone else to pull me out.

It wasn’t all my fault: he was abrupt when I was oversensitive. Whatever; shit happens. The trouble begins when we can’t see our shit for what it is, when we see it through a lens of all the other shit we’ve collected over the years, all the other shit we carry and insist on bringing along where it doesn’t belong. When we throw it at another person’s feet and expect him to take it away. He won’t; no one will. It’s not their job, it’s not their place. Even if their place is beside you, even if that’s where they want to be, they can’t take your shit away, and it’s unfair to ask. Imported fears don’t translate into excuses; they may explain, but they do not justify. There is no justification for the way I acted: it was unfair and it was untrusting. And I may have broken something; I may have broken a thing that’s very precious to me. I hope not; I hope it’s sturdy enough to take this beating and survive, and morph into something better as a result. But I don’t know.

I had firewood to deal with this morning. Whole mountains of firewood that we’d cut off three massive almond trees in the field adjacent to mine, and then sawed into bits small enough to fit into my stove. Whole mountains that I had to move, bit by bit, piece by piece, across the field, over two walls, and into my garden, where it will eventually be stacked. The final leg of the journey – my task this morning – involved dismantling the mountains and flinging the wood, bit by bit and piece by piece, over the dividing wall and into the back end of my garden. I started with limbs as heavy as my heart and nerves shattered to fuck, what with all the drowning and fighting for breath, and trying to convince myself of the curative properties of physical labour. Which certainly provides a reprieve from that terrible, sticky idleness of fear, but does nothing to stop the chatter in my head. So I flung and I thought, and I flung and I analysed, and I flung and I regretted, and I flung and I ran through a thousand worst-case scenarios, and it wasn’t easy work, what with all the roaring waves of fear that kept crashing into me. And still the mountains appeared undiminished.

I don’t know how I came up with the idea, but the idea that saved me from drowning was this: each piece of wood became one of my fears, one of my insecurities, one of those desperate, terrified parts of me that make me lose my shit with people I love. With each piece that I picked up I spoke of a fear, and then I threw it away, as far away as possible, over the wall and into the distance. With each fear that I threw, another one came, and another, and another, and I spoke each one and I threw and I cried, partly with relief, and partly because, fuck: I’m scared of so many things. So many. But eventually I ran out: of steam, of mountains, of fears. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve and steadied myself against the wall; my back hurt and my arms ached, but the mountains had been moved to my garden, and all my fears had been spoken and tossed away, as far away as I could reach.

This piece is not intended as literature, nor as testimony for the curative properties of physical labour. Only, perhaps, as a breath of air instead of fear, a glimpse of the most reassuring, most frightening possibility: that we all have it in us to pull ourselves out, bit by bit and piece by piece, one desperate, terrified part at a time, and to survive. And that we can move mountains if we need to, if we must. And when it comes to throwing stuff: logs are better than shit. No contest.