amsterdam

‘Our mind doesn’t have a back-space key,

we cannot unsee, unthink or unfeel things.’

Dr Julia F Christensen, The Pathway to Flow

Jeanette Winterson is packing for the Apocalypse, which she refers to with a capital A. So it’s not just me who is feeling unsettled. Just reading the NYT’s headlines is enough to blow me off course. Global warming is more rampant than scientists’ direst predictions, with nuclear reactors being switched off in Europe during a current heatwave. AI has interfered with 50 democratic elections around the world, and counting. While in the Gulf of Mexico, Space X debris is causing a mass fish die off.

Closer to home, I’ve fallen for painting my front door a deep burgundy colour that looked great in my mind’s eye, and on the colour chart, however, with a white undercoat to cover the green paint beneath, one coat in and the door looks hideous (more squashed raspberry than burgundy).

We live in a world which seems designed to unsettle us. On Sunday night, I can watch BBC archival footage of Carl Jung talking meaningfully about old age, as I cook dinner, with an eloquence that has me stop chopping and stare into the laptop on the table. Yet two nights before, on the Friday, when I ask friends over dinner what our upcoming state election is really about, I’m met with a round of shrugs.

Four years ago, there was a moment, in a joint therapy session with my ex’s psychologist, when the psychologist leaned over and recommended that I read When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Intrigued, I checked the book out of the library, only to find that the single interesting thing about it was its title. The rest was a plodding critical commentary of The Book of Job.

Whatever the psychologist meant by pointing me to When Bad Things Happen to Good People, I do sometimes feel that we live in a world in which good people, the people who can appreciate different points of view, who don’t lord it over others, who wait their turn and who turn the other cheek, are likely to be left out of big decisions. Not because our opinions don’t matter, but because, to protect our well-being and sanity, we’ve opted out of the sack race of the powerful, in which competitors throw themselves over the line, no matter the consequence.

While it’s possible that I’m redeeming a complex situation, to save face, the fact of my marriage ending, a few years ago, no longer feels like a bad thing to me. I wouldn’t have chosen it, and I’m not recommending it. Still, when I’m honest, I know that I feel better in myself for having moved on. And not just because I can paint my front door a Shiraz colour that I quickly regret, and wear clothes my ex wouldn’t have liked.

That said, there are things that I can’t do, for financial reasons. I can’t, for example, buy a new dishwasher just because the old one is ailing. I can’t travel freely, frequent restaurants or install solar. Then again, I couldn’t do these things freely when I was married either. Yet these feel like minor constraints. Overall, I’m fortunate to have been able to continue the life that I led before my ex left, with bikes in the hall, sails in the basement and a Labrador sitting sentinel on the back doorstep. I work for money, more than before. I do this because I need to. But also because it helps in the running of the house and in pushing into parts of myself that, until recently, there wasn’t room for.

For all this, I struggle to relax. While I’m grateful that my life is on a better footing than it might have been, after spending most of my adult life with one person, I still feel unsettled. To relax, I tell myself without words, would open myself up to danger. But of what, exactly? Then again, who am I to control my unconscious which, like a petulant child, grumbles beneath me for reasons of its own.

Even before my course in Mat Pilates started, I knew this training would put me under pressure. I knew, or thought I did, that there would never be a right time to do it, and that it would cost me in terms of energy, money and time. And it has. Two of the women on the course, one a shop manager and the other a primary school teacher, have five kids at home, which makes ten kids between them. How, I wondered, when they mentioned this, could they commit to 200 hours of on-line and in-person learning, over and above everything else? Driving home last Saturday, after five-and-a-half hours on the mat for six weekends straight, I found myself asking whether teaching Pilates was going to enhance our lives, or just make us busier.

When I’m feeling calm and hopeful, my plan for the next bit of my life isn’t to re-partner, sell the house and travel the world. Nor to become a fitness instructor. It’s embarrassingly simple. It’s to rekindle my creativity. It’s to create rhythms in my day that encourage me to do things that give me that special feeling of fullness, the kind of satisfaction which escapes words, to entertain things that, when I fill up on productivity and busyness, I just don’t have time for.

The awkward fact is that, after years of being busy, and being there for others, my creative side is no longer native to me. And because it doesn’t come naturally for me to express it, I avoid it. It’s been on hold for manifold reasons, all of which boil down to my accommodation of family, work and the world, and my willingness to go with the flow. This falling by the wayside of my creativity has gone unnoticed by everyone except myself, and may well explain some of my unsettled feelings.

It isn’t just me that feels this. When I ask around, others will say, with a whisper of longing, that they too have put their creative side on hold, usually out of necessity, to allow for the rushing torrent of their lives. Like me, they’re waiting for the right time, the right encouragement and the right conditions in which to pick back up this part of themselves. In the meantime, like me, they fill their limited free time, usually late in the evening, with screens, using them as a babysitter, a false friend. Which means that, like me, they know more about their frustrations than they do their satisfactions.

Last night, after dinner, my daughter mentioned that her father had been in Amsterdam over the weekend. ‘Amsterdam’, I thought in an instant, ‘that’s my city’. Later that night, sitting cross-legged in the hall upstairs, not quite ready for bed, I ruminated on a scene from my last trip to Amsterdam in 2015. It was a scene in which my ex lost his temper when I refused to leave our teenagers in our airbnb, to go with him to a late-night bar, after one of our kids pleaded with me not to. When my mind pulled up this memory, it was as if to say, ‘See? This is what comes of not putting romantic love before family love’. Yet even in that moment, I knew that it was dumb for me to think that I had succeeded as a mother yet failed as a wife.

Eventually, sitting there in the hall, I came around to a kinder view. Of course I hadn’t been able to be there for my husband, in the way he longed I might, while also being there for my kids. It is, after all, a high-wire act to be both maternal and romantic. Who of us succeeds in being mother and lover, over the years, without a whole lot of encouragement and support?

Then, with a flicker of memory, I was whisked off to the beautifully painted front doors that I’d photographed so keenly on my last trip to Amsterdam, inspiration from which, coincidentally, prompted me to pick a bold colour for my own front door, just days before.

Curled up in bed, that cold winter’s night, I dreamed that my ex and I were chatting in a room that we’d just finished renovating together. In the dream, he was talking himself down, saying how he was to blame for it not going well. But I didn’t take his side. ‘No’, I said, with emphasis, looking around the room, ‘I think we did a really good job’.

I’m beginning to recognise a pattern in my feeling unsettled, and it goes like this. First, I feel unsettled and don’t know why. Then I get hooked by a painful memory which, though I strain against it, hooks me. Finally I wriggle free, coming out the other side a tiny bit wiser. This pattern has repeated countless times, in various guises, over the last few years. Deep change, I’m beginning to discover, doesn’t happen once. It happens over and over. Each time that I’m pulled under the surface of my unconscious, I have to wait for life to pull me back out. And each time I do, each time I can wait without panicking, I emerge a little stronger. I pick myself up that much quicker. I’m still not able to see the hook coming. There is no advance storm warning. But I always know, not always straight away, when the hook has me. Sometimes the hook gets so close that I can see the memory as a hook as it pierces me, rather than a record of what happened. But only really in hindsight. Which is why, in the here and now, the hook gets me every time, as my mind plays cat and mouse with the past.

This is not to say that the scene with my ex in the airbnb didn’t happen. It did. But so did many other lovely things which far outweighed the trickiness of that scene. Each morning I woke up, for the six weeks we were away, I knew that it was our last overseas holiday as a family, which made the whole trip that much richer.

Eleven years after that trip, I needed my ex to show me that, like him, I could let go of the taut rope that held us together, of the marriage that bound me in place and that for so long had helped me make sense of life. I don’t thank him for teaching me this. It wasn’t a lesson I wanted to learn. And yet, though I would fall, as fall I must, I didn’t hit the bottom. Because on letting go of the rope that had held us together, something simple, elemental, both exquisitely painful yet also sweet, occurred. Life caught me.

My hunch is that this work, this weird healing, is something that I have to do. If I want to clear enough space for my creativity to start up again, there seems no other way. At least, nowadays, there are glimmers of what might be to come. Even if, right now, this only shows itself in painting the front door a dark red colour that, thankfully, is growing on me.

If Robert Frost was right, that the only way out is through, it’s time for me to get a bit uncomfortable. It’s time to forge new habits and different priorities. And to generally brush up on a side of myself that makes everything else feel worthwhile.