truth

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Island Wife – Be Brave

I remember being told that my book, Island Wife, would resonate with older women. I sat there, across a table with my publisher and my agent thinking, older? Yes, I was 59, but sassy. I was still in complete charge of my accoutrements, faculties and agendas. I could move like a dancer, arriving in some sort of wild costume and just off the Oban train, complete with a jaunty herringbone cap. Older for me was my mum heading for 80 and, although still feisty, a bit cautious over rocks – still game, though. I get it now. I started early, in love at 18, married at 19, mother at 20. Nobody does that, not in the lasting game, as mine was. I suppose that I just could not relate to the ‘older women’ thing. The ones I had experienced were tired, downtrod, got their make-up wrong and spent a huge amount of time pretending they were ‘fine’ even though that word meant something so different to me. Fine was about spectacular art. Fine was the way a butcher cut a fillet just right. Fine was how someone arrived looking magical into a gathering; a spectacular arrangement of flowers; a perfect sorbet. Now it has become a dismissal, a middling beige nothing.

I do remember the train journey to almost home, the stunning landscape, the chacha of the train along winding tracks, around lochs, through endless scapes of empty deliciousness, past the Hogwarts Express bridge, the winding of endless drover tracks, the moody mountains, the clouding, the spritzer of light. My thoughts carolled me to the ferry port. ‘Older’? I got that even as it thinks me. I realise I was being a mayfly on the surface of real life, aka, the truth. I believe that as I walked onto the ferry for home that I sunk a bit, got it, and it freed me. Of course my story will resonate with others who have experienced such a life.

There is so much vanilla out there, so much beige. On the out-there forums, everything is ‘fine’. It isn’t. Where is truth? Where are the young writers going through rebellion? Facebook and more are all about memories and wonderful moments. I do love to see that but it is not the truth, not real. If I said anything in my story, it was raw truth, still is.

Be brave.

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Island Blog – Im Patient, Com Promise

I’ve just reversed out from under my desk. Not my desk. A desk inherited with uneven legs and good drawers and with a fallen sharp thing hidden in the down below. Much like me. I had, I noticed, flipped my Winnie the Pooh calendar to September which, even for twitchy, fast-running me, is an overdash and so I set to correct, losing the lot down into the spider depths, hence the reversing thing. This, as you may guess, is a complete irrelevance.

I am (searching for an adverb) fed up with not being able to do whatever I suddenly, and twitchily have done without any thought and for years. I cannot bend down lower than my waist. Well, that laughs me. Waists are, from my own observation, all over the place. However, I know where mine is, and I do not bend below. This constricts, obviously. I am required to curtsey before the saucepan cupboard, before the washing machine, the freezer, before the cupboard under the stairs, before the picking up of any fallen objects anywhere. I can hear my white goods, my doorways laughing at me.

When releasing my washing from the cylindrical drum, I am required to kneel. I was never good at that. I pull out the sheets, towels, tees and jeans and turn towards the skids. Still on knees because I can’t lift anything heavier than a pregnant hamster (they don’t say that), I work my way to the pulley. I rise, good core muscles, and take each piece by itself. It thinks me. I never did that before, just wheeching the whole damn lot onto the struts without noticing a thing. I notice things now. My olding pants require either new elastic or a trip to the bin. Perhaps this is what I learn from this limiting limitation, my eyes so very important, so momentarily com- promised.

Without my work in the Best Cafe Ever, I am remote, stumped, awkward with myself. That’s one truth. Another is the wealth of help offers for lifts, deliveries, friendship. This glorious community. I know I am an im patient. I remember being compromised in Tapselteerie days, so sick I was falling over, but there wasn’t the time nor the opportunity. I was the It and there really was nobody else who could fill my role. I am so rarely decked and thank the bejabers for that because I am twitchy and need to move on. Although I would love for arms around me, for someone to bring me fresh food, light the fire, the candle, gentle the evening, I am alone, strong at times, weak at others. Hearing swans overhead, rushing out to see their traverse, watching still tide, seeing the lushgrow across the sealoch, catching the firelight, hearing the music.

A com promise.

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Island Blog – Moon Heavy Dreamer

I’m watching the sky today, just now, cloud capped, closed. I’m remembering the Snow Moon pushing them away with her bright breath over the past few nights. I woke with her, heavy across my bed, the loud of her a steady night voice, colour, timbre, the whole firking orchestra, around 2, 3, 4 am. Days gone by, nights gone by, as is always. There’s no holding them. I love the moon, the new and the full, because they make me uncomfortable in my jeans, in my life. There’s a holding, a containing I fight, as I always have, and yet, and yet, it thinks me different because, precisely because of this discomfort, I honestly don’t want it to change. If everything set simple, like a milk pudding in my life, then so would I. Disturbance is essential. Yes, it does upset me, feels me contained and restricted, sends me in a spin for easier jeans, thinks me that I am finally achieving what my mum always feared, an increase of bodily self. Funny how that still has a voice.

I know I have choices, always had, always will. However that knowledge is a truth, and not a feeling. It’s the feeling bit that confounds, surrounds, compromises a day, a night. Without the belief that I, or anyone, has a choice, the right to choose, we can be caught up in the twizzle of a twister, a disturbance we deny, allowing outside control. I think that life is a dance, and I think that being energetic, dynamic, is essential, to say no, to say yes, to move, to stay put, and so much more. Trouble is, that the old thinking gets tangled in our knicker elastic, halting movement. I remember it well, the confusion of it all. And, although I am hopeful that times have changed, see in so many ways that they have, I still notice a holding on from my generation of parents, and beyond. Such judgement, no allowance for flick or fancy. It saddens me. All people have choices, and, better, the opportunity to change a deeply rooted belief that says…….what you look like decides whether we approve of you, or not, how you speak, how you present yourself, your qualifications (on paper), your family background.

I get that so many slide down into the swamp of unbelief, and, that others rise up into shapes that don’t fit them at all. You can live a whole life, the only one you have, in that unfit shape. To a degree, I did that too, hoping for approval, for recognition, for acceptance. It worked pretty well. However, at this end of my life, widowed and in the evening time, I do hope that one day choices will be for everyone, for men, women, children, and all of those choices will be welcomed, discussed, guided and supported.

I may be a dreamer.

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Island Blog – Truth and Connection

I considered not writing today, I did. But, if writing is a compulsion, there really is no point in any attempt to avoid. It considers me. I write to uplift, that’s my thing, not contrived and with no agenda, but just because I am who I am. In uplifting, I gain so much. I cannot, not, do this uplifting thing. It is part of me. So, when I am tired, bone weary, feeling shit, I hesitate myself, if that is indeed possible. I pick up and join with the voices of my past, those in my own parental home that said, and clearly, You never go out with a face like that, or Nobody wants to know about you and your current angst, of words to that effect, and so we didn’t. We left our feelings behind because the mess of emotion is, was, something to be ashamed of, an affliction, and everyone else is just fine by the way, so keep your smile bright and your lies constrained by chains in the cellar of your soul.

When I question this now, many miles away from youth and my now dead parents, I find my own answers. They come slow, like geese on a spring wind, like daffodils in an ice cold sky, faltering, halting, holding fast to a risky opening. That thinking was then, I say. Yes, it was, comes the answer, but the truth of it remains steadfast. You don’t ‘go out there’ with your smile half way down your legs and that boring liturgy of stuff that nobody wants to hear pushing at your teeth until it blasts out into a How Are You face, sending the asker into a wall of regret at asking at all.

Another answer that lifts like blossom from the sludge of thinking is that it is a huge mistake to attach possibles to a feeling. Defining a feeling is very important. I feel very tired. That’s how I feel. It isn’t because I have had a tough life, nor that I hold regrets about my motherhood, nor that I find it hard to pump up a car tyre, nor that I find it a damn menace to chop wood. None of that. I am just tired. Funny that we need to attach reasons, when a feeling is just a feeling, and that feeling will pass, as everything does. But, being human, we question, and isn’t it interesting that the judges, bored old buggers who haven’t tasted limelight for a while, leap from their chairs and into the ring, the moment we allow such questions the floor. So don’t do it.

A young friend visited today. I knew her when she was 12 and now she’s a granny. We had a wonderful time, talking of our memories, our connections over 30 years or more and my tiredness got fed up and lifted. Connection is everything, because it takes us out of our own story and into a new and interesting narrative. This might seem that my story is not enough and, at times, it isn’t, and that, I believe, is the same for us all. To question is to quest. To reach out is to reach. To be truthful about feelings is to honour them. I’m learning, all of the time.

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Island Blog – A Big Warm Friend

Once I get to know my mammoth, I find I like her. She presents as a threat, or so I perceive, but she is a big softy inside. I know about this presenting thingy, I do it myself, always upbeat, the cheerful one, the clown to smile away another’s sadness whilst my own nudges against my outer limits like there’s a whole me in there, longing to be seen, heard and acknowledged. It thinks me. However, thinking is not an action unless I I give it full attention, unless I sort the melodrama and sentimental tiddleypom from the core truth of my thinks. Hiding who I really am is often required and even appropriate at times, out there in the world. Was I to moan out my inner angst at, say, a birthday celebration for a friend, everyone would be stultified, embarrassed and at a loss for words. A meltdown on the 10 am ferry crossing would spoil the day for many folk, leaving them feeling emotionally confused and full of questions as to how I feel, at our next encounter. So, like you, I present as if my exterior is a perfect match for my core truth.

However, and there is always one of those, this can become an unhealthy way to live, this cover up choice, until even I, and in private, do not acknowledge how I really feel inside, desperate to fit in to the shape I ‘appear’ to have, and for all my life. My mammoth, who is fast becoming a good friend, has literally softened as I sit before her hugeness, her tusks, not to mention that, unless she budges, I will never see my sitting room again. We talk. She teaches me about her as I teach her about me. Our languages are not the same and we both need to learn. Sometimes we say more to each other by saying nothing at all, just watching, using eye contact, body language and smiles. It is hard for a mammoth to smile, yes, but, as you know, a true smile is really seen in the eyes, a true one, that is, for we can all turn up our mouths, in rictus, in grimace, and it means nothing if it doesn’t reach our eyes. Eventually, we communicate through thought in sentences that wind, like ribbons, into a flow.

Over days and evenings, we grow closer. She reminds me of my inner self and I suggest to her that she doesn’t need to roar quite so much, and at everything, because listening is key in this world. Sometimes we listen for so long that one of us needs to check the other hasn’t died in the process. She tells me that to feel broken and beaten down is okay. But to feel unheard and unseen as the true person I am, even if my presenting as the world expects me to present has dulled my wits somewhat means I must take action. I bristle, a little, at that, even as I know she is right. So what is the answer, I ask her. She watches me watching her, our eyes locked. Ah, she says, we need to be friends. We are friends! She nods that gigantic head and suddenly I laugh at the ridiculous scene, me on the floor, she taking up the whole sofa, a mammoth in my home, a huge and hairy mammoth! She, sort of, laughs too, but its more of a forest shaking roar that blows my short hair into spikes, knocks over the candles and rattles the window. We must be friends for ever, she says, once we all calm down and I have checked the window for damage and righted the candles. Any time you are not paying attention to whom you really are, being open and honest about it, mostly to yourself, I will block your doorway, I will be your stop-and-check checker. Ok, I say. And as I say this, I see her grow smaller, just a bit. She doesn’t seem to mind, so nor do I. After saying goodnight, watching her lie down to rest, I cover her considerably smaller body, with a big blanket against the chill of the dark hours. See you in the morning, I whisper, stroking her long soft coat.

Maybe, she says, her eyes closing.

In the morning, she is gone.

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Island Blog – A Bee, Curiosity and Instant Solutions

How do bees manage to fly sideways? In this African garden with its ebullience of fragrant blooms, I am of interest to the bees. One or two come over to me, perhaps beckoned by my floral perfume or perhaps I just look like a blooming shrub in my colourful frock. On the trajectory towards me, the bee flies straight, but once it arrives a few inches from my face, she swings from right to left, left to right, sussing me out, eyeball to eyeball. How does she do it? I google. It seems that a bee’s wings, both pairs of them, not only flap up and down but also can twist and rotate. How fantastic is that! It thinks me.

How flexible am I inside this life of mine? Do I flap up and down, moving either forward or back, or do I have the mental wings that can twist and rotate, thus allowing me to visit any situation or encounter using a lateral flow? I like to think I can laterally flow with the best of them, and I believe it to be a truth. I visit the sideways of things a lot, particularly when I am unsure-footed, continuing forward, but determined not to go back, because going back over old ground in any situation is not going to show me anything new, after all, now is it? However, there is often the temptation to replay the movie, to berate self for any trip ups back there, to wish I had done or said it differently, a thoroughly pointless exercise, a waste of mind energy, and fruitless, but we all do it now and again and some of us make a life of wishing the past was different.

Logic and emotion can be poor bed mates. I can know something, a fact, a truth, a way of behaving, but if I cannot feel the truth of it, know it in my heart, that ‘truth’ means little to me, much as the bee thought I was a blooming shrub. However, it’s deeply frustrating when that belief lasts only as long as it takes for something to trip me up, like a half-concealed boulder in my new path, the one I absolutely know to be the right one, logically speaking. The number of positive and upbeat wisdoms, particularly on social media, are beginning to irritate me, all those goodly truths serving only to tell me how often I fall short of their perfection. Learning how to accept that each ‘truth’ is something I need to experience personally as I keep moving along my path takes a degree of patience, not something any of us find easy. I want it now, this new understanding, not in ten years time for god’s sake! Other people get it straight away, so what is wrong with me? Your thinking, m’lady, that’s what is wrong, not you. Don’t think, but just keep buzzing along, use those wings to twist and rotate, work the muscles, fly sideways, checking out everything and everyone along the way. Be like a bee. And if a shrub turns out to be an old woman in a loud frock, so be it. Move on.

As I approach 70 years of age, an astonishment for me as I never thought I would pass 60, I take a look down the road from my past. 60, in my opinion, meant bad temper, lipstick smudged, hair, weekly permed into a helmet and sensible shoes and I wanted none of that. Nowadays, however, we are younger than our parents were, in thinking, in opportunities, in attitude and in engagement with younger generations. I don’t feel old at all and plan to remain not feeling old until I fall over for the last time. I have also found, eventually it seems, a confidence I did not have when younger. Although I cannot state with any lofty words that I know where I am going, because most of the time I do not, I am happy with that. If we stay curious, fly sideways as well as forwards, the occasional look back allowed but only to honour all we have gone through and survived, we birth ourselves again. We have inherited DNA, yes, but that doesn’t need to define our choices or actions today, right now. I am truly thankful for my ancestors, what they gifted me, the good and the ‘bad’. I am also deeply thankful that I am not a bee. My eyes are open, my limbs flexible, my curiosity a daily fascination as I can arrive in a strange place just like that, my mental wings ready to twist. I don’t wear lipstick nor do I have a permed head. I am not bad-tempered, nor do I own a pair of sensible shoes, running barefoot most of the time. I am prepared to face whatever the olding process sends my way. I will continue to read those uplifting truths because I never know which one will settle in for keeps, and, best of all, I no longer believe in instant solutions, because the only instant solution I can trust unequivocally, is me.

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Island Blog – We are an I

The dusk falls like a cloak, rumpled, full of holes, quick if you turn away, look back and gasp. It is down now, this cloak, this wizard velvet, mouse-lit velvet rumple, allowing starlights to arrest my thinking, stop me, turn me as they poke through, thrust their death light into my looking. The sun, fighting still against his slip from stage right, thrusts a backlight so that those way-over-there trees, skeletal now and with limbs reach-stretched for maximum effect, stand silhouette against the indigo of a winter sky. I watch and watch as the new moon fingernails across the almost darkness, stars brighten and faraway, and this night, if I go out barefoot and goonied, I will see lace patterns in the wild space above me, above you too, although yous with streetlamps will miss a lot. I remember missing a lot whilst living in Glasgow and it was there I knew how the song came to be, Blackbird Singing in the dead of Night, because we had one of those, right outside our flat, singing and singing and exhausting himself and I felt a big shame for the wild ones who knew something once, for sure, and then became confounded by a change that might take generations to become okay with a species.

Transition is a fine thing for us, even when it sticks spikes into an ass every time you sit down in a place that used to offer ‘sit-down’ as a thing expected, normal and oftentimes visited. From one state to another. That’s how it defines itself. From cocoon to butterfly, from larva to god-knows-what that will eat your cucumbers and primulas and wonder you why you ever bothered planting the damn things. But who has a map for the bridges? The ones, like me, like you, we and many ‘I’s who must and will exist between loss and friendship, between existential pain and the light of new hope, between the doubt and fear of young age and a possible future, and the old agers who would love a rainbow beyond bent fingers, weakened wrists, and faulty legs. Both transition generations seeing what? A bridge?

There is no answer to that question and there may never be. So, we find our own answers, fumbling, faltering, seeking, searching and, in all my reading, my miles and miles of reading, our generational congregation is no different now. Centuries of searching for the absolute brings no reprieve from the ongoing thingy of human-ness. We can watch the sky and think our thinks. We can submit to sulks and huffs and the refusal to communicate within a relationship at home. We can reject or connect with ‘difficult’ children. We can walk the dog or let it die of the lack. We can dress in jewels despite the rain. We can lift old mothers-in-law into an evening of smiles, ask them of their memories, lift them back home into the empty bed of their lonely lives or we can hold to the fact that we don’t like her, nor ourself in her presence. We can enjoy a puddle with little children or claim tiredness and the need to be home to watch Countdown. We can decide to live out our whatever life, no matter what the inside demon tells us. We did not fail. We lived our best. Yes, we failed, made mistakes, have regrets, let no-one hide from that big truth. However, we can tell ourselves, even if nobody will ever tell us, that we did what we deemed right for the family, we were/are a character created, a personality shaped and formed, wonky and faltering. Or we can hide away from a anything honest and watch some celebrity nonsense on TV.

But we are an I.

We are.

An

I

And with an I lies all the power.

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Island Blog – Mythbusters

First I listened to Brene Brown on Vulnerability and Shame on audio whilst I sewed a baby play mat in colours of unicorn, fairies, stars and, bizarrely, dinosaurs in peplum frocks. Next, a recommendation from my little sister, It’s Ok that You’re not Ok by Megan Devine. Another mythbuster, refreshing, raw, a real approach to grief and loss. They both speak my truth, one I can now know for myself instead of all the other ‘truths’ that have no idea. Actually, it isn’t that they have no idea. Not that. It is more that they had no way of connecting with anyone who spoke out their shame, their vulnerability, their grief or loss. Some truth talker throwing their pain into the air confounded me and I did what most of us do. I searched my brain for fixatives. Time will tell. Things will get better. He/she is safe now, home with God, in the Elysium fields. Or, No! you are not weak, not guilty, have no need for shame, self blame, fear. Now, all I feel in the blast of these good intentions, is irritation, anger even. I want to run, to yell at them but I don’t and I won’t because now I get it. Our culture has no coping mechanisms for such a meet. We don’t want it. We hate it. We wish we had never met this messy person and we long to make it better. So, wait, what can I say? I know……Time will heal, things will get better, are you busy, are you eating, sleeping, exercising, enjoying nature? Maybe you should look for another man, way of living, place to live, job, passion? All upturned as querulous questions and there’s me behind them hoping I just said the perfect thing.

I find my home through the myth busters. Politely I always did in song lyrics (acceptable) or books parked in genres, equally politely, in book stores. You don’t have to go that way if it isn’t your thing after all. I always did. The ridiculously trapped genre of Self Help covers a million issues and is the most shelf dusty. I noticed that. Fiction, that’s what we want, diversion, distraction, and for the kids, we want pretty pink unicorns, tutu-ed fairies, equally pinked up, and stars, oh stars, all bright and not dying, no way, and then those dinosaurs in peplum. Happiness. Don’t knock it. It is what we are all seeking, after all and yet who has really found it in its entirety? Nobody, that’s who. Those childhood hopes must be dashed, eventually and yet I can see how it would never work to teach them Grimm, as I was taught. Fairy tales in my day were dark but when I read those tales again I just know I would never put a little hopeful face before those words. But what happens when we hit the adult world of super tough? We are not prepared and maybe that is how life works. Our culture is all about fixing. I feel low Doctor. Here are some pills that will help, just for a little while, until you get back on your feet. And, they do, but the core changeth not, the core that is my pain. The caring professions seek to wrench us from our self-destruct and to point us to our own star. Of course they do. Who wants yet another collapso?

And it doesn’t have to be bereavement, this awkward and uncomfortable truth that walks around with a person. It can be any pain at all. There is no competition. Every one of us who knows how it feels to be abandoned, lost, angry, vulnerable, knows this awkward and uncomfortable truth. It is our truth and not something to be flapped away or fixed. We are not fixable. We are in this for as long as it takes and that is that. However, we will put on a good face for that is what we are taught. Responding to someone who benignly and lovingly asks, How Are You with an honest response is not allowed. We just won’t answer honestly because why? Because we are taught to think of others and this Other who stands before might well fall like a tree if I told her my truth. Awful. Can’t sleep. Am never hungry. Don’t care if I don’t wake up. Feel like a yoyo. Anxious, fearful, afraid, lost, crazy at times. I won’t say any of that. I. Am. Fine. That’s what I will say and always say no matter how much that someone asks. And, the truth of it is this. I am. Fine. Because what I want, what someone navigating the void of pain wants is time and space to get on with this. I won’t even say ‘through this’ because I have no idea there is a ‘through’ at all. ‘Through’ suggests an end result.

Today the ice is wild and spectacular. The sea-loch shoreline is capped with rainbows. No unicorns. As the sun hits the smokey ice cover, it flashes back at me, colour shift and then flat grey again, in a nanosecond. I live in those nanoseconds so I get to see. Other walkers might miss it but not me for I am greedy for it all and I am always watching change. A lone woodcock lifts from the bracken and flies right over my head, her wings speckled, spectacular, her flight unmistakeable, her aloneness palpable. Did you see her? I ask two walkers deep in conversation. See what? they smiled. I just smile back. This is my life and yours looks like this. Cosy, designing supper for two, a warm fire, sharing, plans for tomorrow, next week, next birthday. On the track I see dichotomy. On the north side the granite is cold and dark, ice-sheered, silent. On the other side, snowdrops respond to the sun warmth and open like hope. Icicles as long as a spear head and too fat for my fingers to encircle hang northly. Across the track, sun dapples the plane tree bark, warms the new buds, smiles me. I feel at home as I always do when I am alone. One side of me is frozen. One sun warmed and beginning new life.

I am fine. I want solitary. I have no idea half the time how to get through a minute, an hour, a night, a day, but I will not tell you that because you, as I once had, have no idea what to do with such a raw and bloody truth. However, with these brilliant myth busting women and their courage to speak out, I finally, finally, find a path I can walk that is ok with me.

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Island Blog – A Chance to Bloom

As I walked yesterday along an empty track, empty of people, I mean, life is springing into beauty. Nesting tits dart in and out of the gaps in the drystone walls, primroses leap like sunlight from beneath the old pines, bumble bees scurry into their mossy burrows and the sparkles on the sealoch popple diamonds, as if a thousand fireflies fly low across the surface. The air is crisp and blue and, above the sky, we are healing. Who would have thought it, thought this? That, just by not driving everywhere, flying, catching a train or a bus, we could, in one week of lockdown see a noticeable repair job going on the in ozone layer. How utterly remarkable and what a surprise. We can mend our world, if we take serious note and if we all decide we will not go back to how we were.

Going back to normal is something I have never got my head around. It is actually impossible to go back to anything at all, never mind ‘normal’. Although things may well resume in a way similar to that which we once knew as normal, we ourselves have changed. The process we have encountered, gone through and learned from has made new neural pathways inside our brains. These pathways are opportunities for change and new growth, for a new bloom to flash revealing light in our eyes. Understandably, those who need us to ‘go back to normal’ will be pushing for our business once this is over and done, but we are not sheep. We are big brained humans with a collective and deep need to protect our world.

The wildlife abounds, the waters are cleaner, effluent free and offering safe habitat for all species. Including us. Although I am one of the most fortunate women on earth, to have this wild place to wander through daily, I still know we all really want things not to go back to normal. Not to go back at all. How we turn this desire into action is way beyond my thinking. I found it hard enough to do that with five kids pulling on my apron strings, never mind a whole flipping world of apron string pullers. But I do know that it takes one, then two, then a street, then a village, then a town, a city, a country to make an impact on the whole. There is always a point in making personal change and it never fails to affect someone else. They say that if you want to receive love you first need to give it. And, much as it has irritated me in the past, I believe it to be the truth.

We have been gifted a reprieve, new steps to dance, a chance to bloom.

Shall we?

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Island Blog – The Great Sadness

I have no other name for it. Nor can I explain it, although I have tried, many times over the decades of my long life. In the search for meaning, for an explanation, we are forgiven our walks up blind alleys. It is only human to want an answer. As a child I felt it. It would suddenly invade my mind when I was most definitely looking the other way. Suddenly, even in a gathering of family or peers, in what seemed to be a happy moment, it would hit me full whack. At a young age I had no way of understanding it. I just thought that it was because Angela had pink flashing socks and mine were ordinary white, albeit with a Daz sparkle. Or that Mary had a hamster.

Later, as a supposedly intelligent and educated young women it still hit me. At a party, for which I had taken about five hours to dress, and surrounded by friends and music and a short term freedom, or walking down the town on a Saturday morning with money to spend on something ridiculous like shiny hot pants or chain-rattling tough girl boots, the Great Sadness would punch me in the gut and stumble me. it would leave me completely alone in a huge crowd, like a girl on a raft mid Pacific. Sometimes someone would spot the change and ask a kindly question, but I soon lost them as I explained what a weirdo I was. I think they were scared they might catch something dodgy. I find the same now, in the evening of my life. The only people who don’t run for the next bus are intuits, counsellors or very close friends. Friend, actually. She gets me, even if she does also consider me a weirdo.

As a child I was considered strange, difficult, obtuse etc. I could be brilliant, and I was, supreming at music, writing and insight, but the latter threw even the most open-hearted guides. I was too young, too confounded by the Sadness and, thus, too much of a threat to my peers who seemed not to ever think beyond hamsters or pink flashing socks. I felt alienated and had no idea why. This huge thing I still cannot explain shows me much. I have now learned to welcome it and to walk beside it, even if it really hurts. I used to hang it on pegs. Must be this thing, this person, this event, this fear. Not now. As I grow a stronger connection to nature and to the wildness around me, I accept the Great Sadness as an integral part of the whole point of things, of life and not just this one but the millions of lives already lived to the end. I consider myself privileged to have been visited by it from childhood, even if it did cause a tapselteerie; even if it did label me a weirdo; even if my friends’ mothers shook their heads and scuttled their daughters away; even if my own mum looked at me as she might look at ET.

There are times when I cannot lift my mental boots out of the mud. It is not that I am depressed. There are days when I imagine flying off a cliff. I do not plan to. I am just the honoured host for the Great Sadness, one that shows me all the pain in the world. I hear the cries, feel, intensely, the agony of struggle and cruelty, feel the joy and the happiness too. It’s like being in balance. I can hold the pain and the joy inside me at the same time without having to explain or justify a thing. Nor does it fear me. It gives me a real good look into the truth. And that is something most of us avoid. We would rather push it away when it hurts, buy something, plan a holiday, phone a friend, turn on the TV. But to sit with it when it comes in is not for the faint hearted. It is uncomfortable at best, and this visitor stays just as long as they like.

I am still a student. for over 60 years I have run from the Great Sadness, but it won’t go away, no matter what I do. I think when a person is very creative, the Great Sadness comes too. I see it in art and writing and music that gasps me. Oh, I think, there it is. It won’t be explained, nor justified, nor hung on a peg. It makes its choice. The key is to let it in, like a visitor you don’t much want, who has arrived at the most inconvenient time, and who has no plans to leave for a while. It will not be rebuked, nor thrown out. I am only sad I didn’t read the Great Sadness manual aged six.

Might have been just a bit further on by now.