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Reawakening
Birdsong sweetly finds its way into my dreams, on a breeze through the window left ajar through the night. Half closed eyes and that hint of spring in my nostrils. Flowers opening. Bees sleepily visiting, waking from long winter hibernations, a lone buzz on a cool sunny morning. Stepping outside, feet bare on freezing flags, but squinting against the sun and feeling hope on the wind.
This spring is pulling me forward, one step in front of the other, quickening from the doldrums of last year. I broke connection with the land and space around me over those months. Retreat, stillness, languishing in some unknown torpor. I stayed in and didn’t walk the land. Rhythms of water and moorland beat unheard. I slowed, silenced, stayed away. I drew into myself, and didn’t know why. But now this spring unfurls me, and I feel like stretching to the sky.
It was observation, watching, waiting for the future to pull me forward. Time weaver, tired from straddling the past and present, the raging ocean, the dark whirlpool of memory. But after the storm there is calm. In the moment we may not know why. But last year I finally trusted the process. My world shrank and helpless, I let it. In that surrender there is healing.
I blink in the bright light, and true, 12 months mostly indoors will do that. I feel a pull to the land once more, walking my old paths, following the old ways back to something that is me but newer. With the rising sun comes a relentless possibility, and small smile to the sky, that first ray of light after a long winter. I feel the awakening in my cells, in my soul. I breathe in and fill my lungs with that fresh, timid air of the first days of the changing season.
The darkness was needed, the months away from the land, the breaking of a connection so it can grow anew. Isolation, time away, space to process and trust and surrender to the turn of the earth. But there was no nourishment, no soul-searching, no rest. I ran myself down, working too hard, losing myself in scrolling, spending agonising hours inside my mind in spirals and twists and turns. It taught me what I didn’t want. And in turn, all the truth remains. The storm retreats. Everything is shiny and new, ready and waiting.
I raise my arms and welcome in the spring.
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Stepping forward
It’s somewhat of a introspective time of year, maybe fuelled by the endless grey clouds and rain we’ve been having here in the UK. It sort of sends you inwards, when there’s not much changing outside. I feel as though something is ending and something else is waiting to start, but I’m not too sure what. Coming to the end of my studies, my mind is on the future, some sort of gainful employment maybe, at least some sort of way to make a living that’s fulfilling, fun and interesting.
I’ve been looking back at the cycles in my life over these last 4 decades, and it all seems a little like start and dead end. Re-start and another dead end. Switch and start and dead end again. I’ve felt myself viewing my working life as a series of endless failures over the years, even looking at myself as an endless failure. I couldn’t work out why I couldn’t follow the perfect progression of those around me.
I couldn’t stick with one job, one trajectory. I admit, being in my 40’s now and looking at careers of those around me, there’s some regret that I didn’t ‘stick it out’ in one of those jobs I hated, follow the promotion trail. I sometimes find it hard comparing myself to others, feeling I should be a head of something, a director of something else, a manager of somewhere by now. But I left everything I started. Over the last few years though, I have recognised some kind of pattern. I’ve found in these pattern there are clues. And in these clues are answers. And in answers, there is positivity.
With each of those inevitable, wry aftershocks that come with late-diagnosed neurodiversity, a few more crusty layers fall away, revealing a kind of tentative truth underneath. A hint of gold shining in the rubble. It just takes a bit of digging.
Everything reaches an end, where somehow, I have to change. I’ve felt like it’s just a dead end over and over, to be honest. Why couldn’t I stick with one thing? But I’ve started to realise, dead ends are my phoenix.
I start, and then after a while, it is time to end. Looking at it with the knowledge I have now, of course it works like this. I feel now like it couldn’t work any other way. There’s quite a bit of comfort in that. Having an explanation is the first step of a new plan, I feel. This plan also sounds like a challenge. And that is fun in itself…
After a few years doing something the same, every day, the dopamine runs out, the fun is over, the achievement is achieved. I have been ‘good enough’. The chapter closes, and a new one begins. My brain wants to break free and follow excitement. So is the way. Small cycles, and longer ones. They run concurrently, always looping, always starting and ending.
Society values predictability, stable linear trajectories. When you show up with a CV with a good chunk of semi-successful-but-not-quite jobs listed, with no coherent thread of promotions running through it, it’s met with a grimace and offers to tailor it into something more palatable. I saw myself as a failure that kept hitting a brick wall. But of course I did.
I straighten up a little and look back with clear eyes. I fought and fought and pushed myself past the natural end of everything I ever did. I got burnt out, I got ill, I got depressed. I couldn’t understand why I was so good and then suddenly, I wasn’t. Everything has ended in some sort of burnout and I couldn’t see why. I thought I just wasn’t cut out for success, as I defined it then.
But, and I whisper it, because it is still a new revelation and kind of precious, I can suddenly see it. I got bored. The dopamine ran out. For me, it truly explains why I’ve gone down in flames so many times. Pushing to stay consistent when every part of my brain has given up and just wants difference, excitement and novelty. High stress, low reward, no freedom, many rules, rigid time, hardly any praise. Monotony. No opportunity for ideas or creation. The surefire, 100% successful ingredients for burnout. Of course!
The slog to the top isn’t interesting to me. The reward at the end of a long, long task? I just don’t care. Is the thing I’m doing fun? Then I’ll be amazing at it. As soon as it stops being fun, or challenging, or interesting – I’m right out. It could be a billion pound job at the end of it and nothing on earth would get me there. It could be a career trajectory to be the strategic director of actual Earth, but if there wasn’t a fun path to getting there, I’d say see you later mate. I think I’m making peace with that.
I’m motivated by praise, problem solving, new things, connections. Things where I can win, things where I achieved, where I want to push myself and have freedom to put new ideas in place, to create things, to just do stuff fast. It’s true, praise lights up my dopamine connections like nothing else. I love stuff that is challenging, and finding a way through the challenge and feeling like I’ve won. I love interesting things. I can jump about between unrelated tasks endlessly and get them done incredibly well in record time, if there’s a bit of panic, chaos and freedom attached. Little cycles, within bigger ones.
As for the bigger ones, the ones that stretch over years, well. They come to an end, too, if there is not enough variety, not enough incentive, not enough freedom to stretch out and go full galaxy brain. It’s ok. For me, it’s natural. It’s inevitable. I think of the environments I worked in previously, and that ‘aha’ moment is almost delicious.
So, 7 years into my foray into academia, I’m feeling a little apprehensive. A year before I hand in my thesis, I’m running on fumes and spite like most final year doctoral students, determined to try and finish one damn thing in my life, but slightly worried about what comes next. Do I want to fit myself into that academic structure? Just how much room is there to create something that is sustainably interesting? Is there a trajectory with enough momentum and space to keep me going? Is there glory on tap?
I would love to carry on learning, discovering, researching. The freedom of academia is something I’ve never seen in any other job, yet at the same time the entrenchment of structure is deep and very resistant to change. But there has been space to spin an entire dinner service of plates, follow research rabbit holes, push myself to do more than I ever thought. I’ve actually thrived here.
If I choose to try and carry on, at least my eyes are open to how my brain thrives – and I know that if the cycle ends, it is a natural end, and not because I have failed. Having compassion for all those past endings gives me strength to face the possibility potential of a new one, and the courage to change things that aren’t working to things that do. A recent conversation described it as lily-pad working. Hopping happily from lily to lily, all within a pond. I love that.
So I know if it doesn’t work out, I can make peace with thriving non-linearly, and hop and shimmy sideways into whatever else is on the horizon, head over heels.
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Unsettlement
Do you ever feel that something is shifting? Like you are on one side of a veil, about to step through, but to what, you don’t know. A subtle shift in the wind, a smell hinting on the breeze, a sudden illumination that suddenly highlights a whole different path. Like a diver tiptoeing to the edge of the high board. Toes curled over the edge, arms stretched above. That perfect moment of stillness. The held breath, the clear exhale. That infinitesimal pause, the pinpoint before, and then…
The pause amplifies. It wraps around me in its stillness, the infinite and the instant, endless depth and the deep black potential, waiting for an atom to shift the balance. What I saw as stagnation is instead a building, a deer gathering energy before taut muscles spring forward in a leap. The tightening of an elastic band before a snap. Feeling the pause, feeling the ache, the yearning for movement that is almost painful. I want to know what is on the other side. I want clarity, explanation, boxes, linearity. Instead, I teeter on the liminal.
I look back at cycles repeating themselves over and over and finally realise I need to let go. I feel the constant strive for something that fits in that neat box, for something tactile, solid, defined. The endless wish for that definition to fit in. But the realisation is I’m not made for linearity. I didn’t trust my tangentiality, but I think that’s what is on the other side. A linear road leading me to this veil. Through that doorway, the final freedom to bend and change and whisper on the winds. The expectation of completement, of one track progression, all the things I’ve bent and fit myself into over 4 decades. You do this, then this, then this, then this. Tick, tick, tick.
tick.
tick.
Standing on that high board, I open my eyes. Ready to dive.
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Wind in the Chimney
The hollow howl buffeting down the stone chimney tells me the winds have arrived. Ripping the last leaves from thin branches, whipping shadows through the dark windows where moonlight flashes briefly from behind scudding clouds. I love the sound, that almost boom, the dull echo as the air rattles down through the fireplace, squeezing through the grates, whistling and wheezing. That wild energy finding its way into the old house, as always.
There is a background roar down the valley, too. In the inky darkness, that deep, primal rumble as the gale winds career from valley side to valley side, funnelled around slalom corners formed by the hillsides and hitting our house head on. Wild nights. I need this.
I find it easy to slip into that world of deadlines, of work, of the relentless rejection of the academic treadmill. Old habits die hard and patterns repeat, but I can hold myself now, with the help of those around me who remind me that real life isn’t hours on the screen or judgement by unseen peers. It’s this gale, it’s the rain battering the window, its that wild energy finding its way through every crack and hole in old stone. It’s been a hard week for sure, and I feel myself sinking, sleeping, hiding away. But in darkness is always softness, in these four walls is sanctuary, in the out breath is healing and peace and centring. As the gale rages outside, I remember to let that wild wind find its way to me, too.
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Deep fear and feeling
Wrapped in four different blankets, my hoodie pulled up over my thinning hair, I feel the thud thud thud of my heart deep within. Pumping oxygen to muscles primed to fight or flight, the whisper of shallow breath cooling my lips, pupils expanding in the dim light. But tonight is relaxed, a soft end to a weekend, a day off the following day, a cocoon of ambient lighting, deep bass, tea and company. Yet this insidious, deep, ever-present fear underlines every moment. Snaking its way up through my throat, a long, shaky exhale not enough to disperse the cortisol that’s been flooding this body for as long as I can remember.
Rationally, I don’t know what it is. That constant fear that I am In Trouble, that somehow I will get Found Out, but honestly, what for, I have no idea. For being wrong. For not being enough. For existing. For all this and more, the things I can’t put into words, things that are at most a fleeting sound, a glimpse, a shadow in the back of my mind. All the things that spoke truth to me, whilst I switched myself into whoever I was talking to at the time. A way to protect something that I have no name for.
Weirdly, the more I make peace with myself, the more this feeling seems to rise and start to stick around. I’m feeling the most confident, the most at peace that I have felt, maybe ever. And yet, simultaneously, I feel the most fear, too. The more I relax into myself, the more this thing inside me twists and turns and raises terror that has me screaming in my sleep. What is it, this deep fear? Am I creating space for it, the more I let go?
I think it needs to come out, whatever this anxiety is. It needs to be felt. This journey of final understanding, four decades in the making, has pushed and squashed fear down, leaving an underlying dread that coloured my days but that I thought was normal. I ignored it, I didn’t want to pay it attention. Now, letting go, expanding into myself, colouring in blankness, peeling back layers, existing in a sort of lightness – there is more space to hear. Bubbles rise to the surface, things long buried, things shouting to be heard. And so I let it expand, this deep fear, this beating heart. Monsters that chase me at night, a world that’s louder than I remember, an awareness that is highly alert for danger, for judgement, for discovery. I need to feel it, I know it. As unpleasant as it is, I think the smallness of life right now is a step forward.
My world has shrunk, as I’ve said before. But this time it is my world, and I’m real, and true, and tentative. This deep fear is keeping me small, and at the same time, keeping me safe. This shiny new me, uncovered, a small smile playing on lips, a new lightness of step. It has a purpose, and it deserves to be felt in all the panic, all the wide eyes and racing mind. The shaking hands, the deep, inexplicable terror. It hurts and it heals, little by little.
So, with curiosity, trepidation, and honestly a little resignation, I walk alongside the fear. To hear what was underneath all these years, to begin to understand and then to let it go. In all is waves. In all is a cycle. Seasons rise and fall, and this will fall too, in time.
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In all things
Samhain approaches, that time of held breath, liminality, not quite here but not quite there, either. A time where it is said that movement is easier between worlds, where permeability reigns, fluid, soft, grasping. Timeweavers dance across realities, journeys start and end from both sides of the veil. For those who listen, for those who speak a language that is never heard, for those who tiptoe into the night.
I think a lot about balance this time of year. Where everything has seemed either/or, it is now blurred. Surety is shifting and my mind feels it stronger than ever. For a brain where everything smudges together all of the time, coloured by layers of possibility and thumbprints scattered across synapses, this time of year is a time where I feel myself melt into the season, into the landscape. Into the energies that have carried me along this far.
I try and strive for balance, but balance is effort. It takes planning, muscle, tension to exist on that thin line between too much and not enough. Between light and dark. In the long, looping cycles of life, balance is always off. Save for a few pinpoints hit, in my experience, entirely by accident, I am always pulled one way or another. Immersed in joy, or immersed in apathy, or all of the minute divisions in between. Feeling each moment in my universe soul, with all parts of my being, beginning, end and the times that have no measure. Why should we strive to counter moments with their opposites? Why is the goal a perfect symmetry of experience?
The cycle of the year waxes and wanes with regularity, and I see the balance in light and dark, in summer and winter, in the eternal battle between oak and holly. But what for those who walk one side or the other? For those who are pulled by the deep, relentless energy of everything, everywhere. There is not just this, or that, or a perfect divide. Minds are messy, lives are messy. And mess is wonderful, relentless, and full of potential.
I’m embracing mess and the possibility that ‘unbalance’ is where I naturally come to rest. A mix of quiet and stimulation hasn’t really worked out for me. In fact, my mental rest is in doing, in movement, in beats and thrums. My brain sings to itself, and when left in silence creates its own relentless cacophony of colour, of half formed thoughts, feelings, glimpses and fizzing connection, as those who also belong to the tribe called ADHD will well attest. This year has brought introspection. It’s taken a while for things to settle but this year seems to have been the year of ‘what if’? And so, in celebration of this lightness of spirit, of this curiosity, just maybe, although the earth turns steadily, I entertain the idea of humming to a different frequency. A kind of weighted balance, one side rising higher than the other. Do I need to bring more balance into my life – or do I actually need less?
I’ve tried to incorporate more down-time this year, as university pressure mounts and my workload increases. But as much as I’ve embraced rest, internet-free time and stillness, I’ve not found myself feeling better. In fact, what seems to be helping is accepting the vibrancy that doing brings. I’m realising it’s not a balance between busyness and rest that helps me process and restore. It’s busyness…. and more busyness. Busyness in a different form. Tactile movement, creating, foraging, walking, making. Moving. Learning. Testing out just how much additional stimulation this ADHD brain needs to function optimally, and finding fun ways to embrace that. I’ve spent the last decade consciously making myself stop, slow, think and rest, sometimes forced by illness, sometimes in choice. A time of stillness to facilitate that deep, deep soul processing, and I needed it, viscerally, truly. Now I’m at a place where experimentation seems more achievable. And so, as the nights draw in, I feel this is actually a time for more. Where I’d usually be turning to hibernation, I feel drawn to exploration, instead. More, but different. Let’s see where it leads.
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Gardening and consistency
I love the garden, but I, and I am quite giddy with delight as I say this, I have come to realise I am not a fan of the actual gardening. Ha! What a journey, to be able to speak a realisation about myself. What a tentative delight it is!It should come as no surprise that I’ve battled with this, coming from a large family of green-fingered garden geniuses, resplendent in their piles of vegetables and home-grown preserves, borders of jewel-like flowers growing happily to the sky. I have tried, I really have. I love the idea of gardening. I want to love it, I really do. I’ve even almost convinced myself, whilst putting endless seeds in the soil, watering that little bit of hope that dark, cold days will soon pass and shoots will spill forth from the ground. But no. Inevitably, hardly anything sprouts. The things that do get eaten immediately by supersnails (even super-hot chillies, which only serve to make the snails grow stronger and more filled with rage and teeth). If something progresses to getting actually planted in the ground, it will, by some miracle of nature, become either grass or a dandelion. No, I don’t know how, either.
So, the last few years, as I have played with the dawning realisation that this is just not for me, I’ve let the garden just grow by itself, madly, wildly, full of weeds and yes, full of grass, full of dandelions, full of THINGS. I’ve embraced this funny, rising feeling of joy and freedom, until it spills from my lips in a wild giggle, watching shieldbugs lay eggs on a huge rambling rose that’s twined itself up the holly tree and yelling I DON’T CARE and feeling all kinds of wonderful. Because not caring has given something to the wild. Nature holds me now. The garden is its own beast.
I don’t care that couch grass is taking over the driveway. I don’t care that teasels spring from cracks in the paving, making bare-legged wandering a veritable gauntlet. I don’t care that the same teasels have created a huge, towering field for themselves in what used to be the veg patch. I don’t care that dandelions run rampant and brambles wander enthusiastically around the perimeter, eyeing up the rest of the garden with pure intent. Occasionally we’ll get a little enthusiastic and hack a path so the postie can still get through to the letterbox without being absorbed into a particularly enthusiastic clump of crocosmia. But in true metaphoric style, letting it all go has exploded into more than we ever imagined. The new, wild friends who have moved in to live in this little patch of space with us have shown us that this earth really knows best. “Stop interfering, let us get on with it!” shout the spiders spinning silk between teasel heads. “Thanks for the flowers!” buzz the fluffy bees, sharing nectar with wasps, flies, hoverflies and moths. Voles speedrun through the undergrowth. Frogs rustle in patches of wilderness.
Year by year, things come and go and rise and fall. Last year was borage, this year is teasels. Last year was foxes, this year, badgers. Giant dragonflies pop in over the fence, flitting their diamond wings and glistening all sorts of metallic colours. It’s great. The house becomes more and more permeable with time. Attic bees. Bats. Birds. Mice in the walls. Squirrels in the eaves. Moss. Ivy trying its very best to enter the windows and come and live indoors, thank you very much. Spiders living their dramatic, leggy lives in dark corners, and come August and September, at speed across the living room floor.
Instead of gardening, I wander around and pick things from the hedge that look tasty. Huge blackberries (fighting the nettles to get to the best ones). Wild strawberries, hiding under leaves tumbling from stone walls, super sweet and shiny red. Rosehips from the aforementioned climber, the angriest plant in the garden, seemingly putting specific effort into spiking your skin wherever possible. Boundless oregano, self-seeded and abundant. This is what I like. Dipping in and out, sharing the harvest with our wild friends.
I wondered why gardening is so hard. Looking back over my years of failed attempts, it seems kind of obvious now. Gardening takes consistency. It takes sustained effort. It takes planning and willpower and doing things for no immediate reward. You are definitely in it for the long haul. A lot of work, for a distant, future reward. All of these things are the exact opposite of how my brain works. No wonder I’m tapping out.
The big thing was that I felt like I should like gardening. Thousands of people find solace, support, community, meaning in tending a garden. I know myself that spending time here is healing. But there is also pressure for me. I tried and tried, and when my anxiety got really bad, even waiting until dark to run out to quickly try and do something in the garden whilst no one else was out. But I didn’t get better at gardening. I didn’t suddenly find a seam of joy, or a sense of relaxation. I didn’t get de-stressed, I got more stressed. The garden got ‘messier’ and I got more and more overwhelmed. Why couldn’t I do this?
It all makes sense now, to this brain built for rummaging hedgerows in autumn for the best berries, not for tilling and caring for those berries in the preceding months. This brain built for variety, quick interest and a little chaos, not planting plans, waiting for things to grow, and then remembering to plant them in bigger pots. It’s just not me. Maybe one day in the future some miracle will descend upon me and I’ll gaze at the garden in a golden haze of understanding, the joy of plantsmanship suddenly realised, planting whole crops of broad beans that never get rust or destroyed by hungry molluscs. Maybe one day I’ll actually be able to grow one entire flower from a seed. Or even from a plug and grow. Here’s hoping.
But for now, I just scatter care to the wind. It’s one of the first things I’ve solidly learned about myself, and being able to speak it out is such a thrill. From decades of not really knowing who I am, to being able to say I don’t think this is for me. Yes, I’ll shove a garlic in the ground and be surprised by it again come summer solstice. I might fling some bee mix at a patch of earth, give it precisely one watering can and cross my fingers. I might snip a particularly enthusiastic bramble now and again, or get into a fight with the angry rose bush. But that’s about it for me. I’m happy with that.
Like I say, maybe it’ll change in the future. I’ve grown things before, in a rented house with lovely soil and a proper veg patch, and loved eating beetroot straight from the ground, growing a cabbage bigger than the sink and picking bowl after bowl of warm, ripe strawberries. Someone else had spent years improving the soil. Someone else planted the strawberry patch. A gardener was included with the rent to tidy up and sort the lawn. Left to myself, I fully imagine that huge lawn would have taken on a wild tinge, too. So we will see. For now, I’ll wander on into the wilderness, and see what next year holds.
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Shrinking
My world is small these days. The long commutes and drives, the exploration, the excitement for new places and new things faded away, as over a decade or so an anxiety and dread grew stronger with every passing year. I’ve watched as long commutes were replaced by shorter journeys. Long wanders from the front door were replaced by driving to the wild moors, away from people. The contraction accelerated in recent years. Panic in familiar places. Dread of driving. Inability to go outside in the garden when neighbours were in theirs. An all-consuming anxiety. The grass grew long and I imprisoned myself, pacing, restless, missing the wild freedom I needed, sitting instead on the sofa in our dark stone house, relentlessly scrolling. Hoping to escape via a screen into a world that was just outside my window. I grew quiet. I grew numb. The last year, even the moorland faded from my reach. My car broken, anxiety too great to catch a bus. Cancelled and ignored plans. An invisible forcefield across the driveway gate that I just could not cross. After a long retreat of the tide, over all the years, I had finally reached a singularity. Stasis. Immoveable.
I fought and fought it but it still consumed me. Some deep, primal fear of perception, of judgement, a need for invisibility, a rage against all I used to do and just could not propel myself to do any more. I wanted to escape reality and scrolled incessantly. Screaming in silence, in under-stimulation, a prison of forced apathy for this neurodivergent brain.
But amongst it, finally, I started to find compassion. A small spark where I thought it would never end. Eventual beginnings of neurodivergent understanding took a while to land, initially numb, then growing, seismic pulses reaching back over the decades. I lay still and I felt them wash over me, colouring childhood memories with understanding, filling in blanks across these forty-plus years. A delayed grief for the death of my dad, layers upon layers of confusion, questions, slowly softened by the man who appears in my dreams, finally whole and here. The instability of the pandemic, the raw anger that still ricochets through us all, the pain, mass trauma, but business as usual. The ghostly imprint of a distant job that left me shell-shocked, with flashbacks, nightmares and avoidance that continue to this day, whilst huge chunks of that time are missing from memory. This body has felt it all. This body still feels it all. This body needed to still, and process, and hide away for a while. Perhaps this was its way. Perhaps this was needed. In stillness, I began to work through it all, relentlessly, fiercely and deeply supported by my husband, my only safe place, the person who helps me come back from it all, always. Contained in these four walls, a beginning, and an end.
So I continue my tiny, comfortable journeys – to university, to the shop, occasionally for a coffee in the neighbouring village. Familiar visits for holidays. Tiny movements. The moors wait, visible from where I sit in the garden, proud that I can hear a neighbours’ party and still sit outside, something I would have hidden from a few months ago. The difference now is that I know I will walk them again. The momentum is building, swelling, quietly but strong. This forty-second year is teaching me, and I am learning anew. A new understanding and trust that my world will expand again once more, in time. Tentatively feeling into my brain, into my soul, slowly discovering how to act on the things buried within. Enjoying bubbles of colour rising to the surface, long buried under layers of being countless versions of someone who was never actually myself. With this, the anxiety is receding. My soul, strengthening, not as afraid to be seen these days. The curiosity and hum of life pulling me back.
With my little broken car booked into a garage, I hope small wheels will soon carry me in return to those familiar places. Revisiting spirits of stream, grass and rock. Fingers tracing leaf fossils older than the land on which we walk. A slow re-immersion, a new season of exploration, following deer-trods and footprints once more. This anxiety, this shrinking has taught me much. How much I value the wild expanses and deserted moorlands. How much I need to feel wind on my skin, to breathe sharply in ice-cold water, to follow colours and move my body and drown in sounds. To explore this land, create familiarity once more. This house has held me, even when I felt the walls were closing in around me, and I look at it with new eyes. The jumbly, messy garden with its riot of life living here with us. The stone walls, once under oceans, permeable, providing shelter for us alongside a cacophony of other life existing on this little patch of land, in this minute sliver of time.
The deep knowledge that everything moves in cycles. My deep thaw is starting, even as the season turns to autumn here. Maybe this is my planting time, those few months before Samhain. New beginnings. New paths to tread. Slowly, I step outside the gate.
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Maybe it will all be ok
I feel as though my whole life was building up to this. Nothing special, nothing momentous. No news, no occasion. Just a hint of knowing, of acceptance, a beginning in this middle life.
I turned 42 this summer. A true mid-life age, but I feel everything else was a beginning, a prelude. Wild rides, highs and lows, not knowing who I am, swimming through decades. But it is here I am starting to come ashore. Two-score and two. That many years to begin to say, I am her, I like that, I am good at this. To expand into a body and soul more solid than it has ever felt before. To voice that which I didn’t dare before. To feel tentative joy in experience. To watch the glitter of that August-dry grass in the breeze and feel that same sway in the wind, the joy of movement, the embrace of my place in the web of it all.
My hair is falling out in clumps, probably hormones, probably the final year of the PhD, but with the shedding comes a thought of letting go, of leaving those memories locked in keratin and colour behind. Hanging from branches, pulled from hairbrushes, carried away in water flow. I keep a lock, pandemic hair, curled in a small basket, waiting for some magick to show itself, the time to be right to throw it to the wind or sea, or maybe stay with dark earth in silence. Tiny, silver-white hairs begin to regrow in place of long, red strands. I stare at them in amazement, wonder that I got this far, the emergence of a new chapter. Older me squeezes the hand of my younger self somewhere in another dimension of my mind, a few layers deep. She is healing, slowly, slowly. She is beginning to see the path. Neither of us know where we tread in coming years, but we get there, together.
That peach August sun picks out diamonds in the parched grasses surrounding the garden. The flags glow warm underfoot, skin sinking deliciously into the heat. The breeze tickles branches, glorious days. Rosehips glow red, blackberries shine that deep purple-black in the hedge. Harvest is early, this year, pushed by the heat of this dry, bright summer. These are my days, tiptoe-long and layered. Now I allow myself to stretch deep into the multi-layered love of the season, embracing the true depth of feeling for maybe the first time. Not just love for the long days, but each feeling is faceted, past and future, place and expansion, light and dark, what is and will be. Layers and layers, as always.
Two-score and two. The August exhale, the ripening of a harvest sown unknowingly all those years ago, fighting tooth and nail against storms, against identity, against myself. Now, as age spots and wrinkles begin to adorn my skin, I am beginning to understand. With each white hair, I feel love. With each darker spot on my hands, I smile. With new lines on my face, I gaze in wonder. It took a while to get here, but I wouldn’t change it. 42, but I feel I may begin to know myself for the first time ever. I am still discovering, settling, testing. But it feels different. In place of dread, a hint of a smile plays on my lips. Maybe it will all be ok.
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Pride, feelings and following bees
It’s been a hectic week. Now, here at the end of it, listening to the light patter of rain on the conservatory roof, I’m processing it all. That’s not to say it’s been a bad week. In fact, it’s been really enjoyable, just busy, and long, and a little overwhelming.I was always taught that pride comes before a fall. It’s weird how deeply those sayings can stick with us through life, negating any sense of achievement, instilling in us the belief that feeling good about things we’ve done is wrong, and we’d better be prepared for the ‘something bad’ that will inevitably follow. As part of this long journey of relearning, it’s affirming to feel pride in the things I’ve done. But at the same time, it’s also challenging, with a tinge of sadness and grief, too. But I’ve achieved some things this week so I’m tentatively expanding into that feeling of accomplishment, and starting to learn to let go of the underlying feeling of dread that it will all go wrong soon. It’s not bad to feel proud, and slowly, I allow myself a little smile of happiness, a little warmth kindled inside my soul.
The dry weather and flowering teasels have brought all sorts of wildlife into the garden for a drink of nectar. Voles rustle in the undergrowth, whilst huge butterflies and a rambling assortment of bees buzz happily between those spiky teasel heads, putting their long tongues into the flowers and getting confused when another bee wants to drink from the same place. I love them. I’ve spent hours just sitting in the sun, watching, feeling my heart soar and sharing the space with the beating thrum of life at the summer peak.
It’s a joy that is limitless. Watching a new butterfly flit into the garden, seeing a frog pop its head up from the depths of the pond, getting buzzed by bats at dusk. It’s hard to explain but my soul truly lifts in those moments. The feeling is intoxicating, the feeling of life, of some energy beating through the land, of the full tide of living, breathing, just existing swelling all around. I’m re-learning that it’s ok to lose myself in that overwhelming, full colour, neurodivergent soup of feeling and thoughts and swirling experience. There’s no ‘should‘ or ‘don’t‘ or ‘”stop saying wow!“‘. Some part of me is crumbling and softening, a little, and I am wide-eyed and wonderous at it all. I flung open the conservatory doors earlier and breathed in the petrichor of the grey morning, in a moment that was almost euphoric. Time and colour and smell and joy, just bursting in that one breath, rising from my feet to the top of my head and out, out into the universe. The prickles on my skin where raindrops patter on the rooftop, almost tickling, shivering through my veins. The shine of a leaf that brings glitter to my soul. Following bees around the garden, stopping where they stop, watching them feed and buzz and bumble and fuzz. A line of ants, triggering memories of sunny holidays, following them to a crack in the ground, intently focused.
It’s an overwhelming process, this letting go. I’ve heard of it as unmasking and I get that description, but I feel it’s something bigger, the understanding. That little jolt where it all makes sense, and the enormity of the road ahead. But in this there is joy, and peace, and the freedom now to follow the endless curiosity that didn’t have a voice before. There is pride, and a fierceness, and wonder at the depth of it all.