It is one o’clock in the morning and I am standing under the awning of my terrace smoking a cigarette and listening to the rain. I never stay up this late any more, much less want a smoke enough to put on my coat and go outside. But I have just finished a novel and I need to process before I go to bed. The novel itself was fine, perfectly fine. It was the main character, Frances, that got to me. She is going to be one of those characters that I carry with me from this point onwards. I saw so much of myself in her. I too know how it is to be young and damaged, trapped in repetitive cycles of destruction. How it is to deny any recognition of the pain inside yourself. To lash out when others get too close. To hurt yourself because pain is less confusing than love.
This cigarette tastes good. I haven’t really enjoyed a smoke in weeks. The nicotine has been going in and doing its thing, but the stimulant effects have been lacking, weaker somehow. I’ve been feeling fragmented. Maybe the little alkaloid particles have had to split and disperse off in different directions, each one travelling towards one of my fragments, and delivering a weaker dose of nicotine than I usually get, when I’m whole?
Anyway, I know that today I am feeling more put back together. And not just because of the good cigarette. As I drop the butt in the ashtray I see the burgundy and lemon bruise on the back of my hand where, about a week ago, I had an IV put in for a minor gynaecological procedure. Not for the first time today, I feel the most extraordinary rush of self-compassion. What a tough few weeks it’s been for you, the kinder part of myself says to all the others. You’re doing pretty fucking well all things considered, she insists. Then something about how I’m one brave bitch really when you think about it, but I don’t get to hear that bit to the end, because the disparaging part of myself has woken up and is drowning out the kinder part.
These brief moments of self-compassion bring tears to my eyes. They are new. When they started happening, I was totally freaked out. I wondered if my personality was starting to split. I couldn’t fathom another explanation for hearing more than one internal monologue at a time; This unpleasant thing happened today because you are bad and you deserved it. / Hey man! Don’t say that shit to her, she’s a fucking survivor!
But beyond the multiple voices, I didn’t appear to be losing my marbles in any other perceivable way and one day, I came to the sudden realisation that the compassionate voice was my own. I bawled and bawled and bawled. I felt so warm and loved. It was like a hundred unhealed wounds inside myself had been waiting for this balm.
I had always been suspicious of people who talked about feeling true compassion for themselves. I suspected they were full of shit, to be honest with you. Loving yourself was just psychobabble spouted by bloggers who were trying to sell books. So, when I was overcome with these spontaneously kind inner thoughts, I think the cynical part of myself took a punch to the gut, and I started feeling kinder towards others, too. This made me bawl again, of course. I have been crying a lot, as you can see. And yet, nothing prepared me for how much I would cry when I realised what a long time 39 years has been to live without this revelatory self-love, and how much I needed it before, when it just wasn’t there.
I have gone off on a wild tangent about my compassionate awakening (My Compassionate Awakening – I scribble this down in a notebook as a good title for an erotic short story). This wasn’t what I set out to write about tonight. But, you know, there it was, needing to be written.
What I actually want to write about tonight is Not Writing. About a month ago, I returned from my first trip back to Ireland in about five years. So much has gone down since I last breathed those huge gulps of Atlantic air: my mother stopped drinking, Covid happened, my own alcoholism reached its crescendo, I had a baby, I started addiction treatment, and I began processing the very conflicted feelings I harbour towards my parents. So, as you might understand, this trip back to Ireland was the farthest thing from a holiday a person could imagine . Honestly, I have had more relaxing trips to the E.R. All I can say about it for now is that every waking minute was hard work.
When I got back home (this trip solidified Madrid’s identity as “home”), I knew immediately and beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would not write for a few weeks. This feeling (premonition?) came as quite a surprise, as I have been writing consistently since returning to the craft six months ago. Nevertheless and surprise aside, it was crystal clear to me. It did not sadden me to feel this way, I did not panic about writer’s block, I just listened to the part of me that was quietly asking to be given space and paid heed. As I write these words and recount from the vantage of retrospect, I wonder if this is what the enlightened are referring to when they talk about instinct?
From the last day I wrote to this, it has been a still, weird, cathartic month. It has been a month in which I added the word “quiescent” to my vocabulary, so desperate was I to find a word that encapsulated its experience.
Once I had unpacked my suitcase and the wave of relief at being home had washed through me, under me, over me and rolled on and away, I was left alone with myself, and the best way I can think of to describe how I was feeling was very, very small. Just tiny.
By “small” I do not mean that I was feeling insignificant, or inferior. Just the opposite: I was small like a smooth, round pebble. I had survived a week of being tossed around in turbulent waters and all my rough edges had been eroded. I was indeed smaller than before, but also lighter, more precious. Instinctively (there it is again), I felt sure that a change had taken place, way down in the depths of me, and that the best thing I could do for myself was not to look directly at it for a while, not to dig or unearth, but to go quiet, and wait, and tend to the top layer of soil only, take shelter in the hottest hours of the day and stay warm in the night. (Recently I have heard writer friends talk about their essential geographies and not known what they were talking about, but now I wonder if I may have discovered some of my own essential geography in this last paragraph? Or in this last month?)
Anyway, whatever was going on with me, I knew that it needed quiet. I did not want to be around people. I had no need for music. Boisterous playtime with my toddler was exchanged for finger painting and baking. I uninstalled the Substack app from my phone and ignored my emails. And into the silent water I waded.
At first, the only thing I craved was monotony. I wanted nothing more than eat-sleep-work-jog-repeat. After about a week of this, I still had no desire to write, but I think the writer in me was beginning to wake up, because now I needed to read. And read I did. I read and read and read, I read when I couldn’t sleep, I read in my car at lunchtime, I read paragraphs out loud to my dog, and I read until every unread word on my nightstand had been gobbled up.
As I read, new associations came unbidden.
In Lauren Hough’s memoir, she talks about finding her voice as a writer, embracing the ‘asshole’ in her tone. Who would not be kind of an asshole after all the violence she had endured, I empathised. I admired Lauren as I read. I felt sure that her process was going to be my process, too. I also wanted to be able to stand back and look at my life and say out loud to the relevant people “I know that it wasn't your fault, but all that shit that you did and didn’t do was not alright, and I’m going to write about it, whatever you may say”.
Over the course of the month, I re-read Rainer Maria Rilke. Well, not so much ‘re-read’ but picked up and put down again and again. A few times a day, or between chapters of my novel, I would reach for Letters to a Young Poet, pick one at random and submerge myself in the beauty and generosity of the artist. His advice to Dear Mister Kappus on writing for no one but yourself, on spurning the trappings of audience and publication, resonated more deeply with me than they had during my first reading. I still did not feel like writing, but now I was thinking about writing, my writing, why I had been doing it, what recognition I had been after, why I had come to Substack, and why I had felt such a strong urge to step away from it again. Knowing I was being read was morphing me into something I didn’t want. Regaining my voice and spirit after addiction is the most important thing I have ever done for myself. I cherish the new intensity that is coming to the surface and I do not want to lose the true essence of myself, of my own voice, ever again.
The marvel of these insular days of reading was interrupted about two weeks ago, when, completely out of the blue, I discovered all was not well in my reproductive body. I have absolutely no wish to say here what was wrong with me. Another time, perhaps. Suffice to say it was a shock, I had to have a surgical procedure, and the whole thing, though short-lived, was traumatic as fuck.
In the wake of this trauma, and as it always has done throughout my life, nature called out to me. ‘Solvitur ambulando’, it beckoned, and I put on my warmest coat and walked out of the house.
I have hiked the wild parkland near my home hundreds of times, but its healing powers remain as strong as the first day I set foot there. As I walked and breathed in the green air and looked at the rain-heavy clouds and admired the delicate yellow spring flowers and let raindrops run down my nose, I abandoned myself to that most delicious of all writerly phenomena: flow. Thoughts emerged from their hiding places. I experienced them in perfect, wild undulations. They moved of their own accord before finding their place in the natural order of all the things that I had experienced in the weeks gone by. The trip to Ireland, the wisdom of Rilke, the anaesthetist´s needle, Frances and her endometriosis, my unreliable ovaries, Lauren’s bravery and my own. It all settled, like so much silt dropping, the way individual grains of sand meet and are forged together into something new. Flow. Everything that had happened to me, everything I had read and everything I had not written merged together into one gorgeous kaleidoscopic composition. It all belonged together, it all made sense and it was all going to be alright.
I turned for home, but not before taking another look across the green tufts and sandy hollows of Madrid in springtime. And just then, in that precise moment, was when the need to write returned to me. There, between the Madroño trees, on a particularly grassy patch of ground, I ‘saw’ the unmistakable outline of a heavily pregnant woman’s body. Grass and springtime flowers whose names I did not know had overgrown the woman where she must have laid down a very long time before. But time had not dissolved her bodily form. The soil had swallowed her back into itself, and she and her pregnant belly became a mound of earth. Who was this woman? What had brought her here to this lonely place? And why did I feel such peace at this tragic apparition? These were the questions already forming in my mind as I walked out of the park toward home. A story had emerged from the flow and it was demanding to be told.
In the following days, the rest of the story came so easily, so urgently. A missing detail or two, and a significance that had been eluding me, were taken care of in the dreams and nightmares of the nights that followed. All that remains now is to sit down and write the thing.
I wonder if Not Writing for a while has been the best thing I have ever done for my writing? It certainly feels that way as I emerge out the other end of a month of introspection, love and deep, deep acceptance.
I’m so fucking proud of myself. I’ve been doing the work in therapy and fuck me if I’m not seeing the results. A month ago, my innards spoke and I really listened. I did what my body wanted me to do. And as a result, I processed some pretty tough stuff, I found self-compassion, I returned to a more truthful me, and I think that maybe, just maybe, I became an artist.
This text is going to receive only the most perfunctory of edits. I do not want to give the mean-girl part of myself a chance to pipe up. She will say something like “Fuck’s sake this all sounds a bit manic, doesn’t it? Maybe you shouldn’t put this out there, you sound a bit batshit to be honest”.
No, this one has to go out raw, as it came to me, and unfiltered.
Thank you, sincerely, for reading.
I hope, as always, that you have found something true for yourself in what you have read here.
A beautifully written argument for not writing! It's a compelling one, and from a physical and mental wellbeing point of view, it's important to listen to our bodies, our instinct. But also, from a purely writing point of view, we need time to process the experiences we write about. If we want what we finally say to be authentic to what we feel, and to reach people. And it's clear from what you've written that it was the right decision becasue this is a great read and so well-written (did you really not edit?!)
Wow. This is amazing. Thank you. I’m so glad your self-compassionate voice spoke up. My self-hateful one still talks loudest sometimes — okay, a lot of the time — but a piece like this reminds me I’m not alone. Thank you.