Years spent underwater, counting skeletons on the ocean floor and I thought I could rise to the surface in one big gasp. How naive. Reality is quieter, shuddering progress. Small gulps before sinking and then I’m down in the doldrums again, scraping drawings out of dirt. Tick, tick, there’s no time down here; it goes on until it doesn’t, it exists until it ends.
All summer I rot and I write and I mourn. I write twenty thousand words in a month. I go to a wedding and excuse myself to sob in the toilets once an hour. Ten days before submission we sell the book. When I get off the phone I sink to the floor and stare at the wall like a character in a film. On the last night before my deadline I write until morning then I sleep for an hour and clean my entire apartment and I attempt to read it but I can no longer see the screen and so like that, silently, unceremoniously, four years of work ping off into the ether.
The next day I go to Italy. By the time I land, my body and my psyche have begun shutting down. I cling to the remnants of remaining functions and spend my days walking around in circles and eating occasionally and remembering very little of anything at all. I don’t open a single book. I barely drink. I go to Percy Bryce Shelley’s grave and stare at it and take photos of it and tell everyone it was Lord Byron because my entire capacity for translating sight into thought has been used up by navigating a single metro journey. In Rome I fall asleep every night to early 2000s episodes of Monk, prompted by the Netflix recommendations of the prior guest who left their account logged in. My dreams are punctured by the cheerful tones of Randy Newman.
I take a train to Naples, where I stay in a melancholy apartment in the north of the city. The other room is occupied by an odd German couple who set out their breakfast plates before they go to bed. The apartment is full of sad interwar ghosts, flitting between the floorboards. At night I listen to old jazz records and feel empty and lonely and confused. I thought I would be happy. I have everything I wanted. Instead there is an enormous, gaping gulf where a decade of chaos used to be.
For a long time I knew chaos so intimately that I could not feel its currents. I did not know there was any other way to live; that everyone else was not exhaustingly, relentlessly striving every moment of the day. It was so familiar that it was comfortable in its discomfort and in brief moments of absence - a pause, a breath - I would seek it out in other ways. It is no surprise to me now that immediately after my masters ended I swiftly fell into a brief and damaging relationship that somehow exacerbated every terrible thought I’d ever had about myself. I also gave myself approximately three days of reprieve before I began to apply for PhD programmes in America.
What looked like mayhem from the outside was, to me, an incredibly intricate balancing system, levers and switches and plugs and wires, that I used to propel myself forward. There was method in the madness. I lived like this, in varying intensities, for over a decade. In the span of ten days, it was over.
I knew there was a burnout coming - I had planned for it, allotted time in my schedule, even as new responsibilities began to creep in around the edges. I didn’t know how hollowed out I would feel. I walked into rooms and restaurants and meetings and conversations where people told me things I’d barely even let myself dream of hearing and I felt like I was watching the exchange from the corner. The only truly identifiable feeling was pure fear, which attached itself to anything and everything - I would lose my apartment, I would be burgled, I would be arrested, everyone would die. I felt like I had gotten away with something, stepped back from the road a split-second before the car. Because despite everything, despite all the work, despite how many people said they knew this would happen for me it was clear it was destined, it never felt guaranteed. I lived my entire life like I was on the edge of losing it all.
Clever woman, funny woman, sharp enough even in family myth to get fired from a job for teaching the fellow household help the kama sutra. Went to France alone to war, lost a man, found another. Do you think she wanted nine children in a council house in Fife? Do you think that’s the life she was made for? Got all her girls through school but there’s only so much progress, tiny, incremental, pushing always pushing, doesn’t stop them ending up with men who drink and beat and cheat.
Peer up the branches of the tree. What else do you see? Women in asylums, women drinking Lysol, women pregnant at fifteen from a lodger, women standing at the window watching men go to islands and to sea and to war. Cowed under men, cowed under god. Women of such potential, trapped in tiny fucking Scottish towns, awaking into adulthood to find this was not the life I was made for.
Imagine the frustration that pools in the blood, generation after generation. What else is there to do but narrow your vision to a singular focus: to not live the life that was your inheritance. And so, go. Plunge into the chaos with a selfish determination celebrated in men and condemned in women and do not stop until you have taken what you want, everything you want.
I sacrificed so much and I’d do it all again to break a fate to which I felt so irrevocably destined. Again, again, again. There is no life in which I do not take this path. I’m sorry for the hurt but I’m not sorry for the outcome. This is what it costs to transcend, to climb, to create a world in your own image. Without this I would never be safe. Without this I would never be free.
Wife was yoke. Wife was the end of everything. I made myself a new honorific.
When they say no corrections I thought that meant a kind of perfection. I did not know it meant pulling out the guts of the thing and tracing sharp lines through the wounds. Stark light shining on everything that was missing. Everything that is missing. Some things you defend and others you concede, a gruelling route to a hard-won glory.
A month later I get the report.
it is unlike anything I have ever encountered before.
This is the closest my life has ever been to monastic, some secular solitude. I do as I like. I sleep deeply and I wake up to sun and I write and I walk and I spend long afternoons reading on green metal lounge chairs in the park, nestled among local retirees who begin their tanning regime in early February. I scrawl and I spew and I stretch on the page. I lean into the full tilt of my capacity. Woman alone in a room, only woman in the room, time for yet another room.
Something new is beginning and I’m afraid that in all this shedding I’ll lose my soft. I’m trying to let the hard edges of my hunger loosen into something a little more like longing. I fear I am becoming less likeable. What does it mean to be nice? If I’m not bending to the curve of your desires am I undesirable? Perhaps this is the bargain: sacrificing my social graces for a ruthless self-respect. I’ve never suffered fools but now I’m no longer attempting to conceal it, maintaining any surface illusions that I do.
I do not want to lean on tired tropes but I’m not sure many men are so concerned with their own likeability; if their strength might be considered sharp, a directness that becomes cutting. I go to a conference where I am the only woman speaking. There are two men with the same name, double-the-number-of-Davids than there are women. Later, once I have established myself, I point this out. Isn’t it curious? On the last day at lunch it becomes apparent that for three days everyone has been under the impression that I’m a vegetarian, despite eating meat at every meal, because at dinner on the first night we were joined by a vegetarian female graduate student and I say well I suppose when there’s so many women it’s hard to tell us apart.
And yet there is a soft that persists, cocooned in the most precious parts of me; the space I protect with such ferocity that many have no idea it exists at all until they see it written down. Some things are not so easy to make sense of, leave me skinless and raw. What’s the half-life of mourning? Even now I weave threads of him through my work and listen for an echo of myself in his words long after I pretend to have moved on.
As much as I wanted to be my idealised self I found that I was unable to be anything but my ordinary self around him. It was terrifying and then it was liberating. I began to bloom. I made a tiny effigy in my heart and carried it all through the darkest year, some tender hope that perhaps there was someone out there just like me, odd and obsessive, accustomed to chaos, cut from the same cloth. And then suddenly he was gone and I was left with the collateral damage, endless questions and no answers, and I berate myself for continuing to mourn because it feels pathetic and embarrassing but most of all because it makes me want to seal up my soft little heart forever. I tried to tread so carefully. I did everything differently but I still got the same outcome. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that. I listen to interviews where he recounts his enthusiastic pursuit of a new friendship with a different historian. I try to solve an unsolvable mystery. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken scissors to skin so I tell myself I’m allowed a little emotional self-harm.
I wanted to continue sitting across from him at small wooden tables. I wanted to watch him read, watch him work, watch him laugh. I wanted to call him and say my entire life changed overnight, too. What do I do? What did you do?
The first line of the first blog post: When I was a child, I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. Four years later I read up an email chain to find myself discussed as a certainly an artist to watch. Is that what this was? Growing up? I still don’t know what compelled me to expel my thoughts here, corral the chaos into something with shape and form and meaning. There were already thousands of words in notebooks and notes and documents and diaries stretching back decades. Four years ago in an early unpublished post I wrote that perhaps I was trying to predict the future. In the end, I created it.
I built a whole world here, in these half-hidden pages. I wanted to stop being so afraid of everything all the time, of being perceived as unlikeable or crazy or too much. I wanted to uncoil the chaos, pull the scaffolding of myself down around me until I could finally see where I begin. And then, it became the beginning of everything.
In the end I did not lose any respect, at least not any respect worth having. I created a future that is mine alone. I want to take every woman, young and old but especially on the cusp of her girlhood and say it does not matter if they like you. Do not make kindness your religion. Do not believe them when they say you can have it all, build a kingdom with a baby on your hip. You have to reach the room before you can leave it. You have to make sure there is a room for you to return to. This is what it is to be a woman who wants more than her inheritance.
At dinner on the last night of the conference talk turns to a Romani wedding practice where the bride is taken to a room to be inspected by the women. A bloodied cloth is brought to the men before the marriage takes place, splash stain of feminine purity. Once again I am the only woman at the table. In frank terms I say the blood is not guaranteed so they will find other ways; this is women negotiating among women. I wonder how much it hurts when they cut her.
I used to lament all that I had fed to the monster of my ambition, but perhaps ambition is only monstrous when considered unnatural. In men they call it birthright. Even now I still want marriage and a family but not at the expense of my existence. I would rather never have the children I want than look them in the eye, helpless and half-formed, and say I’m sorry your father is weak.
I feel them pressing gently between my shoulder blades, generation after generation, my blood and my kin and everyone else, the women I read the women I write, reconstructed fragmented scraps of their lives and their hopes and their reputations. Cowed under men, cowed under god. All that talent but nowhere to put it. There’s nothing to do in a trap but twist and turn and eat your own tail. This is for you, all of you, but this is for me most of all. They’re putting my words in seven languages, ma. I had to blow it off the hinges but I got out of the trap.