Between Forever & The End (of summer)

“I have done nothing all summer, but wait for myself to be myself again”.

I took the summer off being myself. I didn’t intend to, it just so happened that my self had evaporated or ejected itself from my body, which was in a deep state of shock. I will spare you the details, but I had a significant and unexpected shift that catalysed this event. This shift affected my home, my work, my future and the way I was able to see the past. I was above, or beyond time in that sense – floating, not quite believing in the fact of my own body, let alone all the stories I had carefully embellished it with.

I live with C-PTSD, so this level of shock, is not all that shocking. And still, the me I was sitting somewhat comfortably in, was no longer, and yet a new self hadn’t arrived. In my own absence, I tried a silent meditation retreat but left after 3 days. Instead, I walked three hours to a bar, double-parked a whiskey & ordered a packet of cigarettes which I chained smoked on the deck among four tables of kitten-healed, polo-shirted, het couples who looked at me with varying degrees of pity and envy.

The day before I received said shock, I was happily working on a long narrative poem I had spent the last couple of years developing, losing and finding my way through writing and editing it. I placed my pen down on my desk and turned to have the conversation which shot me into space, leaving the pen there, untouched, for the next three months.

***

For me, writing has always been an involuntary act, like I might burst if some words aren’t released from the over-inflated balloon of my being. I cannot think of a life situation that I have not feverishly written my way through. But this was different. I tried many times, in different states of mind, sitting with a pen, my notes app open, a Word doc’s flashing cursor tapping on the white screen like the acrylic nail of an impatient desk clerk. And nothing. The extent of my writing in the last three months has included angry texts, and half-arsed to-do lists.

I received advice from a mentor to take all of my emotion and put it into my art; paint red panels, smash and reassemble crockery, anything, It’s not about suppressing the feeling, she said, it’s about channelling it into something. I tried to be a good mentee, I sat on my kitchen floor when my son slept and cried and painted circles of charcoal onto pages. Still nothing. No release or catharsis. I began to think that perhaps catharsis was not even possible any more, that I would never reach that point again, that I would stay bubbling in my own ferment, cap sealed, seething, forever.

***

By July I was having daily panic attacks, which was actually a step up from the full-time panic attack I seemed to be locked inside for weeks before that. I was in the Bell Jar, those who know it, know it’s surreal fog and ambient tinnitus. On top of this, I was moving house, breaking apart my son’s family home, and dividing neat piles of my things from his fathers, while trying to keep up some semblance of a stable parent during the summer break. I became an expert in cry-and-recover into open cupboards and bought and chopped a lot of onions to cover my dribbling tracks. At times it was just too much, I would open a cupboard and a memory would fall out of it and clank me on the head. I would fall into panic, remember to breathe, panic while breathing at the same time – very possible.

At one such time an actual object, a medium format camera, did fall from a shelf. I was feeling awful, critical, dislodged, and decided to take a photo anyway. I looked through the view-finder and wound the toggle on the rewind lever until it clicked the next frame into place. my eye and hand started to adjust and move the frame, I took two paces back, adjusted focus and clnk; exposed the shot.

The effect was immediate. The only thing I could relate the state to was writing a poem. That feeling just after something moves through you. It’s not like I hadn’t taken photos before, I had, but this sensation attached to it was new & more importantly was the first sense of relief from myself (that wasn’t narcotic) that I’d had in weeks. I couldn’t help but think that it might be the literal enactment of Rob Burbea’s “Ways of seeing” framework, which is a meditation practice of becoming aware of and adjusting the lens with which we view reality - and the effects different views have on the body/heart/mind.

So, I gave myself the summer off writing. A friend in Porto unpromptedly gifted me 10 rolls of 120 film (thank you T) and I carried my heavy-arse Mamiya 645 around with me for the rest of the summer, trying, when I remembered, to take photos. To look for light, to see when, where and how time lingers, stops and strays into singular moments. And also, to look with eyes of love. I know how cheesy that sounds, but to me beauty and love are synonymous. When we love a person or a thing, it affects our gaze, and in turn, our gaze affects our ability to sense and feel beauty (and love). Perhaps we can in fact, with the right tools, reverse engineer our experience.

***

I didn’t read a lot this summer, beyond a few self-help books to try and claw back some semblance of a functioning human. But the most helpful book of all was probably Autobiography of Red.¹ Red was the colour of my enflamed heart, the colour of my rage and of those desires of mine which led to my constant exultation and destruction.

Geryon, a red, queer, winged monster living in Beanos Aries is grappling with love and loss and uses photography as his medium to process this pain. Most poignant to me was the way Geryon held his body, the wings he kept tucked under his trenchcoat - the monster in me twitched - the parts that I have hidden or tucked away for the comfort of others began to unfurl their tender limbs.

I have felt a new self emerge, her skin is red, like Geryon’s, because it was not ready for exposure to open air. Loss tears us open, rips off the facade of our being, leaving our insides exposed to open air. A thin, pinkish skin grows over it, and day by day we heal.