Please see my Substack (and please give me a follow) for the pictures and links.
I haven’t written for a while, because I’ve been working on my novel, some of which I will put on here in due course (like a more grown up version of a celeb serialising their memoir in The Daily Mail). This morning I responded to a brilliant post from Anne Boyd called Transitions Are Tough which is really well worth a look (see link), and thought I would put some of it on here (see under this post). I noted Sally Rooney wrote a lot of ‘Beautiful World Where are You?’ As an exchange of emails and she’s a bit of a hero of mine, so maybe I should do that too.
Writing is therapeutic, as since writing the above paragraph I have recalled in my morning mind about the three P’s in Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy – I did a Masters in TA many moons ago. They are Permission, Protection and Potency (Pat Crossman, 1966). Goodness it is a long time since I sourced something officially, and it just felt strangely nostalgic to look up the old doyennes of TA.
I could write another thesis on any of these topics, but Permission often comes to the fore for me, because I am not very good at giving myself permission to do things, e.g., write in the way I want to write, feel what I want to feel, and generally be who I want to be. It is why I haven’t posted here for ages, because I haven’t been able to format the perfect post in my mind. I have some of
Allegra Chapman (she/her) ’s posts which I have found so helpful, in brevity saying that we have to get away from this sort of shiny sexy culture of things being perfect and being able to function in the mess. Writing, marriage, child rearing, it’s all messy, tragic jokey, difficult – and very, very beautiful at times (which is what keeps us persisting with it).
I am loving Richard Flanagan’s writing at the moment, and am just about to finish Question 7. We are watching The Narrow Road to the Deep North on BBC iPlayer. Don’t watch it when you are in feeling wobbly, but it is brilliant, and of course adapted from his auto fiction novel about his grandfather as a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp in WW2. Question 7 is so brave, it’s totally off the wall, it’s as if he sat down and just went ‘I am going to write this down and I really don’t care what it looks like.’ Permission abound. It reminds me of the late great Milan Kundera. It’s unsettling but you cannot quite put it down. I thought the title and front cover of his book was apt for today’s ‘tragic joke’ post. You can buy his novel here at Daunt Books.
So it has to be OK for someone else to do something (Kundera, Flanagan, Rooney, all authors I adore to read) for me to do it too. Of course, I have got ‘better’ at this over the many years of self study, helping clients, being sober and not drinking and drugging away my pain, but of course it is still there. Perhaps it will always be there, and that is the point of this tragic joke of life, to sit with it (the pain), and as Anne brilliantly describes in her Substack post, allow it to pass through.
So I am giving myself Permission on here to just write what I wrote to Anne, in response to her lovely post which you can access above.
I’ve got another article coming out soon which I am writing for a local newsletter about magnets and DNA – stay tuned (it’s off the wall, but then, so am I, and that’s OK).
Dear Anne,
Thank you for yet another beautifully crafted and meaningful post, something I resonate with hugely. August is such a weird month for me, and is often the time of transition. Due to doing a Masters for too many years that I care to recount, I find the year starts in September along with academia, and I find I am reflecting on how I am ‘not further along’ in xyz, abc hasn’t changed, etc. It can be hard.
Coupled with that and more akin to your post, we normally return home from holiday in Cornwall at this time of year. I find I transition through the five stages of grief about the place on the road back to Herts ‘how could I live there?’ And ‘why don’t I live there,’ and ‘if only I could buy the place next door I’d be there all the time and then I would never feel like this again.’
I too take ages to land, thinking I will pack up and go down there again before too long, but it is often a year, as life settles down, and moving the travelling family circus of six year old twins and husband is not as simple as the days of yesteryear when I could literally decide that day to go, throw a toothbrush in and off I went. As I write this I realise there is also grief about the loss of freedom around children, but I am sure as you are at the other end with your daughter as an adult you are feeling the loss of her not being around – life really I as bit of a tragic joke, isn’t it?!
Anyway I am glad you have put your fingers in the soil, and I was going to say, get in that cold sea before everyone gets there each morning, and invest in an infrared sauna (cheap on Amazon for a one man job) or if the budget allows, a barrel sauna in your garden. It will rock your world. Just an idea! The salt from the sea will heal your bones. I was at a Scandinavian sauna place near Cambridge yesterday and I feel so much more grounded today.
Take care, thanks again for another great post.
Jess x
Jessica Drake - OCD / Anxiety Psychotherapist 