I need to start this by saying I am thankful for the world and I need to say that before I say anything difficult, because sadness is selective, and cruel. It can remember a careless sentence from years ago and forget an entire afternoon of being loved. I have allowed it to tell my story too often, my mum always says “why do you always remember the bad stuff”, I wander as well. So this is my attempt to give a fairer account in case it is all left to say.
Firstly, I am so thankful to the countries I was lucky enough to be welcomed. I can recall The Rocky Mountains in the USA, and snow for the first time in Iceland, call to prayer in Afghanistan, pretending to be Marco Polo as I crossed the Stans. There have been so many moments and all I may have arrived alone but almost always left with people whose names still make me smile. Before I left I didn’t believe in goodness but much of what I know about goodness came from these encounters. Someone had their own worries, their own limited time, and chose to make room.
I am an ordinary woman who has been allowed into extraordinary places. I was a girl from Sydney who wanted to see the world, and I somehow I did with no trust fund or anything other than a dream. I learnt to take responsibility, to make decisions while frightened, to help people through situations I could not entirely control and I am proud of that. It has taken me a surprisingly long time to write that sentence without adding a qualification.
However, the underlying choice is I have been tired since I was young. Before there were journeys to recover from or losses I could name. I learnt to organise my life around things that made the tiredness recede. I could find the energy when someone needed me and I was less certain what to do with myself when nobody did, which I suppose is now.
For sixteen years, my body and mind have felt at war. My back hurts terribly, my arms, sometimes every inch of me seems to is in agony, and I cannot tell where one kind of pain ends and another begins. I am tired of trying to establish which part of me has the better claim to care. I want to stop treating my body and mind as adversaries whose suffering has to be ranked before it can be taken seriously. But I am really, really tired.
I need it to be clear that the happiness was real and I refuse to turn every good memory into a symptom simply because I am struggling now. Because you know what, I was curious and I do love people – maybe too much in my own unique way of showing it. I laughed until a perfectly unremarkable evening became something I would remember for years. But I put considerable hope into the next experience, imagining that enough extraordinary days might eventually teach me how to live an ordinary one.
Sydney has made that question difficult to avoid. I recognise the harbour as the most beautiful in the world, and seeing people wake up for ocean swims. I love seeing people order green juices and men carrying flowers on the train home. The city does not become ugly because I am unhappy in it. Sometimes its beauty makes me stop, sometimes I notice it through a distance I cannot explain.
I really admire people who seem able to inhabit their days more steadily. I know I cannot see their whole lives, nevertheless, there are things they do better than I do. They keep promises when their mood changes and don’t let an unpleasant encounter ruin a full day. I turn every decision into a parliamentary inquiry and torture myself.
Looking for Alaska was the first book I fell in love with. I saw myself in Alaska, it was like reading who I was before becoming who I would be. At the time I had no experience of the world but I recognised the longing to get beyond the life I was born into and discover something that made you intelligible to yourself. I did not have the language for that restlessness. The book offered some, and the relief of recognition was enormous.
Every now and again I read it again and it always make me more interested in how little we can know about someone while believing we understand them. Affection does not give us complete access to another mind, neither does a photograph, or even shared history. I have wanted people to see what I concealed, then felt alone when they believed the version I showed them.
John Green writes, “We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.” I do not receive that sentence as a guarantee but I keep it as a possibility, I even thought about getting it as a tattoo but still none.
There are days when I feel like the biggest failure, I cannot get a job, or keep it, I cannot concentrate.There are days I cannot eat, or barely leave my bed, sometimes I wonder if its a casket. I remember what I used to manage and feel humiliated by what has become difficult.
At my cruelest, I tell myself I have spent half my life starving and the other half complaining. The sentence has the force of a judgement and very little of the accuracy. It leaves out what I was struggling with, the help I needed and everything else I did during those years. It would be a dishonest biography. Yet I have sometimes accepted it as self-awareness.
I have also felt as though I was a mistake in everyone’s life. I can list the disappointments and become strangely forgetful about the affection but I suppose its now time for other people have their own memories of me. I hope its good but I can acknowledge that I have hurt people and sometimes think the sole fact of meeting me was the harm.
I wanted to be someone who helped, brought life into a room and made people feel welcome. That intention was sincere, but I know sincerity does not exempt me from criticism, and is very hard to prove. People question my morals and yes there are decisions I need to examine. I want to listen carefully enough to recognise what is fair, rather than defend everything because I am frightened of what admitting anything might mean.
James Baldwin wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I think about that distinction when I consider the people I have hurt. I cannot edit their experience by explaining mine more eloquently. I can face what happened and I should have decided how I will behave when the next difficult moment arrived. I often didn’t.
So, I am sorry for the times I was careless with someone’s feelings, for sharp words and the silences in which I expected people to guess what I needed. I have asked for understanding while failing to offer it. I hope forgiveness is possible. I understand that it belongs to the person I am asking, and that some people may need distance, so please accept mine.
There is another forgiveness I struggle with, how to forgive myself for everything I never became. I thought I would be living a completely different life, I would be the successful woman. My imaginary counterpart has impeccable judgement, largely because she has never had to make a decision without knowing how it ends. She is an impossible person to compete with.
Usually there is one moment I return to, a conversation or departure I imagine redirected everything, all I do is replay it with knowledge I did not have then. Or I shut off from every talking about it because it hurts to much. I picture the other life in considerable detail, overlooking the fact that it has never had to contain its own disappointments, bills or ordinary Tuesdays.
Regret offers a peculiar illusion of control, if I can locate the exact mistake, perhaps I can believe everything would otherwise have been manageable. But I am comparing a life I have experienced with one I have been free to invent (which deep down are so unrealistic). There are things I would change if I could but I cannot know everything those changes would have brought.
This is where gratitude becomes complicated because when I am low, people sometimes remind me how lucky I am, how much I have seen, how many reasons I have to be happy. I understand the impulse. It is difficult to watch someone hurt when you can still see so much worth loving in their life.
Trust me I can see it too, that is why I feel ashamed. I have mistaken sadness for a failure to appreciate what I have been given, and encouragement can accidentally reinforce the accusation. I can love my life and need help living it.
Sometimes the useful response is a question, what has today actually been like? Sometimes it is company, something to eat, help arranging an appointment. I have offered cheerful conclusions because I did not know how to sit with another person’s uncertainty. I am trying to become someone who stays curious long enough to hear what is needed.
And I cannot pretend I have always looked for happiness in particularly profound places. I have wardrobes full of clothes and designer things I wanted badly enough to imagine they might change something, while going broke to purchase them. I can question the foundations of human existence while remaining extremely particular about my shoes.
But I would exchange those things gladly for some peace in my head and a group of friends I could call without preparing an excuse. I want somewhere to go on an ordinary Tuesday. A dinner where I do not have to be impressive and someone asks how the appointment went because they remembered I was going.
Sometimes I wonder whether I was pretty enough to be sexualised, but never enough to be loved. Writing it down, I can hear how thoroughly I have made another person’s behaviour a measurement of my worth. I want to be known beyond being wanted. I want affection that has an interest in my mind, well not anymore.
I am trying to stop treating someone’s inability to offer that as proof I did not deserve it. I also want to notice the care already present, rather than expect anyone – family, colleague, work, my own brain to establish my value.
Travel has given me reasons to extend that attention beyond the familiar. When someone thinks about Afghanistan because of a story I have told, I hope they become interested in Afghan people, including those whose experiences challenge my own account. I want to make room for voices I cannot represent and realities a visitor may not see.
And I KNOW being welcomed into a country does not give me ownership of someone else’s story. I suppose I hope one day my work I did opens conversations and remain open to correction.
While we are at it, war has perpetrators, victims and consequences and recognising humanity does not remove responsibility for harm. It does require us to resis reducing a whole population to the worst thing happening around them. Someone can be living through history while worrying about dinner, missing a friend. I have seen it all, even know in the room next door I can hear them begging Dave to wake up. I want us to be slower to divide people into categories that save us the trouble of knowing them.
Much of my own identity has depended on categories – traveller, useful, maybe even brave. When work disappeared or someone stopped choosing me, I struggled to understand what remained. I am discovering how precarious it is to place my entire sense of worth in roles that circumstances or other people can withdraw.
Sometimes I think about the generations that preceded me, people whose names I will never know, whose meetings and decisions eventually made my life possible. I cannot attach an honest probability to my particular existence. But I can still marvel that I am here, able to recognise someone’s footsteps, at my grandmas funeral I remember reading the quote, “i stand on the sacrifices of a million women before me thinking what can i do to make this mountain taller so the women after me can see farther
― Rupi Kaur.
That wonder does not cure sadness. But it did occasionally makes me curious, and curiosity has helped me before. Perhaps this is the faith I am trying to find, a willingness to leave room for what I cannot yet imagine.
And yet, here I am. In the very same hospital room I was in just three months ago. Three months. Ninety-something days in which I genuinely believed I had made progress, that I had learnt something, that perhaps the worst was behind me. There is a particular kind of heartbreak in returning to a place you once promised yourself you’d never see again. In recognising the walls, the ceiling, the sounds of the corridor and that same damn painting on the wall.
I can remember that I have previously mistaken the limits of my view for the limits of my future now I don’t see that future. I cannot preserve every moment by paying enough attention but I can also stop using the brevity of life as another demand to enjoy every second.
I have filled journals trying to understand myself, documenting a problem in an attractive notebook does not automatically resolve it, which feels like an administrative oversight. Still, those pages preserve something valuable, evidence of how often I have cared, noticed, enjoyed and tried. They contain more than the account I can produce on a difficult day.
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