I have always thought that people don’t want damaged goods, it’s not the best expression but perhaps that is precisely why it has stayed with me. We live in a world that celebrates authenticity but demands that everyone remain presentable. We encourage vulnerability, ask people for it and even demand it, they reshare what it means on instagram as long as it’s articulate. Just enough, not too much. We grow up teaching kids to admire resilience, provided we are spared the inconvenience of witnessing what made it necessary. We even pay people to stand up and give inspirational speeches and tell people about their suffering, but only once they have survived it, when the story has acquired some meaning and the difficult parts can be discussed in the past tense.
I’ve learned, I suppose many times over there is very little room for the person who is still unwell and cannot explain what is happening, who contradicts themselves, who is grateful for their life and yet struggles to participate in it. We are uncomfortable with suffering that has no clear beginning, no identifiable villain and, most troublingly, no guaranteed conclusion. Even when we try to make that ending but it doesn’t work and all is left behind is the guilt it didn’t and the suffering you’ve caused.
So we pretend and become agreeable, entertaining, independent. We learn which parts of ourselves are acceptable in company and which should remain behind closed doors by offering people the version of ourselves that requires the least explanation.
Perhaps that is one of the central tragedies of human connection, we are desperate to be known, but terrified of what being known might cost us. And I get it because every time I have, I lost everything.
In these white walls I have started to wonder whether we reach thirty and begin to experience a kind of emotional bankruptcy. Not because we are old or have nothing left to give, but because we have spent so many years giving without understanding what we were spending. We have invested ourselves in friendships, relationships, ambitions and imagined futures and offered forgiveness where there was no apology, loyalty where there was no reciprocity, and time as though it were an inexhaustible resource. So we eventually begin to understand that generosity and self-abandonment are not the same thing.
There is a peculiar grief in discovering that some of the people we would have done anything for might never have considered doing the same for us, maybe might is even a bit lenient – never. Not because they are necessarily cruel, but because human relationships are rarely as symmetrical as we imagine. We do not all love with the same intensity, notice the same details or understand obligation in the same way.
Recently I wrote that I came home because I felt lonely, I used to think loneliness was the absence of people but now I suspect it has more to do with the absence of goodness… genuineness.
There are people who spend their lives surrounded by friends and remain almost entirely unknown and I did that. You spend time with people while drinking, attend parties, pose for photographs, yet somehow have nobody to telephone when the circumstances of life become too difficult to explain.
I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with parties or photographs, fuck I love both of them, a lot.
Most weekends I go out, drink too much, try to make people laugh and occasionally kiss strangers for the fleeting adrenaline of feeling wanted. I can become an entirely convincing version of someone who is enjoying her life. Then I return home, I take the valiums to help me sleep so my nightmares stop.
We assume that happiness must be visible and suffering must be consistent and imagine that someone who is struggling cannot also laugh, flirt, dance or enjoy themselves. But perhaps the most complicated thing about being human is our capacity to experience contradictory emotions simultaneously.
Sometimes the person making everyone laugh is not pretending to enjoy themselves. For that moment, they genuinely are, the tragedy is that a moment of happiness does not necessarily mean the absence of pain. Maybe this is why we misunderstand one another so profoundly because we take fragments of people’s lives and mistake them for the whole.
Three months ago, I was in the same hospital where I find myself now and the familiarity of the room is difficult to explain. I knew no progress was being made but I thought this time id do it better, I wouldn’t see a wall again.
Instead, I found myself confronting not only the physical consequences of illness, but the frightening depth of my own despair. I had given away possessions and money because there wasn’t a future.
Perhaps that is why suffering can feel so isolating. We expect the world to recognise the magnitude of what is happening to us, but it can’t it simply carries on. So then we imagine people we know, but they don’t show up either, you sit in your white walls and time just goes by.
I have been thinking about the relationship between suffering and control. I suppose for me its my body. I turned mine into a revolt. Against my parents, against people who had hurt me, against former lovers, against enemies, but eventually all it does is revolt against you. For me to became a project, a private attempt to impose order upon emotions and circumstances I could not otherwise control. But there is a terrible paradox in trying to establish control through something that gradually takes control away from you.
Today, a psychiatrist spoke to me about the relationship between eating disorders, power and the illusion of control. It made me think about how easily human beings can confuse punishment with discipline. How something that begins as an attempt to manage distress can become a source of distress in its own right.
I don’t want to romanticise that because there is nothing beautiful about becoming frightened of food, or feeling ashamed for enjoying something essential to being alive. There is nothing admirable about the exhaustion of negotiating with yourself over ordinary human needs.
There is something humbling about being forced to acknowledge our dependence on the very things we once believed we could control. Medication has helped, although at times I struggle with the numbness that accompanies it so I don’t take it. I find myself wondering about the difference between relief and the absence of feeling, about how we measure recovery when the things that make life painful are sometimes inseparable from the things that make it beautiful.
At the beginning of this year, I believed I was moving towards something permanent, I was going to London, towards someone I loved, towards a future that seemed to offer an alternative to the constant movement that had defined much of my adult life. But then circumstances changed, I returned home, life became difficult, it was expensive and I withdrew from the very relationship I had wanted to preserve and still mourn. I wanted him to stay, but created the distance that made staying impossible.
I have thought a great deal about the distinction between cynicism and disappointment. I suspect many people who describe themselves as cynics are simply dreamers who have grown tired of being embarrassed by their hope. But then again, I understand why.
BUT, big but, sometimes, the smallest gesture can interrupt that belief, make you eat that piece of cheese.
After six days in hospital, a man I had met only twice unexpectedly sent me money so that I could buy a meal instead of having another hospital dinner, I hadn’t even told him anything about a hospital meal. He just asked if I was okay?
There was no obligation, no expectation of repayment, no shared history substantial enough to explain the gesture. He simply recognised that another person might be having a difficult day and decided to make it slightly easier. I have thought about that act of kindness more than many grand declarations of affection. In fact today I used it to buy a green juice and cried the whole time because it was a gift.
The significance of an act is not always proportional to the effort it requires and money doesn’t grow on trees, but what he did will remain with me for whatever time I have left.
An almost stranger generosity can restore a little faith in humanity.
Of course, nobody can be everything to another person, we all have limits and we all fail people, sometimes without realising it. Love cannot require the complete surrender of our own lives, and care should not become a measure of how much suffering we are willing to absorb.
Perhaps friendship is not the promise that we will always know what to do, but the willingness to remain present when we don’t. I would say maybe instead of going for beverages and posting about it on instagram and going to see a friend in emergency is a start but then again who the fuck have I come to know here.
Across centuries, people have written about loneliness, longing, mortality and the difficulty of understanding themselves. We read their words and experience the strange comfort of discovering that our most private thoughts have existed in other minds.
Perhaps that is what literature offers us, its all I have here but for me its evidence.
I don’t know what comes next, my health isn’t getting better and right now I struggle to imagine a future beyond the immediate effort of getting through the present. But I am trying not to mistake my inability to imagine that future for proof that it cannot exist.
Perhaps the real measure of a life is not how successfully we conceal our suffering, or how much we manage to achieve before our time is over. Perhaps it is whether, in the midst of our own imperfect existence, we can make another person’s experience of being alive a little better.
We may never know how much that matters.
But I suspect it matters more than almost anything else.
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