crab for lyf
It’s almost Spring again. I have the start of a small cold, the pleasing kind, more of a sniffle than anything else. It makes me think of my first yoga teacher. She said it was a good sign to get sick in a transition, that we are purging. I went for a proper run yesterday. When I woke up it was sunny and I didn’t want to miss it so I cycled to the marshes and ran around. Then the cold in my nose came over the course of the afternoon, like I’d taken in too much fresh air and now something needed to be cleared out. Spring is my favourite time of year. There is no better day than a day when you are just about warm enough in a T-shirt when the sun is on you, but that changes the instant it goes behind a cloud. I think it’s so perfect because it feels finite and fragile. Like lying really still in one place just about warm enough but if anything changes, it’s all over. And it’s all the potential for me, why this time of year is best, everything is still coming and everything could be.
I used to live for potential in boys too. And Anna would say, you can’t fall in love with potential and I’d think, oops but I already have. Can get really stuck in potential. Can actually be in love with potential for a long long time. And you only realise when you realise that you were in love with potential all along and then you can spot it from a mile off.
Last year after we lost the baby I lived with a constant timeline in my head. I set all these markers in the sand of months when it’d be resolved by. And at the time the only resolve I could imagine was another baby. The further along the marker was, the more scary it felt. Like it was the idea of how something would feel, the idea of getting to Christmas and not knowing, the idea of another Spring. And that’s where I lived in those hazy summer months that I can now barely remember. It’s how I know I am someone else now, somewhere else now, because I can barely understand how I had a birthday party just a few weeks later. How I put on a green dress and sipped pints and opened presents and spoke to people. But I did.
We went to the coast for two days and it was my perfect summers day. The T-shirt test day but even warmer. A strappy dress kind of day. We had a cabin, no one else was around and we could walk to the one pub in the middle of the most random village where nothing mattered except being lightly drunk together. Cooking a curry with a jarred sauce and eating it by the fire, more pink wine, rain on the cabin roof in the morning. How it is to eat fish and chips sitting on pebbles and come out of the sea glistening. The stones warm enough to lie on after to dry off. The taste of skin and salt and life. I was happy. We were so happy and it felt surreal to be happy even though we had just had the worst loss of our lives. It’s the whole thing, you can be both. Maybe it’s why it was so bright, why those days could be so bright.
Anyway the timeline thing feels so far away now. I keep hearing Billie Eilish break through ‘I DON’T RELATE TO YOU’. Because I moved on and I don’t mean to be handing out awards for my emotional growth, but I’m going to. I went through something and I grew from it. I realised as I am tasting Spring and my body responds like it did last Spring. Last Spring when everything changed. But I can feel that I am different now. I wrote down that I am harder but not in a bad way. I feel like I belong to less people and more to myself than I ever have. Tom found this picture of me from just before I knew I was pregnant and I have a big wide smile and I look young. I’m not so young anymore but that’s the way it’s got to go.
Having another baby on the timeline I thought I needed to live on wouldn’t have resolved that. Because that was a whole lifetime and something only we really know about. It’s why I don’t talk about it often or like to be asked because no words are enough so it’s better to just leave it. I hate to try to stress the importance of how much it was using words alone. Even though words are where I live. Not in this, not in this. Anyway, for a while being strapped to the timeline kept me afloat until I had to have it prized from my fingertips. Honestly it was like listen honey this life raft isn’t for you, you can swim forwards now. The life raft was sinking me, that’s my best metaphor. And so letting it go and swimming forwards, that was where I grew into a different person.
I think it’s part of why I let go of all this care of what people thought of me too, of trying too hard, of a few friends who weren’t really right anymore, of a career that wasn’t working, of the identity of that, of all the things I’d outgrown now. They could drop off so easily.
Everything that has come to me has come on its own timeline. I have manifested and wanted and visualised and prayed and imagined until I am blue in the face only for something to happen exactly when it was meant to. The more I have tried or fought for something, the more elusive it has been. You can’t always get what you want has looped around my head and life after a million disappointments. I am acquainted with disappointment! We know each other. Rejection also. FAMILIAR FRIENDS. Just about all learning has happened the hard way and I don’t always learn from my mistakes.
Our first summer together was the best and the most painful of my life. We landed in the deep end and we had to come back to shore. I don’t like tying life up in bows of everything happens for a reason, but I do know that everything happens. Everything happens fullstop. So it’s just what happened and for a minute there I lost myself. Can’t help today with the long lyrics to punctuate my story, Radiohead now, about right.
I gave too much of myself away and I let too many people have too much say. Being pregnant was the most extreme version of that, in our excitement we told everyone but that gave away something that I didn’t realise I needed to keep. I overrode instincts to say nothing and do nothing to please people and show up instead. I let them suggest names and talk about a future I was nervous to talk about. In the harshest possible way I’ve learnt about that now. And I feel like I’ve returned to being the crab I am. Hard shell actually. Soft centre but you don’t all deserve it. And yeah I write so much down and send it out, but I keep even more to myself. That’s what I mean, owning more of myself than ever before. And for the first time in a decade of yogic seeking, I don’t want anyone to help me heal. Because I know I have it all in me. Life, death and everything in between.