One woman less at war No edits just blurts...
I have never written about the multicoloured roots of my life. I have never spoken about racial equality when given the chance. I never wanted to be that white person who speaks because of her ‘proximity’ to Blackness. But I once looked around a table and realised there was not one single Black person there. That was the first time I really saw it. I was raised by many Black hands, as were many of…
To trust you is a measure far beyond what you think it is. Where we come from, trust is only earned after observation of actions. The instant trust that freedom brings, the willingness to fall spontaneouusly in love or frivollously about, does not exist on our side of the tracks. Trust and loyalty are blood-deep which make friendships incredibly hard. 'I have known that person a long time' is…
By no surprise, I find myself on holiday in a part of France at war, with fire. Told on the international stage from the angle of displaced holidaymakers, the stories make for upset, not pain. But pain exists. The people who toil those fields. Their land, their livelihoods. If this tale is told by European campers frolicking in the waves, is it the truth? There is not a single journey to France…
Music and writing, my greatest healers, although, never at the same time, I cannot write and listen to anything other than (as now) the birds chirping a merry tune in my South London garden. I danced last week, we sang, we lost our voices, I danced to the music that was played in my childhood, because it wasn't all horrendous. Music was a joy, always has been and in this same week I have watched…
I remember sitting at their kitchen table, I was eighteen, perhaps nineteen. I told them how bad it was at home, I told them everything. They felt like a safe space, they were. They couldn't do anything about it. I needed them to bear witness and to tell me that it wasn't right. I had lived my whole childhood in fear, fear of the next thing happening, it didnt just happen to me, it was the…
It ended, its been ended for a long time but we are still here. In one way and the other, still circling each other, our kids, the stuff of our life. I am watching him go, I see him slowly stepping back, I'm still here, he keeps going, I know. He has a new she. He has gone. Yet I am still watching him go, witnessing myself watching him distance. Traction, movement, heat, poor sleep and…
Navigating adult children can be quite something. They will always be your children, you will view them, experience them, in a way that no one else ever will. You hear the unsaid, you feel their pain. Stay quiet, say it, don't say the thing but perhaps he needs you to say the thing. Is the thing being said going to help this - probably not, but you care - is it control, perhaps, is it enablement,…
Get Up and Go has entered my timeline. Here she is again, full of ideas and ambition. She arrives a few times a year and, when she does, everything suddenly feels urgent. Everything needs doing. Right now. The deep reflection of recent months is quietly pushed to the back burner, forgetting that it was those long hours spent wading through guilt, shame and swamp that untangled enough of me for Get…
I saw their faces when I told them the thing that made them ask if I had ever had thoughts of harming myself (they didn't say it like that). I knew the shift, I understood what was and what wasn't being said, I changed tone but I also quite liked the discomfort that had set in. Unusually I was as open and honest and confident of my story as I have ever been, I noticed that about myself, I could…
I didn't know I did this until it was pointed out. But many of us do this? Right. Perhaps, or not. I am unclear, I am also not a survivor although I know I am. That identity is not for the likes of me, a one-woman power house who you want (need) on your team... except, it is, for me: a normaliser of survival. Concentrate? No. Sit still? No, Worry? Yes, Catastrophise - most definitely. You may have…