The Horrors Persist
About a week ago I broke. I couldn’t stop crying. A solid 2 hours of waterworks followed by another sporadic hour or two. I even left the house in the hope that the fear of public ridicule would dry mine eyes. I was wrong, and instead was the middle aged woman sitting in a bougie London coffee shop wearing dark glasses and crying over her £4 cappuccino and artisanal pistachio croissant.
Now I’m no stranger to a good drizz, when I ended my marriage, age 30, I cried for 2 weeks. I was staying alone and subsisted on beer, Quality Street Chocolates and fruit juice. For every beer and glass of orange juice in and an inordinate amount of salt water and snivel came out. My sister’s very helpful advice - don’t forget to change rooms from time to time to create a new crying environment (this actually proved to be quite useful advice as crying naked in the bathtub has a slightly different feel than ugly crying in the kitchen.) At the time I thought it worked - cry for 2 weeks, get over your marriage and on you pop. No therapy necessary.
The thing is, to quote a favourite meme, “the horrors persist and so do I”. A little over a decade later and the waterworks were upon me again. This time I’m midflight from my problems. Now 41, I have packed up all my belongings into a storage unit in Cape Town and I’m in London living in and caring for a 56 year old Viscountess with a brain tumour.
You’d think that looking after someone who was actively fighting death on the daily would put your problems in perspective, you’d be wrong. It seems that you can still be struck by existential dread so bad that it overrides your tear ducts.
I mean a few things had compounded this problem. A) I was exhausted after months of midnight loo runs B) Milady’s chemo had stopped working, there was a new tumour and her already tenuous walking had gone to pot. The wiring that told her leg to move had been interrupted by pressure on the brain. “Computer says no!” Her brain was sending the signals but her leg was non-compliant. C) She had just self-admitted to hospital and now I was suddenly a carer minus someone to care for.
Suddenly I had some time off and could go out into the world again. See one of my favourite people (an ex-boyfriend who was visiting his new girlfriend in London). I could drink beers and go to the Barbie exhibition and drink coffee in the park with someone I loved dearly. That’s where it all went wrong of course - it’s easy to run away from your problems when you’ve got someone else’s to focus on. Even easier when you’re effectively living someone else’s life (which is essentially what a live-in carer does. Their needs, their timetable, their diet, their preferences for everything from music, to the temperature of the room, to what to watch). Without someone to care for I had to face the world again. A world in which people are making decisions and moving forward with their lives. A world in which people I knew to be extreme commitment phobes (it takes one to truly know one) were committing to the kind of people they wanted to be in the kind of future they wanted. Fuck.
11 years and all that crying later and I realised that you don’t just get over your marriage and pop on with your life. Well I certainly hadn’t. Instead my life had been shaped by my extreme fear of commitment. The fear of being stuck. And ironically in my attempt to avoid it, I’d landed in emotional quicksand. Dammit. As a child of the 80’s who thought that real quicksand was going to be more of an issue in the day to day this metaphorical mire was a real blow. I mean I’m the kind of person who gets married at 25 and divorced at 30. The kind of person who takes 2 years to hang pictures in their rented flat, because I might be moving soon. Buying a washing machine was a big step for me - once you own appliances you’re stuck in the system man.
So here I am, stuck in my determination to never be stuck and two words keep floating around my brain - commitment and community. While I’ve stopped crying I know that unless I lean into those two things death by drowning in my own self-produced saline is a very real possibility. I thought I might start my journey to commitment with a tattoo…
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