I knew something wanted to write itself.
It is a very particular felt internal condition, one that I have finally come to recognise for what it is. It took a long time to recognise, and then longer to trust. For ages, it felt like a should, and then I would try too hard to find writing, and writing got further and further away. Then I would punish and criticise: what kind of non-writing writer are you, I would shout.
Now I know what kind of writer I am, and can sometimes hear when writing wants to happen. I no longer push, dig and harass that sometimes loud, other times a whisper. I have learned to let it be. To trust. To wait, but not wait with baited breath. The kind of waiting where you step away, forget even that you are waiting.
Then sometimes a ‘blessing comes from heaven’ (I am paraphrasing my dear Leonard Cohen) ‘and for something like a second I am healed and my heart is at ease’.
This is writing happening.
This morning it started, and is telling me my own story. I am brought to this moment with the essential ingredient of not knowing. It is a lovely thing. I cherish it, and these days mostly manage to hold it with the lightest of touch.
Actually, no holding, just trusting.
This is the engine of my writing, writing itself.
Over these last years, I have without noticing a whole noisy lot, been allowing many threads of storyline, belief systems, ideas about who and how I am, just fall away. It has not been a project with intention. There was no plan and still isn’t.
I seem to be crumbling like a coastal rock face. Land gets lessened as pieces gently, sometimes not so gently, break away and fall into the sea below. Parts of me feel a bit disturbed, but I have to report that disturbed is not very loud.
On occasions, I find myself sitting on a metaphorical bench overlooking wide ocean with an almost dispassionate sense of observation. I see myself disappearing, whilst at the same time becoming truly me. So this has both solidity and a kind of ephemera. It’s a bit weird to be honest, and as I write it, sounds abstract. It is not abstract from the inside though. It is real and throws me at the rocks enough that I can always touch bruises, run my hands over grazed skin.
Here is what I am talking about, spelt out, not poetic, where yes, I know I can go. This falling away has taken me to a place where the binary norms just don’t make sense. I don’t mean intellectually, though that is true too. I mean literally. The entire binary formulation of good and bad, positive and negative, better than worse, well and not well. You get the gist. I mean, stop and think about it for a moment. How do we say hello? Mostly we say hello with the words – how are you? This question freezes me like the proverbial rabbit. Of course this empty social norm is supposed to illicit – fine. How are you? Fine. Okay, everybody is fine.
I know, love and am loved by people that really want to hear how it’s rolling for me, as I do them. And, I am still finding myself feeling a growing separation from the narratives constructed and formulated in binary terms.
This is interesting in a particular way, because as a psychotherapist I have found over recent years both transgender and non-binary people are finding their way to me. In gender terms, I am most energised by the growing vocabulary of non-binary identity. It is so fulsome and rich. It is everything and because it is a new country in terms of being a recognised place, it is also at its ‘forming’ stage. It is creating itself in real time, and the whole landscape of gender enquiry and expansion touches and excites me. Partly because I am Queer, and so deeply recognise myself as such. Having lived most of my life identifying as a lesbian, when I found myself drawn to explore sex and sexuality with men, I felt I couldn’t, almost ethically, continue to wear my lesbian colours. I grieved. I loved being a lesbi, not to mention what did that make me then? Bisexual is a word that doesn’t feel like me at all, but Queer, yes.
So, in the gender landscape I found a way to help my growing understanding of just how much binary we humans live in, and are defined by. That helping matters because it has taken a while – a not easy while, to understand my falling away experience enough to begin trusting it.
I do trust it now. I find deep peace within it, and I am also finding some lonely.
It is not a problem. I am interested in lonely, alone, solitude, separate, all the highways and byways leading from my own latent understanding of my introversion and need for a lot more space than many. It is an enquiry, and right now it is very alive inside me. I am discovering what it truly means to add non-binary to my home address. Even in the relational places where I feel the strongest sense of belonging, of being known, seen and loved, I am starting to notice this separation from the normative binary.
I belong to a group.
It is an open ended, slow opening modality. For the non-therapy speakers, that means there is an agreement to commit to one, or it maybe two years. After that, if someone feels ready to leave, they give notice and for several more sessions we all get to feel into and experience the saying goodbye.
It is monthly, for a whole day.
This, along with knowing and trusting the group therapist in question, made for an unequivocal yes. That was thirteen years ago.
The group is at its best, an amazing place to become more deeply acquainted with the one you are. This one. The ‘here I am’ one. In a small, skilfully held group, where the same people keep on showing up a lot of falling away can happen.
This group is such home ground for me.
I can’t actually imagine how I would be here the way I am, if it hadn’t been – that though is a doorway to abstraction.
It was here, and I am part of it, and though a few have come and gone there is a culture of staying for a significant duration, and leaving with care. Let’s just say I can’t imagine ever leaving!
I bring my home-ground-group into this essay because it is there, where for me, there is immeasurable trust, a safe that makes anything feel possible, that I am beginning to give shape, form and voice to the feeling of separate from normative binary. I am really feeling the different as I notice how my precious fellow groupies are positioned in the something is difficult, or awful, or tragic, or heartbreaking, or horrifying – things, the stuff of human life, the struggles – and then there are processes that in various ways make suffering and struggle, better. Healing happens through understanding, through engaging with what in some way seems to be categorised as a problem, and then in some kind of construction gets solved, even if solved is sad.
It is tricky, attempting this deconstruction.
But often, I feel acutely outside, in a different country.
I have landed it would seem, in a less populated place, though I still have a place here with you. That’s the comedy, and the reassurance. I do need to be seen in my solitude, and understood enough. This is starting to roll out in ‘group-world’.
I write this in the week I recommence my work after the Christmas break.
I haven’t had much relational contact over these last weeks of space. Two utterly nourishing house calls to me, and one zoom version of such a visit as both of us are broken in body if not in spirit. I have had a therapy session and a supervision session, both on zoom as both these humans that l love and depend on live in Devon, not London. I have had some big waves of two kinds of lonely, though I suspect they weave into the same thread.
Firstly, I have experienced several hardcore moments of needing actual concrete help to manage Leonard getting to and from the vet. It looks likely that his neurological condition is close to a diagnosis of an epilepsy variant. It has entailed getting to the vet and back again in quite an intensive frequency. I don’t drive. My friend and neighbour that drives and is part of my village, hasn’t been free, and my second option for asking within friendship is in France.
I had to manage the expense (huge surcharge for pets) of pet Uber, and the vagaries of drivers cancelling en route, I assume having got a better fare. This kind of lonely is familiar to all of us that live alone, don’t drive, and don’t have the financial resources for unlimited paid being driven. The lonely of having to manage stuff without the more normative constellation of relational life.
I get this.
It isn’t easy when there is flurry or a storm. I manage. It takes it out of me, and I manage.
It rolls into the other point – I have lived in this flat, my home, the place that gave me a secure base/attachment about thirty-three years back, and therefore I have a neighbourhood of sorts. In this neighbourhood over the last year of becoming much more visibly physically broken, using a walker etc, I have noticed turning away, where there used to be turning towards. Not everyone, but more than not.
I understand this too, though I wish it wasn’t so.
I understand I am a reflective surface, a mirror that many are averse to. I both don’t take it personally, and I find it painful.
Then the comedy, if you can find the tender comedic in the brutal and the simple, of those that turn towards me with a zeal to be of help. I have a neighbour I am fond of, though despite living a few houses apart, we occupy such different ground. She really wants to help which touches me; and the way she wants to help, does my head in.
Over Christmas I have been flooded with her wanting to help. I’ve been invited to come out to lunch, coffee, walks, chats – finally I said: Sweetheart, I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less than come out and engage in social intercourse. I said I appreciated her good will with bells on, but the only people I can be around when I am broken in ascendancy, are those that don’t experience that as a problem and try and solve it. She did hear me, which I appreciate, but I know she doesn’t buy it. Doesn’t know how to trust my simple, so I am, in my authentic self, invisible to her.
The thing that really defines non-binary as a location, is it means freedom. Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose – the refrain from Kristofferson’s song, Me & Bobby McGee. As a tortured teen, this was a tragic notion, and now, so many decades later it is an absolutely unequivocal freedom from any capacity to write myself into problem or a crisis narrative. This is a wicked and exquisite freedom, and I kept on stumbling around in my precious little life until I landed in free and recognised my homeland.
Broken and whole, and with no-thing to fix. As the splendid human, Colin Harrison, named the seven day retreat he would offer once a year: Nowhere To Go. A glorious and horrifying peaceful is what I’m learning to trust.
In the beautiful, both complex and simple of Leonard Cohen’s song: Thanks for The Dance, there is the line: and the crisis was light as a feather. Yes, it is that. All is well, even and especially when it isn’t.
My home address with new spaces:
The Fields of Kindness
Simplicity Lane
Village of The Undefended Heart
Continents of Non-binary
I jest.
I am finding my way with myself, with the people that are part of my village, all within the unbearable for many, simple true of bigger kinship. We are all in it together, if we like it or not. Sometimes I experience knowing the deepening truth of this, as a gift beyond measure – and sometimes it feels like hell, to know and trust this, and to feel so unbearably alone, standing in the absolute eye of the big cosmic joke of knowing at the same time I am not.
Alone, that is.
I write at
And my book Postcards from a Little Life is coming soon.
Wonderful piece!