The Day the Mirror Broke

Asking for help

Rose Rouse - who edits this Substack and runs the FB group - created a rich tradition in the Advantages of Age Facebook group. On a regular basis, she posts a question using the coloured box template. She puts her questions into a box and many interesting and unexpected streams of discourse unfold. I can get quite verbose. A testament to the subject matter and to the way these questions are an invitation.

One of the most recent ones was: Can you and do you ask for help/support? So important as we get older. Not that I'm great at it!

I did not comment. Not because I had nothing to say, more because I had too much to say. It wasn’t metabolised into language though, and this essay is essentially my response.

Nine years ago, I had my bedroom walls stripped of the paper - which I had painted on top of - through the seasons of life here at Casa Caro. Initially, my walls had been yellow, (twice) followed by two different hues of blue. I never liked the slightly raised pattern of that original old paper. I bit the bullet and paid two lovely men to come in and take it off and all the many layers of paint overlaying it as well. It was an epic task that had me and everything that lived in my bedroom, set up like a campsite in my front room. I really hate disorder, but that’s a whole essay of its own.

Those naked walls were almost erotic, especially at the point of replastering. I was left with it for a while so the plaster could dry before being painted a colour from the ‘dirty white’ palate. While I sat in the midst of my controlled chaos in my temporary living, I bought some stuff for the eventual reoccupation of Bed-World.

Shopping online is something I do well. I bought a huge mirror, not so much to see myself in, but to open the room out, to play with light and space. It has been an integral component of this room since the day I moved back in. Until recently, it was propped up against a wall opposite a window. It had always stood on the floor.

These days are strange days.
My life seems to be finding its own way.
I notice I have become a person that makes things, absolutely without knowing how. Mosaic, kintsugi, stained glass…

These things need their own paraphernalia, and my minimalist aesthetic is challenged by an-ever-increasing collection of tools.

I acquired containers to make systems of storage that fit neatly behind a curtain across a deep shelf. Then I faced the fact I needed a work station. I needed a place to play with my glass and concrete and gold leaf. Internet shopping bought me a self-assembly work bench that once put together and placed into bed-world, surprisingly didn’t create a crowded situation. It still feels spacious.

I situated my huge mirror on top of my new work bench and it looked fabulous.

Of course, it was going to fall off.
It fell off.

I was talking to a friend on the phone and caught the topple out of my peripheral vision, though I wasn’t quick enough to catch it. I can’t move fast. Period.

It fell into smithereens, trapping me and Leonard on the bed, both shocked. It ended the phone call that was actually a tricky one; an authentic friend washing up one, but not yet at the place where we could hear and empathise with the other.

The reason I’m using this story as a way to talk about asking for, or indeed needing help, is because the feeling of overwhelm amongst all the broken glass had a certain quality that has remained. A feeling that interests me.

The shattered mirror was a chaotic and horrible mess in terms of clearing it up. The feeling that I have interest in exploring has a particular quality of resignation that is thick and dense. It is very heavy. I suspect I always carry it, but without conscious awareness. It has become woven into the heaviness in my DNA.

I have, without making it a project, been feeling into and around this resigned quality – if it was to speak it would say: you’re on your own. If I go closer it says something like: no-one wants you.

Potent huh.

There is a place where this feels true.
It’s small.
It doesn’t drive the car so to speak, but I think I am prone to missing it in my mostly inclusive-to-all home address.

It is slippery, and catching something quite slip-slidey as a takeaway from the domestic horror of so much shattered glass, feels like it matters. I’m staying, as best I can with the murmuring undercurrent of this old, forever quality of defeat. I mean, in the reality of having to cope with the mirror clean-up, of course I had to manage it. There’s no-one else here. I was overwhelmed and that is not a complicated thing. That is the normal of living alone, yet I caught a flash of something in the shadow that has stayed with me.

It's tricky from the orientation of a so much welcomed home, to notice the sneaky nuance, trying so hard to remain hidden. Truth be told, I still carry shame about needing and asking. The shattered mirror took me to the place where it resides. It hollows me out, and I am not enthusiastic about meeting myself here, even in the clunky and clumsy of meeting happening anyway.

Very far down below everything I have brought home is a lonely and homeless tap-root of shame. Shame is murderous, toxic and violent. It can kill people and it nearly killed me. I recognise I have skill in avoidance of this edge.

I have learned to ask for support. I have learned to hear a, no, I’m sorry, Caro, I can’t do that, without experiencing it as annihilation. That is a quiet revolution inside the deep of my home address. Immeasurable amounts of shame have left the building because I did choose life. I didn’t die, and I put my back into getting well and becoming human.

I don’t want this encounter on this edge, at all.

I find a way to bear what feels unbearable through the comedic. I can only yield when it comes down to it. Like waking up to find it’s dark and pouring rain on a day you’d planned an outdoor event. I can’t control or influence the weather. I can protest, kick and scream, but I can’t stop rain falling out of a dark, heavy sky. When cracks open up and show me something I don’t want to see, I can’t unsee no matter how hard I struggle.

Needing more support and help than I ever have - is not easy to look at square on. No wonder I broke a mirror, quips my inner subversive comic. It does help me stay, so I’ll keep making jokes, and it isn’t defensive, push away comedy, more the opposite. I infuse the edge of desperation with tenderness and forgiveness, so I can keep staying with the one I’m with.

It is in a deeply personal sense, hardcore, to welcome the needing/asking/not asking storyline, anew, and from this position of being older and more physically broken. I literally can’t revert to old mechanisms of pushing through. I am grappling with ancient shame that is rooted inside the helplessness of being born in a tiny physical body and utterly dependant on a mother that was repelled. Now, at the other end of being an embodied creature, knowing that one way or another I won’t have an old age, I have to meet the vulnerability of needing help, and pull her clear from the tattered rags of shame.

It does feel relentless, in complete co-existence with the waves of yielding. I fight and I yield. I could scream, roar, tear skin from my bones. I do scream sometimes, in some kind of considered way. I scream in my house, but remember to scream into a pillow so my desperation is muted enough for neighbour management. I screamed in the desert at night, also employing the pillow technique so I didn’t disturb (in more ways than one) Fee’s (the friend that I stayed with in the desert in Egypt) sleeping and dreaming. Sometimes I long to just fall apart; to scream in the high street, with no pillow, no accountability. I imagine myself allowing this, and how people would come and take me away. I mean I do know I’d end up back full circle in a psychiatric hospital, in a broken system. I do know that what I really long for - which is for someone to come and really help me, really see me, receive and rescue me - would not be the outcome if I allowed the psychotic breakdown that is only just the other side of a very thin veil, to unravel.

I know that it’s me now, the one that finds her unwieldy way to love the desperation and the fury. I am my own rapid response team… and I need support in various ways. Needing the three dimensional help, working out in the clumsy of trying, failing, trying again, trying different, yielding when I really have to, to the feelings of old carnage, so that I can enfold the desperate and tell her she’s safe, well, like I said, it is hardcore.

Hardcore has a softness in the yield.
It is not pretty, but it is real and I’m a fiend for real.

It has been uncomfortable to say the least, to write this. It has not flowed, but stalled repeatedly. I leave it and come back. I notice defeat and revulsion. I want to bin it. I notice the dots joining up and don’t want to. I don’t want to see and feel the dots joining up. Here is petulance, impotent rage, helpless and ravaged longing.

I believe I have taught myself to ask for support. Mostly when I’m a few feet back from the cliff edge, I create a little distance from the desperate in order to make a request. That distance doesn’t have to be very big, but it does make the difference that allows me to risk asking.

Being able to do it like that is falling away.

Falling away is trusting me to come through, and I guess I am, coming through.

I think this essay is done, in its fits and starts way. Right now I am nearly naked in a patch of sun outside my bedroom window. At the conclusion of yesterday, I did have an idea of today being not like this. Today, from the perspective of yesterday was a lot more to my liking. My short work week ends at the end of every Saturday, throwing me onto the shoreline of Sunday. I always conceive my Sunday as the longed for experience, and it never goes to plan. I should quit planning.

Dear reader, I want to tell you that after the mirror explosion was cleared, actually the clearing happened over several days, given that much glass continues to reveal itself, either by sticking a splinter in my foot, or glistening at night when the candles are lit. I mean after the initial clear, not only was I beside myself - hysterical about Leonard’s paws - but something happened to this benevolent room as soon as that big sheet of glass disappeared. It closed in. The walls closed in. I couldn’t breathe. I felt suffocation. Extreme, I know, but it rolled like that.

I became an utter nutter. It was intolerable. The quite crazed urgency to get the light back into the room was not unlike the need for heroin when it all ran out and my resources for earning more money by fucking and sucking in cars, was zero. My need was like that and my resources for reasoned thinking about a replacement were zero.

So like a junkie, I scored.
Amazon Prime.
Eight large rectangular mirror tiles.
Agitation in my flesh and bones until they arrive the next day.
Actually rescheduling a client so I could get them on the wall.

The feeling of euphoria when they were there, up, aligned even, as I’d made myself use a spirit level. Oh my, the high. I got the light back.

Once I’d calmed down over a couple of days, some weird creative shit started happening, and one of the rectangles (bottom right) became a mirrored canvas for various ceramic, stained glass shards, mosaic tiles – abstract art started happening, and then it was done. It is weird, but I do really love it.

I sometimes say; writing brings me home.

It is true, it often does, but actually it isn’t usually as rough as this. Often I get into the writing groove and I experience the homecoming within the process of actually writing. I feel it like being danced can feel. It can be deeply sensual, tender, distilled. In this piece, it was not like that. The idea, the calling to write in response to Rose’s AOA question was like that, and then opening the word document threw me hard against a wall. I started putting words on the screen and I hated them all. Very akin to showing up in my church, to the places humans gather to practice movement medicine, and just fighting with it not being the way I wanted. I can’t drop into any kind of groove. I can’t find the doorway, the place. I hate the music. I hate all my fellow humans moving too. I hate the disappointment that reveals my expectation. Usually I stay, and sometimes the fight falls away, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Writing this has been exactly that.
I have mostly hated writing it, dragged myself back into engagement. Kept going. Stalled again and saved and closed.

This morning on my Sunday that isn’t the Sunday I visualised last night - after a very fluent day of work and space between - I remember the quality of being, as I almost sensually moved through my evening. I put a condition on attachment to awakening still in the sensuality of my own river of being me the way I love best.

Not what happened.
Never happens.
Knowing the truth of this doesn’t make a jot of difference to the disappointment reflex, but knowing that, and weaving it into the comedy, does make some difference.

Now I am done.
It is this afternoon, just, I land in 12.30pm.
I am softer.
This writing has written me to the one I’m with, and I am no longer fighting with the relentless of it all.

The sun is shining over London, and there is a strong warm breeze. My shell chimes sing. Max the parrot next door has got a lot to say. I have hung washing outside in a strong patch of sun, and because of the wind blowing through, everything it is almost dry.