Memory is so subjective. We all remember in a visceral, emotional way, and so even if we agree on the facts – what was said, what happened where and when – what we take away and store from a moment, what we feel about it, can vary radically.
But I smell the roses not just to remind myself of how lucky I am, but also to wonder how on earth it all happened. I smell the roses to try and figure out how I came to be in the garden at all.
I love long flights. The feeling of being completely unreachable is something I savor, and the limbolike state of being, having departed but not arrived, somehow allows me to catch up with myself, to regroup and check in.
You can’t go through sustained cruelty and terror for a large swathe of your life and not talk about it and be okay.
We both lacked the same thing in our childhoods – the love of a father... We both sought to fill that lack in our adult lives with family and love, as everyone does, but also with thrills and sometimes periods of recklessness. Luckily, I have always come back from my recklessness. Tommy Darling did not.
I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame.
Sometimes the worst thing about change is the shock of the change itself and not actually the new circumstances.
The most important opinion, of both my work and my conduct in life, is my own.
And we have the same colour eyes. When I look into his, I feel I’m looking into myself.
Go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly, you will be okay.
And so I have grown up wanting to feel secure when it comes to money, but doing so by treating it as something to be enjoyed, shared, and not given power.
These kinds of events, though seemingly glamorous and sophisticated from the outside, are often organized with the finesse of a kindergarten nativity play, and one whose teachers are all lapsed members of Narcotics Anonymous.
I never take anything for granted, and I never forget how lucky I have been, and am.
I cried for my granny and my mum and every working-class woman who had sacrificed like them and been denied proper closure and emotional balm because they had slipped through the system, no, had been failed by the system, and hadn’t the means to do so. I.
Who Do You Think You Are?
I loved the sound of the snow. It was calm and echoey at the same time, and the world felt a safer place being insulated by it. My.
It’s hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down.
So it’s not that every second of my childhood was filled with doom. But every second was filled with the possibility that in an instant my father’s mood would plunge into irrationality, rage, and ultimately violence. This very feeling, this possibility, is what darkens the part of my mind where my childhood stories live.
I really wanted to show that it wasn’t all bad in my family. I tried so hard to think of happy times we all had together, times when we had fun, when we laughed. In the interests of balance, I even wanted to be able to describe some instances of kindness and tenderness involving us all. But I just couldn’t. I.
Even after being beaten down lower than I thought possible, I always bounced back. I still looked for love again.
I believe the second you feel you have triumphed or overcome something, anything – an abuse, an injury to the body or the mind, an addiction, a character flaw, a habit, a person – you have merely decided to.