A Quiet Catastrophe

I go to the healer again.

He has the same message for me every time:

I have a plate full of food. chicken and potatoes.

I must keep at least half of it for myself.

I need to put myself first, second, and third.

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand this.

To stop numbing, helping, chatting

to put down my phone and finally examine the lead in the marrow of my bones that weighs me down.

To understand why I’m so compelled to listen, even when I am exhausted.

To offer help, even as I try to step away.

I grew up in North London in the 70s and 80s, in a world of middle‑class privilege, held together by the structure of school, work, television, and Sunday lunch.

A family where dark humour and creativity were highly prized.

A family where both my parents were mentally ill.

My mother kept it all together. Growing up, I didn’t see what she was doing.

We were three blue‑eyed frogs in her saucepan.

My dad was checked out, suspended inside his bitter hell.

My little brother was wild.

My older sister was not OK.

And I was a secretive, promiscuous mess.

But we were well fed. We functioned. We joked about it in clever ways.

The deadly domestic despair that perfumed our house was obvious to anyone sensitive enough to smell it.

Mental illness has a distinctive odour.

I recognise it instantly.

It fills me with fear and fascination. I want to run but it summons me with an instruction to my blood: to discard my needs, to accompany, to give, to shine, to dim, to keep something alive just by staying close.

When I was a young teen, after my first bleed but before my first kiss, my mother dropped the façade and came to one of her periodic standstills.

She had a stint in Friern Barnet Mental Hospital.

I remember standing by her bed and her saying ‘I can’t go on’

I remember trying to cook for the family and taking my brother to school.

I remember her friends coming to help us out.

I remember my father rallying and flipping pancakes that stuck to the ceiling.

When she was discharged, like a three year old after her first day at nursery, she brought back a painting of a dark cloud, which she said was meant to be a rabbit. It was pinned to the kitchen corkboard and ridiculed. For years it hung over us as we ate.

My mother was truth‑bending, vulnerable, stubborn, hilarious, generous, manipulative, irreverent, and sometimes (often) downright cruel. Her twisted behaviour quite literally floored me.

She merrily gaslit long before gaslighting was a thing.

On my nineteenth birthday she gave me my present: a card with a poem and a £50 cheque inside.

The poem was This Be the Verse by Philip Larkin.

She’d got my catatonic father to write the cheque with his shaky hand.

This Be the Verse - Philip Larkin

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old‑style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy‑stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself’

As I read it, I heard a door slam shut.

Not me, I thought. I refuse this curse.

Our neighbour popped round to wish me a happy birthday. I heard her mounting the stairs, a sound that broke the laws of the house; my parents never made it past the second floor. I desperately wanted to hide.

She found me in bed, snotty, stoned, and weeping amongst the wreckage of my room. She didn’t say a word. She got straight into bed with me and held me like a baby. I have never forgotten that moment.

My father was a brilliant, complex man who spent a lot of time in bed. I used to pilfer books from his groaning shelves (poetry, shamanism, Buddhism, psychology, quantum physics)

It was easy to swipe his stubby and strong Embassy cigarettes from the kitchen drawer, and slip money from his wallet as he snored.

He became utterly immobilised by depression an strokes in his mid fifties and died when he was sixty.

After his death, going through his papers, I found a poem he had written.

It’s a frighteningly lucid and devastating read.

My room is on its nightly journey to the stars

No one left alive on the aberration of earth

The bleak city.

Sounds of homecomers must be in my head

The curtained room hangs in the void

The endless chronicle

I am so tired I can hear my own blood

Tonight my room voyages far.

I hang in the void listening to the sound of my blood

Two cars have passed in the night world

How could he of all people fall into such despair?

He could take it by the throat and choke the life out if it came up for air

But no one is there. No cure.

I can starve it out

The cure is the disease. It is my enemy

(In the brain, my own fleshed fantasy)

The fantasy of cure

That I will remain

When it is no more.’

As a teen, I would often come stumbling home in the early hours.

My heart would sink as I saw our house, the only one in the row with its lights still blazing.

Mostly I crept straight past the living room and up to bed.

But sometimes, even though it scared me, ‘the smell’ compelled me to open the door and wish my father goodnight.

My father would be mid‑voyage, deep in his void.

He would look up. Mute. Imploring.

His direct gaze always felt slightly incestuous. Indecent.

Whatever it made me feel was too enormous for me to comprehend.

I told nobody at school what was going on.

Aged twenty‑two, a year or so before my father died, I travelled to Spain and ended up staying in Barcelona.

One night, in a reggae club in Plaça Reial, I met an Iraqi man ten years older than me. We became lovers instantly. The connection lasted nine years. It was transformative.

I wrote this poem shortly after we met (I say I wrote it; actually, it wrote me)

I know a man, he gave me his eyes

He sits all alone and watches me rise

Tired of tomorrow, he sits and he smokes

Occasionally cries or makes sarcastic jokes

I know a place, it’s inside my mind

A place of all reason, that pain cannot find

This place is still small, a baby in thorns

I watch it quite closely, it stretches and yawns

I met a man, he has animal eyes

He’s feeding my baby and soothing its cries

Like an orange once peeled, skin that’s been burnt,

Paper that’s torn or a language once learnt

I feel a change, I sit terribly still

Holding this feeling, feeling the thrill

I go to the beach to watch the sun rise

All shadows behind me as part of me dies

Then I walk back quite slowly down your narrow street

Just smiling and humming and moving my feet

What strikes me now, reading this poem thirty‑two years later, is that I already instinctively knew about mental refuge, initiation, death, and rebirth.

At twenty‑seven I sat my first ten‑day Vipassana meditation course. I took to it like a duck to water. On that first course I reached states I have never found again.

One day, towards the end of the retreat, I heard a sound. I knew it was the sound that had killed my father. The sound of the Void. I could hear how utterly lonely it had been for him. In a hall full of people sitting, I wept and rocked silently for hours.

At the end of the course, I was full of joy. I learnt that even though my father’s mind had killed him, my mind could be different. I thought I was safe.

James Hollis writes:

“What the parents have not faced in their life remains a glass ceiling - a constriction that either the child serves or has to spend a lot of effort breaking through.”

For such a long time, I didn’t see the ceiling.

I thought I was already free.

Indeed, these past thirty‑two years have been rich.

A first‑class degree in music and visual art.

Two years training in voice and breath.

Teaching music in a Buddhist primary school.

Working as a clown in hospitals.

A diploma in midwifery.

Working as an independent home‑birth midwife.

Jet‑set nannying for billionaires.

Photography.

Gardening

Leading courses in singing, sexuality, creative writing, peri‑menopause.

Two teenaged children.

Homeschooling.

France.

Spain.

Off‑grid.

On‑grid.

And still

I chose relationship after relationship that left me drained.

Partners.

Bosses.

Neighbours.

Friends.

Different faces.

The same pattern.

I was compulsively generous.

Always available.

Impressively skilled at absorbing the weight of their lives when things inevitably got heavy.

It was the old instruction:

stay close, keep it alive, disappear last.

I wore myself out trying to shine into spaces that weren’t mine to illuminate and then had the audacity to blame them for my compulsive co‑dependency

And along the way, I’d become hopelessly addicted to my phone.

I was scrolling on the toilet and in my dreams. I was losing my eyesight. My attention span was decimated.

I repeatedly found myself watching blackhead‑squeezing reels at 2 a.m.

I was living a stupefied, vicarious life that made me feel ashamed.

Somehow last year I heard something faint, frantic, screaming.

The cry of a panicking baby through a thick wall.

The second I heard it, I rushed to its rescue.

It was my own dear soul.

***

“The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes.

The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation.

We must turn away from the cacophony of the outer world to hear the inner voice.

When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood.

We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us,

but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.”

— James Hollis, The Middle Passage

I started changing fast.

I realised nothing would actually crumble if I began to look after myself.

So I stepped back behind the line.

I put myself first.

And I stopped apologising.

I knew I needed to reclaim my mind from my phone.

I removed Facebook and Instagram.

I began switching my phone off for longer stretches.

Over New Year, I had a week alone.

I switched my phone off completely.

I meditated.

I learned how to enter the Void deliberately.

The vast nothingness.

And to my surprise, something appeared.

A cracked, glowing pomegranate,

turning slowly in the centre of my chest.

Then I became aware of others,

many hundreds of glowing pomegranates

That I couldn’t see yet,

They were celebrating.

Persephone is on her way up.

And so am I.