The Cure For Sleep: August Issue
006: Size & Shape: Arriving at a right fit in our skin, our circumstances
| 7 | 25 |
“This is a book of women and words; homes and honesty; light and longing. A life laid bare, held to the morning light and given to us as reminder of what it means to choose to live. Shadrick weaves the raw beauty of the day to day with the magic of myth and fairy tale to offer us way through the darkest woods”
Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places
This month’s advance extract from The Cure For Sleep is about size & shape: what it takes to arrive at a sense of right fit in our skin, our circumstances. How it feels to be without that. After reading, do share a short true tale of your own - no more than 300 words – on this theme in the comments section.
You can read the stories that subscribers are contributing in response to each extract on The Cure For Sleep book site: march issue | april issue | may issue | june issue | july issue
All themes are staying open to submissions until publication day on 20 January 2022, offering new and emerging writers a safe space to share their words and talk with others about their contributions.
august’s extract
The shadow of the wild woman dying back in the West Country, too ill to edit her swim diaries: this cast my own late and very public attempt at storytelling into even sharper relief, so that I became still more ambitious for it. The poolside mile of writing was my single best chance to create a lasting life as an artist, one that might begin to pay enough through grants or commissions to keep me outdoors for good.
And so I needed to amplify my quiet presence beside the water of my small town’s lido. Just as O’Keeffe came to prominence as a painter when her lover Stieglitz exhibited her canvases alongside exquisite nudes he’d made of her, so I must create an iconography for my work: images that could travel beyond the brick and flint walls of the pool and make strangers stop their online scrolling to look, then read.
But to seek and brief a photographer was a terribly shy exercise for an ignored daughter grown old. To have a man pay me close attention had always been my dearest wish, but to ask for it? As difficult to voice as the wild woman had found her end-of-life regrets.
There was just one person I felt able to approach: a father who’d had children in the same nursery as my own, whose family photographs shared on social media were lit so that the everyday seemed infused with a sacred aspect. A loving husband and a proud parent of daughters, I admired his manner too – the kind of man I’d have liked to be raised by, if such choice were ever given.
Like the sculptor, he understood within moments everything I was trying to achieve, saying yes to me as swiftly as I had to the wild woman. There was a condition, though: he wouldn’t charge for his time, but I did need to hand him my whole trust, setting aside any received ideas of my best angle, a pleasing smile. Yes?
Yes, I said, it being my season of agreeing to strange bargains for the hopeful feeling, light as thistledown, that came from making them.
How at ease he made me feel, so that I felt able to say what even Nye didn’t know: that each time my father drove past me, unheeding, in the small town where I’d lived, I felt myself a stray dog or a piece of litter. That I fell into compensatory dreams of being an object of use or beauty – a jug of hedgerow flowers on a tablecloth, a willow-pattern plate. And so these scrolls and my kneeling to them was not only a response to my near-death and wish to live more vividly ever since, but also – at a far deeper level – a chance to remake myself. To assume my right size and shape at last. To claim authority. To be seen. Did he understand?
He did, entrusting to me stories of his own childhood as we began work, so I could laugh and feel natural despite our unusual business. Conversation, my comfort zone.
But then, with our hours of filming almost at their end, he asked me simply to stand still, and straight, against a white wall. To look unsmiling into the lens, naked of make-up.
I’d already floated, face to the sky, and swum laps while he filmed me from underwater. Had knelt at my scrolls, pen in hand, before shaking out a length of the paper like laundry. Bizarre things, all in view of pool-goers. This should have been the work of minutes, and yet it triggered in me a backwash of old miseries: all the many times I’d hated my face in a mirror or my body in clothes.
How much I wanted to end the session then, breaking my promise.
(Oh these brief but decisive moments when we step from shame into whatever lies on the other side. Each one never easier than the last.)
‘Give me a moment, I can feel tears coming. This is horribly hard. Look away, will you?’ I had to close my eyes then, bending over to ready myself. Diver on a high board.
‘OK. Let’s go.’
It was only a camera, a man, and me in middle age. But the sensation was one of freefall, release. A corset torn off and thrown aside.
The writing continued steadily after this as before but the woman doing it parted ways with doubt, deference, disguise. No more being modest, playing small.
I had learned, so late, to stand unadorned and look the world in the eye. To see and be seen in an equal exchange of gazes.
How wild I felt, how free.
about tanya
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Oh that's just beautiful. So vulnerable and yet hopeful. I love the metaphors: "a corset torn off and thrown aside". And that sense of just standing and looking into a camera, into the world, when you are never sure how you will be received, before the realisation that it doesn't have to matter, it can't, despite all our programming.
It has taken me a long time to respond to this - partly because it has forced me to think about my body, which is something I struggle with. I've had to think about how I feel about myself, and it's complicated. Like Amy, I've taken a different journey.
I started out feeling OK about my body. I had the usual questions about my appearance, the usual insecurities, but in retrospect I approached the world as attractive people do, with the understanding that with a little effort, people could be charmed.
When I was 42 I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Over the next year, my body was transformed. Before that, I was looking good - I was happy with my body shape, I was happy with my face. I had thick dark hair, I had heavy eyebrows, long eyelashes. I had a cleavage.
I am now almost unrecognisable. It's 14 years on, and some of those changes would have happened anyway, I guess - but it all happened so quickly. Over the next year I aged - what? 10 years? 20? - I had my oestrogen stripped away. I lost my hair, my eyelashes, my eyebrows. I lost a breast. I gained weight (yeah, steroids). Over the next few years I had a reconstruction, then lost my other breast. The hair came back - thinner, grey. The eyebrows never came back. Even my hands are different. The veins have gone. One is puffier than the other.
I'm now a woman with thin, white hair, with no eyebrows, with stumpy little eyelashes. I'm, frankly, chubby. I'm back on chemo. I have new scars. I have old scars. There are patches of my body with no sensation whatsoever. I don't look at myself in mirrors any more - a quick glance at the start of the day to make sure I'm respectable - but other than that? No, not really. I have become invisible.
These days, I think of my body in terms of verbs. If I can walk up that hill, that's great. If I can enjoy the sun on my face, that's wonderful. If I can eat that peach and really relish it, that's fantastic. If I can walk into that cold, cold water and be cleansed by it, that's a miracle.