The Cure For Sleep: Size & Shape
Season 1, 006: arriving at a right fit in our skin, our circumstances
“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 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 already contributed by readers over on The Cure For Sleep website
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.
First, an apology, for all the times that I have made fun of you, hidden you, kept you in the dark, starved you, stuffed you, forced you to hold all of my feelings in, stared at you in the mirror, looking for nothing but faults. For all of the times I compared you to others and found you lacking. For the times I wanted to alter you surgically. For the times I floated you full of alcohol. For the times I didn’t keep the boundaries around you safe and for the times I kept them too rigid. For Slimfast, diet pills, Diet Pepsi, Marlboro Lights. For covering you in baby oil and baking you in the sun. For making it hard for you to breathe because I sucked my stomach in tight. For wishing you were faster, stronger, thinner, different. For pushing you onto the scale. For keeping you stiff when you really wanted to dance. For making you stay angry when it was really sorrow. For not even trying to like you.
And then, a thank you.
For carrying my babies, soft, plump, healthy babies, giving me the power to birth them and love them. For feeding chickens and walking dogs and picking berries. For jogging and yoga, the joy of movement. For hugging people as they enter our house. For rolling out pizza dough, chopping vegetables and shredding cheese and dinners on the porch. For creating courage, allowing me to write. For riding bikes and playing soccer and deck hockey and sled riding and hide and seek and skipping rocks and woodland explores. For blowing out candles on birthday cakes. For watering plants. For reading. For finding snail shells and watching clouds and drawing me down by the creek to listen to the water flow. For planting willows and daisies and lilies and peonies. For planting kale and tomatoes and basil and pulling weeds. For lighting candles. For snow angels. For being amazed by moss. For making cookies and pouring milk. For baking bread and slathering with butter. For slicing cheese and pouring wine. For gathering eggs and picking phlox for birthdays. For terrible French braids and testing foreheads for fevers. For sweeping porches. For easy laughter, salty tears. And orgasms.
Size and shape
It all seemed to start with dreams of big headed, small bodied people I had as a kid. They felt strange and unmentionable. What could I say? I never heard of anyone else having these dreams, seeing these odd figures. So was I odd? What did their dreams look like?
Now days and years and moments take shape in my head, fill my thoughts. They float in or tumble around.
When writing in my diary I always put the day at the top of the page, not just because you did that at school on a Monday when you wrote your “news”, but because it reminds me of the feel of the time, a little flag of the possible mood.
I run and I measure the time by the feel of a night shift. The ones I work through as a children’s nurse. The first part of the run matches the busy section of the night, the beginning where you meet the patients and their family. You meet their fear, their joy at recovery or their deep despair at life changing diagnoses.
Then there’s the middle section-you’ve travelled some distance, you have a rhythm know where you’re heading. But home and sleep feels far away. Will you make it in one piece?
At last there’s an uplift, it’s 5.30 and you can begin to feel the end of the night, the start of the day. You can almost smell the freshness of the next shift, the perfume, the recently showered and the clear heads ready to problem solve, to send the well home. The run is nearly over.
So is this size and shape of time universal? Did those odd people walking in my dreams ever visit anyone else? I don’t mind sharing so much now, in fact I’m intrigued by others head spaces , not scared of my own or theirs anymore.