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.
Oh my. This is such mesmerising, exciting writing. It will speak so loudly to so many people and I needed it personally - it finding me at the start of a year and a half I've set aside to start mending my health and way of being in the world after seven years of constant creative effort that has carried me too far from health. I love every line of this by you, Sheila, even while I wince in recognition at the ways I too have punished my body rather than simply celebrating it. Thank you. Tanya xx
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.
Wow. This is a beautiful contribution, Louise. I'm fascinated by those dream visitors of yours and wouldn't it be wonderful/strange if any other subscribers on here see this and say they had similar...
I have always had a host of unknown people appear before my eyes just before sleep. They are very real, and are usually having a conversation with another person present. Only rarely do they turn to look at me and that is the only alarming aspect of it. Otherwise, it is simply fascinating. They are from all eras and sometimes speaking in languages I don't myself understand. When they speak in English it is so clear that I could, if I woke, write down their conversations. I always felt myself alone in this until I read a piece by the late John Berger: he had this too from earliest childhood, and was straightforwardly sure that they were real people & not produced by his imagination (being outside his own experience). He came to believe that they were the dead visiting. And he found this reassuring and exciting I think.
Here is your link to your piece on the book website:
Thanks Tan! It was a bit of a contribution to this topic but I was captivated by the aspects of shape ,size and time altogether and the writing flowed. I’ve been unwell but this has been going over in my mind. I’m so loving the inspiration to write and your feedback too. It’s important I think that we pay attention to our dreams. Your visitors have a very particular behaviour don’t they? I’ll look up what John Berger had to say too .
SUB FUSC - St Hugh’s College, Oxford, October 1977
I felt preposterous in my black and white plumage. My silly little pretend mortar board, my velvet length of ribbon looped over my shirt collar, dark tights already slipping down, the gown that came down to my waist. I had walked the streets for ages gathering the courage to go into the shop to purchase it. There had been no handout, no typed sheet sent in advance to warn of its purpose, necessity and cost. If you didn’t know, if you had to worry about the expense, you didn’t belong. If you belonged, you asked no questions. But I had many. and lacked only the courage to tell my truth, that a streak of skepticism born in the terraces of Lancashire wanted to snort with laughter at the whole idea of dressing up like this.
The only thing I could cling onto on this surreal morning of Matriculation was that for once everyone would be on foot. I wouldn’t have to walk alone because I couldn’t ride a bike. God knows I’d tried, all through that summer, but my hands and feet stubbornly went their separate ways, and my lack of balance on two wheels excluded me from far more than my accent. Today, for the first time in the last ten days, I would appear to fit into the crowd. And appearance was all I asked. Nobody needed to know about the reality, that I was floating in a helium balloon far above all this, dizzy from all the meals I’d been unable to face, watching it happen to someone other than myself.
As we crocodiled down the Banbury Road we were joined by chattering penguins from other colleges, gradually becoming louder and more pompous as we neared Broad Street. Eventually we became numerous enough to constitute our own reality, part of the glass bubble that surrounded Oxford in my mind. Two feelings tugged me apart - one that there had to be more to this glittering prize than a cold room in a spartan hall with oilcloth on the floor and a bathroom where rusty water came out of the pipes, and one that all this was far too grand and refined a place for a provincial Northerner like me, that there had been some mistake, that my silence in social situations would be noted any day now and mark me out as an interloper, who had no conception of years of boarding school and a world where parents provided things like smart shoes. Others could effortlessly unravel the linguistic code that called exams Collections and a silly little robe “sub fusc”. What they didn’t know, they would dare to ask, from generations of fathers and elder brothers. It seemed to me that the facade was deliberate, designed to frighten and silence the uninitiated. In many ways I already loathed the place, found its customs ridiculous, felt no desire to be a part of it. But I remembered my English teacher throwing her arms around me after the news reached my school, and talking about the lovely years ahead of me, as if there would be no work, no anxiety, no throwing up in the morning after breakfast, just an idyll of punting and champagne. It never occurred to me at the time that my instinct was right, and hers was wrong.
Miranda, thank you for this compelling contribution that spoke to me so strongly - me who didn't even have the courage to apply to Oxbridge, and would unlikely have made it through the interview process to an offer, should a college have called me up for one. My own greatest burdens even at my more modest university was this business of dress, accent, as you know from reading The Cure for Sleep. I love how you have named here the exclusive/excluding ritualised nature of the costumes, the naming conventions. Thank you so much. Here is a direct link to your piece over on The Cure For Sleep's Stories Beyond the Book archive.... https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#mirandarwaterton
Brilliantly written Miranda,spoke to me too. Of how strong our internal voices can be even amongst a noisy outside world that doesn’t make sense to us .
My skin hung like an uncomfortable coat, buttoned up with unimaginative, beige indifference. A trick of nature had trapped me inside, sealed me up and confined me to my lineage. I needed someone to sit by me and feed me with the ambrosia from books, surfeit my appetite and glut me with words.
Five years of forcing my fingerprints on steel lie ahead. The clink and clank of metal on metal beckoned me from afar. I had already beaten out my second rate, secondary school mask ready for my five year betrothal.
Three years into my marriage of convenience, I had forged a ship strength chain that held me fast, docked me in a foreign harbour and forced me to feed on steel. Fodder for the factory. These shackles defined who I was, my strain, my brand; graded the perception of myself and ranked me to fit the shape of my breed. I felt emasculated by a poverty of words.
My identity was false. I lived with fake documents and became an imposter in my skin. I had been pre-cut, shaped and structured to fit neatly in-line. No freedom to roam. I stalled and stuttered, lapsed into inertia and froze until an epiphany blew in on a warm south westerly, high up on the White Horse Downs along a road running through time. The Ridgeway air was cleansing, full of integrity as it scoured out my doubts, emptied me of fear and blew away the now fragile husk that trapped my aspirations. I walked out of myself; the imago that first trembled at the thought of change now flooded with a clarity that seeped into my blood and awakened the sleeping poet within.
Steve, this is so powerful. Blown away by it. How every word hammers home that early confinement and pressure; how the last paragraph is a blast of wide horizons and air. Just extraordinary. Here is your link and I've shared it on Twitter too. Tan
Thanks for your comments Tanya, I'm pleased the words resonated with you. It's a kind of healing with words for me, exploring self and taking ownership of shadows that have darkened over the years and refused to come out of hiding.
Having received my COVID booster shot a couple days ago, my mind is a bit squarely and I'm certainly in sound body at the moment, but nevertheless....I've read and re-read your extract and managed to craft a response. First...I'm struck by the pain of what you write, and I imagine (but of course could be quite wrong) that it might be similar to what my mother felt growing up. She had a stepfather, but of course never knew her biological father, or he was, until a few years ago when she was in her early 60s. A good man was in her life as she grew up, but it wasn't the same as knowing who she came from and she often felt without mooring and struggled to grow into the woman and mother she is now. Some things she still struggles with and probably will for the rest of her life, burned as they are into her experience and sense of self. I've no idea if my efforts fit entirely with the extract. I had to travel backwards. My body is a battlefield currently. There was a small window of time, however, when I was quite sure of my body's rightness and how I fit into it. This time a poem... Normally I'd work and work and hone things but I try to keep that to a minimum and just write from my center in response to your extracts..
**********************************
Cannonball
Long before bad joints, fatigue, and disability
and before blond haired blue eyed toddlers in check out lines
gaped at my darkness from their mother’s arms,
I lived in my skin like it was a cape.
Ages five through eight.
My smiling uncle called me his Emma Buckwheats, and
I was a warm brown ribbon of sun-drenched chocolate
running through the sprinkler in my polka
dotted one-piece and yellow arm floaties.
I was a chocolate baby cannonball
plunging into the pool with black pigtails and
cocoa hands with bright pink nail beds gripping my knees.
A large white birthmark covered my throat.
Brought into sharp relief by hours of sun
it looked like the outline of a new and mysterious country.
Sometimes, when the kids on the beach asked about it,
I’d say ‘A shark bit me,' hand on my hip and matter of fact
I love how you are using these prompts to write fast and with such power, Amy! This one is so vivid, so defiant...and yet poignant because of the later years of pain we know is ahead. I'm camping this weekend but I will lay it up on Tuesday and you can say how you'd like the formatting to change once it's live, yes? Tan xx
I realise my suggestion to make an image of the poem so the line breaks are right for you might be more work than you have time or health for right now? So I've put it online and can easily make line changes if you let me know. Best as ever, Tan x
Amy - just thinking: would you like to lay up your poem and then send it to me as an image? I'm happy to make an exception to the usual layout so that your poem holds the formatting you intend for it? I'm a bit late creating the August Issue page on the book site this month as I'm getting the children ready for a return to school, so there is no time pressure for you on this. I will add it whenever you can send it through to me by email to editor at selkiepress dot com ...
I lived in my skin like it was a Cape... Love this line Amy. As if you could be a heroine in waiting, ready to fly, mysterious, and the audacity and humour to defy shark-death. Long live the Cape!
I love that poem, Amy. And I totally get that feeling of the body being a battleground. It interests me that we have such different diagnoses, but such connected responses to them.
I don’t know what I expected. I was early, entering the sunny heath past the duck pond I headed along a tree lined path that curved up into the park, leaving the city behind. I had hoped to find time to gather some courage.
By the swimming ponds I saw him, muscular, barefoot and holding a balance stick. He was early too. Damn.
I introduced myself, I’m who he was here to meet. I had booked this session.
We found an area in the open fields and sat down. I took off my shoes and socks. He took my feet in his hands and we talked about them together, he ran his finger along the scars. He asked a lot of questions. I realised how little I knew about what had happened to me, just that they had tried to reconstruct and straighten my feet to allow me to walk. But I didn’t just walk, I ran, I told him. I was the fastest girl in the borough for many years. Tears of pride and a tightening in my throat as I choked back so much.
We stood up, he guided me through balance exercises- watching carefully how I used my feet, suggesting some corrections to my posture.
There I was, barefoot, in public! Onlookers came and went, but I was too involved to worry, I was being held by his considered attention and it felt, ok.
Have you ever asked your mother about your birth? He asked, intuiting that I wanted answers about myself that were not his to answer.
On the way back to my parents house I called my mother and asked if she would meet me from the station, in the park perhaps. I'm ready now, and there’s so much I want to know.
What a stunning and surprising piece. A piece so fully situated in a specific morning, place, experience that I was felt the full force of what you do from midway with ‘There I was, barefoot, in public!’ From this part on, the reader is on a journey back in time with you, with that huge new dimension that you are just about to step into, and we with you if the story continued. A really powerful and poignant use of the short form challenge I set here. Wow. Here is your link:
Lovely to see your name again in my email notifications for the project, Nicola! I will be reading and responding to your piece on Wednesday (my once-weekly time for curating the project this season), but wanted to tell you already that I’ve seen your work come through and am looking forward to spending time with it! xx
Thank you Tanya. It's so good to be back here sharing my words. I realised that I would need to be doing a post a week until the end of the year to finish the seasons whilst you are still curating the content, which felt like just the perfect challenge for me. We'll see if I can stick by it. Looking forward to doing so. Many thanks again. xx
When it comes, all shrinks and grows in haphazard ways, distorting days into Jackson Pollock art. It does not bring me inspiration, joy, or fork lightning dances along synapses, the way I understood change would. It adorns every fragment though- inside, outside, over and through with viscous splotches and streaks that colour me blue with a special kind of drained.
Not special as in greater, better, grander or a treat, but special as in no one else is here, no one else has to enact this bone breaking veneer of pretence that leaves me husk like-hollow, staring at a speck of dust that has settled on my pillow.
Possibility shrinks to the size of the speck, my whole world balanced on this minute moment where the dust on my pillow is more sentient than me.
Lauren.. how good to get a new piece through from you, and as with your previous pieces, I am struck once again by how good you are at conveying internal and embodied experience - I just reread your Rebirth and Time pieces, enjoying how I'm getting through each of them a cumulative sense not only of your life story but also of your writing style. Yes, I admire the way you use shifts of scale and perspective here and in your other pieces...
Here is you link, with thanks for what you bring to the project:
In my twenties, before I had therapy, I had a lot of sex. By that I mean that I let men fuck me. My body was available for their pleasure. Some of the sex was sublime: most, not so much. A very beautiful man, a dancer, said that sex with me was the best he’d ever had. I carry that sentence (still) like a pearl. I thought that if men desired my body, this meant that I existed. I was a sperm receptacle: my mouth, my cunt, the other place. The other place was painful and humiliating, but I never stopped them. Miraculously, I only had two abortions. I never made them use condoms.
Aged twenty eight, sitting in a therapist’s bright white room, I’m feeling confused. I’ve been coming for weeks, at the insistence of a friend. I am broken. I can’t speak. Go inside your body, the therapist suggests. See if you can feel what needs to be expressed. At first I start squirming. And then wriggling, my face contorted. I feel very small. The therapist is very quiet, but her words encourage me. Are there any words now, she asks, gently. I whisper, so that she can’t hear at first. Get off me. The words I had never spoken at the time, the words my body had been holding inside for years, since I was four years old. Can you say that louder, she prompts, and it takes me some time, but I can, I can say the words louder, and soon I am screaming, yelling, GET OFF ME. And then I am sobbing, and curled up on the therapist’s lap, and she is stroking my hair.
That was the start.
And now. Now I am 63 years old. My body is soft, ageing, but still strong. My body is where I live, who I am in the world. My body is full of my stories, my words, my truth. It is a safe place to be.
Kerry the power of this piece by you ... I read for the first time last night before sleep so that my dreams were coloured by it: giving me, in turn, access to memories locked away.
As a reader, I feel sorrow and anger at the violence done to you, and how it shaped you in ways that gave you pleasure sometimes but oftentimes not. My writer self is full of admiration for you who have survived to become the person who can write that last paragraph - where the art of living and writing come together in a statement of intent, of self-sovereignty, that no one can trespass upon or diminish.
And this is why I chose you instantly for mentoring last year. For this strength of voice, of purpose, of truth-telling about how it is to be in your body, your circumstances.
Tanya your words…they for straight to my heart. I have such an emotional response. To be mentored by you, to have your generous and informed feedback, to be part of this incredible project you have set up.. And something is really shifting in me, something is starting to really accept my writing self, to honour her, to embrace that identity. And I couldn’t have done it without you. Can I say queen? Because I want to say queen.…
You can say queen, but you know I think I will smile and shake my head. I'm too homely, too rustic, to be that, and I wouldn't wish to be anyway. I think of myself - now you've sort of asked me - as the first person to put a log on a fire in a clearing I've made, while knowing it won't burn long or bright unless others come along and place their own stories into it. I like thinking of this place - like the creative confidence thread I'm running all year on Sharon Blackie's Hagitude program - as a communal fire in a clearing because others are around it, meeting, talking, listening, even when I'm not there myself.
I love what you bring to our project here. You are brave, brilliant. A born writer. Although I don't want to diminish all the reading and thinking that I know you've been doing all these decades...
Hi Tanya…been meaning to reply to this post for a while, and fretting about it. I love the way you describe what you do. All I was trying to express was the utmost respect I have for what you are doing with The cure for sleep. It is so beautiful. I am happy to be in the clearing with you and all 5he other amazing writers. Thank you. X
Kerry, I'm so sorry. My response to your kind - and meaningful words - was not the one I'd usually give. Which is - as I'm able to say now - simply and wholeheartedly this: Thank you. That's a moving way to be described, to be thought of.
And I realise that the day that gift of words from you came through was in a week when I was feeling very unsure of my life and my use now that the book was published and the last advance paid so that I'd gone temporarily deaf to the good in what I do. Thank you for reminding me that the space I've made here and the mentoring I do has purpose and value and is not at all tied to the book's short publication cycle.xxx
I was born female shaped. Clothed in painstakingly sewn matching dresses and knickers. Brought up to be clean and tidy at all times; quiet too.
No room for questions about why this must be so. My younger brother had the freedom to get dirty, and to play with knives and candles - which is how our house burned down on my thirteenth birthday.
At family gatherings I was withdrawn. Not because I was trying to be feminine, but through being overwhelmed by the noise and expectation to be sociable. Girls love to chatter, you know. Or so I was told.
Usually far too inquisitive and boisterous for my parents’ liking, I was suddenly too silent. I was simultaneously too loud and too quiet. Taking up too much space and not enough.
“Stand up straight, dear!” they exclaimed. “You’ve a lovely figure, you should show it off.”
As I stood, round-shouldered, trying to hide my developing breasts.
Pretending to be grateful for presents of slippery lace underwear from my grandmother and her sister for my fourteenth birthday.
“We saw it, dear, and thought it was so *you*,” they cried in delight.
And I buried my shame and disappointment deep, deep down. I’d have loved a pump for my long-saved-up-for racing bike.
How invisible I felt.
Decades later, having spent (wasted?) too many years squeezing and squashing myself into deformed shapes demanded by family, jobs, husbands and their families, I have finally called time on the whole ridiculous charade.
I am non-binary; I am neither female nor male.
We all need the freedom to take up our own uniquely shaped space. Gently guiding and encouraging less certain souls to claim theirs too.
We are all worthy of being valued, whatever shape and size we are.
Rowan, this from you is so moving and written with such quiet certainty - that knowledge of your own reality and needs that were constantly being undercut by family/society in your growing. How much it spoke to me, and I will be reading it to my teenage daughter when she returns from school: we are trying so hard to use as little language as possible around her, other than to tell her we love her and to show interest in what interests her. So much language is poured over girls from the moment of birth until our last days: much of it nonsense at best, dangerous at worst. I'm so glad to know you've arrived - as I have - at a sense of self that is wholly your own. Thank you for sharing this piece. Tanya xx
Thank you so much for your support, Tanya. Raising awareness of differences and encouraging acceptance is a monumental task. Exhausting often, but always necessary. Your children are very lucky so have such wonderful parents.
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.
Tamsin - thank you for reading and what you've said here. I'm sorry I'm so unusually late in acknowledging too: I've been laid up with a kidney infection and the children's return to school. I'm still hoping to get the September issue up next week though, and I will be thrilled if it prompts another contribution from you. Best as ever, Tan xx
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.
Sarah, the power of your contributions continue to land on me hard. For all of us who have suffered a sudden illness with lasting consequences, it helps so much I think to have others describe it so clear-sightedly. Thank you. Your link to this month's issue is https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#SarahConnor
Oh thank you Louise - and I'm so sorry I haven't been on here to say that to you before now! Kidney infection plus children's return to school has had me lose track of my days a little. Still hoping to get the September issue up next week though and will be very happy if it calls forth another contribution from you. Tan xx
What was the unstable balance which existed in my tiny world and my growing sense of self was cruelly upended in 1973 when I was fourteen. The loss of a loving parent was also the loss of my internal compass and the beginning of decades of trying to fill that void with people, places and things, which became like trying to put two magnets together, the repulsion being me. I constantly looked for myself in the eyes of others. I tried to please the unpleasable, to attract the unavailable and travelled to far flung places to try and leave myself behind. I lived with a sense of being less of being stupid and later this morphed into the imposter syndrome. I could not own my true self.
When I had my children in my thirties the blurry barrier started to lift and I glimpsed myself in their eyes, the purity of real love mine and theirs. Being a mother was the first true expression and unconditional state of being since before the loss of a father.
The other path to reclaiming myself was my creative expression. As a mature student one of my tutors nurtured that shoot she saw in me something I could not and a belief in my abilities and expression started to bear fruit. Slowly a wholeness was forming, flaws and all. Over time I worked on those, throwing one stick away at a time until now I walk unaided, I limp and fall but get back up and stay on my own path which is rich and lush. I look to nature and the sea to nurture my soul and the company of like minded people. My children and grandchildren are my sun the land I inhabit.
Hi Louise,I was moved by your writing and it resonated with me as I lost my dad suddenly at 17. The idea of your internal compass being affected is so disarming isn’t it ? Also took me years to understand how this had affected me and my choices in a way you seem to express too.
Interested too in your experience of becoming a parent ….I was rather shaken by this in a way I hadn’t expected. I think like you it was feeling that rawness of love .
Thank you Louise. Yes loss of a father certainly interfered with a lot and subsequently became a part of who I am. Lovely to touch that lonely place with you. So understand. Xx
Louise - moved to tears reading this by you. Thank you for contributing it to the archive. Here is your link to it on the book site... best as ever. Tx
Ah, thank you! I’m doing the book’s full cover (& purpose) reveal to all subscribers tomorrow at 11.50am just before Twitter & Instagram (& with more backstory) Xxx
Oh you poor woman! Kidney infection no joke!!! Have lost track myself. In Connemara presently and left the clocks behind in Dublin!! I wrote a little piece this morning spurred on by your kind invitation and thought provoking piece. Hope you feel much better soon! Lxx
For the first time I recognized myself. There was relief, pleasure, excitement. A sense of being comfortable in my own skin. This is who I am. Contemplator. I think about things and sometimes I write my thinking down. I am interested in many things. I'm interested in, well, everything.
Unchecked, this led to unfinished crafts, hobbies, and a myriad of lines of pursuit, until the next interesting thing came along. I was a prime candidate for PNF. (projects not finished).
Unchecked, I rarely finished anything well. I started, started well. I didn't lose interest but there was always something a bit more interesting.
But this is the nature of the Contemplator. Life fascinates them. People fascinate them. And that was OK. A relief. A positive not a negative.
Now I am learning to add a little discipline. To recognize myself.
Unchecked, "You never finish anything." Now? "Yes that looks fun - but I'm just going to enjoy someone else pursuing it." Because I am not pursing 'several lines of enquiry' but living more intentionally. Choosing more deliberately. There is not time to do everything. There is time to do somethings well.
Jean, I love how you are sharing your ongoing reflection into self and process here. Thank you. And like Amy, I love the concept of 'contemplator'. I'm late laying up the August Issue on the book site this month as I'm getting the children ready for their return to school next week. But I will create it when they are back and share your link with you then. Best as ever, Tan x
Hi Jean,I loved your exploration of yourself here. I can really get your idea of choosing more deliberately and doing some things well. I do something similar when I’m about to watch something light on telly and remind myself I want to write or read!
T was the master of steering, gear shifting, balancing, braking and dismounting but I had to be attuned to his every move. Until now, I had seen my contribution to the tandem relationship as somewhat inferior - I simply put in the necessary leg-work to help to heave what is quite a clunky beast up the all too frequent hills in God's Own Country. Some call the tailgunner the stoker and one seasoned cyclist we got into conversation with over coffee and cake, said he had ridden a tandem many times and had sat in both seats; he much preferred being at the helm, he said, and how Tallulah would be nothing without me. I was the engine, he said. I wasn't sure about that, but I did start to take a delight in my newfound strength and stamina. When we mastered the art of standing on the pedals so that we could power our way up some of the sharper inclines rather than relenting and getting off to push, I felt exhilarated. To think, in another life it had so often been said that I didn't have a musical bone in my body and here I was singing a duet that had my new love and I sweeping, gliding, tilting, leaning into the wind or riding on its coat-tails. I soon learned that the wind was very much the conductor of the pieces we played, often challenging us, but occasionally putting down the baton just to see what we could do when left to our own devices. To think he, the tormentor in that other life, had also scorned my body, saying that pregnancy and childbirth had ruined it. Now look at me! I was music. All 206 bones of me.
What a gorgeous life-affirming piece, Claire - made all the more powerful when you reveal in the last lines what you had pedalled/sung yourself free from. I love the timing of receiving this too - just a day after my silver wedding anniversary, when Nye & I were wondering if there was anything we could buy in this coming month to celebrate our milestone (we neither of us want for very much). A tandem was the only thing we could think of - and now the coincidence of this from you feels like a sign to give it a try!
Wow! I'm so so glad you've joined the project. Thank you! Here is your link to this second piece, and again you are welcome to tweet about it.
If you do, glad if you can use #TheCureForSleep @tanyashadrick @wnbooks when you do - that way all the collective work starts to show up on the publisher's radar, and around the book's hashtag. Good for my book, but also brings your work to attention of anyone looking up the hashtag! I try for all my projects to have this kind of cumulative energy! Tan x
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.
Oh my. This is such mesmerising, exciting writing. It will speak so loudly to so many people and I needed it personally - it finding me at the start of a year and a half I've set aside to start mending my health and way of being in the world after seven years of constant creative effort that has carried me too far from health. I love every line of this by you, Sheila, even while I wince in recognition at the ways I too have punished my body rather than simply celebrating it. Thank you. Tanya xx
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#sheilaknell
Thank you! That made my day. It's always a continuous journey, some days easier than others and I wish you all good things on your own journey.
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.
Wow. This is a beautiful contribution, Louise. I'm fascinated by those dream visitors of yours and wouldn't it be wonderful/strange if any other subscribers on here see this and say they had similar...
I have always had a host of unknown people appear before my eyes just before sleep. They are very real, and are usually having a conversation with another person present. Only rarely do they turn to look at me and that is the only alarming aspect of it. Otherwise, it is simply fascinating. They are from all eras and sometimes speaking in languages I don't myself understand. When they speak in English it is so clear that I could, if I woke, write down their conversations. I always felt myself alone in this until I read a piece by the late John Berger: he had this too from earliest childhood, and was straightforwardly sure that they were real people & not produced by his imagination (being outside his own experience). He came to believe that they were the dead visiting. And he found this reassuring and exciting I think.
Here is your link to your piece on the book website:
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#louisestead
Do remind me if you have a website or social media account you'd like me to link to from your name.
Tan x
Thanks Tan! It was a bit of a contribution to this topic but I was captivated by the aspects of shape ,size and time altogether and the writing flowed. I’ve been unwell but this has been going over in my mind. I’m so loving the inspiration to write and your feedback too. It’s important I think that we pay attention to our dreams. Your visitors have a very particular behaviour don’t they? I’ll look up what John Berger had to say too .
SUB FUSC - St Hugh’s College, Oxford, October 1977
I felt preposterous in my black and white plumage. My silly little pretend mortar board, my velvet length of ribbon looped over my shirt collar, dark tights already slipping down, the gown that came down to my waist. I had walked the streets for ages gathering the courage to go into the shop to purchase it. There had been no handout, no typed sheet sent in advance to warn of its purpose, necessity and cost. If you didn’t know, if you had to worry about the expense, you didn’t belong. If you belonged, you asked no questions. But I had many. and lacked only the courage to tell my truth, that a streak of skepticism born in the terraces of Lancashire wanted to snort with laughter at the whole idea of dressing up like this.
The only thing I could cling onto on this surreal morning of Matriculation was that for once everyone would be on foot. I wouldn’t have to walk alone because I couldn’t ride a bike. God knows I’d tried, all through that summer, but my hands and feet stubbornly went their separate ways, and my lack of balance on two wheels excluded me from far more than my accent. Today, for the first time in the last ten days, I would appear to fit into the crowd. And appearance was all I asked. Nobody needed to know about the reality, that I was floating in a helium balloon far above all this, dizzy from all the meals I’d been unable to face, watching it happen to someone other than myself.
As we crocodiled down the Banbury Road we were joined by chattering penguins from other colleges, gradually becoming louder and more pompous as we neared Broad Street. Eventually we became numerous enough to constitute our own reality, part of the glass bubble that surrounded Oxford in my mind. Two feelings tugged me apart - one that there had to be more to this glittering prize than a cold room in a spartan hall with oilcloth on the floor and a bathroom where rusty water came out of the pipes, and one that all this was far too grand and refined a place for a provincial Northerner like me, that there had been some mistake, that my silence in social situations would be noted any day now and mark me out as an interloper, who had no conception of years of boarding school and a world where parents provided things like smart shoes. Others could effortlessly unravel the linguistic code that called exams Collections and a silly little robe “sub fusc”. What they didn’t know, they would dare to ask, from generations of fathers and elder brothers. It seemed to me that the facade was deliberate, designed to frighten and silence the uninitiated. In many ways I already loathed the place, found its customs ridiculous, felt no desire to be a part of it. But I remembered my English teacher throwing her arms around me after the news reached my school, and talking about the lovely years ahead of me, as if there would be no work, no anxiety, no throwing up in the morning after breakfast, just an idyll of punting and champagne. It never occurred to me at the time that my instinct was right, and hers was wrong.
Miranda, thank you for this compelling contribution that spoke to me so strongly - me who didn't even have the courage to apply to Oxbridge, and would unlikely have made it through the interview process to an offer, should a college have called me up for one. My own greatest burdens even at my more modest university was this business of dress, accent, as you know from reading The Cure for Sleep. I love how you have named here the exclusive/excluding ritualised nature of the costumes, the naming conventions. Thank you so much. Here is a direct link to your piece over on The Cure For Sleep's Stories Beyond the Book archive.... https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#mirandarwaterton
Brilliantly written Miranda,spoke to me too. Of how strong our internal voices can be even amongst a noisy outside world that doesn’t make sense to us .
Steve Harrison
False Identity.
My skin hung like an uncomfortable coat, buttoned up with unimaginative, beige indifference. A trick of nature had trapped me inside, sealed me up and confined me to my lineage. I needed someone to sit by me and feed me with the ambrosia from books, surfeit my appetite and glut me with words.
Five years of forcing my fingerprints on steel lie ahead. The clink and clank of metal on metal beckoned me from afar. I had already beaten out my second rate, secondary school mask ready for my five year betrothal.
Three years into my marriage of convenience, I had forged a ship strength chain that held me fast, docked me in a foreign harbour and forced me to feed on steel. Fodder for the factory. These shackles defined who I was, my strain, my brand; graded the perception of myself and ranked me to fit the shape of my breed. I felt emasculated by a poverty of words.
My identity was false. I lived with fake documents and became an imposter in my skin. I had been pre-cut, shaped and structured to fit neatly in-line. No freedom to roam. I stalled and stuttered, lapsed into inertia and froze until an epiphany blew in on a warm south westerly, high up on the White Horse Downs along a road running through time. The Ridgeway air was cleansing, full of integrity as it scoured out my doubts, emptied me of fear and blew away the now fragile husk that trapped my aspirations. I walked out of myself; the imago that first trembled at the thought of change now flooded with a clarity that seeped into my blood and awakened the sleeping poet within.
Steve, this is so powerful. Blown away by it. How every word hammers home that early confinement and pressure; how the last paragraph is a blast of wide horizons and air. Just extraordinary. Here is your link and I've shared it on Twitter too. Tan
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#steveharrison
Thanks for your comments Tanya, I'm pleased the words resonated with you. It's a kind of healing with words for me, exploring self and taking ownership of shadows that have darkened over the years and refused to come out of hiding.
Steve.
Having received my COVID booster shot a couple days ago, my mind is a bit squarely and I'm certainly in sound body at the moment, but nevertheless....I've read and re-read your extract and managed to craft a response. First...I'm struck by the pain of what you write, and I imagine (but of course could be quite wrong) that it might be similar to what my mother felt growing up. She had a stepfather, but of course never knew her biological father, or he was, until a few years ago when she was in her early 60s. A good man was in her life as she grew up, but it wasn't the same as knowing who she came from and she often felt without mooring and struggled to grow into the woman and mother she is now. Some things she still struggles with and probably will for the rest of her life, burned as they are into her experience and sense of self. I've no idea if my efforts fit entirely with the extract. I had to travel backwards. My body is a battlefield currently. There was a small window of time, however, when I was quite sure of my body's rightness and how I fit into it. This time a poem... Normally I'd work and work and hone things but I try to keep that to a minimum and just write from my center in response to your extracts..
**********************************
Cannonball
Long before bad joints, fatigue, and disability
and before blond haired blue eyed toddlers in check out lines
gaped at my darkness from their mother’s arms,
I lived in my skin like it was a cape.
Ages five through eight.
My smiling uncle called me his Emma Buckwheats, and
I was a warm brown ribbon of sun-drenched chocolate
running through the sprinkler in my polka
dotted one-piece and yellow arm floaties.
I was a chocolate baby cannonball
plunging into the pool with black pigtails and
cocoa hands with bright pink nail beds gripping my knees.
A large white birthmark covered my throat.
Brought into sharp relief by hours of sun
it looked like the outline of a new and mysterious country.
Sometimes, when the kids on the beach asked about it,
I’d say ‘A shark bit me,' hand on my hip and matter of fact
just to shock and see their eyes bulge.
I love how you are using these prompts to write fast and with such power, Amy! This one is so vivid, so defiant...and yet poignant because of the later years of pain we know is ahead. I'm camping this weekend but I will lay it up on Tuesday and you can say how you'd like the formatting to change once it's live, yes? Tan xx
Absolutely! And lovely to hear you’re camping. Enjoy!
I realise my suggestion to make an image of the poem so the line breaks are right for you might be more work than you have time or health for right now? So I've put it online and can easily make line changes if you let me know. Best as ever, Tan x
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#AmyMillios
Amy - just thinking: would you like to lay up your poem and then send it to me as an image? I'm happy to make an exception to the usual layout so that your poem holds the formatting you intend for it? I'm a bit late creating the August Issue page on the book site this month as I'm getting the children ready for a return to school, so there is no time pressure for you on this. I will add it whenever you can send it through to me by email to editor at selkiepress dot com ...
I lived in my skin like it was a Cape... Love this line Amy. As if you could be a heroine in waiting, ready to fly, mysterious, and the audacity and humour to defy shark-death. Long live the Cape!
Thank you, Jean :-) That little girl was plucky and made sure the world knew it!
Hope she still is...
I love that poem, Amy. And I totally get that feeling of the body being a battleground. It interests me that we have such different diagnoses, but such connected responses to them.
Oh dear…the formatting didn’t keep the lines as I’ve written them.
The Body Coach
I don’t know what I expected. I was early, entering the sunny heath past the duck pond I headed along a tree lined path that curved up into the park, leaving the city behind. I had hoped to find time to gather some courage.
By the swimming ponds I saw him, muscular, barefoot and holding a balance stick. He was early too. Damn.
I introduced myself, I’m who he was here to meet. I had booked this session.
We found an area in the open fields and sat down. I took off my shoes and socks. He took my feet in his hands and we talked about them together, he ran his finger along the scars. He asked a lot of questions. I realised how little I knew about what had happened to me, just that they had tried to reconstruct and straighten my feet to allow me to walk. But I didn’t just walk, I ran, I told him. I was the fastest girl in the borough for many years. Tears of pride and a tightening in my throat as I choked back so much.
We stood up, he guided me through balance exercises- watching carefully how I used my feet, suggesting some corrections to my posture.
There I was, barefoot, in public! Onlookers came and went, but I was too involved to worry, I was being held by his considered attention and it felt, ok.
Have you ever asked your mother about your birth? He asked, intuiting that I wanted answers about myself that were not his to answer.
On the way back to my parents house I called my mother and asked if she would meet me from the station, in the park perhaps. I'm ready now, and there’s so much I want to know.
What a stunning and surprising piece. A piece so fully situated in a specific morning, place, experience that I was felt the full force of what you do from midway with ‘There I was, barefoot, in public!’ From this part on, the reader is on a journey back in time with you, with that huge new dimension that you are just about to step into, and we with you if the story continued. A really powerful and poignant use of the short form challenge I set here. Wow. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#nicolareade
Txxx
Lovely to see your name again in my email notifications for the project, Nicola! I will be reading and responding to your piece on Wednesday (my once-weekly time for curating the project this season), but wanted to tell you already that I’ve seen your work come through and am looking forward to spending time with it! xx
Thank you Tanya. It's so good to be back here sharing my words. I realised that I would need to be doing a post a week until the end of the year to finish the seasons whilst you are still curating the content, which felt like just the perfect challenge for me. We'll see if I can stick by it. Looking forward to doing so. Many thanks again. xx
Black dog days
When it comes, all shrinks and grows in haphazard ways, distorting days into Jackson Pollock art. It does not bring me inspiration, joy, or fork lightning dances along synapses, the way I understood change would. It adorns every fragment though- inside, outside, over and through with viscous splotches and streaks that colour me blue with a special kind of drained.
Not special as in greater, better, grander or a treat, but special as in no one else is here, no one else has to enact this bone breaking veneer of pretence that leaves me husk like-hollow, staring at a speck of dust that has settled on my pillow.
Possibility shrinks to the size of the speck, my whole world balanced on this minute moment where the dust on my pillow is more sentient than me.
Lauren.. how good to get a new piece through from you, and as with your previous pieces, I am struck once again by how good you are at conveying internal and embodied experience - I just reread your Rebirth and Time pieces, enjoying how I'm getting through each of them a cumulative sense not only of your life story but also of your writing style. Yes, I admire the way you use shifts of scale and perspective here and in your other pieces...
Here is you link, with thanks for what you bring to the project:
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#laurenlongshaw
Txx
Thank you Tanya 🙏
In my twenties, before I had therapy, I had a lot of sex. By that I mean that I let men fuck me. My body was available for their pleasure. Some of the sex was sublime: most, not so much. A very beautiful man, a dancer, said that sex with me was the best he’d ever had. I carry that sentence (still) like a pearl. I thought that if men desired my body, this meant that I existed. I was a sperm receptacle: my mouth, my cunt, the other place. The other place was painful and humiliating, but I never stopped them. Miraculously, I only had two abortions. I never made them use condoms.
Aged twenty eight, sitting in a therapist’s bright white room, I’m feeling confused. I’ve been coming for weeks, at the insistence of a friend. I am broken. I can’t speak. Go inside your body, the therapist suggests. See if you can feel what needs to be expressed. At first I start squirming. And then wriggling, my face contorted. I feel very small. The therapist is very quiet, but her words encourage me. Are there any words now, she asks, gently. I whisper, so that she can’t hear at first. Get off me. The words I had never spoken at the time, the words my body had been holding inside for years, since I was four years old. Can you say that louder, she prompts, and it takes me some time, but I can, I can say the words louder, and soon I am screaming, yelling, GET OFF ME. And then I am sobbing, and curled up on the therapist’s lap, and she is stroking my hair.
That was the start.
And now. Now I am 63 years old. My body is soft, ageing, but still strong. My body is where I live, who I am in the world. My body is full of my stories, my words, my truth. It is a safe place to be.
Kerry the power of this piece by you ... I read for the first time last night before sleep so that my dreams were coloured by it: giving me, in turn, access to memories locked away.
As a reader, I feel sorrow and anger at the violence done to you, and how it shaped you in ways that gave you pleasure sometimes but oftentimes not. My writer self is full of admiration for you who have survived to become the person who can write that last paragraph - where the art of living and writing come together in a statement of intent, of self-sovereignty, that no one can trespass upon or diminish.
And this is why I chose you instantly for mentoring last year. For this strength of voice, of purpose, of truth-telling about how it is to be in your body, your circumstances.
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#kerrywhitley
Txxx
Tanya your words…they for straight to my heart. I have such an emotional response. To be mentored by you, to have your generous and informed feedback, to be part of this incredible project you have set up.. And something is really shifting in me, something is starting to really accept my writing self, to honour her, to embrace that identity. And I couldn’t have done it without you. Can I say queen? Because I want to say queen.…
You can say queen, but you know I think I will smile and shake my head. I'm too homely, too rustic, to be that, and I wouldn't wish to be anyway. I think of myself - now you've sort of asked me - as the first person to put a log on a fire in a clearing I've made, while knowing it won't burn long or bright unless others come along and place their own stories into it. I like thinking of this place - like the creative confidence thread I'm running all year on Sharon Blackie's Hagitude program - as a communal fire in a clearing because others are around it, meeting, talking, listening, even when I'm not there myself.
I love what you bring to our project here. You are brave, brilliant. A born writer. Although I don't want to diminish all the reading and thinking that I know you've been doing all these decades...
xxx
Hi Tanya…been meaning to reply to this post for a while, and fretting about it. I love the way you describe what you do. All I was trying to express was the utmost respect I have for what you are doing with The cure for sleep. It is so beautiful. I am happy to be in the clearing with you and all 5he other amazing writers. Thank you. X
Kerry, I'm so sorry. My response to your kind - and meaningful words - was not the one I'd usually give. Which is - as I'm able to say now - simply and wholeheartedly this: Thank you. That's a moving way to be described, to be thought of.
And I realise that the day that gift of words from you came through was in a week when I was feeling very unsure of my life and my use now that the book was published and the last advance paid so that I'd gone temporarily deaf to the good in what I do. Thank you for reminding me that the space I've made here and the mentoring I do has purpose and value and is not at all tied to the book's short publication cycle.xxx
I was born female shaped. Clothed in painstakingly sewn matching dresses and knickers. Brought up to be clean and tidy at all times; quiet too.
No room for questions about why this must be so. My younger brother had the freedom to get dirty, and to play with knives and candles - which is how our house burned down on my thirteenth birthday.
At family gatherings I was withdrawn. Not because I was trying to be feminine, but through being overwhelmed by the noise and expectation to be sociable. Girls love to chatter, you know. Or so I was told.
Usually far too inquisitive and boisterous for my parents’ liking, I was suddenly too silent. I was simultaneously too loud and too quiet. Taking up too much space and not enough.
“Stand up straight, dear!” they exclaimed. “You’ve a lovely figure, you should show it off.”
As I stood, round-shouldered, trying to hide my developing breasts.
Pretending to be grateful for presents of slippery lace underwear from my grandmother and her sister for my fourteenth birthday.
“We saw it, dear, and thought it was so *you*,” they cried in delight.
And I buried my shame and disappointment deep, deep down. I’d have loved a pump for my long-saved-up-for racing bike.
How invisible I felt.
Decades later, having spent (wasted?) too many years squeezing and squashing myself into deformed shapes demanded by family, jobs, husbands and their families, I have finally called time on the whole ridiculous charade.
I am non-binary; I am neither female nor male.
We all need the freedom to take up our own uniquely shaped space. Gently guiding and encouraging less certain souls to claim theirs too.
We are all worthy of being valued, whatever shape and size we are.
Rowan, this from you is so moving and written with such quiet certainty - that knowledge of your own reality and needs that were constantly being undercut by family/society in your growing. How much it spoke to me, and I will be reading it to my teenage daughter when she returns from school: we are trying so hard to use as little language as possible around her, other than to tell her we love her and to show interest in what interests her. So much language is poured over girls from the moment of birth until our last days: much of it nonsense at best, dangerous at worst. I'm so glad to know you've arrived - as I have - at a sense of self that is wholly your own. Thank you for sharing this piece. Tanya xx
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#RowanAmbrose
Thank you so much for your support, Tanya. Raising awareness of differences and encouraging acceptance is a monumental task. Exhausting often, but always necessary. Your children are very lucky so have such wonderful parents.
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.
Tamsin - thank you for reading and what you've said here. I'm sorry I'm so unusually late in acknowledging too: I've been laid up with a kidney infection and the children's return to school. I'm still hoping to get the September issue up next week though, and I will be thrilled if it prompts another contribution from you. Best as ever, Tan xx
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.
Sarah, the power of your contributions continue to land on me hard. For all of us who have suffered a sudden illness with lasting consequences, it helps so much I think to have others describe it so clear-sightedly. Thank you. Your link to this month's issue is https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#SarahConnor
with respect & admiration as ever, Tan x
I just love this piece Tanya! I can really relate and oh how wonderful to be shown who you are through trust.
Oh thank you Louise - and I'm so sorry I haven't been on here to say that to you before now! Kidney infection plus children's return to school has had me lose track of my days a little. Still hoping to get the September issue up next week though and will be very happy if it calls forth another contribution from you. Tan xx
To thine own self
What was the unstable balance which existed in my tiny world and my growing sense of self was cruelly upended in 1973 when I was fourteen. The loss of a loving parent was also the loss of my internal compass and the beginning of decades of trying to fill that void with people, places and things, which became like trying to put two magnets together, the repulsion being me. I constantly looked for myself in the eyes of others. I tried to please the unpleasable, to attract the unavailable and travelled to far flung places to try and leave myself behind. I lived with a sense of being less of being stupid and later this morphed into the imposter syndrome. I could not own my true self.
When I had my children in my thirties the blurry barrier started to lift and I glimpsed myself in their eyes, the purity of real love mine and theirs. Being a mother was the first true expression and unconditional state of being since before the loss of a father.
The other path to reclaiming myself was my creative expression. As a mature student one of my tutors nurtured that shoot she saw in me something I could not and a belief in my abilities and expression started to bear fruit. Slowly a wholeness was forming, flaws and all. Over time I worked on those, throwing one stick away at a time until now I walk unaided, I limp and fall but get back up and stay on my own path which is rich and lush. I look to nature and the sea to nurture my soul and the company of like minded people. My children and grandchildren are my sun the land I inhabit.
Hi Louise,I was moved by your writing and it resonated with me as I lost my dad suddenly at 17. The idea of your internal compass being affected is so disarming isn’t it ? Also took me years to understand how this had affected me and my choices in a way you seem to express too.
Interested too in your experience of becoming a parent ….I was rather shaken by this in a way I hadn’t expected. I think like you it was feeling that rawness of love .
Thanks for your writing.
Thank you Louise. Yes loss of a father certainly interfered with a lot and subsequently became a part of who I am. Lovely to touch that lonely place with you. So understand. Xx
Louise - moved to tears reading this by you. Thank you for contributing it to the archive. Here is your link to it on the book site... best as ever. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#LouiseNewman
Just ordered my Hard copy from Amazon!!!👏 Delighted, xx
Ah, thank you! I’m doing the book’s full cover (& purpose) reveal to all subscribers tomorrow at 11.50am just before Twitter & Instagram (& with more backstory) Xxx
The best of all luck. Xxx
Oh you poor woman! Kidney infection no joke!!! Have lost track myself. In Connemara presently and left the clocks behind in Dublin!! I wrote a little piece this morning spurred on by your kind invitation and thought provoking piece. Hope you feel much better soon! Lxx
My skin
For the first time I recognized myself. There was relief, pleasure, excitement. A sense of being comfortable in my own skin. This is who I am. Contemplator. I think about things and sometimes I write my thinking down. I am interested in many things. I'm interested in, well, everything.
Unchecked, this led to unfinished crafts, hobbies, and a myriad of lines of pursuit, until the next interesting thing came along. I was a prime candidate for PNF. (projects not finished).
Unchecked, I rarely finished anything well. I started, started well. I didn't lose interest but there was always something a bit more interesting.
But this is the nature of the Contemplator. Life fascinates them. People fascinate them. And that was OK. A relief. A positive not a negative.
Now I am learning to add a little discipline. To recognize myself.
Unchecked, "You never finish anything." Now? "Yes that looks fun - but I'm just going to enjoy someone else pursuing it." Because I am not pursing 'several lines of enquiry' but living more intentionally. Choosing more deliberately. There is not time to do everything. There is time to do somethings well.
Jean, I love how you are sharing your ongoing reflection into self and process here. Thank you. And like Amy, I love the concept of 'contemplator'. I'm late laying up the August Issue on the book site this month as I'm getting the children ready for their return to school next week. But I will create it when they are back and share your link with you then. Best as ever, Tan x
Wishing them both the best of years.
Thank you, Jean. Here is your link to your lovely contribution for August. Tx
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#JeanWilson
Thankyou again
Hi Jean,I loved your exploration of yourself here. I can really get your idea of choosing more deliberately and doing some things well. I do something similar when I’m about to watch something light on telly and remind myself I want to write or read!
From one Contemplator to another…brilliant.
The Bones of Me
T was the master of steering, gear shifting, balancing, braking and dismounting but I had to be attuned to his every move. Until now, I had seen my contribution to the tandem relationship as somewhat inferior - I simply put in the necessary leg-work to help to heave what is quite a clunky beast up the all too frequent hills in God's Own Country. Some call the tailgunner the stoker and one seasoned cyclist we got into conversation with over coffee and cake, said he had ridden a tandem many times and had sat in both seats; he much preferred being at the helm, he said, and how Tallulah would be nothing without me. I was the engine, he said. I wasn't sure about that, but I did start to take a delight in my newfound strength and stamina. When we mastered the art of standing on the pedals so that we could power our way up some of the sharper inclines rather than relenting and getting off to push, I felt exhilarated. To think, in another life it had so often been said that I didn't have a musical bone in my body and here I was singing a duet that had my new love and I sweeping, gliding, tilting, leaning into the wind or riding on its coat-tails. I soon learned that the wind was very much the conductor of the pieces we played, often challenging us, but occasionally putting down the baton just to see what we could do when left to our own devices. To think he, the tormentor in that other life, had also scorned my body, saying that pregnancy and childbirth had ruined it. Now look at me! I was music. All 206 bones of me.
What a gorgeous life-affirming piece, Claire - made all the more powerful when you reveal in the last lines what you had pedalled/sung yourself free from. I love the timing of receiving this too - just a day after my silver wedding anniversary, when Nye & I were wondering if there was anything we could buy in this coming month to celebrate our milestone (we neither of us want for very much). A tandem was the only thing we could think of - and now the coincidence of this from you feels like a sign to give it a try!
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#claireeverett
Txx
Wow! I'm so so glad you've joined the project. Thank you! Here is your link to this second piece, and again you are welcome to tweet about it.
If you do, glad if you can use #TheCureForSleep @tanyashadrick @wnbooks when you do - that way all the collective work starts to show up on the publisher's radar, and around the book's hashtag. Good for my book, but also brings your work to attention of anyone looking up the hashtag! I try for all my projects to have this kind of cumulative energy! Tan x
https://thecureforsleep.com/august-issue-sizeshape/#suereed
I felt a physical relief reading this.
Ditching those scales sounds like such a liberation for you (& your body!)
Thank you. It is coming up for a year, and I feel so free. I still have no idea what I weigh.