Season 3, 002: Share a story of boundary crossing or transcendence - a time when you felt yourself joining with someone or something beyond your self. What is the legacy of that experience?
Oh Pipp! Thank you for joining this project as a writer - and bringing such a beautiful use of language with you: in this piece you have a way of fusing the sensory to the soul, so that matters of faith and family which are often invoked in an abstract or straightforwardly biographical are made so alive and new here.
So many phrases or sentences I admired and was moved by (I’ll try not to quote your whole piece back to you!):
the silence started to cut me like a blunt knife
The choir gowns smelled of old churches, musty and thick like gone-off wine
The sleeves at least were full and loose and every time we walked up the central isle, the sleeves would catch the air. They were my wings. They whispered freedom.
And then that surprising last line which gives unexpected lift and lightness.
Just beautiful. How I hope you will write for other themes in the project. I’d love to see what you/your use of language does with them.
Oh Pipp - so very very glad to have you join the project, and it’s lovely to know that there is a link already between you and Susie. There’s a special thrill when friends - whether online or in real time/place - join in here. You say you admire my energy to talk to ‘the likes of you’ - that made me smile, as where I come from ‘the likes of you/us’ was used in a self-limiting kind of way as in ‘no one wants the likes of us there.’ I don’t think you invoked it in that way about yourself, but just in case any one reading this does feel that way about their work/my time… this project is a pleasure for me and although time-consuming, never a burden.
I am so looking forward to receiving more pieces from you. Txx
“High waving heather ‘neath stormy blasts bending … Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.” It was for these words of Emily Bronte's that I crossed the world to walk on the moors.
Contained. Controlled. Careful. What horrible words these are to describe a person. And yet, how necessary these actions are to take to feel that you can walk through your days and still be upright at the end of them. It takes great courage to seek somewhere where you can be free of the constraints you feel hemmed in by and, without any obvious outward warning to others or any clear motivating factor, to seek it when no one but you knows that you need it.
And so it was that I began walking the moors of Yorkshire. Along the path were clusters of white flowers that looked exactly like small tufts of sheep’s wool, like the wool snagged on the barbed wire lining some of the stone boundary fences, like the fleece of the very sheep who grazed the moors. As the wind rushed over the moor heather, the movement caused by its passing looked like fast-moving clouds over a bed of green, the rippling of a Turkish carpet or blanket being shaken. The sun’s weak rays lit up the patchwork quilt of land in a pale glow akin to that of a nashi pear and I stood and I breathed. The movement of my feet on this land was wild and daring and enlivening.
Walking in open places, in treed places, in spaces of green and brown and wind and rain, everything is hushed except the breath of me being. A bell jar descends. Solitude embraces.
Immersive... yes, as Christina has found it, true for me too. I'm under many blankets, with a hot water bottle and bed socks on, but I felt myself windswept. Not just by your description of the landscape but by the clarity of your purpose, how you let yourself travel those distances to be in the place needed for your transformation. And like Christina, I want to quote back the line that she did - I had already copied it ready to paste, then saw she had used it too (a sign of how strong it is): "...to feel that you can walk through your days and still be upright at the end of them." Stunning.
Here is your link, with my thanks as ever for what you bring to this project:
Thank you, Tanya. As soon as I read your prompt I had a vivid recollection of standing on that path, part of the Bronte Way, in the weak light of the sun and the rough brush of the wind, and feeling so beautifully out of myself and also so authentically in myself. It is not a feeling I have been able to hold on to continuously but it is something that I can always find again walking alone in open and wild spaces. The descriptions of the path are taken directly from the journal I kept as I backpacked around Europe from May to December of 2007. I haven't taken that journal out of the box of travel paraphernalia since then and, as I read the words of the self I once was, I am struck by how similar my searching was then as it is now. Thank you for this prompt that reminded me of this moment of transcendence. xx
Thank you Emily for this piece evoked so many memories of my heart-wrenching year in Yorkshire and the miles I walked the moors in search of repose, of relief and remedy. The space and embrace of the wildness, and the ever consoling presence of my dogs healed so much and delivered to me my destiny. I will be forever thankful for the moors. Thank you too, for this evocative piece.
Thank you Tracey. Physical landscapes have such a pull on our interior landscapes, don't they? The moors are powerful indeed and I am so glad to hear that it was there that you found your destiny. I can well believe it! x
Oh yes the power of the moors has to be felt to be believed! I am from Hampshire so the Yorkshire moors provided a stark contrast to the familiarity of the soft Downs. Xx
Loved this from the opening quote, I had a complete visual throughout reading this, also loved the same line of “walk through your days…” Then to see in your comments that you had gone from contained, controlled, careful to honoring you own needs and hitchhiking I was just amazed and inspired. xx
When the world came to a halt. When a space opened up in our days, full of time for thinking. I found myself falling.
I’d wished for the power of teleportation. Now that I had it, I’d give it back in a flash. What’s the point, when you don’t get to choose the destination? When the people you travel to are the ones you’ve tried so hard to leave behind.
Instead, I was ripped through time. Back to places I’d spent years pushing down. To the parts of my mind where the light doesn’t reach. To words like vinegar and smells that leave a cast. To being skinned and cut open. Twisted and pulled. By the tongue of the person who once was everything.
Falling through time and place. Landing, disorientated and bruised. My body bristling from the knowing of what was going to happen.
I needed to break free. And I needed help to do it. I needed to devour the words of other women. I needed someone to lead me safely back to these places, to explore them and see things anew. To travel new pathways. I needed to rewrite my story.
Somehow, I knew all this. The same instinct that got me out, guiding me now.
What I didn’t know is that…
I would be travelling again. Through place and time. There would be an eagle, gloriously soaring. And colour. So much colour. That memories would come seeping back through. Tiny, wonderful moments. Unlocked and unravelling. Wrapping me in their warmth.
I called it my year of freedom. It was an ending and also a beginning. In the great Sat Nav of life, I get to choose the destination.
Sometimes, I still find myself falling. But I know I can pull myself out now.
Christina! I'm so glad you joined the project, and with this fiercely alive, intensely... kinetic piece. I feel that even while you are describing a transformative time acutely personal to you, you are also managing to put into words what so many of us haven't yet been able to about those lockdown times: how so many of us were abruptly pushed back into damaging contact with family members or places that we'd worked so hard to get free of. (My book has a final chapter that unfolded after the first draft was already complete, when I found myself spending a terrible week with my mother who was finally divorcing after 40 years: all the poisons of the past erupted in the seven days I was trying to help her sort and clear).
Love then the expansion of those final lines, the height, the lift - that eagle! What a perfect detail to carry all the other moments that must have also been part of your year of freedom.
Here is your link, and I'm adding you to the A to Z of contributors on the book site and on the By Readers tab here on my Substack. I so hope you will respond to other themes in the archive. All stay open. No deadlines. Whatever work I go into after next year, I will also find time very early or late to keep this project running for whoever wants to use it...
Thank you for your beautiful words Tanya. I’ve been meaning to contribute since listening to you talk about the project on a podcast a while back, so it’s great to (finally!) be here.
That sounds like it was an incredibly tough, intense week. Did the final chapter make it into your book? I am so looking forward to reading it. x
Yes, that week in August 2020 becomes the final chapter of the book - one of only two written in present tense. I so hope the book speaks to you when you have time to spend with it. Lots of reader devour it in days - others write to me to say they've had to measure it out, putting it down for months sometimes, as it speaks so urgently to things they are still in middle of processing. I find it fascinating learning how differently people read it... xx
This is full of energy, made me curious to know more but also perfect as a stand alone piece. Wonderful to think of how you found solace in the words of wise women and now share your experience and wisdom here…full circle! xx
Thank you Sheila, so warming to hear that. I’m attempting to write a memoir (mostly because it just keeps spilling out anyway), but it is sloooooow going. Off to find your words now. I think I spotted them earlier! x
The first pregnancy ended bloodily in a D&C, washed up in a hospital bed surrounded by expectant new mums. The second in a brutally swift emergency surgery for a misdiagnosed ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed me and certainly killed all hope of anything different the third time.
That third time though – the terror of an early scan and another missing heartbeat running through me like mercury flipped to find the small flutter of life inside me. There it was, that insistent beat of belief in me that I couldn’t have in myself. It was dizzying. It was terrifying. It was brilliant. It was awful and awe-full.
I was suddenly struck by the fact that I didn’t know how to go forward with this. I didn’t know how to be a mother. I didn’t trust that my body knew and I knew my mind didn’t. I had been given hope, but I was going to have to learn to trust it and I didn’t know how.
I knew how to live with grief. I knew how to be eaten up by it until I was a shadow of a person. I was very clear on how I could shrink and shy away from life but how was I going to grow, not just for myself but for someone else, someone else who would believe in me when I didn’t believe in myself.
At that point I could feel myself splitting off into what would become the mother me and the me, me and I have been attempting to reconcile them ever since.
Katy... before I even read your words, I had a surge of excitement seeing your name come through in my notifications thread for this project: because of the way you responded to my book as one of its very early readers, and now too because I've begun to read your own substack, and find it so full of energy.
How you used the word limit to concentrate so much loss, life. Wow. The second clause of the first sentence, how that captures the brutal-feeling strangeness of how they put those of us who have a pregnancy ending or who delivery has gone so wrong back into those busy wards with balloons and cards. It is as brutal, yes, as that sentence. The two things shouldn't be put together but they are (I was wheeled from intensive care after my coma back into a busy ward: when I insisted on a private room I was considered rude?!!)
The whole piece is powerful, deeply moving, but I need to quote back this line to you as it in particular blew me away: 'There it was, that insistent beat of belief in me that I couldn’t have in myself.' That is the kind of prose I admire so much: the rhythm that produces the sense as Woolf would say.
Thank you so much for joining the project when you have (I think) a big house move happening and your own Substack developing. I hope you will respond to other themes from the archive. All stay open without deadline.
Here is your link and I'm adding you to the A to Z of contributors on the book site and also on the By Readers tab here on my Substack!
Katy, this speaks for so many women and says so very much, conveys so much of their pain. The brutality of it all and the very fact that is doesn't end where most would expect it to.
This is amazing! So much conveyed here, “like flipped mercury” and “beat of belief,” just lovely language. Found myself nodding along to how much easier it is to shrink, the reconciliation of our new self after motherhood. I often think of motherhood as the feeling of every single emotion nearly every day and this piece felt like that to me. xx
I’m lying in bed listening to the muffled sound of nine o’clock news. Everyone’s home and I feel safe again, but not safe enough to close my eyes. I’ve been trying to invent different ways of staying awake and this time I’m clutching a torch under my blanket. Ribbed metal quickly loses its coolness in my hand. I rub fingers against its surface to refresh my intentions. I feel that I can stay awake this time. I’m not sleepy. Not yet. And when it comes, I’ll be prepared to fight it.
Ghostly shadows of my recurrent nightmares fill the room. I switch my focus to the noise coming from the street. Someone is talking loudly at the bus stop. A street janitor’s metal snow shovel scrapes against icy pavement. Drunken shouting a bit further away. Distant cars horns, occasional sirens... And then silence. Heavy winter silence, when you can hear the snow falling, unstoppable and emotionless. My attention floats inside. Footsteps pass my bedroom door. The tap is turned on in the kitchen on the other side of the wall. Clinking and clattering of the cutlery, dinner plates and pans. Silence. The footsteps return pausing by my door momentarily. I take a deep breath. The news is finished by now and a film is on. This time I’m not going to sneak into the corridor to secretly watch black & white flickering screen through the doorway. This time I dive under the blanket and turn on my torch. All I can hear is the thumping of my heart. Louder and louder. Mellow light of the torch and soft shadows on fabric creases that enveloped me are calming and exciting. I reach under my pillow and pull out a book.
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas”. I open it and breathe in the air that comes off the yellowing paper. I’m still learning to make sense and sound out of those miniature creatures on book pages. Like tiny little ants they run away from me in all directions. But it doesn’t matter now, for I know exactly what those stubborn lines are hiding from me. I inhale the musty smell. The images of deep water and the gentle sound of air bubbles travelling upwards make me feel safe; safe enough to close my eyes and disappear into the ocean of mysteries.
Such a completely embodied piece of story-telling here, Elena. I felt I was as much watching you on screen or on stage as much as reading - felt I could really see you back there and then, even as you were yourself escaping into a different element... Txx
Elena, love this peak into your life, it was so visual, I was there with you, hoping you wouldn't get caught. A girl trying to read "tiny ants," already full of grit and determination. xx
I knew as soon as I drank the dark brown thick sickly pungent tea that it was a bad idea, that I was in for a ride. The tea smelt like soil and earth and grass and other worlds. I felt the sickness in my stomach and my whole body lurched as the mushrooms sloshed into my system and started to move through me. Woosh, tingling everywhere, hands shaking. Was I coming up? It felt like I was sinking down into the ground, into the damp soil, into the seeds and the roots, pulled into the earth. I immediately knew I had taken too many, that it was too strong. Orange juice, must drink orange juice, that will help bring me down, ground me. Familiar faces started to look dark and distorted, moving in strange ways, unsafe. The wall was moving, breathing, shaking. Fuck.
I needed to be alone. With music and cigarettes. The 70’s tiles on my university bedroom floor a deep black lake and my bed was a boat, safe, sturdy. Woosh, waves and waves crashing over me. Vibrating, moving, I was a breaker, part of the rhythm of the earth, no longer separate from anything. My body was pulling apart, my skin, my bones, then my skull. Nothing left. Who was I? My body? Was I my family? My past, my present, my future? Where was I? Where did I exist? Did I even exist? Hours and hours of waves and pulses and visions and movement. Into another time and place. Into space. Sinking into life itself.
I woke in the morning and found my way back. Nothing was ever the same again.
Wow. I envy you that experience a little - even though it began with fear - because you took it alone, and there was no other person messing with your boundaries if you know what I mean. You write so kinetically of an experience I've never had - my younger life so depended on absolute control and relentless work that I denied myself any experiments with drugs or alcohol that might pull me away from that. But I missed out on this kind of exploration/inner journey. Something for my elderhood instead perhaps. Love what you've done with the prompt, thank you. Here is your link:
Thanks Tanya- really enjoyed remembering this although it actually took me years and a lot of inner work to recover from it - I think it’s something that might be better with the greater stability of age xx
I’d slept for fifteen hours and when I woke there was a pause, a moment of calm. In that moment I remembered I was back in my childhood bedroom, safe. The navy curtains in the bedroom were drawn. It was a sunny day and late in the morning by then. There was a chink of bright sunlight shining through the gap between the two dark curtains and in the gap danced tiny fragments of dust, stardust – you, me and everything that surrounds and connects us in the cosmos. And with that thought it began again, the exhilarating, terrifying and joyous journey of my mind, untethered. I had a body, but this mind was out of it.
The day before I had taken the three-hour train journey home from Manchester, accompanied by my brother, his gentle coaxing stopping the out spilling of my mind becoming a public nuisance. A homecoming that wasn’t the visit I’d planned but was well-timed, nonetheless.
I remember my mother and brother sitting on my bed, trying to understand what I was telling them, worry etched on their faces. I had some important messages to convey, I understood everything now…but nothing as far as normality was concerned.
It was a time for decisions. I knew what was in my best interest, but could they trust my judgement? Long walks, under the expanse of wide Norfolk skies. Time alone to quieten and slow down, to piece together fragments of my shattered, twenty-year-old mind.
Thirty years later the fragments are pieced back together, mostly. I brought many back whilst others came, seemingly of their own free-will. Some were gifted back to me, often unconsciously and always kindly by loved-ones and strangers. A few remain, floating in space, like stardust waiting for their time to come home.
Lou - moved to sudden tears here at my sunny kitchen table by what you've written, and how.
The compassion of your mother, your brother; you allowing them to take care of you. How you also let the wide Norfolk skies take some of the much you were carrying/constellating.
Like all good writing about the intensely personal, it has released in me a similar set of sense-memories of when I have been nursed back with compassion from a place of breakdown/flying apart. And how I helped my mother back into a safe state of mind as well as physical/housing safety after her sudden divorce got triggered in the first lockdowns.
Many others coming to your piece will also be able to access those memories of help and healing I feel.
Thank you Tanya for your kind response. So pleased this spoke to you. It was a relief to write it out after all these years, thank you for providing a safe space xx
Your Substack publication name may soon update to reflect your new and right user name. If it doesn’t turn use the same right hand menu to locate ‘Writer Dashboard’. Click on that.
There will be a horizontal tan menu that comes up - scroll to the far right and select Settings. This is where you can rename your Publication
I’ve been here for awhile Elena but I couldn’t figure out how to write a message without my email showing. I’ve got that figured out. I will probably wait until things settle down a bit before I get into it. Life is a whirlwind at the moment.
For five and a half years I’d been dreaming of home. I longed to see the weaved trunk of ancient yews and the horizon aflame with the colours of autumn. I had been in my own kind of winter for years and was struggling to emerge from the depths of grief. But the fertile void within was ripe for transformation and I sensed a return to my lands was needed. And so I went and felt the immediate softening of my bones as I settled into the Northern Hemisphere once more. Surprisingly, it wasn’t on my walks on The Downs of West Sussex, but an unexpected hike in the Swiss Alps that reawakened a part of me I had long forgotten. On that perfect summer day, time seemed to stretch across the creases of the mountains, lighting the steady path ahead as it led me up and across and down and up and across and up and up. For 7 hours I walked. And held in the embrace of the mountains and plains bejewelled with wildflowers, I let myself shatter completely. The darkness bled out with each tiring step, rendering me shapeless and afraid. Yet the cool glacial streams satiated a thirst I never knew I had, and the pines drew in the weight of my exhale, so I could finally breathe again. That night, 2500 metres into the sky, the stars seemed to lean in close and I felt as though my body was being rewoven into the cosmos.
That’s what I had forgotten you see. That I was part of it all. Not alone in my grief, not broken and irrelevant. I was a part of something much bigger; the regenerative flow of the Earth. And now finally, I felt the pulse of life ahead unfolding.
Corinne, this is so raw and beautiful. The visuals really resonated with me. For me also it was a call from wild nature that brought me home thousands of miles away from the place of my birth xx
Corinne - welcome to the project, and what a soulful first piece from you this is. How fully I felt alongside you in that remembered, reconstituting walk. I love how you invoke a rhythm of steps - 'up and across and down and up and across and up and up' - that then is revealed at the end for we the readers (as it was revealed to you back when it happened) that this has been a kind of weaving or stitching. Just beautiful. Here is your link and I will add you to the A to Z of contributors on the book site and also on the By Readers tab over on Substack. I so hope other themes will interest you to try - all stay open without deadline, and I love watching new contributors' aesthetic/themes develop across several prompts...
Thank you for your kind words Tanya. I'm so grateful to have found this project and community. It feels surprisingly good to be sharing my words at last. I'll definitely check out some of the other themes over the coming weeks and no doubt share some more. thanks again! xx p.s I've edited my name in the profile as I realise it didn't include my surname.
Corinne, I loved reading this. It evoked happy memories of walking in mountains last year - the criss-crossing and the healing that can take place in those places as we push ourselves physically and put our small selves into perspective x
Oh Pipp! Thank you for joining this project as a writer - and bringing such a beautiful use of language with you: in this piece you have a way of fusing the sensory to the soul, so that matters of faith and family which are often invoked in an abstract or straightforwardly biographical are made so alive and new here.
So many phrases or sentences I admired and was moved by (I’ll try not to quote your whole piece back to you!):
the silence started to cut me like a blunt knife
The choir gowns smelled of old churches, musty and thick like gone-off wine
The sleeves at least were full and loose and every time we walked up the central isle, the sleeves would catch the air. They were my wings. They whispered freedom.
And then that surprising last line which gives unexpected lift and lightness.
Just beautiful. How I hope you will write for other themes in the project. I’d love to see what you/your use of language does with them.
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#pippwarner
Tanya xxx
Oh Pipp - so very very glad to have you join the project, and it’s lovely to know that there is a link already between you and Susie. There’s a special thrill when friends - whether online or in real time/place - join in here. You say you admire my energy to talk to ‘the likes of you’ - that made me smile, as where I come from ‘the likes of you/us’ was used in a self-limiting kind of way as in ‘no one wants the likes of us there.’ I don’t think you invoked it in that way about yourself, but just in case any one reading this does feel that way about their work/my time… this project is a pleasure for me and although time-consuming, never a burden.
I am so looking forward to receiving more pieces from you. Txx
Thank you dear Monique xxx
Congratulations on the launch of your paperback! And thankyou for the work you do here, and the support you give to new writers. Hugs to your mum. 💕
Thank you dear Ali! xx
Looking forward to this one Tanya 🤍
“High waving heather ‘neath stormy blasts bending … Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.” It was for these words of Emily Bronte's that I crossed the world to walk on the moors.
Contained. Controlled. Careful. What horrible words these are to describe a person. And yet, how necessary these actions are to take to feel that you can walk through your days and still be upright at the end of them. It takes great courage to seek somewhere where you can be free of the constraints you feel hemmed in by and, without any obvious outward warning to others or any clear motivating factor, to seek it when no one but you knows that you need it.
And so it was that I began walking the moors of Yorkshire. Along the path were clusters of white flowers that looked exactly like small tufts of sheep’s wool, like the wool snagged on the barbed wire lining some of the stone boundary fences, like the fleece of the very sheep who grazed the moors. As the wind rushed over the moor heather, the movement caused by its passing looked like fast-moving clouds over a bed of green, the rippling of a Turkish carpet or blanket being shaken. The sun’s weak rays lit up the patchwork quilt of land in a pale glow akin to that of a nashi pear and I stood and I breathed. The movement of my feet on this land was wild and daring and enlivening.
Walking in open places, in treed places, in spaces of green and brown and wind and rain, everything is hushed except the breath of me being. A bell jar descends. Solitude embraces.
Such immersive writing Emily. Deeply felt this line - "...to feel that you can walk through your days and still be upright at the end of them."
Thank you, Christina. I so enjoyed the questioning and the contrasts in your writing on this prompt. I wish you well in walking upright! xx
Thanks Emily x
Immersive... yes, as Christina has found it, true for me too. I'm under many blankets, with a hot water bottle and bed socks on, but I felt myself windswept. Not just by your description of the landscape but by the clarity of your purpose, how you let yourself travel those distances to be in the place needed for your transformation. And like Christina, I want to quote back the line that she did - I had already copied it ready to paste, then saw she had used it too (a sign of how strong it is): "...to feel that you can walk through your days and still be upright at the end of them." Stunning.
Here is your link, with my thanks as ever for what you bring to this project:
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#emilytamas
Txxx
Thank you, Tanya. As soon as I read your prompt I had a vivid recollection of standing on that path, part of the Bronte Way, in the weak light of the sun and the rough brush of the wind, and feeling so beautifully out of myself and also so authentically in myself. It is not a feeling I have been able to hold on to continuously but it is something that I can always find again walking alone in open and wild spaces. The descriptions of the path are taken directly from the journal I kept as I backpacked around Europe from May to December of 2007. I haven't taken that journal out of the box of travel paraphernalia since then and, as I read the words of the self I once was, I am struck by how similar my searching was then as it is now. Thank you for this prompt that reminded me of this moment of transcendence. xx
My pleasure Emily... and that travel journal sounds like a potent resource, especially given what you've shared with us from it here. xx
Thank you Emily for this piece evoked so many memories of my heart-wrenching year in Yorkshire and the miles I walked the moors in search of repose, of relief and remedy. The space and embrace of the wildness, and the ever consoling presence of my dogs healed so much and delivered to me my destiny. I will be forever thankful for the moors. Thank you too, for this evocative piece.
Tracey x
Thank you Tracey. Physical landscapes have such a pull on our interior landscapes, don't they? The moors are powerful indeed and I am so glad to hear that it was there that you found your destiny. I can well believe it! x
Oh yes the power of the moors has to be felt to be believed! I am from Hampshire so the Yorkshire moors provided a stark contrast to the familiarity of the soft Downs. Xx
Loved this from the opening quote, I had a complete visual throughout reading this, also loved the same line of “walk through your days…” Then to see in your comments that you had gone from contained, controlled, careful to honoring you own needs and hitchhiking I was just amazed and inspired. xx
When the world came to a halt. When a space opened up in our days, full of time for thinking. I found myself falling.
I’d wished for the power of teleportation. Now that I had it, I’d give it back in a flash. What’s the point, when you don’t get to choose the destination? When the people you travel to are the ones you’ve tried so hard to leave behind.
Instead, I was ripped through time. Back to places I’d spent years pushing down. To the parts of my mind where the light doesn’t reach. To words like vinegar and smells that leave a cast. To being skinned and cut open. Twisted and pulled. By the tongue of the person who once was everything.
Falling through time and place. Landing, disorientated and bruised. My body bristling from the knowing of what was going to happen.
I needed to break free. And I needed help to do it. I needed to devour the words of other women. I needed someone to lead me safely back to these places, to explore them and see things anew. To travel new pathways. I needed to rewrite my story.
Somehow, I knew all this. The same instinct that got me out, guiding me now.
What I didn’t know is that…
I would be travelling again. Through place and time. There would be an eagle, gloriously soaring. And colour. So much colour. That memories would come seeping back through. Tiny, wonderful moments. Unlocked and unravelling. Wrapping me in their warmth.
I called it my year of freedom. It was an ending and also a beginning. In the great Sat Nav of life, I get to choose the destination.
Sometimes, I still find myself falling. But I know I can pull myself out now.
Christina! I'm so glad you joined the project, and with this fiercely alive, intensely... kinetic piece. I feel that even while you are describing a transformative time acutely personal to you, you are also managing to put into words what so many of us haven't yet been able to about those lockdown times: how so many of us were abruptly pushed back into damaging contact with family members or places that we'd worked so hard to get free of. (My book has a final chapter that unfolded after the first draft was already complete, when I found myself spending a terrible week with my mother who was finally divorcing after 40 years: all the poisons of the past erupted in the seven days I was trying to help her sort and clear).
Love then the expansion of those final lines, the height, the lift - that eagle! What a perfect detail to carry all the other moments that must have also been part of your year of freedom.
Here is your link, and I'm adding you to the A to Z of contributors on the book site and on the By Readers tab here on my Substack. I so hope you will respond to other themes in the archive. All stay open. No deadlines. Whatever work I go into after next year, I will also find time very early or late to keep this project running for whoever wants to use it...
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#christinagolian
Tanya xx
Thank you for your beautiful words Tanya. I’ve been meaning to contribute since listening to you talk about the project on a podcast a while back, so it’s great to (finally!) be here.
That sounds like it was an incredibly tough, intense week. Did the final chapter make it into your book? I am so looking forward to reading it. x
Yes, that week in August 2020 becomes the final chapter of the book - one of only two written in present tense. I so hope the book speaks to you when you have time to spend with it. Lots of reader devour it in days - others write to me to say they've had to measure it out, putting it down for months sometimes, as it speaks so urgently to things they are still in middle of processing. I find it fascinating learning how differently people read it... xx
This is full of energy, made me curious to know more but also perfect as a stand alone piece. Wonderful to think of how you found solace in the words of wise women and now share your experience and wisdom here…full circle! xx
Thank you Sheila, so warming to hear that. I’m attempting to write a memoir (mostly because it just keeps spilling out anyway), but it is sloooooow going. Off to find your words now. I think I spotted them earlier! x
The first pregnancy ended bloodily in a D&C, washed up in a hospital bed surrounded by expectant new mums. The second in a brutally swift emergency surgery for a misdiagnosed ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed me and certainly killed all hope of anything different the third time.
That third time though – the terror of an early scan and another missing heartbeat running through me like mercury flipped to find the small flutter of life inside me. There it was, that insistent beat of belief in me that I couldn’t have in myself. It was dizzying. It was terrifying. It was brilliant. It was awful and awe-full.
I was suddenly struck by the fact that I didn’t know how to go forward with this. I didn’t know how to be a mother. I didn’t trust that my body knew and I knew my mind didn’t. I had been given hope, but I was going to have to learn to trust it and I didn’t know how.
I knew how to live with grief. I knew how to be eaten up by it until I was a shadow of a person. I was very clear on how I could shrink and shy away from life but how was I going to grow, not just for myself but for someone else, someone else who would believe in me when I didn’t believe in myself.
At that point I could feel myself splitting off into what would become the mother me and the me, me and I have been attempting to reconcile them ever since.
Katy... before I even read your words, I had a surge of excitement seeing your name come through in my notifications thread for this project: because of the way you responded to my book as one of its very early readers, and now too because I've begun to read your own substack, and find it so full of energy.
How you used the word limit to concentrate so much loss, life. Wow. The second clause of the first sentence, how that captures the brutal-feeling strangeness of how they put those of us who have a pregnancy ending or who delivery has gone so wrong back into those busy wards with balloons and cards. It is as brutal, yes, as that sentence. The two things shouldn't be put together but they are (I was wheeled from intensive care after my coma back into a busy ward: when I insisted on a private room I was considered rude?!!)
The whole piece is powerful, deeply moving, but I need to quote back this line to you as it in particular blew me away: 'There it was, that insistent beat of belief in me that I couldn’t have in myself.' That is the kind of prose I admire so much: the rhythm that produces the sense as Woolf would say.
Thank you so much for joining the project when you have (I think) a big house move happening and your own Substack developing. I hope you will respond to other themes from the archive. All stay open without deadline.
Here is your link and I'm adding you to the A to Z of contributors on the book site and also on the By Readers tab here on my Substack!
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#katywheatley
Txx
Thank you for allowing the space to write and for your generous reply. xx
Katy, this speaks for so many women and says so very much, conveys so much of their pain. The brutality of it all and the very fact that is doesn't end where most would expect it to.
So very powerful!
Tracey x
Thank you x
This is amazing! So much conveyed here, “like flipped mercury” and “beat of belief,” just lovely language. Found myself nodding along to how much easier it is to shrink, the reconciliation of our new self after motherhood. I often think of motherhood as the feeling of every single emotion nearly every day and this piece felt like that to me. xx
Thank you x
I’m lying in bed listening to the muffled sound of nine o’clock news. Everyone’s home and I feel safe again, but not safe enough to close my eyes. I’ve been trying to invent different ways of staying awake and this time I’m clutching a torch under my blanket. Ribbed metal quickly loses its coolness in my hand. I rub fingers against its surface to refresh my intentions. I feel that I can stay awake this time. I’m not sleepy. Not yet. And when it comes, I’ll be prepared to fight it.
Ghostly shadows of my recurrent nightmares fill the room. I switch my focus to the noise coming from the street. Someone is talking loudly at the bus stop. A street janitor’s metal snow shovel scrapes against icy pavement. Drunken shouting a bit further away. Distant cars horns, occasional sirens... And then silence. Heavy winter silence, when you can hear the snow falling, unstoppable and emotionless. My attention floats inside. Footsteps pass my bedroom door. The tap is turned on in the kitchen on the other side of the wall. Clinking and clattering of the cutlery, dinner plates and pans. Silence. The footsteps return pausing by my door momentarily. I take a deep breath. The news is finished by now and a film is on. This time I’m not going to sneak into the corridor to secretly watch black & white flickering screen through the doorway. This time I dive under the blanket and turn on my torch. All I can hear is the thumping of my heart. Louder and louder. Mellow light of the torch and soft shadows on fabric creases that enveloped me are calming and exciting. I reach under my pillow and pull out a book.
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas”. I open it and breathe in the air that comes off the yellowing paper. I’m still learning to make sense and sound out of those miniature creatures on book pages. Like tiny little ants they run away from me in all directions. But it doesn’t matter now, for I know exactly what those stubborn lines are hiding from me. I inhale the musty smell. The images of deep water and the gentle sound of air bubbles travelling upwards make me feel safe; safe enough to close my eyes and disappear into the ocean of mysteries.
Such a completely embodied piece of story-telling here, Elena. I felt I was as much watching you on screen or on stage as much as reading - felt I could really see you back there and then, even as you were yourself escaping into a different element... Txx
Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#elenayates
PS And thank you again for sharing word of what we're doing here over in our Hagitude community. Really appreciate it.
Thank you, Tanya xx
Elena, love this peak into your life, it was so visual, I was there with you, hoping you wouldn't get caught. A girl trying to read "tiny ants," already full of grit and determination. xx
Thank you, Sheila xx
I knew as soon as I drank the dark brown thick sickly pungent tea that it was a bad idea, that I was in for a ride. The tea smelt like soil and earth and grass and other worlds. I felt the sickness in my stomach and my whole body lurched as the mushrooms sloshed into my system and started to move through me. Woosh, tingling everywhere, hands shaking. Was I coming up? It felt like I was sinking down into the ground, into the damp soil, into the seeds and the roots, pulled into the earth. I immediately knew I had taken too many, that it was too strong. Orange juice, must drink orange juice, that will help bring me down, ground me. Familiar faces started to look dark and distorted, moving in strange ways, unsafe. The wall was moving, breathing, shaking. Fuck.
I needed to be alone. With music and cigarettes. The 70’s tiles on my university bedroom floor a deep black lake and my bed was a boat, safe, sturdy. Woosh, waves and waves crashing over me. Vibrating, moving, I was a breaker, part of the rhythm of the earth, no longer separate from anything. My body was pulling apart, my skin, my bones, then my skull. Nothing left. Who was I? My body? Was I my family? My past, my present, my future? Where was I? Where did I exist? Did I even exist? Hours and hours of waves and pulses and visions and movement. Into another time and place. Into space. Sinking into life itself.
I woke in the morning and found my way back. Nothing was ever the same again.
I love this Helen! I could identify with so much of what you have captured here. Nothing is ever the same again, that is for sure!
Tracey x
Wow. I envy you that experience a little - even though it began with fear - because you took it alone, and there was no other person messing with your boundaries if you know what I mean. You write so kinetically of an experience I've never had - my younger life so depended on absolute control and relentless work that I denied myself any experiments with drugs or alcohol that might pull me away from that. But I missed out on this kind of exploration/inner journey. Something for my elderhood instead perhaps. Love what you've done with the prompt, thank you. Here is your link:
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#helenlouise
Txx
Thanks Tanya- really enjoyed remembering this although it actually took me years and a lot of inner work to recover from it - I think it’s something that might be better with the greater stability of age xx
Ahhh! Love it! I never been brave enough when I was young but I microdosed a few times few years ago and yes - ‘nothing was ever the same again’!💕
💕 I’d love to try microdosing too but haven’t been brave enough based on my experience above!! Love your piece too Elena, beautiful xx
Thank you, Helen. Yes, it’s always tricky after a bad one. You’d know if and when you are ready xx
We are stardust
I’d slept for fifteen hours and when I woke there was a pause, a moment of calm. In that moment I remembered I was back in my childhood bedroom, safe. The navy curtains in the bedroom were drawn. It was a sunny day and late in the morning by then. There was a chink of bright sunlight shining through the gap between the two dark curtains and in the gap danced tiny fragments of dust, stardust – you, me and everything that surrounds and connects us in the cosmos. And with that thought it began again, the exhilarating, terrifying and joyous journey of my mind, untethered. I had a body, but this mind was out of it.
The day before I had taken the three-hour train journey home from Manchester, accompanied by my brother, his gentle coaxing stopping the out spilling of my mind becoming a public nuisance. A homecoming that wasn’t the visit I’d planned but was well-timed, nonetheless.
I remember my mother and brother sitting on my bed, trying to understand what I was telling them, worry etched on their faces. I had some important messages to convey, I understood everything now…but nothing as far as normality was concerned.
It was a time for decisions. I knew what was in my best interest, but could they trust my judgement? Long walks, under the expanse of wide Norfolk skies. Time alone to quieten and slow down, to piece together fragments of my shattered, twenty-year-old mind.
Thirty years later the fragments are pieced back together, mostly. I brought many back whilst others came, seemingly of their own free-will. Some were gifted back to me, often unconsciously and always kindly by loved-ones and strangers. A few remain, floating in space, like stardust waiting for their time to come home.
Lou - moved to sudden tears here at my sunny kitchen table by what you've written, and how.
The compassion of your mother, your brother; you allowing them to take care of you. How you also let the wide Norfolk skies take some of the much you were carrying/constellating.
Like all good writing about the intensely personal, it has released in me a similar set of sense-memories of when I have been nursed back with compassion from a place of breakdown/flying apart. And how I helped my mother back into a safe state of mind as well as physical/housing safety after her sudden divorce got triggered in the first lockdowns.
Many others coming to your piece will also be able to access those memories of help and healing I feel.
Thank you. Here is your link: https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#louhudson
Txx
Thank you Tanya for your kind response. So pleased this spoke to you. It was a relief to write it out after all these years, thank you for providing a safe space xx
HiTanya, just doing as you asked to see if I can solve this puzzle.
Hi Nancy! Okay…
Look at the top right of Substack now you are in it for the grey lines, click on those.
You will now see a menu. Choose settings.
Now choose Profile.
You can type whatever name you want to see on screen there.
Save settings.
Then send another test to me…
Ps in the menu i mentioned settings appears in fret towards the end of options offered
Let's see if this works.
You’ve done it! As ever, I admire how you persist!
Now you need to do the same thing for your Substack publication which is still using your email..,
Your Substack publication name may soon update to reflect your new and right user name. If it doesn’t turn use the same right hand menu to locate ‘Writer Dashboard’. Click on that.
There will be a horizontal tan menu that comes up - scroll to the far right and select Settings. This is where you can rename your Publication
Xx
Yay! Thanks Tanya
Hi Nancy! Great to see you here! I’m so glad you decided to join 💕
I’ve been here for awhile Elena but I couldn’t figure out how to write a message without my email showing. I’ve got that figured out. I will probably wait until things settle down a bit before I get into it. Life is a whirlwind at the moment.
For five and a half years I’d been dreaming of home. I longed to see the weaved trunk of ancient yews and the horizon aflame with the colours of autumn. I had been in my own kind of winter for years and was struggling to emerge from the depths of grief. But the fertile void within was ripe for transformation and I sensed a return to my lands was needed. And so I went and felt the immediate softening of my bones as I settled into the Northern Hemisphere once more. Surprisingly, it wasn’t on my walks on The Downs of West Sussex, but an unexpected hike in the Swiss Alps that reawakened a part of me I had long forgotten. On that perfect summer day, time seemed to stretch across the creases of the mountains, lighting the steady path ahead as it led me up and across and down and up and across and up and up. For 7 hours I walked. And held in the embrace of the mountains and plains bejewelled with wildflowers, I let myself shatter completely. The darkness bled out with each tiring step, rendering me shapeless and afraid. Yet the cool glacial streams satiated a thirst I never knew I had, and the pines drew in the weight of my exhale, so I could finally breathe again. That night, 2500 metres into the sky, the stars seemed to lean in close and I felt as though my body was being rewoven into the cosmos.
That’s what I had forgotten you see. That I was part of it all. Not alone in my grief, not broken and irrelevant. I was a part of something much bigger; the regenerative flow of the Earth. And now finally, I felt the pulse of life ahead unfolding.
Corinne, this is so raw and beautiful. The visuals really resonated with me. For me also it was a call from wild nature that brought me home thousands of miles away from the place of my birth xx
Corinne - welcome to the project, and what a soulful first piece from you this is. How fully I felt alongside you in that remembered, reconstituting walk. I love how you invoke a rhythm of steps - 'up and across and down and up and across and up and up' - that then is revealed at the end for we the readers (as it was revealed to you back when it happened) that this has been a kind of weaving or stitching. Just beautiful. Here is your link and I will add you to the A to Z of contributors on the book site and also on the By Readers tab over on Substack. I so hope other themes will interest you to try - all stay open without deadline, and I love watching new contributors' aesthetic/themes develop across several prompts...
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#corinne
Tanya xx
Thank you for your kind words Tanya. I'm so grateful to have found this project and community. It feels surprisingly good to be sharing my words at last. I'll definitely check out some of the other themes over the coming weeks and no doubt share some more. thanks again! xx p.s I've edited my name in the profile as I realise it didn't include my surname.
Wonderful. Hope you will write more with us here. I've updated your piece and your link so that your full name is included:
https://thecureforsleep.com/out-of-body/#corinnekagan
Txx
Corinne, I loved reading this. It evoked happy memories of walking in mountains last year - the criss-crossing and the healing that can take place in those places as we push ourselves physically and put our small selves into perspective x