So little information

Today’s newsletter is quite brief but it’s also introspective and personal. Before I go into it I want to call on whoever reads this to take an action against the man-made famine in Gaza.

Many friends are participating in a rolling hunger strike to protest, if you follow @eligoldstone on Instagram you can find out more. That type of action will not be right for everyone – after a lot of thought I’ve decided it’s not sensible for me – but you can support it by amplifying those participating, donating to groups on the ground in Gaza doing the vital work to get food and supplies to people and by donating directly to families in Gaza. Please also write to your MP to demand the UK government acts and stops enabling this genocide.

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So Little Information

In her memoir The Odd Woman and the City, Vivian Gornick is talking to her friend Leonard, and he bemoans all the things he’s yet to learn about himself, ‘It’s disgusting’ he says, ‘to be this old and have so little information’. I wince when I read it.

Sometimes I’m comforted by the knowledge that there’s a lot more to learn about the world and myself. It opens the future up. Other times I’m disgusted, like Leonard. How did I get here, at this point in my life, without seeing myself clearly? I know I still hold onto older age as a magical place where your wisdom, at last, outruns your ego.

The past 9 months have been a painful reckoning with a lot of things I simply did not have the time to unmask while I was working fulltime. Not getting up for work every day exposed things about me and my state of mind that I found confronting. Some of these things I’m still trying to figure out and possibly I’ll always be in process of figuring, never resolved. I’m caught between sympathy for the Jemima Kirke meme ‘you guys are thinking about yourself too much’ and the desire to interrogate myself as closely as I dare, because I want to be better – be a better friend, colleague, writer, daughter, sister, acquaintance and stranger. But I know some kinds of thinking and noticing are better than others and maybe I’ve been working with the wrong kind. I’ve found myself obsessing over friendships or social faux pas as though they are magic eye images I’ve been looking at wrong and if focus in the right way the lesson will be revealed to me. Yes, I’m thinking about myself too much. It’s easy for an unsettled heart to grab at the anxieties that are close by, the small abrasions of daily life, rather than thinking about what that impulse might tell you about the larger engine at work, what the accumulation of these things – thoughts, behaviours, events – might be trying to screech at you.

In Yiyun Li’s extraordinary memoir things in nature merely grow, a book for her son James, who died from suicide a few years after his brother also died from suicide, she writes ‘in the past few months I’ve developed a habit of scrutinizing my mind: is this thought a pebble of a thought, is this worry a pebble of a worry, is this question, seemingly unanswerable, only a pebble of a question?’ and her gratitude for her clear-minded friend who ‘do not indulge’ her in ‘pebble-mongering’. I know my friends can help me understand which thoughts are pebbles and which are boulders, but it does mean being prepared to share them.

As things stand, I – mentally speaking – have an upturned jewellery box of entangled chains that I need the patience to unknot. Perhaps that will teach me how to tell a pebble from a boulder.

The pebbles on the beach in Deal, which is the pebble beach of my imagination.

A couple of other things

I wrote a feature for Stylist’s July print issue on planning for older age. It was really interesting and inspiring to talk to people who are creating intentional communities. The headline for this piece is quite bait-y, so please read without prejudice! (It is also online but paywalled).

I’m running the National Centre for Writing’s Next Steps in Memoir course from September onwards. If you’re working on a memoir project it could be for you. It’s online, so super flexible and you’ll get lots of individual feedback on your writing.

Last month my pal and I went to a Medieval tile making workshop and it was so fun. We bought the class for each other for our birthdays which are close together and it made a really cute date. I’d highly recommend it.

Thanks for reading. And free Palestine.