![]() ![]() Illustration: Tom Humberstone/The Guardianīut after that conversation with my dad, I thought about how all those hurtful things I went through had moulded me into a different person. A way for people to explain the random cruelty of the universe. ![]() In quieter moods, I reasoned that the idea that we grow from suffering was just dumb. They felt akin to telling me that all the pain I was feeling was justified that I should be thankful for it even as it tore me apart. Comments such as, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and, “We’re only given as much as the heart can endure” enraged me. Instead of making an effort, I’d wandered around the house with spot stickers and flannel pyjamas on.Īt this point, I hated the idea I could learn anything from my pain. That I didn’t eat meals but staggered, zombified, to the fridge where I’d eat cold pasta straight from the Tupperware and glug a mouthful of apple juice, before finding another soft surface on which to think about all the things I did wrong. That I spent whole days watching things I wasn’t enjoying because the act of lifting my hand up to the keyboard to change the programme felt like too much effort. That I cried so much I looked as if I had an eye infection. All I can tell you is what I did in response to that pain. No words can grip on to it, everything slips off, turns pale. They begin the story once the characters have had a few weeks to settle, or they leave big gaps in the text that the reader fills in with their imagination. There’s no point in trying to describe the pain I felt when reality finally sank in, because even the best writers can’t do that. I cried so much I looked as if I had an eye infection. I felt my life had just split into two: before this happened, and after it. I thought about ringing my parents, but what if he changed his mind and it was awkward the next time he came over for dinner? On the tube, I stared at a snotty-nosed kid opposite and a grey-haired man looking at the property section of a paper. When I saw he was serious, I didn’t know what to say, so I just said what a dumped person might come out with, which was: “You know that means you won’t get to see me any more?” He nodded, and I walked alone to the station, wondering if it might have been better to throw a drink over him the way they do on reality TV. The idea of him actually leaving me felt like an impossibility. It was a normal evening we’d just been for a pint with my brother, and as we set off for the tube, my ex pulled me aside and said, “I want to be on my own.” At first I thought he was joking, and then I thought he was telling me he was moving out of our flat. I was 25 when my ex-boyfriend ended our five-year relationship outside King’s Cross station in London. No thought games where you imagine everything you’d do to get them back: drink a cup of toilet water, cut everyone else out of your life, sit in a room with James Corden for an hour – except you wouldn’t think that, because it’s a joke, and you wouldn’t be making any of those. No listening to Taylor Swift songs and finding it impossible to believe that she didn’t write them specifically for you. No walking through a world where everything reminds you of them, from the blue of your coffee cup matching their eyes to an advert for Jet2 bringing back memories of them wanting to go to Venice. But then I remembered my mum saying that he was a bit of a player once that he had always been the one ending things. “I have to say, I’ve never been heartbroken.” I went to challenge him because, at first, this concept seemed impossible. “It takes me right back to how much he hurt me, like I’ve got PTSD or something. The predominant feeling I had at the time was sadness.‘W henever anyone tells me they’re going through a breakup, it makes me feel sick,” I told my dad, sitting in his kitchen one weekend, during a trip home to Leeds. I remember being moved to tears while hearing Pete Seeger sing " We Shall Overcome," inspiring everyone in the crowd to join in a united chorus of solidarity and determination. ![]() They don’t always fit like pegs into the slots that researchers provide in their experimental designs. But in my opinion, there is another complication at work. ![]()
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