Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
It is no longer easy to gas yourself. The oven won’t do it and modern cars have catalytic converters fitted.
I had an old Porsche 911.
Herman Hesse called suicide a state of mind – and there are a great many people, nominally alive, who have committed a suicide much worse than physical death. They have vacated life.
I did not want to vacate life. I loved life. I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully. I thought, ‘If I cannot live then I must die.’
My time was up. That was the strongest feeling I had. The person who had left home at sixteen and blasted through all the walls in her way, and been fearless, and not looked back, and who was well known as a writer, controversially so (she’s brilliant, she’s rubbish), and who had made money, made her way, been a good friend, a volatile and difficult lover, who had had a couple of minor breakdowns and a psychotic period, but always been able to pull it back, to get on and go forward; that Jeanette Winterson person was done.
In February 2008 I tried to end my life. My cat was in the garage with me. I did not know that when I sealed the doors and turned on the engine. My cat was scratching my face, scratching my face, scratching my face.
Later that night, lying on the gravel and looking up at the stars – the miraculous stars and the wood that deepens the dark – I could hear a voice. I know I was having an hallucination but it was the hallucination I needed to have.
‘Ye must be born again.’ ‘Ye must be born again’ (John 3:7).
I had been twice born already, hadn’t I – my lost mother and my new mother, Mrs Winterson – that double identity, itself a kind of schizophrenia – my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things.
But then I understood something. I understood twice born was not just about being alive, but about choosing life. Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos – and its pain.
I had been given life and I had done my best with what I had been given. But there was no more to do there. Whatever had erupted through the coincidence/synchronicity of finding those adoption papers and Deborah leaving me was my one and only chance at another chance.
It was a rope slung across space. It was a chance as near to killing me as to saving me and I believe it was an even bet which way it went. It was the loss of everything through the fierce and unseen return of the lost loss. The door into the dark room had swung open. The door at the bottom of the steps in our nightmares. The Bluebeard door with the bloodstained key.
The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen.
But I was alive.
And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind.
There was no straight-line connection. You can tell that reading this. I want to show how it is when the mind works with its own brokenness.
In March 2008 I was in bed recovering and reading Mark Doty – Dog Years.
It is a memoir about living with dogs – actually it is a story about living with life. Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life – to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.
And extremes – whether of dullness or fury – successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies – unconscious strategies – to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too – sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.
It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?
I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.
I often hear voices. I realise that drops me in the crazy category but I don’t much care. If you believe, as I do, that the mind wants to heal itself, and that the psyche seeks coherence not disintegration, then it isn’t hard to conclude that the mind will manifest whatever is necessary to work on the job.
We now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. But in the past, voices were respectable – desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wise-woman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing.
Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result.
Ronnie Laing, the doctor and psychotherapist who became the trendy 1960s and 70s guru making madness fashionable, understood madness as a process that might lead somewhere. Mostly, though, it is so terrifying for the person inside it, as well as the people outside it, that the only route is drugs or a clinic.
And our madness-measure is always changing. Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history. There is no place for it. Crucially, there is no time for it.
Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.
There was a person in me – a piece of me – however you want to describe it – so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace.
That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. My violent rages, my destructive behaviour, my own need to destroy love and trust, just as love and trust had been destroyed for me. My sexual recklessness – not liberation. The fact that I did not value myself. I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life. Didn’t that have a romance to it? Wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded?
No.
Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.
The lost furious vicious child living alone in the bottom bog wasn’t the creative Jeanette – she was the war casualty. She was the sacrifice. She hated me. She hated life.
There are so many fairy stories – you know them – where the hero in a hopeless situation makes a deal with a sinister creature and obtains what is needed – and it is needed – to go on with the journey. Later, when the princess is won, the dragon defeated, the treasure stored, the castle decorated, out comes the sinister creature and makes off with the new baby, or turns it into a cat, or – like the thirteenth fairy nobody invited to the party – offers a poisonous gift that kills happiness.
This misshapen murderous creature with its supernatural strength needs to be invited home – but on the right terms.
Remember the princess who kisses the frog – and yippee, there’s a prince? Well, it is necessary to embrace the slimy loathsome thing usually found in the well or in the pond, eating slugs. But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us.
This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.
And – just to say – the creature loves a suicide. Death is part of the remit.
I am talking like this because what became clear to me in my madness was that I had to start talking – to the creature.
I was lying in bed reading Dog Years, and a voice outside of my head – not in it – said, ‘Get up and start work.’
I got dressed immediately. I went over to my studio. I lit the wood-burning stove, sat down with my coat on because the place was freezing, and wrote – It began as all important things begin – by chance.
From then
on, every day, I wrote a book for children called The Battle of the Sun.
Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say.
And that is why I am sure that creativity is on the side of health. I was going to get better, and getting better began with the chance of the book.
It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up me had to tell it to her.
And one of the first things that invented itself in the new book was something called the Creature Sawn in Two.
The Creature who came into the room was cleaved in half straight down the middle, so that one half of him had one eye and one eyebrow, one nostril, one ear, one arm, one leg, one foot, and the other half had just the same.
Well, nearly just the same, because as if the Creature did not astonish enough, one half of him was male and the other half of him was female. The female half had a bosom, or certainly half a bosom.
The Creature appeared to be made of flesh, like a human being, but what human being born is cleaved in half?
The Creature’s clothes were as odd as the Creature itself. The male half wore a shirt with one sleeve, and a pair of breeches with one leg, and where the other sleeve and other leg should have been was a cut-off and sewn-up side. The Creature had a sleeveless leather jerkin over his shirt, and his jerkin had not been altered in any way, so it looked as though half of it was unfilled with body, which was true.
Beneath the breeches, or perhaps the breech, as the garment must be called, having one leg and not two, was a stocking fastened at the knee, and a stout leather shoe on the bottom of the stocking.
The Creature had no beard, but wore in his single ear a single gold earring.
His other half was just as bizarre. This lady wore half a skirt, half a chemise and half a hat on her half of their head.
At her waist, or that portion of herself which would have been a waist, dangled a great bunch of keys. She wore no earrings but her hand, more slender than the other, had a ring on each finger.
The expression on either half of the face was disagreeable.
My own vicious disagreeable creature liked me writing The Battle of the Sun. She and I started talking. She said, ‘No wonder Deb left you – why would she want to be with you? Even your own mother gave you away. You are worthless. I am the only one who knows it but you are worthless.’
I wrote this in my notebook. I decided that I was only prepared to talk to this savage lunatic for an hour a day – and while we were walking. She never wanted to go for a walk, but I made her.
Her conversational style was recriminatory (blame, fault, accusation, demands, guilt). She was part Mrs Winterson, part Caliban. Her preferred responses were non sequiturs. If I said, ‘I want to talk about the coalhole,’ she said, ‘You’d sleep with anybody, wouldn’t you?’ If I said, ‘Why were we so hopeless at school?’ she said, ‘I blame nylon knickers.’
Our conversations were like two people using phrasebooks to say things neither understands; you think you asked the way to the church, but it translates as ‘I need a safety pin for my hamster’.
It was mad – I said it was mad – but I was determined to go on with it. What made it possible was the sanity of the book in the mornings and the steadiness of gardening in the spring and summer evenings. Planting cabbages and beans is good for you. Creative work is good for you.
The afternoon madness session contained the oozing lunacy that had been everywhere. I noticed that I was no longer side-swiped and haunted. I was no longer being attacked by sweating terrors and unnamed fears.
Why didn’t I take myself and the creature to therapy? I did, but it didn’t work. The sessions felt false. I couldn’t tell the truth, and anyway, she wouldn’t come with me.
‘Get in the car . . .’ NO. ‘Get in the car . . .’ NO.
It was worse than having a toddler. She was a toddler, except that she was other ages too, because time doesn’t operate on the inside as it does on the outside. She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen.
Whatever she was, she wasn’t going to therapy. ‘It’s a wank, it’s a wank, it’s a wank!’
I slammed the door. ‘Do you want to learn to eat with a knife and fork?’
I don’t know why I said that. She was feral.
So I went to therapy and she didn’t. Pointless.
It wasn’t all pointless though, because after therapy, in Oxford, I was always so fed up that I went to Blackwell’s bookshop, and down to the Norrington Room, looking at the psychoanalysis shelves. The Norrington Room is a serious place – designed for the university, and stocking every text on brain/mind/psyche/self.
I had been reading Jung since 1995 – I bought the whole hardback set. I already had the whole hardback set of Freud, and I had always read Mind Body Spirit stuff, because if you are raised on the Bible, you don’t just walk away, whatever anybody says.
Now, I was looking for something, and I found Neville Symington, a priest turned shrink, who had a simple direct style and was not afraid of talking about the spirit and the soul – not as religious experiences but as human experiences – that we are more than body and mind – and I think we are.
Symington helped, because I was getting well enough to want a framework in which to think about what was happening to me. Previously I had been holding on to the side of the open boat that was my life, and hoping not to drown under the next wave.
Occasionally the creature appeared when I was reading, to mock me, to hurt me, but now I could ask her to leave until our meeting the following day and, miraculously, she did.
It was summer. The Battle of the Sun was nearly finished. I was lonely and alone, but I was calm, and I was saner than I have ever been, insomuch as I knew there was a part of me that was in madness.
Symington talks about how the mad part will try to wreck the mind. That had been my experience. Now I could contain it.
A few months later we were having our afternoon walk when I said something about how nobody had cuddled us when we were little. I said ‘us’, not ‘you’. She held my hand. She had never done that before; mainly she walked behind shooting her sentences.
We both sat down and cried.
I said, ‘We will learn how to love.’
13
This Appointment Takes Place In The Past
Dear Madam
With reference to your request regarding the above numbered file.
The District Judge has considered your application and made the following directions:
1. The copy birth certificate is not a copy of the entry in the Adopted Children Register.
2. Part 8B of the Practice Direction Section 1.3 requires the Application and Evidence of Identity ‘must be taken to the Court’, the Court makes a note on the application form. The original evidence of identity must be produced (not a copy).
3. After that a redacted copy of the relevant documents, specified in the practice direction, can be forwarded. The file is not open to inspection as a whole and cannot be sent to the Home Office.
Unfortunately it will therefore be necessary for you to attend personally at the Court and produce original evidence of identity together with a certified copy of the entry in the Register of Adopted Children which relates to you.
It was one of many exchanges with the court holding my adoption file.
I am an intelligent woman with plenty of resources but the adoption process skittled me. I did not know what was meant by ‘the entry in the Register of Adopted Children’ – and it took four emails to find out. I did know what ‘redacted’ meant, but I wondered if other people did (can’t you just say ‘the edited version’?), and I wondered what such a cold and formal letter does to people in the heated and upsetting process of looking for your other life.
As far as the court is concerned, adoption records are nothing more than an archive with legal implications, a
nd are attended to in the dead and distant language of the law, obeying protocol that is difficult to follow. That isn’t a good reason to engage a lawyer; it is a good reason to make the process simpler and less insensitive.
I wanted to stop. I wasn’t so sure I had wanted to start.
I was lucky though, because I had fallen in love with Susie Orbach. We were quite new but she wanted me to feel that I was in a safe place with somebody who would give me support and, very simply, be there for me. ‘We are together,’ she said. ‘That means you’ve got rights.’ She laughed her big bold laugh.
I met Susie some time after I failed to interview her for her book Bodies – about the impact of advertising and pornography on women’s bodies and self-image.
My father had died, and all work had to be put aside. Eventually I wrote to Susie, just to say how much I had enjoyed her book – all her books. I had read Fat Is A Feminist Issue when I was nineteen. I had been rereading her Impossibility of Sex, and thinking I would try and write an answer to it – in the broadest sense – called The Possibility of Love.
I am always wondering about love.
Susie invited me to supper. She had been parted from her husband for about two years, after a thirty-four-year marriage. I had been by myself since Deborah and the breakdown. I was beginning to like being by myself again. But the big things in life are never planned. We had a very good evening; food, conversation, the sun setting behind her beech tree. I thought, ‘She looks sad.’ I wonder if I did too?