Girdling
This year has felt like a time of new things - something to do with small changes to energy levels and something to do with the lengthening days and the sun and its warmth. I have felt as though I am emerging from a hole in the ground at times, not unusual with the starting of spring, but particularly felt with an easing of prolonged periods of more chronicity of chronic illness. I step out of the house blinking wide eyed at the sun, struck again that the world is still there and has happily continued without me. I have this year also experienced something I have described as a kind of ‘stitching myself back into my world’.
I mentioned at the start of the month I had been out, and in doing so bumped into several familiar people, a person of note, a past love. I had not seen him or anyone else I’d bumped into in many years, a lifetime ago. I was curious of the process of remembering, the viscerality of it, its physicality of presence, and the peculiar details that return to mind and body in those moments. The unravelling of memories last much longer than the encounter they’re triggered by. It seems people and places can be holders of memory for me when I’m not able to keep them safe. Things thought long forgotten, neatly or not they’re bundled into parcels and stacked on shelves, doors slammed shut.
I met with him again, my love from the past, planned this time - only fully grasping a kind of nervousness about it shortly before leaving the house, not fully appreciating just how long it had been, nor what had happened in the meantime. It was only in waking the following day that I returned to my thoughts of ‘stitching’ and noticed its reparative value (as well as its need to puncture). I am actively stitching myself back into my life, retracing memories and the people connected with them. I am not trying to fit into the same shape I held before, I cannot do that, do not want to. I cannot patch myself up to pretend I am the same or could be the same. It feels a more uneven hand-sewn, wobbly attempt to reconcile the me I now find myself with and the me I was before I got sick.
Meeting this love, bumped into by chance, I remember a little more of that time ‘before’, I am reminded of a little more of me through their memories. I cannot fit myself into that person again but can sit alongside her. I am still wrestling with this new found attempt at hand sewing my past with my present. I am not sure it is always such a conscious process. I am also recognising I have in the interim been making a whole new life (in living now with chronic illness). Finding ways in which these two, three, more, things fit together is incomplete and there are many I am happy to leave where they are, or happy enough, and others I am borrowing aspects of to add to this new patchwork quilt of a life.
I am stitching in recognition of my past, not in hiding from or obscuring it, which might at times have been tempting. A part of that is recognising what has been before, and is now, the people I have been and the people who I have shared my life with. I’m not changing what was, nor bringing my past back to the foreground, there are some things and people I am happy to leave where they are, are necessary to leave where they are, although they are not forgotten. For some, there are happy accidents, of bumping into and ricocheting each other into our shared past, of remembering not as a solo act but as a part of someone else’s life too, people I am happy to keep a connection with, who are a part of who I am now, and who offer me portals into another place and time.
My stitching is important, as while I had felt as though I had fallen out of my life when I first became sick more than a decade ago, a great chasm opening up, the reminder that I had continued to exist in other people’s is an affirming one.
I went to the woods after returning home from my meeting in the countryside, with the church and the love, inhaling the scent of the garlic but disappointed to see the small white flowers starting to turn, the leaves yellowing. A reminder, again, of the circularity of life and death, a reminder I shall see them again next year, and that I will forget about them again before that. In seeing the fading of the garlic my attention was also drawn more clearly to the trees, the constant backdrop to the garlic, and to something I notice periodically. My attention was drawn to the metal wire that has cut into some of the trees along the path - the wire that has cut in and the trees that have grown around. When made deliberately, it’s a horticultural practice called ‘girdling’ or ‘ring barking’, which strips the bark around the tree to disrupt the movement of water and nutrients from its roots to its leaves. It can be done in fruit trees to reduce unwanted vegetation, promoting fruit yield, but if done repeatedly can harm the health and longevity of the tree. It has made me think of my own wounds, and the tender touch of revisiting them in a small cafe overlooking a church in the countryside. In what felt like a tender touch to those soft parts, crumpled with hypermobility and poor quality collagen, scar tissue of cigarette paper. These trees have grown around their cuts, some scars on the bark more visible than others, some with moss neatly covering them, but evidence of the history, the wire now forever embedded in the trunk of the tree, their internal system altered and adjusted. The trees continue to thrive and grow, but the wire is now a part of their story and their ongoingness.
Thanks for reading, have a lovely weekend!
If you are looking for the links to the recent Moving Mountains readings for ME Awareness Week with ME Action UK, you can watch them all on this link.
If you would like to read the piece I mentioned last time that I had written on my PhD research for the Manchester Metropolitan University Doctoral Research Blog, you can now read Beachcombing the Entangled Shoreline on this link. This is a piece of writing reflecting on the invitation to write also for Mental Health Awareness Week, with the theme of ‘Movement’ (a provocative brief!).
The next Moving Mountains events are with the Festival of Nature and The Zebra Club with Jeannie Di Bon.
Moving Mountains: Writing Nature Through Illness and Disability is available from your favourite bookshop, local library and online.