by Poorna Bell
I’m not a person who gets emotional at work, and I’m known for being able to handle large amounts of stress. If things were so bad that I was unable to control my emotions, then it meant I was in distress. Rather than respond to that, what I got was the equivalent of ‘man up and get on with it’.
I thought: Holy shit, this is what guys are faced with all the time?
Unsurprisingly, this had the opposite effect he intended. I felt like I couldn’t or shouldn’t express my emotions, yet at the same time they had reached the boiling point of lava.
Rather than erupt inside the office, I walked around the block to cool off, unable to stop crying. I had written about the need for people to be kind to themselves, to help others who were struggling. And after all that, this is what I was met with?
Yes, I was glad that, after years of being in debt because of Rob and my own mistakes, I was finally earning a decent wage that meant I could spend money on things. But if I was putting myself under such mental pressure simply to get money – what was it all for?
‘Pri, I don’t know what is wrong with me, but I just can’t do this anymore. Normally I can just brush it off and get on with it, but I just can’t . . .’
‘Poo,’ she said gently, ‘sometimes bringing in big bucks is not going to make you happy. And if it isn’t making you happy, then there’s nothing wrong with looking at what else you could be doing.’
As she soothed me and talked me through what was wrong, I saw that I was next to the cancer centre.
I saw a young lady at the reception desk. Is she a patient or visiting someone? I saw a family standing outside talking in hushed tones. Was their world ending or beginning?
My office was probably 100 metres from where I was standing. While I was upset over problems no one – including me – would remember in a year’s time, there was a battle being waged for life here. For the right to spend it with loved ones, to make amends.
For time, for possibilities.
I had both, yet here I was bawling my eyes out. I was overloaded, overworked. I didn’t know where my life was going, and I didn’t have the space or, more importantly, the energy to think about it. So when would I think about it? When it was no longer a possibility? When I no longer had time?
Of all people, I should have known better than that.
The realisation that change needed to happen didn’t come via a dun-dun-duuuuuun moment outside the cancer centre. It had been happening gradually – the pieces of my life pooling together like mercury to spell out a message that I could either heed or ignore.
I knew what happened to people who ignored it – it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t kind and it often took months to recover from a breakdown. I knew, by virtue of me having survived two years of Rob’s death, that there was a part of me dedicated to protecting me, to looking after me.
She had set my alarm every morning, moved my legs as they ran along the riverbank. She put food in my mouth and willed the blood to flow around my heart.
She had done all of this to get me to the point so that, when the time came, I could make the right decision about my life. To actually choose it, with my whole being, not just survive like a piece of flotsam on the tip of a wave.
I had to heed her.
4
SAND IN THE CRACK OF YOUR EMOTIONAL SWIMSUIT
Escape is not necessarily a bad thing: plenty of us do it by taking holidays to remove ourselves from the humdrum of commuting to work and figuring out dinner.
We wash city filth off in bright-blue swimming pools. We ask the hot sun to burn through our irritations. We unfurl our legs from beneath desks to stride across mountains and sand dunes. But as a long-term solution to an unhappy life, holidays are like trying to sustain yourself solely on air.
You go on holiday to escape being unhappy; you aren’t dealing with the thing making you unhappy while on holiday; you return, and are still unhappy, so you book another holiday.
It doesn’t help even when you are aware you are escaping your life, as I did when I sometimes took myself off, alone, for a few days to give myself a break from Rob. Although I was terrified of leaving him by himself, I couldn’t watch him 24/7, and I needed some time to myself or I’d end up going mad.
One of my favourite places I kept returning to was the Cotswolds. The first time I went back there after Rob told me about his addiction was in January, the off-season.
As I drove down a narrow country lane, the hedgerows strung with snow, I entered a world quiet and hushed. Once I settled into my hotel, I prepared a flask filled with hot tea. I pulled on my walking boots, bundled myself into fleece and wool, and headed out across the fields.
I wasn’t thinking of Rob, I wasn’t thinking of my friends and family. Here, I didn’t have to think. I heard the snap of twigs, felt the embrace of ice and mud underneath my feet, brushed against sturdy green leaves surviving winter, here despite it all.
Overhead, freckles of snow fell softly across the field and I felt my breath, hot and alive, meet the cold winter air as it slowly drew into my body.
It was important because, as short as these trips were, they reminded me a little bit of who I was, and what I liked doing.
It was a respite from wondering if Rob would get out of bed that day, or if I’d have to do the supermarket shop. But it was escape. A temporary reprieve. Being away wouldn’t solve my problems or show me a path to happiness.
In the first twelve months after Rob passed away, I spent most of the time wishing I could escape. I wanted to be anywhere but London. I couldn’t bear being there.
It changed from week to week; I was going to work in Singapore, Australia, India, anywhere that wasn’t fucking London, somewhere I didn’t have to scoop up the remnants of my heart every time it shattered because it came across something Rob-like. This initial urge to escape had no form, no proper thought. I just wanted to escape my sadness, do something that would make me feel different, less sad.
As I ping-ponged from one idea to the next, people were sceptical. Looking back, I can see why they didn’t really encourage it, because after a soul-shaking loss, you shouldn’t really undertake big decisions because a part of your brain loses its ability to think and feel and understand in a multifaceted way.
But in those first twelve months, I was so angry that no one supported my decision to leave to become a yoga teacher or a beach bum. I stopped talking about it and, eventually, I stopped thinking about it. But a full twelve months later – two years after Rob passed away – I found myself in my therapist Isobel’s office shortly after my meltdown on the phone to Priya near the cancer centre.
I was telling her about how angry I felt, just all the time, and how I didn’t see how things were going to change. I can’t recall the exact incident that sparked it, but I must have been telling her that whenever I seemed to want to make a change in my life, people always had opinions on it.
‘Okay, so let’s look at why this is making you angry,’ she said.
I liked Isobel, and I liked the light and airy space in which we talked.
Every so often the inside scenery would change – a pot of lavender here, some linen cushions there. I liked her honesty, the fact that she didn’t mind me saying ‘fuck’ about a thousand times in the space of an hour and, crucially, she didn’t irritate me. When she asked that question, I didn’t feel the need to defend myself as I did with friends or family.
I was more or less inured to dumb comments around losing Rob, but that week there had been a slew of exceptional donkey-like statements from a number of people, from my hairdresser assuring me I’d meet someone new to someone at a breakfast meeting asking me exactly how Rob had killed himself. Underpinning all of this was about three baby announcements and one engagement.
Finally I said, ‘I think it’s two things. None of them know what this really feels like. I both envy them that, and resent them for it.
‘And by trying to give me advice, or saying that I need to let go, it implies that I’m not do
ing it right. Or, worse, that there’s a solution. That there’s a better way to how someone should grieve.
‘I know they care. I know they love me – that all this is is love. But I also know that everyone else gets to go back to their lives. They get to plan their futures. And my future has just . . . stopped.’
Isobel looked at me and I knew this dance by now. She knew I had more to say and waited patiently before replying.
I sighed until I found the right emotions and words. ‘I feel like an awful person because I’m happy for them. I’m happy for their babies and the love in their lives, honestly. But I also feel like if I’m not presenting this front that everything is fine, I’m not doing my grief right.
‘And honestly? I don’t know what the right thing is to do. I don’t know if I want kids, or if I have it in me to get into another long-term relationship. I feel that everything I do is framed in light of Rob’s death.
‘Like if I wanted to go to New Zealand for a few months, everyone would assume I’m “not moving on”. People forget that I have a whole other family there who I don’t see very often. Where Rob actually is spoken about naturally rather than me always having to bring him up in conversation like I do here. And, Isobel . . . I’m fucking tired of it. I don’t know what I’m expected to do. I feel like I can’t win either way.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘do you want to go to New Zealand?’
I said thoughtfully, ‘I don’t know. I feel so peaceful there, like I don’t have to pretend. Do I want to go because I feel closer to Rob there? Maybe. But I don’t want it to be this place I avoid just because that’s where Rob died. I love it in spite of being the place he died.’
‘Is it a possibility that you can go?’ she asked.
I thought of the projects I was working on, the book coming out, uprooting my life, packing up my flat, the amount of energy it would require – the weight of everyone’s opinions. I placed my head in my hands and started crying.
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied, snuffling into my fingers. ‘I don’t see how.’
New Zealand had been on my mind a lot, and not just because of its association with Rob. There was something much bigger than Rob there, in terms of my own relationship with the landscape and how it made me feel.
It began after the first and only time Rob and I went to New Zealand together. We were in a perfectly ordinary part of Auckland – Orewa, along the Hibiscus Coast, where Prue and David live.
Orewa has a long stretch of beach, a wide bar of sand that sits like a lazy crescent moon when the tide is tugged back. As Rob and I walked along the beach holding hands, walking along the edge lined with long shaggy grasses, I felt the blue sky around me, the sound of the sea gathering power as it answered the call of the land to return to high tide.
The imprint of that memory, when air, sky, land and water met, would act as a beacon for whenever I needed peace. I would remember it in meetings, or when I felt the city was becoming too argumentative to be in. I’d hold it close whenever I felt trapped and unhappy or filled with noise.
It was the first time I experienced a place that gave me such a sense of quiet and calm. Long after I returned to England, I carried that feeling inside me and pressed it to my heart.
‘Sometimes,’ my brother-in-law John said, when we were both looking out to the ocean a few days after Rob’s funeral, ‘I think all I need to feel peaceful is to watch the light on the sea. I know it sounds silly but . . .’
It didn’t sound silly; I knew what he meant.
After Rob died, I went back to New Zealand nine months later as part of my healing process around his passing. I went to a number of places, and in each one I felt the frequency that truly peaceful places emit, their sound created in the lapping of waves and the language of birds.
Time moves differently in these places; it slows, becomes elastic, and it winds itself around you until all the urgency in you is cried out.
When my dad looked at the pictures I took while I was there, he used the nickname he had for me since I was a baby and said, ‘You look very peaceful here, Putta.’
I needed to restore that sense of peace, but I didn’t know where to begin.
‘Okay, let’s think about this a different way,’ said Isobel, after I had gone through the better part of her Kleenex Mansize. ‘If you just kept going, and everything in your life is exactly the same in six months or a year’s time, how would you feel?’
I knew what it was like to be pinned at the bottom of the ocean by sadness so heavy all I could do was blow bubbles of air and hope for the day when it lifted. I knew that nothing I could do would make it happen faster; it had to happen in its own time.
But now, I had choices. Even if I didn’t feel like I had choices, I did.
The prospect of staying in my job, doing the same thing day in, day out, watching other people’s lives move forward while I was still prodding the edges of my heart figuring out whether it could withstand the rough currents of dating, going to dinners, watching Netflix, getting drunk, going to Christmas parties and summer parties – it was as if I was back at the bottom of the ocean, except this time, someone was holding my nose. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
‘I couldn’t bear it,’ I whispered.
‘So what do you want to do?’
I knew the answer was travel but the words stuck in my throat because it sounded flighty, frivolous – a cliché. Yet I knew enough by now to know that this wasn’t about escaping my sadness. This wasn’t about going to live in an ashram in India or a hermit shack in New Zealand to jumpstart a newfound appreciation for my life.
Plus, I am too Indian for that. Although I’m British born and bred, I visit India every year. I even lived there for five years as a kid when my parents decided we were going to relocate there.
‘No fishfingers?’ I said before we got on the flight, clutching my BA kiddies’ flight pack filled with crayons and colouring paper.
‘No fishfingers,’ my mum replied. ‘But you will have a renewed sense of cultural identity and that will be just as tasty, won’t it?’
My seven-year-old self strongly disagreed when she realised it was going to be curry for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and the bright hope of fishfingers was replaced with a very quick understanding of how disposable life was.
While I was carted around like Little Lord Fauntleroy in Mum’s little red Maruti car, children with hair the colour of straw clambered over the waste in huge open dustbins. Being wasteful or picky about dinner wasn’t an option when food was the pressing concern for so many. Conversely, I also learned how, despite having nothing, a lot of people still celebrated life and got on with it.
I didn’t use their poverty to make me feel better about my life, I just had a better understanding than my English mates, when we came back for secondary school, that life is complicated. It ebbs and flows; there is joy and sadness, food and hunger, and if you are in a position to do so, you help those who need help.
For as long as I can remember, after family parties or when we couldn’t eat all our food in one go, it would be parcelled up and given to the maid or the night watchman. Nothing was wasted; everything moved and turned in a circle. I’m still horrified at the amount of food I see people tipping into their bins or those who think nothing of over-ordering food at restaurants and seeing it go to waste.
So I didn’t need spiritual awakening. I didn’t need travel to save me or show me how lucky I was. This was about me taking my life in my own hands and willing this new version of myself into existence.
‘I need to leave,’ I said to Isobel, but because my nose was so bunged up from crying it sounded like ‘I neeb to lieb.’
Isobel nodded. ‘Good,’ she said.
I looked at the damp tissue in my hands. How many tissues had I filled with my sadness in the past year? Enough, I thought, enough. I could live with crying because I missed Rob. I couldn’t live with crying because I was too much of a coward to take control of my life.
‘I’m not . . . I’m not leaving because it’s too hard to handle or I’m escaping,’ I say, more than anything, because I need to believe it. ‘I’m leaving because, for the first time in my life, I am actively choosing to think about what I want from my life, and I can’t do that here.’
She murmured her understanding. I eventually lifted my head to finally look her in the eyes.
‘I’m like that apartment in a building after a massive earthquake. Everyone else’s apartments are fine, but mine is the only one shaken to smithereens.
‘I’m trying to rebuild, but I know it will never be the same. And that’s okay; it doesn’t need to be. It survived an earthquake; it’s still standing. So somehow, I have to make peace with the fact that it will never look the same as all the others, but that’s what makes it stronger.’
Here’s the less glossy truth about trying to make a decision when you are in the middle of a mental crisis: it is fucking hard.
Not all breakdowns happen instantly, such as not being able to physically move from the top level of a bus or losing the ability to speak. Some happen slowly because you trick yourself into thinking you’re fine. Every time your body and mind send up a distress signal, you tell yourself it’s just a drill; it’s not the real thing.
By the time you’ve reached a stage of snot, tissues, losing your shit in Starbucks because they’ve yet again spelled your name ‘Prawna’, you are at a difficult point. You are in an advanced state of erosion and pieces of you have worn away without you even noticing.
The reason it’s hard is because your ability to reason and make decisions is shot to shit. You need a resolution, quickly, or more and more of you is going to crumble off.
Even if your ability to make a decision isn’t corroded, it’s still hard to overcome the fear of it being a terrible decision. Around this time, I started getting into podcasts, and one of the first I listened to was called The Unmistakable Creative, which featured a guest named Dr Srini Pillay, assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.