In Search of Silence

by Poorna Bell

  By coincidence, he was talking about change, and said that the brain is actually wired for change but resists it.

  ‘The moment you say, “Hey, I want to go to the gym,” your brain is pretty onboard with it because it’s an idea,’ he says.

  ‘Then when you actually make that effort to go, the moment your brain knows you are committed to an action, it actually starts creating brain chaos, which we call cognitive dissonance. And when there is cognitive dissonance, the brain goes back to what it was doing previously, so that it doesn’t have to deal with that chaos.’

  I had decided to quit my job and leave, but my brain was certainly in chaos, and it took daily reminding that I was doing a good thing despite the screeching uncertainty ahead. What didn’t help was that some people said, ‘Wait, you’re leaving your amazing job and your life in London to go travelling? What if you don’t find a job when you get back? Are you going to be okay financially?’

  In that same podcast, Dr Pillay talks about the ‘switch cost’, so, basically, this is the psychological price you pay for changing your life. A lot of people go ‘nah’ and don’t make the change because the cost is often uncomfortable; you feel anxious, less certain, fearful. It’s the equivalent of wearing a wet swimsuit with sand lodged up your crack. You wriggle and wriggle but you can’t get comfortable.

  Even if you manage to overcome this, other people find a way to project their own concerns onto you.

  Eventually, I succumbed to self-doubt. What if I didn’t get a job when I returned? What if I ended up back in the debt I had worked so hard to get out of? What if I was just putting my life off indefinitely?

  Someone who writes a lot about the path to mental wellbeing and unravelling some of the big questions we have about our lives, from loneliness to happiness, is Oliver Burkeman, who writes the weekly ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’ for The Guardian. Interestingly, he’s also published a book called The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

  I asked him about his advice for people making life changes when they were really afraid of change.

  He told me that courage or bravery was not to do with not feeling afraid. The difference, he said, was ‘acting, while feeling afraid’.

  Leaning into that initial fear was part of the magic of making a life change. So, in effect, although your brain senses fear and takes that as a sign to avoid change, changing your perspective to expect to feel fearful – and accepting that it’s perfectly normal to feel like that – is what will help you carry it through.

  Plus, just understanding that not every change you make is for ever. Life is rarely a dramatic novel where one small action causes a tragic spiral of events – most things can be course-corrected and tweaked.

  The fear that was being generated inside me was feeding off everything in the past: the times I’d found it difficult to secure freelance work, the fear of being broke again. This, despite clear evidence to the contrary that if I’d managed to do it once, I could do it again.

  Despite the doubts, once I decided to leave, it was almost theatrical how much better I felt. The things that had previously seemed impossible were actually easy to solve. While abroad, I could work freelance when I needed money, rent out my flat and do it on a short lease in case I wanted to come back early.

  I spoke to people who seemed like they might understand. We expect all the same things from our friends when, actually, we are friends with different people because they speak to and resonate with a particular aspect of ourselves. Trying to get validation from people like my friend Aman or those who would never dream of risking their livelihood to go surfing in India was wasted breath.

  Priya was one of my favourite people to talk to, because she knew what it felt like to have to rebuild your life, having gone through a divorce. And because, being my sister, she didn’t indulge in polite fripperies.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ she said, ‘I think it will be good for you, and I think you need to do it.’

  I also talked to my old colleague and friend Craig, who had announced on Facebook that he and his wife and two young kids were going to leave England for an open-ended trip to Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, which was a minimum five months away. They also kept their circumstances flexible in case they didn’t want to come back.

  I pinged him on Facebook Messenger to ask how he planned it. ‘The aim was pretty clear,’ he wrote back, ‘which was a compelling adventure with family, exploring new places. But we also wanted to create a situation where we could decide new career paths and answer two straight questions: Where should we live? What should we do?

  ‘From decision to departure was six weeks, which didn’t give people much time to react. But there was a mixed reaction from family and friends – family I was travelling towards were delighted, those we left behind were saddened but supportive. Friends were a mixture of supportive tinged with jealousy, with – I expect – elements of scepticism, i.e. “You’ll be back”. All are perfectly understandable responses.’

  I asked him what he and his wife were hoping to achieve by it, and he said, ‘We’re deciding on a new career path and a new home for our family, and I think whatever the outcome it won’t have been brought about by the opinions of those around us.’

  I experienced something similar, although admittedly I didn’t have to factor in three other people. After the initial shock for people wore off, and they realised I’d already made the decision, we started having proper conversations about it.

  The more this happened, the more I realised that in some way or another, everyone is wondering the same thing about their own lives.

  Is my life what I chose consciously and independently of anyone, or what I chose unconsciously based on the choices of other people?

  It doesn’t matter if you’re straight, gay, trans, bisexual, black, white, brown, married, not married, divorced, open relationship, with kids, trying for kids, can’t have kids, don’t want kids – fundamentally, we all want a fulfilling, peaceful and happy life, with our loved ones safe and sound.

  I was talking to my friend Peg about it while we were having lunch at a horribly expensive Mexican small plates place. (What is it with the urban obsession about small plates? I feel like I’m spending twice as much to eat half as much.)

  ‘I totally get it,’ she said. ‘There is this whole expectation and pressure to be a certain way or aim for a certain thing, and by the end of it, you don’t even know if that’s what you want.’

  Peg is divorced and is bringing up her eight-year-old daughter alone, while her ex-partner is remarrying.

  ‘I mean Mark is remarrying, and good for him. We were miserable. But there are all these big eyes looking at me with pity, you know, like I’m the one worse off because I haven’t met someone yet and I’m not settling down.’

  Peg, like a lot of other people who go through divorce, was emotionally walloped by it. On the one hand, she was relieved to no longer be in a relationship with someone she didn’t want to be with. On the other hand, nothing prepared her for the awful sense of loss, and the grief around her marriage.

  As well as mourning her future with this person she thought she would be spending her life with, she then had to deal with navigating her way through her old social circles while grappling with the newer parts of herself.

  ‘Right,’ I replied, ‘and the thing is, we’re wise to this shit. We’ve experienced marriage. It’s not the easy, quick fix to a happy life. So why does everyone keep pushing it as if it is?’

  One of our mutual friends, Jess, joined us about an hour later and asked us what we were talking about. We filled her in, hesitantly at first. Jess has an enviable life in West Hampstead with one beautiful little girl, a recently refurbished house and a gorgeous husband.

  ‘Look,’ she said, taking a glug of her wine, ‘I know I’m lucky. I know I have the husband and the kid, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Married people do not tell you their problems. So you think
they don’t go through it, or that it’s more idyllic. And trust me, I love being married, it’s rewarding when it works. I get to go through the best and the challenging times with my best friend at my side. But I also know it doesn’t stop there. That there isn’t still stuff that . . . doesn’t work out the way you want it to.’

  Peg and I listened but didn’t say anything. We both knew Jess and her husband had been trying for a second baby and hadn’t been successful. Jess had been having a rough time of it with two miscarriages.

  ‘People have been asking me if we’re going to give Anna a sister or a brother. You know, because it’s as easy as buying one from a supermarket.’

  If you looked at Jess’s Facebook or Instagram account, you wouldn’t be privy to any of this. You’d see a perfect life, a perfect home, a perfect marriage.

  There’s an old saying: don’t compare your insides to someone else’s outsides. While social media fuels a lot of the yard-measuring of perfection at a much more frequent and intense pace, it always existed.

  It reminded me of a column Oliver wrote around the concept of loneliness, basically saying that the problem with repeatedly witnessing people’s social events is that you usually do it when you’re in solitude. Therefore, it underpins this belief that you are on your own, while the rest of the world has their shit sorted.

  When I spoke to him to ask about change being so scary, and how a big part of that was driven by the concern that I’d be left behind in my life and career if I just absconded for eight months, he reminded me of a really important thing.

  ‘We are so accustomed to comparing ourselves to other people and not taking into account that we have unique access to one mind full of emotions and thought, and no access to everyone else’s emotions and thoughts,’ he said.

  ‘In a way, in an existential sense, you are inevitably on your own in that respect no matter how great a network you are in. There’s something about being you that can never be communicated completely to anybody else.’

  Yet, despite this, despite being the only person to fully comprehend our own worries and wants, we allow other people’s emotions and opinions to govern what we should be doing, how we should be thinking.

  Caught between the external current and our internal flow, no wonder so many of us feel lonely within our own lives.

  Around two weeks after seeing Isobel, on New Year’s Eve, I was starting to make dinner for myself in my flat, alone. Earlier that day, I’d gone to my favourite cheese place, selected the juiciest beef fillet from the butcher and picked out an incredible Barolo.

  ‘You’re spending it alone??’ people said.

  ‘Yep,’ I replied.

  When I was a teenager, I loved the promise of New Year’s Eve – it was an excuse to pilfer the reject booze from our parents’ liquor cabinets.

  But quickly, I learned the truth: that the idea of it was always more beautiful than the reality.

  My first unsupervised one was a dodgy house party in my hometown of Dartford – a place once known for its leper colonies and smallpox hospitals, now for pound shops and as the birthplace of Mick Jagger. I wondered why people were putting talcum powder on a mirror. (Reader, it was not talcum powder.)

  I remember starting the evening feeling thrilled at the prospect of glamour and freedom, and finished it feeling let down, cradling a box of chicken nuggets.

  The last New Year’s Eve I spent outside my own home was with Rob before I knew he had an addiction problem, with a group of friends in a pub. It was in a sad, grubby part of Farringdon; we ended up getting kicked out ten minutes before midnight because someone had started a pub brawl.

  ‘Never again,’ I said to Rob as we sat in the taxi on the way home.

  When he entered into recovery the next year, we stayed in out of necessity and because we didn’t want to pretend to others that the following year was going to be The Best Year Ever. We knew that though we loved each other, though we hoped it would be a better year, it would still be a tough year until we felt more stable. Those last two years we shared were quiet, beautiful and we ended each one with a kiss.

  For my first New Year’s Eve living alone, I realised I didn’t want to spend it with anyone else. I wanted to cook some great food, watch a film. I wanted to wake up the next morning and go for a run in the crisp first hours of the New Year.

  I didn’t want the forced sense of celebration that comes relentlessly, the too-bright fun of people drinking and raised voices. For me, this night was about taking in all of the wonderful things I had done, and, above all, it was a time for me to remember my life and all that had happened.

  At midnight, I lit a candle. I opened the window and breathed in the winter air.

  I said hello to Rob, told him I loved him. I said I would always love him and that I hoped he knew I was approaching something like happiness. That he wasn’t to worry. That I wished him peace and love, always.

  The softness of that night rolled through the window, the quietness came down upon the room and wrapped me in all of the emotions that painted Rob in my mind. In that moment, I felt how sharp the balance was between my existence continuing or winking out. I knew, then, that in deciding to leave, I had made a choice for my survival. To move forward, not escape.

  Then, in the distance, the stillness was pierced with the sizzle and crack of fireworks, and just like that the flame flickered, and the real world poured in with the smell of frost and gunpowder on its breath.

  The next morning, after my New Year’s Day run, while sipping tea in my living room, I thought about where to go on this journey I had now set in motion. I closed my eyes and felt the perfect balance between the past, present and future.

  I thought of all the places I had ever loved, where my mind felt free, and my edges were softer.

  One of these places was Kerala, in South India, where the landscape is woven in coconut trees, where waters of the Arabian Sea mix with the Laccadive Sea that borders Sri Lanka.

  Along the many waterways that dissect the south of the state, the backyards of houses dip straight into the surrounding lakes, depositing children having a wash, women thudding clothes against well-worn stones, and families trooping up and down sedately in canoes.

  My favourite thing to do when I am there is kayaking. The year Rob died, my parents and I went there to spend time with each other, and to escape the first Christmas of him not being there.

  Kerala shares similarities with the neighbouring state my family comes from: Karnataka.

  Our family kitchen tables are strewn with tamarind, fish and coconut. Our bodies remember a time when our ancestors slipped in and out of the water. Our skins range from almond to the most beautiful indigo blue.

  After I waved Mum and Dad goodbye back at the hotel, their eyes heavy with concern about whether I would be okay, I hopped into a taxi to take me to the water’s edge.

  And as I eased into my kayak, it created tiny ripples that shifted underneath the carpet of water hyacinth that clogged parts of the waterways with thick, fat leaves and purple petals. I liked to kayak in the early morning, to try to beat the sun before it clambered up to its highest point, searing every open inch of earth.

  The first few strokes of the paddle warmed me up, slicing into the water, until its rhythmic, familiar sound became a mantra. Swish, splash, swish, splash.

  The first people I came across were always fishermen, waiting for a small catch to sell to market vendors who positioned themselves near a string of houses for a quick and easy sale.

  The fish unique to Kerala is the karimeen or pearl spot fish, flat like a pancake with a black spot on its side. My stomach remembers it covered in turmeric and chilli, fried in the comfort of someone’s home, served alongside hot fluffy rice and soupy dal.

  In that newborn, pink light, the lake spread out like a clear mirror, its slow, deep heart thudding against the banks. Kingfishers zipped along the waterway, while snake birds rearranged themselves into their distinctive shape to dry off their wings.


  When I got far enough that I couldn’t see the riverbank, everything started to shuck away – the fishermen, the little children in neatly oiled plaits heading to school, the inquisitive housewives and retired old men wondering what an Indian woman was doing paddling into the heart of nowhere.

  ‘Isn’t she worried about getting dark in this hot sun?’ I could hear them think.

  When the British packed up and left, they unknowingly planted in the bosom of the Indian subcontinent a diseased obsession with fair skin. Economic emancipation from the colonial days may be underway, but, psychologically, it will take a lot longer because, to most South Asians, fair still equals beautiful, dark equals bad. We can’t do anything about the amount of melanin we are born with, but boy do some of us try.

  I didn’t care about my skin getting darker in the sun, never have done. There’s no way a fiery ball of gas or weird colour prejudice is going to limit or dictate what I can or can’t do.

  I remember the silence deepening the further I moved away from people, and when I hit the centre of it, I lifted up my paddle. I heard the last few drops of water hit the surface of the lake, the rustle of coconut trees shaking their leaves out like a bunched-up skirt.

  Turning this memory over in my mind on that New Year’s Day in my living room, I wondered what it would be like to do this in Karnataka, to feel the bones of my ancestors rising up through my feet.

  Because, in that place of quiet in Kerala, I wasn’t thinking of my family or my friends. I wasn’t even thinking of Rob or future loves waiting in the wings. As I sat on my sofa, I recalled that moment for what it was, and how it smelled like sun and river water and emptiness.

  Once I handed in my notice, the pace began to quicken. I had to tell my then book editor Nicki about my plans to leave and gave her my reasons. ‘Why don’t you write about it?’ she said.

  I squirmed: wasn’t it a bit Eat, Pray, Love? I didn’t have a vendetta against the author, Elizabeth Gilbert, but her book – while it helped a lot of women – turned the travelling-to-find-yourself book into something of a cliché.