The Art of Precious Scars
footnotes on a long and steep year
I watched an old video of myself yesterday, telling my life-story at a Radical Honesty workshop in 2015.
I’ve never particularly enjoyed watching myself on film, although I’ve managed to desensitise myself a little to it over the years, so now at least I don’t feel the strange kind of fascinated dysphoria I used to. Instead I felt a little sad, a little sorry, for the me who was so obviously conscious of her performance, still so self-protective and cynical.
Twenty twenty-one has been a hard year for me. Unlike twenty-twenty, there were no surprising or radical shifts in my home life, no long periods of sun-filled calm or sweet strangeness that helped keep me awake and present. Instead it’s seemed like a long painful struggle with so much stuff that I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d dealt with, and patterns I’d flattered myself that I’d long since evolved from.
Part of the way this happened was to do with how the year started. One of my very closest friends — R — someone who has been a constant loving and supportive presence and creative collaborator for almost thirty years, received a diagnosis of terminal cancer in March. I was with him when he came home from the doctor’s, before he told his sons, before he’d even fully processed any of it. We made endless cups of tea and talked for hours as we always do, about movies, books, people, our music, and then I went to pick up my daughter from school and I went home.
It took days for it to really hit me, but when it finally did it felt like my whole world was shifting on its axis. I have a tiny group of humans outside of my family that I think of as ‘my people’, and just six I think of as being irreplaceable cross-beams in my support structure. R was — and will always be — in the top two on that list, and a future in which he is missing feels like too strange and lonely a place to contemplate.
The second difficult thing that happened was that — for the first time since my daughter has been alive — I became the sole provider for our family.
I retrained as therapist in 2014 after fifteen pretty successful years in graphic design, and ever since going into private practice, I’ve been struggling to achieve anywhere close to the same level of income I had back then. I’ve always been fortunate in having a co-parent for whom financial stability was a priority, allowing me the time and flexibility to retrain when I did.
So it only seemed fair that when things finally started evening out for me this year, I offered him the same opportunity.
I’m not sure anything could have prepared me though for all the ways this has effected the dynamic of our relationship, or how I now view us both in terms of my daughter’s role models. Her dad’s self-esteem and self-worth has been deeply shaken. My expectations have been closely examined and adjusted. Seismic shifts have occurred, and we are — all three — finding our way through this to a different place with each other which I suspect will hold very little resemblance to the one we inhabited before.
And in the wake of all of these shifts, something fundamental has shifted in me.
Although I’ve spent a large portion of the last twelve months feeling emotionally unmoored, as if I’m making my way slowly over strange and uneven ground, I feel more capable of moving forward than ever before.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m fucking terrified a lot of the time, uncertain of the outcome of anything, but — critically — I’m so much less willing to fake it. Instead - and I feel as if this is pretty obvious to anyone who spends time with me and really listens to what I’m trying to tell them - I am constantly ‘just winging it’, but winging it with everything I know (as well as everything I don’t know) on full display.
I’m winging it with curiosity, with open-mindedness, vulnerability and physical awareness. I’m winging it with love, and — in the place of cynicism — genuine and constant amusement at how utterly ridiculous this life is, whilst at the same time being beautiful, weird, fractured, mysterious and strange.
In all this endless striving for happiness and contentment and the realisation of our dreams, I feel as if we sometimes miss that what we already have is potentially exactly what we needed, wanted and have created for ourselves.
Or, to quote Werner Erhard: “We can have whatever we want, as long as it doesn’t have to look anything like we imagined”.
Sad and bad and unpredictable things happen to us, and we’re broken and put back together a thousand times in our lifetime. Acknowledging that, and being able to cherish all the cracks and rejoins as evidence of my (our) value and loveliness seems like the real payoff at the end of this steep and difficult year.
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Law Turley is an MBACP-registered Integrative Therapist and certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
