Hither Green
Listening to Travis Alabanza speak on the gal-dem podcast about letting go of shame in everyday life hit home with me. Shame is a word that’s come up in my therapy sessions quite a bit, along with blame, control, autonomy, fear, patience. I like noting one or two words from each session to help me chart my thoughts and realise my feelings from them.
Generally when I’d think of shame my mind would immediately point to the years of repressing my sexuality and gender expression because I had been taught from a young age it wasn’t right. I wasn’t right. I was bad, I was wrong, I wasn’t normal. I should be someone different, or shouldn’t be here at all. This is what I’ve worked really hard at overcoming in the last five years or so. Unlearning deep self-loathing, rewiring my brain, training myself to have some respect and love for the person in the mirror.
Unlearning, rewiring, training. They’re all buzzwords to a certain extent, aren’t they? They make it sound like my work was a lot more conscious and gruelling than it was. The truth of it is that I simply began to feel more confident and free. Slowly but surely I came into my own after too many years of just wanting to be something I thought I could never be without shame. Moving away from home for the first time, travelling, losing touch with people who at one time would determine how my day was; a lot of things contributed to it. You could just say it was growing up.
Still, I’m proud of who I was becoming when it happened.
I might not have looked back in order to move forward then but why would I have? I was 21 years old and frankly just very happy to feel real unconditional happiness for what was probably the first time since I was in nursery. Freshly graduated, I was full of hope and excitement for the future. Confident and no longer embarrassed. With how I looked, my body, my voice, my personality, what I liked, how I acted, who I was into.
Summer 2017 was a big one for me. I was suddenly around a lot of queer people, infiltrating queer bubbles and feeling right at home super quickly. I even found myself living in one in a sudden move to London. Everything was so quick and fun, just how it should be at that age. I went to my first Pride that summer, and my second just a few weeks later. Both my editor and my boss at my first ‘proper job’ were gay. My closest friends nearby me were all gay. Everywhere and everything was gay! And it was great! I realise now that I had unconsciously let go of the everyday shame during this time. I was living more freely than I ever had, and the voices in my head were largely silenced, if not altogether gone.
It’s why I’ve felt angry for allowing someone disrupt that peace. It took so long to get there, to have that feeling, and it was taken from me in an instant by a man who’s name I’ve blocked from my memory. I’ve never thought of myself as a controlling person because I don’t think I exercise control over people, so I was confused when my therapist brought up the word control during our second session. I had completely disregarded how controlling I’d become because I couldn’t see one person doing it to another.
I am fixated on controlling every single aspect of my life to the point my anxiety can be absolutely crippling over such insignificant details. I exercise control when I choose not to talk to anyone. I exercise control when I shut down to move on. I exercise control when I don’t let anyone close to me. I exercise control when I perform in conversation to paint a truth that isn’t there. I exercise control when I have another drink when I feel nervous because of the emotions I’ll be confronted with if I act on things too sober. I am in control all of the time, yet all I have felt for a long time is blame.
A moment that left me feeling completely powerless has undermined my strength and control for years. I forgot about my own agency because I — like when I was younger — just wanted to move forward. This time, however, I am having to look back in order to do so.
Being unable to feel safe in your own body is unsettling. Having to stay in that body and rely on it to get you to wherever you’re going next is difficult. There’s nowhere to go, so I just kept moving mine around. Just keep going. Anywhere, everywhere, until I felt somewhere. I couldn’t have looked to the past before now because to turn around would mean facing what had ripped me apart before I was ready. It really is much easier to ignore pain and continue hurtling towards every new day like an asteroid coming to obliterate Earth. Ripping through streets with unbearable amounts of adrenaline rising up through my body like the lower deck of Titanic flooding until the steel bolts ping off and the water bursts into the next room. Every level destroyed one by one.
Forgive the lousy Titanic metaphor but the truth is I was trying to keep my head above the water by keeping my feet moving. Imagine being stuck out at sea trying to stay afloat for 1,029 days. No body is strong enough to kick for that long, and nobody is strong enough to be alone for so long.
But I am strong to have lasted as long as I did.
Written 15 July 2020
