My therapist was talking yesterday about trees: trees as metaphors and markers, but also trees as triggers. Traumatic triggers, psychic triggers. We were talking about the way that the body keeps not so much the score, but a spreadsheet. It’s as if the body knows before the brain what’s up; this date, that date, this bad run of anniversaries. [Does it count as an anniversary if it was weeks of badness? If every day for a month was the worst day of your life?]
The temperature drop, and the dropping of the leaves, make a signal to the body: remember this? This is when the bad things happen. Prepare yourself: flight, fight, or freeze. Personally, I freeze. I try to force things through and nothing works. I try to shove the frozen gears around, and all I do is rip the skin on my hands to pieces, eyes watering with frustration and cold and rage. Nothing will shift; nothing will change. It feels like the harder I fight it, the worse it gets. Everything I write, it seems, is a witness statement to old wounds. I am exhausted from trying to shift it and push past it. I am exhausted from trying to explain to my stupid idiot small animal body that what it remembers, what it feels and what it fears, doesn’t mean anything. It so badly wants to stay indoors, to be safe, to stop. It wants to shut the doors and stay close. It wants to bake bread and break bread and eat a whole loaf with Marmite in a single sitting. It wants to be private and gentle and quiet. It wants to hibernate until the spring comes, and it can’t. It has to work. It has to do Christmas. It has to be the best, happiest version of itself.
The trees are not quite bare, but the streets are full of leaves; and my coat pockets are jammed with gloves and scarf and seasonally-triggered trauma responses. Everything I do is a little bit painful. I’m allergic to my tights. I cry every two or three hours, not much, but enough that I notice. When I try and talk to someone new I feel kind of like I’m talking through a glass window trying to guess what they’re saying. It’s all familiar, all of this. It happens every year. But here’s the thing. It happens every year.
Every year the body knows what’s coming, and every year I try to fight it: the conscious mind v. the unconscious body, the willing flesh v. the weak spirit. Me versus me, hands bloody and tattered on the frozen gears, and the gears never turn. Nothing changes until spring, when everything changes. This is the rhythm of things. This is how it is. This is how I am, and how the seasons are. Time takes the time it takes.
So what happens if I accept that? What happens if I shut the door, and bake my bread? What happens if I stop?
I wrote the other week about doing what we can; but what about, also, doing less?
I have this bread recipe that feels like magic, it wants so little from you. Flour and water, salt and yeast. Sugar and oil too if you want. Call it 425g bread flour; a teaspoon of instant yeast; a teaspoon of fine sugar; a teaspoon of fine salt. A tablespoon of olive oil. 380g of warm water. I stir it all up in a bowl, and wrap the bowl in a tea towel, and put the tea towel-bowl in the airing cupboard, and then I leave it.
Twelve hours, eighteen hours, overnight. Don’t knead it; don’t fuss it; do less. And while you could buy bread, you can’t buy the instruction it gives you. You can’t buy the way it makes you slow down. Welcome to Breadville, population me. If we can’t escape the rhythm of the year, then maybe the only way out is through: give into the year, and give into the rhythm of the day and the night, just a small soft animal looking for a safe place.
My therapist is taking all of December off for personal reasons. My boss is taking all of December off for personal reasons. I am taking December off, as far as possible, for personal reasons. This is an anecdote, but maybe it should be a trend. Maybe we might imagine a world where we don’t make ourselves work through the dark.
In the morning I take the bread out of the airing cupboard, alive with little bubbles, clinging and sticky, and fold it in onto itself, over and over, with oiled hands. I fold it almost like I’m folding a focaccia, to give it structure; and then I shake flour into the teatowel, and drop the floured teatowel into a clean bowl, floury side up, and drop the folded sticky dough into the floured teatowel, and fold the teatowel over it.
The lidded casserole dish, empty, goes in the oven; the oven goes up as high as it will go, heating the house. We’re an hour off baking yet, at least, and I’d have waited to put the oven on; but it’s so cold in our kitchen I thought the dough would never rise without it. The dough-bowl sits, warming as the oven does, and I write this newsletter in my head, even though I’ve given up writing for December and it literally cannot be this easy, it cannot be that the day I say I don’t have to write anything I really want to write this newsletter– and maybe it won’t last but also, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t, because all I have to do is survive. I don’t even need to send this newsletter if I don’t want to! I definitely don’t have to make it good! All I have to do is breathe; be warm; and bake this bread so I can have some Marmite toast.
So it’s maybe an hour later when I take the casserole out of the oven, red hot even through the potholders, and lift off the lid, and drop in the floured damp dough. I snip the top with scissors, which doesn’t really work, I think. The lid goes on the casserole; the casserole goes into the oven; twenty minutes. Another place to pause.
What if this was an invitation to stop? What if this was an invitation to take your hands off the wheel and let it spin; take your foot off the accelerator and crawl almost to nothing, no speed, no miles per hour? What would it feel like to try less hard?
[And if you’re cooking along at home, take the lid off the casserole, and give the bread fifteen more minutes to brown and crisp. It has a crust, this bread, and a song and a crackle and a crumb with soft little holes for the butter and Marmite to sink into when you toast it.]
And so I’m writing this and thinking about the Homework Girls, the Virgos and the Type A obsessives. I see you reading these words and thinking: sure, sounds great, not for me though!! I see your exclamation marks. I see you thinking of all the ways that for you, personally, stopping means death. And the thing is also that I see you thinking of all the ways you have already stopped and failed; all the things that you already let go slack; all the plates that a better person, a cleverer person, a thinner [???] person would somehow spin so effortlessly that in their spinning the world seemed a more beautiful place. I see the catalogue you keep in your brain of everything that you could be doing better and could have done better and should have done better: all the times you took your hands off the wheel for one single tiny moment and the car went off the road, all the times you slowed down and someone else sped past you off into the sunset that was rightfully yours.
Well, the sun has set. I’m writing these words, now, at ten past four, and the sun has officially set: sixteen minutes into the blackness, and counting. Long shadows slipped, while I was writing, into the long dark. The day is done; and it will come back again, but it’s over now. It’s over, and here, golden, is the bread. The snip in the top has worked like a charm; it needed– like everything else, and not to ram home the metaphor- time.
And I think, now the bread’s done, that I will go out in the morning and get a tree.
An evergreen, something that keeps [at least in theory] her leaves. Something that feels like- I don’t know- a marker I’m making, a space that I’m staking out, a trigger that’s under my hand. I don’t want to be triggered, but I want, I guess, tradition: my traditions, the way I want them. I had a tree even when J was in Intensive Care: a tree the size of my forearm, with tinsel wisps and stars.
I don’t want to forget, but I want to choose how I remember.
I was telling my therapist about my Christmas decorations: my baubles, my trinkets, my paper chains and poem lines and glass lights and chilli garlands strung together on a fine fine thread. Some of them I have made; some I was given; others I bought, with my family, with J, with friends, on my own, with T, with R. Three decades of Christmases. Every year I unpack them from the tissue and straw and wicker hamper I keep them in; every year, with the same amount of joy, I pack them away. Like the seasons, they have a rhythm to them: a continuity.
“They have deep roots,” my therapist said to me; and I said yes with a vehemence that surprised me. “The roots go down, way back past before the trauma, and you can see that their leaves and branches extend forward after the trauma too.”
“More trees,” I said.
“More trees,” said my therapist.
Then she said she thought it was a good idea, to stop. Actually she said it was a fabulous idea, and I loved that: the idea of stopping as something actively fabulous, a miraculous thing in and of itself.
I think I will send this newsletter, after all. There is something about it that feels like it, too, gets to be a marker. Here is the day I started stopping. Here is the point, for future reference, where I felt like I might survive December intact, and maybe even happy– with a bit of Marmite toast, some kimchi and a cup of tea. Fabulous.