Grief in bits

Some things I've been thinking about recently...

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

Little strands of ideas often pop into my head and I think “I’m going to write a newsletter on this” but then I can’t quite grasp my thoughts enough to create something solid out of them. But I don’t want them to get lost. So, as I sit in my window seat, watching the last of July’s rain, I’m going to pop them down, run away with them a bit, and see what happens…

I’ve been reading…

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin  

People say it’s a book about gaming. But it’s not. Not really. It’s a book about grief. The grief of losing mothers, of losing friends, of losing grandparents… but also the grief of friendships changing and warping with time. How hard it can be to love someone for a lifetime, when they’re no longer the person you once knew, when you’re no longer the person you once knew. It’s one of these books that has lingered, that’s hard to move on from. It consumed me, for a while. 

Here’s some lines from it (I don’t think they count as spoilers) that I could see my own grief in:

‘“There are no ghosts, but up here” - she gestured to her head - “it’s a haunted house.”’ 

This is how one of the characters says she coped, following loss. By having conversations with her loved ones, in her head, remembering how they spoke, thinking of what advice they might give or say. I don’t have conversations, as such, with my mum and grandma but - every now and then - I get this feeling, deep in my heart, that the words within my brain, at that moment, are not my own, but theirs. It’s a special, other worldly feeling, knowing I’ll never truly be alone. 

(I wrote more about how we can create our own ghosts, for healthy grieving here)

‘What Sam wanted to do was get stupendously high - find a great drug that turned off his brain for a year but stopped short of killing him.’

I’ve written before about my complicated relationship with alcohol, following my mum’s death. How easy it was to turn to oblivion. How distraction from pain can take on many forms, and how I’m not even sure how in control we are of our survival techniques.

For my dissertation, examining heroin addiction, I caught the train to Brighton and sat in a sunny beer garden with a heroin addict. He was 21, strikingly good looking, and would inject heroin secretly in his halls bedroom, the other students around him completely unaware of his self destruction. He’d been a casual user for years but then, he lost someone he loved. “Katie,” he said to me. “I had something, in that moment, in my possession that could turn the pain off. That wrapped me up in a cloud, pulled me away from my blistering reality. Why wouldn’t I turn to it? Why wouldn’t I use it?” Of course, eventually, all his pain caught up with him. He now had to face it all, and worse, do so navigating an all consuming addiction. The drug Sam (in Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow) wants doesn’t exist - we have to feel our grief, our pain, to survive it. It will tornado its way to us eventually.

‘She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while though, the memory fades and, each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.’ 

When I interviewed a neuroscientist about grief, and the brain, she confirmed that this is true. We’re not well wired for loss, our brains struggle to function. This, I think, is comforting, in grief it can be easy to chastise ourselves for not ‘moving on’ or for spotting someone in the crowd, and thinking it’s them, or still expecting to hear their key in the door. But this is natural. Our brains, our beings, need time to rewire and adjust. (Also, on the topic of AI, I dug into the new technology that allows us to create AI avatars of ourselves and ponder does it help or hinder the grieving process, for this piece in Women’s Health, which will also be in the next on-sale issue.) 

‘For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you god damn did.’

When we first began dating my (now) husband found it overwhelming just how often I told him I loved him. He said I said it so much it lost all meaning. I didn’t care. I didn’t change. I’m someone who tells people I love them constantly: my husband, my family, my friends. Life changes at a terrifying speed, one day people are here, the next they’re gone. I need them to know, at any given moment, just how much they mean to me. 

Have you read it? Or read any good books that encapsulate grief recently? Let me know in the comments…

I’ve been remembering… Impulse o2 

I know, if I could just smell it, I’d be able to go back. Back to my primary school self, holding red gobstoppers in a brown paper towel, licking the fiery flavour, overwhelmed by its intensity. I’d feel small and scared and unsure and unsteady, but I’d also feel giddy, ridiculous and be able to honk laugh at the smallest of things. For many, it’s the scent of childhood, of being on the cusp of being a teenager, where summers stretched endlessly, lengthened by all the newness. I can’t even describe what the notes were: it was zesty and fresh and it made me feel alive. I’m convinced that Impulse must have lost the recipe for it, as why wouldn’t they bring it back? There’s such high demand for it that every time the 90s Museum post about it on their Instagram they’re flooded with comments. And… OH MY GOD… I was just Googling to show you how much cans go for on eBay and discovered that Impulse HAVE BROUGHT IT BACK. It’s only £1 in Savers! I’ve ordered a bottle and now I’m slightly afraid… what if it isn’t how I remember? Should some things remain only in our memories? Not everything can last forever and isn’t that the joy of living? 

This was inspired by this article in the Guardian where writes mourn their favourite discontinued products. If you could bring back any discontinued product, what would it be?

I’ve been watching… Nothing Compares, the Sinead O Connor documentary 

I didn’t know very much about Sinead O Connor, I must confess. Sometimes I feel ashamed admitting how little I know about huge musical figures. Like some man from my past is going to pop up behind me and sneer at how uncool and uncultured and idiotic I am. But, as I get older, I’ve come to realise it’s never stupid to not know about something or someone, it’s only stupid to choose not to learn. So, on Saturday night, I settled down to learn about this magnificent woman. 

I, of course, knew pieces of her. I had an outline of who she was, placed in my brain by all that has been written about her. I knew she was outspoken, that she was a rebel… but I didn’t realise how softly spoken she was with it. The documentary shows old interviews with her and I was struck by how childlike she appears, how she had such strong convictions that she delivered both incredibly loudly and incredibly quietly all at once. How she remained steadfast in her beliefs, while also being aware of the nuances of life and how she could deliver withering put downs politely and with a smile on her face. She talked a lot about the “contract” she made with herself, what she entered the industry for and why she wrote, and was so vulnerable, for the world to see. She was using her art as a form of healing and while it’s horrendous to think of how she was treated, how she was torn apart by cruel, side line strangers, there are moments watching her on stage, dancing and mucking around and smiling, and - in a world where women’s pain is so often used as a commodity - I wanted to pause and soak in those snatches of her joy. 

I’ve been thinking about… what’s been sewn under my skin

For the early part of this year, I was working on a ghost writing project which involved me interviewing a huge number of people about neurodiversity. I knew writing the book would be important professionally, but I didn’t anticipate just how impactful it would be personally.

It’s taught me to examine what has been placed deep within me, where my thoughts of right and wrong come from, why I enjoy the things I enjoy, why I am upset by the things I’m upset by. There’s an undercurrent passing through all of us that tells us what happiness is, what a ‘good’ life looks like - it’s the 2.4 family unit, the ticking things off an invisible list of ‘achievements’ that we have been given, but never once asked if we want to possess. Often, I’ve been learning, when we feel sad, or let down, or ashamed of ourselves, it’s not necessarily because we’re actually sad, or let down, or have a reason to feel ashamed, instead we’re unconsciously feeling the weight of false expectation. Life cannot be one-size-fits-all yet we’re so often told it should be.

Making the decision to be child-free has also played its part in this awakening, as I thought I wanted children for so long simply because it was what I was told I should want. Now, I’m trying to figure out what my life will look like, from here, unpicking deep rooted expectations, and plot out a new beginning for myself. Writing the book, and interviewing a huge number of people who have figured out their brains, and what they need from this world, has been so enlightening. I’m excited to be able to share more, once I can. 

I’ve been… promoting

I spent a lot of last month interviewing doctors, marketing and advertising executives, government officials, teachers and shop keepers to uncover why we’re all so hooked on vaping… and how illegal, dangerous vapes have infiltrated the market. I even spent the morning with Trading Standards Officers trying to catch illegal vape sellers in the act. The aim of the feature was to highlight the dangers of vaping without it reading too finger-wagging as, we all know, the more we’re told not to do something, the more we tend to want to do it. It’s in this month’s issue of Cosmopolitan, with the Heartstopper cast on the cover. 

I also went on Sharon Gaffka’s podcast, to talk about my career. Sharon is an ex Love Islander using her platform for good: she’s been campaigning and working with the police to highlight just how insidious spiking is across the country, and how little is done to prevent it. Her podcast interviews various different women about their careers, and it was a lot of fun to reflect on my own career journey (plus I was delighted to be able to promote my book at the end, as I’m still so proud of it, but without it being a new release sales have - of course - dwindled.) 

And that’s it for the week! Let me know of any thoughts/recommendations below. I might try and do a round-up every month or so, what do you think?