Rebel, rebel

Celebrating rebellion and a slight update from me....

They went for afternoon tea. Perhaps a trip to Jenners, Edinburgh's grandest department store. They might have marvelled at its plush cashmere, and said to each other, without ever looking at the price tag, that it’s:  "much softer than Marks and Sparks" before heading to the beauty hall, spritzing Anaïs Anaïs samples on their wrists.

Truthfully, I don't know what they did. I know this moment only through five minutes, told to me, by a stranger. I was in a church hall at my grandma's funeral. I was letting a tea, thick with sugar, deliberately burn my hands. And then this woman said hello. I can’t remember her face, or her name but she broke me out of my fog with a simple story. Of how my grandma gave her a (tiny) dose of revolution.

It was just after this woman’s husband had died, she explained. My grandma had phoned her up and invited her to Edinburgh to stay. This was a woman my grandma knew from her church in Peterhead, a small town she had lived in for many years. It's where my granddad is buried. It's where she is now too. But Grandma moved to Edinburgh to be closer to us, and therefore suddenly had the means to invite this woman on a "girls weekend."

It sounds small. Booking a coach, or a train, travelling a few hours to see a friend. That's standard for most of us. But it wasn't. Not for this lady, not for my grandma.

How can I explain how big this weekend was? They may have looked, to outsiders, like two older women in dour tartan skirts and properly pinned brooches. Women who stick to the rules. It’s how I viewed my grandma for many years: she didn’t drink alcohol, she never wore trousers and always wore a hat to church. But underneath all of that, there was a woman slowly breaking free.

Long after she died, I bought a copy of Marie Claire. It had a coverline that read "I grew up in cult." The cult in question? My grandma's religion. Its odd extremities had, for me, until that day, always simply been part of the fabric of my life.

Whether her extreme subsect of Christianity (I won't name it) is a cult is not for me to say. My grandma attended her church pretty much until the day she died. It brought her a lot of joy. I don't want to diminish that. Her life is not one for me to tell. But, this article and my subsequent research that followed, showed me that it will have restricted her in ways I will never truly know.

So even the smallest things she did, from cutting the hair that she always wore so long it trailed down her back, to playing television on Sundays, took courage. Rebellion doesn't always display itself in punk clothing or outrageous acts. It can be small and unnoticeable. Seen only as bravery by those at the very heart of it.

And inviting this woman, who, like her, was shunned from the group for suddenly being "single" certainly was an act of rebellion. They didn't disobey the rules of their religion, the community that raised them. Even when the community was literally turning its back.

My grandma was a rebel. And no one knew it. So was my mum. In a way that everyone knew. Both ways take courage, I suspect my mum's took a lot more. She broke away from her religious family as a teenager. Flew to San Francisco. Partied. Decided not to marry a traditional Christian man. Fell in love with my hippy dad on her return. Spent her life's work writing and fighting for feminism, long before it was cool to wear the word around our necks.

They had so much in common. I wonder if they knew?

So, why am I telling you this? Well, I'm currently on a plane and... things feel clearer in the air. I'm in between time zones, I'm head-shrinking(ly) high and away from any contact or (most likely) perceived criticism. It's helping me see what I need.

I've been struggling to write the newsletter lately. Time, yes, has been tight. But a tiny time frame has never held me back before. If I want to do, or write, something enough I'll squash it in. Always.

This, I think, is an unconscious (until now) form of protection. I can feel the delicious temptation of sinking. Sinking into my own grief.

I could easily be swallowed by my own sadness, plucking it out even when it's not there. I have begun to frame every second of my life within the gaze of grief, examine and prod and poke and question  "who would I have been if this specific set of circumstances didn't happen to me?"

We all could. We are obsessed by our own suffering, as if knowing every detail of our wounds will cure them. And it might. I believe discussing our lives, openly and honestly, is one of the best ways to move forward. It's helped me immensely.

It's why I set up this newsletter. I'm also not going to stop doing it, or asking others to speak of their own grief. The aims set out at the start remain the same.

But I can't do it every week.

I'm a happy person. I work at this.  It's not easy but I choose, each morning, to be happy. If you don't feel happy right now, please don't read this as a judgement, as if I'm telling you to work harder. That's not what I mean. I'm just always trying to learn what's right for me. I know there have been times when I've choked on my own positivity. It's why I decided to dredge up my darkest parts. Doing so has changed me in many ways, mostly, I believe, for the better.

My grandma hid her sludgiest, saddest parts. I don't think I ever saw her cry. She wasn't unusual, stoicism was the making (and breaking) of her generation. I love how we are rewriting the ills of our keep-calm-and-carry-on history.

I also speak a lot about balance. Hopscotching our way through the light and the dark.

And, personally, I can't continue to make deadlines out of death.

Not if I want to continue to, on the most part, feel happy. As even when I’m not writing about my own grief I am trying my best to, with guest posts and interviews, take the upmost of care with others grief. That takes a lot and I don’t want to rush it. But I still want to write each week.

So, I've made a decision! As one of my aims of this newsletter is to discuss the joy and lessons that come from grief I'm seeking that out in a new way. I want to celebrate the lives of those I've lost, those who I may lose. And the thread that stitches them all together is rebellion. I believe that same thread stitches my own seams.

It's a quality that is shamed. It's also, sometimes, celebrated too much. Defining ourselves as purely a rebel can drive us into mistakes, adopting personas that aren't our own. I'm interested in examining that. So while I'll continue to do exactly what I set out to do (be as open and honest about grief as we can be) I also want to interview people about their own acts of rebellion.

This newsletter will be a mix of both. I hope you'll join me on the journey.