On a warm summer evening in 2008, my mother asked me why I hadn’t killed myself yet.
We were on a bridge just around the corner from home, on the enigmatically named Wigley Bush Lane, staring down together at the A12. I was twenty-four years old. I had completed my literature degree; I had traveled Europe, I had lived in Italy, and learned, among other things, how to make pesto and to speak Italian. I was young, interesting looking, educated, traveled – and in so doing I had done what I thought an adult should do; challenged myself to rake risks, to do hard things, and I’d proven to myself that I could. I should have been ready for anything.
But I wasn’t doing so well.
I was at a juncture. I was, like millions of other young people, trying to figure out what comes next, what direction to throw myself energetically into, how to really take off and be successful, and I was languishing in the malaise caused by the realization that a glamorous career wasn’t going to present itself to me like all the movies said and I had no idea how to go out and get it. I didn’t even know what It was.
This was the point. Indecision – like Sylvia Plath’s beautiful metaphor in The Bell Jar about the purple fig tree – was like throwing myself at any one thing which seemed a horrible waste of all the other things around me, so I sat in the fig branches watching fat opportunities wither. Lacking purpose is a real downer when trying to prod yourself out of bed in the morning and thirteen years later, that’s still true. What was unique about that time was that I was paralyzed with indecision about seizing that purpose; the fear of making the wrong choice.
To give myself a break, the year had had its challenges. I’d come out of a pretty bad relationship while living in Italy, which festered longer than it should have. I was unemployed, so I was skint. I was living at home – although that prospect had brightened considerably since mam had chucked out the old bloke and the two of us spent our weekends merrily driving around Essex and London to jig about to live music in pubs. (I still can’t listen to The Dawn Chorus without thinking about trying to break into art exhibitions in Brick Lane to drink free booze and eat my weight in cheesy snacks).
Conversely, my sweet twin sister at the same juncture of life was doing really well. She’d moved out, like a real grown-up; her relationship had survived the distance of her time living in France and she was now with him in the West Midlands, with a job, volunteering for an eco-charity, and was working hard at getting into that sector. She had bags full of purpose, and didn’t she look pleased with herself at our birthday lunch in Hereford, with her handsome chap beside her, talking about her future while my eyes glazed over and I tried to be pleased for her, hating myself for being so selfish. How did she figure it all out so quickly? How was she moving forward while I was stagnating like a rain puddle slicked with oil?
Back up on that bridge, I was having to shamefully admit to myself that I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, and I really wasn’t dealing very well with not being able to figure it out. Why couldn’t I be one of those optimistic, resilient sorts of girls, pottering along, getting by, and doing some sensible, good thinking until I made a decision? Instead, I was sulking like a brat.
August 2008 was a bit of a funny time. I had just finished a long-term temp position in a school office. I’d quite liked it. I’d found myself hungering about outside classroom doors, wishing I could find out what was going on inside and be part of it, and affirmatively finding out what happens to a teenage boy who can’t express his emotions articulately. I was between shit jobs, including a day of photocopying and a laughable role basically watching telly as part of a project to test for faults in new LCDs. I was shortly to start some lowly admin temping in a recruitment office in London staffed by two cheerful girls about my age, and two older women who were irredeemably arrogant and racist. Two very important things were only months away from happening. In one month I would be hiking in the lake district with a friend with whom I would hop, laughing, onto a bus and fall resolutely in love. I was two months away from walking into a school to interview for another admin job and finally feeling like I’d figured out where I was supposed to be.
I suppose – spoiler alert – that reveals the only two times in my life I have ever made real decisions and known they were right. But back up on that bridge over the roar of the traffic, I didn’t know any of that yet. I’d been sulking hard for a good fortnight and my mother – clearly worried, had suggested a walk. I was horrified when she started trying to get it all out of me. What was I going to tell her? That I’m a loser and I don’t know what I’m doing with myself? I had hardly articulated that to myself. And there was my mother, the bitch, easing herself onto the crash barrier with knees spread wide for balance, leaning against the white-painted railings and looking as immovable as a sphynx. She didn’t look at me or keep asking questions. She just bloody sat there, inspecting her nails, waiting. I writhed and paced like a caged animal against the sunset; I had a door key in my pocket – I could have stormed off – but when your mother has taken her ease and is waiting, you have to deliver, and if you’ve got nothing then it’s time you started thinking about it, my girl.
I don’t clearly remember what we talked about. It became a family myth that she had said ‘well it can’t all be that bad, or you’d have thrown yourself off the bridge.’ That’s how she likes to tell it. But as we leaned on the railings, one foot each wedged between them with our wrists dangling over, she made me feel better somehow. To at least have the patience and fortitude to bear with it all a bit longer until something – as I have foreshadowed it would – turned up.
Despite my mother’s flattering confession over a glass of wine in the pub one night that she is nonplussed when my sister and I ask her for guidance as we seem to have everything figured out far better than she ever did, my mother knows when her daughter is in need and comes through with these real golden bits of wisdom. Even if on that August evening she didn’t quite know what to say or do with her torn-up daughter, she knew very well Something had to be done and so did it. I think of that moment in my life as a turning point. Though the dramatic landscape of the late summer Essex countryside is riven through with the motorway did not serve as the actual moment of realization, it planted the seed. And it’s something I tell my students when they leave school. That stepping out of formal education is not stepping into certainty and what you imagine you will be as a grown-up. You will still be you. And I’m afraid shit will still be hard. I have failed a driving test five times. I have done job interviews. I have traveled abroad and lived in a country where I spoke none of the languages and had to learn it, sharp. I learned to maneuver seventeen meters of steel. I moved to Australia and tried a whole new career and wandered into libraries looking hopeful and smiling and joined writing clubs, Morris sides, shanty clubs. And it was all terrifying.
It never gets easier, but after each iteration of horror, you learn that you are stronger at withstanding it. Turns out, it won’t kill ya, after all.
The great misery of Indecision still plagues me thirteen years later when I’m thirty-seven and old enough to know better. We thought about staying in Australia or returning. We thought about where in the UK to return to. I thought about what career to pursue; do I leave teaching for a bit? I tied myself in knots with it and burst into tears in the middle of a more interrogative phone call with my mam and sister about What Next.
And she comes through again. Having seen that I was digging my age-old little hole, she sent me a message that said, you should not worry, because, little dear, you have a golden, wonderful knack, for being able to be happy, anywhere.
Thirteen years after The Bridge Incident, that gift of those words has become another defining moment. And an absolution for my failure to make decisions. Because maybe in life, there are really only a couple of real decisions we ever need to make. Everything else is just things. Nothing is an either-or, it is another thing. And I look back over years of going with the flow, ending up in Scotland walking the banks of the Don, dancing Ceilidhs on Burns Night, babysitting local children, cycling to work with a fellow, and going to local gatherings. I look at ending up in northern Italy being struck dumb by the beauty of the Alps and making friends so close to my heart they are like another family. I look at ending up in Buckinghamshire, on our little boat, (alright, yes, boat buying was the one other affirmative life decision), getting involved with the local Morris side, singing at folk nights, capering madly around apple trees on glorious winter pub crawls, hovering outside someone else’s boat until they came out and I could say, ‘I do like those fairy lights,’ then sitting in that pub until I made friends; foisting myself on the local newsletter – getting to Australia and falling in love with wattle, marching myself off to writing clubs, meeting wonderful people, starting a novel, leading songs with shanty singers, bedding down at book wine clubs, dancing more Morris at a festival, performing poetry in local bars and events – and I think, damn. Isn’t that all beautiful? I don’t I work really hard at going out and finding ways of being happy. Maybe it is like a skill or stupid superpower.
So I have decided to see the next part of my life on the gift of those words from my mother. It is another thing. There is no or. There is just next. There will be no wrong house, or wrong town, or wrong job. There will just be the next one, and I’ll do what I have learned that I always do when things are new and terrifying, bed the hell down and get stuck in and get to love it for its own special things. Who knows, I might be volunteer dog walking by this time next year, or whatever nonsense I’ll manage to come up with.
And therefore, to the young girl of thirteen years ago, chewing her lip and looking at the traffic underneath wondering what the clusterfuck she’s doing, and thus to any young person at the same stage: you’ll be alright, kid.
And to the dogged, wickedly patient and wise woman standing next to her, waiting:
Thank you.
Photo by Alaric Duan on Unsplash
