My first and last word of advice on love

Love is a topic I prefer to steer clear of. I like making it, feeling it, having it in my life. At a push, I'd call it a gift from the universe; one that becomes smeary with scrutiny, to the point of disappearing altogether (at least until you look away, and then there it is again - sweetly bothering your peripheral vision). You're not meant to question it - you just enjoy it for as long as it stays.

Given that I've never found cause to examine love, then, it's no wonder I've developed few techniques for tending it. Someone is forever saying that love is hard work - that it won't always come easily, and so you need to work at love. I picture myself prodding a slumbering cupid with the butt-end of its archery bow. "Come on now, Cupid," I'd say. "Time to get back to work." I don't know how you work on love, or coax it into action if it decides to take a sabbatical of indeterminate length.

In recent months, though, I am learning (or maybe discovering) how to maintain that hottest and most volatile of gardens. The old adage would have us believe that love is like an eternally hungry hearth fire. If it exposes the glowing embers of its empty belly, throw on another log - easy peasy. Prod Cupid in the arse with a hot poker now and again and you're laughing all the way to the sperm bank or something. But to what does the metaphor (mixed or otherwise) actually portend?

It's only by taking note of what I'm doing in these earlier stages that I've discovered my slight misreading of the tale. Do you want to know how? It's not earth-shattering.

The way to keep love motivated is to keep working for it, rather than on it or (heaven forbid) against it. It might be more helpful to think of love as a small child. Anything you do now that could hurt its feelings, or fill it with anxiety or sadness, will come back to haunt you when you need it to do its homework or tidy its room. But as long as you ensure that you are acting in love's best interest, it not only does your bidding - it thrives. It sticks around, because it likes your company. And it's really that simple.

Anyway, I'm not here to disrupt your day or tell you what to do. It's just that these lessons are hard-won for someone like me. I've had to learn them alone, and for the most part through the distorted lens of anger. Where that anger came from is something I'm sick to the teeth of talking about, and I'm not even sure I'd like it to remain attached to my narrative. In fact. Why don't we just…

There, that's better.

Rhetorical maybe

I sometimes wonder if the things you loved about me at first are still apparent to you. Or whether they amount to a most fortunate misconception we shed like a wrapper off a bar of chocolate after purchase. Or, worse, if they fell into place like a single puzzle piece, its outline fading into the background of a mundane landscape.

Not as often, mind you.

Brave new self

My husband did some serious damage to his liver (and reputation as the most sober husband on earth) last night. And yet I’m the one feeling hungover this morning – why?

It’s becoming more and more difficult to rake back personal time at work. Everyone deserves a lunch hour, and everyone is responsible for ensuring they take one, but with the amount of work I do on a daily basis, I can barely justify doing no work for an entire hour, even to myself.

This morning I woke to the noise of birds, which was something I noticed a lot during that period of a few months when I was not well in the head. Their morning song seemed like a recording at that time; it was just another superficial element of a convincing backdrop concocted by the party (or parties) who were collaborating to keep me from understanding my predicament. Or so I believed.

I capitalised on the lucidity of this hazy recollection, extending the meaning to encapsulate what I find so impossible to nail down about my experience now. The only way to achieve continuity is to live without ever having to abandon your own foundational context. I’ve lost this context twice in my life: once when I went mad, and once when I fell in love (which is a bit like going mad) and moved away from home.

This morning, I had to concede that the life I experienced in the hospital almost six years ago is still the same life I lead now, in London. I won’t say there’s little difference between a mental ward and London, though I guess someone more cynical than me might try and make that comparison. But even though both experiences are vastly different in terms of what they mean, they share the same undigested quality.

The only way to measure experience is with the levelling tool of identity. Lose that essential component to life-building, though, and you’d be hard-pressed to understand much of anything. Okay fine, I’d tell my addled brain, Let’s regroup here on January 2008 at oh nine-hundred hours and assess where we’re at. Except that no thoughts resembling mine ever showed up to the meeting place.

Psychologists are forever telling you that it’s a bad idea to fracture identity, but when you discover something you find impossible to explain, the only thing to do is to stretch yourself until you can account for it. If not me, then some other self.

And this is the other me. The one who is not alone, bitter, narrow-minded and afraid. I can be all these things, of course, but I will never again be all these things, and only these things, all at once. These are the fragments of my identity that, compiled, would exclude everything I am becoming today, and that self is growing stronger by the minute.

But I’m sorry you had to weed through this to find out that none of it was about you. On the other hand, maybe you found yourself washed up on the shore of some brave new world too, in which case, I extend my hand across the divide to shake yours.