Once upon a time my world was really quite small. It was restricted by what I could cope with, by how well I was, by whether or not I’d have to retreat to my room. I’d look out the window and enjoy the trees over Richmond Park, but I would stay indoors and watch bad television shows and try to read and maybe manage to distract my mind.
My mother asked me, in those early days of tentative wellness when everything was still scary, why I wanted to move to Liberia. I answered that, at the heart of it, I wanted to know if I could do it. If I could manage something so alone, so different, so far.
In five years of being well (five years guys) my world has soared. There’s no longer anything that I don’t think I can cope with; anywhere I don’t think I can go. I don’t feel the need to test myself anymore, I just know that this is the case.
In 2014 I spent three months unexpectedly couch-surfing around London, six weeks in Sierra Leone, three weeks in France, a week in Cote d’Ivoire, two weeks in Liberia, two weeks in Ethiopia, a week in Rwanda, two weeks in Iran and four months in South Sudan. It was wonderful, although it was also the most unsettled, unsettling year of my life. I wanted to have arrived. Enough with this transient life, filling the space before something else.
I also spent two weeks living back in my very own room, overlooking those Richmond Park treetops. They were so serene. But as I looked out the windows of my current world, I could see them as I did before: still waving at me from a world that I hadn’t been able to cope with.
Now, my fears are fears that most people feel. I fear being alone, I fear time passing.
Do you remember when you thought that the people you knew were just the age they were? As if frozen in time? People were kind of fixed, not in fact transiting so fast through the years.
I’d like to spend more time with people of different ages. Meaningful time – to help with that sense of where we come from and where we're going and that it's all ok.
But for now I turn up on Wednesday evenings or Sunday afternoons with my laptop at Logali House and friendly faces greet me – people I know or people I don’t know. I never leave without new names in my mental notebook and new stories in my memory bank. There’s no pressure or expectation, just a coming together of interesting people living somewhere they probably never expected to be.
I still hear the clamouring of all the lives I’m not living, and I am not at ease with all the versions of me that exist in parallel universes where different choices had been made. But at the same time I feel strangely connected to who I was before.
Maybe one night a week I revisit my old life in my dreams, so intensely I wake shaking with the knowledge of how I used to feel. Then I feel both anger and relief as, when the morning comes, I step back into my now five-year-old life.
My mother asked me, in those early days of tentative wellness when everything was still scary, why I wanted to move to Liberia. I answered that, at the heart of it, I wanted to know if I could do it. If I could manage something so alone, so different, so far.
In five years of being well (five years guys) my world has soared. There’s no longer anything that I don’t think I can cope with; anywhere I don’t think I can go. I don’t feel the need to test myself anymore, I just know that this is the case.
In 2014 I spent three months unexpectedly couch-surfing around London, six weeks in Sierra Leone, three weeks in France, a week in Cote d’Ivoire, two weeks in Liberia, two weeks in Ethiopia, a week in Rwanda, two weeks in Iran and four months in South Sudan. It was wonderful, although it was also the most unsettled, unsettling year of my life. I wanted to have arrived. Enough with this transient life, filling the space before something else.
I also spent two weeks living back in my very own room, overlooking those Richmond Park treetops. They were so serene. But as I looked out the windows of my current world, I could see them as I did before: still waving at me from a world that I hadn’t been able to cope with.
Now, my fears are fears that most people feel. I fear being alone, I fear time passing.
Do you remember when you thought that the people you knew were just the age they were? As if frozen in time? People were kind of fixed, not in fact transiting so fast through the years.
I’d like to spend more time with people of different ages. Meaningful time – to help with that sense of where we come from and where we're going and that it's all ok.
But for now I turn up on Wednesday evenings or Sunday afternoons with my laptop at Logali House and friendly faces greet me – people I know or people I don’t know. I never leave without new names in my mental notebook and new stories in my memory bank. There’s no pressure or expectation, just a coming together of interesting people living somewhere they probably never expected to be.
I still hear the clamouring of all the lives I’m not living, and I am not at ease with all the versions of me that exist in parallel universes where different choices had been made. But at the same time I feel strangely connected to who I was before.
Maybe one night a week I revisit my old life in my dreams, so intensely I wake shaking with the knowledge of how I used to feel. Then I feel both anger and relief as, when the morning comes, I step back into my now five-year-old life.