I set up this Substack just over a month ago on March 1st, and at that time, I had no idea how the next part of life was going to unfold. As it happened, we did end up moving on March 31st (so something went to plan for once!), but a couple of weeks before then, we also, completely unexpectedly, found a new place to live. I had imagined a period of time post-move, where we’d explore; perhaps go and stay in Wales for a week at a time and look at a bunch of houses, or maybe do some travelling, but instead, a series of small nudges led us to a house and a piece of land, in our preferred location, in our budget, with no chain. I can’t quite believe it’s happened, but it also feels exactly right. I’m excited but feeling calm too, and very ready for the next chapter to start. We’ve been in limbo ever since we returned from Detroit three years ago, but it feels like the years of uncertainty - at least about where we should be living - may finally be coming to a close.
Alongside that unexpected development, my commitment to writing has faltered, as we’ve prioritised packing up our house and moving out (to my mum’s as a temporary stop-gap while the purchase of the Wales house goes through). Moving is never fun, and despite the excitement I’m feeling about the next phase, I’ve been pretty lost since we completed, a week ago last Friday. Today I had nothing I needed to do, but I couldn’t settle. I sat under the big ash tree in the garden, the tree we got married under. It was sunny and warm, the birds were singing. I had a pile of books next to me, but I still felt flat. After the frenzy of activity around the move, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I picked up one book; then another, and read a little, but I couldn’t concentrate. I scrolled a list of podcasts from my favourites, but nothing jumped out at me. I felt the familiar itch to pick up my phone to go on social media or read the news.
For once, I didn’t scratch it, and instead hauled myself inside, had a shower, and now I’m writing this post. I’m still getting used to the idea that it’s ok for me to love writing; and if it’s where I feel most myself and how I make sense of the world, then of course it should be one of the first places I turn when I’m trying to figure shit out. Everything has felt so sped up recently, so full of activity and plans and doing, that my head feels like mush. I don’t know what this post is going to look like - I have no plan, no idea - just an overwhelming desire not to feel so tangled up, coupled with a gentle knowing that getting whatever’s rattling around in there out and onto a page will help.
The move was over a week ago now. It was a strange few days. I was sadder than I expected when I left the house for the last time. Due to a combination of factors, I was alone at the very end: the morning had become compressed, leading to a sprint finish to get everything out and cleaned. The weather was dicey, with gale force winds and rain battering us as we ran between the house and the van. Karl and my dad needed to get the last load shifted, and mum and I had finished the cleaning, so they all left, and I stayed in the house, waiting for the notification from our solicitor that completion had occurred and that it belonged to someone else.
In the empty house, I felt a rush of affection for the place. Without all our stuff in it, I saw what I had seen initially: the beauty of the open-plan layout and the light that streamed right through, via the old sash windows; the beautiful little touches, like the coloured tiles in front of each fireplace, and the gorgeous double length mirror on the wall. I didn’t have anything else to do so I walked around the house slowly, looking at the rooms where I’d spent so much time over the past three years. I filmed it - why I don’t know - but it felt like the right thing to do. As I pulled the door closed for the last time, a wave of emotion fluttered through my chest, but I didn’t cry. The emotion felt stuck, like there was a plug in my heart. I got in the van and called the estate agent and let them know I was out and that the new owners could pick up the keys. It was no longer ours.
The night before, we’d crashed out in the lounge on our mattress, having hauled it down the stairs ready to be moved the next morning. We watched a few episodes of New Girl and ate a takeaway and had one last fire. I had a memory of a little blog post I’d written when we’d left our flat in Brighton to move to Seaford (the house we’ve just left) back in 2013, and I dug it out and read it to Karl. The blog described everything I was going to miss and all the things that had happened in our lives while we’d lived there. I think the point I was trying to make was that it wasn’t just the place I would miss - the four walls of the rooms - but what those walls had held, and this was mixed with sadness, that this part of our life was coming to an end.
I read my words from 2013 with a mix of affection and nostalgia. I’d captured that time pretty well, I thought. When I think about our time in the Brighton flat, so many of the memories are associated with going out: of drinking and parties and smoking; of rambling conversations and late nights and hangovers. I think of freedom and a lack of responsibility; of weekend breaks and time with friends and festivals and hanging out with my family. I felt a lightness in my words and a blissful lack of awareness about what was to come. There’s an innocence there, a sweetness in me that I don’t think I possess anymore.
Yet I know that underneath the veneer, I was also anxious and at the height of my people-pleasing. I was drinking a lot, and my identity was completely enmeshed with my social life. I was desperate for connection, but I didn’t know how to be myself in the world without booze. I can see now that all those great times were intimately tied to alcohol because drinking allowed me to feel ok in my own skin. I had no sense of what I really wanted from life, or what my desires were. I had no real connection to anything other than my relationships. I went to work. I did nice things with my friends and family at the weekends. I loved music, and I wanted to travel, and these were the things I focused on. These are not bad things - far from it - but they feel somewhat limited compared to what I want now. With the benefit of hindsight, I also know now that I was in a much worse place mentally. Even so, I felt a wistfulness for the simplicity of it all.
When I think about those good times, and they were good times, I think I feel a bit jealous of myself. I may have been sleepwalking through my life, but it was fun. There’s a lack of self-consciousness I had then that I wish I could get back. I read an amazing piece by Freddie Deboer on Substack recently, about life in the 90s. There’s so many great observations in it, but the bit that really got me was where he describes the difference between consciousness in the 90s and consciousness now. I didn’t live in Brighton during the 90s - I was only a teenager - but still, he perfectly captured for me the difference between how my mind behaves now, and how it did ten years ago:
“Of course people were still anxious and shy and overthought everything. But there wasn’t yet this second mind thing going on, this sense of another consciousness that’s welded to your own consciousness and has its own say all the time. Your own mind might have been mixed up and gripped by worry but it was still one linear mind. Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self.”
When I wrote those reflections of our time in Brighton, it was towards the end of the golden age of social media. I had some awareness of how my mind might appear to others, sure, but I can categorically say that it’s nowhere close to what I’d think now. I was anxious and stressed, yes, but I wasn’t worried about being anxious and stressed. I didn’t have any awareness that the ‘negative’ or self-destructive aspects of my personality were anything other than normal. I didn’t realise I was policing myself around others, or agreeing with everyone to keep the peace, or continually saying yes when I meant no. I had no awareness of it at all. I was completely oblivious! And while I wouldn’t change what I know now, when I read the words spoken by another version of me, I pine, just a bit, for that obliviousness.
Sometimes, I get so bored of thinking about myself, about my childhood, about how I can be better, do better, be a present human in the world. What I want to do and how I’m going to do it. How to be more creative. How to live a life with no regrets. What I’m going to do with my one wild and precious life. Etc etc. I’m simultaneously thrilled that I’m not that person anymore, and envious of the (perceived) freedom I had from my own mind. Sometimes I wish I just wasn’t so aware of all my goddamn thoughts all the goddamn time. Even as I write this, my skin is crawling, just a bit, with the sheer indulgence of it all.
It was interesting to compare the feelings I had when I left Brighton, to what I feel now, leaving Seaford after 3 and a bit years (plus 5 years of daydreaming about returning to it while we were in Detroit, and a year living in it before then). Many things strike me, but the most obvious thing is that that life is very different now. That the things I think I’m going to miss about Seaford are not the same as the things I thought I would miss about Brighton. That the four walls of the Seaford house have held two people at a very different stage of life: we’ve moved on from those early adulthood milestones - engagement, marriage, work, family - and replaced them with… I don’t know. Heartbreak and sadness, yes - but also growth, knowledge, depth, love. Not to mention the whole other chapter in Detroit, complete with its own highs and lows. 5 years that have also been contained by the Seaford house, our time there bookended by periods here.
Although there are far fewer snapshot ‘good’ memories from our time in Seaford, I’m going to miss the house which has been my sanctuary and the place where I finally began to get my shit together and heal from a lifetime of mental and emotional issues. When I look back at what I predicted I’d miss about Brighton, it’s all outward-facing stuff: things that we did, people we spent our time with. When I think about what I’ll miss from Seaford, there’s very little of that, really. All of my big moments have been personal, have happened inside me, are not instagramable.
I will miss things about Seaford of course, not least our walks across the downs to all our favourite views - High and Over, Cuckmere Haven, Seaford Head, Rathfinny Farm. I’ll miss the house and the aforementioned spaciousness, and light and windows. I’m going to miss the huge clawfoot bath. The fire. The neighbours plum blossom tree. Watching the cats rolling around outside and patrolling on the wall. But they don’t feel as immediate and obvious as the other things did when we left Brighton. I’m also ready to go, ready to start a new chapter - one we’ve been dreaming about for years. And most of the stuff I’ll miss from Seaford we will have again: we will bath again and sit by the fire again. The cats will roll around in the sun again. We’ll find new walks to new places. There will be other views from other windows that I will love again.
Just before I left the house, as I walked around it for the last time, I had the thought: this was the house that I had been pregnant in, twice. That the bath that I love so much was the bath I had sat in back in October 2021, for hours at a time, adding clary sage to the water and pressing on the forbidden acupressure points, trying desperately to coax my body into letting go of the first failed pregnancy so I could avoid surgery. And 6 months on, this was where the second would pass naturally, painless and without ceremony. It is the house where Karl walked down the stairs with the strangest pain on his face, to tell me that my friend Poppy had died. These are the rooms that we escaped back to after multiple prolonged stays at Karl’s parents, as we watched his mum slip away from this world. It was the place we settled as we readjusted to life in the UK after America. Where we’d waited out the pandemic. It all flashed across my mind, but then it was time - I had to leave, and I busied myself with locking up the house.
Later that evening, when, exhausted and spent, the tears began to flow, all those thoughts landed back on top of me again. It often does. It’s such a bundle in my mind. I can’t think about the past few years, this weird, liminal period, without thinking about the loss we’ve experienced: it’s like dominoes, I think of one and the rest follow, falling one after the other in a predictable pattern. I worry that I’m too attached to the story: this happened, and then this, and then this, but I’m not able to divorce one thing from another yet - it all feels so close and inextricable. And it all happened in those few years, within the walls of the Seaford house.
As I finally let go that evening, there was the added loss of our ark, our anchor, gone now too. I cried for all of it. Mingled within it was the sadness for the 33-year-old me who moved away from Brighton for a new life with such hope in her heart. I could never have predicted how it would have all panned out. I wouldn’t change a second of it, but at that moment there was still a part of me that wished I could. That wished that maybe we hadn’t turned our lives upside down and gone to Detroit; that we were still living in that insulated Brighton bubble. That acknowledged that we were leaving Seaford because it hadn’t worked out. And that part of me wished it had; wished desperately that returning to our old life, and our old house, and this place and these people had been enough. For a moment I wanted that so much. My heart broke for it all, at the same time it overflowed with love and gratitude for the house we’d called home through all that rough stuff.
And now…. well I guess we’ve moved from one limbo to another. I suppose it makes sense that I’m feeling unsettled and flat and empty. The limbo we’ve experienced for the past few years is continuing for a while longer, as we wait to properly finish up this chapter and move to Wales in the summer. I’m conscious that I don’t want to be doing that thing I always do where I’m pushing ahead: when this happens, or that happens then I will be ok. When we get to Wales, I’ll be more present, I’ll eat better, lose some weight, start doing yoga again, meditate more. Although I know I will, this constant forward motion means that I’m never really here; I’m always ten steps ahead.
I had a moment when we were packing up our living room. I was wrapping up some of our most treasured possessions, including the original framed papercut of our wedding invitation made by my friend Martha. I was doing what I always do: rushing, getting frustrated, moving too quickly. Not treating the item with the respect it deserved. On course to break something and feel bad about myself. I do this all the time, and I’m very aware of it, but this time I really saw myself, as if from above. What the fuck was I doing? Why was I rushing? What mythical promised land would be reached, what important thing would I do with all the spare time I’d generated from completing some necessary tasks at breakneck speed?
I felt my undefined root centre in action, that sense of urgency, and the feeling of “once everything is done, then I’ll relax.” It’s a nice idea in theory, but there’s always something else that fills up the space, always something else to do. Either that, or by the time I reach that mythical empty space of no commitments or tasks, I’m so tired that I can’t accomplish anything of worth anyway. But this is how I live my life. I’ve always been praised for doing things quickly and efficiently and effectively, and it’s such a well-worn path in my mind. I rarely build up relationship with anything, never give myself space for true intention, so focused am I on reaching the goal and then moving onto the next one. It’s relentless: the need to always be doing, going, achieving, and I really saw it as I wrapped up that picture.
It’s not a new concept of course: everything I’ve learned in the past few years has basically had the same message: be not do; to slow down, take more time, be more feminine, receptive, open. I have tried, and at times, I’ve succeeded. But it’s hard because the world we live in doesn’t support it. Since I’ve been back in the office these past 6 months, I’ve noticed the way everyday life has just swept me up again. All the work I did, all the new ground I covered, the fresh pathways I began to forge in my mind have been hijacked by the simple acts of being on a schedule, of going to a day job, and of being around others who are doing the same.
This Easter weekend we visited Karl’s friend Clive, who lives in a cabin in the woods in West Sussex. We’ve been going to see him on and off for the past 15 years and it's always such a balm to my soul. I’ve never met anyone so fully situated in himself. We were only with him for a few hours, but as always, I learned so much. He spoke to us about all the different projects he was involved in at a local school and in the nearby villages; he showed us a new area of coppice and gave us a tour of his workshop. He read us a story he’d written, before describing various woodland and soil management processes that could help us on our land in Wales. He told us about the necklaces he’d been making on request - he said he didn’t just want to churn them out for money (which seemed like such a pure expression of the Generator response strategy, which I, of course, loved).
I love him. I want so much to be more like him: fully myself, living my design and present to it all. As Karl and I walked around the paths in the woods that we knew so well, spring emerging everywhere: violets, primroses, wild garlic, bluebells, we realised that every time we see Clive, we drive away feeling restored, but also wistful: wanting so much to live how he’s living, to be closer to nature, to feel free. But this time, for the first time in 15 years, we would be able to drive away knowing that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to doing so. After all the craziness of the preceding couple of weeks, that thought landed in my body and I looked around at all the new beginnings, the cycles of nature starting over again, and all was well in the world. We’re not there yet but we’re on our way there. Limbo can be exasperating, boring, exciting, and exhausting but I wouldn’t change it. I know I’ll look back on this time and there will be a lesson in it that I’ve not seen yet.
If you’re still here, thanks for reading to the end of this jumble of thoughts.
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