how to forgive yourself: an exercise. (For F.S.)

Let's say that you're talking to someone.   The conversation is about forgiveness.  The question is posed:  What would make you forgive yourself?  An event?   Love?  Would love be ... enough?

What would you say?

Would you lie?

The truth is that I don't forgive myself.

Do you?

Have you?

Ever? 

Here is a writing exercise.   Find a piece of paper.   It doesn't have to be blank.   It can be the back of an envelope, preferably an opened bill that you can't currently afford to pay.   Say this bill represents things that you've bought in your past that you no longer remember buying.   Say this bill is for things you've consumed and forgotten.  Say that you need the money now, to hold on the house, but it is already gone.  You spent it on things that didn't matter.  Say this bill, and the fact of it, is one of the things for which you probably should forgive yourself.  It's an easy one.   It is just a bill.

And, after all, you didn't know then that you would be trying to hang on now.

You couldn't know.

Find a pen.

Write the following sentence on the white space on the back of the envelope:  I forgive myself.   Feel the pen pressing into the layers of folded paper.   

Doodle around the words.

Draw a bird.  The bird looks terrible so make the bird into an elaborate scroll.   The scroll looks stupid.  Frame the words with this stupid, ugly scroll.   Scribble over the scroll.   Look at the words.   Scribble on them.  Feel the way the pen feels too sharp for the paper and rips through in a few places.   Cringe because of the sound it makes.  Stop.

Trace over the half-obscured words with your finger, so you can feel the way the pen bit into the paper but really left no mark on you.   Look at your blue fingertip.   Make a fingerprint.

OK.   

So that didn't work.

Throw the bill away.   Looking at that envelope will only remind you of what a jerk you really are, doing lame self-help exercises in lieu of, say, paying the bill.

 

Try again.

This time, go to a mirror.  Stand in front of it.  Do not be distracted by the colour and texture of the skin on your winter-red cheeks.  Talk to yourself as though you are someone you don't know.   Try not to feel crazy.   Do not moisturize.  Not right now.

Say the following words out loud:

"I forgive you."

Point to yourself.   Do not laugh.  Do not under any circumstances begin fixing your hair, out of habit.  

Repeat the phrase, "I forgive you" until it begins to sound like gibberish and you become worried the neighbours can hear you from the walkway and are preparing to call some sort of authorities to report the obvious loss of your mind.

Sigh.

Go ahead and wash your face.   This isn't going to work.

Make a list of all the things you've forgiven yourself for in the past.   Do it on the computer.   (The pen idea was bad because it was too distracting.   There was doodling and the fact of the bill itself, which isn't even one of the things on your looming list of things for which you ought to forgive yourself.)   

Try remembering awful things that you've said and done.

List the people you have hurt.

Then remember what made you forgive yourself.

Realize that you never have.  Not even once.   Not even for things that no one remembers, or even cared about in the first place.

Realize that you are awful to yourself.

Hate yourself for it.

Add "hating myself" to the list of things for which you must forgive yourself right now before you lose yourself in this unforgiving morass of self-loathing.

Realize that saying "I forgive myself" is exactly the gibberish that it sounds like.   Saying it does nothing to loosen the tight bolts of unforgivingness that keep you together.   You are not a forgiving person.  You have never forgiven anyone.  In some ways, your inability to forgive yourself or anyone else feels like the glue that is holding you together.

The list of people you do not forgive begins with the boy across the road who once threw pinecones at you so hard and so relentlessly that he made your ear bleed and then laughed about it.  His name was Ben.   Ben was the first person who you did not forgive.

You did not forgive Sean, who on the first day of school picked you up and shotputted you across the playground, knocking the wind out of you and leaving you dazed for a day.

You did not forgive your best friend in seventh grade for deciding, on the eve of 8th grade, that you were no longer good enough or cool enough to keep her company.

The list of boys you do not forgive is long.  The ones who embarrassed you, the ones who liked you, and the ones who didn't.

You do not forgive the men, either, the ones you loved who let you down.

Especially the last one.

You definitely do not forgive the girl with the moon-shaped face, her eyes greedy for all that you had, which is now hers.

You do not forgive yourself either.   It's in you, in the veins and sinews and tissues of you, this list of the ways you've been wronged and the names of the wrong-doers.   There is a catalogue of what happened and who said what.   There, among your ivory bones, is all the detritus of the ways you've been wronged and have wronged others.

Lately, your chest has been hurting.  You imagine that all these unforgiven wrongs have been pushed to the center of you, your beating heart, and there they are, blocking everything.   Your blood trying to get past it, pounding loudly in your ears.   The pain pulling like a Charley horse.

You must get this unforgiveness out of your heart.

Writing it on an envelope is not going to help.

You must do this thing.  There is going to be no event that triggers this change, there is only you, with your pile of bills and blank screen and awkward complexion, holding on to all these things as though they still matter more than the things that should.  That do.

It gets confusing at this point.

Because it isn't a narrative, it isn't clear.  

There is no defining moment.  

There is just this moment, amongst all the other moments.  It is the same and it is different.

It is the moment when, instead of writing it down, or talking to your reflection, you allow yourself to let go.  No, that's wrong.  That makes it seem like the things themselves want to be released, but you are holding them back.   They are stuck to you with barnacle-like tenacity.   It's not that you have to let them go.  It's that you have to make them leave, pry them off one by one.

Not of all of them.   Just one thing at a time.   All at once is too much to ask of yourself.  Remember?  The point of this is to be kind.   To yourself.  

Gently pry off one barnacle. Take a time when you said or did something stupid, years ago, for which you have yet to forgive yourself.   Remove it willfully.   Cry.   It's so stupid to cry about this one small thing, but there it is.

Now pick something bigger.   Someone recent.

Force yourself to forgive it.

Saying it out loud doesn't have any meaning.   You must feel it.  You must breathe as though it is gone, dislodged from where you were storing it, a greying-white tenacious fist-sized barnacle blocking the flow near the large vessel of your heart.

Now.

Is it gone?

Good.

Cry.

When your friend posed the question about forgiveness, he wondered out loud if love was the thing.  If being loved by someone else could be the trigger to forgiving yourself.  

You said, "No."

Now you aren't so sure.

Love is kindness.  Sometimes kindness must creep in and loosen the bolts and glue of this unforgivingness.  Maybe it is one of the ingredients that can make the barnacles release their grip on you.

You want to email him now and say, "Maybe."

At the time, you thought maybe it needed to be something MORE.   A near-death experience.  A huge life event.  Now you aren't so sure.

In the moment of death, do you really forgive yourself?  Or do you simply realize -- too late -- that none of it actually mattered as much as you tried to make it matter?   

Whereas love, a love that you actually accept?  Maybe there is more power in that, after all.  Because isn't the very act of accepting love the same as the act of forgiving yourself?  Because to accept love, you must feel worthy of love.  

And to feel worthy, you must also have done the work of forgiving the unforgiveable.  

(It is work.  Make no mistake.)

Then, and only then, your heart will be ready:  smooth and unbarnacled, showing only faint marks of the scars where the barnacles once clung.  The blood will then be moving painlessly, allowing love to move gently in to the flow of its unhampered beat. 

hope is the thing with feathers.

This year has been a year of revision.   Thousands of words, but none of them quite new.   

You yearn for "new".  

Next year will be a year to begin again, start fresh.  There are two new books to write, already half-formed, waiting.  There will be new ideas to love and new places to go, if only in your mind.   If only on the page.  (Blank, white pages have always been your favourites.) 

There will be new people.   Maybe.  

What you look forward to having is simply new hope.  

Hope, when you say it out loud, does not feel like a thing with feathers, like Emily Dickinson wrote.  Rather, it feels round and mellifluous, something you hold in your hand and worry between your fingers.  Something with weight.   Hope, you revise, is the pebbles your kids pick up from the beach.  You carry them by the pocketful, as they wish.  ("As you wish, m'lady."  It means, "I love you," of course.)  

Hope is a coat weighed down by pebbles.

Some metaphors are easy.

Hopelessness, for example, is a razor sharp ridge that must be traversed in adverse conditions, like say, with a broken heart, or in bad weather.   Or both.

Just an example.   Nothing personal.  

You are not referring to yourself.   To your own life.  

Are you?

Well.

You have been pretending that it is not the case.   You have made out like it hasn't hurt to cross these 365 days.  This winter ridge.   You have not let on how it has been.   You have not told anyone about the way you have been carrying your kids' pebbles in your pockets, held tight in your clenched fists.  

Hope.

You walked all year, one foot in front of the other.  

Sometimes, it was hard.  

Sometimes, it was easy.  (Not really, that's a lie.)

Sometimes, it was impossible.   At those impossible times, you sat down and waited.   Then you decided how to continue.   By letting go.  The more things you let go of, the easier it became to keep going, although letting go of these things was intensely difficult.   You wrote all your hurt on blank white paper, long paragraphs of jealousy and regret.  Then you folded each page with a great precision.  In this way, flocks of origami birds rose behind you as you made your way towards now. 

The pebbles in your hands kept you safe.   They kept you from flying away, too.   The words were caught on gusts and vanished into the blue.   You wrote her name, Melody, this girl who took everything you believed.   And you let go of that, too.

That was the hardest.  

The last step.

Hate is always the last thing to leave.

There were complicated paragraphs involved.  Sheaves of your papery birds swooped down in parks and on rooftops, like a sudden snowfall.   You imagined Melody standing amongst them, confused and blank, not understanding, because she never tried.  How she never seemed to understand any of it will never fail to shock you.   When you think of it too much, the hate comes back, that one paper bird stuck to your heart like glue.   How you were sick.   How she was there when you couldn't be.  How she rolled her eyes and giggled.   How she took.

You write more.  You fold more.  You walk more.  

A novel's worth of words.   More.   

You let them go.   While you let them go, tears slide over the pebbles in your hands.  When they are shiny, they look beautiful.   The metaphor quivers at the edge of your vision, but you can't quite see it.   There is a beauty in being sad that you don't have access to at any other time.   Letting go of the sadness will mean losing that.   Are you ready?

Yes.

Now, you say.  It's enough.  It's done.

And so you come to the end of the jagged ridge and of the hopelessness.  

At the end of this journey, there is a sea. 

Hope is a sea, you think.  

You look out to the sea and you cannot tell what is there beyond the white crests on the surf that foam towards you from the distant horizon.   It's dark.  There are stars behind the clouds.  There is not yet much to see.   But you wait and keep looking.  Eventually your eyes adjust and you see all the pebbles on the beach, glistening in the moonlight when the tar-black waves retreat.  A million pieces of hope, buoying you.   You stand on the shore and drop your pebbles amongst the ones already there.   Under your feet, they are holding you up gently and firmly, like loving hands.  

Hope, you say.  

And the wind finally peels away your last carefully folded origami swan.  It takes it somewhere far away from you, into the infinite stars and the darkest forests and all the places no one has ever seen.   And only then, out of sight of you and everyone else, only then does that swan really fly, wings pushing against air, to climb higher and higher, until it becomes the sky, the feathers the thing that Emily Dickinson understood and that now you finally do, too. 

Hope is the thing with feathers.   And hope is the shine on the pebbles.   And hope is a sea.   And hope is a blank, white page.  

Hope is the reason.   Hope is everything.   

Happy new year everyone.    And may your 2012 be filled with hope.     

don't try to remember your dreams. don't write them down.

Your son is covered with dots.  Conjoined chickenpox, you say gravely.  You're about to help him but you can't because the army is marching towards you.  You know that everyone must run and hide.   Now.  Do it.  

Your heart is rickety.  The thing that is missing already in this dream is hope.  The soldiers are killing your children.

NO.

Remain lucid, you say to your hand.  It folds into a shape like a paper crane.

There is a card game on a paddle boat.  The floor is sawdust.   You are wearing a black dress overlaid with a thick lace made from yarn.  Something spilled on the white web of wool, blood or jam.  You wait for your cards.  Now there is a game, but the rules are vague. The numbers slide off the cards like rain down windows.

Your ex-husband is laughing in the distance.  It isn't him. In the dream, he is being played by Christopher Walken.  You are so angry that he's even there, in your dream.  You aren't welcome, you tell him. The women he's with are naked.  You know them.  Christopher Walken shrugs, his laugh boiling out of him like blood roiling in shark-infested water.   

You stand up and you are falling.  A brown bird flies toward your eyes.

You are at a kitchen table.   There are yellow checks on the clean tablecloth.  Something important must be done.

There is a newspaper.   Spiders crawl over it. The horror bothers you. You brush the spiders off. You can't read the paper, the type won't be read. .  

You concentrate on an address where you have to go. Take a train.  The sky outside is a painter's frustrated mistake, smeared with various different weathers.  

You walk across a lawn strewn with frozen leaves towards a forest. The kids are in a sprinkler, laughing.   

You go inside the house. It's huge.  You go up all of the endless stairs.  The carpet lifts and curls and smells like nothing.  The kids would trip if they were there, but they aren't.  Did you forget them somewhere?  Isn't one of them sick?  Trying to remember is like trying to swim through thick, viscous mud.  

Your heart briefly stops in panic.

You can't fill your lungs.   You swim because the house is full of water.

There's a hole in the wall, a gaping maw.   You look at it and think, I shouldn't go there, bad things will happen.  

Where are your wretched hands?  Gone.   

On the top floor, you find -- as you knew you would -- a classroom lined with ancient desks.  The clock on the wall says 3 o'clock.  The grass is ten stories down.  The kids are playing, dressed in white.   

Coming towards you is a little girl in pigtails.  It's six year old you, walking slowly.  You have red eyes, burning like coals.  The horror is profound.  You say, "Let's not."  She sits down.  She is reading a book.   Her hands melt, dripping white wax on the brown desk.  

It's OK, you say gently.   You feel benevolent.

She is the zombie, with her conjoined chickenpox and in her hands a deck of cards.  You shoot her again and again and she stares at you sadly, her eyes are brown.

You try to run, but your legs are wobbly thin, pieces of paper, so you lean down and somehow pull yourself forward with your arms.   

And then you are on the subway platform and you are singing: I am just a poorboy though my story's seldom told, I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbled sexual promises.

The crowd on the platform moves like water around you.  Most people are wearing blue.  The sky is blue.  You are relieved.  

You wake yourself up with the singing that pushes through the dream and out of you, loudly enough to become a real sound.  All lies and jests still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. 

Now that you've woken yourself up, the dream is going fast.  The song remains.  Each remaining piece is evaporating as quickly as a blown bubble pops.  Gone before you can catch them.

Were you dreaming?  he says.  

Yes, you say.  Sorry, did I wake you?

I was already awake,  he says.  You were talking in your sleep.

I was singing, you say. 

You want him to tell you that he heard it, that you truly sang, but he doesn't.  You didn't. 

You remember that your voice resonated and was loud and powerful, rising in the blue. 

I finished a novel last night.  Writing it, not reading it.   Although I've read it, believe me.  

Once, twice, a thousand times.  Four years of work are in those 285 pages.  The words themselves have begun to feel more like a dream than a dream itself.  I have only ever spent this much time on one previous book, my first.   This is my new first book.   My fourteenth first book.  

The novel is as polished as it ever will be, the stones examined and carefully cut with precision tools after being pulled out piece by piece, extracted from the same subconscious that gives me whales that drag me nightly into the dark green glass depths of unknown seas.   

I hope you read it one day, when it exists, bound and glossy on a bookstore shelf, my small story that I lucidly dreamed through my fingers onto this same small screen.  

No one is interested in your dreams or mine.  

A novelist's dreams are likely the most annoying of all, as we are in the habit of looking for meaning in metaphors or making them up in those moments when we are first awakening.  We fill in the blanks and polish the tale.   We add details and explain.  

Dreams should be like failed novels, stored on hard-drives, never to be seen again.  (All those scenes strung together like wetly shining beads, that on closer examination, are only flat dry pebbles, boring in their multitudes.)  

Do you tell people your dreams or do you stop yourself?

a murmuration on rotten island.

A long time has passed now, so things should be better.  And in many ways, they are.   They are and then they are not again.  It isn't something that's easy to talk about because people confuse how you're not able to get over the new details with you not being able to get over the thing itself that happened.

The loss.

It isn't the loss, not the way that most people would probably assume.

It's the details, people. 

The old details:

The Christmas party.  His hand on her bare back.   Your eyes meeting her boyfriend's eyes.   Both of you, looking at the hand.   

The way you'd been sitting at dinner, talking about your pending City Hall nuptials.   Your words still hanging in the air, frozen, like a warm exhalation on an ice cold day.   Those same words, now falling in shards of ice all around you, plinking like diamonds on the restaurant floor.

The way the girl giggled.   The way she rolled her eyes.

This new detail:

Now she is in your children's lives.   

"I choose not to suffer," you repeat to yourself, when you think you might be listening.   You think of Buddhism.   You think of leaves floating down a river.   You think of birds, swarming in huge flocks, flowing like water across the sky.  A murmuration.   

You think of the word murmuration, and how it sounds like exactly what it is:  surprising beauty, the soft strength of feathers and the sound of air being pushed downwards by a thousand different wings.

You go to the woods while the kids are with their dad and this girl, and you look very closely at beautiful things.   Trees and leaves.   The way the clouds unfurl.  The footprints of elk in the mud.   "Choose not to suffer," you repeat.   You watch the salmon struggling upstream.   The way the sun filters through the moss growing on a hundred tree trunks.  The way shadows languidly stretch into the undergrowth.

You are choosing not to suffer.  

And yet suffering occurs, against your wishes.

Time heals all wounds, right?  Or at least it fades them to scars:  The dress.   The hand.  The broken words, crunching under your favourite high-heeled shoes.  

And everything that came before that.  And after.

Those scars are old.   Established.   So much a part of you that you no longer notice them first thing when you wake up, or last thing before you sleep.

But now:  the girl's hand holding your children's hands as they walk away into the forest.

Does she ever stop taking, this girl, who wanted wanted wanted and got?  (The boss, power, and more than she bargained for, no doubt.)

This thing that she got, it also comes with your children.  

You choose not to suffer. 

Oh, stop.   Read a book.   Write one.   Do something else.   Knit.   Paint.

But.

You can't.

She giggles and rolls her eyes.  

She giggles and rolls her eyes.

She giggles and rolls her eyes.

She gets high.

Again.

It is this part of divorce that hurts the most:  the sharing of your children with people you with whom you have no desire to share.  With people who are, for lack of a better word, unsuitable. 

It is this part that will tear you inside out.   It is this part that scrapes your insides raw and wakes you up in the middle of the night, heart racing, awash with sweat.

It is also this part of divorce that no one talks about.   Because it isn't supposed to be like this.  It's supposed to be downright pleasant, everyone still "friends", everyone still OK, laughing about the bullets they dodged, making scathing jokes about 'all men'.  It's supposed to be sharing Christmas dinner, everyone with their new partner, framed in a photograph.  Laughing.  Playing a board game.   Having a drink.  Celebrating.  

And the kids moving between them as easily as birds, migrating on a simple path.   Back and forth.   Weekends and Tuesday nights.   

Or maybe that's just how it is on sitcoms, where no one's feelings run any deeper than 1/4 of an inch.

At bedtime, we read a story called ROTTEN ISLAND.   The kids love the line drawings, the monsters with their jaggedy teeth who live on an island where it is boiling all day, and freezing all night; where every wind is a hurricane and the volcanoes shoot poison arrows and lava and two-headed toads; and, where the loathing grows on twisted vines, spiked with thorns and shards of all the broken things.

The monsters thrive on their hate for each other.   Their hatred is what keeps them alive.   They love their hate.

And then somehow, a flower grows.   And the beautiful thing that grows there does not, in fact, make everything better.   It actually makes the monsters hate each other even more, until ultimately, they destroy each other.   And, of course, their demise creates fertilizer for the ground, and more flowers grow.  And eventually the island is awash with flowers, punctuated by the dormant, lush volcanoes, surrounded by the turquoise blue sea.

It looks like St. Lucia.

In there somewhere, there is a metaphor for me, my ex-husband, the girl, and my children.

Find it.   Let me know what you discover.   

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

i remember you.

The Bun loves graveyards.   I have been sitting here trying to think of an explanation so I can put it here, where this sentence is sitting.

But I don't have one.   Not really.  I could guess, I suppose.   I think it has something to do with how he can't say goodbye.

"Please," he begs.   "I'll give you 50,000 kisses. I'll give you ten dollars."   

So we go.  

It's so cold and I have the flu and barely feel above-ground myself.   Every once in a while, a strange jerking pain in my chest and I think maybe I am not the right person to be, right now, walking around in a graveyard.   The irony, oh, the irony.   Shiver, shiver.  This damn flu.

The Birdy plays hide and seek with herself behind the markers.   She climbs the cross of a baby who died in 1898.  I think about the baby's parents, choosing the marble, and I'm sad.   Parents were still parents in 1898.   The marker reads:  "Innocent".

"Don't PLAY on the dead people," shouts The Bun.  

"Oh", says The Birdy.  She looks down at the grass under her feet.  "It's OK!" she says.  "They aren't here."

"Yes, they are," says The Bun.  

"OK," she shrugs, and starts her game again, further away.   The Birdy isn't afraid of anything, especially not of a few hundred ghosts.   Or her brother.

The Bun has brought a clipboard and some lined paper, which he made especially.  It is my job to write down the names from the graves he selects.   He chooses seriously and carefully and gradually we fill five pages of lines.   My hand is freezing, my fingers are numb.

"Are we done?" I say.  "What is this for, anyway?"

"For remembering," he says, in a voice that suggests that maybe I'm very stupid. 

Which sometimes I am.

"But you didn't even know these people," I say.

"They still need to be remembered," he says, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.   

Some things don't need to be remembered.   Some people.   Yet the ones you'd like most to forget are the ones who stick the most firmly, lodged in your daily consciousness like rats in sticky traps.    The ghosts of living people are the ones who never, ever, ever leave you alone.

They are the scary ones.

The Bun keeps the catalogue of names beside his bed.   

Read it, he says.   So I do.

It's sad and definitely a little strange, but also it isn't.  In a way, it's the most normal thing in the world -- to hold on to what (and who) is lost.  

In that way, it feels a lot like love.