Never Walked In High Heels

When I told my mom that I would never go back to the UK, she immediately said I would. As I’m on a boat going home, curving around the Thames, those five years seemed to have never happened. A lifetime has passed and I am doing exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do.

The first time I was in London, I constantly felt as though I was drowning. Going deeper and deeper it was clear that I was not in charge. My assistants were, and I would never be able to take the reigns away from them. From before we even left home in Chicago, the tensions were clear, and as we crossed passport control, I kept saying to myself over and over, “tomorrow I’ll wake up and everything will be better. Everything will be as it should be.” That summer we would spend three months based in England but also going to various places in Europe as I was completing my research for a thesis. My memories of those that time can be best summed up in two words: fear and hunger. Outside of that I don’t remember going to the Eifel Tower, or the first time I saw Big Ben. I don’t particularly remember the Swiss Alps or being in a bathhouse in Budapest. Fear because one of the assistants was constantly threatening that my chair would go into the river if things didn’t go his way. And since every major European city has a river, it was a constant danger. And hunger, because the assistants saw the fact that I needed help getting food as a way to maintain a level of control. Sometimes it wasn’t ok to eat anything. When they felt like it, it was, but the food was minimal.

How I ever got a combination between these two assistants, I don’t know, but after I had returned from my journey, several people commented that they knew these individuals better than I did and they immediately thought of it as a bad idea. Why didn’t they say anything before? I will never know. But before I left people encouraged me that these two would be good at keeping a schedule and help me with research. We did indeed keep our complex schedule keeping interviews and seeing resources at an alarming rate. By the end of the summer we had been in no less than 12 countries, and it had all gone exactly as I planned back at the university when I was setting up logistics. It was just that none of it felt the way I had planned it to feel. Several times my assistants told me that I should never leave the United States again because it was so difficult for me to travel and they had to do so much of the work. Six months later I finally had a doctor tell me that what I was facing during that summer was abuse.

When the psychiatrist gave me a diagnosis, I immediately asked if he was sure. “I thought that’s what they gave war veterans after being in horrific situations. I’ve been in nothing of the kind. Just a trip to Europe that didn’t go the way I thought it ought to.” He said to me, “But you were in a horrific situation.” It would take me several years to realize that he was right, that my once insulated world was shattered. It was almost as if I had a demarcation between childhood and adult life. And sometimes, despite the amount of grace for forgiveness I have sought, and successfully obtained, I still wish I could go back to before that world was shattered.

So, at home, I swore to my family I would never return to the UK. Without thinking, my mother made her response.

The promises we make ourselves when we are in pain are some of the most dangerous oaths we can ever commit to. These promises inevitably shut down our world and shrink life. On one level it makes sense. We are hurting. And who does not cower in the closet when they know there is a monster outside that is two big for them? Mom knew that my oath was quite literally taking the world and shrinking it down to places I would go and places I would not go. When I called her up exactly nine months later telling her that I had gotten an internship that I could not pass up, and I was excited to be moving back to the UK, she wasn’t surprised in the least. Sooner or later she always knew that I would find the strength somehow to re-open what I had locked away and refused to explore.

The boat culls around Canary Wharf and is headed towards home. The geometric skyline looks completely mythical and fierce in its proportions compared to the rest of London. I am lucky that, despite my diagnosis, I don’t get many flashbacks, and when I do, I can usually control them. I am headed home and I can see my dock from Canary Wharf as the boat approaches. It’s a Tuesday night which means there is Quiz Night at the pub with people I know and trust. Tomorrow I have and audition followed by a concert with a friend at Saint Martins. It seems impossible that a city in which I felt so much terror could grow within three years to be my home and is now a place for joy.

And I shudder to think what would happen if I kept the promises I made to myself while I was in pain.

The sun streams into my bedroom window as it rises. Given that its high summer right now, this means that I get woken up by full sunlight at about 5:30 each morning by a blaze of heat and light. The world is ready to go. Boats blaze past, stopping just underneath my window to pick up passengers. Canary Wharf is in constant motion already. And the computer’s email box dings with emails from the USA… friends back there getting ready to turn in are sending final messages for the day. It keeps moving.

Recently I’ve been waking up exhausted.

It’s not the type of exhaustion that comes from lack of sleep. I get eight hours and my eyes don’t want to shut anymore. It’s on the inside, something like inertia that is on a 24 hour cycle and the only reason why I get up is because there is nothing else to do. That and the sun is now burning my eyes like eggs.

The best way I can describe it is fatigue. Its the type that comes when there’s an innate conflict in one’s philosophy which can’t easily be solved. We say to others ‘do what I say, not what I do’ with the realization suddenly that we know neither what we say nor what we’re doing half the time.  Of course, to make matters  worse, we all have these contradictions. You can’t get away from them as long as you’re alive. The best you can do is take a cue from Walt Whitman when he says “do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.” And then you try to push on.

Times like these I can’t debate or even discuss much. I don’t know what I think and really don’t have the energy to debate on sandy ground. I try to listen to what I hear and think it through when I can. These times are for digestion and opportunities to be fed as I am one to starve myself most often. 

I remember once when I was at college I remarked that I found the need to sleep very annoying. My friend turned to me and said “we need to rest so we don’t make idols of ourselves.” And in our strain to make demigods of feeble men we have to lay down every 16 hours or so just to reiterate that the world keeps going without us. It’s like a plant, force anything to grow all the time and the result is something floppy and lanky.

And so, I do get up. I don’t jump out of bed and start making phone calls but I do brush my teeth.  I know I need to do that, and wash my face. I go through all the things even though the list seems so much shorter today. And I know above all else, I must get up if for no other reason than to get out of the sun for a bit.

            During my twentieth year, I had gotten the remarkable ability to lose time.  I could sit in my dorm room and watch the wall hoping that nothing would happen. And then my roommate would come in and ask me down to dinner, forcing me to look at my wall clock and see that over four hours of my life had gone missing. Sometimes I would find myself in a bathtub full of water staring at my razor blade  at 3:30 in the morning, having no idea how  I got there. It was like little green men had come and taken me, the essence of who I was, and left a shell which was too stupid to know to stop. And because I kept going through the motions, everyone thought I was fine.

            By the time four months slipped away from me (according to the calendar) I was gone. Everything that was characteristic about me had vanished. I couldn’t even recognize my own body in a mirror. I had a diagnosis, which frankly may as well been in Japanese. I knew what it was called, I had read about it during AP Psychology in high school.  I knew the literary context of it from English classes. I knew back then it only developed in extreme circumstances, back when I was eighteen I knew that I would never get it. Now I knew that logic was wrong. I knew all these facts, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

            I ‘snapped out of it’ next to find myself lying down on the back pew at our campus church. I heard singing. I heard bongos.  I pieced together that I was at our Thursday  night worship service. It was Thursday. Huh, who knew? I stayed there staring up at the ceiling, too heavy to move. People walked out by me. Suddenly my friend Ashley came into my vision.

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.”

            “What?”

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend. I’ve asked nearly every other one of my friends and nobody has the balls to do it. I have a painting due next week. So now I’m telling you. I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.” I don’t know what I was expecting Ashley to say, maybe ‘you look tired’ or ‘I’m worried about you.’ All I know is this wasn’t how most people climbed out of the depths of despair. But I agreed.

            For most women, the idea off stripping of all clothes and letting someone sit there with an easel and study you is horrifying. Not for me.  Body image is, unbelievably, one of the few struggles I have never had to deal with. Maybe it comes from the fact that my body is utterly uncooperative anyway. As a movement teacher in drama school once told me: “You can just tell, your brain says ‘do it’ and your body says ‘fuck you.’”

            All of which was probably just as well at this point. I have no recollection of that Friday and when I ‘snapped out of it’ again I was lying on my side, Ashley readjusting my hair over my bare shoulder, my arm straining to reach the edge of sunlight. She looked at me with the eyes of an artist, selecting what to paint and highlight as a metaphysical recreation.  Her eyes shifted back and forth from the canvas to my skin with the level of observation like a scientist. Her brown hair fell into her eyes every few minutes when she forgot herself.

            To let someone paint you, see you without obstacles and barriers and then interpret it for an audience, means they know everything. Not simply every scar or mole, but she knows you from observation and study, much like a scientist would know his subject. And yet she deems you a worthy subject to reproduce. As I stared up at the ceiling, feeling the ruffles of the cloth underneath me, I felt at rest. For the first time in months I didn’t have to explain or excuse anything. She just spoke quietly about her own thoughts and reactions so I could gather my own.

            It takes being naked and having nothing sometimes to regain something. That day I got the smallest part of myself and my pride back. This is me. I need nothing else. I am lovely. It’s okay to be naked and have no excuses. Within this feeble state you will be made perfect.

            And I sat there, naked, aware of every moment. I still haven’t forgotten a second of those three hours in November.

It has now been five summers since I first came to London. In 2004, I was here working on an undergraduate thesis, and I swore I would never come back. By the end of those eight weeks my life had forever changed, and I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In many ways, it was a loss of innocence. If you ask me what happened, I can honestly say I don’t remember much. It was a nine week long black-out in my life, which happens to be recorded in my journal. Something that I never open. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office when I was diagnosed and thinking, “I’m a twenty year-old young woman in private school, and they are giving me the same diagnosis as men returning from war.”

Nine months later, I was making plans to move to London permanently. 

The sun hits the Thames so fiercely in the summer that sometimes it acts as a flashbulb trigger between here and yesterday. Oddly enough, I don’t mind. It serves as a reminder of where I’ve come from and where I’m going. And if you’re on the right path, you shouldn’t be ashamed to remember either.

I love summer in London more than any other city I’ve ever lived in. I think it’s because everyone loves summer here. There’s always that first day that you look around and notice that all of the women are wearing dresses that catch the breeze just so. You walk outside and are warmed by the sun, and it’s like winter never even existed. Months of grey skies disappear within a relatively few days of sunshine. It’s like you can breath again.  We all know the rain will return, the biting cold will seem worse next year, and that being so far up North means that the nights will swallow our days. But life is always best lived when you can be present in the moment no matter what the conditions. 

Last week I went down to the docks to see the sunlight flash on the Thames. There are a few days when I want to see it, to remind myself that London can be a harsh mistress. Other days, I know full well that living here is really hard. But on those days, the ones where the sun is shinning for the first time in weeks, and you know you have months of summer left, it makes surviving the winter worth it all.