This bears repeating...

I just posted this on facebook, and glancing over it again I think it bears repeating here. I've just been reading this article and am left full of thoughts and feelings. It hits me hard, as it sums up something I've struggled with a lot over the years, especially during the last decade since turning forty.

It's been so long now since I was in a relationship that I can barely remember what it actually felt like, making those compromises and sacrifices, and playing that role of tacit care-giver that Laurie Penny writes about. I'm not sure I was ever much good at it.

I've spent years of my life regretting being single, and many sleepless nights struggling with the "what's wrong with me?" question, trying not to settle for the easy "they're all bastards" answer since it has always felt fundamentally false (not to mention mean and petty!).

I fall in love regularly just the same, no matter what's wrong with me, no matter how single I am - sweet gods, I fall in love like a very large brick dropping off a cliff, I am a heavy-weight sharp-cornered effing nightmare when I fall in love - but that falling process has been as far as it has got, for over 20 years now. There has never been a person I could actually have a real, equal relationship with, when I picked myself up at the bottom of the cliff.

Mostly they were long gone. I think maybe they ran like thunder, seeing a brick about to fall on them; and can one blame them, if so?

As time has gone by, and particularly in my forties, I've come more and more to think "Good grief, what on earth would I do if I WERE to find an equal partnership - now, when I am finally myself and have found my own life? Now when I recognise that for me the experience of 'falling in love' is primarily one of losing myself and going slightly crazy for a while?" But the knowledge that I had grown into myself and accepted who I was, which ought to have filled me with hope and certainty, proved instead to be deeply depressing, because it made me fear I was no longer fit for love.

A couple of years ago I began to get to know someone I had known by sight for several years and had always found tremendously physically attractive; and to my immense surprise, this person turned out to be really very interesting. I didn't 'fall in love' straight away as I have done in the past; the brick of my heart stayed peacefully on top of the cliff, taking pleasure as usual in the view over the English Channel. But I began enjoying someone's company simply because it was always enjoyable; this person was intelligent and articulate, kind and mature, witty, hard-working, capable, even shared some of my more esoteric tastes and hobbies and likings. Potentially, then, a good friend; but an attractive one of the opposite sex.

They were also unavailable, and not remotely interested in me as a woman. I knew this from very early on, and it actually helped a lot, in what was for me a pretty peculiar experience. Because as I went on getting to know them, I found myself thinking "IF you had been interested in me and attracted to me, and IF you had been unattached, I could actually have envisaged trying to do the drastic amount of restructuring and rebuilding of my own life that would have been necessary in order to have a relationship with you." And that idea was a hell of a shock.

It really was. Firstly simply because I'd never expected to meet anyone who made me feel that. Secondly because it brought home to me what the other side is of that feeling of being 'no longer fit for love' - the fact that I have grown into myself. I actually no longer saw my self as something I would willingly set aside for a man. I saw - I see - the possibility of adjusting my life around a relationship as something I would need to be seriously rewarded for, where for my entire previous life I had seen the relationship as a reward in itself.

Well, so I grew up. About bally time. I wish I'd been able to achieve this degree of self-knowledge and self-acceptance thirty years ago. Even twenty. But better late than never.

I'm not writing love off. I'm sure I'll fall off that cliff again in the future. It does have its benefits (for a start, I write lots of poetry when I'm 'in love' and some of it is even quite good). I hope I never land on someone and crack their head open, though.

And if someone were to come along who was as thoroughly interesting as the person I wrote about above, the one who wasn't interested in me, I can imagine contemplating whether I would be willing to dismantle my life and rebuild it to include them. Now that I know that's what it would be.

But for now, I am single, and I am no longer unhappy about it except in jest; and that is a lot.

An Anne Elliot kind of day

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Love and life and fear and joy, and snow...

I was struck by these words today, mooching about online in my lunch break (I have avoided going out today after picking the wrong footgear and nearly falling arse-over-tit three times on the way into work – okay, so I’m a big baby and I have no shoe-sense, or no snow-sense, or something…):

“’The way to a woman's heart is through love and faith and trusting each other.’ That's what my mom told me, and in the long run, it turned out to be true. But I sure spent a long time getting through the stage where women only go for the guy with money or an athletic build. I was never that guy -- I was the dull trustworthy one.”

I just read that, and my heart gave a little skip of recognition. It’s different for girls, of course (what isn’t?!), but I have been stuck in the woman’s equivalent of that stage for so long now (ie, the stage where a guy only goes for the women who are either drop-dead gorgeous or else sweetly nice-but-dim), and it touched me to see a man admitting to having been through a similar experience. Because I’m the ‘dull trustworthy one’, too. I know exactly how it feels.

I can’t offer high-impact sex-appeal, or that humbler but more durable quality, real beauty; I can’t offer excitement; I can’t offer most of the classic “feminine virtues” (you know, the list that includes ‘good cook, sweet-natured, doesn’t answer back’…). I am reliable and a bit old-fashioned and I can cook, but I’m intelligent, and not ashamed of it, I’m not particularly sweet-natured and I have a mind of my own.

And I am single. That’s not to say my life is loveless; but most of the love in my life at present is the broad, joyful, general love I feel for the world and its beauty, for plants and birds and all living creatures, for art and music and all my friends, for good food, fresh air and a glass of decent whisky...

I wish that I could find that “special someone”, Der Richtige; a man with whom I could share these passions, a man I respected and loved and with whose life my life could walk in partnership, with whose roots my roots could grow together.

Although I am not getting any younger and not getting any better-looking, and my behaviour is not getting any more like the cliché model of proper femininity, I still hope one day to meet someone who fits with me and with whom I fit. A healthy, secure, intelligent man; a man I could do the garden with, and who liked my cooking. A man who wouldn’t mind my penchant for ballet and birdwatching, my ever-growing collection of bog-standard hybrid phalaenopsis, or the fact I’m probably too old now to give him any kids. There must be some of them still out there… I still believe it is possible to have an honourable relationship that is a marriage of true minds, despite my being rather quiet, plain, and downright wilful. In the meantime, the world is full of beauty, and miraculously there is always room for more, so that I cannot complain that my life is fruitless or unhappy, though it is lonely sometimes.

But sometimes I can feel as though all of this happiness has vanished. Sometimes I am consumed with such fear that it leaves me weak and drained of energy; sometimes I feel sucked dry with misery and depression. Will I never do my own true work? Will I never find human love? Will I leave nothing of worth to anyone behind me? When fear strikes it undermines everything that I have achieved, everything positive, every hope and every past gain. It kills me as surely as really being killed, and then leaves me still alive afterwards to cringe in dread and horror at my own inadequacy and hopelessness. I cannot deny this deep inner fear; it too is part of my deepest feelings, just as much as the joy and the love of life.

I sweat it out, each time it strikes, and eventually I come through and out the other side and I see that my life is still good, and still full of hope and worthwhile things, and the beauty and wonder is all still there; and I fall in love with the world again, when perhaps only days earlier I had thought it all mere dust and ashes.

The other things I love are the arts; the magical work of performing artists and the magical creations they perform or display. Although I know I am not a performer, I also know that I belong in that creative world, because that is what I find feeds my soul time after time; creative work, my own true work in this world.

I write and draw, and these give me a buzz that little else can equal; a delight in life that feels like being in love. Being in love with the world fills me with the energy to write and draw, too, so it is very often a circular process.

And whenever I have a muse, a man-of-my-dreams to whom in my mind I can direct my admiration, and for whom I can pretend I am working, this too inspires me to heights of creativity. It is partly simply the passion of the crush, but also a little inner dream that my creative work makes me somehow the equal, the match, of all those talented, successful people I admire from afar. I don’t really think that they would all like me – that idea is a bit daft, after all! – but this dream/hope says to me that if I could just met them as an equal, they would recognise me as such. In my dream, Imogen the writer and artist is not inferior to the musicians and singers I admire, to the writers I long to emulate, the actors I dream of seeing play my fictional characters, the brilliant botanists and horticulturists here at Kew. In my dream, I am their equal, their comrade in arms, even their friend. It is only that I’m really Imogen the office junior, and she is invisible to them. Invisible, as well as dull and trustworthy. No wonder I feel a tad blue at times.

None of that, Dent! – stand up, take a deep breath and head out into the snowy night. It’s beautiful world. No, really, it is. A big, cold, snowy, beautiful world.