Falling inside myself
It’s still relatively early days and I am no closer to being able to articulate what I am feeling.
Autumn 2022, maybe.
So one evening, as the kids comfort themselves with episodes of Bluey and you sleep upstairs, I put on my headphones and search for solace in my newly begun record collection.
I open the Journal that was supposed to house my deepest feelings and most profound thoughts but that instead mocks my writerly pretensions with its blank pages.
As I listen, I write what I hear.
As I listen again, I return to the phrases that come closest to the feelings that fill my heart and the thoughts that flood my head.
“You are in my blood.”
“Oh I could drink a case of you darling and I would still be on my feet I would still be on my feet.”
“Love is touching souls.”
“All my heart is breaking I can’t overstate it.”
“The ceiling is all coming down.”
I write out the lyrics as I listen, over and over and over again.
I underline and box out and highlight these words, these cracks in the rock face I cling to by my fingertips, these tiny release valves that just for a moment, come close to describing the tip of the iceberg that is what I feel.
“I’m so scared of losing you
And I don’t know what I can do about it
Tell me how long, love, before you go
And leave me here on my own, I know it
I don’t wanna know who I am without you.”
I don’t want to know who I am without you.
But the words I return to most often are not song lyrics but a feeling articulated in a play.
A play I was lucky enough to spend 10 years alongside, inside.
A play whose words give me the tools to truly describe, what this feels like - how I am:
.
“
I have a hole running through the middle of me.
It’s a bit embarrassing because you can probably see it.
…
I am holding my entire head together.
The skin and the shell of me.
I am falling absolutely inside myself.
But you know that.
You can see the
In my
“
(Seawall by Simon Stephens)
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On Coping is my story of surviving on the sidelines of cancer. It begins in 2022 with On Coping #1, written the day after my 41st birthday. The day my wife Imogen, the mother of my three children, was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. It’s the story of what happened next. Read from the start.