Sunday Bookmarks 05//22
Good Morning, Happy long weekend to those who have time off, sadly the Dutch monarchy is much more aloof than the British, so no bank holidays in these parts this weekend. May was a month in the pits, truly. From hospital stays to wavering friendships and an unexpected and somewhat belated or more accurately, refreshed? Grief for my late grandmother. I now notice I have not been processing the numerous experiences that have happened to me this year.
I have lived through them but I haven’t had the chance, or more likely, haven’t allowed myself to think about what they mean. Sometimes I take comfort in the nihilistic approach to life, we are all masses of cells wandering on a floating planet in space, much encouraged by my boyfriend, whose life philosophy remains, for the most part, that nothing matters until we create meaning from it. That is an idea I subscribe to, I think, but I am unsure how I apply such thinking to the processing of my experiences which for at least the most significant ones this year, are a processing of trauma. More on that below, for now, books:
READING // LONG FORM
I am having a moment with short stories, using them as a sort of discipline, or more, a temptation, to read before bed again. It is a habit i have for the most part kept up with since i became what i term, ‘a full time reader’. However, I occasionally fall off the bed time book band wagon, mostly when depression or severe illness hits, and instead scroll or in my latest case, play crap mobile games.
It isn’t something i berate myself over, life is too short to care about my candy crush habit. However i know it makes my sleep even more illusive. So as I leave my cavernous post surgery existence behind, I am trying to get my sleep in order and so i vowed to read just one story, before bed. As expected, it is never usually just one, I wrapped up in the ideas and the turning of the pages. Sometimes i switch to a novel on my kobo, so i can turn the light off and let my boyfriend sleep in peace, his snores arising only seconds after closing his own book (a lifelong dream of my own)
I just finished Homesickness by Colin Barrett, a much anticipated read considering his first collection is nearly seven years old. Returning to his native Ireland via a brief detour to Canada, this second collection takes place for the most part in County Mayo, stories of isolation and dead end dreams are mangled with community and violence. Much like Young skins, his first book, the bulk of the characters are men, subjected to and subject of anger, grief, repression.
Repression of feelings feels typical of Irishness but Barrett pushes his characters to the brink, stereotypes be damned. Many live in the confines of ill adjusted bodies, of the mind and the limbs. More females come into focus in this second collection, well observed and thankfully, not only as companions to their masculine counterparts. But, I appreciate his lasered focus on masculinity, his characterisation of these often wayward men is biting. There is fear in reading the agitation, the rage, as a woman, a background hum of knowing, you’ve known men like that, likely the one whose name is missing on your own birth certificate.
It is something like deja vu for me to read of this place, of these men and their lives that are likely the same as the lads my dad, if I knew where he was or if his aliveness could even be checked, is rolling around with.
Throughout the stories, the long winding roads are driven on by men over the limit, in a rush, in unreliable modes of transport, reminding the reader there is no such thing as public transit on this rural island. Crap vans and busted Micra’s taken from their old ma, it took me back to my childhood, a Sunday night on the motorway, three seats in the front of a paint splattered white transit van. Sat squashed between the overgrown legs of my lanky brother, only a year on me but at least a foot in size, both ways. A faded image of what I think he looked like, my dad had his hand hanging from the open window, cigarette dangling, even though it was long past sunset. Chewing mints and aircon on blast, trying to keep himself awake, return us in one piece to my mother’s house, on the other side of the city.
I can’t be certain that is a true memory. It floated back around after years of forgetting while reading Barrett’s stories but there is no way to know if it was imagined, my own mind taking Barrett's men and morphing them into my own. I know we [my brother and I] weren’t left alone with him often, and then there were the lawyers and the restraining order, and the rehab and the police sirens. So it seems unlikely he was allowed to drive us anywhere, particularly after dark. And yet, I can see the van, smell the nicotine drenched headrests, clock his chapped, ruddy hands on the gearstick, my own squinting eyes, praying to an Irish Mother Mary I didn't believe in, that we would make it back to safety.
READING // SHORT FORM
British Vogue's Role In Upholding The Royal Family And Affirming A Century Of Imperialist Notions Halima Anita for Black Ballard considers the way the fashion powerhouse does very little to disrupt problematic norms, a role many consider part of an arts institution playbook. Although we are kidding ourselves if we think their interests lie anywhere expect where the £££ signs are, Anita’s deep dive gives much to think about on the need for Vogue to so ostentatiously participate in the Royal history.
Whips and Chains Jamie Fewery for Fence magazine explores a sworded moment in recent publishing history, an insight into the house that published E L James - branded sex toys and Champagne galore.
The rise of the corporate emo Emma Wilkes for The Face, a somewhat tongue and cheek article discussing a micro-trend / internet subgroup but moreover an comment on that ongoing discombobulation most of us feel when we tether between work and our ‘real’ identities of self.
Has our obsession with therapy gotten out of hand? Catriona Innes for Cosmo discussing the state of therapy in current society. She unpicks why the discourse has so swiftly moved to: ‘have you tried therapy’, ‘stop asking me to do emotional labour’, ‘men would rather [insert awful thing] than go to therapy’, which whilst also ignoring all of the real financial and social barriers to attending therapy, assumes it is also a suitable prescription for all mental illness and turbulent life crisis. It talks of the instagram industrial complex [my favourite thing to hate] and the conflicting life advice the internet is constantly dishing out, and concludes, as I do now, we should all stop telling people to just to therapy.
WRITING // OTHER
I have slowed down my output of articles this month due to my health and taking on a more permanent freelance role in the podcast world, so not much to report here. In keeping with the Jubilee Weekend, my May column for Screenshot is all about the Queen’s mobility aids, ageism and as always, disability.
I do have another new writing space for you all to browse!
Myself, along with some brilliant other writers have launched BOOKISH - A new book website, a place to read reviews, essays, ideas and round ups of books of all genres, no snobbery involved. You can read my first essay, on the way Pachinko’s disability narrative is overlooked, here. A round up of key titles from radical publishing house Pluto Press here, and have a browse around the site to see what other gems we have too! Follow us on instagram to keep up with Bookish news and stories.
LIVING THROUGH // Capital T trauma
I have flip flopped between feelings on writing this month. More than ever do I feel a pull to detach my vulnerability from my words. So far I have built a career off of my own misery, my broken body and my disillusionment with society’s limited attempts to care about disability. I have put myself, for the most part, in this box. I don’t feel regretful, I am often overcome with gratitude, and reward to some extent, when someone emails, DM’s or tweets me to say my writing helped them understand something about their body. For the most part, my brain is disinclined to believe them but my ego feels rubbed for a minute at least.
And it is just a minute, because I think part of my recent disenfranchisement with writing with such vulnerability, almost confessional, is that the shelf life of those pieces is a flash in the pan. That is the nature of writing online, which is to say, the nature of most journalistic output today. It is there and then it is lost in website pages and bumped down to irrelevance as the all powerful SEO driven reactive news machine whirrs on.
For a brief moment I thought I would stop altogether, a string of rejections and a few unsettling parasocial experiences led me to think that all in all, it wasn’t worth it. Worth the constant instability thinking too much brings to my mind and god only knows I need less, not more of that.
I say only a moment because as you can see from above, I started what was a book review and ended up telling you about my estranged father and if you can read between the lines, which I trust you all do, you can piece together what sounds like a nasty bit of childhood trauma.
I was plagued with recurring nightmares after my most recent hospital stay. They began two or three nights after I had returned to my own bed [more accurately, the bed a kind friend was letting me stay in]. After the most hardcore medication wore off, night time became intermittent bursts of sleep, each time my eyes closed, a hospital ward was imagined, the machines, my own screams, the rush of needles and pans of vomit and shit. Here I go again, telling you about is my trauma, in a not even well veiled attempt to read between the lines.
These nightmares forced me to remember how awful I felt during that stay, to process the occurrence of, in this case, medical trauma. During the stay, I put a photo on my close friends, telling 40-something people that I didn’t want to keep living because this pain was too much. I am visibly sobbing. I don’t why I did it, partially to have people to speak to perhaps. It was the middle of the night, most of my closest people [of whom there is only really one, my boyfriend, who I would even express such raw emotion too], were asleep. I thought my internet friends would be awake, the ones in other time zones, ones who keep odd hours, the ones who are sick too. And I was right, people replied, telling me I could do it, that I just had to make it to morning, and that buoyed me, seeing the hearts appearing in my inbox, the idea that someone else was thinking they’d like it if I survived. I wasn’t going to die, I was in a hospital, perhaps one of the hardest places to take your own life, but nonetheless it felt like at least an option, at the time.
I don’t really talk to the people in my life about how I feel. They watch things happen to me, mostly through the posts I make on social media or the articles I write or the close friends stories that are utilised in moments of terror but I don’t actually tell them, face to face, about the way I feel or the experiences I am going through. I told instagram I wanted to die before I text a friend.
I am very awkward by nature, I don’t like confrontation, I hate eye contact and the longer time goes on the more I realise I struggle a lot with one to one conversations. I can’t imagine a day where I returned from an awful hospital stay and sat down with a friend and explained to them how fucking awful it really was. But I will write about it online for them to read instead, huh.
So I suppose I partially expose myself through words online as a way of keeping the people who say they love me, informed on how I feel, without having to speak at all. When you write, it’s one sided. Occasionally a real life person will message after reading something, ask a prying question about my pain or sex life, but rarely is it an inperson interaction. There is time and space to construct, in words, a suitable reply. There is something there about not wanting to be pitied, to expose your pain to someone in real time involves them reacting to you, and when it comes to dysfunctional bodies and disability, that is never without pity. And if I know something about myself, it is, I have always despised, being pitied.
That is all to say, I acquired new medical trauma, as just another piece on my shelf of bad things and I don't know what I am supposed to do with it. It is my inclination to write about it but for any good reason I cannot say. I hate the argument that writing is cathartic. I hate the way women’s words are perceived as confessional when they are saying something about themselves but then again I guess that is exactly what I am doing. I guess this thesis is a work in progress but to write about trauma just for me seems worthless because I feel no better after I do it. To turn it into a story and be paid to produce it, create a palatable or productive, neatly packaged thing, is in some ways mining my trauma to pay my rent but I am the one constantly offering up the stories so can I really be so mad when people read them.
That is all for this month folks, catch you on another side of the internet,
Hannah x