Erica Wheadon
© 2021 Erica Wheadon. All rights reserved.

Careful truths

This morning I woke up to an interview with Glennon Doyle about the genesis of her blog. She began writing, she said, because she was “dying for a place to tell the truth.”

Well, shit.

She talked about the long missives she would send her friends, the way her story was spilling out of her. I kept nodding, yes, yes. My friends are still on the receiving end of of similar rants, although perhaps not as long anymore. I’d like to say that this is because I am writing a book, but that’s not necessarily true either. Writing, as I have learned, isn’t about pouring your story onto the page. It’s as much about curation and craft as it is anything else. Finding connections. Truth, I have discovered, often lies between the lines.

I met someone recently for coffee (okay, bad juice in an empty cafe) who encouraged to me pour out my unabridged version; realities and feelings tumbling out in ways that I will never be able to put my name to. She then talked about her life and as I listened, a shared reality began to emerge. This isn’t just my story. This is hers too. And I know there are more out there like us – too-much women grappling with the stigma attached to our choices. She implored me to continue writing in the same way that I myself have crawled through essayistic writing and memoir, in order to find traces of myself. And yet, sometimes it’s that very work that halts my efforts. It is both a blessing and a curse to have a story and a desire to share it.

Glennon Doyle had legions of blog followers when her books came out. She had amassed an army of believers who moved swiftly to defend her against the tide of scorn, and sometimes I wonder what hope an introvert who is disenchanted with social media has against that.

My new friend called me brave. It’s not the first time. Truth be told, I am afraid of underestimating the courage that I will need to summon. What if I only summon a little and then come up short? What if there are consequences that I can’t see?

I told my new friend that I am more careful with my truths now, and that even these posts will sit in drafts, often weeks at a time.

What kind of world do we live in when it requires this much courage just to be yourself?

40 lessons from 2020

Yeah I know. A calendar is a construct and 31 is a number etc. etc. but since I like a bit of ritual and reflection, here’s a quick and dirty list of forty lessons I’ve taken away from this clusterfuck of a year.

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2020 – Songs that Shaped a Year

This year’s soundtrack didn’t take me long at all. Out of the thousands of songs I listened to in 2020, these were the ones that I obsessed over, etched into my psyche and wrote alongside the most.

In a bid to combat what could have been a treacherous year, depression-wise, I did my best to avoid anything that would potentially kill me (Woodkid, Nick Cave, Anaïs Mitchell etc) (progress), so these songs are stories of my highs, lows, ruminations, triumphs, vindications, decisions. Stories about family, forgiveness, addiction; the songs that would play on repeat in my head at 3am.

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Twenty-Two Exposures

I’ve started to dig out some of my older work – most of the time I don’t really know what to do with it, so it stays buried on my hard drive. Photography and I haven’t really been talking this year – we’ve been eyeing each other from opposite sides of the room, looking for an excuse to start a brawl.

I took these images in 2019, pre-pandemic. It felt disingenuous to glorify normalcy of any kind in 2020 so I didn’t look at them again, but now I feel a small ache creeping in my chest. Looks like we don’t have to come to blows after all.

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forty-one

As a child, I would visit my grandmother and together we would pick blackberries off bushes in a nearby common, our hands and mouths stained with purple. I’m sure that the common was just a thicket of trees, but to me it was a forest, and it was magic. She was the first to teach me how to ground myself, to reconnect with the earth, and that walking, and trees, and dogs and birdsong was its own kind of healing. 

When she died, I was fourteen – having only seen her four times in my life. I had such little time with her on this earth, so blackberries are more than nostalgia to me, they’re a symbol of simplicity, and healing.

At the start of the year, I bought a blackberry plant of my very own. I had no illusion that it would bear an abundance of fruit, but it has been sitting on my back deck since January and I have been tending to it protectively, nonetheless. About a month ago, a tiny little red fruit sprouted and I felt a little pinprick of pride. Life goes on. I had proof.

41, and I’m still not sure how to measure a year.  In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee…(thanks Jonathan Larson) (#nerd). Probably more along the lines of… in whisky, in first drafts, in new books and medication. Doesn’t really have the same ring to it. 

I’m not sure how it’s been a year since 40. What the fuck, world. I’d demand a do-over, but it’s been a pretty good year, world-going-to-hell notwithstanding.  I won’t lie, my interpretation of ‘pretty good’ is a little different now to what it used to be. It’s been the first (relatively) drama-free year in a long time. I mean, unless you can count thesis writing and the slow-release-grief that comes with losing a parent inch by fading inch. 

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Cairns

There isn’t a year when I am not planning at least two international trips in advance. I’m still smarting over our fourth to Japan, my Scotland sabbatical. First world problems I know. This year has taught me about holding patterns, patience. Divine timing. And so, I have no choice but to be at peace with it.

I have always felt as if I don’t belong in this country (but then, the idea of belonging anywhere has always been foreign to me). Perhaps that is why I wander, one eye on the horizon, shrugging myself out of leases, or anything that grates against my desire for freedom. 2020 has tempered that impulse somewhat. It’s funny, for once I don’t feel tethered. This year has forced me to centre myself and find balance, at a time I think we all need it most. Also, it’s forced me to travel locally, something I’ve never held much interest in before (me: why would I do that when I could travel to Europe?).

And so, we decided to spend a week in Cairns. Sun and sand, with September on the horizon….literally what the doctor ordered. We took our time and explored the Atherton Tablelands, Green Island, Port Douglas and the Daintree. I marked Cape Tribulation on a map, proudly. The furthest north I have ever travelled.

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Palimpsests

Music nerd that I am, I’ve been collating a list of every song I listen to for about 13 years now. A song can store a myriad of data – it can zap you back to a moment, or a feeling – so this isn’t just a catalogue of songs per se, it’s a storehouse. I decided to compile a Spotify playlist of every single song I have ‘loved’ on Last.FM. It’s a trip. There are 420 songs on this beast. And I’ve been listening to every. single. one. I’m trying to listen to them all consecutively – just to get a sense of the journey. Some of it is still too hard. (I mean, I have four different versions of “Survival Expert” by Something for Kate. Count them.) Right now I’m at the part of the narrative where my head was turned back to the light. Making the choice to try. Stay. It’s like my own personal hero’s journey.

Two nights ago, I dreamed of palimpsests. I received a letter – the kind you know you shouldn’t respond to – and I felt myself twinge and relent, feeling my resolve give way as I scrawled replies on torn scraps of paper, across walls, on the back of the letter itself, but my words were a jumbled mess. I even tried to disguise my words with fiction and parable but couldn’t do it justice. No matter how hard I scrubbed, faint traces of my story remained. It seems as if all I do is rewrite. Scribble. Erase. Paint it over and pretend it never existed.

Transference of music is a cardinal sin. It is a broken vow. The worst kind of betrayal. It bastardises a moment in time, becomes its own palimpsest, where we overwrite one story with another. I’ve learned to stop fighting it and just surrender. Under the layers of paint and paper and glue, it exists. It will never not.