TW: I’m thankful that you’ve chosen this in your inbox. This is a slight departure from the Ligurian diaries, but I feel it provides some important context for the move to Italy.
Contains mention of mental illness, S.A., and loss.
Something broke in me when I watched Hamnet in January.
For context, I was already feeling fragile. I wanted a pick-me-up, and foolishly booked Hamnet for a solo artist’s date in the Soho Everyman.
Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of Hamnet centres on Orpheus and Eurydice – and rather than me retell the story, I’ll happily pass the mic to the beautiful Paul Mescal.
I’ve always mixed the story of Orpheus and Eurydice with the story in Genesis where Lot and his family are fleeing the destruction of Sodom. The angels also give one instruction: don’t look back.
Lot’s wife – sometimes called Edith, Ado or witness in later Jewish tradition – turns, and she becomes a pillar of salt.
Somehow, any mention of this story and “Don’t look back” has me in a chokehold.
Because I think we always do.
Six months in Dorset
I didn’t mean to be home for quite so long.
The past six months have been beautiful, but have also meant going deeper into the roots and coils of my life, the repeated patterns, lovingly turning them and understanding them.
Realising that structures give. Empires end. Patterns can, and do end.
I worked through the layers through mentoring, somatic bodywork, and plant medicine – including three ten-hour plant medicine ceremonies in Costa Rica. I entered the first ceremony concerned about my heart being closed, which, funnily enough, was the very thing that brought me to a priestess in the Caribbean jungle in the first place two years ago.
Grandmother Aya laughed and un-clicked the shield around my heart.
There, your heart is strong.
And then, I tried to call on my first boyfriend’s voice for comfort. And I realised I couldn’t remember what he sounded like.
Ah, that’s where the hurt is.
And for a few drawn-out moments, all I could hear were those words repeat around the temple, echoed back at me.
It’s been more than ten years now, and while I know every cell of mine has changed irrevocably since then, somehow – deep in the jungle – there, he is. Still.
I’m sharing this because I never grieved him at the time. I was twenty-two, and for a week, I lay on the sofa in his plaid shirt with the holes in the elbow, unable to move, not wanting the pine wood smell of him to disappear or merge with mine.
But then, I picked myself up and told myself the adage I’d heard many times over: you’ll get over it in half the time you were together.
I was in another relationship within two months, and I gave myself a year and a half to quietly heal.
That was the worst advice I’ve ever had.
All that grief that had nowhere to go, which twenty-two-year-old me had no capacity or support system to process, turned into self-destruction. I failed to heal him, so I would destroy myself; I think that was my subconscious logic.
So, I started dating someone who wasn’t himself abusive, but who came with a side of knuckle-duster and a lot of violence, and I lost myself in locked bathroom stalls and dissociation – accepting the love I thought I deserved.
After that relationship ended, I spent my twenties in London dating men who resembled him in some way, whether it was his dark eyes, his love of film photography, his sense of humour, his lanky build, or even his doctor’s handwriting.
I didn’t care if these men were emotionally available or kind or not; my ex had become some kind of God to me, whom I just wanted to see in some shape or form again.
Any glimpses of him in another being, and I was there.
At my most unhinged, I went to a past life regression to spend time with him in a past life in ancient Iraq under hypnosis.
All the while, I dreamt of losing him in a thousand different ways while my heart broke over and over again in the daytime – and his letters, the photos, postcards and jewellery, they all stayed in a box beneath my bed, carried over from Aix-en-Provence to London, Bristol, and Dorset.
But then, towards the beginning of this year, the dreams changed.
Rather than losing him, I started repeatedly dreaming of burying him in a garden beneath Caribbean flowers. And I think, finally, at age thirty, I started to grieve.
Grieving for someone who isn’t dead but also very much not here is a particular kind of hard.
And I think accepting that the end of the relationship, as it was so tied to mental illness and suicidal ideation, was a death of its own, was the first step to processing what happened without having to over-explain the sorrow.
I planned a grief ceremony, which I felt as nervous about as I did walking into the third plant medicine ceremony. And for hours, I allowed myself to be rocked by grief. To howl and to scream, to feel myself roar. The roar didn’t sound human; it didn’t sound like it came from me. I felt Sekmet. I felt Kali. I felt all the goddesses of war, pain, and ancient sorrow at once.
This deep well of pain continued to roll, and over the next couple of days, when I thought I was done, another wave would hit. And I’d let it. I’d pull the car over if I were driving, and I’d let myself go there. Telling myself again and again, to feel it; feel the depths. Try to touch the bottom. There has to be a bottom.
And then, just like a bad storm rolling through the mountains, it lifted.
After that, things slowly but surely changed.
The beauty on the other side of grief
Sometimes, the old stories have to be burnt to make space for new ones. Their ashes laid out at the foot of the rose. We have to look back so we can look forward.
“We get to have another love story.”
