“We either die of the past or we become an artist.”

The woman who wrote this was Deborah Levy but I am not sure if she is the one who thought it, or if Louise Bourgeois thought it and Deborah heard it and then wrote it down. It was unclear. The font was smaller than the rest of her book The Cost of Living, indicating a quote, but then the text got even smaller, which led me to know for sure that she was writing down a quote, by no-one less than Goethe, what’s more. But whatever the provenance of this line it made me stop breathing for a moment, before remembering that I am not a free intellectual in the 1930’s, but rather, a 21st century traveller enslaved by her need for external validation. Even if this external validation be of what she presents as internal life, internal existence, internal, as my anarchist-cum-psychotherapist ex-boyfriend A once put it, locus of control. He said that whether or not you have an internal locus of control, that is, whether or not you judge yourself based on your own, private, home-cooked system of values (as opposed to one designed by your peers, your culture, your parents) is one of the biggest determiners of whether you’ll be happy or not. I was following him very well up until this point, but then he looked me in the eye on a London spring day five years after our terrible breakup in Bangkok and said, “You have an internal locus of control.”

“LOL what?” I obviously said, because as we can all tell from this coherent masterpiece, I am an artist.

“Of course you do. Otherwise you couldn’t be such a flamboyant dork.”

It’s still up there with the best compliments I ever received. If it hadn’t come out of the mouth of the man who first broke my heart and who therefore, on the days my victim-consciousness is the strongest, symbolises to me the Great Beginning of the Great Demise, I might just have put it on a t-shirt.

The Great Beginning of the Great Demise. I was twenty-five. To quote another literary madwoman-in-arms: “Very early in my life it was too late.” That’s Marguerite Duras, writing in her eighties about the love affair she had with a thirty year-old Chinese man when she was fifteen and living with her school teacher mother in Sadec, Vietnam, then called Indochina and full of French bread and oppression. As it happens, I made a literary pilgrimage there when I was twenty-two and still very much in love with A, got on a minibus from Saigon with a Diana F+ camera and an unbroken heart, but that’s neither here nor there. I guess this is why my writing doesn’t really work out. I set out to write a piece as structured as the East London canal system about Why We Need Art and I end up writing a serpentine wild brook about everything that ever happened to me.

At least this is only a first blog post. You can leave, have a coffee, return rested or never at all. Imagine me on a first date.

I was gonna make a point about Instagram here, but I’ve gone so far off track I’ve lost interest, so just imagine genius. Also, if you’ve got any tips for staying focused other than Adderall (very hard to sleep on) pls comment.

Anyway! Next point! In Sicily, where I worked at a German horse-riding centre until yesterday, we would run the horses around the arena for a few laps before we let riders get on them if the riders were beginners. The idea was that if the horses, who unfortunately lived in paddocks, had any pent-up need to buck or kick or bolt from spending the night behind bars, they would do it while running around me and the three other European lost souls wielding whips in the arena rather than out on the trail with the seven year-old son of the local NATO boss on their back.

It worked. After ten minutes of galloping freely, the horses would’ve worn themselves out, and without protest accept the application onto their immense bodies of saddle, bridle and kicking child.

I suppose that is how I feel about structure, “a point,” and generally sticking to the subject. The above paragraphs are my mind running around the arena kicking and bucking. Getting out all that got stored up over the night.

Except, it’s never just over the night. It’s over the life, and I guess this is where we come back to the original Bourgeois / Levy quote-collab. I guess this is difficult for people who live well-adjusted, socially full, and generally unquestioning lives to understand. And when I am surrounded by people who also want to talk about the weird things in my head (which has happened actually three times in my life) I also feel that I can just say what’s on my mind (so as to avoid this build-up of matter to kick and buck at). Then I feel good. But damn, that is hard to find. When I find it, I tend to fall in love, but experience has also taught me that the person I would most beneficially spend my life with might not, in fact, also be the person who understands me the most.

This is a hard one to swallow. I am working on it.

For now, what I am doing here is chasing the objective handed to me on a piece of paper in the Ecuadorian Andes in October 2021. We were around fifteen volunteers and staff that had gathered on a hill to drink out of little plastic shot-glasses a juice made from San Pedro, or Wachuma as the indigenous call it, an entheogenic cactus we were told would open our hearts and souls. This was not my first plant medicine rodeo, so when our ceremonial leader (Californian, robed, carrying a staff) held out a little box of tiny paper cards with words printed on them I knew the programme. Tune in, take a breath, and accept the fate of your medicine journey.

Usually the paper cards would hold words like joy, peace, forgiveness, liberation. Your average spiritual fare. Once, when I drank ayahuasca in a yoga centre in San Francisco, a woman picked a card with nothing on it. It was just a piece of cardboard, probably a part of the Angel Card packaging that had travelled with the magic pieces on their journey to the sacred jar we had just passed around under great ceremonial silence. The woman looked at it, smiled, and dutifully reported that her interpretation of this card was that she needed not seek answers outside of herself; that she already held, within, all the answers she required from this world.

It was clearly not that woman’s first plant medicine rodeo, either.

Anyway. On that hill in the Ecuadorian Andes, I did not get a piece of blank cardboard, nor did I get a fluffy, sparkly, comfy hippie word. Instead, I got synthesis. Bringing to mind chemistry, linguistics, US university essay writing classes.

I was pissed. I wanted a new one. But the jar had already made it another three voluntourists down the circle, so I took the grown-up route of deciding to ignore the whole stupid card game to focus instead on communing with the earth, moon and sea etc.

Well. Since then, this word has, obviously, come up a lot. This will happen with anything you suddenly focus on and is usually called “synchronicity,” like that game where you choose a specific shade of colour (say, seedless grape green) and spend the next twenty-four hours looking for it. The Meditation 101 lore goes, you’ll see it everywhere, because you’ve chosen to look for it. It’s confirmation bias, intentionality, the basis of the law of attraction. Choose to be happy. Choose to win the lottery, pass all your exams, break your socio-cultural chains with mind magic and collapse in a sobbing heap of shame and self-hatred when if it doesn’t work.

Sorry. That wild brook took a little side-leap across a national border.

One, two, three, you’re back in the room. Synthesis. The pragmatic rules of synchronicity notwithstanding, I did start to see synthesis in unexpected places and now I guess I kind of see that it was, in fact, just what I needed. Even if it wasn’t, to paraphrase the in ayahuasca integration circles oft-paraphrased Rolling Stones song, what I wanted.

In Baños, where I went on a secret weekend break with one of the shamans from the aya retreat, this fucking bus went past. How do you NOT become a crazy everything-is-a-signy!?

I’ve had like seventeen blogs. Most of these are now shut down, but some of them still float around the internet. You might find them if I’ve been sloppy, but generally I’ve taken great care to use separate usernames, phone numbers, Google accounts or even IP addresses. Because God forbid someone who knows me as a sane teacher of Creative Writing should know about my secret life as a ho, shaman groupie, Mariah Carey impersonator. Etcetera.

Not surprisingly, keeping all these personas separate takes quite a lot of time. I think it also alienates me, prevents me from connecting with other humans who have accepted the full extent of their own complexity. Contradictions. To be completely honest, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to fully accept all parts of who you are, but Tara Brach has made a whole career out of championing it, so I think it’s time I tried.

Also, I’m interested in the difference between accepting who you are and reacting to any and all instances in your past of having felt controlled by becoming everything you were told not to be, and then throwing it in the faces of your former judgers. I have defo done this. A lot. Conforming on the surface, and then channelling all my unwelcome impulses into an alter ego and, when meeting someone who seems like they can handle it, throwing this alter-ego (also known as The Shadow) straight in their face as soon as possible to see whether or not they will judge me, too. I have also seen it in others, and maybe that’s what made me finally realise it’s maybe not the absolutely greatest way in the world to be. It puts a lot of pressure on the other person to accept a difficult version of you, which, to boot, might not even be who you want to be, or, get this, are. Just who you haven’t been allowed to be and therefore feel compelled as a big fuck-you to the former oppressors of your soul’s full glory to become, in defiance. In short, you’re fucking twenty-eight / thirty / forty-four and acting like a teenager. Don’t.

Hence. Non-anonymous, synthesised blog. For honesty, connection, and taking a bit of motherfucking care. So many amazing things have happened to me in the last six months, and I just rush through it. As if not valuing what I have makes me more discerning, harder to impress, cooler. Let’s not be cool. Let’s be impressed. Let’s meet what is given to us with attention and care, instead of throwing it onto our Insta and rushing to the next thing. Let’s focus on depth, not width. Stop being throwaway consumers of life.

I’m on a train, in Spain, going from Madrid down to Extremadura where I am going to do a three-week volunteer placement with a woman who seems to me like the coolest person on the planet. It’s 11:16, and the train arrives at 12:22. She’s picking me up from the station. I am so fucking nervous. We’re going to study wild horses. I see in them myself, a wild person. I see in the way things have gone wrong in our treatment of domesticated horses everything that’s gone wrong in our treatment of ourselves and each other. It might be that I’ve put too much on this, and all I’ll actually be doing for three weeks is repair fences in exchange for some pan y queso. We’ll see. But I’m excited, I’m impressed, and I had to work really fucking hard for over a year to make this happen.

So I am not going to let it rush past me.

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