Twenty-six years ago, on my birthday, I stood at an open hotel window, calculating whether the fall was sufficient to kill me. I didn’t want to end up in a wheelchair, giving my then-husband even more control over me. In the middle of that calculation, I realised what I was doing. And that I had three little boys at home.
My husband had said he’d kill me if I left him, and I believed him. But my health was breaking under the stress; I was repeatedly hospitalised, coughing up blood, for reasons doctors couldn’t diagnose. Standing at that open window, I realised that though he said he’d kill me if I left, if I stayed, I’d *definitely* die.
So I started looking for an escape route. I had no money of my own. No support from friends and family; he had made sure of that. I had no idea how to get out, and it was dangerous. But I started planning.
The way I found was, essentially, illegal, so I shan’t document it here. It gave me an escape route. I left him on March 14th 1998. A secret flit while he was at a meeting in London. While the kids were at school, I loaded carrier bags of books and clothes and toys into the car.
It was the hardest thing, and the best thing, I’ve ever done. Better than any of the books I’ve written or will ever write. Because none of those books would have existed without me doing this first.
I’m so glad I didn’t kill myself that day. I’ve had so much happiness and love in all the years that came after. I’ve created a lot of good things, too, for others.
It can be incredibly hard to find a way through darkness. But there is so much light on the other side. I hope if you are feeling despair, that you, too, can find your escape route.
***
On Friday, I posted this spontaneously on Twitter (yes, I know, it has a new name, it’s rubbish, and you have to keep qualifying it). It started getting traction and has topped out at 1,600 likes, more popular even than the tweet Neil Gaiman retweeted. After a few hours, I posted it on Facebook, too, while neglecting you, my dear friend. The plan was to expand on it for newsletter purposes, but following this first post and responses to it, a lot more things have been coming up. So I’d better get on with it, because there is more in the pipeline.
Why did it surface now, you might ask? Last Monday, an actor friend of mine, describing how they channel their own emotional experiences into their acting, asked if I did the same. Oh yes, I said, and described a section of the novel I’m currently editing, that my agent, when he read it, was moved to write to me about.
He’d described it thus (and I’m sure he won’t object to this small extract of private correspondence since it might also act as something of an appetite-whetting trailer):
as powerful, disturbing and accurate portrayal of male-female relations and breakdown as I've read and rings down the ages with absolute truth like face caught in a domestic scene by Dutch master.
I went back and read those chapters, and I wept. I gave this example to my actor friend, who asked me more about the marriage. I gave the ten-minute potted version, and the shock was palpable. His eyes filled with tears, and he hugged me. He didn’t know. I said it’s fine; it was a long time ago, and I’m over it. But actually, am I?
On the way home, the motorway was blocked. I took the Diversion signs at the roundabout, but further Diversion signs vanished. Soon, I was lost. The Sat Nav just kept trying to put me back on the blocked road, and after twenty minutes of wrestling to find my own way, I was heading West, back the way I’d come. A tide of emotion was rising. Strong emotion, entirely out of proportion with the situation. I rang my (second, lovely) husband, who guided me back onto a route (hooray for Google location sharing). But as I took deep breaths to reset for the rest of the drive home (and, symbolically, there were two more roadblocks), I asked myself, “What’s underneath this? Where has this emotional reaction come from?”
No prizes for guessing: first marriage. The powerlessness I felt, the moments of danger and panic, stretching over several years, sometimes threatening to snuff out my existence.
Getting lost on country roads and being married to a sociopath don’t feel like they have a lot in common, but one can trigger responses more suited to the other when there’s an emotional resonance, like feeling powerless and lost. The neurological pathways etched then were vital to survival, and such is the nature of trauma that you only have to venture onto the start of the route for the whole route to light up in your brain and body; for fight/flight/freeze to reactivate.
I’ve had a memoir on the back burner for a couple of years. The focus was a little different. But these experiences, and responses to this post, have made me think that as soon as I’ve got my novel edits done, I’ll be taking it off the back burner and putting it on the main hob. I seem to have whole chunks of it already arriving, demanding to be written. Am writing it when I should be doing other things.
So yes. It’s time to spill the beans about the mad few years that had me call my first poetry collection (before it got retitled) “My Year As A Loon.”
Thanks for sharing this. What is the memoir currently titled?
Dear Ros, I look forward to reading your memoir. You might be interested in a book my younger daughter Phoebe recommended to me called The Body Keeps the Score. It explained to me a lot about the mechanisms that keep people locked in nightmare relationships or past trauma of any sort. So glad you didn’t take the plunge as we would have never met again that day in Greenwich Common at P’s 30th birthday celebrations. Sx