INVIRONMENTALISM 🌷

I know this like how I know it’s going to rain ~ innately, intuitively. I scent it on the wind. I sense it in the burdensome clouds. But I didn’t know how to put it into practice. In fact, I had become an absolute pro at running from my feelings and at giving them to someone else to hold. Until it had to be me. Until it was clear that no one else could do it for me. That’s when I could finally see. 

The March I discovered Mrs Atha’s was the coldest and brightest I have ever known. The city was brown and blue and gold, dragging itself towards Spring and stronger colour, but right now it was here. Freezing air, a smattering of daffodils, and strangely industrial, as though I was getting to know the very underbelly, the backbone of the city that Leeds is built on. I had moved the former November and it had been a whirlwind of Universal Credit meetings, no internet for 6 weeks, and attending free, incredibly informative workshops for my small business that I wasn’t totally sure I wanted to go all in on. And it was from one of these seminars that to Mrs Atha’s I came. 

I had decided, as I dismounted the bus, to give myself a budget of £15 and eat out for once. I used to love exploring cafes and eating out in London and so I ventured onto Google Maps and found the closest to 5* rating I could. Walking through the frigid city with hands chapped from washing them incessantly due to my OCD, which was at that time running rampant, I noticed the number of black puffer jackets surrounding me, heads bent against the wind, and felt both very alone and strangely comforted. There was space inside me, there was hope, and yet there was grief, too. 

I sat down at one of the tables inside a warm, high-ceilinged room and noticed immediately the darkened interior, the little shaded lamps that reminded me of my grandparents’ house in Sussex, and the old pieces of artwork that climbed the walls. I ordered my favourite breakfast I used to eat in Paris ~ Croque Monsieur ~ with a smoky Caravan black tea in a little teapot and cup and saucer. I relaxed properly for the first time in months. I reflected on where I was ~ meeting myself right there, in Mrs Atha’s in Leeds, reluctant to go home to an empty house and feeling almost purposeless, but also like the past 32 years had led up to this singular random moment. I pulled out my phone and started to write. 

I have known that I wanted to write this post ever since I took these pictures and wrote these words. And I thought (optimistically) back then that perhaps all those years I had spent sitting, crying, fist-punching and yelling in my therapist’s beautiful flat in Islington were my penance ~ that perhaps that was all the feeling I had to do, contained in a white room with a massive comfy sofa and a chandelier above my head, and a therapist with the patience of a saint sitting across from me to share my pain.

I now know that this was a long and very necessary part of the process ~ a process that someone on my favourite podcast ‘Super Soul Sunday’ once slightly ominously called ‘doing the work’. Because feeling, processing and accepting pain has been the one thing I have run from my entire life. And yet I have known all this time, like a mother knows her child, that this is my assignment in life ~ to know how to hold myself. To know ~ utterly and completely ~ that feeling is healing. That sitting with pain and feeling it fill my entire being with familiarity and not running, not even singing or moving, but letting it be, completely, inside of me ~ that this is how, finally, it can breathe.

In Love&Light, FS XOX