To be seen or not to be seen, that is the question..

There was something shameful I learnt in allowing that part of me out to play. What else was shameful: the part that got into a fight in the school playground, the part that got hit over the head with a ruler by Fifi the RE teacher, the part that had a boyfriend with a beard and a motorbike who took me out the night before an exam and kept me out until the ungodly hour of 9pm. (I got 95% for the exam.) In other situations the too good, too clever, too posh parts were equally unwelcome and unpopular. The bits I needed to hide were conditional on who was looking.

Love and approval

It’s so easy I find, to muddle love and approval. I longed for a god who would love me wholly but then there was the problem of sin as I was taught it, and this ‘parental figure’ didn’t just see my actions they saw my thoughts as well. All exhausting, all requiring hiding and control. Fast forward into adulthood:

Husband number 1 saw someone to keep him safe. Appealing and ultimately boring – he left.

Husband number 2 saw someone to rescue and make himself feel a hero. Initially appealing for me, ultimately controlling – I left.

Husband number 3 saw all of me, never judged me or made me wrong, loved me. But for all I loved the man inside out, such was his shame that there were parts of himself he tried to hide even from himself – enter addiction and that cruel cycle of numbing and shaming.

In one of his own blogs he wrote:

“The pattern I see now is that paradoxical one of my yearning to be seen and my need to remain hidden or at least to control how others see me…. I know that I still carry much that I hide, primarily from shame and fear of being outcast and unloved.”

Unravelling

He was rushed into A & E one awful January afternoon a few months later and before I left that night I was told that “he has a swelling on the brain consistent with a brain tumour”. When I saw him the next day and he had been told his diagnosis, he said, tearfully,

“I know what this is.” He had hidden debts from me which had got out of control and he believed his deceit and the stress was toxic. I don’t know but I would say that what was more toxic was the self hatred he had because of what he had done, as he saw it, to me, to us, to the new start he felt he’d been given 5 years previously. I saw the suffering in him more than I saw the deed and the most healing thing for him was, he told me later, that after I knew, I still looked at him with exactly the same eyes of love. Perhaps, he thought, against all the odds, he was loveable. Little by little he unravelled.

I saw him wholly and truly, and as his body and brain were ravaged by surgery, radiotherapy, seizures and medication until he was barely recognisable from the outside, I loved him still. Finally, when he was able to look himself in the face and not turn away, he was able to die at peace with himself.

Now what?

So now the question for me is, having been seen and loved by him, what am I going to do with that in his absence? There are still those who are willing to let me know that I am, in effect, a show off – writing to you, allowing myself to be in films, letting others see me as I am, vulnerable, imperfect and all. Why do I? Because I do not want to hide any more, I want to live truthfully and I do want to allow myself to be seen, inside and outside congruent. How others receive me isn’t actually my business. And I do it because I hope that somehow my effort to express myself authentically serves those of you who also may be tired of hiding, tired of trying to fit yourself or your grief into moulds, rules or models which don’t serve you. And because I’m old(ish) and if not now, when? I’ve no intention of following Jenny Joseph* into wearing purple (though I do have some rather fine bright red boots!) but I do want to own my elder years and be all that I am and speak all that I now know, unashamedly.

“When the grandmothers speak the world will be healed”, say the Native American Hopi people.  To all the elder women reading this, here’s an invitation – or a recipe even. Gather the ingredients from your experience and let them marinade in the loving juices of your hearts. Bake gently in the fire of your understanding.  Then offer it to the world as a dish to nourish those who love your cooking.

With my love

Nickie

*Reference to the poem “Warning” by Jenny Joseph

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