Dear Kathleen,
Good work noticing you’re ill and taking the day off work. ‘Better than this time last week’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘better’. And don’t worry about the butterfly attention span. Nobody is expecting you to focus on anything. You don’t have to do everything today, and working on getting better is still work. Don’t worry. You do get better at letting things sit and work on themselves.
Looking at you from here, I want to give you a map. I want to tell you, on the twenty-fifth of October, everything will suddenly become all right. Which is sort of true. You’ll see. This is the least glamorous part of the whole journey. You don’t know how far you’re going because every day looks the same and you don’t know yet how far you have to go. I promise you it’s not as far as you think. And nothing needs quite so much work as you think it’s going to.
Have a look back at how far you’ve come. Keep listening to Wenn ich mit Menschen- und mit Engleszungen redete. It is the most important letter in the world, and the music makes it more so.
Now. About being thirty. I’ve had a month to get used to the idea. It’s pretty good. You want to know about the ‘if not X, then Y’ question, of course you do, and of course you know that I can’t tell you which way that particular cat will jump. There are parts that I don’t know myself, particularly about Y. What I can tell you is that, as with all your cat-on-a-fence situations, you will go forward bravely whichever side it jumps, always remembering that there was, and still is, the other side. You don’t lose anyone you were, or might have been.
Keep loving. Keep trusting. It’s worth getting your heart broken. You are going to meet the most fantastic people this year, and the ones you’ve already met are going to turn out to be even more fantastic than you thought. You are going to reclaim every part of your life, rewrite all the stories that scare you. The people and things who reappear from your past are not as scary as you thought them.
You are brave. You always have been. Remember that it is all right not to be brave sometimes, that you are allowed to say how difficult it is. Ask for help when you need it.
Much love, and see you here in a year,
Kathleen xx
P.S. No, I’m not completely grey. Try Thirty-five 😉
Kathleen Jowitt 