Author: kathleenjowitt

How have you created and/or sustained connections in your life this year?

As so often with Reverb prompts, this makes me flinch, and then realise that I didn’t need to. Sometimes I feel that I am a complete disaster when it comes to connections. Every autumn I drop off the radar.

I have to expend so much energy keeping myself together that I can’t keep a conversation going with anyone else, particularly when it’s something that the rest of the world seems to consider easy. A phone call. A birthday card. I just can’t, and I feel so pathetic for not being able to. Even now, with my head almost back in the right place, the thought of having to buy, write and send Christmas cards is filling me with a vague sensation of dread.

But –

– this year I have reconnected with two people from secondary school, fifteen years after I last saw them. Now we follow each other on Twitter.

– the internet is, in fact, excellent for keeping up with people. Generally speaking I’m better with the written word than the spoken word, and the ability to build in a delay is incredibly helpful.

– finally getting around to setting up a blog reader has helped, too – I follow an eclectic mix of people, on an equally eclectic mix of blogging platforms, and remembering to look at them all was becoming an arduous task.

– I am still in touch with my colleagues from Guildford, the ones I was so worried about losing, this time last year.

– the London Waterloo-Portsmouth line has been, and will be, seeing a lot of me through December, as I catch up with family and friends.

– this year we re-instituted the tradition of meeting at Warblington to remember Héloïse.

– I don’t lose people. Not permanently. They come back to me, and I go back to them. I’m not perfect, and they understand that.

How to keep this going, next year? And how to keep it going when all my social systems shut themselves down? Last year I was concentrating so hard on getting through the great move, on making the most of my last months in Surrey, that I did it all in a state of accidental mindfulness and it was fine. I worked very hard on my connections then, because I thought I was about to lose them all. I’d like to recapture that, but without the stress that induced it all.

I remember something I saw written across a wall in a hostel in Spain: SER SINCERO Y COHERENTE ME HACE UNA PERSONA AUTENTICA. That, I think, comes very close to being the answer.

Please post your favourite picture of yourself from 2014, self-portrait or otherwise!

One night in late June I drank an espresso martini and stayed the night with a friend who has very pale curtains in her spare room. I’d been waking up with the dawn all spring. I managed about two hours of sleep that night, but before I finally dropped off I worked out exactly what to do with my green and black dress that I’d made in 2006 or 2007, which I loved but which no longer fitted.

There had been a conversation, earlier in the evening, which included the oft-heard line, ‘Do I need to buy a hat?’ The answer, it turns out, was ‘No’ – but only on the metaphorical level. It served to remind me of a hat that I’d been hankering after for a long time – because it would go so beautifully with the dress, if only I could rescue it. And because it was completely outrageous. And because it was made by my dear friend Arnie, whom I have known since the first day of secondary school, when we met in a very cold and windy lunch break and decided that we would be each other’s friends.

I spent more on this hat than I’ve ever spent on a hat in my life. It may have been more than I’ve spent on any garment. I was angsting a little bit about this. ‘I’m spending all my money on hats. Not even hats. A hat.’

‘The singular is important,’ Tony said. ‘It proves that this is a significant hat.’

And this is true. It is not just a hat. It is art. I have been thinking a lot this year about art, and about how it deserves to be paid for. I need to value other people’s art, and my own.

I bought the hat. I bought some black velvet and replaced the bodice on the dress. I made a set of jewellery to go with them. I got new glasses this year, too; it took me a while to get used to the (comparatively) huge frames, which made me feel like Woody Allen for the first few weeks, but I love them now.

This is how it turned out:

This photo was taken at Nicky’s wedding, which was an excellent day. I did wear the same ensemble to Arnie’s own wedding, but because I got changed behind a car door in between the toasts and putting up a tent (long story) I never got around to getting a good photo. Or to putting my nail varnish on, if it comes to that. Anyway, I love the September evening light in this particular shot. It was a very happy summer.

Despite our usually sunny dispositions and dedication to the practice of “assuming positive intent,” we all occasionally find ourselves having to deal with an incredibly unpleasant individual.

What is the sound of your own voice?

I am not sure that people hear much of my voice. I am a quiet person; I sit at the edges of conversations and listen. Sometimes I have something to say, but not very often. I’m much more vocal online than I am in real life. Or – is that true? I’m a lurker, not a commenter; I read a lot and only occasionally respond. Sometimes that’s because I don’t want to get drawn into drama. Sometimes it’s because someone else has already said everything that I would have done.

When I do, how does it sound? Diffident, kind, amused, sometimes veering to cynical, wanting to believe the best of everything, not necessarily sure that it’s safe. Prone to long words, ellipsis, and sentences that run on and on, far away from the original point. Much like my real voice, really.

If we are going to take this literally, I have recorded my poem Manifest. I am always nervous about hearing my recorded voice, but I find, when I muster the courage to listen, I am not the awful person I thought I was.

We are all lightning rods, conduits for that which the Universe wants born into this world. What energies did you channel this year?
This year has been about acceptance – acceptance of who I am, acceptance of what other people are.

Everything that I have written this year has, somewhere along the line, been about that, saying, ‘You and I have a right to be in the world, the way we are just at this minute, imperfect, hesitant, apologetic as we are, none the less, there is a place for us.’ All the jewellery I have made has said, ‘Look at this thing! Isn’t it gorgeous?’ Even in my day job I have been thinking about better ways to work with what we already know.

And acceptance isn’t really the right word, either; it goes too far and not far enough. I don’t necessarily want to accept all situations, and I want to do more than just accept people. What I am trying to say is that I want to meet people where they are, without trying to change them – frustrating as that is when those people are not themselves accepting, and are trying to change me or other people. I want to let people be who they are, not who I think they ought to be. That’s what I’ve been writing about all year.

I want to see what is really there. I want clear-sighted love. I want to show that this is possible for everyone. That is, it turns out, what I have been striving for all this year.

It’s all too easy to put off loving where we are until everything is perfect. What can you love about where you are now?

I’m in a good place, a safe place. I’m warm and I’m dry and I’m in my study, my nest in the heart of this house, with a lavender candle burning, and Tony’s cheesy music drifting in from the conservatory. I’ve got a very long weekend: tomorrow and Friday off, and then Monday and Tuesday, and a party and a show and all sorts to fill it with. Tomorrow I’ll go out and remind myself how much I like this city I live in now.

Eighteen months ago, in the middle of all the terrifying changes, I identified four conditions in which I planned to remain, and here I am: alive, sane, married and employed. The sanity is a bit wobbly sometimes, but the more I remain in the now, the more secure it is.

I came off my bike on the way home this evening, but nothing was damaged except a pair of tights that was on the way out anyway. My bike, my mother’s birthday present, and I, are all intact. Tony ran me a bath and lent me his huge fluffy dressing gown. I smell faintly of lemon bath stuff, and my belly is full of shepherd’s pie, and I’m pleasantly sleepy. My nose isn’t bleeding. That puts today ahead of most of the last week. I’m getting better, and in the mean time I am being looked after in the most delicious manner.

This morning was stunning. I left the house at quarter to seven, and the sky was clear enough for a couple of stars still to be straggling above me, while the dawn was brightening across the river. The red lights and the white lights of the city glowed. This evening it was all moonlight and moody clouds, and there were ginkgo leaves on the pavement.

I like my job. I have reasonable prospects of moving up the ladder. I’ve written a novel. That’s a hell of a thing. I can and will write another. I’ve learned to ride a bike. All the time, I am growing. And, much as I whinge about being ill, I am an awful lot better. I am not just better than I was five years ago, I am better squared. I have discovered whole new dimensions in which to be better. I’ve come an amazingly long way and barely noticed.

I am thinking of various friends who are in difficult places, and wishing (really wishing, you know the sort I mean) them well. I’m thinking of my eldest little brother, whose birthday it is. I am thinking of my ex-colleagues, with some of whom I had lunch today, and how much part of my life they still are, and after I was so worried about losing them all. Thinking, too, about friends from way back with whom I have reconnected this year. I have such wonderful people in my life.

I don’t know how to finish this entry. Every word brings in a new moment, a new now, and each now another good thing. Now is all there is, the only moment that time touches eternity.

What unfinished projects from 2014 am you willing to release now? (Regret not required.)

I have lengths of silver wire in various different gauges lying around the house, the relics of an autumn in which I didn’t achieve nearly as much as I’d intended. I had so many grand dreams for this autumn, but I had a cold, then stress, then seasonal depression, and then another cold. All that writing, all that smithing, all those things I simply did not have the energy to do… I have done some things. I’ve written about 20,000 words, in various places. I’ve made a ring, a bangle, another ring, a sort of torc thing. I have done some things. I have just not done as many things as I wanted to.

I’m not sure that I’m ready to let go of any of that, yet. Part of that is knowing that they will come back to me, one way or another. These things always do: I have lost count of how many times I abandoned Speak Its Name, before it was even called that. I’ve finished it and abandoned it again, for the moment, trusting that when the spiral brings it back to me I’ll know what to do with it. The same with The Slowest Elopement, which is a book I’ve been writing for even longer. I haven’t completed any projects, because I have been so damn tired; but I am releasing the need to have completed them. I have demoted the whole lot of them to ‘one day’, and that’s fine. They’ll come back to me when they’re ready.

That leaves this other project, this terrifying, overarching idea of ‘real life’, and ‘getting on with it’. 2014 has been huge. It’s a year today since I started my new job, and within that year there has been a graduation, a move, and all manner of subtle readjustment.

I unpacked and broke down two boxes at the weekend. There are still a few about the place, but it is time to acknowledge that this project is, to all intents and purposes, done, or as done as it’s ever going to be. The year (eighteen months/five years) of transition is over. We are back in the same house as each other, and we both have ‘real’ jobs, and we still like each other. Time to let go of Project Grow Up.

What can you say right now with certainty?

Certainty is a word that I find enormously difficult. I have spent so long trying to disentangle ‘certainty’ from ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ that I am much more comfortable with plain old ‘doubt’. Talk of certainty puts me on the defensive, reminds me of all those years feeling that I was a fraud, before I understood that ‘faith’ doesn’t necessarily equate to ‘belief’, and that ‘belief’ that isn’t strong enough to amount to ‘certainty’ is equally valid, anyway.

Go off in the other direction, and the mundane starts wobbling, too. I’m suddenly very aware of how relative everything is. I can say for certain that it is five past nine on the first of December, but then I remember that time is an artificial construct. I start wondering about certainty, and I start wondering what’s ‘really’ true, and before I know it I’m wondering whether I really exist, and what this bottle of nail varnish I’m looking at is made of, I mean, really made of. And that way leads nowhere useful. What can I say for certain? Absolutely nothing at all.

I’m not certain of anything, particularly myself. My mind doesn’t really deal in certainties. As someone who spends a lot of time in a state of mind where it is necessary to discard apparent self-evident truths about who and what I am and what is my place in the world. I am constantly questioning my own perceptions, for my own sanity.

I cannot afford to let myself be too certain. And, even when I come out the other side of all that, what I emerge into is something entirely different from certainty. It’s more reality than certainty, I suppose; a fizzing, sparkling reality that I don’t have to be certain about. Certainty is a state of mind that I can’t produce with any kind of reliability, and over the years I’ve found that I don’t feel the lack of it.

What can I say with certainty? Now, as ever, not very much at all. All the same, I don’t really think that matters.