“…a certain amount of energy and courage (though I dislike using the word), and a certain amount of recklessness.” ~ James Baldwin

Hindsight is 20/20, isn’t it?

I look back and see the moments and the decisions made. And I wish I was braver.

Though perhaps hindsight makes it too easy to ask courage of the person we were.

To leave a marriage takes courage. Ten years in the making, before the decision. Like many, I lived with the thinking and dissatisfaction, the worry, the “what-ifs” and the “shoulds”. They piled up, and like clothes strewn across the floor of a marriage - day in, day out, I stepped over them. Occasionally I picked up a piece or two and considered them yet not quite having the heart to let them go.

Over time, one piece after another, I began to let go until I could see the marriage floor only to find the foundation had indeed rotted away. By then the decision to leave was clear. From there, swift actions were taken and just like that, we let go.

Except, of course, it wasn’t “just like that”. There were years within that moment.

Courage at every moment of contemplation. Courage at carrying on within the uncertainty. Courage in daring and taking action.

My book “First you have to say goodbye: A gentle guide for the unfolding self” grew out of the long ending of a marriage. Ending is not the moment of decision; it is through the years of change and transitions. Ending, like dying, is a process. The poems threaded through the book held some of the emotional turmoil and hope I experienced, the self-care and the values I sought to protect. It took courage to write it.

Amidst the wild changes, it took years to get the book published. Years in which I pondered and agonized over a word, a phrase and the effect those words might have on readers. I wanted to avoid misunderstandings. To avoid making my experience sound like everyone’s experience. To own the experience as mine without imposing it on the readers or diminishing a life unlike my own. I had after all gone through that experience relatively unscathed.

I was considerate and careful in my writing.

I still value that care. But now I wonder about what I left out in its name.

My intention was to offer company to someone finding their way through an ending, any ending not just a marriage. To make room for uncertainty, grief and the possibility of a life they could not yet imagine. I wanted them to feel seen within the contradictions they are living through, and to give hope of a possible brighter future.

Yet, as I focused on how my words might negatively affect a reader, I paid less attention to what I hoped those words might make possible.

I wish I was braver in allowing myself to express the anger, sadness and disappointment of a dying marriage. They mattered. I ought to have honored their place in the book. At the time, it felt important to convey that these painful places were not where I stayed. I had moved through them, found some resolution and arrived at a place of greater ease. That was what I wanted the book to offer: a gentle guide through an ending.

But perhaps I was too quick to guide the reader through - to provide comfort and encouragement. Perhaps I could have stayed a little longer with what hurt. The grief is there in the book. Looking back, I wonder what else I might have allowed it to say. I feared my words might seem unkind. I wonder what might have opened if I had allowed those feelings to remain, without needing to justify or resolve them.

I have described myself as having come through relatively unscathed. I am less certain about that word now. Finding ease does not mean there were no wounds.

And I know there were circumstances and support that made it possible for me to leave and begin again. My experience was mine; I could not assume that someone reading the book had the same choices available to them.

This awareness mattered. It still does.

Yet I was also playing “nice”, Not wanting to hurt those who might read the book and find themselves in it.

I do not have a tidy answer. There were other people to consider. There still are. I continue to grapple with balancing respect for myself - as I speak my truth and sometimes provoke - and respect for others. And the wish to do no harm.

A lesson from my psychotherapy training, and a practice I have maintained throughout years of practice, is to refrain from telling a story that isn’t mine. This means owning my perspective and feelings, and giving others space to own theirs.

My anger was mine to speak of. So was my sadness and disappointment. I could have allowed them fuller presence without them being the whole story. Nor did I need to resolve them on the page quite so quickly to show that I had found my way through.

Perhaps this is something I am learning here, on Substack. Starting in a new space, sharing thoughts while I am still living with the questions. Noticing when care for the reader becomes a reason, a justification to hold myself back.

It is there, too, in an idea I am giving shape to: a retreat centred on writing. A space to explore what writing might help us discover about ourselves and the lives we lead, personally and professionally.

Even writing that sentence makes the idea feel more exposed. It matters to me and I do not yet know what it will become. I am allowing myself to begin - just as I hoped my book would inspire others to begin.

“Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt but in spite of doubt.” ~ Rollo May, “The Courage to Create”

I wish I had been braver. And I can recognize the courage it took to get here.

Perhaps the question now is - where am I still stepping over things? What might I allow myself to say before hindsight once again tells me what I could have?

What might you dare to say now, rather than wish you had said later?

In the messiness of life, we keep becoming.

Florence
On Meaning and Becoming

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There’s more to explore beyond this essay. If you’re finding your way through endings, change or new beginnings, my book, First You Have to Say Goodbye: A Gentle Guide for the Unfolding Self, might be good company. Pick up a copy on Amazon.

In Simon Sinek’s account of the law of diffusion pertaining to innovation and culture change, there are those - “the early adopters” - who are willing to venture early into unfamiliar territory. They are curious enough to experiment and perhaps courageous enough to proceed without knowing quite where it will lead. I recognised something of myself in them.

Substack, however, took me a little longer.

Perhaps I had become too ti(r)ed to the familiar. Life had taken unexpected turns, as it is inclined to do, and I no longer felt the same urgency to enter every new space simply because it had appeared.

Perhaps I had mellowed.

Mellowed is an interesting word to use of a woman as she ages. It carries a romantic expectation of softening - that time will somehow smooth her sharper edges, quieten her opinions and make her less demanding of the world. She will become more accommodating, less troublesome. Less “passionate”, perhaps. Less vital.

I say NO to that.

Age need not extinguish the fire. It may instead teach us how to tend it.

There is a difference between losing one’s fire and becoming more discerning about where to place it. There is a difference between becoming silent and learning when words are necessary, between reacting to everything and choosing what deserves a response.

If I have mellowed, I hope it is in this sense - not that I care less, but that I have become more deliberate about how I care. The fire remains. I simply no longer feel compelled to set everything alight.

Anger, too, carries energy. In physics, energy does not simply disappear; it changes form. I wonder whether something similar might be said of our inner lives - as a way of understanding what we do with what moves through us.

I do not wish to deny anger or pretend myself beyond it. Anger can tell us that something matters, that a boundary has been crossed or that an injustice should no longer be tolerated. But I want to be discerning about what I allow that energy to become, and to whom or what it needs to be directed.

If I am angry, I allow the energy of that anger move towards clarity rather than cruelty, towards courage rather than destruction, towards constructive action rather than careless scattering of more hurt into the world.

The choice lies in how I carry and transform this energy, any energy.

Even in the early days of social media, I knew there were things I would and would not do there. I watched Facebook and Twitter become places of connection, discovery and exchange but also arenas for keyboard warriors, manufactured outrage and echo chambers in which certainty grew louder while curiosity diminished.

I have always been inclined to watch and learn before jumping in. Not because I am without opinions, but because I want to understand the shape or nature of a space before deciding how I will inhabit it.

And when I did enter, I made a promise to myself and, in some small way, to the world I was co-creating.

I would not use my words merely to provoke a reaction. I would not knowingly diminish another person for the satisfaction of making a point. I would not manufacture division in order to attract attention, even as I wrote about the absurdities, contradictions and horrors of our shared life.

This does not mean avoiding difficult subjects. Nor does it mean being agreeable, neutral or silent in the presence of injustice.

Some things need to be named. Some assumptions need to be unsettled. Some questions must be asked precisely because they make us uncomfortable.

But there is a difference between provocation that opens a space and provocation that closes one. There is a difference between a question that invites us to consider and discern, and a declaration designed to make us take sides. Between challenging an idea and stripping dignity from the person who holds it.

Clickbait trades in immediacy. It asks us to react before we have had time to reflect. It rewards certainty, outrage and the clean division of the world into opposing camps.

Introspection requires something more from us. It asks us to pause. To notice not only what we believe, but why we believe it. To consider what our responses reveal about our fears, loyalties and longings. To remain with a question long enough for it to “trouble” the stories we tell about ourselves.

As a woman, a migrant and a South-East Asian person who has spent most of her life in the West, I have lived within and sometimes between different cultural narratives. I have seen how easily people can be reduced to categories, and how categories can become assumptions about whose voice carries authority, who belongs and whose humanity is readily recognised.

As a former lawyer, an educator and a psychotherapist, I have also spent much of my working life in the presence of competing stories. I know that disagreement does not disappear simply because we wish to be kind. Nor should it. Difference can illuminate what certainty conceals.

The question is not whether we provoke, but what our provocation is in service of.

Does it deepen understanding, or merely display our cleverness? Does it make room for complexity, or flatten the world into heroes and villains? Does it invite reflection, or demand allegiance? Does it retain the humanity of those with whom we disagree?

My values lie in lifting up, in healing and in sustaining hope, not a shallow optimism that turns away from suffering, but a hope capacious enough to look directly at the messiness of life and remain engaged with it.

Hope, after all, is not the denial of what is painful. It is a decision about how we will meet it.

And so, as I begin again in this new space, I remind myself of the promise I made all those years ago.

• to question without reducing complexity to a slogan,

• to provoke thought without manufacturing division,

• to speak honestly without forgetting the human being on the other side of my words,

• to resist the temptation to trade nuance for attention, and

• to remain willing to turn the questions towards myself.

Because our words do more than express who we are. They shape the spaces we inhabit and the world we share.

The fire remains. The task is to tend it well.

How are you with the contradictions and conflicts in your life?

How are you tending to the fire within?

In the messiness of life, we keep becoming.

I have long felt the value of artistic expression. Art has brought me a certain gladness, many smiles and a sense of connection to something far greater than myself.

There are many who share my feelings. Yet are those feelings proof of Art’s value? And are artists themselves sufficiently respected and valued for the work they do?

In a capitalist world, where productivity is so often the measure of worth, there remains an underlying question about whether good art - however “good” is defined - is worth very much at all. Unless, of course, the market decides that it is. In 2020, Banksy’s Show Me the Monet sold at Sotheby’s in London for £7.6 million. Ironic it may be, given Banksy with their hidden identity symbolises the rebel, the outsider of the “art scene” and critical of the consumerist society.

Sometimes function is the measure of value. We are prepared to pay a great deal for products that make our lives more efficient, convenient or comfortable.

But if Art is not validated by a high price, is it still worthy? Is its worth found in what it produces, in the function it performs, or in something else entirely?

Perhaps the difficulty is that Art resists our insistence that everything must justify its existence. We ask what it does, what problem it solves and what measurable outcome it produces. Yet perhaps Art’s value lies partly in its refusal to be reduced to a function. It does not always offer answers. Sometimes it unsettles the questions.

So what good is Art? Is its function - or its usefulness - to feed the soul: to heal, inspire and motivate?

During the pandemic, I came across this anonymous quote:

“If you think artists are useless, try to spend your quarantine without music, books, poems, movies, paintings and games.”

Looking back, perhaps the pandemic gave us a collective experience of how Art sees us through. When the world contracted and our physical lives became smaller, stories, music and images carried us elsewhere. They helped us build connections - to tell stories in different forms and create a common bond.

And yet Art did more than help us escape. It gave form to experiences for which we did not yet have language: fear, loneliness, uncertainty, grief and hope. It enabled us to recognise something of ourselves in the imagination of another. In that recognition, we were perhaps a little less alone.

Art has also long been a vehicle for critique, shining a light on the hypocrisy and inequalities of contemporary society. What does Show Me the Monet say to you about the world in which we live?

Banksy’s altered landscape interrupts the tranquillity of Monet’s garden with discarded shopping trolleys and a traffic cone. Beauty remains, but it is no longer innocent. We are asked to look again and notice what consumption, neglect and human interference have placed within the frame.

This, too, may be part of what Art does. It disrupts what has become familiar. It invites us to see what we may have learned not to see and to imagine that the world might be otherwise.

Art gives voice to those who might otherwise not be heard. Every one of us needs witnesses to our lived experience and to the stories we tell. Artists, in turn, create a space in which our hearts may dwell.

There is something profoundly human in this exchange. The artist offers a fragment of an inner world - a melody, an image, a sentence - and another person receives it, sometimes across cultures, generations and centuries. A private act of creation becomes a meeting place for connection.

Our hearts, not only our minds, need a prominent place in this turbulent world.

Art reminds us that being human is more than being useful or productive. It returns us more fully to life - to its beauty and brutality, its contradictions and possibilities.

Perhaps this is what Art is good for.

In the messiness, we keep becoming.

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I replied, “not as often as I’d prefer”.

Just as I enjoy the solitary space of a buzzy café on a weekend morning, I revel in the atmosphere of a festival, but on one miniscule condition. It must be a festival which is intellectually enriching and one I can engage with curiosity; one that might extend my understanding of the world or offer a different lens through which to view it. One where I can be in the company of my tribe.

Now, I don’t know the people at the festival. I often attend on my own. It is a time to “fill my cup”; to retreat in public and be introspective. Nevertheless, to be among diverse people gathered with a common purpose (or so I’dd like to believe) is deeply gratifying.

Critically, it is this sense of belonging that calls me back, time and time again.

I have been pondering the notion of belonging for a while. In mainstream media and common narratives, belonging is often depicted as being welcomed into a group that is, finding your people, being accepted and included.

Belonging is a fundamental human need. It gives us a sense of connection and of having a place in the world. But belonging is not simply about being surrounded by others. Nor is it necessarily dependent upon familiarity or friendship. Perhaps it is the felt sense that, here, something of who we are is recognised; that our presence makes sense in this particular space.

What is incredibly rewarding about my experience of belonging is that it is separate from whether I am in the company of people I know. To be in the midst of this “sea of humanity”, among people who may be like me in some small but meaningful way, and who have also chosen to attend the festival, is what makes the experience exhilarating.

The world may present festival-going as a group adventure: sometimes raucous, but most certainly sociable. For an introvert, my experience is different, and that is fine.

No two experiences will be the same, and yet here we all are, under the same roof and dimmed lights, sharing in discourses about matters that are, in one way or another, important to us.

But belonging is not without its tensions.

Belonging requires some degree of alignment with the norms of a group. There are spoken and unspoken understandings about what is acceptable, what may be questioned and what must remain unquestioned. Yet, in the face of conflicting or contradictory views, does one conform or remain true to oneself?

What are you prepared to risk in order to remain true to yourself?

And would conformity not be in opposition to the spirit of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, a festival I attended recently that invites us to explore ideas that challenge the mainstream, unsettle familiar assumptions and disturb our certainties?

Perhaps an introvert and lone wolf such as I has little cause for concern. I have long been accustomed to standing a little apart, observing from the edges and forming my own view. Yet even the lone wolf longs, at times, to belong and perhaps differently.

Do you risk your sense of belonging for what you believe to be true or right?

In the messiness, we keep becoming.

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All futures are tinted by the way in which you choose to view them.

~ Cat Hellisen, ‘Mother, Crone, Maiden’

What image pops into your head when you hear the word ‘crone’? What characteristics do you associate with this female archetype? Does she remind you of the 3 witches in Macbeth, ‘fire burn and cauldron bubble’? Is she repugnant to you?

I first encountered the Crone in Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. This book is a study of the instinctual nature of women – a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing – and tells the story of 3 archetypes representing the stages of life – the Maiden, the Matron and the Crone. Of these archetypes, the Crone jumped out at me, calling me like a kindred spirit.

I was 22.

Yes, I have been gently teased, occasionally unkindly mocked. Comments like “you are born 40 after all”, “you are an old soul”, “you are all too serious”, “be careful you may become boring” all too common from my teen years and beyond. Well, perhaps I am one, some or all of these; honestly, so what? And it is not surprising that the Crone resonates with me.

Having grown up in a conservative society and acutely aware of the value of beauty norms to a woman’s perceived worth, an image not reliant on the traditional sense of beauty was appealing. I longed for the freedom of non-conformity; the Crone has illuminated many moments of my becoming.

The Crone is present in the myths of different cultures such as Baba Yaga in Slavic, Annis in Celtic, Elli in Nordic, and Kali Ma in Indian mythologies. For me, the Crone has never been the ugly old witch, in modern-day parlance. Neither is she beauty, especially ‘beauty’ as espoused in contemporary society.

The Crone represents a woman of wisdom, the old and wise one; she is an ageless Wisdom Goddess.

Through the years, I have learnt the Crone is light-hearted but never flippant, she is gentle not weak, she is healing not malevolence, she is ageless not old, she is wise not (necessarily) intellectual – what an inspiration! And the journey so far has been a blast!

Always becoming, I have come to understand the Crone as being wholly self-assured of her place, or her magic, of her power. Whether cauldron or throne, she is ready.

To quote Jean-Paul Sartre,

“[w]e only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.”

Perhaps that is what I have come to love most about growing older: not the promise of arriving somewhere polished and complete, but becoming increasingly at home with the mess, beauty and imperfection of being alive.

Like the Pilgrim in Annie Dillard’s novel Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

“I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them…”

I have come to stand in my world, in awe of its beauty and aware of its fragility, at peace with its messiness and consoled by my responsibility.

Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that in Scottish-Gaelic tradition, the Owl is often associated with the Crone aspect of the Goddess. I have long had a certain affinity with the Owl.

Its querying penetrative gaze draws the curious me into its mystery. Mythological symbolism pointing to its ability to uncover hidden truths and look into the human psyche. This solitary nocturnal bird of prey, gracefully unyielding, also in Greek mythology, symbolizes learning, intellect and sharp insight - not dissimilar to the Crone.

I had wished to connect to the Owl’s symbol of wisdom - in my youth, mistaking wisdom for cleverness or intelligence. This intelligence was nevertheless a lifeline to this “frayed and nibbled survivor”. I now know they are vastly different.

Yet an affinity born of mistaken belief continues to hold a special place, for it has come to mean much more: the wisdom of my becoming. And here the Crone is ever present.

A woman’s life, like the moon, waxes and wanes. Let us embrace, revere and honour her – the Crone in our lives – for she must come to pass.

In the messiness, we keep becoming.

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