Working through this island

Last night, talking to one of my dear old friends via a freebie app that allows such things (welcome to the future, I sometimes think to myself), he asked and kept asking about the island. Like a good friend does.

I feel that this island still has much to teach me, I said. We will be better off for the experience, as a couple, as a family and individually, but woo, in the meantime, it ain’t easy. He listened. And he spoke and I listened. My friend and I talked about how to survive such travails and the meaning of things and faith as he has had a helluva few years himself, near death and loving and supporting a seriously injured and ill partner and so on. And so on. And on. He’s a tough one, my friend.

I told the story of a former colleague I had, who was an religious education teacher, and though he had been raised by a pastor father in a Jamaican family, he seemed to transcended religion in his outlook and his manner. He was an educator at his core. When he left the school to take up a post elsewhere, he gave a speech as was common in the school. He talked about a song he had learned coming up and then sang it, simply and beautifully. I can see him now, head back, long dreads down his back as he sang what I realise now is also a verse from the bible: god did not bring me this far to leave me.  

But it made me realise that again we need to shift and redraw the lines of this experience and challenge ourselves to be tougher and more tender and more honest than we have so far. Again.

Another topic of discussion my friend and I had was about people generally. How they are messed up. Endlessly messy. Effed up and shadowy.

I think I have been unwilling to look at this side of people, really look, until now, individually and collectively, because although I was completely okay with the shadow side of humans and life and things theoretically, the reality is far more difficult to deal with. In practice, we do not have the cleanliness that the distance of theory allows.

People are awful and disgusting and pathological. All of us. All of them. Everyone.

And it is ok. Yesterday afternoon, we witnessed a conversation between a mother and a teenage daughter, where the daughter asked to have some chips to eat (aka French fries) and the mother hinted that she shouldn’t and when the daughter pressed, the mother spelled it out: you have a modelling gig in a few weeks. Message: you need to be skinny and not eat those chips.

Now, in a former life, like more than a few weeks ago, I would have been hella-judgy. How very dare that mother. And still, I feel left in a moral limbo to stop the fat shaming and body controlling of a young woman. But let’s be honest: body issues, particularly inside families, are complex. Where do you wade in and how do you wade out without getting yourself soaked with their stuff? But more importantly, who is actually “right” in such a complex scenario? How can you even know if you are helping by saying anything?

I would have written that mum off completely. Now, I am willing to sit with this situation and consider, really consider, what, if anything, I can do to improve the situation. And know that I am not better or worse than she is.

Who is “good”? No one. I’ve been desperately trying to be “good” for as long as I remember. Maybe I can just be human and do my best. And still examine what that last bit even means.

I’ve had some pretty gross conversations in the last few days, some of which I have participated in ways that I am surprised at myself. It’s easy to get sucked into nastiness. To snobbishness. To being judgemental and forgetting the things you value, even for a moment.

This is the shadow and this is part of life.

So, one of the lessons I guess we get to learn is how to digest that all along with the rest of it.

Today, we got a chipper reminder that one of our neighbours is a gigantic bully. In a bigger community, you would be like, whatever, and continue on your way. We did that with one of our old neighbours who was ridiculously unpredictable, moody and often-times, just downright rude. It seemed she could have been struggling with her mental health with the hugely dramatic changes in her treatment towards us, when nothing had actually transpired between us.

Today, our current thorn in the side decided to take her stuff out on T.

Here we go again, I think. Most people we get on with or can be neutral about. The lady on the island has been here since before time began and seems to have her own wobbles which go splat on the humans around her.

Or maybe that is just the narrative I am most comfortable with.

When she did this to us for the first time in May last year, it really caught us off guard. We were definitely in an earlier phase of island life and still clinging to our idealism about how people were going to behave on the island, or that they would generally. It felt awful.

It’s funny, because now I still feel I have my ideals, but I am certainly a lot less idealistic. I feel things should be better than they are, but getting from here to there is cloudier and less certain than ever before. Nowhere has the change been as noticeable as on the island in this new normal.  

I feel humble and tender and unsure, but more sure about some of the more important things. I don’t need to find my friends here, though I feel we are starting to anyway. Thanks to technology, I have several groups of friends around the world who have known me longer and better than the people who I ride the ferry with every day. I will be cordial. I will be friendly when appropriate, but the people here can be just neighbours. It may be a small island, but it is situated in a huge world. These people are no more or less valuable than the innumerable faces I would pass in a London street. Or on a pavement in Munich in the '90s. Or in any of the other places I have lived. These are merely people who I will maybe remember later and perhaps we will have a laugh. Or we will dismiss them. Or the distance of time will just make us more comfortable with them or create a new understanding of their currently mystifying behaviour. Who knows? I have to have this perspective now so my heart doesn’t break when they show that shadowy bit, that crazy bit of themselves. So I can stay tender, inside, where they cannot reach me unless I let them.

When I worked in a secondary school in north London, I saw hundreds of teenagers every day and worked with at least dozens directly daily. They were unpredictable often and I could not take it personally, but if a young person wanted to connect or needed support, even if they had been the shittiest shit the last time I was anywhere near them, I had to be able to choose to open to it if it made sense for me at the time. It was how I stayed alive doing that job and didn’t completely tune out and become dulled by cynicism. Because these kids could be marvelous and hilarious and heart-breakingly sweet. But being closed to them completely precluded all that. By the same token, if they wanted to take their own shit out on someone and I landed in their path, they had to know that this was not going to be allowed to happen or allowed to pass. And it didn’t by and large.

So, here we are again, re-learning the lessons we knew, but differently, more deeply. Learning and being open and still learning how to that better, more honestly, more wisely. We cannot be friends with everyone. That is a waste of our friendship, which is priceless. We cannot say hi to everyone on a London road because our brains would explode and hello would lose meaning and just becoming a gathering of syllables that started to sound funny for all the saying.

Maybe that is what a small community can teach: that what you needed to know to live here is what you knew all along. You just have to mean it. And sometimes that is a hard truth to work through.