Remembering the distant hours

I’ve got a few posts kicking around in my head but thought I’d start with a more personal, less gungo-ho theology one for now. I headed home for a visit this weekend as it’s unlikely I’ll be back before Christmas, to collect my winter coat and check in with my parents and brother. It’s been a really busy week on my attachment, with a lot of 12 hour days without breaks- but also really good and I’ve learned a lot, and have got to scrub in on a lot of surgeries too, which is always fun – but I was pretty knackered by the time I was on the four hour journey South.

Home as always, is strange. There is so much that my family don’t know about me, that sometimes it really does feel like I’m playing to the crowds, and after a fairly painful discussion about family stuff in counselling last week (is it ever, not painful?), I was dreading it and feeling pretty vulnerable. On Friday night once everyone had gone to bed, I was in my childhood bedroom, looking out at the night sky from a darkened room, as I did so often when I was younger, wondering how it was that the sky was so peaceful, when inside our walls, everything was chaotically falling to pieces. I feel so empty, so two-dimensional, when I am here. My old room in many ways is a catalogue of who I was – the list of grades needed for every medical school in the UK, which I pinned up three years in advance to spur me on, is still there, and now, a year from qualifying, it’s odd to look and realise that I’m so close to my childhood dream. The photos of the first learning disabilities respite camp I worked, age 16, are still there – and I’m still involved with similar things. The stack of thank-you cards from the Brownie unit I helped to lead, and used as an escape, is still there. The photos from the sixthform ball, me awkward in a balldress and heels, are there, despite the fact that the evening ended in tears when I ended up, as usual, being the ‘responsible’ one calling the parents of people who drank too much and were sick in the floor, further fuelling a complete fear of alcohol that would tar the future years with uncertainty and mistrust. The books on the shelf suggest that even then, I was painfully searching for answers, something to explain what I was seeing and thinking and feeling, something to help me get over and get through. Jostein Gaarder, my fifteen-year-old self owes you a debt. My old room almost feels as though it’s in mourning for something I can’t quite place.  Being back reminds me of how much I hated those last years at home, of how desperate I was, for such a long time. It reminds me of how young, and vulnerable, and afraid I was, how lost and alone and bruised, I was and to some extent, still am.

It’s pretty much five years to the day since I moved up to University and every year around this time, I think back to what that meant. For me, the thought of escaping and starting over, was intoxicating. I’d been ticking off the months till I was predicted to leave, for three years. I couldn’t wait to get away from it and find people ‘like me’ who wanted to change the world and change it whilst sober. The reality was a little different; my first week in medical school landed me in a horrific tutorial on alcoholism met with (probably fairly typical) bad attitudes from the other students and I literally was like a rabbit in the headlights, running away, so needing to find somewhere, anywhere, that alcohol and its damage couldn’t get me. I was so upset I ended up catching the first train I could, regardless of destination, and spent a day wandering around a city I didn’t know, just trying to get some peace and sort my head out before realising that I was truly on my own, not knowing anyone, and that I had no choice but to pull myself together and head back. I returned, headed out with a group from my halls, and churlishly drank more than I ever had (not hard, as I’d not really touched it at all before then), and ever will, to try and push through. If you can’t beat them, join them, after all. It was awful. My medical career did not get off to a sparkling start. Fortunately, it got better.

Now, I am five years on, stronger, older, wiser, though often, it doesn’t really seem that way. I don’t want the next decade to be as hard as this one has been. I don’t want to lose more time. I don’t want to still feel so caught and tethered by the things that bring me down. At twenty-three, there is still plenty of room for life to throw things at me that will knock and hurt me; if I’m going to manage, I want to be free of the weights my family life hung about my shoulders. Going home still wears me down and makes me feel fainter about the edges, as though if I’m not careful, I’ll fade into the wallpaper and cease to exist. It still makes me feel masked and costumed, concealed and false. When I was eighteen, the thought of being stuck in a room talking about my issues scared the daylights out of me. It still does, but I do it.I’m learning. I just hope that I’m learning enough.

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