August Theme: Rest and Integration

I do not have to create anything more this month to be enough. I am practising saying this out loud.

Nine months on Substack. There are more than four hundred of us here in this community now. When I started I couldn’t have imagined that, and how it would be to get to know so many lovely people. Thank you all for reading, for staying, and for supporting this work with such generosity.

I have written about Sam. About the system that couldn’t hold him. About giftedness and trauma and shame and the five roots of belonging to ourselves. I have written about how it has been to learn to live with profound loss.

I have written and written, and somewhere in it I told myself that the writing was the proof. Proof that I’m doing enough. Proof that I am enough. But this is not the truth.

Last week I wrote a few notes about sorting my bookshelves. I didn’t say that it took me most of a week. That I did it in ten-minute pieces with long lie-downs in between. That when it was finally finished I collapsed onto the sofa in triumph, the way other people might feel finishing a marathon.

Allegra Chapman (she/her) of Creative Fix has published a fabulous book this year. It’s right there in the middle of my downstairs bookshelf. It’s a really lovely book with all kinds of inspirational ideas for creative projects and activities.

And Allegra wrote recently about the exhaustion of faking wellness — of presenting a bright, capable public self while the private one is struggling with ill-health. I read her courageous words and recognised myself, and I realised that I’ve been doing that too.

So here is my own confession.

I am a dormouse now. I sleep through the night and then again in the afternoon — sometimes for many hours, and the time that remains for writing and making and living is short, and the days disappear at a rate of knots. My body after years of being at my command is saying ‘No,’ on a daily basis. I don’t know why — over the last few years there have been clots on my lungs, twice, frightening ones, and perhaps there’s damage left behind, or perhaps there’s something else the doctors haven't named. What I know is the incessant tiredness, and that it does not often lift.

On a good day I clear the breakfast things and I am happy with that. Or I do two loads of washing. Or I pay a visit to the dentist or to service the car. Just one of these can be the achievement of the day. The bookshelves were a mountain.

I am telling myself I do not have to create anything more this month to be enough. Rest is not the withdrawal of the offering. Rest this month is the offering, continuing, while I sit down for a few weeks.

This month I am asking my typing fingers to be still, and asking the rest of me to believe something I’d tell any one of you without a second’s hesitation — that you were enough before you produced a single thing to prove it.

So I’m resting until September. I’ll still read and respond to you all throughout August, and I’ll share a few notes and a couple of the tools I’ve been building. But I will do this when the hours allow and only then.

Some of the time I’ll be with my daughter and my grandchildren, which will involve a different kind of demand alongside the delight. And some of the time I’ll spend reading my own books — the ones I spent a week putting back on those shelves, finally taken down and opened. And we’ll be marking Sam’s 41st birthday at the end of the month.

I’ll be properly back in September.

Before I go — I want you to know that you are part of why I can let myself rest without feeling I’ve abandoned my post. I did not expect to make friends here, but I have. Real ones. The kindness in this place is tangible, the way we care for one another and hold each other up. The work is held. You are holding it with me.

Integration needs fallow ground, and what I’ve written these nine months is settling. A field that is used for growing season after season without pause gives less and less, until one year it gives nothing at all. The farmers know to let it lie — to leave it bare for a while, un-grazed and un-planted, so that the ground can recover its ability to nourish.

So, the chair by the window. The kettle. A small hand in mine. The tide coming in and going out. If you need to rest too, please take this as your permission. However, I do know how impossible that word can sound when there are children depending on you.

This week, on the 12th, if the Cornish sky obliges by staying clear of mist, the Moon will cover all but a sliver of the Sun — more of it here in Cornwall than anywhere else in the country. And later that same night the Perseids will fall through a dark sky — my dear friend Lin Truman, one of our community of readers here, reminded me of the coming meteor shower only today.

And I don’t have to make either of these things happen. I don’t have to do anything at all. I only have to go outside and look across to the west.

The last time the solar system did this, we watched from my home in south Devon. My dear parents had come down from Berkshire to witness it. Sam was thirteen. I remember the strange chill, and the birds going quiet, and the light steadily dimming. And then the confused birds beginning to sing again a few minutes later with a second dawn chorus. I will be watching again this time.

Thank you for listening. And thank you for being part of this community.