Tania Kindersley
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Choosing Love.

Choosing Love.

Apr 04, 2023


Someone came for me just now on social media. 

This hasn’t happened for a while and it’s always a shock. I don’t mean random people on Twitter; they don’t touch me. I just block and mute and move on. Twitter is a huge, shouty market square, and you are always going to find people who are in too much pain to deal with their own anguish and so they displace it. 

But I have places out there on the internet which feel safe to me. One of them is the Facebook page where I write my red mare stories. Although there are thousands of people there - a number that astonishes me - they are almost unfailingly kind and understanding and generous and funny. Because of this, a very public page feels like a private group, and I wear no armour there. I’ve written in that place of searing grief, after the death of my mother, after having to have a beloved mare put down, after one of my oldest friends died very suddenly and unexpectedly. I’m fifty-six, and I’ve been through my share of funerals and griefs, and I write those all down. There’s very little about me that my red mare crew don’t know. 

So when someone comes with anger and accusation, as they did today, I feel it. I have to process the bafflement and pain and I thought I’d do it now, in real time, so we get two for the price of one. I start the first and vital part of emotional processing, which is to put the pain on the page, and you get to see how this life-changing tool works. That feels like it has a meaning and purpose in it.

Interestingly, when I read the angry lines - and there was a lot of fury in them - the first thing I thought was: oh, that poor person. I know only too well that when I get snappy or say something disobliging which I later regret, it is because there is some trapped angst or fear or sorrow deep inside me which I have not looked at. So that was the first reaction: this is a person in pain. 

We can never know what is going on in someone else’s life. I had clearly written something which touched on an old wound or an old bruise, and this must have sparked off the explosion. 

The words were very personal indeed: there was accusation there, and disdain, and belittlement. It felt as if the person really wanted to wound, and that only happens when a person is wounded themselves. 

This was all rational, grown-up brain. I confess that I rather surprised myself. Usually, I have to go into my teenage, end-of-the-world, why is someone being mean to me self, console her, feel the hurt without scolding myself for being so weedy and tragic, and get everything out of my mind and out of my body. Only then can I return to my grown-up self, who lives in reality and who understands that everyone is walking a hard road.

For a moment, I am afraid to have to tell you that I felt slightly smug. My goodness, I thought, I have trained my brain so well that it skips the teenage despair (I think of it as teenage, because when you are a teenager there is no perspective and everything really is the end of the world) and goes directly to the calm, compassionate grown-up.

Ha, ha, ha, said the fates, we were just messing with you. As I read the furious words again, the old familiar feeling came rushing in. It’s the feeling I always get when I think I’m among friends and someone says something hurtful. It’s a shock, as if someone has smashed into my body. All my resting atoms start scooting about, reconfiguring themselves restlessly. I often describe this as a kind of existential pins and needles. There is an ache - in my throat, down my gullet, across my shoulders. A weight presses on my head.

This is my body telling me that although this is such a tiny matter, in the great scheme of things, it feels, as all attacks do, like a mortal threat. This is old limbic system stuff and I ignore it at my peril. Someone wrote a brilliant book called The Body Knows the Score, and that person was right. I’ve taught myself to listen to my body.

As all this comes on, there is a falling sense of disappointment, because I’d had that glimpse of the sensible grown-up, and I thought for a moment I might be able to skip this part. 

Then there is a resigned sort of tiredness. It’s a weariness. It says, ‘Buggery bollocks, do I really have to process a whole bunch of horrible emotions again?’ Only on Sunday I got some shockingly sad news and I had to work my way through some deep sorrow. I was just coming up for air when this happens. 

At this point, Mabel, my lesser self, raises her head. I used to stuff her in my internal Cupboard of Doom because I was ashamed of her, in all her flaws and frailties, but now I let her out to do her dance.

She’s irrationally angry. Not with the person, but with life. Because this stuff happens all the time and could people just not say unkind things and why can’t everyone leave her alone? She’s cross because she was having a nice day and the sun was shining and now she’s all bent out of shape. She’s also furious with me for being such a wimpy weed. She wants to know why I can’t just shrug this kind of thing off and barrel on through life without a care in the world. 

Mabel can also get quite victimy and sorry for herself. She’s singing a very doomy, self-regarding song which goes something like - I spend all my time trying to put things out into the world which add to the sum total of human happiness, and then this happens. (I really, really am not proud of this part of myself. I give it to you in the spirit of radical honesty.)

So I’ve got the teenage self feeling battered and as if her life is over and I’ve got Mabel full of anger and self-pity and my body sending me signals that a woolly mammoth has just charged out of the woods, straight for me.

And then the Not Good Enough gremlin says, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, it was just one person who was having a bad day (or month or year) and you know how this works and you are writing it all down like it’s some epic Tolstoy novel and your poor readers are going to lose the will to live.’ And, just for good measure, in case I hadn’t got the point, ‘What is wrong with you?’

So that’s a merry little cocktail of toxicity. 

I go into the kitchen and breathe it out and stretch it out. I become conscious of all those hurt parts of me, yelling for attention, like a bunch of tired and querulous and baffled children. 

And that’s when I get out my secret weapon, which is love. In love, I can console my bruised bunch of inner selves. ‘All right,’ I say out loud. ‘You’re all right. I’ve got you. You are safe.’

The next bit is the hard part (well, it’s all hard part, but this is the hardest because it’s so counterintuitive). I feel, slowly and consciously and  love for the person who went after me. Mabel wants payback and punishment and is thinking up all kinds of passive-aggressive strategies to make the person feel bad. Love says, ‘No, that is not the answer. Adding more bad to the equation will only increase sorrow and not add to joy.’ (Love is a bit of an old hippy.) Love says, ‘How about stepping into compassion instead of sitting in resentment? See how that feels.’

So I choose love. 

Sometimes, there are people in our lives from whom we need to protect ourselves. That’s when love is like a mamma bear with her cubs. There are relationships where the only answer is to move away and secure ourselves, because the person is never going to change, no matter how much compassion we throw at them. I’m pretty hard line about that kind of thing. But this is a wounded stranger on the internet. In this case, I really can choose love, without sacrificing my sense of self. (Those boundaries of the self do need to stay strong; I patrol them like those brilliant dogs they have in Canada which guard livestock.) 

I’ll beam love out at that person all day long. Every time I get a little flash of Mabel, or an echo of the hurt I feel, I’ll get my love beam out and use it like a superpower. I’ll take love down to the field in a minute and give it to the red mare and to the Scottish hills and to the sunshine, with its promise of spring.

And I’ll choose love in an hour or two, when I’ll ring up my friend Kathy in Wales and ask her if she can help me process the last of the emotions. (You can’t do this stuff alone; I’ve learned that so hard that it’s gone into my bones. All of us need a crew.)

So there we are, my darlings - the processing of an emotion, in real time. We’ve had a lovely story arc; we’ve gone from pain to love in twenty-seven paragraphs. That is the kind of parabola I like. 

As I write these last words I feel my shoulders coming down and my body returning to itself and my mind softening. My fingers slow over the keyboard, because my work is done. I hope that this might be of help to the sensitive people out there, who are prone to all the shocks that flesh is heir to. I hope that you might read this and sigh and smile and say, ‘Ah, yes, I am not alone.’

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