We Are All Human

We hear it shatter. A million tiny razor blades slicing the air of the living room and landing scattered across the rug. Reflecting back a hundred thousand memories from multiple households. I was so busy all day, watching them and trying to stop one of us from drowning in the paddling pool that I didn’t notice the big, heavy mirror loose on the wall. I didn’t notice the mirror fall. I didn’t notice it as it was falling, knocking the vase of flowers off the mantelpiece, about to shatter in to a million shards. Just seconds earlier I’d ordered the girls off the rug and in to the bath so there was no broken people or skin, just a broken thing. But the sound of the large crash, the big broken thing made me think: it’s always the things that we don’t expect, that catch us off guard. The things that we don’t see that blindside us in a moment when we least expect it. The things we don’t predict or plan for. We are often so busy focussing on lots of other things that we are surprised when something shatters without warning nor ceremony.

I have been really struggling to find the right words to say to you, dear reader. It seems that the world has been imploding and that there has been little that I can do from my bubble. Lots of things have happened in the last few months, some good but some bad. Big stuff. And I’ve been figuring out how I find the words, the right tone, read the room and say something meaningful in the context we are all living in without it coming out wrong.

I have been doing a lot of Sudoko during lockdown. I find the menial repetition cathartic and it allows me to go in to a zone where eventually persistence pays off and I achieve the perfect answer to my problem. Sometimes I have to scribble stuff out and swear a bit, but usually I can get there in the end. You see, I was never that good at maths. One of my oldest friends recently found a letter I had written her when I was eight and I had asked her, since she had moved Down South, who was going to help me with my Maths now? I got a D in my Maths GCSE and tried to resit it in college to get the C, but ended up with a double D. There’s a joke in there somewhere about my bra size at the time. Ironically, I ended up doing a job where I have spreadsheets and formulas and equations and data analysis coming out of my eyeballs. I’ve had to hone my numbers work on the job and get to a place where I can enjoy working hard at something that doesn’t come naturally to me. 

I think what I have learnt is not necessarily that I should have passed the first time round, or that I should get my C in Maths as an adult because it will help me to feel as though I have not failed. No, I think it’s actually quite good to not be the best at something, to try and fail, to not always get what you want. The learning is in the journey we take, to keep trying even in the face of adversity. The persistence and resilience we develop to keep going, to not let how something makes us feel prevent us from pushing forwards and just bloody getting on with it. To look something scary in the eye, meet it’s gaze and walk towards it. To meet it or to miss it.

I failed my driving test five times before I got my pass, when I was in the early stages of pregnancy and thought I might vom all over the examiner (and I beeped the horn with my boob as I reached down to get my licence out of the side compartment). It cost me a shed load of money and exhaustion, tears and embarrassment, but boy was it worth it when I could drive to the coffee drive-thru on a roundabout so the baby and the toddler would sleep at the same time and I could drink a latte in silence whilst listening to Sandra from Birmingham talk about how she once kept her dead cat in the freezer on the Jeremy Vine show. It was worth it when I saw my husbands face the first time I reverse parked in to an impossible gap in a busy market town street. It was worth it when I could drive to see friends or family in moments of need. I have never regretted failing that test over and over again. I will never forget ringing my Mum in tears in a lay-by outside a Thai restaurant and telling her I had actually passed and hearing her voice through tears, telling me how proud she was. I failed when I applied for jobs that I didn’t get. When I spent hours and hours every night, tired, my eyes hurting from too much screen time. Writing applications and filling out forms and answering questions and searching and searching and searching for something that was the right hours with the right money and the right remit. Trying to fit it all in, between eating and showering and working and putting the kids to bed. Attending interviews and building my hopes up for different roles just to get a standard email telling me other candidates more closely matched the job spec. But I just kept going, another application, another interview, eventually I got there. And I don’t regret it now. I’m in my new job and it’s wonderful. It was worth every minute of depressing rejection. Although if you had asked me at the time I would have told you that I was ready to throw my laptop out of the fucking window. I’m just an ordinary person and these are just ordinary everyday things. We all have them, the things we have to keep working at, the every day things we have to get done just to keep doing more and to keep going. Sometimes it has been really hard to know what to say you, these past few months, when all around me feels completely and utterly in overwhelming flux. And I just can’t keep blaming everything on Mercury bloody retrograde. Especially now NASA have introduced a new star sign and are trying to tell me I’m a Taurus when quite clearly I am a Gemini for life, through and through. I mean, who do NASA think they are, really? Unintelligent fools. When I was in college, my friends and I really loved that song about sunscreen, I always remember the lines: “Don't worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.”  And so I am writing to you again my dear reader, to say, life is hard and I don’t have the answer but I’m just going to keep going. Onwards. I will keep doing all the stuff, getting on with all these things, until one day something else creeps up behind me and pulls the rug out from underneath me. I will try to catch my breath while I keep doing all the things I will have to do to just keep things going, to keep all my people ticking over. And that’s just my very, very small world. There are millions of people in the world who will be going through better or worse, at any one time. I will always try to tell myself that there is always someone worse off than me, even when I am feeling pain and sadness. I will try to help others. I will try to hold on to the steering wheel and the sudoku book through hard times. We sometimes fall apart; we are all human.  I lay back in the garden and look up to the sky. “Where do people go?” “We don’t know. There’s no way of knowing Em.” I close my eyes, wondering. My eyes stinging. After a while he says “I think what’s important is what you leave behind, isn’t it.”