A Journey into London

After the quiet

I haven’t been in to London for a number of years, and it’s been even longer since I went in on my own. I used to study in central London and lived in Turnpike Lane for a couple of years; if I could handle being in Turnpike Lane, a trip to the wonderful, tree-filled, creative hub of Bloomsbury shouldn’t be so bad.

I was travelling to the Women’s Prize Live, and truthfully, I just knew I needed to be there the moment I saw tickets available. You hear about people getting a calling, well this was my literary calling; an invitation to do something that was just for me and my interests. And that pull, that desire – it miraculously wiped away any anxiety I was expecting I would feel.

This station and I have history.

I stood at the platform remembering the stomach churning train journeys of a decade ago, where I forced one foot in front of the other to find a seat, closed my eyes once I sat down in an attempt to dissociate from my body, and felt the walls of the carriage press in on me. I was overcome with the crushing, indisputable feeling that I needed to escape, but couldn’t. I was trapped. Was that a shooting pain up my arm? Right on cue, a sudden drop in my stomach: my breakfast trying to escape by any means; sweaty palms, heart racing, vision blurring.

Get out, get out, get out. If you can’t get out, then everything needs to get out of you.

Then I would step off the train at Euston and… no immediate requirement for a toilet. No heart attack. This repeated daily for a year, and it was like every day I forgot, and so every day I lived through it all again. Grief does bizarre things to the mind and body.

And so, this week I could fully appreciate how far I have come, because I did not feel the need to shit myself. What a bar to set, hey? But here we are.

When I stepped off that train in London earlier this week, the only overwhelming feeling this time was of freedom. If I can do this, what else can I do? Surely the world is my oyster.

It also struck me how much of my life I’ve spent quietly living through things and moving on without ever really talking about them.

And so here we are. This is my first Substack post.

"Have more than thou showest, speak less than thou knowest..." (Shakespeare - King Lear, 1.4)

I have experienced some of the most joyous moments and some of the darkest, and throughout it all I have always remained quiet. “Have more than you show, speak less than you know” is a Shakespeare quote from King Lear that I always stood by. In many ways, I still do. I am an introverted book girl, after all. But I think I leaned into that too much; let it settle over me, like a comforting blanket. I sat back, watched everyone else experience their joy and their grief, and spoke minimally of mine. But speaking less does not mean I have less to say.

Then, a Big Life Event happened (maybe as a result of me just doing the aforementioned ‘sitting back’, though my therapist would likely challenge that thought) and I didn’t want to stay quiet anymore.

I wanted to shout about the injustice I was feeling. I wanted to scream about the emotions I’ve been gripping tightly on to for decades. I wanted to live with abandon; laugh without anxiety; experience life without caution. I wanted to feel like a woman.

But that’s all quite a big jump, so what I did instead was write a book.

And I screamed on to the page.

And then slowly I opened myself up, page by page, to the people around me and to those who I barely knew, and I discovered that life can be good despite all the bad.

Rooftops in Bloomsbury

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