Is it just me or are we all just kids?

I thought I was a grown up and then The Summer I Turned Pretty blew my cover

Hi friends,

I’ve been quiet. Very, very quiet. I’ve been reading, journaling, painting, cooking, listening and, best of all, sitting very still for hours at a time and looking around and feeling what I feel and thinking big and little thoughts that keep popping like I’m blowing bubblegum bubbles in my head.

It’s a superskill that I doubt I will ever win any awards for, and that I doubt anyone else even notices: my ability to go completely still and hear everything, see everything, and feel everything. I can become so still that, on occasion, sparrows can briefly alight on my knee for a morsel of pastry proffered, so quiet I won’t notice how insular I’ve been til a friend checks in after a week to see if I’m OK.

For me, insularity is a relief. The past couple of weeks spent mostly alone have been delicious, satisfying in a way that getting exactly what you want when you want it is. I’d say it’s on a par with that summer’s day I found sorbet in the chocolate and watermelon flavours I’d been craving for years, except these were also flavoured with jasmine and rose, my favourite florals; or the first annual cup of rich, steaming hot chai in the little paper cups from the kiosk outside Arrivals as soon as I land in India; or that New Year’s Day when my ex-boyfriend was so sick I’d needed to change the sheets, and I found myself alone at the window at 4.30am, watching the sun come up on a brand new, pale blue new year in blissful silence and solitude from the comfort of cool, clean sheets.

I can think of very few incredibly satisfying, rewarding experiences that weren’t solitary ones. I’ve always taken enormous satisfaction in the most tiny things, and usually no one is around to share them with me; and if they were, I’m not sure the experience would be made richer for sharing them, or if that would even be possible.

How do you share what you feel when your inside is a Disneyland, and what you can see when your eyes are kaleidoscopes? They’d need to have an internal fairground and prisms for eyes too, I suppose—and to want to question and be delighted by all of it.

I’m never happier to be here than when I feel like I’m part of everything, even if no one else can see me. It’s very easy to feel that way when I’m very, very still. I feel like my edges begin to blur and disperse, dissipating into the air around me and not… separate, from anything. It makes me cry, sometimes; I can feel everything when I’m that quiet.

I’ve cried a lot lately, for that reason. Stuff I haven’t acknowledged has had permission to enter without knocking; not rudely or aggressively, but simply as if to say, “Here I am. Will you see me now?” and I haven’t been turning any of it away. A lot of it is decades old.

I said earlier that my inside is a Disneyland. It’s the most magical place in the world (to me), but there’s also a haunted house. I’ve been spending a lot of time on that ride lately. The weird thing about that ride was that I found the spacious seats and slow pace oddly comfortable—but, when I was little, I would never, ever go on it alone, especially because there’s that one bit where there’s suddenly a holographic ghost sitting right in the seat with you. I find myself alone on it, now—I still don’t know if it’s by choice.

I do escape it from time to time. One of my favourite genres of escapism is a good young adult romance and this past week, I binge-watched/wept through The Summer I Turned Pretty—and when I finished the show, read all three books over the weekend. My perpetual emotional investment in YA fiction was suddenly suspicious to me, and led me to interrogate more uncomfortable truths that I’m still unpacking. It got me wondering, also, if all of us are really just kids, and I considered how the people I most easily identify with aren’t the “grown ups” but the ones whose child versions I can see in plain sight. I thought of this observation by Dr Maya Angelou:

“I am convinced that most people do not grow up. We find parking spaces and honor our credit cards. We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

We may act sophisticated and worldly but I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

This is how I ended up on the floor of my therapist’s office this past weekend as she talked me through inviting my child self to come join me. When I could see her—the most vulnerable part of myself, about eight years old, so scrawny, gangly, sweet, and uneasy everywhere except between the pages of a book—my therapist asked me to make eye contact with her/me. I tried, and couldn’t, and immediately realised why—because eye contact had always been hard for us. Eye contact is hard for autistic people, especially autistic children. I had no way of knowing that then.

Living has been an experience in bewilderment for as long as I can remember. I’ve got by mostly by looking at what everyone else is doing, inferring what I’m supposed to be doing, and replicating that, rather than simply being how I feel. It’s little wonder I’m most comfortable being on my own. Acting like a person in front of other people is second nature to me now, and I have only started questioning it since my autism diagnosis; but being confronted with a version of myself who was still learning to be in a world that she didn’t understand and couldn’t see herself in took a giant sledgehammer to the glass house called “Grown Up” that I’ve pretended I live in.

I don’t cry openly in front of anyone, not even my therapist—so when I cried huge, shaking sobs there on the floor of a room in Neukölln, Berlin, across the world and a lifetime away from the child sitting with me, I did it into my hands, with a tissue covering my whole face like I was giving myself some kind of depressing spa treatment. (I could have used some cucumber slices afterward.)

When it was time to say goodbye to my child self, I found I was afraid to let her go without me to protect her. Knowing how to move on from her without abandoning her is the hardest part—I guess that’s the point of inner child work. On this occasion, I ended up leaving her in the safest, happiest place I could think of for her: a bookshop.

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For all the sitting still I’ve been doing, I’m pretty exhausted from all this inner turbulence. Practically everything else I’ve been doing has been solitary self-care of the frothy and soothing variety.

Brooklyn 99 is my go-to for easy, obnoxious laughs, and I found this movie absolutely delightful (seriously, I just watched it last night and might watch it again right now).

I’ve been curating a sweet, moody playlist that mirrors how I’m feeling. I’ll also listen to pretty much anything by Mac Miller—to me, his music comes from a place of profound childlike wonder, hurt, and bewilderment that resonates so deeply and makes me so, so sad that he’s gone. I can’t have Spotify open while this song is playing because his eyes in the background gif are too heartbreaking to look at.

I’ve been eating all my feelings lately, but I’ve also tried to balance it out by cooking healthy meals. I went through a bone broth phase, which felt wholesome and virtuous, and last week I bought a kilo of green figs at the market which I had with everything and felt like Aphrodite.

There have also been flowers, so many flowers, although I am failing to keep my very favourite pale green-and-pink hydrangeas from wilting (does the hot water trick not work for the green ones?).

I talk a big game about solitude but the truth is, I’m never really alone when I’m at home because of the cats. They’re a constant solace and especially sweet when I’m weepy.

I was weepier still when I read

Haley Nahman

’s post about the passing of her cat, Bug. She invited readers to share comfort in the comments, and I found myself one night, at 3am, poring over the words of hundreds of strangers attesting to all the ways we love and grieve our animal companions. This was my favourite:

I've lost two family dogs, who we all still miss, and now have my own 6 year old dog whose eventual death causes me so much sadness whenever I think about it. The only thing I've ever come across that comforts me is something I read in a Cup of Jo post by Kelly Conaboy about her dog Peter's eventual death. She wrote "No, I won’t have you forever, even though I desperately want to; even though I would donate years of my own life to make our timelines more even, if I could. But the one silver lining I can see in the discrepancy between human and dog life expectancies is that you will have me forever. And that is more important."

I hate that I’ll be spending a month away from mine in October—to wit, we’re still looking for a subletter (well I’m looking for a subletter, they’re looking for a roommate). If you know of anyone who a) is looking for a sublet in Berlin and b) loves cats, please put them in touch.

Hi please come stay with us

It looks like summer is over, which means it’s as good a time as any to try out a vitamin D supp…lement that was recommended to me by a holistic therapist. Ironically, it seems the best way for ladies to get our vitamin D (quiet, you) is by putting it where the sun don’t shine ☀️ I’ll report back because science is important but so are happy coochies.

See you in the autumn, I guess,