UnlearningSilence.blog

I am sitting in one of my favourite places, waiting for the food I have ordered, a restaurant dish involving some rather fancy mushrooms. Work is finished, and after a lovely little chat with the person behind the bar, I have settled into my usual corner to write.

I love this place. I know everybody here, and the people who work here are absolutely wonderful. Over time, it has become our own Central Perk, only appropriately fancier, as any Central Perk in the lawyers’ district ought to be. It is where my friends and I gather after work to talk, laugh, exchange stories and decompress from our days. I always feel at home here.

This evening, while listening to RAYE’s new song, Goodbye Henry, I had a thought. It is a brilliant, tongue in cheek breakup song, and it describes exactly how I feel at this moment. There is pain in the ending, but there is also clarity, humour, gratitude and the unmistakable sense that it is time to say goodbye properly.

Why do we treat the end of a relationship only as a death to be mourned? Why can it not also be a life to be celebrated?

Where I come from, funerals are very different from the Caribbean funerals I have attended recently. Our funerals are centred around loss, and people cry with the full force of the realisation that somebody is gone.

In the past year, I have been to two Caribbean funerals, and I found them incredibly beautiful. There was grief, of course, but there was also music, food, dancing and togetherness. The person’s life was not reduced to the fact that it had ended. Everybody came together to celebrate the fact that this person had lived, loved, laughed, created memories and occupied their own unique place in the world.

Perhaps relationships deserve funerals like that too. Perhaps we should stop sitting alone, replaying every mistake and treating an ending as proof that the entire relationship was a failure.

We could gather the memories, play the music, eat something delicious and give thanks for what we experienced. Then we could dance, celebrate and let it go.

Every ending is difficult, but an ending does not make the love meaningless. Nor does it mean we were foolish to believe in it. Some people enter our lives, awaken parts of us that had been sleeping and introduce us to new worlds, yet may not be the people with whom we build our lasting future. People are not permanent fixtures in our lives, and perhaps they do not have to be.

We should not allow the pain of an ending to discourage us from believing in true love. We should not remain in relationships that no longer serve us simply because we are afraid of being alone, afraid of beginning again or afraid of the powerful emotions that come with a breakup.

We should allow ourselves to feel those emotions and perhaps even enjoy them a little. They remind us that we have lived, that we have loved and that we are alive.

Recently, I went to an Amy Winehouse tribute concert marking the twentieth anniversary of Back to Black. The singer was full of energy and amazingly talented, but what filled the room was not only Amy’s music. It was the force with which she had loved, because love was not a minor subject in her life or her work. It was the great theme running through both.

We cannot know what Amy would say about her life if we could ask her now. Perhaps she would change some choices, protect herself more fiercely and spare herself some of the pain. Yet I wonder whether she would ever choose to have loved less, felt less or created less honestly. I suspect she might still claim the life as hers, not because the suffering was beautiful, but because her capacity to feel so deeply produced something beautiful from it.

When the singer began Love Is a Losing Game and reached the words, “Oh, what a mess we made,” something in me opened. The emotions I had been containing suddenly came out of hiding because those words captured my last relationship exactly.

It was a huge mess of love, pain, fear, hope and raw emotion. I did not always “behave” in the usual sense of the word. I did not remain composed, measured and carefully edited. For once, I allowed myself to be led by my feelings instead of remaining loyal to my usual sensible and reasonable judgement.

My friends were shocked. They knew me as the woman who could assess a situation, identify the problem and make the necessary decision. They could not understand why I kept returning to something that my rational mind could see so clearly.

Perhaps I needed to go through all of it. I needed to follow the feelings to their furthest point, challenge every fear, test every explanation and exhaust every remaining possibility until there was nowhere left for doubt to hide. I do not say this to romanticise the choices I made or the things I accepted. I say it because this was the journey I took, and denying that would be another way of denying myself.

I was surrounded at the concert by friends and colleagues who know me as composed, capable and strong, someone who leads and usually appears to have everything under control. My best friend noticed me trying to hide my tears and quietly hugged me. For a moment, I felt embarrassed to have been seen, but then I thought, yes, this is me too. Strength is not the absence of emotion, and composure is not the only respectable way for a woman to exist.

So I let the tears come, wiped them away and continued dancing. The emotion did not defeat me or interrupt the evening. It passed through me and became part of it. We are human, really and truly human, capable of crying and dancing within the same song. Thank goodness for that.

The relationship was messy, but in its own way it was also revealing and beautiful. It showed me parts of myself I had not deliberately kept hidden, but had never known existed. It taught me more than I could have learned from remaining composed and forced me to confront truths I might otherwise have continued avoiding.

I will never forget it, and I do not need to diminish its importance in order to leave it behind. I needed to live it, but I do not need to relive it. I will never return.

I have always wanted a daughter. Sometimes I imagine what I would tell her about love and whether I would warn her against making the choices I have made.

The truth is that I would not offer caution as the great lesson of my life. I would not teach her to keep part of herself outside every relationship or to confuse avoiding pain with living well.

I would tell her to live. I would tell her that loving deeply is not shameful, fighting for love is not foolish, and entering another person’s culture, life and inner world can be one of the greatest adventures of being human.

Every person I have loved has expanded my world in some way. Through them, I have discovered music, places, cultures and ways of seeing that I might never have encountered alone. The relationships ended, but the worlds they opened to me remained.

Walking beside different people has also shown me how differently the world receives us. I have experienced racism and misogyny myself, so I do not move through the world untouched by prejudice. But my own experience does not give me access to everybody else’s. As a cisgender heterosexual woman, I cannot know what it feels like to move through society as a Black man or a transgender person.

Privilege does not mean that a person has never suffered. Sometimes it lies in the particular forms of danger, suspicion or humiliation they have not had to anticipate. Knowing that prejudice exists intellectually is not the same as watching somebody you love encounter it and noticing the looks, assumptions and subtle changes in behaviour that might otherwise have escaped you. You also begin to understand the exhaustion of having to anticipate them.

Love has therefore taught me things about society as well as about myself. It has allowed me to stand close enough to another person’s experience to see more clearly, while also teaching me the humility never to claim that their experience is mine.

Even this idea of celebrating an ending came partly from entering another culture deeply enough to witness how differently life and death can be understood. Attending Caribbean funerals taught me that sorrow and celebration do not cancel each other out. We can cry because something has ended and still dance because it happened.

It turns out that I live rather like I read. Some people keep their books pristine, with perfect spines, clean margins and pages that look almost untouched. I bend mine back on themselves so I can hold them in one hand. I underline, mark and return to the sentences that make me think. My current book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, already carries the evidence of our encounter.

By the time I finish a book, it is truly mine. You can see that it has been read, questioned, absorbed and thoroughly enjoyed. Apparently, I approach life in much the same way. I do not want to remain unbent and immaculate merely so that nobody can say I have been marked by it. I want to reach the end knowing that I entered fully, felt deeply and left unmistakable evidence that I was here.

The relationships themselves have also taken me into unexplored parts of my own mind. Through them, I have examined my history, my attachment patterns, my nervous system and my instinct to escape when love begins to feel like imprisonment.

I have learned the difference between fear and evidence, between taking responsibility and accepting blame, and between the ordinary difficulty of intimacy and the danger of a particular relationship. I have learned how to remain myself while loving another person and how to tolerate vulnerability without surrendering my judgement.

I have also learned to recognise when I am reacting to an old wound and when I am responding to something that is genuinely happening in front of me. These are not small souvenirs from relationships that ended. They are knowledge I will carry for the rest of my life.

Yes, I have approached every relationship seriously. I have never entered somebody’s life merely to pass the time, avoid loneliness or see what I could obtain from them. When I have loved, I have believed in the possibility of building something real, and I have brought my whole self to it.

Yes, after all that love, I am not somebody’s wife. Society, and certainly my mother, may regard that as an absence or an unfinished part of my life, but it was never the role I dreamed of occupying or the measure by which I understood love.

I would like to marry one day, but only if I meet the person with whom marriage feels like the natural expression of what we have built. I would want to marry that person to celebrate our relationship and our commitment to each other, not for legal convenience, financial security or social approval. I want it only if and when it genuinely makes sense.

I still have so much to do and so much to build, including my home, my business, my financial security and a life that feels fully mine. But that does not mean the years behind me were wasted or that I have somehow failed to arrive at my life.

My life has never been suspended pending marriage. Nor do I regard the loves that ended as preliminaries to some future relationship. Each was a real and complete part of the life I was already living.

My life has been happening all along. I have raised two wonderful sons, built a profession, started again more than once, travelled, created, survived, loved and continued to ask difficult questions about who I am and how I want to live. I have built more than I sometimes remember to give myself credit for, and I am nowhere near finished.

Every song, journey, dance, conversation, discovery and difficult truth has become part of me. The people themselves may not have remained, but what I discovered through knowing them has remained, and I am richer for it.

Perhaps that is the real beauty of this moment. I am not standing among the ruins of a life that did not work out. I am standing inside a life that is still being created, with knowledge I did not have before and a much clearer understanding of what I will and will not carry into its next chapter.

I have lived, really and truly. I have felt, experienced, travelled, danced, cried and loved. I have been brave enough to enter other people’s lives, embrace their cultures, encounter their insecurities and confront my own.

I have sat with difficult feelings, challenged myself, fought for love and questioned the fears, values and beliefs I inherited. I have taken parts of my upbringing apart and rebuilt them according to what I have learned and who I am becoming.

I have learned so much. I have also experienced beautiful things that I would never have experienced if I had chosen to live cautiously or refused to risk being hurt.

Of course, I would tell my imaginary daughter never to abandon herself for love. I would tell her that she can question herself, face her fears and take responsibility for her wounds, but she must also know when she is fighting for love and when she is fighting against reality.

Leaving does not erase everything beautiful that came before it. Sometimes leaving is simply how we honour what the experience has finally taught us.

I do not want to be somebody else, and I do not even want to become the best version of myself yet. “The best version” sounds like another performance, another impossible woman I must build and present to the world.

For now, I want to become the most authentic version of me. I want to know the woman beneath the instructions, the fear, the inherited rules and the pressure to appear perfectly healed.

That is the woman I am discovering now, and I love discovering her. She has made mistakes, created messes, loved deeply and stayed in some places for too long, but my goodness, she has lived.

Perhaps it is slightly ridiculous that I spend so much time thinking and writing about love. My friends tell me that if I had devoted all these hours to my business, I would probably be a multimillionaire by now. They may have a point.

I do intend to become one, of course, and I will work for it. I have a business to rebuild, a home to create and an entire future to finance. But money, work and professional success have never been the great mystery of my life. I understand those worlds, and I know what to do in them.

Love is different. Love has always been the central theme of my life, the question I return to and the subject that continues to fascinate me. What is true love? How do we recognise it, remain ourselves within it and know when to fight for it or release it?

Perhaps I think about love so much because it is still capable of surprising me. It is exciting, frightening, illuminating and endlessly inspiring. I love love, but I also love the search for its meaning. I love the journey, even when it takes me somewhere I did not expect to go.

So tonight, I am not mourning any one relationship or declaring that love itself has failed. I am celebrating every love that has shaped me, every ending that has taught me something and every version of myself I discovered along the way.

I would not change anything about my life. Not because everything that happened was right or painless, but because I lived it fully and it brought me here. If I were given the choice, I would do it all again. I would love, risk, travel, dance, question, learn and become.

We can leave without denying the pain, rewriting the past or carrying its bitterness into the future. We can honour what was beautiful, accept what could not remain and, in the spirit of Goodbye Henry, leave with one final wish: “I wish you only love and happiness.”