Turbulence Part 10: An Embracing

(Once more we’d boarded a long haul flight and were hitting those rough air currents again)

Towards the end of the first 12 months of our daughter’s life, Bill began to develop severe migraines, most likely triggered by sleep deprivation. As time went on these became chronic, until he faced them daily. Just as my strength was returning I went from being cared for to care giver in a complete role reversal. It was very difficult for all of us but I remember a sense of relief to be well enough in myself to be able to do this. Bill was and is incredible. I genuinely don’t know how he managed to keep working through what he was going through. My admiration knows no bounds for his persistence. Pain filled days, darkened rooms, lack of sleep… the pressure was heavy and unrelenting. I realised that I really couldn’t be out touring and on the road again, with Bill in that condition trying to look after our daughter. So as I released my Stone’s Throw, Lament Of The Selkie album, I had to let go of the big push of live work that would normally accompany an album.  After two years of trialling various medications, some of which had severe side effects, Bill finally found a medication that did at least help, even if it didn’t prevent the onslaught of the migraines.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. We made the most of the moments that were migraine free and grabbed days at the beach in the sun when it shone (a rare commodity living in Wales) as well as when it rained. We recorded and worked on our creative music projects in the evenings and did our best to defy the ongoing battles of health hardships. As with any chronic condition, it becomes normalised as you learn to live with it.

But there was another turbulent factor that began to sweep across the UK however, namely the political business of “austerity.” The cuts to arts and third sector budgets were becoming increasingly severe. We watched on as our peers and colleagues began to find themselves out of work and then, Bill’s own role as creative director of his self founded arts charity became more and more unsustainable. Revenue funding was nowhere to be found.  Eventually the heart breaking decision was made that after running for over a decade the best thing to do with Bill’s People Around Here charity was to amalgamate it into a larger organisation, to enable some of its work to continue. As Bill’s own job searching began, it soon became apparent how crushing and far reaching the regime of austerity cuts have been for so many and inevitably, despite our best efforts, our worst case scenario “that if we couldn’t pay the rent once the charity had ended then we’d have to put our stuff in storage and stay with my folks for a while” is what happened.

Home and studio packed up, just our clothes and an acoustic guitar, our pets, (one of whom has now passed away) and as many toys as we could fit into a bag for our 4 year old daughter.

In many ways for me this latest round of turbulence has felt so much easier than any of the post birth trauma. I can walk, I can function, I can sing, I can carry and lift, physically and emotionally. I can fully engage with life and all the people in my life. Helping to found the One Day Without Us campaign in support of migrants (the week after we packed up our home) was both a great experience and a great distraction strategy. Sometimes it helps to just focus on others, many of whom have far greater troubles. More and more I find myself empathising with the devastation that is faced by refugees…This part of the story isn’t over yet, we’ve lived in limbo, travelling the length and breadth of the UK for interviews (picking up small bits of freelance work along the way) for 11 months… but events of recent weeks have brought new hope with them that very soon we will be back in a home of our own…

People say we have to embrace our pain and my kneejerk reaction is to want to yell “No, that’s not it, that’s missing the point of what pain is, that’s masochism.” Yes, I accept that there will be pain in my life, but that doesn’t mean that I want to run head on to embrace and greet it, generally I’ll run the opposite direction and try to repel it if possible. I want to be spared from pain and to save others from having to go through an experience of it if possible, but I know that sometimes there is just no way to avoid pain.

Going beyond the semantics and working from the understanding that to embrace means to accept, (as in embracing an idea) I can fully comprehend that pain is an essential part of life and that without it there can be no growth.

I do not accept that all pain is justified or “meant to be”.

I do believe however, that all of us are able to take our brokenness and allow something new, beautiful and true to be born out of, and in response to, the wreckage of our lived experiences. This doesn’t have to be via an art form, though it is what most artists do, but it can equally be through conversations, life choices and attitudes. Sometimes we can attribute new purpose, worth and meaning to ourselves that becomes far greater than the initial suffering and that has the power to reach and heal far and wide. Sometimes it’s just about being authentic. Not having a grand plan or wisdom or ambition, just saying, “This is who I am here and now. This is my life.” And through that honest vulnerability others can say, “Yes, I know that too in my own way, this is how it happened for me”…  and so as we resonate, we discover we are not alone.

Some pain we can bear. Some pain is unbearable and we break.

So do I embrace it?

I embrace life.

In embracing life I acknowledge that pain is part of the fullness of this mortal existence. If the physical process childbirth reveals one thing, it’s that there is no life without pain.

I learn to embrace the growth I can make out of pain.

I learn to embrace and lean with compassion into the part of myself that experienced pain.

I learn to embrace a process of recovery.

I learn to embrace a process of facing up to pain and in doing so destroying its power.

I learn to embrace a process of overcoming my fear of pain.

I learn to own my pain as part of who I am and I can choose to hold onto it or find a way of letting it go (and sometimes I think I do both at the same time.)

I learn to embrace my story and the sum of the parts that make up the whole.

None of that is easy... (Brief pause for my cynical internal voice moment saying, “You embrace life?! Could you sound any more pretentious? At least suffix it with a…“well I try to” statement...”)

I don’t deny any of the struggle, anger, frustration, bitterness, loneliness, self doubt or hopelessness I experience as I try and I fail and try and fail again. Every now and then however, I find that I can and that I am and that I have managed to learn to do some of the above and that is reason enough to continue to try. I know that I wouldn’t be the person I am now (for better or for worse) if I hadn’t gone through these and other experiences.

In telling my story I reclaim the narrative and choose the interpretation that best serves me to continually overcome. I can now perceive myself not as the victim of a specific set of circumstances but as a survivor who finds a way through.

I rediscover my story reflected in the words and lives of others; in the myths and the legends, in the novels and songs and paintings and poems, sacred and secular and across the blurry line where there is no longer any divide, and in those moments of connection my own narrative becomes part of something greater. We are all stories and each of our stories interconnects to make up the epic tale of humanity in the cosmos that has been ebbing and flowing from the moment life first crawled out of the ocean. The pages of our brokenness aren’t always an ending. Sometimes they lead into new chapters of redemption as we regain ourselves, or even just survive to live another day. Sometimes the new beginning comes from a totally unexpected angle as life takes on a twist that we never could have predicted.  Sometimes it may be as simple as an unexpected act of kindness or empathy from another human.

The turbulence is never going to stop shaking up the long haul flights of our lives.

Dark days and anxious nights will visit far too often... and stay far too long…

But, if I am going to say that these last five years have taught me anything it’s the truth in the words that Leonard Cohen sang:

“There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Turbulence Part 9: Selkies and Selfies

It was time to get back onto a plane and prepare myself for take off…

The longer I didn’t play music, the more self-doubt seeped into my psyche.
What if I could never get my voice back again?
How would I ever be able to perform in front of people again?
Our internal narratives are usually cruel and rarely constructive. Tentatively, I began to take off on a new flight of my musical self and discovered that music was not lost to me, rather it was my confidence that had been shattered. What I needed to do was just start, right there from my place of weakness and allow myself to learn how to play again while giving myself permission to fail and (in the words of Bob Dylan) “keep on keeping on”. Ability can be retrained and re learned and deeply frustrating as it was to have to start again, it was not going to be impossible to gain back physical strength and control enough to play and sing. I just had to make myself begin.

Like my re-beginning to walk, it was a slow process. My back was still so weak that at first I couldn’t even hold my guitars let alone play them. I started with my lightweight ukulele, then little by little began to play the bigger instruments, initially for only five minutes at a time before my back muscles would twinge and begin to spasm. It was hard to imagine that I'd ever be gig fit again but, as with everything over time, (and with lots of physio) I became stronger. 

Bill and I decided to reinvest finance I’d set aside for the cancelled EP I’d been due to record at the time of my accident, into to creating our own home recording studio. So we did. The studio became both a lifeline and a sanctuary. In those precious moments when our daughter was asleep and we were actually awake and lucid enough to engage, we started working on tracks and it was during these times that I began to take ownership of myself as a singer songwriter again.

Before my fall in Italy, I’d been working on a collaborative project with my friend, Gill Stevens, who had introduced me to the selkie (magical seal people) mythology of Orkneys.  Little had I known then how central a role the selkie story was to play in the coming months and years. I now revisited the songs I’d last been working on and in doing so walked back into in the skin of the selkie. There in the ancient legends of her mythology I found a resonance with my own story. The power of the artistic muse is a most mysterious and fragile entity. It is unique to each of us. Every artist will have their own way of describing the creative process but the key word here is 'create', to make a new energy and to inhabit that journey of discovery and imagination. I was profoundly moved by revisiting words I had penned prior to the last nine months and how they now had deep and powerful relevance.

I’d written Selkie’s Song before my accident. It was based on the female selkie legends and the lyric describes a selkie woman's struggle with her identity when her seal skin is stolen from her, leaving her trapped in human form unable to transform and return to her ocean home. The words I’d written so many months before, took on a whole new meaning. 

 “This skin it won’t fit like it used to

These bones they don’t hold it so well

In too many ways I’m a stranger

And it’s a stranger who warms you right now”

Her restlessness and longing to feel comfortable in her own skin now resonated deeply with my own struggles of trying to rebuild my battered body. This song was no longer just describing an imaginary character it was now also a personal song about me.  

As I read and researched the folklore, I found that many myths focussed on the selkie trying to reclaim her stolen skin so that she could return to her first love, the ocean. In some stories this meant that she had to abandon her human husband and children on land. In other stories her children couldn’t survive on land and had to be returned to the ocean while she was left stranded without them. I began to see her as the outsider, the refugee in spirit and circumstance, the mother in the wrong body struggling to find her place in this world. The selkie became an extension of me, but she was also the version of me who didn’t recover. She allowed me to explore my “What if ?” In the narrative that I reconstructed, Selkie's troubled mind led her to the point of falling back into the ocean to return home, but this event created a devastating ending for everyone else around her. 

The muse didn’t stop at my personal trauma. Selkie became my way of dealing with all the other external turbulence that had been happening around me. During my pregnancy and the subsequent few years, several of my closest friends had faced the heartbreak of miscarriages... We experienced multiple tragic losses of friends and family both through natural causes and suicide... Relationships and marriages broke down around us…Globally the wars in Gaza and Syria and the outrageous killings of so many innocent young civilians, the endless rise in refugees of war, economic and ecological circumstance, all played heavily in my heart and mind. While I sought to process all these events of the world around me, I found that Selkie became a vehicle to filter my lamentations and the many themes of refugees, loss, depression, grief, fragile sanity and unstable circumstance found their way into the lyrics.

I wondered if it was all too dark, but then reminded myself that much folklore is very dark as it is rooted in the plight of humanity. I just needed to be brave enough to stay the path that the muse was taking me. Stories are an innate part of human existence. The stories of our own lives intersect, ebb, flow, decline and rebuild.  I interpreted Selkie’s story in the world around me, I saw her reflection in my own struggles and in the hardship of my friends. She was both ancient history’s legend and 21^st century’s reality and I soon found that I was working on a full concept album.

As I’m writing my story again, I realise I’ve already been telling it in different ways over the last five years, through our post birth debrief and the written account for the investigation as well as my counselling sessions and many conversations with friends and family. In each successive retelling, I’ve been able to look back with a greater objective clarity and a gradually lessening fear of the pain inherent within. The emotional retelling through the medium of the selkie and her re-imagined story in my album was totally different. I was able to pour all of my pain, trauma and heartache into the songs and music I was creating. It was nonlinear and raw and operated outside of cerebral analysis. Once again art was offering me a lifeline of survival and healing. I would not have been able to make any of my story public as I am doing now with these blog posts, without having first gone through all of these previous retellings.

Bill and I took two years to record the album slowly chipping away track by track. In the second year I redid all of my vocals as I’d finally regained strength and found my voice (and tuning) again. 

Sadly, just as my health began to improve, Bill’s began to decline and yet another kind of shake up was on its way. 

Stone's Throw, Lament Of The Selkie is available on Bandcamp 

Turbulence Part 8: Replay and Rebuild

Post crash  - finding the black box flight recording and replaying it - What went wrong and how had this been allowed to happen? The path to recovery had to be met on every level and it had many potholes.

The replaying

“I think I need to talk to someone.”

Bill looked up from his coffee. He’d heard from my tone that I was saying something big.  

“I think I need some counselling, to talk to someone about everything that’s happened, so that we can make the complaint, I just can’t go there again and write it all.”

My health visitor had suggested that we attend an official birth debrief with a consulting midwife at the hospital. Both Bill and I welcomed this, we had so many unresolved questions. During the debrief, the consulting midwife handling my case became more and more concerned about aspects of my experiences as we relayed them. At the end of our session she strongly urged us to make a formal complaint so that there could be an official investigation into my care. I agreed that this could be a good thing to do, both for myself and future patients and told her that I’d be in touch, but as the months went on I found that I couldn’t easily talk or write about my trauma and I needed to put it all down in detail in order to lodge the complaint.

I stalled for six months.

How could I walk back into that time and relive each and every moment that had been so torturous and brought me to the point at which I’d broken both mentally and physically?  

Then, on Easter Sunday 2013, (full of chocolate) I suddenly found myself online searching for trauma counselling. As I’d put our daughter down for her nap, the niggling inner voice had come at me again saying, “You have to write about what happened, or you’ll never make that complaint.” I realised at that moment the only way I would be able to revisit what had happened, would be if I got professional help. I booked myself 6 sessions with a counsellor who specialised in trauma in order to help create a game plan to deal with all that had happened. Talking to a professional listener is always a good thing to do. I wrote my story for the first time as a part of those sessions.

The complaint went through in detail (along with recognition of great work from some key medical staff) and although many of the issues were never fully dealt with, the ward midwife who had so mishandled my situation was put on a monitoring system as a result of the investigation, it was not the first complaint lodged against her.

The Rebuilding

My physio sessions continued over the next year. 

I started my own baby steps of walking again without crutches. 

First milestone was to make it down to the end of our street.

The next was around the block and then around the bigger block, until finally the day came when I was strong enough to physically walk to the park on my own!

My daughter and I were learning to move and grow in physical strength together at the same pace. She brought (and still brings me) so much joy. I was awed at her being and revelled in her tenacity for life. She gave me new eyes, new insight and a new focus. I watched her determination to master each of her new milestones. She was definitely a major player in my recovery process. As she loved and needed me, she also filled me with new purpose, kept me busy and meant that I had no choice but to throw myself back into engaging with life.

I must admit however, that at the same time as I was awed with my new sense of purpose and the wonder that is my daughter, the trouble and turbulence of loss began to rattle and shake me while I struggled to rebuild myself. This time the loss centred on my identity as I tried to figure out who and where I was in the new version of me as a mum.

I think that on some level, every new mother has to face these questions of how to come to terms with their post baby body and their new baby filled life?

One of the big questions that played over and over was how could I become Rachel, "The Singer Songwriter" again? That person on a stage in a kooky hat and steam-punk dress playing those songs, seemed so alien and far away now. The lady who would walk into an unknown room, in an unknown city, in an unknown country and sing a capella bringing a rowdy crowd into stillness, she was not this unfamiliar person, called mum. This new version of myself couldn’t even fit into any of those gig clothes, let alone stay awake long enough play a set!

I was huge. I tried not to beat myself up about it, (I mean what else is there to do when you’re house bound, recovering from injuries and growing a baby, but to eat cake?!) but after pregnancy and the birth trauma I found that I didn’t recognise myself either physically or internally. My scar was a daily reminder of all I’d been through. It was a physical jagged line reflecting back the lines that my mind and body had crossed. Having such limited mobility for all those months as well as the invasive surgery had meant that my muscles had atrophied. My core muscles weren’t even strong enough for me to hold my notes in tune when I sang, let alone strum my guitar. I was stripped of music and my ability to make it from within.

This was hard.

Music was and is so much a part of me.

Identity can be a devious thing. We all fill our minds with tricks, devices and props to ease ourselves though our days. We are what we do. We kid ourselves that what we can do will build our importance. We torment ourselves over our physical appearance and our self confidence rises and falls in relation to what we tell ourselves and how we perceive ourselves. At that moment I didn’t have the ability (or time) to do much of anything that I’d being used to doing previously. My body didn’t do or look anything like that of my previous self. The rebuilding here took a lot of self compassion to accept who I was right in that moment. Sometimes I succeeded and sometimes I failed. There were days when dredging through everything was too much. The mud and muck of my circumstances clung thick and fast in a smothering blanket of dark thought. Some days I wallowed under the covers of self pity, other days it wasn’t so much wallowing, it was just too much effort to lift the weight of those heavy sheets and the best I could do was simply try to come up for air and catch my breath, but having a baby meant I didn’t have time to stay there long. In those times I think an instinctive primal ‘mum type wiring’ kicked in as I knew I needed to take the focus off myself and get busy keeping my focus on caring for my daughter.

Through it all I realised that it was going to be a long time before I was going to be able to find the singer songwriter again and that when I did, she would be a whole new entity, as the scars of these experiences had and were changing me.