Lying awake in the heat at 2.30am. An unusual 28C at night in the UK. I’m glad of it in the day as it disguises my induced menopausal sweats when everyone else is sweating. I look like I’ve been swimming or just come out of the shower in the days following my hormone injection. I can stop asking ‘is it hot in here or is it me?’. It’s hot! The past few days this endless summer has arrived back with a vengeance and I suddenly feel released from my fatigue. Aligned and whole. I seem to have adjusted to the lower dose of the tablet form chemo and no longer feel I am walking around like an egg with a thin shell. My energy is back and I’m assuming my white blood cell count with it.
Today the phrase that keeps coming to me that I have green energy. I went to my personal training session, bench pressed and felt strong. I feel the tumours on the right clavicle and shoulder blade when I do it a little. Slight discomfort and weakness on that side. Bone cancer when I am conscious of it feels a bit like hitting your funny bone in slow motion. A dull, sick pain that really isn’t funny at all.
I sat by the river and talked on the phone to a friend with stage 4 cancer for a long time. It’s so good to connect with people who understand all the things that go unsaid. It’s very hard to communicate the gamut of emotions you go through and the long term effects of it. My day to day is a conscious process of getting through as best I can and not overtiring myself. Finding positive life affirming things to do. Finding joy. This is the only way I have to survive and it kind of works but I don’t make much time for quiet reflection. That time will come but right now I need to be generative and connect. I’ve been accepted on a cancer retreat at the Penny Brohn centre in Bristol and am currently going it alone. This takes a bit of courage but I think it will be good for me. Having a community of strong resilient women who have been through trouble, one way or another, means a lot to me. We give each other endless strength and amplify each other. After contemplating the river and the ducks and chatting for a while I had a couple of hours before my (only) big rehearsal for the jazz gig in a few weeks time but I got the urge and ran to the studio to paint everything five shades of vibrant green and then legged it to Richmond to sing. I painted like a woman possessed. Green. Bright lurid luminous beautiful fucking green. That’s me. Think Kermit lying on a freshly cut lawn, smoking green weed with a grass skirt.
I’ve spent the whole week singing since the languid fog has released me. Making up for lost time learning lyrics, two hours with my singing teacher one day, two hours with the band the next, and then practicing mic technique in my kitchen and my bedroom with my amp using the brilliant Moises app. A well thought through AI application that helps you rehearse by separating out the tracks you import and changes the key whilst keeping the pitch and tempo. Allows repeats of sections, lyrics and bar by bar chord breakdowns. God I love creative technology. You can do a whole performance tailored to your voice with this as backing. Yesterday I went to my singing teacher Linley’s house in Chessington. The kindness, talent and patience of this woman is something else. I sang my heart out in her log cabin to my dear cousin who had accompanied me but will miss the gig as she lives abroad. A very enthusiastic audience of one! Any audience makes a difference to how you sing. My jazz performance course has released a long held back passion to sing solo again and really own it. My voice has deepened and experience/trauma makes me sing from my soul. So in this creative form I really feel I can embrace my age and my inner diva and I love it.
I sang a lot of jazz in my teens and twenties and did a few gigs but gave up when I moved to London. Jazz was my first love having grown up on a diet of Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington. It’s intimidating and baffling in a big city, the idea of trying to break into a scene and get to know musicians. Nowadays it’s a bit easier perhaps with so many open mic nights and most working jazz musicians are around my age. You could sing at one every night of the week around here. So I sang in choirs and opera choruses instead which is a different more accurate discipline of making yourself part of a whole. Finding the Richmond Jazz school course has reignited my passion and even though I feel the two lung tumours changing my voice and sitting on my lungs a little it kind of suits jazz. You can sing it till you drop. I do wonder if I will turn into one of Bart Simpson’s aunts soon but the gravel works for me. I just have to work around it. Rotate after three songs to allow recovery time so I don’t cough my guts up. Definitely I am finding the act of voicing emotion and the simple feeling of sound moving through my body is releasing some trauma and all the little happy atoms are finding their way through. As the saying goes ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady sings’. I’m revising that to ‘It ain’t over till the fat lady croaks and stops singing’. So I’d better keep singing…
I am naturally like a happy curious child. Life and work can squash that in you over the decades. Singing gives it all back to me in one go. This is all said with the exception of my current job which I genuinely love but maaaan TV work became a drag. It was fun to begin with as a director but the whole culture brought me down in the end. Brilliant people, funny people, people who cared about the world around them…but the self importance of the industry and the sense of entitlement became wearing. It felt like the whole machine was driven by fear of failure and vainglory rather than being a celebration of talent, diversity, communication and creativity. At it’s best it is still that, but not for everyone. I stayed a long time for the beautiful clever lively souls and the best of the output but by the end I could barely stand to watch any of our programmes. Guilt by association. Leaving for a whole new endeavour was a release. I left broadcasting after my first cancer and thought ‘that’s it. My career is fucked.’ So I did a PhD to buy time, think about things and reposition. I remember crying with gratitude on one of the first days I drove out to our beautiful leafy campus. I was grateful to have a second shot at doing something that meant something to me. Now, having time and the freedom to explore all my creative forms of expression is shaking off decades of work related stress. My trauma is not so much the cancer. Because of my mother’s 34 year battle this state of emergency almost feels more normal. My real trauma was the slow burn of driving myself so hard in my career as a young woman I nearly broke. I like supporting women in their 20s now to check they are ok. It’s got much harder.
Returning to singing in my current physical state has also awakened and connected with my curiosity about sound and its restorative abilities. A couple of years ago I trained as a sound healer because this idea interested me so much. I bought all the bowls at great expense and did a few sessions for people and then put my bowls away. I don’t know why. I saw the beneficial effect it had on them and me. Maybe it scared me or I felt foolish for believing it worked. Sometimes my rational mind is a terrible bore and stops me from going full woo-woo, to the places that interest me. Sound healing released all the colours. My beautiful sound bowls are literally sitting next to my bed in a box. I out them in a box trolley recently at least so I can move them and take them places. Sometimes I feel them calling me like they want to be let out. Soon. Soon.
I have wondered if my association with sound and emotion and colour is a sort of synesthesia. I experience making sound as a synthesis of senses, a full somatic expression. Sound, colour, emotion. Why should we expect to experience one sense at a time in one body? There’s a lot written about it and certainly the colours I see in relation to parts of the body when I am doing this work or it is being done for me relate to chakra colours and ancient knowledge. So it’s not just me and I don’t think it’s just auto suggestion. I had these very specific colours and tones in relation to different areas of the body before I knew about the theory. When they come they are so intense internally it takes my breath away. They are deeply comforting and I emerge from a mediation or experience calm and changed somehow. It’s usually just one or two colours at a time and flashes and bursts of shapes related to natural forms like a complex flower or shifting geometry. Sacred geometric forms. I was reading about the work of Dr Hans Jenny as I journeyed down one of my rabbit holes the other day. Cymatics. He demonstrated the shapes and geometric patterns of sound in a series of visualised experiments. It caught my attention as the shapes he discovered through his research closely resemble the shapes and forms I see when I am in periods of creative flow.
Dr. Hans Jenny was a physician and natural scientist who coined the term Cymatics to make visible sound and the acoustic effects of sound wave phenomena. He experimented with liquids and solids and how they behaved with continuous vibrating frequencies. His work contains hundreds of photos showing his results. These visible sound vibrations show how matter is transformed by sound. It shapes us and we can represent it digitally but usually only two dimensionally. The sound and light shows going on in our own bodies all the time is accessible any time! We just have to tap into it. When I see the beauty and the ever shifting alignments of the forms he videoed and photograph it makes total sense to me that Incan see what is probably happening to my body as matter and it quietens my scepticism. My inner child scientist says ‘of course’. Of course that is what is going on. I have seen images of cancer cells which have lost their natural perfect geometric form. I can’t find the source of these images and am skeptical that they are manufactured. But I want it to be true because if it can bend out of shape it can perhaps be realigned.
Cymatics helps us grasp how sound quite literally shapes us, continuously. And that our internal shape and form changes. And other bodies and forms vibrate at similar frequencies in the same sound universe. All the things we perceive as hard objects, including our bodies, are continuously vibrating and shifting and changing at their own rates. By the translation or association of this with colour is harder to explain. I’ve been told in the past that my tendency to disappear down these rabbit holes for ‘quite a while’ is not ‘normal’. But why wouldn’t you? I decided I was ok and that person just…you know…a bit dull and incurious. Hahaha. A damning indictment. Hope they are not reading…I think I’m perfectly normal and curious but the depth of my curiosity has led me to three masters and a PhD which I see is not that normal but they have all been very satisfying. If you don’t bother to find out more about what interests you, you’ll never know a thing.
I was diagnosed only last year with adult ADHD. It felt necessary to go through with the diagnosis as it’s not acceptable in my field to say ‘I’m a ‘bit’ autistic or I have a touch of ‘ADHD’. I accept there are plenty of people who suspect they do and say so but I thought it better to let a professional decide and be able to identify my traits and claim it with confidence. With pride even. Not as a fault but a wonder and an acknowledgement that this is my normal. I also accept that my ADHD is not so much of a disadvantage or a barrier as others as I am older and am in a position where I can advocate for myself and others. I also realised through the diagnosis process that I have developed many many semi conscious adaptation processes. Nevertheless you still spend time after diagnosis processing doubt, wondering what has been ‘wrong’ with you all along. I decided after some months, grieving for my younger self who’d struggled with all these traits undiagnosed, and then eventually came to the conclusion that these traits have also been responsible for getting me where I am. There are just a few which can adversely impact my welfare and others sometimes and I have to be mindful of that. Crashing out of the odd high pressure job in my 20s and walking out with a big Fuck You on a wet Wednesday afternoon was part of the ADHD perhaps but it also saved me from putting up with bad situations for too long. A slash and burn approach. Whilst I am a diversity and inclusion specialist, and an advocate for neurodiversity in the workplace, I do wonder about the pathological framing of ADHD but it helps spot patterns of repeated overwhelm in people who otherwise function very well indeed. Mind you the senior ranks of the broadcasters also had a fair amount of ‘comorbidity’ with narcissism and psychopathy in the mix and that didn’t help. My diagnosis was ‘severe’ ADHD which took me by surprise but it helped me understand the patterns of intense hyperfocus on work followed by overwhelm (and moments where my passionate personal and political beliefs tipped into unchecked RIGHTEOUS RAGE – oh yes!), and usually accompanied by walking out of jobs. At least I am secure and possibly arrogant enough to interpret this diagnosis as a severe case of creative genius. Ho ho. But it doesn’t always serve me.
I’d initially gone for hearing tests as I’d been experiencing a lot of sensory dissonance in my current workplace. Lights seemed to bright. Sounds in a crowd too loud. The audiologist told me I did have some hearing loss but my problem was more a listening problem (I imagined my husband dancing delightedly like Rumpelstiltskin at this point shouting ‘see’!). I had of course noticed I went about things differently to other (more logical, better behaved) people in academia. In TV, bad behaviour is so normalised I was the well behaved one but I learnt to mix it up with the worst of them and hold my own. What a thing to have to normalise. I arrived in this new world of the university ready for the usual wrestling match. Occasionally some of the usual gender issues and a male proclivity for speaking over women but not the worst I’ve seen and I can talk louder than most if pushed. It’s not perfect but it felt like an over reaction. Muscle memory of past battles expressing itself. I started noticing that people thought I wasn’t listening sometimes. I was, but I process silently and appear not to react occasionally. I’ve learnt to say ‘I hear you. Give me a second I’m processing.’ I sometimes blurt things I am thinking which can be funny and I usually style it out as comedy but it can also seem rude. I interrupt when my thoughts are racing. I think round a problem backwards upside down and right to left, not in a straight line, I read books in a random order, I have to mind map and visualise to write logically. This is how my energy and my mind expresses itself. There is no other way for me to get things done and it might look chaotic to others but I get there. The PhD really highlighted my non linear processing and challenged me to acknowledge where it was a barrier to being organised or getting a thing done.
Stripped of all these tasks and adaptations now with work put aside it seems overly complicated. Right now all I have to do is keep turning up and be a good patient but doing 100 creative acts at once is my own form of radical healing. I imagine my cells renewing and regaining their symmetrical shapes as I sing. And I have to believe I can heal myself.
Breathe 
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