Sound and silence

January was characterised by silence. It was probably a good thing to pause and begin the new year thoughtfully but, by the end, it felt like January had lasted a whole year all by itself. For the greater part of the day, unless I happened upon another soul at my art studio or at a local coffee shop, I have been virtually silent. To anyone who knows me and how much I like a good chat this may be surprising. Then around 3.30pm, when the children come home from school, it is noisy for a few minutes and then they too settle down to doing their homework and hiding in their bedrooms. This is probably the quietest life has been for a long time. I spend the days mainly in my own company painting or writing. I have always been content with my own company. As a child I could invent infinite tasks and games and creative endeavours for myself but somehow the grey dirge of recent weeks has stretched out time and added a large grey muffler on top like a cloud of sound insulation. By the end of the month I finally came to terms with my own silence but it was not particularly welcome for a few weeks. I wanted my life to restart with the new year and I miss being busy and part of things. Instead I have felt that the sense of purpose that has kept me in perpetual motion for so many years was gone.

I may have looked busy and noisy on my social media as a Macmillan campaign I was filmed for at the end of last year launched mid January. It went out on BBC Music magazine’s site and a few other places and featured me, with other cancer survivors, ‘living my best life’, and then singing my heart out, talking about my jazz epiphany (!) and encouraging people to leave money in their wills for Macmillan. I’m a good media pop tart. I can say the right things at the right time and truth be told, after years behind cameras it was quite fun to be in front of one. But it is pretty weird to see the worst thing that has ever happened to you as a rather sad little photo story for someone else’s social media. Being a digital campaign it is completely ignorable and the campaign sat comfortably with me as I could genuinely say that Macmillan made a massive difference to me as I coped with all that the past brought with it. I feel a great sense of gratitude and was pleased to be able to find another way to say thank you to the organisation that had given me so much.

Nevertheless, in spite of this glamorous start, I have really been struggling to shake off feelings of frustration and boredom. I have literally never in my life felt I had nothing to do and no reason to do it (beyond the very important purpose of being a mother, wife, daughter etc). You’d think I would fill it with books I haven’t read or going to galleries to see art but I have felt pinned to the spot. Coping with side effects of the meds with a fair bit of joint pain and paralysed with the psychological inertia of not quite knowing how to go forwards whilst trying not to look backwards. I’m trying to go back to work but it takes time and everyone is being kind and careful. I feel like an egg. But I am not an egg. I bounce. I have Bouncebackability.

Eventually the 102 weeks of January mellowed into slightly softer form of existential panic and I cheered up. I found myself inventing daily goals to mark the time and credited myself with small achievements. A trip to the gym, little progressions down the weights in the stack. A forgotten painting a little closer to done. Sanding down some clumsily splattered wooden frames. But even my oil paints seemed to be feeling curmudgeonly, refusing to dry in the damp and cold. A movie for one in the daytime. Always a delightful stolen pleasure at our new Everyman cinema. A banana loaf made spontaneously in time for the kids arriving home. Each one a tiny triumph. My medication was halved and I started to feel human again. Joint pain and fatigue easing with my dose reduction. The absence of my monthly rockbottom neutrophil count of 1/1.2 and this month not even the sallow eyes that have marked my nadir. I am in bed less in the afternoons. I do genuinely feel quite a better and stronger but sometimes still very compromised as soon as I try to do too much. Recovery is slowish and I am impatient to get back to life

There’s nothing like an anniversary to trigger the best and the worst in you. The past week marked a year since my stage 4 diagnosis. I mean, what was I really marking here? The (incorrect) news that I had about a year to live maybe? It was pretty shocking. Should I celebrate and mark the moment when pure mortal terror made me want to pee my pants and be swallowed into the earth all in the same moment? I cannot recommend it as a life experience. I hope you never have to go through this sort of moment. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I can, of course, celebrate still being alive though. A whole year of fortitude and friendship and appreciation of life. A poetic year. A heroic year. With a fair dollop of inglorious whingeing but I suppose I should allow myself that at least. Part of me wants to say the past year has been A Gift. It seems glib but partly true. Certainly the type of gift you open, sniff and frown at. ‘What is it?’ ‘Oh!’ Hmm. Thanks? I guess.

I would happily forget the shock and the horror, and I’d happily forget the date too but for the fact that it coincided with what would have been my mother’s birthday, a day I find difficult anyway. I decided to take it as a sign from her to hold on and put my trust in her experience of living 30 plus years with her cancer at a time when survival was not so common. To take comfort in her memory, her positivity and Not Panic. In the waiting room of the dreaded lung department there was one of those calendars with an aphorism for every day of the year. The sort I would sneer at on a normal day. The life advice for the 30th January 2025 read;

‘Determination is not so much a matter of action as of stillness. Such stability penetrates the surface of life and removes the bumps’

Ok. I thought. OK. I’ll take that. In the absence of being able to anchor myself in any experience quite so awful, or find any comfort from the medical staff who only seemed able to say ‘sorry’… this would do.

Stillness.

I clung to it like my mother was speaking to me from beyond the grave.

Last week, the visceral memory of that day awakened a lot of trauma that I thought I had safely buried six or sixty six feet under. It is part of my very British tendency to harbour unexplored feelings and it serves me well sometimes. Sit on those fuckers no matter how loud they shout and don’t let them out under any circumstances! I hereby consign you to the bin of memories I visit only when absolutely necessary! There. A mature modern attitude to trauma. That’s me. I hear my therapist friends chuckling wisely and see them shaking their heads. I’m so bored of therapy. I’m happy to paint it, or sing it out. Let’s talk later! Maybe later. Maybe. Or…tell 20000 of my best friends and post it! With exclamation marks to hide the mania!!!! (Or maybe not). My habit of privately oversharing my inner life creates a strange sort of schizophrenia when I do step out in public. Especially in a work context. I forget that I have told everything to everyone I know (and quite a few people I don’t know) and I don’t expect anyone to read it. And then someone I hardly know sidles up to me and tells me they’ve been reading my blog in a conspiratorial way like they know the inside of my head. And they do! And I am at once surprised and delighted to discover that anyone has bothered. It pleases me mainly because it saves me having to explain myself and when they say ‘how are you?’ I can legitimately say ‘well you already know, let’s talk about something else’. I also take some pleasure from the hope that my writing about hope and hopelessness does someone, somewhere, some good. Even if only to discover that life is difficult for another human and that, sometimes, in spite of our well polished, well-edited appearances on social media, we are all just muddling through imperfectly and are largely coping inelegantly with the crap life throws at you on a daily basis. There are bright glimmers of course and you must grab them with both hands and notice when life is glittering at you.

But I digress. Back to anniversary week! If you happened to be the two people (other than my immediate family) who encountered messy imperfect me on the anniversary itself, I am genuinely sorry. It was not an easy day. I tried to keep myself hidden like the beast but I accidentally opened the door a crack. The dam broke a little. I see it a bit like the wall in the last series of Stranger Things. I shouldn’t have let anyone see me in the Upside Down where I become my own worst monster. If you got tarred with the black goo that came out when I opened the door….Sorry. Meet me on the other side when the sun is shining? I’ll buy you a pint of Guinness to make it up to you.

It didn’t help (on the day before the anniversary of the Incorrect Pronouncement of My Imminent Demise) that I had agreed to speak at Macmillan’s national conference at the ICC in Birmingham. Which is Quite Large if you’ve been there. And so, on a stage in front of several hundred people, I found myself working out how I felt. Macmillan had asked me to be on a panel of ‘lived experience storytellers’ at their all staff conference. As I write about my cancer and talk about it one-to-one quite a bit it had not even occurred to me that this might be a difficult or emotional thing to do. But I managed to maintain a stiff upper lip by pre-scripting the tricky bits in poetic metaphors. It kind of worked. You’d have to know me pretty well to detect that I was about to break from the slight croak in my voice or the tightness in my throat as I spoke about the moment when I realised it was very serious indeed. Irreversibly so. The moment the consultant I thought I was seeing about a ‘little nodule’ on my lung handed me over to the Macmillan nurse in the soft seating area. They might as well have opened the door on a black hole or a den of lions. If I ever see another municipal blue soft seating room again I will scream and run. This is the more rational reaction. I diverted my emotion in recounting that by telling the assembled staff about it in metaphor by saying that in that moment, as I found myself cast upon that black sea – the Macmillan trained nurse – a genuine human trained to speak…human – was like someone appearing on a small boat with a light, a rubber ring, a silver emergency blanket – and always A LOT of leaflets – who says ‘do you need some help? Come on board. I know the way. I’ll get you back to shore.’ And you don’t stop to ask questions if you know what’s good for you. You just say thanks and get on the fucking boat and they save you from drowning. But still I was drowning for a few weeks. The leaflets weren’t waterproof.

The other storytellers’ experiences were harder for me to sit through dry-eyed. Their emotional honesty caught me off guard. Regardless of whether they’d had more or less cancer, type or stage doesn’t make a difference here. We all had different journeys but the one thing we all had in common was our sense of trauma in the aftermath of the initial cancer experience. A brave man and experienced campaigner who told the story of trying to end his own life after diagnosis and successful treatment, of how he failed to do so thankfully and lay there for three days before he decided to carry on. How he made the choice to return to life to form a prostate cancer support group that has helped over 4000 men in several different cities. That’s decisive courage. The name of his group is ‘Cancer Don’t Let it Win’ if you know a man who needs support with prostate cancer.

So the question after cancer for us survivors becomes not one of straightforward survival. But of what to do next. How to live. How to decide what is worth it and what is not. What do we do once we hit The Silence that comes after trauma? How do we speak to ourselves in the silence and face up to the questions life asks with honesty and grace? For when all the noise and the bright lights of the hospitals and the drama and the present danger is over you are simply left with your thoughts. And that can be deafening. The existential dread catches up with you once you finally have a time to let it in. And although you might look the same from the outside to anyone casually looking on it feels like you have been bombed out. You can’t go back to how it was because that house is gone. And yet you have to rebuild. For a second time in my case. I feel less traumatised than exhausted. Really? I have to put it all back together again? Really. Goddamit. I was busy doing stuff! Although, I can’t really remember what it was that seemed so important befoe all this but I was VERY BUSY! I am reminded to be grateful that I do at least have an actual house. The metaphorical one can be put back together. It’ll be a bit weird and knocked out of shape with secret rooms full of horrors but there are new rooms too. Filled with light, new friends and unexplored adventures and extended metaphors. And sound. In all this actual sound has helped. Singing. Sounding. Somatic healing. A year of intensive gong training begins in April. I’m gently planning another jazz gig for Spring. Practicing faster and happier songs. Going deeper into sound.

Finally, the welcome and seemingly impossible sight of the shores of February loomed into view. I knelt down and kissed the ground when I got off the January boat. I looked back at the rocks of Anniversary Island receding into the murky fog of distance and memory. I could see a few discarded personal items left behind for me to rediscover next miserable January. It can fuck off for now. I made it and you didn’t manage to suck me into your dark forests or dash me against your rocks. Soon I will be able to throw off my scarf and hat and then the land of no tights and boots awaits and eventually…I will get to free my toes and wear sandals.

This week I celebrated the arrival of Spring (yeah ok a bit prematurely) and took myself to Delft for a conference on art, vision and depiction. An academic conference just for fun! Imgine that. It’s not even really my field. I arrived on a bright clear day. The perfectly meticulous ornate small red brick paths along the canals take you everywhere you need to go. You’ve got to love the Dutch for their clean shiny Calvinist windows and neat living rooms on display. These few days have reminded me how much I love philosophical talk about how we see. Listening to the art lectures was like the feeling the return of a warm climate, a soft breeze blowing in with the thought. The talks bordering on neuroaesthetics and drug free psychedelic experiences blew my mind. I booked a ridiculously nice hotel for a great price and had to force myself out of my giant bed to attend the thing I’d come for. I made some new friends and spent important time with an existing one who needed to talk. I remembered how much I enjoy a life of ideas. Getting back to life after illness is a very particular sensation. Maybe one you can only appreciate it fully if a lion has had its jaws around your neck.

And in a week, in real life, I will wash up on the shores of my very own magical island, Ibiza – out of season – to run my first overseas creative cancer retreat. Just a little one. About ten of us. The luxury retreat I went to with my family in the summer offered us a week for the price of a night to do this for people with cancer when I mentioned what I wanted to do. Just because. We’ll do a bit of yoga, meditation and sound healing. An Ibizan pottery class. A bit of plein air painting. I hear the almond blossom may be in bloom and there’s a food festival in one of the towns. The water might even be warm enough to dip a toe in or kayak. I like to walk along beaches in winter as the first signs of spring appear..

It may have been quiet but I’ve been quietly plotting to do more of the things close to my heart. And I’ve been doing a little fundraiser – a big thank you to the kind people who donated over £1000. That’s not paying for my holiday, by the way, but going towards two more retreats at the family bonsai farm later in the year. There’s the possibility of some further funding to do a lot more of this but I am taking a moment to contemplate if I am really ready. It takes a lot out of me to hold the space for others right now even though I enjoy it. I need to be sure it’s sustainable without me.

One thing became clear to me in the silent wilderness of January. Give a busy person time to think and they will eventually fill their time with some activity. But it takes a great deal more strength and wisdom to pause and consider how to spend your time wisely. So I travel on (begrudgingly) with a bit of January’s grey goo stuck on my shoe. The bit that holds me back and tells me to keep resting, and thinking, and not rushing. It’s not a part of me I really want to listen to but it knows me better than I consciously know myself and it has some wisdom in its stubborn refusal to cut me loose completely.