This is inspired by various comments that have been made by various people in various places, but they have set me thinking. The themes are ‘emotional numbness’ and ‘adolescent problems’.
I was emotionally numb, as I’ve said elsewhere, for most of my 30s – after giving up my job to go with my husband to live in a foreign country where I found it hard to make friends (sorry, Lady Lucy, obviously we’re best mates now, but back then, I was so UPTIGHT that I couldn’t connect with anybody), had small children, never went out and met people, except as somebody’s wife or somebody’s mum. Melinda just disappeared, she died inside, she was completely swallowed up and lost. Cassandra was pretty stultified too, she managed to keep going enough to finish her Open University degree and every so often she would add a bit to the first novel (the one that has never been published), but mostly she had no place in life.
Then, about 15 years ago, I met someone and WHAMMO! Melinda leapt back into life. He was the tutor at an evening class on drawing, and apart from being sex on legs, he actually spoke to me as though I was an interesting, worthwhile and maybe even attractive woman. Set the old heart a-flutter and no mistake. Real adolescent stuff. I was trying to work out what was going on in his head, but as soon as he realised what was going on in mine he ran for the hills at a tremendous rate of knots and left me feeling completely crushed and humiliated and wishing I’d stayed numb. So I retreated back into numbness again for a few more years, now thoroughly convinced that I was a sexless old crone whom no man could ever want.
These feelings changed again when I started doing my PhD. Suddenly I was no longer just somebody’s wife and somebody’s mum and I was out and mixing with intelligent and interesting men and women on a daily basis. At first I felt a lot of ‘What-am-I-doing-here?’ and ‘I-don’t really-belong-here’ and ‘They-can’t-possibly-like-me-not-really’. But gradually, as I got interested and involved in my research, I suppose you could say I started to ‘blossom’, and other people responded to that.
I said the other day that it was my EMBM (Erstwhile Male Best Mate) who dragged me out of my shell of emotional numbness, but thinking about it, he was just a catalyst in the process which had started already. I think I had blotted the art-tutor incident from my memory, probably rightly, because, as I said, the main impact was to destroy my confidence and push me further into numbness.
By the time I finished my PhD, I was working 6 days a week, the university had become my refuge. It’s an awful thing to admit but spending time at home with my husband and kids… I can’t finish that sentence. I can’t explain how I felt – maybe that’s just shame and guilt. I had been through such an intellectually stimulating and exciting time, how could I ever go back to being just Mum? So I applied for job after job, I planned to leave, to get away, to start a new life. And – nothing. (This was the period when I was told that, if I didn’t get out then, I would become an alcoholic).
But it didn’t happen. I never found a job (well, I did a couple of years later, but that’s another story). I went back to being Mum, out of necessity, because there was nothing else I could do. I applied for dozens of non-academic jobs, too, but apparently I was just too over-qualified, or under-experienced, or maybe just not very good at selling myself, I don’t know. But nobody wanted me.
So I threw myself back into Belinda – but a spark had been lit, and I’ve never quite let it go out. Every so often it flames up again, the craziness of life.
This isn’t what I set out to write about. But obviously it’s what I needed to write about today.