Category / mental health

by Cila Warncke

Let’s Talk About Sex Education

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Last year, for the first time, I taught about gender and sexuality in literature. My kneejerk reaction was, I can’t talk about sex to teenagers. Arrggh!

On reflection, this reaction had everything to do with my hangups (to use a good old-fashioned word) and nothing to do with my students’ needs.

This is a common problem in sex education, with the current brouhaha in the United Kingdom serving as an example.

British prime minister Rishi Sunak has, according to the Guardian, “asked the Department for Education to “ensure schools are not teaching inappropriate or contested content” in the subject of relationships, sex and health education… Sunak confirmed the review… after a Tory MP, Miriam Cates, said children were being exposed to sex education classes that were “age-inappropriate, extreme, sexualising and inaccurate”.”

Numerous Tory MPs are on board, one of their complaints being that young people are being taught about oral sex — a classic case of adult prudishness being prioritized over teen well-being.

Chambers et al. (2004) is quoted by Leung et al., 2019 saying Britain’s “value-led approach [to sex education] merely reflects the interests and principles of stakeholders, while overlooking the actual needs and wellbeing of youths.”

Sex ed in the internet age

Does anyone with two brain cells to rub together think not discussing oral sex, or any other sexual act, proclivity or topic, is going to prevent kids from knowing what it is, discussing it, watching it and even doing it?

Children are handed internet-connected screen devices almost as soon as their chubby baby fingers can hold them, in many cases.

Statista data show that 58% of British children own a smartphone by age 8; by age 12, that jumps to 93%. You can bet the farm they aren’t just using it to watch Sesame Street.

Sexuality isn’t a switch that flips at puberty. Sexual behaviors and curiosity are apparent in early childhood.

This might make grown-ups uncomfortable, but our discomfort isn’t useful. Parents and teachers have a duty to help kids navigate this vital part of life.

If we don’t step up, the internet will.

Student needs versus teacher discomfort

In an op-ed, 25-year-old journalist and editor Sasha Mistlan writes (re: Andrew Tate and the importance of proactive sex education): “My friends and I didn’t get any proper education about sex, consent or relationships until we were 13, by which time we had learned it all from internet porn and lads’ mags.”

How can educators ignore this need?

I am a literature teacher; the biology of the birds and bees are beyond my remit. But it isn’t the birds and bees that students need to know about.

They need models of relationships and ways of relating that affirm sexuality as an important (but not overwhelming), natural part of adult life, and of sex as a source of joy and connection. They need love stories with happy endings. They need, also, stories that are unhappy or ambiguous; stories that show mistakes and heartbreaks as a navigable part of human sexual experience, not reasons to drink poison.

However awkward I may feel, students need a safe space for curiosity and discussion. Because lord only knows, they are talking about sex outside the classroom.

Sex positive education

Does the phrase ‘sex positive education’ make you a little uncomfortable?

It does me.

But what does the alternative imply? Sex negative education doesn’t prevent young people from having sex.

Data from the worryingly puritanical United States show that even students who promise to abstain from premarital sex… don’t.

Research published by the American Academy of Pediatrics peer-reviewed journal Pediatrics found: “Five years after the pledge [to abstain from sex], 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers did not differ in premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and anal and oral sex variables. Pledgers… did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers used birth control and condoms.”

Scaring teenagers away from sex has never worked; ignoring sex in the hope teenagers won’t notice it is ludicrous.

The best, bravest, least-comfortable option is to say: hey, sex is a huge part of life, however whenever wherever and with whomever you do it (or don’t), and it can be one of the most joyous parts of life, or one of the most damaging. Let’s talk about how to make it joyful, empowering, pleasurable, safe and beautiful.

Affirmative literature

As a literature teacher, I can do my part by teaching texts that articulate the delights and challenges of sexuality and sexual identity, and working with my colleagues in health, science and psychology to create a safe, affirmative atmosphere for conversations about love, sex and gender.

This requires making careful choices about what my students read. Many of the canonical ‘love stories’ of European literature are anything but — think Wuthering Heights or Romeo and Juliet where ‘love’ and violence are inextricably mixed.

The search for affirmative literature requires looking beyond the cano and seeking stories that reflect a variety of experiences, cultures, orientations and gender identities.

Next week, I’ll share a list of powerful literature that treats sex with the openness, thoughtfulness, honesty and sensitivity it merits.

Suggest your favorite teen-appropriate, sex-affirmative story, poem or film in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

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by Cila Warncke

You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Study Humanities But…

Photo by Blaz Photo on Unsplash

While I cherish the idea of autonomy, life experience and research argue persuasively that my choices are (while still choices) rooted in the bedrock of where I was born, to whom, how I was raised and what it took to get away from all that.

University majors and mental health

“Students who study humanities, social work and counselling were more likely to report childhood adversities, which are strongly associated with poor mental health” according to McLafferty et al. (2022) in the study ‘Variations in psychological disorders, suicidality, and help-seeking behaviour among college students from different academic disciplines‘.

The authors’ findings are not unique: “A large, cross-sectional study spanning 81 American universities found that students studying art and design presented with the highest rates of mental illness. Almost 45% of art and design students reported at least one disorder, followed closely by humanities (39%). Art and humanities students also had the highest rates of suicidal ideation and over one fifth of students from these disciplines reported having engaged in self-injury” (McLafferty et al., 2022).

This seems entirely plausible.

Unfortunately, it also seems like the sort of thing that could be weaponized against already beleaguered arts and humanities courses and practitioners. Touchy-feely BS for people who can’t hack a real job, etc.

McLafferty et al. (2022) note: “Disciplines demonstrating the lowest rates of mental illness included engineering (31%), public health (28%) nursing (28%) and business (27%). Likewise, a recent study conducted reported that students from arts and humanities, social work, and behavioural, and social sciences, were more likely to report emotional and substance use disorders in comparison to their peers from business or engineering disciplines.”

The bottom line

Observed through a certain lens, this suggests that pragmatic, socially desirable subjects attract composed, socially desirable students; with the obvious, if unarticulated, corollary that arts and humanities are for damaged bohemian types who can’t hold it together long enough to learn quadratic equations, or whatever.

I can see why people might think that, and perhaps they’d be right.

Numerous studies find a strong correlation between parental socioeconomic status (SES) and their children’s academic achievement (Saifi & Mahmood, 2011; Azhar et al., 2014; Lam, 2014, etc.)

Academic disciplines such as engineering and health sciences are resource intensive. Ideally, students will have access to high quality labs and IT equipment from primary school onwards. Ideally, they will also have personal tech — laptops, tablets, etc. — that facilitates connection and learning.

Students from families lower on the socioeconomic scale are less likely to have personal technology, reliable home internet, and so forth. They are also more likely to go to underfunded schools where resources are limited.

When I was in school in the 1990s we were lucky to have Bunsen burners and space to mix hydrogen peroxide and baking soda; my teachers wrote exam questions on the board because the school couldn’t afford Xerox paper. My family could stretch to the graphing calculator required for advanced math classes, but I wouldn’t get my first laptop until 1999.

What I did have access to was books. One thing the United States is blessed with an abundance of is libraries (cheers, Mr Carnegie, I’ll try not to think too hard about how you made your money). Even my home town, pop. 4800, had a substantial, well-stocked library with plenty of cozy reading spaces, stacks of periodicals and regular free activities. It was my refuge, my favorite place, a source of endless bounty.

Having a predilection for reading and writing, I also had a space where these were valued and supported. If I’d had a predilection for trigonometry or building radio cars, there would have been no such space or support.

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

Steered by circumstances

The Covid-19 pandemic threw learning inequalities into sharp relief: “Children from families with a low SES are less likely to have access to remote learning (UNESCO, 2021), are less often provided with active learning assistance from their schools (Tomasik et al., 2020), and spend less time on learning (Meeter, 2021) than children from families with a high SES. Moreover, parents with a high SES are more likely to provide greater psychological support for their children (OECD, 2019),” reported Hammerstein et al. (2021).

Take an imaginative leap with me: A fourth or fifth grader has a nascent knack for programming. But they don’t have a computer at home, or they do, but share it with several family members and they can only afford a cheap, shaky internet connection. During the pandemic, this kid was out of school for 12, 18, 24 months, with minimal access to educators or learning materials.

They are fortunate that their fascination with the logic of computer language applies to English too. They do still have access to books and reading materials, and they’re sharp enough to learn to craft a strong essay or article by imitation.

They get back to school and the language arts teacher notices their progress, encourages them, makes sure they have access to the school library, gives them extra feedback on their writing.

Meanwhile, they’ve dropped behind their well-to-do peers in IT, simply because they haven’t had the tools or training. The IT teacher, like the language arts teacher, focuses their attention on the strongest students and fails to notice the lost potential of this particular kid.

Naturally, the skillset that gets the most care and attention is the one that flourishes. By the time university rolls around, this student is poised for success in the humanities, perhaps never to realize how financial circumstances subtly but ineluctably shaped their academic trajectory.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

It takes courage and gusto to believe in one’s weaknesses. In my head, I’m terrible at maths and mediocre at science (until math gets involved, then I’m terrible at that too).

Photo by Mikael Kristenson on Unsplash

This self-perception solidified to fact in my head over years, following the switch from a pre-med track to English Literature in my second year of university. It was wrenching to give up on a long-held goal, but the hard reality was all my English and History professors were encouraging me to major in one or the other, and I was barely scraping by in science.

Telling myself I “couldn’t” hack the math and science was a self-soothing mechanism. However, like many palliatives, it may not have been entirely benign.

I took Algebra I and II, trigonometry and statistics, geometry, and calculus in high school: straight As (though seasoned with tears of frustration); I also took general science, chemistry, physics and biology: A, A, A and A. This rather complicates the “couldn’t” narrative. Sure, I’ve forgotten it all now, but I did learn it — even excelled — at secondary school.

What broke me was the leap to university level, where chemistry became calculus and physics became flat-out terrifying.

If I’d had access to more challenging high school courses, would I have stayed on the pre-med track?

If I’d had greater self-confidence…?

If I’d been aware of the help available…?

The right decision for the wrong reasons

Am I happier as a writer and educator than I would have been as a cog in the moribund US healthcare system? No doubt.

But I wish I’d made that decision from a position of self-confidence and clarity, not an overwhelming fear of failure.

  • When you grow up poor and see an escape route, you really, really don’t want to miss out.
  • When you feel excluded because of how you dress, where you live, what you can’t afford, you will do most anything to blend in.
  • When your financial situation has never not been precarious, you want to stay safe.

Failing classes, tanking your GPA, needing more time to graduate: these have different consequences for well-to-do students and those scraping by on scholarships, loans and work study jobs.

Links in a chain

Difficult circumstances are not always merely socioeconomic; there are certainly young people from affluent backgrounds who have had adverse childhood experiences. It would be wrong, though, to discount the exacerbating effects of poverty on issues like intimate partner violence, child abuse and neglect, substance misuse, incarceration and mental health difficulties.

There are many ways poverty shapes people’s choices and chances, from birth onwards. My hypothetical scenario is just one of many that could shed light on how socioeconomics influence an individual’s choice of study and mental health.

What are your experiences or observations regarding the relationship between study/career choice, mental health and socioeconomics? Please share your reflections in the comments or Tweet @CilaWarncke

by Cila Warncke

16 – Letting Go of Emotional Baggage

Gradually, my writing moved beyond all music, all the time. There is a heart of darkness in Ibiza’s club world; the shadows got long. It was time to look at things differently. This piece was written for Tiny Buddha. You can read the full article here.

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

“Sometimes the past should be abandoned, yes. Life is a journey and you can’t carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.” ~Ha Jin

You’ve probably heard of the fear of missing out but what about the fear of letting go?

My father was volatile and mentally unstable. Criticism was his preferred method of communication. As a child and teenager, I learned to keep my thoughts and feelings locked away and became an expert at deflecting personal questions.

Without realizing it, I carried this habit into adulthood, avoiding any talk about my feelings or turning them into a joke. When a friend finally called me on it, the shock of self-recognition quickly turned to resistance. This is who I am, I thought. Why should I change?

I plodded on, working as hard as ever to keep my fortress intact. It wasn’t making me happy yet I wasn’t ready to change.

As I struggled with my desire to cling to hurtful memories and self-defeating behaviors, it dawned on me that I was afraid to let go because defensiveness was part of my identity.

The problem wasn’t that I had baggage—everyone has baggage—but that it had come to define me. I didn’t know who I would be without it. At that point it hit me: I had to dig deep, discover the person I wanted to be, and then act on it.

After I identified that I was holding on to the past because it seemed too important to jettison, I discovered that letting go is harder than it sounds. Relaxing a long-held belief isn’t a one-day, one-week, or even a one-year process. However, it is possible.

Read the rest at Tiny Buddha.

by Cila Warncke

James Baldwin +Black Lives Matter

#BlackLivesMatter
Donate to Black Lives Matter

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Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

 

The late literary genius and humanist nonpareil James Baldwin spoke for Black Lives Matter decades before the movement gained a name. And as a gay black man, born poor, he understood intersectionality in a profound sense.

Baldwin’s gifts included the ability to study himself and report, however painful or unflattering the truths that emerged. This spawned an empathy as rare as wise. He didn’t excuse cruelty but he acknowledged and, as a writer, rendered in meticulous detail the pain that (often) underlies it.

The following quotes, from interviews and from his fiction, articulate truths that are as urgent and relevant today as when he uttered them.

 

“Look, we live in Harlem, let’s say, or we live in Watts. The mother who comes down there with his cap and his own gun in his holster, he doesn’t know what my day is like. He doesn’t know why I get drunk when I do. He doesn’t know anything about me at all. He’s scared shitless of me. Now, what the fuck is he doing there? All he can do is shoot me. He’s a hired concentration-camp keeper…. All you can do is bring in tanks and tear gas—and call the National Guard when it gets too tight. And think you can fight a civil war and a global war at the same time.”

Baldwin speaking to Esquire in 1968

“The black cat in the streets wants to protect his house, his wife and children. And if he is going to be able to do this he has to be given his autonomy, his own schools, a revision of the police force in a very radical way. It means, in short, that if the American Negro, the American black man, is going to become a free person in this country, the people of this country have to give up something. If they don’t give it up, it will be taken from them.”

Baldwin speaking to Esquire in 1968

“The country has got the police force it deserves, and of course if a policeman sees a black cat in what he considers a strange place he’s going to stop him—and you know of course the black cat is going to get angry. And then somebody may die. But it’s one of the results of the cultivation in this country of ignorance. Those cats in the Harlem street, those white cops; they are scared to death and they should be scared to death. But that’s how black boys die, because the police are scared.”

Baldwin speaking to Esquire in 1968

 

“I’d learned how to get by. I’d learned never to be belligerent with policemen, for instance. No matter who was right, I was certain to be wrong…. I only had one head and it was too easy to get it broken… I figured out what answers he wanted and I gave them to him. I never let him him think he wasn’t king.”

‘Previous Condition’ in Going to Meet the Man

“Those boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage.”

‘Sonny’s Blues’ in Going to Meet the Man

“For everyone’s life begins on a level where races, armies, and churches stop. And yet everyone’s life is always shaped by races, churches, and armies; races, churches, armies menace, and have taken, many lives.”

‘This Morning, This Evening, So Soon’ in Going to Meet the Man

“To be forced to excavate a history is, also, to repudiate the concept of history, and the vocabulary in which history is written; for the written history is, and must be, merely the vocabulary of power, and power is history’s most seductively attired false witness…. One thing is absolutely certain: one can repudiate, or despise, no one’s history without repudiating or despising one’s own. Perhaps that is what the gospel singer is singing.”

Just Above My Head

“All the years that we spent in and out of the South, I always wanted to say to those poor white people, so busy turning themselves and their children into monsters: Look. It’s not we who can’t forget. You can’t forget. We don’t spend all our waking and sleeping hours tormented by your presence. We have other things to do: don’t you have anything else to do? Maybe you really don’t? Maybe the difference between us is that I never raped your mother, or your sister, or if and when I did, it was out of rage, it was not my way of life… Maybe the difference between us is that I’ve never been afraid of the prick you, like all men, carry between their legs and I never arranged picnics so that I could cut it off of you before large, cheering crowds.”

Just Above My Head

 

#BlackLivesMatter

Donate to Black Lives Matter

by Cila Warncke

A short quarantine reading list

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Photo by Lilly Rum on Unsplash

Even before a ton of ordure hit the propeller-style cooling device I’d only read three books this year.

Three. 

Since the age of six or seven I’ve been capable of reading three average-length books a day. Once, when I was about 9, I read 1,000 pages in a day, to see if could.

On another occasion (again, pre-teen) I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in three days.

The point I’m sidling towards is that it is a sign of spiritual/ emotional/ logistical malaise when my word-consumption dips to such low levels. (The other obvious conclusion is I was backward as a kid, which is fair, but there were reasons.)

Being almost too far gone in anxiety to even read a book is new and unnerving. Books have always been a reliable portal away from the unappetitliche present, but the present present has got me so tied in knots I’m afraid to miss anything.

Initially, I tried to negotiate this in my usual Protestant, eat-your-beet-greens-they’re-good-for-you fashion. That is, I started a book about Palestine. If there is one thing more depressing than coronavirus, it’s the situation of Palestine. Reading about children getting shot with tear-gas canisters and all the other interminable head-fucking brutality of the Israeli occupation was enough to make me think that maybe enough humans are ugly enough that we all deserve to be wiped out by a virus.

Not reading material for these times.

After that failed effort, I didn’t read anything for a few days. Then my friend Nick emailed and it turned out I bought his book (presciently titled It Gets Worse) last year and forgotten to read it. That’s like discovering the bottle at the back of the cupboard you thought was cheap emergency plonk is a fantastic vintage meant for a special occasion.

This is a special occasion.

So, I’m (finally) on my way to having read four books this year. When I finish Nick’s book I may go back and reread his first, Bitter Experience Has Taught Me, because it’s nice to hear a friend’s voice — especially when it is funny, acid, and laden with anecdote.

After that, I’ll try Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Oscar Wilde and Primo Levi.

Disparate, yet equally essential.

All of these writers, including Ms Austen (whose reputation for daintiness is undeserved) exhibit rare levels of integrity, perspicacity and moral clarity. They took the world as it was, but refused to accept the supposed constraints of that relationship.

And they, one and all, write sentences so good I have to pause and let the wave of admiration/envy/admiration pass. Right now, it’s reading for pleasure, or not at all.

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Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

 

 

 

 

 

by Cila Warncke

The New Barebacking

I had to go to the village today.

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Photo by Kate Trifo on Unsplash

On the short drive to the village a couple of cars passed heading the opposite direction, both drivers wore surgical masks.

In the taxi rank in the village a driver leaned against the hood of his car, mask tucked beneath his chin, smoking.

The receptionist and vet wore blue masks.

The middle-aged man with the shock of dark curly hair who passed me on the sidewalk wore a white N95 mask.

The lady carrying two armloads of groceries wore a mask.

The young dude unlocking his car wore a mask.

 

Barefaced and bare-handed, I felt like a lowlife misfit.

Appearing in public sans mask is the new barebacking. Socially irresponsible, verging on reprehensible.

On arriving home, I decided it was time to buy masks (Amazon orders are delivering a month out, so thanksthefuckverymuch Jeff Bezos, I’m off elsewhere).

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Covid Photo by pixpoetry on Unsplash

Why the previous reluctance?

Because I don’t want to walk around thinking the next breath is going to kill me, or someone else. For the first time, I have an inkling how some men feel about condom use. Yeah, sure fine it’s the most appropriate thing to do but goddamn it, who wants to experience the world through a prophylactic shield?

Cherry blossoms are out, yellow wands of broom, did I mention the walnut trees are leafing? The air is pristine, sharp and Atlantic-cold. Our neighbor trundles up and down the road in an old red tractor, moving wine-sweet hay bales.

I do not want to touch the world with rubber fingers and breathe through layers of activated carbon. Why the hell would I sign up for that? Why not just lock myself in a sterile box and wait to die?

Okay, it’s not that dramatic but something important is being (has been?) lost in all this. Our sense of touch is already degraded from devoting too much of it to digital screens. We rarely breathe as deeply as we should. This stupid cunning virus is robbing us not just of too many lives but, sneakily, of things that make life worth living.

I’ll probably end up like wearing a mask for the common good (assuming I can beg borrow or steal one) but I refuse to think it is a Good Thing, in a larger sense.

We cannot do without enjoyment, wrote to Jack Gilbert. The ordinary sensual pleasures of filling our lungs and encountering the world through touch are not dispensable.

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Photo by Chris Murray on Unsplash

 

 

by Cila Warncke

The Future? Don’t Bet on It

Last year, Chris and I spent Easter week with our dear, long-long-long-standing friends
C & R in Yorkshire. On the edge of the moors. Next door, it transpired, to my ex-boyfriend (who, true to form, was smoking on the front porch as I had my first cup of coffee).

Twelve months ago, someone I’d met and dated in Ibiza turning up next-door in a northern English was cause to murmur, small world.

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Yorkshire bluebells

Today, proof of the world’s smallness is inescapable and grim. The ticker-tape death toll mounts, the number of official coronavirus cases races towards two million and even the most fortunate of us hunker at home, waiting for a future that might never happen (that’s cribbed from Mavis Gallant, who wrote exquisitely about societies in meltdown and the delusions they cherish on the way to the flames).

There seems to be a split take on COVID-19. Either, it’s going to usher in hitherto unimaginable era of mutual support and higher consciousness or we’re going to be dragged (resisting or not) back into the machine and crushed between the cogs of resurgent capitalism.

The latter argument is ably made by Julio Vincent Gambuto in his viral Medium piece ‘Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting‘ in which he writes, plausibly:

What is about to be unleashed on American society will be the greatest campaign ever created to get you to feel normal again. It will come from brands, it will come from government… the all-out blitz to make you believe you never saw what you saw. The air wasn’t really cleaner; those images were fake. The hospitals weren’t really a war zone; those stories were hyperbole. The numbers were not that high; the press is lying. You didn’t see people in masks standing in the rain risking their lives to vote. Not in America.

On the chirpier side of the fence is Rebecca Solnit who writes in ‘The impossible has already happened: what the coronavirus can teach us about hope‘ (published last week in the Guardian):

When a storm subsides, the air is washed clean of whatever particulate matter has been obscuring the view, and you can often see farther and more sharply than at any other time. When this storm clears, we may, as do people who have survived a serious illness or accident, see where we were and where we should go in a new light. We may feel free to pursue change in ways that seemed impossible while the ice of the status quo was locked up. We may have a profoundly different sense of ourselves, our communities, our systems of production and our future.

(To be fair, Solnit is no Pollyanna. Most of her longform piece details how fucked things are and how stacked the cards are against people trying to unfuck them.)

It says something about my own wiring that I feel compelled to take sides, to argue the case. Coronavirus has turned me into armchair experts. Like a sad gambler, I stare at screens, watch the numbers, argue my interpretation of the stats, have opinions about things I zero right to opine about (South Korea’s testing policy! Sweden’s schools!)

This impulse has  to do with lack of control. I value knowing things, having well-formed and well-informed ideas. In other words, I’m an instant relic; a creature who belongs to the bigger yet more predictable world that existed before January 2020.

Taking sides, prognosticating, surmising and supposing are ways to pass the time but little more. (Aside: I was listening to a TED en Espanol talk about coronavirus from 16 March; it felt like  listening to a historical reenactment.)

If this pestilent mess proves anything, it’s that opinion is pretty much beside the point.

Still, if I had place a few bob on an outcome, my money is on business as usual with a twist. Advertisers will come after what’s left of our bank accounts, governments will wrangle for the remaining shreds of our civil liberties, global warming will heat back up and we will not turn into kinder, gentler, better versions of ourselves.

Nonetheless, we may be more attuned to the ludicrousness of the situation, and quicker to say so, to complain or resist. I hope so, anyway.

Above all, a year from now, I hope to be with friends somewhere, drinking, breathing fresh air, gossiping about some minor coincidence. That would be a happy ending.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Cila Warncke

Love, the Verb

Yesterday, after spending the preceding waking hours running in furious circles and generally comporting myself like a week’s worth of bad news, my friend called.

We’d scheduled a video chat (the vomitous de rigueur of current social interaction) and, armed with a glass of cava, I sat down, propped my feet on an adjacent chair and tried to think happy thoughts.

Within a minute or two of saying hello we were cackling about something.

That’s the first time I laughed today.

A guilt-breaker washed over me. Somehow, I’d found something to share a genuine laugh about with a friend while my partner had heard nothing but bitching all day.

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Photo by Alfonso Scarpa on Unsplash

Love and courtesy

Once, apropos who knows what, a colleague said that one’s family is ‘obviously’ easy to get on with. I argued then, and argue now, that however much and sincerely we love someone, intimacy and proximity often cause carelessness.

I choose, when engaging with friends, to not sulk and storm. My time focused on them is brief so, even on bad days, I can muster the energy to be a slightly better self.

This isn’t falseness so much as simple courtesy. Other people have feelings too, and limited time, and worries. It is unkind to fill up their head space, which is surely every bit as overcrowded and precarious-feeling as mine, with solopsistic whinging.

But when you’re with someone round the clock, for the indefinite, it is easy to feel like every moment doesn’t count. Like, it’s okay to be grumpy and skip showering because he’s going to be here tomorrow (and the next day, and the next day).

Slipping into this perilous relaxation happens when we treat love as a noun. I love him, he loves me, ergo I can do what I like.

Fair is fair

The trouble is reconciling my bellyaching inner child with the duties of an adult relationship. I’m an individual, entitled to feel and express my feelings. Granted.
My partner is also entitled to not live with a whiffy harpy.

Excuse me while I shove a tea-towel in the gob of the me, me, me voice in my head.

It is only right to acknowledge that my rights end when they being to infringe on someone else’s. Yes, I have every right to curse, moan and carp; but when my crappy mood blackens the air for both of us, I’ve overstepped.

Basic courtesies like this are what allow us to maintain friendships and relationships. Letting ourselves act and react unchecked is what leads to breakups, meltdowns and guest spots on Jerry Springer (if that’s even still a thing).

Get to work, love

Making it work, in real time, means doing love not just giving ourselves credit for feeling it. Love has to be a verb, or it risks losing any real meaning.

Love, the verb, is making the effort to find something funny or pleasant to talk about, it’s not complaining constantly, it’s taking a shower and remember to put on deodorant, it’s shutting up for a minute and listening, it’s keeping some of the more outrageous paranoid thoughts to yourself, it’s saying ‘we’ll be okay’ even if that seems like a stretch.

Ursula LeGuin, the (Oregonian!) stalwart of goodness, sanity and fine prose, said:

Love is not a thing that happens to us. It’s a thing we do. It’s not a thing that lives inside of us and can be left to its own devices. It’s an action. It’s not an experience. It’s a way of relating.

Of late, my way of relating has been sub-optimal, to put it mildly. Which is, and this I must remember, okay. Only Pollyanna or a complete ditz believes that long-term confinement, financial precarity and uncertainty bring out the best in people.

It can’t be all or nothing anymore though. I can’t be one of those positivity freaks (and would hate myself more if I tried) but that isn’t licence to be unbearable.

For now, I’ll do my best in the circumstances and try to keep faith with love, the verb.

by Cila Warncke

Running to nowhere

Since I was 12 or so, running has been my talisman against self-destruction. It hasn’t kept me slim (that was an early-20s drug cocktail followed by vegetarianism) or particularly fit — after more than 25 years of running regularly I still take an hour to run a 10K — but it kept me functional, if not always happy.

run

Photo by Emma Simpson on Unsplash

The worst of this godforsaken lockdown is not even being allowed out to exercise. The minor saving grace is we have a driveway, or mini-camino, that is the only part of the property currently free of knee- to hip-high grass.

After five or so days of trying to get a buzz off yoga I started jogging in the driveway.

It is about 75 metres long, uneven, inconsistently cambered and comprised of a variety of surfaces. Beyond the concrete slab in front of the house is a spot of mud from where we turn the car round. This gathers itself into a mossy, grassy hump I cover in two strides before settling into the right-hand tyre track.

The driveway subsides going away from the house till it reaches the j-bend up to the paved road. About halfway down, at the end of a crumbling, overgrown stone wall, a walnut tree is putting out leaves. They are still tightly furled, waiting, presumably, for some solar encouragement before showing face.

Chris has tramped along the verge with our trusty hand-mower, keeping the grass reasonably lawnish for about 50 metres. Beyond the close-cut strip is an explosion of waist-high weeds. There is dandelion and stinging nettle in there, but mostly some skinny chancer with reddish seed pods. No idea what it is.

Romeo, the tiger-ish looking one of our twin boy cats, usually stakes out a spot at the end of the driveway during my run. Yesterday, he sat at attention, perfectly immobile, for about 15 minutes, staring at something I couldn’t see. He may be a Zen master.

I am not.

Today’s news was that Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s improbably debonair, well-spoken and (I believe, as of today) utterly useless, mashed-potato-brained president has threatened/requested an extension of the state of emergency until 10 May.

While I’m rarely carefree I am also not often apoplectic. Continuous low-level outrage and cynicism seems to inoculate me against the wilder mood swings.

Hearing we are going to be trapped in a rain-sodden ice box of a house, in a place neither of us have any love or affinity, for makes me want to put my fist through a wall.

Literally.

As I write, my chest feels like it is self-compressing. If it weren’t for Chris napping upstairs and the cats (Teddy in particular is distressed by loud noises) I would scream.

Running is supposed to help when I feel like this. Watching my footfall, adjusting my posture, picking up my knees, monitoring my breathing, these things can help.

So I run, counting out the laps: 2.5, 3… 5… 10… 14.5… 23…

On odd-numbered laps I run faster, picking my way between extrusions of natural rock — pinkish, glimmering with tiny crystals — and detritus: rubber piping, smashed tiles, bin liners, odd bits of plastic embedded in the hard earth. Uncut hair flops damp against my forehead. My left Achilles tendon twinges a warning.

Near the end of the drive, on the right (as you face the house) is a bare tree with small white flowers. Must check with my sister later, she’s the garden wizard.

Add that to the post-release list: plant a garden. Be ready,  when (not if) this shit comes raining down next. Dig potatoes and pluck herbs.

The permanent mist thickens and moves purposefully. Rain, now, really.

I jog/wheel/sprint/job/wheel through the 40s without shedding the desire to inflict damage on something. I’m going to need a lot of therapy, which I can’t afford.

And the reasons I can’t afford therapy are part of the reasons I’m at risk of melting into a lava pit of rage and self-loathing without it. None of which can be addressed now, or in a week, month, or perhaps a year.

That’s the kicker, as I turn through 47… 49… 52… Nobody knows when, or how, this ends. (I’ll take ‘bang’, if that’s an option.)

 

 

 

by Cila Warncke

28 Lockdown Days Later

Sometime ago, in the hazy days when freedom still seemed like a possibility, however faint, I wrote a pile of rubbish.

Writing rubbish isn’t an occupational hazard, it’s inevitable. Most writing is crap in the aesthetic/artistic sense: unrefined, hasty, careless, lacking finesse. Ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of anything I write falls in that category and, for the sake of sanity, has to be accepted as ‘good enough’ otherwise I would never make a deadline.

The article for which I need to apologize isn’t that kind of rubbish. It is pure, unmitigated cringe. My strong inclination is to wipe the pile of twaddle titled ‘10 things to do on coronavirus lockdown‘ from the internet and, if it were possible, from my memory.

What kind of grade-A asshole writes, in the face of a global pandemic, things like:

Always wanted a capsule wardrobe? This is the moment to dig through those chests of drawers, wardrobes, cupboards and shoe boxes and sort the wheat from the chaff. If this current crisis demonstrates anything it’s that certainties aren’t. Stop holding on to that sale-rack outfit you bought for the occasion that never happened.

or

Do something with your fingers that isn’t typing. Do you draw? Paint? Sculpt? Throw pottery? Play an instrument? Knit? Quilt? Scrapbook? If you do — awesome. Now you have time to throw yourself into it. Get into the flow and lose a few hours, see what you can create.

The smug wanna-be positivity MindBodyGreen-lite-esque-ness of that makes me want to crawl inside my skin and pop my eyes out from the inside.

What moron writes that?

Er, this one. 

mirror

Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash

My words stare at me: the image of myself I don’t want to see.

Worse than silly, worse than naive, worse than tone-deaf, worse than irritating.

Phony. Forced. What she thinks someone (or some algorithm) wants to hear.

Let’s be clear: I have never in my life looked on the bright side. I have never seen the silver lining before the cloud. I have never thought the glass was half-full.

As a kid, I believed neither in Santa nor happiness. Not much has changed.

Though I am conscious of and grateful for the many good things in my life my default setting is not optimism.  My primary emotions are boredom, frustration, fear, and disappointment.

Before COVID-19 I worried about dying without having accomplished anything. Now, after 27 days of my own company, unrelieved by the mental-health saving drudgery of work and other people, that meaningless death feels inevitable — and  my own fault.

The inescapable fear is that if I were a person who could take my own vapid advice (“If you aren’t already studying something, check out online learning resources”) maybe I would have something to show for 40 years on earth. But I’m not and, it seems, I don’t.

No doubt some people are using quarantine to repaint their cupboards, learn Danish or perfect their eclair recipe. Whoever and wherever you are, I salute you.

eclair

Photo by Xenia Bogarova on Unsplash

Meanwhile, I’ve purged zero items from my wardrobe. I’ve read zero books. I’ve written zero letters. I’ve had sex zero times. I’ve made zero playlists.

What have I been doing?

  • Checking the Johns Hopkins coronavirus map.
  • Reading the Spanish lockdown rules the way hungry people check the fridge: hoping something new will have appeared since the last time.
  • Checking my bank account, hoping something will have appeared since last time.
  • Crying.
  • Dropping thing, having meltdowns then crying.
  • Being cold.
  • Having nightmares.
  • Watching Father Ted.
  • Trying, unsuccessfully, to remember what having freedom, or a libido, felt like.
  • Running up and down my driveway.
  • Being angry.

There is so much to be angry about. I’m angry at myself, at global capitalism, at politicians, at the old ladies in the grocery store who travel in packs, at the weather, at my inability to concentrate, at my helplessness, at my writing skills, at my ex-boss, at the banks, at timing, at circumstances, at the whole stinking croaking aching joyless goddamn mess.

Whenever, if ever, we get out of it, I’d like very much to see my friends, go to the beach, go to a gig, hug someone without worrying one of us will be mortally sick as a result.

Until then, I’m hanging on by my fingernails, not using this as an opportunity for self-improvement. My sincerest apologies for suggesting otherwise.