So many post ideas, so little actual typing. Often there will be something I intend to share here but I miss the moment and nope, it’s never going to happen. Why is that? Oh yeah… That.
There was a post about that. The neurodivergence thing. It may yet appear with additional content so I’ll stay quiet on it.
There was a post about the weird wildlife encounters I had around the time of The Very Hot Days that appeared in the middle of The Very Dry Weeks. I suspect animals were being displaced and stressed by failing water sources, as I was coming face to face with them for the first time ever. At strange times and in strange places. They all left me feeling as if a veil had grown thin and I was standing with a foot either side. The two black mink I encountered, away from water, middle of the day, busy dirt track, close up…that unsettled me for days. I’m still not entirely sure they were real.
Time Restricted Eating and what it means to fully unmask your ADHD qualities to yourself. From the inside. Unsedated by sugar and carbs, I am raw-skinned and hypersensitive to just about everything. It’s almost unbearable and indeed I’ll admit to allowing some heavy carb-loading back into my eight-ish hour eating window because - what with everything else going on at the moment - I can’t handle having the sound, the colour, the texture and the vibration of the world turned up to 11. Nor is it ideal to be incapable of actually sitting down. I’ll work it out later. You know, when that magical week appears when the planets align and life is easy.
Talking of planets: Screw you, Mercury. I have been one of those people who rolls their eyes and says,”Oh Mercury Retrograde isn’t ACTUALLY about communication and travel issues… It’s about revisiting, reassessing, remembering.” Yeah right. Since the minute that sucker turned I (and the rest of my family) have been beset with communication and travel issues. The details are irrelevant but I’ll throw in missed flights from East Africa, which meant last minute scramble to arrange elder care that is impossible to arrange at the last minute. Internet issues; 999 calls; car issues; verbal and written misunderstandings; contract stuff; lack of necessary information from teen’s new college…there’s more. How much longer? October 2nd? Does it turn again, just for a laugh? Please no.
In the middle of all this I booked myself a night away. My second in this past two years of 24hrs on call. Remember the last one? Storm Arwen and the migraine from hell thanks to an abundance of air freshener? The One Where My Car Got Wrecked (by a flying wooden sign)? The One With No Heating In My Room? This one was way better, although obvs the bar was not high.
I left early and drove down to The Gower in South Wales, with a Spotify playlist of songs I can sing along to all lined up. The peninsula is about two hours from my front door and after maybe 25 minutes getting to the motorway, you just sit there and keep driving in a straight line. When the road runs out, you’re at a beach. Beautiful, beautiful beaches. I was ready for thunder but the sun came out. I saw rainbow after rainbow. My heart sang as loud as my mouth. It was bloody brilliant.
The Queen died. Weirdly, all the other guests at my hotel had gathered for a family funeral and were already in respectful black attire before the announcement came. Either that or it was an FBI convention. Like most of us, I have mixed feelings but it was most certainly a moment in history and I will always “remember where I was when…”
The second day I was there I was just hitting my relaxed stride when I got a call to say the stand-in carer had to leave early and could I order fish’n’chips for my Dad’s supper. “Leave it with me,” I said. Sat down on a damp, sandy rock and felt the top of my head explode. Some frantic messaging and calling later and all was resolved. At this point I could run a small country. Wales, maybe.
Thankfully, the sea brought me back to myself. Through the stress, the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the weariness. The perspective it offered, the ions it gave to my body, the beauty that soothed my heart, all of it was exactly what I’d needed. I cried a lot, just because it was all “sooooo byooootiful”.
And here’s a thing:
The first evening, I got back to the hotel and quickly realised that the sun had come out and I should be outdoors, not planning a shower and a massive journalling session. I headed out to the far end of Rhossili beach where the tide was in, making it unrecognisable from the vast stretch you see most of the time. There were only a few people there, mostly surfers off in the water. The sun was bright and glittering off the waves, and I set off for some beachcombing. I found a log to sit on and just let everything go. Looking around the beach, I glanced at the 15 or so other people there and just for a second I thought they were all women. A couple; a mother and daughter; two friends, and several women on their own like me.
In that moment, when I registered everyone as a woman, my body had a powerful reaction. It really relaxed. I mean, really. For a split second I felt safer than I have felt in what is probably decades. I didn’t even know that I hadn’t been feeling safe there on that beach, because feeling unsafe is how women live. How I live. Probably how you live, right? The low key tension of being a woman out on her own, even in broad daylight in a public place - I didn’t know it was there until it was gone. Not gonna lie, it felt like heaven.
Then I realised that one of the silhouettes to my right was a young man with his partner and their little daughter. That the surfer staring out at their (probably mostly male)mates still in the water, was a man. I still felt safe, I was still loving every moment of that perfect evening light, but it wasn’t the same.
From that point, whenever I went to a beach (I visited several in the space of 30 hours), I noticed the women. I noticed just how many women of midlife and older take themselves, alone, to the water. Almost certainly for the same reasons I was there. On my second walk along Rhossili, the next day with the tide further out, there was me and two other women. Metres apart; poking around in pebbles and driftwood; staring out to the waves and the sun and just exhaling. Releasing. Coming home to themselves.
I felt such kinship to them, even as we politely ignored each other, allowing for this precious solo time. It felt good to know there is a whole cohort of women out there who are like me. The internet tells me so every day but there in the flesh and blood, sand in your hair and sea spray on your face, feeling the sweet, low humming energy of a human animal just being human, it’s different.
Since then I keep thinking about the Beach Women. I’m a Beach Woman. I have at least one friend who is 100% Beach Woman (waves at Kristen)(and Penny). I think most of us are, given the chance. I remember my dream of a shack on the shoreline, helping women step out of the waves and on to a new land. I’m not sure how the two things match up, I just know that they do.
Nothing else really interests me right now.
I’ve spent a lot of my minimal spare time this summer, being distracted by shiny things and shiny people but suddenly I don’t care for them. They’re not my people. I saw my people and I liked them. A lot.
I came home. I stepped back into the daily routine of firefighting problems and holding shit together, but I knew in my bones that something was different. I’d left a whole ton of nonsense on the beach at low tide and now it was gone. Back to Source to be recycled into something lovely.
I shaved off my hair. I cut off the length and then clippered the rest. It’s less than an inch long. 7/8ths of an inch to be precise. It felt like a devotional act. It felt profound. It felt like freedom. Still does.
Among the things I left on the beach were some fancy ideas about my creativity. What’s left is minimal, true and here. I want to write letters to the Beach Women. Build that relationship and make it strong. That’s all. Sometimes it’ll be a voice message and sometimes a letter. I don’t know what they’ll say but I hope that you’ll read/listen to them and maybe write back.
That’s all I’ve got, but it feels like a lot.
Love this so much. I can feel that exhale and relaxation through my screen, your words feel like a lovely opening and somehow permission as I start my day over here. You’re a gifted writer, my friend ❤️
I've had real communication/misunderstanding issues with people of late which have, frankly, been quite distressing. Of late, I seem to be a forest dweller with my hound who came from a forest woman (his German name is Hugo of the Oak Forest) but when I go to a beach, it's as though my self feels "Oh, right, yes, this is where I come from". Strangely, I used to have thoughts, notions in my head of being in one of a row of beach shacks set slightly above the sea, living in it, people passing my rudimentary front door, living a life, a life in times gone by, the smell of the sea and woodsmoke from the fire in the hearth perpetually in my hair and clothes. I wondered if these thoughts were origins of a story I would write. I then researched my maternal ancestry to see if I could find where the roots of my mother's dark eyes and olive-skin came from (of which I am the complete opposite). Italian perhaps, or maybe even further afield. Cornwall, it turns out. By the sea. Literally, the census states the address of my great, great single parent grandmother being 'The Beach'.