Relief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  During my absence from school, Sally did a splendid PR job, elaborating on the symptoms she could mention in great detail in order to allay suspicion. And for a while our system worked well. But this could not be a long-term solution. All in all, I was beginning to miss at least six weeks a year, and even though I looked far from healthy, the head began to suspect me of malingering. Finally I came clean, and she responded perfectly, with one of those leaps of sympathy that reminded us of how humane she could be when she was not trying to control every detail of our lives. “I am so relieved,” she explained. “I can quite understand why you didn’t tell me. Of course I can. But this is something physical, something that we can work with. Far more worrying is a vague neurosis that produces psychosomatic symptoms that nobody can ever get to the bottom of!” I was an asset to the school, she said, and if I had to take time off for unavoidable illness, so be it. It was worth it—for the time being. And so I settled down at Dulwich. It was not what I had wanted to do with my life, but I had a secure job and friends. Sally and I had our own little coterie of the livelier and less conventional members of staff; we had a couple of holidays together in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. And I also had my North London life. I was uneasy about my inability to rise above the institutional idiocy of the school, and I was disturbed that I seemed to be wishing my life away. I spent the whole week longing for Friday, the weekend dreading Monday morning, and the whole term pining for the holidays. I knew that this was all wrong, and yet for the first time in my life I felt safe and ordinary. Nothing much happened to me during these years. I was no longer being carted off to hospital; I had no scandalously public failures; I was beginning to be like everybody else at last. And I have no doubt that, even though it was dull, this was a valuable period. It gave me some time out. I could rest and, as I thought, heal. As for prayer, God, holiness, all that seemed to have happened to somebody else. I sat through school prayers every morning in a daze of bored abstraction, incredulous that these ideas had once been so important to me. “How on earth did you stick it out in the convent?” my colleagues would ask me in astonishment. “You don’t seem religious at all!” A few members of staff were churchgoers, but they were in a minority. Many of the children I taught had never heard of basic Christian concepts. One day, my class of eighteen-year-olds seemed to be making very heavy weather of John Donne’s poem “Good Friday. 1613.

• From Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry (2017)

  Chapter 11: The Expanding Life I began this book by declaring that the things you’ve been doing to try to control your anxiety are actually what maintain your anxiety. It follows that when you stop trying to control your anxiety, it will no longer be maintained. What exactly does that imply? Without maintenance—regular monkey feedings—the anxiety cycle breaks down. When, after setting off anxiety alarms, it repeatedly gets no confirmation of the threat it had perceived, the monkey learns that the situation is something that you can handle. The less reactive you are to the alarms of the monkey, the less active the monkey is. When you stop feeding the monkey, you will eventually experience less anxiety and worry. For those of us who have suffered all our lives with the ambient background of monkey chatter and an IV drip of fear, the promise of less anxiety is almost too far-fetched to imagine. What would life be like without the ambient background of anxiety? Well, for one thing, you’ll be thinking in a whole new way. An Expansive Mind-set The monkey mind-set is a formidable structure, one we’ve all spent years constructing and reinforcing. Is it possible to overwrite it with something new? Most of us have tried endless variations of positive thinking and affirmations, and we’ve learned through experience that changing one’s mind isn’t comparable to changing clothes or changing oil. Learning a new way of thinking is like learning a new language. We need to use it. We need to experience living with it. This is especially true when there are real worries in your life, actual primordial threats like Samantha had. Telling herself that she was not responsible for her son’s safety just wasn’t believable until Samantha began to stop checking up on him and began checking in with herself. The first few times that Samantha chose not to check on her son were agony for her. When her son got angry with her for setting limits on borrowing money, that was even more painful. But Samantha continued her practice, tolerating the discomfort it caused her, and praising herself for taking care of herself. She joined Al-Anon, where she met others with similar situations. It was easier to see the limits of personal responsibility in others’ lives than in her own. She got lots of support for taking responsibility for herself rather than for her son and his illness. After a few months of trying on these new ideas,

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  But now that he was stuck in here and branded a “nutter” (his term), how would anybody ever find out? A woman in a cerise knitted dress, her shoulder blades sticking painfully through the thin material, her graying hair pulled neatly from her face, walked uncertainly toward us. “Who am I?” she asked, bending down so that her lost, worried eyes looked directly into mine. “I don’t know who I am.” “You’re Mrs. Sims, dear,” my companion explained patiently, with the air of one who had done this many times before. “Got that? Mrs. Sims.” “Oh!” she cried in relief. “I’m Mrs. Sims!” she informed me happily, before wandering unsteadily to another part of the room. “Karen.” A nurse stood at my elbow and picked up my bag. “Would you come this way, please?” “Off to register now, I expect?” my new friend said cheerily. “See you later, sweetheart!” he called after me as I hurried after the nurse, passing Mrs. Saunders, who was still creeping down the corridor. I rounded the corner and there, standing as close to the door of the ward as possible and looking fastidiously alarmed, was Jenifer Hart. “My dear!” She hurried forward and took my bag from the nurse. “What are you thinking of? You can’t possibly stay here— it’s absolutely ludicrous!” I had never been so glad to see anyone in my life. “Do you mean—?” I asked, scarcely daring to hope for so swift a reprieve. Jenifer had already pushed open the door, nodded grimly to the nurse, and was striding resolutely out. “Come on!” she called back to me impatiently, and I followed her down a flight of stairs, through the cavernous entrance hall, and out into the fresh air. I took a deep, luxuriant sniff, reminding myself of Jacob greedily snuffing up the incense at Blackfriars. “What an extraordinary thing to have done!” Jenifer exclaimed. “I telephoned the hospital to ask when they were going to let you out and they told me that you had come here!” “Dr. Piet—” I began as we hurried across the car park toward the Harts’ Morris Minor. The late autumn leaves looked more golden than I had ever seen them, and the air smelled fragrant after the thick, heavy despair in the ward. I felt a thrill of pure exhilaration. Suddenly everything seemed possible. The battered, dusty car looked a chariot fit for the gods. “Yes, I’ve spoken to him.” Jenifer flung my case onto the backseat. “He told me that you didn’t feel able to come back to us and that you had wanted to stay in the convent. My dear! I’ve never heard of such an insane scheme!

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Yet despite my depression and my fear for the future, I could not quite succumb to the prevailing despair. The worst had happened, but that meant that I no longer had anything much to lose, and increasingly I found that quite liberating. I had recently moved from my Highgate flat into the house of a college acquaintance in West Finchley. Her husband, Barrie, had died, almost overnight, of viral pneumonia, at the age of twenty-six. Susan had been six weeks pregnant at the time of his death and decided that she did not want to live alone. Her tragedy put my own woes into perspective, and Susan was also a marvelous support to me. Together we looked forward to the baby, and when her daughter was born later that summer, I helped to look after her, changing nappies and even getting up to do the night feed. Susan’s Jewish family generously welcomed me into their midst. Neither Susan nor her parents were believers, but they did have family dinners on Fridays, and I was introduced to chopped liver and challah. On the baby’s naming day, I attended my first synagogue service. Sitting in the women’s gallery, watching the men below transformed by their white prayer shawls, and listening to the strange chant, I was aware that this was quite different from any religion that I had experienced. People talked throughout the service, taking apparently little heed of the long Hebrew readings and prayers. But there was a warmth in the room that was moving and intriguing: the men embraced one another and came over specially to talk to us women, admiring the baby and congratulating Susan’s and Barrie’s parents with tears in their eyes. I did not think about it much at the time, but that service planted a seed: there were other ways of being religious than I had been accustomed to. Not everybody felt that it was unworthy to feel emotional and to show your feelings.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I explained about Dr. Piet, the hospitalization, the therapy, and the drugs. Dr. Wolfe covered his eyes with his hand, shook his head, and looked up again. “Do you mean to tell me,” he asked, with devastating quiet, “that you were treated by psychiatrists for over three years—men and women who were all fully qualified doctors—that you presented these symptoms, and that none of them, not one, in all that time suggested that you have an EEG?” “No, they didn’t.” I was beginning to be invaded by an enormous astonishment, a confusion of feelings that included anger but also a relief so great that I was close to tears. Dr. Wolfe uttered that explosive sound that novelists used to transcribe as “Pshaw!” “It’s not even as though temporal lobe epilepsy were an obscure condition,” he snapped. “It’s the most common of all the focal epilepsies, and very well documented. And as I say, you are almost a textbook case!” He trailed off. Then his face cleared, while he wrote out a prescription for the drug that, he hoped, would eliminate the demons that had haunted me so long. As I got up to go, he looked at me sternly. “I don’t think you need waste any more of your time with these psychiatrists.” He made the word sound like an obscenity. “No amount of talking about your problems will make the smallest impression on your condition, and I’m very sorry indeed that you have had to wait for so long before getting adequate medical help. By the way,” he added, as I reached the door, “it’s interesting that you were once a nun. People with temporal lobe epilepsy are often religious!” I walked down Mortimer Street in a daze. For many people, I am sure, a diagnosis of epilepsy must be unwelcome news, but for me it was an occasion of pure happiness. As I looked at the grimy buildings, the diseased London pigeons flapping untidily round the gables, the littered streets, and the overflowing dustbins, this urban detritus seemed a vision of beauty. For the first time in years, I felt that I could trust my perceptions. I knew now that my mind was neither broken nor irretrievably flawed. I was not mad, and need not expect to end my days in a locked ward. The world had been given back to me, and perhaps for the first time ever, I felt that I could take charge of my life.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  There was also the problem of my health. I was now much better. The jamais vu of a temporal lobe attack was almost entirely a thing of the past, but I occasionally still suffered from petit mal. Anticonvulsant drugs do not work automatically. Nobody fully understands how they prevent seizures, and as the various epilepsies are all so different, it is sometimes hard to find exactly the right pill and the correct dosage for each patient. It can be a matter of trial and error, and at first, in my case it was often error. It was some years before my doctor brought me into hospital and, by carefully monitoring the dosage, found some truly effective medication. I had been advised to conceal my condition from the authorities. My doctors warned me that even though we lived in an enlightened age, the condition still carried a stigma, and that epileptics often found it difficult to gain employment. As I had been appointed to the post before my epilepsy had been diagnosed, I did not have to lie directly, but I just kept quiet about my disease. I was beginning to learn that virtually the only people who reacted to my problem in a balanced way were those with a medical training or those who had some firsthand experience of epilepsy.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  As I left the school grounds to wait for the bus that had been the bane of my life during the last six years, I felt as though I were beginning a new journey. Other people seemed to progress much more smoothly through life, I reflected wryly, as the bus finally crested the hill and roared toward me. They went through college, chose a career and a partner without all this drama. But that didn’t seem to happen to me. I kept getting derailed, ejected from one job, one lifestyle after another. Doors kept slamming in my face. But had I really wanted to be ordinary; had I really wanted what T. S. Eliot had called “the usual reign”? I forced myself to remember all the times I had been bored and frustrated by the school, despite the regular salary. I couldn’t have it both ways. And now, here I was again, heading into the unknown, and yet I felt in some strange way as though I were back on track. The bus was taking me away from my nice safe job, but it seemed to be going in the right direction. 7. Infirm Glory This could not be happening. I stared incredulously at the gentleman sitting opposite me and asked him to repeat his question. The room was noisy, after all, and I might have misheard. We were in the BBC studios in Glasgow, having dinner before going on to make a live television program. But this was a dinner party with a difference. There must have been about a hundred guests, most of whom would make up the studio audience, and apparently they were all prostitutes, pimps, strippers, drag artists, porn dealers, and other members of Glasgow’s vice ring. There were also a number of bathing beauties and beauty queens. As one of the principal discussants, I was seated at the top table. A few seats to my right was Linda Lovelace, the notorious star of Deep Throat, now in her feminist phase, slightly overweight and clad in a tent dress and sneakers, earnestly explaining to one of the transvestites that her little boy was going into first grade that fall. To my left was Oliver Reed, who was downing malt whiskey as though it were lemonade, and already looked the worse for wear.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  I probed. Jane seemed so much at ease with the world and so bracingly positive that it was hard to imagine her style cramped by a disapproving church. “Oh heavens, yes!” she breathed. “I used to love the liturgy at school. Last Christmas, Mark and I were in Paris and went to midnight Mass in Notre Dame. You can imagine . . . Mark couldn’t believe that I had been able to give all that up. ‘You’re a heroine,’ he said. Though I can’t say I believe in much of it anymore, frankly.” I wondered how much of a Catholic I really was. No one would ever have admitted to doubts in the convent, and it was somehow liberating to have Jane do it for me. “But that’s enough about me!” Jane got up and reached for her books. “I’m going to get the college nurse to have a look at you—I know, I know, she really is perfectly awful, but I promised Mr. Jones. And it is sensible, you must admit, even if it is all due to stress. Mr. Jones was right. That really was a very long faint.” Before she left, Jane looked around the room. A typically modern box: shiny cork flooring, matching orange curtains and bedspread, desk and dressing table combined. “You ought to try to put your own stamp on this,” she said appraisingly. “It looks anonymous. Have some of your own things around. Whoops!” She laughed. “You probably haven’t got any things. Well, you’d better acquire some. You’re not a nun now. No more holy poverty for you. What about a record player? You like music and you won the Violet Vaughan Morgan last year. You must have some of that prize money stashed away in the bank. Go on, treat yourself.” “Yes,” I replied thoughtfully. “Perhaps I will.” The college nurse was brisk and matter-of-fact. Yes, the fainting almost certainly was due to stress. I had had a confusing time and it was bound to take its toll. But worse things happened at sea. Mustn’t give in or feel sorry for yourself. Get back into the swing of things. Put your best foot forward. I listened to this string of clichés with mounting irritation. It was easy to be brisk and bracing about other people’s difficulties. I was quite aware that leaving a convent must rank very low on the scale of human suffering. Certainly, a bad divorce or bereavement must be even more painful, but after all, it was not a competition. “Do make an appointment with your GP, however,” the nurse concluded. “Always wise to get these things checked out, especially if it’s happened before.” I promised that I would. It did seem a sensible precaution, and I was grateful for the concern that was so different from the icy response of my superiors. News of the faint traveled fast.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  Quite simply, I wanted help, and I didn’t feel that I was getting it. That was probably what lay behind this unconsciously performed gesture. As I lay in bed that morning, amidst the confusion and the fear—what might I do next in this amnesiac state?—I was also aware of a definite sense of relief. I was sorry to have caused all this unnecessary bother, but on the other hand I was so weary and needy. I had spent years now fighting with demons, and the struggle had pushed me to an extreme. I felt exhausted, and it was good to have people looking after me, instead of telling me briskly that I was perfectly well and getting along just fine. I knew that this could only be a temporary respite, but it was not altogether unpleasant to give up the struggle for a while. And something in me had been calmed. Instead of the familiar turmoil within, there was a new stillness. I had tried my best, and to no avail. I had expressed my fear and despair, and I could do no more. I had come to the end, had given up hope, and there was a certain peace in that. Dr. Piet, who came to visit that afternoon, seemed to take it all rather personally. He had challenged me to surprise him, and I had taken him at his word. I was, he told me, clearly angry with him— and that, in his view, was a step forward. Even in my becalmed state, I felt faintly annoyed that he had placed himself so squarely in the center of my personal drama. He seemed to believe that I had done all this just to grab his attention—whereas, in reality, he was by no means as crucial to me as he seemed to imagine. He had decided that the things that truly distressed me were peripheral, and had thus become a rather marginal figure in my emotional life. If a doctor had failed to respond in this way to Rebecca, I would have been furious. But you get angry only with people who are important to you in a way that Dr. Piet was not. For months— indeed, for years now—I had felt increasingly insubstantial. As Tennyson put it, I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts. I had existed for so long in this twilight state that nothing seemed quite real any longer, and therefore nothing seemed to matter very much. I could also see that Dr. Piet was no longer quite so dismissive of my amnesia, however. “It would have been much easier, Karen, if you had made an extra appointment and told me that you were feeling this depressed,” he said, with a certain exasperation. “I’m your doctor and I should know if you are feeling suicidal.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And so I settled down at Dulwich. It was not what I had wanted to do with my life, but I had a secure job and friends. Sally and I had our own little coterie of the livelier and less conventional members of staff; we had a couple of holidays together in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. And I also had my North London life. I was uneasy about my inability to rise above the institutional idiocy of the school, and I was disturbed that I seemed to be wishing my life away. I spent the whole week longing for Friday, the weekend dreading Monday morning, and the whole term pining for the holidays. I knew that this was all wrong, and yet for the first time in my life I felt safe and ordinary. Nothing much happened to me during these years. I was no longer being carted off to hospital; I had no scandalously public failures; I was beginning to be like everybody else at last. And I have no doubt that, even though it was dull, this was a valuable period. It gave me some time out. I could rest and, as I thought, heal. As for prayer, God, holiness, all that seemed to have happened to somebody else. I sat through school prayers every morning in a daze of bored abstraction, incredulous that these ideas had once been so important to me. “How on earth did you stick it out in the convent?” my colleagues would ask me in astonishment. “You don’t seem religious at all!” A few members of staff were churchgoers, but they were in a minority. Many of the children I taught had never heard of basic Christian concepts. One day, my class of eighteen-year-olds seemed to be making very heavy weather of John Donne’s poem “Good Friday. 1613. Riding Westward.” Eventually, to my astonishment, one of them cried in bewilderment: “Miss Armstrong, what exactly did happen on Good Friday?” I used to look with pity at the young teacher who was the sole member of the religious department and taught only a tiny number of students at the advanced level. What a dead-end subject!

• From Wild (2012)

  It was early but hot already as I walked the road to the place where the PCT crossed it. I felt rested and strong, braced for the day. I spent the morning weaving my way through dry creek beds and bone-hard gullies, pausing to sip water as seldom as I could. By midmorning I was walking across a miles-wide escarpment, a high dry field of weeds and wildflowers that offered barely a scrap of shade. The few trees I passed were dead, killed in the fire years before, their trunks scorched white or charred black, their branches broken and burnt into daggers. Their stark beauty bore down on me with a silent anguished force as I passed them by. The blue sky was everywhere above me, the sun bright and unrelenting, scorching me even through my hat and the sunscreen I rubbed into my sweaty face and arms. I could see for miles—snowy Lassen Peak nearby to the south and the higher and snowier Mount Shasta rising far to the north. The sight of Mount Shasta filled me with relief. I was going there. I would walk past it and beyond it, all the way to the Columbia River. Now that I’d escaped the snow, it seemed nothing could take me off course. An image of myself hiking with ease and alacrity through the rest of the miles formed in my mind, though the shimmering heat soon eradicated it, reminding me that I knew better. If I made it to the Oregon-Washington border, I knew it would only be with all the hardships that moving at foot speed beneath a monster of a pack entailed.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  My deep and wild friend Keegan had called me one afternoon and, in the midst of this hurt, gave me some sister-girl-witchy wisdom: “Go put on a long and flowy skirt with no underwear, and go find somewhere in nature to sit your coochie on the earth. Let the earth hold the ache for you. Just cry and let it all out.” I had stopped mid-sob at the suggestion. The advice was unexpected and profound as an actual act, something I could do with myself and not just a thought to obsess over. And later that day, I swung my skirt off my ass in a swirl and lowered my pum pum onto the sweet, green grass in the park by my house. I felt soothed and understood by the depth and weight of the earth, that nobody’s words or my mental pondering could provide my heart. I was going through a heartache existing on the energetic and physical level, and getting to feel the breeze on my pussy reminded me of a part of me that was essential and limitless. I really did feel a relief and release as I melted into all the layers of earth beneath me. This experience taught me to ask nature to hold and ground me in my immensity, and I have brought that to my work as an organizing artist. Because it is so intense being a human, descended from legacies of trauma and triumph and all kinds of things that we carry within us as Black folks (and all folks), invisible yet influential on a soul level. So much of our healing will include sweetening on, rubbing on, and laying open in the expanses of nature and letting it wrap our bodies in remembering and pampering. The ancestors in our bodies, known and unknown, need these rituals of healing and softness, as do we. In the wilderness of ancient, marrow-deep trauma, I’m figuring it out. And despite any of the delusions of oppression, I’m allowed to luxuriate, for me and all of those in my blood. I have learned to rely on nature, desire and creative inspiration to be a compass and a place of solace for my heart in the persistent struggle for justice and transformation that I’m committed to. In this lifetime, I was born a warrior, healer, and sweetener, and nature was my first mentor on how to be erotic, wild, free, generative, intelligent, rhythmic, sexual, sensual, and shameless. When I create and work in the community, in the presence and meditation of nature’s wildness, it becomes a practice of sweetness I offer myself within the beautiful struggle.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  This included helping Nanny to cook lunch for the conscripts, who returned home hot, scratched, stung, and dirty—with no hope, of course, of a hot bath, since that too was regarded as a ludicrous extravagance. In the afternoon, everybody was expected to bathe from the beach at the foot of the cliff, but nobody was permitted to utter the word “cold” in case we put Jacob off. Tight lipped, with muscles clenched, we strode into the icy water, calling strangled cries of encouragement to Jacob, who showed good sense in his reluctance to join us. Sometimes he would agree to sit on an inflatable raft, which Herbert dutifully towed up and down, wading at thigh level through the freezing blue sea, his hair blowing patriarchally in the breeze. “How are you getting on?” I asked once as I swam briskly past. “I am unaware that I have legs,” he replied calmly, adjusting his spectacles. After we had dressed, each of us was required to fill one of the backpacks that we had brought down from the house with pebbles from the beach (few of us were ecologically minded in the early seventies) in order to replenish the gravel on the terrace, which was constantly being blown away by the high winds. We used to struggle up the cliffs bowed under the weight of our burdens, looking for all the world like the vainglorious who, to expiate their sin of pride, had to toil around Dante’s Mount Purgatory bent double under massive stones. But this remote literary echo was the only reference to religion for me that Easter. For the first time in my life, I took no part in the rituals of Holy Week: the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Maundy Thursday, the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday, and the solemn Mass of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. The strange thing was that I did not feel at all odd. I experienced no nostalgia and no guilt during my first wholly secular Easter. In fact, I felt a good deal better. The beauty of my surroundings and the general goodwill of the Harts and their guests were healing me in a way that religion had never done. In my first years with the Harts, I used to make the effort to hear Mass every Sunday at the Catholic Church in Mevagissey, which meant getting up extremely early and walking five miles over the cliffs. It had been a pleasant walk, even though I’d had to brave a field full of bullocks and sometimes tore my clothes on barbed-wire fences. The service itself, however, was less rewarding, the words of the Mass soullessly intoned by a priest who seemed bored and irritated with his congregation of holidaymakers, who were patently longing to get back to the beach as quickly as possible.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  And then there were the problems of institutional life. It brought it all back: the way rules became absolute and could not be adapted to particular cases. I was sharing a room with a pretty, bulimic girl from Switzerland. Our beds were made up so that our heads were only inches away from a huge old-fashioned radiator, which gave off a thick, suffocating heat, smelling strongly of paint. Each night I turned the bedclothes around, so that my feet were beside the radiator and my head near the door. And each night a nurse would shake me awake and put me firmly back in the original position. Each morning I woke with a headache. Although I was supposed to be in hospital for a rest, I was yanked out of bed each morning at six, hustled down the corridor, and weighed with the other anorexic girls—and then told to go back to sleep. It was no use protesting; you were simply humored by the ward staff and rarely saw your doctors, who disappeared behind a phalanx of nurses and registrars. Both times, because I was so heavily drugged, it took me days to work out what to do. I would pretend to swallow the pills that the nurses gave me, spit them out, and then wait until my brain gradually cleared. When I had regained the necessary lucidity, I slipped out of the ward and ran down the corridors to my doctor’s office. Both times, fortunately, she was there and was good enough to see me at once. “I can’t stay here,” I told her. “No, Karen,” she agreed, adding, the second time around, “Hospitals are not for intelligent people.” After that I never went back again. Each time, the color, vibrancy, and sheer energy of the outside world greeted me like a gift. Food tasted better, the air smelled sweeter, and ordinary little privacies seemed the greatest of privileges. I would wake early each day, filled with anticipation. True, nothing had really changed. I would probably suffer from these anxiety attacks all my life, but at least I wasn’t in a psychiatric ward. And as my doctor had reminded me, I had talents. I was intelligent—more intelligent, perhaps, than the nurses who had seemed omnipotent in the hospital. Maybe this was not the kind of intelligence that was of interest to the University of Oxford, but it was a potentially powerful tool, a weapon that would help me to fight my way out of this apparent impasse.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  “You’re Mrs. Sims, dear,” my companion explained patiently, with the air of one who had done this many times before. “Got that? Mrs. Sims.” “Oh!” she cried in relief. “I’m Mrs. Sims!” she informed me happily, before wandering unsteadily to another part of the room. “Karen.” A nurse stood at my elbow and picked up my bag. “Would you come this way, please?” “Off to register now, I expect?” my new friend said cheerily. “See you later, sweetheart!” he called after me as I hurried after the nurse, passing Mrs. Saunders, who was still creeping down the corridor. I rounded the corner and there, standing as close to the door of the ward as possible and looking fastidiously alarmed, was Jenifer Hart. “My dear!” She hurried forward and took my bag from the nurse. “What are you thinking of? You can’t possibly stay here— it’s absolutely ludicrous!” I had never been so glad to see anyone in my life. “Do you mean—?” I asked, scarcely daring to hope for so swift a reprieve. Jenifer had already pushed open the door, nodded grimly to the nurse, and was striding resolutely out. “Come on!” she called back to me impatiently, and I followed her down a flight of stairs, through the cavernous entrance hall, and out into the fresh air. I took a deep, luxuriant sniff, reminding myself of Jacob greedily snuffing up the incense at Blackfriars. “What an extraordinary thing to have done!” Jenifer exclaimed. “I telephoned the hospital to ask when they were going to let you out and they told me that you had come here!” “Dr. Piet—” I began as we hurried across the car park toward the Harts’ Morris Minor. The late autumn leaves looked more golden than I had ever seen them, and the air smelled fragrant after the thick, heavy despair in the ward. I felt a thrill of pure exhilaration. Suddenly everything seemed possible. The battered, dusty car looked a chariot fit for the gods. “Yes, I’ve spoken to him.” Jenifer flung my case onto the backseat. “He told me that you didn’t feel able to come back to us and that you had wanted to stay in the convent. My dear! I’ve never heard of such an insane scheme! You must be mad!” “Yes.” I smiled to myself. “I sometimes think I must be.” “Here.” Jenifer scrabbled in the glove compartment and pulled out an already opened packet of after-dinner chocolate mints, threw them into my lap, and turned the ignition key. “These were left over from the guest night we had in college yesterday. There are quite a lot left. I thought they might cheer you up.”

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  School teaching is an extremely exhausting job: it is like doing a one-woman show, in which you are onstage for about seven hours every day. By the end of term, we all looked at death’s door. At coffee time we no longer laughed and chattered, and the head had no need to complain about the noise. We all sat around silently, staring into space like zombies. Sometimes—horror of horrors—we actually forgot to record our purchases in the Biscuit Book. My particular difficulty was that my drugs were debilitating, and this increased my natural weariness. Fatigue is one of the things that trigger my seizures, as does sleep deprivation. So it all became a vicious cycle. The more tired I was, the less resistance I had and the more flu bugs I caught from the children; the more seizures I had, the more exhausted I became. During my absence from school, Sally did a splendid PR job, elaborating on the symptoms she could mention in great detail in order to allay suspicion. And for a while our system worked well. But this could not be a long-term solution. All in all, I was beginning to miss at least six weeks a year, and even though I looked far from healthy, the head began to suspect me of malingering. Finally I came clean, and she responded perfectly, with one of those leaps of sympathy that reminded us of how humane she could be when she was not trying to control every detail of our lives. “I am so relieved,” she explained. “I can quite understand why you didn’t tell me. Of course I can. But this is something physical, something that we can work with. Far more worrying is a vague neurosis that produces psychosomatic symptoms that nobody can ever get to the bottom of!” I was an asset to the school, she said, and if I had to take time off for unavoidable illness, so be it. It was worth it—for the time being. And so I settled down at Dulwich. It was not what I had wanted to do with my life, but I had a secure job and friends. Sally and I had our own little coterie of the livelier and less conventional members of staff; we had a couple of holidays together in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. And I also had my North London life. I was uneasy about my inability to rise above the institutional idiocy of the school, and I was disturbed that I seemed to be wishing my life away.

• From The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)

  In the crazed excesses of such theologians as Tertullian, Saint Jerome, or Luther, and the lamentable neuroses of some of the women saints, Christianity appeared as unhealthy, unkind, and unnatural in its rejection of women and sexuality. As I finished the book, I felt profoundly relieved to have shaken off the toils of religion once and for all. In the spring of 1985, John asked me if I would like to do another series with Joel: this time on the Crusades. Channel 4 had been so pleased with The First Christian that they were going to give us a proper commission this time. “No more cutting corners, no more silly schedules, darling,” John promised. “Proper, serious filming!” I was thrilled. I remembered what wonderful fun it had been last time and could hardly wait for the project to begin. Joel was also delighted. This time we would be a team right from the start, we promised each other. And with a decent budget, we could do wonders. At first all went well. I flung myself into the research and quickly became fascinated by the topic. Joel and I spent many happy hours planning the series and considering possible locations. We toured France, Spain, and southern Italy; we explored the Crusader castles of Israel; and my publishers commissioned a book to come out with the series, to be entitled Holy War. It was soon clear that it was a rich subject. I discovered that the Crusades had been crucial to the development of Europe and made a marked impression on the Western spirit. Even though we knew that the Crusaders had committed fearful atrocities in the name of God, we still used the word “crusading” in a positive context, talking about a crusade for justice or peace, or praising a crusading journalist who was bravely uncovering a salutary truth. The Crusades had been the first cooperative act of the new Europe as she began to recover from the Dark Ages and struggled back onto the international scene. They had helped to weld Europeans together, but at terrible cost. These were brutal wars of religion. The Crusaders had slaughtered thousands of Jews and Muslims with the cry “God wills it!” on their lips. They represented the worst possible type of religion, and confirmed me in my determination to keep as far away from it as possible. But besides studying the place of the Crusades in Western history, I also had to look at them from the point of view of their victims. The first victims were the Jews of Europe. In 1096 a group of Crusaders from Germany had decimated the Jewish communities along the Rhine Valley, giving the inhabitants the brutal choice of baptism or death.

• From Wild (2012)

  “I want to walk a bit farther, if you don’t mind,” I said, leaving my sandals near the blanket. It felt good to be alone, the wind in my hair, the sand soothing my feet. As I walked, I collected pretty rocks that I wouldn’t be able to take with me. When I’d gone so far that I couldn’t make out Jonathan in the distance, I bent and wrote Paul’s name in the sand. I’d done that so many times before. I’d done it for years—every time I visited a beach after I fell in love with Paul when I was nineteen, whether we were together or not. But as I wrote his name now, I knew I was doing it for the last time. I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore, to wonder whether in leaving him I’d made a mistake, to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him. What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I’d done something I shouldn’t have? What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was what also had got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?O “Do you want these?” I asked Jonathan when I returned to him, holding out the rocks I’d collected. He smiled, shook his head, and watched as I let them fall back onto the sand. I sat down beside him on the blanket, and he pulled things from the Safeway bag—bagels and cheese, a little plastic bear of honey, bananas and oranges, which he peeled for us. I ate them until he reached over with his finger full of honey, spread it on my lips, and kissed it off, biting me ever so gently at the end. And so began a seaside honey fantasia. Him, me, the honey with some inevitable sand mixed in. My mouth, his mouth, and all the way up the tender side of my arm to my breasts. Across the broad plain of his bare shoulders and down to his nipples and navel and along the top edge of his shorts, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore. “Wow,” I gasped because it seemed to be our word. It stood in for what I didn’t say, which was that for a guy who wasn’t much of a conversationalist, he was ass-kickingly good in bed. And I hadn’t even fucked him yet.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  So his soul took its departure, but the purgatorial agony of a day seemed like the pains of ages and the sufferer was glad to have the opportunity of returning to his body, which was still unburied, and endure his sickness for another year. Such stories are numerous and reveal the coarse theology which was current in convent and among the people. CHAPTER XV.

• From Boys & Sex (2020)

  That tortured syntax Zane used when coming out to his mom—“I’m not straight”—was actually more accurate than he initially realized. Like many “not straight” boys I met, Zane referred to himself as “gay,” even though the word felt dated to him, as constricting and antiquated as “homosexual” to a previous generation. “The way I think of ‘gay’ at my school is the white boy who takes on the hetero ideals instead of questioning or undermining them,” he said. “He presents as ‘masc’ and has an aversion to the more ‘twinky’ boys and feels more entitled than ever, with the sexuality difference ameliorated, to blend in and embody the privilege of his straight brothers. So it’s strategic and political to call myself ‘queer.’ It describes everything about me. I like the ambiguity. It feels safe.” “Queer” for Zane meant that it was all up for grabs, open to question: masculinity, sexuality, monogamy, virginity. “I’ve been trying to move away from that narrative that as a gay man, ‘losing my virginity’ has to mean penetrative anal sex,” Zane said, though, even so, that was how he ultimately defined it for himself. The spring of his freshman year, he met a student on Tinder from a nearby college whom he described as “the stereotypical ‘femme’ boy who loved Lady Gaga, which is what a baby gay like me thought ‘gay’ was.” They traded messages for about a week—an eternity for gay men in the swipe app era—then progressed to text and Snapchat. Once Zane was reasonably sure the guy wasn’t an axe murderer, he invited him to his dorm for, depending on how things went, a get-to-know-you date or a hookup. They had a glass of wine, chatted for a while, then the guy suggested that, although he preferred to “bottom” in anal sex, he could “top” if Zane wanted, so that his first time would be with someone who cared about his well-being. After some further discussion, Zane decided to go for it.