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.

Page 68 of 88 · 20 per page

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’ She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door. But before she could reach it, I called her name. I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’ ‘You are!’ She gaped at me. ‘Annie said it all along; but I never thought much about it, after that first night.’ She began to frown. ‘And so, if there never was a man, your story wasn’t like Lilian’s, at all...’ I shook my head. ‘And you were never in trouble...’ ‘Not that kind of trouble.’ ‘And all this time, you have been here, and I’ve been thinking you one thing, and...’ She looked at me, then, with a strange expression - I didn’t know if she felt angry, or sad, or bewildered, or betrayed, or what. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ But she only shook her head, and put a hand across her eyes for a second; and when she took the hand away, her gaze seemed perfectly clear, and almost amused. ‘Annie always said it,’ she said again. ‘Won’t she be pleased, now! Will you mind it, if I tell her?’ ‘No, Flo,’ I said. ‘You may tell who you like.’ Then she went, still shaking her head; and I sat, and listened to her climb the stairs and creak about in the room above my head.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Get over yourself, Helen, I hiss inwardly. ‘It’s yours?’ he says. ‘Wow.’ I tell him about the goshawk. He listens. Then his face turns serious and sad. ‘You are so lucky,’ he says. ‘I’ve always wanted to do falconry. All my life. I’ve got books and everything. But I’ve never had the time.’ There’s a pause. ‘Maybe one day.’ He hugs Tom a little closer. ‘Come on then, you,’ he says, and they walk away to the ice-cream van. White air and aching bones. Another migraine. I swallow a dose of codeine and paracetamol. My head still hurts. There’s a brumous, pewter light outside, as if someone had stuck tracing paper against the glass. I go back to bed. Must fly goshawk, I think when I wake. Must fly goshawk. But I’m finding it so hard to move that secretly I’m hoping the hawk’s weight is wrong, or the weather is. I have no excuse to stay in bed this time: both hawk and weather are fine. We drive into a strange, windless, sunny afternoon that makes everything resemble hollow metal models painted with enamel. Clouds, swags of leaves, houses. All in the same plane, like a stage-set, and riveted together. The air smells of woodsmoke. I am inexpressibly tired. I park the car on the grassy verge near the field, change Mabel’s jesses, unhood her, and she snaps into yarak in an instant. She knows where she is. And here we are. And there are the rabbits. She leaves the fist. As soon as she does the pain in my head recedes and my exhaustion fades. Her flight is getting much more stylish. I am still astonished by how fast she is. When I watch her scaly, foreshortened, hunched flight away from me towards a distant target, I swear that the world around her slows. She seems to be moving at precisely the right speed, and everything around her – rabbits running, leaves falling, a pigeon flying overhead, all these things slow down as if they’re moving through liquid.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  When they’d knocked on the door and roused me from sleep I knew I had to maintain some desperate fiction of competence. And so far I’d managed this, though there’d been a nasty moment when Mandy looked at me with concern in her eyes and I realised my own were red and raw. It’s OK, I told myself. She’ll think I’ve been crying about Dad. I pick up the hawk and stand there like someone with a present at a party and no clear idea to whom I should hand it. ‘Lie down, Jess,’ says Stuart. The black and white English pointer they’ve brought flops onto the rug and lets out a sigh. I unhood Mabel. She stands on tiptoe, the tip of her beak pressed to her spangled and silvery chest, looking down at this new phenomenon that is a dog. The dog looks at her. So do we. There is a curious silence. I mistake it for anger. For disappointment. For anything but what it is: astonishment. A look of wonder passes over Stuart’s face. ‘Well,’ he says, eventually. ‘You’ve got gold, there. I thought she’d freak out completely. She’s very well manned.’ ‘Really?’ ‘She’s so calm, Helen!’ says Mandy. It takes me a while to even half-believe them, but it helps that I manage to hood Mabel without too much fuss – and after two cups of tea and an hour in their company the world is bright again. ‘Don’t drag your feet,’ Stuart says as they leave. ‘Get her out of the house. Take her outside. Man her in the streets.’ I know he is right. It’s time for the next stage of training. Carriage is what falconers call walking with a hawk to tame it, and all my books insisted it was the key to a well-trained gos. ‘The key to her management is to carry, carry, carry,’ wrote Gilbert Blaine. It was ‘the grand secret of discipline’ to Edward Michell. Back in the seventeenth century Edward Bert had explained that when you walk with a hawk ‘her eye doth still behold change of objects’, which is why carriage works – and why you can’t tame a hawk by keeping her indoors. Such a hawk ‘will endure nothing, because shee hath not beene made acquainted with any thing’, he says. Oh, Edmund Bert, I think. I wish it was still the seventeenth century. There’d have been fewer things out there to frighten my hawk. But I knew that wasn’t true. There’d have been carts and horses and crowds and dogs and they’d have been just as frightening for a half-manned goshawk as buses and mopeds and students on bikes. The difference was that in 1615 no one would have paid me the slightest attention.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  We have to leave. This field, and the one beyond it, are not on our land. Even if I could flush that pheasant for her it would be poaching. And we’ve done enough inadvertent poaching to last a lifetime. I call her. She ignores me. So I wait. And slowly, as the minutes pass, her predatory fire cools. Now she has returned to the world I am in. She can see me again. There , she thinks. And she has a whole quail in her fist . From her sunlit perch she descends to the hand I hold out in the shade of a hedge and I feel a surge of indescribable relief. I start shivering, cold and hot all at once. The day-book that records White’s long, lost battle with Gos is not simply about his hawk. Underneath it all is history, and sexuality, and childhood, and landscape, and mastery, and medievalism, and war, and teaching and learning and love. All those things were going to be in the book he was writing about the hawk. When the hawk was lost he abandoned the attempt. But not entirely, because the book, in a different form, was still being finished, and the hawk would not be lost for ever. At the beginning of The Sword in the Stone Sir Ector’s son Kay takes the Wart out hawking. He picks up Cully the goshawk from the castle mews – an unwise thing to do, for the hawk is deep in the moult and wildly out of condition. After a half-hearted sally at a rabbit the hawk takes stand on a high branch and ignores their calls. They follow it from tree to tree, whistling and luring, but the hawk is in no mood to return. Kay flies into a temper and storms home, but the Wart stays with the hawk, because he cannot bear it to be lost. He follows it into the deep wildwood, and there he is afraid. Reading The Sword in the Stone after reading The Goshawk is a deeply curious thing. You start to confuse which forest is which. One is the tangled wildwood of Arthur’s Britain, a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men. The other is the tangled forest around Stowe. It too is a refuge for outlaws, hawks and wicked men, the place White hoped would give him the freedom to be who he was. Like the forest in Sir Orfeo , the forests of White’s imagination exist in two worlds at once, and it is into these strange, doubled woods that the lost hawk leads the Wart. In following it, the boy is drawn to his destiny, just as White had been drawn to his own by looking for Gos.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Just rabbit?’ I nod miserably. He looks at me, considering. ‘Tell you what, Helen, come out on the hill with me tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’ll be going up there to fly the tiercel. We’ll get her out into the fields, away from streets and houses. She needs space.’ ‘That would be brilliant, Stuart.’ ‘I’ll pick you up at five.’ ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’ ‘She needs to come down a bit more, Helen.’ He was offering to help, and I was unprepared for how this made me feel. I’d flown scores of hawks. I’d taught falconry to beginners. I’d written papers on it, had lectured on its venerable history. But now I bowed my head before Stuart. He knew what to do. He knew about goshawks and I did not. I felt weak with relief at not having to be an expert any more. There he was, rolling a cigarette, reassuringly calm and kind, a proper , generous friend; and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life. ‘Need to excel in order to be loved,’ White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved? White was triumphant: Gos had come a whole hundred yards on the creance, was ready to fly free: he could say truthfully now that he had trained a hawk. But something terrible was caught up in his triumph. For the first time since the hawk arrived White felt exposed. Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement. In his hawking day-book White began writing about critics and how he might ‘ avoid the kicks which frighten me’. He felt it necessary to explain that his self-satisfaction was not egotism, but ‘actually a horrible surprise at being good at anything after having been so bad at living for 30 years’. And all the authoritarian figures in his life under whom he had lived in fear coalesced in his imagination into an elderly falconer with a waxed moustache who would read his book and consider him a fool. He knew he must explain to that man that what he had written was only the book of a learner.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  There it was, White’s cottage, Merlyn’s cottage, quiet on the Ridings over the hill. It looked so ordinary; not a magical place at all. Black leaf-shadows moved on its high gables. A grey horse grazed outside. Electric wires chased fenceposts down the grassy slopes. The forest behind the house was still there. But not all of it: the dark wood where the hobbies had been had gone; now it was Silverstone racing circuit, and the chapel where White had walked with Gos was long demolished; as Chapel Corner it is just a curve on the track under which the long-dead sleep. But as I stood there in the hot sunlight there was a buzzing in my ears. It was the strangest sound, as if on that windless day I could hear the marine roar of wind in all the oaks. It was winter history. Time’s receding. Or possibly heatstroke. I wished I had brought some water. I stood for a long while and looked at the house. It was a private place. I did not want to get closer; I didn’t want to intrude on the person who lived there. But I saw that the trees had grown, that the barn was now a garage. The well would still be there. And then I heard a chipping, scraping noise, and froze. Behind a bush in the garden was a flash of white; a shirt. There was a man kneeling in the garden, bowed over the ground. Was he planting something? Weeding? Praying? I was far away. I could see his shoulders, but not his face, nor anything of him but his concentration. I shivered, because for a moment the man had been White, planting out his beloved geraniums. The feeling that White was haunting me had returned. I wondered if I should go and speak to this man. I could. I could talk to him. He wasn’t White, I knew, but there were people here who had known him still, and I could talk to them. The farmhouse was still there, and behind it the ponds where Gos had bathed and White had fished. Perhaps the same carp swam in them. I could find out more about him, make him alive again, chase down the memories here. For a moment that old desire to cross over and bring someone back flared up as bright as flame. But then I put that thought aside. I put it down, and the relief was immense, as if I had dragged a half-tonne weight from myself and cast it by the grassy road. White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be. I saluted the man, though he could not see me. It was a silly, wobbly salute, and even as I did it I felt foolish. And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water. Notes

• From Educated (2018)

  directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. The relief came when I turned inward. When I discovered, finally, that the decision could be upheld for my own sake. Because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it. It was the only way I could love him. When my father was in my life, wrestling me for control of that life, I perceived him with the eyes of a soldier, through a fog of conflict. I could not make out his tender qualities. When he was before me, towering, indignant, I could not remember how, when I was young, his laugh used to shake his gut and make his glasses shine. In his stern presence, I could never recall the pleasant way his lips used to twitch, before they were burned away, when a memory tugged tears from his eyes. I can only remember those things now, with a span of miles and years between us. But what has come between me and my father is more than time or distance. It is a change in the self. I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her. If there was a single moment when the breach between us, which had been cracking and splintering for two decades, was at last too vast to be bridged, I believe it was that winter night, when I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, while, without my knowing it, my father grasped the phone in his knotted hands and dialed my brother. Diego, the knife. What followed was very dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the bathroom. It had played out when, for reasons I don’t understand, I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place. Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  I stood for a long while and looked at the house. It was a private place. I did not want to get closer; I didn’t want to intrude on the person who lived there. But I saw that the trees had grown, that the barn was now a garage. The well would still be there. And then I heard a chipping, scraping noise, and froze. Behind a bush in the garden was a flash of white; a shirt. There was a man kneeling in the garden, bowed over the ground. Was he planting something? Weeding? Praying? I was far away. I could see his shoulders, but not his face, nor anything of him but his concentration. I shivered, because for a moment the man had been White, planting out his beloved geraniums. The feeling that White was haunting me had returned. I wondered if I should go and speak to this man. I could. I could talk to him. He wasn’t White, I knew, but there were people here who had known him still, and I could talk to them. The farmhouse was still there, and behind it the ponds where Gos had bathed and White had fished. Perhaps the same carp swam in them. I could find out more about him, make him alive again, chase down the memories here. For a moment that old desire to cross over and bring someone back flared up as bright as flame. But then I put that thought aside. I put it down, and the relief was immense, as if I had dragged a half-tonne weight from myself and cast it by the grassy road. White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be. I saluted the man, though he could not see me. It was a silly, wobbly salute, and even as I did it I felt foolish. And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water . Acknowledgements My thanks go first to those people who made this book possible, and two in particular: to my wonderful agent Jessica Woollard, for her friendship, expertise and long-standing support, and to my inspiring and extraordinary editor Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape. I’d also like to thank everyone at the Marsh Agency, and Clare Bullock, Ruth Waldram, Joe Pickering and everyone else at Jonathan Cape who worked on this book behind the scenes.

• From Educated (2018)

  night when Gene wandered in with a pack of his friends. She’d never seen him before, so she knew immediately that he wasn’t from town and must have come from the mountains surrounding the valley. Farm life had made Gene different from other young men: he was serious for his age, more physically impressive and independent-minded. There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama. In the valley, Faye tried to stop her ears against the constant gossip of a small town, whose opinions pushed in through the windows and crept under the doors. Mother often described herself as a pleaser: she said she couldn’t stop herself from speculating what people wanted her to be, and from contorting herself, compulsively, unwillingly, into whatever it was. Living in her respectable house in the center of town, crowded by four other houses, each so near anyone could peer through the windows and whisper a judgment, Faye felt trapped. I’ve often imagined the moment when Gene took Faye to the top of Buck’s Peak and she was, for the first time, unable to see the faces or hear the voices of the people in the town below. They were far away. Dwarfed by the mountain, hushed by the wind. They were engaged soon after. — MOTHER USED TO TELL a story from the time before she was married. She had been close to her brother Lynn, so she took him to meet the man she hoped would be her husband. It was summer, dusk, and Dad’s cousins were roughhousing the way they did after a harvest. Lynn arrived and, seeing a room of bowlegged ruffians shouting at each other, fists clenched, swiping at the air, thought he was witnessing a brawl straight out of a John Wayne film. He wanted to call the police. “I told him to listen,” Mother would say, tears in her eyes from laughing. She always told this story the same way, and it was such a

• From City of Night (1963)

  After a short pause, he asked me—again bluntly: “Do you always go for money—only?” “Yes,” I lied. How impossibly difficult it seemed to explain to him that it was the mere proffering of the sexmoney that mattered; the unreciprocated sex: the manifestations that I was really Wanted. “Oh?” he asked, as if something in the way I had reacted so quickly has made him doubt it, perhaps, too—certainly—the fact that I hadnt asked him for money, that he had given it. “Somehow, listening to you with those two in the bar—and having seen you with others—I got the impression that the money they gave you wasnt the important thing—that you were, maybe, compulsively playing a game.” His words annoyed me. Yet I can stop them by merely walking out on him. Nothing keeps me here, I keep insisting to myself. Still, I remain lying on the bed. There is a new relief in the knowledge that he has overheard me in the bar with those other two—beyond the adopted pose—when I had acknowledged my own terror. Knowing that, he had nevertheless sought me out. At the same time, my senses seem completely alive, tingling, after the resurrective sleep. What could be false, momentary sobriety—which, if false, could hammer me into drunkenness with just one more drink—makes me feel reckless. It could be, too, the noises outside, the recurrent anticipation—beyond the fears—of rejoining the people sweeping along the streets madly. It could be that like a child before a luscious dessert, Im savoring the anticipation before the actual taste—trying to stretch the time before I’ll be in the midst of the steadily growing, thunderous frenzy.... Perhaps this man, Jeremy, senses my doubts as to why I remain in this room with him. In an almost amused tone, he said: “Did you think that if I knew—since you didnt know that I had overheard you in that bar—that if I knew what you were really like—or might be like—what you were trying to tell those two about yourself—that I’d lose interest in you?” “It’s happened before,” I said. “You saw it happen then. People want you for what you ‘appear’ to be—unconcerned, toughened. You learn that immediately when you hang around the streets.” “Thats where people looking for streetpeople naturally go,” he said. “And maybe it’s true that for them you become more masculine if you appear ‘tough’—or even dumb. Or maybe—as someone once told me—they feel that, although theyve paid you, theyre ‘better’—smarter. And it could be also that theyre searching for their seeming opposite: the seemingly insensitive street-youngmen—as they themselves might want to be in order not to get hurt....” And I remembered the man in Los Angeles who had almost begged me to rob him. “Im sure, in part, it’s all of these—but not exclusively,” Jeremy went on. “It sounds too much like a defense.... It could be, rather,” he continued slowly, “that theyre resigned to finding nothing but a momentary sex experience.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  The more we come to know him, the more we come to understand ourselves. In the end, his vision and ours are intimately connected. His path and ours are one. Chapter 3THE VOICEI heard the voice of God. It came to me one quiet afternoon in a small town in South Dakota. I was sitting in my favorite chair reading the Bible when the voice came to me. It was a voice with which I was familiar because I had heard it some years before when I met a messenger from God on a rooftop. You have just read the first vision quest of Jesus. That’s what it said. That’s all it said. And those few words changed my life. I had come to North and South Dakota to work for a leadership development ministry with Native American communities in the Episcopal Church. I was a seminary graduate, but had chosen not to be ordained because I did not feel I was spiritually mature enough to become a priest. I had some deep questions to resolve in my heart about being a Native person and a Christian. Being in the Dakotas was a way to work on those questions. My job brought me into close contact with people on many reservations. It gave me a chance to listen and learn from both Christian and Traditional Lakota men and women. As I drove from community to community out across the wide prairie beneath the open sky, I had lots of time to think about what I was hearing and seeing. In the years to come I would often say that seminary was where I did my Western-style graduate studies, but the Dakotas are where I did my Native American graduate training. I had a lot to learn. Before I settled in the Dakotas, I had traveled throughout the United States and Canada, experiencing life in a wide variety of Native nations. I was the national director for Native American ministries in the Episcopal Church and that role opened a door for me to meet with and learn from indigenous people from every corner of North America and beyond. From Maine to Arizona, Alaska to Alabama, Minnesota to Texas, I crisscrossed the continent engaging with different urban and rural communities. I not only had an opportunity to spend time on reservations and in villages, but I also attended international gatherings with indigenous people from Central and South America, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Hawaii, Samoa, and Fiji. The breadth of my experience with indigenous people was extensive, but I went to the Dakotas in search of depth. I was following my vision of the crow, searching for a way to live in balance between Native tradition and Christian theology. To do so, I felt that I needed to go deeper. I needed to find the elusive point of fusion between the two. I thought I might find it where the spirit of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse still watched over the land.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  Sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost, and sometimes we take it upon ourselves to burn them to ashes. In the evenings, by the light of the Aladdin lamp, in the soft white glow of its fluorescing mantle, White is doing his old life to death. He is committing the murder in a novel he’d started writing at Stowe, and now it is nearly finished. The book is called You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down, and it is the story of the decline and fall of a public-school headmaster called Dr Prisonface. Prisonface is terrified of life; he is a chameleon, a mirror, existing only through his reflection in the eyes of others. He loses his job at the school. He woos and is rejected by a boyish dark-haired barmaid, flees in terror from the advances of her mother. He flies with drunken aviators descended from Romantic poets. He tries to teach Hollywood moguls how to be Gentlemen and is humiliated when they mow down grouse with tommy guns. The book is a vicious satire on the educational system and the cult of the English Gentleman, but it is also a psychological exorcism, a caustic narrative written to burn away his former life. White called Prisonface to life in order that he should suffer, be punished, mocked, reduced to rags and die. From headmaster to private tutor, from farmworker to beggar, he fails at everything he attempts. Everyone he meets on the way lectures him on why he is useless and unreal, and the book’s narrator, too, puts the boot in at every opportunity. Towards the end of the book, limping and homeless, Prisonface meets a mysterious man on a country road. The man has saturnine, strangely carved features, and walks in darkness, a black dog by his side. He is a supernaturally suave figure: Prisonface is drawn to him, drawn to his power, recognising in it ‘the wisdom of certainty, the happiness of reality, the mastership of right’. The stranger had once been a schoolmaster too, at a place called Golden Gates, but left because he could not bear the people teaching there. Now he is married, lives in a cottage in the woods and is content. The man is White’s vision of his future self: a White freed, a White triumphant, a man who lectures Prisonface, over several pages, on the failings of the school system: ‘To anybody who has spent two months training a goshawk, knowing that it will be fatal even to give the creature even a cross look,’ the man says, ‘it seems very extraordinary that the complex psychology of a human being can be taught with a stick.’ Sitting by the lamp, White finishes writing the speech that is perhaps the least cruel, the most humane in the whole book. He is speaking to his past self with pity and compassion.

• From Educated (2018)

  decision had already been made, and what he was doing now was just the long work of justifying it. It was October when I got the letter. It came in the form of a PDF attached to an email from Tyler and Stefanie. The message explained that the letter had been drafted carefully, thoughtfully, and that a copy would be sent to my parents. When I saw that, I knew what it meant. It meant Tyler was ready to denounce me, to say my father’s words, that I was possessed, dangerous. The letter was a kind of voucher, a pass that would admit him back into the family. I couldn’t get myself to open the attachment; some instinct had seized my fingers. I remembered Tyler as he’d been when I was young, the quiet older brother reading his books while I lay under his desk, staring at his socks and breathing in his music. I wasn’t sure I could bear it, to hear those words in his voice. I clicked the mouse, the attachment opened. I was so far removed from myself that I read the entire letter without understanding it: Our parents are held down by chains of abuse, manipulation, and control....They see change as dangerous and will exile anyone who asks for it. This is a perverted idea of family loyalty....They claim faith, but this is not what the gospel teaches. Keep safe. We love you. From Tyler’s wife, Stefanie, I would learn the story of this letter, how in the days after my father had threatened disownment, Tyler had gone to bed every night saying aloud to himself, over and over, “What am I supposed to do? She’s my sister.” When I heard this story, I made the only good decision I had made for months: I enrolled in the university counseling service. I was assigned to a sprightly middle-aged woman with tight curls and sharp eyes, who rarely spoke in our sessions, preferring to let me talk it out, which I did, week after week, month after month. The counseling did nothing at first— I can’t think of a single session I would describe as “helpful”—but their collective power over time was undeniable. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now, but there was something nourishing in setting aside that time each week, in the act of admitting that I needed something I could not provide for myself. Tyler sent the letter to my parents. That winter I spent many hours on

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  But when he had gone - and when Mrs Dendy, too, had closed the door on us and wheezed and coughed her way downstairs behind him - I lowered myself into one of the armchairs and closed my eyes, and felt myself ache with pleasure and relief simply to be alone at last with someone who was more to me than a stranger. I heard Kitty step across the luggage, and when I opened my eyes she was at my side and had raised a hand to tug at a lock of hair which had come loose from my plait and was falling over my brow. Her touch made me stiffen again: I was still not used to the easy caresses, the hand-holdings and cheek-strokings, of our friendship, and every one of them made me flinch slightly, and colour faintly, with desire and confusion. She smiled, then bent to tug at the straps of the basket at her feet; and after a moment of idling in the armchair, watching her busy herself with dresses and books and bonnets, I rose to help her. It took us an hour to unpack. My own few poor frocks and shoes and underclothes took up little enough space, and were stowed away in a moment; but Kitty, of course, had not only her everyday dresses and boots to unpack and brush and straighten, but also her suits and toppers. When she started on these, I moved to take them from her. I said, ‘You must let me take charge of your costumes now, you know. Look at these collars! They all need whitening. Look at these stockings! We must keep a drawer for the ones that have been cleaned, and another for the ones that need mending. We must keep these links in a box or they will be lost ...’ She stepped aside, and let me fuss over the studs and gloves and shirt-fronts, and for a minute or two I worked in silence, quite absorbed. I looked up at last to find her watching me; and when I caught her eye she winked and blushed at once. ‘You cannot know,’ she said then, ‘how horribly smug I feel. Every second-rate serio longs to have a dresser, Nan. Every hopeful, tired little actress who ever set foot upon a provincial stage aches to play the London halls - to have two nice rooms, instead of one, miserable one - to have a carriage to take her to the show at night, and drive her home, afterwards, while other, poorer, artistes must take the tram.’ She was standing beneath the slope of the ceiling, her face in shadow and her eyes dark and large. ‘And now, suddenly, I have all these things, that I have dreamed of having for so long! Do you know how that must feel, Nan, to be given your heart’s desire, like that?’ I did.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  Pull out the mind map you created at the beginning of this book. Would your map be the same if you mapped your thoughts today? Have you noticed the thoughts you are thinking? Have you started to interrupt them by remembering you have a choice? Are your spirals shorter and fewer? With each positive choice made—choosing stillness instead of distraction, for example, or community instead of isolation, or surrender instead of anxiety—we are training ourselves to use the mind of Christ that we have. The more we make these positive choices, the more reflexive that approach becomes. We said that at first such a shift is possible through consciously, deliberately interrupting our spirals. But as we practice more, that shift becomes probable and then predictable and then utterly instinctive to us. Eventually we get to the place where we don’t even realize we’re interrupting our negative thinking in order to choose mind-of-Christ thinking, because the impulse has become so ingrained. I liken it to cutting a road in the woods. At first the path is marked by flattened leaves on foot-worn soil. But over time the demand for that path will cause someone to come in and lay gravel on top of the dirt and then pour cement on top of that gravel and then put in mile-marker signs and streetlights at regular intervals along the way. Eventually the path is so clear cut, it would be senseless to take another route. That path is just the path you always take. That path keeps in step with God’s Spirit. That path is the way of constant surrender. That path is the way of abundant humility. That path is the way of full reliance on Jesus, with every step, for every moment. Training ourselves to take the path in our thinking is crucial because when the pressure is on and we’re stressed out and hurting, how we practice is how we will play. I recently spoke to a field full of girls at Baylor University. I still am awestruck at what went down. I preached about Paul’s declaration in Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Why are we living tied down and defined by our sin when the Bible tells us we are free and there is no condemnation in Jesus? Why don’t we live as if we’re free? I challenged the girls to just shout out what they were struggling with and bring into light the dark hell they had been dealing with. To my surprise, one by one they started standing up. In the middle of their campus, they stood and shouted out one struggle after another.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  Suma was open to making some changes, particularly with her caffeine intake, adding in breakfast, and spending some extra time with meal prepping. Before long, she started to see that she felt less jittery, especially in the morning, when she changed to black tea (coffee to green tea was too big a jump at first) with a high-protein breakfast to help with her blood sugar. She added in more colors of the rainbow, shooting for three a day (such as carrots, strawberries, and spinach), and she started to feel more energized as a result. She also started to have snacks on hand, such as a yogurt or a nut pack, so that she wouldn’t get dizzy from getting too hungry. In a matter of weeks, she saw how food changed her mood—and the differences were so noticeable that she felt it was worth the effort to keep eating differently. AS YOU CONSIDER THIS, I INVITE YOU TO TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR OWN PERSONAL DIET. LET’S START WITH A TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR FOOD LOG. WHAT DID YOU EAT IN THE LAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS? GIVEN THIS DATA, WHAT DO YOU MAKE OF HOW YOU’RE EATING ON A DAY-TO-DAY BASIS? WOULD YOU SAY THAT YOUR NUTRITION MAY BE HELPING, HURTING, OR A BIT OF BOTH WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR BRAIN HEALTH? WHAT ARE SOME POTENTIAL CHANGES YOU’D LIKE TO MAKE TO SEE WHETHER THEY SHIFT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF ANXIETY? THIS MIGHT INCLUDE CUTTING BACK ON CAFFEINE, LIMITING ALCOHOL, ADDING IN MORE FISH OR LEAFY GREENS, OR TRYING TO EAT A HIGH-PROTEIN BREAKFAST MORE OFTEN. LIST WHAT YOU’RE OPEN TO TRYING OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. COME BACK TWO WEEKS LATER. DID YOU NOTICE ANY DIFFERENCES IN YOUR MOOD AS YOU MADE THESE CHANGES WITH YOUR NUTRITION? DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF SLEEP It’s not just about what you eat, though. Given that we spend about 33 percent of our lives asleep, and considering that sleep problems impact more than 50 percent of people living with generalized anxiety disorder, it’s worth discussing sleep hygiene and the benefits of getting enough rest. 151,152 Insomnia and anxiety is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: it could be that when we’re anxious we have trouble falling and staying asleep, and when we’re lacking sleep we feel even more anxious. It’s the worst kind of biofeedback loop. One of the best things you can do if you struggle with insomnia is to practice accepting it. I know—completely counterintuitive. But what often happens is that we get ourselves so worked up that we’re not sleeping that in the process, we get ourselves even more agitated, making it harder to fall asleep. If we practice accepting that we’re struggling to sleep—and if we don’t get threatened by it—that can often help us relax enough so that we can drift off. When we’re upset about our inability to sleep, it’s often tied to a fear that we’ll be in pain the next day.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He wasn’t White, I knew, but there were people here who had known him still, and I could talk to them. The farmhouse was still there, and behind it the ponds where Gos had bathed and White had fished. Perhaps the same carp swam in them. I could find out more about him, make him alive again, chase down the memories here. For a moment that old desire to cross over and bring someone back flared up as bright as flame. But then I put that thought aside. I put it down, and the relief was immense, as if I had dragged a half-tonne weight from myself and cast it by the grassy road. White is gone. The hawk has flown. Respect the living, honour the dead. Leave them be. I saluted the man, though he could not see me. It was a silly, wobbly salute, and even as I did it I felt foolish. And then I turned and walked away. I left the man who was not a ghost, and I walked south. Over the bright horizon the sky swam like water. Notes Place of publication London unless otherwise stated. 1: Patience — Travelling Sands – John Evelyn, Memoirs of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, Henry Colburn, 1827, vol. 2, p. 433. — There are divers Sorts – Richard Blome, Hawking or Faulconry, The Cresset Press, 1929 (originally published as part of The Gentlemen’s Recreation, 1686), pp. 28–9. 3: Small worlds — No matter how tame and loveable – Frank Illingworth, Falcons and Falconry, Blandford Press Ltd, p. 76. — She is noble in her nature – Gilbert Blaine, Falconry, Philip Allan, 1936, pp. 229–30. — Among the cultured peoples – ibid, p. 11. — Do not house your graceless austringers – Gace de la Bigne, quoted in John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, p. 221. — One cannot feel for a goshawk – Gilbert Blaine, Falconry, Philip Allan, 1936, p. 182. — Bloodthirsty . . . Vile – Major Charles Hawkins Fisher, Reminiscences of a Falconer, John Nimmo, 1901, p. 17. — When I first saw him – T. H. White, The Goshawk, Jonathan Cape, 1951, p. 11 (hereafter The Goshawk). — The Goshawk is the story – Back cover text, T. H. White, The Goshawk, Penguin Classics, 1979. — For those with an interest – Anonymous, review of The Goshawk, The Falconer, Vol. II, No. 5, 1952, p. 30. — would be about the efforts – The Goshawk, p. 27. 4: Mr White — 1) Necessity of excelling – T. H. White, unpublished manuscript notebook ‘ETC’, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. — Bennet is the name . . . like a wagtail in the streets – Letter from T. H. White to L. Potts, 18 January 1936, in T. H. White, Letters to a Friend: The Correspondence between T. H. White and L. J. Potts, ed. François Gallix, Alan Sutton, 1984, pp.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He was offering to help, and I was unprepared for how this made me feel. I’d flown scores of hawks. I’d taught falconry to beginners. I’d written papers on it, had lectured on its venerable history. But now I bowed my head before Stuart. He knew what to do. He knew about goshawks and I did not. I felt weak with relief at not having to be an expert any more. There he was, rolling a cigarette, reassuringly calm and kind, a proper, generous friend; and it was there, standing on the edge of a village playing field, that I gratefully stepped into novicehood again, as if I had never seen a hawk in my life. ‘Need to excel in order to be loved,’ White had written in his dream diary. But there is an unspoken coda to that sentence. What happens if you excel at something and discover you are still unloved? White was triumphant: Gos had come a whole hundred yards on the creance, was ready to fly free: he could say truthfully now that he had trained a hawk. But something terrible was caught up in his triumph. For the first time since the hawk arrived White felt exposed. Being a novice is safe. When you are learning how to do something, you do not have to worry about whether or not you are good at it. But when you have done something, have learned how to do it, you are not safe any more. Being an expert opens you up to judgement. In his hawking day-book White began writing about critics and how he might ‘avoid the kicks which frighten me’. He felt it necessary to explain that his self-satisfaction was not egotism, but ‘actually a horrible surprise at being good at anything after having been so bad at living for 30 years’. And all the authoritarian figures in his life under whom he had lived in fear coalesced in his imagination into an elderly falconer with a waxed moustache who would read his book and consider him a fool. He knew he must explain to that man that what he had written was only the book of a learner. The words in his day-book read very like a prayer. May I hope that this book will receive the oblivion of those austringers on the one hand, and of those critics on the other, who realise that indifference and a supposition of non-existence sometimes are the most killing weapons. May I hope that some will realise that I am only a man. He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  And it was this realization, I think, that finally allowed me to share more of myself with the people I was working with, to break out of the larger isolation that I had carried with me to Chicago. I was tentative at first, afraid that my prior life would be too foreign for South Side sensibilities; that I might somehow disturb people’s expectations of me. Instead, as people listened to my stories of Toot or Lolo or my mother and father, of flying kites in Djakarta or going to school dances at Punahou, they would nod their heads or shrug or laugh, wondering how someone with my background had ended up, as Mona put it, so “country-fied,” or, most puzzling to them, why anyone would willingly choose to spend a winter in Chicago when he could be sunning himself on Waikiki Beach. Then they’d offer a story to match or confound mine, a knot to bind our experiences together—a lost father, an adolescent brush with crime, a wandering heart, a moment of simple grace. As time passed, I found that these stories, taken together, had helped me bind my world together, that they gave me the sense of place and purpose I’d been looking for. Marty was right: There was always a community there if you dug deep enough. He was wrong, though, in characterizing the work. There was poetry as well—a luminous world always present beneath the surface, a world that people might offer up as a gift to me, if I only remembered to ask. Not to say that everything I learned from the leaders cheered my heart. If they often revealed a strength of spirit that I hadn’t imagined, they also forced me to acknowledge the unspoken forces that retarded our efforts, secrets that we kept from each other as well as from ourselves. That’s how it was with Ruby, for example. After our aborted meeting with the police commander, I had worried that she might back away from organizing. Instead, she had thrown herself headlong into the project, working hard to build a network of neighbors that could be regularly delivered to our events, coming up with ideas for registering voters or working with school parents. She was what every organizer dreamed about—someone with untapped talent, smart, steady, excited by the idea of a public life, eager to learn. And I liked her son, Kyle Jr. He had just turned fourteen, and in all of his awkwardness—one moment frisky and bumping into me while we shot baskets together in the neighborhood park, the next instant bored and sullen—I could see all the contours of my own youthful struggles. Sometimes Ruby would question me about him, exasperated with a mediocre report card or a cut on his chin, baffled by a young man’s unruly mind.

• From Generation Anxiety: A Millennial and Gen Z Guide to Staying Afloat in an Uncertain World (2023)

  When someone is struggling to identify their values, it can be helpful to start with a person’s history and how they identify intersectionally. For Jacob, we looked at how his life as a straight, cisgender man, raised in Louisiana in a religious and conservative family, was informing his perspective. We explored how he held some traditionalist ideas of masculinity and religiosity that were making him feel guilty for not being “even more committed” to the relationship than he already had been. While he had given it his all and was miserable in the process, he felt that as an adult man, he “should” continue in his unhappy relationship from a place of honor and respect for his partner—even if the love was absent. We were also able to note how his history in the marines played into his values of loyalty and dedication, no matter what. As we explored this, we were able to identify what Jacob’s “should” values were versus his actual values. Our “should” values are often societal in nature. We hold our parents’, our teachers’, and even strangers’ opinions on what we’re “supposed” to value as the standard to strive for in life. Jacob felt like he “should” value commitment, honor, and dedication—particularly in his relationship—and that is why he trudged along for years in a lifeless partnership for the facade of public and familial approval. But eventually we were able to sit with what Jacob actually valued. He noted that vulnerability, reciprocity, and respect in a relationship were crucial for him —and they were missing at present. It was upon this realization that many of his true values were absent, including that of personal happiness, that he found the courage to ask his fiancée to call off the wedding with him. The relief he felt in taking this step was tremendous; at the same time, he acknowledged that he felt awful that his ex-fiancée was, understandably, upset. Even though it was a major shift in his life, he felt a sense of alignment—which had been absent for years— because he clarified his values for the first time. Now, you may have noticed your own feelings come up as you read what happened for Jacob. You may have felt like Jacob “gave up” on his relationship or that he’s a selfish asshole, as he put his happiness before his commitment to her. This may be an indication that commitment is a top value for you. We all have different values that matter more to us, and that’s okay. The important thing is that we are honest with one another about where we stand while still being respectful of the values that others hold. When we’re dishonest (or lying to ourselves) about what we value, this is when we can get into some dark territory.