This blog was just supposed to be a testing out of sorts. I have no pretensions for it – at least I don’t intend to have any pretensions for it. It was meant to be a vantage point over which I take stock of how I got to be the way I am. I have descended further and further from myself these past few years, into the throes of fear, doubt, self-hate. Its roots go deep, long before Cornwall, but it was in Cornwall that I was forced to grapple with it, when there was no easy way out anymore. That’s usually what drives us to ask the big questions, after all: why am I like this? Why do I hurt so much? It’s amazing how long we can go on like this, burying our deepest pain in behaviours, people, substances. I don’t want to live like this any longer, but it’s hard to let go.

I don’t have much to write, so here’s a poem about being brave:

Lionheart

So do you have the courage

To stop countenancing the child?

Step by step now: slow, trusting movements

As you quake in your heart

And beg to be saved:

No one is here to save you

Because the only monster

Is that great serpent of rage inside.

So what are you going to do?

No running off to the ends of the earth

Or burying your face in gold or people:

Just silence.

And the endless dark inside you.

So what do you say?

Shall we explore this inky vastness?

Shall we dare to ask, how are you doing in there?

To do so is to have the heart of a lion,

Ready for this long journey

At the mouth of the cave.