Home, and a Digression into Other Things

by thimbleshelf

A month or so ago my landlord told me he was increasing the rent on my flat by almost 20%. By this he meant that he had been approached by previous tenants who were willing to pay the increased rent and he wanted to leave the rent-collection agency he was with to avoid commission, so although he pretended to give me the option to stay, it transpired, on further probing, that this was not possible. Even if I could afford the massive hike.

So I started flat-hunting. Which was depressing. When I moved to Brockley back in 2009 it was an unknown pocket of pleasant greenery and booming gun/knife crime. It wasn’t on the tube map, no-one had ever heard of it, and its situation between the less-than-salubrious areas of Deptford, New Cross, Lewisham, and Catford, kept the rents comparatively low for a zone 2 location less than 10 minutes’ train ride from London Bridge.

In 2010 the ginger line opened and suddenly Brockley began to catch the eyes of young people wanting to start families, and property developers. The gentrification of south-east London boomed in Brockley, with new cafes, bars, and children’s clothing shops cropping up apace. It was on the map, it was better-connected (although it was always well-served by buses from both the Brockley Road and Lewisham Way sides, as well as the mainline to London Bridge, the DLR at a short walk to Deptford Bridge, and the Cannon Street line from New Cross – very handy when the other mainline was down for engineering work), and the lovely Victorian houses, parks, and cemeteries, have seen an influx of more affluent professionals than were previously typical of deprived boroughs like Lewisham.

Great! It’s made it a nicer place to live in a lot of ways, and the ginger line is super-useful. Rent, though, has become completely ridiculous. I earn a reasonably good wage and it’s been nearly impossible to find anywhere I can afford to live without contemplating moving out to Croydon – although the further you go, the more transport costs you incur so it ends up becoming a false economy anyway. I have now found a nice little place in Forest Hill, but it’s a small studio (I currently live in a one-bed), it’s a zone further out, and it’s still higher rent than I’m currently paying. It’s not like it’s news to anyone that rent in London is utterly absurd and is soon going to become an untenable situation if it increases at the rate it currently is whilst wages go up by about tuppence a year. And that’s not really the point of this entry anyway so I don’t know why I’m waffling on about it so much. Context, but context with digression as always…

The point is, I have found somewhere (yay!) but as relieved and pleased as I am about not being properly Homeless, once the joy of having my offer accepted yesterday wore off it was replaced with the unsettled feeling of being, in some sense, homeless. Temporarily, yes, but still. It’s an upheaval. It’s like it suddenly sunk in that I’m moving, I’m leaving my home (not helped by the fact I didn’t have any choice in the matter). And I’m excited about being in a new place (it has a little garden! I’ve been longing for outside space for SO LONG so I’m super super super enthused about that) and I’m in many ways looking forward to exploring Forest Hill and getting to know my new ‘hood…. BUT… It’s still hard. Home, the concept and the actual place, is an important thing for me. Having a stable home makes me more stable, a tidy home makes my brain tidy, familiar surroundings put me at ease, knowing where to go for what gives me confidence. I find it profoundly uncomfortable going through change, it makes me feel insecure and unsafe and afraid. I’ll soon settle in, I know, but for the time being it’s like being in limbo – my current flat doesn’t feel like home any more because I know I’m going to be leaving it, but I won’t move into my new place until the end of the month so I don’t quite know where I am at the moment. I didn’t really prepare myself for this sensation; I had essay deadlines and my birthday and relationship crises dominating everything for a good six weeks and now all the contracts are being finalised it’s like, oh, fuck, this is actually happening.

I’ve been in my current place for nearly four years. That’s the second longest I’ve ever lived in one property in my whole life. It’s also the first place I’ve lived in since my mum upped sticks and moved to Canada; the first place that’s been my only home. You know, in that way where most people have ‘home’ – the place they go back to each day – and ‘Home’ – their parents’, that base that you know is there, the safety net, the one you can go back to if the shit hits the fan. One of the hardest things about my mum going to Canada was losing that. The idea of home. The home we made together, which was partly located in her and partly located in the dinky little house on an estate that was the first home we owned, the first place that was really ours. It made me feel incredibly alone. And then, once I’ve got over it, it made me feel strong and resourced and like I could actually cope completely on my own. No crutches. No nets. So the flat I live in now went from being home to being Home. Or rather, it was both home and Home. So losing it is kind of like losing that original home all over again as well, if that makes any sense.

The new place will be home and Home too, at some point. And it’s not even as if I especially like where I’m living now. But nonetheless, leaving it is more scary than I thought it would be.

Compounding this is the fact that my mum, who’s been on this side of the globe since April, although I haven’t seen her much as she’s had to sofa-surf her way around and spent a couple of months in Holland, is going back to Canada on the 24th. So that emotional home is going away too, a week before my physical one. When she’s away I get used to it. It starts off painful and then becomes fine. Our relationship changes to become the kind of relationship you have with someone who lives half way across the world and seven hours behind you. It’s okay. And because it’s okay, I forget that when she comes back I get used to her being her, I invest in her being here, I always think maybe she won’t go back. Then she does. And every fucking time, for a bit, it’s like the first time she went when it nearly completely destroyed me. Every time it’s like being abandoned all over again. Every time I feel like why am I not enough for you? I know that it’s better for her to be there, I know she’s happier there, I know she can’t stay here just because I’m here when she has nothing else. Yet I can’t stop becoming the child left to the babysitter, screaming and crying because she’s going out and how could she possibly want to leave me, how could she abandon and reject me like that. I know it’s not reasonable, but that doesn’t stop the feeling being there.

Let’s not get into how this hyperbolic overreaction to perceived rejection and abandonment manifests in relationships. Suffice to say, it does, and it’s a fucking train wreck. Some aspects of BPD have lovely qualities associated with them. This one absolutely does not. It is destructive and diminishing and I loathe it. Of all the aspects of my various mental illness issues that have caused me tribulation and suffering over the years, this is candidate number one. It just causes so many problems. All I want it a stable, loving relationship in which I feel secure and safe, and it’s the one thing I have never quite managed to have. I came close, with the Cunt-Thief, and ironically his dependability and the fact I felt safe with him was precisely what attracted me, but I’ve never been free of the crippling insecurity, the ludicrous and irrational overreactions to small things, my inability to translate any tiny slight into anything other than YOU DON’T LOVE ME, SEE, HERE IS PROOF. We did have a stability and lack of drama that I thought it was impossible for me to have, especially considering my mental state was very bad at the time. And that gave me hope. But then he betrayed me worse than anyone ever has, he damaged me more than I could ever imagine him capable of, so it’s difficult to reconcile those things. He didn’t know what to do when he came home and found me under the table with a kitchen knife because he’d come home an hour later than he said he would (SEE, YOU DON’T LOVE ME), but his anger and fear were always rooted in worry, in concern, and he was good at resecuring me afterwards. My doubts about his love for me were acute and episodic, not chronic, but since then, since what he did, and since the horrendous and, in terms of my ability to trust subsequent partners, more damaging breakup with The Coward, I have significantly backtracked in my ability to feel secure, to trust another’s love, to not constantly pick up every tiny thing and see it as a sign that I shouldn’t really trust it.

I had this epiphany the other day. Something that had been bothering me for years suddenly became clear and I can’t believe I didn’t put it all in place earlier. Most of my neuroses are known to me and anyone who’s read more than a couple of entries in this blog will know that I’m obsessed with self-analysis. I have a pretty good idea what my issues are and why they are, but this one thing always troubled me.

When I’m in a relationship I have this overwhelming impulse to want to practically surgically attach the other person to me. I feel an urgency to see them all the time. I feel I want their exclusive attention. A related but separate issue is a tendency to make them reliant on me so they need me and won’t leave me. But this impulse to see them all the time is the one that confused me. Because I like my space. A lot. I need it, I want it, when I’m single I have it in abundance and enjoy it, but once I’m in a relationship I find it really hard to not spend that time feeling insecure and wishing they were with me. Things I previously liked to do alone don’t look appealing unless they’re there. I couldn’t reconcile the strength of the urge with the knowledge that it’s not what I really want. The childish yearnings of my ego are at odds with what I know is actually good for me. I don’t want to give my life over completely to another person, I don’t want them to be my only focus, I don’t want to spend every minute with them, I don’t want them to do any of these things in return, either. I want to be an independent person and I hate feeling stifled but at the same time I become unable to be independent or to enjoy my independence. I’d obviously got as far as realising that this is all grounded in intense insecurity, but I was still puzzled about the importance of physically seeing each other, because of course people can make you feel secure in a bunch of ways that don’t involve staring at your face.

Then I linked it up with a more general issue that I’ve written about before here, which is the feeling that each time I see someone I have to win them over again. Like each time I see them is the first time we’ve met. That there is no basic trajectory of love and friendship underpinning our relationship; that each time we part, and the longer we’re parted for the more likely it is, they will stop loving me. If I’m not right there, they will think about all the ways I’m shit and wonder what the hell they’re doing being friends with me and I will never see them again. That when they go, especially if we don’t have the next arrangement booked in, they will never come back.

So DUH! It’s completely fucking obvious that the same thing is happening in my capital-R relationships too. If they are not with me they will fall out of love with me. Once they have gone there will be no reason for them to come back. While they’re there I can see how they feel, I can be safe in the concreteness of their presence, I can distract them from contemplating the relationship too much. It’s harder to abandon someone if you’re right there with them.

Thus although I don’t really want to spend all my time with one person, I don’t truly desire no personal space, the reason I stop enjoying that when I’m in a relationship is because I spend all that space terrified that they are going to leave. Much as it sickens me to admit it, I need regular reassurance – less as time goes on, as I get the reassurance I need and begin to trust the truth of it, but if I don’t get it I become steadily worse, worse, worse. For me, most of the time, the words ‘I love you’ expire as soon as they’re spoken. They were true in that moment perhaps but there is nothing to stop them becoming untrue in the next. I think that’s why I place such importance on physical evidence – gifts, hand-written notes, mix CDs – because they somehow anchor feelings into tangible objects. This necklace is a symbol and receptacle of love. I can relate to it as love.

I guess I just have quite a strict idea of what means love. A gift means I love you. Doing the washing up means I love you. Turning up at the arranged time means I love you. Massaging my feet means I love you. I also have strict ideas of what means not love. Things done and not done are not just things but carriers of love. Symbols of love. This point is a problem in arguments because – although I wager this is mostly wilful obtuseness – the other person usually counters with ‘all this over xxxx? All this over a tiny thing? All this because I did/didn’t do some trivial whatever?’. And it’s like no, no, all this because you don’t love me. All this because that thing you didn’t do or did do carries the message, to me, that you don’t love me, that you don’t care. An argument is almost never about what it’s ‘about’. We are not arguing about a picnic, we are arguing about what the picnic represents. We are arguing, really, about feelings. I am saying ‘I am hurt’ and you are saying ‘it’s a trivial thing, don’t be unreasonable’ and I am hearing ‘your feelings are trivial because they are about something small and I refuse to acknowledge that the something small is not small for you and that this argument is not about that anyway and I care more about being right than about your feelings and because I deem your feelings unreasonable you should cease to have them’ and, strangely enough, this does nothing to ameliorate the feelings and only makes them worse. And all that needed to be said was ‘I’m sorry it made you feel that way, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you and I didn’t mean to make you feel like that at all’. Which IS NOT THE SAME as admitting you’re wrong or at fault or taking responsibility for personally CAUSING the feeling, it’s just an acknowledgement and validation of the fact that, for whatever reason, the feeling is there, the feeling is happening, you can’t reason with the feeling by using logic or rationale, you don’t have to say sorry for doing the thing I did, you just say sorry the thing I did made you feel like that, I see and hear your feeling and I don’t need to understand it or think it’s reasonable in order to recognise that for you it is distressing and because I love you I don’t want you to be distressed. The problem is with arguments that stem from the ‘you don’t love me’ feeling is that if the other person just defends their position and tells you you’re being ridiculous it only serves as evidence that you’re right, that winning the argument is more important to them than acknowledging your pain, that standing in ‘I haven’t done anything wrong so get the fuck over it and I’m not going to dignify your feelings because I am in the right’ matters more than bringing the situation down to a calmer place because what does it fucking matter whether you’re right or not? What’s the point in ‘winning’ an argument if all it does is cause tension and disharmony and pain? It’s not even about right or wrong or winning or not winning, it’s about one person saying they’re hurt and the other person trying to find a way to help – yes, without compromising your integrity or admitting fault for things that aren’t your fault, or saying you’re wrong just to placate someone, but there are so many ways to prevent a discussion turning into an argument or turn an argument back to a discussion and none of them involve pride and right and wrong and winning. They involve compassion and acknowledgement and recognition that you don’t have to become a doormat or renounce your actions or take responsibility or blame for things you feel were correct and justified in order to validate the fact that regardless of how correct or justified or well-intended those actions were, someone felt hurt as a result. Everyone has their soft spots and insecurities. Everyone can be triggered by what seem like tiny things to the one with their finger on the trigger. It’s easy to set someone off by accident and it should be easy to apologise for an accident because you know it’s not your fault. We’re good at apologising for accidents in real life, and it’s an unwritten rule that we all know it’s not actually the fault of anyone, it’s just one of those things, but nonetheless if we bump someone’s shoulder on a crowded pavement or knock over a vase with our backpack or jump the queue because we didn’t realise there was more queue behind it,we apologise. We say we’re sorry because we realise that our actions hurt or inconvenienced other people even though we had no intention to do so and it was unavoidable.

Lessons in how to avoid certain trigger points are a whole other blog entry… but I think we can do that too, and it doesn’t mean compromising ourselves or fundamentally changing, it just means learning about people, finding out what’s likely to push them into a bad place, working out how to phrase things differently or modify the way things are done so as not to press the sensitive spots. It’s always inevitable to a certain degree of course, and relationships of all kinds are hard and painful and we hurt each other all the time. But there are ways of improving, there are things to be conscious of. You keep putting the same things in, you get the same things out. Where the same problems keep coming up, I think something has to change in order for the problem to be relieved. I guess a lot of people want things to just be easy and aren’t willing to put in the work, seeing problems, especially recurring ones, as death tolls. I think if a problem keeps arising it’s just life saying ‘the way you are approaching this is not working. You need to find a new way’. Like getting stuck in the same place on a computer game I guess. You pull the same moves, the computer responds the same way. People are not so different from computers – except for the fact that we can learn and adapt. We can find a new way.