An uncertain spring
On decisions, new phases of life and f***ing things up
Spring feels slow this year. It drizzles and rains from lead coloured skies. The temperatures hoodwink us. One day it’s warm, only to be freezing the next day, leaving everyone somehow underdressed. Occasionally, the sun breaks through and draws everyone outside. “It feels like proper spring,” someone says and laughs. True, of course, we associate spring with an uptick in weather but, in truth, it’s the changeability that makes it so. The news reminds us that nothing about this is as it should be. 2023 was warmer than all other years on record and 2024 looks set to be warmer still. The lake is already 3°C warmer than it should be, birds have sung in January, how does one live in a world that feels upended by catastrophe?
“There are many questions in life worth asking, but perhaps if we’re wise we can understand that not every question needs an answer.”
— Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions
Time, too, seems especially contracted and muddled. I cannot believe it’s already April, that three months have passed. Somehow it feels like there has been both too much and not enough happening. For a week in January, time slowed down. The week was filled with friendship and food, laughter and art. I felt centered and save but it also felt a little like a dream. One of those dreams you wake up from suddenly, unsure of what’s real and what isn’t, wondering if any of it really happened or if it was all just a product of your wild imagination. But still, it serves as an anchor in my mind after which chaos began swirling around us, condensing the weeks, landing us in April.
With the passing of time, one question becomes increasingly pressing: what am I going to do with this year? One Saturday in February, walking up and down in my local park, considering potential travel plans, I realise that I don’t want to run away. For the first time I don’t feel the need to run from my everyday life, to experience a life I enjoy, because I am already doing that. But if I don’t want to run, does the idea I’ve had of going away to research and write, make sense still?
There’s a feeling that’s been creeping up on me. A contentedness of sorts. Feeling like I have somehow, magically, realised a version of me and of my life that I always had at the back of my mind but couldn’t access. It’s difficult to explain. It’s not like I had a five-year-plan or a vision board or have actively worked towards this version of me. I have, to a degree, but a not insignificant part of what makes this moment beautiful is sheer blind luck or fate or magic, I don’t know. It is what Rebecca Solnit might describe as surrendering to the story being told and following the story line, “rather than trying to tell it yourself, your puny voice interrupting and arguing with fate, nature, the gods.”
It is frightening to think how many of my previous decisions have been motivated by a need to run away. Sometimes it happened consciously, most of the time, it didn’t. But it’s scarier still to realise that I do not want to run now. I’m not good at being happy. I am, however, good at being sad. I have collected the coping skills for it. I’ve learnt how to bear the brunt of sadness and discontent. Sadness holds a kind of certainty I find easier to deal with. Happiness or joy are fickle feelings. You know they cannot last, so it’s easier not to get too comfortable with them, to always keep them at arms length. When you’ve had a persistent dread bred into you, it’s difficult not to wait for the other shoe to drop.
So ironically, not wanting to run, makes me want to run.
“The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
To distract myself from my decision and the building tension in my chest, I head to gigs. Much easier to wait in line with strangers, to sing along to old, familiar songs and try to connect with new ones, than to think about myself. “It’s a terrible thing to share everything that you’ve got/ With the one person who matters/ And have it not really matter,” Frank sings for the first time ever on a stage. He is about a meter away from me, I can see the sweat on his brow and feel everyone around me taking in these new words. He is like a preacher on a pulpit and we’re a hundred willing disciples squashed into a tiny record shop on a Monday afternoon, all of us “covered in a gluey light” as Kae Tempest says.
If this makes it sound like a cult, then that’s because it sort of is. A cult of kindness and community, a cult where the pinnacle of connection is dancing until your feet hurt and then together shouting until you’re hoarse that “broken people can get better, if they really want to”. I never feel less alone than in a room full of Frank Turner fans who openly admit that they’ve been bruised and almost broken by life but have chosen to live.
Unexpectedly, I get a chance to listen to the entire record of new songs with about 50 others, weeks before the world gets to hear them. We watch Frank drum along in mid-air, play the piano and pick at his imaginary guitar, all while listening to songs we’ve never yet heard. Watching an artist love their art, is one of my favourite things. One of the new songs is about how the Pandemic has changed and marked us all and yet, collectively, we seem to act as though none of it ever happened. Great art, the art you feel connected to the most, expresses a feeling you’ve long felt but haven’t been able to articulate. I already can’t wait to hear this song again and one day down the road sing along to it with a room full of strangers.
Still stuck in the in-between space of not wanting and wanting to run, I book flights, knowing that time is running out and that they will only get more expensive the longer I wait. So six weeks in New Zealand it is, to write and think and walk or, as I message M after booking the flights, “worst case scenario, I’ll be on an expensive holiday”. Afterwards, I’m still not sure how to feel. Maybe, a friend suggests, I’m not as excited because, for the first time, I’m not running away. The tickets are not the answer to some unformed question, they just are. I spill my messy thoughts to another friend who argues that maybe this means that the trip will be better than any other because “you’re actively choosing to go towards something rather than running away”.
Maybe they’re right. But the overwhelm and exhaustion that came from a week of almost too much excitement, and such peak-autistic thoughts as “how do humans dress” and “do I normally laugh like this”, has made me realise something else. I don’t yet know how to behave in this phase of my life. I’m not just better at being sad, I am also better at being alone because my autistic brain has acquired the rulebook for it. Right now, a significant part of my day consists of wondering whether this is how I am meant to behave or if I am doing it all wrong and thus about to ruin it all. It is impossible to convey how much energy it takes to question and judge your every move, word or thought.
But rulebooks can be rewritten. So while my brain gathers the data on how to behave and how to make decisions in this new phase of my life, a small part of it shall be singing “You have to bear with me if I’m fucking this up/ Because the truth is I’m useless at opening up,” on repeat, hoping that the right people will bear with me.
Well, I screenshot the whole piece, because I want to keep rereading and mulling over parts of it.
Some sentences are so clear and true they hurt.
This one vibrated deep in my brain.
As always, Ulrike, beautiful writing. Your words speak to me in so many ways. They leave me with things to think about, images in my mind.