Failures of feeling

Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is one of the most powerful books I have read in some time and I love the insights she comes to about her own journey to find her real birth mother (who gave her away as a baby) and use what she calls ‘the dark gift’ of her stepmother’s pathological behaviour to fuel her art and emotional recovery.   I have shared parts of it on my blog before but the following paragraphs spoke to me today.  Jeanette felt herself to be ‘an outsider’ due to being gay and not having that accepted by her stepmother.  She also suffered from feeling unwanted and therefore struggled to belong but the truth was her birth mother wanted her but could not in the 60s keep her without support.  Jeanette is honest about how these deep wounds led to her to block and fear feelings and I do relate to her story.  I am sharing these paragraphs for other readers who struggled in similar ways.  We are wanted by life and we do belong to ourselves and to those who see our worth despite wounds we suffer.

When I stood up to speak about Dad (at his funeral), I said, “The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement, but failures of feeling.”

I was thinking about that as I ate my dinner quietly in my room.

There is a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling.  It isn’t.

When we are objective we are subjective too.  When we are neutral we are involved.  When we say ‘I think’ we don’t leave our emotions outside the door.  To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

My own failures of feeling were a consequence of closing down feeling where it had become too painful.  I remember watching Toy Story 3 with my god children, and crying when the abandoned bear turned playroom tyrant sums up his survivor philosophy : ‘No owner, no heartbreak.’

But I wanted to be claimed.

I had styled myself as the Lone Ranger not Lassie.  What I had to understand is that you can be a loner and want to be claimed. We’re back to the complexity of life that isn’t this thing or that – the boring  old binary oppositions – it’s both held in balance  So simple to write.  So hard to do/be.

And the people I hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasnt poor judgement, it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

(I didn’t blame my stepmother)… Mrs W gave me what she could too – it was a dark gift but not a useless one.