The Gift of Giving Up

Surrender as a powerful act of creation

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Metaphorically, I drove into a wall. But I got out of the wreck and walked away. This is dedicated to those who didn’t make it.

It was January. I was in despair, as was my common condition in January. January blues are pretty normal, but in those days, my Januaries had an extra dark hue. My brother had died in January twenty years earlier, a couple of weeks before his 18th birthday and a few days before my 15th. If I was going to have a breakdown, it was going to be in January.

January, from Janus, the God who looks in both directions. But I only ever looked in one direction. Back to a time when he was alive, and there was one other human being on the planet who treated me like I mattered. The future, I couldn’t look at. What was there? I could only see blackness, and it scared me.

This particular January was something else. Still reeling from escaping my abusive marriage, I’d now spent almost two full years locked in a legal battle with my ex, trying to get divorced. Not only was he contesting the divorce, he was trying to prove me mentally unstable (you think?); an “unfit mother”. The aim was to strip me of the last thing that made it worth getting out of bed for: our three boys. Shared custody wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to cut me out. Not because he was keen to raise them personally: he had never so much as changed a nappy. I can’t claim to know his motives, but I can guess them. Firstly, despite becoming a millionaire, he resented paying £1,000 a month towards their maintenance. But also, he knew that losing the kids would destroy me. And as he’d made clear more than once, he wanted revenge.

The legal battle was exhausting. Whereas I was on legal aid, he had a top firm of lawyers. Sworn affidavits flew back and forth. I spent hours in the evenings once the kids were in bed, poring through densely-worded documents, writing accounts of his behaviour and counter statements to his misrepresentations of mine. “She would drink every day and leave empty bottles lying about the house,” he said, of the wine-with-meal habit we shared and the carrier bag of bottles outside the backdoor, which I’d take to Recycling.

In one of the most shocking moves, he utilised the authority of his sister’s husband, a deputy headmaster, to imply I had Munchausen syndrome by proxy. My mild-mannered former in-law lodged a sworn statement that, in his professional opinion, my children’s accidental injuries — including the time my middle child fell out of a window — were not accidents at all but deliberate. He alleged I had cut, bruised, and physically assaulted my children. These horrific allegations will exist in official records for eternity.

It was my word against his, and he was Mr Respectable, as charming and plausible as they come, an IT expert and entrepreneur. Me, what was I? Thanks to his wholesale destruction of my career, I was nothing but a single mum and part-time office temp who had, yes, in her late teens, spent a year in therapy. All this was used against me.

The last twelve months had been the most trying year of my life. More had gone on than the legal battle. For a start, I’d spent the year on high alert. My ex’s death threat seemed likely to be realised at any moment. Particularly that part of it where he’d said he could afford to have me killed and make it look like an accident. Twice, my car had been tampered with (according to the mechanic who came to fix it), one time on the morning when I was supposed to be at court to take out an injunction against him. I’d been repeatedly tailed by men I didn’t know.

When I talked about these experiences, in a highly stressed state, it looked like paranoia. Friends distanced themselves. I knew how it looked. I was (despite appearances) still sane. I also knew that what looked like paranoia didn’t help me in the case to prove my mental stability and keep my children. But people were genuinely following me.

It felt like pressure was being piled on to make me break. (The truth was even more weird, but that’s another story). When I eventually gathered enough evidence to get the police to believe me, they installed a panic alarm. My cousin put extra security on the back door of my flat. I slept in my clothes on the sofa in the front room, in case I needed to bolt. I wasn’t sleeping well.

On Easter weekend, someone spiked my drink and sexually assaulted me. The very same day (though I didn’t find out for three), my ex had been arrested at his home when the kids were there, sent to prison and denied bail. Meanwhile, I’d accidentally fallen in love with one of my students (an adult, and only four years my junior, not as bad as it sounds). And then, when it was far too late for my poor tattered heart, he’d told me he was about to get married. He married in May, and I tried, oh, I really did my best, to keep my shit together.

Friend, I did not keep my shit together. I stopped eating completely. For six months, the only things I consumed were red wine, black coffee and cigarettes. I marvelled at the ability of the human body to keep me alive against my clear instructions.

The only pleasure I had was stepping on the scales. It was a slow, polite suicide, traumatising no one. It wasn’t an eating disorder. I’d just lost the will to live. The aim was to get so thin I’d no longer exist.

On the outside, I was a supermodel. On the inside, I was a tar pit. The irony didn’t escape me. Never looked so good. Never felt so bad. On the High Street, a man fell to his knees in front of me, hands in prayer, and shuffled round to watch me pass in my hotpants. Which I wore because I could. Trying to find an upside. Men thought they wanted me. I knew they only wanted my tiny, thin surface, and not the roiling mess of tar inside.

And now it was a new year. It was about to be my birthday. And I couldn’t find a single adult human who cared about me enough to spend it with me.

Nothing I had dreamed of being or achieving by my age was in place. I counted up the things I didn’t have, and they were legion. A writing career? Nope. A decent income? Nope. Respect, recognition? Nope. A loving partner? Nope. A single friend to spend my birthday with?

The sum of that calculation was zero. I was a failure. I was exhausted. And I was done.

Two years before, my moment calculating the drop at a hotel window had jolted me out of my marriage. But now? There was nothing to leave except life itself.

For several days, I pressed myself towards suicide. The kids were staying with him. Important not to cause them extra trauma. After all my fight, he had won. I had run out of strength. I couldn’t bear the pain anymore.

And here I am, all these years later, happy. And the obvious question is, How did you get from that place to here?

Firstly, someone stopped me from going through with it. That person was my brother. Even though he was dead. Killing myself felt like dishonouring him. What Pete would have given for one more day, I thought, however shitty. I could almost hear what he thought about my plans. Like he was looming over me, telling me off, in that big-brotherly way he had. In the end, my love for him made it impossible.

But what to do then? I couldn’t keep living with that level of anguish. The question became, therefore, what was causing me anguish? All those things I didn’t have. The career, the lover, the income, the recognition, the friends. The only way to stop the pain was to give up wanting what I didn’t have. Surrender completely to the life I actually had.

So I counted that up.

• My children (even though I was struggling to look after them on my own). Lots of people, including my own sister at the time, desperately wanted kids and didn’t have them.

• My ability to write (even though I didn’t yet have a single book to my name). Many people want to write and don’t have what it takes. I’d at least had poems and a story published, had been shortlisted and commended, had won a writer’s grant from the Arts Council, and was employed by a university to teach my skills to others. Was that not, minor as it was, some recognition?

• A roof over my head (even though the flat was too small for the four of us). It was warm and dry in a part of a town I loved. It even had a garden! I reminded myself there are people in India living on rubbish dumps.

I decided to make this enough. Three kids, writing, and a home.

And then, I realised there was more. Enough money not to go hungry. Fresh drinking water at the turn of a tap. Hot water, too. Hell, a computer! An internet connection! A mobile phone! When you start looking at your life from a different perspective, the basics of modern Western living are miraculous luxuries. So yes, and I know it’s a terrible cliche, but I started counting my blessings.

Oh, and I got a cat. I’d avoided a cat because of the trope that sad single women get a cat and play the cello. Getting a cat was my symbol of total surrender. Single. And given up looking.

I didn’t know then how the universe works. I do now: the basics, anyway. Then, I had no idea that wanting (especially desperate wanting) has this huge ‘pushing away’ energy which will keep you without those things you are desperate for (just like a person who is desperate for you to be their lover is a massive turn-off). Yes, I’d learnt during my science education that everything is energy — that all seemingly solid things are just complex arrangements of electrical particles, all vibrating at different frequencies. But I’d never understood what that has to do with day-to-day living. How the vibrational nature of the universe responds to our vibration.

With my surrender, I dropped all the want, all the pushing away. Instead of focusing on the gap between my desires and reality (which had amplified that gap into a chasm) I was focused, with appreciation, on all the things I had. This shift made all the difference.

A few days later, a postcard dropped through my door from someone who had booked me for a gig the previous August. We spent time together in February. By May, he was a lover. His friends became my friends, too. Within a couple of years, without anything changing but love, I had a dream house, a longed-for daughter, and the very first book with my name on the spine.

‘Giving up’ is a gift, when what we give up is despair. When what we give up is yearning and complaining, and the envy of others’ success. It’s not easy, I know: I’m as much of a try-hard as anyone. Always trying to bang what I want into place with hard work; often getting frustrated.

But time and again, I am forced to remember that surrender is key. Dozens of experiences of letting go, followed swiftly by manifestation, and still, I forget to trust my desires have been logged. Old habits, I suppose. But no need to keep shouting for the waiter; your order is cooking. Your trust makes space for the things that you’ve asked for to come. You just have to look at what makes up your life and say, Yes. This, and this, and this, and this, are wonderful. And this is enough.

Friend, you are wonderful. You are always enough. Our lives are extraordinary. Let’s not give them up. But let’s surrender.

Envoi

A huge shoutout of gratitude to you if you are a paid subscriber. You keep me going. You help me keep faith that what I am doing has value and that I will find my footing in this salary-free existence. This January, paid subscriptions to How to Evolve contributed 70% of my mortgage payment! Bless you. May your toast be golden and the rainfall bring you flowers.

If you can’t afford a subscription but you love poetry, you can show appreciation by buying one of my books or leaving a review. The book most relevant to this post is Material, which contains all the poems documenting this part of my life, including the ‘Driving Without Lights’ sequence.

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No pity or sorries required; it was exactly what I needed to evolve.