Seeking Solace in the Before And After
Lately I’ve found myself drawn to stories of people with a distinct before and after. My attention is irrevocably held by a “but then” in the telling of a life. First it was being drawn into the orbit of Madison Morrigan, a fundamentalist Christian who married at 19 but then fell in love with a woman and began unravelling her programming to step into sovereignty of herself and others.
More recently, it was the chance mention of the late writer Jan Morris on the slate patio of a tearoom at the foot of Snowdon. Relaying the story casually to my friend she said “well Jan Morris was quite a woman...”. Born James Morris, she joined the Hilary/Tenzing ascent of Everest as the only journalist, met Che Guevara, visited Hiroshima after the bomb, lived in a Venetian palazzo – and in 1972 had gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca. After the surgery she returned to her small village in North Wales, to her wife and children and remained here writing books until her death last year at 93. After leaving my friend’s kitchen that night I returned home and read every interview I could find.
It interests me, why I am so drawn to these distinct before and afters, because I have spent the last year settling into the unequivocal mess that is life. I have been leaning into the total chaos of it all, getting comfortable with existing within that. Understanding that there is no right one thing but a series of things which could all work, and trusting that the only deciding factor is my own choice and agency, relaxing into the two-sided coin of every experience, with nothing ever conveniently wholly good and wholly bad. And with my injury recovery, embracing cyclical rather than linear time; that what has been done before will be done again rather than an unending march of consistent improvement.
I have settled into this non-binary world where all the colours are mixed together and yet – more than anything I love the clean poles of before and after.
The most obvious explanation for this is that it mirrors my own recent history, and what are we all searching for if not recognition of ourselves in the world. “Before the break up” and “after the break up” will always be a way that I think of my life now; a distinct moment of, possibly for the first time, putting my own survival first, choosing myself in the most primal way, and from there seeing myself and what had come before with brand new vision. And of course, in the background, is the universal before and after we are all living within – I need say nothing more than “before March 2020” to evoke that.
When you feel a cleave through the fabric of your own life it is natural to want to make sense of it, and to turn to the cleavings of others to help with that.
And what is that, but a craving for clarity? In as much as I consciously see the infinite options, the both/ands, the wonderful scrappy squiggle of it all, somewhere I also want a definite. I long for a this/that, a yes/no, a right/wrong, a before/after. To be able to have a simple focal point from where to make things make sense.
The trouble is, in reality, there is no such thing as a before/after. This is most beautifully shown in miniature by Jan Morris’ magnum opus, a trilogy of history books called Pax Britannia – the first in the series was published by James, the last by Jan. Her before and after wasn’t a great chasm, across it lay sinews of continuation – her work, her family, herself. I know, too, that my before/after isn’t a clean cut. There are roots of my current life which reach and tangle back across the divide, that will always tie me to the before. There are things that changed forever and things that never changed at all; things that came with me and things that stayed behind.
I spent most of 2021, I think, trying to force my work to have a before and after, trying to make the new thing completely, completely different. But that wasn’t working because that’s not how things work. You cannot simply pull up the tracks in front of the train want you want to change direction; you need to alter the turn of the tracks ahead. In order for there to be a before and after, there must be continuation.
This is the first post that will be published on my new Simple & Season 2.0 website; this is the “after”, but it’s all about the “before”. And that’s because I’m the same human.
It is a sprawling, complicated thing, being a human, and that’s why we try to chop it up into definites. Our “work self” and our “home self”, our “before self” and our “after self”. But when we create these boxes, we sterilise our lives. There are parts of the before that bring joy to the after; the understanding of the after brings peace to the before. Rather than a box, let’s turn these moments into sign posts on our tracks of continuation – a way we can make sense of the mess, rather than define it.
