A New Home / A Swan Dive / A Blank Page / A Rewrite
At the end of the bookshelf in my bedroom sits a painting by the Croatian artist Asja Boroš. A pomegranate split open to reveal the entire universe, captioned with the words “You can always reinvent yourself”. Fitting, I suppose, that the shelf leading up to it is filled with all my years of diaries. The painting used to hang above the sink in my kitchen. I remember looking up at it in March as I took a leap of faith, chose to be selfish, chose to be brave.
The first thing I notice about living in a girl house for the first time in years is that all our toothbrushes are different shades of purple. I could weep with joy. The scent of incense wafts through the air, the fridge is filled entirely with vegetarian food, and every time I look out the window, I see a different cat. I have landed myself in paradise.
The last time I lived in a 3-person flatshare was 5 years ago. I lived with two Sagittariuses and a cat. One of my new flatmates tells me they are both born in November and December. I resist the urge to ask their zodiac signs, but when she tells me they’re both “very chill” I strongly suspect I am once again living with two Sagittariuses. And a cat. His name is Sven; he used to live here and now he belongs to the neighbours. Sven does not know that he no longer lives here, and who are we to tell him? So we let him in, cuddle him on the sofa, and take pictures of his feet.
The only man I want in my house
My nervous system doesn’t know what to do with girl house. The clean bathroom filled with our many bottles of hair products, the plants, the warmth, the peace and quiet. I spent four years living with a man, and two weeks living alone in a lovely flat that I knew was temporary. Now, I can finally rest, but I don’t quite know how. So I keep busy. I unpack all my stuff in 24 hours (unheard of). I look around my bedroom, and for a moment it takes me back to the flat on Peel Street in Glasgow. I still have the same purple duvet cover. Most of the same books line my shelves. It would be easy to think the years hadn’t passed, that perhaps I hadn’t changed at all. The evidence is subtle. The small collection of books about Ukraine, the lesbian romance novels, the contents of my clothes rail. The only item of clothing I’ve kept for all those years is a black cardigan my friend gave me in Estonia.
The real evidence sits on my windowsill. A Citrine crystal and a sprig of rosemary from my yoga teacher. Three pottery figurines, made precious to me not just for their craftsmanship and beauty, but for the hands that made them. And a lesbian flag, leaning nonchalantly behind a candle in the corner. Indisputable evidence that I am not the girl I was in Glasgow. The crystal, the rosemary, the pottery cat and cauldron and indecipherable animal have all belonged to me since Sunday. The day I got the call from the landlady, telling me I could move in. I got the lesbian flag in April, from the LGBTQ centre in Blackfriars. I used to keep it tucked away in the back of a cupboard, now it’s the first thing I see when I enter my bedroom.
I have been living in a montage sequence since late August, speedrunning growth and progress and personal development. I told myself I stopped believing in fate. I still don’t know how to reconcile my trust in the universe with the knowledge that so many terrible things happen to good people every day. I don’t know how to spend years researching the worst experiences of people’s lives, without losing my faith in any benevolent force. Yet these past few weeks have felt undeniably fated.
Before I moved to London, I listened to Maisie Peters’ There It Goes on repeat for months. The lyrics were a prayer of sorts I’m back in London / I’m running down Columbia Road, I’m doing better / I made it to September / I can finally breathe. When I didn’t know if I would get PhD funding, when I thought I’d be stuck in Glasgow forever, I told myself I just needed to make it to September. This year, the song hit differently. It’s about coming back to yourself after a breakup. Knowing my lease would end in September gave it a newfound meaning. So I repeated my mantra, held the lyrics close to my heart. September came, and breathing was replaced with panic attacks and precarity. The hope I had held onto for months meant nothing now. The first week of September was one of the worst weeks of my life. I didn’t know where I would live after the 10th. All my friends were away and busy; I was alone and terrified and felt like I had no control over my life.
My miracle came through. One of my old flatmates from Glasgow had a friend with an empty flat until the end of September. For two weeks, I lived alone. I came back to myself, recalibrated after so many years of squishing myself down. As I stepped outside the next morning to go to the pharmacy, I found myself living another lyric from There It Goes: Brick Lane in the brisk cold. And I wondered, perhaps, if I was living this song after all. I watched kittens running from under parked cars in the early morning, took the fake-deep quotes pasted onto lampposts as gospel, walked in a two-hour loop from Whitechapel to Hackney every morning because my restless legs could not sit still. In my solitude, I reconnected with my intuition. I heard a voice in my head telling me shut up and listen, and went two entire days without sending voice messages. I don’t know what it says about my level of talkativeness that both my parents messaged me with concern when I hadn’t sent a voice message in a few hours. But I needed the quiet, needed the discomfort of stillness. I poured my thoughts into my diary instead of yapping to anyone who would listen. I created a new world in my head, an East London gothic, where the graffiti in Brick Lane is a portal to the underworld and the sweet dog drooling on me by the kiosk in Haggerston Park is a hellhound. I found my creative voice again.
My two weeks in Whitechapel ended how they began: transporting everything I own down three flights of stairs by myself. This time I didn’t feel alone, I felt strong, I felt supported because I knew I could rely on myself. I needed my solitude, but by the time I left I was so excited to have flatmates again. I am not the solitary creature I once thought I was. I love to talk, I love to share, I love to be part of something. My flatmate tells me we can share cartons of oat milk, and my heart melts into a puddle on the floor. There are many ways to be alone, and I was much lonelier than I realised these past few years.
The universe has a sense of humour, but there is a lag on the line and the jokes take a few weeks to land. In the background of a voice message I received during the Week of a Thousand Panic Attacks, I heard the beep beep beep of an overground train opening its doors, the voice of the announcer saying “the next station is Homerton”. Before Sunday, I had been to Homerton once before. I went to a queer market in Homerton Library shortly after coming out as a lesbian. I bought an overpriced, oversized slice of black sesame and banana cake, and wandered around the neighbouring streets, sick from the sugar high. The first street I took after Homerton High Street had a mechanic’s garage on one side. I came up a different street when I went to the house viewing. It was only after I moved in, when I walked past the garage on a late-night run to Hackney Tesco, that I realised: I walked past my now-home way back in April, when the freedom of September was a far-off dream. I walk past Homerton Overground Station, and remember where I was three weeks ago, lying on my mattress on the floor in my old flat, listening to a voice message an embarrassing number of times because her voice soothed my panic attacks. I remember turning the volume up, holding my phone close to my ear, and hearing the train announcer’s voice in the background. A coded message from the universe that I didn’t know to pay attention to at the time.
The astrology girlie in me knew my life would change on Sunday with the eclipse in Virgo. But every moment of Sunday felt like fate. After weeks of viewing the most decrepit flats known to man, I viewed a lovely house with lovely women who made me cups of tea and chatted with me for ages. I walked along the canal by Hackney Marshes, my feet taking me towards Leyton when my brain was still undecided. I met a friendly cat by the canal, who flopped down on his back and let me pet his furry belly. Butterflies and dragonflies floated through the sunlit air beside me, a physical manifestation of the lightness I felt in my heart. I sat on a park bench, writing in my diary, trying to balance my logic and my intuition. In a moment of stillness, I heard a voice in my head saying take a leap of faith. I think of the therapy scene in Fleabag, where the therapist tells her “You already know what you’re going to do. Everybody does.” So I take my leap of faith, and I’m rewarded with the warmest hug and the reassurance that my anxious brain had craved. As I walk to the train station later, feeling warm and fluttery and hopeful, I receive a call from the landlady of the house I viewed that morning. I have reached the third verse of There It Goes: the universe is shifting and it’s all for me.
I spend Sunday afternoon at yoga, breathing easy for perhaps the first time in years. It’s a small class that week, and afterwards the three of us lie on our stomachs, kicking our feet in the air, and talk about astrology and crushes and British immigration policy (I contain multitudes, I’ll have you know!), and I am struck by the beauty of the life I am building for myself. I am surrounded by amazing women, I am surrounded by so much love that my heart is bursting.
At the start of September, I felt so isolated, so terrified of what came next. All I knew was I needed to be in control, and the London rental market was the one thing I couldn’t control. So I clung to control in other areas of my life, and I lost control there too. The plans I was holding onto fell through; I read into people’s texts too much and convinced myself they hated me. I was in the worst mental state I had been in all year, and I reached a point where all I could do was surrender, detach from the outcome. As I hovered around the stalls of a ceramics market on Sunday, I bought something called a worry stone. A small piece of pottery with a thumb print pressed into it. On the back, you write a word, a mantra to hold onto. I thought about the lessons I had learned over the past few weeks, and I chose the word surrender. The worry stone lives in my coat pocket now. I am not particularly anxious these days, but I press my thumb into it on the crowded tube, or as I walk through the bustling university campus. I feel the coolness of the clay, the smoothness of the glaze. Everything I did on Sunday was an act of surrender, an act of detachment. All the things I wanted are now mine, or at least finally feel like they are in reach, because I relinquished control.
All I can control in this world is my choices, my behaviour, my assumptions. So I choose to take great leaps of faith, I choose to stop assuming how people feel about me based on texts and look instead to their actions, their energy. I choose to be my full self, a person who is simultaneously a cat-loving astrology girlie who has a portrait of Taylor Swift’s head on Jesus’ body in her bedroom, and is also a serious academic doing important research. A person who cares so deeply about both the personal and the political. I am serious and silly, I am a competent, capable adult, and also a menace whose hobbies include bilingual flirting and constantly pushing my luck.
There is this strange paradox that comes with late-onset lesbianism. I have an adult brain and an adult body, but there is part of me that feels like the tape of my life has been rewound and I am a teenager once again. All the hard-earned maturity and life experience doesn’t take away the youthful part of me that yearns to hold a woman’s hand in a dark cinema, or tell silly jokes to get her attention. It would be easy to let the teenageness of it all consume me. But alas, I am 27 and my life is filled with emails and teaching prep, and I somehow have to find time for my actual PhD rather than just the admin of it. So I find balance, instead, as is befitting of Libra season. I fill my life with so many kinds of love and companionship. I make more friends, acquire more mentors. And in my quiet moments, I think of a hand holding mine, the brush of a thumb against my skin. I hold onto hope that one day all the things my inner teenager yearns for will find me. But I hope without attachment to the outcome. I hope for the joy of it, hope because wanting doesn’t have to feel like pain anymore.
The person I was at the start of September wasn’t ready for the things I yearn for. She had to unlearn the behaviours she spent years absorbing, had to learn how to be fully alone, to trust herself wholeheartedly. But in these weeks of pushing myself out of my comfort zone and relishing in the adrenaline of the freefall, I built someone new. Like my bedroom filled with old books and new trinkets, I have held onto the parts of myself that were too precious to let go. I regained my sparkly side, my fun and adventurous side, my creativity and my curiosity. But I’m not the person I was the last time I was single. I am no longer 23 and insecure. I am 27 and in love with the serenity that aging brings. I look at the life I live now, and think of the Taylor Swift lyric these hands had to let it go free / and this love came back to me. I had to let go, I had to watch everything that felt certain slip from my grasp, because that was the only way to grow into the person I needed to become. This month I lived out the lyrics of There It Goes, as the prophecy foretold. Now I have made it here: a new home / a swan dive / a blank page / a rewrite.