a beautiful gift idea for future-you

do this one simple thing now and your heart will burst later -- i promise

Whenever someone tells me to keep a journal for therapeutic purposes, I think of that quote from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ And yet, for some inexplicable reason, during the most painful and difficult year of my life, I began keeping a diary on my phone.

This was about three years ago, just before I left my marriage. A hellacious period. You see, I was wavering. I hate wavering. Some people find comfort in indecision but I personally can’t bear it. The teetering, knife’s-edge of the wind-whipped precipice holds no romance. It’s all the bad maths and false logic that come with it. The ludicrous emotional spreadsheeting. The push-me-pull-you-stuff. Cost-benefit and risk-rate analyses… hours and hours of nonsense calculations predicated on what-ifs that won’t happen anyway. Wavering is a miserable, myopic time suck.

I’d have a lot of silent conversations like this one:

You’re fine, Leah. Calm down. Stop being so melodramatic.

But my life. My actual life is happening. Right now!

Remember what happened to Edna O’Brien.

(She told me the whole chilling story of leaving her husband one night at a pub quiz in Hammersmith. This was years before she published it in her memoir. You can look it up if you want to.)

So I hid in my shed that year. 2022. The year after Covid. I hid and waited for my own memoir to come out and when I wasn’t waiting I squinted at single beds in local boarding houses on spareroom.com . My husband played a lot of tennis. Eventually he decided what we needed was a bigger house. Took me round to see a few of them. Gleaming faux-marble kitchen islands and double aspect sitting rooms. Halal butcher shop on the corner. Endless talk of a trampoline. The boys deserved it, did they? Soon they’d be too big, a lost opportunity. At first I pretended to be open to the idea. I tried to convince myself I was convinced. Sure, why not? A trampoline. But I couldn’t keep up the act. He knew how much I hated them.

Trampolines are injurious to my soul! What’s the point of remortgaging for a garden only to plonk a squeaking eyesore in the centre of it?

If you’ve lived through a ragged marital unravelling you’ll know how it goes. Crashing squalls followed by eerie moments of stillness. Regression to the mean of calm seas. (A mean which is no longer the average but in fact another extreme, but you don’t grasp this until it’s too late.) Soon the air pressure shifts and the breeze lifts, this time north-westerly. A spinnaker line rips loose and flaps in air, then is caught and winched in. A menacing torque as the rope is coiled tight to the spindle then cleated off hard with a firm leather glove. But is it secure this time? Really? Maybe.

A dead gull floats past on the current. Something terrible is about to happen.

I had this thought over and over and over again, during that time. So much that eventually I left. But the terrible thing happened anyway.