🧵 🧵🧵🧵
If you’re reading about Afghanistan and feeling sick and helpless about the unimaginable situation people there are facing, now would be a good moment to donate to a refugee-supporting charity. I’m putting together some links. Take your pick. Give what your can. UNHCR (United Nations Refugee Agency)
@Refugees

donate.unrefugees.org.uk/~share?cid=72&…

Some honest reflections on parenting, from the morning quiet: We don’t talk about how fucking hard parenting is - at an often viscerally challenging level - enough. Mental health and parenting logically go hand in hand. But there’s still stigma and pressure to look like you’re loving it, particularly when kids are young.

And here it is. The crazy thing about the government standing by and letting this Ofqual debacle play out is that it amounts to nothing less than an act of mammoth, wilful harm to the nation. theguardian.com/education/2020… In one fell swoop, the inaction of the government has (further) alienated students, and parents and undermined teachers and school heads. It has allowed grotesque social unjustice to play out in plain sight once again. And toyed with the lives and MH of thousands of young people.

We are a household of 3 women: 1 44yo with lifelong body shame issues and 2 teenagers. We have a rule to not comment directly about each other’s bodies.

Instead:
“You look great!”
“Your eyeliner is 🔥 today”
“YAAAASSSS”
“Loving that style journey for you” There is no general discussion about size or weight or comparisons, positive or negative - that also means no “ooh you look so slim!” Or “your bum looks great in that!”. All food is good food, but we also talk about what is needed for balance. There are no diets, just science.

My happy place. 2 years ago, I came to work here, earning minimum wage to serve cups of tea because writing work had dried up while I was sick with cancer. It turned out to be so much more than a job. I found family here, people who mean the world to me, and a place that soothes my soul. I now share it with my most loved people whenever I can. Both daughters work here, these days. Eldest is cleaning the loo while I type. It’s been good for them, and I’m grateful.

Re. the Adele thing: I have 2 teenage daughters and struggled horribly with my body image through my teens and 20s. It was crippling. Our rule is that we do not comment on each other’s bodies. It’s just not up for comment. Yes to cute outfit / killer eyeliner etc but that’s it. That’s not to say we don’t talk about body image, worries, weight, how we look etc; we do. But we talk about it in an owned way. ie. unless you’ve instigated the conversation about your body, it’s not a conversation that’s happening.

I know lots of people are talking about it and it’s not new but the sheer arrogance of Johnson’s camp, surely knowing how tone deaf his stay at Chequers comes across to millions who ARE observing the rules, yet supporting it anyway while another few thousand die. This is not leadership. So what, he praised the NHS nurses by name. So he bloody should. We’ve been doing it for years and we’re not the ones who voted against fair pay for nurses.

Am in the middle of attempting a DIY washing machine repair that involves REMOVING THE MOTOR and putting in new carbon brushes. This sort of thing is my actual worst nightmare, but I also really like having clean clothes 😬 So far:

1 tantrum
1 episode of shrieking A TORX SCREWDRIVER? à la Lady Bracknell
2 cups of tea
2 rounds of applause from supportive offspring
4 grimly made vows to get a new bloody washing machine when this is all over

A thing I wrestle with every day is that I feel like I *should* be writing creatively more during this interruption and finally creating a masterpiece. Same during both cancers.

Truthfully, it’s the last thing I want to do rn. Crisis kills my creativity and saps my energy. Weird hurray! Means my nervous system is totally doing its survival thing. I’ll work to regulate it, but not override it.

Undeestanding this, I’m better at batting away the shoulds without feeling bad. Right now, getting by is enough. More than enough.

My sister runs a pub just outside of Salisbury. Her village has a fairly high average age, so many of her neighbours and customers are housebound now due to being classified as vulnerable. As a business, of course, this is the worst. But they’re making a difference by carrying on supplying meals, picking up extras on the cash and carry run for people who can’t get out and acting as a delivery hub for a local bakery.

It’s sinking in that with all the “great packages” announced for SE and businesses, there’s nothing for me. I’m SE through a limited company so can only get help through Job Retention Scheme if I furlough myself (the only employee), which would kill my business. There’s less work and I’m single parenting/overseeing kids’ home schooling for who knows how long. I’ve never claimed anything - nor do I want to - but this feels like a really unfair gap many SE and contractors will fall down. A universal living wage could have evened the field.

I got a bit overwhelmed with how shit everything is earlier but the following has helped:

• the comfort of heat (fire, blanket, jumper, dog)
• buying a bunch of flowers and putting them where I can see them
• listening to Ludovico Einaudi
• cooking sthg delicious It’s mainly sensory stuff, which is very important at times of information overload. Our brains are having to do way too much thinking about risk and all the what ifs, so trying to psych yourself happy prob won’t work.

[thread time] About this time, exactly a year ago today, I got back from a run and *something* intuitively made me check my breasts while I was in the shower.

Looking back, this is poignant. I'd had a clear mammogram 6 months before AND an active phobia of self-exams. I can't really describe to you what it's like to feel the thing that, it seems, at some level you already knew was there. A definite lump, deep in my left breast. My blood run cold. I felt sick.

But I let logic take over. Probably a cyst right? So many reasons why it should be:

I’m in a Facebook group for younger women with breast cancer and it’s a precious community to me. But it comes at a price: every time a new member joins, or is gently announced by the moderator to have left us, or tells us she is now “living with”, my heart breaks a little more. Until it happens, it’s hard to believe it could ever be us. And then I see these little thumbnails of beautiful young women and their families and can’t believe it’s them, either.

In case anyone is still dubious about the power of Twitter, let me tell you some stuff. [thread, and I’m not sorry] I met one of my most precious people here. One of my best ever friends lives in Guernsey so it took us years to physically meet (and we’d never had met otherwise), but now she - and Guernsey - are a major part of me and my family’s life to an extent I can’t even describe ♥️

I was in labour exactly 15 years ago. I’m not sure what I thought the future would look like, but probably not this. Life moves in mysterious ways. So it feels poignant that in one month I’m having my ovaries removed, to help save my life. I’m so much more sad than I expected to be, that the third child I always desperately wanted won’t ever happen now.

Mine’s a doozy. Forgive the thread but it’s long-ish:

One 2015 night I dreamed my car was stuck in a city building (obvs) and a kindly, avuncular yet somewhat mysterious stranger said he’d help. In this dream he led me through some offices and I realised I was in a newsroom.

https://twitter.com/orbyn/status/1211970556997840896

“Oh! I’m a writer too!” I said to my impromptu dream-friend. “Who do you write for?”

But he just smiled and said, “doesn’t matter”. I was struck by how unusual it was for someone not to take the opportunity for even a little writerly flex.

We came to give thanks.
#WinterSolstice I found a friendly stone and leaned against it. Had a little cry. I thought about how that stone has been there for so many years before me, and how it will be there for so many years after. I felt thankful for the permanence and impermanence that life is.

The end of the year and a reminder that I’ve been on Twitter for TEN(!) years this month has been making me feel all kinds of things and some of them are surprising.

Mainly what I want to say about it is this: Life will break your heart. And sometimes it’s not the sad things that break it; it’s the happy things, the searing moments of clarity or bliss or wonder, even the ordinary.

Having a flashback to a bf who would mock my work and financial choices (while being out of work himself 🧐) in a really insidious way, all the while professing love and admiration for me. [Backstory: we were going to buy a place together but thank GOD I saw sense and decided to buy it alone, which funnily enough marked the end of our relationship. He'd also argued that if I paid off his 30K debt we could get a bigger mortgage.]

LAST CHEMO IS GO! There are 6 of us squeezed in the chemo room, wearing flower garlands and eating jelly. My family are lunatics. Join the queue to get on the bed with me