September

I am lying in an MRI chamber wearing only a soft hospital gown and my sneakers. The tone that tells me to hold my breath has been evenly spaced until this moment, when it comes again and again and again. I try to breathe very deeply in between so that I do not become dizzy. But when I do inevitably become a little dizzy, my eyes are closed and my whole body is tensed from avoiding the ache in my lower spine, and it feels like I might be somersaulting backwards. I am somersaulting through the thick starry space of my own mind in a loud magnetic tube as people behind a window make detailed black-and-white video of my badly-formed heart. I had thought, naively, that this might be a relaxing hour and a half spent lying down. Instead, I am a little bewildered by the intimate confrontation, always so surprising, that I cannot know my own insides without help. I am here in the machine and also not here, adrift in black.

When I went into the tube, my life was a dense, dark morass of agitated, angry depression. I could not tell if the depression was purely seasonal – I am always at my least resilient during transitional times of year – or if this was a result of everything else, the weight of it all pressing pressing pressing, and me not clever or agile enough to just deal. When I come out of the tube, I am sore and light-headed, and a nurse who looks just like Laurie Colwin points to a chair, gets me a cup of water, and says very kindly right into my eyes, “You just rest.”

After the MRI, I am buoyant. The worst appointments of the year are over! Suddenly it is properly autumn and I let go of the guilt for not eating all the tomatoes I grew, and for abandoning the garden pretty much entirely sometime in August. Some of the helplessness of depression leaves my body. I decide, after three years of living here, we are going to finally paint the living room. Over the inoffensive beige that was scuffed and stained by the previous owners, we paint the pinkest white that Farrow and Ball offer. It’s a colour that changes with the light, from brightly neutral in morning, to soft and peachy in afternoon, to sometimes, in evening sunshine, like cream stained by strawberries. Against the white gloss paint on the door and the windowsill, it suddenly reads to me like “toddler’s bedroom”, so I paint the woodwork a deep, nearly-black purple, the same colour as the black elder in the back garden. Now I am in a room that is mine, ours, no longer anything like what it was when it was theirs, and the feeling of being home lands squarely in my heart. I am home like when I was a child, reading in my room as my mother made dinner. I am home in the simple animal way that tells my body, rightly or wrongly, that it’s safe. I am stupidly astonished by the simplicity of how I got here. All I did was paint! It is exhilarating and emotional to feel like this, after all the years spent renting flats we could not alter, all the years spent in this country that has embraced me socially but made it more hostile, expensive, and degrading to be an immigrant, all the years missing my family and missing the land and being shocked at how I’ve been here so long now that I couldn’t even afford to move back if I wanted to. I think of all the many months this year alone that I have weighed up whether it’s safe to visit right now, or if I will miss my window of it being “safe enough” and find myself in some kind of political exile for years. For the moment, in this fresh pink room, I am surrounded only by beings who love me and the belongings we have assembled together. I am home in a way that makes me feel like everyone I love might walk through the door at any second, like I have created a metaphysical, time-travelling portal to every other house I’ve ever felt truly at home in.

This is a delicious, addictive feeling; like waking up suddenly wealthy. I want to feel at home now in every room of my house! Between migraines (there are 11 in September), I throw myself into every neglected pile in every corner. I want to make space, both literal and metaphorical, for good things to come back into my life. I move all my books out of the study where I work and paint the room a cool, even white.

October

I am not finished with the house when an old friend reaches out for a catch up. We sit in my sweet peachy living room and she tells me about recently meeting up with another colleague who did her PhD at the same time as us, but with whom we were not as close. They had realised together how truly bad our PhD experiences were, and she thinks maybe we should all meet up, maybe even cowrite a paper about it. I’m intrigued, despite myself; leaving my academic career after I finished the PhD was not so much a choice as it was a consequence of my unrealised autism in a profoundly ableist industry. I have spent a long time trying to build a new career outside of the work I did then, and I’m not sure it’s worth revisiting such a painful era. But days later, we three meet: tentative at first, and then enthusiastic. I feel a rush of vindication in this collective blood-letting, realising that my experience was not the fault of my own mental health issues at the time but part of a systemic failure in our research group and the department as a whole. I have spent such a long time not looking this grief in the face; it is much uglier than I remembered, worse than I knew for my friends, still raw in my body despite nearly a decade passing, despite my writing a whole book just now about the period in my life that came after.

A powerful curiosity follows me home. One of my friends had asked if we’ve read our theses since submitting them, and we two had laughed in response. Why would I? But after a night of insomnia, chased down by a feral sense of mourning for how quickly my contributions were erased from the research project website, I download my own PhD thesis from the university library. Inherited Violence: Examining Museum and Academic Relationships with the West African Illicit Antiquities Trade in a Post-Colonial Era. I spend all day reading: remembering anew how for a few years I was doing essentially two PhDs in one, with a big quantitative study and a littler qualitative one; how I completely changed my research framework a mere year before submitting because of complications with how one supervisor in particular had failed me, and the other had to leave for health reasons; how I wrote this entire 88,000 word document while house hunting, moving from Inverness back to Glasgow, becoming permanently estranged from one parent while jubilantly reconciling with the other. I read and read, and cannot believe how much I have packed into one thesis: a detailed schematic for the history of the African art/archaeology field and how the market for cultural objects emerged from the violence of colonial occupation; an unsparing analysis of the casual, insidious racism that pervades much of this field, captured just before the flash-bang of the 2020 civil rights movement and the surge of repatriations of cultural objects back to African countries; an extremely detailed, bespoke set of terms for examining and explaining epistemic violence and its resultant social harms. I take issue with only two things: I would not use the word “terrorists” in the introduction now, and I am confused why I used “slaves” instead of “enslaved peoples”. But mostly, I am overwhelmed by how valuable and relevant this research still is. All these years, I truly believed this work was sub-par. I had done it in such a rushed way; I was so afraid and ashamed that I had been a failure; that it made sense that I should have left everything I ever dreamed of doing with my career.

Over the next 48 hours, I question whether I want to let my academic legacy sink under the sediment of everything new I’m doing now. Or do I want to haul it up, to float it out on the world somehow? It is abundantly moving to think I might have a choice in this moment, when it did not feel like I had a choice all those years ago. But it doesn’t really matter whether I say yes or no: I feel these two sides of my life draw together like magnets, a before and after that I’d thought were made with repelling poles. But it was me, holding them so far apart that I could never see they were made of the same urgent stuff. I have never “changed fields”: I have always worked in cultural heritage! I have always pursued questions of memory, inheritance, ownership, and belonging. All this work over all these decades has been one long practice of devotion and curiosity about the things people have held in their hands and grown around their homes, about the importance of not misrepresenting them, about justice. It’s the same thing, it’s the same thing, it’s the same thing..

I get a letter from the hospital, arranging a time for me to go back. I sit in the office with the friendly cardiologist, who shows me a quartet of videos from the MRI. He switches between frames, demonstrating how one side of my heart is profoundly bigger than the other. The regurgitation from my 17-year-old replacement pulmonary valve is now classed as “severe”. “But that isn’t necessarily an emergency,” he says, “because it would have been classed as ‘severe’ your whole life before the valve replacement when you were 19.” We agree that the valve will need replaced again in the next year or two. I go home and am bewildered by how a body can live with such a broken thing inside it for such a long time. I have been leaking for my whole life, my whole life suffering from a heart that cannot contain itself, that cannot control the flow of what goes in and what goes out. A heart that mimics what I feel in every other part of me, all my failure to control the sensory inputs and outputs, all my inefficiencies of moving haphazardly from one stage of things to the next.

The sound my heart makes is not a clean beat so much as a whoosh, gush, whoosh; inhale, exhale, inhale. Henry Rollins once described somewhere that he has inhale years of reading, absorbing, and making, and exhale years of performing, touring, being out in the world. I think my year has so far been a big, rattling inhale, growing steadily amidst the breathlessness of fear and grief for people and earth. A few weeks ago, Jeanette Winterson wrote about a similar kind of inhale and exhale in our inner and outer worlds, and how imperative it is for us to cultivate the inner world and decide for ourselves what our relationship with the often-exploitative, demanding outer world should be. “Humans like having two world. I say this from the evidence. We have always had inner and outer worlds. We like having the related shared space between them too. It feels deep and alive. Connected but profound. In time, but not subject to time.”

I am stepping carefully but hungrily back into the outer world from my bright, happy home. I am looking straight into the big fecund darkness as the autumn welcomes winter. I am holding my faulty inner heart with all the grace I can muster with my earnest outer body, whooshing and gushing from those connective places that are in time, but not subject to time, eager to share them with you.

Thank you for sticking around all these months of my sabbatical from internet life. pod by pod will now come out on a monthly basis, and will have a more essayistic/lyrical bent than before. But it’s still all about the intimacy between human and non-human memory as felt through garden-growing, place-making, and land history.

This newsletter remains free for the moment, but if you enjoyed it and have the means, it would mean a great deal if you could donate to the Sameer Project, to THAMRA, or to any of the Palestinian families who might come across your social feeds. If you’re based in Scotland, Refuweegee urgently needs funds and supplies; they have never seen the situation so bad for refugees in Scotland, many of whom are sleeping rough right now.