Bed Worlds

Bed-World has been a place, both real in three dimensions, and a metaphor, for a long time.

It still is both those things, but I noticed a piece of writing simmering and it was very definite about the title. Bed Worlds is a bit different, so I pick up my laptop to allow writing to tell me more.

It is 2025.
I finished my memoir.
I found the wrong publisher and then the right one, and my book will be in the world at the end of April.

Something happened that is linked and threaded into the simple fact of my book making it. This one book. My book. The book that I didn’t seem able to finish, even though it wasn’t writing in the traditional sense that was taking so long. I had to meet up with the brutal truth that I might not get it done. Somehow, that released me from the storyline, the soap-opera of it being a problem or a tragedy. It just might not make it. I might die, still mumbling the truly irritating repetion of it’s nearly finished.

Then it was finished.

Quite a lot of not easy played out between my finished, and properly finished. Finished as in the very best it can be, and with the best people to do what it takes to make a book that is finished, into a book in the world. Thank you to the ones that helped me through that in all the different ways you did. You know who you are. I got a bit lost, and then I got found.

I think that is just the way of it, this being a person thing.

2025.
I already said that.
I am letting writing happen, and it is this.

A theme of being me - and now at 66 years old it is long enough, and some, to recognise a theme – has been balance, space, financial stability, sustainability – all threads in the theme of deep safe.

I feel safe.
I have space and balance. I work. I don’t work. When I say work, I mean the profession that ended up being my work label. What are you? What do you do? What I do in the sense it has been what I have mostly paid my bills with, is called psychotherapy. I love it, this thing I do that is called work, and people pay me for doing.

Funny thing is, having been doing this work for over three decades, I know I am finally offering my ‘best’ work. I am able to say that because it has nothing to do with being good at, successful at, multi-qualified, many letters in a growing signature of academic stature. I had some very good training, some much less good training, but that taught me so much of what informs my little life by being ‘not good’ training, not to mention being a place I met a significant sister. A sister I cannot imagine my life without.

I can say ‘my best work’ because I trust the excellent training is metabolized, as is the meaning and value of the not so good. I have landed in a place of humility and trust. From that place I no longer work in the orthodoxy of psychotherapy – I work from trusting my capacity to hold safe. I offer safe. Safe does not mean always comfortable, for either myself, or a precious human that I show up for. What I mean is that I can and do, trust my safe, my unequivocal showing up safe, and in that I can not know with you, the one that I am in service to. A different way to offer my work. Somehow, along the trails leading to my own home address, I have been relieved of so much trying, and gifted with trusting instead.

These last couple of years have been an unwieldy masterclass in yielding and trusting. I have been invited to meet the most strongly defended and wounded parts of little old me. When I say invited I do not mean on an embossed card to a celebration, I mean invited in the hell and healing modality. Life has thrown me hard against some walls, and that is the hell. The healing is the possibility there is a doorway to meet, rather than to repeat. There has been some carnage and some redemptive.

Out of the redemptive I have been able to, and continue to, create this elusive balance: the work that I love, the space too, enough money, though I’ll probably never have much of a stash for that rainy day.

It is 2025.
In 2020 I was gifted a spinal surgery that gave me two years of reprieve from constant and acute, relentless embodied agony. I met so much of what I have carried in the baby-bones and dust of unremembered. So much fell away and into a kind of deep alignment. I was receiving myself, and the more that rolled, the less old systems of internal architecture could hold onto. It took me deeper than the fields of kindness, where under those fields I found myself somewhere new. I have and do struggle for a nice bit of lyrical to describe this place. There is immeasurable peace, while at the same time often beyond brutal. Peaceful has an archetype, skewed of course by our human longings, but isn’t it supposed to be still and serene and blissful?

The word I keep returning to, not especially poetic, but the only word that cuts it, is everything. The fields of everything – yielding to the everything.

In October 2023 the pain started to amp back up.
I’m in pretty much constant acute again, with the added symptom of falling over without any warning.

It is different than last time.
The pain isn’t that different, in some ways it is more unforgiving.
It is different because I am in a different location.

I live in the everything place.
That makes it impossible not to be different.
I can’t make it an anything because it just is – I have to report this is horrifying, spacious, and hilarious – all at once.

My metaphors have come home to roost, as I now literally crawl, fall, stumble and lurch. I need a walking frame. I found a funky one when I yielded to that particular bullet to bite. She wears feathers and is named Betsy. Still a fucking mobility aid though.

I don’t know how Bed-World became Bed Worlds, but it has happened, and there is an ocean of difference. Bed Worlds is bigger even though my life feels smaller. Today I wanted to go to the Farmer’s Market with Betsy, and I gave up. It was too much. It would have taken everything I’ve got, and I wanted my everything for writing. I didn’t know that when the giving up on going out happened. I just noticed it was okay to give up.

I noticed it was not a problem to notice my heavy, my defeat, my lonely, my angry… all these feelings, states of moving landscapes within this creature I am. Spikes and flashes of bits of everything, so much more space to notice all this movement of being me. As I write I am feeling the wonder of noticing from within feeling, not over there through some lens that has judgement and attributes value.

All this noticing has brought tears.
Leonard has dog breath, and he loves tears. My tears anyway. The smell of his breath, not horrendous, but pungent and doggy is part of my intimate life. He and I spend a lot of our time together, close up on the bed that has expanded into Bed Worlds. We are flesh and bone and blood. We smell of our embodied life. I find myself remembering Jan dying. Remembering the smell of it. She smelled of the illness that was eating her, and of the indignity of incontinence – she smelled of dying, and I remember never loving her more or the ease of being so close. I remember Alba Maria as a tiny baby, growing every day into a slightly bigger tiny baby, and how she always seemed to choose me to have explosive shit storms on. I remember how easy it was to love her in those moments of utter vulnerability and helplessness to visceral embodied being human.

I am astonished to find myself writing about what the beginning and end of our human lives smell like. Also not astonished. Bed Worlds is wide, and being embodied is beautiful and brutal, and if we can bear it, free.

In the new more space I have found myself two new preoccupations.

Well, some would call them hobbies.
I have a terrible internal snob.
The snob part has a judgement about hobbies.
She also swore off emojis.
She disapproves of glitter and tinsel too.

I have been teaching myself Kintsugi.
The artform of ancient Japan - mending the cracks where the light gets in with gold. It is compelling, and it is technical hardcore precision. There is a very particular mixture to create out of epoxy resin and gold. The measure needs to be exact and then the window it is viable before it turns rock solid is small. I’m not so dextrous. I am making quite a lot of sticky messes.

I am humbled and furious in equal measure.
It’s great.
It’s grand.
There are bits of gold everywhere, even Leonard sported a few specks of gold in his fur.

I am also compelled by mosaic.
I started playing with tiles, broken tile in the garden at first, and now tiny tiles.
Also, an artform requiring some precise, and messy.
I keep mumbling about needing more space, a room for my ‘hobbies’, then laughing at my horrified minimalist trying to cope with a mobile studio. Sometimes the kitchen. Sometimes the actual bed.

I have over the years attempted several laptop, lap tables. You know the kind with fold out legs, sometimes a cup holder, an integrated little drawer. I’ve never settled with one, all have been lovely wood, aesthetically pleasing, and all have been given away because they just didn’t trump the cushion on my knee. They all cost a bit of money.

My poor snob sensibilities as I now have a single piece of hard moulded plastic for my mobile studio. It will outlive the apocalypse. It’s only redeeming feature is that it is pale blue, and only cost a tenner.

I guess Bed Worlds is done writing for now.