I once had a thief of a job. It stole nearly everything: every waking moment and too many of the sleeping ones, my health, my attention. Whenever it broke into my mind, its burglary tool of choice was my phone. All my daughter’s early drawings of me depict me with a glowing rectangle in my right hand, a kind of cyborg arm. The stick person would always be smiling, but I know — and she knew — that behind those two dots for eyes, the mind was elsewhere.
My daughter had a stick person with an illuminated hand for a mother.
To be grateful, you have to be able to see the lovely and amazing things that are right in front of you, right now. To appreciate something, you have to be present and aware of it. And I wasn’t present. For far too long, I wasn’t aware. I was too busy, too concerned with the people and problems on the other side of every email. It took a series of unfortunate events to wake me up, but I finally managed to quit the job that was robbing me of my attention and my gratitude.
I started to write. While writing a book, I enjoyed a flexible schedule that breathed more oxygen into my family life. For a good while, both my ability to be present and my gratitude were restored. My daughter stopped drawing me with a phone in my hand. Sometimes we sat down together and drew pictures of ourselves, choosing other colourful objects for us to be holding, like triple-scoop ice cream cones.
But the minute my book was published, the thief stole back into my brain. I was on my phone again, constantly monitoring how well things were going, whether I could relax. How many reviews? How many sales? How many stars on Amazon? HOW MANY STARS? In any given day, I could only feel happy or grateful when the stars were aligned.
We marked the end of a stressful, watchful summer by going to a festival in the back of beyond. English summer music festivals can be damp and muddy affairs, but fortune was on our side. It was warm and dry, we spent time with family and friends, and there was music everywhere. In years past I’d embraced the lack of 4G in this location, but this time, I was constantly trying to catch a signal on my phone. When I couldn’t get one, I felt tetchy and anxious. When I could, I was distracted and anxious.
And then something dreadful happened.
On the last day of the festival, I lost it. I lost my phone, and I panicked. I patted down my pockets repeatedly, upended my rucksack, scoured the tent and made frantic repeated trips to lost property, but it was nowhere to be found. Even more than the cost of replacement, I was worried about being out of touch for 24 hours.
With misery hanging over my head like a cloud — and not The Cloud that I craved — I trailed listlessly behind my child, who was gambolling like a lamb through the crowds and sounds and darkness. What if I failed to respond to a comment on Twitter? What if I failed to clock a new review of the book, or missed a new constellation of stars on my Amazon listing?
And then something magical happened.
With surprising rapidity, my mind reorientated to the present moment, like a spotlight swinging to another space on a stage.
As she navigates a tunnel of trees and low-hanging branches wreathed in fairy lights, my 9-year-old daughter’s waterfall of blonde hair ripples as she moves, and shines as though it’s lit from within. Spotting something up ahead, she darts ahead of me and behind a shadow puppet theatre that is hidden in a quiet corner of the woods.
Soon I see the silhouette of a long-extinct creature, a Dodo, emerge from stage left. The Dodo meets a Griffin, who is swooping in from stage right, and they engage in silent conflict. Although music drifts through the trees from a nearby stage, everything seems very still.
I turn to the dad of the Griffin, who is standing nearby. He says hello and asks me what I do, and I feel a stab of anxiety, but I say, simply, ‘I’m a writer.’ I ask what he does. ‘I’m a woodsman,’ he says.
Woodsmen are not particularly garrulous, it turns out, and so together we watch the play in mute appreciation, not so much a writer and a woodsman as the mother of the Dodo and the father of the Griffin, parents of these two shadowy, fantastical creatures.
Now it is gone midnight, and my daughter signs herself up and takes to the stage at a karaoke bar housed in a ramshackle temporary structure in another part of the woods.
When it is her turn at the mike, she pulls me onto the stage with her to borrow courage that, in the end, she does not appear to need. It is clear from the first shimmering glissando of piano notes that this little creature has selected Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’, which she belts out with as much determination and forcefulness as any woman who’s ever been jilted and regained her strength.
There is rapturous applause and her eyes are alight as we return to our seats. She sits alongside me on a hay bale and joins in the choruses.
Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ…
You’ll never live like common people…
Sweeeeet Caroline…
I have no way of filming or recording any of this. Somehow, although it usually would, it doesn’t seem to matter.
Later still, with bits of hay still stuck to us from the karaoke venue, my daughter and I sit close to one another as our chair pauses at the top of the oldest functioning Ferris wheel in Britain, a surviving hunk of Victoriana. In the star-flecked inky darkness above the tree line, bats wheel and dart all around us. It is chilly, and she is wearing a knitted hat that looks like a chicken.
I cannot take a photograph. I cannot post to or check any social media. These impossibilities, far from seeming tragic, are the furthest things from my mind.
The other passengers have boarded and, as the wheel starts to rotate in earnest, my little one insists that we both keep our hands in the air. The smiling faces of onlookers on the ground are blurry as we flash past. My daughter’s face, as I look down at her, is clear. Her smile is wide. Her joy is pure.
We squeal as we ascend and descend, rising into darkness and falling into light. The night is chill and black, but my happiness is so great that it seems to fill my body with light and warmth, right up through my arms and my hands as they reach into the air. I imagine our mutual gratitude illuminating our outstretched fingertips.
We too are stars.
This story was originally told for Brune Smith’s fantastic storytelling project Bodies of Stories. You can buy the book here or check out the YouTube channel.
My latest book, which you can get a free copy of if you become a paid subscriber to Wednesday’s Ghost and/or This is Your Life on Tech, is All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data. This is Your Life on Tech is released in autumn 2023.
What a beautifully written piece and so resonant. Thank you.
Love the opening!!!