Nearly swept away under a tide of other things, a newsletter very nearly didn’t happen for today. I usually call it a ‘story letter,’ but I’m not sure if this will reach to that. It’s actually Wednesday morning, I have an hour, my daughter is getting ready for school, and we have a time-honoured ritual to perform, our usual dance. She slides nonchalantly around the house at a pace as stately as a snail, while I hover around her birdlike, flapping and chirping, until she leaves, several minutes too late to be on time, except she nearly always makes it, which I should take more account of, really.
When I joined London Writer’s Salon, I made a commitment to myself that, on the way to the finish line for my nonfiction book, I would publish a smaller piece of work every Wednesday. I gave myself some small grace: it didn’t have to be entirely new. But I had to refresh it, to edit it for this moment, to record it anew.
There were reasons for the doing the Substack, justifications for the pressure. Because it seemed important for ongoing motivation and a feeling of legitimacy, I wanted to have small interim bursts of accomplishment, which I’ve managed. Because I desired to feel more part of my new writer’s community, one which seemed to favour Substack, I wanted my own. Because these lean days away from my ‘day job’ are supposed to be all about writing, I wanted to create as much of it as I could, which I think I have.
But I’ve always given myself too much to do. My specialty is designing time-poor, big-goal, deadline-driven panic. Has there ever been a time that I haven’t felt overwhelmed with an abundance of people and things and tasks? Have I ever not felt inundated?
Sanibel Island in Florida is close to my heart. I’m not sure how many times I’ve been there, but my parents had a time-share, where you don’t own a structure, you own time. A curious thing, the concept of owning time, but in this sense one apparently can, and it’ll cost you dearly. You own the right to be there at such-and-such a week, but there are still maintenance costs each year, maintenance costs that sound to me like, well, the cost of a week’s holiday. I never quite understood it, but I didn’t have to - I benefited from it. We loved the place we stayed - my memories of it stretch back to my childhood and adolescence, when it was newly built, and include three of my daughter’s first six birthdays.
The last time on the island was during Easter holidays, just this year. My daughter and I were meant to be there with my parents, but illnesses and Covid-beleaguered airlines put paid to all that. We were alone there in the end, just she and I. We made the best of it, but something of the magic seemed to be gone. I marvelled at how the place could be the same - same blue skies, amazing shells, astonishing sunsets, leisurely bike rides, stunning wildlife - and yet could feel so different because the usual people were not with you. It was odd, that it could change like that, in a different social context.
The pause and relaxation of a usual holiday didn’t happen. I was overwhelmed in Florida, with the pressure of this book, and with the need to see clients online while my daughter was at a loose end, and with a strange existential freefall. We stayed in my parents’ cottage in Bradenton for a while, too, in a community for over 55s. I am not far off that. My daughter sat next to me, taking in the view over the wide, brackish river, the pier. People circled the road between the house and water, waving at us or peering into the windows of the house everyone wants to purchase out from under my parents. My mother and father get letters in the post, cold calls. Not a week goes by.
But we were polite. We waved back. They circled constantly - walking, power-walking, limping, wheel chairing, piloting customised golf carts.
She patted my knee as I sat there, my every muscle gripped with tension. ‘See, this could be you one day,’ she said, a sardonic smile on her tween mouth. ‘One day, all this could be yours. Soon, you can live here.’
Complex and confusing emotions washed through me. What kind of old person did I want to be? Would I be able to be the kind I wanted? Would my health allow it, my brain? I’d just had surgery on my knee. Was this it? Would I die having completed this book, or having reneged on my contract, flaked out? Would that be my story? Would I ever write anything worth writing about?
On my down days in Florida, I looked up articles about women who hit 50-something and decided to die. I wasn’t serious. I’m not sure why I was doing it. But I read about Stella Tennant and Kate Spade, trying to work out what they were thinking, whether they were worried they wouldn’t accomplish anything anymore, whether they were ill. Why they felt like they couldn’t get past it, whatever it was, or get to it, whatever that was.
But I was fine, really. I was just overwhelmed.
Months later, my mother rang me. She was upset. I had been too flooded with chapter deadlines to read the news. There was a big hurricane coming, the biggest, maybe even bigger than the one that knocked down my brother’s house in the Virgin Islands, the one that sent them back to my home city, closer to family. This hurricane was tracking straight towards Bradenton, where the old folks circled my parents’ cottage like vultures in search of an expanded property portfolio.
But is over 55 old? Who am I calling old? Shit.
There were precious memories in the house, precious things. She was sure it all would be lost. For a time, we all were. We researched how high the storm surge would be, calculated the height between the river and the edge of the house, crossed our fingers and waited for the bad news, that the house had been overrun with water, perhaps even carried away.
But it didn’t happen. The storm turned, just a bit, in the eleventh hour. Sometimes, even when we’re sure it’s all over, we are spared.
Sanibel was inundated. The word ‘destroyed’ is no exaggeration. I hate TikTok, but I created an account just so I could follow one particular woman I read about in the Washington Post, who was cycling round the island, her island, with a GoPro, providing running commentary against a soundtrack of sad country music. I think she was my age, but under the sun of a now-shadeless island, her skin looked tanned in all senses of the word, burnished brown.
Everything she filmed was snapped, knocked down, covered in ooze, stripped of its vitality. It looked like the kind of event from which nothing ever comes back, not even nature, which is almost never the case, especially in places like Florida where wildness is always pressing against the gates.
I felt so guilty, having taken Sanibel for granted at Easter, not having appreciated it enough. I had wanted to appreciate it, and I did, but not enough…I tell myself again that I was inundated myself at the time.
It will come right. I will come right.
I’m so close to the finish line now. I have one more chapter to write in this book before I go into the editing phase. The tide of overwhelm laps against the porch nightly, seeps in the cracks. I’m known for throwing all the portals open and kicking aside the sandbags, letting it cascade in. I’m trying not to.
And yet it’s a complicated thing, overwhelm. It feels like it’s drowning you, or might drown you. But when all the things you’re doing that are letting in the flood are the same things that keep you alive - really alive, and you know what I mean - how can you not open the door?