Storms and squalls and shifting sands

On letting go, getting lost, and learning how to write

When we first moved to this island, it was storming; a palette of steel grey seas and purpling skies, roiling waves and rolling clouds.

There was something unsettlingly and deliciously otherworldly about it.

In those first few weeks, I came to know the beach closest to my house well. We had just adopted a dog, Magnus the Magnificent (a teenage pup with boundless energy), and we took turns walking him twice a day on the three-mile loop to the coast.

I was free-floating – untethered and delighting in it, but also – somewhere deeper – trying to find some small way to anchor myself. The stretch of coast I walked each day became that anchor. I knew where the sea would cough up kelp into great mountains of slime, where the sand would be uncovered and untouched, where the best rockpools could be found, where to slide down rocks into hidden sandy nooks, where the rocks would be slippery, where they would hold me firm.

The sea was, as it always is, changeable and unknowable. But I was getting to know the beach. Or, at least, this is what I thought.

A few weeks after the move, I walked to the beach. It was the morning after a fierce storm and the sun was just climbing into the day, but slowly, as if hesitant to sit in the sky after weather so brutal. When I arrived at the beach, it took a moment for me to realise that its anatomy had almost entirely changed. This beach was not my beach, it was a landscape that had eaten itself up and spat itself out into some different form. I had the feeling of free-fall you might get when you misremember a dream as a memory. Or when you’re recounting an event and someone else remembers it entirely differently. Or when you’re sure you’ve lived this minute before, in some other life, in some other body. The feeling of a brain unrooting itself.

Just for a second, the earth lost its footing beneath me. Ocean and sky embodied one another as if they had slipped into the other’s skin. Familiar became foreign. Form became formless.

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I’d been feeling a little formless for a while. Not long before moving to the island, I had quit the career I’d been working towards for a decade and this had (unexpectedly, but perhaps not surprisingly) stolen the shape of my world, of my self.

It’s not that I’d always wanted to be an academic. What I wanted was to spend time asking questions, trying to answer them, trying to understand the world in any small way I could. I dug deeper and deeper into the things that fascinated me: evolution, genomics, social behaviour, perception, cognition. And I loved doing the research. I loved uninterrupted time in the wild, spending hours with the monkeys and birds and whales I was studying. But these times were few and far between, and what an average day looked like was very different: it was politics, it was chasing pots of money, it was competing with peers, it was navigating egos, it was navigating the want to do careful, quiet science with the pressure to do loud, money-grabbing science. I was more stressed than I really understood, but what I did understand is that life felt like it was slipping through my fingers. In the evening all I could do was sit in front of the television and try not to think about everything I needed to do tomorrow. I started getting heart palpitations. More frequent migraines. A general sense of dread.

My body seemed to be screaming at me to stop, to change.

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It was a funeral that brought all this into focus. A brilliant young man, gone, suddenly and way too soon. I think I’m still learning from it – that day, his death, what we carry when someone dies before they have lived the life they should have, even when it’s not someone we know well. One lesson that clung to me from that day, that would not let me go, is that life is short. Way too short. And there will be sadness. Heaviness. Grief. But amongst that there will be joy.

I think his death probably rippled out in a thousand different directions – waves landing on countless distant shores – and I often wonder how many people changed their lives a little, after what happened. How many needs were brought into focus by the concentration of all that grief.

I quit academia a few weeks after the funeral. It really seemed like the only thing to do.

And then I started walking. This also felt like the only thing to do¹. I was living near Dartmoor in southern England at the time, and I found myself walking and walking and walking across the barren, beautiful land, meeting occasional ravens and wrens and ponies, heading towards any tor that would hold me, laying my palms flat against the cold stone. My partner likes to think of tors as sleeping giants, curled up and keeping guard of the land, and I let the image fill my mind as I laid my hands on the rocks. I felt safe in the laps of those giants, like maybe they could show me the way.

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When a crab outgrows its shell, it must shed the exoskeleton. The crab pulses its flesh – push, pull, push – until its old shell cracks open and the newly-moulted crab emerges. It is a dangerous time. The crab can get stuck in its exoskeleton and die there, half-trapped, half-free. If it escapes, it is a soft-skinned creature, delicate and vulnerable until its new shell hardens.

After all the walking, the writing began. Just like the walking, it also didn’t feel like a choice. I thought I might write about my love for science, about evolution, about how our relationship to other life on this planet can be a way to find roots, can be a way to understand our place in this world. Or, maybe, I thought, I might write about myself. Maybe it would be a kind of therapy. But when I sat down to write, it was not any of this that came. It was a novel².

I hadn’t expected a novel. I didn’t even tell anyone I was writing it until I hit about 25,000 words and thought oh, okay, I guess I really am writing a book. I let it come, a little unsure of it, a little surprised by it, but giving myself up to it completely.

My characters showed me the direction of their story (I would not have believed this, before I wrote the novel – that the characters really do show you their own path), and through them, through learning how to listen to something a little outside my own consciousness, I somehow opened a door to writing about myself. To be clear, the novel really has nothing to do with my life. The characters are entirely their own people. Their story is entirely their own, too. But there was an unlocking, an unravelling, an untangling that happened as I wrote about them, and I found that it meant I could write about myself in a way I never could have, before. It is difficult to explain, but maybe the best way to put it is that I learnt the art of dissection, of shedding skins.

I have to admit, when I first felt the tug to start writing about my own journey, I resisted it. I don’t like speaking about myself, and writing about myself seemed like an uncomfortable extension of that. But I am learning that it is not the same thing at all. That writing about yourself is more like shedding an exoskeleton, revealing your soft alien skin to the sky, and describing how it all feels – to exist, to crack yourself open, to let the saltwater wash over the thin membrane of your being – not only so you can understand it all yourself, but also in the hopes that someone, somewhere, speaks that same soft-skinned language, too.

I am learning how to stop resisting my need to write about this journey. I am learning how to stop resisting this vulnerability. I am learning that writing is how I understand myself, and that it is also how I will find my tribe of fellow soft-skinned creatures.

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My partner and I moved to this island not long after I left academia. We both felt a calling to move somewhere different – somewhere quiet, open, wild. Somewhere we could be swallowed by blue in every direction, where humans would be outnumbered by winged things, where we could slow down, breathe deeply, make our lives smaller and – as a result – more expansive in all the ways that matter.

The island has given me even more than this, though. The shifting sands of its shores have gifted me peace with my own shapelessness. It took me a while to get used to the way a storm could rearrange the land I knew so well, to get used to the feeling of being unrooted, of becoming untethered from the geography of my world. But I am learning to delight in it. In the edgelessness. In being a little bit lost but trusting that I - a newly moulted, thin-skinned creature - will find a new path.

Storms and squalls and shifting sands.

I suppose, in a way, this post is really an introduction to between two seas. I don’t intend for this to be a newsletter about my life, but it is a newsletter inspired by the journey I am on, the lessons I am learning (and unlearning, and re-learning) and all the small and beautiful things (like bones, birds, whales, folktales, evolution, painting, poetry) that bring me joy.

Thank you for joining me here, I hope you find joy on this journey too x

1. While I walked, I listened to Angie McMahon’s album Light, Dark, Light Again. I recommend listening; it is a phenomenal piece of work. While I wrote this newsletter, I was listening to one of her new songs, Just Like North. Have a listen, especially if you’re feeling a little bit lost.

2. The novel is now finished and, as of last week, I am querying it with literary agents. It weaves together threads of love, loss, trauma, birds, oceans, how we can save each other, how the wild can help us save ourselves. I won’t write about it often, but I will share any news, if and when it comes.

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