Interlude: Gold From Straw; Reframing Everything

I write this while in a sit down from doing the gardening. 👩‍🌾 ridiculous I know. Today I made my gardening debut. Aged 30. 

It’s beautiful. I love it. One of my colleagues refers to himself as “the destroyer” when he deletes lots of code. 

This is me when I delete lots of weeds; delete all the overgrown plants; and delete everything that’s blocking the front steps back at home at my house in Luxembourg. A few big realisations happened today. 

I have become re-obsessed with Tibet; that obsession is never very far from me thank goodness. 

View from where I am sitting right now; front garden. 

I am watching a documentary on it for the 6th time but for the first time in the big tv we got during Covid (our old one was tiny and this one is just pretty normal nowadays) and I am re-watching seven years in Tibet and then I started listening to some Tibetan music I was obsessed with while I lived in Liverpool and then everything came up for me. 

I was a superhero 

I was at the uni of Liverpool in 2018-2019. I got an amazing degree and I loved the city but it was not your standard masters year. I was having seizures left right and centre and they almost kicked me out for it. The stress they put me under actually made everything worse and significantly hindered my recovery but I still got my masters degree. 

It was a really difficult year. I used to feel so guilty all the time. 

I felt guilty for every corridor I disrupted. I felt guilty for every time I left a class and collapsed outside and I felt guilty for the one time I actually collapsed in a class because I misjudged the situation (normally my warnings are on point). I felt guilty for ambulances being called out to me all the time - that happened a lot in Liverpool. It was an especially bad year for that. It was a year of constant guilt. I lived with a very kind Egyptian PhD student, for the second half of my year, as well as three amazing Chinese flatmates. I loved them all so much;

• The girl, Agnes, got me a gluten free vegan cake for my birthday, a beautiful L’Occitane en Provence sakura 🌸 gift set (Sakura is my fave), and a balloon that said happy Father’s Day 🥹- she liked the star shape and misread it and didn’t realise that it said happy birthday. It was the only time in 8 years of uni a friend made a big deal of my birthday (although when I did have a partner a few years before he was incredible); it made up for every other year when it didn’t happen
• Mike, one of the guys, and I used to have amazing chats in the kitchen and have the funniest laughs in the world; one time I stormed in furiously and said to Mike that “the newsagent said to me that I need to find a man! And then he will take care of me.” And Mike nodded and said: “yes! He is right.” 
• I can’t remember the third one. Was it Bob? He was studying planning like me but at undergrad level. My marine personal tutor tutored him too. We both loved him. Bob had been to Tibet. He showed me his 20 minute video. Tibet was my obsession and my passion. I could’ve watched that video a thousand times. It was his video that got me listening to the music I just relistened to now. 

Anyway. The Egyptian flatmate was Omar. One evening I just gave up. 

I was crying in the kitchen. The guy who was meant to be helping me recover from my seizures had said that I might need to go down a route I couldn’t afford and that would’ve taken much longer (again five years later they can still occur but nothing like back then and also I’m glad you didn’t tell me that then!).

And he said to me: “you cannot be responsible for things you didn’t cause. You didn’t cause this and it’s not up to you to HAVE to try and fix this.”

And this is the theme of this section of this blog post. Bearing in mind I did everything I could and spent my whole life doing everything I could. Sometimes it was out of my control. But anyway.

No one ever said to me: “you are doing so well. You are so brave. You are having such a hard time. You are persevering so well. You are so strong.”

There were a few exceptions:

• My tutors said this to me without words. They said this to me through the faith they had in me. They said this to me through the help and support they gave me. They said this to me through believing in me all the way. 
• A cleaner once said that to me in a uni building and I got really upset. I wish I could change that. It’s just I didn’t know who she was and she said “oh! I’ve heard of you! You get so many seizures but you still study so hard.” I was really upset because it was a brilliant example of how my privacy was so compromised that year. But I should’ve been grateful. And I am really sorry about that. We really do have to take what we can get - and be grateful for it. I kept how bad it was from those closest to me because there was nothing they could do but on some level the knew and they were super supportive.

The conclusion is: I felt so guilty all of that year. I think I had a serious seizure at least once a day every day that year. Not medically dangerous. 

Just incredibly disruptive. And literally paralysing - not figuratively. And taking an incredibly long time to recover from - wherever I was, I had to recover there. 

I have memories of people doing beautiful things for me too though so you know. But I was an absolute hero. I never so it as how brave and how strong I was. I was so resilient. I was persevering in spite of the circumstances. 

I got what I asked for 

I mentioned my seizures set on in tragic circumstances. 

I am not ready to talk about that yet on here and I might never choose to. 

But these were things that happened at 15 and at 17 which led to my brain being wired in a certain way or reacting to certain things in a certain way.

When I was 17 I got a book about wishes 

It was a book called five wishes. But I could never make five. They kept changing. There was one wish that never changed. It was always wish number two. It was a wish for “Zen”. I just pictured a pagoda on a hill. What did I know? I’d grown up surrounded by Taoist books and philosophy and I’d read Tibetan Buddhist books and really acted on them for years and I already loved Lao Tzu although I didn’t really know who he was.

But I just had this dream of “Zen”. I made a wish and within a month my whole life was tragically turned upside down. The significantly worse of the two events was the second one. 

And today I realised, 13 years and one day after it happened, that I was just having my question answered. I was just having my wish come true. That was my real wish. Peace. Everything that has happened since; 

• Reading loads of Theravada Buddhist texts
• Online Tibetan Buddhist meditation retreat 
• Three non dual meditation retreats 
• Reading a lot of non dual texts and watching a lot of YouTube videos

But none of that really matters. 

It was just a finger pointing to the truth. 

The truth is in the lived experience. 

And apart from the massive pain of trying to heal what I went through - seizures are a great tool for waking up. Every single one of them brought me a bit closer to God. What could be a better gift than that. And on my arm I have a big tattoo.

It is from a poem called Hour by Carol Ann Duffy.

It ends:

“Time hates love, wants love poor, but love spins gold gold gold from straw.” 

But the whole poem is about “Zen”.

Okay it’s time to go back to doing the garden. 

My whole life falling apart gave me exactly what I wished for; exactly what I longed for above all else. Namaste 🙏 go in peace 

A photo taken a little later as the light transitions; an absolute golden hour 

And p.s. just to relate this back to coding; a shout out to me and to everyone who’s early on in their careers who’s struggling; we may feel so guilty for knowing so little compared to our seniors; we are absolute heroes who make it work every day; and this is what we asked for. We asked for this. 

This is how we make our dreams come true. 

This struggle is how we make our dreams real. 9 pm; it’s getting cold and I have wet hair. Need to quickly do a few more weeds… 🫶💛❤️🏞️🏞️❤️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️🏞️❤️🥹🌸