I know what's real now.

On choosing what's in front of you, and on being brave

The couch at Christmas time. I’ve done my best to make the most of decorating choices that were not mine.

As I write this, I’m sitting on the grey tweed couch I did not pick out, in the furnished rental house we moved into back in November, after making a transAtlantic move and then surviving a “generational” flood and then evacuating to a city two hours away and living in a 3-bed house with seven other people for 18 days while calling my senator’s office every day trying to get my husband from England to the US more quickly and then coming back to the mountains with no idea where we were going to live.

I went to a new therapist for the first time about a month ago, and I told her I was fine but my insurance covers therapy and I always think it’s a good idea. During our first session, she wanted a brief overview of my life currently, and when, at the end of the hour, after I’d recounted all of the above plus my husband’s mother’s serious illness and my own serious illness six years ago, I said, “Now that I say all of that out loud…”

“It’s a lot,” she finished.

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When I faced my own diagnosis back in 2019, people kept telling me I was brave. It weirdly and probably unfairly annoyed me. I wasn’t trying to be brave, and I didn’t want to have to be, but what is your other option, when you are a mother and a wife and a person who loves living, and who faces her own mortality?

I don’t think I was being brave, really. I just wanted to be alive, in that present moment and for a much longer time afterward, and maybe, from the outside, it looked brave - but for me, it looked like the only way.

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Outside my window, from the grey tweed couch I don’t own and wouldn’t choose, the leaves are back. In the winter, we could see the mountains across the valley, but now it feels like we are in a treehouse - everything is green. The birds and the cicadas are loud; my coffee cup and the novel I picked up off the bookshelves that aren’t mine are sitting on the table on the deck. This house is normally an Airbnb¹, but in the wake of the hurricane, the owners thought it would be helpful to let someone displaced by the storm live here for longer. We have it for two more months, and we’ve been looking for a place to buy, but now we are spoiled in our little alcove of 12 houses on two dead-end streets: by our next-door neighbours who took us hiking and bought us lunch on Easter Sunday, who let us borrow their lawn mower and bring over yard games for the kids; by the couple down the hill whose kids are in their 20s and live elsewhere, who invite us over for take-out pizza and text us when the power goes out to come and sit on their porch and drink wine - the husband builds cars in his garage and has promised to take our 14-year-old to a junkyard, a dream that began when he still lived in England and watched old reruns of American Pickers on Youtube.

Simon and I joke that our house-hunting area has narrowed from the entire East Asheville region now to two streets in our small mountain town. Our realtor must hate us.

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I took all the social media apps off my phone. I prefer to live in reality, and I’d never fully seen the stark contrast between my immediate reality and the one the internet creates until the storm, when for three days, in what I can only see as the way the world was supposed to be - all of us here were asking “What do you need?” before anything else, no one giving a shit about anyone else’s political beliefs or religion or sexual preferences - only to evacuate for three weeks and see the world arguing over whether the government manipulated the weather, to read lies about what was happening in a place I had just been, could step out of my front door and see with my own eyes the opposite of what I was reading.

The morning of the flood. I wish I’d taken more pictures, but I was in shock.

I couldn’t wait for my husband to arrive so we could go back to the place with no power and no clean water. I preferred to collect stream water and run it through my purifier, to fill up tanks from trucks in the grocery store parking lot and take showers with what I heated in the homebrewing kettle borrowed from my friend’s boyfriend, if it meant being back in the Real, in the place where I needed my neighbours and they needed me.

Life is pretty much back to normal now. It took 10 weeks but we’ve had clean water since Christmas (I still run mine through a purifier, and probably will for the rest of my life). Two Saturdays ago, the power went out - we still don’t know why but there are rumours someone hit a pole with their car - and we went down to our friends’ house because he’d fired up his generator. His wife scolded him. “You don’t need the generator on for a 4-hour power outage,” she’d said, rolling her eyes. We’re all a little traumatized, but it still turned into a nice evening - wine and s’mores on the porch, a feast of crackers and pimento cheese and salad from their humming fridge, our 14-week-old puppy annoying their geriatric dog.

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Anyway, there was a time I was pretty active on Instagram. It was, I believe, the curse of the Millennial Mother. It came out just as I was having babies, in a life phase when it was so easy to feel alone and disconnected from the world, and it allowed us all a way to plug back in. But it was new, and we didn’t know then about dopamine and algorithms and phone addiction.

But we do now.

I’m not interested anymore in being well-known on the internet, but I do want to write. I finished reading a novel yesterday, and I always like to read the About the Author inside the back cover; this one writes novels and lives on a farm outside of Toronto. A little flame leapt in me when I read that, because really, that’s all I want - maybe all I’ve ever wanted: to write books and live a Real Life somewhere (here, preferably) where I love my neighbours and they love me, and my kids are happy and swim at the pool in the summers and ride mountain bikes with their dad on the weekends. Where my dog finally learns not to nip at my heels and goes on long hikes with me before curling up at my feet while I write. Where I drink wine on my front porch with my friends.

I wrote the first draft of a novel last summer, and I just opened it back up last week after the last year turned my creative brain to mush. I hope to edit it this summer and start submitting it soon. Fear of failure has stopped me so many times before, but if I can be “brave” enough to ride out a hurricane and a life-threatening medical crisis, then I can sure as hell be brave enough to send a couple hundred pages of words off into the world.

The difference, I think now, is that I know what’s Real - the Real is here. The words matter because they are mine; they belong to me and to the people who love me.

xx

Faith

1. My views on Airbnbs have changed drastically since moving to a town tourists love to visit, and trying to buy a house here.