A post with no title
this is straight up the very last post in the Book Serialisation project
Part 2, Chapter 25 here we go. No preamble. It just is. Of course, do read Part 1 first here. And please start at the beginning of the book if you’re new to this book. Because this is, indeed the end of the last chapter…
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HOMECOMING - Part 2
“We are searchlights, we can see in the dark
We are rockets, pointed up at the stars
We are billions of beautiful hearts
And you sold us down the river too far
What about us?
What about all the times you said you had the answers?
What about us?
What about all the broken happy-ever-afters?
What about us?
What about all the plans that ended in disaster?
What about love? What about trust?
What about us?
We are problems that want to be solved
We are children that need to be loved
We were willing, we came when you called
But man, you fooled us, enough is enough, oh
What about us?”
- Pink, What About Us?
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It’s been almost three years of swirling research and eight months of corralling 100,000 words into 25 chapters and I have to tell you, my process of landing into myself and humanity has not been all soft welcomings and glorious awakenings. It has been ugly and I have never been more like a wild animal. It fascinates me to watch myself turn so “original” - railing and raging, clawing at my stomach. As I write this bit here, it’s 3am and I’ve swigged whisky and I’m listening to that Pink song in my AirPods, hunched over on a kitchen chair. What about us? What about the billions of beautiful hearts who trusted and who came and were fooled? I’m lock-jaw wailing the pain of the entire planet.
Dear Readers, I fear I’ve failed to emphasise this enough - collapse also and necessarily precipitates our own internal collapse. There is a lot of gnarly emotional, egoic and psychic buttressing that was required to hold us in that precarious Dr Seuss pile-up, which must now also come down as we confront all the truths. Oh, the resentment! Oh the indignant shock when I can no longer just reach for cheap dopamine hits or the cognitive platitudes that once sustained me!
The battle with my left-brain has been particularly heated. Wonderfully, poetically, absurdly, I met a beautiful right-brained Corsican man at a party on a Basque beach the week I started writing this book. We recognised each other in a suspended moment of silence that made us laugh. He says he saw my soul; I knew there was a parallel journey we were going on together. The guy doesn’t own a computer. He can fix cars and kitchen blenders (and even computers) using some weird intuitive “seeing through the layers”. He has to stare at the ocean a lot. But we both got overwhelmed by the wildness and wound up triggering in each other a violent need to jerk the steering wheel left (brain). We ultimately crashed.
As my dear late friend Tim used to tell me, life is a self-referring phenomenon. I know many of you here are also getting met with the most rage-inducing challenges and life-imitating-life losses that seem to be herding us through this collapse process before we think we might be ready for it.
But, and this is more helpfully where I land: We are more than ready for this.
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At 51, some hectic peri-menopausal oestrogen drop-off has meant, as Jane Fonda once put it, that I have a whole lot less fucks to give about the wrong things, and a raging care muscle primed (after decades of oestregeinal conditioning) for the right things. Mid-life women - the hags, the black-belt aunties - I feel are particularly ready for what comes next. Not for wading in and being heroes about the place, but for simply getting jobs done. It’s time for the messy, surreal fairytale where we must draw on the “soft skills” of cooperating, coordinating, restraining, allowing and holding…yes Fierce Mother Energy holding.
This moment also belongs to anyone who has been to some sort of brink in their lives, perhaps repeatedly, or who has had to sit in the bleachers observing the patterns, an outsider to the main event. And for all the sensitive people out there who sat up trees as a kid trying to work out points and purposes, and who have always cried when they recognise essences in songs and children’s expressions.
But, really, it’s our entire civilisation’s moment.
After centuries of being enthralled by a system that took ownership of the means of production and rendered us deluded about our truest capacities, it’s a shocking about-face to realise we were actually built for this exact moment. Even our “bullshit jobs” that we regret, our despair and loneliness, our churning dread, our cringy hypocrisy …they laid the ground.
Not for fixing things with our meddling, overlord-y ways, but for rising. That’s what we are hear to do now, rise.
:
“Picking up this mantle doesn’t have to feel like a burden—it can feel joyous and momentous, like the swell of music in a beautiful film when the hero realizes and commits to their purpose.”
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