At peace

I got an email from someone a couple of weeks ago remarking that I sounded lonely. She must have read the blog when I booked into Lyelta Lodge in Bundy and felt a bit weepy. The day before had been a difficult one. That email got me thinking about loneliness and homesickness though, which was useful.

I suppose that just for a few moments there in Lyelta Lodge I did feel homesick and lonely. I don't really 'do' homesick any more. I cried all the homesickness out of me between the ages of ten and twelve at boarding school. It has had repercussions though, that boarding school experience. It's why I find walking into hostels so difficult, where it feels that I'm the new girl all over again, having to find or make a place for herself; and it's why I get anxious whenever I have to pack my possessions up in order to go somewhere - that's like going back to school after the holidays. (I was anxious this morning, at having to pack up). I still sometimes have anxiety dreams about trying to pack all my stuff up at the end of a school term and not being able to fit it all in, having to leave things behind.

I was ten years old when I started at Sibford Friends boarding school. My birthday is at the end of April and the term would have started around mid-September, so I wasn't even ten-and-a-half. I remember walking, with my Mum, into the hallway at the Manor House and being greeted by Miss Ellis, the headmistress. As I stood in that bare hallway I suddenly shivered and Miss Ellis smiled (her shark's smile) and remarked in a sympathetic tone that it was normal to get the butterflies in this situation.

I'd taken Beano, my hamster, to school with me and I was shown where he was to be kept, in some old pig styes in the Manor gardens. After my Mum had left I didn't know what to do. I was very shy and unable to just 'make friends' as children are expected to do. I felt lost and alone and very lonely. I desperately wanted to go and see my hamster, but I couldn't remember how to get to where he was. Eventually I found Miss Warren, the housemistress and asked her. She said she would remember me as 'the hamster lassie'.

Whenever I go to a new place where there are lots of people who appear to be interacting and socialising with each other (like CCI or other workshops, or backpacker hostels) I feel like that new girl all over again and I go into a kind of panic and want nothing more than some space to be quiet and to gather my resources.

As to loneliness, well what Marilyn French says about loneliness in The Women's Room struck a chord with me when I read it in 1979: she says that 'Loneliness is not a longing for company, but a longing for kind.' That's true. Loneliness is being in an unhappy marriage or relationship; or in a job where you feel that you have little in common with most of the people you work with. Loneliness is the absence of like-minded people. I've spent a lot of my life feeling lonely, but not any more. I've been alone some of the time out here, but seldom lonely.

As to being alone, a lot of people have asked me - often a little incredulously - if I'm travelling alone and if that's alright. I think it is easier to be alone when you are older - as a woman anyway. I've had a lot of practice at being alone throughout my life, at different periods. I've always been quite self-sufficient (again, I had to be as an only child and then being sent away to school). I don't feel self-conscious about being alone now, whereas I have done in the past. I can enjoy being alone, enjoy whatever I'm doing and wherever I am without feeling that something is missing. I'd love it if Paul was here to share this, but he isn't and that's the way it is. I know he's there for me. I think that part of the reason I find it easier to be alone now - without that old self-consciousness - is that I do have someone who is there for me. I know that I am not alone (except of course in the sense that we are all ultimately alone - it's one of those dilemmas) no matter how it might appear to other people. I'm happy with that.

The other thing that I have now, that I think comes with age, is an inner peace. It's certainly something I didn't have in the past; I always seemed to be in emotional turmoil then. I am at peace with myself. Perhaps it's because I'm not ruled by my hormones any more? I don't know if that is why.

What I do know is how happy I have been these last few weeks and how much I have been in the present moment. That being in the present and being able to maintain that feeling of the perfect present moment (like a kind of ongoing meditation) is new for me. My happiness isn't tinged by thoughts of having to go back to a daily routine that I hate, as it has been in the past.

I always knew that I wanted to travel. Now I have to find a way of doing more of it.