time travelling at christmas
We’re in that liminal period, where time passes quickly and slowly between Christmas and New Year. While I should be spending my time lost in revision, I keep coming back to my rediscovered diaries, previously buried in boxes at my parents’ house.
Festive dinner parties, Mariah Carey playing in theatre, and wrapping presents brought the Christmas feeling to Swansea. But my parents’ busy lives hadn’t made space for festivities at home. With a couple of days before the niblings arrived, there was time to tidy and decorate. Linens were folded. Floors hoovered. Books shelved. Among them were my old diaries, French-styled exercise books - as though clearer handwriting would bring clarity to my mind. Reading through their scrawled pages though, it’s evident there was little coherence in my thoughts.
From front-to-back, my entries are squeezed in between mood trackers and therapy homework; frustrated prose between a cramped array of sad faces and colourful mind maps. But buried in the back pages are rows of measurements and weights, snippets of opposition to the positive perspectives shared during therapy. The poles of my mental health, and commitment to recovery, lie at each side of these books.
While brainstorming the notion of perfection and dissembling my obsession with it during therapy. I wrote hurriedly about why I would never be perfect, why I must never let go of the idea of reaching perfection, and iterated my strict criteria for “perfect” : size 4, popular, abs and a thigh gap, only eats healthy food, skilled, spreads joy, tall, long hair. Sorry 14 year old me, but you should have trusted your therapist more. By 20 you’ll realise that perfection isn’t real, and those who aim for it fail to appreciate the messiness of human nature. But at least you had two things right - developing skills and spreading joy are totally worth it.
Then there’s the letters, to 19 and 24 year old me, honest and optimistic in their tone and dreams.
14-year-old me hoped for a year out pre-university. It was supposed to be filled with the laughter you missed out on while having panic attacks about pasta. She wanted me to travel to beautiful places which made me feel grateful to be alive, and try new foods without checking calories. That year was meant to raise money for charity and help others. We smashed all of that. We travelled across Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa - volunteering with charities and NGOs along the way to help wildlife conservation and healthcare provisions. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe while interrailing with friends, and made new friends as we backpacked through the Nordic countries. We ate breakfast from bakeries, tried homecooked meals around the world, and fuelled our body well to climb mountains and swim in open waters.
However, at 14, the vision for 24 was a little off. I’m not a teacher, nor am I travelling the world “doing something really cool, like disaster support”. Instead I’m still at university, in Swansea studying Medicine, which is something pretty cool. The core of the message was accurate though - help people. And unlike those messy entries tucked at the back of the book, you can help others without hanging your entire self worth on it.
By so intermittently returning home, it’s easy to see how time has passed. The goals I set then were “don’t cry at mealtimes”, now it’s more “find time to publish papers”. The running route that I’ve done for the last 8 years has the same morning mist despite my lungs burning less. The fridge feels shorter, and some of the packets of bacon have been swapped for tofu. Mum and Dad are much the same, plentiful hugs and talking about working on the house, but now there’s whispers of retirement too. The big change is the loss of my Grandmother.
Two doors down, her house is now a little more empty. Beds pilled high in the centre of rooms so the walls can be plastered and painted. The old paths through towering clutter have been cleared while photos and figurines still line coffee tables and fireplaces. The imagination that my grandmother encouraged with crafts is now overactive, finding her face in the dim corridors and her figure in the reflection of windows. But her pastel coloured walls are friendly and conjure happy memories of baking and making and dancing while my parents were away.
With three generations around the Christmas tree this year, rather than the usual four, the reasons to be grateful for living are clear. Lives may be long, but they are not infinite. And the depths of despair that came with my eating disorder felt endless. So thank you, littler me, for helping me get this far. Hopefully we’ll do that same for 35-year-old Sarah too.
