Second Anniversary Guest Blog Post

I love the incongruous title of this blog, and I love this blogger’s thoughts, quirky and off-the-wall as they usually are. I love the way they click with rich seams of thought and reminiscence in my own psyche. Sometimes it’s the blog as a whole; other times it’s simply a sentence or phrase. Introvert reaching to introvert, trying to identify their home, their hearth, their ‘true’ self, in an insane, increasingly sorrowful – but, thankfully, also increasingly anonymous - world.

I’m not sure if everyone spends valuable hours of their life on such a search, or whether it’s only the extreme introverts. Or is it that introverts continue the search all their lives, despite the setbacks, because they’re also naively optimistic that they’ll find the ‘true’ answer? Maybe - for me – to quote the (in)famous character, Arthur Fallowfield,  from the radio comedy series Beyond Our Ken (older blog-followers will remember), “the answer lies in the soil”....but I get ahead of myself.....

I’ve been searching for my true self all my life. Even by the age of 8 or 9, I was experiencing life as though watching through a window (the early development of my introvert personality, or a response to emotional and psychological abuse?). I knew I was a girl – that was painfully obvious. But learning to ‘be’ a girl in my dysfunctional birth-family of the 1950s was, with the benefit of hindsight, an intellectual – and emotional - impossibility. I rebelled. I rebelled in ways that I’m not proud of now, and would not boast about, but – suffice it to say - in ways that enabled me to identify closely with David Williams’ journey of escape in his e-book, ‘Amsterdamned’.

Later, I became a mother: and devoting one’s entire existence to bringing up a large family is a wonderful way of switching into denial the search for the soul-self.  Changing and washing nappies, and baking bread, and jam-making, and re-painting barge-boards, and teaching kids to ride bikes, and refereeing repetitive arguments and fights leaves no mental energy, let alone physical energy, to reflect on who I ‘really’ am. The crisis comes years later when the all-consuming task of parenthood eases and you realise that you have allowed the self – whoever that is – to fall into a bottomless pit, and you don’t even have a ladder long enough to go and look for her.....

Becoming a sociologist provided me with the language with which to start asking the questions: effectively enabled me to start constructing a ladder down into that scary, dark pit. It also enabled me to feel some self-worth, having destructively left my grammar school education the moment I was legally allowed to do so. Unlike with secondary modern schools, there was no provision for those who left at 15, before they’d run the full gauntlet of the grammar system: I left without even a school-leaving certificate. I felt then – and still feel – that our education system did nothing except hold us captive, teaching us to repeat the answers that had already been discovered and written down. For heaven’s sake – if I really wanted to know the answer to something, all I had to do was read the book! Why did I have to spend all those long, long days and interminable years being forced to write it all down? And those mathematical ‘problems’ – why so illogical? Who on earth needs to calculate how long it would take for 3 people to empty a 125-gallon bath of water with a 2-gallon bucket each, when there’s a perfectly good plug at the bottom?

So – a woman, a mother, a sociologist...and later, a ‘born-again’, ‘liberationist’  (oh, those labels!) Christian, a socialist, a communitarian....but maybe these labels are really about my social identity?  Not ‘I’, not my soul-self. As I approach the seventh decade of my life, I’m feeling optimistic. I think, finally (finally?), I’m coming near to finding that soul-self.  Several years of keeping an allotment, developing a Church project for sharing food from a communal garden, and caring for two other gardens, have started green shoots of contentment in my life: contentment that’s totally new, that I’ve never experienced before.  I realise I am, in the very depths of my soul, a nurturer, a grower. The product of growing – the harvest - is not the most important thing; the key lies in the very process of the growing and nurturing of plants. But, preferably, food-plants which may, in some small way, help the human species to survive the economic and social chaos that is surely around the corner. Maybe, after all, “the answer lies in the soil”.

As your blog, Shark Fishing in Wales, nears its second anniversary, David Williams (known to me more colloquially as RB), I thank you and salute you for the part you have – quite unwittingly – played in my own search for self. 

 

About the Author

In a former life, Gillian Reynolds (and, as she always responds when asked by the BBC, yes, she IS the real Gillian Reynolds!) was a sociologist, gaining her PhD in 1994. But the greater honour was that she was officially awarded her PhD alongside the amazing and awesome journalist, John Pilger.

As well as writing numerous chapters for other people’s publications, she teamed up with her great friend, Professor Gayle Letherby, to write Train Tracks: work, play and politics on the railways in 2005. Having enjoyed that experience of working together so much, they went on to edit the collection of writings: Gendered Journeys, Mobile Emotions in 2009.

Now happily retired, Gillian facilitates a sociology group for her local U3A, adores her grandchildren, contributes to several community ventures, lives a full life in her local Church, and spends as much time as possible on her allotment, in her greenhouse, and in various gardens. Oh – and nurturing and maintaining her wonderful friendships on Facebook!