Dear readers
Since returning from the sunny banks of the Ganga in Rishikesh last month, I've been feeling grey.
Last year, I started using the 'emotions wheel', recommended by a therapist, to identify my feelings.
He was a terrible therapist - patronising and sexist. He was supposed to be helping me come to terms with CFS/ME, but he turned out to be a hindrance. I finally quit when he answered his iPhone during a session.
Nevertheless, I like the emotions wheel and the colour-coded sections. I can look at the wheel and assess a particular situation's colour - how it feels in my body. Then, I consult the wheel's named emotions and see if they correlate. It's not perfect and doesn't work every time, but it's valuable.
Using colours to solidify emotions has been at the top of my mind this week as I've read Bluets by Maggie Nelson. A memoir in short pieces, or vignettes, as the literary world calls them, about her obsession with the colour blue. From what I can tell, although I haven't finished it, it's about pleasure, pain, loss and desire as she tries to make sense of the distressing breakup of a passionate love affair.
At a job interview at a university, three men sitting across from me at a table. On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the colour blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel 'in progress' rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette. One of the men asks, why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don't get to choose what or whom we love. I want to say. We just don't get to choose.
While Nelson is obsessed with Blue, it seems to be grey for me.
I made a mood board from all the grey images I could find in old magazines. I wanted to sit and face my greyness.
A dead, open-mouthed fish on a lonely gravelly beach in November, cigarette ash, a sterile modern kitchen, pointy slate rooftops, a mottled palette knife, the muddied hem of a skirt, a silver bracelet embracing a wrinkled wrist, a faded tarmacked road, a bushy beard, ancient bobbly rocks on the shore, the dirty cuff of an overworn shirt, a dove.
It all sounds so depressing, yet I like the colour grey.
My eyes are pale blue/slaytish (phonetic spelling - there is no such word!), so wearing the same colour as my eyes suits me, as it does everyone. I fondly remember a grey cashmere jumper belonging to an ex, which I'd wear as a mini-dress over black opaque tights, and refused to give back.
I also fondly remember the luxurious feel of peachy soft, grey tracksuit bottoms I wore in my third trimester as nothing else fit me. They were bought on credit from the Next catalogue as I had no money as a university dropout with no job at twenty years old.
I have a more odd memory of another grey. In my mid-twenties in London, at an all-night rave in an abandoned warehouse, probably on drugs, my friend's boyfriend, who was going prematurely grey, brought up the topic of grey pubic hair. I thought he was joking. I had no idea grey pubic hair existed.
Soon after, in a damp swimming changing room in Yorkshire, a friend mentioned she had found a grey pubic hair on her vagina. How odd that is when I think about it, that I had never seen an image, ever, and I still haven't, of a human being with grey public hair.
But how can we question absence if we don't know it exists?
As much as I like the colour grey and enjoy its tones I don’t seem to be able to appreciate the soot-hued sky I live beneath, the constant companion of my life.
Could it be that after decades of living beneath her faceless blanket, she has finally absorbed into my body and created grey matter in my brain? Because my memory of India and all the things I said I'd do and be on my return has gone, and my emotions are….smoky, and scientists say grey matter is responsible for memory and emotions.
They say that yoga reduces grey matter, and I can feel marginally better after a downward dog or child’s pose. However, when I look at my cerise mat and contemplate laying it out, the act seems alarming, and moving around on the floor is beyond me.
I remember three grey stone bottles I used as vases for Orange gerbera once. I have no idea where they are now. So many objects lost. Along with relationships. And house moves, and trying to relocate abroad, and be a decent person, and live.
Maybe existing under so much grey is a unique state of mind never known to those who live under cobalt skies.
How can we question something's absence if we don't know it exists?
And I have this fantasy, no matter how many times it proves itself untrue, that if I live in a place with cobalt and orange skies with hot winds, the greyness within me will suffocate and die.
I did try once, no twice, to live elsewhere. First, in Vietnam, a country of red, gold, and pink, but the grey seeped in from elsewhere. From diesel fumes, motorbike horns, industrial plants, capitalism, and misogyny.
I tried to live in Sicily, too, but the grey seeped in from religion, the Pandemic, and, again, misogyny. I found out the beaches of Sicily in March match the grey skies of Yorkshire anyway. I found out that macchiatos and red wine made it all better. But I can do that anywhere. I no longer want to anaesthetise my life.
Maybe this is the problem? I'm no longer willing to hide from my emotions, to mask them with booze or food or shopping or the internet, and now I'm seeking out my feelings on this paper wheel the incompetent therapist gave me. And I'm finding out it's hard to exist in the world without a mask; it's a very painful thing.
Maybe I should find another addiction to help me hide from my greyness.
I have tried many; once an addict, always an addict. There are times when I'm not engaged in any addictive behaviours at all. Or maybe this is a lie; perhaps I am addicted to being a good girl who walks 10k steps, cooks organic meals from scratch, and wears the right clothes; perhaps I am addicted to not being an addict?
But maybe my wrath against the grey is like that of married couples who snap at each other about the overflowing recycling bin—lashing out at those closest to them? Those they love the most?
When I rage and cry about how grey I feel, maybe I’m abusing my most loyal friend. Because she is here for me every day. Every single day.
I wonder if I can befriend the ashen skyscapes and the gunmetal within me.
I wonder what that would look like?
Maggie Nelson says we don't get to choose what or whom we love, but maybe, with some redirection, we can.
Maybe I could learn to love the mottled palate knife and wrap my arms around the dead, open-mouthed fish on a gravelly beach on a November day.
What’s fascinating is that the greyness lifted as I made the mood board and wrote this piece. Parhaps this was the first step in accepting, and learning to love all the different parts of me…
The power of creativity and/or the written word is immense.
I hope you have a colourful week,
Love Hannah xoxo
P.S Paid subscribers can direct message me about anything related to this essay—or anything at all 😊 Please don’t be shy!
Love this. Without grey everything would be black and white.
Also I’m sorry you had a terrible therapist. Unfortunately there are many bad ones out there. Even those with PHD’s! I’m glad you had the sense to leave. I want to write a post about it, it’s one of the things that led me to write a Substack. ✨
Don’t underestimate the beauty of grey. As your mood board shows there are so many variations. As I write this looking out over a dark grey sky, I realise how much more interesting it is than the cerulean blue of a sunny day. They are so many different shades and colours in grey 😘😘😘