Choosing Life

I don't find it easy to explain this to anyone, but I'm finding it very hard to adjust to wanting to be alive. It's like waking up after a sex-change operation. Actually, no it's not, because people who opt for gender realignment have lived with the conviction that they truly belong to a gender that their body doesn't express.

This is more like being given my eyesight, a great gift, undoubtedly, but one that I have always managed to live without. I'm not sure what to do with it.

For several months, I said the words that I always say, "I hate my life", my familiar Tourettian outburst of despair, and the words rang hollow, untrue, and archaic, like saying "Gadzooks" or "Verily". And recently, I've entered into a phase of life where no part of me is pulling me towards death any longer.

This is exceedingly strange and unfamiliar. I have left it a bit late, really. I am going to have to live to hundred to make up for what I've missed out on. And I'll have to find a job I can do 'til I'm ninety, because I'll never get a pension. Somebody will have to pay for me to stay in nice hotels.

I'd better finish this PhD, hadn't I?

My Favourite Cat

I want to talk a little bit about depression and creativity.

There was a time when depression was a demon sitting on my chest, a stomach full of acid I couldn't throw up, an undertow in the water, a dark magnetism stealing life from me. Now, depression is like a favourite cat that sleeps on my bed.

There are people we love in our lives, and animals and places and moods and posessions. Some of them, we wouldn't be parted from, no matter how bitter or heavy they can be, because they remind us who we are, and our reason for being in the world.

"We are wounded again in the same place" writes Jeanette Winterson, and I know what she means. "This doesn't turn us into victims. Rather, we are people in search of a transformation of the real."

When I write, I am on that kind of a search. To say something true, and be heard by someone else. To share, and be transformed.

I learned I could write when I was six or seven years old. It was the most wonderful thing I'd ever known since I learned to read. The most empowering thing, the thing with the most integrity, and yet... it opened a door to a world of forbidden things.

In my family, there are stories you don't tell.

I am a survivor, from a family of survivors. And I never wanted to survive. To flourish, yes, but to survive, no. It makes very little difference whether I am the corpse and you are the pall bearer, or the other way around. The year I discovered I could write, I discovered death. People around me started dying. I didn't make them die; I know that. But I asked questions, and I learned what people do and don't talk about, and what grown ups are afraid of.

The year of six and seven was the year I was expelled from the Garden of Eden. I had eaten from the tree of knowledge, and life would not be the same again.

Last week, my mother showed me some writing. It was quite a shock to me. It was mine. They were poems I had written, but not in my writing; they were in my nana's handwriting. My grandmother must have taken my books and copied out my words to keep for herself.

From the moment I learned to write, I learned to censor myself, to please others. That lies heavy on me, and always has done. And I know that I censored myself to protect my family.

We are people in search of a transformation of the real. And my favourite cat sleeps on my bed, and I have bad dreams, and I hear her purring.

A Happy Ending

Thank you for reading HotVimto in 2008.
See you all again in 2009!

World's First Blogging House Plant

Kamakura is a little town in Japan, about thirty miles south-west of Tokyo, and is home to the Hachimangu Shrine, and this wonderful statue of the Buddha.

It's also the home to Bowls Cafe, and Midori-san, the blogging houseplant.


The weak bioelectric current flowing across the surface of Midori-san's leaves responds to changes in the immediate environment, such as temperature, humidity, vibration, and nearby human activity.

Local software company KAYAC has developed software to translate the plant's awareness into Japanese sentences, which are then posted on Midori-san's blog.