The summer of four realizations
A quartet of insights
There are always a lot of thoughts going on; sometimes it feels misguided to insist that some number as more crucial than others. Still, there are some thoughts – we might better call them realizations - which really do seem to be the product of years of the Tectonic plates of the mind shifting away and, in a way which feels sudden, giving way to reveal an insight.
The odd thing about this is, at base, there’s no set character for the nature of said insight, not in the way a character in a film can be expected to see that, say, someone was a baddie all along. The insights you attain about the people in your life and what’s made them how they are can come from all manner of places and have all manner of natures, which is what gives that moment of finally perceiving what makes someone tick such force.
The problem with these types of insights is that, even if you’re absolutely aware of their significance at their arrival, you forget them. Even if you write them down, as I try to, you forget them – it’s like when you come up with the perfect title for a story and then can’t find it again. Thomas Hardy claimed to have forgotten an entire novel structure upon getting up from the garden to go write it down. Moments of epiphany flare up but then seem to irresistibly sink down into the slurry of thought again, retaking their place amongst the rank of file of what goes through your mind on a given day.
This summer, tho, I was blessed with no fewer than four such major insights about my life. Each one seemed the product of long mental gestation and, in the spirit of not allowing them to slip away unnoticed this time, I’m writing them down for you here.
1) My wife was the Londoner, not me
In 2013, I moved to London to make a go of my artistic ambitions as a writer and a comedian. In 2016, I met my ex-wife K, and together we built a life together in the city. We fought the Home Office so she could stay, graduated from our respective interpreting MAs, purchased a small flat in 2021 and in 2023, secured her Permanent Residency in the UK.
In the process of sorting out our separation this summer, I was going to meet a friend in Central London and, standing on a tube platform: Which of us had really prospered in the city? Was it me who, after vast amounts of chiselling to earn the odd artistic success, had generally brought home 17k-23k a year cobbled together from various sources?
Or was it my spouse – business-minded, resolutely industrious, motivated by money and above all thrilled by the city’s endless eating options? She was the one who’d naturally suited the currents of the city, she was the one who had adopted best to the culture there; meanwhile I had, after a hundred different applications, finally been forced to return to good old social democratic Europe in search of decent pay. My skills were not suited to London’s hustle and the city certainly hadn’t found affection for my art. In a way, I reasoned, my whole role in England’s capital had been to ensure that K, true Londoner and putative millionaire, found her best footing there.