That's Perfect

On positivity and why every day has become my perfect day

The sun paints a bright stripe down the back of Annie’s t-shirt. She is my very own Derry girl; whip thin, strong-shouldered, with a way of bending at angles as she talks and gestures. She darts back and forth with napkins, cutlery, cups of tea. Her voice carries like a song above the community centre chatter: “Will you be having some lunch, my darling? How aaaare you today?” She tells me stories of her mammy and her obsession with drying the washing outside, always an eye on the weather. She stretches out the time it takes to make my drink as long as she can, filling me in on her latest loves and losses in a long, fast stream of beats and cascades, words tumbling over each other, her hair escaping its bun. She is like a wild river. She’s only been here four months and she’s already profoundly ‘one of us’. I love her with a fierceness that I’ll never feel able to express to her directly, feeling a shyness in my chest descend every time I try. I wish I could freeze time so she could talk and talk and talk and paint the air with everything she is. 

You see, it’s perfect that I don’t have a studio, an office, a room of my own, a different life, a ‘proper job’, because it means I get to be here, here with Annie. I get to be here with the old hunched form of Evelyn whose bulging eyes point in opposite directions, who tells me on the regular that I’m “just brilliant,” who claps her hands when her dinner is set before her, the gravy thick and brown as leather. She is balding at the back, her white hair whisper thin. 

Most of you will already know that the community centre by my house is my second home, because it’s safe, because it’s cheap and warm, and because disability is as common as chips here, which they happen to serve piled high and hot and generous. It’s the one place in all the world where I’ve felt that I truly belonged and it’s hard for me to feel the lack of anything at all when I’m here. I don’t focus on what’s wrong as I watch Evelyn try to press a pound coin into the hands of her friend who has bought them a pot of tea each, both sets of fingers swollen and curled with arthritis. “You put your money away,” her friend hisses, good-naturedly, their backs curved in their chairs like parentheses around a secret. All I see is story; the preciousness of life, of people. All I see is how much everything there is in everything else.  

I’d have missed all that, serious and conventional in my imaginary studio, in my imaginary healthier, busier, more comfortable life. I’d have missed Nicola’s new dress and her birthday sandals and her matching red scrunchie as she pushed her rollator across the hard floor like a yacht through clear water, her head high; I’d have missed her commanding, thick-mouthed, insistent instruction that I sit with her for lunch and missed my own delight at her invitation, her learning disability a barrier to friendship in the world outside, perhaps, but not here, here where she is high queen of the room and us all. I’d have missed our long conversation about a new type of crisps that have appeared in “our Tesco”, and I’d have missed someone dropping their water bottle on the floor and it going everywhere, Annie racing with the mop, and I’d have missed Lee, my friend in his mobility scooter shouting, “You need to start wearing a pad, Annie!” and the great cackle of glee that rose from my elderly and disabled friends, barely a fully continent one among us. You see, it is a perfect day for me. A perfect life.

It is my first day ‘up and about,’ as they say, after a bit of a crash. Fraser and I ventured further from home than usual and had a delightful time, but it meant a heavy spell in bed after, my body an incredible storm. What progress I’ve made with my walking lately was lost for a little while as I became as shaky as a lamb again, grasping for something solid, my skin pale, my mouth twisted with pain. “Oh, but this is perfect because it means I get to stay in bed and read!” I declared croakily from the pillow, and we laughed at my determined catchphrase. It is a statement I have taken to using, everywhere and anywhere – this is perfect because... We’ve turned it into a game. It was perfect that it rained hard on the day when we braved an outing so that we had race my wheelchair up and into the shelter of the bandstand, the smell of old paint mixing with damp earth, a steady growing number of people joining us with little dogs and pierced noses, the colours all around us like a painting dripping, dripping onto the ground. It was perfect that I still wasn’t well enough to work on Tuesday despite a deadline due, the pressure of it pressing on my tender body, because waiting and trusting and relaxing into the gap sharpened me like a knife and meant, come Wednesday, I cut into the page neatly and quickly, filing it by lunchtime.

Every individual must decide for themselves how they will cope with the ups and downs of life. It’s taken me forty years but I know now that what serves me best is a kind of focused, relentless positivity. It’s not a popular idea these days — I’ve noticed that often any kind of positivity runs the risk of being labelled ‘toxic’, as if it can only ever be a kind of lie — but this isn’t a positivity I push on others, it’s a right I simply claim for myself and myself alone. I claim it like someone deciding on her own pay rise far beyond her station, with a confident entitlement. I claim it like a protester standing down a bulldozer. 

I deserve to find meaning in my life so I will make everything feel meaningful. I will do it by reframing every single thing, if I have to, making everything symbolic. Of course I ‘feel my feelings’ and all the rest, but when it comes to writing the story of what this moment means to me, I have learnt to roll up my sleeves and take charge. I won’t do half measures, either — it isn’t just fine, it’s perfect. If I’m going to rebel, I’m going all in. Positivity has become how I channel my anger, fear, disappointment, panic, resentment, envy — all of it. I take it all in my hands, fierce and strong-fingered, and I reshape it and offer it back to myself fiery, grinning, “hey, but what about this, instead?” It isn’t lying, it’s simply the crafting of new truth from dirt, from waste, from blood and tears and laughter.

What helps, I’ve found, is to focus less on trying to wrestle my own story into a specific shape but to focus more on the stories of people around me. Not everything that happens to me offers opportunities for pleasure or control, but whatever does happen, I am offered an opportunity to tune into what else is going on, and that is what I’ve learnt to treasure, to welcome — that is what makes every day my perfect day. Another game I’ve been playing lately is to decide that every person I meet is the Main Character. Not me, I’m not the main character today, they are, and, wow, isn’t it lucky that I got to meet them? Isn’t it lucky that I got to pay attention to the things they said and the things they didn’t say, the way they moved their body, the things they reached for, the things they pulled away from? This is perfect! What a chance!

“Your job is to just be with what’s arising in this moment, in your body, in your heart, all around you, and to look for the possibilities.” I typed these words onto a virtual sticky-note and ‘stuck’ it on my phone’s home screen when frustration filled my body like fire. I put a hand to my heart to seal the deal. It is the first part of my contract with the universe and the one I’m getting better and better keeping. The second part of my commitment is harder — to capture the moment in some way, in words, in pictures. I still often forget that part, or lose my nerve, or get distracted, but that’s ok, I remembered to today.

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