Ep.28: Get thee to the spare room!
As July rolls into August my inability to say ‘no’ to visitors means more and more people land at our door and I progressively become more and more exhausted – emotionally, physically, mentally, wrecked! In the space of one week we make pizza out on the deck with cycling friends Lee and Alice; bestie Ali arrives; my colleague Helen and family drop by for hurriedly baked scones and a swim in the loch along with my swimming buddy Nicky; we throw a BBQ for some local pals; my cousin Dom and his family come to stay in an Air bnb at the top of the croft. In the midst of all this one of my oldest friends from Edinburgh also stops by. It feels at once wonderful, nourishing and utterly overwhelming. I want to see all these people and with lockdown loosened I understand their need to see me, to touch, press, hug, show that they understand and know what we’ve been through. Their love and support is so important to me but at the same time I realise that I’m in danger of drowning in it. When things finally quieten I lie in a heap, flattened by the exertion of it all, sick with tiredness and dreading the fact I’ve committed to returning to work the following week. I’ve done it again. Pushed and pushed and pushed myself until I’m broken. I’m not sure why I do it. Is there something in me which can only feel alive by living a beyond-full life? Why can’t I feel satisfied without everything spilling over? I’m furious with myself for continually looping back round to getting myself into this terrible state but I genuinely don’t know how to stop it from happening.
The inertia when it comes is a forced one. Work. But not the work I was used to 6 months earlier before my operation. My return to work means I sit in the spare room and stare at an endless series of other people’s spare rooms in an endless sequence of zoom meetings, none of which seem to mean much to me. I feel utterly disconnected. Strategy meetings centring around pandemic health and safety regulations replace creativity. I feel slight panic at how little any of it means. I hadn’t expected to feel so removed. Floating between the spare room and the kettle then back to the spare room I wonder how I’ll ever feel enough energy to start making programmes again let alone managing my team members and supporting them through all this crap. It’s like constantly wading through treacle.
The loosening of lockdown also means B returns to school. Each morning she leaves a quarter to 8 to wander down the track to meet the bus and I wander aimlessly and too early into the spare room. When I went on sick leave pre-op and pre-pandemic, back at the start of March, I was confident in my job, purposeful in my interactions with my team. I’d continued making as many programmes as I possibly could right up until that point when cancer overwhelmed my thought processes too much for me to conjure up ideas and scripts and solutions. But even then I remember reassuring my colleagues, pressing on them the idea that I’d be back by mid May at the latest. Instead here I am in the middle of August, nervous, shaken, unsure how to fit back into the hole I left behind. I feel there’s a part of me missing and it’s not just my left breast. Cancer has eaten away at my self-confidence and self-belief. I’m not sure I can do this anymore.
Dan, my friend and job share, spends long hours on Skype and Zoom slowly nudging me back into the way of things, coaxing me gently into the language, life, ebb and flow of the BBC. And I do try. I try hard to re-engage the passion and compassion, try my best to listen to colleagues’ frustration and isolation and empathise with the all too frequent technical irritations of trying to make radio from front rooms, back rooms and bedrooms on laptops and over long distances but their negativity and back biting hits me like a slap. A small voice whispers in the background ‘does this really matter, seriously, it’s just radio, you all have jobs, you have your health, people are dying from Covid and losing their businesses, STOP FUCKING COMPLAINING!’.
I call Dan, ‘you have to look out for me being a bastard about all this’ I say, ‘I’m not sure any of it feels important enough’ and he laughs and says he’ll message if I’m being a bitch. If I’m honest I’m not really certain whether this is the big C poking its nose in again, muttering darkly that nothing can be that important compared to cancer, or whether this is all stuff that I wouldn't have cared about anyway, who knows, maybe the pre-cancer me would have turned to them all and told them to get over themselves. I really don’t want to be that person who weighs up everyone else’s crap against their own battles and wins. This is not about playing top trumps with how short your straw is but maybe there is an element that I want to shake them out of the slightly obsessive navel gazing and point them at the horizon and remind that them life is flipping, bloody marvellous so start enjoying it a bit more!
It does get better as the weeks go on and I’m more in the mix of things, starting to plan the next series of Brainwaves, thinking through the problems of how I’ll present it from home, contacting contributors, then, just as we’re thinking through our first interviews and recordings, my boss calls and tells me gently to press the pause button because they’re giving me the redundancy I requested back in July. In the quiet of the spare room as I gaze out over the loch to the shore and hills beyond she tells me how much they value all I’ve done over the years, how much I’ll be missed, and I hear her and don’t hear her because I’m at once utterly relieved and totally floored with the grief of what I’m about to leave and lose. After 25 years, half my life, I’m going to be leaving the BBC and for the second time this year my world is up ended.