Part 2 of Your Love Life | The comfort zone

When the unthinkable happens, it feels as though, suddenly and without warning, the ship you’ve been sailing on safely for so long has sunk, leaving you clinging to the wreckage in a choppy, grey sea. Still painfully alive, but with open wounds and in deep shock.

At this stage you need to find the metaphorical equivalent of respite. You need to find comfort and a way to let the wounds begin their healing process. Not too much violent action and lashing out. Save your energy. Just hold on.Then gradually, gradually, inch yourself into a lifeboat, and rest.

When my own personal unthinkable happened — a much loved and trusted husband of a dozen or so years had an affair and left me to be with her — I kept diaries into which I poured all that rage and misery. For years I could not bear to read them, but now they give me vital clues on who to get through and how to get through trauma.

'The craft'

What to do with those endless hours when your mind continues to churn over its misery like a rat caught in a maze?

I recommend distraction as a powerful balm.

I am no good at craft and early on in my life wrote it off as boring, but, going through my own miserable time, I bought a beginner’s simple cross-stitch kit from an art shop and was surprised at how it absorbed and soothed my jangling nerves. There is something mesmerising and hypnotic about the rhythm and repetition of the stitches. The feeling of wool and cotton slipping through the fingers, the handling of soft fabrics, soothes and strokes the skin. As the body is soothed, so the mind relaxes. My hands stopped trembling.

Working with needle and thread was a traditional female craft and as I sat doing my tapestry in the evening, I felt slightly comforted in the knowledge that generations of women had done the same, sewing into stitches and seams their misery and frustration at the hands of men and life. They had gone before me, gone through it, and come out the other side. Their pain was in the past. Perhaps, if they could do it, so could I? Perhaps one day my pain would be history too?

Losing myself in a book to give myself a break from reality is another coping method. This is when I discovered Persephone Books which reprints ‘forgotten’ fiction by and about mid-twentieth century women. They are timeless and nostalgic at the same time.

Just why is nostalgia comforting? I think it's because it’s safely in the past and is a reminder that one day our pain will be in the past too. And there was something visually appealing about these women in their retro fashions with their shopping baskets and powder compacts and stiff upper lips, who mostly didn’t have to juggle as many life facets as we do today: job outside the home, domestic life, the pressure imposed by trying to live up to Instagram.

I admit I’m looking at the past through rose-tinted lenses here, but isn’t it sensible to protect your eyes with sunglasses when the light is too glaring? As a woman I have always been glad I’m alive now rather than then, but it was calming to escape into the lives of these women for a while.

Since then I’ve also discovered other favourite publishers who specialise in discovering and republishing books from the past, such as Dean Street Press, Turnpike Books, and Handheld Press.

For the worst days, for insomnia, there was Celia Haddon’s The Yearbook of Comfort and Joy , snippets of reassurance combined with her collection of cosy rural Victoriana, and The Fireside Book of DavidHope (see The Varnished Culture  website for an evocation of the appeal of The Fireside Book series) whose idealised picturescapes and easy-to-read poems gave me something to immerse myself in when mental effort was too hard.

I mostly hate sport but to give myself a short-term goal to focus on I decided I would finally learn to swim.. It was a revelation to discover that learning to swim with an encouraging one-to-one coach in a warm, uncrowded pool with no danger of going out of your depth was nothing like the miserable school experience of sadistic games teachers trying to oversee 30 kids all at once in a freezing cold pool.

An absolute beginner in modern-day gyms, this was also the time I discovered how soothing water can be. My muscles unknotted in the gym whirlpool, I felt calm stealing over me by taking breaths of lavender-scented air in steamroom-cum-sauna.

I wrote, ‘Learning to swim.Two lessons a week. I go into the lovely café afterwards, have a cup of tea andapple, read the newspapers and feel oddly comforted. An enjoyable day even in the middle of heartache and uncertainty.’

Today I would call this experience finding and sheltering in the eye of the storm.

The forlorn figure in the lifeboat was beginning to unslump herself out of the foetal position, to look about and take stock.