8.20pm on a Wednesday, in the shop at the end of the road, scanning a bag of rice at the machine that keeps telling me to place the item in the bagging area. And my hands are not quite steady.
Not dramatic. A small tremble, the sort you only notice because you are watching your own fingers move.
I remember thinking, in this order: I have not eaten since breakfast. Then, I am probably coming down with something. Then, with a bit of irritation at myself, that I had not sat down all day and that was nobody's fault but mine.
What I did not think, at any point, standing at that machine, was: the call at 10 this morning was horrible, and this is that.
The alarm goes off in the wrong hour
At 10 that morning I was excellent. I want to be honest about that, because it turns out to be the important part. Clear, warm, organised. I asked good questions. I did not get defensive at the bit designed to make me defensive. I came off the call, made a cup of tea and got on with the next 4 things.
Nothing arrived then. No tightening, no heat, no dropping away under the ribs. There was nothing to push down, because there was nothing there to push.
It turned up 10 hours later, in a shop, with no label on it. And it did not mention where it had been.
Why the wrong name sticks
A feeling that arrives with no cause attached will take the first explanation it is offered. At 8.20 in the evening the explanations nearest to hand are all small and all plausible. Tired. Hungry. Run down. Too much coffee. My own fault for not stopping.
Every one of them is a dead end, which is exactly why it gets picked. Tired asks nothing of me. Tired has no phone call in it.
So the morning goes unrecorded. The one piece of information my body produced all day gets filed under housekeeping and thrown out with it.
Then it happens again a fortnight later with something else behind it and the same label on the front. Do that for a few years and you end up a woman who will tell you, completely sincerely, that she has no idea what sets her off.
She has every idea. It just always turns up late, and she keeps meeting it in a shop.
It is not avoidance
This is the bit I had wrong for a long time.
There is a room where you keep moving on purpose, where the washing up late at night is a way of not sitting down. I know that room. This is not that one. Here there is nothing being outrun, because at the time of the thing there is genuinely nothing there to feel.
It is not courage either. Courage would mean I felt it and carried on anyway. I did not feel it. It is a delay, and a delay is not a character trait.
And it is not the room where a feeling has to produce its reasons before it is let in. Here it comes in straight away. It just gets handed somebody else's name at the door.
What it costs
3 things, and none of them look like much on the day.
The morning never gets dealt with. The call is closed, successfully, and it is still in me. Nobody goes back to a thing that went well.
I lose my own instrument. The one system I have for knowing when something has gone past what I can carry reports 10 hours late, and then gets overruled by a theory about coffee. So when the same kind of call comes round again I say yes, because on the day it went fine. It did go fine. That was never the question.
And I start to think of myself as somebody who wobbles for no reason. That is a quietly corrosive thing to believe about yourself. It makes you trust what you feel slightly less about everything, including the things you are right about.
Which room is this?
The room where the signal arrives 10 hours late and gets given the wrong name.
It is not bracing, which is the body getting ready for something that has not happened yet. Nothing is being waited for here. The thing has already happened, and I was good at it.
It is not being grateful out loud and exhausted underneath, which is a long weather system. This is 1 evening, over and over.
It is not answering a question as though it were an accusation, which is the mouth running before any decision has been taken. Nothing moves here at all. That is the whole trouble.
The door is the lateness, not the feeling. The feeling, by the time it turns up, is only weather. The useful thing is the hour it chose.
The lateness is the information
If something arrives in the evening with nothing attached to it, the cause is almost never in the evening.
It is earlier in the same day. And more often than not it is the part of the day I handled best, because handling something well and putting it down are 2 separate pieces of work, and only 1 of them gets noticed at the time.
One thing to do this week
When the shaky, flat, snappish thing turns up with no reason on it, do not look for the reason in the room you are standing in.
Go back through the day and find the hour. Not to fix it. Not to tell anybody. Not to decide what it means or whether you overreacted. Just put the feeling back next to the thing it came from, so that for once the 2 of them are in the same place.
That is all. You are not solving the morning. You are giving the evening its proper subject line.
You will quite often find that the hour you want is the one you were proudest of. That is the part nobody claps for, and it is the part that charges.
Tuesday, at Twickenham Green
This coming Tuesday, 27 October, the session at The Hare and the Moon is Signals. 10am to 1.30pm, private, one person at a time, 60 minutes. It is learning what your own body does when it is frightened and what to do about it in real life, which this week means the alarm that rings 10 hours after the fire. The hour starts with whatever is actually going on for you that morning.
The Returning Circle is 2 to 3pm, donation only, come as you are. Breath, ceremonial and medicine music. Every Circle is recorded and the recording goes out afterwards, so you can take part without getting to Twickenham.
For either, message me on WhatsApp, use the contact page, or email anna@annalouoflondon.com. There is no booking page for the Tuesdays yet.
If a Tuesday in Twickenham is not possible, the same work runs longer in the evenings and workshops, and longer again on the retreats.
These letters go out from here. And if you would rather keep practising with other people in the room, that is the Reset Room.
The second life is the real one. Anna Lou x.