Lovely cocoon.

From where I am sat in the back of the car right now I can see your small, brown head bobbing around. You turn to your right and smile, which makes me smile. The Driver, as we like to call him, is merely a silhouette to me. So tall I cannot see through to the front without leaning round. I remember when I was very little and car journeys made me sick. Now the comfort of The Driver blocking my view, tall and safe and constant, is wonderful.

Sometimes I sit directly behind you. You and your head popping round the front passenger seat, curling your arm around to touch my knee. The way it feels so safe when you hold my hand.

My backseat buddy gets those smiles too. You reach round to touch her knee, and then mine. The Driver does the same as if you are reassuring yourselves that we are still there. We are still there. Sometimes I reach out to hold her hand and she obliges me by sticking her finger out. She says my hands are small and clammy. I bully her into holding it for just a moment.

We spend whole journeys like this. Reaching out to each other, making each other laugh, giving smiles that send love. We sleep a lot. Not The Driver, The Driver is not allowed to sleep. But in the warmth of the back of the car and the lulling of the engine I always manage to nap.

It makes me feel like I am a child again. But in a good way. I am not helpless or afraid. I can exist without you always being there. But in these moments, in these long journeys in the car, I am back in that lovely, lovely cocoon. Our family unit sleeping and driving and being content all the way to wherever we are going next.

Up on my high horse.

Yesterday I tried to educate someone on the damaging effects of sharing rage-porn posts like the one about “people wanting Santa to be a woman or gender neutral”. I am not sure if my message eventually got through or just pissed her off but the post was deleted, and quite a few people read the comments. A tiny, minuscule victory of some sort. Not a drop in the ocean, more like a drop of condensation down a window in middle class British suburbia.

Normally I don’t bother. Normally I switch off to Facebook friends who express outrage at the inaccurate, continuous and unfair reportage of marginalised groups. The outrage coming from a foolish belief in the toxic story twisted from someone’s innocent, discursive tweet rather than from the deceitful journalism. And it is foolish, because the stories are meaningless and none of it touches their lives. I never see them get that angry at, say, reports about trans people who were murdered because of their identity. That is more outrageous to me.

But there it is. “To me”. Those are my values, not theirs. Who am I to sit on my high horse to tell them otherwise? And I am on a high horse; I am not affected directly by transgender politics and I sit in a comfortable, educated position from which I can pass judgement.

So where’s the line? Where do I use my privilege to educate? Where do I know when to shut up?

I can’t leave it. If I can help expand one person’s view I have to at least try. I’d be a hypocrite if I kept my mouth shut.

I just have to watch out, because it’s so comfortable up here on my high horse. It’s so easy to theorise, to moralise, when you are not touched by the problems on either side.

Putting it off.

Putting it off. As if the moment will be better in a future that does not exist. “I will feel more like it then.” 

I was going to write a piece on love, because I want to write a longer piece on love. And yet here I am writing about putting things off in an attempt to put off the piece on love. Maybe I should just sit down and write that.

Sometimes I think if my surroundings change I’ll feel more like writing. If I go to a cafe, if the music is right, if I’m looking out from the window at a busy street. I’ll write then. I’ll do my work then.

I am also hard on myself. If I binge-watch a series, if I have a lie in on more than two days in a row, if I have a nap. I feel bad about it.

But if I just sat down and did the stuff I needed or wanted to do, if I didn’t have such a struggle in my head about it, I could relax without any hassle from my internal monologue.

I wonder if I could just get that voice in my head to shut up. Well, we’d all be much more chilled out without that problem.

The thing is you don’t take much in of anything when you’re constantly telling yourself you should be doing something else, all the while another voice is telling you to put it off.

It is a wonder I get anything done with this endless monologue. Endlessly putting ‘it’ off, endlessly berating myself. All a figment of my mind, I suppose.

I did not write this blog post in a cafe, the rain running down the window, a hot cup of coffee steaming. I wrote it on the sofa on my phone, finally finding the energy to pause the TV. It may not be a post on love, but at least I stopped putting it off.

And that’s the first step, right?