On Walking: On Giving Up

It’s just after noon, and cold, I’m cold. We’re walking over the fields below the dryer, through long whip-ribbons of rye. It winds around my boots, makes my knees wet through my jeans. I barely notice. My steps are slow, I’m holding my coat in tight, rounding my shoulders. The dogs stay close, unused to me being so folded-in, like an old umbrella. I wish I could shake myself.

We’re headed to the flat margins of the old railway fields, paths I can walk without thinking about them. I need all my thinking power, for something else.

Yesterday, a friend said I’d given up. She meant on writing, on books, on trying to make my voice heard. She said it really in passing, it wasn’t meant as an attack, it probably wasn’t actually all that much to do with me, and more to do with her, and the day she’d had. But it was like an iron to the face.

I thought, when she said it, fuck off. Fuck right off. You’re wrong. I’ve never given up, not ever, not in twenty years of trying.

I’ve thought about this all night. And this morning. It’s painful, like a tooth that’s been worried at. What if, actually, I had given up, but didn’t realise? If I’ve somehow assimilated failure as part of my character, wearing it like an ugly brown hat, sweat-stained around the crown, rendering me squat and mushroom-like to the world?

I climb a stile, jump off high, irritated by the mushroom thought. I want to fling this hat, frisbee the horrible thing into the Sor brook, watch it sink. I can hear the crake of a crow. The shrill demands of half-grown lambs in the old mill field. I’m angry, now. Not hurt. Not beaten. I whistle in the dogs, pick up my pace.

I’m not giving up, I won’t. I want to tell the stories of the women in Nightwalking, I want to make people see how important it is to face fears, to overcome them, to not let your own self doubt wear away the ground beneath your feet. And I want to call out things I find unfair, or sexist, or plain wrong. I want to write truths, and make things change.

We’ve reached the railway fields now, I’m marching, practising speeches in my head, feeling some kind of fire taking hold in my belly, warming my core. I take off my jacket, tie it round my waist, stash my scarf. The dogs sense my change of mood, game on. Pants is wheeling out to my left, Dora’s no longer worrying beneath my feet. I storm past a bank of goat willow, inform it of my intention to do more, try harder, engage, persuade. Fight.

That, I think, is what my friend meant. Not that I had given up on my dreams, but that I’d stopped fighting for them. I let that bloody mushroom hat sit on my head. But here’s me, taking it by the brim, standing up straight and tall, and I’m throwing it, hard, my best long-arm, watching that hat arc high in the air. If I had a gun, I’d shoot it.

I watch it fall, drop from view. Perhaps in the water. Then I walk away, head for home. I’ve got stories to tell. Dreams to chase.