The Unlived Life

I listened to an interview with the psychoanalyst, Adam Philips, on my way to work this morning. He was speaking about his book, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.

Most of us, spend a huge amount of our lives, our actual lived lives, thinking about lives that we are not (in reality) actually living. Peculiar.

For every door we open, thousands slam shut.
Some seem eternally out of reach, locked and barred.
Or tantalising ajar, if only we could . . . .
Most of us don't get the glossy lives depicted in Hello magazine.
Doesn't stop us dreaming.

I don't dream of my life as Beyonce or Angelina. If only I'd been in the right place, could sing, could act, was more physically attractive, didn't prematurely eject babies from my uterus? I could have been a contender.

My unlived lives are far more modest affairs. I know that I still, on occasion, think of my life as a pharmacist. If only I had taken up that university place instead of sticking closer to home to be near my then boyfriend. Because that was worth it. Snort.

Or my life married to snort-inducing boyfriend. Double snort.

I was speaking to a colleague at work the other day who told me that, when he left university, he had two job offers. One working for the health service, where his lived life took him and how he ended up sitting over the desk from me last week, and another, at the Financial Times. And his face was wistful and animated as he discussed his possible future, years ago, as a journalist at the Financial Times. This life he never had still, somehow, lived within him.

These unlived lives are a strange mixture of hope and regret.

We seem to need to reflect on what we want, on what we could have, those lives that we do not currently live, in order to hope, in order to plough forward. To harness our frustration with the absence of what we want, to identify what precisely it is that we want, to plan and scheme and dream of how to achieve what we need, to live this unlived life of our yearning wishes.

If we could not imagine anything other than our real lives, we would have no spur, no push, no stick and no carrot.

And our frustration slides along a continuum, from the cries of the child to works of literature and music. That yearning, that frustration, that want, for the unlived life, those lives that illustrate what it is that is missing from our own? Accompanies us, throughout our days.

I think of my daughter. The single embodiment of my unlived life. A super dense entity, collapsing in on herself. With the weight of all my yearning focused on such a tiny point in space and time. Poor child.

Every scream I ever screamed as an infant. every sigh I ever sighed as a child gazing out of my bedroom window, melancholy for no reason that I could articulate. Every teenage tantrum and occasion of drinking myself into a stupor. This blog. Every word. Yearns. Leans. Towards her. The central mystery and, in some ways, the central figure, the defining relationship of my life.

I have identified, very precisely, what it is that I want. Something that I have no hope of obtaining.
A relationship with a real human being. A baby, a child, a young woman. Who would poop and cry her own screams of want and frustration and fall over and hit me and throw her food on the ground and read books and make cups of tea. Generating her own unlived lives, like streamers from her fingers as she was pulled through time.

But, no.

Instead I have a relationship with a strange semi-celestial being. Who seems to symbolise Death and wonder and love and parenthood. And so many, many mysterious, baffling things. A puzzle. A trap that encircles my hand and is, whilst not painful, intractable. The one who lives no life at all. Or every life with every possibility, reduced to something so small that she can carry them around in her pocket.

I do still hope for her. In ways that are, obviously and inherently flawed. Because that life, my life as Georgina's mother, here, in actuality, will remain forever unlived. A dream, unfulfilled. A love, unrequited. A daughter who can still light my face up with wistfulness and anticipation.

But the hope, the want, the yearning, still drives me forward.
Still encourages me to live.
Pushed forward by tiny, gentle hands. They are kind but insistent.
'Live," they say. "Wake up," echoing their twin's hands. Elsewhere.

****

But this isn't for her.

It's for a beautiful girl with a pirate smile. A feisty spirit.

How the years pass without you? Well, I just don't know.

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band
Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand
And now she's in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand