This was not the self I thought I knew. I simply could not accept me as this bag of nerves; in my mind, at least, I had always been the calmest and most even-tempered person in the room, someone who could cope with whatever life threw at them. A friend once asked me if I didn’t sometimes get afraid, living the way I did. I was bemused, and I couldn’t begin to understand what he was talking about. He had to spell it out for me: I lived all alone on a remote mountainside, far from any help, in a creaky old house with cobwebs and flickering candlelight and a loft full of bats. And I had to admit that it had never crossed my mind to think of it like that; it hadn’t occurred to me that people might consider any of these elements something you could be afraid of. To my eyes it was just me, at home, getting on with my life.
But now I began to consider something I would never have thought possible previously: that I was having some kind of nervous breakdown. I looked at my life to see if there were any hidden points of stress that might have had this effect on me, and I could find nothing. My life might have been physically demanding at times, but that was as far as it went; the way I saw it, I was leading a life without any stress whatsoever. I began to wonder whether it might in fact be the total absence of stress that was the problem.
In the end, what took me to the doctor was the realization that I was losing weight, a lot of weight, and not for want of eating; I had been behaving like a squirrel getting ready to hibernate for the winter, eating four or five substantial meals a day and still being hungry at the end of them. I wasn’t sure how long this had been going on, and it probably took longer for me to recognize the change than it would have done for anyone else. I never looked in a mirror and of course had no bathroom scales — I didn’t even have a bathroom. Nor did I have anyone around to tell me I looked different, so it was only when I noticed that my ribs were protruding that I took note of what was happening. I set off down the hill, over the suspension bridge across the river and to the main road, where I hitched up-valley to the town where I was registered with a doctor. This was not the town I occasionally went to for shopping, but it was a more straightforward hitch, along just one road. I had a good relationship with my doctor; when I had first gone to register he had seen my name and come out to see if it was really me. We had been school friends, and our very different paths in life had ended up delivering us both to the same place, at the same time. I didn’t know quite what I was going to say to him when I saw him this time.
He was able to make a provisional diagnosis before I had even arrived at his surgery. He saw me from his window, walking up the driveway in jeans and a T-shirt. As he pointed out to me later, everyone else was already dressed in overcoats and scarves, hats and gloves. I had been vaguely aware of this myself, but had assumed this was because my time on the hill had made me hardy, while others had gone soft from years of central heating and running hot water. He took my temperature — way too high — and my pulse — way too fast, fluttering like the heart of a bird. Then he showed me the swelling in my neck where my thyroid gland was swollen to twice its normal size. There followed batteries of tests, visits to hospital, stays in hospital, and though I was able to recover without needing an operation, I required heavy doses of drugs over many months to reduce the inflammation.
It shook me to the core. I had thought I knew exactly who I was, but it turned out that a minute chemical imbalance in my body could turn my whole life out of balance and change me into a different person altogether. We tend to think of the self as something fixed, the bottom line, but it seemed now to be the most fragile of constructs. It was not until my metabolic hormones started to regain their natural equilibrium that I began to drift back towards becoming the relaxed person I had always known. So perhaps this was my default setting after all, the place I came back to when all was well with the world; perhaps this is as much as we can hope for, that the person we find when we come looking for ourselves is conditional at best.
That autumn, however, while I was ill, all my certainties blew away with the falling leaves. I was not as independent as I had thought, not as self-sufficient. The drug treatment I was on left me weak and lacking in energy; the walk to the village shop felt like an ordeal; I didn’t have enough concentration to keep my journal, or even to read. I had friends that would have happily lent me some support, but they were far away. I had made no effort to create any sort of support network where I was. Quite the reverse: as the years had gone by I had isolated myself further and further as I grew more and more habituated to the solitary life. I had made one friend on the estate within walking distance, the sort of friend I could drop in on when passing by, and my landlord and landlady would generously offer to take me into town if I needed a shopping run or a hospital visit. But other than that I was on my own.
It would have been the sensible time to leave the cottage, but I didn’t do that. I would be there for another eighteen months yet. Perhaps it was stubbornness, but I wanted to jump rather than be pushed. The winter to come would not be the hardest in terms of the harshness of its weather, but it would undoubtedly be my hardest test. I tried to keep to my habit of going out each day, even if the walk to my postbox was as far as I could manage, or perhaps the river on a good day. Otherwise I would move slowly through my day, doing what I had to do to keep myself alive. Fire, water, food, sleep. I was not unhappy. From my window seat I watched the world outside, and the struggle for survival that was played out daily on my bird table.
What remains if you peel away all those things that help you think you know who you are? If one by one you strip away your cultural choices, the validation you get from the company of your peer group, the tools you use for communication? Then what is left behind? If you had asked me that three or four years earlier, when I was just arriving at Penlan, I imagine that I would have guessed: your true self. But I soon found that in fact I rapidly became less and less self-aware; my attention was elsewhere, on the outside. And now that circumstances had forced me to look inward once again, it was to discover that there was perhaps no fixed self to find. So what was there instead? Now, more than ever, I had the sense that my life was not so very different from that of the birds fluttering on my bird-feeder, as though a boundary between us had been broken.
Though I could not be persuaded to leave the hill for my months of convalescence, there was one respect in which I gave in to pressure: I got myself a phone. With no electricity or water at the cottage, it seemed anomalous that there was a long trail of telegraph poles already in place, spaced along the top edge of Penlan Wood, then sloping off down the hill to meet the lanes by my postbox. If those poles had not already been there then connection would have been prohibitively expensive, as nowadays you have to pay per pole — and it took an awful lot of them to link me up to the line that ran alongside the lanes — but long ago, when telecommunications were about to be privatized and it was the final chance to take advantage of the flat fee for connection to any address, a line had astutely been strung to every building on the estate, in case it was ever needed. So I had only to pay for the reconnection of an existing service, even though it had never been used before.