Google Maps

"What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands."

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I was walking near Phoenix Park earlier in the week when a car with eyeballs captured me: the Google Maps Street View. Personal safety, government surveillance and the right to anonymity aside, I made a note in my notes app to check back and see my likeness. A time stamp to say: I was there.

At night, sometimes I go on Google Maps and use the Timestamp feature. Frequently I visit my granny’s house in 2009, when she was alive, and every Sunday we would visit and drink tea and eat wheels of bread. I can zoom in on the little house and see the front door and the long vertical letterbox - knowing that, if I reach my hand in, the keys are hanging behind and I can easily let myself in. There is a small pot of yellow flowers sitting outside the front door and the neat front garden has recently been cut. I wonder what is going on inside the house right now, in 2009. Are you reading? Watching TV? Enjoying the silence of your own space after an unimaginably hard life?

I visit another location on Google Maps. This time I can see timestamp images from 2008 right up until 2024. Here, I can map your losses. Here I can map my own - the demolition of my spirit, the vanishing of my compass. I can draw a line between these locations, these two geographies and parallel times. When my granny died, my mapped location wasn’t present. I was physically at the house with the little yellow flowers, but by that point I had been so consumed that my spirit floats ephemerally at this second location. Probably in the shape and form of a bin, or some other banal object. GPS signal lost.

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:   
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

- Sylvia Plath, ‘Elm’.

What does it do to a body and a soul when they have been decimated by the world? I’ve seen what happens, and I’ve also experienced it. Seeing it is honestly more frightening. When you look into the eyes of someone you’ve known so intimately and loved so fiercely but they are unrecognizable and will never return. When the bottom falls out of someone’s life and the only person left to blow up the life-preserving dinghy, is you - what do you do? I believe/d that you get onboard.

* * *

Years later, the gallons of love I poured into that particular relationship, the co-survival and co-dependence - it all became a bit of a laugh. But I was the butt of the joke. What a silly girl - and actually maybe even more than that - ‘she’s a bit strange’. It’s still quite mortifying to think about, people laughing at me when I bared to them the tenderest flame of my soul.

Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth (1948).

Recently I watched the very touching film Spoiler Alert and despite the complete heartbreak and abject cruelty of cancer, I shamefully felt envious of the fact that the lead character who survived knew he had ‘done a good thing’ and ‘learned a lesson about the depths of love and value of prioritizing others.’ He went off to start a deserved new chapter knowing something about himself - that when times got tough, he was the kind of person who stuck the course. He knew what it was to love.

As it is, I don’t know if the years I devoted to care and love were in fact ‘a good thing’ - there were and are no real learnings here. In fact there is a strong case to be made that I wasted many years of my young adulthood, irrevocably damaged my sense of self and jeopardized my ability to love ever again.

(I realise I’m throwing around the word ‘love’ here quite generally. I know there are very different forms of love, different ways of showing it - and different capacities for experiencing and offering it.)

I would contend that loving someone in general, can exhaust us. For the longest time, I was all loved out. Choosing to move to Dublin in 2021 was me giving the world one last chance to show me what might be possible. Otherwise I was going to a comfortable cave and ready to live solitary for the rest of my life.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Series 1, No-1 (1918).

I have no easy answers here, no neat reflections to conclude on. I gave myself over to what I believed love was and it almost destroyed me. I didn’t ask for it, but I didn’t even get a ‘thanks’ for giving up a large chunk of my life to help someone. Instead, I was laughed at. This makes me angry, even today. I continue to work through these issues in therapy.

Life in Dublin has caused some movement of these gears, however. I feel myself wanting to confront my recent history and interrogate how I have been navigating my interpersonal relationships. I do believe the connections I have made in Dublin in the past two years are intentionally and reflectively done on both sides of the equation. I trust the people I have in my life now and I don’t believe them capable of some of the cruelties I have experienced.

In All About Love, bell hooks contends that we need to have ‘a working definition of love, before love can come about in its truest form’. I firmly agree with this. Later, hooks wrote:

“Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”

- bell hooks.

So while I may not be able to wrap up my past in a bow, tick off the learnings and move on - I do accept and understand that what I choose to do with my suffering is in my own hands. I’m very much at square #1, but there is a freedom and excitement knowing that there might be pages unwritten waiting for me.

In a decade, I hope I remember to look back to Google Maps and see the 2024 timestamp recording how I spent time walking on my own in Dublin city - rebuilding. The street image was captured at a moment of tremendous change and self-compassion for myself. It’s another dot I can align to in the story of my life.