The Beach Tree

A story about letting go of a dream

On a sandy beach close to my house, a tree stands naked and smooth, its bark worn away by years of weather weaving itself around the trunk and branches, changing its appearance with every tide.

This tree has always fascinated me. Still essentially itself, but not where it started, not like the other trees, not where we might expect it to be.

The beach tree once stood high above the sand on the clifftop, a leafy sentinel with command of a view through which people came and went, season after season, year after year; holiday makers, dog walkers, swimmers and surfers alike.

As the years passed, each new storm wore away the ground on which it stood - ground that seemed so firm, until one day it was simply no longer there. The view changed, and the tree changed with it. Green clifftop exchanged for shifting white sand. What was once above, now below. What once gave shade, bark wrapped, now naked and engraved with human stories, a sculptural object disrobed and worn smooth by the relentless caress of time and elements.

I am 300 miles away, lying on the floor of a bedroom in a house near another beach. Wall has become ceiling, the carpet's close crop close up. To move is be torn by a scream that makes no sound, escaping from my body in a whimper, an echo of a distant storm. I am shocked into tears, which spill from me without the usual emotions that accompany this many of them. A part of me watches, trying to make sense of this instant erosion that took me from clifftop to sand in a matter of seconds.

I've put my back out before, but never this thoroughly. The view is different here. I'm inside 'now' with a ferocity that takes my breath away. Knives slice through me with clinical efficiency until I understand that movement is now a luxury I can't afford.

Above becomes below in the span of an in-breath; the landscape of daily life that I'd stopped seeing through familiarity, now far away and unreachable as the past.

Pain sloshes through my pelvis as my body seeks a quieter arrangement. Shoots up the side of my spine and pushes a gasp from me as I learn and relearn that I am in a new place now, and can’t go back.

The gift of pain is clarity, a stark white trunk revealed where once complex layers of bark and foliage could obscure the view.

The shock of pain my body brought me over the following days and nights - practising its repertoire first with knives, and then with blunter tools, in a language I learned fast and feared at first - joined forces with the eroding clifftop on which my life was already standing. It peeled back layers of belief, identity, choices and once-new dreams, until one particular afternoon, when it became clear I would not be driving home in time for the first appointment of a new treatment cycle.

Presented with this most delicate of straws, the back of the proverbial camel caved in. The last inch of earth beneath the tree dropped away, and there it stood, suddenly looking at the same view it had known all these years in an entirely new way.

For many months I had longed for the ability to decide to stop the fertility treatments I’d started over five years before. Unable to give that last piece of ground for fear of regret, for fear of unmanageable and unending emotions I might never be able to put down. A 'what if' that threatened instead of bringing gifts, or at least gifts I'd actually want. I longed for incisive and brave clarity, and simply could not grasp it.

Until, stripped back by pain and the restrictions of prolonged bedrest, I looked down and found it in my hands, clean and unexpected and feeling very much like relief, with just a hint of a heady freedom that crooked its finger and beckoned me closer.

We danced together, this smudgy future self and I, spilling ideas and possibilities as we tripped over our own feet in a growing excitement about a life that had previously felt like a dreaded consolation prize. Since this all started, I hadn't been able to fully inhabit the ‘what if’ of a future without a child of my own, to see if it might hold a life I could also love; only looked at it sideways and fearfully from behind the murky glass of longing and grief. The razor of pain my back offered me didn't just clean the glass, it shattered it, making short work of stepping into what had previously felt like unreachable terrain. What had been below was now at eye level, and fizzing with untapped potential.

Bewilderment, finding itself unexpectedly displaced after so many years of holding centre stage, stood nearby, looking unsure and wondering how to retrieve my attention. I gave it the side eye and continued with the unfolding of ideas onto loose sheets of printer paper my mother brought me, rattling off new ‘what ifs’ to her as the images sharpened, just to hear and taste them. I didn't know if the clarity would stay, so I wanted to root into it while it was easy.

Periodically I'd poke at Bewilderment like an old bruise, to see if it could still hurt me. It seemed not. But what about regret? I asked it. What about playing this out, going through this final treatment so I could say I'd tried everything, and hope that was a substantial enough peace to carry me through the rest of my life? The bruise proved painless, which shifted bewilderment to wonder, and then grace, and gratitude.

That afternoon I walked for the first time in three year-long days. Slowly, cautiously, not painlessly, but without feeling sliced in two.

I knew I needed to sit with this newly naked self, to make sure the excitement, although tentative, was not temporary; that grief wasn't waiting to catch me revelling just a bit too much in the prospect of a future I'd feared for so long would be forced upon me.

My back, although significantly improved since the first searing slice through me three days before, was still far from healed. It required an altered way of being in relationship with it - less defensive, more accepting - but the pain wasn't ready to leave me just yet. We had more to do together.

Anyone who's ever woken suddenly at night knows that darkness is a place. Whether it’s a benevolent landscape or a chamber of horrors doesn't always feel like a choice. But a friendly dark can be like a silent library - full of enticing maybes, of the potential for new understanding, and the quiet invisible magnetic thrill that book lovers know.

It was in darkness like this that I woke one night around 2am, thinking about the beach tree, and typed the main heft of this essay into the glowing screen of my phone over the next two hours, awkwardly positioned to accommodate the pain. The words poured out, mostly unedited, and full of typos from using my least favourite method of recording, in the dark, with a deranged disc and the seed of a new life inside me, if not the kind I’d been reaching for.

It’s been a couple of months since then, and while my back has long since healed, and day to day life has resumed, obscuring some of the gorgeous clarity that was the gift of the intense pain - nothing is the same.

The future I was aiming for with such deep longing and devotion, the pursuit of which took so many things from me over nearly six years, was gone in the moment I realised I couldn’t go through with another treatment. The moment I was finally able to grant myself the freedom I’d been longing for, while being too afraid of the cost.

I don’t know what my life will be now. I don’t know who I am in this new place, bark stripped, the same daily view from a completely different perspective. All I know is that everything is different, and my task now is to craft a new life from the pieces I have around me; to rework some, to release others, to wait and see what still others want to be, and what new ones arrive.

I’m still myself, still here, but not where I started, not where I might have expected to be.

PS. I have hesitated for many weeks to publish this one, because it reveals something intensely private that has been my constant painful companion for more than five years, and which only a handful of people have known about. And, I believe in being brave with our creativity, gently stretching our own boundaries sometimes, and wouldn’t share if I didn’t think there was value in it, or if I was still ‘in it’. Besides which, I have deeply enjoyed the process of trying to put words to such an intense experience without tipping into the melodramatic; I’m still unclear as to whether I’ve succeeded there! Sometimes a little drama is called for.

However, I’m not looking for advice, sympathy, or {obviously?!} critical opinions of my choices, so any comments in that regard will be deleted. Thank you for understanding - I have yet to encounter an insensitive reader but including this note helps me feel a little safer to share.