Where I was born was a place of great learning. The place was Oxford, in fact: Oxford UK.
I was born in an infirmary, they tell me. When infirmaries still got called that. I don’t remember, even though I was there. I wasn’t too young to remember: it’s not that. Rather, I didn’t want to remember.
That moment presaged the rest of my life until the day of a birthday of mine: my 54th, that is. A parallel existence I lived for most of my time on this otherwise beautiful rock. I lived in the shadow of my father, who was a terrible man: he was terrible to me but also to himself. His own family had been little better. His brother, my uncle, was a tall and imposing figure: but took no nobility or honour from his physique. Instead, he casually and cruelly advantaged himself of it: his first wife died young, driven to it in my opinion by the hatred her husband breathed daily; their many children, meanwhile, suffered brutal bullying, both physical and mental.
He was well seen by his community. It happens like that; especially with unforgiving men. My own father wasn’t unforgiving: he wasn’t strong enough to be unforgiving. He was just unforgivable.
But he hurt himself as much as he did me. And so my mother … well … if I lived under the unforgivable shadow of my father, it was under the permanent excusing of those behaviours no one should consent to that we all laboured under, whenever my mother failed to duly and properly, fairly, intervene.
She is Catholic: her brand of Catholicism gravitates to finding reasons to forgive the dreadful instead of searching out and celebrating the absolutely praiseworthy.
I — as the first child and then progenitor of my own children, official — was exposed to all of this for probably 53 years, and so lived a parallel life until my 54th. I didn’t live or enjoy life at all. It wasn’t my purpose to do so.
What did happen, then, when I crossed my chronology’s 54th? What exactly happened that evening of three hours of fabulous encounter and exploration … almost of verbal dancing and sometimes glorious sparring? What happened to me — and then again, what happened to you, my dear Claire?
These are thoughts I’ve never voiced or written down before. I know my life changed. Actually, I don’t like the term “change”. It implies foregoing what went before. I much prefer “transform”.
Why?
To “transform”, to me, means to enable the flowering and emergence of a self buried too long from the world: buried in all those parallel existences that, in my case, preceded that 54th.
That’s what Claire did: that’s what you did.
I didn’t, after, act with any sort of decorum for a long while, and whatever you had been trying to do for me that #bloomsday2016 in #dublin #ireland was stupidly quashed for sure, at and by my confused and silly hand.
At least in respect of us doing and forging and engineering something together by engineering, forging and doing something world-changing. Which is, I am now sure, what you intended that June evening. And this, wherever and whatever that world might have been: whether utterly public or beautifully private.
And perhaps even with my projects as they currently stand and as they show signs of truly moving forwards, there is still nothing we will ever be able to work together on.
• https://secrecyplus.com/faqs
After all, life leaves behind real scars, and such scars are made of decisions poorly, truly poorly, taken. Decisions which in hindsight were crossroads: even forks in a road we sometimes fail to understand we are traversing. They cannot be undone: the deepest cut will always remain so.
But … even so. Even so …
If you were of a mind, dearest Claire, I’d love to repair what most who know of this story will consider, right now, as unrepairable.
I don’t say heal, yet: that would surely be a presumption too far on my part. But … repair … could this be ok? Could it?
I don’t mean what could never be: I mean to reach out to reinstating what should have been, if my own idiocy hadn’t so foolishly truncated what could have been the best friendship of our lives.
That’s all I mean.
I’m going back to #sweden on the 8th August for a month. By that time, I’d love you to have understood the Nio Kvinnor/Secrecy Plus (NK/SP) corporate proposal enough to consider being the #ceo that sits atop eight other #femalefounders and #csuite executives, who I’m determined shall run NK/SP:
• https://secrecyplus.com/planning
• https://niokvinnor.com/people
If you did want to consider this seriously, I would then step aside wholly.
It would become your project and related workstreams for the rest of your life. For as long as you cared, I mean …
In their entirety, they would become so.
As long as Nio Kvinnor really did equal nine women. At the top. And constitutionally, for the absolutely foreseeable.
My only condition being that, tbh. Just that one.
I’m 63 tomorrow. My utility to this rock will begin to decay in perhaps a decade. I want my legacy to be people, not fixtures nor brands. I want my legacy to be culture: ways of doing stuff. Not bank balances (though these have their place), nor brute power. Just good humans like you and me, who have suffered brutality for far too long and now know — oh how we know! — that we don’t want to continue to facilitate its march.
Just that.
Just this.
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