About Me — Em Unravelling

(I’m not sure how I feel about the “unravelling” part these days, tbh)

You see, I would quite like it all, that’s the overriding thing about me — I really would quite like to have it all, as all the ball-busting ceiling-smashing shoulder-padded business women of the 1980s promised me I could; I’d like to trip-trap-trip between glossy offices in my patent heels and pencil skirts, making deals and being very important. But then I’d also like to be a yoga-lean, raw-vegetable-nibbling, patchouli-scented earth mother type, wandering barefoot between my homegrown raspberry canes with my eyes on a higher purpose. I want both of those things. And all the selves in between.

It was with this general sense of wanting it all that I started out in life. What I actually got was a curious mish-mash of everything and nothing. I got, in effect, an ambition-and-life-plan stew.

Some of the ingredients were inspired (do you catch this mouthful’s spicy tang of Gentle, Loving Husband? One of my better life choices, I don’t mind telling you) whereas some were a rancid and bitter mistake (ugh, no, please remove all fatty, gristly trace of Ill-Advised Midlife Extramarital Affair before this goes anywhere near anyone’s plates; I don’t seem to recognize the self that got inveigled in that nonsense at all).

I dream and I drift and I pad all the gaps that might appear in my life with books and reading. All of my shadow-selves are characters in books that I’ve absorbed at some stage. I have very little imagination of my own, but I’ve been plugging the holes with other people’s imaginations for so long that the substances are indistinguishable.

If we’re going to go deep on my boring biography, well then: I was born in London in 1980, a surprisingly blonde, blue-eyed girl child (my parents were dark-haired and dark-eyed and for some reason had also entirely expected to have a boy). I was like a little fat unexpected cuckoo in their nest, and I felt both smugly proud of my role and that it was entirely my nest to inhabit.

I had a pretty normal childhood until I was five, and then all of a sudden my mum changed entirely. She’d joined a new religion, which in all honesty was a cult, and suddenly her rules and Biblical prophecies became the fulcrum around which all of our lives turned.

Thanks to the cult, my two sisters and I were homeschooled. (Believe me when I tell you that in the 1980s and 1990s in England, this was not a common occurrence). We were permitted no sugar or refined foods at all; meat and dairy products were also sinful, so we didn’t have those either. We had no TV, no fiction books, no music that wasn’t classical music, and certainly no social lives. Basically, we were a little clutch of weirdos.

The homeschooling ended quite abruptly in the early 1990s and I was allowed to go to school when I was twelve years old. I loved school. I loved learning. In particular, I loved books. I couldn’t have been happier to throw off the shackles of my homeschooled, strangely isolated childhood, and only in small flashes of hindsight do I ever realize now what a gift some parts of that isolation were.

I fell pregnant at 17. Being a teenage mother is something that never leaves you. I still feel a vague sense of shame about it, and I’m now forty. My first husband, who I met when I was just a teenager and who is the father of my eldest child, was abusive and cruel to me, so I had some lost years.

I learned very early what it is to be afraid of a man, and how cruelty and violence can lurk behind all sorts of facades. Reconstructing a life for myself and my little daughter after I left him is one of the things I feel unconflicted pride about. One of my shadow-selves stayed with him and is still scared of him, and I’m glad that shadow-self is only imaginary.

When I eventually remarried, though, it was to the kindest, gentlest, most loving man imaginable. I made an excellent choice in Husband №2, and we both know it. I’m grateful to him for many many things, but mostly for the fact that he restored my faith in men again. We both wanted a family, to give my daughter a sibling, and I had 3 children by the time I turned twenty-six.

The experience of that treacle-slow but simultaneously lightning-quick phase of parenting, when your children are small and sticky and need you physically all the time, is one of my favorite memories. It was hard work alongside studying, but it was real and visceral and I loved it. (It’s how I know that if I’d gone down the patchouli earth-mother route, I’d have aced that path).

I didn’t take that earth-mother path, though. My undergraduate degree was in law, which is nothing to do with earth mothering. I preferred the idea of English Literature, but I thought studying the law would get me to a better job more quickly. And it did: despite part-time postgraduate study, I was a qualified lawyer well before I was thirty. (In England, a qualified lawyer can be either a barrister or a solicitor. I am a solicitor, so unfortunately I don’t get to wear one of those cute curly little wigs with pigtails at the back).

Oh. I should also explain. Being a lawyer, and having a very senior role within my company, is why I write under a pseudonym — I am not in the least ashamed of who I am or of my life experiences, but I write about very personal events and I have a duty to not link this side of me publicly to my business. (I went with “Unravelling” as a blog handle because I was obsessed at the time with Brene Brown’s definition of a woman in midlife as not so much having a crisis, but unraveling. I still think she’s spot-on in that).

I was particularly grateful for the anonymity decision when this article went “viral” last year (viral is a relative term, of course, but I got 20,000 reads within a couple of days and for me that’s huge). I was getting plenty of bile and mean comments alongside some lovely, supportive ones, and I was very glad that my clients weren’t reading them. Or my children. Or my husband.

I have always loved writing and the written word, but the first piece of writing I did for any reason other than studying was when I began my blog (theunravelling.net) in the first Covid-19 lockdown (April 2020). I’d planned for years to write, and suddenly I had time to do it.

So, I sat down at the computer and realized in a blinding, sickening flash that I was actually terrible at writing. All that reading I’d done, and everything I tried to write myself sounded stilted and horrible. It was a gruesome experience, but it was a useful lesson.

Nevertheless, I persisted with my blog. I had things I wanted to write about. I had had an extra-marital affair in my mid-30s, at a time when I felt that my life had come apart at the seams and I did not know who I was. I felt like every component of my core self had somehow malformed, and although I had managed to find a shaky route back to myself again, there was a real valid comfort in setting the whole sorry tale out in black and white. Not least because it was the sort of story I would have loved to read at the time I was in crisis.

I learned that there’s a distinct psychological closure when you give part of your life a beginning, a middle, and an end. You make a story of it, a narrative, and any loose ends in your heart tie themselves up neatly. I really can’t describe how helpful I found it. And what I learned, from comments on my little blog and from emails from readers, was that other people found it comforting too. It was humbling but it made a strange, quiet sense to me.

In May 2020, six weeks or so after starting my blog, I was on Twitter one night and saw mention of Medium. I had never heard of the site before, but when I clicked on it I recognized the interface as one that I’d seen on shared articles sometimes. I signed up as a paid reader and inhaled hundreds of articles. I started writing my own stories here within a week or so after that, and I’ve loved the journey so far.

I’ve “met” some absolutely inspiring writers, humblingly brilliant wordsmiths, and I’ve felt little zings of excitement when my words have appeared on the same publication pages as theirs. It’s a trip, it really is. I feel like I’m learning how to write from scratch, and I’ve got all these teachers just leading by example.

This is a surprisingly long piece, considering how basically basic I am. What else is there to say about me?

• I’m a runner, have been one for over 10 years now, and I run pretty much daily (I’ve only done one marathon, though — but it was a big one; please see my heavily-cropped photo for details thereof). Running is like pure therapy for me.
• I like to drink cold white wine in the garden on summer days, condensation beading on the glass, with a bowl of Popchips on hand. (Barbecue flavor, please, but salt and vinegar is also fine).
• I love traveling; before Covid-19, my favorite hobby was to put “anywhere” in the Skyscanner destination box and book the cheapest flights to the strangest places I could find. (I’m lucky that my husband enjoys this hobby too).
• I’m a staunch feminist. I love to read essays by feminists whose brains I covet and admire and I’m learning all the time, widening my understanding of feminism’s intersection with other parts of society.
• I believe that my generation of women was sold a lie and that through our own unrealistic expectations we were far more trapped by the patriarchy than we ever believed; I believe I owe it to my daughters and to the generations after theirs to fight for the sort of equality we are still not afforded. (For more on that, see this piece of mine).
• Finally, and this is an abysmal cliche to end on, but the older I get the more ignorant I realize I am. I was naive about so many things. I thought I was worldly-wise and world-weary and that I had enough life experience and education to know how the world worked, but I’m still only just figuring it out.

And that, in the end, I think is quite exciting. It’s quite fun to know there’s so much more to learn.

My latest Medium pieces: