Issue #82: Is it intimacy, or 'Into me, you see'?

The power of being witnessed as the feral sloth you are.

I just got back from a week-long holiday in Madeira with my mother. For the past few summers, we’ve gone away together, and this time felt like our most relaxing break yet. So much so that, as I write this, I feel my soul yearning to board the next easyJet flight back to Funchal.  

I love living in London. But God, it’s exhausting. A sprawling city full of lonely, ambitious strangers, united by our shared striving to be better, faster, fitter, cooler, richer. And to what end? It’s never enough, not when you look around you. Madeira is a slower kind of island; it has beautiful-but-slippery floor tiles, similar to Lisbon, which slow you down naturally (as you feel like you’re walking on banana peels).

But it wasn’t just the slowness of my surroundings that relaxed me. I let myself take the whole week off from… well, anything. I hung out with my mum, not trying to perform any identity other than ‘Daughter’ and ‘Consumer of Things’: tuna steak, rosé, everything on my ‘to read’ list (scroll down for my recommendations, paid subscribers). I bought teal-coloured eyeliner from KIKO, like it was 2002. A notoriously hopeless packer, I borrowed my mother’s clothes and suncream. We watched Sex and the City. We cackled with laughter when, while sunbathing in a shady spot in the hotel garden, one lizard, followed by another, rained down on us like something out of the Book of Exodus.

I didn’t do any work. I didn’t post on social media. I probably wasn’t even a good conversationalist, letting my mother take the brunt of a rather garrulous hiking guide I hired for us one day. 

But it felt good to just be. What’s more, it felt good to do so in the presence of someone who, thanks to some sort of biological madness, has to love me unconditionally. Because being witnessed to that degree – when I’m just being that unvarnished, bargain bucket version of myself – is not something that happens to me very often. 

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It’s a phenomenon I rarely see written about living alone: how going unwitnessed, day to day, impacts your interpersonal relationships.