After a lean Summer of cinema in which I went to see Barbie twice and tried not to laugh too loudly at some parts of Oppenheimer (namely when Robert Downey Junior tried to be anyone other than Robert Downey Junior), this weekend there was FINALLY something new to watch.
Most people have probably been too busy being outside to notice, but once those two parked up nobody but a slew of horror films I would never watch and the Paw Patrol movie came rolling in to town. And I’ve been more than slightly bereft about it.
I am a greedy cinema go-er. I guzzle them up. I could say it’s because my world has been so much smaller in the last two years, but really that would be a lie as I’ve been obsessed with trips to the cinema even when the world was more manageable.
While I lived in London in a flat share in my late 20s and then when I moved to Essex into my own place, going to the cinema alone was one of my great luxuries. Not just of expense but of time, a leaning in to joy I was rarely capable of elsewhere.
I have had so many of my favourite cinema experiences alone. I watched Book Smart in a tiny screen in the King’s Cross Everyman at 10am on a Sunday, just me and 3 men, also alone. One walked out after 20 minutes (??!!!), while the rest of us laughed so loudly that when the lights came up we grinned at each other like old friends.
I watched Good Luck To You Leo Grande with a glass of Prosecco and a smuggled in pastry at 11am in the Chelmsford Everyman, sitting in an empty cinema except for me and two middle aged women who got smashed and couldn’t stop giggling every time people took their clothes off. It’s a film about the pursuit of an orgasm, so that happened quite a lot. When it was finished (both film and orgasm), they promptly fell over.
I curled up under a blanket at Screen on The Green to see on The Basis of Sex, my first ever solo cinema experience. I was worried everyone was staring at me, but under my blanket I felt entirely invisible.
When I went to watch The White Crow, a Russian film about ballet I’d oddly been unable to convince anyone to want to see with me, I walked around and around London for hours afterwards thinking about what it means to be an artist, and dreaming of how, in another life, I might have been a ballerina.
The greatest compliment I can ever give any partner, any person really, is that I love going to the cinema with them almost as much as I love going with myself.
And now, cinemas mean even more to me. They are most often physically designed to be inclusive, comfortable spaces where I feel not just considered but encouraged to be.
I try so hard to forget that the weight of recovery has been an erasure. My disability demands so much of my time energy and attention just to keep it from consuming me entirely. It is an ever hungry monster that lives within me.
I am still too afraid to write or even think about a life spent in permanent pain. It is a room in my mind I am too terrified to enter. A well I fear I will fall in to. It is enough to just be living with it, articulating it feels dangerous. The issue with this is that I don’t, can’t, communicate it. Often I just send my boyfriend things where other people have been better, braver than me at being truthful about its realities.
One of these was Kirsty Young’s own Desert Island Discs episode, when she talked about how much pain grinds you away, “you lose your personality, you lose your sense of humour, you lose your sense of self”.
I have been re-grappling with this loss again in recent weeks.
Like almost all of this, I can talk a good game to myself about how I know the Winter is coming, and what that means for my ability to move and my pain, after a Summer of feeling the closest I have come to touching something like ‘normal’.
But still, I have felt blindsided by how quickly a daily 5 has become a jangling, ever pressing 8, and 10 thousand steps feels like a dream I just woke up from, not a thing I was able to do just this last warm weekend. I have written before here about needing to accept I can’t be cured but the truth I didn't even realise is, that still every Summer a tiny part of my brain believes I have somehow healed myself.
That because I work so hard to pacify the incessant demands of my disability with meditation and physio and yoga and journalling and therapy and medication and exercise and hydrotherapy and eating well and and and and… The list is so relentlessly long and yet none of it is ever enough to satisfy my injury or my body’s capacity for pain. I have spent three weeks feeling, again, like a profound failure.
Here’s a hard truth- it makes me irritable and angry. It makes it hard for me to see people casually doing things my brain has stopped even dreaming about doing effortlessly anymore. It gives me hard edges where once I was soft. Waking up in pain every day can quickly become a very dark place. I am afraid of going back there.
I am resisting the slide with every piece of quickly ebbing energy I can scrounge together. I am feeding myself a life line through this season I once loved but now fear, plotting out film release dates and refreshing the Odeon app until I can make an appointment some place the old and new me agree on.
I am delighted by every new release just as much as I once was, but now it brings an additional delight- the opportunity to leave the house for some place just as safe, just as friendly. Some place I can curl up and climb inside the world of someone else for a while. If I’m really lucky, if the story is strong, I can leave my body behind just for a bit, just long enough to remember why it’s all worth it.
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I started writing this post to review (ha!) a beautiful film I saw this weekend The Great Escaper, but instead all I seemed to want write about was this. A really cheery part 2 about old people and the Second World War to follow, then. No you’re welcome!
