Yesterday, I left my house of more than two decades, this time forever. It’s no small thing to a person like me, who thrives on continuity, familiarity and always having a reliable, unshifting, base as a means of safely externalising a sense of who I am. Home, for me, isnt just a safe haven but is a construct, long in the making, of “who I am”made manifest in a world where I otherwise struggle to safely represent myself because of my neurodiversities and the relative abstraction of who I sense I am to myself. To dismantle that is to, in effect, dismantle part of myself…in fact, a construct that has felt like the bigger part of me for years.

So I’ve been expecting more ructions, a stronger sense of the earth rumbling or cleaving apart as I left but, really so far, I feel just so relieved and released. My emotions were all over the place yesterday and I’d be hard pressed to name them, yes, plus the day was so intense and took about all I had physically and emotionally but I’m doing ok and there’s a definite shaft of light breaking through. Something in me is starting to realise the door has been left open and that I’m free to step out into a different paradigm. The part of me that is the endlessly fascinated witness to what it is to be human is aware that a new construct is taking shape before my very eyes.

Its a poignant thing because I’ve loved my house with a passion; it’s been my safe haven, it has really good bones and I’ve made it mine in so many long-evolving ways, not to mention all the priceless memories we’ve made in it across all the incomparable years of raising a family. So yes I’ve loved it so deeply… but I haven’t always liked it, or more specifically, the road that its on, for at least the last few years. If I could have lifted it brick by brick and placed it somewhere else, I would.

When we first moved in, my little daughter and I were delirious with excitement. We sat on the big windowsill and watched all the horses trotting by and we explored all the country lanes and byways nearby, patting horses and collecting leaves and conkers in the woods; compared to city life, it felt like a rural idyl to us, although it always needed the prefix “semi” inserting before that descriptor. What did the place so much harm over the two or so years we were there was all the unbridled planning permission that allowed countless new housing developments to go up in such a tiny radius in such a short time and with inadequate infrastructure, with more and more signs for “exclusive” new housing appearing, it seemed, every time we drove down the increasingly overloaded B-road that ran past our house and through the village.

The opening of a supermarket directly opposite, where there used to be a tiny village shop, was the nail in the coffin of the “old” village and the kiss of death for us. That discrete little shop used to be somewhere that people passed the time of day and shared cheerful information on the community noticeboard plus nearly all of them walked there. Now, they arrived by car to grab a lottery ticket and some booze-to-go, assuming they could pull out into the 50 to 60mph traffic flow since vehicles now seemed to actually speed up as they got to the centre of the village with its chaotically parked cars, as though to get through it all the quicker (and there has been literally nothing to stop them, the ridiculous 40mph signs, given pedestrians and shop, apparently an inducement to put the foot down harder). Lack of parking and too many people has turned what used to be quaint into an accident waiting to happen!

So now road rage and parking chaos plus all the many forms of badly behaved humans have became the norm outside what were, until yesterday, “our” front windows. Vehicles too big for a B-road charge through as though they are still on the motorway and refrigeration lorries bump up on the pavement to deliver their wares to the shop at all kinds of unsociable, impractical hours, for instance when all the school children are already struggling to get across the road safely by the shop and school bus stop because they can’t even see what’s coming or find a break in the traffic flow. Pulling out into the road from what was our drive has taken patience and great daring, something that, with the best will in the world, I’ve not always had. In five short years, I’ve witnessed two horrible accidents, one involving a pedestrian run over by a reversing van to whom I was one of the first to the scene (she was in such a mess, her leg badly crushed), one deliberate ram-raid of the shop window, one head-on collision with serious consequences and the aftermath of a stollen car chase where the car in question ploughed into our neighbour’s car and nearly into our wall, the velocity of the approaching vehicle waking me from my sleep even before the inevitable sound as it hit. The effect of all the steady changes for the worst in the village’s so-called “planning” seemed to have acting like a magnet to more and more drama.

After lockdown, or did we just notice it more, the traffic volumes and lack of consideration seemed to escalate exponentially. We no longer had reliably quiet times of day or night and the petrol fumes, the noise pollution and the sticky black dust stuck to window frames only increased. We found ourselves pressed further towards the back rooms of the house every day, yet spending far less time in the back garden than we ever had, though it had never looked lovelier after years of flamboyant planting (oh the irony), since the noise outside was too all-pervasive. Ever-present goldfinches, robins and sparrows, attracted by our feeding stations and fresh water sources, not to mention all the love and attention we have given to them, did their best to out-sing the continual traffic roar but they had their work cut out and I, for one, could hardly focus enough to hear them any more, such was the toxic distraction of the road chaos (let’s hope they can still hear themselves).

As it occurred, each change for the worst, every small surrender of peace and amenity, “didn’t seem that bad”by itself. That’s the thing, environmental sickness sneaks up on you in subtle increments, using the familiar to worm it’s way into your psyche inch by inch.

So the same sunshine still poured through the east-facing bay window in the mornings (assuming a delivery truck wasn’t parked there, as was often the case) but now I could only bear to be in my once favourite chair with earplugs or noise cancelling headphones wedged in and, even then, it had its time threshold as I could still sense all the traffic grinding past all the time through my peripheral senses and would take it into my body as muscle tension if I sat there too long. It was as though the house began to shrink as we drew ourselves, smaller and tighter, into its middle as though to buffer ourselves from it all as best we could. Our need for distractions increased and every trip away reminded us that our nervous systems were struggling back home, making it harder to return. When it came to selling the house everyone else could, of course, all too quickly perceive all the many pitfalls that only I knew didn’t exist when I first bought it; so I felt like I was offloading faulty goods, apologising for its shortcomings, stressed and tense through every viewing and of course we took a considerable hit on the price.

There’s no doubt in my mind that environmental sickness has been a big part of my considerable health challenge these past years. Whether the “cause” of that has been air-borne pollution, noise stress and EMF soup or mostly emotional in origin really makes no difference since the effect has been the same. When you are deeply unhappy with the place where you live (worse, when you remember it being one way and then it gets utterly abused and marauded, changed for the worse by forces you can’t control) those effects on your psyche can make you feel deeply, VERY deeply unwell in time, not least when you are wired to be highly sensitive.

Its a sort of sickness of the soul that you pretend isn’t there whilst you try even harder to focus on the comforting and familiar trappings of life and yet, somehow, the very familiarity draws you even further into the core of the pain and more effectively than if you didn’t care at all. I’ve largely been in denial of the very extent and depth of my feelings of sadness and hopelessness since to admit was to leave myself feeling utterly desperate and that denial is the very definition of TMS pain (see my other posts on this); which then expresses through other symptoms that can be as real as they are often unfathomable when examined according to all the normal diagnostic approaches. While you are busy telling yourself something is perfectly OK, acceptable, normal or to be expected, your inner psyche is shouting at you “No! I don’t want this anymore!” and bizarre symptoms become it’s language!

So that, in a nutshell, has been my experience of the last few years of living in what was my house; sad but true, even though it hasn’t all been bad but that’s the thing…the acceptable bits make the unacceptable feel like petulant complaints, so those complaints hide themselves deeply underground out of shame, as though we believe ourselves not to be entitled to have them, which in turn feeds the conspiracy of silence. I share it fully today because I finally can, since I no longer live there, thus I can fully own my feelings and let the them out (which I must, for my own sake). I also share it because I know this story isn’t just mine; there are thousands upon thousands of us experiencing versions of the same thing in many different forms, we watch our chosen world being altered beyond recognition by forces that are as relentless as they seem to care so little for the opinions of those most affected, driven by shortsightedness and greed. It can leave us feeling powerless and without importance or agency in this world and those feelings also feed into the kind of frustration that expresses as ill-health.

It wasn’t even that I just sat there and took it like some sort of victim of circumstance as I tried, so very hard, to fight against the destructive tide but it all came to nothing in the end, only wearing me out in the effort. When it came down to it, nobody else seemed to care as vehemently as I did, or they seemed more willing to believe that the negative changes were inevitable, even desirable in the name of “convenience” and so the planners continued on regardless and the bad behaviours followed in their wake. It was like witnessing the inevitable downfall of humanity in the micro, a cliché enacted like a tragic play enacted on the “stage” in front of our windows and us with front row tickets.

For a lot of years I was unhappy in that place in ways that even I didn’t know about or couldn’t put my finger on. I told myself it was all alright and did what most of us do; carried on. My discomfiture spoke to me in other ways, coming out of me symptomatically. That’s TMS for you…it deflects what you’re really feeling. It will do almost anything to draw your attention away from the things that most bother you.

To write a new ending, I have had to do what is right for me and me only by moving away in search of some wind-back-in-time place as yet to be affected so badly (though we all have to keep our eyes peeled on the horizon as some version of this is likely coming to our neighbourhood soon since it is so utterly relentless). For now, I’m truly weary of the struggle and need to carve myself some peace. I take with me all the heart-warming memories of family life and visuals which, if only I could turn down the audio and shut out the view at the front of the house, would seem like a little peace of heaven…because we made it so, with all of our efforts.

As for the place that I knew so well that it almost felt like it was part of me (the way I have taken on its blows as physical pain tell me that it really was…) and to which I have now bade my last farewell because I will certainly never return, I feel such sadness at the thought it may only get worse, that there is really no redeeming it, though I prefer to cultivate the hope that maybe someone else will find their version of peace in our lovingly planted little garden or by our fireside. I feel sad to leave the birds we have come to know so we’ll and supported with our nest boxes, water and food. I feel heavy hearted for our neighbours who struggle on with it all, one of them elderly and living alone and another who is nearly at her wits end with it all. I’ve done my time there and am ready to move on to somewhere I can plant the seeds of a new-old way of living and stoke the living, internalised, flames of hope and optimism back into life because I need them so desperately for the full recovery of my health!