It is not a place

You have an exit plan.

You have probably had the same one for years, and could produce it in a sentence if somebody asked you at the right hour of the evening. A different job. A smaller house in a quieter place. Out of this city. Away from his family. Just six months on my own to think.

It is not a stupid plan and you are not a fool for having it. In the version you run at a quarter to ten, whoever is in that house is noticeably better than whoever is in this one — calmer, more patient, not the sort of person who says the thing about the sister.

The reason it has never worked is not that you lacked the nerve to run it.

Here is the usual account of where all this is happening, and it is both very popular and wrong.

It says the jail is your body — your nerves, your appetites, your particular wiring. Or, in the more domestic version, that the jail is your circumstances: this house, this job, these people, this marriage.

You can see why both are attractive. They are specific, they are local, and above all they imply somewhere else.

But you have already run this experiment, and you have the results.

Think of the last time you genuinely got out of something. The job you left. The house you moved out of. The relationship that ended, or the city you left behind, or the year somebody died and the whole shape of your life changed.

There was relief. Real relief, and it was not imaginary — some things genuinely were better.

Now be exact about the timing. How long was it before the same evening happened again? Not the same circumstances — the same evening: the tightness behind the breastbone, the sentence you had decided against, the flatness afterwards. Put a number on it before you read on. Weeks, or months — and whatever you have just thought of is the figure that matters, because it is yours and not an average of anybody else's.

Now notice what you did not think. You did not think never.

New house. New people. Nothing to do with your mother-in-law at all. Same evening.

That is not bad luck and it is not a judgement on you. It is information about where the jail is, and it has been lying around in your own history for years.

So: it is not a place. It does not have a location, which means it cannot be left by travelling, and it has no walls, which is why you have never been able to find them.

And it is not your body, which is worth saying flatly, because the body version of this idea does real damage. If the jail is your body, then everything embodied is the problem — eating, sleeping, wanting, being touched, having a family, doing a job. The only consistent response is to get away from your own life, and people have wrecked perfectly good lives trying to, and arrived at the same quarter to ten in a quieter room.

Nothing in this book will require you to leave anything. That is a statement about the practice, and not advice about your house.

Then where?

It is a condition, and it is general, and you are not having a private experience.

This is the sentence the chapter exists for, so let me put it where you cannot avoid it: the man who was short with you in the car park is in it. So is the colleague who undermined you in front of people. So is whoever you were talking to at twenty past nine. So is your mother, and so was hers.

Every person you passed today was somewhere in the same arrangement — most of them with no idea there was anything to notice, most of them with an exit plan of their own, a few of them running one at this very moment and about to find out how long it holds.

It is not that everyone has your problem. It is that there is one problem and it has everybody.

Now take both halves of that, in order, because the first half is worse than people expect and the second is better.

The worse half: there is nowhere to go.

Not a quieter version of nowhere. Nowhere. Every room you will walk into for the rest of your life is inside this, including the good rooms, including the holiday, including the morning next March when everything briefly feels fine. No rearrangement of your circumstances will get you out, because your circumstances were never what you were in.

That ought to land as a loss, and I would rather you let it. An exit plan is not just a plan; it is a quantity of hope that has been parked somewhere for years, and this chapter is asking you to take it out of there. Give it the evening it deserves.

The better half, and there are three parts.

It is not personal. In the flatness it felt entirely personal — specifically that there is something the matter with you that is not the matter with other people, who seem to manage. That was the most convincing thing you felt all evening and it was false. You were not singled out. You were not even unusual.

There is nothing to renounce. If it were your body or your house, the price of getting out would be your body or your house. It isn't, so it isn't. Whatever the opening turns out to be, it is available in this kitchen, in this marriage, in this job, at this age, without your leaving anything or telling anybody.

And the people who hurt you are not your jailers. They are in the next cell, mostly asleep. Whatever was done to you was done by somebody being operated in exactly the way you were operated yesterday evening — and if you want to know what that looks like from outside, you have your own evening to consult.

Now the limit on that last one, and it is a hard limit.

What I have just said is a diagnosis. It is not an amnesty, and it is not a request.

It does not mean that what was done to you was acceptable. It does not mean it was not their fault: it was, and the fact that somebody is being operated has never once made them not responsible — you were responsible at twenty past nine and you knew it at a quarter to ten.

It does not mean you have to forgive anybody. This book will not ask you to forgive anybody, at any point, and if you have been waiting for the chapter where it does, there isn't one.

And it does not mean you have to stay anywhere, with anyone, or let anything continue. Some rooms should be left. Leaving them is sometimes the sanest thing a person does and this chapter is not an argument against it. The only claim here is about what leaving achieves: it ends what is being done to you, which can be urgent and necessary, and it does not end this. Those are two different problems and you are allowed to need both solved.

Tonight

One question before anything else, and it overrides the whole chapter.

Is anybody in your house frightened? Is anyone being hurt, threatened, or made to account for where they have been? Are you?

If the answer is yes, then your exit plan is not a comfort to be examined. It is a plan, it needs executing, and nothing in this chapter applies to it. Everything above is about a condition that no move will cure. Being in danger is a different problem, the answer to it is to get out, and it is more urgent than anything in this book. Put this down and deal with that. It will keep.

I am not qualified to help you with that and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Somebody is, and this is who.

If it is tonight, the emergency number where you are. That is the one that brings somebody to the door, and it is the right call before you are certain it is bad enough — deciding that is their job. If you cannot speak when they answer, stay on the line anyway: operators are trained for a call with nobody talking on it.

If it is not tonight and it is not nothing, a domestic abuse service. Every country has at least one, they are free, and they do not tell you what to do. There are no telephone numbers in this book, on purpose — one set in print goes out of date, and a dead number at eleven at night is worse than no page at all. findahelpline.com lists them by country and takes about ten seconds.

And failing both, anybody who will look it up for you. A doctor, a pharmacist, somebody at work. Asking a person to find a number is not a disclosure — you do not have to say what it is for, or to have decided to leave.

Then, if that is not your situation: ten minutes, with a pen. No system, nothing to keep up.

One. Write your exit plan in one sentence. The real one, the one you actually run, not the respectable version.

Two. Write down the last time you actually executed one — left the job, moved, ended it. Then write how many weeks or months it was before the same evening happened again. Guess if you have to; your guess will be close enough to be the finding.

Three. Name three people you would describe as difficult. Against each, write which head you can see operating — you have the list from the second chapter and you will not need long.

Then a fourth line, and this is the only part that matters: against each, write whether that same head is on your own list.

However many of the three it turns out to be, that number is the finding, and you did not get it from me.

You are not being asked to feel anything about these people. Not sympathy, not forgiveness, not understanding. This is a count, exactly like the last one. If something softens while you are counting, that is yours to do as you like with, and if nothing softens, the exercise has still worked.

What this is worth:

Nothing in your circumstances will improve this week, and one real thing will probably get slightly worse: the exit plan will stop working as a comfort. That has been load-bearing for years and you are going to feel the loss of it, most likely at a quarter to ten, in about a fortnight.

Unless it was never a comfort. If your plan is an actual plan — a door, a date, somewhere to go, because staying is not safe — then it is not an alibi and this chapter has not been talking about it. Keep it. Keep it exactly as it is.

What you get in exchange is that you stop spending yourself on the wrong problem. Every hour you have put into arranging an escape has been an hour spent on walls that are not there — and that hour is now available for something else, which is the second half of this book.

And one quieter thing, which you may only notice much later: the pressure to be the one person who is managing comes off. You had been carrying it without knowing. It turns out nobody is managing, and that is not a bleak discovery. It is the first easy breath in the chapter.

There is one more comforting idea to take off you before this book can offer you anything, and it is the one you are most attached to: that whatever else is true, there is some small part of you that all this never reached. The next chapter is about that part, and about why believing in it is most of the reason you are still here.