A Rush of Blood From The Heart

or the one where I get scary honest about love in a LONG essay

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway used to say ‘There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at typewriter and bleed.” Whether it was actually him who shared this rather macabre piece of writing advice is apparently hotly contested in literary circles but for argument’s sake, we’ll give it to him. The whiskey drinking ocean-obsessed man who once brought a pub full of people to tears after they didn’t believe he could tell a story in just six words. His response? For sale: baby shoes. Never worn. Yeah, OK Ernest you win.

While I’m not using a typewriter (that’s packed away in my wardrobe) I am bleeding. A lot. From the place where my heart seems stubbornly stitched into my sleeve, despite all my best efforts to find it somewhere safer and less exposed to live. Despite all the evidence of being bruised and battered or otherwise mishandled by people who were too afraid. Because, didn’t you know? I’m terribly scary.

This might well be the most honest piece of writing I ever share and to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure what happens next. But I’m hoping that by doing what I’ve always done since I was a little girl and writing about my feelings - the sharing them with an audience bit came later but I’ve gotten pretty good at that too, that it makes me feel less alone for having them.

*deep breath* here we go…

I’m almost 25 years old and never been kissed.(someone tell Drew Barrymore we’re making a sequel). Not properly anyway. I’ve done that and a fair bit more onscreen (hi Latecomers) but with someone who really meant it? Who wanted to do that with me and not just because we were telling a love story onscreen?

Nope. Not yet. No first dates, no feelings returned. Nothing. Now, I know what you’re going to say. Everyone moves at their own pace, Hannah. It’ll happen eventually. You just have to get out there and go for it. Logically, that argument makes sense. There isn’t some arbitrary timeline by which you have to have the romance boxes ticked. I know that. I look around at the people in my life who are in their 20’s or 30’s and see so many versions of a life.

Some people are still at university. Living with their parents. Some people have been out of school for well over a decade now, running their own businesses. There’s everything from first dates and casual sex to egg-freezing, breakups and babies. Weddings and apartments, renovations on houses and explorations of sexuality that lead to someone feeling like they’re finally free. Being young and alive is to be part of an ever-shifting series of sliding doors brushing shoulders and nerve endings with a thousand different roads available at all times, each marked equally with treachery and triumph.

I know all that. I repeat it to myself like a prayer, over and over. But I also know that in many ways, my disability makes for a steel fortress. The kind people would be and often are called heroic or saint-like for navigating and scaling. The kind men, thanks to patriarchy and conditioning are less likely to be interested in. They’d have to do too much of the work society still intuitively assigns to women in relationships. I know the wheelchair I use to navigate the world seems to send out some sort of wonky bat signal to the world that I don’t have desire or love, and that if I do, it can only be returned by someone who sees the world from a similar seat.

The ‘why’ of those foregone pairings has never been fully clear but I think, according to the embarrassed mutters of people who haven’t been able to look me in the eye when I’ve asked, it’s meant to be easier. Easier for who is always my follow-up question but I’ve never worked that one out either. They surely can’t mean me. How is it easier if both of us can’t get out of bed on our own? If both of us can’t cook or cuddle on our own? Teach a kid to kick a soccer ball?

I know there’s more to life than the physical things - believe me but they’d still be bloody handy. I say this delicately, because I know not all disabled people feel this way (surprise!) and that there are many happy disabled couples who love each other beautifully and probably do find it easy. But to me, a partner who also struggles with the things I do is not who I’m looking for. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe the universe will make me eat my hat on that one but it’d take some serious convincing.

Instead, the partner I imagine is someone who makes me laugh as they carry me bridal style, someone who lets me pick the playlists in return for always being in the driver’s seat on errands and roadtrips, the kind of guy who never makes me feel inadequate for the meal I can’t prepare or the bedroom I can’t fully clean on my own. Who sees a set of stairs and thinks nothing of them, doesn’t flinch at finding a way for me to come too. At braiding the curly hair of our kids. Someone who can match my brain, my drive, my zest for life that often remains trapped behind layers of inaccessibility and exhaustion. Who isn’t threatened by my success but my biggest cheerleader instead. Who lets me be the same for them.

I know that’s asking a lot. Probably too much. I don’t think there’s a human being who could really do all that, not forever. Maybe for a moment, a season but a lifetime? I think they might only make those men in movies or books.

But then again, what did Kathy Bates say the other night in A Family Affair? Oh, that’s right, the end is none of your business. She’s right, it’s not.

Real love is one day at a time. Choosing another person over and over again in all the ways that count until suddenly you’ve chosen each other for more days than you haven’t, while also keeping your own innate sparkle alive. So, let’s start with that.

If you’ve read my first book I’ll Let Myself In you’ll know that my penchant for hopeless romanticism exists because of the love stories around me. My maternal grandparents who met at a dance but almost never got together because someone else had a crush on Pa and conveniently forget to give Nana her invitation to his 21st. My mum and dad, set up by a sly matchmaking co-worker who told them both she had a bet with the other, they wouldn’t be brave enough to ask for a dance. My aunts and uncles. The Taylor Swift songs I could sing backwards while asleep. I’ve been surrounded by it, and happy to be.

But I won’t lie. For all my dreams and hopeless romanticism, there’s a skeptical snake in the garden. My fortnightly therapy sessions are spent reminding me in as many different ways, as we can that I am enough. That I am worth something. That I am actually a human being who is fun, allowed to live, and worth getting to know. That comparison is the thief of my joy. But even with all that, it doesn’t stop the restless nights.

Will I ever be loved romantically? Do I deserve to be? Could I ever be enough? Could all the colourful parts of me make up for the burdens I would bring? The unfair labour? The literal heavy lifting? Are my brain and heart enough to make up for my body?

I want to have kids one day. Can I? What would being pregnant even look like? How would I be someone’s mum? Would that even be fair to them? Would what I give them be enough for all the things they’d have to get somewhere else?

I lie awake wondering whether the Cool Forever Single Aunt™️ or someone like her is an identity I can actually make myself believe in. What if, even though it is a perfectly valid and extremely fulfiling way to live your life, I can’t ever make it feel that way, for me? Settled in my skin, heart and head.

Maybe romance would feel less like another mountain to scale if I had a solid, comfortable and constantly warm friendship circle a la Hugh Grant in both Four Weddings & A Funeral and Notting Hill. But I don’t. The thing no one tells you about adult friendships is how much work they take. How much time can easily slip by before you see each other in between vowing to catch up ‘soon’. I’ve found a few of my people plus those who I thought were but have inadvenrtently proven themselves to be playing pretend. Or if not playing pretend, moving through the world in a way that means I have to be happy when they appear but equally fine if they don’t because otherwise it just hurts over and over again.

All of these things, these totally understandable schedules and lives and lapses in communication would feel less painful if they weren’t cumulative. If they weren’t actually just another moment in a shitty plotline that has been happening to and around me since I was a kid. Since my classmates were old enough to think that running away from me while I couldn’t catch up was hilarious but not old enough to understand why that made me sad. If it weren’t for the birthday parties I wasn’t invited to, the lonely lunchtimes or the moments I was told point blank no one liked me. We can’t forget the student-organised prom or formal, as we call it here in Australia that my peers wouldn’t make accessible or the sleepover from hell where half an hour in, my friend told me I was full of darkness and then I was stuck either. These are just a few examples, I could keep going, ask my therapist.

If just one of those events hadn’t happened in my childhood, maybe I wouldn’t care so much when friends flaked out on a plan for the umpteenth time or left me on read for weeks. But those things did happen. So now, I have a minefield of friendship trauma and triggers to navigate that I need people to spot as they step. Gosh, I’m really selling myself here, aren’t I? Fuck.

Hell, a lack of romance or found family would both be easier pills to swallow if I loved myself. If I felt comfortable in romanticising my world and not caring what other people did with their Saturday nights or Monday mornings as long as I was happy in my own company. But as you can see, we’re a long way from that.

The last few months have been the worst depressive episode I’ve had in ages. Hence the romcoms, they’ve been helping the existential dread. I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few months with Greg and Audrey. Andie & Hugh. Julia & Hugh. Julia & George. Brooke Shields. Zac & Nicole. Kate & Matthew. Ethan and Julie. Taylor & Travis (hang on that’s real life, not a romcom). Basically, any story I can get my hands on that allows for a moment of escape. A world where wandering into a bookshop might mean bumping into forever.

What I imagine love might look like. Hugh Grant & Julia Roberts in a still from Notting Hill (1999)

This particular depressive episode has born from a number of things really - stress at work, despair at the state of the world, an aching loneliness that feels as though it has soaked into my every cell forever, a terrifying creative block that means words feel unreliable which is the very reason this Substack exists, and a deep nagging feeling that no matter what I achieve, I will always fundamentally feel as though I’m lagging behind. It’s the same feeling I used to have when racing the other kids who lived on my street home from school. Something I kept doing and being annoyed at, long after it should’ve clicked that I was never going to cross the finish line first.

People look at my life and see the book. The TV show. The film. The auditions I get or don’t, and the stages I speak on. The made-up face. The bright shiny smile of a switched on performer who says what she’s thinking whether to her Mum or a live audience. They don’t see the tracksuit pants and food crumbs or the hours-long naps I take just to give myself a break from my own head every day. They don’t see the texts that go unanswered or the times I almost burst into tears at the gym. They didn’t see me sobbing yesterday while Mum stroked my hair and I said, ‘I really hope I don’t cry about these things forever.’ Her sad smile, as she replied, ‘I hope you don’t either’

While I’m waiting to find out, I’m writing an interabled (disabled person + ablebodied person) romcom script I’d love to pitch to someone like Hello Sunshine, Bruna Papandrea or anyone else in Hollywood who might listen. In my head, I play the female lead for two reasons;

1. I’ll at least get to play pretend at falling in love, getting married and having a baby + people might consider me a drawcard??? jury’s out on that one…

2. But far more importantly, because representation matters and if it’d been there for me, I might not be in as much of a mess as I am.

Oh, I also want to get better at being myself. Sometimes she seems half decent? I’ll keep you posted, once I’ve spent more time with her.

Love, Hannah x