I n 2022, my younger brother drowned in an accident. His death reset life as I knew it. I had been offered my first proper job; I didn’t take it. I was planning to move out; I stayed at home. At this critical juncture, with my foot on the pedal, ready to enter adult life, everything exploded.
At home, there were now three of us. We orbited separate corners of the house, each needing a different thing for comfort: for my mum, exercise; for my dad, music; for me, escape.
It was a long, grey January, and I was stuck in the mud. My brain had puffed up like an airbag against the full force of grief; my head was fuzzy and foggy, my thoughts were sludge. I was so sensitive to light and sound that it felt as if a layer of my skin had been peeled off. Mostly, though, I just felt nothing.
I was in limbo. In my early 20s, I couldn’t haunt the house indefinitely. At some point, I would need to rejoin the land of the living. But for now, stepping back on to the hamster wheel felt pointless.
Getting out of the house, at least, I could manage. But where to go? I had seen a sign at my local cinema for an under-25s membership, which offered weekday tickets for £5.99. It would be a relief, I thought, to lose myself in a fantastical world for a few hours. So I pulled on my dad’s coat, made a flask of tea and took a blustery walk down the hill to Greenwich.
I peeled off my layers and sat down with four or five others for a screening of Corsage, a feminist telling of the life of Sisi, the 19th-century Austrian empress, at 40. Vicky Krieps plays her as cheeky and conspiratorial – sticking her tongue out and her middle finger up, having affairs, playing tricks. Immersed in the ups and downs of her story, I felt dormant emotions rise to the surface. Her self-possession was emboldening. When the lights came up, I felt as though a valve had opened and some of the pressure had hissed out.
Though it felt frivolous to escape to matinee screenings with retirees, I started to go to the cinema once a week. It was comforting to sit in silence with others. To be in the dark and let my face crumple and fold, and not worry about how it might be received. I was alone, but not really, feeling a kind of implicit solidarity from my fellow audience members. I read once that in a cinema, strangers’ hearts can start to beat in time. It was a better balm for grief than the more overt expressions of sympathy I had been receiving, like being asked how I was doing – it felt like loosening the muscles around an injury instead of pressing directly on the sore spot.
For this reason, I found films about loss, such as One Fine Morning, about a daughter coming to terms with her father’s degenerative illness, too hard-going, and instead watched life-affirming escapades: the swashbuckling adventures of The Count of Monte Cristo, the simple pleasures of The Taste of Things, the easy laughs of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
At some point, the cinema screened How to Blow Up a Pipeline and I thought about eco-anarchism for the first time since school. It set off a spark; the blurry edges of my brain came into sharper relief, and ideas for stories began to surface. Soon after, Aubrey Gordon’s documentary Your Fat Friend gave me the idea for my first piece of journalism on atypical anorexia.
January turned to February and then March, and I turned a corner. Watching all these funny, sad and silly films, I was reminded of the world beyond my bubble, and decided to rejoin it. Even now, on a bad day, I buy a ticket, sit in the dark, let my shoulders drop, breathe and reboot.
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