According to my notes, Cerestrial was born on 24th April, 2023 – which makes us almost two years old at time of publishing. Although the truth is that she was born lying on the floor of a rasul somewhere in the East Midlands, holding hands with Manisha while we tried to grieve for the last thing we had tried to make together. Or she was made from twisting together decades of highly coloured strands of experiences of being different, of being an outsider, of being strange. Or all of the above.
I don’t know where it started, really. The being different. My brother was born when I was 18 months old – which is not unusual. But he has Downs Syndrome, which is. Although the word everybody used was “special”. To me, he was just my brother. But to everybody else he was “special” and by extension I was different. Especially when he came to my mainstream primary school and I fought every bully in the place week after week until they gently suggested to my parents that I might do better and he might do better if we were schooled separately.
And then, aged eight – we moved. From the relatively inclusive and open-minded sea-facing haven of 1980s Bristol to a land-locked village in Staffordshire. Where, not only were we new, but my Dad was also the Vicar. And I was preposterously bright, and appallingly articulate and used to facing down bullies with rhetoric. And the occasional slap. So – bolshy, opinionated, clever and almost entirely self-sufficient. And insufferable. By the time I’d got to Y6 the gloriously scatterbrained Headmaster told my parents at parents’ evening that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when I left for secondary school, because I was basically running the school office for him.
I did not really make friends with many girls – because they mostly seemed so silly. And I did not really make friends many with boys – because they mostly seemed so aggressive. I didn’t understand any of the nuances of the social lives of my peers. Adults seemed much easier – they seemed to say what they actually thought out loud instead of saying one thing and meaning another. But that meant that aged 14 or 15 the people I spent time with were in social groups outside of school – men and women in their twenties and thirties and forties. Some of them were generous and kind and considerate and patient. Some of them were predatory.
And of course – this story isn’t everything. It’s a tiny distillation of what might happen when you do not fit in, and you find it hard to find people who share your experiences, and so you cast about anxiously to find a tribe. But it is an origin story of a sort. Because in all of this differentness and difficulty I did always have a place of belonging with my family – otherwise my life might have fallen very badly down the cracks.
And so I learned, bit by bit, to make my own tribe. I learned from the example of my parents, who threw their doors open to anyone who needed a space to belong – because those people were scared, because they were grieving, because they felt alone, because they needed community and laughter and joy and boundless open-minded love. I am not sure that it makes me feel any less different. But I am able to see my difference in communion with everyone else’s. And to see how by sharing it, we can grow.