the opposite of fire

on losing the plot

I have been writing this newsletter since November. Part of me wanted to switch tenses to explain the chronology of thought, but the part of me that won just wants to bring you on a journey with me, undated. So here it goes.

Every year when the leaves start to fall I think both of Gilmore Girls and The Odyssey. Black coffee in one of Luke’s chunky cups, and autumn spreading her saffron robes over everything. I feel exultant until the sun sets, when my mood descends to the darkest depths and can only be cured by the company of a close friend. Most of my early evenings now are spent sitting in silky speakeasies or curled up on someone’s couch or floor until nighttime, and I am so happy and also losing my mind.

On a ritual mid-morning scroll, I stumble upon a screenshotted tweet. ‘I think about this every day,’ someone has typed. They are referring to something Mary-Kate Olsen said about her twin: ‘To me, the difference between us is pretty obvious. She thinks the opposite of fire is water, and I think the opposite of fire is no fire.’

I learn that this may be not a quote but an internet creation, attributed not to Mary-Kate but to the satirical website, Clickhole. The discrepancies of this are not all that important to me.

Is the opposite of fire the absence of fire, or the element that extinguishes it? Like with the example of love: is its opposite hate, or apathy? My current thinking is that it is, as Mary-Kate Olsen may or may not have alluded to, entirely personal.

I’m starting to lose my sense of reality. Not in a concerning way, but in the way of feeling sort of unmoored from what’s happening in my immediate perception. More and more, I am forgetting what I entered a different room to do, or look for. Yesterday, a man quacked loudly at me on a bustling street, startling me out of some reverie I now can’t clasp. He laughed when I jumped, waddling off with a parting cackle before disappearing into the city. Londoners are all weirdos, but it made me think about what I was doing as I walked down that road. What was I thinking about? Why can’t I remember?

The weather has turned drastically this week and I want to blame that, to say it’s the blistering cold and the way the sun sets at four that has loosened my hold on reality’s hand. Autumn is my favourite time of year, but it’s also the one that precedes my saddest season. It makes me colder in my actual soul, I think, so I can avoid thinking too hard about how I feel about anything, because if I do, I will be plunged into seasonal despair.

It doesn’t help that I’ve not been spending much time by myself. Being alone is something fundamental to my personality. When I don’t cultivate this meaningfully, I start to lose the plot, and feel like Theseus on his way to meet Pasiphaë’s monstrous baby, holding desperately onto Ariadne’s ball of red thread.

Speaking of red threads, I’ve come to acknowledge that it’s not actually just the time of year that’s making me feel unhinged. I have premenstrual dysphoric disorder, which in a nutshell, is really severe PMS, and in the ridged, nutty labyrinth that might emerge, say, if you whittled a nutshell into a long, woody piece of string, is a cyclical hormone-based depressive disorder experienced by people who have periods, ramped up to an alarming and very painful ante in the ten days before the arrival of blood.

Consciously, I’ve been living with PMDD since 2021. It’s probably been part of my life for longer, but that was when I was given a name for the increasingly debilitating turmoil I would experience each month. My particular hue of PMDD involves a lot of brain fog, a lot of exhaustion, a lot of weeping, a lot of losses in productivity and ensuing guilt. There is a lot of extreme quickness to anger, a lot of spiteful words, a lot of ungenerously picked fights. It is really very ugly.

I feel in those days like my body is the house of a monster, and I have to scramble like an ancient Greek craftsman to build a structure that will amuse, or at least waylay, the beast.

If, as Mary-Kate Olsen or some satirical website using her clout as a vehicle for their art has hypothesised, the opposite of fire is no fire, the world would probably be a much more existential place than the one I think I inhabit. There is what is, and what isn’t, the presence of something, and its absence. There doesn’t seem to be space for an opposing worldview, which is sort of delicious and sort of insane.

I’ve always found it kind of unbelievable how people cannot imagine something that hasn’t directly happened to them. When I was at university, a lot of people in my year group spoke openly about the vitriolic racism they faced every day. One of my housemates once brought this up to me, asking me if I had ever experienced this alleged racism. I didn’t understand why he was seeking my confirmation that these accusations were untrue, and said so. Just because I didn’t overtly experience discrimination because of my ethnicity in quite the same way, in this particular university town, did not mean other people’s accounts were false.

It’s interesting, the mistrust we have about pain that follows universally experienced phenomena. It’s just your period. We all know what that’s like. And to some extent, I get the skepticism, because at the end of the day, we are all charlatans trying to make the world bend to our will.

But some pain stops the will entirely. It’s just a comment about someone’s homemade food smelling weird, but sometimes it’s a deep-seated, dangerous unwillingness to open up the senses to the unfamiliar. It’s just a headache, but sometimes it’s a growth that is not supposed to be there. It’s just a bad day, but sometimes it’s the seventy-eighth bad day of the year, and the sun is out and your family is safe and there is soup on the hob and someone is coming over to stroke your hair but still, you cannot stop crying.

If, as Ashley Olsen allegedly thinks, the opposite of fire is water, it seems to paint a picture of the world where different, opposing realities can exist and be equally alive—until they come too close into contact, perhaps. It feels like more fertile terrain for subjectivity, for holding truths that are compatible with both our universal oneness and multiplicity.

I don’t like talking about PMDD in detail. It makes me feel weak and cowardly, like I’m making excuses. My closest friends know what I’m going through, because they are on the receiving end of the tearful calls or the cancelled plans, but once the fog has lifted, I brush it off with a meme: I was so crazy back then! (yesterday).

I do all the things. The seed cycling. The supplements. The gentle exercise. The decaffeinated coffees. It’s not anywhere near the end of the world, or comparable to the chronic illnesses experienced by so many people, but it still activates the pain receptors in this body of mine, which no one else can feel for me, even if they wanted to, even if I wanted them to, which I don’t.

I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m feeling a little battered. And I guess I am now also, like Clickhole, using Mary-Kate Olsen’s clout as the spark to ignite a newsletter I am struggling to write now, when the weather is really bad and everything feels like a Keane song.

But if there is such a thing on this gilded earthly prison as living with contradiction, pressed against the bars of another person’s subjective truth, I’m okay with that. A lot of the time, I need the opposition of the other to affirm my own sense of reality, am enriched—or sometimes also just entertained—by wild hands stretching from another person’s cage into mine, as long as they can’t topple it or do much more damage than just announce their presence.

I’m staying in my family home now, revisiting this newsletter from a very different physical and mental place. It is twenty-nine degrees outside. We don’t have autumn or winter here, and this has done wonders for helping me manage my premenstrual symptoms, to the extent that I can. Looking back at what I’ve written above, in the non-luteal phases of my cycle and from my sun-soaked vantage point by my bedroom window, I’m thinking: wow I was so crazy back then (two months ago).

Yet still, a part of winter clings to my psyche. I think it always will, and maybe the fact that it does is why I write.

The other evening, drinking tea with my family, my not-so-little-anymore brother says that even though we are all good friends, some part of him will never stop being slightly afraid of his two big sisters. He describes it this way: his fear of my sister is like the fear you have of a wild animal in a forest, and his fear of me is like the fear of the forest itself. I’m afraid of you the way I’m afraid of the dark, he tells me.

I am both perplexed and thrilled by this comparison. Being afraid of the dark is like being afraid of something primal, something that doesn’t necessarily change, although its textures might, but that is manifold, difficult to grasp. Also—and I think this is what he meant, to be honest—inevitable. Clearly, it soothes my vanity to be thought of as an unstoppable and terrifying force of nature.

I don’t really want to delve too deeply into my brother’s offhand comment, at the risk of hurting my own feelings or worse, plumbing a particularly interesting bit of wordsmithery for a deeper meaning when it was said in aesthetic jest (something I, both on and off the page, obviously never do).

What I will use it for, though, is the way the particular glow of its imagery has finally given me a way to tie up this two-month newsletter. To take its depth and its texture as a point of possible arrival, one where I agree with neither the Olsen twins nor Clickhole, where I conclude instead that, to my mind, the opposite of fire is perhaps darkness.