Before I Leave, Let Me Learn To Stay

A Love Letter to Liverpool

If you struggle with long-form writing, I recorded it above so that you can be going about your ablutions or chores and listen.🤓

There are also some edits made post-recording and you can find these by scrolling down and finding this emoji: 🔴 and 🔵

What is your relationship to your home city?

I would love this letter to spark curiousity on how the place from where we herald shapes our expression (or lack thereof) in the world.

Liverpool, UK.

I don’t remember any point in my life where I’ve not yearned to be anywhere but here. From childhood I wistfully dreamed of a life elsewhere - mostly deepest, darkest Africa or South America in Missionary work, because as a child I seemed to deem that as my only ticket out of here.

We’d return from wonderful caravan holidays in the beauty that is Anglesey and as we’d hit the Mersey Tunnel, the radio signal would start to sputter and spit and that it was it. That was my signal to feel the weight of the Mersey above on my little shoulders. We’d emerge onto Scotland Road, past the brutalist flats and boarded-up hopes, and I’d ponder, how, of all the places on this beautiful earth did I come to be born in Bootle, Liverpool. And heck, we were super lucky to live opposite a green space - Derby Park.

What fascinates me now is realising that my desperation to flee my home city is likely the very thing that has tethered me here. Because if everything is energy, and I believe it is, then whatever we cling to for dear life - people, relationships, beliefs, jobs, outcomes - we’re often sending out a signal of lack, fear, and resistance.

And what does energy do with that? Mirror it right back. Oh ‘ello, surprise! More of what we don’t want.

So in my wild, frantic yearning for “Anywhere but here,” I suspect I unwittingly tuned myself to the frequency of “Stuck Here.” And ooh baby, did I materialise aaaall of the circumstances that have seen to it I couldn’t leave. Over and over again.

If I chose Liverpool, what did I come here to learn?

Anglesey felt like paradise. With its windswept expanses, a mystical place of myth and moss, its bracken softened by purple heather and its soul, ah the very epitome of salt-kissed, wind-whipped freedom. I’m pretty sure little Suzy remembered something ancient there, something beyond memory, in its landscape. Something, or someone, free.

And Liverpool? It felt constrictive. It was concrete and conflict. And that conflict lived inside me.

It still does.

I often wonder about the energetic imprint of places and how land holds memory, frequency, even trauma. I believe, on some soul level, we choose where we’re born. If that’s true, what did I come here to learn? And what has Liverpool been trying to teach me, all this time - while I’ve been busy trying to eschew it?

Liverpool is alive with spirit and expression. scarred with history. Its light is as bright as its chasms of darkness. It’s fierce and soft. Tender and tough. It knows grief intimately, and it knows how to fight. It’s a beacon of hope and yet also has a whiff of hopelessness (any proud Scousers here, don’t shoot me down, I can explain later). It is, in many ways, a perfect reflection of me. A tale of two Cities, a tale of two halves.

Trying to radiate serenity externally, whilst internally howling

I have a unique relationship with Liverpool because I didn’t just live in it. I knocked on its doors.

Thousands of them.

As a Jehovah’s Witness, I spent decades walking its streets, Bootle, Maghull, Dingle, Crosby, Litherland. Armed with leaflets and a desire to be invisible, smiling through my own disconnection, hoping no one would answer. There’s something surreal about knocking on doors to share “The Truth,” when your whole nervous system is screaming that it isn’t.

Luke Evans captured it perfectly in his memoir Boy from the Valleys:

“Like me, Mam was smartly dressed. As a Jehovah’s Witness you always had to look respectable, because you were representing the religion… We always smelled nice; we smiled a lot and had neat hair. There was a lot of deprivation in the Valleys and when people saw us at their front door, looking so clean and fresh and happy and hopeful, it must have been a powerful draw…Our immaculate appearance seemed to say. Join us, and you could be like this too!

The moment it was time for home, whether, I was 15 or 35, I can’t begin to tell you the exhale of relief I felt. Sometimes, as a young regular pioneer (the name given to those in voluntary full time service) I’d make up appointments that didn’t exist - my whole body in flight mode - I’d flee the neighbourhood we were assigned to, jumping a bus, slipping away with the speed of a bolting horse. I’d sneak home and climb back into bed. Ever exhausted, ever overwhelmed. And then the guilt. The deep shame that I hated it so much.

🔴You might expect stories of abuse or unkindness from knocking on doors all over the city, especially perhaps during the 80s and 90s.

But truthfully? I have very few memories of anything unpleasant in that sense.

There were surreal moments, like I remember being a kid and knocking at a door next to a flat being robbed, one of the men simply put a finger to his lips before vanishing with a washing machine down stone steps. Humour, there was always humour. A soft “not today, love,” or even just curiousity.

And that will always stay with me, that Liverpool, even in its hardest chapters (and mine), held space for (or tolerated?) the weird ones. (Still weird, thank God!)🔴

The Paradox (and I ain’t talkin’ about the 90’s club)

I was a child full of innate self-expression, but with no real outlet to pour it. School left me in tears almost daily. I mean, how could it not? The belief system drilled into me that we were to be “no part of the world,” and I took every word to heart.

School became a battleground, every interaction framed as a test from Satan, designed to lure me away from God. No wonder it felt like oil and water. Little Me and the Big, Bad, World. Fitting in was betrayal, true expression dangerous.

And in some ways, Liverpool reflects that same paradox. It pulses with creativity. Look at its music history, humour, defiance, life, but there’s also an undertone, a collective voice whispering, “We’re the poorer North. We’ve been overlooked, underestimated, left behind.”

It’s been a city that in some ways fights to be seen; alive with expression while simultaneously told it’s small, poor, or worse, made to believe it is. There’s a thread of learned hopelessness woven through its soul, when in truth, it’s wild, powerful, and deeply alive.

Just like I was.

And, maybe I’m taking the metaphor a bit far, but I feel Liverpool carries the innocence of a child in its exuberance, and also the wounds of an aged warrior. Same. Naivety, perhaps, but foolishness. Never that.

In Liverpool but never truly of it

I don’t have what you might call the typical memories of a home city. Quadrant Park, The Paradox, Cream, those weren’t landmarks of my youth, just mysterious places other kids talked about in Monday morning gossip. There were no first dates, no drunken kisses in back alleys, no football chants echoing in my bones from its two temples. Nope. I didn’t buy Smash Hits magazine or have a favourite Take That member. There was no college. No bittersweet goodbye for university, or a job, or a lover.

Dang, it would be just a few weeks shy of my 44th birthday before experiencing anything akin to a date. My adolescence played out in Kingdom Halls not on dance floors or behind bike sheds. And while other kids were sneaking out, I was learning how to disappear in plain sight.

“The kids already thought we were freaks,” Luke wrote. “And now we were coming to their house on a Saturday morning! That’s how we were treated, and that’s how we felt. Like freaks, oddities, weirdos.”

Ahh, and yeah, there was that.

That shame of being visibly “other,” and not in a magical, mystical way, but in a way that made you the punchline…it’s a shame that lingers in the nervous system long after you leave the belief system.

The city became my scapegoat

l saw Liverpool as the whole cage of my entrapment. I love its people and yet I blamed the city. Every time there was money in the ole bank account, I left, even if for a few days. Plane, train, huge exhale.

A couple of weeks ago at the end of a trial run for something I’m yearning to grow - Pedals and Presence - we pulled oracle cards. Mine was the Acacia tree - symbol of protection in the harshest conditions. The two lovely souls with me read their cards out. I died inside… Oh God, no, must I read mine out?

It’s message?

“Trust that you being given the support and protection that you crave, even if you are not yet aware of this…”

I felt embarrassed. Because it spoke truth, as my oracle cards always do.

I do crave support and I’ve rarely felt supported by this place, this city called Liverpool. Not in a needy way, I’ll always consider myself a solitary bee before anything else, but in a soul-held way. In a “this place has your back” kind of way.

I’ll never be a Scouser who declares, “Liverpool is the best city in the world la.” That’s just silly. All the beautiful, complex, resilient people, in all the beautiful, complex, resilient cities across this planet, no city has the monopoly on that.

And yet, somthing hit me like a thunderclap to the heart the other day: maybe that’s the work now. Not to flee. But to let this city meet me. Even if it never has.

🔵That bolt came not during some grand revelation, but as I sat on the loo, tears unexpectedly falling after the tragedy that happened last Monday during Liverpool’s FA Cup final celebrations.

A man in a car had driven into the crowd. Celebration turned to chaos in a heartbeat.

And something cracked open in me. A wave of grief, of recognition. And how maybe, just maybe, my being here isn’t a punishment, but a call to be fully present here. Like all true epiphanies, it’s hard to even put into words because it was less a thought and more something felt deep in the marrow.🔵

When your city becomes your mirror

Liverpool is a city of opposites: injustice and rebirth, ecstasy and loss, resistance and fragmentation. There’s an undercurrent of lack and fear that runs in its bones, and sometimes, that fear takes the form of racism.

From the Hillsborough tragedy to the Toxteth riots to its painful legacy of slavery - it holds a collective trauma field.

So do I.

I was born into a belief system that suppressed sensitivity, shut down intuition, and told me the world outside was bad. The belief system taught me to be in the world, but absolutely no part of it.

It was never possible to resonate authentically with the place in which I was born, with all of its pride, expression and sense of self. Sometimes I feel ashamed of my timeline. That I only left the religion late 2020. That I’m still fumbling for language, still untangling deeply rooted shame, still learning how to belong, all whilst guiding someone through a meditation, helping another find the courage to give a webinar, or using NLP to gently soften the edges of someone else’s fear.

The irony isn’t lost on me. And yet, what if that is where the gift lies?

“Then I opened my mouth,” Luke Evans writes, “and out came this pure voice… and suddenly I was someone. I had an identity.”

I know that feeling. Not in song, but in story. In exhales. In the unglamorous miracle of still being here, still feeling the abject dilirium of feeling everything so deeply and intensely. In the grit, the tears and the ecstasy of it all.

It’s like I’m reintroducing myself to the world. As me.

I know what it is to have lived every day not for myself, but awaiting Armageddon. It was to have a life paused in a way no one should experience. Very little choice, no career, no dreams, no children, no roadmap, because I believed the end was imminent.

And that pain? That misunderstanding? That’s where my offerings come from. Not polished. But always true and always from a heart wide open.

A Softened Symphony

I heard the fabulous Nancy Rebecca say just recently that when there’s been something like a traffic accident it leaves a residual trauma point, thus making further accidents more likely until a healing is offered to the place.

This made instant sense to me. I see Liverpool in that vein. There are chords of unhealed trauma in this city’s architecture. Grief etched into its bricks, resistance baked into its streets. And maybe that’s why, at times, it continues to attract more.

I carry those same chords in my own body. And often, when I’ve shown up with my voice or courage, I’ve been met with silence. I’ve been trying to belong on my own terms, but the echo of conditional belonging still reverberates. I even went so far as seeking Workaways in 2022, in the hopes of finding something, community, anything, to numb the deafening sound of isolation.

There was no buffer upon leaving. No community to find a soft landing or to network with. It’s been a rebuilding from the absolute ashes.

I know my former community still love me, as I love them but it becomes impossible to integrate the two worlds. Even for those who don’t go in for the whole shunning palaver and greet me, it’s as one member said, almost well-meaningly:

“Well, you are a danger to us now.”

Weirdly, I’m so grateful for it all. So deeply grateful. These have been four or five years of incubation I guess. Often feeling like I’m playing my own tune without the support of an orchestra. Maybe it’s been a tuning-up before the symphony begins?

These lines from Breakfast at Tiffany’s have haunted me for many, many years and it couldn’t be more apt now:

“You call yourself a free spirit, a ‘wild thing,’ and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself… Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I wasn’t meant to outrun it - but to ride straight through. Ahh the emotion I feel even just writing that tells me it’s my truth.

Golden Threads of Healing

Each Friday night in Liverpool, there’s an eclectic gang of humans on wheels. The Joyriders. Cycling through the city with lights, music, and full-body joy.

I have this theory (back to everything being energy again) that when people feel good - open, alive, free - it spills over. Energy leaves residue. Like runners in the zone who unknowingly shift the air they pass through.

Imagine then, what it does to a city when a caravan of humans ride through it, feeling alive and open like that. I reckon The Joyriders leave trails of magic behind them. Golden threads spun through the streets.🚲🪄💫

Every time I go out on one of those rides, there’s a little healing. I pass streets I used to knock doors on, and I silently send love to the Suzy who once stood there, struggling to feel belonging even within her own community, trying to disappear even in her own skin.

What fascinates me is that I can do those rides alone, playlist on, wind in my hair and still feel free, still feel good. But when I do them with others…

Ahh. There’s a special kind of magic in moving together. In laughing at red lights. In weaving through the city as one beaming, glowing thread. It’s joy, yes, but it’s also a restitching. A quiet mending of something I didn’t know was torn.

May it be from peace

I don’t know what the future holds. In so many ways, I still feel like a square peg in a round hole.

I see myself moving on suddenly, all at once. I hope I’ll finally find the softness my nervous system longs for: a warmer climate, less concrete and more wild flowers.

But when I do leave, oh please, let it be from peace, not pain.

Let it be because I’ve found my footing here first. Not to prove anything. But to stand still long enough to say:

I love you, Liverpool. Even when I didn’t know how to be held by you or felt so abandoned by you... I love you.

Let it be because I’ve found Real Home first - which is always within.

I would LOVE to hear stories of the relationship with your own home city or town and how it shaped your expression, or if anything here resonated.🙏🏻 I love you!🪄🫶🏻✨

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