Storytelling with Impact | Salima Saxton at The Moth

The Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.

In this story told at The Moth London Mainstage on September 28, 2023, Salima Saxton talks about how her (nearly) perfect life was uprooted when her husband had a nervous breakdown, and the changes they entire family made in order to build an even better life.

I’ve encountered a lot of people whose lives were interrupted by an unforeseen event. In this situation it was a mental health issue, but for others it could be a physical health crisis, death in the family, or one of many other scenarios. And quite often these people don’t feel that their story is anything exceptional, not worth sharing on a stage. But I can assure you that there are people out there who will benefit from such stories, so spend a bit of time watching Salima’s talk and thinking about she constructed it. Here are a few of my own observations.

Salima begins her story by taking us to a specific point in time, and it happens to be a day, Valentine’s Day, that we assume would be a happy day. But such is not the case, as the mood turns dark when her husband, Carl, comes into the room. Over the next minute it becomes apparent that Carl is struggling, although we still don’t know any of the details, or the reason why. She has our attention.

Rather than tell us what’s happening, Salima takes a step back in time to share the moment when she first met her husband, and in doing so, we return to a romantic story line, one which culminates in their marriage.

We get a sense of their domesticated life in a shishi neighborhood where their kids attended private school, where they didn’t learn much, which gets a laugh, and thus keeps the tone of her story uplifting at this juncture.

The tone shifts again with her comment about their lives lacking joy, and that brings us back to the opening of the story, to Valentine’s Day, nearing the half way point of the story. Think about how much has been said in 5 1/2 minutes.

In short order their lives are turned upside down in an effort to take care of her husband, and we get a clear sense of Salima’s self-determination to do whatever it takes. We also hear a change in attitude as she “couldn’t give a fuck actually”.

When hearing a well-told story you sometimes hear a brilliant line that defines the topic. In this case, “when your life explodes and it morphs into something far better, the fear evaporates, disappears, distills, just goes into the atmosphere”

With calm returning to their lives, she beautifully brings the story to an end. An impactful personal story connects the audience to the storyteller, while at the same time inspiring us to reflect on our own lives, and what’s really important.

Valentine’s Day. It reminded me that most success is a wiggly line on a grubby piece of graph paper. I used to think of success as tick, tick, tick, ambition, ambition, ambition. Now? Now I think of it as… Finding the people, finding the places that make you feel safe and bring you home.

Transcript

00:00 So, it was Valentine’s Day. My husband Carl came into the sitting room and he closed the door. He was wearing a big thick winter coat even though it was quite mild outside, and he was shivering, he was trembling. I didn’t recognize him.

Something terrible has happened, he said.

00:22 My husband Carl is a coper. He is a man with a plan. If you want someone on your team, pick Carl. He’s an oak tree.

Then he said, I just can’t do this anymore. Whatever I do, it is never enough. He had a business. He has a business. He’d been navigating it through COVID, through Brexit, through all of it.

And I’m embarrassed to admit right now that I just kind of got used to him being stressed all the time. I barely saw it anymore.

And then he added, do you love me? Can you still love me? Because sometimes I just think it would be better if I wasn’t here anymore.

01:11 I met Carl when I was 22 in the waiting room of an audition room for a Bollywood film. Neither of us got the part. I asked him for the time, as a really spurious reason to talk to him, because he was simply the most handsome man I’d ever seen in my life.

On our first date, I asked him if he wanted children over the starter. I cried over the main course. I am a crier. And over dessert, I very optimistically asked him for a second date. Miraculously, he agreed, and six weeks later, he asked me to marry him.

01:56 The following summer, we were married in a London registry office. Me in a red vintage dress, him in an ill-fitting suit. He still looked really handsome. We cobbled together a reception at a pub down the road. A chef friend of ours and made a big chocolate cake, and we bought tons of boxed wine from a cash and carry.

So on my side, my family. There was my dad, very angry because I’d walked myself down the aisle. There were my extended family, the Buddhists, the Amnesty International members, the Liberals, the very earnest guests. On the other side was Carl’s family. They were different.

There was a man called Mickey Four Fingers, whose name really explains the man. There was a group of ex-cons whose gold jewellery competed for attention with their gold teeth. And then there was his dear dementia-ridden mum, Pat. She’d actually been a getaway driver for her naughty brothers in the 80s. She was an amazing woman, but now she just called everybody darling, very, very charmingly, but mainly because she didn’t really know where she was or who any of them were.

So it was a joyous, it was a sad, it was an awkward, it was a stressful occasion. And it made both of us yearn for elders that could be there to hold our hands in such big life events.

03:30 We both wanted to rocket away from our upbringings. Carl, partly for physical safety. Both of us, no, really for physical safety. Both of us for emotional safety. And together we did that. I also had ideas of success from 90s rom-coms and TV series.

You remember, The Party of Five, the O.C.. I had an idea that if I had a kitchen island, freshly cut flowers, linen napkins and a gardener, like just a weekend one, then somehow the perfect TV family would just walk in.

04:09 So together, Carl and I did actually do some of that. We lived in the shishi neighborhood. I had a tiny dog that I carried under my arm, Raymond, because he couldn’t really walk very far. And our three kids, they went to a progressive private school where they called the teachers by their first name, didn’t wear uniform, and didn’t learn so much. But they were happy in their early years, at least.

I hadn’t had this kind of education, by the way. I’d been to a state school. I’d ended up at Cambridge. I’d really been like a happy geek at school. And sometimes Carl and I wondered what we were doing, kind of pushing ourselves to such an extent to make sure that our kids went to that kind of school. I think it was another idea of ours to be safe, to be successful.

But there wasn’t much joy in all of this, you know. We were just busy, frantically scrabbling up this hill all the time. Yeah, we had the kitchen island, we did have linen napkins, but they were grubby and they were mainly kept in the back of the kitchen cupboard.

So that Valentine’s evening, when Carl said to me he couldn’t live like this anymore, it cut through all of it. He kept saying to me, do you love me? Can you still love me? Do you love me?

And I kept saying, you are loved. Oh my God, you’re so loved. I felt angry. I felt angry at him. I felt angry at me. How could we have got this so wrong that the boy in the ill-fitting suit was asking me whether I still loved him?

I phoned our family doctor who said that she thought Carl was having a breakdown and that he needed medication and respite immediately. I phoned a friend whose husband had had a breakdown a few years earlier. And I remember standing on the front lawn in my pajamas. It was dark. I was freezing cold. And I was kind of whispering into the phone so my kids wouldn’t hear, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. I mean, who cares?

So I realized that things had to change really quickly. This life of ours that we had created was a weight around us, and Carl in particular was gasping at the surface for air. I had to change things immediately. I knew it. So I told Carl that.

I said that we were going to move to my childhood home, that we were going to take the kids out of the school and we were going to do things very differently, and look after him. He’d always looked after us.

So I did that. It was a bit like triage, I suppose. I gave notice to the school. I started to pack up the house. And then I would drive out of London with my car filled to the brim to set up my kids’ bedrooms in advance of us moving. I would do that at that end. I would go to the tip, visit schools, and then drive home to London sobbing.

07:30 I felt like I’d… I’d just taken a shrinking pill. I felt like everyone in London with their game faces was saying, who did you think you were trying to live this big life? I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed for feeling ashamed. I remember saying to people, oh, please don’t tell them because I think it would make really good gossip. But then there are the people, and there are the moments that stand out for me.

There was the friend that flew across the ocean with squish mellows for my children and words for me saying, we have got this. We have got this. There were the class mums who organized my son’s birthday party. There was the woman in the playground who squeezed my hands because she could see I was feeling really wobbly.

All those signs of kindness had actually always been there, but I’d been too busy looking for other things. So for about 13 weeks, I lived on coffee, sausage rolls, and adrenaline, and by that April my kids were in their new school, Carl was beginning to resurface, and I could kind of exhale again.

That February 14th took the sheen off everything. I couldn’t give a fuck. Can I swear? I don’t know. I couldn’t care less about… I couldn’t give a fuck actually. About appearances suddenly. I just couldn’t. I felt like I’d woken up.

We lost the Deliveroo. We lost complicated cupcake flavors. We lost hotel people bar watching, which I love. We lost the perfect butter chicken tully. Oh, and we lost 24-hour access to buttons, chocolate buttons and Pringles. We lost the people for whom a postcode matters. Most surprisingly of all, we lost the fear.

Because, you know, when your life explodes and it morphs into something far better, the fear evaporates, disappears, distills, just goes into the atmosphere. I’m not scared anymore. There’s just like a little firefly of fear. And that’s to do with the health of the people that I love.

10:16 There was an afternoon last summer. I was sitting in the garden in the farmhouse that we now live in. And it was sunny. And I was watching my husband and my son tear up the lawn on the ride-on mower. There were my two girls, and they were leading their friend’s horse, Stan, to get a bowl of water just inside the front door.

And there was our cat, Tigger, failing to catch a mouse in the hedgerow. Tigger was an indoor cat, actually, in London. But now, well, gone is this skittish creature whose mood you could never predict. Instead, we have a creature that leaps up trees, parties all night, purrs by the fire. She knows exactly who she is. I think much like all of us.

11:10 Valentine’s Day. It reminded me that most success is a wiggly line on a grubby piece of graph paper. I used to think of success as tick, tick, tick, ambition, ambition, ambition. Now? Now I think of it as… Finding the people, finding the places that make you feel safe and bring you home.

Thanks.

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