When Jenny Diski decided she would journey to Antarctica, she did so with the four walls of her bedroom in mind. “White walls, icy mirrors, white sheets and pillowcases, white slatted blinds,” the author wrote in her late-1990s travelogue, Skating to Antarctica. “Opposite my bed, in the very small room, a wall of mirrored cupboards reflects the whiteness back at itself, making it twice the size it thought it was.”
This gave her a pure moment of gratification each morning, and a feeling of expansiveness. A boundless feeling that, when she traced it back, had emerged among the white hospital sheets of London’s Maudsley psychiatric unit, where she had been a patient at the age of 21.
It couldn’t have been more different from my own vision of serenity. I grew up with a magpie for a mother and, as a result, I quickly developed a similar garnering spirit when it came to accruing stuff and displaying it around me. I have always found comfort in this scrapbooking approach to the many homes I have lived in. Not least, the one I live in now: a flat I moved into in south-east London on a sweltering day in August 2012, unwrapping crockery and glassware as a neurosurgeon excised my husband’s brain tumour on the other side of town.
But Diski’s white walls came back to me on a restless Sunday afternoon last year, at a juncture in my life where I was questioning the clutter I’d accumulated since his death in 2018. “What do I have, why do I have it, and where should it go?” I had asked myself in my grief. What followed was a period of frantic rearranging in an attempt to figure out who I was, and what my home should look like, without him there. The walls, in particular, suddenly looked off to me. Did I still want to keep the pastel-hued landscape he’d hung – and so admired? And if not, how to assuage the guilt of removing it?
On the morning that I ticked the option marked “widowed” on my home insurance, I took our wedding photographs down, and replaced them with a splattering of riot grrrl posters instead. The feeling it gave me was gratifying, so I kept on adding, creating a dizzying mishmash of clashing frames that I switched and swapped from one month to the next – trying to achieve some kind of clarity.
In 2023, when I looked at the chaotic walls around me, I could finally see the discombobulation of my early grief – like a foreign land in sharp relief – and I wondered how much my clutter was a response to that sudden trauma. It was almost like I had a compulsion to paper over the calamity with pictures and trinkets: shiny things that might distract me from what had just occurred. Until the 16th century, white was commonly worn by widows as a colour of mourning, and I wonder whether a small part of myself sensed this as I threw pictures aimlessly at white walls in the days I spent decorating alone. “Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself,” writes Bessel van der Kolk in his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score. “The challenge of recovery is to re-establish ownership of your body and your mind – of your self.”
The challenge of recovery can be to re-establish ownership of your domestic space, too. Last year, I was reminded of Kolk’s writing when I looked at the clusters of pictures that I hammered up so clumsily in 2019. For the first time since my husband’s death, I felt quite distanced from the haphazard woman who pounded nails as though they were malignant cells. And with it came a sense of peace with who I am now. Perhaps, even, who I was then. “What do I have, why do I have it, and where should it go?” These questions will always resurface regardless of life’s twists and turns. But my ease with the empty space between them? Well, that’s where the recovery is; that’s the thing that’s new.
There is a patch of wood panelling in my living room that I intentionally left blank. And despite my compulsion to fill it with something, I resisted the urge. My walls are less cluttered now, and although I’d hardly call myself a disciple of Diski’s white-slatted philosophy, there is something about her spartan approach that has roused a certain kind of selectiveness in me. Less paraphernalia on the shelves, for instance. And a more guilt-free approach to all the things – including that pastel-hued landscape – that I’ve chosen not to keep. To say I’ve “quit” my maximalism seems like too extreme a word. Yet there is something in my paring back that feels in keeping with it somehow. A relinquishing of sorts.
It’s true we cannot live in the past. But we can honour it as we evolve – like Diski did with her white walls. A place of safety was what she was ultimately seeking on that hospital ward, she explained – a white oblivion. And so: “When hospitalisation failed, I transferred my fantasy to the idea of a monk’s cell. A small, bare, white room with nothing to distract the eye from the emptiness.”
How different two writers can be. Unlike Diski, this emptiness has always frightened me. Until a moment last autumn, when I challenged myself to take everything off the walls and face them in the bright light of day. The blank slate stared back at me as if to say: “what next?” And I found comfort remade in the not knowing.
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The Elements by Kat Lister (Icon Books, £14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
