The email landed in my inbox late one Friday night in the middle of winter, 2023.
I was not cheerful. For weeks I’d been wrestling with a difficult article I should long ago have submitted to an editor. As a freelancer, the longer I spent on it, the longer it would be before another cent would hit my bank account. I’d been to the dentist that morning. I’d booked a vet appointment for my dog that afternoon; I feared she might have yet another ear infection.
I opened the email. It started:
This would be the first time I have ever written to a person in a personal context, without knowing that person. In your newsletter this week you said you were looking for a place to crash on the coast.
That was true. In the weekly newsletter I send out (reflections about this and that, links to cool and interesting stuff I’ve read) I’d asked readers if they could suggest a budget-friendly, dog-friendly place near the ocean where I might take my burnout and my dog and, literally, crash.
The email was from a woman, I’ll call her Alex. She went on to say:
I’m about to get the keys for a shack I’ve bought on the South Coast. It is extremely basic, just a one-bedroom 55sqm Fibro Majestic, about 150 metres from the beach. I’m having it cleaned and painted but after that you would be welcome to stay there for a few days/week for a headspace break, gratis. I live elsewhere so you’d have the place to yourself.
I sat on the email for a few days. I thought about the reason Alex had given for wanting to share her fibro cottage with me. I thought about personal wounds and how, when they heal, the scar tissue can be beautiful.
She wrote:
Your book helped me through a traumatic marriage separation from my husband who had a personality similar to your ex’s, so I would be very happy to help you in return.
She was referring to Fake, the book I wrote to help me understand a traumatic relationship I had with a narcissistic fantasist who lied about everything.
My intention is just for my children and I to use the house and I want to let people who have helped me through the last few years have a nice time away too. There are a few special peeps I know who don’t have a lot spare in their budgets that I think deserve a bit of TLC/random acts of kindness. My personal sociopath-next-door was clever and successful, so a silver lining to the trauma is to be now financially comfortable. I have decided I would like to share some of that in a way that He Would Never – ie, for no ulterior motive or personal gain.
Alex and I met for coffee. Then, a couple of months later, for dinner. We couldn’t stop talking. We discovered common interests and oddly parallel lives; our paths over the years had almost crossed, then not, then nearly again.
Alex is gentle, softly spoken, an artist who has been dealt some blows in life. “Being a human is ridiculously hard,” she said.
My dog and I went to Alex’s fibro shack. We pulled in late one afternoon more than a year after she first reached out to me, retrieved the key from its hiding place, unloaded the car. A text message pinged. “Make sure you get down to the beach for dusk,” my new friend wrote.
