WHELMING AND OVERWHELMING

So it all worked out. We turned up, we met the previous owners, we stepped inside a shell of white walls and wooden floor, we heard our voices echo, and then they left.

The removal men were quickly on it. Minutes later, the two big vans squealed up outside and in within an hour or so, everything that had been in Stuff Jail stood stacked in various rooms inside our new, still empty-feeling house.

Last time I did this, Sammy’s well-designed Christmas card was lying on the welcome mat. This time, she was there with me, beaming and asking if I felt okay.

“Overwhelmed?” she smiled a couple of times.

“Yes,” I said.

I was certain there was a different word, but that one, overwhelmed, would do for now. Whatever that feeling was, I still have it two days later. It seems like an unreal feeling, a too-grown-up thing. How can we be home owners? How can this strange arrangement of cupboards and tiles, carpet and lightbulbs, be our actual home now?

There once was the idea that you could be whelmed, of course. It sort of meant ‘overturned’ like a ship that had capsized and was bobbing about with its hull skyward - something so momentous had happened that everything had been inverted.

In time I guess, people started to say a thing was over-whelming, as in they had been 'over-turned’ in order to emphasise the drama. An ‘overwhelming’ wave could clearly ‘whelm’ a boat, and it would only be appropriate to say it had been overwhelmed.

It was a pretty good choice of word then: bobbing about in the ocean while all the cleaning was going on in the kitchen. The house is rammed with boxes and crates. We have though, made a decent start.

It’s occurring to me that I feel overwhelmed a lot more than I used to. There’s definitely a nervousness in my life that wasn’t there before. Perhaps it was - perhaps there was a confidence of youth. Perhaps covid wrecked a lot more pathways in my brain. All I know is that I struggle feeling like I’m any good at my job and I’ve felt like that for two years (over two jobs). In the meantime, the overwhelming feeling from the world is that things are meaner, nastier, more dangerously divisive - and that’s kind of heartbreaking.

We’re okay though. And it’ll be one step at a time with the house. I’m looking forward to being able to close the door on the world out there and reminding myself how to live - perhaps the right-way-up, if I can manage a bit of seaworthiness.