Eleanor Anstruther's truth

Unfixed resource

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Calling Eleanor Anstruther an Unfixed resource feels too tidy and finite. Her essays are food, prayer, solid earth and good dirt under my fingernails.

I discovered Eleanor’s essays early into my Substack days and was immediately struck (like a shard of truth into the gut) by the raw, honest urgency of her words. Eleanor’s characters, including herself, are stripped bare, illuminating the cramped corners of our own psyches and gently urge, “Come near, let me hold you.”

And if I’ve learned one truth from my own journey living unfixed, it is this: I must allow, embrace even, all the unwanted, unfriendly, uncomfortable guests in my life. Instead of pleading on hands-and-knees for them to go away (been there, done that) I now invite the ick to co-exist alongside my more “desired” plot lines.

To make friends with the part that beasts me, to understand its actions, to tell it that it’s done a great job, and it can rest now, to ask it what it wants and what it needs to put the stick down, these are the forward movements of integration.

-Eleanor Anstruther

One of Eleanor’s recent essays is titled Mercury Ward. I recommend binging on all of her work, but I highlight this one today to continue a month-long focus on mental health. What could be a lost chapter from Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Eleanor’s protagonist wrestles with past and present, so covered in the “slime of mental illness that every slice of her dripped with it.” The humanity is visceral—a tragedy of a girl traumatized and misunderstood, navigating the toll of an aberrant biochemistry. Eleanor doesn’t just ask us to wear this girl’s shoes, she invites us to wear her pain. And through donning her plight, truth as it’s lived, is realized.

But there’s something else about Eleanor’s writing that makes her a resource for meeting adversity. She pays attention. She listens. Whether she’s describing a summer’s meadow “waving long and blond,” why meditation frightens the hell out of her, or how the “drumbeat of my cat rumbles through my blood, healing worry and pain and ancient hurts,” Eleanor reminds her readers, she reminds me, to let life in, to touch, hear, taste and see all her textures. To be curious. As any good trauma therapist would say, when we drop the story and open to our embodied experience, the bottom of the brain stem can finally relax. Our sometimes-not-so-sophisticated brains can’t be deeply curious AND afraid at the same time.

So yes, Eleanor is a resource for anyone grappling with NO, I DON’T WANT THIS IN MY LIFE or NO, I CAN’T POSSIBLY SURVIVE THIS because her essays, like masterfully poked acupuncture needles, open blocked channels, quiet the discord, and humanize this mortal experience so we can at last, befriend our own.

What a perfect coincidence that her last name, Anstruther, contains the word truth—I imagine a lineage of Anstruthers standing behind her, all mining for this precious, yet elusive, universal gem.

Please join us for some more ”truth listening” this Sunday 11/12 @ 2pm PST for the premiere of Unfixed Mind: Episode 3: Relationships and Mental Health.

Are you new to Unfixed? I recommend starting the memoir from the beginning for the full context and story. Thanks for being here!