– A lived episode of interruption, recognition, and the climate that shapes intention

I sit here trying to make my perception intelligible, and the system I’m using to do it keeps pulling the strength out of the intention. I can see the shape of what I want to say – the movement, the contour, the climate of the thought – but each time I reach for it, something in the tool interrupts me. A small refusal. A misalignment. A moment where the world does not meet the gesture. It isn’t dramatic. It’s draining. I feel the energy leave me in a way I recognise immediately, even before I can name it.

And as that drain happens, I’m taken back to a moment I haven’t thought about in years. I’m six, maybe seven. I’ve been given a pair of scissors at school. I have a vision of a colour collage I want to make – vivid, alive, already formed in my mind. I can see the shapes, the arrangement, the movement of colour. I reach for the paper, ready to begin. And the scissors won’t cut. They slip. They bend. They refuse. The idea is there, but the tool in my hand will not cooperate. I try again. And again. And with each attempt, something in me collapses a little. Not the idea – the strength to keep reaching for it.

There was also a bodily shift I didn’t have language for then. A tightening, a drop, a kind of internal recoil. I know there are limits to what I can claim about this – anything involving stress or the nervous system belongs to the domain of healthcare professionals, not to me. But what I can say is that I felt something in my body respond before my mind could make sense of it. And even the caution around naming that response – the sense that I must stay within what I can legitimately describe – is part of the climate I’m trying to reveal. The world presses, the body registers, and the language must move carefully around that pressure.

When I arrived home that day, I tried to explain it to my mother. I didn’t have the words. I only had the sensation – the collapse, the drain, the way the idea had been alive in me and then suddenly wasn’t. She listened, and she named it instantly. “Ah,” she said, “that’s something sucking your gumption.”

She didn’t say it lightly. She knew the climate. She’d felt it herself as a child. She told me about being a Brownie, about Lady Baden‑Powell, about the way the adults arranged themselves in the room – the leader, the neighbours, the priest, the figures of authority who carried themselves with a kind of moral weight. She told me how, even then, she could sense the power in the room, the way it pressed on her, the way it made her smaller, quieter, less herself. She didn’t have the language of power or authenticity. She had the lived sense of something that drained her, something that stopped her from being who she was in that moment.

She had lost her own mother at four. Through the conversations she later had with me about her childhood, I came to understand how a child in that position learns to read adults – to sense danger, to feel asymmetry, to know when authenticity is unsafe. She learned the world through the body, through the moods of others, through the way authority occupies space. So when she encountered the Brownie hierarchy, Lady Baden‑Powell, the priest, the family roles – she didn’t just experience events. She experienced the arrangement. She felt the moment when the world reaches in and takes the strength out of intention.

So when she heard my story, she recognised it immediately. Not because she had thought about it. Because she had lived it.

And in that moment, her recognition was not just understanding – it was a kind of care. Not care as comfort or reassurance, but care as intention: her movement toward me to ease the pressure of what I had encountered, to help me see that the force acting on me was relational, not mine alone. She was trying to give me a way to hold the experience without being crushed by it.

And what stays with me now, as I sit here trying to write, is not the failure of the scissors or the failure of the software. It’s the moment of drain. The collapse of forward motion. The sense that something outside me has reached in and taken the strength out of the intention. Not enough to stop me forever – just enough to stop me now.

And when this happens again and again – when each attempt is met with a small drain, a small interruption – something larger forms. A field of waiting. A field of postponement. A field where the self never quite reaches the point of breakthrough, because the strength never has the chance to accumulate. The experience repeats, and the repetition becomes the atmosphere. The world closes over again before the intention can become action.

I didn’t know any of this as a child. I barely know it now. But I know the climate. I know the moment when something sucks my gumption. I know the way it interrupts the self, the way it drains the strength of the intention, the way it repeats, the way it shapes the conditions from the inside.

And I know this: the experience is not personal. It is recognisable. It is inherited. It is lived before it is named.

The episode has already revealed its structure. The naming can come later.

David Marshall
Skerries
April 2026