My tomato plants as of a week ago

Every suitable windowsill in my house is taken up by tomato plants. Last October, when I moved house, my friend Siân bought me seeds as a housewarming present. I planted all of them in April. At the time, my partner compared me to a mother during a period of history with high infant mortality rates; I planted all of them because I thought they were all going to die, except now I’ve ended up with twenty-five tomato plants. Some of them are beginning to look a bit unloved, and I am panicking that none of them will flower, so the joke is starting to feel a bit uncomfortably close to how I actually feel. Now I’m emotionally invested and worried that having no tomatoes will be worse than the tomato plants not surviving at all.

This morning, I looked at my windowsill and very suddenly saw my whole life reflected back at me. I thought about how I’d started playing guitar regularly earlier this year, but then I got Covid, started knitting again, and now I haven’t played in a few weeks. I thought about this newsletter and my laptop hard drive, which is littered with half-finished essays. I thought about WhatsApp, and the slew of notifications I get when I start ten different conversations at once because I realise I haven’t spoken to various loved ones in a few months.

It’s not as though I ever stop wanting to do all these things. I stop being able to find the time but the hope doesn’t go away. It just hides in my brain where I can’t find it easily; in the meantime it rots away, and by the time I found it again it’s eroded another hole in my self-esteem.

Pushing this analogy even further, there’s about as many plausible reasons for why this happens as tomato plants. Maybe it’s undiagnosed ADHD, or CPTSD! Maybe it’s a profound existential malaise that goes way beyond psychiatric categorisation! Maybe I’m just bored!

Often, I spend more time trying to work out why I’m like this than doing anything that I find fulfilling. Except it’s not as if all these tomato plants haven’t given me any happiness at all over the last couple of months - I can barely conceive of them as being anything other than seeds now, and that’s incredible. Not to mention that it prompted me into writing this.

When I started knitting again, I finally learned to purl after 10 years; just now, I picked up my guitar and I can still play all the chord shapes I've ever learned. The time spent on all of these activities has all been time that I’ve spent not mostly concerned with feeling inadequate or worrying about things I can’t control, it’s all muscle memory slowly trained, it’s all life lived in spite of everything that conspires against unmonetisable human activity.

Being inundated with delicious tomatoes would be a bonus though, so fingers crossed.