Could a new way of thinking solve all our problems? Sheila Heti believes it's possible
Lilly in the Wintertime is an original short story by Sheila Heti
Lilly in the Wintertime is an original short story by Sheila Heti. It is part of Healing, a special series of new, original writing featuring work by the English-language winners of the 2022 Governor General's Literary Awards, presented in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts. Read more works from Healing here.
There is nothing wrong with the body and there is nothing wrong with the mind. They exist in perfect stillness. Nothing holds the body together and nothing holds together the mind. Even the mind cannot hold the mind together. What holds a marriage together and what holds together a life? It is some force we cannot see. What binds us to other people? Some invisible force that no knife can cut. What holds the mind or the self together? No ingredients. How can a sick mind or body be mended? Only by the most invisible things. Do you have invisible thread? Invisible scissors? An invisible will? A hope that is invisible even to yourself? Are you willing to live with an invisible outcome? Are you willing to be perfectly invisible each day, for your sufferings to be invisible, and can you believe that your life is invisible, too? I had gone to the doctor with so many problems.
What holds a marriage together and what holds together a life? It is some force we cannot see. What binds us to other people? Some invisible force that no knife can cut.
I had gone to every healer, mental and physical, and consulted psychics, Tarot cards, my friends. There was not one solution proposed to me which did not cause me more stress. I felt, the solution should not be more agonizing than what I am suffering. Everyone who I asked to help me get better only made me feel guilty, like I was walking the wrong path. Was the only route to getting better through such difficult means? No, I thought. It didn't make sense to me anymore.
I mean, after a few years of really giving serious thought to what all those doctors and my friends said, and horoscopes. It put so much anxiety in me! That is when I began to really look at my body and my mind and my life, and I realised: it isn't even there. That's the problem! That I believe my life is real, that my body is made of flesh, that my mind is made of thoughts.
Everyone who I asked to help me get better only made me feel guilty, like I was walking the wrong path.
And I was so young when I started believing in all these things: back before I could reason, before I could really see with my own eyes. Finally, the only thing that brought me solace was to remember: who can prove these hands are real? Who can prove what my name is? Who can prove this life I am living is a real human life at all? The doctors were attending carefully to my blood, to the bones in my knees, to my aching stomach. My friends to my romantic upsets, as I was to theirs. Therapists to a history which I myself reported, but which I could not touch. What were the threads connecting it all together, except my own belief? And who had taught me to believe in this belief? Only other people. Yet how highly did I think of other people, now that I had lived for 46 years? Not very highly at all. Not one person had ever seemed to me worthy of the name, person or human being. So why don't I invite you into my house?
When I came upon solutions in the street, they were all for people whose bodies still meant something to them, whose path forward still meant something to them.
After all, there is nobody home. Sit down, have some tea. I searched through every pocket, every corner of my being, and I couldn't find anything there. When I came upon solutions in the street, they were all for people whose bodies still meant something to them, whose path forward still meant something to them. I couldn't lie to myself anymore. Was the lie that I had ever meant anything to myself? Was the lie that I ever had any reason to care about my body or my mind? Was the lie that I had ever cared about love, or the persistence of things through time, or any virtues at all? That I believed my actions should result in something eventual. Something eventually happening. Some outcome. Some result?
Tonight, sitting by the window, looking out at the snow, I had spinach soup made with chicken stock, potatoes, onions, garlic, pepper and salt, finished off with some old bread that I had earlier sliced and toasted in the oven with a bit of olive oil and dried thyme, basil, rosemary, tarragon, marjoram and oregano. Should I say that this green soup was the result of my life thus far, that soup was the result of the day?
The inspiration
Sheila Heti: "I wrote this story over the Christmas holidays, in the middle of the night. Sometimes it feels to me that there is a key to a new way of thinking about the self that solves all the riddles, or a new way of thinking about what the world is which could erase a certain category of problems about living — if only one could hold onto it.
"These stories come to me in different voices, voices different from my own. I feel like I am solving some problem, and at the same time, I know I can't possibly be."
About Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti won the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction for her novel Pure Colour. Heti is a Canadian playwright and author whose work has been translated in over a dozen languages. Pure Colour was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2023.
Heti's novel Motherhood was on the shortlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is also the author of the novels Ticknor and How Should a Person Be? and the self-help book The Chairs Are Where the People Go.
About the series Healing
CBC Books asked the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award winners to contribute an original piece of writing on the theme of healing. Lilly in the Wintertime was Sheila Heti's contribution to the series.
- Na-naan-dah-wih-i-way by Eli Baxter
- When Big Healing Comes in Small Ways by Dorothy Dittrich
- This Story is Against Resilience, Supports Screaming As Needed by Jen Ferguson
- Some Notes on the Requirement of Hope by Naseem Hrab
- The Invisible Cage by Nahid Kazemi
- Circumference by Annick MacAskill
- Possessions by Judith Weisz Woodsworth
