Dr Stella Duffy OBE is an existential psychotherapist and writer. She has written 17 novels, 15 plays, 70 short stories.
Last Summer, with no warning, she suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm. Having survived this and two cancer diagnoses, she writes here about her purpose.
"I understand the desire to find purpose. It suggests a path, a way, a meaning for life that we can stick to regardless of what may come.
And yet, that’s not how life is. That’s not how being is. We change. Everything changes, always. Impermanence and uncertainty are at the core of every anxiety because somewhere, deep down, no matter how many cities and roads and industries we humans build, we know that eventually, it will all be dust. We will all be dust.
Life is essentially groundless and searching for grounding – even in something as potentially lofty as ‘purpose’ –is likely to lead us away from the basic truth that nothing will last.
Yes, I appreciate that might not sound very positive, but to me it is beautiful. Beautiful in a bittersweet, heartbreakingly poignant, core truth kind of way.
Here’s why ...
In my twenties I was mostly a performer. I was a stand-up comedian for a bit, an improviser over many decades, and occasionally I was even a traditional does-plays-says-someone-else’s-words actor. I loved acting, theatre – most especially the improvised, devised, unrehearsed kind. I loved that sense of live connection, performer to performer, performers with audience. That felt like purpose.
In my thirties I became a writer while still performing. Improvisation is the best grounding for writing (actually it’s the best grounding for almost anything that involves connecting with others) and improvising led me to writing. Over the next thirty years I wrote seventeen novels, more than seventy short stories, fifteen plays and quite a few screenplays that were optioned but never made. I believe writing is about connection. Me and the characters, me and the reader, me and the story that uses me to write it. That felt like purpose too.
In my forties I finally had the courage to offer myself as a theatre director. The men I’d grown up alongside in theatre had been calling themselves a director for decades, most of the women I knew had not. There were fewer women director role models, far fewer women who might be mentors. But eventually I found some courage based on my performing and storytelling work and I started making theatre as a director who held space for people to create rather than told people what to do, who supported others in their creativity rather than took the role of creative leader. I loved that. Making space for others to connect. That felt like purpose.
In my fifties I co-founded and co-directed Fun Palaces. My background is working class, council estate, no access to arts as a creator. (It’s all very well to say we want to bring people into the arts as audiences, but really that’s just ticket sales, why not be truly inclusive and support them to be artists?). Based on Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price’s 1960s never-built idea of a Fun Palace, the 21st century version supports local communities to co-create the arts and culture that they believe matters to them, right where they are. Instead of saying only some people have ‘talent’, it asserts a belief in the genius in everyone. (And don’t go telling me Mozart was a genius, Mozart’s dad made him a scale model violin when he was 3 and was a brilliant violin teacher himself. Until we’re giving all children these opportunities – in every form of education – we have no idea who is a‘genius’.) Offering connection across the UK and further, connecting within communities, Fun Palaces definitely felt like purpose.
Being gay and out for over four decades has felt like purpose. Being married to my glorious wife of 34 years has felt like purpose – even though only 10 years of our relationship has had the privilege of being called ‘marriage’ according to our still-homophobic society. Being queer and knowing that we still have so much to do to make our culture more inclusive feels like purpose. Speaking publicly, being an activist, running workshops, trying to make a difference, that all feels like purpose.
I’m 61 now and I’ve just finished a five-year doctorate training in existential psychotherapy. I’ve written a thesis on the embodied experience of post menopause. From an utterly non-academic background, I’m not only the first in my family to go to university, I’m the first to be able to finish secondary school. There was not enough money for my six older siblings to stay on, both of my parents had to leave school at 14. And now I am a psychotherapist supporting others to remake the stories they’ve struggled with, to find the story they want to tell about themselves, to connect with themselves and with others. This too feels like purpose.
So, in some ways, it could be said that my life has been about creativity, finding purpose through connection, but my greatest personal learning has come through health challenges, my own embodied experience. Those experiences that have taught me I can only live in my body, this body, which is the only way I have of being in the world, from in-utero until death.
At 36 I had my first cancer, chemotherapy made me infertile, I am childless-not-by-choice. My work supporting others in this position in our profoundly pro-natal culture feels like purpose. At 50 I had my second cancer. My work supporting people who live with difficult diagnoses and those who love them feels like purpose. For years I have lived with chronic pain that is sometimes disabling. Then, in summer 2023, with no warning and shockingly, I had a ruptured brain aneurysm, a sub-arachnoid haemorrhage, that nearly killed me in a way my cancers didn’t. With the cancers, however frightening, there was treatment. There was chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy, methods to keep death at bay. With the brain bleed there was simultaneously and immediately total pain and utter lack of control. The only thing to do was hope that surgery could fix it in time, my body handed over to medical staff. My death was in me, filling me up, in a way nothing else ever has.
My sister died suddenly when I was 18. My father died suddenly when I was 25. My mother’s sudden death came when I was 40. My dearest people have more often died suddenly than slowly, with no opportunity to say goodbye. Sometimes I feel that the life I have left – at 61 I am definitely not ‘midlife’ anymore – might be about saying goodbye. Not just to those I love, but also to me, to how I understand ‘me’. Connecting with my death offers deep possibilities for connecting with life.
Having survived the ruptured aneurysm, I find myself unable to say what my purpose is now. I return more often to my yoga and Buddhist practices. Every now and then, I find myself beginning to feel grounded, safe, and then I recall how easily I lost that safety last summer, how uncertain it all is.
I have, for a long time now, preferred verbs to nouns. Artisting not artist, writering not writer, therapisting not therapist. Something that is moving rather than stuck, potential rather than decided. I believe in process far more than I do in product or end points. And so I wonder if purposing might be more useful than the definitive, declarative ‘purpose’?
Inclusion, creativity, engagement, social justice, equalities – these have all been part of my work and my passion, but right I don’t know whether I am purposing my life or if life is purposing me. I suspect the latter. I suspect none of us are that important. I suspect life moves through us, being.
I hope I have been useful. I want to continue to be useful.
I try to remember to be grateful.
I want to rest in the fullness of this world and savour it, for however long I have left.
I’m not very good at this resting thing yet.
I aim to get better.
Hopefully that will do."
