Love blockages

Even in life's biggest moments, emotions can feel like clogged pipes. Sometimes all it takes is a pop song.

Olive is six weeks old today. She was born on Saturday morning, which makes it easy to mark these milestones. Each weekend I wake up and remember what was happening, minute-by-minute. This is when we were rushed to the delivery room. This is when Jessie closed her eyes and went to a place beyond my comprehension. This is when you were placed, gurgling and windmilling your purple limbs, into my arms for the very first time.

During those two hours that our new life was emerging, like a butterfly pushing through its chrysalis, I mostly gripped the Stanley cup and tried to keep a look of reassuring confidence in my eyes. Secretly, I worried whether I was going to feel the right things. Olive’s birth was imminent – minutes away – but what if I wasn’t reborn with it? If, instead of the blossoming of love I’d been told to expect, I felt cold, or detached? Would it show in my face? Would I do or say something wrong?

This preoccupation manifested in fiddling with the Spotify playlist we’d loosely prepared for the occasion. Each time the midwife told us she was almost there, I pressed skip, hoping to land on the perfect song. How do you soundtrack the biggest moment of your life, something you’d both fought so hard for? A recent banger, to keep things topical? Something that reminded us of our old selves, falling in love eight years ago? Surely my child couldn’t be born to NWA? In the end, it was ‘Africa’ by Toto: one of Jessie’s favourite songs, which seemed fair given she had been through the fight of her life while I was merely the cornerman.

At one point, in the middle of worrying if I’d feel the right things, ‘Love My Life’ by Robbie Williams came on. Easily mistakable for a song about how great it is to be Robbie Williams, it’s actually about the relationship he hopes he will have with his child.

I might not be there for all your battles
But you'll win them eventually
I pray that I'm giving you all that matters
So one day you'll say to me:

I love my life
I am powerful
I am beautiful
I am free

Cheesy or not, it struck such a chord in me – the desire I have to raise our daughter feeling free to be happy, to know you don’t have to fret and worry all the time, that actually it’s also OK to be OK – that I burst into tears. The song pulled me back from fretting about the future to existing in the moment. It reminded me that music can function this way: not just as a time machine to the past, but as connective tissue to the present.

In the weeks since then, there have been many times I have looked down at Olive and feel such a surge of love it stops the breath in my chest, but then the feeling snags on something I don’t fully understand and I get blocked. I put some music on and any song, as long as its heartfelt, seems to kick the door down. She looks up at me quizzically, maybe grimaces out a fart, while my eyes fill with tears and my body hums with a joy I would have thought impossible just six weeks ago.

In somatic therapy, you learn that emotions can and do get trapped all over the body. Anger is often caught in the jaw, where it gets repressed and sometimes ground back into the body through the teeth. It can also gather in the legs – the seat of power – without being properly discharged. My legs vibrated with it for years.

Unlocking all that anger soothed out many of the kinks and twitches in my body, and I did it by talking – a lot. But when it comes to unblocking feelings of love, words don’t seem to cut it. It takes a major or a minor chord, a stirred string or a howled soul. The ineffable touch of music; something, for some reason, I thought I’d left far behind. And here was me thinking music would be something I’d teach her about, not the other way round.

Good Anger, my book about the surprising upsides of anger, is out 5 June 2025 and can be pre-ordered here.