Black pits did not always come equipped with broadband and Sky Plus...

My name is Ms Havisham.

Jilted and unemployed, I am the lost cause of the twenty first century. I also pursue a love/hate relationship with modern technology.  

Today, I received an email from the Love of my Life, now known as Lol. It was nothing special of course, just a message to tie up a few loose ends. I mentioned previously that I was in constant hope of this occurrence. I mention now that I also dread it for the coldness of those sparse impersonal words freeze me to the core. How conflicting, how masochistic to long for what I did know, if I am honest with you and with myself, would only be an additional stab of pain.  

Despite this message, long awaited, business is still unfinished: he has now begun to reclaim his possessions so dear to me, not in their romantic nature but in their intent to be useful, or in other words, in his intent to take care of me.

In my mixture of hope, anger and grief with regards to this episode, my thoughts turn to my Dickensian predecessor. Over the past month, Lol and I have communicated by way of phone texts and broadband and I awaited each hurtful message with the same bated breath. What is interesting is that today, it takes the same amount of time for a message to reach someone halfway across the world as it does someone in the next room. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was a different story: had old Miss Havisham lived anywhere but in close proximity to her beloved, the number of notes exchanged would be significantly fewer.

I think of myself, paralysed in my waiting even a few hours for news and I wonder how any woman in the mid nineteenth century could bear this. Did they also take to their beds (or in my case, a flat screen with Sky Plus…Yes, my pit is well equipped!)? Or were they stronger than we are now? I do admit that some women nowadays in a similar situation may be more composed than this. Perhaps my weeklong collapse was partly a conscious choice in compliance with my tendencies towards all that is passionate and dramatic. And so, as I think of women throughout the ages, I come to another point of contemplation along my quest:

To what extent can we and should we master our own emotions?