I’ve been thinking a great deal about things recently – the passed two years, myself, my family, relationships, the future – just to name a few and trying to work out my place in them all. I might be a coward but I do take on some formidable things to batter myself against...so that would make me stupid too then.
Mostly I’ve been thinking about the healing process and the different way people come to terms with things that have hurt, been traumatic and made them vulnerable. Undeniably what works for one is not necessarily the recipe for success for another. I can go out and beat the crap out of the punch bag in the garage or pound the pavement jogging and they do little to make me feel better or like I’ve vented any emotion. They do a damn sight less in helping me to understand what I’m going through or my reaction to it as well. For my husband however, they are a part of how he deals with everything.
A university lecturer once told me he didn’t believe in people writing for therapeutic reasons, he didn’t place any faith in the notion it was cathartic or beneficial and quite frankly thought it all a load of crap. He believed people write because they ARE writers. The dreamer in me wants desperately to believe him – wants to believe that I write about all the painful things in me and that I’m going through because I AM A WRITER and it is simply what I do regardless of the motivation behind it.
Yet, there is this voice at the back of my head that argues “Natasha you are quite clearly not a talker, you can’t draw or paint to save your life, you can’t sing (lovely what you do shouldn’t in all fairness be called singing, if it was, that would be an insult to professional singers) nor are you athletic – have you seen yourself running? I’ll leave it that. So, the process of elimination reveals you have to do something to release the emotions inside you and to help you along the way to healing, and after all the things that you clearly aren’t or can’t do...only writing is left. Therefore, that is what you do.”
I don’t know whether to listen to it or not because for me writing isn’t just about healing, it’s about escapism (in my stories I can have the cold resolute devil may care attitude and the slim athletic size 10 figure I’d like to have in reality), its about exploring relationships and human nature. I even think in stories and scenes – I once walked into Sainburys and while waiting for my husband by the entrance I watched one of the staff self-consciously dancing before a display selling the new DVD release of Slum Dog. You could tell that while she really didn’t want to be there and hated absolutely every minute of it she had made a special effort with her hair and makeup to look as good as she could. She wasn’t a bad mover either. In my head I wrote a story about how a senior female member of the store management didn’t like her and therefore had purposely picked her to stand there and dance as means of ritually humiliating her. In my story one of the security guards who spend all day over in that corner watching the monitor for thieves etc finally notices her and asks her out on a date. Obviously it’s the same security guard the dastardly female management member has fancied all along, thus justice is served. I know, I know I should get out of my own head more often (not in the drunk way of course although...) Oh, I should also stop watching so much Disney. But my inability to socialise and to stop watching cartons isn’t the point – the fact I think and imagine in stories is. Everything before me that I see, hear, smell, touch, feel, experience has the potential to be a story and somehow becomes a scene in one in my head.
I however won’t take the plunge to write that novel that I’ve had in my head for more years than I can remember and even have the first three chapters of and full synopsis of. I publicly post my inner demons for all and sundry to poke around and judge me on but I won’t write a story. Why does one thing, the most painful, come so naturally yet the other ‘fun’ thing I find myself unable to let flow?
I can’t answer that but what I do know is that without going through this process of writing about myself, my thoughts, my emotions and giving them voice – in short the process of righting myself – I wouldn’t have discovered that this mode of expression does come naturally.
So, to follow on from that is the next step in righting myself writing?
