It’s been a while since I posted something here. That’s partly because I’ve fallen into a trap. Not a big snappy metal thing with teeth or cheese, or a hole in the ground covered by leaves and netting. This is a trap I’ve made for myself and exists only in my head. Writing short blog posts used to help me think through an idea or an issue related to my work as a therapist. It was also one side of an imagined conversation which might have offered something helpful, or even disagreeable, to my imagined reader. They didn’t take long to write but satisfied my introvert’s urge to communicate something without the complexity of actually talking to someone. I used to have to write academic papers and books, which have conventions and formal constraints that don’t exist in the blog-sphere. My blog, my rules. Freedom.
Because I enjoyed writing these short pieces to no one in particular, I started to wonder if I could manage something longer, and maybe get something published. I put together a couple of articles which were duly published in therapy-related journals. The process wasn’t as pleasurable but there was a ping of something that felt good when they were accepted and then again when they appeared in print form. (Though I haven’t actually looked at them in print form as that part makes me want to hide in a cupboard.)
So what did I take from my experience of these different writing experiences? The fairly unfettered pleasure of thinking on paper (or laptop) versus the more labour-intensive and uncomfortable process of writing in a prescribed form for a journal and negotiating with an editor? Surely I’d take the former? Reader, I wrote a book. Which isn’t yet finished. Which means I haven’t been writing pieces over here, because ‘writing a book’ is a convoluted and all-consuming process and demands my undivided attention.
So I’m here to prove to myself that I can write in more than one way at a time. That writing over here might free up my writing over there, in the dark underworld of ‘book’. I don’t want to give up on the project because there are good things in it which might be illuminating, or helpful or disagreeable to a future reader if it ever makes it into print. And I’ve committed a lot of time to it already. But I am trying not to repeat a pattern. Academic writing was tied up in career progression and subject to processes of review and evaluation that demanded a robust sense of self that I didn’t actually have. My work was published but I felt like disappearing. Eventually I did disappear from academic life and retrained as a therapist. In this career there is no expectation to write or publish, so those who do so are motivated by something else. It is that ‘something else’ in me that I am trying to understand.
For me, the solitary experience of writing ‘without purpose’ is calming, surprising, at times repetitive. It contains and illuminates thoughts and feelings I carry around but am not always aware of. Writing ‘with purpose’ (to tell a story, to explore an idea, to share something) can feel the same but is undoubtedly more demanding. I have started the process of trying to get the attention of editors, which brings a rush of hope every time I send a polite email and a flattening shame and a prickle of indignation as days go by without a reply. This is where the change in me needs to come. Instead of bundling up my sense of worth and sending it to an editor to validate, I can learn the skill of presenting and selling my words without feeling I am offering the whole of me.
The trap I found myself in was to return to a relationship with writing which didn’t work out well for me the first time round. It’s time to recontract, to remember to write ‘for me’ in whatever form that takes. The Sunday Times bestseller list has not been ruled out.
Coming soon – a post about dogs…