On Getting Back to Basics

As far back as I can remember I wanted to be a gangster writer.

I love writing, the feel of words and energy flowing out of you as you press keys and see your words flood out onto the screen. There’s never been a problem I can’t release through my words, even if nobody else reads them.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my life over the last decade I hate to use the J word so early in but it really has been a journey. One I would never have gotten through if it hadn’t been for blogging.

2009 was undoubtedly the worst year of my life, I lost everything I knew and had to rebuild from nothing. Hot off the back of my first suicide attempt I didn’t know who I wanted to be or how I wanted to do it. Blogging was an escape, and the only types of “real” fun blogs I saw were fashion and style blogs.

From that I shaped my future, I chose to study fashion communication at uni, got to visit fashion week twice, changed my style and who I was to suit London fashion ideals. If you’ve ever met me in person you’ll realise I have the weirdest accent known to man and will copy your accent instantly, that comes from being looked down on for my north-east accent. But ultimately stretching so much to fit others instead of myself lead to burn out.

I kept blogging and writing my feelings and moved into writing about my disability, this led to me finally realising my niche whingy essays about my shit body! I realised that people would pay me to cry onto a page and ran with it.

My style of writing is and has always been first person essays, even back in the style blogger days I’d constantly be talking about myself. Nowadays I make my bread by writing about the hard times in my life or reacting to recent events in the news. I make my living by selling these to editors who then have to make this depressive stuff marketable. In today’s world all stories are judged by how much ad revenue they will bring the site, meaning that my deeply emotional story about how getting a dog saved my mental health isn’t worth anything to them.

This way of working fed into what I have to contend with inside my head every day. You see I have that great combination of depression and anxiety that can both convince you you’re not writing enough whilst at the same time tell you there’s no point in writing because it’ll be shit, nobody will want to read it, you’ll upset everyone and they’ll all think you’re stupid.

As if that wasn’t bad enough my disabilities, the menopause and medication give me what is accurately known as brain fog, making my mind feel like soup and making even the simplest words hard to remember or get out.

I found myself judging every idea I had by if an editor would like it and if it was bankable and in the end letting great pieces pass me by and fall out of my brain for worry that it wouldn’t make me any money.

I couldn’t tell you the amount of things I haven’t written in the last year because they wouldn’t make me money. No I really can’t. I’ve forgotten them.

Expressing my feelings by how much they’re worth is a horrible way to live and it’s only when it was highlighted to me that I don’t have to be paid for all of them that I realised this.

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m crap at talking about how I feel, sure I’ll share all the great things and rant if somethings provoked me but when I’m truly upset I just can’t get the words out of my mouth. But they can always come out of my fingers onto the page.

But when I put a price on my thoughts and feelings and only prioritised letting out those that would make me money I took away my way of processing what was going on. I effectively cut off my hands and locked down my heart. meaning they all got stuck in there and jumbled. I snapped more and spewed them out after too much wine, had bad nightmares and generally couldn’t function.

I can’t carry on like that. I need somewhere to share everything I love and bit of what I don’t. I need to let my thoughts out of their cage. So if you need me I’ll be on the beach with my doggy, scribbling in a notebook.

I need to let myself be free.

I didn’t allow
myself
to heal
I gave
my heart
permission

From my debut poetry collection Phoenix: Notes on Rebirth, available on kindle