Baby steps

Photo by David Brooke Martin on Unsplash

I’m not expecting a single person other than me to ever read these posts, but if you are here, and you’re not me, then let me explain a little about what I’m doing.

I love writing, and I set this website up so I can be a writer who writes. However, it’s been very off and on for the past few years. Sure, I wrote a book, which I’m proud of, and that’s not nothing. But there have been long stretches where the only thing I’ve written are emails and WhatsApp messages.

Like many writers, I struggle with perfectionism. I don’t know if I ‘have’ it, or if it has me, but last week, something shifted in my perspective and it’s given me a new freedom.

Rather than pressurise myself to write something remarkable, which results in writing nothing at all, I have found a new contract with myself: I will spend the next ten years rebuilding and then hopefully honing my craft, so that I can write something that matters in my fifties. It feels like a little trick I’ve played on myself, out in the open but clever enough to actually get me to get some words out of me and onto the page/screen.

I have given myself permission not to write anything remarkable or noteworthy. In fact, I’ve said to myself that the next decade is actually about not writing anything special – and even though I know this has planted the seed for a fantasy that sometime soon, I’ll actually write a thing that means something to someone, I keep coming back to the contract. Just write, and focus on the process rather than the product.

These first few days (barring Friday and yesterday, which I missed) have simply been about showing up, writing about the writing process. The deluge of stuff inside of me, the things I think about and want to translate into the written word, have yet to form into even a single sentence. Right now, I need to trust that the time will come for all of that.

Today though, I do want to say that I would like to write about midlife, about being a stepmum, about friendship, anxiety, depression, about having a mum with severe mental health issues, about my and my partner’s decision not to have a child together. I still have the title of my memoir in my head, and it sits right in my chest. At different points, I feel like I’ve found the ending to that memoir, that it will finish with a chapter on the choice to stay alive. Even sharing this here, on a blog that no one reads, feels risky.

I’ve watched for years as a tidal wave of memoirs, ‘authentic sharing’ and opening up of topics about which I have so much to say, have unleashed themselves on the internet and into the world. I’ve felt jealous, envious, frustrated with myself and left out as days roll into months and years in which I’m not joining the conversation. I want to try to contribute something, the thing that is mine to bring, and to be honest, I don’t know quite how to do it.

But this new contract with myself is at the very least enabling me to sit here on a Sunday morning and write some words. I’m considering this a new beginning, another baby step, and I can feel my thoughts shifting in the direction of what next. A return to Writer’s Hour, perhaps this week, a recognition that I do not need to hit publish every day (although today I will), but that writing (editing/reading/reworking) is the goal.

Perhaps the baby steps thing is more powerful than it appears. I’ve always heard it through the lens of taking small actions, of wobbling, falling down, getting up again. But what I’ve forgotten is that as babies learn to walk, they have a loving adult or two there to encourage them, cheering them on, calling them forward, supporting them. I think that’s what I’m managing to give myself a bit of.

So, if anyone else is reading this, and if like me you’ve been struggling to commit to something in your life, I wonder how you might reframe it, and whether there’s a contract you might like to make with yourself. If you delayed the need to be ‘good’ by a year, or a decade, does it free you up to simply do the thing in the here and now, however badly, however self-indulgently?