I write myself into being
She is 8 years old.
She is sitting at the desk in her bedroom, with a new dream forming in her head. She has just discovered that a 9 year old girl has created a series of books that have been published by Ladybird. The Garden Gang, by Jayne Fisher. Stories about vegetables and the adventures they have in the garden.
She has just read one of them. Roger Radish and Sarah Strawberry. She doesn’t know yet, but she will read that book time and time again, and get to know their friends Percival Pea, Tim Tomato and many more. She might not like vegetables but these walking, talking garden folk have lit a spark in her that will burn her up for many years to come. She has never felt so inspired. If a 9 year old girl can do this, then so can an 8 year old. So can she.
She doesn’t have many friends in her life, but she has her books. She will spend many a happy hour read and re-reading the books she loves so much. Her favourite people to spend time with are Peter, Susan, Lucy and Edmund, joining them in their adventures in Narnia, and bringing them into her world every time her Mum takes her walking in the woods. She often thinks she would much prefer to live in Narnia than the Rhondda valley. They seem to understand her much more in Narnia than in the Rhondda, she has more friends there.
Jayne Fisher, the 9-year-old girl who wrote the Garden Gang story, showed her that books are written by real people. She couldn’t really ever picture the real person behind the name C.S.Lewis, or Enid Blyton. They were old and distant and she believed in the characters they wrote far more than she believed in the people who wrote them.
But Jayne Fisher looked like her. Jayne Fisher could have been in her school. Jayne Fisher could have been her friend.
She made her first book at that white desk in the pink bedroom. The white birds on the wallpaper tweeted their joy as she stapled sheets of paper together, created a cover and wrote a story.
She was going to be an author. She was going to write the children’s book Jayne Fisher would admire. They would become friends and they would talk about how great it was to write books. And she would inspire other little girls to create their own books and share their stories.
She was so excited, she was going to be an author!
Dear reader, she did not become an author. Well, not for a long time at least.
But the spark was lit and was smouldering away, ready for the right fuel to be added, and the right wind to blow it into flames.
……………………………………………………………………………
She is 16 years old.
She is rejecting the path she was on for her life. She is sick of being the good girl, the teacher’s daughter, the ‘girl most likely to study French and become a linguist’. She has always hated school with a passion, and now she is old enough to choose. Her mother doesn’t like it, of course. But she doesn’t care. She can’t do it anymore. She doesn’t want to be the person who she is at school anymore. She wants a new adventure.
She wants to be a music journalist.
She loves music.
The excitement of the live concert is something she will never tire of. To be in a room full of people she doesn’t know, and be so intimately connected to them as they all sing ‘We are the Youth gone wild’ at the top of their voices with Sebastian Bach strutting about on stage is the most exciting thing she can imagine ever happening.
She gave up playing the violin a couple of years ago, a decision she has regretted since about 5 minutes after she made it. She wasn’t ever London Symphony Orchestra material, but she was a decent player, and she enjoyed playing it. She gave it up because she was too scared to ask her Geography teacher for time out of his classes. He scared her so much that she ave up the one thing in school she loves rather than draw attention to herself in his class. She still misses it and wishes she could go back to it, but she can’t.
So instead she immerses herself in other people’s music, other people’s words. She loves how someone she has never met and who has no idea she exists can put her emotions into words so plainly.
She devours every word of Kerrang, NME and Melody Maker and loves to read the interviews with the musicians about their work. What a privilege it must be to be the person interviewing them, who gets to ask these questions, and write these interviews.
To be paid to talk to rock stars. To listen to their music and write reviews to tell other people about them. To go to concerts and meet the band. That’s not work surely? That sounds like THE BEST way to earn a living.
She wants to be a music journalist. She leaves school and enrols in a media course at her local college. It is heaven in a classroom. She learns about radio production. She contributes to a class magazine, going to see Rhondda band Blood Orange play in a pub, and writing a review of it. She is on the way to becoming a music journalist and she is so excited.
And then a little blue line on a white stick changes everything.
She is 17 years old.
And her life just changed forever.
Assuming that the music journalist life is not for her anymore, she leaves the course, and gets a job that only lasts 3 months and sucks her soul dry.
The ‘responsible’ thing to do. Pack her dreams away with her size 10 jeans.
Dear reader, she did not become a music journalist.
But the spark was still burning, and the fuel was being piled on, and the winds that will fan the flames are coming.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
She is 26 years old.
She is in her final year of the degree that is going to enable her to save the world ‘one child at a time’.
She loves to teach using books as a central theme. The Lorax inspired an entire month’s worth of learning ideas that would have brought environmental education into every subject of the curriculum. The week of teaching she did on it created some amazing interaction, understanding and learning with the children. They just get it. They understand the messages in the book so clearly, It’s amazing what you can tell children when you write it in a story book they can engage with.
She is working on her dissertation, all about the importance of environmental education in the primary classroom. The power of words to convey an important message has never been more important or obvious to her. She is writing her manifesto about how she thinks education needs to be, and how it IS possible to save the world, one child at a time, through coherent, cross curricular environmental education.
She is spending a lot of time in the university library. It is her second home and she loves it there. Surrounded by books and inspiration. The energy of all those words fills her up and moves her forward.
She is looking at the shelf filled with all the PhD theses that have been written at the university.
One day, someone will take a book off that shelf to use in an essay they are writing. They will find some valuable insights that will help them to shape their thinking and their writing. And they will write (Nagle, Esther, 20xx) after their words, and add her publication to their reference list.
She wants to learn more, to shape the conversation around teaching and learning and saving the world one kid at a time.
Maybe she will even be at this university teaching and inspiring the next generation of teachers to go and inspire even more children to save the world.
As a teacher, and an academic about teaching, she can save the world. This is the most exciting and important dream she has had yet.
Dear reader. She did not become an academic. She didn’t even become a teacher. She didn’t get to “save the world one kid at a time”, although she did raise one who is an academic and is working on it, so maybe she succeeded there!
But that spark was still alive in her. More fuel was being added to the pile. She was filled with splinters from the wood she was chopping to feed that fire. But she didn’t even know there was a fire. She just felt the pain of the splinters. But still she kept chopping.
She is 43 years old.
Her life has turned upside down completely. She has turned herself inside out, dismantled her whole being and put herself back together again. In leaving some parts of her behind, she is more whole than she has ever been. She is writing. For the first time in her life, she believes that she might just one day write a book. She knows she has a story to tell at last. But it isnt a story she ever imagined she would tell.
There is no wicked queen and lion to save the day, although she feels like she is in the spring that comes after a perpetual winter.
There are no rock star friends, and no one paying her to listen to music. Although she is far more present and conscious when she listens to music, and always remembers the gigs she goes to now.
There is no academic research, although she has learned more about the nervous system, about addiction and about her mind and body than she ever anticipated, and wishes she understood science better!
And there is a book. The story she hid from herself for so many years, the story she would have denied passionately had anyone ever challenged her on it, is now part of the story she tells. The shame she tried to hide is now there for all to see. The shame that nearly crushed her finally lit the fire she had been preparing for all her life. She was utterly consumed by the heat, and felt the agony of the burning. In the heat of those flames, her stories and delusions were laid bare. As the fire burned away the masks she had worn her whole life, she began to transform. She has emerged from the flames with a new sense of who she is, has burned away the shame, and stands naked and proud of who she is.
The fire is well and truly lit, and the book is out in the world. She can finally call herself a writer. Or she could if she could actually believe it. Still part of her believes that ‘writer’ is something that other people are, that she can’t possibly have the temerity to call herself writer. Who does she think she is?
But she keeps writing, tending the flame. The fire that once burned her now keeps her warm, lights her life, and guides her to into becoming. The flames burn away more delusions, more shame, more confusion. And in the light it creates, she sees herself more clearly every day. Sometimes she forgets to care for the fire, and it begins to go out, but she remembers, adds some more fuel and basks in its glow once more
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
She is 48 years old.
She is sitting on her sofa with a sleeping dog at her side, headphones on, words pouring from her. She doesn’t know if anyone will ever read these words, but she is enjoying writing them. It has been a strange few years. Years in which she has got to see herself even more clearly, been burned many times, and written herself into being more completely than ever before.
She has written through the new relationship beginnings, and pain of sober relationship endings where the only way she can deal with her emotions is to deal with them, no red wine to numb the pain. She has written through discovery of ADHD, and having to relearn her whole idea of who she is, and what her life has been. She has written through her fears for the safety of the world with Donald Trump in the White House. She has written through her rage about Brexit and the Conservative Party’s looting of her country. She has written through money and family worries. She has written through the existential terror, loneliness and huge anxiety of a global pandemic.
She has written herself well and truly into the identity of writer. Finally, she is happy to tell others that is what she is doing. But there is still, even as she writes these words, a snarky voice in her head telling her that she isn’t good enough. That the words she is writing here, in what Anne Lamott would call her ‘shitty first draft’, aren’t anywhere near as good as the books she reads by Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, and Jamie Catto, so why is she even bothering? Who DOES she think she is? She can’t call herself a writer, why would anyone want to read the shit she writes?
Luckily, she has another voice in her now. That voice is gentle, compassionate and much better at listening to others, and remembering what she knows in her heart to be true. That voice reminds her of the many people who have told her how much her writing has impacted them. How many have seen her words and been inspired to make changes to their life. All the times people have told her how good her writing is, and how much they love to read it, how much she speak to the things they didn’t even know they needed to read, to think, to feel. This voice reminds her how many times she has revisited her own writing and been surprised by how much it has moved her.
And above all else, that voice reminds her that when they are sitting down to write that shitty first draft, all her writing heroes will also have that snarky voice in their head, telling THEM they shouldn’t bother.
And so she writes. And she writes and she writes.
Sometimes the words are for her. Sometimes they are for sharing.
Sometimes she crosses the line between the two, but her body quickly tells her if she needs to pull back.
She writes. And in the fire that is now burning strong, she forges herself
She is 49 years old
She is a new person. The flames of a cremation have given birth to an entirely new version of her.
She is now a woman who has said goodbye to her mother.
Nothing will ever be the same again. She will never be the same again.
And in the turmoil of the pre and post death grieving, the role reversal as she becomes carer to the one who always cared for her, the discovery of the strength of her bond with the woman who gave her life, she turns once more to the page, and the comfort she finds through her words.
She remembers the soothing that comes from writing about pain. The connection that comes from sharing it. The healing that occurs when we remember our profoundly human need to share and hear our stories.
She has felt as though she has lost herself as she watched her mother decline and die. But as she writes her way to healing, she comes to see that she has, in truth, found parts of herself she never knew before.
Yes, her life has changed. Lots has happened in the last 12 months that mean she will never be the same as she was before.
But she is not lost. She knows exactly where she is. And she will never need to forget, because she is wriitng it all down. The stories and explorations of today will remind her who she is for years to come. And because she writes, she knows that she will never be truly lost. She can always find a path back to herself by taking a blank sheet and filling it with words.
She knows who she is. She loves who she has been, although she can be glad she isn’t that person anymore.
And she is looking forward to seeing who she will become.
Whether the words she writes shape the person she becomes, or vice versa, she isn’t sure anymore.
But she knows she will keep writing, so the stories will always be there.
