I have a strange, surreal feeling of finding myself.
I am here, in my new study, except that it isn’t new, it is renovated and rearranged. That is what makes it new. And me. I make it new.
My folders, those that contain my annotated articles, notes, quotes, and drafts, have all come out of storage. Well, that is, I think I have them all. There is space left on the shelf, just in case, for those I may have missed.
But everything else, all of my books, are here on the shelves, arranged according to rough genre groups—psychology, trauma, how to write, poetry, how to write poetry, literary essays, and on and on. It seems I have made order out of disorder and now there is no excuse for not writing.
That is the way we go, isn’t it?
Move toward the thing we want to do and find an excuse not to do it. The excuse is a powerful force. If I write and it is terrible, it is terrible. But if I cannot write because my notebooks are in storage or my shelves are disordered or my desk in the wrong place, then no one will ever know that the writing is terrible. The outcome is certain. No writing, just pity that the one who should be writing is not because of this reason or that.
Worse, is to write and find you are no good at it. And worse again, is to write and have someone tell you you are no good at it. Although, personally, I am less bothered by the idea of someone telling me they don’t like my writing than by someone who does not read. I am not fussy, I will take readers of all kinds!
I have this quote on my wall:
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.
Franz Kafka
When I look back on my life, it is writing that has always been there. Yes, I draw and paint and garden. These are all wonderful but in my world they are only hobbies, things I attend to when the whim takes me or the weeds grow too high. They are part of the fabric of what it means to live my life, but they are not things I label myself with. I am not an artist—I am artistic, creative even. I am not a gardener—I garden. Growing food is part of how I like to live. I stewed home-grown rhubarb with some shop bought apples the other day but rushed through the task knowing I was due back at work the next day and realising I had let this particular job get away from me. It was fun, by the way, using my new stove, but terribly practical—I like stewed fruit on my porridge and was all out.
The renovations are nearly done. There are one or two last things to attend to—like the new light-fittings in the lounge room that are being put in tomorrow—but aside from those things, the job at hand is to unpack and settle the house into its new living configuration. I keep putting off sharing photos in the hope that soon things will be sorted and liveable. We are close. Hubby rehung some doors today and we are making inroads with the unpacking boxes.
Now I can close the door to my new study, put some music on—Alan Gogoll, an acoutic guitarist—and see who I am in this space. Not only do we form the identify of a space but that space forms our identity. Who I am while sitting in here is shaped by whether I am beside or facing the window—much less distracted sitting beside rather than facing. Likewise, removing the printer from my desk seems to have expanded my ability to think.
Today, with it raining steadily and me beside the canopy of our much loved Elder tree watching two little Brown Thornbills complain, I find I have reached for my new notebook—number twenty-six—and written pages of poetry. I write about healing from trauma. The writing is as cathartic and renewing as the rain itself.
The space has lead me here, to this moment. Once I finished, I opened the pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and read ‘All I could do was offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (p.18 in the MacMillan Collector’s Library edition).
Not that I am a writer of fiction. Although, having signed up for NaNoWriMo 2023, I seem to be on my way to spending the month of November writing some sort of fiction (goodness!). I haven’t patience for detail and am one of those horrible readers who will skim overly long descriptive passages. Nonetheless, I signed up on impulse after a writer friend encouraged me. I can only hope she signs up as well. Hint, hint.
If a woman, or anyone for that matter, is to write, they must have space that will lead them to it. Of course, some can and must write anywhere. I am partial to writing at my local coffee shop and will confess to the occasional not-bad poem having been written in front of the telly. Still, having a room, a place to give yourself over to flow and feeling and getting something down, helps.
It is a given, too, that a person, any person, must have money. Either your writing makes you money, if you have had some sort of lucky break, or your money comes from somewhere else. I have made a grand total of $120 from my poems—I am, I will say, particularly pleased with that. The reality of writing is that most of us must have some other income or else live very simply. Or, better yet, find a balance between the two.
Still, it is the space that particularly matters. Perhaps it is the way your laptop is organised or your nook or, like me, they way your small, weirdly shaped, desperately in need of some sort of name, room is arranged.
What of you, reader?
What is your space leading you to?
We all have something we must do to avoid insanity and ensure that we are reasonable human beings. It won’t be the same as someone else, even if it has the same label. I had a season of painting every day, producing some pleasing pieces that I still enjoy. Funnily enough, even in that season, I still kept a daily diary.
I can go months without touching the garden—and have done. I can go years without painting a painting—and have done. But I can hardly go a day without reading something, without writing something.
We each consider the thing we do naturally to be the thing that everyone does naturally. This is not the case and we do well to remind ourselves this. Likewise, to not do that thing is, for us, to allow ourselves to become the worst versions of ourselves, as Kafka says, the ‘monster courting insanity’.
What is the thing asking you to make space for it? Give up wanting it to make money for you, do it anyway. Give up excuses. Who cares if it is terrible if you are made better by doing it? Isn’t there some saying about doing a thing badly being better than not doing it at all?
Sit for a moment and reflect: what’s one small physical change you can make to your space that will direct you to being the person you wish to be?
You will likely find more than just the space changes.
This Writer's Life 