The First Domino
Just as the gap between brain and page widened with the length of time you didn’t connect them, it narrowed every time you did.
The first writing group I joined was how I (eventually) took on board how very much perception drives reality – or, rather, self-perception drives the behaviour that creates reality – and that it was up to me to decide what I did with that.
It was 2013, and I was a peripatetic speech and drama teacher and LAMDA Exam coach, as well as senior tutor for Years Nine to Eleven at the youth theatre where I had grown up. All of which was very satisfying: I loved being the person I’d needed as an under-confident teenager, the one who knew how to take you from where you were to where you needed to be as a character onstage then helped you realise how you could apply that confidence to life offstage too. Still, something significant was missing, something I knew (however hard I ignored it) was the main thing.
I wasn’t writing.
Well, not for me anyway. I was writing end-of-term plays the schools, parents and teachers were loving but my short stories and novels had stalled. And the wider the gap between the end of my Creative Writing MA six years earlier and admitting how much I missed writing, how much of what confidence I’d had then was leaking into that gap, the scarier it was to try and see my way back.
No one was going to hand me the perfect time or the perfect confidence to believe myself to be a writer, and so to step into writing being a part in my life. Because that – had I only realised – was the order I was expecting it to go. Worse: was waiting for it to go.
Then, one day, I sent an email to a writing group I saw met on a Tuesday afternoon. To join them would mean I needed to move my work schedule around enormously, but more enormous still was the real obstacle: acknowledging to myself and, at some quiet level, the world, that I saw myself a writer.
It wasn’t the writing group itself that changed my life.
The writing group was fun, I made friends, I met a lot of very interesting people and in doing so I reminded myself that writing had always been ‘there’, was a part of me and that whatever ‘it’ was, I’d still got ‘it’ no matter what my life looked like on the outside.
I think I also starting to realise the seized-up muscles were confidence, not artistic ability; that just as the gap between brain and page widened with the time you didn’t connect them, it narrowed every time you did. It was great, but it wasn’t the reason my life changed. It wasn’t what we did there (it was there I got the idea for the Writers’ Gym, seeing people with great intentions and ability do nothing between one workshop and the next). It was my realisation that giving ourselves the permission we’re looking for to change our own lives is how our lives change.
The reason my life changed was not the writing group but showing up for the writing group: showing myself that me making things happen was how my writing life was going to work. And that was when it started working.
Until then I’d discounted the money it would cost, the time it would take, the fact I wasn’t writing enough to justify the money and the time. I believed every word of those excuses. I believed it would be arrogant to see myself as – and invest in myself as – a writer. When we're worrying about what something says about us (which until then had stopped me from signing up and could have gone on stopping me), we’re not being honest about what we want and who we are; we’re choosing to let our perception reverse over our reality.
Whatever hindsight might say to me today about how small a deal it looks ten years later, moving my work schedule to dedicate a single afternoon to writing when I didn't feel good about myself or my abilities was a huge, brave thing. That was the first domino to becoming a fiction and non-fiction author. It’s also what allowed me to realise the way I directed and taught people to become the most confident, obstacle-free version of themselves – the thing I’d wished I’d had – was coaching all the time. Working with writers to see themselves as writers has become the biggest part of the beautifully unique jigsaw of my freelance life.
By acknowledging yourself as a creative writer, or by not doing so, you are taking an important stand on the reality you are showing up for.
If you've found your way around impostor syndrome enough to read this newsletter, or join The Creative Writer course I’m running from this Thursday (now sold out but taking applications for autumn), I hope you’re giving yourself well-deserved congratulations. Your realised self-esteem is self-perception. That it’s how we create our life, how we step into our choices – or, if we’re not careful, it’s what stops us noticing the choices that come up every day about how we honour and invest in ourselves.
It was just one domino. I took the truer choice about who I was, what mattered to me. I turned up with a beginner’s mindset to find what I could do and be. It’s what I try to do every day now at my writing desk (or writing sofa or writing kitchen table or writing café or writing balcony…). Instead of waiting for the right or (God forbid) perfect moment, I let myself be open to and curious about this one. Whether it’s a titled commission or a new thought piece where I have absolute freedom, I ask myself the same question: What if I see what falls out of the pen, what if I’m curious about what comes out rather than judgemental? Something more me, more true to me and the world, is the result on the page just like it is off it. And we do have time. We can prioritise who we want to be and what we want to explore. While there’s a tomorrow, there’s a today.
So, whoever or wherever you’ve spotted to help you make your journey more of an adventure than a commute, I say flick that domino. You’ll be more you than you’ve ever been and that is the very definition of “worth it”.
Here’s to the first domino.
Questions? Thoughts? Dreams you want to turn into goals? Join me in the chat box.