I forgot all about reverb12 until yesterday, and then couldn’t find it. I should have begun on the 1st; it’s now the 9th. I will attempt to catch up by posting two a day until I’m back on schedule. We shall see how this works.
Day 1: How are you starting?
How are you starting this last month of 2012?
Take a moment, close your eyes, take a deep breath and ask yourself the question: how do you feel…
… in your body? in your mind? in your day job? in your creative life? in your heart?
This is rather retrospective, of course, but I’ve felt rather stuck in the first week of December, and only really woken up today, so let’s go with it.
When I went into December I was fed up with 2012 – so much so that I was talking, only half-jokingly, about switching to the liturgical calendar and calling it new year already. My depression was atrocious, made worse by the dark mornings (because they are getting dark, now). This led to my not wanting to get out of bed in time to cycle to work, which led to me feeling worse.
Work has been one long slog since July, dealing with staff absence all over the place, feeling that I was enjoying what I was doing, but there wasn’t enough of it, and I wasn’t actually supposed to be doing that, and anyway, what was the point? I’d not picked myself up properly from a mental crash in October, having finally got fed up with being dragged into other people’s causes, and feeling like a fraud for being paid to care about other people’s causes.
My creative life, on the other hand, had suddenly picked up, thanks in large part and the House of Laity. I got some blinding white-hot fury down in pixels, and this kick-started a project that had been stalled (even, I thought, abandoned) since – well, the last time I decided it wasn’t worth writing. This time it’s looking a lot sharper; it has much more shape to it. That’s a positive, then.
Day 9: Your favourite book?
What was the best book you read in 2012, and why? (And by “Why?” I mean: Why did you read it? And why was it your favourite? Although these answers could be one and the same…!)
To Kill A Mockingbird, without question. Why did I read it? Because it was the May choice for our works book club. Why was it my favourite? Because it was so utterly convincing. Because I was kicking myself for never having read it before. Because it made me so sad, and so angry. Because everything else I’ve read this year has disappointed me in one way or another, and To Kill A Mockingbird didn’t.
Kathleen Jowitt 