My perception is that 2017 has not been a very good year for noticing. And by ‘not been a very good year’ I mean that I haven’t been very good at it. And by ‘noticing’ I mean that sharp, intense, take-your-breath away sort of awareness, of feeling very much present, of having a sense of the substance and nature of a thing. I’ve written very little poetry this year, and that seems like evidence of my not having noticed very much.
Why might that be? It might partly be because the camera on my phone has got all fuzzed up (Friday afternoon wasn’t nearly as hazy as the picture at the top of this post suggests), and so I’ve stopped looking for things that might make good photos, and so I’ve stopped looking.
It might be that I’ve been forgetting to look.
It might be that I’ve been looking in the wrong places. It might be that looking is the wrong verb. It might be that I need to listen, smell, touch or taste instead.
It might be that what ‘noticing’ means for me now is different from what it meant three years ago – although two striking sunsets (or, more to the point, my reaction to them) suggest that this isn’t necessarily the case.
It might be that most of my noticing happens on the train (the early morning sunset on the Hertfordshire hills is simply glorious) and so I can’t just stand and look at it; I’ve usually been whisked onwards.
It might be that things are generally better for me than they have been in previous years, so I haven’t been noticing my own noticing.
It might be that previous years’ noticings, being the most memorable parts of those years, stick out more and run together until I half-persuade myself that 2014, for example, was a golden succession of constant awareness of the glories of the universe, whereas 2017, at this much closer distance, seems like a couple of interesting moments stuck together with tedium.
All those explanations seem plausible. I don’t know which of them are true, and maybe I never will. And you know, even noticing that I don’t think that I’ve been noticing is in itself noticing, so perhaps I’m not doing as badly as all that.
There’s a part of me that’s very embarrassed about admitting to liking anything. Liking things is bad enough, but admitting to liking them? Nobody wants to know. Everybody will laugh. And so on…
I don’t know when those buttons got installed. Perhaps it was at school, when I found that the things that I liked were so weird that nobody else had heard of them. Perhaps it was at home, because liking things tends to cost money. Either way, they seem to have been with me for a very long time.
And then I’m suspicious of anything that looks like a fad, anything that seems to be flogging something. If there are twenty copies of TheLittle Book of Whatever propped up on the counter at Waterstone’s, I’ll avoid Whatever everywhere else it pops up. Even if Whatever is something that, left to myself, I’d probably enjoy.
I worry about what other people will think. Is what I’m reading/listening to/watching too juvenile? Too highbrow? Too tacky? Too problematic? Am I just showing off? Is there some reason why I shouldn’t be enjoying it?
The answer is always ‘yes’, of course. Nothing and nobody is perfect. What I am beginning to learn is that this is irrelevant.
This year I’ve begun to break free of all that and just enjoy things. This year I’ve been following rabbit holes. I’ve let myself be interested in things. At the beginning of the year with my virus-infested brain unable to cope with anything more heavyweight than a fluffy anime, I watched Yuri!!! on Ice. That got me interested in figure skating (leading me to re-read White Boots, watch the actual events on Eurosport, and resolve to learn to skate when they finally get round to opening a rink near me) and Russia (leading me to Tolstoy and an exhibition at the British Library). I read Blackbird, an alternate universe fanfic where the characters are reimagined as spies, and that took me off to John Le Carré and Helen Dunmore.
Some of that’s proper intellectual stuff. Some of it, less so. I don’t really care. It’s all been fun. Last time I got into something (cycling, by accident – but that’s another story) I got a whole book out of it. But I’m still feeling faintly embarrassed about being interested in anything, and I really do want to get past that. I want to be enthusiastic! I want to enjoy things and not care what people think!
I don’t need anybody else’s permission to enjoy things – but I’d really like to have my own. An exercise that I’ve been doing on and off and that I want to carry into 2018 is naming, every day, one thing that I’m enjoying or am interested in, and one thing that I want. Today I’ve been watching the snow. At the moment the freezer is defrosting and I’m enjoying listening to the drips and occasionally prodding at lumps of ice to see if they’ll fall off yet. It’s not remotely productive; it isn’t even inherently interesting, but I’m taking pleasure in it. And identifying that and admitting it and being OK with it is a very good start.
so it seemed like a good day to consider my relationship with the rest of the Church and how that’s changed this year. As I say, I haven’t punched anybody, although if I’d happened to meet Franklin Graham I might have made an exception.
I seem to be pretty much settled in what I still think of as my ‘new’ church. ‘It takes years to train a man to love me,’ says Katisha in The Mikado; similarly, it takes years for me to begin to feel at home in a new place.We’ve been here three years now, and I’m getting the hang of it. It suits me well: I’m just a Parish Anglican, really, not very High Church and really not very Low Church. The current church has a cycle of services that runs from ‘about as low as I’m comfortable with’ to ‘slap bang in the middle of my comfort zone’. And I get to sing.
I did go to Little St Mary’s for St James’ Day, however, because my protestations about Not Being That High go out of the stained-glass window when it comes to things Jacobean.
I’ve joined a house group for people in their 20s and 30s. It’s a little bit anarchic – sometimes someone volunteers to lead an evening or a series of evenings; sometimes we just make it up as we go along. It’s been good. I’d forgotten – perhaps I didn’t know – how good it is for me to pray with other people.
I went to two launch events for Our Witness and found both very refreshing. It’s an unusual experience, to walk into a church full of strangers and to know that nobody’s going to think it remotely odd that I manage to be simultaneously bisexual and Christian.
It’s been an interesting year to be bisexual and Christian more generally. There was that Report on Marriage and Same-Sex Relationships and the Synod vote not to take notice of it. There was another chapter in the Jeffrey John saga. There was Tim Farron’s resignation. There was the Scottish Episcopal Church vote to allow same-sex marriage in church and the various reactions from the rest of the Anglican Communion. I continued to think that perhaps destroying the institution of marriage would not be such a bad thing, although my own continued to be enjoyable.
Meanwhile, my own internalised biphobia was prowling and prowling around – possibly more this year than last. I’m still not sure who I’m out to (at church and elsewhere) or what they think about it. On the other hand, I began to be able to articulate a growing sense of my sexuality aligning with my spirituality – and then going to Pride with a lesbian Christian friend was a joyful and affirming experience and I grinned solidly all afternoon.
What does next year have for me, in terms of church and Church? I’m not sure at all: I don’t seem to be able to visualise it at all. That might mean that it’s going to be about learning more and going deeper; or it might mean that there’s something huge and unexpected coming. We’ll find out!
And then on New Year’s Eve I went down with the virus that was sweeping the nation. This took up most of January, on and off, during which I:
spent a lot of time feeling absolutely exhausted
kept on editing A Spoke in the Wheel, which has a lot to do with physical ability and disability
watched Yuri!!! on Ice, which also has a lot to do with physical ability, all the way through at least twice
planned a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
And I was exquisitely aware of what I could do and what I couldn’t do.
I got better. I walked a lot, working my way up to being able to do fifteen miles in a day and not . I made it to Santiago (and am still intending to write all that up). I’m still quite into Yuri!!! on Ice. (And what I really like about it is the way that it deals seriously with physical limitations and spiritual themes in a universe where there is no homophobia; I also spent this year in the Church of England, after all.) I have nearly finished A Spoke in the Wheel, and it’s still about physical ability and disability, though it’s also about burnout.
Presence ended up mostly being about physicality, but also about being a spiritual creature, about paying attention to what it’s like to exist in a body, and what it’s like to exist in time and space. Being me, here, now. Knowing what I can do and what I can’t do, and moving things between the categories. And all sorts of things seemed to come back to that. Slow travel. Being in the body that I’m in, experiencing sex and desire and love the way that I do. Blisters. Going to church when I didn’t feel like it. Pilates classes. Burnout. Depression. Sudden striking moments of awareness of the created world: unexpectedly, intensely, appreciating the taste of soup or the way the sunlight falls on the collar of someone’s coat. Frustration at having so little time that is truly my own.
The Incarnation, for me, is the most remarkable thing about Christianity: that the sacred is physical, that the physical is sacred. That’s what presence seems to be about, for me.
I don’t think that I know anything now that I didn’t know last year. Not in terms of facts, at least. (Except for a lot of figure skating terminology, and that I really do need to get some new walking boots before my next long hike.) Or perhaps that all that I have learned has gone to show how much I don’t know. I still feel that I know very little about presence, that I still have a lot to learn – but that perhaps a little has sunk in, that I’m beginning to understand about being who I am.
Happy New Year! Well, a happy new year to those who are celebrating it today, anyway.
Personally I’m all for celebrating the new year as often as possible. I celebrate it on Advent Sunday, along with the rest of the western Church, at Easter, when I generally stop feeling so grim, and at my birthday. I also celebrate it when the number ticks over from 2017 to 2018 and, if necessary, at the start of the academic year in September. But Advent is, for me, the big one. I take the whole month to do it. Ease the new year in gently. Look back, look forward. Light some candles. Sulk about how everyone else seems to be managing to be cheerful and excited.
Usually I observe Advent with some kind of reflective, communal, blogging exercise, but the days of reflective, communal blogging exercises seem to be past. Besides, I don’t seem to be in the mood for asking myself searching questions or nominating the best book or best day of 2017. I want to do something, but it’s not Reverb; so I think I shall just bumble around and do my own thing, picking and choosing exercises from elsewhere on the internet, and not answering any questions if I can help it.
I’m starting with a compass, identifying the qualities I wish to have in my orbit in 2018.
North is COURAGE
North East is TRUST
East is LOVE
South East is INTEGRITY
South is HOPE
South West is PRESENCE
West is JOY
North West is HAVEN
Some of these are concepts that have been important to me for several years. PRESENCE was my word for this year just gone. INTEGRITY came in around 2012, I think, and hasn’t left. COURAGE got me through 2014. HAVEN, on the other hand, is a new one. I’ll probably end up writing about some or all of these at some point over the next couple of weeks.
After writing the qualities in, I put the quarter days at the cardinal points, and the changes of season at the ordinals. (My life has been much better since I decided that summer begins on May Day and August is actually part of autumn.) I also put my three main new years on there. Other than Lady Day/Easter, they’re slightly out of step with the rest of the compass, but they do seem to want to be on there.
Some of the conjunctions between festivals and qualities are striking; some are amusing. PRESENCE coming in at Lammas, just after my birthday, is both. Some I don’t quite see. (HOPE needs to come in at Midsummer, otherwise it’s downhill all the way; but why JOY at Michaelmas?)
Anyway, knowing me I’ll either revisit this every day until next Advent, or forget about it immediately. Or revisit it every day for the next three weeks and then forget about it completely.
I thought I’d escaped second novel syndrome. By the time my first novel was out, I already had the first words of the second novel queuing up in my head, clamouring to be written down.
Speak Its Name didn’t make much of a splash, and that was something of a blessing. I was able to keep plugging away at A Spoke in the Wheel, here a word, there a paragraph, and by about April I had something that resembled a first draft.
Then I won a Betty Trask Award. And that was amazing and brilliant, and I am at this moment planning to spend my prize money on an epic Interrail trip around Europe, but it hasn’t half given the monsters a lot to talk about.
Here is a sample of some monster views on A Spoke in the Wheel:
this one’s not going to win you any awards, you know
it’s not as good as Speak Its Name
it is NEVER going to be as good as Speak Its Name
and everyone who reads both will know that and you will DISAPPOINT THEM
you’re a one-hit wonder
everyone who was impressed by the award? NOT IMPRESSED ANY MORE!
you have to create a COHERENT BRAND!!!
write what you know!!! why are you not WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW???
But that’s monsters for you. They don’t want you putting a substandard product out there, because then PEOPLE WILL LAUGH AT YOU.
And you know, it’s a reasonable point, if only they could make it without all the screaming. Nobody wants me to put a substandard product out there.
What I’d forgotten – what I always forget, every time – was that I’d been here before. I’d already run into momentsofself-doubt, several times over the course of writing that first draft. I’d always been able to talk myself out of them. I thought this time was different, that this time it really was going to turn out to be unsalvageable.
That always happens, too. I always think it’s going to be unsalvageable, and it never is.
Second Novel Syndrome was only a recurrence of what had happened during the writing of the first. It’s always the same. I get a horrible sense of its not being good enough.
Then I see what’s wrong with it.
Then I see how to fix it.
And then I remember that all that the yelling really means is this:
The nights are drawing in. I’ve been using my daylight lamp every day since the beginning of August, and I have to say it’s helped. I’ve been very tired, but on the whole I haven’t been experiencing the low moods that I usually get in these early autumn months.
So here we go. Five stories of music and nightfall.
I am pleased to say that we are in fact up to date with the rent. But it is rather dispiriting to consider that, Cambridge property prices being what they are, we will probably be renting for some time yet. I believe that this was not – for a variety of reasons – something that Gwen Raverat had to deal with.
This week I was enraged, yet again, by a reappearance of the ‘writers write, and nothing stops them writing’ meme. I won’t link to the specific instance, because it was posted under lock, but here’s a (comparatively inoffensive) case of the genus in the wild. (It was the first one that came up on Google. I do not endorse the contents of the rest of the blog, either.)
Some of them add, implicitly or explicitly, ‘every day’. Some of them add, implicitly or explicitly, ‘and don’t make excuses’. Some of them end up implying that any week – any day – that you’re not writing, you’re not a writer.
Which is bullshit.
This is the longest thing I’ve written in days. I’ve written no fiction at all since last Wednesday, and I could quite see this state of affairs continuing all summer. Have I suddenly stopped being a writer? Of course not.
Here is a selection of reasons why I haven’t been writing:
I wanted to read Alistair MacLean instead.
I have had a lot going on in my day job.
I spent last Saturday at Norwich Pride.
I’d never seen Die Hard and we had to spend an evening remedying that state of affairs.
It was my birthday.
A fanfic I’ve been following was updated, so I read that instead.
I was off sick for two days and good for nothing other than sleeping and watching Star Trek.
I could point out the ways that all those things that don’t look like writing could contribute to making me a better writer. I could tell you that reading and watching other creators’ work gives me tools to use in my own. I could tell you that time in the ‘real world’ expands the material I have to write about. And that would all be true, but that’s not my point.
Because really, it all comes down to this:
I’ve been really tired and haven’t felt like writing.
That ‘excuse’, yes.
Here are some other reasons, which don’t apply to me, but which do apply to plenty of other writers who may not be in the physical act of writing at this moment:
childcare responsibilities;
other care responsibilities;
having to work two or more jobs to make ends meet;
chronic illness or disability;
wanting to enjoy that holiday of a lifetime and not spend it on things they ‘should’ be doing.
I’m sure there are many, many more. Feel free to mention them in comments.
These days it’s increasingly difficult to make a living by writing alone, and most of us therefore don’t have the luxury of time devoted to writing. We have to fit it in around the edges, and sometimes the edges themselves are filled up with things like other responsibilities, or sleep, or even fun.
Here’s the thing: I know, because I’ve been here before, and I’ve come through it and written again, that it’s not the end of me as a writer. I very much doubt that anyone would try to tell me that it was, now that I’ve finished and published a book and won an award with it.
I put the first word of Speak Its Name on the page in November 2007. I approved the finished work in January 2016. Did I write every day of those eight-and-a-bit years? Of course I didn’t. And it’s the better for it.
But I also know people who have been discouraged by this ludicrous gatekeeping, who have believed the pernicious myth that because they couldn’t or didn’t devote every spare minute to writing they weren’t ‘really’ a writer, and stopped altogether.
Bullshit, I say again. Stop telling people this. It’s untrue and it’s harmful. It’s not encouraging people to write; it’s doing the opposite.
You don’t get anywhere as a self-published author by caring what other people think about you, but it’s taken me a long time to get past caring what other people think about me. I didn’t tell very many people that I was writing, and it was largely due to the fear of coming up against this idea that I wasn’t.
I am not excusing – or asking you to put up with – the tedious people who bang on and on about how much they’d like to write, or expect you to listen to their detailed exposition of what they would write if only they had the time. You could consider sending them an invoice for your skills as a writing consultant. Certainly if one more person tells me that everyone has a novel in them, I shall find it difficult to restrain myself from attempting to extract theirs by violent means.
But you don’t get to tell people that they’re not a writer. I don’t, either. (That picture at the top of the page? Means basically nothing in terms of my right to assess other people’s writer status.) Nobody does.
Happy Saturday! I hope those who are now embarked on summer holidays are enjoying them, and that the weather cooperates with any long-planned activities. Personally, I’m just getting to the end of a week off work, and I’m very slightly less tired than I was when it began, so I’m counting that as a tentative plus.
This week I have a guest post up over at I Heart Lesfic where I talk about the difficulty of finding the book I wanted to read and my consequent decision to write it myself.
There’s also a giveaway of Speak Its Name, which still has a couple of days left to run. You might be lucky!
Kathleen Jowitt 