I don’t get Halloween. What’s it for exactly? I mean, I get that it’s supposed to have some kind of supernatural angle to it; maybe it was once considered in a serious light and thought of as a night on which the ghosts and spirits rose up to taunt people. But, I mean, we all know that that’s not going to happen now, right? So what’s it for?
Maybe it’s me, but all the holidays and traditions (in the Western world at least) have just become so commercialised and merchandised that it seems that that is now their only purpose. Christmas is almost as bad, but at least that does have a deeper significance for some people than just dressing up in stupid costumes and eating too much. (I’m not actually a huge fan of Christmas, as regular readers of this blog might have seen, but I can at least accept that there was a legitimate reason for having it before the shops starting marketing the hell out of their products in preparation for it.) But things like Halloween really stump me – Valentine’s day, Pancake day (if you’re British you will know what this is and if you’re not you won’t – so I’ll leave you to wonder :-)). Bonfire night in particular (another British one) makes almost no sense to me. Sometimes I think we just create these days as an excuse to behave stupidly and give ourselves a day off from being serious. And, ok, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I still don’t like Halloween.
*Puts on grumpy old killjoy voice* Ahem . . .
Let me tell you why that is:
Firstly, stupid costumes that obscure the appearance of ordinary people so that they look like monsters are not fun, especially when said people go walking around in dark streets, banging on doors and scaring the living sh** out of jumpy, anxious, quiet-living people. I was never allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid and I came from one of those families where it was completely acceptable and even prudent to turn off all the lights, lock all the doors and pretend to be out of the house whenever the kids came round clamouring for sweets.
Halloween is a scary time for me, largely because it’s so noisy and so full of boisterous people who refuse to behave like orderly, civilized human beings. I don’t understand the impulse there. We spend all the other days of the year positively demanding that people behave in a calm, orderly manner; if people ran wild in the streets like that on any other night they would be considered as causing a public disturbance. So why, on this night, is it suddenly allowable, forgivable and even, in some people’s estimation, fun, to do just that?
I realize that, by now, I am sounding very much like a killjoy, and I don’t begrudge people a good time – really, I don’t. But why does it always have to involve so much public uproar? Why can’t people have fun in a nice quiet way and leave the rest of us to do the same?
I don’t know what it’s like in America, although I’ve seen all the stuff on TV about mass trick-or-treating expeditions around suburban neighbourhoods and people making jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins. How accurate this is I do not know. But we’ve kind of picked up on it here, despite the fact that it doesn’t really go with our usually staid and reserved style of living. . . .
Incidentally, what is it with American people and pumpkins? I’ve never eaten pumpkin, but it seems to me that they feature in quite a lot of end of year festivities over there – pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving and all that. Honestly, why pumpkins?
. . .
Well, anyway, whatever it is we’re trying to emulate from the American traditions, we have adopted Halloween quite seriously and taken it to our hearts. And it’s loud and it’s disruptive and I don’t like it. Sorry America! :-/ I think it’s worse in this country because not only do we have Halloween at the end of October, but the disruption tends to continue after that because we also have a little thing called Bonfire Night (mentioned above) right at the beginning of November.
I should probably explain this – although I wasn’t going to – because not everyone around the world will know what this is; it’s a very British thing and it remains a mystery even to some of us. People question the sense of it every year, and yet we still do it. It’s just as noisy and disruptive as Halloween but it has a completely different origin.
The historians amongst you might know who Guy Fawkes was, but, for those of you who don’t, I will enlighten you. He led a little revolutionary group at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the purpose of which was to blow up the Houses of Parliament using a shed load of gunpowder. The intention of this was to murder King James I of England and the rest of his government, although his reasoning is probably too complicated and boring to go into right now.
The upshot, anyway, is that Fawkes was unsuccessful, but his memory – as a potential assassin of the King – has lived on for the last 400 years and it is now a tradition in this country, every year on the 5th of November, to light bonfires in public places and burn effigies of this man while eating hot dogs and other barbecue style food and setting off fireworks – presumably to commemorate the whole gunpowder plot thing.
Most people don’t consider the origins of this day any more, since it’s just considered to be fun to light fires and set off noisy sky rockets that make pretty patterns in the sky. But, like I said, this is just more noise and disruption and, being so close to Halloween, it sort of gives people in this country a licence to spend almost the whole week in between behaving like hooligans. Bonfire Night is probably worse than Halloween I think; they actually have to issue warnings every year to tell people how to handle fireworks safely because it is, traditionally, one of the busiest nights for all the hospitals in Britain. They invariably have to treat people for burns and other injuries and, occasionally, people die. (NB. I’m really not making this up!)
Suffice it to say then, it baffles me that we still have these holidays and traditions when all it really does for anyone is cause mayhem and get people injured. I’d rather stay indoors – but then I suppose I am very boring that way – but seriously, who invents these things, and what the hell are they thinking when they do?
In my nightmare vision of the future every day has been turned into some kind of commercial holiday or otherwise stupid commemoration day. That will soon be all we do – it could be a revolution of sorts, or it could just be the end of the world as we know it? Nevertheless, I would like to scrap Halloween. Who’s with me?
No?
Oh well . . .
Wednesday 30 October 2013
Tuesday 29 October 2013
Technology
I am not usually bothered by technology. You get used to it, don’t you? I mean, it’s everywhere so you really have no choice. You want to write something, you turn on your computer; you want to send a message to someone, you type it in on your phone; you want to see someone, you Skype them. There is a machine for everything now – every little part of everyday life that we don’t want to have to think about for longer than a second is now facilitated by machines.
But what has this done to us?
The issue of this, as I said, often does not present itself to me in my day-to-day life because I, like you, am usually surrounded by machines. These, although they are not usually directly connected to me, act as a kind of life support – allowing me to connect with the world, to work and create things that form the end product of all that work, to see and hear things that interest me such as movies, music, books, newspapers etc. I could go on . . . and on . . . and on.
I am now lost without my computer and I despair when it breaks down.
And when I despair I ask myself why the hell I have placed myself in a situation where I am now almost completely dependent on all this stuff? At times like these I remember the time, back in my teenage years in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when I didn’t have any of these things – no laptop, no broadband, no iPod. This was, I might add, largely because these things either didn’t exist, or just because I didn’t know they existed, or that they were in any way necessary to me. When I was 15 I bought my first mobile phone and thought it was the coolest thing ever because it was the first and only phone I had ever had; and it was only a simple, lumpy, brick-like, ordinary phone with an aerial on the top.
Remember the days when mobiles had aerials? And, like, actual buttons instead of touch screens? . . . I loathe my iPhone with fiery passion, largely because, apart from the basics, I don’t actually know how it works. Plus, no matter how much other people rave about them I will never think that a touch screen is a better invention than good old-fashioned push-buttons. I wouldn’t have a phone at all actually if I could help it, but I have to have one now because it’s my only lifeline if my computer crashes, plus it’s handy sometimes if I’m out and need to check on something.
Most of my day-to-day business is conducted through the internet now, and I reckon that’s how it is for a lot of people. I can’t – I mean, literally, can’t keep away from it. I’m just one of those freaks who sleeps with their phone and laptop right near them. And it’s not even that my life has to be bound to these things, it’s just that I’ve put myself into the situation where everything I do sort of relies on them. And it is easier now, isn’t it? To do everything online and text the people you know instead of seeing them and having actual conversations. It’s insane. How did I get to this, I ask myself?
But it’s not just me, is it? It’s the whole world who’s become obsessed with things like Kindle, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and God knows what else. It’s so easy now to keep in touch with people, do business, order shopping etc. online and never see anyone and, for a generation of increasingly agoraphobic or socially disinclined people, this is totally brilliant. Because you can do everything now that you used to do outside your house from the comfort of your living room, bedroom, whatever, and convince yourself, while you do it that this is real social interaction and real life.
I know. I’ve done it. I do it. I live through my laptop and my phone more than I live out in the real world. And if the machines conk out on me then that’s me in the dark.
So, what’s the point then? What have we driven ourselves to? . . . Well, the whole point of technology in the first place, ostensibly, was to make our lives easier and give us more time in a world where the work was increasing and the time allotted for it was becoming ever narrower. It was a convenience thing that was supposed to allow people to do their daily work faster and more efficiently so that they would then have more time for themselves in which to relax and, you know, live. But, as the old saying goes: “Work Expands to Fill the Time Available”. Machines may have been invented to free up time, but, at a certain point, it was decided that all this free time needed to be filled with something else. So there was then a need for more machines to create entertainment and other work possibilities during the newly created leisure hours.
The result of all this, then, is that we’ve become a generation of techno-heads who wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we weren’t attached to something electrical, battery operated and possibly flashing an Apple symbol. We have no survival instincts any more because we use things like Sat Nav, or GPS if you’re American, to get us around or, worse, we use some “app” on our now so necessary iPhones to tell us the answer to all our questions or concerns. We no longer have to think about anything, or puzzle over anything, because now there is an app for everything. You hear a song on the radio that you can’t name, there’s an app to find out what it’s called. You need to Google something while you’re on a bus or buying cheese, there’s a Google app. You need to take a picture of yourself while you’re flossing your teeth and the computer is all way down the hall: Instagram!
Here’s what I’m worried about though: What are we going to do if there is a mass power outage, or if the internet, somehow, fails. What if someone pulls the plug? It would be like being back in the dark ages. How would we cope? Because I do not, for the life of me, remember how I coped before technology took over my life.
I have just spent the whole of last weekend fighting with my computer – eventually having to move out of the comfy but grindingly slow living space that was my old laptop and set up home in a new one. This, you may be able to imagine then, is the reason for this post. I absolute hate technology – when it breaks – but I can’t live without it. And I hate that too. It just occurs to me at times like this, when I get a glimmer of what it might feel like to have none of these things around me and have to be completely cut off from my blog, my Facebook page and my many other online outlets, that the world we live in now is really badly designed and really precariously poised on the top of a great pile of machinery and virtual space.
What have we done to our world? It used to be beautiful and simple, now it’s all metal and plastic and Pentium chips. Not even that any more probably, everything exists on a virtual cloud now, doesn’t it? Soon it won’t even be boxes and wires that run our lives for us but a big virtual nexus that we all just float about in. . . . Ok getting a bit metaphysical there, but it scares me sometimes that we’ve lost the ability to do actual things in life and we just leave it all up to far more capable electronic devices. And, if I’m honest, I kind of miss my childhood when technology meant a wooden box TV without a remote control and when CD players looked radical and new age. In the last twenty years or so we’ve all become conditioned to think that life is not worth living unless you have every single new gadget on the market and make daily use of it.
I think about junking it all. And I really could do it.
. . .
But then I remember that I have to update my Twitter page and all that goes out of the window. Because that’s the world we live in now – horrible and doomed to ultimate destruction as it may be – technology is mandatory now. We could exist in theory, but we literally could not function without it.
But what has this done to us?
The issue of this, as I said, often does not present itself to me in my day-to-day life because I, like you, am usually surrounded by machines. These, although they are not usually directly connected to me, act as a kind of life support – allowing me to connect with the world, to work and create things that form the end product of all that work, to see and hear things that interest me such as movies, music, books, newspapers etc. I could go on . . . and on . . . and on.
I am now lost without my computer and I despair when it breaks down.
And when I despair I ask myself why the hell I have placed myself in a situation where I am now almost completely dependent on all this stuff? At times like these I remember the time, back in my teenage years in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when I didn’t have any of these things – no laptop, no broadband, no iPod. This was, I might add, largely because these things either didn’t exist, or just because I didn’t know they existed, or that they were in any way necessary to me. When I was 15 I bought my first mobile phone and thought it was the coolest thing ever because it was the first and only phone I had ever had; and it was only a simple, lumpy, brick-like, ordinary phone with an aerial on the top.
Remember the days when mobiles had aerials? And, like, actual buttons instead of touch screens? . . . I loathe my iPhone with fiery passion, largely because, apart from the basics, I don’t actually know how it works. Plus, no matter how much other people rave about them I will never think that a touch screen is a better invention than good old-fashioned push-buttons. I wouldn’t have a phone at all actually if I could help it, but I have to have one now because it’s my only lifeline if my computer crashes, plus it’s handy sometimes if I’m out and need to check on something.
Most of my day-to-day business is conducted through the internet now, and I reckon that’s how it is for a lot of people. I can’t – I mean, literally, can’t keep away from it. I’m just one of those freaks who sleeps with their phone and laptop right near them. And it’s not even that my life has to be bound to these things, it’s just that I’ve put myself into the situation where everything I do sort of relies on them. And it is easier now, isn’t it? To do everything online and text the people you know instead of seeing them and having actual conversations. It’s insane. How did I get to this, I ask myself?
But it’s not just me, is it? It’s the whole world who’s become obsessed with things like Kindle, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and God knows what else. It’s so easy now to keep in touch with people, do business, order shopping etc. online and never see anyone and, for a generation of increasingly agoraphobic or socially disinclined people, this is totally brilliant. Because you can do everything now that you used to do outside your house from the comfort of your living room, bedroom, whatever, and convince yourself, while you do it that this is real social interaction and real life.
I know. I’ve done it. I do it. I live through my laptop and my phone more than I live out in the real world. And if the machines conk out on me then that’s me in the dark.
So, what’s the point then? What have we driven ourselves to? . . . Well, the whole point of technology in the first place, ostensibly, was to make our lives easier and give us more time in a world where the work was increasing and the time allotted for it was becoming ever narrower. It was a convenience thing that was supposed to allow people to do their daily work faster and more efficiently so that they would then have more time for themselves in which to relax and, you know, live. But, as the old saying goes: “Work Expands to Fill the Time Available”. Machines may have been invented to free up time, but, at a certain point, it was decided that all this free time needed to be filled with something else. So there was then a need for more machines to create entertainment and other work possibilities during the newly created leisure hours.
The result of all this, then, is that we’ve become a generation of techno-heads who wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves if we weren’t attached to something electrical, battery operated and possibly flashing an Apple symbol. We have no survival instincts any more because we use things like Sat Nav, or GPS if you’re American, to get us around or, worse, we use some “app” on our now so necessary iPhones to tell us the answer to all our questions or concerns. We no longer have to think about anything, or puzzle over anything, because now there is an app for everything. You hear a song on the radio that you can’t name, there’s an app to find out what it’s called. You need to Google something while you’re on a bus or buying cheese, there’s a Google app. You need to take a picture of yourself while you’re flossing your teeth and the computer is all way down the hall: Instagram!
Here’s what I’m worried about though: What are we going to do if there is a mass power outage, or if the internet, somehow, fails. What if someone pulls the plug? It would be like being back in the dark ages. How would we cope? Because I do not, for the life of me, remember how I coped before technology took over my life.
I have just spent the whole of last weekend fighting with my computer – eventually having to move out of the comfy but grindingly slow living space that was my old laptop and set up home in a new one. This, you may be able to imagine then, is the reason for this post. I absolute hate technology – when it breaks – but I can’t live without it. And I hate that too. It just occurs to me at times like this, when I get a glimmer of what it might feel like to have none of these things around me and have to be completely cut off from my blog, my Facebook page and my many other online outlets, that the world we live in now is really badly designed and really precariously poised on the top of a great pile of machinery and virtual space.
What have we done to our world? It used to be beautiful and simple, now it’s all metal and plastic and Pentium chips. Not even that any more probably, everything exists on a virtual cloud now, doesn’t it? Soon it won’t even be boxes and wires that run our lives for us but a big virtual nexus that we all just float about in. . . . Ok getting a bit metaphysical there, but it scares me sometimes that we’ve lost the ability to do actual things in life and we just leave it all up to far more capable electronic devices. And, if I’m honest, I kind of miss my childhood when technology meant a wooden box TV without a remote control and when CD players looked radical and new age. In the last twenty years or so we’ve all become conditioned to think that life is not worth living unless you have every single new gadget on the market and make daily use of it.
I think about junking it all. And I really could do it.
. . .
But then I remember that I have to update my Twitter page and all that goes out of the window. Because that’s the world we live in now – horrible and doomed to ultimate destruction as it may be – technology is mandatory now. We could exist in theory, but we literally could not function without it.
Saturday 26 October 2013
Suicide
This is a depressing subject, I won’t deny. But, as explained in a previous post, this is the time of year at which I invariably start considering it. This is mainly due to SAD, I think, but it can also be put down to a number of other, smaller things that all seem to happen at once towards the end of the year. I won’t go into those. What I want to talk about instead is the wider reaction to something like suicide – the way that, as a subject, it gets thought about, treated by others, etc. – and, more particularly, I want to think about the perverse ideas that people have about it.
What I have discovered in more recent years – particularly last year when I was very seriously considering killing myself – is that there are a lot of people in the world who are fascinated by suicide and, more so, by the people who either attempt it or manage to achieve it. Perhaps these people are predominantly teenagers with a lot of angst or people with problems of their own, or perhaps they are just sickos, but they exist in the world and can be found very easily online – usually by people who are desperately seeking sympathy. There are even, you might have heard, suicide clubs, who meet each other online and then arrange to meet and conduct group suicides – presumably so they won’t have to be alone and they can all make sure they go through with it; so it’s kind of a sick, twisted support group you might say! :-/
I have never done this, obviously, but I am aware of the existence of such things and have taken a vague interest in that fact. I actually remember taking note of these things at various points in my life – for future reference – so I can’t categorically say that, had things gone very badly for me, I might not have tried it. All things are options for me when I’m depressed, any means will do in an abstract sense and I have, as a result, collected quite a lot of information on suicide over the years just out of natural curiosity.
So, this is what I’m interested in now. I’m trying to understand why everyone takes such a morbid interest in other people’s pain? Maybe because they have a lot of pain of their own and they want to know they’re not alone? Yes, that’s possible. But, by and large, no, I don’t think so. I think that for a lot of people, when they get really interested in other people’s misery, it is just because they have a perverse and slightly sadistic need to know that there are people in the world worse off than them. I think, in a half-conscious, suppressed sort of way, those people like to watch other people suffer.
Now, I can admit it, I have had certain glimmers of uncharitable thoughts myself; I’ve thought about other people who I know are having a hard time and taken a twisted pleasure in knowing that their seemingly perfect lives are not quite so perfect and that I, in comparison with them, might actually have quite a good deal. This is not a prolonged thing in me. I don’t mean to do it. And I don’t wish any real harm to anyone. But I can be spontaneously and momentarily vindictive with really quite startling ease.
But the online crew, I’ve discovered, have taken this to another level. We’ve all heard of Twitter trolls; many of them are callous when they write things either to or about other people, and some of them can be purely evil in what they say. For most people with the strength of mind to brush this off, it’s fine – because who the hell are these people anyway? But if you don’t have that strength, and if you’re desperately looking for someone to like you or say something nice or comforting to you, these cruel responses can really hurt.
Seemingly, the trolls think that this is funny – taunting desperate, lonely, or fragile people with their really rather poisonous remarks. I haven’t been trolled in this way, but I have seen other people get this treatment and I think that it is utterly disgusting.
When I considered suicide last year I was in a very bad place – clearly. But one of the things I did to try to deal with that was to start a Twitter account specifically to vent my feelings of anguish/depression/whatever. It’s been removed now so I can tell you the Twitter name I used – @Awomanofnoimportance. Because that was what I thought I was. At the time I was anorexic, I was failing my PhD, I was completely isolated from the world and it was deepest darkest winter. I felt like I’d already disappeared and that all that was left for me to do was to get rid of the empty shell of my body – the final detritus of myself.
“A Woman of No Importance”, I should say, does not refer to the Oscar Wilde play. It is the name of a short play/monologue by Alan Bennett. I have it as a sound recording with Patricia Routledge playing the main character, Margaret Schofield, and I was listening to it repeatedly last year, because it held some kind of profound resonance for me. For those who don’t know, it’s about a woman without any close friends or family who gets diagnosed with some kind of terminal illness – she has some kind of tumour or something in her stomach, the details of which are never properly defined because the doctors don’t figure it out in time – and, during the course of the monologue, she describes her life and the people around her while she goes through the process of being (mis)diagnosed.
So, while she’s talking she describes things that, at every turn, reveal her own delusion about how important she thinks she is in other people’s lives and, with every sentence, there is some kind of ironic tinge to show that she is actually not important at all. No one comes to visit her in the hospital, or if they do it’s only because they have to see someone else there and they’ve stopped in, briefly, on the way (occurrences which then lead her to insist that she’s been “singled out” for some sort of special favour, when in fact she hasn’t); the people in her office – who’ve all but forgotten her – send her a standardized greetings card to say Get Well Soon, and she takes the printed, mass-produced message inside as a sign that they’ve thought about her and genuinely care about whether she’s ok – as if she thinks they all banded together to write the message.
She’s alone, is basically what I’m trying to say, but she keeps going because she just refuses to see that she’s alone; she goes into denial and takes the crappy, little bit of attention that she receives as if it’s real and genuine and enough to fill up her life. So she believes she’s important, and the centre of everything, when she actually has no importance. She’s not even important enough for the doctors to strive to find out what’s wrong with her and when she eventually dies the only thing with her is a housefly, which, she insists, has also singled her out.
Anyway, this long description should give you some idea of how caught up I get when I hear it. But, leaving that aside for a moment, I’ve felt an affinity with the woman in this monologue for some time, and I’ve known plenty of people who I perceive to be like her. I can understand the impulse – it’s what people do when they have nothing in their lives and they know that other people don’t care; they embellish and imagine things about other people who pay attention to them, as if the people in the shops or the postman who delivers the mail every day are somehow their best friends because these nodding acquaintances are all they have to hold on to. Most people, I think, would want to kill themselves if they didn’t believe they were valued, and anyone who’s never known what it is to be genuinely valued might convince themselves, over time, to accept social niceties as a substitute. My mother has got by doing this for years, and nothing I say can ever convince her that this is the wrong way to go about things. I couldn’t do it, certainly. It is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen and, I finally realised this last year, I couldn’t bear the obvious hypocrisy of carrying on when it was obvious that the rest of the world didn’t give a damn if I was there or not. I just get angry when I think about that.
So I put myself on Twitter as a woman of no importance because I was so angry at the rest of the world for not caring that I was in pain, and because I wanted to tell people what bastards they were for letting me suffer that way and for not paying attention to the fact that I was here and had something to say.
But this was what really interested me. Are you ready for this? The whole time I was posting these things on Twitter – really quite vile and ugly things, full of expletives and offensive content – not only did no one respond to ask if I was ok, but I saw, as I continued to post, that I was getting more and more followers, who kept appearing as I continued to post.
Before you say it, they were not just the kind of advertising people who will follow anyone on Twitter regardless of what they post; they were, from what I could see, actual people.
This really bothered me; it made me even angrier. And it still makes me angry now. Because why on earth would someone sit at home, or wherever it is they sit when they’re online, and watch the progress of someone who’s saying, repeatedly, that they want to die and that they’ve been driven to this by a cruel and horrible world full of people who don’t care? Why would someone follow that with such avidity, and, more importantly, why wouldn’t they say anything in response to it?
Answer: Because they enjoy other people’s pain. What I didn’t realise last year was that there are a lot of other people who just take a sick pleasure in pathetic displays of pain and suffering. There is an impulse in most people to kick other people when they’re down and to smile cruelly when they see people who can’t manage their lives.
Someone says they want to kill themselves and a lot of people will sit there and say, “Well, do it then. Go on, I dare you.” And there’ll be a part of them that actually means it and wants to keep watching so that they can see if that poor person really will find the guts to do it. I imagine that they sit forward in their chairs, their eyes light up, they get really, genuinely excited by the prospect that someone might actually destroy themselves; they feel more powerful and more in control of their own lives when they see someone else give up.
It’s disgusting and terrible that people think this way; that they can score a point off someone in despair. But people do it.
There are, of course, other people in the world who have no wish to do this and who do want to help. But they are often unreachable at the crucial moment. Plus, it’s a tricky thing to know how to help someone in that situation and, ultimately, it will come down to whether the person themselves can find anything to hang on to.
But I think that people do try to hang on. No one wants, really, to kill themselves; we have too many survival instincts built into us for that. The body and the mind will always conspire to find some way to stop people before all hope is lost and they do it anyway. A lot of people would happily be talked out of it. But it disturbs me that, at that crucial moment, when someone needs bolstering that way and they reach out for help, they might just get abused or trolled instead.
It disturbs me even more that the world is growing in population and that mental illness and depression are continually on the rise, and that no one, or almost no one, is helping. What’s happening to the world that we have even less compassion for other people, and even less sympathy/understanding/tolerance for people, so that we don’t even care if they destroy themselves because “Hey, that’s one less to worry about right?”
The internet has certainly opened this up. I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I just imagine people sitting at their computers, watching people despair online – perhaps some of them are reading this blog – and laughing at those people, calling them pathetic and sad because they need to connect with someone who will tell them that they’re worth something. It might be wrong to blame everything on the internet, but it’s definitely detached people from the reality of human emotions. We don’t think about the actual people who put themselves out there and how desperate/lonely/miserable/or even suicidal they might be. And we don’t think about what we say to them, albeit through our computers, and how this might be received because there is just this overwhelming mentality – easy to subscribe to – that what you write online won’t reach people, because all the other people in cyber space aren’t really real.
But, I’m sorry, it is real. What you say and do online does affect people, it does hurt if you say something evil. It does matter if you follow someone’s Twitter account and then watch them tweet about how they’re planning on ending their life. It’s not ok to do that.
So don’t laugh. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t jeer at those people. And don’t hit the “Like” button when they tell you all about their pain or try to spur them on when they’re having a really bad time and just want to end it all. Because it’s not funny. It’s really NOT funny. Anyone who thinks it’s just a game that they can play online and then go on with their lives should just be totally ashamed of themselves.
What I have discovered in more recent years – particularly last year when I was very seriously considering killing myself – is that there are a lot of people in the world who are fascinated by suicide and, more so, by the people who either attempt it or manage to achieve it. Perhaps these people are predominantly teenagers with a lot of angst or people with problems of their own, or perhaps they are just sickos, but they exist in the world and can be found very easily online – usually by people who are desperately seeking sympathy. There are even, you might have heard, suicide clubs, who meet each other online and then arrange to meet and conduct group suicides – presumably so they won’t have to be alone and they can all make sure they go through with it; so it’s kind of a sick, twisted support group you might say! :-/
I have never done this, obviously, but I am aware of the existence of such things and have taken a vague interest in that fact. I actually remember taking note of these things at various points in my life – for future reference – so I can’t categorically say that, had things gone very badly for me, I might not have tried it. All things are options for me when I’m depressed, any means will do in an abstract sense and I have, as a result, collected quite a lot of information on suicide over the years just out of natural curiosity.
So, this is what I’m interested in now. I’m trying to understand why everyone takes such a morbid interest in other people’s pain? Maybe because they have a lot of pain of their own and they want to know they’re not alone? Yes, that’s possible. But, by and large, no, I don’t think so. I think that for a lot of people, when they get really interested in other people’s misery, it is just because they have a perverse and slightly sadistic need to know that there are people in the world worse off than them. I think, in a half-conscious, suppressed sort of way, those people like to watch other people suffer.
Now, I can admit it, I have had certain glimmers of uncharitable thoughts myself; I’ve thought about other people who I know are having a hard time and taken a twisted pleasure in knowing that their seemingly perfect lives are not quite so perfect and that I, in comparison with them, might actually have quite a good deal. This is not a prolonged thing in me. I don’t mean to do it. And I don’t wish any real harm to anyone. But I can be spontaneously and momentarily vindictive with really quite startling ease.
But the online crew, I’ve discovered, have taken this to another level. We’ve all heard of Twitter trolls; many of them are callous when they write things either to or about other people, and some of them can be purely evil in what they say. For most people with the strength of mind to brush this off, it’s fine – because who the hell are these people anyway? But if you don’t have that strength, and if you’re desperately looking for someone to like you or say something nice or comforting to you, these cruel responses can really hurt.
Seemingly, the trolls think that this is funny – taunting desperate, lonely, or fragile people with their really rather poisonous remarks. I haven’t been trolled in this way, but I have seen other people get this treatment and I think that it is utterly disgusting.
When I considered suicide last year I was in a very bad place – clearly. But one of the things I did to try to deal with that was to start a Twitter account specifically to vent my feelings of anguish/depression/whatever. It’s been removed now so I can tell you the Twitter name I used – @Awomanofnoimportance. Because that was what I thought I was. At the time I was anorexic, I was failing my PhD, I was completely isolated from the world and it was deepest darkest winter. I felt like I’d already disappeared and that all that was left for me to do was to get rid of the empty shell of my body – the final detritus of myself.
“A Woman of No Importance”, I should say, does not refer to the Oscar Wilde play. It is the name of a short play/monologue by Alan Bennett. I have it as a sound recording with Patricia Routledge playing the main character, Margaret Schofield, and I was listening to it repeatedly last year, because it held some kind of profound resonance for me. For those who don’t know, it’s about a woman without any close friends or family who gets diagnosed with some kind of terminal illness – she has some kind of tumour or something in her stomach, the details of which are never properly defined because the doctors don’t figure it out in time – and, during the course of the monologue, she describes her life and the people around her while she goes through the process of being (mis)diagnosed.
So, while she’s talking she describes things that, at every turn, reveal her own delusion about how important she thinks she is in other people’s lives and, with every sentence, there is some kind of ironic tinge to show that she is actually not important at all. No one comes to visit her in the hospital, or if they do it’s only because they have to see someone else there and they’ve stopped in, briefly, on the way (occurrences which then lead her to insist that she’s been “singled out” for some sort of special favour, when in fact she hasn’t); the people in her office – who’ve all but forgotten her – send her a standardized greetings card to say Get Well Soon, and she takes the printed, mass-produced message inside as a sign that they’ve thought about her and genuinely care about whether she’s ok – as if she thinks they all banded together to write the message.
She’s alone, is basically what I’m trying to say, but she keeps going because she just refuses to see that she’s alone; she goes into denial and takes the crappy, little bit of attention that she receives as if it’s real and genuine and enough to fill up her life. So she believes she’s important, and the centre of everything, when she actually has no importance. She’s not even important enough for the doctors to strive to find out what’s wrong with her and when she eventually dies the only thing with her is a housefly, which, she insists, has also singled her out.
Anyway, this long description should give you some idea of how caught up I get when I hear it. But, leaving that aside for a moment, I’ve felt an affinity with the woman in this monologue for some time, and I’ve known plenty of people who I perceive to be like her. I can understand the impulse – it’s what people do when they have nothing in their lives and they know that other people don’t care; they embellish and imagine things about other people who pay attention to them, as if the people in the shops or the postman who delivers the mail every day are somehow their best friends because these nodding acquaintances are all they have to hold on to. Most people, I think, would want to kill themselves if they didn’t believe they were valued, and anyone who’s never known what it is to be genuinely valued might convince themselves, over time, to accept social niceties as a substitute. My mother has got by doing this for years, and nothing I say can ever convince her that this is the wrong way to go about things. I couldn’t do it, certainly. It is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen and, I finally realised this last year, I couldn’t bear the obvious hypocrisy of carrying on when it was obvious that the rest of the world didn’t give a damn if I was there or not. I just get angry when I think about that.
So I put myself on Twitter as a woman of no importance because I was so angry at the rest of the world for not caring that I was in pain, and because I wanted to tell people what bastards they were for letting me suffer that way and for not paying attention to the fact that I was here and had something to say.
But this was what really interested me. Are you ready for this? The whole time I was posting these things on Twitter – really quite vile and ugly things, full of expletives and offensive content – not only did no one respond to ask if I was ok, but I saw, as I continued to post, that I was getting more and more followers, who kept appearing as I continued to post.
Before you say it, they were not just the kind of advertising people who will follow anyone on Twitter regardless of what they post; they were, from what I could see, actual people.
This really bothered me; it made me even angrier. And it still makes me angry now. Because why on earth would someone sit at home, or wherever it is they sit when they’re online, and watch the progress of someone who’s saying, repeatedly, that they want to die and that they’ve been driven to this by a cruel and horrible world full of people who don’t care? Why would someone follow that with such avidity, and, more importantly, why wouldn’t they say anything in response to it?
Answer: Because they enjoy other people’s pain. What I didn’t realise last year was that there are a lot of other people who just take a sick pleasure in pathetic displays of pain and suffering. There is an impulse in most people to kick other people when they’re down and to smile cruelly when they see people who can’t manage their lives.
Someone says they want to kill themselves and a lot of people will sit there and say, “Well, do it then. Go on, I dare you.” And there’ll be a part of them that actually means it and wants to keep watching so that they can see if that poor person really will find the guts to do it. I imagine that they sit forward in their chairs, their eyes light up, they get really, genuinely excited by the prospect that someone might actually destroy themselves; they feel more powerful and more in control of their own lives when they see someone else give up.
It’s disgusting and terrible that people think this way; that they can score a point off someone in despair. But people do it.
There are, of course, other people in the world who have no wish to do this and who do want to help. But they are often unreachable at the crucial moment. Plus, it’s a tricky thing to know how to help someone in that situation and, ultimately, it will come down to whether the person themselves can find anything to hang on to.
But I think that people do try to hang on. No one wants, really, to kill themselves; we have too many survival instincts built into us for that. The body and the mind will always conspire to find some way to stop people before all hope is lost and they do it anyway. A lot of people would happily be talked out of it. But it disturbs me that, at that crucial moment, when someone needs bolstering that way and they reach out for help, they might just get abused or trolled instead.
It disturbs me even more that the world is growing in population and that mental illness and depression are continually on the rise, and that no one, or almost no one, is helping. What’s happening to the world that we have even less compassion for other people, and even less sympathy/understanding/tolerance for people, so that we don’t even care if they destroy themselves because “Hey, that’s one less to worry about right?”
The internet has certainly opened this up. I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I just imagine people sitting at their computers, watching people despair online – perhaps some of them are reading this blog – and laughing at those people, calling them pathetic and sad because they need to connect with someone who will tell them that they’re worth something. It might be wrong to blame everything on the internet, but it’s definitely detached people from the reality of human emotions. We don’t think about the actual people who put themselves out there and how desperate/lonely/miserable/or even suicidal they might be. And we don’t think about what we say to them, albeit through our computers, and how this might be received because there is just this overwhelming mentality – easy to subscribe to – that what you write online won’t reach people, because all the other people in cyber space aren’t really real.
But, I’m sorry, it is real. What you say and do online does affect people, it does hurt if you say something evil. It does matter if you follow someone’s Twitter account and then watch them tweet about how they’re planning on ending their life. It’s not ok to do that.
So don’t laugh. That’s all I’m saying. Don’t jeer at those people. And don’t hit the “Like” button when they tell you all about their pain or try to spur them on when they’re having a really bad time and just want to end it all. Because it’s not funny. It’s really NOT funny. Anyone who thinks it’s just a game that they can play online and then go on with their lives should just be totally ashamed of themselves.
Friday 18 October 2013
An Explanation of Jewel
Ok, so some of you might have read, or at the very least downloaded my novel, JEWEL. I have no way of telling whether any of the two hundred and something people who downloaded the free copy when it was available have actually read it or whether they all think it’s a pile of crap. Whatever your opinion though, the book is now going to become a series – because I, as the self-published author responsible for its creation, have decided so.
So I thought that perhaps I should explain a little bit about this world that I’ve created, for anyone who hasn’t read it and for anyone who has and was thoroughly confused (I hope there aren’t too many of these!)
First let me go into the etymology and development of the story. I started writing it 9 years ago and it has gone through many drafts and many fallow periods, and has even had me tearing up whole handfuls of pages because it was “never going to amount to anything” and was “obviously rubbish”. I actually scrapped the whole novel about 6 years ago, I think – and threw out all the original bits that I’d written – which means that no one will ever get to know just how diabolically awful it was in the beginning. (This I am thankful for because it was pretty dreadful, I have to say.)
When I wrote the initial scenes I had just started an English Lit degree at university where I was, like most English Lit students, encouraged to think about creative writing. Part of the course was to keep a journal in which we would write every day and thus have an outlet for whatever we wanted to create. There was no form or logic to this and we were not marked on it, per se, but it was supposed to help us develop ideas and get us into good writing habits so that, if we wanted to produce anything, we’d have the discipline in place to do it.
Now, I’ve never been good at keeping journals. I always get bored after the first few diligent days of writing all about my life and what’s in my head at that moment. Because my life, in itself, just isn’t full enough of interesting things for me to be able to sustain a proper dialogue with my diary. I’m just not that type.
So, that was out for a start. Writing about real life, I mean. I just couldn’t do that. But I did embrace the idea of creativity and, at the suggestion of my university Professor, I dutifully went out and bought a beautiful hardback book in which to write. I decorated it, I wrote quotes in it, I told it all about myself and then, eventually, inevitably, I started making things up in it.
I had to, like I said, after a few days there’s nothing else to do. It’s either that or sit staring out of the window trying to get inspiration from the sky and the trees. (Incidentally I have done this several times before when all other possibilities have deserted me and let me tell you it is not worth the trouble. Trees, in their ordinary sense, are really quite dull and William Wordsworth I ain’t.) So, anyway, I had to start making up stories in order to fill up the pages and one day I was so desperate that I just sat down and thought “Right, what’s the stupidest, most fantastical thing that you can think of? Never mind if it’s no good or if it will never be readable by any sensible person. Never mind if your characters are likable, because you won’t ever have to do anything with it. Just write it.”
And I put the pen on the paper and I started to write the stupidest and most fantastical thing I could think of:
A lady in a ballgown, standing on a balcony with her lover – confessing their undying love to each other – and then committing suicide.
. . .
Yeah.
It was a total rip-off of Romeo and Juliet at that time, and written in the most awful, saccharine prose you can imagine. Thank God I junked it.
But, anyway, this is not the point, the point is that after I had written that scene – which would eventually morph into a far more complicated relationship between two of my characters, Lady Jade Worthington and Lord Lorenzo de Chapelle – I then continued for several more days to produce similar scenes; scenes about fairy-tale princesses and noble lords, battling knights or some such nonsense. And it occurred to me that, since I was doing so well with this I could perhaps combine all of these scenes and make them all part of the same world. Fashioning, in the process, an entire fantasy world that might become a great epic novel. (At that time I was still desperately searching for the perfect story for my debut novel – the great literary masterpiece that I hadn’t begun yet but, I was adamant, I would write – I knew it was there in my head somewhere I just had to find it: *Delusions of grandeur*.)
So, that’s how it started. I wrote crap in a diary and then strung it all together. And, at the time, I thought that would be the hard work done.
Boy was I wrong. Aside from the fact that you never write a book just once, when you create a fantasy world, you have to be really detailed. You have to think of everything – or if you can’t think of everything you have to be really clever at disguising all the holes – promising yourself, as you do so, that you will fill these holes in if you write a sequel. There are definitely many things about this world of mine that I did not consider in the first book and that I am now going to have to address in the second, third and fourth (Yes people, I’m up to four now, and I may add more!)
But I’m getting ahead of myself again. It’s hard to cram 9 years worth of writing hell into one blog post. Maybe I should write a book about it? . . . *Groans* No, maybe not.
Right, so I had the idea. I started to write. I even produced quite a lot of story, which started to take shape over a number of months. I had an idea that it would be a sort of detailed gothic fantasy thing, like Gormenghast – with a full complement of idiosyncratic characters, all of whom lived in a kind of harmony with each other in the same palace and all of whom had a key part to play. The thing I always liked about Gormenghast was that you got to see the social hierarchy and interaction between characters. It starts in the bowels of the place and takes you all the way to the turrets, introducing you to newer and weirder people on the way. That’s what I wanted to do originally. It didn’t, of course, come out quite like that in the end and, if it had, I think it would only have been an obvious and cheesy rip-off of Peake’s much greater genius. No one would have loved me for doing it.
And then what happened next was that, somewhere in the initial writing phase, I gave up on it. As usually happened when I was younger and lazier and more easily distracted by other things, I got bored; I lost the thread of what I was doing, life got in the way, maybe something interesting came on TV. I don’t know, but, whatever happened, it got shelved for a while and the most I would do was pick it up and look at it every now and again and then put it back.
Finally, as I’ve mentioned above, I scrapped it, because it was terrible and because – here was the clincher – it was going to take a lot of WORK to put it all together into something that could actually be described as finished.
I don’t want you to think that I’m afraid of hard work. Because I’m not. I did a PhD for four and half years and, if nothing else, that was good grounding in the hardest of all hard work. But when I was in my early twenties I was something of a lay-about. I didn’t like being put out of my comfort zone or being forced to take great big strides forward into my future. I was also very depressed and I mostly just wanted to sleep and eat all day. So, it was only later, when I was being forced to take great big strides forward into my future with my PhD, that the story resurfaced in my head.
I remembered my characters and their stories long after I had junked the original pages, and they kept coming back to me, over and over again, like old friends revisiting me after an absence. And I would think about them and remember the story of their lives – but, this is the thing, I would remember it as if it was real, not as if it was just some silly story that I, in my infinite boredom, had made up. These were real people to me. Queen Ruby and Princess Crystal and the grouchy King Julius in their make-believe palace – the location of which, incidentally, I still had not fixed upon at that stage. The kingdom of Sapphiria only materialized when I re-wrote the story.
It was make-believe, and it had been badly constructed to begin with, but the story was still there in my head and it had enough dimension so that I could think of it as real – so I knew that there was something to it.
I have always told myself stories in my head. I’ll make up any number of scenarios in my imagination and slip away into them whenever real life bores me. It’s just how I cope. But it never occurred to me before that any of these real fantasy lands that I used for my own private holidays could really be stories, or that anyone else might one day be able to share in them. When I wrote stories before – when I was younger and trying earnestly to be a writer, I would always look for something outside of my own fantasy-addled mind and write something serious about the world. I would think: “Well, what do writers write about when they write?” I didn’t ask myself what I knew or what I liked, or what I was actually capable of describing – which would have been far more helpful.
And I’ll always remember the day it hit me that this story, about a fantasy palace inhabited by a dysfunctional royal family, was the one I should write down. I was driving in my car and I think I’d heard something on the radio, although I can’t remember what now. But it was something that reminded me of one of my characters. And I started, without even really thinking about it, to replay the scene that I’d written, bringing it to life in my head.
But, like I said, it wasn’t remembering words on a page. Instead it was more like a flashback. The real scene was playing out in my head and I was saying to myself: “Oh yeah, remember when Ruby had that affair with the Archbishop, and whatever happened with Persephone? Did she find out? And remember the evil Lord Mortimer? Yeah, he was great!” And suddenly it was real again. And I had a real fondness for it. And I knew that I had to write it.
I’m not saying I thought it would be any good. Although, of course, I had hopes and aspirations about getting it published. And, as time went on, I even allowed myself to believe, in a delusional kind of a way, that it would be an instant success and I would be hailed as the next J.K. Rowling (a comparison that I would, then, try to rebuff in the most worthy and modest way possible – because I am so humble. HA!) Of course this hasn’t happened, and probably never will. But, as I was re-constructing and editing my story, I did begin to think that I should just have fun with this and see where it went and that, even if I didn’t make shed loads of money off it, that would be enough.
Editing is hard though and what you see in the final work, which you can find on Amazon if you’re so inclined, is by no means what I just rattled off first, second, or even third time around. (Cheeky plug there, you might have noticed. But, let’s face it, you must know by now that the whole point of this blog post is to tell you all about my book. Really I should just have named it “Book Plug” and had done with it.)
I should also say that I re-wrote it with the intention of entering a competition that Terry Pratchett was running a couple of years ago, which is why the finished book is the way it is, I think. I did the bulk of the writing with Terry Pratchett somewhere in mind.
I’m not saying that I copied the Discworld – my world is not flat, and does not rest on the back of a giant turtle. And there are no wizards. Sorry to disappoint you, but there aren’t – I didn’t want to get that far into the realms of fantasy. What I did instead was to think, as the brief for the competition specified that I should, about what the world would be like if things had gone a different way – if something in history had happened to create an entirely new civilization so that the world was ours, but not quite ours; Terry Pratchett described it in the competition description as the world going down the wrong trouser leg of history, or something very like that. So, knowing that I still had to place my palace and royal family in a world that was not our own, I used this competition to ground what I already had and surround it with this wrong trouser legged history and I cast my mind back right back at the dawn of humanity, and thought about how prehistoric people discovered the world.
I then decided that, since early man took everything he needed from the environment in order to build the foundations of the world, it stood to reason that they would eventually start digging things out of the ground.
“So,” I thought. “If they’re digging stuff out of the ground, it stands to reason that they would eventually find rock, and in the rock, they could find precious stones.”
“And what do human beings with a propensity to greed and a passion for shiny things do when they see such precious stones?” said the cynical and far more prevalent part of my psyche. “They snatch at them. They horde them. And, if our own history is anything to go by, they attempt to hurt or kill anyone who tries to take their greedily horded wealth from them.”
We all know that money makes the world go round and whoever has the most money has the power. So that became the basis of my world.
In my world, the royal dynasties that ruled the main kingdom, and had power and influence in all corners of the world, took their power from the jewels that they owned and controlled. The Diamond dynasty came first, I decided, because diamonds are, more usually, the highest prized. And, due to this fact, that dynasty lasted for the first 1000 years. Then they were overthrown by the Emerald dynasty, when it was decided, finally, that emeralds could be worth more than diamonds, if enough people agreed and could force everybody else to agree at sword-point. Then other dynasties followed, usually taking over by the same means, until the Sapphirian royal line came into being. And this is the line that I describe most closely in the first book. King Julius is the last of the Sapphire kings, who have ruled for a century (our twentieth century) and he has a dilemma, because he has to organize an heir to his throne.
(I’ll leave you to read the book to find out what happens there.)
But, the problem with creating all this back story, re-writing history and jiggling about the world’s geography in the process, was that it needed to be explained properly. Thinking more seriously about how to explain my world to others, I constructed maps, designed family trees, and produced illustrations and cover designs for the book that were in keeping with all elements that had gone into creating the story.
I became something of a control freak about this and I was adamant that, since I had done all of this work, it should all go into the book, because what’s the point of having it all otherwise?
This was one of the many decisions that went into the production of the book. And I do remember the most important issue of all – which came towards the end of the process – was how the hell I was ever going to get it published. When I eventually had the final book, I wrote a proposal and sent it and a couple of sample chapters out to a publishing house. Unsurprisingly this had little effect. I knew very little about getting published at that point, but I have since discovered that it is a painful, arduous and usually unprofitable process, and it was one that I just didn’t want to waste time on.
The more I thought about it, the more self-publishing seemed appropriate – I knew other people who had done it and it seemed easy. Certainly, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that I could make a mark on the world just by being original and that this might even be quite fun.
The pictures were not very good in the first instance, but they got better over time, and the more I did, the more helpful I found them. In the beginning I wasn’t going to include them. I did them, initially, because I was trying to get a handle on my characters, thinking that it would be much easier to describe them if I drew them out first. But I enjoyed constructing them too. I liked the process of taking a few oval shapes on the paint-box on my computer and fashioning them into recognizable faces. It’s fun to see them emerge from the nothingness and the thing I love best is tweaking at the details of them until they look almost exactly like what I’ve got in my head.
My skill at this has certainly developed over the last couple of years and I think the inclusion has leant something to the overall work.
But getting it out there was not the end. I finished the book and I’m now writing the second, but I guess it’ll take some time before anyone really picks up on it – if they do at all. That’s more or less it, anyway: how I wrote the book, what it’s all meant to be about, and why the hell it took me so long. And I hope that a few of you will at least go and look at the novel, even if it is only a free extract on Amazon, and tell me what you think of it. I’m still going to write this stuff even if you all hate it, but it would be nice to know that someone’s reading it.
Thanks for sticking with me. Until the next time folks . . .
So I thought that perhaps I should explain a little bit about this world that I’ve created, for anyone who hasn’t read it and for anyone who has and was thoroughly confused (I hope there aren’t too many of these!)
First let me go into the etymology and development of the story. I started writing it 9 years ago and it has gone through many drafts and many fallow periods, and has even had me tearing up whole handfuls of pages because it was “never going to amount to anything” and was “obviously rubbish”. I actually scrapped the whole novel about 6 years ago, I think – and threw out all the original bits that I’d written – which means that no one will ever get to know just how diabolically awful it was in the beginning. (This I am thankful for because it was pretty dreadful, I have to say.)
When I wrote the initial scenes I had just started an English Lit degree at university where I was, like most English Lit students, encouraged to think about creative writing. Part of the course was to keep a journal in which we would write every day and thus have an outlet for whatever we wanted to create. There was no form or logic to this and we were not marked on it, per se, but it was supposed to help us develop ideas and get us into good writing habits so that, if we wanted to produce anything, we’d have the discipline in place to do it.
Now, I’ve never been good at keeping journals. I always get bored after the first few diligent days of writing all about my life and what’s in my head at that moment. Because my life, in itself, just isn’t full enough of interesting things for me to be able to sustain a proper dialogue with my diary. I’m just not that type.
So, that was out for a start. Writing about real life, I mean. I just couldn’t do that. But I did embrace the idea of creativity and, at the suggestion of my university Professor, I dutifully went out and bought a beautiful hardback book in which to write. I decorated it, I wrote quotes in it, I told it all about myself and then, eventually, inevitably, I started making things up in it.
I had to, like I said, after a few days there’s nothing else to do. It’s either that or sit staring out of the window trying to get inspiration from the sky and the trees. (Incidentally I have done this several times before when all other possibilities have deserted me and let me tell you it is not worth the trouble. Trees, in their ordinary sense, are really quite dull and William Wordsworth I ain’t.) So, anyway, I had to start making up stories in order to fill up the pages and one day I was so desperate that I just sat down and thought “Right, what’s the stupidest, most fantastical thing that you can think of? Never mind if it’s no good or if it will never be readable by any sensible person. Never mind if your characters are likable, because you won’t ever have to do anything with it. Just write it.”
And I put the pen on the paper and I started to write the stupidest and most fantastical thing I could think of:
A lady in a ballgown, standing on a balcony with her lover – confessing their undying love to each other – and then committing suicide.
. . .
Yeah.
It was a total rip-off of Romeo and Juliet at that time, and written in the most awful, saccharine prose you can imagine. Thank God I junked it.
But, anyway, this is not the point, the point is that after I had written that scene – which would eventually morph into a far more complicated relationship between two of my characters, Lady Jade Worthington and Lord Lorenzo de Chapelle – I then continued for several more days to produce similar scenes; scenes about fairy-tale princesses and noble lords, battling knights or some such nonsense. And it occurred to me that, since I was doing so well with this I could perhaps combine all of these scenes and make them all part of the same world. Fashioning, in the process, an entire fantasy world that might become a great epic novel. (At that time I was still desperately searching for the perfect story for my debut novel – the great literary masterpiece that I hadn’t begun yet but, I was adamant, I would write – I knew it was there in my head somewhere I just had to find it: *Delusions of grandeur*.)
So, that’s how it started. I wrote crap in a diary and then strung it all together. And, at the time, I thought that would be the hard work done.
Boy was I wrong. Aside from the fact that you never write a book just once, when you create a fantasy world, you have to be really detailed. You have to think of everything – or if you can’t think of everything you have to be really clever at disguising all the holes – promising yourself, as you do so, that you will fill these holes in if you write a sequel. There are definitely many things about this world of mine that I did not consider in the first book and that I am now going to have to address in the second, third and fourth (Yes people, I’m up to four now, and I may add more!)
But I’m getting ahead of myself again. It’s hard to cram 9 years worth of writing hell into one blog post. Maybe I should write a book about it? . . . *Groans* No, maybe not.
Right, so I had the idea. I started to write. I even produced quite a lot of story, which started to take shape over a number of months. I had an idea that it would be a sort of detailed gothic fantasy thing, like Gormenghast – with a full complement of idiosyncratic characters, all of whom lived in a kind of harmony with each other in the same palace and all of whom had a key part to play. The thing I always liked about Gormenghast was that you got to see the social hierarchy and interaction between characters. It starts in the bowels of the place and takes you all the way to the turrets, introducing you to newer and weirder people on the way. That’s what I wanted to do originally. It didn’t, of course, come out quite like that in the end and, if it had, I think it would only have been an obvious and cheesy rip-off of Peake’s much greater genius. No one would have loved me for doing it.
And then what happened next was that, somewhere in the initial writing phase, I gave up on it. As usually happened when I was younger and lazier and more easily distracted by other things, I got bored; I lost the thread of what I was doing, life got in the way, maybe something interesting came on TV. I don’t know, but, whatever happened, it got shelved for a while and the most I would do was pick it up and look at it every now and again and then put it back.
Finally, as I’ve mentioned above, I scrapped it, because it was terrible and because – here was the clincher – it was going to take a lot of WORK to put it all together into something that could actually be described as finished.
I don’t want you to think that I’m afraid of hard work. Because I’m not. I did a PhD for four and half years and, if nothing else, that was good grounding in the hardest of all hard work. But when I was in my early twenties I was something of a lay-about. I didn’t like being put out of my comfort zone or being forced to take great big strides forward into my future. I was also very depressed and I mostly just wanted to sleep and eat all day. So, it was only later, when I was being forced to take great big strides forward into my future with my PhD, that the story resurfaced in my head.
I remembered my characters and their stories long after I had junked the original pages, and they kept coming back to me, over and over again, like old friends revisiting me after an absence. And I would think about them and remember the story of their lives – but, this is the thing, I would remember it as if it was real, not as if it was just some silly story that I, in my infinite boredom, had made up. These were real people to me. Queen Ruby and Princess Crystal and the grouchy King Julius in their make-believe palace – the location of which, incidentally, I still had not fixed upon at that stage. The kingdom of Sapphiria only materialized when I re-wrote the story.
It was make-believe, and it had been badly constructed to begin with, but the story was still there in my head and it had enough dimension so that I could think of it as real – so I knew that there was something to it.
I have always told myself stories in my head. I’ll make up any number of scenarios in my imagination and slip away into them whenever real life bores me. It’s just how I cope. But it never occurred to me before that any of these real fantasy lands that I used for my own private holidays could really be stories, or that anyone else might one day be able to share in them. When I wrote stories before – when I was younger and trying earnestly to be a writer, I would always look for something outside of my own fantasy-addled mind and write something serious about the world. I would think: “Well, what do writers write about when they write?” I didn’t ask myself what I knew or what I liked, or what I was actually capable of describing – which would have been far more helpful.
And I’ll always remember the day it hit me that this story, about a fantasy palace inhabited by a dysfunctional royal family, was the one I should write down. I was driving in my car and I think I’d heard something on the radio, although I can’t remember what now. But it was something that reminded me of one of my characters. And I started, without even really thinking about it, to replay the scene that I’d written, bringing it to life in my head.
But, like I said, it wasn’t remembering words on a page. Instead it was more like a flashback. The real scene was playing out in my head and I was saying to myself: “Oh yeah, remember when Ruby had that affair with the Archbishop, and whatever happened with Persephone? Did she find out? And remember the evil Lord Mortimer? Yeah, he was great!” And suddenly it was real again. And I had a real fondness for it. And I knew that I had to write it.
I’m not saying I thought it would be any good. Although, of course, I had hopes and aspirations about getting it published. And, as time went on, I even allowed myself to believe, in a delusional kind of a way, that it would be an instant success and I would be hailed as the next J.K. Rowling (a comparison that I would, then, try to rebuff in the most worthy and modest way possible – because I am so humble. HA!) Of course this hasn’t happened, and probably never will. But, as I was re-constructing and editing my story, I did begin to think that I should just have fun with this and see where it went and that, even if I didn’t make shed loads of money off it, that would be enough.
Editing is hard though and what you see in the final work, which you can find on Amazon if you’re so inclined, is by no means what I just rattled off first, second, or even third time around. (Cheeky plug there, you might have noticed. But, let’s face it, you must know by now that the whole point of this blog post is to tell you all about my book. Really I should just have named it “Book Plug” and had done with it.)
I should also say that I re-wrote it with the intention of entering a competition that Terry Pratchett was running a couple of years ago, which is why the finished book is the way it is, I think. I did the bulk of the writing with Terry Pratchett somewhere in mind.
I’m not saying that I copied the Discworld – my world is not flat, and does not rest on the back of a giant turtle. And there are no wizards. Sorry to disappoint you, but there aren’t – I didn’t want to get that far into the realms of fantasy. What I did instead was to think, as the brief for the competition specified that I should, about what the world would be like if things had gone a different way – if something in history had happened to create an entirely new civilization so that the world was ours, but not quite ours; Terry Pratchett described it in the competition description as the world going down the wrong trouser leg of history, or something very like that. So, knowing that I still had to place my palace and royal family in a world that was not our own, I used this competition to ground what I already had and surround it with this wrong trouser legged history and I cast my mind back right back at the dawn of humanity, and thought about how prehistoric people discovered the world.
I then decided that, since early man took everything he needed from the environment in order to build the foundations of the world, it stood to reason that they would eventually start digging things out of the ground.
“So,” I thought. “If they’re digging stuff out of the ground, it stands to reason that they would eventually find rock, and in the rock, they could find precious stones.”
“And what do human beings with a propensity to greed and a passion for shiny things do when they see such precious stones?” said the cynical and far more prevalent part of my psyche. “They snatch at them. They horde them. And, if our own history is anything to go by, they attempt to hurt or kill anyone who tries to take their greedily horded wealth from them.”
We all know that money makes the world go round and whoever has the most money has the power. So that became the basis of my world.
In my world, the royal dynasties that ruled the main kingdom, and had power and influence in all corners of the world, took their power from the jewels that they owned and controlled. The Diamond dynasty came first, I decided, because diamonds are, more usually, the highest prized. And, due to this fact, that dynasty lasted for the first 1000 years. Then they were overthrown by the Emerald dynasty, when it was decided, finally, that emeralds could be worth more than diamonds, if enough people agreed and could force everybody else to agree at sword-point. Then other dynasties followed, usually taking over by the same means, until the Sapphirian royal line came into being. And this is the line that I describe most closely in the first book. King Julius is the last of the Sapphire kings, who have ruled for a century (our twentieth century) and he has a dilemma, because he has to organize an heir to his throne.
(I’ll leave you to read the book to find out what happens there.)
But, the problem with creating all this back story, re-writing history and jiggling about the world’s geography in the process, was that it needed to be explained properly. Thinking more seriously about how to explain my world to others, I constructed maps, designed family trees, and produced illustrations and cover designs for the book that were in keeping with all elements that had gone into creating the story.
I became something of a control freak about this and I was adamant that, since I had done all of this work, it should all go into the book, because what’s the point of having it all otherwise?
This was one of the many decisions that went into the production of the book. And I do remember the most important issue of all – which came towards the end of the process – was how the hell I was ever going to get it published. When I eventually had the final book, I wrote a proposal and sent it and a couple of sample chapters out to a publishing house. Unsurprisingly this had little effect. I knew very little about getting published at that point, but I have since discovered that it is a painful, arduous and usually unprofitable process, and it was one that I just didn’t want to waste time on.
The more I thought about it, the more self-publishing seemed appropriate – I knew other people who had done it and it seemed easy. Certainly, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that I could make a mark on the world just by being original and that this might even be quite fun.
The pictures were not very good in the first instance, but they got better over time, and the more I did, the more helpful I found them. In the beginning I wasn’t going to include them. I did them, initially, because I was trying to get a handle on my characters, thinking that it would be much easier to describe them if I drew them out first. But I enjoyed constructing them too. I liked the process of taking a few oval shapes on the paint-box on my computer and fashioning them into recognizable faces. It’s fun to see them emerge from the nothingness and the thing I love best is tweaking at the details of them until they look almost exactly like what I’ve got in my head.
My skill at this has certainly developed over the last couple of years and I think the inclusion has leant something to the overall work.
But getting it out there was not the end. I finished the book and I’m now writing the second, but I guess it’ll take some time before anyone really picks up on it – if they do at all. That’s more or less it, anyway: how I wrote the book, what it’s all meant to be about, and why the hell it took me so long. And I hope that a few of you will at least go and look at the novel, even if it is only a free extract on Amazon, and tell me what you think of it. I’m still going to write this stuff even if you all hate it, but it would be nice to know that someone’s reading it.
Thanks for sticking with me. Until the next time folks . . .
Wednesday 16 October 2013
SAD and Other Winter Miseries
There’s something about this time of year isn’t there? The season changes and the leaves fall off the trees and everything starts to die. Some people find this beautiful, and, in a way, it kind of is. But there’s also something unbelievably depressing about it – because it signals the onset of winter, in which there will be no warmth, and no light, and probably quite a lot of rain and snow.
I live in the UK – which is depressing enough in itself because it rains for about 89% of the time (specific amount, I know, but I thought 85 was too low and 90 might be pushing it) but it’s also October now – the time of year when it gets really cold and really dark and rains even harder. It’s the time just before Halloween, when the pumpkins appear in the shops alongside all the Christmas stuff that they insist on putting out on the shelves as early as September because, you know, people really want to buy Christmas wrapping paper and cheap mince pies at that time of year. Who wouldn’t, right?
So this is what starts to happen to me around this time of year. I become morose and start to feel like the life is being leeched out of the world. I don’t mean this in the simple way that everyone hates winter; I mean that I genuinely come to believe that the light is seeping, or bleeding out of the world and that it’ll never come back (I must know, somewhere in my head, that it will come back, but when I despair I can never see past the immediate).
Last year, before Christmas, I nearly killed myself because of it. There were other things going on then too, I should say, and these exacerbated the problem (I was failing my PhD, for one thing, which never does much for a person’s self-esteem), but the winter weather and continual darkness did not help either because I was working very hard and never seeing daylight and I felt like my life was very rapidly running away from me without me even having a chance to notice.
It was during that time that I started to feel that the world we now live in is really not conducive to happiness any more. The weather is going to continue to get worse, the darkness is going to continue to close in, but the world itself is gradually becoming more and more squeezed and pinched by circumstance and the truth of it is that, even if you don’t have a tendency towards depression, there is just nothing much left in the world to make people happy.
I am now dreading the end of this year because, despite several changes in my circumstances over the last few months, my life has not become better and I’m hard pressed to decide whether I’m worse off now than I was before. But that’s something else, and will only lead to me detouring into a long rambling moan about how awful my life is right now – so I won’t go there.
To get back to the point, then, the end of the year is depressing to me, not because it’s dark and cold, but because it serves as a physical reminder that there is just nothing pleasant left in the world. When it is light outside, it isn’t white light, it’s grey and drab and filtered through a sheet of driving, drizzling or just plain dirty rain. Everything’s wet and muddy and there’s a smell in the air; damp earth and leaf mulch.
But it’s not the weather that gets to me though – not really. This is only another thing that adds to the miserable atmosphere. It’s the dark that gets to me more than anything, or rather, the absence of proper light.
The only relief I’ve managed to find from this, in the past, is when I’ve gone out to the supermarket.
Ok, this is going to sound weird, but last year before Christmas I was spending a hell of a lot more time in the supermarket than anywhere else. It was like my personal haven – I would go there every single day to stare at the cheese aisles or the magazine racks, going largely unnoticed by everyone else but, all the time, in the pits of despair. I did this, just in case you were wondering, not because the supermarket is a particularly fascinating place, but because the lights in the supermarket are just the right shade of white to simulate proper light (and by “proper” I mean real, happy daylight sort of light.)
This is a marketing ploy – I know – used by supermarkets all over the Western and possibly also the Eastern world. They make the place look as inviting as possible using crafty lighting techniques and displays and it makes you feel like you’re in a happy place so you spend more money because you’re in a good mood. It’s a tactic. I know. But I totally fell for it last year.
Anyway, my point, really – aside from pointing out that supermarket chains cash in on people with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) – was to highlight that I have SAD and that it makes the last part of the year a pain in the arse *British expression* for me. I go through two or three months during which the year winds down and I become progressively more crazy and, by the time I get to Christmas, I usually just want to kill myself. I often spend Christmas Day hiding from other people because I really don’t want to get involved with their celebrations. People call me a scrooge, but it’s not hatred of Christmas that I feel, I actually have fond feelings about it. It’s just that, somehow, the bright blaze of joviality on Christmas Day is worse than all the darkness and crap that leads up to it. Because when it’s over I know I have to go back into the dark and cold and crap for two or three more months until it gets to spring – and I can’t handle that.
Getting used to it once is hard enough, getting a safe haven of light and joy and then going back into it again is quite another thing. For me, Christmas is a bit like Sundays used to be when I knew I had to get up for school the next day – the whole of Sunday was ruined by the thought of that; so the weekend, which should have been a nice time, was made horrible because it was only a short stopgap between horrible stretches of week.
If you know that more hell is coming your way then you can’t really enjoy heaven for a day can you?
So that’s how I deal with my SAD feelings. I avoid light and I get used to the dark, and I go quietly mad. Last year I spent most of Christmas lying on my bed staring up at my ceiling, waiting for it to be over. I think I had the radio on at one point. I couldn’t do much else. I didn’t want to do anything else.
I was so depressed that year and, as I said, I really seriously considered killing myself.
SAD is difficult, and I think that if I look over my life, I have always had it in some form or other. My fear of the dark probably comes from another source though – but that’s probably another topic. The SAD, however, has certainly become a lot worse in the last couple of years. And this is what I really want to talk about because I think that, as a global problem, SAD is spreading and worsening.
So, are you ready? . . . Here goes . . .
The reason we’re all so miserable is because the world is just worse now.
Simple thought, I’ll grant you. But it’s true.
People have far too many other problems to worry about now. The end of the year is no longer a slowing down time. There is no time to hibernate and make a cosy space in the dark. There is too much work to be done – saving the planet, repairing the economy, pandering to the demands of our various governments who want us to work harder and scrounge less. All of these pressures and worries become mixed in with the feeling of misery caused by the cold and dark – because weather and seasonal changes link to mood and because emotions become attached, very easily, to the things that go on around you. This is when suicide starts to look attractive. When it is not just one small thing that’s getting you down and which you can simply dismiss, but when it is everything in your life and in the world around you and there is, seemingly, no hope that it will ever be better. This is when you – or I, in this case – begin to question the point of it all.
My point here is not that SAD is bad – although it is – but that the world is not helping to alleviate it. Maybe because the world doesn’t understand it. It’s not just people moaning about the weather, it’s not just people looking at the world and feeling dissatisfied with it. It’s real despair.
Imagine that the world was ending and you were alone in the dark and shivering. That’s what it feels like. It’s frightening. I have been in floods of tears, screaming and twisting like a crazy person before now, simply because of this feeling. And it needs to be better understood, especially if you’re going to expect any sort of useful contribution from people at a time of year when they just want to crawl into a hole and not wake up again.
People need time to deal with things. And the world is just not an accepting place.
I live in the UK – which is depressing enough in itself because it rains for about 89% of the time (specific amount, I know, but I thought 85 was too low and 90 might be pushing it) but it’s also October now – the time of year when it gets really cold and really dark and rains even harder. It’s the time just before Halloween, when the pumpkins appear in the shops alongside all the Christmas stuff that they insist on putting out on the shelves as early as September because, you know, people really want to buy Christmas wrapping paper and cheap mince pies at that time of year. Who wouldn’t, right?
So this is what starts to happen to me around this time of year. I become morose and start to feel like the life is being leeched out of the world. I don’t mean this in the simple way that everyone hates winter; I mean that I genuinely come to believe that the light is seeping, or bleeding out of the world and that it’ll never come back (I must know, somewhere in my head, that it will come back, but when I despair I can never see past the immediate).
Last year, before Christmas, I nearly killed myself because of it. There were other things going on then too, I should say, and these exacerbated the problem (I was failing my PhD, for one thing, which never does much for a person’s self-esteem), but the winter weather and continual darkness did not help either because I was working very hard and never seeing daylight and I felt like my life was very rapidly running away from me without me even having a chance to notice.
It was during that time that I started to feel that the world we now live in is really not conducive to happiness any more. The weather is going to continue to get worse, the darkness is going to continue to close in, but the world itself is gradually becoming more and more squeezed and pinched by circumstance and the truth of it is that, even if you don’t have a tendency towards depression, there is just nothing much left in the world to make people happy.
I am now dreading the end of this year because, despite several changes in my circumstances over the last few months, my life has not become better and I’m hard pressed to decide whether I’m worse off now than I was before. But that’s something else, and will only lead to me detouring into a long rambling moan about how awful my life is right now – so I won’t go there.
To get back to the point, then, the end of the year is depressing to me, not because it’s dark and cold, but because it serves as a physical reminder that there is just nothing pleasant left in the world. When it is light outside, it isn’t white light, it’s grey and drab and filtered through a sheet of driving, drizzling or just plain dirty rain. Everything’s wet and muddy and there’s a smell in the air; damp earth and leaf mulch.
But it’s not the weather that gets to me though – not really. This is only another thing that adds to the miserable atmosphere. It’s the dark that gets to me more than anything, or rather, the absence of proper light.
The only relief I’ve managed to find from this, in the past, is when I’ve gone out to the supermarket.
Ok, this is going to sound weird, but last year before Christmas I was spending a hell of a lot more time in the supermarket than anywhere else. It was like my personal haven – I would go there every single day to stare at the cheese aisles or the magazine racks, going largely unnoticed by everyone else but, all the time, in the pits of despair. I did this, just in case you were wondering, not because the supermarket is a particularly fascinating place, but because the lights in the supermarket are just the right shade of white to simulate proper light (and by “proper” I mean real, happy daylight sort of light.)
This is a marketing ploy – I know – used by supermarkets all over the Western and possibly also the Eastern world. They make the place look as inviting as possible using crafty lighting techniques and displays and it makes you feel like you’re in a happy place so you spend more money because you’re in a good mood. It’s a tactic. I know. But I totally fell for it last year.
Anyway, my point, really – aside from pointing out that supermarket chains cash in on people with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) – was to highlight that I have SAD and that it makes the last part of the year a pain in the arse *British expression* for me. I go through two or three months during which the year winds down and I become progressively more crazy and, by the time I get to Christmas, I usually just want to kill myself. I often spend Christmas Day hiding from other people because I really don’t want to get involved with their celebrations. People call me a scrooge, but it’s not hatred of Christmas that I feel, I actually have fond feelings about it. It’s just that, somehow, the bright blaze of joviality on Christmas Day is worse than all the darkness and crap that leads up to it. Because when it’s over I know I have to go back into the dark and cold and crap for two or three more months until it gets to spring – and I can’t handle that.
Getting used to it once is hard enough, getting a safe haven of light and joy and then going back into it again is quite another thing. For me, Christmas is a bit like Sundays used to be when I knew I had to get up for school the next day – the whole of Sunday was ruined by the thought of that; so the weekend, which should have been a nice time, was made horrible because it was only a short stopgap between horrible stretches of week.
If you know that more hell is coming your way then you can’t really enjoy heaven for a day can you?
So that’s how I deal with my SAD feelings. I avoid light and I get used to the dark, and I go quietly mad. Last year I spent most of Christmas lying on my bed staring up at my ceiling, waiting for it to be over. I think I had the radio on at one point. I couldn’t do much else. I didn’t want to do anything else.
I was so depressed that year and, as I said, I really seriously considered killing myself.
SAD is difficult, and I think that if I look over my life, I have always had it in some form or other. My fear of the dark probably comes from another source though – but that’s probably another topic. The SAD, however, has certainly become a lot worse in the last couple of years. And this is what I really want to talk about because I think that, as a global problem, SAD is spreading and worsening.
So, are you ready? . . . Here goes . . .
The reason we’re all so miserable is because the world is just worse now.
Simple thought, I’ll grant you. But it’s true.
People have far too many other problems to worry about now. The end of the year is no longer a slowing down time. There is no time to hibernate and make a cosy space in the dark. There is too much work to be done – saving the planet, repairing the economy, pandering to the demands of our various governments who want us to work harder and scrounge less. All of these pressures and worries become mixed in with the feeling of misery caused by the cold and dark – because weather and seasonal changes link to mood and because emotions become attached, very easily, to the things that go on around you. This is when suicide starts to look attractive. When it is not just one small thing that’s getting you down and which you can simply dismiss, but when it is everything in your life and in the world around you and there is, seemingly, no hope that it will ever be better. This is when you – or I, in this case – begin to question the point of it all.
My point here is not that SAD is bad – although it is – but that the world is not helping to alleviate it. Maybe because the world doesn’t understand it. It’s not just people moaning about the weather, it’s not just people looking at the world and feeling dissatisfied with it. It’s real despair.
Imagine that the world was ending and you were alone in the dark and shivering. That’s what it feels like. It’s frightening. I have been in floods of tears, screaming and twisting like a crazy person before now, simply because of this feeling. And it needs to be better understood, especially if you’re going to expect any sort of useful contribution from people at a time of year when they just want to crawl into a hole and not wake up again.
People need time to deal with things. And the world is just not an accepting place.
Monday 14 October 2013
Mental Illness: The Reason I Write
You might wonder why I’ve chosen this as a subject for a blog post. Aside from anything else it seems to be something that everyone is writing about right now. Writers all over the world seem to be really picking up on the depression thing; probably because, for writers, it is such a big thing. You spend lots of time on your own, talking to yourself in your head, never quite knowing if what you’re doing is any good or if you’re just going mad, quietly, on your own and wondering if, eventually, when you release your work to the world, this madness will be exposed and you will have to go away somewhere to be treated for whatever it is that’s wrong with you.
Being a writer, and being introverted in the way that writers often are, makes you very easy to label under the banners of “mental illness” or “depression”. And you can never quite prove, even to yourself, that you do not deserve these labels.
Well, in the spirit of all that, I’m going to treat you to a description of how mental illness has affected my own life and the things that I write. I do this, both by way of introduction into my slightly odd imagination and generally weird psyche, and in order to explain the ways that depression and madness – whatever its form or voracity – can twist people in really quite terrible ways and, if you’re lucky, lead to creativity.
(I say “if you’re lucky” because many people are not lucky enough to find or make use of an outlet like this, but I should also point out the irony here which is that anything creative you might do as an artist/writer/whatever is only a way of venting some of the frustration you feel when you know that nothing can fix what’s wrong; this is a far more serious and important concern.)
The process of writing is cathartic in a way. And this is, in part, why I write.
I should say, at this point, that I am not have a mental illness (at least not an official one that has been diagnosed and medicated) – but I was brought up by a single mother who has suffered from schizophrenia for nearly three decades. To say that she has twisted me up a bit might sound unfair, but I think this is probably true.
I will try to explain this further in a moment. But, if you look at most of my work, you will see mother-daughter relationships running all through. You may even become quite bored with how many of my characters hate, complain about, or generally just want to kill their mothers. This is not just a recurring theme, it’s a fixation.
I only really noticed this after I’d put most of it up on Amazon – but I think the thought had probably occurred to me before that I was harping slightly on this. It’s true. I write about my mother a lot. But I do that because my attachment to her is the biggest, strongest, most complicated, and least satisfying relationship I have ever had in my life. And I think that it is only when you write that you realize just how crazy and screwed up you’ve become throughout your life. Because everything you write – whether you want to admit it or not – is just you in another form. You can never escape your own voice.
I, however, might really be crazy, because it is not only my voice in my head but also my mother’s and – at the risk of sounding like a total nutcase – I can’t ever get rid of that.
Living with a schizophrenic is not easy. (NB. I make no bones about the fact that being one must be bloody hard as well. But living with one, especially when you are their only child and you have very few other people to help you survive, is really not easy.)
I’m not trying to make any sort of disparaging remarks about people with mental illnesses, nor am I trying to inspire fear of them – because this is also a major problem and many different charitable organizations have had to set themselves up to sort that out.
But my mother really did drive me crazy in a way; because her view of things was so distorted and because she was the one in charge of explaining things to me.
I grew up being spoon-fed the paranoid delusions that were inside my mother’s head and, as you can imagine, I grew up rather confused and really quite terrified of everything. Your mother probably told you that there were no monsters under your bed. Mine not only did nothing to dispel these childish fears, but she even reinforced them by insisting that there were monsters, and that she had monsters – REAL ones – all around her; I would then be further informed that, as the only other person there who might be able to see them for what they were, I had to help her defend herself.
She was convinced that the neighbours had sinister intentions, or that people in the street were going to hurt her because they were looking at her strangely, or that the doctor was trying to kill her with the new tablets he wanted to put her on.
I think, when people very patiently explained to her that these things were not true, and she’d had some time to think about it, she was able to realize that she was not seeing things clearly. But it would take time and hindsight to reach this calm point after the paranoia storm.
As a child, I would be my mother’s confidante, and primary means of support and I would have to listen to her because, as a child, I had no choice.
What became a real problem, however, was that I also had no choice but to believe what she said; as a child, I had to learn from her.
This, in case you were wondering, is probably where my twisted and really quite odd imagination comes from.
It was only when I grew up a bit more and I started to see the real world and interact with different kinds of people, that I saw that my mother was wrong about a lot of things. She looked at life as if she was looking down a kaleidoscope. One twist and the picture changed, and then another twist and it would change again. And she would always believe what she saw because she saw it. But, while she was busy being twisted and turned that way, the rest of us were just seeing reality.
It was weird being a kid in my house because I saw everything from two sides, like a double-think. I saw what my mother saw and I saw how things actually were; and I knew that I was supposed to believe my mother – so I did – but I also knew what was real, and I was grounded in that.
Hence, split level brain.
I saw two ways at the same time and both were true because they had to be.
It’s hard to sort that out. And I didn’t even begin to sort it out for a long time. And I’m still only just starting to realize now how powerful my mother’s lies and delusions were for me and how much of myself and the way I think about life has been screwed up by those early years.
She’s still twisting me now, in fact, but that’s another story.
My family is quite small, and most of us don’t get on so well. I’m an only child, as I said, and my mentally ill mother makes it a point to remind me every now and again that I’m all she has left to live for and that she can’t be expected to manage without support.
But, the truth is that it’s hard for me to love my mother any more because of the continued distrust that I find myself receiving from her. We like to think that, over many years of building a relationship with someone – especially someone to whom we are supposed to be so tightly bonded – that there would be a trust element there; but when your mother is schizophrenic, this trust never builds, no matter what you do. The voices or nagging doubts or whatever it is that person has in their head will always be stronger than you. You can’t make a schizophrenic person love and trust you unconditionally, because they don’t think that way about anyone. They will find it just as easy to see you as a threat as anybody else, and they will quite happily treat you like a criminal or a dangerous stranger without the slightest provocation. In a nutshell, then, their opinion of you turns on a dime.
I had some very scary experiences growing up. My mother would sometimes flip completely – sometimes in the middle of an argument and sometimes in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation – and then I would see just how dangerous she could, potentially, be. Because when she lost herself that way, she lost all ability to see reality, and she would look straight through me as if I was not there. I might easily have been a burglar in my own house. That was very frightening because it made me realize that being her daughter, and being the only person in the world who was precious to her – as she sometimes said I was – was never going to be enough.
And, to come to the point, it is as a result of all this that I have become a fractured, twisted, and terribly insecure person. I can say this unequivocally, because I’ve spent most of my life trying to make my mother love and trust me, without success. I did this by being a good girl; always doing what I was told; never having much of a life as a result. And, perhaps unsurprisingly then, I have suffered with depression for most of my life. I have seen psychiatrists, I have contemplated suicide many times (although I’ve only tried it twice), and I have done just about anything and everything I could to try to get myself out of the nightmare that has been my life for twenty-eight years.
So far, the only thing I’ve found that has worked is fantasy. I dream, and I create stories in my head.
I never used to write them down. I’ve spent years talking to imaginary friends in my head, creating personas for myself, morphing stories from television shows and books and putting myself into the one of the roles – not usually the main role though, which is probably due to some kind of inferiority thing. But, anyway, all of that probably sounds pretty weird. I talk to myself a lot, you see, which they reckon is a sign of madness – but it’s how I make sense of things. With my mother around, I never had much space to do any real talking – all her voices and worries take up all the room, so mine have to go somewhere else where they won’t be in the way.
But that’s it. That was what this blog post was supposed to be in aid of – explaining why I write and outlining all the psychological twists and turns that have contributed to my work. You could say that this is my way of saying “HELLO” to the world. So you’ll all know I’m here and that I need to write what I write because I need to escape; because I really hate real life.
Real life is hard, and thinking about it is depressing. And I hate having to sort out what’s real and what isn’t from the jumbled mess that my mother creates for me every time I talk to her. So, rather than deal with all the nightmares there, I write/read and live fiction because, in fiction, I know where I am. I am in my own imagination and all the rules are made by me, all the images are mine, all the people do what I want them to do.
Real life sees me getting pushed around by people whose logic and sense of reality are completely topsy turvy. I often compare my life to Alice in Wonderland, because I seem to be surrounded by mad-people. (I even wrote a short story called “Sentence First” that is underpinned by this comparison; it can be found in my collection, Oddities, where there are several stories that relate to my life.)
I’m rambling a little now, and I know you probably thought you were going to read some straight-forward piece about the issue of mental illness in the modern world – possibly quoting statistics and symptoms, or issuing an earnest plea for more understanding. (None of which I’m against, I should add. Such straight-forward pieces are great and usually have important points to make.) But, sadly I’m not that much of an expert on the real, widespread problem of mental illness; I only know my mother and myself.
I also don’t want to claim that I was abused as a child, because I think this would be hard to prove and I doubt that many people would have much sympathy with me – there are children being raped, beaten and murdered all over the world, so the fact that my mother told me I owed her something because my birth ruined her life and drove her, literally, crazy, might not seem so bad to some people. No, I wasn’t abused or beaten or nearly killed as a child. But it was bad being my mother’s child. It hurt. And I do not, at any point in my life, remember being very happy.
I still suffer very badly from depression and most of my life has seen me just trying to get through things. I live from day to day thinking of all the potentially horrible things ahead of me and calculating how much time it will take before it will be over so I can get onto the next stretch of time in which, if I’m lucky, things will just plateau out and be kind of ok.
I’m so used to doing that now that I’ve got comfy in this pattern. I haven’t even got the inclination to kill myself any more – not because I don’t want to, in fact I keep thinking that I probably should, but just because it seems to me that, since I’ve done this carrying on thing for so long, I might as well just keep on with it. Dying would be as much of an upheaval as changing my life.
This was not meant to depress you, but it is meant to describe a little bit about my life to you, so that you might understand where some of my weird ideas have come from. I wanted to explain how I have lived with depression all my life, but I also wanted to explain that that depression is an off-shoot of someone else’s mental illness and, while the resulting stories and all the other strange and unusual things I do in my life, might (if I’m lucky) constitute some sort of worthwhile achievement, I will really have achieved nothing because I still won’t feel better.
So there’ll be more writing to come. More stories, more weirdness and this will be because I need it. The world might try to claim my body, but my mind is free. And I have to straighten it out somehow.
Being a writer, and being introverted in the way that writers often are, makes you very easy to label under the banners of “mental illness” or “depression”. And you can never quite prove, even to yourself, that you do not deserve these labels.
Well, in the spirit of all that, I’m going to treat you to a description of how mental illness has affected my own life and the things that I write. I do this, both by way of introduction into my slightly odd imagination and generally weird psyche, and in order to explain the ways that depression and madness – whatever its form or voracity – can twist people in really quite terrible ways and, if you’re lucky, lead to creativity.
(I say “if you’re lucky” because many people are not lucky enough to find or make use of an outlet like this, but I should also point out the irony here which is that anything creative you might do as an artist/writer/whatever is only a way of venting some of the frustration you feel when you know that nothing can fix what’s wrong; this is a far more serious and important concern.)
The process of writing is cathartic in a way. And this is, in part, why I write.
I should say, at this point, that I am not have a mental illness (at least not an official one that has been diagnosed and medicated) – but I was brought up by a single mother who has suffered from schizophrenia for nearly three decades. To say that she has twisted me up a bit might sound unfair, but I think this is probably true.
I will try to explain this further in a moment. But, if you look at most of my work, you will see mother-daughter relationships running all through. You may even become quite bored with how many of my characters hate, complain about, or generally just want to kill their mothers. This is not just a recurring theme, it’s a fixation.
I only really noticed this after I’d put most of it up on Amazon – but I think the thought had probably occurred to me before that I was harping slightly on this. It’s true. I write about my mother a lot. But I do that because my attachment to her is the biggest, strongest, most complicated, and least satisfying relationship I have ever had in my life. And I think that it is only when you write that you realize just how crazy and screwed up you’ve become throughout your life. Because everything you write – whether you want to admit it or not – is just you in another form. You can never escape your own voice.
I, however, might really be crazy, because it is not only my voice in my head but also my mother’s and – at the risk of sounding like a total nutcase – I can’t ever get rid of that.
Living with a schizophrenic is not easy. (NB. I make no bones about the fact that being one must be bloody hard as well. But living with one, especially when you are their only child and you have very few other people to help you survive, is really not easy.)
I’m not trying to make any sort of disparaging remarks about people with mental illnesses, nor am I trying to inspire fear of them – because this is also a major problem and many different charitable organizations have had to set themselves up to sort that out.
But my mother really did drive me crazy in a way; because her view of things was so distorted and because she was the one in charge of explaining things to me.
I grew up being spoon-fed the paranoid delusions that were inside my mother’s head and, as you can imagine, I grew up rather confused and really quite terrified of everything. Your mother probably told you that there were no monsters under your bed. Mine not only did nothing to dispel these childish fears, but she even reinforced them by insisting that there were monsters, and that she had monsters – REAL ones – all around her; I would then be further informed that, as the only other person there who might be able to see them for what they were, I had to help her defend herself.
She was convinced that the neighbours had sinister intentions, or that people in the street were going to hurt her because they were looking at her strangely, or that the doctor was trying to kill her with the new tablets he wanted to put her on.
I think, when people very patiently explained to her that these things were not true, and she’d had some time to think about it, she was able to realize that she was not seeing things clearly. But it would take time and hindsight to reach this calm point after the paranoia storm.
As a child, I would be my mother’s confidante, and primary means of support and I would have to listen to her because, as a child, I had no choice.
What became a real problem, however, was that I also had no choice but to believe what she said; as a child, I had to learn from her.
This, in case you were wondering, is probably where my twisted and really quite odd imagination comes from.
It was only when I grew up a bit more and I started to see the real world and interact with different kinds of people, that I saw that my mother was wrong about a lot of things. She looked at life as if she was looking down a kaleidoscope. One twist and the picture changed, and then another twist and it would change again. And she would always believe what she saw because she saw it. But, while she was busy being twisted and turned that way, the rest of us were just seeing reality.
It was weird being a kid in my house because I saw everything from two sides, like a double-think. I saw what my mother saw and I saw how things actually were; and I knew that I was supposed to believe my mother – so I did – but I also knew what was real, and I was grounded in that.
Hence, split level brain.
I saw two ways at the same time and both were true because they had to be.
It’s hard to sort that out. And I didn’t even begin to sort it out for a long time. And I’m still only just starting to realize now how powerful my mother’s lies and delusions were for me and how much of myself and the way I think about life has been screwed up by those early years.
She’s still twisting me now, in fact, but that’s another story.
My family is quite small, and most of us don’t get on so well. I’m an only child, as I said, and my mentally ill mother makes it a point to remind me every now and again that I’m all she has left to live for and that she can’t be expected to manage without support.
But, the truth is that it’s hard for me to love my mother any more because of the continued distrust that I find myself receiving from her. We like to think that, over many years of building a relationship with someone – especially someone to whom we are supposed to be so tightly bonded – that there would be a trust element there; but when your mother is schizophrenic, this trust never builds, no matter what you do. The voices or nagging doubts or whatever it is that person has in their head will always be stronger than you. You can’t make a schizophrenic person love and trust you unconditionally, because they don’t think that way about anyone. They will find it just as easy to see you as a threat as anybody else, and they will quite happily treat you like a criminal or a dangerous stranger without the slightest provocation. In a nutshell, then, their opinion of you turns on a dime.
I had some very scary experiences growing up. My mother would sometimes flip completely – sometimes in the middle of an argument and sometimes in the middle of a perfectly ordinary conversation – and then I would see just how dangerous she could, potentially, be. Because when she lost herself that way, she lost all ability to see reality, and she would look straight through me as if I was not there. I might easily have been a burglar in my own house. That was very frightening because it made me realize that being her daughter, and being the only person in the world who was precious to her – as she sometimes said I was – was never going to be enough.
And, to come to the point, it is as a result of all this that I have become a fractured, twisted, and terribly insecure person. I can say this unequivocally, because I’ve spent most of my life trying to make my mother love and trust me, without success. I did this by being a good girl; always doing what I was told; never having much of a life as a result. And, perhaps unsurprisingly then, I have suffered with depression for most of my life. I have seen psychiatrists, I have contemplated suicide many times (although I’ve only tried it twice), and I have done just about anything and everything I could to try to get myself out of the nightmare that has been my life for twenty-eight years.
So far, the only thing I’ve found that has worked is fantasy. I dream, and I create stories in my head.
I never used to write them down. I’ve spent years talking to imaginary friends in my head, creating personas for myself, morphing stories from television shows and books and putting myself into the one of the roles – not usually the main role though, which is probably due to some kind of inferiority thing. But, anyway, all of that probably sounds pretty weird. I talk to myself a lot, you see, which they reckon is a sign of madness – but it’s how I make sense of things. With my mother around, I never had much space to do any real talking – all her voices and worries take up all the room, so mine have to go somewhere else where they won’t be in the way.
But that’s it. That was what this blog post was supposed to be in aid of – explaining why I write and outlining all the psychological twists and turns that have contributed to my work. You could say that this is my way of saying “HELLO” to the world. So you’ll all know I’m here and that I need to write what I write because I need to escape; because I really hate real life.
Real life is hard, and thinking about it is depressing. And I hate having to sort out what’s real and what isn’t from the jumbled mess that my mother creates for me every time I talk to her. So, rather than deal with all the nightmares there, I write/read and live fiction because, in fiction, I know where I am. I am in my own imagination and all the rules are made by me, all the images are mine, all the people do what I want them to do.
Real life sees me getting pushed around by people whose logic and sense of reality are completely topsy turvy. I often compare my life to Alice in Wonderland, because I seem to be surrounded by mad-people. (I even wrote a short story called “Sentence First” that is underpinned by this comparison; it can be found in my collection, Oddities, where there are several stories that relate to my life.)
I’m rambling a little now, and I know you probably thought you were going to read some straight-forward piece about the issue of mental illness in the modern world – possibly quoting statistics and symptoms, or issuing an earnest plea for more understanding. (None of which I’m against, I should add. Such straight-forward pieces are great and usually have important points to make.) But, sadly I’m not that much of an expert on the real, widespread problem of mental illness; I only know my mother and myself.
I also don’t want to claim that I was abused as a child, because I think this would be hard to prove and I doubt that many people would have much sympathy with me – there are children being raped, beaten and murdered all over the world, so the fact that my mother told me I owed her something because my birth ruined her life and drove her, literally, crazy, might not seem so bad to some people. No, I wasn’t abused or beaten or nearly killed as a child. But it was bad being my mother’s child. It hurt. And I do not, at any point in my life, remember being very happy.
I still suffer very badly from depression and most of my life has seen me just trying to get through things. I live from day to day thinking of all the potentially horrible things ahead of me and calculating how much time it will take before it will be over so I can get onto the next stretch of time in which, if I’m lucky, things will just plateau out and be kind of ok.
I’m so used to doing that now that I’ve got comfy in this pattern. I haven’t even got the inclination to kill myself any more – not because I don’t want to, in fact I keep thinking that I probably should, but just because it seems to me that, since I’ve done this carrying on thing for so long, I might as well just keep on with it. Dying would be as much of an upheaval as changing my life.
This was not meant to depress you, but it is meant to describe a little bit about my life to you, so that you might understand where some of my weird ideas have come from. I wanted to explain how I have lived with depression all my life, but I also wanted to explain that that depression is an off-shoot of someone else’s mental illness and, while the resulting stories and all the other strange and unusual things I do in my life, might (if I’m lucky) constitute some sort of worthwhile achievement, I will really have achieved nothing because I still won’t feel better.
So there’ll be more writing to come. More stories, more weirdness and this will be because I need it. The world might try to claim my body, but my mind is free. And I have to straighten it out somehow.
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