So, I've had a pretty grim week. I've been studying with the OU now for about 6 months completing a Creative Writing Module. I was excited to begin with although realistic enough to know that I was going to find it difficult. I've previously had two attempts at a local course and managed to complete it the second time around but this is much more intense- more demanding.
I registered with enthusiasm, wanting to take my writing to another level. I knew it was homespun, instinctive and chaotic. It pours out of me most of the time and I don't stop to correct, edit or shape what I write. There are also dry periods when I have nothing to say. I shut myself away behind iron curtains and nothing gets in or out. But just before the course began my father wrote to me (see earlier post: Hurricane Reality) and my enthusiasm faltered then stalled. I wanted to hide away and lick my wounds, not complete a course that demands so much honesty, but it had been paid for and I couldn't bear my life to be curtailed any more by his actions so I pressed on.
Now, 6 months into the course I am struggling but determined to make it to the end despite all my dreams hanging from me in tatters. I am average so far and sometimes above average - but not brilliant, not by any stretch and my inability to handle criticism has led me to one of my alters - IsaBell. We are busy trying to get to know each other and to change.
I don't know if IsaBell is entirely happy about the focus she is getting, preferring to keep her defences and ways of managing separate from the rest of us - after all we've relied on her often enough and she wants to be ready for action. I've been happy in the past to throw her cheap promises and vague assurances that one day everything will be fine, that we will in some cosmic way be compensated for the shit life we've endured (which is just a way of avoiding grief actually) and that one day her strength and brilliance will be noticed by the world.
She in turn has kept her feelings secret, ploughing through difficult situations when everybody else inside has lost hope and survival is looking doubtful. IsaBell is brilliant to me, she is strong and has endured some of the most degrading moments of our life; physical abuse, sexual abuse and in teenage years, emotional abuse, when without her all sense of self would have been annihilated. I don't say that lightly or to be dramatic. She has helped us to feel as though we had a sense of agency when actually we were powerless. She became the 'best' abused child she could be, did things just the way 'they' wanted. She comforted my mother who was threatening to kill herself. IsaBell with her intelligence and quick thinking kept us and my mother safe (and alive). I want to acknowledge her here because there is so few places she can be appreciated.
Unfortunately though IsaBell functions on adrenalin, by shutting out everything emotional and functioning like a robot. This it turns out is not the road to creative brilliance! If (or when) IsaBell takes over I start to write as if floating above real life. I refuse to let myself feel anything gritty or painful and our pieces become trite and abstract even though they start out as . Then they get criticised and IsaBell is distraught. She only turns up in the first place because she wants us to get through the course, to survive it, to cope with the exposure. And then because I let her take control we end up with writing that is trite. But my life is not TRITE! It's shitty and dirty, gruelling and raw. It's not Trite! If it was trite I wouldn't have needed IsaBell in the first place.
My partner has suggested- more than once - that I write about less emotive subjects, something that isn't motivated by my past but I wonder 'what is the point of that?' I expect it would stop the need for IsaBell to appear but at what cost? My past is my goldmine, the place I can unearth something unique, something infused with emotion. To write about something else is like using a butter knife to carve a chicken when I have in my possession a sharp, glittering knife. It's confusing and each step seems to be a battle between different parts of me.
There is a strong desire to be seen. To write about my life - just as it is but then when I do IsaBell is needed. That's the rub I suppose, the ambivalence that keeps me trudging forwards despite the day schools and the forums fullof perky students all enjoying themselves and making me feel alien, like I'm some thick dullard who can't keep up with normal folk. They seem to write for pleasure. seem able to draw on their memories of childhood without becoming soaked in shame.
I suppose I write to know I am alive. To hear one voice, on paper, telling me the truth. It turns the stagnant and blocked bog of my life experiences into running water. It filters out the debris and allows energy to run through my body.
I can't stop writing, I can't give up. When I float away from my body that is slumped over a computer crying in frustration because the brain has frozen in fear of someone reading my description of my life I know it would be justified. But nobody broke out of chains without pain. It takes time and whilst I have to stop and unravel metres of cold, heavy chains to unblock my writing I think ultimately it is worth it because I am not only learning to write, I am learning to be all of me.
