On writing

And why I think I'm back at it

I miss it: the writing, the act of pouring the day’s events from the full jug of the brain.

Somehow, everything that happened made more sense - even when it made no sense at all (especially when it made no sense at all?) - when I pinned the abstract and temporal firmly to a page. Creating structure through syntax and paragraph meant wrangling and handling memories and events until they took shape as something recognisable (if not always totally understandable).

I tell myself there’s no time for writing now. There are instead two small children, and reading homework, and post-nursery snacks. A dog who would always like another walk. A house that’s quite clearly a home in the least fashionable of ways, with finger paintings pinned to the fridge and a fine layer of dust on all the skirting boards (don’t look any closer, whatever you do). A full time job, where occasionally I write but never in the way I crave. A husband, a neglected piano, a horse (not my own) whom I don’t see nearly enough, a terrible tsundoku habit, a garden going wild.

But of course there’s time. There’s always time, really, if you force yourself to find it. There are snatches, here and there. Train journeys into the office - not every day any more but still, they’re just as long as they used to be. A few evenings a week spent mindlessly scrolling on the phone while the tv plays something American and forgettable. The twenty minutes after the alarm goes, sacrificing hopeful, peaceful productive moments before the children, fresh from bed, warm and toast-scented, pad along the landing, all for a short, forgettable stay under the covers where - just for now - no one is asking anything of me, even myself. Even the occasional hour where I’ve drawn the long straw, and Husband chauffeurs Children to various parties leaving me alone in the quiet, when I inevitably crumple into the sofa and stare at the middle distance, or take the crossword to the local coffee roastery where I tell myself I’ll spend an hour using my brain, only to find myself staring emptily at other people, wondering what they’re avoiding on a Saturday afternoon.

So it’s not the lack of time, not really. While there’s not as much of it going spare as there once was, pockets exist to be found.

It goes a bit deeper than that, if I’m honest. It’s more about other things that certainly are now lacking: practice (can I do this any more? Can my post-matrescence brain remember how to mould the words to my liking?), and content (what on earth is there to write about? The days of living for the copy seem long gone) and confidence (even if I did drum it up, who wants to read it anyway?).

Mostly, really, I suppose, it comes down to a very gentle, low-lying fear of not being able or good enough or somehow otherwise qualified to put myself down on the page. And fear so often isn’t a good reason not to do a thing. So, here we are. Pouring.