Made Up
She told me she liked the term “Lifecrash”. And then she apologised for that, knowing what it must mean to me, even though I hadn’t told her.
She needn’t have apologised. I was properly “made up”, as a character of mine might put it, if I let her speak. I’d got a response from a writer — on her blog — about writing. I was writing about writing, to a writer, and engaging with the community. A step up, I thought, from writing on my own at the laptop. Splurging words onto the virtual page with no real sense of sending it out anywhere.
They say, these people who like saying such things, that writing isn’t the best thing for mental health. Oh, really, they do. I’d been told that in “Group”, as we all called it. The therapy has a name, but I don’t expect many will remember it. What I do remember is saying how I’d started writing again, after so many years without even trying, and how important this was to me. And Trevor — let’s call him Trevor — the older of the two therapists who were apparently needed to keep us in order, had given me the cross-eyed concerned look. Cross-eyed because he was always checking in on the others in the circle, to make sure they’d agree with whatever the narrative was this time.
“Writing’s a very solitary thing,” he told us, with the same self-assurance he’d said everything. If you’ve worked in a supermarket, he knows all about stock ordering and the layout of the aisles. If you’ve been found face down in your own vomit surrounded by pill bottles, he knows all about that, too. Disapprovingly, of course, but writing, for some reason, really got his proverbials. I expect he’s had a go himself in the past. Been rejected, possibly. Of course, that’s mostly to make me feel better, but at least I know that now, and without his help, too.
“Do you think that’s wise?” he’d asked, making out that coming to Group was a big deal for all of us — he’d always include the others when he really wanted some heft behind his pronouncements.
He’s asking me, in Group, if I think something is wise. Given the power relationship, and the emphasis on socialising and work — mostly work — as the means to cure us of our multifarious ills, there’s no way I’ll win the argument. Besides, he’s already got Dani and Claire and Ailment-Steve to give me their pitying looks.
Another nutter, they’re thinking. Another fantasist.
But I persevered. Yes. Yes, it’s a very good thing. It’s about communication. It’s about putting into words those things that had only ever been at the very edge of your consciousness. Given everything that had gone wrong in my life — a breakdown brought on by overwork and underthinking — and given — God, did I say this? — how sitting in that circle hadn’t even come anywhere close to working this stuff out, it seemed like a good bet to me. Worth a punt, as another character of mine might say. Someone who didn’t exist before the “Lifecrash”.
Trevor tutted, gave it the whole biro tapping on the teeth thing he’d do when he was really disapproving, and eventually he allowed the conversation to move on. Something desperately important about politics and Donald Trump and Brexit and things that we couldn’t do anything about right there, any of us, and yet were somehow worth our time and our worry.
And I started writing. And, without knowing it, I didn’t do the solitary thing — I sought out others. I signed up for writers’ blogs. I posted thoughts, before scampering away and hiding behind my firewall, frightened of response but still there — there — putting out again, as I’d done before the chronic stress almost certainly brought on by years of doing things that cut against everything I believe in.
And I post — tentatively, tentatively — on one blog, and I mention the “Lifecrash”. I try to explore what had really happened, and why writing is important to me, and I get a response and a connection and, even if I’ve reached only one person, and even if it was only one word that attempted to capture something profound, maybe for the first time in decades, I feel something that I haven’t felt when sitting in those damp, peeling NHS therapy rooms. And I know Trevor’s wrong about the solitary thing, and — yeah — I’m made up. Properly made up. But the writing community, and its power when you reach out and you’re honest and you share, that, I know, most definitely isn’t.
Which is a shame, because only some of this is true.
