Category: Creative pursuits

2020 vision

30 April 2021

Prompt: Write what you’ve been putting off.

I made this work in February 2021 as part of my Storytelling Lab course. I had no plan for it, I just drew it haphazardly in 45 minutes, crying most of the time. I’d put it off to the last minute out of dread.

The prompt had been: create a graphic novel about your pandemic experience. My stomach sank when I read it. Mine had been amazing until it suddenly really wasn’t. The person who I thought I was building something with, who I was spending every day with, and who was asking me to make certain, increasingly quite troubling sacrifices, in the name of his family, ended our relationship by turning up at my apartment unannounced to demand his keys back. 2 weeks before Christmas.

He refused to talk to me inside: instead he screamed at me in the street that it was over, that he could never trust me again, that our lives were on different paths. ‘Take care’. Months spent in each others’ pockets (through a pandemic), and it was over in 5, maybe 7, brutal minutes. I never heard from him again.

I don’t mean to sound flippant when I say the whole experience was traumatic. I know many people have suffered much, much worse. In the days and weeks after though, I thought maybe I was insane. There was more than one point when I asked myself if I was having a breakdown.

It wasn’t so much losing him from my life – I can see I had a lucky escape. It took a while to see that though. And this tough a break up doesn’t negate the good times we had together – I can still say that I don’t regret the relationship. But it was the loss of my voice, the loss of my side of the story, the loss of any sense of ‘justice’, the loss of my confidence that I hard worked so hard to build that I felt – and still often feel – so deeply.

I felt angry that I told him things that are hard for me to share. Things he used against me, even in the way in which he chose to break up with me. I felt angry that I too had made mistakes, the words that he’d said weighed on my mind: ‘You’ve betrayed my trust. I can never trust you again. I have nothing to hide’ (I had never suggested he did). I felt angry that, even though my intuition was ringing loudly in my ears the last 6 weeks of our relationship, that I had never confronted him. Often I was angrier with myself than I was with him.

I felt angry that he fell back onto the ‘crazy woman’ trope that so many are prone to: ‘Are you going to give me my keys, or make me have to change my locks?’ I really thought he was better than that. And then to deny me any conversation. It made me feel like I deserved everything that was happening. At the time I really thought that I did. Now I can see more clearly.

The few people I showed this comic to told me I should share it publicly – post it somewhere, but I was too scared. But, as time moved on, I started to feel angry that I was quiet all the time, that I had lost my voice. I had to accept that there were things that happened in my relationship that I should have been louder about, angrier about at the time. Why did I find it so easy to give up my voice?

I didn’t want to write this either. Part of me thinks… you’re just showing your hand, that you still hurt, that you still care, almost 5 months later. It’s embarrassing that I do. I know that he won’t be thinking of me. Despite this, I’m also really scared that he will somehow find it and judge me for it the way I judge myself.

But the other part suddenly feels compelled to write out my feelings, and put it down in black and white. I’ve never felt such compulsion to write something so personal before. Not for him, not for sympathy from friends or kind strangers, but for me. I need to take my voice back. It feels more like quiet resolution, or even revolution – not revenge. I really hope that it marks a new chapter.

What I’ve learnt

I’ve learnt that life isn’t fair.
I’ve learnt that even the ones who play different
still have the capacity for great cruelty.
Being the bigger person doesn’t stop the revenge fantasies.

I’ve learnt that things aren’t black and white
I always knew, in truth – but now I know again.
And yet my mind swings like a pendulum
between them both. Black to white and back to black again.

I’ve learnt that when I’m scared
I lose my voice. Shut up tight like a bad mussel.
Clinging to a rock like a clam, for fear of falling off.
A salty, solitary oyster, afraid of standing out in target practice.

But I’ve also learnt that I’m good.
Not at love but yes at love. At loving anyway.
At exclaiming out loud when seeing the landscape as
we turn a corner. At reaching up to touch the leaves overhead.

I’ve learnt that feelings have highs – as well as lows
‘Your problem is you always feel things so deeply’ he once admonished.
But I’d rather feel the prick of the thorn of the rose than never
– ever- know how lucky I am to breathe in its scent.

29 April 2021

What have you learnt about yourself and your practice? What from this four weeks do you want to carry-on? Make a commitment.

My commitment: try to never stop seeing (and writing) the good and the great in being alive, even if sometimes it breaks your heart

Nature versus nurture

I am one for flash-in-the-pan kind of ideas. I don’t do well at sitting with things. Quietly contemplating. This extends to all parts of my life, not just the creative side.

To contemplate too much risks tipping over into rumination. An endless, exhausting mental thought loop that tires out any energy I began with. Running an idea over and over means starting to extend myself. Like the absent-minded finger tug on an old, tasteless piece of gum, that was once hot pink but now closer to beige.

No, I prefer my ideas to pop. An expansive, electric, sugary bubble – blown out by a quick, strong gust of oxygen. Life force becoming art. And preferably right into someone’s face, so they can’t ignore the possibility or potential. Pay attention to me, I may as well say.

I think it’s always been this way. In school art lessons, our teachers pushed us to ‘explore’, to play with a few different ideas, seek different directions, before stepping back and choosing one to follow. But I always knew which road I wanted to take, right from the start. All of my options were just detours.

Call it gut instinct, or pig-headedness. But I just always knew what I wanted. It’s like they all say, a feeling that starts simultaneously in your abdomen and your brain. A flash of awareness. Of excitement. A feeling.

What I’ve found surprising, and enjoyable, about this 30 day creative challenge is that it has shown me that the nurture of an idea is just as possible, and as important, as the one that crashes over you. Whilst there is excitement to be had in the idea that comes, seemingly from nowhere, but almost fully-formed, there is also equally a thrill from creating out of nothing: a few words given to you by a friend, or a stranger.

28 April 2021

Prompt: Who or what nurtures your ideas?

Picture credit

E.A. Caldwell

A writer
of books, lots of them – tens of them.
All published to critical acclaim and
Gobbled up by those around her.
Her brother’s her biggest fan.

A Batman,
A Christian Bale Batman,
Trick-and-treating up the lane.
A whole band of Batmen together,
Archie playing the Joker.

A thumbsucker,
From day one, hour one perhaps
Self-soothing her sweet self to sleep
Plotting her world domination
The first female (thumbsucking) president

A member,
Full-fledged, not honorary,
Of the Vaginae Dialogue.
A coven she can always call home.
Just send out the signal.

27 April 2021

Prompt: Make a work to give to someone else, and then give it to them.

Written to celebrate the birth of Edith Arden Caldwell on Monday 26 April.

Life lessons from small animals

We were never allowed a dog, so, of course, my parents got one as soon as we left home.

Mum had, quite rightly, assumed that if ‘we’ were to have a dog (the we being me and my younger sister), the reality was that ‘she’ would be the one taking care of it, day-in, day-out. I’m pretty sure she would have been right, judging by how much attention we paid the pet we were allowed. A hamster, named Hammy.

I’m certain I came up with the name.

I was around 3 or 4 years old when Hammy joined the family. A small, wriggling ball of tan fur, who spent most of its time ensconced in shredded up paper in the corner of its cage. I only really remember three key moments in Hammy’s time with us, and one of them was, technically, after it.

The first two were the intense pain and indescribable shock of being bitten, quite hard, on my tiny little finger. I’d poked my fingers through the slats in Hammy’s cage, clearly frustrated that she wasn’t performing for me.

It’s funny how, though I was so little, and Hammy so small, I have (what must be false) memories of two enormous front teeth chomping down into my skin, and the shocking bright red of the fresh blood running down my finger as I cried for my Mother. It’s the first memory I have of seeing blood.

I clearly didn’t learn my lesson, as the second memory I have of Hammy is almost a carbon copy of the first.

The third, was at the moment of dear Hammy’s departure from this world. I remember, very vividly, being sat in the car with Mum on the driveway of our house, after she’d picked me up from nursery school. I don’t remember how she delivered the news, but I just remember sobbing.

We were relatively religious back then – well, as religious as you can be trying to get your 5 year old into the local Roman Catholic primary school, and I am certain that Mum explained to me that Hammy was now in Heaven, with Jesus.

However, if this was supposed to be reassuring, it didn’t do the trick. Instead, it kicked off my first ever existential crisis. I’ve had many since, but this was the first. It was the first time I realised that it wasn’t just hamsters who had to go to heaven, but humans too.

‘OK but promise me you’ll never die’ I’d plead with my mum, after we’d buried Hammy in the garden in a floppy disc box, the spot marked by a smooth, grey pebble for her tombstone.

‘Darling, it happens to all of us one day, but only when we are very old’. Of course, as a 4 or-so year old, this didn’t much help. I had no comprehension of time. I had once, seriously, asked my mum what dinosaurs were like, assuming she had been around the same time that they had.

For what now feels like weeks, but which was probably days, I worried. I asked a lot of questions. I probably asked my priest. People kept telling me about Heaven, which began to sit with me better as a reassuring option, but what made me most sad was the idea that – even if it was heavenly, as promised – we’d have to leave our earthly belongings behind.

To that end, one night Mum found me crying on the top of the stairs. This wasn’t for the sake of dramatics, I knew I wasn’t allowed to come downstairs once I was in bed. I was clutching my favourite soft toy, a plush rabbit whose whiskers had been cruelly cut off by a horrible little shit called Dale in my nursery.

‘Love, why are you crying?’ my Mum exclaimed, coming to meet me and wrap me in her arms.

‘Be-cause…’ I stammered, my eyes thick with tears and snot dribbling onto my mouth and onto my Mum’s shirt as she hugged me. ‘Be-cause… when I die… Bunny is going to be all alone’.

It still tears me up thinking about it. I was always so worried about other people. And even the feelings of inanimate objects, apparently.

Mum comforted me, and reminded me that it would be many years off, and that surely there would be someone who would look after Bunny for me.

I am sure my parents bought Hammy to teach me the mortality lesson, but I’m not sure that she was expecting it to kick off such a melancholic streak.

26 April 2021

Prompt. No prompt today, but inspired by a story I told my Spanish teacher when she asked me about my first pet.

Picture credit

What’s my responsibility as a maker? A one minute manifesto.

To write from a place of integrity
Whilst maintaining some level of flippancy.
To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,
Or my version of it, anyway.
To depict life in all its messy, chaotic, glory
To find the reverence in the quotidian: that hot cup of coffee
And capture its irreverence: another mug turning stone cold on the side
To detail the ferocious, as well as the pure,
And those events which tick both boxes:
The punch to your gut when you least expect it.
The crash of the release when you write it down.

21 April 2021.

Prompt: What’s my responsibility as a maker?