A Life in Words

How Writing Has Positively Influenced My Life

~ ChanAtkins ~ 7 Comments

I am writing this for the contest ‘How Writing Has Postively Influenced My Life’ hosted by Positive Writer http://positivewriter.com/writing-contest-how-writing-has-positively-influenced-my-life/#sthash.lKiCckuh.dpuf

Writing has been a positive influence on my life in so many ways. It has been my friend for most of my life. It was my friend when I was a child who had learnt to read. Books opened up my imagination, enticed me to dive in and swim up to the surface with my own ideas exploding. It was there for me then, poking me in the back, winking, telling me I could do it too. I could write a story. And then my head became full of them. They were with me all the time; the stories and the people that came with them. Thanks to writing, I have never been lonely, not once. Writing has been behind me the whole time, urging me on, winding me up, filling my head.

It was there for me when I was an awkward teen, full of self-doubt and negativity. There was always somewhere to stash those feelings when pen hit paper. Words would pour from me like blood being washed from a wound. Every word was a gasp, a letting go. At the same time though, I was holding on. Because I had something that was all mine. Something secret and precious, something that saved my life in so many ways. Something that more than anything else in my life, made me me.

When I think about who I am, I think of writing. When I think about what sets me apart, what makes me stand tall, what makes me smile, and dream and hope, I think of writing. It is something I can never part with, it is something that can never be taken from me.Without it, I would be empty, or I would explode.

I once let it drift. I was so busy with work and children and being exhausted. It was there in my head the whole time though, looking sadly on. Silenced, but still needling. It didn’t let me forget about it. Every time I thought it had gone forever, it would jump up and remind me, sending me off into a dream, a trance, conversations spiralling inside my head. People watching when I did not mean to. Plots weaving slowly between the voices that were piping up.

I got it back before it was too late. I had the urge one day to write and it was like something alive inside of me, clawing at my eyes. I found a notepad and pen and didn’t stop writing for about six weeks. Could I do it? Could I really do it? Rewrite one of my books, one of my stories from long ago? Did I have in me? Did I have any talent? Writing did not give me a choice. Once it had me back in its grips it was not going to let go again. Not a chance. Not ever.

Writing reminded me that I had books inside of me. I had people living inside my head. Actually living there! Knocking on the walls, banging at the door. They were fed up to the back teeth of this; living inside a prison, unable to speak. They wanted to tell their stories, and not just to me this time. They wanted to get out, right out, and into the open. They had all sorts going on, this lot. A real rabble. I’ve had to quieten them down, tell them to be patient and wait their turn. The thing is, some of them have been waiting so long! I don’t think I can write fast enough to keep them happy!

But they will get heard. They will get out. There are readers. I will make it happen. I won’t waste any more time.  Writing has been my friend my entire life. It has made me who I am, it has helped me deal with pain and confusion and desperation; it has taught me how to speak up for the people inside my head, how to make their words dance on the page. Writing is my addiction. It’s how I make sense of the world, and how I keep myself anchored to it. In conclusion, writing makes every single day of my life an exciting one.

The Pink Haze

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

The pink haze is a phrase used by the author Kate Rigby in her gritty novel Down The Tubes. The novel follows the two lives of estranged mother and son, Cheryl and Michael. (You can find my review and a link to the book at the end of this post.) For the character of Cheryl, the pink haze describes that aura of loveliness and addiction that surrounds the newborn child. What a perfect way to describe the near dream like state you exist in after having your first child. Although Cheryl is not exactly mother of the year (you’ll have to read the book to find out why!) I found myself completely understanding this state she found herself existing in during those early newborn days.

A haze indeed. Sleep deprived, foggy headed, surrounded by attention and well wishers and smiling faces. Everyone goes to jelly over newborns. Everyone wants to stop and stare at that rare little piece of perfection. Everyone says enjoy it while it lasts. They soon grow. It doesn’t last for long that haze. Because everything passes to the next stage so quickly. One minute your house is full of chunky baby equipment; baby gyms, and bouncers and car seats. The next moment these items are vanishing one by one. And you start to realise that as they change before your eyes, you cease to become the centre of their world. If you get in their way, they start to peer around you.

The pink haze is an addiction to love and needing and fulfillment. Maybe you have never experienced those things quite so strongly before. Will it ever be enough? It will always be transient and shifting. Like sand slipping through the sand timer, like the earth shifting beneath your feet. None of these moments can be held onto or held still. You are forever forced to chase leaves in the wind. You only get so close, your fingers brushing, before it lifts away again teasingly.

Chasing your next fix. That sweet milky baby smell. When even the waste in the nappy smells good. Inhaling every part of them so that you might contain it forever. No description fits. No words are ever adequate. The smell of their musty sick on your clothes, or the cheese balls that you scrape out from under their chubby chins. The smell of their hair and their scalp and their breath. Sniffing them up, as if that might be a way to capture them. Oh their cries are just for you. Their needs and wants and comforts are delivered by you. You exist in your own hazy bubble bouncing away from the world. Separate and secret.

A secret addiction. When you hold them in your arms and feel the urge from your heart to squeeze them back inside of you. Absorb them back to where they came from so that they might be yours again. Their fat wet drooly cheek pressed up against yours. The smell of their warm neck. The giggles from their lips. The curl and bend and thrust and flop of their changing bodies.

My baby. My baby. No other two words so precious, so beautiful. But every gasp of your love for them is a painful one. Because they grow and change and move away. You feel it is shameful. How you secretly long to keep them small and in love with you, needing you. You, the centre of everything.

Time marches on, though you drag your feet, and those special moments wander and wane. Demands are put upon you. Expectations have been raised. Now you are one of the mothers, sighing and rolling your eyes and rattling your car keys at the school gates. And most days are a rush from one fixed point to another. Breakfast is shovelled in. School bags packed and thrust upon shoulders. Lists are needed so that nothing is forgotten, so that you do not fall short or fail. You miss them and wish they would think of you, but they rarely do. You put the washing on the stairs and you wash out their lunch box at the end of the day. You tell them off and grit your teeth, and everyone is the same, everyone is moaning and whining and saying there is never enough time, a mothers work is never done, I have a lot to do and a short time to do it in!

Sometimes you think about the pink haze. Sometimes you can still feel them kicking inside of you. Sometimes if you close your eyes you can still feel their body in your arms, their head against your shoulder. You can still hear their breath as the snores whistle in and out, and their tiny ribcage moves against your breast. And you can still remember how you never really wanted to put them in the cot. And you never really wanted to move them from the breast. And you never really wanted to say goodbye at the school gates knowing that the pink haze was over.

Like all addictions, you could go back for more. Have another one, and then another. But eventually time will smash this apart too. Eventually mother nature will shake her head.

All you can do is watch them go. All you can do is be there whenever they come back. All you can do is hope that when the day comes that they hold their own newborn in their own arms, and they find themselves surrounded by the pink haze, that then they will know what they meant to you.

This book gets 5 stars from me because it was quite simply everything I look for in a book, and can never seem to find! A brilliant storyline, real characters, real dialogue, gritty, hard-hitting, heartbreaking and touching. I am so pleased the author has written lots of other books! Down The Tubes is a story about two people; Cheryl, who has all but turned her back on her four children in order to have a ‘life’ and is pursuing a career in drug rehabilitation, and her estranged son Michael, who ran away from home aged sixteen. The book brilliantly weaves their two life stories together, in the third person and present tense. Cheryl is such an interesting character, in many ways extremely unlikable, but I could not help be intrigued by her. Married young, she has child after child, seemingly addicted to the ‘pink haze’ that surrounds an innocent young baby. However once they start to walk and talk she sees their innocence fade and starts to lose interest. Michael, on the other hand, having been abused by his father, is such a lost soul that you are immediately drawn to him, instantly rooting for him and hoping he can eventually kick his drug habit. As the narration takes us back and forth between their two lives, the two characters almost cross paths but seem destined to never be reunited. This is such a well written book, and I am so pleased I have found an author who does not shy away from gritty storylines that make you flinch. I was left wanting more

Feeling sick today…

~ ChanAtkins ~ 1 Comment

Do you ever wake up like that? Do you ever wake up and think god this world is going to bring me down, some time sooner or later, one day. It could really bring you down, couldn’t it? You know it. If you let it. I mean, in every sense, physical and emotional. If you let it, it could. It could destroy you. Or at least, you wake up feeling sick.

I woke up this morning and I travelled downstairs to begin the usual routine, with this terrible skin of despair clinging to me. No fancy words or descriptions needed for it. It is sadness. I felt terribly sad and it was bringing me right down, because it wants to, and I know why…

A brief flick through Facebook on my phone and this familiar uneasy feeling of disquiet settled in my belly. Except it does not really settle. It stirs and groans and rumbles and churns. It dulls the brightness of everything around me. My home, the music playing, the baby chewing on his toast. I have to shake it off and I will. Keep the music playing. BBC6 Music in the kitchen. Choose some CD’s for the car. Oasis or The Stone Roses will fit the bill for the school run. I need it. Room to breathe. The chance to shiver, tingle, let the brightness seep back through me, let me see the shine again.

It could bring you down but the trick is not to let it. Not the daily dose of misery and selfish tainted humanity, not the tragic loss of everything that was once golden, everything now sullied and dirtied and stained. Nothing precious or fresh or bright anymore, nothing sacred or untouched by greed and hate.

Greedy soulless human hands destroying everything everywhere you look. Our beautiful world, beautiful possibilities and potential all washed away or crushed by the clutching blood stained hands of psychopathic corporate politicians. Yeah, all of them. I don’t distinguish anymore. Corporate greed owns politics and politics owns the media and the media own our fear and our fears allow them to systematically rape the natural world, killing children, dropping bombs and missiles, over and over and over and over, endless war, endless carnage, and the continued dulling of the senses, the turning away that we all do, the blind eye.

So depressing. Every little inch of it. People at the bottom more trodden on than ever. Despised and maligned. Massive yawning gap between rich and poor. Desperate times for so many, and the poisoning of our food and our air. And worse than this, worse than all of this, the dreadful heavy apathy. The don’t care, and don’t see, and they deserved it. The TV addicts and reality show vultures and fast food devourers. Soaking it all up day after day, oblivious and stubborn, lazy apathetic carelessness. Something precious lost forever. Innocence and hope.

You see, you see? It brings you down. Makes it hard to breathe, hard to hope. Hope is so painful and disappointment rages every day, knocking it away. Live in it and crawl, live in it and forget. Don’t worry. Don’t bother. Don’t fight them back. Go back to sleep. Watch TV. Buy things.

But that’s what they really want, what they need, what they expect us to do…Are there enough of us left to realise this? To fight back and stand up? To see the beauty and the shine before it is rubbed away, erased forever? Human nature. Human race. By and large, overall, a massive let down. A dastardly disappointment.

Or will we be able to turn it around at the last moment? Realise what we are doing before it is too late? Will the best of us ever win, ever shine through? Will the good guys ever win? You could feel so angry. I could scream and snarl and spit. It’s our world and they have put a price tag on everything. But what can we do but small things?? Listen, become informed, question everything, seek the truth, speak the truth, grow your own, tell your children. Do your best. Pass it on.

I feel better now. She Bangs The Drums on the way home. Singing loudly. I have a crap voice but I like to hear it singing loudly. Went for a walk and spotted a little fawn on the other side of the river eating some leaves. It looked up and saw me watching and then it went right back to what it was doing. It knew I couldn’t bother it. It knew it was all right. There it was, like all the animals and the insects living it’s little private life peacefully. Made me smile anyway.

The heavy feeling is still there. I still feel sick. Never know whether to watch the news or tune it all out and try to be happy. Sadness is allowed, though theirs is so much greater than mine in my cosy little life. The right amount of anger, sadness and rebellion is needed, the right amount of realism and joy, and most importantly keep looking for the shine.

Is Writing Selfish?

~ ChanAtkins ~ 3 Comments

Hmm, well ask my seven year old this question right now and he will probably tell you that it is. I am certainly feeling the guilt for spending so much of my time on something that only really benefits me. When I was a kid it was so much easier! School, home, write. Weekends, just write. I lived in my own carefully constructed little world of characters and stories. I lived and breathed my stories and my characters. I raced home to be with them. I stayed up late at night banging away on my word processor. I took a notepad and pen everywhere I went. My head was full of it constantly. My mum would roll her eyes at me and tell me to get my head out of the clouds. Daydreamer, they called me. In a dream. Away with the fairies. Yep, and I loved it. But I only had myself to please.

Then came the years I let the writing slip. University followed by employment followed by children and more employment. There was just never the time. Every now and then I would grab a notebook and pen and curl up in a chair with them. Every now and then I would re-read something I had written in my younger days. People used to ask me; did you ever do anything with your writing? Do you still write? What happened about all your writing? God it was depressing. Every time I heard a question like that I felt like another little piece of my true self had been chipped away. Noel Gallagher once said ‘while we’re living, the dreams we had as children fade away’, and he couldn’t have been more right. This is exactly what happens if we are not careful. Life just simply gets in the way. There is pressure everywhere you turn. Pressure to fit in, pressure to make money, pressure to have a career, to contribute to your family and society in general. There is no time in all this to pay attention to passions that are yours and yours only.

When I was a kid my teachers loved my writing, but I was too afraid to show it to anyone else. I had no idea whether it was good or not. When people asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up I always said be a writer. People often laughed at this. My dad in particular said there was no money in this, and you needed to make money in life. I needed a plan b.

It has taken me a long time to conquer the fear I had of sharing my work. Four books published and two blogs on the go, and I no longer have this fear. Like it or don’t like it, either is fine by me. I know why I write and I have blogged about this before. I write because I have to, because it is who I am, and I have finally clawed this back after years of letting it go. I won’t ever let it go again. I am happier than I have ever been. I feel like I am living my dream. I am me again.

However, this new found obsession with writing brings its own problems, and the main one is guilt. Writing can make you money, and I am slowly and painfully learning how to make this happen, but the chances are you are never going to be rich. So there is guilt about this all of the time. I could do other things and earn more money. I could throw all this energy and time into work that pays! But I would lose myself completely.

Then there is the parental guilt. I guess all parents feel this to some degree at least some of the time. Especially mothers. If you don’t go out to work, you feel guilty for not contributing. If you do go out to work, you feel guilty if that means leaving your children. If you are self-employed things are not really any easier. You have to find a way to concentrate within the home, throw yourself into work while washing sits in the basket, and dinners need to be made. It is almost impossible to find peace and quiet in my house. It does not exist. I am writing this now while Doctor Who blares from the TV behind me, a remote control car is zooming around the room, and the dog has just opened the door and run upstairs with a bone he has dug up. Not to mention the 12 year old stood right beside me playing with my phone whilst asking me how she can become an extra in Sherlock. Arghhhh!

Inevitably I get stressed out, I get snappy, Christ, I just want to get things done! I’ve got this bloody to-do list you see! And if they make much more noise they are going to wake the baby up and then….well.

In the day, it goes like this. Up at six am, with writing on the brain. No lie. It is there all ready to go, fizzing and crackling, winding me up, already setting off a certain panic that I will not find the time. Sort the baby and the animals out, then get the other kids up. All out of the house by 8am. Back home after 9am and walk the dogs. If I am lucky laptop is on by 10am, but then I automatically feel a surge of horrible guilt for neglecting the last baby I will ever have…I do what I can before he needs changing and feeding again; usually emails, some simple promo stuff like Facebook and Twitter, links to my books etc, maybe a few other things from my promo list if I can. The rest of the day is basically taking care of the little man. Another dog walk, and kids home from school. Dinner, baths, lunch boxes, bed. The trouble is now the other kids are older they don’t go to bed as early as they used to. I have to grab whatever there is of the evening before the little one wakes up.

So when my seven year old lingers around the laptop, leaning all over me, chattering away about Doctor Who, asking me for snacks, I have to finally turn and say to him; mummy is working. The look of confusion on his face was highly amusing. No you’re not, he said in reply, that’s not working. So I had to explain to him that actually it is. That mummy writes books that make a little bit of money, and that mummy also gets paid if she writes articles about writing books! Hmm, he said, still confused, that’s not work.

Well, fair enough. How can you explain it to a seven year old? I had better luck with my twelve year old when we were looking for a new coat for her on ebay earlier. When she hit confirm on the paypal button I told her that all the money in the paypal account has come from my writing. My writing bought her coat. She looked at me and frowned. Really? She sounded as surprised as my son earlier.

The thing about writing though, is that it is with you all the time. I find it really, really hard to switch off. Even when I am making the dinner, or hanging out the washing, my thoughts are on my characters and my plots. Sometimes when my kids are talking to me, I drift off, totally unable to hear what they are saying. Just like when I was a kid, my head is off in the clouds. God I feel guilty. They know when I am doing it as well. Oh yes, they know.

Sometimes we will be on a family day out, or enjoying a pub meal, and again I feel myself drifting off. I am thinking about a new promo site I found earlier, or I am listening to my characters converse in my head. I want to grab a pen and write it all down before I forget. But then I feel them all looking at me….

Well you know you can’t win. Whatever you do. Writing is selfish. I know it. I can’t justify it. It is never going to make us rich or famous. I do it because I want to and I have to, because it is my dream, because it makes me who I am, because it makes me feel happy. It is pretty much benefiting me and only me. It takes me away from my kids, and makes me rush them into their beds. How awful. I sometimes tap away at the keyboard with the baby on my lap, trying to write while he tries to hit the keys. I have a constant gnawing terror that one day when they are all grown up, my kids will turn to me and say their main memories of me are me sat at the laptop, tapping away…

So there it is. Writing is selfish and so I am. I have to try to strike a balance. I have to try not to let one important thing slip. My writing means the world to me, but my children are only children once. I hope it might teach them a thing or two that is just as important as spending time with them. I hope it teaches them that living your dream is not simply a dream. That actually you can do whatever the hell you want in life, write, paint, draw, teach, sew, knit, grow things, whatever makes you happy, and if you are strong enough and work hard enough you can also make a living out of it. I hope it teaches them to follow their dreams and stoke the fires of their passions rather than let them peter out. I want to tell them that they do not need a Plan b, or a better paid career. I want to tell them they can do whatever the hell they like and just be happy.

And I also just promised my seven year old I will definitely, definitely play Doctor Who figures with him on Saturday…