Hello.

I’ve had my WordPress blog for a few moons now, so I thought I’d say a quick hello and drop a few random facts about the woman behind the words…

📸 by Alan Harding

I’m horrifically shy. Like heart palp/flop-sweat shy. You wouldn’t know to meet me, as I do my best to be cucumber-level cool, (and a lot of energy goes into this façade) but inside I’m wanting to put a me-shaped hole through the wall and get the heck out of Dodge. I’ve tried the whole ‘fake-it-til-you-make-it’ majiggy, but it ain’t happening. Some of us are born hermits, I think.

That said, I try to speak openly about uncomfortable topics. Particularly mental health. This is definitely a step out of my comfort zone, as I’m naturally quite an inward person, (particularly about my own relationship with mental health) but I think it’s important to normalise depression, anxiety, cognitive function disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, etc. Nothing good ever came from sweeping shit under the rug.

I’m not really sure of the when or whereabouts of my interest in writing stemmed, it’s just something that has always been there really. I say I don’t technically have a tone, for the sake of versatility, but secretly I do and I like to refer to it as ‘eloquent and a little sweary’. Obviously I use this tone exclusively for my own projects, as that shoe tends not to fit all manner of foot!

I have a cat called Squeak, who is of equal parts grumpy and sweet. I would like to add a dog to my little family one day.

One of my favourite book is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I like the sentiments behind it, the humour, and the fact the lead character is a total mud-slinging, tree-climbing tomboy, like I was (and secretly still am!)

I bloody love food. Particularly anything of the pasta variety. Food is literally what gets me out of bed in the morning (well, that and a full bladder…)

Despite using technology daily, I am something of a technophobe. My devices get sworn at… a lot.

My nickname is ‘Maurice’. It derived from an ill-fated trip to a hairdressers a few years ago, when the (obviously hard-of-hearing) receptionist misunderstood my name… because I clearly look like someone called ‘Maurice’… Needless to say, this story tends to amuse people, and the nickname stuck.

I used to live on a canal boat. A proper Rosie & Jim style barge. Did I fall in from time-to-time? Yes, yes I did. Once I fell in, scrambled myself out on to the plank between the embankment and the boat, just for the plank to give way, sending me face-first back in again. Not my finest hour.

Marmite all the way. Marmite on everything. Marmite on crumpets, marmite and cheese toasties, marmite on roast potatoes. Heck, marmite for president. Vive la Marmite

Extract

Rose had fought tooth and nail against her parents and society to bypass the linear movements of most young women in the late 1950s. She hustled her way through her degree and her Masters, and into the murky, male-dominated pool of psychology. Grappling all three and nailing them down, and doing it all with little fanfare.

Which is why it bewildered everyone when she decided one day to simply pull the plug on it all. To them it seemed a monumental waste of time, energy and money, and to some of her enemies in the field; devoted and unmoved on their initial opinions, a typically impulsive and illogical action that seemed to personify women as a whole. To those more fervent in their professional distaste of Rose, they saw this as a victory. Proof, really, that women just aren’t cut out for the workplace.

Whilst in the midst of her profession pioneering (and personal existential crisis), one of her clients who had been with her since the infancy of her practice, and had remained a devotee to his treatment, had died unexpectedly, and unbeknown to Rose, had made her his benefactor. Initially this was nothing but a headache. He’d owned a small apartment in Jessons County, Maryland, which revealed him to be the very definition of a hoarder. Mercifully, he’d left her no debts to deal with, but the hassle of having to clear out all of his belongings – none of which had much value or even practical use – had meant having to close her practice for a few days and reschedule her patients.

It was sorting through his abomination of a home that she discovered the deeds to a little property he’d owned in Napa County, California. Complete with ten acres of land.

Rose had become a psychologist because the human mind fascinated her. She’d later opened up her own therapy practice because she had wanted to be the vessel that made her patients reveal to themselves (and her) pockets of their psyche that marred their lives. But as interesting as her patients usually were, people exhausted her. The endless hostility from her male professional peers, the constant prying into her personal life, (“I don’t see a ring on that finger?”) the clinginess, and the attempts at breaching doctor-patient boundaries in the quest for Rose’s friendship, or romantic involvement from more than one needy male patient who thought that if he could just find himself a wife and homemaker all his problems would be solved (“you’re such a good listener” they’d often coo at her.) All of this would eventually lead her to believe that the mind was so seemingly irrevocably moulded by society, that the mysteries that it once held for her had begun to evaporate. Her job was to help people, not to revolutionise society one depressed individual at a time, or to shatter the American dream, which was something she knew held dear to many. Not so much a dream but a belief system.

She knew she’d be labelled a quitter, and she didn’t care.

[image and all words are mine and are subject to copyright]