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]

Woolf Mother…

In celebration of Pride month, I am paying tribute to some of the LBGTQ+ writers who have inspired me over the years.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

I first became aware of Virginia Woolf, or at least the character of Virginia Woolf, a little embarrassingly, by way of another writer. Those familiar with Michael Cunningham’s novel, The Hours, will recall the rather honest and (generally) factual portrayal of Woolf during the genesis of what would later become her novel Mrs Dalloway – and like Mrs Dalloway, follows the ‘day-in-the-life’ concept. Those who have read both novels will see the obvious similarities in tone and structure, as well as emphasis on singular moments and emotions throughout a person’s day; focusing both on the trivial and the monotonous, as well as the small, creeping fragments that, if indulged, threaten to cause their life as they know it to unravel.

The Hours (as named after the original title of Mrs Dalloway) is of course a fine novel (it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, and was later made in to a movie, which is also excellent) and I would recommend it regardless of whether Woolf’s work appeals to you or not.

I’d been aware of her before that, sure. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, Virginia Woolf is a household name. But her writing wasn’t something I’d stumbled on at school, or even at University (worrying really, as I studied Creative Writing…) and it wasn’t until I happened upon The Hours that it dawned on me (back then when I was first dipping my toe in the pool of writing) that I should probably give her a whirl.

Like most ‘gifted eccentrics’ Virginia Woolf’s infamy is just as much personal as it is professional. While she wasn’t wild, rambunctious, or into heavy-drinking like many established writers of the twentieth century were (yes, Dylan Thomas and Mr Hemingway, we’re looking at you) her notoriety stemmed from her rather precarious mental health. Woolf notably had at least three severe nervous breakdowns, and attempted to take her own life on two occasions before finally succeeding in 1941 at the age of fifty-nine, triggered by the onset of another breakdown which she was sure she’d not recover from.

I was drawn to her because of her fragility, and because I (having my own strained relationship with mental health) admire the beauty that came out of the darkness of it all. I like her tone (although it is almost shamelessly upper-class and by today’s standards, rather dated) and I like her trailblazing as a progressive female author. While you have your classic women novelists such as the Brontës and Jane Austen, who are acclaimed in their own right, Woolf followed an entirely different aesthetic, that by the standards of her particular era, where women’s literary inputs were by and large expected to be classically-structured romantic fluff, was bold in its use of modernist expression, with the ‘stream of consciousness’ approach being her trademark narrative. And it’s a hard narrative to pull off without sounding, well, ridiculous. I know this because I have tried.

Most people who are familiar with the Bloomsbury circle of writers and artists (the English and rather posh equivalent of the Beatnik movement) will know that Woolf (who was married until her death to the political theorist and author, Leonard Woolf) was known for her personal torment and her sad, untimely demise, as well as her frivolous nature; her love of parties, her playful gossipy side, and her lengthy affairs with several women, all of which inadvertently snuck their way into her work; demonstrating a story-teller that was of equal parts dark as she was sparkling.

Recommendations: (other than Mrs Dalloway)

To the Lighthouse
A Room of One’s Own
Orlando
The Waves
Jacob’s Room

Wilde by Name, Wilde by Nature…

SESSIONS: ‘Establishing Roles’

SESSION 6:

Late December, 1966

“I wanted to discuss the controversial relationship stuff today,” she says with a small grin, as if the two of them share a private joke. He makes a note on a notepad before looking up and offering a nod of encouragement.

“Did I tell you I’m writing a book?” she continues.

“You have mentioned it, yes.”

He is not only learning to tolerate the role reversal in the form of her quizzical bombardments but has come to understand this as a sign that barriers are dropping. Most clients are passive; allow the therapist to control the conversation and are goaded easily away from asking questions. Not her. Questions asked on her part are an establishment of trust. During the early sessions when she was too frightened to ask questions, she was moody and withdrawn. Her body language tight and closed, her mind elsewhere. Very little progress was made in these sessions. He is youngish and fairly new, with a practice that has been open for just shy of eighteen months. Psychoanalysis is moving steadily out of fashion, particularly with female clients of a modern nature, and a standardised talking therapy was slowly being introduced; leaving plenty of room for learning curves for young, new-to-the-game therapists wishing to move away from dated Freudian approaches.

“Did I tell you what it was about?”

“You mentioned suicide. Something to do with coping with the loss of a loved one by their own hand,” he says in the usual monotone. A voice trained to have no highs or flats that could influence a client’s answer or thought process. Quite a skill to speak fluently in monotone and not appear disinterested.

“Yes,” she agrees. “Generally.”

“Is the relationship you wish to discuss connected to someone who has killed his or herself?”

“No.” She shifts in her seat and looks momentarily guilty. She drops her eyes away and to an untrained eye this might suggest dishonesty, but to a psychologist it often leads to a revelation, and often one all too sharp and jagged in its honesty. She carefully collects her words in her mind, no longer wary of the therapist’s eyes upon her, waiting for this painful birth, and no longer pressured to hurry an answer, thus dampening all the facts and clarity behind it.

Christ, where to begin?

SESSIONS: ‘Initial Assumptions’

December, 1966.

SESSION FOUR

“Why are you more nervous today?” the therapist asked. This isn’t an assumption, though it would be a fair one. Her body language is more closed than usual. She has given little to no direct eye contact and seems to be fascinated with the patterns her nails make whilst pressed tightly into her palm. One of the very few statements she has made during this session is that she is more nervous than usual.

After a considerable pause to which the therapist silently wondered whether she had even heard the question, she replied, “When you initially got back to me about setting up our first appointment your first question was to ask if the reason I was seeking therapy was because of a break-up.”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I know.”

Her words are distracted and slow, but her face has an archaeologist’s concentration on the little pink crescents forming on her palm.

“But it’s got me concerned that I can’t discuss past break-ups, which have played a role in why I am here.”

“No content is off-limits” is the way the therapist described the reassurance that proceeding with this and any topic is fine. Still, this initial assumption had irked her. There are other events in life that can create cavities in a person’s mental well-being. More going on behind the scenes. She wondered if that was the first thing they asked a man. Possibly, but she doubted it. It is the middle of the sixties and a woman’s biggest woe still seems to be regarded as anything that infringes on her primitive desire to be a mother and homemaker.

“No content is off-limits.” she murmured, with a small smile. Still no eye-contact.