Serious Stuff
Mental health, especially my own struggles with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and recurring negative thoughts, has been a huge subject in my writing. About one in twenty days I seem to be trying something silly or fun or creative, and the other nineteen I'm worrying sincerely that I'm a worthless failure and everything in life is irreparably broken. There's strength to be taken from writing about all this though, in helping me get through it, and hopefully helping others who may feel similar things. Here are some of my faves:
Day 12 - an early post about blogging as Zen painting.
Day 13 - being hit by waves of self-loathing, thinking back on an adolescence growing up suffering from acne. Painful, but helpful.
Day 25 - another early one, about dealing with my gammy eyes and what it actually feels like to be depressed. I used to be incredibly self-conscious when writing about my own depression. Guess I got over that.
Day 30 - to celebrate reaching my original goal of a month of sober blogging I wrote the most intimately I have yet done about having acne. It felt gross to write, and still feels gross now, but, hey, you gotta write that real stuff, or what's the point?
Commitment - a nice post about writing-as-relationship, about accepting the hard times.
Passion - a day finding beauty, or at least the briefest reflected glimmer of beauty, in the mundane, the quotidian.
Still - yet another attack of depression, but forcing myself to write through it, to get something down. To have come here on the hardest, worst, most futile days, and still to have hammered words out, is perhaps the achievement of which I’m most proud.
Friends with bicycles - a post about being socially anxious in a coffee shop, as is my wont.
Things I like - a nice dose of positivity. The bit about vision is cool, it’s something I think about a lot. Vision is weird.
Unwrapped - about going to the zero-waste food shop round the corner from my house. I still go. You should go. Just go!
Echoes - from when I did some manual labour with my friend and learnt all about being a man. Half silly, half sincere, as usual.
Storm - another post about feeling depression, I remember the effort it took to not rise to the negative thoughts, to accept them, watch them, write them out honestly, and let them go. At the time it felt like turning a corner, and though of course I’ve retreated back round the corner many times since then, I’ve also been able to retrace my steps forwards a few times as well. It’s slow going, but it’s progress.
Unique - at my sister’s in London, trying to fathom the scale and complexity of the world. I can’t. It’s unfathomable!
Triviality - a post in which you can hear me standing up to the negative voices that are continuously rattling around my head. The more I do this, the more power I have. If you have negative thoughts, try to do this. Shine the light of awareness upon them, bring them out, analyse them, and pick apart their faulty logic. They will dissolve under the flame of attention. Then they’ll come right back. But you’ll know what to do.
Windscreen - an analogy comparing depression to having faulty windscreen wipers on your car, explaining why it’s so hard to get yourself out of low moods.
Arty Stuff
I’m the most self-conscious about my writing when it is overtly attempting to be literature or poetry. Masking your clumsy attempts at fiction under the guise of an overblown Mad Max parody, or a vignette about ghost ships, is one thing; standing in front of everyone saying “I made this thing that wants to be serious art” is another. Sincerity is scary. But I’ve made a few faltering attempts over these past six months...
Flavours - I spent a few weeks trying some fiction writing prompts. This one, involving writing a scene around a bunch of flavours, came out like a young-adult story. It was fun.
Penny for your thoughts - another writing prompt, about an executive and a homeless man.
Photographs - loose, ramshackle word streams inspired by the photographs of Steve McCurry. Why aren’t I doing this every day, as a way to unclog the clay from my mind and get the words flowing?
Mirror - a day exploring Bradford with my family.
Interstices - similar to other posts about looking for the sublime in the ordinary, but more focused on the feel and flow of the words than on an argument for the intellect.
Bollard - the last day working with my friend, a post about the sadness of endings.
Solemn - a bit of writing about the flickering joys, and dangers, of being drunk. I like some of the lines in here.
Howling - a sketch of what it feels like to work a busy weekend bar shift. I was angry when I wrote it. You can tell.
Reviews/Articles/Other
And here’s a list of the stuff that doesn’t fit into the categories above. Mostly articles about films and videogames, and the odd thought piece.
Re-Bourne - a sort of draft of a review of The Bourne Identity. Man I love this film.
Story structure - notes on the hero’s journey, the monomyth, story circles, all that good stuff.
Switch impressions - as a reward for sober blogging for 90 days I bought myself a Nintendo Switch. Wrote lots about it. Here’s one such piece.
Blade Runner, the sequel, parts 1 and 2, the original, parts 1 and 2 - lots of words about Blade Running. My love for the first film knows no bounds. The second? I can take it or leave it.
Red Dead Redissonance - wrote a few posts recently about Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. Some praising the beauty of the game’s world; this one was critical of the ludonarrative dissonance at the game’s heart, and touched on what it is we want videogames to provide for us: gritty art, or a warm bath? And can we have both?
Let’s have an argument about Apu - I tried to write an article that essentially argued the opposite of what all my friends felt about the news that Apu might be written out of the Simpsons, while avoiding any ego or aggression. I wanted to try to change people’s minds, or at least provide a fresh perspective. I think it worked well actually.
OK. It’s 4am, as usual, and I cannot write any more on this. Compiling this list today and yesterday has shown me how far I’ve come. Yes, every piece has been a rushed first draft, ragged and unfinished, often starting as one thing and becoming another halfway through. Many times I’ve had a brainwave as to how I should have written the post at the point at which I’ve posted it, and it’s continuously frustrating to have to put up work I know I could make better with time, but not having any time, already being stressed that I’ve stayed up too late and eaten into my energy and resources for the next day’s post. As has happened today.
But there’s been a lot of snatches of good writing within the greater haze of words. There have been many, many words, and a not-insignificant amount of them have been good.
Drop that desire for perfection, and suddenly it’s so lovely that I’ve gone and done the work every day for 203 days now, and that that work has even momentarily helped people, made them laugh, given them pause for thought - and of course kept me from throwing myself under a bus as well.
Writing is the best. It really is.
