You walk into a room with a pencil in your hand

Do you want to know when I first started writing? Not the essays of high school or the picture books before that but for myself, in spiral bound black covered note books. About 7 years ago. My mum gave me a blank sketch book to draw in and I wrote in it instead. It was perfect timing really, just before or just after my first significant, gut wrenching, life questioning breakup. At first I was actually self conscious about writing in it, about the ostentatious process of writing one’s thoughts, of the sheer white cliff of page without even a faint blue path for my pen. I soon got over that though, and the next hurdle was writing in public. As in me, on an aeroplane, scribbling from here to Melbourne, business man next to me says ‘you must really like writing’ and I look at him blankly and think what a stupid comment it is, on so many levels, and notice how uncomfortable I seem to have made him by the act of having something to write, continuously, for an hour. Then it was writing on trains (in my book on a train, I’m not talking black felt tip on vinyl seat backs) that made me feel outrageously exposed – just think, all those people walking down the aisle – anyone could read it! After living in the blue mountains and commuting for 9 months I am happy to say that writing in blank books became as comfortable as daydreaming out the window, as eavesdropping, as sleeping in public, as eating a late breakfast between Penrith and Central. Of course somewhere in there, around 2003 if memory and the archives here serve me, I also started blogging. At first I thought it was a ridiculous proposition, ‘like lazy email’ if memory serves me (but then I resisted text messaging for so long because I thought it spoke of a desperate need to not be alone in public spaces and was therefore contemptible, until I tried it myself, then realised it was fun and convenient. I am an obstinate luddite with a penchant for becoming the poster girl of the spurned technology, just a little later than most). Miss B actually set this blog up for me, as a going away present on my travels to Mexico. Which I didn’t use. Until a few months later when I found myself heading to Malaysia for work, and wanted to process my feelings about the move. I think that’s when it was. So blame Miss B for all this blabbing. Anyway, the rest, as they say…

So yes, then a blog became another place to write stuff. A far cry from the covert notebook scribblings of a shy commuter, these were out on display, knickers on European clothesline style, for all to see. The funny thing about blogging, as I have chosen to play it, is the indulgence of almost universally subjective, personal and whim driven reflection. Where are my well thought out political articles? Not here. Where is my witty reparte? Maybe down the back of the couch – have you looked? Where is my beautiful well-crafted romantic poetry? Oh somewhere back in the late 1700’s, seriously, who has time now for any kind of pentameter? According to my recent reading of Virginia Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, I take it that the self indulgent writer explores the frustrations of their own life in print only at the expense of making burning, glorious timeless prose. That many women poets and novelists would have been far better if only they’d put aside their own angst at the status quo, their own misery, and instead focused on the universal human experience, like, for example, Shakespeare. Shakespeare didn’t whinge and moan about the pain of being a writer or the issues he had with his in-laws or the way his itchy breeches held him back from worldly exploits. Oh no, he put all his boring mundane life shit to one side and got down to the business of crafting cracking good stories, inventing squillons of new turns of phrase (was that one of his?) and making poignant, funny, high jinxing characters. With pathos. And kings and blood and wars and doublecross thrown in for good measure. So she reminds us. But then I think, Ginny, you my dear are the one who died with pebbles in your pockets – a fat lot of good your glittering prose did you. Perhaps you should have considered a little self indulgent whingeing now and then? But that is unkind. Meanwhile I feel pangs of guilt over the idea that while I do have a Room of My Own(ish) and make an independent living(ish, if you call working for the Man, even with a coffee machine and flex time, independent) nonetheless I am not picking up where Jane Austin left off, or even emulating Virginia – not crafting some beautiful gift for future generations, no, I am just thinking out loud into some kind of strange electronic medium which only exists down wires and on panes of glass backlit by tiny particles hurtling down other wires. Spooky. And I do this with the hope that ‘better out than in’ applies to all sorts of bodily functions, and that also somehow, just the act of honesty (as best we can do it, biased and self interested as we are – that is, I am) is a gift, and that somewhere someone might read just one passage and feel less alone, feel less strange, feel somehow reconnected to the documented range of human experience, and therefore not so alone.

Aah, yes, so in that vein, I began this post wanting to tell the whole sorry tale of my family woe. I got off the phone to a loved one with wrenching sobs and felt like it would be cathartic to list off all the strange features of my family, explain to you exactly how exhausting it has been these last few years supporting my parent in a difficult situation, how unemotionally supported I felt as a child and young person. I wanted to take one winter dry finger and trace it back down the generations that I can see, and show you some of the limps that begat limps, show you the context that make me understand why these people have their particular sensitivities and wounded gaits. I wanted to roll up my pant leg and show you mine. I want to say ‘and what about.? That wasn’t normal was it?’. I want to say ‘and then I had to teach myself how to...Now can you see why things are hard for me?’ and have you nod in sympathy, maybe strain my ears for a few oohs and aahs and clucks. But now, after writing, I feel somewhat better, I am no longer sobbing, I have told myself a story and distracted myself, I have bought some time of calm concentration to let the rest settle, I have stemmed this desire to peg each incident on taut wire between these two crumbly buildings that are you and I.

So thankyou, for coming with me. For sometimes seeing the washing and not being scandalized by it, for going ‘yep, that be a pair of knickers fairly waving in the breeze’ and at other times seeing the empty line and me staring at the window for clouds.