Failure. And how I stopped being one.

Supposing you have tried and failed again and again.  You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down. 

~Mary Pickford

Sometimes you read a quotation and think ‘pretentious rubbish’ and sometimes you read one and think ‘that’s it! Perfect.’ For me, the above quote is one of the latter.

If I had read it a few years ago I probably would have been in the other camp.

What happened between then and now was a lot of things, including for a time, being a total failure on many levels.

I had a bit of a rocky break-up with my childhood sweetheart at uni, I forced myself to go out there and feel good and found a new person to share my life with, got carried away with the emotion of it all, got engaged, got pregnant. I battled my way through final year of uni getting bumpier and bumpier and see-sawing from ecstatically happy to pathetic and miserable as the rollercoasters of university life and pregnancy met and multiplied. Liberty dragged me through the crap bits and kept me laughing so I finished on a high, ready to face the world when Baby arrived and determined to live the life I dreamed of, now I was accustomed to the idea of motherhood.

Then PND hit. At about the same time that the fuzzy honeymoon period of my new relationship ran out. I crashed and burned and cried and fell apart, picked Tori up and walked out of the flat.

But I got up, brushed myself down, walked back in and determined to make the best of it for our baby girl. In hindsight, I probably should have stayed out but I can’t go back and I can’t change the past so there’s no point dwelling on it.

I went back and slowly but steadily sank further and further into the fog of depression, setting aside who I was in order to keep my partner and my baby happy. I thought that would fix everything.

It didn’t.

I was determined for a number of reasons that Tori wouldn’t be an only child and so, despite everything, I got pregnant again. Ready for this to be a whole new start.

It wasn’t. It made it worse.

I lost my desire for life. I didn’t want to play with the kids, I didn’t want to talk to or see anyone, I couldn’t focus on anything, I let everything in the house pile up til it was at a point that both depressed me even further and overwhelmed me too much to fix. I just stared at Facebook all day because I could click through lots of things not having to concentrate for longer than a few seconds.

I made sure the kids were clean and fed and safe. I never dropped that responsibility, but I didn’t enhance it. I didn’t want to sit on the floor and be silly or colour in or anything. No urge to at all.

So I went on anti-depressants. What people often don’t realise is that anti-depressants don’t make you happy. They just make you numb.

I wasn’t sad anymore but I wasn’t anything else either. I still didn’t want to play with the kids and I simply didn’t care about the washing up or the cobwebs.

And I wallowed and I didn’t get back up.

I failed at a million little things and I let that failure define me.

Then I cracked. I thought some dark, depressing things and a voice in my head said ‘enough’.

I had friends and family who loved me and it wasn’t doing any of the four of us in the household any good me being the way I was.

So I  left.

And in doing so I stopped failing.

I took the kids and me out of an unhealthy situation and started over.

I found my way through, not on my own, but with help. I got myself and the kids a flat and started to pick myself up.

I play with the kids, I colour in, we go to the park and play silly games. I can focus on things for longer than forty seconds. I laugh. I still suck at housework but I try and I do enough for the place to be clean, even if it’s messy (and I genuinely don’t own an iron…).

I still fail. But I am not a failure.

I keep trying. That’s the difference.

365 Project Week #16 ~ “Time”

MONDAY:Time to relax…

TUESDAY:

FaceTime!

WEDNESDAY:

Lunch time…

THURSDAY:

Fun time…

FRIDAY:

TIME WARP! (University reUNIon!)

SATURDAY:

Home time

SUNDAY:

Bed time.

Why I’m a writer…

Where do writers come from? I don’t know for certain, and there will always be exceptions to any rule, but generally I think writers come from passionate readers. After all, if you don’t read books, why on earth would you want to write one? Like I said, there are exceptions, some people no doubt write books after being inspired by something incredible in their lives that just filled them with a need to pick up a pen. Generally though, I think you just grow up as a writer, even if you don’t notice at first and go along thinking you want to grow up to be a vet or a racing driver.

I was lucky, I knew what I wanted to be from fairly early on; aged about 7 I had ambitions to be a vet, a pet shop owner, a newsreader and a wolf (yes, you did read that last one right) and I also had a burning desire to write down the stories that kept racing through my head.

My first real writing endeavour was in one of those square exercise books where half of the page is lined and the other left blank for pictures. This tatty, dog-eared little notebook was the home of my first ‘series’ of stories, written when I was about six years old. Each story was a double page spread long on average and contained about 4 sentences (often written out by my Mum or brother first so that I could copy the letters). Every one was illustrated (badly) and there were probably about 15 or so in total. ‘Tim and Tom’ were a cat and a dog and they went on adventures together such as visiting the park or going shopping. The series came to a dramatic end when I got bored of my two beloved characters, probably shortly after my seventh birthday in a fit of ‘I’m too old for this now’ temper, for the final story read, quite simply: ‘Tim and Tom were in danger. Tim died. Tom didn’t. The End.’

It wasn’t much, but it was a start. The first of many ‘books’ I wrote between then and the age of about 14 – all fairly dire but good practice all the same.

It was when I hit fifteen that I lost my ‘finishing powers’ – unless it was work for school or college I tended to get halfway through pieces and then start something new as soon as it popped into my head. This resulted in story upon story that stopped abruptly somewhere in the middle and never ever found conclusions. I had one piece that I started when I was 16 and continued, on and off, until I got to university and realised that, despite being over 11,000 words long,  it was actually fairly terrible and beyond rescue – it wasn’t going anywhere other than on and on… So I put it down and left it alone. The story may have been a failure but I was rather fond of one of the characters and he has since cropped up in other pieces, that actually had direction and purpose. Sometimes his name changes but he is still effectively the same person, a tip I picked up on my course at University  – just because a story has failed, it doesn’t mean there is nothing in it worth keeping.

This inability to finish things lasted a few years until I started at university and the sudden total focus on writing alone, rather than mixed in with other subjects as it had been all through school and college, brought back my ability to write endings. And short stories. And poems. And other forms I didn’t even know existed or had just never really tried like prose poetry, short-short stories and non-fiction writing. I was flourishing and didn’t even realise it until almost the end of my final year.

Then University was over and I was thrust into the real world with a 2:1 Creative Writing BA and a new baby. I was suddenly ‘Mummy’ as well as ‘Carole’ (well, I’d had a few months to get used to the idea but it’s not the same until the baby actually arrives) and I didn’t have anybody telling me what to write any more. Not that I was ever restricted to what others wanted me to write but that had always been a major factor in life until then. I didn’t have any specific deadlines or reading lists and it as up to me to get stuff done. Eeeek.

Being a new Mum threw me off course a bit, which is hardly unexpected, but always, even when I was barely writing a sentence a week and only reading at 3 in the morning whilst feeding Tori, I was a writer.

I’m getting back into the swing of things now, I’m used to being Mummy and I know how to balance her with being Carole. Why am I a writer? Because that’s who I am, it’s that simple. I wouldn’t want it any other way.