That stuff doesn’t stay in your boots, you know

The season of mists, mellow fruitfulness and Mince Pies In The Shops Already?? is with us. Rather like a bear waking up at the wrong time, I’ve been emerging, blinking, into the welcome light of a return to reasonable health and sanity. I used to hate it when life went off the rails for a bit, mainly because, as a single parent with two full-time jobs (one at home and one in the office), I really didn’t have time for all that mental health shit. Just get on with it, kid. But, as my Mum used to say, ‘That stuff doesn’t stay in your boots, you know.” (No, the words make no sense at all, but you kind of get the gist.)

Now I’m old and retired from both full-time jobs, I had the space to indulge in a full breakdown. All the accumulated Black Dogs/Clouds/Portents/Whatever demanded their turn, and despite my insistence that “I’m seventy-one, now I really don’t have time for this mental health shit.”, the buggers wouldn’t go away until they’d been given satisfaction. I thought you were supposed to be wise and have come to terms with it all by the time you’re seventy-one. Turns out you’re just as screwed up, and your knees hurt.

My GP was lovely, handed me a tissue while I sobbed in the surgery, and prescribed Fluoxetine. After the regulation number of weeks in which it definitely Gets Worse, it started to Get Better. And then I couldn’t eat. I mean, I could put food in at one end, but a matter of minutes later it would explosively emerge from the other. I got fed up chucking clothes away. “Damn tummy bugs.” On the positive side, I lost nearly a stone in a week, so in my more delirious moments I did wonder if this was actually the universe being kind. (I’m a podge. I’ve always been a podge. Being a podge at my age probably isn’t the best plan.) I missed a family anniversary/birthday gathering, and thus lost the chance to get a cuddle with my newest great-nephew. Eventually, exhausted and pissed off, I forgot to take my pills. And the food stayed put.

I’d never made the connection, but there it was on the bit of paper in the packet. ‘May cause…’. Always read the bit of paper.

I’m off the pills now, trying not to return to full podge status, and for the first time ever, able to accept that yeah, that stuff really doesn’t stay in your boots (the mental health issues, not the food) and it’s fine to acknowledge that. I’m on the waiting list for a ‘talking therapy’ and really grateful for the lovely family and friends who have been so kind and understanding, and ready to help me overcome the Fear of the Page that blocked the writing for a bit.

We should all have time for this mental health shit, even when it’s at its shittiest. So it was discouraging to read that prejudice against people with ‘mental health issues’ is rising in England, and that research by Mind shows that one in ten people would be unwilling to live next door to someone with a ‘mental health condition’, even if that person was receiving treatment or had recovered. There is also increasing hostility to community mental health facilities. Violence against people with mental health issues, which has always been more of a problem than violence by people with mental health issues, is also on the increase.*

I’m deeply saddened, but not surprised. It’s part of a tendency that has always been present and is now becoming more acute: where there’s a recognisable shortcoming in society, blame the people who are the victims of the shortcoming rather than the people causing the problem. Do migrants, legal or illegal, make the decisions about their housing, financial support, work status etc? (There’s a load of deranged bollocks talked about this subject, but the system is a mess.) Do people with serious mental health conditions decide that mental health care is becoming more and more difficult to access? No, of course not. If you want to hold someone responsible, find out who actually pulls the strings, rather than beat up people who, like you, are having their strings yanked in all directions. 

Also, what the hell is a ‘mental health condition? I’m not daft. I’m an elderly, white, middle-class woman who can more or less pass for ‘normal’ in most settings. It ain’t me they’re coming for. My daughter, however, has tonic-clonic epilepsy, a neurological condition which may or may not be accompanied by mental health issues, and she’s had to put up with all sorts of abuse and discrimination. 

Being seventy-one doesn’t mean you’ve sorted everything out. I still feel like the kid sitting on the stairs peeking through the banisters at grown-ups doing grown-up things. When a kind adult says to their child, “Let the lady get on the bus first,” I still look round for the lady we’re supposed to be getting out of the way for. But I have learned that just being alive means you have a ‘mental health condition’, and we ought to be supporting those who are less able than some of us to resist the string-pulling.

As you may have gathered, Fear of the Page has gone. Rant mode is now engaged. Thanks for reading! 

*‘Alarming rise’ in mental health stigma in England, research shows | Mental health | The Guardian

What I’m reading:

Not a lot lately, if I’m honest, due to concentration issues, but I have just started Lucid by Oraine Johnson (Gollancz). It’s a debut fantasy/sci-fi (genuinely, a mixture of both) novel – one chapter in and I’m already mystified, in a good way!  

AN UNINVITED GUEST

How are you getting on with AI?

Every time I open up a blank page on the computer, Microsoft’s Copilot bounces up, tail wagging, tongue hanging out, asking if I would like to draft with it. No ta. Every time I write an email it asks if I would like Copilot to rewrite it. No ta. I tried to uninstall Copilot because it was getting on my nerves. Computer said no. I am really not keen on uninvited guests.

I would imagine most writers these days use AI for purely practical purposes. I spell-check. I word-count. I don’t use any writing software tools (Scrivener etc) because, to be honest, I prefer to keep my tech simple, rather like my brain when it actually encounters tech. I save, I meticulously file, I back-up. To several places. I print out, because I can’t edit on the screen, and in any case I see editing as an intimate and sometimes very irritable relationship between me and the current version. It needs to be physical.

I’m an editor on a community writing website. It’s free to join and people can post anything they want, as long as it doesn’t break our terms and conditions, which basically involve guaranteeing it’s all your own work and not being an arsehole. The only reward writers get is being flagged-up if an editor feels the piece is particularly worthy, or being selected as a pick of the day, week or month if it’s worthier still. The idea of the site is to enable and encourage anyone who feels the urge to get their writing out there and maybe get a bit of feedback. We have prose writers, poets, published writers, unpublished writers, people writing in any and every genre. It’s great.

We’re increasingly having to run things through an AI checker. Which is a bit of AI which will tell you how much of the piece in question is likely to be AI generated. We have a strict ‘no AI’ policy when it comes to the actual writing.

It's a bit of a mystery to me why people use AI to create creative writing. Surely the whole point of the thing is to put yourself out there, for whatever reason – artistic glory, competitive instinct, or the much-maligned motive of making enough money to pay your bills. I can see why anxious or lazy students use it for essays – I thoroughly disapprove, but at least, if you get away with it, you’ve got a certificate in your sticky mitts, and every time you look at it you can feel the warm glow of knowing that you obtained it under false pretences. I get that it could be useful for job applications. In that respect, is it any worse than the friend who used me to write resumés and job applications, in our youth, because I was ‘better at words’ than they were? 

But why the hell would you do it on a website where the sole purpose is to develop your own creativity?

Is it that ‘winning’ is everything, even if ‘winning’ is no more than a nod from an editor? 

Is it that people are frightened of being not good enough, even when there’s no actual definition, on our site, of what is good enough? You do your best. You contribute. You offer encouragement to others. We hope you enjoy. Your AI tool will not enjoy.

I’m not inherently anti-AI. There’s no point in being so, apart from anything else. It’s here, you can’t uninvent it, we have to learn to live alongside it. Members of my family greatly enjoyed ABBA Voyage, with the avatars. Someone (not one of my family) asked me why I was so against people using AI in creative writing when I was so pleased my family had enjoyed themselves listening to recordings of ABBA songs while watching gussied-up videos of ABBA. It’s questions like that which make me wonder whether the machines have taken over already. 

The real point of writing, the absolute essence of it, is that it’s a thing you feel you have to do. It’s a part of you. It’s not always the happiest of parts, but you can’t ignore it. We shouldn’t let AI take that away from us. 

What I’m reading:

The Time Traveller’s Guide To Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (Vintage). The Guardian called this ‘…the most entertaining book ever written about the Middle Ages’. I don’t know about that, I’m not an expert on books about medieval England, but it’s enormous fun. I thought it would help with research I’m doing for a story about a medieval ghost, and it’s the most enjoyable bit of research I’ve ever done. When AI finally does crack time travel for us, this book will give you all the information you need for your weekend in the 1300s.

In The Shadow Of Gods by Rachel Deering (Black Bough Poetry). Declaration of interest: Rachel is a fellow editor on ABCTales.com. She is also a much-published poet whose work on nature, mythology and folklore creates its own magic. Even if poetry isn’t usually your thing, if you like being enveloped in a world of blurred boundaries, glimpses of beauty and cruelty, and explorations of all nature, including the human kind – you’ll love this.

WRITING THE LIFE

I’ve never been too keen on doing much Life Writing. I do Daily Pages, when I get up early enough to fit it into the morning. If you’re not familiar with Daily Pages (there are many and varied names for this), the idea is that you sit down and let words come out, spontaneously, for however long works for you, but not too long, because then you start self-editing, and that ruins the whole point of the exercise. 

I find Daily Pages particularly helpful when I’m stuck, either with writing or life in general. If I can’t force anything coherent out, I play games. I do mirror writing, or drag words diagonally down the page, or in a circle. At least I’ve got squiggles on paper, and it’s reassuring and freeing to be completely childlike for a bit. 

Daily Pages are for my eyes only, though. Even when they’re just games, they’re a part of me that is just for me. It’s like the Diary I kept from when I was about nine or ten until my late teens. I’m not sure why I stopped keeping it. Maybe I just got too caught up in living life to want to spend time recording it. 

A few years ago I ‘downsized’ from the semi I’d lived in for twenty-three years, and chucked the various notebooks containing the Diary into a skip. Life had been stressful for a number of years, and I wanted a complete reset. Also, I didn’t fancy my kids reading the inner workings of my teenage mind, should I shuffle off the mortal coil at short notice. 

I also threw out old love letters. We had handwritten love letters in my youth. Some came with photos of the boyfriend of the time, but dick pics were there none. It was a different age. Or maybe it was just that none of my boyfriends had a Polaroid camera and taking the film into Boots would have got them arrested.

The only thing I actually miss about the Diary, or the letters, are their fact-checking facilities. It’s not that I don’t remember the past, it’s - do I remember it right? 

I’m an only child so I haven’t got siblings to compare notes with. I spent most of my childhood abroad, because of my Dad’s job, and I’m not in contact with anyone I knew then. It all changed after my teens – I’m still in touch with a few people from Uni days and having lived in the same city for nearly fifty years now, I’m not short of people to reminisce with. 

I’m fascinated by the process of memory, how we remember, and why we choose to remember some things and allow others to float away. It’s a recurring theme in my writing. It doesn’t take a therapist to point out that this fascination is probably because I feel unmoored from parts of my own past. It’s as though the only existence those parts have is in the images of them I hold, or possibly create. 

That could have advantages, of course. I could make up all sorts of bollocks, and no-one would ever know. I was the most popular girl everywhere I went! Blokes fell at my feet! I was bravely outspoken on matters of social conscience from the time I could form words! I had amazing taste in clothes and boy, could I rock a green lurex halter-neck maxi with towering black platform shoes!

Actually, I didn’t look too bad in the green lurex. I fell off the platform shoes and slipped a disc. 

I do have the letters my parents sent me when they were abroad and I was in the UK, doing my A Levels and then going to Uni. They kept all my letters as well, so I now have both sets. This gives a timeline but obviously, my letters were heavily censored versions of my life. ‘I had a great time at Mary’s birthday party last Saturday!’ I got shit-faced and didn’t wake up in my own bed. In all probability.

Who the hell was Mary? 

So Life Writing has always scared me a bit. How can I do it? I can’t give a reliable account of the first twenty years of my own life. Also, who’s interested in some old woman burbling on about her dodgy neo-colonialist childhood? 

It took me far longer than it should to realise that Life Writing is present in every story we concoct. Our memories are writing aids. Unless we’re actually writing a fact-based autobiography, it doesn’t really matter if we remember precisely how we felt at a particular time. The feelings we have now about a place, person, or experience from the past are the truth about the effect those things had on our lives. If that effect was overwhelmingly negative, it might help us to re-examine what facts we have and reshape our own narratives. But there’s a reason we remember things the way we do. We have to discover why that particular story has always felt like the right one.

And because we’re writers and we plunder everyone’s experiences, including our own, for material, the question of why we choose to frame our own narratives in a certain way helps us give our characters substance. We lend them bits of our lives that fit. 

If we can get them to play along, of course. Characters are stroppy buggers. If they don’t like the bits of our lives we’re offering, they soon let us know. 

Thanks for reading. See you soon! 

Jane x

What I’m reading: 

Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton (Published by 4th Estate). The English version of this was published last year and got great reviews. I’ve only just started it so can’t really say what I think of it yet, but the first seventeen pages are very promising indeed! 

The Kraken Wakes, by John Wyndham (Penguin). Another of my nostalgia reads. This was the first John Wyndham I read – I must have been twelve or thirteen. My Mum was a big Wyndham fan and I’m pretty sure she bought it for me. Wyndham is a very underrated writer, in my humble opinion. He’s often been denigrated for his ‘cosy catastrophes’ but there’s a lot more to him than that. People have been scathing about his conventional female characters but there’s a lot more to them as well, and if you want a searing comment on the exploitation of women through advertising and propaganda, read his short story Consider Her Ways. It was written in 1956, so it’s not cutting edge now, but it was then. I read it in my teens and all that pretty much passed me by. I read it again in my thirties and I was gobsmacked.