An invitation to my birthday

It is Sunday, May the second, and it is my birthday. Everything is very calm at the moment; James and the children are still sleeping, and the dog and I have walked round the garden. I have noticed the blossom on the apple and plum trees, the new spears in the asparagus bed, the soft red shoots on the rose bushes. It is strange to me that, of everything I could do right now, I am choosing to write.
Once upon a time, reading was how I lived. In the turbulent, unpredictable landscape of my childhood, reading was my bunker, my shelter, my meaning in life. It was where I found myself, where I hid, the only place where I was able to breathe. I read Charlotte Brontë and Jilly Cooper, loving them both with equal fervour. I absorbed words without discrimination. Writers, to me, belonged to another world, where they sat on ethereal thrones and delivered their words by magic.
The year I was eight, my aunt gave me a five year diary with a tiny lock and key. I was not scared of blank pages then, and the reader slowly became a writer. I did not know I was a writer. I did not know what a writer was; I had no concept of writing as a career, and no one to ask. Writing was what I did, but I wrote in the way that I breathed – it never occurred to me that someone like me might get paid for it. Writers were amazing, other-worldly beings, lucky, blessed and, in the main, dead. I needed to write, but I also needed to eat, and I was the only person I could count on to make sure that happened in any kind of sustainable way. The possibility of bringing those two needs together simply did not exist. I got in my own way constantly, by finding a career I loved and was good at, by fostering and nurturing relationships without paying any attention to my own feelings, by believing, constantly, that if I could make myself simultaneously invisible and high-achieving, I might finally become deserving of love.
As I grew older, writing a novel became the dragon I needed to slay to appease my demons. It was, I decided, the achievement that would justify every decision I had ever made.
And I did it. I got there. I was not naïve enough to think the career would be automatic, but I believed – truly – that if my work was good enough, if I lived sufficiently gratefully, the career would follow. I offered myself to unpaid mentoring schemes, I answered e mails from aspiring writers at length, I poured myself into workshops and festivals and tried to deserve my good fortune.
I’ve written elsewhere about the courage that’s required to turn back. I know, because when crisis came, I was not brave enough to do it. Endurance and perseverance had got me my book deal; endurance and perseverance would get me another. I wasn’t sure about writing something in a completely different universe to my first novel, but my agent told me that the first draft definitely had legs, so I pushed on. My publicist told me that, if I didn’t get another novel out by 2017, I would have no chance of a career. My editor, who had first refusal on that novel, responded with effusive praise, then asked what else I was writing. I found joy in creating a middle grade novel, sharing it chapter by chapter with my own children; an agent loved it but ultimately, couldn’t sell it. I wrote tens of thousands of words of a sequel, then a prequel to The Ship – the response came in an e mail so blunt and cruel, forwarded without any cushion or warning by someone who should have known better, that it is seared on my brain for eternity. I lost my ability to sleep. I lost a third of my hair. Most debilitating of all, I lost my ability to read. My lifeline, my sanctuary, my safe place, was gone.
In the wake of those losses, others – ones that had nothing to do with writing – insisted on coming to the surface. Like a sedated leviathan slowly waking, something monstrous and undeniable began to flail dreadfully and angrily about my tiny boat, threatening not just me, but the four small people I had brought into it with me and the person with whom I’d made them. I saw it coming and offered it all kinds of sacrifices. I accepted that I might never write again, I took on extra volunteering responsibilities, I tried to embrace the chance to learn other things, as though by plugging the gaps in my childhood, this terrible, powerful horror of pure crushing muscle would swim quietly away. It did not. It would not. It didn’t want James or the children or my dreams. It wanted my self-worth, and it would not let me go until I had found it. And I could not find it while I clung to the fallacy that, by denying its existence, I was making things right.
It has been a long process, hard and strange and breaking, and it is far from over. Even now, I cling to the image of a doctor needing to break a bone which has set badly, in order to restore it to health and function. But slowly, I am coming to recognise that every analogy has its limitations, and so do I. Some things must be let go, and whether they wither or thrive is not up to you. The most important part of my life is the section between my birth and my death, and I cannot lose any more of it by investing my being in things that I cannot control. I must notice the blossom on the apple and plum trees, the new spears in the asparagus bed, the soft red shoots on the rose bushes, and accept that I am broken.
And so, on this, which could quite well be the half-way point of my life, I would like to share the one thing I have learned. You do not serve the abyss by continually throwing things into it. It does not matter whether the abyss is yours, or someone else’s, or what the things you offer have cost you. You cannot satiate the appetite of one whose purpose is not to be filled. There are no medals for self-sacrifice, no rewards for serving a toxic relationship in the hope that your courage and constancy will bring a fairy tale reward. Only by feeding yourself will you be able to raise your slumbering monster, look it in its vicious glaring eyes, and comfort it with the three words, ‘I am enough.’ It will never go away, but it will swim alongside you. Listen to it; maybe it will lead you to a sister you had lost, and riches you did not know existed.
In the time I have been writing this, my children have been wandering in and out. I have made waffles, I have fed my sourdough starter, I have comforted the teenager who ran out of time to bake the birthday cake she’d planned for me. I am reading a wonderful novel, the latest in a string of wonderful novels I have loved, and in two hours from now, Claire Fuller will be my guest on Chiltern Voice Book Club, the radio book programme I write and host on a volunteer basis for our local community radio station, Chiltern Voice (Sundays at 2pm on chilternvoice.fm). Claire and I had our debuts published in the same year; Claire’s fourth novel is on the Women’s Prize shortlist and I no longer know whether I will ever publish another. But what once felt like failure of the cruellest kind now feels like something else. A different road, a different journey, a meeting with the person I could have been had I known, not only to ask for support, but how to accept it. It’s not that this is a person I still have time to become – it’s a celebration that – to steal a phrase – I am, I am, I am. And that I am, is enough.
I have written myself my birthday gift. That makes me a writer – amazing, lucky, blessed and, delightfully, not yet dead. Thank you for reading x