When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother, "what will I be?"
And she said "what the fuck do you think I am? Psychic? Now fuck off outside & play. Mummy's got one of her wine headaches coming on".(*)
Ha ha ha.
You remember how, when you were a kid, people were, like, almost obsessed with what you wanted to be when you grew up? It seemed as though you'd get asked that question on almost a daily bloody basis. There you'd be, minding your own business, for some reason drawing a picture of a clothesline heavy with underpants, and people would start getting all up in your grill (or 'face' as it used to be known in the olden days; faces were like grills, except not so popular amongst the rappers) about where you think you're headed, and you're all "mate, I'm 4 years old. I'm still not entirely convinced the people on telly can't actually see me. I'm clearly an idiot. What are you asking me for?" I mean, you personally might have said something else, like "astronaut" or "call centre operator" or something. I don't know, I wasn't there.
Anyway.
I had all sorts of different futures in mind for myself when I was little. Mostly based on whatever, with hindsight, wildly age inappropriate TV show I was obsessed with at the time. For example, whilst watching LA Law at age 7, or thereabouts, I was determined to become a Californian lawyer because it meant I might get to meet Amanda Donohoe. And Amanda Donohoe made my tummy feel all funny....ahem yes well. That's not for here. Moving on.
But the one thing I wanted, more than anything else, was to be an author. I wanted to write stories & get money for them & live by the sea in a lighthouse.
I wrote nearly all the time. At primary school I would often negotiate my way out of having to learn anything, you know, useful, like maths or joined up handwriting, by offering instead to write a 25 page epic about a hot air balloon that ran on laughter. I developed a fierce literary dispute with a boy in my class over whether every story needed a happy ending (it will surprise you, I am certain, to discover that I was firmly in the downbeat camp). I would spend hours crafting palaces & sea lairs & vampire discos on paper. Poems, short stories, existentialist essays, you name it I'd write it. My output very probably exceeded that of Barbara Cartland. And was just as fucking awful.
So that was my secret dream. To go on writing & writing & writing until all the stupid crap that kept me awake all night was written down for other people to have to endure. And I had this dream right up until the age of 10.
And then;
I stopped having any dreams.Wow.
Pretty dramatic right? Yeah. You see exactly how I have robbed the literary establishment by abandoning my writerly dreams. What with my amazing ability to craft tension, and my masterful use of commas(**), I would have taken the world by storm. Yeah, you get it. You totally get it.
"But sonofajoiner! What could possibly have happened to you to make you abandon your deeply held desire to make a modest living from peddling your nonsense to the public?" absolutely no one cries.
Well, to be strictly truthful, my dream didn't disappear overnight at age ten. It was, however, dealt a blow that would eventually prove fatal..
When I was ten, I foolishly agreed to accompany my mum & dad to a school parents' evening. See, I was one of those obnoxious little child shits who fucking loved school & who never turned down an opportunity to hear how awesome I was doing at the whole business of learning.(***) Also, my teacher was a pleasant enough woman who kept a prayer card with a faintly terrifying image of a crucified Christ right there on her desk. My mum, on the other hand, was one of those murderous atheists that have been in the news a fair bit lately for bombing all the Christians to death by making them be polite to gay people in public. And in my childish way, I thought I really ought to be present to keep the peace, just in case my mum took it upon herself to headbutt some secularism into my teacher, or attempt to openly piss on her prayer card.
Now, I am aware that human memory is a notoriously unreliable thing. So in the interests of balance I have provided my parents' recollections about what transpired on this particular parents' evening as well as my own, in the hopes that somewhere in the middle, the truth may be found.
My memory of the evening goes as follows:Mrs Teacher - "Here are some things that came from the amazing imagination of your child proving that she clearly is amazing & we must start ringing around publishers immediately"
Parents look at one another with WTF faces (although in the olden days such faces were known as 'confused' & were marginally less sarcastic than their modern day counterpart).
Parents laugh so hard they catch on fire.
I secretly vow to have my revenge on them both by never writing another word ever, ever again.
My mum's memory of the evening is as follows:"For the last bloody time, I have no idea what you are on about"
My dad's memory of the evening is as follows:"I'm sorry, which one are you again?"
Obviously, I am exaggerating a little bit.
My teacher didn't use those exact words, but that was the general gist.
And I don't really think my parents fell off their chairs in hysterics & crawled out of the classroom hyperventilating at the very notion that their daughter might possess a talent(****).
But they did look at the proffered poems & laugh.
And my teacher did look sad that they laughed.
And she did ask them to at least consider what she had said to them.
And they did chuckle about it on the drive home.
And they did refer to my teacher as 'nuts'.
And they did stress, repeatedly, to me that I was really not good enough to make a living as a writer, because hardly anybody was.
And I did go home that night & cry until I fell asleep.
And I did wake up the next day knowing I could never let anybody read anything I wrote ever again because if my own parents thought my writing was laughable rubbish, well then, it must be laughable rubbish.
I did keep writing though, in secret, for myself, for a little while. But it had stopped being fun. I became my most ferocious critic. I would have what initially seemed like good story ideas but I gradually became terrified about writing them down. I couldn't bear the thought that someone might read my thoughts, and then never stop laughing. And eventually the ideas stopped coming altogether. By my teens the only shit I was able to drag out of my brain onto paper was the worst kind of angst-ridden, death-fixated, deadly, deadly serious poetry that still produces teeth-grinding embarrassment in me every time I stumble across it.
Then one day I realised, I was no longer anything approaching a writer. But, also, I wasn't anything else instead. And that's how things have remained.
Little pieces of my dream obviously still float about in my head. I sometimes catch the thud thud thud of a vampire disco somewhere in the back of my brain but I don't think I will ever find my way back to it. The roads leading to my imagination are almost entirely sealed. On odd occasions things still manage to slip out, but a lack of confidence means I hesitate to write them down and then my inner censor gets in on the act & the whole thing is usually over before it starts.
And sometimes I manage a blog post that doesn't go anywhere. But I make sure I do it late at night, when no one's looking, so no one knows I wrote it & I won't know that you're laughing.
(*) My fictitious lawyers have asked me to point out that such an event never took place. My mum drank gin exclusively.
(**) Grammar, punctuation & how to count accurately are just 2 of the many things I was never taught because from age 6 I could apparently out-manouvere grown fucking adults.
(***) Don't worry though, secondary school educated that right the way out of me. By age 13 I had absolutely no curiosity about the world left in me whatsoever.
(****) I do really think that.
