For over two decades, I didn’t dare write.
I was broken-hearted. I had loved this work and it had hurt me, and after the hurt came terror. I missed writing, and the high it brought me, but the harder I tried, the more blocked I was. My thoughts stammered.
So I pushed that part of me aside and got on with other things. Things I enjoyed. Horse riding filled my life, and I went as far as I could in it, almost to Grand Prix. But I felt small inside there too. Never worthy, never good enough. I hated competing and for some reason forced myself to do it anyway. I would chicken out the night before, or not sleep and ride like a zombie, and a zombie cannot pilot a stressed-out 550-kilo horse around an arena.
Hypermobile people are not made to sit big-moving dressage horses. Years of pushing through despite the pain wore my body out, and in the end it packed it in. I got ill, and illness put an end to my big outside world. I was housebound for years.
My world became miniature.
Then one day I dared write a poem. It was called “Wolf”, and it was about telling fear to fuck off. About taking a stance, putting my hands on my hips and blowing it away, like the big bad wolf with better breath.
One poem, and the floodgates opened. They did not open politely. They went insane. Poems, and more poems. Then ideas for more books, and for song lyrics, and then music, and then films, fully-fledged little stories.
My world was still small. My ideas became big.
Next, I burned an older fear, the fear of painting. That one began in my early twenties, after criticism. It was the same fear. Not good enough.
I don’t care any more whether I’m good enough. I’m good enough for the joy of being me.
These days I’m full of myself, and I mean that as a good thing. We need to be more full of all the good stuff we bury deep in ourselves: joy, excitement, the giddy high of creating.
So I paint every day now. Little things.
I’ve written about this before, and I will probably write about it again. I think we all write about the same things over and over, looking at them from different angles, microscoping them, because we’re still looking for the answers and hoping that what we find might help someone else.
So here is what I found, in case it helps. People say “it’s too late” a lot. I don’t think it is usually what they mean.
Today I made a romantic video and a funny video, painted a clapperboard, and answered hundreds of comments on the Instagram page of my fictional pop star, Emilio Caliente.
It was never too late.
It was only ever too scary.
Find your joy. And from 20 October, pre-order my book, Just Like A Movie. Or/and buy my poetry book, Illicit Croissants At Dawn