learning to write
I don’t know where to start and so I start with the desire to write.
It seems an ancient one: embedded back in those earliest memories of bedtime stories, birthday cards, roadside signs. A world of codes and symbols just outside my reach. I taught myself to read for the sake of those signs, convinced that one could never be bored with so much to decode. The highway markers proved disappointing whilst books brought the real revelation. A best friend to an often solitary child. Devoured voraciously.
I don’t remember learning to write, but once I did it formed a kind of holy trinity – reading and writing and me. When I wasn’t buried in a book I was an inexhaustible correspondent, barraging friends, family and faceless pen-pals with letters. Cataloguing birthday gifts. Capturing anything list-able in endless lists. A few years ago my Nana handed back an early example: an inventory of every food required for a summer visit to my grandparents’ sleepy coastal town, with each item carefully illustrated. Strawberries, floured fish fillets, dry ginger ale and extra-strong mints, clearly remembered in their giant jar atop the fridge. Oh, the audacity!
My first diary was a gift for my twelfth Christmas. A common brand of notebook still found in newsagents today, given to me by my brother and sister. Black-and-red-cover, hard-back. I made it my own with shining Easter egg foils – blue, gold, green, pink, a scene of frolicking bunnies and chicks – and set about documenting my summer, then my first year at high school and part of my second. Starting with sweetness and light, dear diary, and then descending into teen angst.
Many of the themes have remained the same in the subsequent notebooks. Identity, love, loss, friendship, family conflict, depression. The struggle to make sense of it all. For many years the notebooks were a struggle in themselves. I wanted them to be good. I wanted to create something that was beautiful, imaginative, insightful but more often than not I created a giant whinge. The same woes, repeated over and over, instilling a sense that nothing was changing. Finally I realised that the only unchanging element was my need to expel the rubbish, to exorcise it through writing it down.
I have never been without a notebook since age twelve-and-a-half, and I mostly use them when times are tough. There is little about the writing that is beautiful, imaginative, insightful. It doesn’t come anywhere close to capturing my experiences or thoughts as a whole. And yet the role that the notebooks play in my life is one of enormous importance. I would not be without them.
