Poor Things

Writing about difficult subjects, empathy, and Pat Barker's Regeneration.

Apologies but I've been trying to institute/ settle into a writing routine for a new project and it's been kicking my arse. To the extent, that I had a conversation with a dramatherapist friend about how best to take care of myself while writing about difficult subjects. Even having someone to have that conversation with is tremendous lucky/ a professional privilege/ an example of my own cultural capital which I'm tremendously grateful for and thankfully, things seem to be working a lot smoother now.  
 
So yes, the summer seems to have been marred by my cancelled hiking trip, healing from the injury that caused me to cancel, and further frustrations on the creative and professional front. With that in mind, I'd perhaps placed too much emphasis and hope on this latest writing endeavour, and was disappointed that it was going as well as I hoped.  
 
This is a very long-winded way of saying I've been feeling kind of low, and while I've been doing everything I should be doing (meds, sleeping properly, eating properly, exercise, fresh air, mindfulness, meditation, journalling, hanging out with dogs, holding a baby, and I still feel like shit so don't @ me), I get the distinct impression I just need to let this cloud pass. Very annoying. 
 
I met with a friend last. We were due to go to the cinema but a combination of feeling low/ having not eaten/ and having not left my writing behind me, I got on the wrong bus and ended up being late for meeting them, at which point I just brain farted what had been going in with me. 
 
At our last meeting, they had revealed a piece of information about themselves that saddened me, made me understand them a bit better, and made me feel a desire to affirm them. And so, in spite of my own brain malaise, the part of me that’s hard wired to care for people was switched on like an immersion heater. 
 
Among other things, we ended up having a conversation about Pat Barker’s excellent novel Regeneration which got me thinking of Siegfried Sassoon who, despite his own acute symptoms of PTSD, opted to return to the trenches of WW1, not for God and country, but for friendship, for the love and loyalty of his fellow soldiers. 

By the nature of the work, writing can render me quite myopic, focusing on my own petty grievances and suffering, and lifted up my head to see what weather patterns are affecting the people around me can be a regenerative, empathetic act.  

This is different of course to caring about others when I don’t have the capacity, people pleasing at the expense of your own mental health, it is a way of making meaningful human connection, that makes you want to be strong for others. And it is in doing this that I learn how to be strong and show up for yourself. 

I once had a play I’d written performed at a festival that, in retrospect, was not settling well into the space, which I interpreted as evidence of the writing’s innate awfulness. On the phone to the director, as they drove from another job, I sobbed at them that the play was awful, that it didn’t work, and they needed to pull it. They murmured ‘you poor thing,’ and bizarrely, that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. And not only was it exactly what I needed to hear, but I then knew what I needed to say and do when someone else was suffering.  

It has of course come full circle, as when the same director's little girl came running at me with a skinned knee a few weeks ago, I knew what to say to her, just as I knew what to say to my friend.