This week I'm giving zero fucks about... writing this newsletter
*You don't have to click "display images" at the top this week - no visual content in this little wonder.
This week I'm giving zero fucks about... writing this newsletter
Guys (in the inclusive sense of the word - that is: women and men. I once met someone who would leave a meeting if anyone referred to the room as "guys". She's allowed to have her pet peeves but personally I'm fine with it, hence),
I've got no original content for you this week - surprise! It's Sunday, I've come to my favourite cafe near where I live specifically to work on my freelance work (because I frittered away my Wednesday on things I enjoy instead) and do my newsletter. The day has gone to plan so far. I did a fair bit on my freelance work and, when I felt a little tired of it and a little hungry in the tummy, I had a delicious lunch while I read my book ("Don't Hold My Head Down" by Lucy-Anne Holmes; more on this next ZFs) and then up it popped on my calendar: "Write ZFs", Google's typeface told me. 3pm was the time.
The truth is, though, that writing my opening piece for my newsletter doesn't feel quite right. I've been a bit emotionally exhausted this week (it's not entirely because The Pool had to shut up shop, but I won't pretend I've been unaffected by it) and the normal feeling of excitement and "oooh, what shall I write about this time?" wasn't hitting me. All manner of things ran through my head, but mostly "they won't even miss me. No one blinked an eye at the "big shakeup of 2019", when ZFs went from weekly to fortnightly, so what's the odd missed week?". But the loudest creation from my thought-making-machine was - I feel bad about this. I feel like I've given up. Like a failure.
Well, Jacs it's time to get some god damn perspective on the matter. It's one week, the people will still either like or dislike your writing when you next land in their inbox and you'll be back the next week.
Well, surprise! Here I am this week still - because I'm bringing you some writing in spite of it all.
Two lessons to be learnt here:
Go easy on yourself. Put things into perspective.
When a writer, always write because there'll always be some content to pull out the bottom drawer and re-hash for a different audience #writertips
Public interest warning:
I wrote this last week. It's a pitch for people to work with me and have me write content for them on mental health. If you want to work with me or if you know someone who might, please get in touch.
p.s. Lesson #3: never miss an opportunity for self-promotion.
If you want the realest writing on mental health there is — work with me
I write about mental health because it is, I often say, an absolute compulsion.
Living through depression is so inexplicably hard to process — both while you are going through it and afterwards — and the only way I have come close to feeling like I can is by pouring it all out onto the page. When I say “it all”, I mean all of it. The only distance between my experience of depression and what you’ll find written in my work is when I just don’t have the words to explain those feelings that are so alien, so unfathomable, so removed from the normal human experience. Other times it’s because I’m still too close to the experience; I haven’t had the time, even over months and years, to find the perspective I need to communicate just what the beast is, what it can do, what it can create and destroy.
I think I’m lucky to have the compulsion that I have. I also believe that the world is lucky that I suffer from this obsession. I know that the intensity of my experience means that my writing communicates the pain, sorrow, confusion and heart-wrenching awfulness of depression well. I know it’s good, if often shocking and upsetting and confronting, writing. I’d rather it raised a few eyebrows (and even sometimes elicit a few tears, as I know it has done) to be honest.
I also believe that what I’m writing is important. We are so scared to share our experiences of difficult mental health. We fear it makes us odd, our behaviour is weird/lazy/mad/pathetic [delete as appropriate], we fear that people may not understand and we fear that employers might see us as a risk. I’m scared too. I often feel nervous before clicking “publish” on my writing but always end up reminding myself that I would rather share my truth than not for the sake of some employer who isn’t good enough for me anyway if they’re going to discriminate based on mental health. Sometimes I have to remind myself a couple of times and quite forcibly, but I always get there in the end.
The world needs more people like me — that is, people who can find the strength and have the words to tell the rest of the world why life can sometimes be so difficult. And why we are so powerless to change that. It’s ok not to "get" mental illness but we at least need to give people the opportunity and the means to.
There are people writing about mental health and some of it is so bloody brilliant, it makes my heart both weep and rejoice. There’s an odd dichotomy between wanting to find people like myself, whose experiences have dragged them through the deepest darkest parts of their mind (and believe me it gets deep and it gets dark) and back out the other side, and wishing this experience on no one else ever. All in all, I’m thankful for these brave voices with whom I share an aspect of a reality that we often go to great lengths to hide. Recently I discovered Kitty Hannah Eden who writes some of the best stuff I’ve ever read on depression. And of course there was that award-winning viral article by Hannah Jane Parkinson that opened eyes to some true spoken realness on mental health, for once.
But there is a lot of writing that doesn’t touch the depths that these women do, doesn’t scrape the bottom of the very deep, dark, dank barrel that I’m searching for. I get it — exposing vulnerability, and one that isn’t yet properly understood by society, is fucking scary. I’m still scared. I’m not yet in a place in which I feel I can say that my mental health history is not a black mark against my name and that I control my narrative rather than it or someone else controlling it for me. I would like to be proven wrong. But in the meantime, it is scary.
I’m still doing it though. I feel proud of the fact that I am confident enough to say that I feel that there is a place in this world for my writing — an important place, at that. Not because I am better than anyone else or I am a better writer than anyone else; these just aren’t things I ever consider. It’s simply because I’ve managed to touch something inside me and have decided to suspend my fear for long enough so as I can do my damnedest to try and replicate all those feelings (despair, hopelessness, fear, self-loathing and more) for anyone who reads my writing. Excellent writing isn’t always about technical skill; sometimes its just about a humanity that is made palpable. My voice, my experience, should not be heard above those of others though; our narratives are all as important as the next. But I do feel mine should be heard. My writing on mental health changes perspectives, it changes understanding, it changes outlooks. It, in short, makes change.
Maybe your platform (be that a media publication, a business website or a blog) is sharing mental health content already, maybe it isn’t. If you’re not, I recommend that you start to think about it. If you are talking about mental health — or are going to — I do urge that you make it real, make it honest, and make it the kind that disrupts someone’s day. Maybe it’ll be that day they read it, or maybe it’ll pop up and steal their breath for a split second a week later. Regardless, I ask of you: make it hard to stomach. Make it uncomfortable.
This year for me is about branching out and bringing my content to other people’s platforms, rather than just my own. I do and want to continue to write content that people can’t just read in five minutes in a lunch break and leave it there. I want to write words and thoughts that trickle through into conversations between partners at night, that raise heated debates between pints in the pub, that cause the tear that creeps out at work and has to be silently swept away. I want to make mental health a ball of fire that can’t be ignored. If you want to be part of that too, regardless of who you are or where you’re from, get in touch. I’d love to write for you.
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Zero F*cks will return to normal service in two weeks from now. I'll have so much stuff to get off my chest by then that no doubt the cup will runneth over. Yep, maybe clear a space in your diary now.
Like what you've just read? Pass this on to a woman or man who gives so few fucks that they haven't even read this far.