Writing

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anais Nin

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Sylvia Plath

Following on upon a recent essay on one of my creative passions, namely photography, today’s inclination is to address another; – writing.

My first memory in this respect is of proudly showing my parents a letter I had written, long before actually learning how to write. I had simply poured out my infant hieroglyphics on a page and announced that this was my first letter. There were good humoured, encouraging chuckles in response and the warm energy of the moment remains etched on my memory.

Like many kids, writing came easy to me, even by the age of four. The first tasks, – writing my own name, and those of other family members, were followed by formal letters of thanks to my godmother for birthday and Christmas gifts received; `Dear Aunty Fionnuala, I hope you are well……´

There was an early pattern of mixing up letters of the alphabet, putting `i´ where `e´ should have been, and vice versa, etc. but progress was otherwise swift, and a sense of accomplishment ensued. The difference between the sound of words and their spelling posed challenges, more due to the fact that I had little patience for the fact that the adults couldn’t seem to get it right. After all, my logic ran, words should look like how they sound. There was no alternative but to acquiesce to the reality that `they simply didn’t get it´.

Meaningful encouragement came in the form of an English teacher in secondary school of whom I was quite fond. The warmth was mutual, and this Jesuit priest gave me meaningful feedback on my essays during my somewhat turbulent teen years. To this day, I have some of the corrected manuscripts in my desk, these being the only school memorabilia in my possession. His encouragement left me with the conviction that real talent resided deep within me and could and would be brought to the surface, if sufficiently cultivated and expressed. It was my intention then to become a writer, my role model being a certain compatriot by the name of James Joyce.

Then circumstances helped throw me into a wobble. My beloved father died at the age of fifty-one within six months of a lung cancer diagnosis. The idea that my great love of him was not sufficient to save him from this cruel destiny left me incredulous, resentful, and angry. This coincided with my mother falling into a deep depression and the beginning of my own alcoholic drinking and daily self-medication using marijuana, which was to persist into my early forties. My wanting to be a writer morphed over the years into me wanting to want to be a writer. Not much got written during these years, at least not in terms of creative writing.

What did happen, in my late twenties, was that when family circumstances dictated that I needed a `real job´ after years of teaching English and German to engineering professionals, one was offered to me by the Dutch company Philips. They needed someone to establish multilingual documentation capability for the telecommunication infrastructure equipment being developed at their location in Nürnberg. It was part of their drive to succeed in the emerging newly deregulated global telecommunications market.

Despite knowing little about the technology and less about documentation and the translation business, I accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. It was to be the beginning of a twenty-year management career during which it quickly became evident that most people have an aversion to documenting processes, workflows, and the progress within projects, all of which I therefore tackled with relish. My management assignments included such things as writing annual reports and taking board meeting minutes; the extra leverage which can be gained by being the person who documents the formulation of policy and strategy was not lost on me, and my skills improved with practice.

Under the ever-increasing weight of my drinking and other addictive patterns, which included workaholism, my world eventually fell apart in the summer of 2003. The abrupt ending of my marriage and career led me to the decision to clean up my act and embark on a path of recovery. For help with this, I turned to the various communities which use the Twelve Steps of AA for this purpose.

My first sponsor in recovery assigned me the task of writing a list of ten things each day for which I was grateful. While I initially detested this task, it did get me writing again on a regular basis. Following instructions now seemed like a good idea after my best thinking had gotten me completely derailed, heading straight for both emotional and spiritual bankruptcy.

Soon after this, the work of Julia Cameron (`The Artist’s Way´) crossed my path. Julia conceived a programme to help blocked , using the principles of the Twelve Steps of AA. It includes the stroke of genius of encouraging the participants to write so-called `morning pages´, i.e., simply letting the pen capture whatever stream of consciousness which happened to present at the beginning of each day. The brilliance of this approach is that the `blocked´ writers found themselves writing regularly, despite their `block´. This discovery prompted me to begin daily journaling with all its creative and psycho-hygienic benefits, a practice which, over fifteen years later, continues to this day.

Then came a stroke of luck. The emergence of covid and related lockdowns coincided with a fully paid sabbatical period of eighteen months which I spent here in my home in the Rheinland. My ideas for the next phase of my career were taking shape, and it appeared the stars were now aligned for me to finally write that book which had been taking shape in my heart and mind over the years.  `Recovery´ now being the focus of my vocation, in all its facets and applications, this book deals with the issues of addiction, trauma, and recovery as they play out in my own life experience. The intention was to entertain the general reader with good storytelling and to inspire those seeking liberation from their own addictive maladies.

Upon completing this, as yet unpublished, manuscript I fell into a bit of a hole until it became clear that there was no reason to stop there. It was here that the process of crafting essays on general issues related to healing, recovery, and living our full potential began. These `Weekly Reflections´ have become an integral part of my website.

I still consider this as an apprenticeship, and get great joy from the weekly opportunity to further hone those skills which my kindly English teacher recognised and encouraged in their genesis, so many years ago.