Write like nobodies reading

What's that expression, "dance like nobody's watching, sing like nobody's listening"? I could Google this, but I don't want to. It's a nice opening.

I tend to use this expression in my writing. To me, writing is incredibly therapeutic, though I am still a long way from mastering it as a skill. Each day, without fail, I try to find something to write about. It's a groove I fell out of some years ago, a groove that I'm desperate to return to, a groove that I miss, which put all the pieces of my fractured life together.

I didn't do education (see what I did there) for me. Going to school was a way of stultifying my mind. Also, school was insignificant in my "bigger picture." I was the kid in the class nobody talked to, but also the kid nobody ever really disliked. I was a shelf filler, like all those videos with titles you'd never remember in the video shop if you're old enough to remember those. I was probably deemed a little bit square. Years earlier, sexual abuse from an older female sibling broke me a little, and the effect ricocheted through my life. So, by the time I was 14 years old, I had no time to be at school. I needed to look after my baby while my then-partner, a teacher, went to work. Yes, you read that right. My first and only sexual encounter with someone unfamiliar with me was essentially, I guess, another act of sexual assault given my age. The result of this first voluntary penetrative sex was a little baby girl.

Until the event that made me a dad, to some degree, I still played with toys. I was a loner who was always on their own. Suddenly, I was never alone. I had been part of the creation of something, something out of something bad that became something good. As a result, I abruptly grew up and lived a double life—a life less ordinary. To my classmates, I just started to disappear. During the day, I would go to school, register as if I was there, and then sharply leave. I'd head to a church where a confidant would meet me with my baby girl; the mother would have long been at school. We lived on an island joined to the mainland by a beach— I'm told it's the biggest beach in the UK, who am I to argue? Our days would consist of us walking the streets from place to place in all weathers. If I'd saved a few pounds, we'd get a bus into the next town. We would almost never see anyone I knew there, so I didn't have to explain who this child was. My life from here became even more confusing. The mother of my child was not my girlfriend; I had another, closer to my age. So at night, I'd drop off the baby, go to my own home where I lived with my mother and sister, and pretend I'd been to school. When asked why I was late home I'd say I’d been playing in the quarries. Then I’d have my dinner and go to my girlfriends. My girlfriend had no idea I had a baby; I kept the secret from everyone I knew.

So, where does writing come into this, I hear you ask? I'm doing it. I'm writing. Hear me out... scratch that, read me out.

In the UK, it was illegal to have a full-time job before you were 16. However, it was 1988, and computers were not accessible to everyone. Once you received your national insurance card, you could technically go to work, but nobody was checking the fine details. So when my card arrived, my baby's mother and I decided it was better we hire a babysitter, and I went to work. I found a job that started at 10 am, so I went to school, signed in, got a bus to a nearby town, and went to work in a shop. I earned £60 a week, and we paid the babysitter £40 of that. We were "quids in." I'd created an alter ego to go alongside my alter ego. To the world at work I was 16, but actually I was still only 14.

One day, my girlfriend (the one everyone knew about) and I were walking through the next town, and we ran into someone I'd occasionally smiled at during my baby-walking days. They came up to us and said, "No baby today?" I laughed and hurried my girlfriend off, claiming she was a local nutter. Which seemed to do the trick. But I realized I'd nearly been rumbled. My baby's mother had warned me we had to be careful, as she could go to prison, and the baby would be taken away for adoption. Never for a minute did I contemplate that I could come clean to everyone and make my own mother the custodian of my daughter. Unfortunately, this doomed my relationship with my girlfriend because I didn't want to go out, in case I was found out. I became more and more reclusive, while she wanted to go out and live. You see, I was caught in another lie. In order to make my daytime and nightlife add up, I'd started lying about my age. I pretended I was older than I was, and by the time I was 16, my girlfriend thought I was 18. There was this kind of unwritten rule that if you went to a pub or club, if one of you could prove your age, they'd almost never ask the other. She wanted to be out, doing what other 18-year-olds were doing, but she was 16, thinking I was 18. The wheels fell off, and my first love slipped away.

The next ten years went by in a blur because my mind was younger and more thirsty to learn. I glided through the ranks at work and soon became a trophy project. I worked for a worldwide retailer who saw an opportunity to create their youngest-ever store manager. At 19 years old, I was the youngest-ever store manager Debenhams had ever created. The joke is, of course, on them because unbeknownst to them, they'd made a 17-year-old a store manager. By twenty-five, I was the youngest ever fashion director of any major UK brand ever, but of course, I was only 23.

Somewhere around here, I changed my job, and it was apparent I had to adjust my real age as verification checks had come into play. So I had to create another lie, adjusting my time served at my previous job. Weirdly, my new job put me on national television once a week, a process that made a further landscape of lies.

By 35, I was burned out and jobless I began writing on a review website, 5, 10, sometimes 15 articles a day, to earn less than an hour's wage in proper employment. But as the reviewing changed, I became more savvy. I learned a bit about grammar, a bit about flow, a bit about writing to encourage an audience and build an income— a sizeable income. I did a part-time day job, then at night, I was writing or being interviewed or attending a film premiere or interviewing a famous person. The few pence a day I earned turned into pounds, and those turned into hundreds, thousands of pounds. I became a powerhouse, though my writing still lacked a lot of direction. I was an uneducated author of sorts. Articles I wrote on two specific platforms were clicking up millions of reads a day, and in one year, I earned enough money to buy a house outright.

As magically as my success happened, it was taken away. I was warned I needed to start writing on other platforms, but I ignored this advice, and then in the blink of six months, one platform, then the other, imploded. One was bought and then destroyed because it was deemed competition by Hearst Magazines, and the other lost its leader in a terrorist attack. It was worse than having nothing; I lost EVERYTHING. All my back catalog of thousands of articles, all gone.

I've left a gap of ten years, but I'm back. New platforms, new mindsets, my websites, and storage of everything I write. My lack of flow has drifted off because I'm now 50 years old most likely dyslexic, and yes before you ask I’m really 50 years old. Between articles on travel and social media, I'm letting many of my secret facts about my life out so later on, nobody can expose me. I'm writing like nobody is reading because, realistically, nobody is, and that freedom right now is part of the amazing healing process of life. But maybe one day, you'll stumble upon this article, and you'll discover the real me, until then I bimble on in relative anonymity, my secrets of my youth very much my secrets, for now.