The Dreamer, The Monster, and Me

In March 2020, I suddenly found myself back at my family home with a lot of spare time on my hands. I had quit my job at the end of 2019 to fulfil a lifelong dream of travelling South America. But when man plans, bats laugh…

Unsure what to do with myself, I decided to finally tackle the boxes under my bed that my mum kept threatening to throw out. She had extremely rudely turned my old room that I moved out of 12 years ago into the guest bedroom and, apparently, they made it look messy.

I spent a whole day going through the boxes, separating the things that simply MUST be kept (a ticket stub from a Kings of Leon concert in 2007) and the things that could, through gritted teeth, be thrown away (painstakingly-drawn Spanish conjugation tables…so much effort!).

I refreshed my memory of basic science concepts. I reread the poetry anthology that had been the bane of my life in Year 10. I laughed at the notes written all over my Latin revision guide (“Aeneas is HOT”/ “Dido is a crazy wench”). I marvelled at history papers responding to questions like: Do you agree with the view that the Henrician Reformation greatly increased royal authority? Wow, did I write this?! God, I was a genius back then. I’ve got literally no idea what I’m talking about here.

At the bottom of one of the boxes I found something that wasn’t a school assignment: a story I had written at age 8 or 9. It was named The Campfire and it was a cross between the Famous Five and Goosebumps, with the main characters being me and my schoolfriends. A vivid memory came rushing back and hit me like a slap in the face: hours spent curled up on my bed writing stories - adventure stories, fairy stories, fantasy stories, witch and wizard stories; and then hours more slowly typing them up on the shared family computer.

I don’t know why I had been so proud of The Campfire that I had kept it all these years, or why it had got the special treatment of being turned into its own 'book.' I had made a front cover, with the title in big capital letters and a hand-drawn, coloured illustration underneath – five young girls sitting round a campfire in the woods. I had printed off each page (all six of them) and put them back-to-back inside plastic wallets so that you could flick through it and read it double-sided like a real book.

I laughed very hard when I turned the last page and found a back cover too, on which I had written endorsement quotes from famous authors about my own story.

“Wow! This was great!”

JK Rowling

“The best thing I’ve ever read!”

Lewis Carrol

“Comparisons with Dahl are, this time, justified.”

The Daily Telegraph

That last one I had stolen straight off the back cover of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I remember quite clearly that I didn’t understand what it meant, but it had two very long words and I assumed it was a fancy way of saying the story was good, so obviously it was something that would be said about my book.

All of a sudden, I felt very sad. My heart ached for the optimistic little girl who had loved to write stories. I mourned the young writer who had dreamed of being a famous author. I felt I had betrayed the fledging storyteller who truly believed that one day she would be a celebrated novelist and that people would love her book and write praise for it.

I remembered how much I had loved to write, and how I would excitedly show my parents my latest masterpiece. I remembered how I used to enjoy writing poems, and how I’d won a regional children’s competition and been published in an anthology. I remembered how my Year 6 schoolteacher had told my mum and dad at parents’ evening that he was certain he would see my name in print one day. Aside from the essays I was forced to do for school and university, I had not written a single thing for 20 years.

***

When I went to secondary school, I discovered fast that being academic was Really Not Cool. At breaktime just a few weeks into our new school, a girl made fun of me in front of the whole class for getting the top mark in a test. I recall like it was yesterday the burning of my cheeks and the stinging shame of being singled out of the group to be ridiculed.

I clapped back with a cruel insult about her own intelligence (which I feel a little guilty about now), but it shut her down quickly and made sure that nobody would mock me again. However, the lesson was learnt: it was not cool to be clever, or to try hard at school, or to write, or to do anything remotely educational for fun.

As I entered my teenage years, I doubled down on the rejection of that side of myself. I played sports, I went to dance class, I joined the cadets, I did anything at all that wasn’t 'nerdy.' I hung out with friends as often as I possibly could. When I got home from school, I ignored my family and spent hours hogging the computer, talking on Instant Messenger all night to the friends I’d been with all day. I stopped reading for God’s sake. Reading! The girl who used to go to the library and check out the maximum number of books every single fortnight gave up reading!

Of course, with all the changes and developments that the teenage brain goes through, family fights and personality shifts are inevitable. Teens are trying to discover who they are, create their own identity and develop independence, all while riding the rollercoaster of adolescent hormones and self-esteem. That is normal. However, I feel my inner and outer conflicts were very extreme.

I remember being angry at everything all the time when I wasn’t with my friends, and sometimes when I was. I felt a white-hot, blinding rage whenever my siblings or parents annoyed me, which was frequently. Anytime spent with my family was either a blazing row or stony silence. They tell me now that I could be truly horrible during those years. I know that. I feel incredible guilt and shame over the way I acted. It was me, but it wasn’t me. At times it felt like there was a monster inside me, who took over when I felt my annoyance levels starting to build. (Without being too dramatic about it.)

I did have a lot of fun as a teenager, and mostly loved life. But I also felt a lot of hate too. I hated living in the countryside, so I couldn’t hang out in town like all my friends did whenever they wanted. I hated being made to go to church every Sunday. I hated that my parents were strict and old-fashioned, and I had rules and restrictions that my friends didn’t. When you are a teenager, life is hard enough, but it is especially hard when you are different, in any small way, from your peers.

I hated being a geek, but it did have the silver lining that homework was quick and I didn’t have to study much for tests. I hated being shy and quieter than others, and wished fervently that I was more confident in groups and didn’t blush so easily. I hated not being stick-thin, like the hot girls at school or the heroin-chic idols of the early 2000s. I hated being female most of all. I had fully internalised the misogyny of our society, and went careening down the “not-like-other girls” path. I hate to admit that now.

Eventually, a light appeared at the end of the tunnel. By the time I was in sixth form, I emerged, blinking, from my monster shell and became an actual human being. At that time in the UK, you could leave school at 16, so the only people who stayed on were those serious about studying. You specialised in just three subjects, so everyone picked the things they were good at and interested in. Finally, finally, it became cool to be clever! Everyone wanted to get the best grades possible to go to the university of their choice.

I feel a lot of shame when I look back at my teenage years, and I still feel guilty for the way I acted towards my family. I think they’ve forgiven me now though, 15 years on. I try to feel compassion for myself at that time too. The teenage years are difficult, and I struggled through them. I hated a lot of things at the time, but above all I hated myself.

It’s strange to look back and not really recognise who you were. I never could have imagined that I would go for years without reading for pleasure. Now I have a constantly replenishing pile of next-to-be-read books beside my bed. Although I know it’s a necessary part of studying, being forced to analyse the life out of literature and write countless essays at school really kills the joy of reading and writing.

However, I didn’t lose the little storyteller inside me completely. She was still there, but the stories changed from written to oral. I loved to tell jokes and entertain friends with tales of things that had happened. I still do. Looking back, I think that as a teenager I was like a wet piece of clay, spinning and spinning on the wheel, taking shape, then collapsing, then morphing again, trying to find my final form. Eventually I became the figure I am today, although the invisible potter is still making tweaks around the edges.

***

Which brings me back to the day I found my story ‘The Campfire.’ Although I had long since rediscovered my love of reading, I had never taken up the pen again. Maybe it was trauma from all the writing I had done in university, writing as if my future depended on it (which, I suppose, it did). Or maybe I thought that writing for pleasure was something that only children did. After feeling sad for a while, I tucked my ‘novel’ gently back into the box. Definitely a keeper.

That same evening, I was watching TV and scrolling through social media, as you do. An ad popped up for a website called Vocal Media. Average people could join for free, make a profile and write stories, and they had challenges that anybody could enter. A challenge? Well, that wasn’t writing for my own selfish pleasure then, that had a purpose. They were asking people to write a story for them. They were asking me, specifically, via an advert on my social media!

I sat down and typed up my first Vocal story, Can You Drive a Ford Fiesta Through a Desert?, for the Good Deeds challenge. It wasn’t great – the title is formatted wrong, the paragraphs are far too long, I’m not sure that it fully answered the prompt – but it was a start. And I enjoyed doing it! The hours flew by, the process was fun, and I felt proud of what I had written at the end. I rushed and showed it to my dad, and he was just as encouraging and supportive as he had been to the little storyteller 20 years earlier.

It has been two and a half years since I wrote that first story on Vocal. I realised that I haven’t changed my profile since I created it. It still says “I haven’t written anything for many, many years. Please be kind!” That’s not true any more, but it still feels true to me. I still feel very new at this. The early pieces I wrote were not particularly revelatory or personal. They didn’t reveal anything very intimate or challenging. But, ever so slowly, I’ve started to branch out and write more heartfelt stories.

It took me a long time to write something that wasn’t for a challenge (because who would want to hear from me? Why would I write something that nobody has asked for?!) and even longer to write a fiction piece. After repressing the writer for such a long time, it is taking a while to coax her back out. But I’m getting there. Ideas drift around my head now, like they did when I was a child, stories that just come to me, asking to be told. Maybe I’ll write them down soon.

I’m finally learning to reconcile all the different sides of myself. When I was younger, I was all introvert and dreamer, the shy, quiet, pensive, but optimistic writer. When I was a teenager, I was extroverted and friend-focused, practical, athletic, cynical, sarcastic. But at 32 years old, I’m all of these combined.

I am contradictory. I am the funny, friendly people-lover (sometimes) who enjoys playing netball with the team, or drinking wine with a group of friends while analysing reality TV. But I am also the geek who spends entire days alone and loves it, learns new languages for fun, reads books about historical events and, now, writes stories on the internet. This is me.