truth

The stories we tell ourselves

When I wrote this piece, I was questioning the idea that our experiences make us who we are; a belief that had, until then, provided me with both justification and reassurance. I’d come across the work of Kahneman who suggests that it is not an experience per se that we remember; what we remember is…

Rarely linear, sometimes chaotic, always meaningful

One of my dear writing friends wrote to me recently, saying that she thought she shouldn’t be blogging because she felt that her semi-regular posts which touched on a range of topics made it look as though she had five personalities. ‘Your posts don’t strike me as being inconsistent at all,’ I reassured her. ‘If…

You don’t have to shout to be heard

If I wrote about me—my thoughts, my fears—who would I be? What would my voice sound like? Would I sound old? Scared? Interesting? Just a little bit crazy? What would I write? Is long-form the way to go? Could I sustain reader interest, let alone my own? When I hear the story in my head…

I’m sorry wind, but I’m just not that into you

I don’t like the wind. It makes me agitated and unsettled. I think maybe it’s because my body struggles to settle into its own rhythm amid the noise and chaos of a windy day. Everyone in my family feels the same. Anytime we’ve ranked the weather elements on a likeability scale (yes, I have the…

We spend our lives not seeing what we saw

It’s writing exercise time, again! This time the task was to use the prompt We spend our lives not seeing what we saw to draft three micro pieces – some poetry, some fiction, and a personal response. As always, I did these under time pressure and with the understanding that exercise of any kind isn’t…

‘To be or not to be’ should not be the question

As a rule, I don’t like definitions. It isn’t really that I don’t like them, it’s that I don’t find them very helpful. Their purpose seems to be to divide and conquer. In their assumption of an ‘other’, they trap us in unhelpful, unproductive, ‘either or’ thinking. Take the glass half-full or half-empty scenario. The…

My treasure chest of life

In an earlier post, Fictional words with real-world swagger, I talked about how we can apply made-up worlds to our everyday lives and achieve real-world outcomes. Today, I want to give a shout out to the sentences that take your breath away; not in a oh-my-god-that’s-horrendous type of way, but in the I-have-to-go-back-and-read-that-again type of…

This is why I’m here …

For those that have followed my blog since its inception (quick pause here while I yell a big thank you into the bloggerverse), you’ll know that my posts tend to be a bit all over the place. In fairness, I do give a heads up on this in my ‘About’ page, so I don’t feel…

Today I celebrate my tiredness

Today I woke up tired. It’s the end of the week, I didn’t get a great sleep last night. I have hay fever, client deadlines, parents to worry about. And this covid thing still won’t go away. Enough. It isn’t often that I wake up tired, which is great, but sadly it means that I…

We have only this life

My jumping off point for this poem was a quote from ‘Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing‘ by Cixous (1994). ‘We spend our lives not seeing what we saw.’ heart ruptures released from its anchor I close my eyes to banish the vision exorcise the demons but they hold fast to my being infiltrating…