I haven't written here for a while. I've been trying to let things settle and to think forwards, rather than backwards all the time. Obviously I had to do that while I was writing the book, think backwards — wade through all that past, all that heavy sludge of childhood emotion. I felt like a spring recoiling on itself. But once the book was finished it was time to try to go forward again. It's what we all have to do, but that's exactly what I hadn't been doing for so long. I'd gotten stuck. So these past few weeks I've tried to think forwards, and put all the past behind me. But the paperback is out tomorrow, so for a while I can see that will be difficult to do.
I've still been writing, lots of writing, but all of it in notebooks, scribbled on the bus on the way to work or in cafes over lukewarm teas at lunchtime. Some of it okay, but more of it just words, grounding words, anchoring me to the day. I don't think I could get through a day without writing something now...But being back at work changes everything.
There's no time for anything anymore. Even on days off I still find myself thinking about work, or washing or ironing or tidying, or making soup to freeze or replying to emails. Sometimes, something that happens during the day strikes me and I say ' that'll be a nice thing to tell people on the blog, I must remember to write in it tonight.' Even if it's just about fighting the urge to kick up the piles of leaves noisily on the way to work, imagining myself laughing loudly as I mow through them. Or seeing the beautiful imprints of big, golden sycamore leaves on the pavements as I walk up from the bus each morning, the early autumn streets overnight paved with gold. One morning, weeks ago, the pavement was full of those leaves, crunchy yellow and gold, then the rain came and for days soaked through them, and when it stopped and the leaves were blown or swept away, gold-brown 'leaf-stain' was left underneath, on the pavement. Beautiful, clear patterns, like ghost-leaves, were left, as far up as the eye could see. They're still there, beneath the city grime. Every day they get a bit fainter, but the pavement on the hill up to where I work is full of beautiful, feint, leaf pattern. The streets already holding their memory of autumn.
Seeing things like that makes the walk to work far less dull, and one day last week it lifted my spirits so much that I decided to write a blog about it when I got back. But when it comes to the end of the day, I switch on the computer and stare glassy-eyed at the blog and I've either forgotten about what I was going to write, or it suddenly doesn't seem interesting at all. I start telling myself that nobody wants to read about somebody else's day at work when they get home from their own, or about ghost-leaves on pavements... And I end up convincing myself to wait until I have something more interesting to write.
But apart from work, nothing much else has happened. Well... I shouldn't say that: I'm not living in the car anymore, so that has happened! And I've told the most intimate details of my life in a book, that's an enormous thing to have happened. But you all know that already... It's still hard to accept the emails I get from people everyday still, telling me how inspiring my story has been, or how it has helped them — even if it is just to appreciate what they have, or simply to stay positive, or to see that there is always a way out, or just to open their eyes to the lives of someone around them. It's difficult to take on board that somehow my life, when I was at my lowest ebb living in my car, and especially the bits of my childhood that I have been so ashamed of, have somehow gone on to help others. Very odd. Somedays, I still have very mixed feelings about telling my own story, wrestling with the rightness or wrongness of it. But when I get those emails, when people tell me how much the book has helped them, even people who ordinarily wouldn't read this kind of book, I can't help feeling a little bit...?? maybe even a little bit proud...?? A little bit like this was what I was meant to do — tell the story that so many other people do not have the words or wherewithall or opportunity to tell. It hasn't been a nice story to tell, but hearing other people's stories has made me appreciate how lucky I was too, in many ways. I have lived two lives in one, and not many people do that — I don't mean one after the other, but both of them in tandem. Yes, I had that childhood, and ended up homeless living in my car on the streets of London not far from where I grew up, but in between I lived a very different life, one which some people would see as being full of priviledge. Maybe that's why I survived intact. So that I could tell the story so many others couldn't tell — stories need to be told, they are what connect us, and what sometimes heal us. So even though it did take falling to the bottom rung of the ladder, with a breakdown and a period of homelessness living in my car to finally get the words out, maybe, in finally getting my story out, I did do the right thing afterall.
