Pocket lint

Ode to my notes apps and something from a while back

Sleep has been really elusive for me recently.

I could blame the planets.

I could blame bad habits.

I could blame the weight and mental load of juggling too many things.

I could blame a thorny tangle of trying to work out if I can realise some of my dreams and ambitions for the work I actually want to do that is of service to this world and if that is actually viable.

I could blame imposter syndrome for shouting loud and proud in my ear all week.

I could also blame a brain that overthinks and worries far too much.

The one positive of inconsistent sleep is that my notes app gets filled with randomness. Some of the thought ribbons that I have collected this week include the following…

3AM nuggets…

Oh how my 3AM mind seems to fizz and splutter and come up with the most random of things…

While I’m pretty sure cynicism can absolutely cloud our vision (I don’t think it actually causes cataracts) but I do love the idea of making confetti out of our to dos in a beautiful protest at productivity.

If I were to die tomorrow and you opened my notes app, you would find everything from baby nap/feed times circa 2013 to lines of half-written poems, from draft emails to things I think sound amazing at 3AM only to realise they are crap or sound so bloody weird…

Inconsistent sleep has also led me down a rabbit hole of re-reading things I have written over the past year. And it has got me determined to start normalising returning to old words and losing the shame of sharing things again and countering the churn and pressure to create. So in this spirit, I’m sharing a little essay that I wrote ages ago that got rejected for an anthology on motherhood and creativity. As I said back then…

It is so very tempting in this culture of over-consumption, over-production and monetization to put pressure on ourselves to churn out more shiny new things… Yet, very often, we already have the things we need within reach, we just need to look in our pockets…

Loose Change

The words jangle like loose change in my pockets, clamouring and clinking for my attention.

They grow in number as I collect more and more throughout the day. Expanding into the small gaps and chinks of space in my now baggy outline. Every now and then I reach to check that they are still there, that I can still find them.

In between the juggle of paid and unpaid work and the muddle, monotony and marvellousness of mothering, I keep these words held in between the seams and gaps.

Just like my son and daughter collect shells, sticks and other random curiosities whenever we go for a walk, I fill my pockets with wisps of poems, ribbons of prose and collections of tiny twinkling words that come to me when I least expect it.

Over the course of the day, the words get caught on the pocket lint and fluff, they linger too long without light and begin to tangle in the folds. As the insistent and persistent demands of parenting fill my day, I wonder when I will get the chance to hold those words firmly in my hands, the chance to turn down the volume on any interruption and use those pocketed treasures to make a sentence that sings.

For much of my mothering journey, I have found myself on the back foot racing to catch up with my own high expectations. Torn between feeling that my parenting and creativity should be a certain way and a burning desire to break convention and just do it my way.

So often, I feel like the load of my mothering will tip me over.

So often, all I want to do is slow things down to stop my brain from glitching, to stop myself from swimming in a sea of todos and uncertainty.

At the very beginning, I lamented the fact that there never seemed to be any time or space to write. I bemoaned the perpetual interruptions and chastised myself that the conditions for my creativity and writing to thrive had to be perfect. If I didn’t reach a certain word count or goal then I would deem myself to be a failure. Even calling myself a ‘Writer’ or ‘Poet’ has been a journey of self-doubt and self-loathing and my inner critic has had a field day shouting loud and proud that I can’t dare to call myself those things. And yet, despite the insistence of interruption that comes with parenting, my pockets have still filled up with words.

Curiosity and creativity are rather uncanny in that way, they seem to appear in spite of it all.

Over the years, I’ve come to see motherhood as not just a marathon of many seasons and phases but as a multitude of states of being that twist, turn and flicker. I see now that my actual mothering age is only that of my eldest child and that I too will invariably change and fluctuate. From the early milk stained baby days through to fledgling children who have outgrown my hugs and whose heads now pass my shoulders, as my own mothering bends and twists with time so does my writing.

I’ve realised that more often than not, my writing practice doesn’t look like actual writing. It finds form instead in quiet contemplation, in reading, in walking, in surrounding myself with friends and family; it even finds form in the very repetitive mundane tasks of caring like folding clothes or settling a small one to sleep, those little wisps of words still persist and arrive. Having tried so long to hold my creativity separately and wait for the perfect, ideal conditions for things to appear, I realise now that I need to allow time and space to just keep filling my pockets and that sometimes they fill up without me realising it.

For it all counts, from the interruptions to staring out a window, from the snatched moments typing furiously into my notes app to watching my children grow, the beginning of something can start with just one word, just one small piece of loose change found in a pocket.

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Thank you so much for reading and to everyone who has purchased a set of Small Acts of Attention cards, it truly means the world (just one set left).

A gentle reminder, my next co-writing session takes place on Monday lunchtime if you fancy joining from 13:00 - 14:15 UK time.