Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
I am so full. This is partly due to the incredible delicacies we feasted upon at La Luna today and of which I partook with great relish and enormous satisfaction (thank God there is a restaurant left in Melbourne that still celebrates the use of salt in its cooking! ) but also, and perhaps more importantly, I have come to the rather alarming realization that I have a mental disorder of the kind which might be aligned with, er, let’s just say, a literary back-up. A consternating constipation which, interpreted for the average Aussie, means “full of shit”. (Being full of shit is not the disorder, obviously, as most of us are well aware that almost everyone around us is full of shit most of the time and it is indeed a rare person or moment that transcends the norm and rises above the shit). Sometimes we grow so familiar with our little patterns and habits that we fail to see our lives clearly, and we don’t know why we feel ‘blocked’ or stuck, we just know we feel shit. And then we keep going, doing the same that we have always done, even when we know something needs to change, because to change is far harder than to remain stuck in what is familiar to us (Catherine, if this was one of your many quotes from famous people today then I’m sorry. I’m even sorrier if it was something I picked up from a bumper sticker on my dazed bike ride home. Is this plagiarism? I’ll need to know if I’m going to be a real writer)
It is only when we are hurled out of our comfort zone that there comes the opportunity to have our innermost selves reveal a shard of information that may just be the sharp key to cutting open the belly of the whale and releasing the hidden Pinocchio (sorry but I’ve gotta get this out before 10pm or I run the very real risk of exploding, so deal with the shit metaphors and similes or whatever and bear with me) that has been causing indigestion for so long. Quite frankly, I have had a bellyful of stories for so long that I say slit that blubber and free the unborn babies of their hideously unnatural gestation period of 20 odd years – okay, 30, – damn! And just let it be birthed, whatever it is. Obviously it’s some sort of Frankenstein by now, some re-hashed zombie of what once was pure and natural and dewy in its youthful prime, but please, let me just release the beast!
So. Inadvertently, today, in front of the group share in Catherine Deveny’s Writing Masterclass, I referred to myself as a “word hoarder”. I have never used this term before, it just spilt out of me like some sort of writerly confession fuelled by two lattes and a mild case of hyper-anxiety at having to speak in public. I had no idea that I had just diagnosed my own mental illness, even when Catherine suggested at the end of class that it might be a good idea to go home and look up something like “Help for Hoarders” and ‘play around’ with that as a concept.
I told the class how I had been writing since I was thirteen, and kept a diary pretty much every day of my life, but had never put anything out there to be published. In all those years, I wrote copious amounts, mountains of memoirs, great piles of pages, almost all of which have never read by anyone but myself. I hoarded them and stacked my shelves with each book as I finished, scrawling in inner-city cafes and getting a chain of addictive crushes on boy baristas as I went. Apart from a brief – but nonetheless fairly spectacular – burning of all my diaries on my 30th birthday (actually all I really remember is the smell of burning plastic from the cheap covers, and the smouldering metal spirals that remained in the ashes afterwards) there has been no hiatus in my literary hoarding career. Like anyone with an obsessive compulsive disorder (yes, the Hoarding Disorder is very often linked with OCD but is even more innocuous and hard to recover from, according to my very current research) as soon as I burnt all those diaries from my teens and twenties, I immediately began writing once more and filing them away, watching them rapidly pile up again.
I am a Word Hoarder. A hoarder of words. My diarized self-obsession is nothing more than long-term narcissism. I live – nay, survive – in a house full of words piled to the ceilings. They are inside the rafters, packed into every nook and crannie, they grow old and mildewy under the floorboards, and they darken the rooftop where I’ve bound them to me with rope so not even one page might fly away. Wikipedia says that “often the perceived importance of the hoarded items far exceeds their true value” and that “the results of hoarding can lead to BLOCKED EXITS and HEALTH HAZARDS (due to vermin infestation, excreta and detritus from excessive garbage or the risk of stacks of items collapsing on the occupants and blocking exit routes” ). I realize that I am actually lucky to still be alive. Heavy, burdened with shit, but alive.
Funny, really. Ironic, in a macabre and haunting kind of mental way that only us writers can truly understand… but I have always wanted wings. I longed to be a faery, not a giant, heavy Word Hoarder. I fantasized about flying above it all, laughing at the scenes far below me, not attached either physically or emotionally. I dreamed I could leave it all behind. I would catch the next wind current and soar to new lands, new visions, new ideas, new adventures. I wanted to be the light-boned, bright and feisty Tinkerbell, not the sensible story-telling, shadow-sewing Wendy.
Perhaps my subconscious mind was all along only trying to protect me from the lonely, accursed, unappreciated destiny of the scribe. Maybe part of me was inwardly screaming against a destiny which, as Catherine so honestly and forthrightly- and somewhat repeatedly -insisted today in our class, IS NOT FUN. To quote:”Writing is shit. It is hard work and if you think it’s fun then you are severely deluded.” That’s what I learned. I am pretty devastated because what this means is that today I realized that not only am I a severe Word Hoarder who lives in a derelict metaphorical dump, a narcissistic literary heavyweight of my own masturbatory mindscape, but also that I am a glutton who has not shared the plate around but sat gobbling at the writers feast for as long as I can remember and grown heavy of my own accord.
But still, I have hope. I have this coffee cup which is sitting right here with me on my desk now (subtly suggesting I drink tea rather than vodka). And on this cup, this vessel of destiny, my very own holy grail, are inscribed the words of one Theodore Roosevelt : “FAIL WHILE DARING GREATLY” and to this end, I make tonight a simple yet heartfelt offering of a NEW kind.
Thank you Catherine. My head hurts but my heart is happy. And to my dear friend who gifted me with this wonderful day, Sheree Cairney. Thank you xxx