I Can Do Hard Things
Actually, we can all do hard things, and trapsing around looking at all matters history, it’s pretty easy to say that many in the past did way more hard things than I do.
Travel can be hard, but it pays off and largely is very rewarding. My ability to board a flight and visit the most incredible exhibitions and monuments in a city such as London is testament to that.
I’m no stranger to hard work, as they say. In recent years, I have simplified my life and spent time focusing on things that enjoy and inspire me, rather than what I am necessarily good at. Over the past 5 years I have wound down and closed a very busy private psychiatry practice, because I had lost my passion for managing my patients, and it wasn’t fair on me or them that I continued to try and provide the care they needed. That was unbelievably hard. I had no idea that a pandemic would wipe out the scarce mental health resources the way it had, and the ‘sensible’ thing to do would be to use my training and experience to fill a diary and take on a patient load to in some small way alleviate the demand for psychiatric care that exists like never before. But I have decided that in so many ways, that would be too hard.
I find the hardest things for me stem from battles in my own head, challenging self doubt and growing. I do know that growth only comes from difficulty and a bit of adveristy and I tend to forget that when it does feel tough.
Moving away from clinical practice and establishing myself as a medicolegal expert who writes reports has been hard and easy at the same time. Things always feel easy when they are fun and exciting. My interest in abuse law and ability to provide assessments for those who have endured tremendous adversity with life long consequences have kept me engaged and sustained for the past year or so. I’m a sucker for a story, whether I am writing it, creating it or listening to it.
About 6 months ago I decided to embark on this journey, which was in part about seeing bright, shiny and new things. But more importantly for me it was about a journey inwards, getting a story out of my head and onto paper. Creating a manuscript I could pitch to publishers and move closer to my dream of being a published author.
I already am a published writer but I stil challenge that notion, even though it’s a fact. I write stories and articles and I get paid for them. In 2014 I self published a novel, containing 30,000 of my own words. People bought my book and told me they loved it. I know self publishing is “vanity publishing” but there was way more humility and doubt contained within the cover than any vanity. Readers are following this blog and telling me the writing resonates. The only person in the whole entire world who doesn’t beleive I am a writer is myself.
The main protagonist in my story is a female with red hair who struggles with self doubt to the point she does not see herself the way others do. I know I can write about her becasue she is basically me. The novel is not autobiographical but I look forward to the day when people read the story and tell me if they see me in the writing. I’m using the first principle of writing which is to write what you know, from my personal and professional experience, and I can imagine that is going to go very close to being autobiographical. Perhaps that’s why I have been procrastinating with the task. It’s so hard to expose youreself and I will inevitibly do that through this process of writing a story that is authentic and resonates with a reader.
I plan my writing day to involve being up bright and early and basing myself in some very inspirational places, so that I create and allow the characters and plot that I have been mulling over leave my imagination and begin to live on a page. I have noticed that when I get into this state of flow, things start to appear like magic. I often surprise myself that my words take on a certain direction. Sentences appear with a cadence that I don’t anticipate, and I notice that I’ll use metaphor or a play on words I couldn’t have predicted. I wonder if that’s what real writers do or if that is something I do. I looked into the eyes of many writers as I wandered around the rooms at the National Portrait Gallery. I tried to see if I could evoke some sort of learnings from the faces of Emily Bronte, Beatrix Potter or Germaine Greer. Nothing transpired and I decided to make a pact that I would just write my story the way it comes to me.
In many ways this writing journey is one of the hardest things I have chosen to do in my life. It’s taken a lot of backing myself, walking away from an “easy” rest of my career as a clinician. I know after years of introspection and discovery that I am a writer, whether I believe it or not, and hence it feels like more of a calling than a choice. Medicine was never a calling, it was hard and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t energise me. This writing process actually does. So as hard it will be over the next week to avoid distraction by the bright, shiny and new, I will do it and write about protagonists who do hard things and live lives I hope people will find easy and pleasurable to read about.
