Taking Up Space

I am relieved to write here again; I know it’s been a while. It’s comfortable here, familiar, safe. I feel a contentment akin to going home to a warm house and switching the kettle on. There’s that ahh factor, that ‘oh yes, this is where I’m supposed to be’ feeling as I get settled in, open a new post and start to type.

(I’ve been denied this sanctuary for most of the year. I succumbed to daily mental beatings from a brain which doesn’t think much good of me at all. I’ll go into this more in a bit.)

Having a blog is wildly different from maintaining a social media presence, for me at least. (Or two, or three, or four. I hardly cope with having two; I don’t know how folk co-exist with more than that.)

If I were to delete IG and FB now, I’d be ok, (my work wouldn’t fare so well due to the lack of ‘exposure’), but I couldn’t delete my blogs, not without feeling as if I’d just severed a major artery.

I don’t feel that I’m capable of writing as succinctly, as authentically, as creatively on social media, and the anxiety involved is so profound it verges on absurd, which is why not much of my writing shows up there.

My brain, which I’m actively battling with most of the time – knows I benefit from blogging. It knows blogging excites me and elevates my productivity, so it tells me I don’t have the time to do it. It tells me there are more important things to do, such as… I couldn’t even tell you.

It also says, and this is the most damaging, that what I have to say doesn’t need to be read and that people don’t care about the tree, which stopped my entire family in their tracks on a Sunday walk. Or the pilgrimage made to Mother Shipton’s Cave. Or that I enjoyed the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire. Or that since tasting Yorkshire Gold tea, I’ve never returned to regular Yorkshire Tea.

It also dismisses me wanting to write about the difficulties I’m experiencing, for instance that I’m not penning much poetry at the moment, or that the wait for my ‘official’ ADHD diagnosis has left me suicidal.

The joy writing can bring me, even during burnout or a depressive episode (the current episode is unlike some others before, which left me unable to write or read), is almost childlike in its intensity. It always has been. I’m a better person if I’ve written. I’m more upbeat, talkative, and easier to be around. When I haven’t written, I’m awful.

My brain tries relentlessly to tell me that what I want to write about isn’t worth writing about, that there’s no point, I shouldn’t bother, and I’ve been listening. I’ve been listening for ages. But it stops now.

Things I encounter in my life are very much worth writing about. So, expect to hear from me and on my other blog, A Nordic Fever. I’ll leave you with these photographs of the tree that bewitched my family and me the other day and takes up space unapologetically, as we all should.