The joy of blogging

A confession

I have a confession to make. I’m struggling.

Last Thursday a tsunami of anxiety hit me and I haven’t found my feet since. I recorded an audioboo at the time, in the hope that talking would help, as I was by myself in the house. Then I worried about whether I should have put it out there, naturally, but I received so many private messages of support and also “I suffer from this too” notes that I don’t regret it.

I’ve been quite open on this blog about how I suffer from bouts of anxiety. Some people think I am too open, and seeing as this blog is effectively the hub from which all of my writing and audio book work and other things can be found, I suppose that it might be a gamble.

But why? If I was a confidence coach, or an entrepreneur responsible for the livelihood of hundreds of people, I can see why admitting that I struggle sometimes would be worrying – and perhaps detrimental to my business. If I was selling a product designed to help people with confidence issues, and periodically kept being struck down by crippling anxiety and a complete lack of confidence, I could see that undermining my credibility.

But that’s not my business. I write stories. I record other people’s stories and often my own. That’s all. It might be a risk being as honest as I am about these things, in as much as it is to admit this in our society at all, but I’d like to think it wouldn’t hurt how my writing is perceived. Indeed, one of the small comforts I have in being so screwed up (and having unscrewed myself up a great deal compared to how I used to be) is that it gives me insights into the darker recesses of the mind that I would have been oblivious to, had I been a happy, stable, content person. Those insights get woven into the characters in my books, and I’d like to hope it makes them more believable. I don’t have many comforts in this, so I have to take what I can.

I’ve seen a gradual shift in recent years towards people trying to be more open about mental illness. Stephen Fry (another of my heroes) recently recorded an amazing two-part documentary about bipolar disorder, and how it affects him. And there have been lots of other examples since.

Whilst my anxiety may be incredibly mild in comparison to many that suffer, I’d like to think that talking about this can help other people suffering from anxiety feel they’re not alone. It’s very, very difficult to understand unless it has been experienced, so if I write about mine, it’s recognisable to other sufferers. Hell, even when I’m not in this state, I find it hard to remember what it’s like.

What is this anxiety like?

It’s physical, mental, emotional. At the moment, everything scares me. Writing e-mails, being on Twitter, phoning people up, and all of the other hundred things I should be doing to prepare for the launch of From Dark Places seem insurmountably difficult. I’m shaky, I’ve lost three pounds in the last week and feel tearful. I’m waking in the middle of the night with a racing heart and no memory of a nightmare, my body straining as if an assassin has burst into the room and I need to leap out of bed so he can’t stab me.

I can unpick the underlying triggers (the ones accessible to the conscious mind anyway) and they are both internal and external. There’s no getting away from the fact that there are things going on at the moment that are scary, and stressful. But none of them merit such extreme anxiety, and indeed, this response is tipping the stress over from being a helpful motivator and tool for keeping me alert, to overwhelming me, and damaging my performance.

The awful thing about anxiety like this is that an intellectual understanding of it cannot make it go away. Sometimes the uncovering of a root cause can ease it. Last night, for example, I began to suspect that it’s particularly bad at the moment because I haven’t been making time in my schedule to write. I’ve only been managing a flash a week (though admittedly the latest one, Control, might be the beginning of a future novel), along with three short stories in January. It’s not enough. Writing keeps me sane, and that’s partly why I’m here, writing this, instead of editing the latest chapter I’ve recorded. And whilst this can be cathartic on some level, and offers an explanation for my radio silence online lately, it doesn’t nourish me in the same way as writing a novel does.

So that’s the first thing I need to address; bringing the anxiety to a level that allows me to be fully creative. I’ll get there. This has happened in the past and somehow I got through it.

What kind of author platform do you call this?

If you’re a writer, you’ll have heard all kinds of talk (and implicit pressure) related to building an author platform. The most cynical interpretation of this is having a website and presence online that sells your books.

In line with some of the driest advice about this I’ve read, I should be blogging about… post-apocalyptic fiction, or short stories, or all kinds of other topics related to my anthology and my novel, the idea being that I’ll draw in people who are likely to buy my books.

Now, if I had written a memoir on how anxiety has plagued my life so far, this would be appropriate. But I haven’t. And more than that, I’m telling you that I struggle, and I am scared and that no amount of book deals and exciting things can make the hard, messy stuff go away. Not the most positive message. Sorry.

But you know what? I don’t care, because I think it’s much more worthwhile describing what it’s really like to be an anxious ninny who happens to have a couple of book deals. I don’t want to build an author brand which portrays me as anything other than what I am, and this, my sparkling ones, is the rough underbelly of my creativity. My brain, that writes these books and stories for you, often screws up and tries to convince me that the world is ending any minute now. Hey ho. Rough with the smooth and all that.

So that’s where I am at the moment. Over there, in a little hole, shivering, for no good reason. If the world really was ending, the way I feel would be appropriate, but it’s not. Until then, I’ll be holding onto the little comforts that I can. Normal service will be resumed shortly… Keep calm and carry on… When in doubt, put the kettle on…