New Years, New Beginnings and Starting Somewhere
New Years, New Beginnings and Starting Somewhere
Expectations low, heart wide open.
I have wanted to have a consistent writing practice for a long time. Actually, that’s not true. I already have a consistent writing practice and have done since I was a little girl. In fact I have so many ideas and write so much daily (this piece originally started out as my first Welcome, welcome, welcome! piece for the home page, but I had to sidetrack because it morphed into something else and seven other creations besides) that I am starting to feel like if I don’t do something with all this creative energy soon that maybe I never will and as a result will either a) implode or perhaps even more terrifyingly b) one day wake up and all the ideas will have just moved on.
As Elizabeth Gilbert writes about so beautifully in one of my fave non-fiction books of all time Big Magic (a gorgeous exploration of ‘Creative Living Beyond Fear’) when inspiration strikes and is not acted upon - not carried, not borne, not shared, not materialised - it will find a new host, one who is willing to bring it to fruition. Because thoughts, want to become things. Oh I feel that keenly. And I also feel the sweaty, grubby guilt of one who’s laboured over a thousand screenplays and stuffed them into overflowing drawers, never to be seen by another living soul. If I’m being totally candid, I have one of those too! But there is a sort of paralysis I experience when it comes not only to taking an idea beyond that initial spark of inspiration but also in allowing other people to see it.
In 2016 I entered the New Wise Voice competition run by Psychologies Magazine and Hay House publishers. Spoiler alert: I went on to win the competition. Thanks ever so if you were one of the people who voted for me by the way :) But that’s not the keystone of the story.
Part of the process of that competition was to create content for a digital platform. At the time, I didn’t even know what a digital platform was but I soon learnt out of sheer necessity that it meant I had to create a lot of content very quickly that could be uploaded - videos, blogs etc. Initially I mostly stuck to videos but I also tentatively uploaded a few written posts. I gained in confidence over the course of the competition, posting more and more pieces of prose as I went, culminating in an emotional and extremely personal essay titled Why I Have To Write. After the competition I felt called to keep creating in that space, with a particular focus in the wellness field. I felt deeply connected to the work I had been making. I was even offered the opportunity to develop a book inspired by the material I had published, but in the four months that immediately followed the competition, I not only filmed the first season of the television show Fleabag, but it was also released into the world at break-neck speed, and thereafter changed my life forever.
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Acting had been taking a pretty disinterested back seat for around two years at that point but suddenly, rather aggressively took the wheel and spun me in a totally different direction onto a five lane highway, Cher Horwitz screaming at the wheel. I had occasionally pootled down this same highway before, in the slow lane of course. But mostly I’d glanced at it longingly from minor side roads, sneaking a peek through scattered trees and brushland, repeatedly missing turnings, or finding the entryways closed, unsure if that path was truly meant for me. So inevitably, this turning point in my life was an incredibly seductive time. When the thing that’s been eluding you suddenly craves your attention, you cannot help but utterly surrender to it. Like a long term crush that you’d more or less given up on urgently grabbing you by the hand and whispering ‘let’s go on an adventure’. And whilst the past (almost) seven years since then have been truly extraordinary - I met Brad Pitt ffs - what initially felt like a wild, all-consuming Summer fling, has since developed into something that feels more like a loving, steady, long-term relationship. Ok. Well. Maybe not so much loving. As if I am not forcibly aware of the fickle whims of the acting industry, nor averse to the burden of rampant job insecurity that seems to drip through every strand of an actor’s DNA. But like any relationship there is always a requisite element of risk, or rather, trust, and whether or not my relationship with acting goes the distance, I certainly believe it’s in a secure enough place now to finally allow myself the space to branch back out on to some of those side roads, maybe even go off-road altogether.
I love acting but as an actor you have very little agency. There is a horrible statistic out there in the universe that something like 98% of actors don’t have the freedom to be choosy about which jobs they get to do and even if you are in the fortunate position where you can be reasonably choosy (much to some people’s surprise even with a BAFTA in your back pocket you can still do an awful lot of auditioning), you will still be told where to stand, what to say and how to say it. And once they call cut on a film set, your job is over. You have zero control over what happens next - what parts of your work are used or how. The creative limitations can feel stifling and certainly for me and many friends of mine, that lack of autonomy after the event, can send you into a pit of neuroses and anxiety, worrying about how the thing, or rather and especially, your role in the thing will turn out. I’ve even been known at the end of a day’s filming to go home and set up a camera to capture what I think I did that day on set, in an attempt to at best, reassure myself that my acting choices were acceptable, or at worst, despite the fact that no one will ever see it, try to redeem whatever it was I’d failed to do earlier in the day and do it better. Yep, I know. Rationally this is an extreme, pointless and unhealthy exercise and yet, it doesn’t stop me from doing it. My requests for reshoots have become a running joke amongst my colleagues. Ultimately, unless you are making your own work, you are entirely at the mercy of someone else first choosing to employ you and then how they choose to interpret your work. To be honest, even if you are making your own work someone still has to give you money to make it, and that usually comes at the cost of relinquishing some creative control. Either way, I feel it’s important for me at this stage of my career, even just from a mental health standpoint that I reclaim the feeling of some of that for myself. Control, yes. Although that word feels a little like a strangle-hold so let’s say: Autonomy. Agency. Sovereignty? Hello.
If acting is the wild tempestuous adventurer in me, then writing is the contemplative romantic. The truth is I love writing just as much as I love acting and I sort of feel like writing loves me. I want to go off-road and have an affair with it. There is a groundedness, a flow, an expansion, and a deep sense of creative fulfilment that I have only ever experienced when I am writing. You know when people ask - what could you spend your entire day/ life doing and never tire of? For me it’s writing, or reading. Or a perfect blend of both. My friends will testify that I can lurk around a good colour-coded spreadsheet for a nice long while too. But I’ve been known to work through 14 hours without a break when I’m writing. I’m not saying that’s healthy behaviour either, just that that’s how easy it is for me — once I start that is. Starting is the tricky bit. The leap of faith. The moment of decision to, in my case, open the floodgates because whatever the opposite of writer’s block is, that is my affliction. And it is that inundation of ideas and the sprawling way in which they present themselves in my brain that can often send me directly through a gateway of overwhelm, down the slippery slope of anxiety and into the depths of the dirt pit of inactivity. Sometimes I have so many ideas that I don’t know where to start, so I don’t start anywhere. The irony being that my number one tool for clawing my way back up into the light, is to start somewhere.
Do you ever put off messaging or phoning a particular friend because you always end up in really satisfying but prolonged chats, and you don’t feel you have the time in that moment so end up leaving it way too long until you finally pick up the phone? I do. I do it with writing too. I can be a bad friend to my writing.
I purposefully gave myself the entire months of December and January to properly research Substack (procrastinate) and plan (colour-coded spreadsheets) how I wanted to show up on this platform over the next 12 months. The important part of that though is that I allowed myself time to prepare in a way I have never done before outside of acting - partly because of the time of year (I genuinely think we should all be in full hibernation mode for the entirety of Winter), partly to indicate to both myself and the universe how seriously I am taking on this new commitment, but mostly because in the past, as a former addict of grind-culture, I have not dared be so kind to myself. When I initially set up Still Space I experienced a breakdown for the first time. It wasn’t the last and old habits die hard, so I was much more careful this time. I have left room to grow for ideas that are still finding their form and have been much more realistic with myself about what I can fully commit to day to day, and happily sustain alongside my other work. It’s also something I want to show up to in a meaningful and consistent way though, to challenge myself and develop my craft as a writer.
None of this is to say I think I’m any good by the way or that I don’t doubt myself but what I think I can at least lay claim to is being totally myself when I write. AT least, I hope I sound like me. Ironically, given my profession, I’m not trying to be anyone else when I’m writing. I think that’s possibly why I find sustaining a social media life so difficult - my Instagram, the last one standing, is barely hanging by a thread but the endless sycophantic presentation of self-serving extroversion through gritted sponsored teeth, is not a place I feel many of us and least of all me, can thrive in. Like most modern millennials I have a multitude of allergies but perhaps my most severe and life-threatening one is inauthenticity. Arguably writing is just a different kind of mask to hide behind but it still feels deeply vulnerable to me, much in the same way as singing. You don’t easily share those parts of yourself with everyone.
What I love so much about Substack is that it grants me a space where there are no real world consequences if I fail. My ego may suffer a small blow but so what? To borrow from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic again and bring us full circle —
“There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? But I’ve always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail?”
BIG MAGIC, Elizabeth Gilbert
Substack is a completely free resource that you can immediately start earning money from if people are interested in your work. It also provides you with a space to just simply write, if that’s your thing, and see what happens. And if you’re just here to read and be inspired, have at it! There are so many wonderful people on here and it is so antithetical to social media and its twisted algorithms it seriously makes me want to cry with joy. Substack allows you to cultivate a real community, that you interact with in an authentic way because you all want to be there. If inauthenticity is top of my intolerants then passive consumption is a close second.
You can also tweak posts on Substack in perpetuity and I cannot tell you how much that appeals to the copy editor in me — for those who don’t know, that was my job for three years whilst trying to get a drama school to take me on. Though much like during the New Wise Voice competition I am learning how to use Substack as I go which means relinquishing those old modes of things needing to be ‘just so’ as far as possible. So I’m going to plough on, a day at a time and ask your forgiveness rather than permission. A girls gotta start somewhere after all.
This really does feel like a homecoming of sorts. A return to a part of myself that I’ve kept under wraps. I don’t know why but it also feels absolutely right that I do it now.
Where are you taking a leap of faith in 2023? What (or who ;) ) would you drop everything for in a heartbeat, to go on an adventure?
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