Hello! If you don’t know me, I’m Beverley. I’m a pretty well-established but not very successful writer and a pretty well-established, rather more successful facilitator, writing coach and project manager. Are the two related? Of course! Have I given more of my energy to other writers than to my own creative work? You betcha! Is that about to change? Let’s see…
I’ve had this Substack platform for a while now but I haven’t known what to write on it. I have so many ideas in my head, my fingers in so many pies and so many hats, literally and metaphorically (the hats, not the pies - I’m allergic to wheat and don’t much like pie anyway. I digress…) Besides, I already have so many platforms. I built a great following on Twitter and then someone burned that down. I connected with large communities when I blogged about grief but gradually I moved away from those spaces after the publication of my memoir Dear Blacksmith in February 2020 (bad timing, much?) I built supportive writing communities on Facebook during the pandemic and, over the last few years, I’ve been building the fabulous Writers Workshop community. Within that community, I have my own core writers who attend my regular Get Writing and Monday Motivation sessions. Building community is evidently something I’m good at. So, why build a new one here? And why call it Aftershocks?
The truth is I miss the days when I could write freely, unhampered by my identity as a facilitator, coach and founder of The Writers Workshop - the person who feels like they must have it all together, to know all the answers. Honestly, I’m also tired of the business of writing, and the thought of learning how to monetise and optimise another platform has held me back from Substack. (So, this is free for now.) I’ve also been held back by the fact that there’s become an uncomfortable (for me) mismatch between the image I project online and the messy reality of my life as I move forward following a truly horrific few years that I’ve not been able to speak publicly about. Years that, as I come out of them, I realise have left me burned out, with chronic health problems and with complex ptsd (undiagnosed, after what I’ve been through I’m wary of doctors, maybe I’ll come to that later). Not everyone who connects with my work will want to read about that, but it’s something I feel I need to find ways to express. Write what scares you, I always tell my writers. So, Aftershocks. It’s a word I wrote down as I circled around themes in a notebook recently and it seemed a fitting title for something, for what happened after.
I’ve already mentioned that February 2020 was the launch of my memoir about my intense grief following the traumatic of loss of my partner and my mother. It was a trauma that has repercussions even now, eight years after the loss (grief goes on and on, ripples outwards, I might write about that later too). For all of us it was also the beginning of an unprecented pandemic which has had a huge impact on so many lives. But, for me, February 2020 is mostly remembered for the day that my then twelve year old daughter refused to go to her father’s for half-term. It was an incident that catapulted me into the insane and dangerous world of family court and that took my family to the brink. It took me into a two year protracted nightmare, a circus of social workers, lawyers and court rooms with its own language: factitious illness, parental alienation, DARVO, gaslighting, narcissistic personality disorder, and new worlds: neurodivergence, the crevasse of adolescent mental health support, the failing education systems, the toxic world of identity politics and incredible misogyny. But I can’t write about that. There’s an embargo on speaking out about the family court. We must protect the children, though children, I have learned are collateral damage. I could lose my children if I wrote about it, I was told. I nearly did lose my children though I didn’t write about it.
But that’s another story. A story I’m not yet sure I can tell.
I have tried over the last year or so to work out how to write about that time and the time that followed. I nearly lost my mind, though writing is what usually saves me. And not writing about it makes me lose my mind too. I have to try. But is it a memoir? A poetry collection? A stage show? I just don’t know. What I do know is that it was a kind of madness to build all that I have built whilst living these nightmares. The poet, Kate Fox, epitomised it for me in my living room one night having spent twenty four hours in my company discussing my likely neurodivergence (undiagnosed, I could lose my children, I was told, if I was diagnosed. I nearly l did lose my children) and the direction of my writing. ‘On the one hand,’ she said. ‘What extraordinary resilience you have shown. On the other, what an astonishing capacity for dissociation you must have.’ It is true. I lived on adrenalin for those years. I am exhausted now.
It’s only now that the dust has settled and the calm returned, as I’ve begun to rebuild my life and find new love, that I’ve realised just how badly damaged I have been by the experiences I have had, not just in recent years but in the times before. And so, life now is about unpicking and healing and learning to live fully again. About post-traumatic stress and post-traumatic growth. And Aftershocks.
But how do you write a story when you’re not allowed to tell the truth? And where do you begin in expressing the unspeakable? How do you write when you don’t know what to write about?
Write about that, I tell my writers. So, here I am, trying to find ways to write out of the silence beyond the trauma and burnout and into an unknown future. Join me, if you like. It might be a bumpy ride.
‘But how do you write a story when you’re not allowed to tell the truth? And where do you begin in expressing the unspeakable?’
Almost word for word my thoughts when I started my memoir. Really looking forward to reading what you write , when you’re ready x
Incredible writing already: right here x