What Kind of a Writer Am I? Feminist, emotion driven & striving for honesty

Last autumn, I wrote a slightly tangled blog post called What Threads Run Through Your Life? Go With Your fascinations!. This was my attempt to articulate the key ideas and themes that have populated my life as both a writer, a teacher and a human being.

I tried to put into words my growing awareness of the interconnected nature of these different 'threads'— and that perhaps these 'threads' may be less different from each other than I'd previously thought. At the time of writing, I felt excited to be understanding this because I felt like I was getting closer to the clarity I'd been seeking about who I am, what I do currently and what I want to do more of in the future.

Like much of my writing, this post—'Go with your fascinations!'— took on an invocatory quality. It think through writing I was daring myself to go deeper into what I love, what moves me, the tensions that pull me (often painfully) in two different and the compulsions to understand that infuriate me sometimes.

When I wrote it, I thought I had clarity on these interconnections. However, reading it back now I don't think I have nearly as much clarity as I do now. There's a strange alchemy that happens with writing because I now feel I not only have more clarity on who I am (at this given moment) as a writer— but more audacity to share it here.

So, here goes...

I'm a feminist writer

I write to make invisible things visible. I believe that the worst kinds of silence are forms of violence and, relatedly, that 'the personal is political'.* I don't believe in sharing personal things as a 'moral imperative' though; it should be a personal choice made only if a person feels safe to do so and it gives them fulfilment.

A significant part of my writing is to resist narratives that I've been told about people with a diagnosis of BPD— mostly women, and more often than not women who have experienced trauma. The DSM-5 states that 75% of people diagnosed are women and 2019 research by The University of Manchester showed that people with a BPD diagnosis are '13 times more likely to report childhood trauma than people without any mental health problems' and 71.1% of people with this diagnosis 'reported at least one traumatic childhood experience'.

For me, it's not only about writing to resist narratives, but it's writing to find out what my own narrative is— and can be. As weird as it sounds, I sometimes feel like writing is a way of making myself!

Writing for me is part of being an introspective and a curious person. As a writer, and as a person, I love questions as much as I love answers. I reflect a lot about myself, other people and the world. I don't take 'that's just the way things are' as an explanation—or as a prediction of how things will inevitably turn out. Without writing, I can't enjoy my life. I write pretty much every day: it's a cliche, but it's how I process my life so my head doesn't explode.

I take strength from feminist writers who are not afraid to transgress established genre boundaries and write in this way to make something new. Maggie Nelson, bell hooks, Melissa Broder and Virginia Woolf.

I look up to writers who delight in introspection and aren't afraid to make a project out of sharing their 'inner worlds', thought processes, vulnerabilities, idiosyncrasies and their relationships with themselves and others.

I'm a fangirl for writers who take language itself as a subject and question its possibilities. I like to read the kind of stuff I like to write, but I also love to read lots of different types of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, old and new.

My second book is full of questions and it felt very 'me' to write a book with a reflective and introspective feel to it; it kind of chimed with me as a lifelong journal/notebook writer which is me thinking out loud with a page.

i mostly write from a position of vulnerability

The things I'm most compelled to write about most are my sources of hurt or confusion. This means that I write mostly from places of vulnerability, including fear and uncertainty. Ironically, this is by far my most productive stance from which to write! I'm like a giraffe when it bends its neck to drink at the watering hole, simultaneously quenching my thirst but most open to attack.

I probably write about things that hurt or confuse me because it helps me to try to understand them. I'm a person who is constantly seeking to know things, even things I may ultimately not be able to know. Sometimes writing for me is kind of an attempt to know something. I sometimes need to let go of trying to know things though!

Writing gives me a sense of agency over what I express and how I express it, that I don't feel when I speak. I feel more sure of myself when I write than when I speak.

Having a conversation about my writing can be hard for me because it means I'm having a conversation about things that make me feel vulnerable. I need a high level of trust with someone to be able to have more than a surface level of conversation writing.

writing and speaking are related

Writing from places of vulnerability means writing about topics that feel feel hard for me to speak about verbally. Over the years, much my writing has happened because I didn't know how to talk out loud: I didn't feel safe enough. One specific example of this is the how I was diagnosed— 'off the record'—which made me feel like I had something to hide. I'm a person who feels immense pain from feel like I have to hide. Some people are comfortable with that, and I respect that, but I'm not. I find it really painful.

Writing has long been my search for words 'that felt right to me' . Writing to me is exploration of language, but it also becomes (unsettling and exciting) stepping stones towards spoken language.

Although I come from an entirely different context to bell hooks, I feel a resonance from her words: 'language is also the site of struggle.' For me, language is also tied up with longing. I want to find precisely the right words to articulate what sometimes feels beyond words. In her experimental novel The Waves, Virigina Woolf wrote: I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on pavement.' For her words are an intimate thing and I feel that for me too.

In another way writing is related to speaking because for me, poetry is as much about sound and rhythm as it is about imagery or metaphor. When I write poems, I hear them in my head and I say them out loud. That's why I look so funny when I write them in the park as I quite often do! As someone close to me said, language is 'sharp' and 'visceral' so whenever I walk around, or I'm on the bus, or even when I'm talking to someone, my ears are open. Language has a music to it.

As one poetry critic put it so perfectly (who I can't reference because I can't remember who it is): 'the sound creates the sense'. Sometimes that's a clash and sometimes that's a harmony. The way words interact with one another aurally and rhythmically when I read certain poems out loud gives me a particular joy that I don't feel at any other time in life.

A lot of my poetry is quite angry! Anger is a productive force when channeled in the right way. Again, this is part of me as a feminist writer because a lot of girls grow up being told that their anger is wrong. Anger can be a powerful signifier of injustice and it pays to listen to what it might be communicating.

I almost solely write from places of tension

I realised recently that I don't write much about how I love my daughter or my husband. When I asked myself why, I realised it was because I mostly write from places of tension or inner conflict, including confusion or uncertainty.

With my daughter and my husband, I feel very little tension, conflict, confusion or uncertainty so that's probably why I write less about them than I do about other topics. If part of writing is about trying to 'figure things out', my daughter and my husband (gladly) give me little to 'figure out'. I mean that in an affectionate and contented way.

As a writer, I guess I have a Gothic sensibility! There's an undercurrent of unease and even spookiness (?) running through my writing— even my sentences are fragmented or recursive. The kinds of questions that my writing asks are: What can I say and not say? How much can I say? Who can I say it too? Where is the line and how do I know when I've crossed it?

I'm interested in boundaries, especially ones that feel unclear to me. Relating to being a feminist writer, my writing obsesses over transgression and with that— shame. A part of that is emotional maximalism: overflowing emotion and not always knowing how to be or exist like that. This idea of excess and 'too muchness' comes with pain, but also possibility too. I am a hopeful writer, as well as a hopeful person.

I'm an emotion-driven writer

I don't generally write unless I feel. I'm an emotion-driven writer— even when I write academic essays and, understandably, I've been critiqued for that! I can't help but write most productively from emotions like: longing, shame, anger, despair, joy, excitement or loneliness.

Most of all, my writing strives for honesty and nothing is more satisfying to me than expressing something which, until that moment, felt inarticulate or semi-articulate. I'm aware that for me this is somewhat related to trauma and silence. Imagery around the theme of silence and speaking is throughout my writing, especially my poetry.

As many writers and academics have described, trauma resists representation and writing is my attempt to represent. For me, this personal and political, as I mentioned, it's related to trying to make invisible things visible. I'm hyper-aware of precision when it comes to words and I choose words for their undertones and subtle meanings. This is one reason why I love etymology. Language holds possibilities and imperfections, sometimes at the same time.

I take words seriously because language shapes reality. Sometimes though, I accord words too much importance, instead of just letting them wash over me like waves. Like many others with a BPD diagnosis, I've been hurt by words like 'manipulative', 'attention-seeking', 'cry for help' and 'refusing help'. The reverse of this is that I've also been healed by words too though.

Most of all, as a writer I strive for honesty, or maybe a better word is authenticity. I want my writing to sound like 'me', or an aspect of me (even if I can only notice that), and that's true in some way even when I am writing as a fictional character.

I don't strive to be a 'good' writer, and even if I did I think it's completely subjective. I don't have enough time to worry about 'good' now I've got a child. I've spent most of my life to date fraught with worry about whether I'm a 'good' person (whatever that even means) to waste time now worrying about whether I'm a 'good' writer too!

My writing is relational; my writing is acts of care (for myself and others)

I mentioned that I'm a hopeful writer and person: I write for the world in which I'm longing to live. I want others who have big unruly emotions to see that this is a deeply valid way to exist on this planet and deeply valid way to be a human being.

My blog and my books are relational because they aim to create a sense of connection between the reader and the writer. I intend for that feeling of connection to flow two ways: from myself to my readers and from my readers to myself.

I wrote my Medical Humanities Master's dissertation on 'affectively-motivated DIY texts' (mostly zines and poetry) and I see my books as part of this tradition of writing. Largely by women and non-binary people, these are texts with the primary intention of create a sense of connection between their readers and their writers. They intend to and validate their readers' emotions, and identities, even when others may try to tell them that they are 'wrong'.

When I write my books, care is at the forefront of my mind. I care about how my writing makes others feel. I write because I care about my own survival and I care about the survival of others. I try to live my life as generously as I can— giving as much of myself as I can to others— and my writing is one of the ways I try to live out the value of generosity.

As a writer, I'm full of hope in a similar way to how I'm hopeful as a teacher. As both a writer and a teacher, I aim to create something— whether that's a piece of writing, a book, a lesson or a classroom community— which embodies the values that feel right to me.

I don't want to be a writer for my career

I'm a writer because I love to write and because I need it to live my life to the fullest. I'm very happy being a special education teacher as my job. I like the structure that being a teacher brings and I need to be around people every day to feel content, even though I'm definitely an introvert.

Some of the themes I explore in my writing are the same ones that I encounter in my work as a special education teacher— and that can't be a coincidence. I frequently encounter shame, silence and stigma. One of the reasons I relish this career is because I'm a person who feels comfortable with things that some other people don't find comfortable. I don't move tend to move away from things that our society might label as difficult. For me that's related to being a person who has experienced things that society doesn't always understand and is quick to label, like the more serious aspects of my mental health problems.

Also, I notice that both as teacher and as a writer what I do has communication at its core.

my writing was always about my survival

Whilst I write for others as well, firstly I write for myself. I was a child and a teenager who obsessively wrote notebooks and journals and one of the reasons for this was because I couldn't speak about my lived reality and how it felt to be me. It was incredibly painful feeling like that, so painful that I didn't know how, or if, I would survive.

At that time, writing was one of the main ways, probably the main way, that I made it out. I no longer have a need to write like that— because I have people who know me and see me and I understand myself much better now. But I still have a need to write that will never go away and I never want it to because it gives me so much.

One of my favourite by-products of writing about my life is being able to look back and see how far I've come. Writing is a place for my memories, as well as a way of exploring my possibilities. I can be a love letter to whatever I fancy, a means of unpacking my thoughts or a way to try on new identities. After all, being a writer, like being a person, is not a fixed thing, it's open to change.

...

I'm going to finish this post now because I need to go and do something else. I could probably write so much more, but my writing is always limited by my time, especially since I became a mum.

Thank you, as always, to my readers for being here with me.

Rosie x

Shout out to my husband who spoke to me about this today on the way to the park. He gave me some characteristically incisive questioning (!) which helped me add to this / edit this tonight.

*The phrase 'the personal is political' was popularised by the publication of feminist activist Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay, "The Personal Is Political."