Rosetinted

I think I have a plan. It is a vague one, but I just about see the outline in the smog. My life has been devoid of plans for a while. Quite some time ago, I had a fixed long-term plan and it fell through, not dramatically - it quietly crumbled without so much of a care from anyone, except for me. It was, as is often the case of plans that crumble quietly, a life changing plan and its demise caused my grief alone. Sadness held alone is a lonely affair. Perhaps I didn't mind, at least not as strongly as I first felt and with the joy of hindsight - I was quietly relieved that the plan had been wrong all along. The aftermath of a plan failing is that you live in a state of loss, feeling awkward and embarrassed that you ever afforded yourself the belief, time and money to pursue a goal that led nowhere. It is hard to lift your head high when your  self has been so wounded.  But time ticks on and you have a choice, accept your lot or continue to tug at that string that things as the...

This week my mind has been occupied with my inadequacies. It is confession time and here is my confession; as a wannabe writer I possess only rudimentary knowledge of grammar. Allow me to elucidate-I know what sounds alright but have no knowledge of why, and if you asked me to label the grammatical devises I use, I would not have: one, single, clue. In fact as I write now I am wracked with the self-consciousness of the 'non-grammatical' class. You may inwardly sigh and tut (here she goes again), but my lack of grammatical knowledge has always felt like part of the thing that we dare not speak of - class divide. Competent writers can dissect text, like a surgeon's knife through flesh, identify and classify, diagnose and be part of the cure- at least that is the message I have received. And because I have never been able to dissect text: only like or dislike, follow the journey the author sets out or get hopelessly lost- I thought that writing was beyond me. I heard another r...

My inner voice is speaking to me quite clearly. It says, and this is no whisper, get any old shit out or this gig is up. This is my fourth draft since August. Things seemed different back then, in some ways there was a hope that we might learn to live with whatever this thing is and find some sort of normal. I suspected that we would be living in a hinterland and with no end in sight but I was feeling my oats for my new found love of the written word and my drive to seek out words seemed like a wall of protection surrounding me. I did not believe for one instance that this time, I would be gaping dry- mouthed with nothing to say- this time was different than the others, this was the first time, for example, I had lived and written through a global pandemic. But if there is one thing I have learned, you are who you are and real change is a position hardly ever won. Those who change have the fortitude to chip away at the bedrock and foundations - not chosen but left behind; they don'...