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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Mental health, Brexit, and political displacement projects

9/8/2020

13 Comments

 
Mental health’s a work in progress for most of us. Tougher for some, easier for others, yet there must be few this pandemic hasn’t wobbled. Years of therapy have killed off some of my demons, and given shape to those that will dog me to my dying days. Normally that dog will walk to heel, chase a ball and even raise a smile. Alas, it’s recently escaped the leash and is running rabid, baring bloody fangs. Everything’s harder with that monster circling me yet, while defeated by a trip to the supermarket, I can still, intermittently, report to my laptop and write.
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Many of us come to writing through adversity: neglectful childhoods and/or the crisis of middle age. While transforming our angst into words and setting those words on the page can be therapeutic, I’m suspicious of writing as an alternative to therapy and of translating writing produced as therapy into a published book. And yet. Here I am, deeply committed to a new novel that emerged from my rage of my government’s mishandling of this pandemic. Ordinarily, I can’t create when I’m at my lowest, but 100 Candles is shaping up, slowly but quite well.
 
How do I know it’s going well? I don’t, of course, until it’s exposed to other eyes. Its origins in mental turmoil should make me wary of assuming I’ll get something worth publishing out of this, but – my nasty self-critic aside – I think it’s quite good. If that’s a delusion, and this project is simply a distraction from painful reality, it’s a healthy one. A receptacle for my grief and anger that won’t do me, or anyone else, any harm.

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It would be different if I were in a responsible position – say, Prime Minister of a small European country – and my displacement project were – picking an example out of the air – splitting that country from the protective embrace of its neighbours and stomping out onto the windswept moors in flip-flops, holding up a battered umbrella. If that were the case, I’d have to attend to the voices that said I was leading the troops on a mission that would be folly in less turbulent times, criminally insane in the midst of a pandemic.

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To do that, I’d need to be in touch with my vulnerabilities, a quality many of our leaders lack, having had it bullied out of them at boarding school and not had the therapy to put it back. Naïvely, at the beginning of the pandemic, I listed acknowledging our interdependency as one of covid’s silver linings, but I’m wiser now. (I even included the government accepted its responsibility to govern!) A brush with mortality hasn’t dented our PM’s delusional optimism. Recent communion with depression’s dog reminds me how painful that vulnerability can be. Little wonder we’re driven to avoid it: flouting social-distance guidelines to congregate on beaches; getting lost in a shiny new novel; the Tory government’s displacement project of getting Brexit done.


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In the couple of hours I’ve spent on this and the 99-word story that follows, I’ve discovered I’m no longer as low as yesterday: is that the result of writing or was the dog already tamed? That state of mind already seems alien yet, each time I’m in it, I try to capture a whiff of its essence to inform my fiction, but depression’s coded in another language that doesn’t automatically translate. Here’s today’s attempt, in response to another flash fiction prompt from Charli Mills.

Faculties petrified
 
First the sting, then smothering, then slugging down, then stopped. Gaze turned inside out to pick the marrow from my bones. Mouth a Munchian scream until the lava swallows that and blands it over in Mona Lisa smile. “How are you?” “Fine, thanks, you?” Frozen, glued to nothing, brain reboots itself to factory settings, erasing hours of therapy. Erasing the adult.
 
Barbs can pierce the carapace. Kindness can’t. Shelled in ineffective armour, identity fragments. Dissolves. Only I can save me. But I’s in exile, I’s abandoned me. Depression’s being washed in molten lava. Transforming flesh and faculties to stone.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
13 Comments
Kay-Anne Sheen link
10/8/2020 08:29:58 am

I really enjoyed this. Your descriptions of your world are so relatable to.

Reply
Anne
10/8/2020 12:09:54 pm

Thanks for visiting and glad it resonates for you.

Reply
D. Avery link
10/8/2020 01:41:11 pm

I thought your post was spot on. And a very well done flash, great use of that prompt.
These are crazy times, no denying.

Reply
Anne
11/8/2020 10:30:26 am

Thanks, fortunately or unfortunately the pandemic is the least of my problems! Did you see I put in a dog specially for you?

Reply
D. Avery link
11/8/2020 01:43:35 pm

Oh, Anne, not that kind of dog! I am currently dog sitting for the neighbor. She kayaks and walks and likes to hear stories so we're getting on and it is nice to not have to keep six feet away from her and she's very huggable. It is wonderful, we're having a great time and I am reminded that I wouldn't want one actually living off me again full time. (Phew) The cat's relieved too.
Hope you are feeling better and better.

Anne
13/8/2020 04:24:52 pm

I still have fond memories of temporary dogs that looked after us in Peru, taking us for walks and escorting us between a restaurant and our digs. But wouldn't have wanted to share a house with either of them.
Problems more or less resolved now – thanks for your support.

susan scott
10/8/2020 07:52:32 pm

Great post thanks Anne. And the flash fiction!

Reply
Anne
11/8/2020 10:31:11 am

Thanks for your support, Susan.

Reply
Charli mills
12/8/2020 05:29:25 am

Anne, I'm a proponent of using writing in therapy as a tool but not as a substitute. I'm hopeful of a program that has been a year in the works with the Veteran Center. It's a narrative writing group. I lead the writing and a therapist guides the process or anything that comes up in the setting. We now have eight former combat soldiers, three of them women, three Naive American, one a Vietnam vet and one a WWII vet. And they are so studious as writers! We started workshopping once a month in addition to group. Six of the veterans came to seek therapy so they could be in the writing group! It got them in the door yet beyond that or my simple role in the process I can't speak to writing as therapy but I do believe it has a cathartic quality and can be a tool by which we can process.

I wonder how bigger the black dog might be had you not had writing as an outlet? However, I have noticed that a sizeable number of writers have not been writing since quarantines began. Yet others, like Marjorie Mallon, got an entire collection put together and published! One thing I do know, we are all suffering together world-wide and that's remarkable. You are right about leaders without their vulnerabilities -- they have no sense or empathy. Capitalism at its worse is showing. Everything at its worse is showing.

Glad you got a dog in there for D.!

I found your flash moving despite its paralysis. That last paragraph is especially full of emotive imagery, and the rhythm and language beautiful in its expression of pain.

Reply
Anne
13/8/2020 04:53:18 pm

Yes, your group seems a good combination of the different skills and functions – and leading such a group can be therapeutic too so long as you don't take those problems home with you.

I’m not sure about writing, but this dog would’ve been wilder if I were already laid low by the pandemic. Apart from my rage at injustice, I have it a lot easier than most. Which meant I could put my time and energy, depleted as it was, into fighting for what I needed to fix this current issue, now – fingers crossed – resolved. But I haven’t felt as low as this for years.

When I studied the dynamics of organisations there was a really useful book – I can't remember the name although it might be on one of my shelves – about good managers drawing on their vulnerability. I think you display that quality well at the Ranch.

Glad you liked the flash. I was, and still am, quite pleased with it.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
28/8/2020 05:37:47 pm

Thought I'd add this further reflections since coming back here to reply to Norah. I think for me walking is the most useful as pseudo-therapy, and then if that produces some inspiration for writing it's almost a cure.

Reply
Norah Colvin
25/8/2020 12:07:12 pm

That's a powerful flash, Anne. It really packs a punch. Funny (not) how the punches, real or imagined, seem to follow harder and faster when in that dark place.
I'm pleased you're lifting up and out.

Reply
Anne Goodwin
28/8/2020 05:40:21 pm

Thanks, Norah. Yeah, much simplified and artificialised that thing about the knocks being harder when you're already down was my PhD research

Reply



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