Thursday 2 May 2013

Instead of writing fiction

I've started documenting my life. Or snippets of it. What happens though is that I send it up. I haven't really been awake since 5am, high and manic on a cocktail of melatonin, antihistamines, travel sickness pills and valium. Though I've thought about getting in that state. What is true is that I walked to poncey Broadway Market, intent on sitting in La Bouche. I planned to have a cappuccino (one pound ninety-five) and an almond croissant (two pounds twenty) and pretend to read my book on trauma while watching all the passersby. La Bouche was full of like-minded and similarly pretentious people so I continued on my nonchalant way to a less trendy and almost empty Middle Eastern cafe whose almond croissants were forty-five pence cheaper. I took a seat and got out my trauma book. Actually made some notes about a psychiatrist called Lenore Terr who proposed that trauma in children took two forms. Type 1 trauma results from a single - often life-threatening - event, and it can be easily remembered in all its detail. Type 2 consists of repeated and predictable trauma, particularly sexual or physical abuse, which a child begins to anticipate and then learns to cope with through psychic numbing or dissociation. Terr's thinking - backed up by some questionable research - is that because of the repetitive nature of this latter kind of abuse it would become a general blur, less easily recalled. Richard J. McNally, however...actually, you probably don't want to know what Richard J. McNally thought. All you want to know is why I'm writing about abuse. 'Was he abused?' you'll be thinking. I don't think I was. Although according to some commentators there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who remember their sexual abuse in childhood and those who do not. I remember, when I was five or six years old, the boy next door lifting up his shirt and showing me his stomach. It was highly erotic and led to other things. But I'm not going to tell you what those other things were because I've been fictionalizing them in Human Waste, the novel that I'm having difficulty finishing. Probably because of this futile and near obsessive documenting of my life. I hold 'Sunshine and daydreams' responsible. He/she left an encouraging comment beneath a former post, telling me this was the most interesting blog he or she had ever read. I don't know who 'Sunshine and daydreams' is. She/he (I suspect a she) left her comment anonymously. She hasn't created a profile, which means I can't reply and thank her. Or complain about the way her positive comment is making me post more rubbish on this blog rather than get on with writing Human Waste.        

2 comments:

  1. Great write-up! Writing is a talent, and it must not be wasted. As with everything that we had been entrusted, we should

    let it grow and share it with the world.>self directed education

    ReplyDelete