It's the way I tell 'em

Writing is such a weird thing. It’s such a specific thing. No matter how hard you try, even if you’re Marcel Proust, you cannot write about everything that happens to you, all of the time. If you’re me, this is somewhat problematic for lots of reasons, only one of which is that I seem to live an extremely strange life that lends itself to ripping yarns. I love a good story. I have been gifted a life which is full of them and it is distressing when I either don’t have time, or the inclination or the permission to write them all down. Choices must be made, but I am not always happy about them.

I write for lots of reasons. At the moment, I write because I have a lot of feelings I need to process and it really helps me organise my thoughts. When the kids were small, I wrote to save myself. I wrote to remind myself of who I was and that there was more to life than crippling exhaustion and small people who had mistaken my body for a climbing frame. There was a time when I wrote because I thought I might make a career out of it. Then there was a time when I wrote to remind myself that not every day was a bleakly hollowed out scream and that there were good, positive, funny things to hold onto.

Whenever I write at the moment, I get the terrible urge to write the whataboutery. The whataboutery is all the stuff that provides the caveats to the topic at hand, or the light relief. Last week, while I was writing about the becoming of my dolls I had to physically restrain myself from popping in some humorous anecdotes about the weird cat feud that’s currently obsessing the marina and a particularly excellent cat called Susan. Today, as I was writing about the never-ending thing and my petty tyrants I had to stop myself writing about the pottery class I took over the weekend.

It’s not that writing about those things is bad. Writing about those things is a joy. I definitely want to write about those things, but it was the why of writing about them then that I had to resist. I told myself I should write about them so that you, the reader, got better value. I told myself that I should write about them because, ‘frankly, Katy, you’re even boring yourself at this stage. Throw them a bone. It wouldn’t kill you to tell a funny story.’

Only it might.

Because that’s how I have lived so much of my life to date. Telling funny stories that entertain people. Stories have been a currency that I have traded in when I didn’t feel the rest of me was worth anything to anyone. Stories have been a way of hiding painful things. Sometimes they’ve been a distraction and at other times they’ve been a way to tell people terrible things in the manner of a humorous anecdote on a light entertainment programme in 1957.

It’s easy to be funny. I have the knack of it. I see the absurd in most things. Even the darkest moments can twist in a second into something howlingly funny. And that’s great, until it isn’t. It’s all hilarious until someone loses an eye. As my mum used to say: ‘it’ll end in tears.’ And it does. For me, anyway. First I was a funny fucker. Then I taught myself not to feel much at all. Then came the tears. Now I’m finding my way back to some kind of balance.

I want to write all the other stuff. I need to write this stuff. Part of the deal of becoming myself is looking after my needs. I used to think it was dull, looking after myself. I also used to think staying up all night and eating nothing but chocolate mousse were two of the things I was most looking forward to about being grown up. Turns out they were both over-rated and make me unbearable to myself and everyone else. Turns out that sleep is not for the weak and chicken soup really is good for the soul. It turns out being serious is pretty good for me too. The jokes can wait a bit longer.