Naive Psychologist

I learnt a long time ago to not comment too much on books and writing that I haven’t read (or if I haven’t read haven’t at least taken the time to learn about). When I was young, I did as all young people who like to read did, and I started to work my way through my parents’ bookshelves. I was most interested in my mother’s books, but for a short time I delved into my father’s. Where Mum had Edna O’Brien, Doris Lessing and science fiction, Dad’s shelves were filled with texts on philosophy and Modern European History. Thick, hardback books with titles I have long since forgotten. This included a book which is now more or less banned and which I don’t want to mention by name, but you can probably guess what it was. I assumed—because it was on my father’s shelves—that it was a book about how awful war was. My parents’ lived their politics. There were no two sides to every argument–there were my parents’ politics (correct) and everyone else’s (wrong). They were left-wing at a time when left-wing was still left-wing; and in the shadow of the Vietnam war, Dad was stridently anti-war.

As I had done with most of the other books I pulled off my father’s shelves, I didn’t read a page of this book, or if I did I would have been quickly bored and stopped reading. Without reading it, I did assume that it followed the logic of Dad’s anti-war stance. For whatever reason—probably because it was thick and therefore a sign of how smart I was, I put the book in my bag to take to school. Whether I showed it to anyone or whether anyone saw it, I don’t remember because all other memory of that incident is eclipsed by the eruption of my mother’s white-hot fury when she saw the book in my bag. Most of this anger was directed at my father, but I certainly bore the brunt of some of it.

The meaning underlying all of this has grown both deeper and more intense for me over the years. While I’m glad Mum found the book I do have a deep sense of shame at even having picked that book up, deeper still that I might have taken that book to school. This sense of shame has never diminished; if anything it has grown even sharper and even now I will sometimes wake in the night suddenly struck by the awful enormity of this childhood incident.

This has had a huge impact on my understanding of the power of words and books. It also means that I’m very, very careful with opinions about books I haven’t read or feel I haven’t understood. I felt this most keenly as a children’s librarian. I read as many of the books I bought for the library shelves as I could. I worked my way through all the shortlists because I knew they would be sought after by both children and their parents; I read commentary and reviews to make sure I wasn’t overlooking anything; and I was particularly careful that I had least skimmed the books that I recommended to the children and teenagers in my reading care.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying it’s been a devastating week for an ex-children’s and young people’s librarian.

Whenever I start to write, I think, ‘I don’t know where to start.’ The words, the phrase, the feeling I get when I say it, they all make me so grumpy with myself. That after all this time I still get seduced by the fetish of procrastination.

But about ten minutes ago it occurred to me that if I keep saying it to myself that might be something in it. So perhaps it isn’t so much that I need to stop myself from saying it, but more that I need to listen in a different way.

It might be that ‘I don’t know where to start’ is not some kind of existential cry for help to try and overcome my ongoing inability to sit still for any length of time. If I take it at face value, it’s as simple as what it says it is. ‘I don’t know where to start.’ And the answer of course is simple too: start here.

I’ve been reminded all over again, that the times when I thought my writing was closest to where I wanted it to be, were in the early days of my blog. So that’s how I’m going to start. With you, my strange, long-lived blog. To remind myself how I used to sit and search for ways to put my feelings and sensations into words.

Time passes and the things that don’t get done keep not getting done. I did want to leave myself some notes about this year’s Adelaide Fringe experience, but as it fades further into the past the things I wanted to remember also fade. But I was just messing around in my (also neglected) substack account and found a draft that has definitely passed its time for being a newsletter update, but will do just nicely here.

So here it is, a quick reminder of something else I learnt from this year’s Adelaide Fringe:

👀 For the last few years, Adrian and I have been discussing my approach to ticket sales. My aim has always been to sell out the season. He has long maintained that at a certain point of your career, setting up a season to sell out is not a good business decision. His argument is that at this stage, it limits the potential growth of my audience. That there’s no opportunity for people to make last minute decisions or for word of mouth to do its thing.

💼 Let’s face it, he clearly has a better brain for business than I do. And it seemed that this season while I was wanting to put on all six shows (a creative, not a business decision) it would be a good opportunity to experiment with added capacity.

🎯 Long story short: he isn’t wrong. Just over half the nights have been sold out, and they’ve nearly all been nearly sold out. But not all tickets sold. However, even without selling out, I’ve sold more tickets this year than any other year. And I do think it’s been a good chance to grow my audience beyond my lovely friends (I love my friends, and I’m deeply grateful that so many have been so supportive across so many years and so many bad jokes).

🎲 It does feel somewhat disconcerting to not sell out every night, but it’s also kind of freeing as the release of tightly held boundaries can often be. I’ve learnt a lot from this fringe season.

I told myself I’d go to the 7.15 gym class, but then I couldn’t wake up at 6, at 6.15 and at 6.30 I made a deal with myself. I told myself that I could go to the 9.15 class which would give me time to get an hour’s writing done before my class.

This, I told myself, would actually set me up for a better writing day. With an hour’s thinking done before I got to class my thoughts would be percolating even as I exercised. A double win.

I have been able to get myself to my desk, but I haven’t been able to settle into my writing task. And as I sat, I suddenly understood something about myself. I thought: I’ve forgotten how to write. By which I meant that I’ve forgotten how to go through the actual physical process of doing the writing.

Then I realised something even more sobering: I haven’t actually taught myself to write. I’ve done a quick look back on the things I’ve finished, a very quick assessment: two novels, six shows, three Christmas letters, some essays, a few newsletters, countless blog posts. And what I see is an utterly scrappy process, and what I remember is my mind constantly berating itself for not doing better, for not having done better, for never truly being in the flow, feeling the words unfold.

As I type that thought, I realise it isn’t strictly true. That there have been moments when I have been in the flow, and those moments were primarily writing blog posts, short intense pieces that felt enormously satisfying in their execution.

The upshot of all this–and why I’m writing this as a blog post now–is that I feel like I have finally arrived at a certain moment I’ve been building to for about eighteen months. After all of the sifting and sorting through thoughts (some written on scraps of paper, some in dropbox folders, some rolling around in my mind); after all of the planning (physical folders with labels; virtual folders with labels; journals; notebooks); after all of the projecting (what if I do this, what happens if I do that); after all of this, I feel an emotional, physical and creative certainty. It is time to sit and write. I finally have a picture of myself in my head, sitting here, leaving here but always returning here to get things written.

And this is probably the only thing I’ve learn about how to write. That sooner or later (apparently later, much, much later in my case) there will be nothing left to do but to sit with a pen, a keyboard, a self-made pad of stapled paper, a document open on the screen, and a bunch of thoughts which require nothing more than to be written one by one, word by word, page by page. Find a thought, start from there and just keep going.

The Adelaide Fringe has kind of started, but not officially, I’m not exactly sure what this preview week is about. But the city has definitely started talking about it. Lovely Deb Tribe invited me on to her show this morning to talk about my season. I really love her show, she has the same kind of warmth that makes me enjoy listening to Zan Rowe so much. Like they really do want you to have a good day.

I was all primed to go and sitting with my phone ready to make sure I could answer as soon as the producer rang. I had the radio on, but I was all ready to turn it off as soon as the phone rang. But as the time approached, I could tell it wasn’t me coming up next. Gah! I didn’t read the confirmation text properly, and I just assumed it said 6.45 because the show is filled up with so many regular segments like gardening. But it actually said 7.45. So I was up way ahead of time.

It wasn’t actually all that hard to wake up. I mean, I’d been awake most of the night anyway, worrying about my superannuation. Which is obviously an excellent use of sleeping time. But I did feel bad because I asked Adrian to set an alarm as insurance.

Anyway, the interview went really well, Deb is always super prepared and asks interesting questions. And at the end, there was a truly beautiful moment when someone texted in to say that I had helped her with her husband’s funeral and how well the funeral went. Sometimes, I just love living in this big-town city.

Then, because I was up, I made it to a gym class and now I will spend the rest of the day worrying about which show I should be working on. I might write more about that tomorrow.

Talk soon!

Throwback to when I was teaching myself free motion stitching so that I could stitch the text of Pearls onto my unstitched wedding dress.

“What is happening?”

I say this about one thousand times every day. Adrian says it’s like living with a toddler 🤣. Actually it’s my way of getting myself to stop for a minute and possibly calm the chatter in my brain and reorient myself. (Also, I do like to know what people are up to, and it’s not my fault that my hearing is better than anyone else’s in this house and that I can usually hear most, but not all, of their conversations and if I have missed a crucial part then why wouldn’t I come into the room and ask, ‘What’s happening?’).

When I was doing the test stitching, I thought I would use some of these dodgy test pieces as gifts for my family. I thought they would be great in frames and be a cool family joke. However, when I showed it to my youngest son he said, ‘That looks like something the swot team would find on the wall when they broke into the main suspect’s house.’

So I just left the test pieces in my box of test pieces.

But geez.

What actually is happening? For my own context, when I’m looking back over these posts and re-reading them, today is the day after POTUS told the world that it would be okay if he built a golf course in Gaza. That’s not exactly what he said, but what he actually said is so hideous I can’t bring myself to type it out.

What is happening? And how long until we get to swipe right and tell ourselves, ‘All good.’? I know that we have to push back, but it is almost impossible to know what to do and how to act.

At the moment, I’m rehearsing ready for my upcoming Adelaide Fringe season, and I must admit that whenever I am rehearsing or going over lines I’m very often overcome by the questions: ‘What’s the point? There’s urgent work to be done. How is this helping?’

Something has been keeping me going. Partly the fear of being on stage and not knowing my lines, that’s definitely a motivating factor. But last night it kind of clicked to me. There is purpose in rehearsing.

One thing I think we need more of, and urgently, is less combative conversation. To talk to and with each other. To sit quietly, to listen, to let people explain themselves to us, and to explain ourselves to them.

And I guess this one way I can be part of that. By creating one more place for gentle conversations and connections. I mean, in the scheme of things it isn’t much and it isn’t enough. But it’s better than the alternative which is scrolling the news trying to understand what is happening. I can’t understand it, but I won’t accept it either.

Here is a photo of me at a time when I was still pretty unhappy, but not entirely unhappy in this moment.

I can’t remember the exact name of the place where we were staying, but it was a kind of desert glamping which I think would have been somewhere between Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.

I had taken along a bienenstich cake, or as we call them ‘bee sting’ cakes. I hadn’t realised that it was yeast cake, nor had I realised just how many components it had. But I was extremely proud of the result. Haven’t made one since.

Some expats who live in Abu Dhabi really get into the desert camping, but I never did. I mean, I spent my whole childhood camping and I was mostly in the car reading and willing the time to pass. But I did love the desert sunsets. They were so gentle and peaceful and created such evocative colours.

I remember being not unhappy because I had a friend who had invited me to go away; because I’d made a beienstich cake; and because the sunset reminded me that even the harshest of days have gentle moments.

As for the present day, I spent this morning working my way through some admin tasks, then the mid-morning until the afternoon running two shows. It’s only three weeks now until I open with Pearls and Stitches so I’ll be running shows every day from now until the end of March.

After I’d finished rehearsing I spent ages tidying up after myself. I feel like I’m a tidy person, but the evidence suggests otherwise. There are always piles of clothes in my bedroom just for starters. At this stage of your life, do you try to change yourself, or do you just accept this is what you’ve got to work with and go from there?