On the surface, I have always been deeply unambitious.
I cannot for the life of me remember whether I ever declared what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t want to be a doctor or a lawyer. I didn’t want to work with animals or be a teacher. I didn’t want to go to space or be an actor. I had no real desire to go to gymnastics or to dance. Or to take up some form of martial art. I didn’t fake getting married or fantasise about having four kids by the time I was 25.
I didn’t really want to do anything. I think I low key just wanted to get a lot of money in a mysterious way and live that Rich Auntie life. Only I didn’t have the vocabulary for that back then. And also, apparently ‘lady of leisure’ isn’t something to aspire to…
Look, I can’t lie and say that I don’t still want to be a lady of leisure with a mysterious amount of money but that’s just because it seems like the life that I was built to live. I’m good at the leisure thing.
But, on a deeper level, I have always known what I wanted to do with my life but it just didn’t seem like something that was available to me. I looked at the world that I secretly wanted to inhabit and it looked overwhelmingly ‘other’ to me.
I have always been happiest when I am in the pages of a book. When I am just getting lost in the worlds created within the pages of book after book is when I find myself coming into my own. When I look at all the authors that I grew up with, they were all white. Jacqueline Wilson, JK Rowling (not that I support her now, but I can’t pretend that the Harry Potter series wasn’t a huge contributor to who I am in a lot of ways), Roald Dahl (another problematic one), Meg Cabot and honestly the list could go on. They were all authors whose books I would devour but they also highlighted to me that being the creator of books wasn’t something that I could ever contribute to.
I don’t quite remember how old I was when I discovered Malorie Blackman, but I was a teenager. Noughts and Crosses was the first book where I saw a family that looked a little bit like mine but it was all wrapped up in pain and segregation of a different kind to the one that I had grown up learning about. That seemed to highlight to me that there could be exceptions, but only if you want to explore pain and trauma.
I won a sticker for spelling the word ‘decision’ when I was 7 or 8 because apparently that is a difficult to spell (I say apparently, it is rare that I type it right first time 20 years later, so clearly it is) and I did it with ease. I told everyone that would listen that I was smart because I spelt ‘decision’ correctly. I liked words. I liked writing.
I always had a pen and a notebook knocking around. I was always thinking of new stories that never had any endings. Or middles. Usually just beginnings. There would be characters that were as two-dimensional as you could get, but that didn’t matter because I was writing.
The fact that I wrote didn’t go unnoticed by the people around me and so because I thought I couldn’t create books I clung to the next best thing which in my head was apparently a journalist.
My dad made it more specific and said that I would be a good sports journalist because my retention skills when it comes to random sports facts is truly unmatched (it still is). I played along with this for some time because it felt good to feel like I wasn’t directionless.
But here is the thing. If I read a newspaper backwards, or watched the sports section of any news programme, or saw any of the pundits at any football match ever then I couldn’t see where my place was in that world.
I panicked when I went to uni because there was never actually a conversation about whether I was going to not, it was just assumed that I was and well I didn’t want to let anyone down. Also, I had no idea what the fuck I wanted to do and another 3 years in education seemed like a good enough buffer of time while I tried to figure it out (spoiler alert, it wasn’t).
Because I knew all the things that I didn’t want to do (wasn’t good at science, couldn’t be a doctor/vet/anything that involved Chemistry, Physics or Biology) I was left with a very narrow things that I could do. They were all humanities, they were all arguably pointless. If we follow the through line from my AS and A Levels the three subjects that I was most interested in were History, English and Sociology. I eliminated Sociology because that is way more facts and science based then you think and I think the only reason that I really liked it was because I liked the teacher.
Which left History and English. With every university prospectus that I read I read the requirements and descriptions for both subjects. Shakespeare swung it in the end. Shakespeare and the fact that you can get away with being a lot more subjective in English as long as you can find a way to back it up with the text.
People just assumed that I chose it because I wanted to go into teaching, but no, it was Shakespeare. And the fact that I got to spend 3 years with words and nothing else (a slight lie, I did two History subsidiaries modules in my first year). I was basically just actively encouraged to read as much as possible and while it ultimately fucked my relationship with reading for a lot of my early 20s, it felt like a godsend.
Because that is the thing that I always wanted to be surrounded by. Words.
I wanted to work with words, but I didn’t want them to be factual and bound to the confines of an article because that wasn’t what fuelled me. Making shit up fuelled me. But I never really wanted to say that one out loud because of all the ways I managed to convince myself that that world wasn't for me (I will however also say that just look at publishing and tell me that looks very welcoming if you are not white - fittingly this article just came out talking about diversifying the industry).
I also didn’t feel like I had any right to call myself a writer because who the fuck was I even writing for? Myself. Also, I have literally never finished a full length thing in my life. Do you have any idea how many years I’ve had ‘finish the first draft’ written down on a goals list? Add onto the fact that I am moving ever closer to 30 and society will really have you believing that by that age you should have your whole damn life sorted out in some way (especially if you’re a woman) and it all just sounded very pointless to declare it to the universe.
There have been a few things that led to a change in mindset. One, the faces that I saw on the back page covers of books started to look like me. Two, I stopped having to read about black people’s trauma and they got to fall in love, save the world, be messy, be funny and all that other shit that I have spent years reading other people do. Three, I stopped trying to work on the idea that has been haunting me for years because I got a different one that actually had legs and is letting me run wild with it and is tapping into a part of my creativity that I have never really wanted to access before because it felt ‘wrong’ (whatever the fuck that means). And finally, I’ve given myself permission to call myself a writer, because that is what I do. I write. I don’t necessarily spend hours doing it on any given day, but I do write. I put words onto a page and I plod away at getting a draft done. Once that is done I will plod away and get the edit done. And once that’s done, fuck knows what I’ll do, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I wouldn’t say it at 5, 10, 15 or even 25, but at nearly 30 I can (and will say). When I grow up I want to be a writer.
It seems somewhat fitting that I talk about the fact that I have an English degree at a time when unis are starting to cancel their English Literature offering because the likelihood of graduates going into a ‘highly skilled’ job within 6 months of graduating is low when you have an arts or humanities degree. And also, that I talk about being a writer on this, the one year anniversary of launching this little corner of the internet.
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - Here’s the problem, and it’s not a real problem, but it’s a problem. For the third time this year I’ve sworn off romance novels and it happens to be the week that Honey and Spice - Bolu Babalola is being released and well…I may have to break that ban because I’ve been excited about that book since the beginning of time. And there is also the other problem of the fact that all the other books on my TBR are just not seeming to give me what I want. I don’t even really know what it is that I want, but the spines stacked up on want to read pile aren’t calling to me in any way. (as always, an affiliate link)
What I’m watching - Am I even doing anything else but still watching a lot of tennis and getting hella stressed out by the Silverstone race at the weekend? Not really. I am dipping in and out of God’s Favourite Idiot which is proving enjoyable. I also started The Summer I Turned Pretty which is giving me what I want.
What I’m listening to - I don’t really know how it came about, but I remembered that The Driver Era exists and I have only listened to a couple of songs, but they’ve all been good. They have two albums out now and so I’ve been enjoying them. When You Need a Man is a particular highlight
Title Inspiration - It could have been Matilda, but it’s not. It’s The Pussycat Dolls - When I Grow Up