WHAT ARE YOU MADE OF

how I am learning to release doubt and stay dream-full

Well my friends,

Many things occur in the time between writings. I like this idea that we can exist intermittently over the inter-web-nets, a kind of container for the constant tumblings that echo from our earthly souls.

As it’s the first of September tomorrow (we do love a good September) I would love to know what you are dreaming of? As we move from summery heights toward the shoulder season of Autumn things can become almost overripe, too ripe for dreaming. Harvesting now seems like the best bet, leaping now, learning later. Then when we are ready to fall, drop and descend we will, but with the rest of them. I am so full of apples, I could hide in a pie. Nature has provided this year, that much is certain.

These past weeks, months, I have noticed the little niggling doubt seep in more and more. I am no stranger to this friend Doubt, she’s my neighbour. I have made many mistakes because I just couldn’t stand her. But lately on this earthly plane I have given her a first-class ticket to my consciousness, and honestly, I’m quite fed up.

But Doubt has a friend called Fear, and fear well, fear is not my favourite. In my life up to this now moment, I have overcome fear either by taking action for or against it — toward it, running-in and getting backfired, or running-from, and floundering like squid. On the one hand, I let Fear lawn-mow my very existence, one the other, I was the pollen. Adrift, afloat, amiss.

There has got to be a balance, or a point between letting Doubt befriend Fear too closely, and allowing the two of them inhabit us so completely we cast out the rest — Trust, Knowing, the attitude of all that could be.

All of this is just to say that I have written a book. It started as a string of glimpses into life past and present in 2019, as a way to organise or make sense of experience. Six years later and I suppose I’ve been obsessive enough to keep at it, rewriting and revealing.

In 2024 I had enough material to put a book together with, but no glue. Couldn't see the wood for the trees, in a sense, was far too close to the first draft and life was coated in a thin veil protecting me from truth, in a way, and harming the veracity of the manuscript, in others. I had a deep, dishevelling but necessary year last year, which however disorienting, helped me to shape the narrative into what it is now. Better, I hope.

I got eyes to look upon it, and was lucky to receive a few funded mentoring sessions in January.

Life moved in, as it does, and I too needed to move in to the cabin, declutter and live precariously between places without running water or electricity, making life a little dispersed. Writing for me has always come on the sly. I write better when outside on a bench or a bus or somewhere bustling. Spring was lonely and I didn’t have enough buzz left to rewrite a story that felt heavy enough already.

But here we are. There’s a book on my docs that I feel happy with. I think I may have mentioned it before in these letters to you, pal, but it was in storage— storage being my hard-drive heart.

I questioned this sharing so deeply. In many ways, it’s the fear. Could sharing that I am writing a book paralyse my creative muscle, could being open about the fact become a pressure in itself? Am I sharing ‘too soon’? Am I a fake writer? Part of it is also that since I was a kid I loved secrets, and I loved keeping them, I loved having a little secret thing to tend to, and part of that love has not always been of benefit but that’s a story for another day. Because that is also a Fear story. There are stories of our Fears written everywhere, enveloped within the pages of the heart.

But it’s also a dash of doubt — doubt that I have a worthy story to share with the world, ‘not-good-enoughness’ of it all. I love to write and its what I’ve always done to deal with life, but does that make me a writer? The difference with visual art and words is that, visual art doesn’t necessarily explain itself. It sits on its own in a sense. With words there can be consequence, miscommunication.

Can I write a feeling? Does the act of writing add to or take away from the precarity of a certain topic? Is it wrong to script the past? Is there a universal truth to be found somewhere, a seed that can be universally explored in which everyone feels heard and seen and felt.

A part of me feels like a fraud to even let people know that I have written a book, as if I could somehow jinx the reality of it if it were all out in the open. Writing a full-length manuscript takes time, sentiment, obsession, and clawing away. And I guess I’ve been a little obsessed, working on this manuscript every night and early morning like a tired gremlin. I hunch so much when I write. I don’t blame the positioning of the computer, I blame the feeling that pours through my back and shoulder blades when I experience thoughts,

the clenched sentiment.