This is a quick post to let everyone know where I’ve been writing this week:

Jenn J McLeod invited me to be part of her series, ‘A Letter to My Younger Self’, so I wrote to my twelve-year-old self and, as it turned out, I had a fair bit to tell her. I could have gone on and on, but I cut it down to the bare essentials …

My 12-year-old self

Hi Lou,

This is your 49-year-old self here. I’m a bit stouter, creakier, and have a few more creases in my skin, but inside my head, I’m still the same as you. All of the things you love—walking in the bush, swimming in the ocean, music, reading—I still love, too. You’re still here.

I’ve learnt loads in the intervening years, though, and I’d like to share a few of them with you:

Firstly, you are a good girl and you are lovable. You should have been told this from the minute you were born, so that you’d know it inside your heart. But you weren’t. If I was with you now, I’d tell you that you’re not a bad person, you’re not selfish, and you’re not a bitch, and I’d keep telling you until you believed it. You weren’t born bad, no child is. What you’ve been told is bullshit and don’t believe any of it. There’s nothing wrong with you and don’t listen to anyone who tells you differently.

That isolation and loneliness you’re feeling, it’s because of all the rubbish you’ve been told above. You are worthwhile. So march right up to those girls you look up to because you’re just as good as them.

Also, you’re an intelligent girl and you needn’t hide it. Intelligence is good. Don’t deliberately make mistakes and get things wrong so you don’t stand out in class. And tell everyone you like Mozart, love Maths, and want to study Medicine. So what if they call you a ‘brain’? There’s worse things to be called …

(There’s so much I want to tell you, young Lou, that my fingers can’t type fast enough …)

Needing time on your own and not making friends easily doesn’t mean you’re antisocial, so don’t believe that either. It will be a couple of decades before you’ll read Susan Cain and realise you’re just introverted, that’s how you’re made, there’s nothing wrong with that, and you don’t have to try to be different. The world needs introverts.

That restrictive, oppressive, Catholicism you’re being brought up with, and all those sermons telling you not to have sex before marriage—oh god, don’t get me started—don’t listen to any of it, Lou, and don’t feel ashamed of anything to do with your body. One day soon, no one will care.

I need to tell you, too, that things will get a lot worse before they get better. A really, really sad thing will happen without any warning, and it will be a long time before you’ll feel normal again. You’ll feel the deepest pain you’ve ever felt, but at the same time, you’ll feel yourself expanding. I know you don’t believe this is possible—but it is, and you will survive. Not just that, but you’ll grow from it. It will be the making of you, and you’ll put it to good use. Forever after.

I’ll tell you something else, too: you will fall many times over the next decade. You’ll make mistakes from which you think you can’t recover. But each time, you’ll face up to it, claw your way through, and learn big lessons.

One day, in the not-too-distant future, you’ll meet a wonderful man with whom you’ll make your own family and you’ll be happy. Except every now and then, your mind will slip into a deep, dark place and want to stay there. You won’t understand why it does this, and you’ll try everything to comprehend and prevent it.

It will take a long time, but with the help of a book and a wise person, you’ll realise all the lessons I’ve just told you in this letter, and they will sink in. After that, you won’t visit that dark place ever again.

And beside you will be that wonderful man you married and your four children, and you’ll look back at your twelve-year-old self and your 22-year-old self and your 32- and 42-year-old selves, and you’ll see how you’re still all of those people, the same yet different. And you’ll see that everything happened for a reason and led you to where you are, and you’ll be at peace.

With lots and lots of love,

Lou xx

PS. On the Monday after the end-of-term pub crawl in third year, don’t forget to look at the window on the left when you enter the Medical Sciences building. He’s left you a note. I didn’t look and missed it.

PPS. And the next day, on the Tuesday, don’t dally like I did when you leave the lecture theatre because he’s waiting for you in the hall outside.

PPS. Your daughter will share a birthday with Mozart. Sorry about the spoiler, but I knew you’d be excited by that.

Click here to read the post on Jen’s blog.

~

I also visited Monique Mulligan‘s blog in the lead up to the launch of the ‘Writing the Dream‘ anthology in November.

Here’s the piece I wrote, Freedom to Imagine, about play and imagination and the games I played as a child.

FREEDOM TO IMAGINE

When I was a kid, we seemed to have days and days with no commitments and nothing to do. Weekend sport hadn’t been invented, and homework could be dashed off in milliseconds, so there was plenty of time for reading and playing.

I read a lot, mainly the staples of my era: Enid Blyton, Anne of Green Gables, The Silver Brumby, and the Billabong series.

Being brought up Catholic, the Bible was rather important, too. Now there’s a book to inspire your imagination—Harry Potter has nothing on Jesus Christ; I’m yet to find anything that trumps a resurrection.

When I wasn’t reading, I was playing. When we were really young, my sister and I played with our dolls for hours on end. We made up gender-stereotyped stories about how much cooking and cleaning we had to do by the time our husbands came home from work (I still make up the same stories), and about the naughty things our children were getting up to (none of which would have been based on ourselves), as we ironed our dolls’ dresses on the toy ironing board or sipped from dainty teacups.

When we were a bit older, we spent whole days with our friends up the street. We played a game called Traffic Lights, which entailed skating on the concrete paths around and around their house, and sometimes out on the street (without helmets, protective pads, or adult supervision, I might add). We had rules so the concrete path wasn’t anarchic, and one of us was the designated policewoman whose job it was to enforce the rules and book the lawbreakers—we fought over that role.

We played Murder in the Dark and held séances, and did many other politically incorrect and unsafe things. We worked out the rules and sorted our disagreements by ourselves, not always harmoniously or without tears, and at the end of the day, we might have had the odd scrape and bruise when we went home, but we survived.

While we played, there was no one looking over our shoulder saying, ‘That rule’s unfair’, or ‘Why don’t you do it this way?’, or ‘Come in off the road’, or ‘You shouldn’t be trying to contact the dead.’ To our young minds, it all seemed fair and safe, and we liked the shiver that ran down our spine when John’s spirit spelt out that he’d been murdered.

We also presented concerts for our family, complete with professionally handmade programmes and house posters. The concert would plan to start at 7pm, but the time would have to be crossed out and changed to 7:10, then 7:20, then 7:30, when our parents had finished what they were doing and could come.

We provided good value for the ten cent entry fee, and would have sung and danced and acted all night, except our audience had to leave because they had other things to do.

We loved drawing and colouring-in, and making houses out of sheets and a chair. My sister would build one, too, so we had a neighbourhood. Any contraption under the sun could be made from paper, toilet rolls, scissors, and glue. I once made a Tiger moth aeroplane for my brother, complete with wings and propeller. I followed the instructions from a book, but I had to substitute a few items we didn’t have. I used an empty box of caps (remember cap guns?) for its body, which was smaller and more orange than the large brown box they’d used in the picture. I also used a long, thin cotton reel for the propeller instead of a short fat one. When I’d finished gluing ‘Tiger’ together, he looked nothing like the picture in the book, but my brother loved it anyway.

When I was a bit bigger, I sewed dresses for my dolls from scraps of fabric—I once made outfits for a bride, her wedding party, and a few of the guests. The dresses gaped a little because of my loopy hand-sewing and I hadn’t worked out how to put the seams on the inside.

It appears that a few of the wedding guests fell asleep.

As kids, we seemed to have much more unscheduled space and time, most of it away from adult supervision. During that time, we read and played and crafted, our imaginations free to roam and explore without someone telling us the rules or correcting us.

My kids haven’t known that freedom. Their afternoons and weekends have been filled with sport and music and activities, and they’ve barely been out of my sight for fear of danger. My husband and I have hovered and helped, monitored and checked, and corrected and fixed. We’ve made sure everything was fair and everyone got a turn. We bought games and toys already made, or craft kits for them to build, and we helped if they couldn’t make them and fixed their mistakes.

I was a very responsible parent, but sometimes I wonder if I should have just let them be more often. Given them a bottle of Clag, a few scraps of paper, and some toilet rolls. I forgot that the free time of my childhood was where my imagination made it first outing.

Hopefully, their imaginations and creativity have survived my protective parenting.  

~

The Writing the Dream anthology will be released in November. I’m proud to have an essay included alongside pieces by 24 authors from all across Australia: Anna Jacobs, Tess Woods, Jenn J McLeod, Natasha Lester, just to name a few.

The stories examine how we’ve achieved—or are achieving—our dreams, the hurdles we faced, and the tips we have for aspiring writers. It’s aimed at readers as much as writers, and hopes to inspire, motivate and encourage the creative-at-heart.

Will Yeoman from The West Australian had this to say about the book:

If you’d like to pre-order a copy, click here. A special ‘Writing the Dream’ notebook comes free with all pre-orders.

If that’s not enough to tempt you, here’s the trailer: