Giving up my goals and getting curious
Hello Team CCC! Hope you’re really well and had a glorious weekend. I loved meeting some of you at Cheltenham Lit Fest and the Margate Bookie. Our brand new episode of the You’re Booked podcast just dropped, we’ve got a brilliant conversation with Jodi Picoult - you can listen here. There are still places available for the final Write Like A Reader course of 2024, click the link to find out more or email creativeconfidenceclinic@gmail.com Paying subscribers always get a discount on my courses, so this is a great time to take advantage of the Autumn Upgrade offer - click here
This week, I’m away on a retreat, and I’ve been thinking about the hopes and expectations I bring with me - and why growth can be slow, strange and surprising.
I’m writing this on the train. It’s not quite 7.30, the sun is rising and it’s turning everything gold. I’m gliding through a canopy of burnished leaves. The sky is blue, and the clouds are lilac, edged in neon. My friend Emma recently shared some photos from a trip to Canada, on her Instagram account. She saw an eagle, and described it as a ‘morning reward’. That phrase has stuck in my head, I love it. And this journey feels like my morning reward, it makes me feel glad and grateful that I got up at half past five.
Today is going to be train-tastic! I’m travelling into London, and then out again to Cornwall. This week, I’m going on a retreat. I hesitate to call it a ‘writing retreat’, because I want it to be a dreaming retreat. A reflective, restorative, nourishing retreat. A getting-my-breath-back retreat. I’ve been on retreats before, and I’ve always struggled to reconcile my expectations with reality, especially my expectations of myself.
It’s been almost exactly two years since my last one (Chez Castillon, I recommend it highly!) At the time, I was frazzled. After months of rewriting, panicking and crying, I’d just completed a working draft of Limelight, one with a structure that everyone felt happy with. With the benefit of hindsight I can see that I’d been struggling with depression, and the depression was beginning to lift. I went away, hoping to restore myself.
Things I remember: Accidentally writing an early version of the first chapter of Pity Party, in response to a prompt set by the brilliant Jo Thomas. (Technically I wasn’t there as a student but I was allowed to join in!)
Getting an email saying no to a project I was pitching, and spending a whole morning feeling phsyically heavy with shame (a response I now realise was down to my rejection sensitivity dysphoria. The more you know…)
Feeling out a proposal outline, which would eventually lead to READ YOURSELF HAPPY - it started life as an idea for a different book about an anxiety. In its original form, absolutely everyone rejected it on submission. I think we eventually had one tiny offer that took months to come in - and then my visionary editor Elizabeth took the idea and helped me to evolve it.
If I had to find a word for how I felt at the time, I’d pick ‘messy’. I was very new to sobriety, a little over three months in. My last visit to Chez Castillon had been a boozy one - a dream of drinking. A cold beer at lunchtime, an aperitif before dinner, then as much wine as you wanted, staying up late, sitting around the dining table, talking and laughing and remembering and forgetting. A communion of writers, awash with humanity, tenderness and good Bordeaux.
I was learning about falling over and finding grace, trying to listen more than I spoke, realising that I was starting out again, clumsy, lumpen, but hopeful. I couldn’t pick up the magic potion that made everything smooth and easy. It made my writing harder and easier, better and worse. I didn’t have anything to hide behind. It was as though I spent the week trying to get on a horse that wanted to throw me off its back. Bruised and aching, I kept getting up and trying again. Taking it slower, and slower, and realising that I needed to give the horse more time to trust me.
I really enjoyed the retreat. I remember the dining table conversations, the laughter, the delicious food. Excursions to la pharmacie and making small talk in halting French. But I also remember thinking that the peace and calm I was craving had eluded me. I wanted to come home feeling rested, confident and sure. Instead I felt scratchy, restless, fearful. And, as I said, messy. It helped that every sobriety memoir I’d ever read had warned me that returning to the site of old boozing - especially joyful, cheerful, consequence free boozing - would be tough to the point of overwhelm. My mood, my vibe, my sober energy was and is that of Kate McKinnon in the SNL alien abduction sketch. I still feel as though I just fell to earth, following a rigorous probing.
It’s only now that I can appreciate the seeds that were sown during the week. I brought my anxiety, and without alcohol to help, I was forced to take it out and shake out the creases, instead of zipping it into the smallest pocket of my suitcase. I worked really hard, on raw, unpolished, imperfect first drafts, strange and scrappy ideas that eventually became actual books.
Back on the train, it’s clouded over. The gold has gone. We’ve left the bucolic splendour of Kent, and we’ve arrived at the brutalist, grey and navy cross-hatched Ashford International. I suspect that is how this week is going to go. Gleaming hopes and expectations, tempered by grey skies and frustration when I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m still me, at home, or on a train, or in France, or in Cornwall. I’m a woman who prays for pockets of peace, but still gets shaken by internal storms. I can do hard things, but sometimes I struggle with easy things. I’m going to encounter anxieties and insecurities, alongside my ideas and dreams. The horse might win.
But I wonder what I’ll be doing in two years time, as a result of something I learned, or thought, or tried this week? I’m planting seeds, with no idea when they’ll bloom, or whether they’ll bloom, or even what plants they will become. But I’m curious and excited. I’m trying to remind myself that I have no idea what to expect, and that’s a good thing.
How do you feel about retreats? Have you been on any you’ve loved? Are you trying to pluck up the courage to go? (And if you’ve signed up to hear more about my gorgeous Aweventurer reading retreat, you’ll be receiving more information very soon!)
Love
Daisy x
I feel much more creative away from home - and would love to go on a writing retreat. Preferably in the sunshine by the sea. Do I ask too much, I wonder? xx
What a lovely morning reward - and way of thinking of it. That train journey is so beautiful. X