two months, failure, etc.

Today marks two months since I left home. Since I boarded a plane and shifted myself to the other side of the world. For what? For something I couldn't find at home. For an adventure, one that felt so incredibly necessary. And yet, if I'm honest, the past two months have been characterised by intense emotional experiences that have tested everything I thought I knew about myself and this decision that I made.

Nothing good is easy. We appreciate things more when it takes a little something of us to get where we want to be. Only, sometimes you underestimate how much you have to give, how much of yourself you have to open up to get to that good. And sometimes, as you find these little pieces of yourself falling away, you wonder if the sacrifice is worth it. If the good is enough to compensate you for the loss.

They're questions I can't answer yet. They're questions I may never be able to answer. Maybe the point is in asking them at all, with no promise of an answer. Like moving to the other side of the world, with no promise of anything at all.

It's early summer in London right now and the sun rises before 5am. I lay in the single bed of my temporary home and stare our the window, thinking thoughts. I find myself musing like that quite often, moments when I'm alone and the city is spinning past me and I can stare out a window or across a street or straight ahead and just let my mind go. And often, more often than not, I find myself circling back to one theme. Failure.

I found the following quote on Brainpickings, my go-to site for, well, just about everything. And it feels quite pertinent right now. 

'The word failure is imperfect. Once we begin to transform it, it ceases to be that any longer. The term is always slipping off the edges of our vision, not simply because it's hard to see without wincing, but because once we are ready to talk about it, we often call the event something else - a learning experience a trial, a reinvention - no longer the static concept of failure' - Arts Advocate Sarah Lewis, in her book The Ride: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

Before I left for London, a work colleague told me not to be afraid of failure. But, it's difficult to be afraid of something that you can't quantify. Something you cannot accurately describe. After all, what is failure? I've never been able to articulate exactly why I'm here, so what exactly does it mean to fail?

And if Sarah Lewis is right, it doesn't matter anyway. Because what might feel like a failure today, will be an experience tomorrow. 

kb xx

a week, a roller coaster

A week is a long time. And yet, no time at all. I've been in London for a week now. And I've found myself cycling through some intense emotional experiences. I'm calling it my emotional roller coaster. Up and down and up again. It's a strange thing, but not an unexpected thing. 

Moving your life halfway around the world, far far away from family and friends, from the people that are significant pieces in the puzzle of your life, how can that not be an intense emotional experience? How can that not split you open, spilling nagging feelings of doubt and fear and sadness into the world around you? 

The very act of separation feels like the end of something. Like something irreversibly changed. And yet being in London feels like a beginning, an important and real beginning. I wrote about beginnings here. I thought that one thing had to end for another to begin, but now I'm not so sure. Why can't things go on simultaneously? Why can't I be here and there, too? 

And so I ride my roller coaster and I feel myself splitting open, spilling those feelings of doubt and fear and sadness - and hope and desire and something that might be happiness - onto the page. I'm scrawling the thoughts as they come to the surface with a blue pen on the lined pages of my composition book. 

I wonder if it is there, amongst the scratchings of my pen, the loops of my letters, the messy and seemingly unintelligible scrawl that is my handwriting, that I can find a balance to the wildness and unpredictability of this space I'm in. If, in amongst the words, I can find what I'm here for. 

kb xx

endings and beginnings

One of my cacti is dead. Well, dying at least. Its stem has lost the vibrant green of its youth and is now dried and twisted. I noticed it this morning as I pulled my bedroom curtains open for what will be the second last time. It caught me a little by surprise, as death is wont to do. And yet, the sadness is permeated by something else. Something that feels just a little hopeful. 

Does one thing have to end before another can begin? Maybe. In a way it feels almost necessary. If nothing ever ended, how would we ever begin something else? 

A little over twenty-four hours from now I’ll be boarding a plane for perhaps the biggest beginning of my life - save the initial one perhaps - and the cactus and its untimely demise feels strangle poetic. 

The past few months I’ve had a handful of dreams that featured snakes quite prominently. The dreams were vivid and I would wake from them and instantly push a mental rewind button to play them back as I lay in bed. Some cursory research revealed dreams about snakes can indicate change or transition.

The demise of the cactus, the appearance of the transition snakes - strange indicators of fate?

Relying on fate is nothing new for me. It’s the basis of my wardrobe and it’s served me well. Perhaps that’s why I’m comfortable taking the cactus and the dreams of snakes as signs from the universe that this decision to take my life from its comfortable space right here and drop it into one of the biggest cities in the world is the right one. That getting on that plane tomorrow night is the best choice for me right now. 

I am of course overflowing with feels that I cannot quite reconcile. Happiness and sadness, excitement and fear. Doubt, great big doubt. And yet, in part I know because of the snakes and now because of the cactus, I must get on that plane. I must do this. I can’t stay here. 

This part of my life is ending, this chapter in this safe and warm and comfortable environment is coming to a close. But there will be more chapters. Tomorrow marks the opening sentences of the newest, and so despite (or perhaps because of) the chaos of my current emotional state I will get on that plane tomorrow night and I will begin my new chapter. 

Wish me luck!

kb xx

comfort is a double edged sword

I’ve been trying to narrow down a list of possible suburbs to live in using a tube map from 2008 - the first time and only time I’ve been to London. On the back of the map is an advertisement for Ikea: ‘Travel is a means to an end. Home.’

I wonder if that’s really why we travel. If the reason we take ourselves out of the comfortable and force ourselves into the uncomfortable is to attempt to discover what home really is. 

For most of us home is more accident than careful planning. Home for me right now is the house my parents built in a smallish country town about an hour from Melbourne. It’s the place I feel most comfortable in the world. It’s the place I’ve lived most of my days in. It’s the place I’m leaving in a  bit under two months. 

Comfort is a double edge sword. Being comfortable equates to feeling safe, secure, generally happy. It’s a nice feeling, a warm one. One many of us spend years trying to find. But it’s also the reason why I find myself distracted, the reason why I leave projects untouched for months, why I don’t send pitches, why I wile away hours watching old episodes of Grand Designs or downloading old books from Project Gutenberg. Being comfortable can often be more of a hindrance than a help. Being comfortable makes it easy to not move, to not challenge yourself, to sit yourself in the safe, secure and generally happy space and just be. 

When I try to peer under my own skin, to scrape away at my desire to take myself out of this comfortable space I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in, the truth feels a little like freshly squeezed lemon juice on a paper cut. It stings. 

The truth is, it’s easy for me to not do the work, it’s easy for me to not challenge myself, to not put myself in positions that guarantee nothing but an almost certain failure. It’s easy to not do those things when you’re comfortable. 

I don’t think that Ikea advertisement is true for me. I’m not travelling to find home. Home is already established. But home is too comfortable, too easy. I’m travelling to find those hard, uncomfortable spaces. I’m travelling to fall over an edge not knowing what lays beneath me. 

I’m travelling because sometimes the only way to see if you’re good enough is to throw yourself into a deep pool, fully clothed, and see if you sink or swim. 

kb xx

89 days

3.17 months

12.71 weeks

89 days

The closer I get to leaving, the further I feel from ready. What is that about? The abstract is most certainly a landscape now. The details become clearer every day, the reality more potent.

I wondered about cold feet. And turned to the internet. And Italian proverb? American writer Stephen Crane's 1896 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets? Change is daunting, not least because routine is comforting, but it's also really ridiculously exciting, too. Well, at least when it's planned. 

2136 hours

128,160 minutes

Too many seconds

Time seems like such an arbitrary measurement sometimes. Because it feels so strange sometimes, it doesn't make sense: too quick, too slow, too much, not enough. 

There is so much I have to do before I go. And yet I want to really enjoy these last few weeks. I want to soak up the warm Australian sun as summer rolls on. I want to imprint the sound of the cockies as they settle in for the night in the pine trees the border the boundary of my backyard. I want to lay in my bed and watch the sky change colour as the sun rises. I want to create new memories with the people that matter, ones that will stick. 

And yet it's not like I'm going away forever; like I'm catching that one-way flight to Mars and will never return. It's a strange contradiction of thought and feelings that are running through my mind. 

89 days. It's nothing and everything. 

kb xx

goals, not resolutions

I've never been one to make new years resolutions. They've always felt arbitrary and pointless - their timing probably contributes to most of that. Why do we wait for this one specific day to make change? Or, at least, to resolve to make change. 

Goals, however, I like. 

Especially ones that are in some way measurable, ones that are specific enough that they don't allow any wiggle room. Next year is going to be a significant year for me. I'll be finalising my dual citizenship and not long after that taking my shiny new EU passport overseas. I'll be moving halfway across the world, thousands of miles away from everything that is familiar and comfortable and easy. I'll be stepping far outside my comfort zone, a concept that is simultaneously terrifying and thrilling. Seems as good a time as any to set myself some goals that also push me outside that comfort zone. 

As any good goal-setter knows, writing yourself a list and tacking it to your wall is one thing. Publicly announcing said goals is a whole other kettle of fish. Hence, I wasn't sure I wanted to actually publish this. I mean, what if I fail miserably and achieve nothing next year? What if all my abstract non-concrete plans disintegrate around me and I find myself slinking home with my theoretical tail between me legs?

Sylvia Plath said the worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt, so I guess it's all fodder for the work, right?

In that, somewhat, optimistic spirit, on this the last day in 2014, I'm going to list a couple of my writerly goals for 2015.

- Finish my tbr pile before I leave for London: there are probably about twenty physical books to be read before I hop that plane for Europe. Maybe it's about tying up loose ends, I'm not sure but this feels like a really important thing to do. It's doable - I'm sure.

- Work on some strategies for organising my work: that is organising my completed work, in progress work and random snippets of thoughts and ideas into a system that at least looks tidy from the outside. (Open to ideas and suggestions from far more organised folk than me!)

- Experiment more with form: lyrical essays, the merging of creative narrative and journalism, poetry, micro and flash fiction. If you're going to push yourself, push yourself as far as you can, right? There are so many styles and genres that I feel I've yet to fully explore. And considering my impending adventure, it feels like exactly the right time to do it.

- Submit my work to journals/magazines/sites: if a writer writes and no-one sees their words, are they still a writer? Maybe. For me, part of the joy of writing is sharing it with others and to do that I need to put my work into the world. I need to open my work, and myself, up to critique and questioning and criticism. And that is a scary proposition. Rejection is a real, and sometimes horrible, thing. But rejection is countered by just one person, just one, telling you they liked or loved or understood or appreciated what you wrote.

I published my first piece outside of this blog only a few short weeks ago (this on the idea of two literary families in light of my soon-to-be dual citizenship for Writers Bloc, in case you were wondering) and there is no doubt there is some connection between that moment and my growing feeling that I'm ready to be more open with my work. In an email to a good friend a few weeks ago I wrote about how the publication of that piece felt like a thumbs up from the universe; like fate giving me a not-so-subtle shove towards my future. 

As real as rejection is, doubt is much more tangible (in that way something completely intangible can be tangible) for me. But the only way to counter that doubt is by pushing my work into the world. I guess I'm starting that not only with the Writers Bloc piece but also with pushing these goals into the world.  

I have more writerly goals than those listed above, but I'm going to keep those to myself. Sometimes it's good to keep a little something under wraps, close to your skin and secret from the big, bad world.

So here's to a new year, to reading that tbr pile, getting organised, experimenting and pushing back against the self-doubt. Here's to 2015. 

kb xx

a hundred days

It is a hundred days until I fly out to London. A hundred days until whatever this is that I’m doing begins. 

I wanted to write a post about it. About my move overseas and about the plethora of emotions that are along for the ride: the excitement, the sadness, the fear. About how all these things are spinning around me and crashing into each other and how strange it all is. 

But all I can think about is how a hundred days is really not a long time. 

It’s a hundred sunrises and a hundred sunsets. At least as many hot showers in my own shower with the water pressure and temperature set perfectly (is it strange to think you’ll miss a shower?). A hundred nights in my own bed. A hundred nights in my family home. A hundred nights in my home town. A hundred nights laying awake at night wondering if I'm doing the right thing. 

A hundred days is nothing. Two thousand four hundred hours. One hundred and forty-four thousand minutes. Eight million, six hundred and forty thousand seconds. Nothing. 

Amongst the excitement and the fear is a restlessness that has only reared its head in the last few days. Which I guess makes sense, this is generally a time when people feel restless for something different, something new. A new year, a fresh start. A chance to get right what we’ve been getting wrong. 

Except my restlessness feels a little different. It’s almost like these last hundred days are a test. A test of my will to do this, my desire for exploration and change and a life I cannot find here, my strength to do this even when I’m not sure I can. Because as the day draws closer it becomes clearer exactly what I’m leaving by going. Of all the things that form the kaleidoscope of my life, a great many are here in this wide brown land. And in a hundred days I’ll be very very far away from them. 

They say that familiarity breeds contempt and I’m sure there is truth in that. But familiarity breeds other things too. And sometimes the familiar is the closest thing you can have to knowing who you are. 

Despite the restlessness I find myself trying to savour moments. Trying to capture things and fold them up and put them somewhere where I’m sure I won’t lose them. 

Those warm Australian summer nights that are just beginning to appear in my part of the world. Listening to the sounds of the cockies that live in the pine trees that mark the back border of my parents property as they settle in for the evening. The smile that dances across my nieces face, the laughter that spills from my nephew, the smell of home, the noise of my family - smells and sights and sounds I'm trying to burn into my memory. All these pieces of my life that are so familiar will, in a few short months, be replaced with so much that is not. 

A friend told me recently that many of these things, and even some of the people in them, will recede once I leave. And that this happens more easily that one could anticipate. I’m just not sure I’m ready for that. Yes, there are parts of my life that I would happily see recede, to a point where they become ornaments in a past not worthy of examination. But there are parts of my life that I feel the urge to hold on to tightly. Things I don’t want to recede. 

I wasn’t sure I was ready to write this. The past few hours have been spent writing and deleting and writing and deleting. And thinking about those familiar things receding, even when I don’t want them too. And wondering if maybe the restlessness is a way to ignore the sadness that is increasingly a part of my emotional response to moving. Sadness for the people that mean the most and the way I won’t be a part of the landscape of their everyday existence. The way I will recede from them. 

And then I think about spending time in Ireland and seeing family in England and friends in Scotland and being so close to Berlin and Barcelona and Prague. And all the newness and exploration and adventure that awaits. I think about how important this is to me, how so much of the past few years feels like preparation for this. And suddenly a hundred days feels like forever. 

Someone asked me the other day what my plan was. I haven’t really figured that out. I have some abstract notions, some ideas about the first few weeks and maybe some possibilities about the months that follow. But it’s really quite fluid. There is every chance I’ll be back in a few months, that I’ll fail miserably at whatever it is I’m trying to do and come home. And there is every chance this is it. I don't know and I think that's a big part of both the excitement and the fear. I just don't know. 

What I do know is tomorrow will be ninety-nine days.

kb xx

this week #5

Listening: Serial podcast

Yeah, I know. Me and everyone else who is aware that podcasts exist. I'm normally adverse to the zeitgeist, not a fan of bandwagons etc. But I love This American Life and many of the names involved in Serial are formally or currently involved with This American Life, so I figured Serial would be on par. And I'm kind of hooked. I stay up late Thursday nights waiting for the new episode to appear and will either download and listen right away or download to listen to first thing on a Friday. 

Something about the way the story is unfolding, something about the uncertainty, the way nothing in this narrative seems concrete. And perhaps there is some voyeuristic thing happening, too. The way the story is unfolding feels like we are participating in it, in Serial's investigation of it I mean. We are listening and digesting all this information and forming our own conclusions and opinions. Maybe that's the pull, we as the audience are not passive, we are active? I'm not sure, but it's damn good radio. 

Check it out here, but please start at episode one. It's really the only way to listen. And, you're welcome. 

Reading: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1985. I wasn't born in 1985, didn't make it into the world until 1986 for reference, make of that what you will. It has taken me until now to read this dystopian speculative fiction classic and I devoured it in a few days. Atwood has a way with words that I thoroughly appreciate and this story of a society overtaken by religious extremists, a society where women are stripped of just about every right they have and relegated to subservient roles: wives and daughters, marthas (cooks and cleaners) and handmaids (concubines, basically, walking wombs) is told from the point of view of Offred, one of the first generation of handmaids, a women who can still remember her previous life; a life with a husband and a daughter who are long lost to her. 

Offred lives with the Commander and his wide Serena Joy, an elite couple who are unable to conceive. Enter Offred, who acts as their walking talking womb. Every month the Commander has sex with Offred during 'the ceremony', an occasion Serena Joy is present for. However, soon the Commander begins a strangely ambiguous relationship with Offred outside 'the ceremony', something that is expressly forbidden. And things kind of unravel from there. 

There are a few themes running through this book, notably the importance of language and the complexities of oppression, but the most significant is the subjugation of women. In fact, worse, the politicising of women's bodies, reducing women to merely modes for reproduction. Ugh. Sometimes as I was reading this I would get so angry, so annoyed, despite being fully aware it was a work of fiction. But then, there is always some element of truth in every story. 

Look, the end point is, this is a really great read. So if you haven't already, read it. 

Watching: Not much, but there is this...

True be told, the only thing I've been watching this week is more episodes of Twin Peaks. But there is something else that happened this week I feel is worth mentioning, especially in light of the fact that I wrote so generously about it here. 

This past week I booked my flights to London. I officially have a seat on an airplane that is flying to London next April and I hope you'll excuse the plethora of feelings I have about this. Feelings that will no doubt manifest themselves on here. For the moment, it's a curious mix of excitement and fear. I say curious because those two words seem odd together - at least to me they do. How can there be fear in excitement? And how can there be excitement in fear? I'm not sure. And maybe what I'm feeling isn't either of those things exactly, but something that can only be described in a way that conveys some meaning by those two words. We'll see what other words rise to the surface over the next few months. 

kb xx

to be a gypsy writer

I'm heading to London, cliche I know but cliche doesn’t have to be bad.

this week #2

I'll be honest, I was concerned this week's this week would not actually make it into the right week. And my concern has been realised, perhaps I should call it this fortnight? Full time study and nearly full time work do make a negligent blogger of me; but, there are some brilliant things I want to share with you this week.

The New Yorker has thrown open their archives for the next three months before a paywall goes up. Run, don't walk to your nearest wifi connection and start perusing. I'm already there, will report back. Feel free to leave links to your favourites in the comments.

Came across these illustration by Brazilian graphic design Carol Rossetti, and I've found myself back here a few times since. Something about the simplicity of the design, the diversity of the messages, the reality of the situations drawn. I mean, a women's freedom to be in control of her own body, behaviours and identity - isn't that what feminism is all about?

How much would it cost to buy everything in an issue of American Vogue? Just a tad under $350K according to American journalist, Noah Veltman. Veltman tallied up the cost of all the products featured in ten major American magazines and Vogue beat out its nearest rival by nearly two hundred thousand dollars. Talk about aspirational. I have to wonder at what point it gets ridiculous though?

Commencement speeches generally result in a plethora of blog posts, news articles, tweets and retweets, Facebook status' and a host of other information spreading, inspiration instigating rubbish, basically. But I quite liked this one by Neil Gaiman from 2012. Especially his points about the possibilities that are open when you don't know what's impossible, the way a creative life is like sending out messages in bottles and hoping for a response and that if you're making mistakes it means you're out there doing something - and that is a good thing. 

I'm a sucker for a bookstore (and a library too - basically anywhere with books) and this list from Buzzfeed featuring fourteen independent bookshops in London has me champing at the bit to get back to the English capital and explore.

kb xx