Rediscovering the catharsis of writing
After 35 years of writing professionally, I have finally rediscovered the joy of writing for pleasure.
I have always written. As a child, I would write wild and elaborate stories about cowboys, football players and astronauts. In my final year at primary school (I was 11 years old) I was off sick for a week during which I wrote about an imaginary race car driver. Somehow, that story included a fight with a killer shark.
Regardless of the background to the story, I was always the hero: the gifted footballer; the unbeatable boxer; the brave and noble soldier.
It came as no surprise to anyone in my family when I became a journalist. Perhaps the only surprise was in my chosen field of expertise within the business-to-business magazine arena.
Over the years, I have written about boats and cars; hotels and restaurants; about computers and technology. In the end, I alighted upon the field of demolition and construction, and I have written about precious little else for more than three decades.
I have written articles on demolition; published books on demolition; and I owned a magazine dedicated to the subject of demolition. I no longer wrote for fun. I wrote purely to pay the bills.
And then March 2020 came around, bringing with it COVID-19. In an instant, I was no longer able to produce my demolition magazine because the rest of the team were on furlough and the magazine printer was locked down, never to reopen.
Out of sheer desperation and the need to keep paying those bills, I pivoted. I took up LiveStreaming. Three and a half years later, I am still broadcasting a live daily show for the demolition and construction sector.
A career switch in my mid 50s was certainly something I had not planned. But it has had several key benefits.
For one thing, I now have a direct interaction with my audience. There are no “letters to the editor” weeks or months after an article was published. My audience speaks to me, asks questions, makes comments and offers suggestions live as I am delivering the show. We are on first-name terms.
The second key benefit has been that it has allowed me to once again write purely for the pleasure of writing. It turns out, my brain has been saving up stories, anecdotes and recollections for years.
Over the course of 35 years, I have never once suffered from writer’s block. But it is now like I have struck oil. The stories are coming faster than I can actually write them.
Weirdly, those stories are not about demolition or construction. I am no longer the protagonist or the hero.
It seems that I have instead tapped into a wellspring of stories about those I have loved and lost.
It is cathartic to write about my parents and about my best friend who are no longer with me. And while those recollections can be sad, it is a joyful process to write about them and to get my thoughts about them out of my head, even if no-one else ever gets to read those words.
A few years ago, I suffered what we used to call a “nervous breakdown”. The loss of my best friend and my father’s cancer diagnosis unquestionably contributed to my mental health wobble.
But I now wonder if I might have headed off that breakdown if, instead of bottling up all that emotion and grief, I had just written about it. Maybe, just maybe, I would not have sunk quite so low if I had managed to unburden myself of all those unspoken and unwritten words.
