All the time, and yet…

Lately, I’ve been going back through some of my old writing, some of it from well over a decade ago. And it’s been weirdly emotional, getting close to my past self and having the clarity to see what she was trying to do: to see her keep experimenting, grasping to do something real and not always getting there.

In digging back through the digital vaults, what stands out to me most is how little that voice sounds like me. Not totally: there are moments, here and there, when I’ve laughed at some bit of description or dialogue because of how typically me it  is. My voice: clear and pure and recognisable.

But so much of it could have been written by someone else, a stranger from the past. In some ways, that’s inevitable. I’ve changed with time, like all of us. That version of me is long gone. But it’s also disconcerting, this mish-mash of the recognisable and not. That horror film trope of the voice-changer app: a voice you know as well as your own, all familiar lilts and tells, then suddenly – button pressed, switch flipped – Ghost Face, cheerleader, monster, minx. The sweet dulcet tones of a beloved best friend becoming a menacing serial killer growl. The person on the other end of the phone frozen with fear, everything falling away into surreal dream-like denial. What you thought was one thing is suddenly another. Nothing can be trusted. Everything’s a lie.

Of course it’s right and proper that our voices and our writing evolve with time. I know that and so do you. As I do these excavations into the past, some of what’s standing out to me are the things I’ve become better at over time. Some of the nuts-and-bolts craft aspects have become more doable the more I’ve practised. In these old stories, I can see the places where I was less confident about certain elements, like how to end conversations or transition between scenes.

There are thematic things that stick out too, where I keep coming back to the same sorts of characters and situations: completely unconscious remixes, years apart, but when I put them side by side, I can see that they’re echoes of each other – the same thought or idea, fighting to find its true form. Which reminded me of this piece by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore about writing on your own terms – one I’ve returned to over and over in the two years since it was published – and its acknowledgment of all the uncertainties and organic discoveries of writing. Maybe it’s this and maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s all of it at once, and that’s allowed, and it doesn’t have to always be coherent or pretty or profound.

But there’s another thing I can see when I go back to these earlier stories: how scared I was. How scared to write what I wanted to write. How scared I was to trust my own voice. How I was doing it, here and there, but in a couched and tentative way. Building my muscles, my experience, my courage, my trust. How when I read back over that work and question whose voice its in, the answer is: mine, but fearful. Small, self-censoring, timid, try-hard. A shadow of its later self.

Yesterday, I drove across the moody, misty Pennines to my friend’s house. We talked about writing in his attic study, the rain a steady heartbeat against the skylight until we went downstairs to light the fire. We talked about writing about people from other times, other places, other experiences than ours, and at one point he asked me: are you ever scared of getting it wrong? And I realised: yes, yes, yes. I have my pet themes, experiences and archetypes that – after years of practice – I have some level of security about. In those moments when I’m not afraid, I can be braver, more mischievous, more playful, more experimental, more joyful. I can push myself to be more innovative and more imaginative because less of my energy is being spent on just white-knuckling my way through getting the words down.

I want all that, I want more of that. But I also want to challenge myself to go beyond my comfort zone. To allow for the possibility of bringing that joy and trust and imagination to the places I’m still scared to go. To trust the voice I’ve formed and am still forming and reforming, and let it speak on other subjects instead of only ever being allowed to sing the same songs on repeat.

I am grateful for that past self that kept going, through the fear, through writing that was awkward and shit and grasping towards something she didn’t know how to do yet. I hope and trust that there is less shapeshifting and masking in my voice now. That’s something I’m still practising. And I’m practising writing about times and experiences that are less familiar, topics that might my have my voice faltering and stumbling and sometimes getting scared, and trusting that that’s part of how it gets stronger, braver, more real and more mine.

The project I was developing when I wrote this evolved into my chapbook Lost + Found, a collection of fiction and non-fiction from over a decade of writing. 

 

Originally published via Substack in February 2024.