Fast Slow Disco
I Have No Idea What I'm Doing
Do you ever just drop back into your life and realise you have no idea what you’re doing or how you got there? Like waking with a jolt to discover that you’ve been sleepwalking and finding yourself not only out of bed but outside, in the middle of the night, standing under the orange glow of an unfamiliar streetlight? And somehow, despite the alarming nature of the situation and a cool breeze around the usually covered parts of your body alerting you to the fact that you went to bed naked and are therefore incredibly exposed, you notice you are not scared, not exactly, but rather bemused by the strange knowledge that this is precisely where you intended to be? No? Just me then.
I am a published author. That sounds quite impressive at face value. I am living out a dream many people have, a fantasy I personally have pictured since I was a small child and realised books were not only tools for learning or moments of comfort offered by a tired parent to an expectant child, but a place to escape to. A personal world you can dive into, naive and full throated and raw and scared. A world of sacred imagination and holy impossibility, where you play out unspoken, unrealised feelings, unfold forbidden parts of yourself, safe somehow in someone else’s creation. Since Sunstruck came out, I have had the unsettling experience of realising that I may have created one of those worlds for other people. Readers – both friends and strangers – have spoken to me about characters, moments, and emotions in the book as if they are real. And in doing do, I suppose, they have made them real. These abstractions, plucked out of my subconscious, my internal emotional life, have been petrified into existence. A transmuted version of my own story suddenly fossilised through the process of being read, compacted, and maybe understood by a separate other. Emotional mosquitos trapped in amber. Uncanny doubles reflected in a thousand mirrors held up by all the readers with whom I get the privilege of interacting. I am grateful for this experience. Humbled beyond imagination. And, emotionally, completely nude.
Sunstruck is, of course, a work of fiction. The events of the novel are exactly that: new, original, unfamiliar. That is to say, it’s made up. A fantasy. None of it is real. Except that it is. I think with novels – especially debut novels, especially debut novels by queer people of colour that deal with the harshness and pain that those experiences can bring – people want and sometimes even expect them to be autobiographical. I do not know for certain why, but I think it comes from a mixture of wanting to hang the emotion of the story onto something real and a perverse delight in seeing other peoples’s pain spread out on a page. Maybe it’s just a lack of imagination. Maybe it allows a certain type of reader to feel less guilty about their position in the world, having now empathised so thoroughly with the experience of someone over whom they are told they hold privilege. Or perhaps, if I am more generous, it is part of the process of feeling understood by a book and needing the person who wrote it to in some way understand you too. I have certainly been guilty of indulging this impulse in the past. I have projected my own need for understanding onto people who have made work I deeply identified with. I have formed parasocial relationships with people online. I have allowed myself to believe that if I met a certain celebrity, we’d immediately click and become firm friends at once. (I still believe this.) To suddenly find myself on the receiving end of this process, I realise that it is not as entirely one-sided as I may have thought. Because the thing is, while the events of my novel are fabricated, the emotion that underlies them is real. It’s real and it’s mine and I, like everyone else, want to be understood. And so, while I find it bizarre that readers have been moved by the book, I also find myself buzzing with a strange kind of affirmation. The little voice in my head that tells me all sorts of peculiar things (and often what to write), now hisses excitedly: See, see, I told you, you are known.
If the emotions in the book – and in my writing in general – are real, then the process of writing started as a way for me to understand myself, to take out fragments of things I could not quite make sense of and rearrange them into a recognisable shape. It sounds strange to admit, but until publication I had never properly considered what it would feel like for the shape I had made to be recognised by someone other than myself. I think this is a good thing. If I write with any reader in mind, I will not be writing for myself, what I write will not feel like it’s mine. But what I’ve realised is that now that the book is out there, it no longer belongs to me anyway. Once it has been read it becomes a shared thing. A different version of the book now exists for every person who has read it. And that is an odd and unwieldy thing to try to hold.
What I mean to say is that I find this strange. What I mean to say is that I wasn’t prepared for it. What I mean to say is that I have no idea what I’m doing.
Before this book, I’d not only never written a novel before, I’d also never really tried to be understood. I have, historically, been incredibly guarded about my own internal world. I preferred to escape into others’, which fostered my love of reading, which in turn led me to believe I could write, and then to the bewildering experience of being read. I feel like I am writing in circles now. Read to understand, read to be understood, write to understand, write and in doing so ask to be understood in turn. But I had no comparable experience as for what this would feel like. And so, I find myself bewildered, naked, harshly lit and wondering how my literary somnambulism got me here.
Over the last few months, my life has changed in a number of enormous and minuscule ways. I have discovered and welcomed a level of naivety and newness that has forced me to let go and listen to the wisdom of people around me. I will write about some of these changes in more detail another time, I promise, but the shoots are too tender for now. One thing I have learned about myself is that I have been living life as fast as possible. Darting from one experience to another, trying to feel as much as I could in as short a time as I could manage so that I did not have a moment to look around. I thought that if I stopped, I would be swallowed up by whatever moment I found myself in. And so I sprinted through life. These last months, I have been forced to slow down. Made to sit in the now. To realise that yes, this too shall pass but also that passage takes time.
This personal slowing coincided with a professional gathering of pace; the book came out, I went on tour. I have been the busiest I have been since I quit my medical career and started the stop-start work of freelance writing. At one point I was booked in for an event ten nights out of the next fourteen. At times it has been overwhelming, at others frustrating, but always wonderful and new and exciting. I was confronted with the knowledge that I have made something that makes people feel. People have asked me for advice, for explanations, for acknowledgement maybe that what they have felt is okay, that it is real. And I have done my best to answer, to explain, to hold up something made out of things that once felt true and hope that in doing so, other people have understood me (and possibly themselves) a little better.
And so here I am now: not sprinting, not sleepwalking, but something in between. Awake, yes, but still standing outside myself sometimes, blinking under the glow of it all. The lights, the attention, the questions, the invitations. It’s surreal, it’s intense, and yet somehow it feels like the right place to be. Not because I’m entirely ready or even entirely willing, but because for the first time, I’m not running. I’m just here. Caught in the streetlight. Exposed, bewildered, but somehow grounded. Maybe bewilderment is part of the process. Of writing, of being read, of becoming known in ways you didn’t quite realise you were asking to be. Maybe this disorientation is proof that the work has done what it needed to do. I wrote to understand myself, and in the process, I was understood. And maybe that’s what it means to be known: not to be fully understood, but to be seen and to stay.
Things that have moved me this week
I have a creative crush on Rue Yi on TikTok. Her takes on creativity are excellent.
I have had this song on repeat, hence the title of this piece. The video is silly and sweaty. Give yourself a three minute and fourteen second break and watch it.
I finished an excellent debut novel by Rowe Irvin called Life Cycle Of A Moth, it’s strange, beautiful, feral and definitely worth a read.
The genocide and deliberate famine in Gaza rages on. It is easy to feel powerless but the tide does seem to be turning. Write to your MP to add to the pressure.
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