To the writespiration: The challenge this week is to write about something being cut down. Maybe it’s a person being cut down in their prime, or perhaps something more physical.

The reason I chose it this week is because…(and this ‘half-story’ counts as my entry!):

I was walking my son into town the other day and there were some tree surgeons milling around our area. One was half way up, helmet and ear defenders on with his legs wrapped firmly round the tree. He let the chainsaw rip and cut a branch down in front of me.

It was weird. I had an urge to cover my sons eyes, like it was something bad or sordid. But I have no idea why. It was just a tree being cut down, yet, it felt so wrong. I’m not a tree hugger or anything but, I do like trees. This one in particular was huge, and stunning. Maybe that was why. I ushered us away and we walked into town to complete our errands.

On the way back the tree surgeons were still there. Except now the tarmac was littered with chopped logs. Each one looked like a severed limb. The tree didn’t bleed red like you or I would. Instead it scattered a blanket of shavings that looked like brown snow. It made me queasy. Thankfully my son had fallen asleep. But they were cutting the main trunk. The methodical grinding of the chainsaw ripped through my ears as it sliced further and further through the trunk.

A hand signal went up – a truck moved forward. A crack echoed round the car park as the last bit of wood connecting trunk to root, severed. Then it fell. Slow, like a movie freeze frame. The thud reverberated through the ground, I expected it to echo. It didn’t. Instead it was almost hollow, like the ground swallowed the thud, desperate to cling to any bit of the tree it could. I felt desperately sad, something so beautiful had been cut down in its prime. It seemed pointless. A random act of violence. There’s so much violence in the world at the moment and we nature isn’t immune.

I’d still don’t know why I was so affected. I’ve seen far worst things in life than a tree being cut down, but this felt like I’d witnessed a murder. So today, I feel compassion, sympathy, sadness, regret for that tree and the lonely stump that now sits in its place.

***

Now to last weeks Writespiration where we were writing about being trapped.

Kim M. Russell was first in this week, with an awesome poem which you can see here.

The post #Writespiration 71 The Thing That Got Cut Down #1000speak appeared first on Sacha Black.

Weird, weirdo, strange, unusual, abnormal, not normal, odd, freaky, eccentric, all words I’ve been called over the years. But why? Why have we (society) corrupted the words weird and inserted negative meanings into them? I don’t know about anyone else but I wasn’t party to the memo telling me the ‘Normal Police’ had been legislated and were arresting anyone who showed even a hint of stepping over the accepted line. I know humans are conformists, but really?

Conformity as described by simply psychology is:

‘Conformity is a type of social influence involving a change in belief or behavior in order to fit in with a group. This change is in response to real (involving the physical presence of others) or imagined (involving the pressure of social norms / expectations) group pressure.’

I’ve tried conformity, didn’t like it. Tasted funny, a mix of bitter sourness, self depreciation and depression. Conformity is dangerous. Humans are wired to want to fit. To belong, and that means we absent mindedly accept the presumed authority of those that present themselves as authoritative. Ever heard of the Stanely Milgram experiment? He made himself look authoritative by wearing a scientific lab coat, and used particular commanding phrases like:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

Which forced experimentees to continue to give electric shocks to people who got answers to questions wrong – even when the shock levels read XXX. In the first set of experiments 65% continued to shock all the way to 450 volts (the XXX button). Milligram himself summarised his experiment as ‘The Perils of Obedience’.

Just think about that – because we would rather submit ourselves to the judgement of a presumed authority we would give someone electric shocks to the point of death. If we would do that then it’s not even remotely surprising we have conditioned society to view ‘weird’ as bad. There are other psychological experiments showing similar results – Asch’s line experiment where a group of participants were primed to give wrong answers about the length of lines, and the one participant who was blind to their reasons for giving wrong answers would give the same wrong answer as the rest of them – instead of giving the answer they knew to be right. We have conformity wired into our genes. Any kind of social upheaval is seen as negative. But why?

Groups make us stupid. They make us think one thing.They make those who could speak up, those who think differently shy away from voicing their opinions because they will be in the minority. Groups sap all our creativity, morph us into sheep, a group consciousness all thinking the same ‘wrong’ boring shit.

Personally I think weird is the new black. But going again something hard wired in our genes is extraordinarily difficult. It’s like wading through sludge. People (kids, teens and adults alike) get bullied for being different, being the one with their hand up in class ready to ask another question, for thinking outside the box or standing up and saying ‘I will’. But without those people, we wouldn’t have progression. Society wouldn’t grow. It makes me wonder though, if – when we are constrained to such an extent that only the exceptional few like Galileo, Da Vinci, and Einstein are able to break away from the norm, except their inner weird and use it to change the way we all think, then what would happen if we could all accept our inner weird?

What would happen if one day we all woke up and lived in a world where there was no weird, because we were all different?

Oh. Wait. We are all different. So why are we not allowed to embrace it?

I’ve heard people say that life gets better once you get to your thirties, I’ve heard people say every decade gets better. I’m starting to wonder if some of that ‘betterness’ isn’t actually about acceptance? I’ve had more existential life crisis than my 28 young years should have allowed. But it is what it is. Most of them have been about my inability to accept who I am. I have been trained to think I am weird or wrong because I think differently, speak differently even look different.

Teenage years are the worst, because you become cognisant of the fact that there is an acceptable norm, and then you spend that decade trying to work out what your position is in it. When you realise you don’t fit, you spend much of those years racing through fads, crazes and styles trying to establish which one fits so you know your place in society. In your twenties the fads slow to just one or two interests with life getting in the way of most of it. The life crises cease because you find a groove and a set of friends that accept you. Sometimes friends drift, and you have a period of readjustment trying to find another square hole for your square self to fit in.

But I hear that as you get older you stop giving a shit. Square pegs, round holes, fads, groups, fashions… none of it matter anymore. Why? because you know you can go get a saw and a piece of sandpaper and carve the sodding hole yourself.

The thing is, we are all a bit weird. There’s a bit of strange inside all of us, and the quicker we accept it, the faster we become comfortable with ourselves. Like when I discovered someone at work who I thought was completely straight laced, was actually in a rock band… A ROCK BAND?!

I’ve had a bit of a journey trying to accept myself. I have more weirdness than your average person and trying to squeeze all the odd aspects of myself into one group is impossible – a fact I have only recently been able to accept. So I’ve stopped trying. Now I’m carving my own hole, standing up and saying ‘I will’ and knowing that every piece of me I can accept makes me a better writer, more creative, more able to understand the plight of others.

I’ve accepted the weird in me… have you?

The post Accepting The Weird In You – A Writers Must #1000speak appeared first on Sacha Black.

There used to be a time when I would accept nothing less than perfection. I still fight the frustration when I’m not completely perfect.

I’ve come to believe perfectionism it’s a disease. An infection that slowly eats away at your skin until it buries itself into your bone and spreads to every corner of your body like an angry cancer. The growing niggle questioning whether perfectionism is something to be strived for, or maybe, abhorred has become a raging monster, and now, a blog post…

As writers creative people we torture ourselves striving for something that deep down we all know is almost impossible to achieve. And if we somehow do achieve it, we spend our lives endlessly searching for that golden thread of genius within us so we can create another masterpiece. It’s like a drug, an addiction, a sought after high impossible to replicate.

But what is this blind search for perfectionism doing to our mental health and psyche? I talked about the shocking truth behind creativity recently, where there was an underlying point from Gilbert about depression in creative people.

Creative people in particular seem to suffer a high prevalence of depression, suicide and other mood disorders, including most frequently, bipolar disorder. Van Gogh was Bipolar and suffered tremendously until his suicide at 37. Syvia Plath, another sufferer with a mood disorder and eventually she committed suicide to at just 31. There are others, who vehemently argue against this trend of depression in creative people, and if you read enough research then like everything you can find enough studies that you end up sat on the fence completely befuddled.

I’m ignoring most of the science and am speaking from experience, with just a little science thrown in; from knowing many a creative person and seeing the effect of creativity gone awry, and from experiencing it myself.

My focus is on writers and one of the earliest studies of creativity and mood disorders focused on writers. It showed that 80% of writers had some variant of mood disorder. But why? Are we predisposed to mood disorders? Do we have hormone imbalances? Is it because we spend so long lost in our thoughts, pondering, reflecting, dissecting our every ideation and decision? Do we spend too long deliberating and judging ourselves? Does that lead the creative into a spiralling depression as we deconstruct ourselves and examine each tiny piece of us and our stories?

I know for me, boredom, and the restriction of my creativity is extremely bad for my mental state. I can end up in a very dark place if I am not allowed to thrive as a creative person. And yet equally, I can drive myself literally insane in the pursuit of that winning story, that character that makes someone cry, or laugh or fear for their safety. I can be so critical of myself its self destructive but especially for my sanity. I’m trying to pursue something I know I will never be able to achieve.

Despite constantly striving for perfection, I don’t believe it exists.

Will I ever be able to put the pen down, stop tweaking? Can you? I doubt it.

There’s just one more tweak? One tiny edit, a comma? A sentence? Sound familiar?

We grind ourselves down, wear down all our drive and pick and nag at our creative minds until we leave ourselves in a creative black hole. I think over striving for perfection gives us writers block and depression. If we pursue a concept that doesn’t exist we set ourselves up for constant failure.

Society is the same. Kids today think Barbi is perfection. (Yes that really is a real woman)

Kids think that plastic fantastic is acceptable and something to aim for. But sometimes when you get a little too hooked on achieving the impossible on too much plastic this happens:

Ok, maybe I’m being a little facetious but you see the point I’m making?

I wrote a poem last #1000speak, so this time I decided to share something personal. I have edited this, removed some of the bits that made me cringe, but it’s mostly intact. I wrote this piece when I was just coming out of a dark hole, it’s an odd piece of writing, more of a stream of consciousness rather than a story or anything much, but I think it makes the point, creative depression is not good by any standard:

Phantom Limb by Sacha Black

I am watching my life through his eyes, at his mercy.

My glass was always half empty, its why I never noticed the cracked cup, the leaking liquid. He didn’t arrive with the grandeur entrance I expected. He snuck quietly into my life like the silent thief, slyly changing the minutia, stealing my belongings until he consumed everything.

I can never see the world through those precious rose spectacles I used to have. The virgin eyes I owned are gone. Stolen. He took them for himself, replaced them with his dark and twisted ones. I didn’t even notice. Not until I was already exhausted from staring through his shadowy specs.

I understand what numb is; to really feel nothing.

It’s infinite.

He took my feelings away one by one. Every happy thought tarnished by a rusty anesthetized memory.

I am left watching my life play out through him.

I am his phantom limb. I see my life, but I’m not really there. I used to be present, alive, able to breathe. But now I’m surrounded by a vast suffocating nothing.

He torments me with the life I could lead. I am ashamed of him. I am meant to be strong. Unbreakable. Instead I crumbled like an ash statue. He blew over my life, and I drifted apart piece by piece.

He is the dirty little secret I punish myself for.

I’m tired of being a phantom limb.

I will not do it any more.

No matter how foggy his spectacles get, I will smear the lenses until I can see the tunnel in the distance. I know there is a light at the end of it.

***

I’m not suggesting we should stop striving or aiming for the top. I’m saying sometimes we need to take a step back and remember, perfection is usually impossible. What we create may well be someone else’s idea of perfection. You will be someone’s favourite author. I highly doubt whatever I create, no matter how many drafts or how many edits I do, I will ever be truly happy with it. So why not accept that? And be kind to ourselves?

We need to start believing that just because ‘WE’ don’t think something is perfect, doesn’t mean somebody else won’t. There is no perfect – perfect is unobtainable because what you think is perfect, I won’t. No two concepts of perfect align. Our own concepts of perfectionism are dangerous, and unrealistic. Praise yourself, nurture yourself away from that pedestal. Perfection isn’t all that anyway, it’s boring, outdated. It’s the goody two shoes at the front of the class, the ‘know it all’ everyone sniggers at when they finally get a question wrong.

Isn’t that the point? Humanity is interesting because we are full of mistakes and problems. Aren’t the best characters the ones who fuck up, and make mistakes? Isn’t that why we secretly like the anti-hero?

Nurture yourself. Stop striving for the unachievable. No body likes Miss Perfect anyway.

But more important than anything, don’t forget…

The post Nurture Yourself in the Pursuit of Perfection #1000speak appeared first on Sacha Black.

I had to coax myself into posting this. Not because I didn’t want to do a post for #1000Speak, but because bullying is one of those things that everyone has been affected by, and I am no exception. It’s all a little close to the bone. Bullying is one of those universal topics that touches the lives of almost everyone. But I want to focus on the positive. On why being bullied made me a better writer. Without having been bullied I wouldn’t have focused on writing in my youth, and I probably wouldn’t have realised writing was my dream. So am I compassionate with the bullies? No, probably not, I know that’s the point of 1000speak, but, I am grateful for the experience of bullying.

But first – #1000speak is a  concept whereby, writers, bloggers, people, come together on a single day to speak about compassion. February 20th 2015 saw the first event, and today March 20th is the second, and this months topic is building on bullying. So I thought what better way to talk about it, than to consider what the experience of bullying did to my writing. Oddly enough, the more I thought about it, the more I realised just how significant of an effect it actually had. I think there are 5 key reasons bullying made me a better writer:

1. Bullying made me introspective – It might sound odd, but looking in on myself wasn’t something I was that bothered about until I was bullied.

When a bully picked up on a trait, or a fault, or a mannerism that perhaps I hadn’t paid much attention to, it made me overly self aware, and analytical. But that’s a good thing, not for the damage it did to my psyche or confidence, but for the mind set it put me in. As a writer and creator of characters I need to be able to analyse, deconstruct even: behaviour, people, traits, mannerisms, everything. I need an eye for detail that is so scrupulous a microbe couldn’t walk across my nose with me scrutinizing it. It’s how we writers create and develop characters so life like, so emotional we can captivate audiences. There’s always a baddie, a villain or antagonist, and what better place to draw characteristics from than your own personal bully?!

Bullies made me introspect, made me understand my own behaviour, reactions and emotional constructs, and that…that made me a better writer, and a better crafter of characters.

2. Bullies made me write – Ok, so not the novel or short story type of writing I’m doing now, but writing nonetheless. I started writing through journaling. I have dozens of journals filled with hours and hours of hand written tales of she said this, and he did that, just littering my loft. If I hadn’t have been bullied, I would never have needed to write, I would never have found my passion, and for that, I am grateful. We all need practice, and I had hours of it, and now, I can focus for hours writing my novel, just as I did writing journals years ago.

3. Bullying made me determined – There’s nothing like being beaten down, being crushed and broken, having every ounce of your personality torn to shreds to make you want to get straight back up again. To say ‘Fuck You, you think I’m odd, well, I know I am beautiful.’ The harder the bullies would push me down, the more determined I was to rise up again and fight, even if that meant weeping into my journal in private. Bullies made me a fighter, and I am proud of it.

Now I fight to write my novel, fight distraction, procrastination and time but most of all, I fight the self-doubt. They taught me I was determined, and now I know I can do it, No… I know I will do it. I will finish my novel. If it wasn’t for the determination they showed me I had, I might have given up by now.

4. Bullying showed me how strong I was – I wasn’t just bullied once or twice, I was bullied for years, nine of them to be precise. Nine long grueling years of bully based torture. And you know what, I wouldn’t change a single day of it, because it really has made me who I am. Every time I got beaten down, I got tougher, stronger, more resilient. Each time it was harder for them to hurt me. And each time they did hurt me, and I still got back up again, I knew I was stronger than them.

Writing can be grueling, writing a novel is a marathon and that takes strength. It takes strength to submit to competitions, agents and publishers and when you get rejected time and time again, it takes strength to stand up and try again.

5. Bullying showed me I could win. Win against cowards, and malicious back stabbing Queen Bees. Bullying showed me that every time I got hurt I could get back up. It could show me that a tiny bit of rebellion, standing back up, knocks a bully off their perch. It turns that chip onto their shoulder into a fullscale amputation. Bullying made me realise that if you want something bad enough, if you are determined enough, you get knocked down enough times and stand right back up, it will happen, you can win.  I know that, the experience of being knocked down, will help me when I get the inevitable trail of rejections from agents publishers and competition submissions. But you know what? I am going to stand right back up and try again, and one day I know I will win, I will finish my novel, and I will publish it.

***

I don’t often write poetry, but, in writing this post a phrase kept repeating in my mind. A phrase of the strong. So I just let the words flow and this is what came out of it…

Rise, Stand, Fight

No matter how many times you beat me with your jagged words,

wound me with your wicked ways, or tarnish my pure heart,

I will rise, I will stand and I will fight.

You can make my skin crawl with self-loathing,

make me doubt and judge myself,

but your dirty words all covered in hate are useless against my strength,

I will rise, I will stand and I will fight.

Your beatings, torture and abuse have marked my soul with shadows,

But scars are tougher than skin,

and that makes me tougher than you.

You can push me over, knock me down and crush me with your might,

But, I will rise, I will stand and I will fight.

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