The last year...

Weekend visiting Melbourne. Interesting restaurant names.

After telling you a little about me, my journey and how I got to the point where I wanted to finally write my novel in my last blog, we now come up to more recent months.  Lindsey suggested that this blogging malarkey is far more interesting if it is personal, warts and all, which (to be honest) is pretty scary. But I’ll give it a go, as we’re amongst friends here!

I guess it’s important to acknowledge that fitting the writing of a novel around your normal life is pretty tough. I am not in a financial position to just quit my job and work full time on getting this novel finished. Therefore I’ve been juggling work and personal stuff for months and months and months, while trying to put as close to 100% as I can into a creative project. Something has to give when life gets this hectic, and this is where this blog becomes a little more serious, so I apologise in advance if there are no super-smiley, sunshine-and-roses, skipping-in-the-sunshine moments. But here is an honest reflection on the last year of my project:

I love my job as a recruiter and I love putting 100% into it. I’m a passionate person generally, and that includes being committed and enthusiastic about what I do for a living. I’m also a bit of a perfectionist in and out of work. I focus fully on the job at hand during the day and then at night I can think about my novel, which amounts to only a few hours of novel time per week.

There have been delays on this journey of mine, and in the interest of genuineness and authenticity, I’d like to share with you that these were caused by the breakup of my long-term relationship. I am lucky that there is no animosity between my ex and me, but going through a break up is one of the hardest personal things you can face. We’ve all been through it and we all know how incredibly painful it is - essentially, you are grieving the loss of someone from your life. My relationship was extremely important to me and my partner is an amazing woman who deserves the best in life. Despite making the awful decision to walk away, I am still heartbroken. At the time I essentially fell apart. I questioned everything, as you do in this sort of situation – my identity, my purpose, whether I’m a good person, whether I’m attractive, whether I did the right thing and I worried incessantly about my ex and how she was coping. 

Understandably, this break up took my focus away from the novel. It’s hard to write about love when you are going through this rollercoaster of emotions and the novel took a back seat. It was like tiny pieces of shattered glass were spread throughout my body and I took a long time to find each individual piece and slowly put them back together into some semblance of what I used to be.

Eventually though, the novel became an outlet for me. The break up put a different perspective on what I had already written and shaped the bits I hadn’t. Then as I started to feel a bit better I decided, in my wisdom, to acknowledge a lifelong regret and face it head on. I’ll keep this bit vague, but it basically turned out that the situation I had always thought about and harboured regret for was not as I had thought. When I found that out, it completely changed my perspective on that period of my life: It is quite confronting to have a key moment of your life invalidated through misinterpretation and misunderstanding. At that point I decided the novel was a complete waste of time and pretty pointless.

That is a brutally honest reflection of recent months. I literally thought about not even bothering to carry on writing - the concept felt fake, the story felt wrong and like I didn’t really understand what I had written anymore. I became like a petulant teenager – morose, self-indulgent and overcome with self-doubt. I felt like the story was rubbish, that it was written badly and so I gave up. That is, until two very lovely ladies asked to read the novel. This is where I have to thank my two buddies who I’ll nickname Thelma and Louise.

Louise read it first and she read it in a day - She said she couldn’t put it down and loved it. She said she could completely relate to the protagonist. Pretty cool. Then Thelma read it. She also read the story in just a couple of days. Both of them were so genuinely excited about the story, Louise even called me to go through the details of the journey taken by the main character, which ignited a renewed purpose and confidence in me. They both reminded me why I had written the story in the first place and challenged my recent thinking: So what if I was doubting the original life event that the concept was based on? The motivation for writing it was genuine and my aim had been achieved. Thelma and Louise’s reaction was something I was genuinely touched by: That they both could relate to the main character and her journey means so much to me.

They turned my attitude around completely and made me excited about my project again. I am reinvigorated, committed, motivated and not to mention champing at the bit to get this novel published. My hope is that it touches people’s lives and helps them put things into perspective. I hope my novel is read by lots of people and I hope it helps them realise that life is full of bumps; you just have to ride them out and ultimately it doesn’t matter how many bumps are in the road – you slow down and go over them with care, you don’t stop and turnaround - keep going because ultimately you will still end up at the same destination and those bumps will be well worth the ride. Those hopes are nice to hold onto while I piece my life back together again and rediscover who I am.

Written by Corina Hawkins, soon to be author of ‘Tattoos of memories’ and creatively bossed by Lindsey Barnett, who is a legend.

A bit of background

Trying to pin those moments

My parents’ summer wedding plans for 1979 were rudely ruined… by me and their preceding pre-marital relations. Once I was old enough to figure out the gestation period of the average human, they had set themselves up  for a lifetime of not being able to preach ‘not until after you’re married’. Mum and Dad married in the January of 1979 and in the summer I popped out. (Yes, popped... don’t listen to my Mum’s exaggerated ‘you were a long and painful labour’ nonsense. Can you tell I haven’t had children yet!?).

I grew up in Brizzle, or Bristol to my international friends, specifically in a small town called Nailsea. Here, I ran around the playground of my infant school screaming ‘Mighty Mouse is on the way, here I come to save the day’ with my coat over my head as a mock cape. I saved various females on the playground from many imaginary dangerous situations and still believe I was the reincarnation of Mighty Mouse. Anyway, the signs were there at 5/6 years old that I did love to rescue the lovely ladies.

In my adolescence I was often forced by friends to date people I didn’t really like. Well, it wasn’t that I didn’t like them – I just wasn’t interested in them ‘in that way’. I had to do a lot of faking interest in the hope that one day there would be someone I liked. However, the only real interest I had in anyone was my female teachers… Ahhhh, I always had a thing for older females in positions of power... I struggled with these feelings a lot. I was always buying Just Seventeen magazine and would hopefully search the agony aunt pages for someone else who felt like me. About twice a year there would be a letter from a distressed girl about a crush they had on a female teacher or classmate, and Agony Aunt Anita Naik would helpfully explain it was just a phase.

I would like to express my insincere gratitude to Anita Naik for encouraging me to stay firmly in the closet until I was 22: I convinced myself I was straight, it was just a phase, I hadn’t found Mr Right. My head was a complete jungle of what I should be feeling and what I should be thinking. I was petrified of being rejected by friends, disappointing my family and just being classified as weird.

My social circles at this time were filled with derogatory comments about ‘rug munchers’ and how weird it was that there was a ‘vagatarian’ couple who had reproduced – probably with a turkey baster - and how they both probably fancied us all… Because yes, that’s how it works. I heard countless stories about how gay people were promiscuous and lead unsavoury lives.

I fell in love in my teenage years and I couldn’t tell a soul. I was mortified and I suppressed it. I tried to ignore it and I tried to quash every natural feeling and joy I felt around this person.

It. Was. Torture. 

I cannot even begin to tell you how horrible that period of time was for me. I am quite an honest person and holding that in was awful. I just felt ashamed of myself, my feelings and I wanted it to stop. In hindsight, my friends must have all known: I couldn’t speak about my new ‘friend’ without my smile stretching from ear to ear and my voice full of such pride and adulation for a wonderful woman. How dreadful that I couldn’t celebrate with friends that I had found a person I felt so attracted to, so drawn to and had such a connection with, and most of all, how sad that I couldn’t be honest enough with that person for fear of shame. It was one of the most amazing feelings in the world but such an juxtaposition of emotions.

Woah… Dawsons Creek drama.

At  22 I met a lovely, amazing and awesome couple who just happened to both be female. They owned a house; both worked hard, loved each other and had been together for a number of years. I will forever be grateful to them as finally I came out of my firmly locked closet because of their support and the example they set for me. Naturally, the first thing I did was chop all my hair off… Because that’s what you do. It was a massive identity thing – all of a sudden you want everyone to know who you are, and chopping your hair off is the right way to do this!

During this whole period of time I always wanted to write down a story to capture what I was thinking and feeling… Mainly because I couldn’t express it and I wondered how many other people would be feeling the same as me. I always wanted to make sure that nobody else felt the way I felt, or was ashamed of who they are. I wanted to write a fictional story that drew on my emotions to help other people rationalise what they were feeling.

It takes time to come out the other side of this newfound honesty and feel comfortable with yourself and others. It takes time to admit who you are and who you are attracted to – some people move through the process faster than others as it is so natural - they just knew when they were a child and never questioned or fought it – hats off to those people! Gay, straight or bi, we all go through a process when we’re falling in love, I just think it’s unfair that the usual challenges of being in love should be added to by fear of what people think or concern around how they may react.

The most comfortable I ever felt was when I ended up in a loving relationship. I think that is the happiest I have ever been in my own skin. Although I am no longer in that relationship I think it was the most pivotal moment in time for me because finally I felt loved and accepted. That is the best feeling in the world. I will forever be grateful for that and I am so happy I experienced that feeling of contentment with who I am.

This is why I have written  my story, and where the motivation to get it on paper came from. Times are changing and the world is slowly adjusting to the reality that some ladies love ladies, some ladies love men and some ladies love a bit of both. There is more acceptance, but there is a long way to go globally. The more we get the message out there, the more likely we are to eradicate ignorance so the masses know that homosexuals are normal people that just love like everyone else – we are not a threat and we are not looking to convert everyone around us. We just want to be accepted and loved.

Written by Corina Hawkins, soon to be author of ‘Tattoos of memories’ and creatively bossed by Lindsey Barnett, who is a legend.