[Ciara]

Hi Mere, Zoom kept asking me for a password thatvi didn’t have???and wouldn’t let me in. I’m glad this situation didn’t happen with everyone and that the rest of you were able to gather and have a productive time together. I did something else, so no worries and hope to see you next time instead xx

[Ciara]

Hi Nathan, I’m interested in the Anxiety RX book and the gifts from the underworld one, in no particular order of preference…and apologies for not being able to transfer the actual titles but I trust you’ll get my drift. Thank you so much for doing this and everything you have done to date. I’m so glad to have this fabulous group to belong to which meets my needs for depth, connection, belonging, community, expansive experiences and whole host of other things. ☘

[Ciara]

Hi everyone, when I hit reply it says going to Joey but I hope it goes to everyone. Think it will.

Anyway, my process is that I save all our A4 junk pages with a blank side, turn them sideways and I write my morning pages on them, though they could be any time of the day pages, and any length, depending on what’s going on that needs to be written about, to process it.

I have probably saved a few trees over the years and I have an archive of interesting things that surprise me when I look back over them, from the kids school work, old receipts for purchases made for our home, airline tickets, medical appointments, a pure hodgepodge of ‘stuff’ that would have been binned or burned…instead it’s like a mini family history.

I’ve a background in both script writing and writing poetry. I loved doing the script writing as it suited me very well. I could tell a story cinematically and was pretty good with injecting subtext, inventing ‘snappy dialogue’, and all the other moving parts that go into writing a script. I loved the challenge of figuring out the flow of a project and I always used a computer for writing scripts as it was easy to move scenes around, but with a chronic illness it was too difficult to attend in person production meetings pre Zoom so I had to give that up and find another way to write, which has brought me here. I think I could do some kind of memoir writing and I’d also like to write something in the realm of Magical Realism, but both these types of writing have proved difficult, because I was trying to write by myself in ways that really didn’t work for me. I hope now that all of that can change saying as I’m here. I too have a lifetime’s worth of notebooks filled with observations, snapshots of dialogue etc. and I swap between laptop and handwriting so for me it’s both. The long answer is part of me practicing ‘putting myself out there as a writer of prose, writing about myself’.

Scary, so thanks for the question and providing a space to grow.

[Ciara]

Hi writing friends.

Yes, I love Dr. Gabor Maté’s work too.

By the time of my first Saturn return aged 29, I had developed a chronic illness for which I was told ‘we don’t know what causes it, but there’s no treatment and no cure’.

That set me on a bit of a quest to figure out what DOES cause it AND what can be done about it.

I read a huge amount of books in the process and realised that my innate sensitive nature coupled with growing up in a very stressful setting had, over time, over taxed my nervous system to breaking point.

So, I had found the ’cause’, thanks to many books, including The Body Keeps the Score by Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk and Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start With You.

In more recent years I have been figuring out the ‘what to do about it’ part and once again books have been instrumental in pointing me in the direction of the help I needed to begin to rewire my nervous system and the other affected systems.

This is all still very much a work in progress, but I feel like I have made it ashore to a kind of safety now, instead of constantly struggling to keep my head above water, as I was so used to doing, that I didn’t even realize that my physical, mental, and emotional systems had all been under intense pressure for years.

Books have always been my best friends.

And now it’s nice to be here with my fellow creatives too.

‘A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost’. I love that quote from Henry James. It has kept me going through thick and thin.

Here’s to all of us and all our as yet unwritten projects. May they each become somebody else’s best friend when the time is right.

[Ciara]

Susan, sorry to hear that you need to rest. Glad to hear that you are looking after yourself and allowing yourself the rest you need instead of pushing through. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

[Ciara]

Hi Nathan, enjoy your daughter’s graduation. See you all next time 🙂

[Ciara]

I’d forgotten reading this part the first time round and when I read it again it came flooding back to me how I’d howled with laughter the first time…and this time again. In part because I could imagine any of our ones saying something like that too.