The future for me, I have concluded after therapy today, is to keep on writing. The hits to this site have steadily declined in the last year or so, for what I must assume are a variety of reasons. They could be, not in any order (!), a decline in the quality of my writing, the fact that a change to this site means that currently you cannot subscribe to it (I am working on this, or rather someone who actually knows about computers is hopefully working on it), I have become a broken record, I have fallen out with so many people (over Brexit, Trump, Tommy Robinson – so the same thing, then), there is better stuff to read out there in cyberspace (this is certainly true) or, as I say when I can’t think of another excuse, whatever. Seven weeks in therapy so far and I am becoming convinced that writing is part of the answer. It could be all of it.
For someone who wants to get his work out there, standing down from B24/7’s website and then the Bristol Rovers matchday programme The Pirate may not seem like smart business, but my declining passion for the club (but not B24/7) meant that I could no longer justify my positions. I had to go and, in any event, would surely have been removed by the new regime at the club who, for what little it is worth, do not enjoy even my qualified support. And that’s not for another day. The party’s over for me. They can do what they like now. It’s your party now, Wael.
No, I need to write. For the first time, I have wondered whether creative writing is my bag and everything else simply isn’t. I have spent a lifetime underachieving at absolutely everything academically and professionally and it is more than likely that my brain, or what passes for a brain, simply isn’t cut out to do the things that really matter in life. Like basic mathematics, science and everything else I was rubbish at when in school and just about everything I have been useless at in work.
Not that I am some kind of literary genius. My creative brain, if there is one, is hampered by my piss poor grammar, so if you want perfection, you’d best read elsewhere. I’ll always get my verbs and adjectives wrong, I’ll break so many rules of writing. There is nothing I can do about it. You’ll get what you’re given or simply not accept it at all.
I am reasonably sure therapy is exhausting because it might just be working, or at the very least helping. I’m shattered again tonight and don’t expect to sleep that well. However, there is an improvement on the last few days where I was, metaphorically anyway, looking at life through a thick fog with the words not always coming out in the right order. After the inevitable post therapy afternoon sleep, my brain had cleared a bit. I went out and bought a magazine called ‘Writing Magazine’, which is – amazingly enough – a magazine for writers. Well, I write, therefore I am a writer.
I need to think this through because if I concentrate more fully on what I am good at – and I am by no means convinced I am good at writing – then I’ll have to write off large chunks of my life which I see as a massive failure. That sounds like a good idea, actually.
I so want to get better, though. It’s this or nothing. It had better be this, then.
