secret identity

nearly three months review

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Suddenly more months have gone past and I haven’t had a moment to look back.  Christmas, New Year, woosh.

But it’s a sunny Sunday morning and I am nearing the three month anniversary of starting extraplorer.  I have a few minutes peace between business trips and the perfect moment to reflect and be happy about writing.

Of course when I started extraplorer, I had bits of writing lying around that I could add to extraplorer when I liked.  That gave me a thrill of momentum, but it was not sustainable forever.  I wish I had more time to write, but I am also happy to have a busy life of adventures in the outside world.  I wouldn’t swap the balance, I don’t think, even though it sometimes makes me feel restless.

Only one person in my ‘real life’ knows about extraplorer – my mother.  I am very very lucky that I have a mother who is trustworthy with these small attempts at writing.  Writing and having her comments is one thing that has given me more confidence that what I am doing is ‘real writing’.

And having real readers is the other thing.  I find it amazing to think of readers reading my writing (thank you so much fellow extraplorers!).

Sometimes I feel sad that I have not invited all my friends to join and see extraplorer yet.  In a way it feels awful, like having a baby and then asking a lot of strangers to come to visit it in the hospital while you tell your friends they are not welcome.  I am very lucky that some of my friends know about my blog, and are happy for me to trying things out in secret.  In a way, my friends’ generosity of spirit is the third thing that is making my writing be able to grow.

Thanks to these three sources of encouragement, I am becoming braver and getting closer to the day when I can share my work more confidently with more people.

inventory of subpersonalities – commentary

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The minute I heard the word ‘subpersonalities’, I was fascinated to find a concept that allowed me to explore different aspects of myself as if they were actual people.  The idea of different inner ‘me’s is something that I had been aware of for a little while.  My name lends itself to multiple nicknames, and it fascinated me why people chose a particular diminutive (interesting word) and what it meant to them and to me.  I also recalled my childhood love of playing roles from The Great Escape; I was fascinated by which role was chosen by which sibling, and by the potential revealed in those early choices.  I was aware too, of the odd diversity of my reading, which over the last two or three years has encompassed all my childhood favourites, mountaineering literature from the 1950s, Russian history and culture, stories from Bletchley Park, and several times, The Happiness Project.  The choices seemed so disparate as to belong to different readers, yet they were all me.

Since I started writing extraplorer, I’ve had the phrase ‘inventory of subpersonalities’ in my head as the starting point of a kind of poem.  Now that I’ve had a look back at the sheet of paper where I first drew and labelled them all, it occurs to me that it might prove interesting at some point to give each one an actual voice and see what happens.

A couple of notes on the poem:  The mixture of capitalised and lower case first letters is intentional as the words appeared in my mind complete with the variation in these aspects and I think it is significant.  Also, originally I just wrote down the list of subpersonalities, but it seemed incomplete.  Then I added the story of their discovery, but still the list itself seemed too clumsy, too concrete for something experienced as fleeting, shifting.  The addition of the inverted commas made the poem coincide with my inner feeling.  This makes the subpersonalities relational.  You can hear the poet identifying them, rather being faced with a flat kind of list.  This made the poem feel complete in a way that I felt happy with.

The inventory of subpersonalities might initially seem a bit spooky – after all we are reaching towards the fringes of our consciousness – but really it is merely a development of our ordinary everyday experience of the different roles we play – daughter, sister, worker, friend.  Some of the ones in the poem are everyday – (‘businesswoman’ for example) and some are metaphorical (‘enigma code-breaker’, sadly).  Each image holds a kind of magic and fascination that is big enough to grow into, or evocative enough provide a warning (it is not healthy to spend too long as an orphanage worker or speck).

inventory of subpersonalities

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drawn on a sheet of A2 paper,
in fine black ink,
and coloured in with caran d’ache,
labeled with more care than usual,
a window on an inner world:

‘enigma code-breaker’
‘French resistance worker’
‘Businesswoman-globetrotter’
‘Rebel with a cause (there’s no rebellion more radical than goodness)’

‘orphanage worker – or orphan’
‘good little girl’
‘Poet queen’
‘secret lover’

‘storyteller-pied piper’
‘speck’
‘dancer-choreographer’
‘Mountain climber’

an inventory of subpersonalities.

ten things I love about blogging – seventeen day review

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OK, so I know seventeen days isn’t a conventional review period, but I am brimming with reviewing thoughts about writing my extraplorer blog, and having missed the more traditional one week and fortnight review moments, I can’t wait any longer.

Here are my top ten:

1. Somewhere to share my writing ~ I have been writing a journal since I was sixteen, poems since I was six, and all sorts of other bits of writing, but I have not really had a space to share it.  I have read one or two things to close friends, but then some of my attempts to share things have met with a wall of silence, and this has made it feel hard to believe that what I am writing is ‘real writing’.  By setting up this blog as a series of fragments, I have been able to hop over the hurdle of ‘real writing’ and just write, which I love.

2. Writing ~ I can never understand authors and writers who say that they hate actual writing (or even sometimes that ‘everyone hates the writing part’).  I absolutely love it.  For me it is like falling in love, and hearing beautiful music, and watching children play and the dawn when the snow has just fallen.  I love love love it.

3. Readers ~ Of course this is ridiculous, but somehow when I decided to start the blog, I had forgotten that people might actually interact with it.  I had readers in my mind’s eye, but I had forgotten that readers would jump out of there and turn out to be real.  It is quite amazing that people are reading what I write (see point 1 above).  Thank you so much!

4. extraplorer ~ I also love the name extraplorer, and now I have had the idea for a secret blogging identity, I have had some follow ideas like making little cards with ‘extraplorer’ on them to help people who would like to read something like this to find it.

5. ‘Penscratcher theme’ ~ What a great word!  The minute I saw ‘penscratcher’, I knew it was the one for me.  I love the word and I love the layout.  I love customising.  It’s so fun being able to say ‘yes’ to this and ‘no’ to that (and much much easier than designing a website which I’ve had to do for work and was laborious and very time-consuming).

6. Paying attention to things ~ This is one of my favourite things about writing – it helps to encourage you to pay deeper attention to things, and it also helps you to be brave.  There is a reason that a pen also connects with a sword and with a scalpel and with a torch.  It makes it possible to go deeper into things, to venture into dark places and take a look around, to understand more and even to do battle for things that are important (like beauty, and hope).

7. Learning about blogging ~ Now that extraplorer exists, I would like more people to be able to see it (again, if they would like to).  It’s fun to check our tips and work out what I might be able to do (and also helpful to be clear about what is not possible, given my other commitments).

8.  Becoming more creative ~ Having a space to write is making me stretch out creatively.  As I wrote before, creating found poems has been immensely joyful.  I’ve loved starting to think thoughts in writing and then follow the thought to the conclusion.  I love having a thought pop into my mind ‘passion opens doors’ and to have a place to explore it.

9. Secret identity ~ I feel a bit funny that I have not told all my own actual (lovely, fun, kind) friends about my blog, but the chance to try something in a totally fresh place is very invigorating.  For a while I worried about it in case I was not being brave enough, but no, I think sometimes a new land is an important place for growth and transformation.  It is a liminal space.

10.  Being connected to a new world ~ I’ve been a bit reticent about social media use because I feel sad when it’s used badly, and I feel protective about myself.  I use it for my work, but we could say I am a mixed-speed adopter.  Writing extraplorer has made me comfortable with taking time to find my place, my path and my pace, and taking the time to find out how to be wholehearted means I am really loving it.

So hooray for blogging, hip hip hooray!  And thank you WordPress for making something wonderful and fun.  And thank you people who are curious about extraplorer…