In between lives

& how writing my new book transformed me

One of my favourite quotes has long been “I never change, I simply become more myself.” I think that’s why I’ve been so obsessed with change and growth for so long. I think that’s why I’ve been working so damn hard at it. Because I understood, intuitively, that there are layers we need to shed - layers we must change to shed - and that with every shedding, we get closer to the people we really are. Like those Russian dolls my grandmother used to have on her shelf; each lifting revealing more and more and more until finally - the kernel inside them all.

Does one ever reach their kernel, or is the lifting and shedding in itself the point?

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Last month, I finished the second draft of the novel I’ve been working on for the last year, and something immense shifted inside me while writing it. The novel in many ways delves into my deepest darkest fears, and as I worked on that second draft, as I was confronted daily with those shadowest of shadow aspects of my self, something immense shifted.

Did I have a choice really? I have never been more compelled by anything ever in my whole life.

And yet still, I will give myself credit where it’s due. Because although it didn’t feel like a choice, it always is. I could have shied away. I could have stayed at the surface. I could have written something else. Instead, I protected my time and energy in order to do what I needed to do; I became the person I needed to become to look at the truth and to admit it and to write it down; to alchemise it. And is that not the purpose of a work of art, really? A searching and a shedding that becomes an offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.

I am not the woman I was afraid I was, is what I learned in the process. I am the woman I always wanted to be.

As the character in my novel went through her dark night of the soul, I went through one alongside her. The novel became a mirror to my own fears, and as I wrote, I found myself transforming. It was a process of seeing myself fully - trusting and accepting each part.

As I approached the end of the book, I found myself sobbing in bed one night, all the younger versions of myself flashing before my eyes, all the many times I had abandoned myself;