This week, in her Summer of Substack Essay Festival, Beth Kempton suggests we consider vulnerability. And as I listen to Beth talk about how she wrote while at her mother’s side in the hospice, yet waited many months to publish anything at all from that time, I am filled with grief. For Beth, and for anybody who has gone through that incredibly difficult period. I listen, but I cannot connect personally, because thankfully, I have not experienced such a thing, and obviously, hope I never will. And I am not sure if I can write anything this week.
As usual, at the end of these voice notes, there is a crib sheet to guide us in case we are struggling to start. This is the first time I have opened that guide, hoping it will help me put words to my page. Yet it does not.
The very first question is ‘which book or passage has been most helpful for me on my journey through life, from an emotional perspective?’ and yet there is not a single one that I can think of. Another asks us what we have been holding off from sharing, and still there is nothing.
And then I reach the question ‘How might writing help you personally?’ and I have my in. I know where to start. Because I know that since I started writing as the Cocktail Queen, my writing has changed. I am aware because my readers started telling me so. And I am much better for it.
At first, I wrote about a cocktail I had made over the weekend, sharing it on our work social media platform: a kind of water cooler conversation but online. Perhaps how I had discovered it, who I had created a cocktail for, or sometimes literally just the instructions and a photo.
And then Putin invaded Ukraine, and these people who looked just like us, shopped like us, lived like us, were running for their lives and there was no way I could do nothing.
From that very first realisation, and attending a local meeting about how we could help, I started sharing my frustrations alongside my cocktail. Frustration at how we were being urged to help, yet how nobody was making it easy for us to understand how to do just that. Frustration about who to trust in finding a family to help. Or simply that I was trying to do all of this at the same time as a full-time job, and sell our house, which is usually enough stress for any sane person. People started contacting me directly, telling them how my posts were helping them.
And before I knew it my posts were much more about life than the cocktail. In fact sometimes, I realised I had posted something without even a mention of a cocktail (shocking!) because I simply needed to write and to share. My readership went through the roof (for me), and I received so many more direct messages that sometimes these became a little overwhelming too, but I realised how much I needed to do this.
I needed to share this journey so that others might learn from my experience and be prepared when they eventually found the right forms for their Ukrainian refugees to fill in, that you couldn’t fill them in for them, and then you realise that all twenty pages were in English. Not one single form translated into their own language, yet the Government forgot to mention that. And with none of our family of four refugees speaking any English at all, I’m not sure you can imagine how difficult that was. Many openly shared their thoughts that I was foolish for doing this, but I just couldn’t bear the thought that I could have saved this family and chose not to. Imagine if Lviv had been bombed and they had been killed before finding a ‘better’ family? One who spoke Ukrainian? What would be the odds of that? No. There was no choice for me. I had to do this, and I had to help this family that nobody in our group wanted to help simply because they had no English. That cannot have been the reason they died.
This was three years ago and I think you can still sense just a little of the pressure that I felt at that time; why I could not step away; and why I was very near to breaking point.
I know that sharing these things in my posts helped others. But I also realise just how cathartic it was for me. I was sharing these things with hundreds, thousands of people that I did not know, and it was these strangers that reached out to provide my support. I think had it not been for that platform, for these strangers, I would have broken down completely.
But sharing my worries, my fears, my own vulnerability, and doing it absolutely in the moment helped me explore exactly how I was feeling, and why, and what I needed to do to make myself feel better about it. My feelings, like much of the fiction I write these days, seemed to just spill out of my fingers and onto the keyboard. So much easier than finding words to say out loud. But once they had been given life on the screen, they were, and still are, so much easier to talk about.
Throughout this process, and onwards, I have continued to be open in everything I share, and I have realised that I’ve always been an open book. Open about the difficulties, the stresses, the impact on my mental health, instead of keeping secrets that don’t help anybody. Sharing these things in a blog, predominantly to strangers, means that those people who are not interested can just scroll on by. So much easier than the risk of a meltdown/rant in the office, pub or family gathering that would be difficult to walk away from: here I know I need to be much more circumspect, and I can be, because my blog enables that.
In sharing life’s challenges, perhaps tackling a few taboos along the way, I may have helped others, but more importantly, I know I have helped me. I have helped me be stronger, so that I can deal with the next whatever it is, more effectively, helping me tackle any vulnerability before it becomes a thing.
So as our house sale progressed to a house move (in which we collected our Ukrainian family from the airport on the Wednesday, and then on the Thursday moved my husband and I, four non-English speaking Ukrainians and two Border Collies 350 miles and a nine-hour drive to our new home), was followed by the challenging but wonderful period while they were here with us, separation anxiety when they had to return home, a significant period of physical ill-health for myself, my mother dying, the increasing pain and disability that comes with waiting for both hips to be replaced, at the same time as managing my father’s house sale and moving him 350 miles to come live with us, I absolutely cope better for the sharing. (Which by the way is a 126-word sentence that would have given me conniptions as a plain English champion, but just on this one occasion, I’m allowing myself to let it go so I hope you can too?)
This is no illusion of coping. I am convinced that I coped with each of these situations better than if I had not shared them openly in this way. That my own vulnerability is ameliorated by doing so. But if I’m honest, I think that the coping thread is wearing a little thin now.
I am of course preparing myself for it to continue until I get the call inviting me in for surgery. I am however planning for the worst, hoping for the best, and writing about it here.
I agree, this prompt has been a sticky one but your response is heartfelt and I think it's wonderful.
Sometimes plain English is boring English. The 126-word sentence is just right, as a shower of words beautifully conveys the storm you've been running under. It's also interesting to see how you expanded your blog to broaden in response to what was happening around and to you. Great reminder to be flexible and write about what you know.