I've not written this blog for over a week now. It's the longest I've ever gone without writing it (unless you count the time before I started it, and even then it still existed: it was an embryo in my brain that I just didn't know was there yet). I wish I could give a good reason - a disaster, perhaps, or a long, exotic holiday somewhere without computers - but the truth is that my world is never without computers, rarely filled with disaster, and infrequently particularly exotic. The simple fact is: I was sad. And when I'm sad - when I'm truly, truly sad - I am lost, and I can't write. Whatever it is in me that needs so desperately to write every day (like the part of me that needs so desperately to drink water when it's hot) goes numb, and there's nothing I can do: words just don't fit together. It's been a while since that has happened so entirely, but there it was: The Write Girl couldn't write a single thing.
Why was I sad? I'd reached an inevitable crossroads. Everything had suddenly stopped moving. I'd had my heart broken, was very sick (the two are often interlinked: as my mum says "when you're miserable you get poorly, Holly, so I wish you'd either stop playing silly beggars with boys or start taking vitamin C regularly"), I hated my job - it's cack - and I'd just finished my novel and sent it off. What was - I thought - supposed to be a congratulatory moment (a mental high five) turned out to be a huge anticlimax, and I posted the manuscript and went home to have a little cry because no fireworks had gone off at all when I dropped it in the post slot.
The thing about a dream is that it's a direction. Once it's over, it's easy to find yourself spinning in a circle and not really knowing which way to look. I've never wanted anything other than to be a writer and see the world: having written, and with nothing left to do but wait, I was lost. I've never felt so thoroughly that I had nowhere to go, and nothing to do. I'm not happy here - I have never felt at home in the UK - and the thought of returning to my old life (PR and bars and commutes and drinking so much coffee in the morning that you vomit in the toilets at lunchtime) made me want to get back into bed. Which I did: getting out only to go back to my crappy old temping job, whimper in the loos, and slink back into it again wearing pyjamas that I hadn't washed all week.
And then - just like that - the world turned on its head, and everything became shiny again.
My unicorn was the first thing to come back to me. He said he still adored me, and it would take more than a couple of erratic hissy fits to scare him away. Which was very sweet, even if entirely and utterly unbelievable: I'll test him on that the next time I feel like being bonkers.
Then my dad suggested that I go back to my original idea of teaching in Japan, and try that out for a year. Get a bit of space, learn a new language, get some money together and then go and travel. I'm not a 'career girl': I never have been. If I can't write for a living, then I don't actually give a crap what I do, so it's not like there's a career ladder I'm slipping down by seeing the world for a bit. Thus, after a long discussion ("Will you be leaving the house?" "Yes." "Great.") he's lending me money, I've booked my teaching course and I'm flying out in August. Never mind the fact that all I can say is 'Good afternoon' in Japanese: it is often afternoon, and I'm tall and blonde. It's not like the locals will run out of things to say to me (they'll say to me - in Japanese - "gosh, aren't you tall and blonde," I'd imagine).
And then - this evening - I got an email from an agent. I wasn't even looking for an email: I'd vaguely checked my post for the little brown envelopes I sent out, and then - realising I was being premature because I only sent anything out 3 working days ago - felt rather silly and watched The Simpsons instead. 3 working days is enough, though: apparently. It's not Missed Connections, though. It's not my baby novel: the one I've spent a year honing and honing and loving and torturing myself over. Nope: it's three chapters of an idea I whacked out over Christmas, which I thought was kind of fun and then promptly forgot about. Last week, I figured that - as I was in the post office with stamped addressed envelopes anyway - I might as well send out The Metamorphosis of Harriet Manners as well. And it's Harriet they love. Which I'm unfeasibly, air-punchingly delighted about, but I can't help but roll my eyes a tiny bit at the irony of it. I could have done that without leaving my job and getting into debt and living in my dad's spare room for a year.
Anywho. I'm not punching any gift horses in the chops, so I'm rolling with all of it. I've got my Japan travel book next to my bed (strangely my brain refuses to compute any word that is not English: it simply pushes it back out again), I'm trying to work out in my head just how many shoes I need in one year (two: I don't wear them very often), and I've sent an email back to the lovely agent to say that I haven't actually finished Harriet, but that I wrote 50,000 words of it in 3 weeks so I can probably finish it pretty quickly. If they want it. Which they might not. But ey: 'tiz still better for the ego than a finger up the nose.
Every time I get sad, and every time I get lost, something comes to make me feel foolish for ever feeling that nothing could be wonderful again. And - okay - you could say that I make my own fate (I sent the manuscripts out, I booked my Japan tickets), but it's bigger than that. As I tell myself each morning, just before I burn my toast: take each step you make bravely, and they will all lead somewhere.
But I've got to be honest. I'm not religious in the slightest, but - no matter how big or how brave my steps are - I just can't believe that there isn't something else out there - something invisible, something huge - secretly holding my hand.
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