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Flight or Fight?




I've often read how people shape their image on social media in order to appeal to a certain demographic, or a particular social strata, or to construct a desired persona for one's peers.

And I've always thought - well no-one could accuse me of that.  I blab out the sorts of things which other people find best not talked about, and I write when the Black dogs on my shoulder and when I'm going to take over the world, and show little embarrassment for either.

Yet, I have never written as myself in my life. I don't mean that I've hidden things. It's just that one is always constrained:by editors, by "policy", by the body which pays out, by the institution to which one belongs.

Because then, overshadowing all, come the kids. At first you worry about the other mums'n'dads - will they still let their kids come over on play dates if they ever read about me bonking on the Prime Minister's desk? Then it's "Will the kids be scarred for life if I'm labelled as being 'foul-mouthed' by South African society?" And then it's the horror of having their adolescent, pimply friends sniggering over  their mates' mums story of her twat tat.

But, more than all that, it's how the hell could one really talk about the things that have changed the person you are, that shaped your disastrous future as a family, when all that stems not just from the violence, but from the sexual violence  their father had committed?

Overarching all other considerations always, is that it is not just my story  - it has always been our story. My boys and mine. So telling my story, talking about me, is intrinsically telling their story too - and I certainly have no right to tell the story of their childhoods for them.

Until I finally left the Regency Town House towards the end of last year. I realised it no longer mattered if I said 'fuck' in print, or if I admitted that my huge passion for history was predominantly centred around women's history. I need no longer be concerned about whether what I say might be seen to favour any particular political ideology (it doesn't, btw), or whether I leave the Georgian/Regency period. I'm free now to talk about the full rich tapestry of British History and Literature and Theatre; and admit my fascination with iconic figures from other periods.

But, primarily, I finally could  admit to something that might possibly bar me from any Regency group in the land - I can take Jane Austen or leave her. (In fact I've left her far more often that I've taken her.)

 I no longer represented, reflected, or had to mind my p & q violations, for  anyone else.

It took another couple of weeks before I realised that the pas devant les enfants rule no longer applied either. The "enfants" are now grown men with their own lives. In a completely different life and country.

  They, of course, kept their surnames but mine is now different. We have different groups of friends & associates; and there's no chance that any of them - or my sons themselves - would ever read any of my blogs themselves! (What am I even thinking!?) And, when one day I finally come to publicly present my Memoirs to the world, (a stout tome in tooled leather jacket) we shall together devise a way to tastefully cover this period.(Seventeen years, but who's counting.)

 For I have reached Nirvana!  The apogee of a writers dream!

  I am free!

  Free at last to be who I am without the restraints of anyone else's secrets; free to admit that I am not madly spell-bound by Jane Austen and find the Brontes rather gloomy going. Free to talk about my own sanity without the fear that it would make colleagues or employers doubt my abilities......to stand naked before the world!

 Yet, in the time since I had this sudden realisation, (I utterly refuse to have an "epiphany" until the wretched word has fallen from fashion again) I haven't written a word. I haven't fallen into a frenzy of unleashed creativity. I am not blazing a smoking trail to anywhere.  I find I'm quite stymied. Stunned, almost.

Because now that I finally have the freedom to write exactly as I want to write I find myself restrained once more - more cripplingly than before, because fear is now part of that restraint:....what if the "real" me - the me without any oversight or guiding lines - just doesn't cut it?

What if the person who came out of the events of the past few years is nothing like the person who was always chaffing against her bonds and breaking through boundaries?

A question I've never asked myself before now rises like a grey wall in front of me: - what if this person is just not good enough?


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