Freedom Comes From Being Unafraid
This is something I posted at the weekend over on Substack and thought worth cross-posting here. I’ve edited it lightly and also added a link to the song from which the title comes.
In the newfound reverie
Of quiet peace I found
Freedom comes from being unafraid
Of the heartache that can plague a man
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I haven’t posted here for a while; I have been caught up with treatment for early stage prostate cancer and my focus has meandered. Some initial reflections on that are what I want to sketch here, fully conscious that these are neither well-formed musings nor decided positions.
When I was coming to terms with the diagnosis, before I knew details of the staging and treatment, I had plenty of time to consider personal mortality and also to determine, firmly, that creativity is resistance. That conviction remained, and remains, even after it was determined that my cancer (bog-standard, no funky stuff, per the Clinical Nurse Specialist) is eminently treatable. What has changed over time are the ways that creativity has manifested as my treatment has progressed.
A key impact has been on my ability to focus on my novel-in-progress – that focus has come and gone; in parallel my reading has shifted back and forth between books that require concentrated attention and books that don’t. For a while I had that sense of guilt usually expressed as hashtag I should be writing. I was conscious of every day that passed without my putting forth a thousand words or so. I still am. On the other hand, somewhere along the way I have worked out how the novel will end and how that ties to what I’ve already written and thus how my existing draft should flex to accommodate it.
And I have generated a load of running notes of ideas and scenes to write, plus I’ve had plenty of time to consider (and reconsider) the overall shape of the book and the ineffable something that I’m searching for in the first draft, the ghost in the story that animates it.
Even though I expected it, I have been surprised by the extent to which my reactions to treatment have affected my focus and stamina for fiction; it is as though concentrating on the realities of life has got in the way of my ability to live in a fictional world of my own devising. Conversely, I also think that sharp focus on the mundane is shaping my approach to the prosaic, and that this will be manifest in my writing once I have a first draft and can get down to the hard work of turning words into writing.
In the meantime I have channelled creativity into other activities: I tried my hand at verse that occasionally aspired to poetry (and in the process read a lot of poetry); I learned to stitch and bind my own hardcover notebooks; I began the process of remembering how to play guitar; and, as sales of my existing books have fallen to zero, I have pondered what that means for the one I am writing, the scattered short stories sitting unpolished in folders and the stories I hope to write when the current one is done.
Somewhere along the way my mindset shifted. Or perhaps something that has always been there crystallised and the title of this piece frames it: although the realities of treatment get in the way of some aspects of creativity, they will pass. I have reached an uneasy détente with mortality that frees me to articulate to myself the things that are important to me.
The renewed story I tell myself of who I am is shaping the fictional worlds I create.
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