At the moment I've had plenty of time on my hands as the appalling weather has meant that I haven't really gone anywhere other than a local shop since last Monday. So I've been wondering why with all this time I haven't been writing my book. It's a perfect opportunity. Instead of which I've kept house,cooked all sorts of things,including bird food cake.
As an aside, I always feed the birds in the winter and it is an absolute joy to see them coming in the garden and availing themselves of the food I've left out.There are robins, blackbirds, thrushes, fieldfares, turtle doves, pigeons and the occasional magpie all popping by daily. There is even a Peregrine Falcon in the area, and it is in fact taking sanctuary at night under my neighbours eaves, which is a very odd place indeed for this bird.
But there has been no writing.I haven't been blogging, I haven't written emails, and I certainly haven't written a chapter of my book.
This book that is now in it's third year of going nowhere, came out of my needing to leave a legacy for my sons of them knowing what skills I had. And to bare witness to my knowledge of therapy.
Several things have happened that have stopped progress apart from disinterest on my part. The biggest thing is difficult to articulate in that I have been doing my work as a therapist now for 26 years and have worked in my current job for 17 years. In that time I have written endless handouts on anything and everything that I deal with clients about. Most of them dating back to the early days of this job.
So when I wrote the chapters I have, they were an expansion and a better writing of the handouts. A great deal of my knowledge is instinctive, I have a gift of understanding human nature, this combined with common sense has meant that my words have resonated with my clients always. I believe most of the stuff I have written about is my take on life, it obviously has endless influences and bits of knowledge picked up as I've gone along.
However I find it disturbing when someone comes along and seemingly takes my knowledge and expands on it so far that they have written a book themselves, or are like Paul McKenna making a fortune doing a TV show on how he can make you thin.
I feel devalued in that although although I have been saying the same things someone else is saying them louder and making their fortune.
Now this is where it gets very delicate, cause who knows who has the original idea,I feel that the way I explain human behaviour is unique, but borrows stuff from wherever I can find it to back up any hypothesis I expound.
So on the one hand I want my sons to know that I had a knowledge and an intelligence, (they of course have always known this.)It is my history that says I was once stupid that I've been trying to prove that disbelieving part of myself.
But at the moment I feel battered by reading things by others I believed were my knowledge. Of course I understand Jung's collective unconscious. But it is having the affect of making me feel I can't be bothered, someone else has already done it, no-one will want to read what I have to say. So I've reached an impasse, where I have 20 odd thousand words written going nowhere or being expanded upon, which is a shame.
I wish I could find some inspiration to pick it up again, as I really do have a wonderful opportunity at the moment to type my fingers off. I even have courtesy of a journo friend a new way to run with the book. But I don't have the inspiration to start.
I'm hoping in finally writing these words down it will, as Hercule Poirot would say I can use my little grey cells, to motivate me.
Equally I'm not beating myself up, as I have written what I have done so far. And although nowhere near completed, or rewritten it is a start, and I just need the wherewithal to finish the start,and start the finish.
