A tender thing

a decision after 8 years of public work (including these three incredibly rich ones I’ve spent curating soul stories on Substack)

Shy as I’d always been, I wanted to begin living a public life, not a private one. To make something happen, for the good of myself and others. However slight, however brief…

The Cure for Sleep (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

Eight years ago today I joined Twitter and a few weeks later I began - aged 42 - my first creative work as a self-proclaimed ‘writer of the outside’. The Wild Patience mile of scroll-writing I composed beside Pells Pool lido here in my small hometown of Lewes across the summers of 2016 and 2017 changed my life (and touched other people’s) in many and strange ways: starting off ripples that have been moving me onwards and outwards ever since.

Everything that went into that first work and each that came after - including my book The Cure for Sleep and its story-sharing project here on Substack - was driven by a stubborn desire that had built up in me for a long while before I was able to act on it: to live a public life, not a private one

Here’s what I wrote about that ready-for-change time:

It is tender thing, admitting to a purpose so at odds with the values of my time and place. How, after decades of saving, I became profligate. Giving myself out and away, so that while I continued to practise patience in one sense - sitting alone in flower gardens, doing my thirty laps a day or more of the outdoor pool - I was burning with a mayfly fervour to meet and merge with other people.

In my second summer as a swimmer at the pool, I began writing a story called The Cure for Sleep in which a woman returns from near-death (medical mystery) without the need to rest. Who creates chaos by lavishing love and care on strangers, ceaselessly, for weeks, until she dies, suddenly, dessicated, insect-obscure on the far edge of a busy city scene. Modern version of the swallow in Wilde’s The Happy Prince, that little bird which does itself to death delivering alms to the townsfolk. This woman like that: a mechanism of excess generosity.

What I might have chosen in real life if a simple nip and tuck in my brain could have delivered me one ever-present year: awake without strain day and night until I reached event horizon - that place promising an eternal communion of souls that I’d turned back from in the ambulance.

Shy as I’d always been, I wanted to begin living a public life, not a private one. To make something happen, for the good of myself and others. However slight, however brief.

Just a year later, I’d found the way to do it, right there beside the pool, and I’ve been living in that same radically open and receptive mode ever since, even through pandemic, the writing of The Cure for Sleep, and the divorce-then-decline-then-death of my mother.

And it has been my pleasure and privilege to do! What a rich almost-decade - to come into such close connection with hundreds and then thousands of good people all over the world after living a shy and frightened first half of life. All of you who write with me here have been a large part of that. Thank you.

But now, in my fiftieth year - with my late mother’s most-precious possessions finally condensed into a single small archive box and my children at home with me for only a few more years - I have a different set of compulsions building. Ones that are just as demanding and uncertain as those that led to so much change in my forties.

That drive I had in this last decade to take up space and be seen, heard - just at the age when women are first being made to feel invisible? This is now giving way to a wish to be hidden, quiet.

So this is where I find myself. Not wanting to cut myself off entirely and forever from creative conversations, but also needing to risk the possibility of that - should this later prove the price of taking a step back into silence.

I hope however that the existing prompts in this free-to-all project — with the contributions and conversations that have grown around them — will continue to be of use to you if you find this Substack (or return to it).

What next for The Cure for Sleep on Substack?

I will keep the three-season archive of prompts open for story submissions and will continue to read and respond (with the first Wednesday of the month as my usual day to be online here). But in terms of new content from me, I won’t be sending out any more regular monthly posts from this project. Perhaps in my time away I will find new stories and experiments in living worth sharing once again, and I hope you will follow other Substack projects of mine as and when I develop them.

And finally…

Remember you can read hundreds of short true soul stories already contributed by members of our community over on thecureforsleep.com.