“THE LITERARY NUDE”: HOW EMBRACING VULNERABLE WRITING HELPED ME HEAL”

One thing that no one tells you about writing a book is how difficult it is to actually sit down to write one. Similarly to Vaughn Wysel in the only show I ever reference, Sex and the City, I truly believed that writing in today’s age meant there was so little writing involved. Living out my real-life Carrie Bradshaw fantasy, I concluded that a page a day or a week was enough to fill a book. The reality was anything but. When I first sat down to write LOVE, WINE & OTHER HIGHS, my mind was blank. Or rather, filled with excitement about having secured a book deal, and the contrasting but crippling anxiety that I might let everyone involved down. The conflicting emotions made me terrified to put pen to paper, and as a result, all I did was procrastinate when I should have been writing. I had longed for a space to write about my experiences in a humorous and vulnerable way, as I had done so far, but I was scared. 

Little did I know, it would be an added therapy, a cathartic experience and a healing journey through many lessons (read: mistakes I’d made) in my life. Writing about my most vulnerable experiences wasn’t necessarily the hardest part of writing this book. Actually, the more difficult part was thinking about people reading about my most vulnerable experiences. For it all to be on display and have people question how I had the courage to spew my narcissistic drivel. You see, there’s something about being verbally naked that terrifies me so and even as I stand here in the literary nude, I remain mortified. To be on display and judged for many of the choices I made, though they helped me to grow, is something I’m still getting used to.

The writing process was difficult. While detailing the intricacies of my otherwise mundane life, I began to unpack many of my somewhat dated experiences. Scouring through minor details to discover that perhaps I might have been the cause of a large number of my problems. For example, perhaps if I hadn’t cold-called my crush asking to be my boyfriend as an opening line, the other boys might not have mocked me about it mercilessly for the remainder of the school year. But without the mortifying experience of telling a boy I like-liked him, I likely wouldn’t be as upfront in my relationships in the present day. I was able to look back and laugh at a lot of the experiences I’d gone through while being utterly tear-stricken in other aspects of my life - it was here where I learned humility.

While writing LW&OH, I also learned that I perhaps didn’t always give myself the love that I extended to my partners and peers. It was only during the writing process that I noticed how much I was pouring into others and how little I had poured into myself during many of those albeit brief encounters. Plagued by my daddy issues, I was loling the pain away and doubling down on surface-level self-care. If not for my experience in dating the world’s worst options (safe Tinny, Hingeroo and Bumble Bee), I might have never learned that no one will love me half as much as I adore myself.

In detailing my abhorrent dating life of men who hold up the fish they’ve caught or hiking photos et al in their dating profiles, I might never have learned the beauty of self-love, which admittedly took me far too long a concept to grasp. Though listening to men speak about themselves for hours on end without an, “and you?” follow-up question might sound riveting, those brief encounters helped me to determine that I’d rather be alone scraping the tubs of lactose-free ice cream than sit through any more small talk dates, simply because I wanted company from the opposite sex. 

In the end, and a final score of 2-1 for my self-esteem, my incessant need to tell people random anecdotes about my tragic life, far outweighed my need to hear dates ramble on about themselves without an ounce of awareness for me, the other person. And writing embarrassing life stories helped to quell that emotion.

GROWING UP is actually kind of hilarious. While bullying, being a child of divorce and guessing my way through a number of minimum-wage jobs sounds like a barrel of confusion and destruction, it’s not. In fact, quite the opposite. Taking years to grow into my left boob may have left me open to extensive ridicule from crushes et al, but it also helped me to realise while writing that many of these experiences shaped my humour and the way I’m able to relay these embarrassing stories. Sure I may have cried during each initial encounter, but I’ve come to find the beauty in each occurrence. Being terrified to show off any “cleavage” (in inverted commas because they really did cease to exist) in my formative years, meant that as an adult, I bare my chest in ensembles with very little discretion and I’m slightly more comfortable with my figure. It was through these uncomfortable life stories and reliving them via the writing experience, that opened my eyes to extending myself more grace in the present day. 

Writing of my most vulnerable experiences, from being called a turd by my Year 6 crush, and having my hair being ripped out as a teen, to the loss of a best friend later in my teenage years, helped me develop a new outlook; and forgive myself. Though I’m still not sure if being called a turd was warranted at all, given that the crush was incredibly top secret.

Having the privilege of growing up in a multicultural city like London opened me up to a variety of cultures and understandings. The mixture of backgrounds, particularly in my school life, meant that experiences later in life, such as moving abroad, didn’t feel so insurmountable. The overall experience, though often damning at times, helped me to harshly critique myself, my peers and a number of choices that I would absolutely not make today. Navigating through fresh terrain, and with a seemingly large number of the same problems in adulthood, I’ve been using the experience as a what not to do. 

Perhaps LOVE, WINE & OTHER HIGHS is just the prelude and my own BECOMING, and though I have yet to arrive in a Mercedes A-class with a full Versace gown awaiting my wear and sitting in the front seat, I live in hope that this will be my reality one day.

*Read the article here