Self esteem is a ridiculous thing. It shouldn’t matter, your abilities and talents should speak for themselves without the need for confidence or arrogance or even the ability to promote them. I’m sure for a few, this is absolutely the case, and to be honest, aren’t they the envy of all of us? You see them, the chosen few, beautiful and talented and with seemingly endless opportunities falling into their laps and I wonder breathlessly what it might feel like to be that way, have that life.
I have a lovely life, I have miserable moments, of course. Last night, I ended up in Tesco in tears buying butter after a stupid row about butter. Butter?! Stupid. But I am very good at looking on the bright side, my cup is rarely half empty, I genuinely need to just look at my sleeping girls and I am back to feeling incredibly lucky. But that is my family, it isn’t me.
For me, my self esteem is pretty low. When I left my job on maternity leave, nearly four years ago, I left on a high, fully expecting to go back, twins blissfully happy at nursery, me continuing my career onto heights that I had not even contemplated. I did not imagine, could not imagine, that I would only not go back, but remain a stay at home mum approaching their fourth birthday. I did not anticipate that I would not want to go back, that I would realise that raising my girls would be more important than anything else I’ve ever done and ever will do. I didn’t realise that leaving my girls in a nursery when they were eight months old for ten hours a day would be as mentally devastating as it was. I didn’t work out the financial implications, didn’t do the sums that, in the end, it was costing me money to work.
So I wrote. Wrote a book. A whole book with 115000 words in it. I have wanted to do that for twenty years. So I’ve done that. But does it matter if no one read it? Or reviewed it? And that countless agents rejected it. What does that do to a person’s self esteem? I can tell you what it has done to mine. I can feel utterly worthless as a person. I contribute nothing to my family financially. There is an interesting dichotomy to being a stay at home mum these days. My mum and J’s mum stayed at home to raise us and this was the eighties, it was the done thing, the financial world was different then, rent was not two thirds of an average salary, there wasn’t a dependence on tax credits then. But aside from that, socially it was the right thing to do. You could still raise independent strong girls who wanted to be doctors and lawyers and politicians despite their mum being at home, cooking meals and keeping a house. You could still raise boys who understood the changing role of men in our society, the fact that J took on as much as he did when the girls were tiny, on top of his full time job, is testament to his mum as much as anyone.
The thing is, and this has got rambly and for that, I apologise. The thing is that I believe myself to be a good writer, better than average and absolutely good enough to be published. I am so glad that I have this blog. For so many reasons, but mostly because my love for writing fiction has left me for now. All of my characters seem contrived, their conversation clunky and unnatural, the scenarios I write them into are unrealistic and a little bit ridiculous. I have three books started and I don’t want to continue with any of them. My book was perfect to me, the characters were absolutely the ones I wanted to write, the story was the one that I wanted and needed to tell.
I need to raise my self esteem. I need to promote my writing. Others do, without fear or abject terror of being rejected. I need to learn. I need to write this bloody short story and enter it into this competition without being so stupidly frightened.
I am ten weeks away from having my third child (all being well) and I have two amazing daughters. I have a relationship with a wonderful, funny, frustrating man. I am incredibly lucky. That should be enough.
But it isn’t.
Fairy Lights and Fear 