This series of three posts work through what stuck patterns are, and the ways we can address them if we’re stuck in alone, or if we’re stuck in with others. However, all three are relevant to everyone because I’ll suggest that those of us stuck in alone could do with exploring how we might do some of this work with others, while those of us stuck in with others could do with getting plenty of solitude in order to do the parts of the work that need doing alone. 

In this first post, I’ll start with a bit more of an introduction to what stuck patterns are, and why we might prioritise shifting them at this time. 

Hopefully if/when this period of Covid-19 crisis is over, the ideas and practices here will still be helpful for those finding themselves alone and wanting to address their relationship patterns, and for those wanting to do so while in relationship with others. I’m also aware that not everybody will be ‘stuck in’, particularly those in the category of key-workers. Hopefully some of the ‘stuck together’ advice will also be useful for those who’re still out in the world working with others.

What are stuck patterns?

The point of the tweet I began with is that intimate relationships hold up a mirror to our habitual patterns of relating with others, and with ourselves. Most of us will have fetched up with some stuck patterns in how we relate along the way, which will have ended up being harmful – or at least not helpful – to ourselves and others. 

These patterns will generally emerge in all of our relationships, given time. Often they influence how we relate to other things in our lives besides people too: work, leisure, food, exercise, technology, etc. In this post I’m focusing on how stuck patterns emerge in relationships, particularly in relationships where we are very emotionally close and/or spending a lot of time together. This is where they often come up most intensely.

Stuck patterns determine how we relate to others  – and ourselves – on an everyday basis, and also when we’re triggered or activated. Different therapeutic approaches have all kinds of ways of naming these patterns and understanding where they come from. Generally they agree that stuck patterns are the strategies which we learnt when we were young – or sometimes through stress and trauma in later life – which enabled us to survive.

One useful model comes from Pete Walker’s work on cPTSD. He suggests that these strategies are often versions of the classic trauma responses of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Some of us learnt as kids that what worked was to battle, belittle or control those around us (fight). Others learnt that striving to perfect ourselves and do all-of-the-things was the way (flight). Others learnt to retreat into ourselves and self-soothing (freeze). Others learnt to do whatever it took to appease others and be what they wanted us to be (fawn). 

Most of us have some combination of these strategies, or go to different ones at different times. Generally they have become the way we habitually relate to other people, and they come out most vividly when we’re triggered or activated: in times of crisis or conflict.

For example, my go-to patterns are mainly fawn/flight. The fawn part means I habitually try to monitor myself to ensure I’m being ‘good’ for those around me, and struggle to have boundaries if people want me to do things that don’t feel good for me. The flight part means I tend towards over- rather than under-functioning, like – I don’t know – writing a whole bunch of books, zines, and blog posts to try to figure this stuff out and communicate it to others! 

When triggered, fawn/flight means that it can feel life-or-death to me to make things right with people. And I’m likely to throw everything that I have at the situation, exhausting myself in the process, rather than taking the time I need to look after myself and get some perspective.

If Pete’s model doesn’t work for you, there are many other ways of looking at stuck patterns out there. For example Jeffrey Young lists ten common problematic schemas with which we tend to approach relationships, again developed as survival strategies during our lives.

Whatever language you use for the stuck patterns, and whatever understanding you have of how they got there, we all have them and we can address them by:

• Noticing the patterns
• Doing something different
• Making that an everyday practice so that new habits can bed in over time

Why address stuck patterns?

If we decide to stay in relationship with somebody, we’ll need to address those patterns in order for that relationship to work well for everyone in it over time (if it’s not working for everyone, it’s not working for anyone). If we break-up because the patterns are hurting us too much then we’ll need to address them or we’ll likely bring them into subsequent relationships.

Better for us

Addressing our stuck patterns is better for ourselves because it will help us to discern which relationships in our lives are good for us. It will also prevent us from getting into painful dynamics with others, and enable us to notice such dynamics and shift them when we have.

Better for our close people

Addressing our stuck patterns is better for the people we’re close to because we’re less likely to hurt them, or get stuck in dynamics where we keep triggering each other with our patterns. Hopefully once we’re clearer on what our patterns are – and more able to shift from them – we’ll also have more capacity for the people in our lives and deal better when relationships do become difficult.

Better for everyone else

Addressing our stuck patterns is better for everybody because when we’re stuck in painful dynamics we have so much less to offer to the other people in our lives and to our wider communities. It’s extremely hard to be empathic and compassionate when we’re stuck in these patterns. We’re also more likely to act out of these patterns with others beyond our closest people if we haven’t addressed them: friends online, the staff in the supermarket, strangers on social media. 

It might seem like addressing our relationship patterns is not the most urgent thing we could be doing while the world is literally on fire with rising fevers and global temperatures, conflagrations and conflicts. In fact I’d argue it’s one of the most vital things we can do. Why?

• On an everyday level our lives have the potential to be heaven or hell depending on how we relate to ourselves and each other. If we’re all relating to each other through our stuck patterns we’ll hurt each other and feel terrible about ourselves. If we can find ways to shift out of our stuck patterns then there’s the potential for everyday life – even a much more constrained everyday life – to be okay, perhaps even pretty good if we explicitly make this our plan and notice how we’re making progress over time.
• In relation to sickness specifically we know the toll that stress and trauma take on the immune system. If we’re putting other people – and ourselves – under stress and/or triggering them into trauma responses with our patterns then we’re making it more likely that they’ll get sick and struggle to recover quickly, not to mention the mental health crises that can result from prolonged relational stress or being frequently retraumatised.
• Just as our relationship to ourselves often mirrors the way we relate to other people, so too does the way we relate to the wider world. At a time when we urgently need to all be thinking and behaving collaboratively and collectively – and kindness, compassion and mutuality are essential – unlearning patterns which keep us locked in our own individual pain – and in stuck dynamics with close people – seems pretty urgent.

Addressing stuck patterns

In the next two blog posts I’ll cover how you might address stuck patterns if you’re stuck in alone, and if you’re stuck in with others. In some ways the challenges and opportunities of these two alternatives are opposite. Those stuck in alone may find it easier to get the space and time needed to do this slow habit-shifting work (although this will be more challenging for those who are still working full time from home and/or who struggle not to fill time with distractions). They may find it harder to get opportunities to practise shifting habits in relationship with others. Those stuck in together may find it hard to get enough space to do the inner work needed here, but they may find it easier to get practical opportunities to practice in relationship, particularly if those around them are up for this kind of work too.

A key aspect of what I’m arguing here is reframing our stuckness (alone or together) as an opportunity. Of course it’s vital to experience and express all of our feelings about the ways in which the current situation has altered our lives. This isn’t a Pollyanna approach. We need to feel our fear at what might be coming, our grief at what we’ve lost, our rage at systems which have failed to support us. 

However, embracing the potential in what has happened for befriending ourselves and addressing our stuck patterns can definitely be a useful reframe. It also means that we can relate differently to the micro-moments of difficulty which come up as we spend more time alone or with close people. Instead of regarding each freak-out, plunge into loneliness, argument, or relationship tension as a failure, we can reframe these as opportunities to slow down, to turn towards what we’re finding hard, and to learn more about our patterns and how they operate in us.

To read on to the posts about how to address stuck patterns if alone or with others, follow these links:

Stuck in alone.

Stuck in together.

There’s more about shifting stuck patterns when they are fleeting, entrenched, or overwhelming in this post.

Patreon link: If you liked this, feel free to support my Patreon, it will certainly help this self-employed person to maintain some income during these uncertain times.
Plural tag: This post was written by Beastie.

The post Stuck in alone or together: An opportunity to address stuck patterns appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

This summer I left employment – and education – after over two decades, to focus on writing full time. It’s a curious way to celebrate it: writing about being a failure. But it’s been such a major theme of the past year that it feels like the best way to do so. 

Over the last year I’ve failed repeatedly. My favourite author and teacher, Pema Chödrön, wrote a book called Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better which I’ve been reading a lot of late. I’m not sure that I’m failing better yet, but I’m certainly becoming very well acquainted with failure and what it has to offer us. If that sounds like a strange idea – surely failure is something to be avoided – then keep reading.

My great mate and co-author Justin Hancock says that we can generally handle it if one of three areas of our lives – work, home and relationships – is shaky, so long as the other two hold relatively steady. If two of those aren’t good then things start to feel pretty precarious. And when all three go at once…

That’s what happened for me last Summer. I was starting the process of leaving academia so work was shaky, I was moving city and it took a good while to figure out where I’d be living, plus things were rocky in my relationships. This was all against the backdrop of it finally really hitting me what it means to be a trans person at this cultural moment of moral panic; a survivor during #metoo and all the conversations that have followed, and recognising how intertwined those things are with my life and my work. 

Still, I landed, I found a sense of relative safety, and I managed to keep going, albeit at a much slower pace and with a lot more emphasis on self-care than before.

But now I actually have left my employed job after a whole life spent studying or working in education. Having thought I had a handle on it, I’ve fallen back into my old relationship patterns more than once in the last year (like a hamster on a freaking wheel!) and I’ve had to painfully confront the impact that’s had on myself and others, with a whole lot of regret and loss in the process. And, just when things were at their worst, I found out that I couldn’t stay living in the place that had become home for me.

Approaching Failure

I’ve been through these kinds of failures before. I’ve lost several jobs, homes, relationships, friendship groups, and communities along the way, often under painful circumstances that have left me feeling shame at having let others – and myself – down. The shift this time – I hope – isn’t that I’m not failing, it’s that I’m trying to approach failure in a radically different way.

Authors like Pema, and Brené Brown, who write about failure point out that failure is inevitable in life. This is particularly the case if you are ‘in the arena’ – as Brene calls it. Doing what feels valuable in work, love, and community is inevitably also going to be vulnerable. And we’re inevitably going to fuck it up at times.

Because of the stigma around failure, most of us endeavour to avoid it at all costs. If it happens we respond by blaming ourselves and hiding away so we never risk failing again, or by blaming everybody else and not taking any responsibility for what we’ve done because it’s too hard to face our shortcomings and limitations – and their impact. When I failed in the past I often burned my bridges pretty fast, moved on, and worked even harder to avoid such failure in the future, without looking too carefully at what’d just happened.

What I’m doing this time is different. I’m trying to embrace the fact that these failures have happened – and that they certainly won’t be the last ones I experience (well so long as I stay alive of course). Instead of adding them to a long list of past experiences that have felt similar – and using them as proof of the story that something about me is wrong and unacceptable, or that there’s something wrong with the work, people or communities I’ve surrounded myself with – I’m trying to look at them clearly, with honesty and kindness.

When I do that I realise that there’s much to be learnt here – probably far more than we learn from experiences of ‘success’. Also, the closer I look, the more the success/failure binary is called into question. I see that these two elements are closely woven together – inseparable in fact. As Brené points out: learning, creativity and innovation aren’t possible without failure. But I think it’s more than that: failing at work is a kind of work (perhaps this kind of work that I’m doing right now!) Also, failing at love and home have both brought me as much love and home as they have lost me.

Let’s delve deeper into these three areas so you can see what I mean…

Work

I’m a failed academic. Clearly. I’m 45 and I haven’t made professor: the pinnacle of the academic ladder. This is because – despite publishing twenty books and over a hundred articles – I have never been REF-able: The Research Excellence Framework which is the way academic success is measured in the UK.

I’m not excellent. Far from it. I haven’t brought in research funding because I didn’t want to spend my time on funding bids or administrating big research projects. Also, every time I thought I’d finally written something that ‘counted’ as the right kind of academic work, I was told that it still wasn’t right: too ‘polemic’, too far out of my discipline (undisciplined), a chapter when only journal articles counted, a theory paper when only research papers counted, a co-authored paper when single author is the gold standard, single author but not in the right kind of journal, in the right kind of journal but not the right kind of research. 

I tried to carve out a different path as a public engagement academic, but it’s not enough to do that alone – you do need to bring in the money and publish the papers also. When you point out that it may well not be possible to do all of those things, teach, and practise self-care – and care for the others in your life – that doesn’t tend to go down particularly well.

I could say a lot about which kinds of people academic systems and structures do – and do not – serve; about the kinds of labour, knowledge and bodies that are – and are not – valued there; and about the impact this has: the shame, imposter syndrome, and anxiety that so many academics are plagued by. I probably will say more about these things at some point. And I should also acknowledge the massive privileges I’ve been afforded by being within academia (and being privileged enough to get there in the first place): the money I’ve been able to save, the things I’ve learned, the projects it’s supported, and the ways it’s been (mostly) a safe-enough place to be my particular brand of non-normative weirdo. For now let’s agree that I’m a failed academic, by academic standards.

It’s okay though, I never actually wanted to be an academic. I only did a PhD in the first place because I was too young to do the thing I really wanted to do which was to be a therapist. And I only took an academic job post-PhD to fund my therapy training. I stayed in academia because I got passionate about teaching, and about studying the things I care about as an activist (gender, sexuality, relationships, mental health). But really I always wanted to be a therapist.

Here’s the thing: I’ve failed at that too. I worked as a therapist for over a decade – mostly in voluntary contexts because I had the academic job to pay the bills. Last year I left the voluntary therapy behind with the plan that I’d take on more private clients, so that I could afford to live once I quit the academic job to focus on writing. I didn’t take on any more clients. I realised that not being a therapist felt like a relief. My reservations about therapy in general – and about my particular capacities as a therapist – surfaced, and I realised that I needed to stop. So I did, with no idea about what I was going to do for money if I wasn’t going to do that.

It’s a good thing too because I would not have been able to hold therapy clients through the last year, given the crises I was facing in my own life. But it’s not just that. Being a therapist isn’t for me, I realise. I’m not the kind of therapist I would want to be: the kind that I’ve been lucky enough to experience a few times in my life. I don’t have that skill set: the capacity to contain people, or to work with them relationally in the ways I’d want to. I can do great one-to-one work with people, but in much more of a peer-to-peer mentorship type way. Not therapy.

But this is all okay because the whole point was that I was giving it all up to be a writer, right? So that’s what I’ll be: a writer. D’you want to know how much I wrote – for publication – between last summer and this? Zero. Nothing. Not a word! The stuff I have coming out this year was all written before then. I have written thousands and thousands of words in my journal. I have written the third book in the four-book erotic fiction project I have going on, which may never see the light of day (the prospect of putting something that vulnerable out there and failing remains too scary, but who knows?) I managed the odd blog post, but even those were few and far between.

What did I achieve – workwise – in these months of failure? A lifelong workaholic I finally learned how to underfunction instead of overfunctioning. I learnt to prioritise self-care: always putting The Work before the work. I largely undid my previous patterns of working to soothe or distract myself, or getting through the to-do list before I allow any self-care. I learnt to relate to work consensually: to feel into my body when I get a request, and to only say ‘yes’ to things that feel good immediately and still feel good 48 hours later. It’s been hard and it’s been messy, like all change. I’ve let people down. I’ve felt like the flaky colleague just when I wanted to end on a high note. I’ve taken time off sick when previously I’d have worked on through. I’ve had to go back to people when I’d said ‘yes’ to change it to a ‘no’ when I realised I’d overridden my self-consent. 

It’s still a work in progress, but it is The Work: changing the habits of a lifetime of remaining in sometimes toxic and bullying work environments, forcing myself to produce the kinds of things I thought would count rather than what I valued, working through crises, sickness and struggle instead of allowing rest, recovery, recuperation. Writing is coming back now (as evidenced by the sudden explosion of blog posts and tweets about my new graphic guide). What I’ve been through is helping me to keep remembering to engage with writing more kindly, openly, mindfully, and flexibly. I’m pretty convinced that when we write in such ways it’s better quality – and connects more with others – too.

Home

To relate very differently to work – prioritising the work I find most fulfilling and feel most skilled at – requires rethinking home too. How to live in order to be a full-time writer, because sadly writing alone will never provide a liveable income for most of us? Twenty books in and only one of them brings me in more than a few hundred quid a year – and that may only be for a short time.

The main answer is, again, privilege. My whiteness, financially comfortable background, being largely non-disabled within our current society, location in the UK with English as my first language, and more, meant that I had enough privilege to access higher education. Also, remaining in higher education meant that I had the kind of job where it’s possible to be pretty crazy and pretty weird and still keep a paying job (except for that one faily, faily time when I nearly got fired after The Sun called me a bisexual boffin). So – despite a relationship pattern where I’ve given a lot of the money earned through this work to other people in order to secure love (top tip fellow people pleasers: it doesn’t work) – I managed to save up enough to live on for a while, now that I’ve downsized considerably

While I was searching for somewhere cheap to live an opportunity came up to live in the co-op my friend lived in. I’ve loved the idea of communal living since I came across Tales of the City at a formative age. I did have some assumptions and fears about what it might be like in practice, most of which were wholly inaccurate. It seemed like a financially sustainable option outside of the problematic systems of renting and buying property. I also loved the possibilities it opened up around access intimacy, care, and consent. 

Living there I learnt lots about how much more possible self-care becomes when we have systems and structures which support it. I also learnt how much more possible caring for each other through physical and mental health struggles is when there are many people around and available, all of whom get it. I saw how conflict – openly addressed and held within family and community – can play out differently. I also learned some hard lessons about group dynamics. I’m sure I’ll be reflecting on this experience for many years to come.

But when the house considered whether to make me a permanent member after eight months they decided not to. Partly this was because I had been going back and forth a lot about what my ongoing living situation would be. But more than that – and this was bloody hard to hear – it was because I felt to them more like extended family than immediate family.

It would’ve been so easy to experience this as rejection, as me failing. The day it happened I was awash with memories of previous experiences that felt like this: when my university housemates threw eggs at my door because they were so sick of me having my depressed partner round at our flat all the time; when I lost most of my group of friends following one of those painful periods of ricocheting break-ups that can happen in queer community. 

Partly thanks to the work the house has done in holding people through conflict and crisis – and perhaps also thanks to The Work that I’ve done over the years – this played out very differently. I was able to feel the feels and to express them – quite vividly – to everyone, and to feel heard and seen and understood. And I was able to hear them too. They were right that I felt more like extended family: I felt that too. And while it was terrifying to have this final rug pulled out from under me at this exquisitely vulnerable time, there was a sense of possibility in it too: things that might open up as well as close down.

Interestingly, since that time and in the conversations we’ve continued to have, I’ve actually felt closer to my friends from the house – not further away. There’s been a lot more openness. And I’ve been able to put more time and energy into nurturing other friendships where I have deep connections, including sharing my new home space with them in ways I never did before. I’m able to hold the possibility that, in losing a home and family, I may paradoxically have gained one.

Feeling Failure

I realise at this point that I’ve been talking about failure in quite a prettied up way: the way it can look in the fuzzy glow of hindsight. You could go away with the impression that it’s this okay thing – not that bad – quite beautiful in fact if looked at from the right perspective. Let’s talk about what failure actually looks like. Let’s talk about what it feels like. 

Brené likens it to stepping out into the arena and falling on your face, eating dirt in front of everyone. It is like that. Except imagine that you’re naked. Not noble Cersei Lannister kind of naked but crying, begging, and scrabbling at the door you’ve just been pushed through to get the hell out of there kind of naked. There are tears and snot, there is rage and terror. It’s not a pretty sight. And scrutinising your every move are all your closest friends and family, plus everyone who has ever bullied you or criticised your work, definitely all your exes and your scariest school teachers. And every single one of their faces is filled with disgust. And they are just about to release the terrible monster that you have to fight. And when they do there is every fucking chance that you will crap yourself from fear in front of everyone. That, my friends, is what failure feels like.

That’s how it felt when those eggs hit my door, when I saw that headline in The Sun and had to face my managers afterwards, when I felt rejected from my community and slunk away, when I tried to bring my soft consent-y activism into my workplace and everybody looked at me like I was completely crazy, when the house gave me my notice. And that is precisely how it’s felt every time I’ve tried and failed at love, especially during the period where I’m desperately flinging everything that I have at it, trying to pretend that I’m not doing the same old thing again like the aforementioned hamster. 

Relationships

I’ve already said most of what I need to say about my relationship patterns in the second edition of Rewriting the Rules, and in these blogposts. Sadly that hasn’t stopped me from finding thrilling new ways of acting out the same old patterns: struggling to be honest with myself and others, striving to meet others’ expectations, or assuming they will be on the same page as me. This was a big part of the dynamics that brought three of the relationships – with individuals and groups – that were most important to me to breaking point in the last year.

Understandably, failure cuts deepest for me when I’m failing in this particular arena. Being somebody who has written several self-help style books on relationships really doesn’t help with that. At least I make it very clear in my writing that this stuff is bloody hard for all of us – so-called relationship ‘experts’ included. Perhaps I should insist on being billed as a relationship failure from now on.

However, I’ve noticed that, as with work and home, there is a lot of love to be found in failing at love. These days my go-to response to a life crisis is to book in time with close people each day until I’m steadier – online calls or in-person walks and talks – in addition to ongoing message exchanges. During these conversations it’s been reaffirmed for me that intimacy deepens with vulnerability. I’ve shown my feelings, my insecurities, more openly than ever before and I’ve felt how much closer that’s brought me to my people. Also most people have shared their struggles right back.

I feel more able to be real with my people – instead of monitoring myself and keeping up a facade – and I feel more able to connect with them too. How paradoxical and wonderful that mulling over the potential impossibility of love has resulted in such strong feelings – and actions – of love.

The other thing that I’ve made into a daily practice of late is explicit internal conversations. Anyone familiar with my work knows that I’m big into the idea of plural selves, and I often experience myself as more of a team – or a system – than an individual. So most days start and end with a check-in between the members of this team – written in my journal – with the explicit intention that the parts of me who are struggling will support the parts that aren’t so much on that particular day.

In Rewriting the Rules I suggested that experiencing ourselves as plural could make it easier to love ourself than it is when we imagine that we’re this singular, static individual who can be judged as good or bad. That’s certainly been my experience of late. There’s a lot of love within for the vulnerable parts, the parts who fought so damned hard and still managed to fail, the parts who took the risk and now find themselves exposed in the arena.

Embracing and Learning from Failure

This blog post is already over 3000 words long: another failure. I rarely manage the SEO-pleasing 500 word shorties that experts recommend. WordPress will doubtless give me a bunch of angry red emoticons for this latest opus and for my continued use of the passive voice.

So what are my quick take-aways about failure then, other than what doesn’t kill you makes you stranger?

• Failure is an inevitable part of being human, get used to it, and go gently because our whole culture tells us that it’s not okay, that we’re to blame for it, and that we should punish ourselves for it.
• A sense of failure may be more about you not fitting the particular system or situation you’ve tried to succeed in. Moving into a different system or situation – perhaps one with values more aligned with your own – might be something to explore.
• Feeling you’ve failed at something can give you an opportunity to stop doing that thing. The space that opens up may bring something different that you end up finding more fulfilling and feeling more competent at (like me replacing therapy with writing mentorship).
• Failure shows us where we’re stuck, where we’re hooked, where we’re messy. Learning these things is super helpful because then we can work to shift our patterns (again, gently please).
• Failing in different arenas can actually bring us the very things we thought we were losing from failing. Failing at work can become a big part of our work (emotional, creative, and otherwise – like all the people who make their work out of helping people who are struggling in the same ways that they have). Failing at home or family can bring us other forms of community and kinship. Failing at relationships – and sharing our experiences around this openly – can bring us love and connection.
• If you can stay with the fact that you’ve failed – and the impact of this on you and others – it can make you a lot more humble and compassionate for others caught in the same kinds of situations and dynamics.
• As Brené Brown points out, remaining in the arena even when we know the risks of failure – and what it feels like to fail – is pretty badass. Think Captain Marvel standing up again each time she gets knocked down in the movie.
• As Pema Chödrön suggests, having the rug pulled out from under us completely can be just what we need in order to stop looking for babysitters to look after us, and to start opening up to what life has to teach us.
• As queer theorist like Jack Halberstam and Sara Ahmed point out, what is considered successful in our culture is often determined by those with the most power. The more non-normative we are, the more likely we are to fail according to the normative standards of what counts as success. So failing can be seen as a radical part of resisting these norms. And we can rightly get pretty pissed off at how we’re set up to fail by norms which require us to pass exams, make lots of money, own property, ascend various professional ladders, stay in particular kinds of relationships, look attractive according to western beauty ideals, have kids who also meet these criteria for success, etc. etc. etc.

Okay that wasn’t so quick. Let’s try again. What can you do if you’re struggling with failing and failing again. I’d say the important things are to: 

• Practice self-care around it. If it feels overwhelming then first focus on getting yourself back to a safe-enough state to look at it. Refrain from doing anything till you’re in a good-enough place to deal. There’s no rush.
• Stay with the feelings.
• Try to see the failure clearly, honestly – and above all – kindly.
• Consider what it would be like if we could see the faily parts of us as the most precious, tender, and loveable parts of us. Wow right?
• Focus on addressing your part in what happened – it’s up to others whether or not they want to address their’s. Also recognise the wider dynamics, systems, and structures that are in play which mean it’s not all on you. Try not to be drawn into blame and shame, and go easy on yourself when you’re inevitably drawn into blame and shame.
• Question the success/failure binary and who this serves.
• Recognise that habits take time to shift and require repeated failure in order to do so – check out this poem by Portia Nelson to help with this. It’s okay that you fell into that hole again.
• Don’t listen to criticism from people in the cheap seats. They aren’t in the arena, as Brené says. But do welcome generous feedback and support from people who have your back and are up for facing their own failure. This is not something we can do alone.
• Let failure crack you open, soften you up, connect you with others who’re going through similar stuff, and fuel your creativity.
• Try not to be part of cultures which shame people for failing, making it even more difficult for all of us to accept our inevitable failures, to take responsibility for their impact, and to fail better.

I’ll leave the last word to Thor’s mum, Frigga, in Avengers Endgame because I liked this thought on failure: ‘Everyone fails at who they’re supposed to be. The measure of a person, of a hero, is how well they succeed at being who they are.’

The post Embracing failure in work, home, and relationships appeared first on Rewriting The Rules.

I haven’t blogged as much this year as I have in the past. This is partly because it’s been a year of huge change and upheaval for me, so my writing has been focused inwards more than outwards. It’s also because the things that have been going on in the wider world – particularly #metoo and the trans moral panic – have echoed through my communities, families, close relationships, and internal world in ways that have made it difficult – often impossible – to write and speak publicly about them, even though I still have much to say on the topics of consent and gender.

What have I been up to?

I have been podcasting with the fabulous Justin Hancock all year though, so feel free to check our collaborative project out at megjohnandjustin.com, including our holiday special on giving and receiving coming out over the holidays.

I’ve also finished a couple of books that’ll be out next year: Life Isn’t Binary with Alex Iantaffi, and Gender: A Graphic Guide with Julia Scheele (our follow-up to Queer). This year The Psychology of Sex came out which I’m really pleased with, as well as Mediated Intimacy – an academic book about sex advice with Rosalind Gill and Laura Harvey. It felt wonderful to publish a book based on my research before I leave academia next summer to focus on writing full time.

The comic

For the holidays I want to share with you a comic that comes out of the more internal work that I’ve been doing. Last year for the holidays I shared my Plural Selves Zine – about how we can see ourselves as multiple rather than singular, and learn to communicate better across all of our selves. This is something I’ve been delving deeper into during the year – in my journaling and creative writing, as well as in my relationships. The comic is one thing that has come out of that work. I hope you enjoy it. You can check out more of my resources on plurality here.

You can either download the pdf of the comic below, or read it through the pics that follow…

ChalkBoard Comic

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Why this means the world to me

Hi. Thank-you so much for having me here today. When Ruby approached me last year saying she would like to subtitle the conference this time after my book Rewriting the Rules I was blown away.

Partly this was because that book has been such a labour of love for me. It was the first self-help style book I wrote and I spent a decade longing to write it but unable to believe in myself enough to do so. When I finally did manage to battle through my inner critic I had to distill years of painfully finding my own way with relationships onto the page. The second edition – which just came out – was no less difficult. It felt like I was co-authoring it with an older version of myself and that was not an easy collaboration by any means.

Also it is a huge deal – as a European writer – to be welcomed to a US conference. A bunch of us have been studying and writing about polyamory in Europe for some decades now, but it often feels like the – often more recent – work coming out of US academia and activism eclipses what we’ve done, and are still doing. Of course this is even more the case for Europeans who sometimes or always write in languages other than English.

This is particularly challenging for me now that I’m working towards making my living as a writer. It’s extraordinarily hard to make any money from that line of work, and it can feel tough knowing that I am – I think – saying something new and important, but that few folk on this side of the pond will know about it. This recognition – and potential to speak to an American audience – means the world to me.

So it was already a huge deal to be invited to speak at this conference. And then I checked out the event online. It quickly became clear that here, finally, was an intersectional non-monogamy conference. For years I’ve been frustrated by the lack of coverage of power dynamics and social structures, privilege and oppression, in polyamory communities, and now I was being invited to an event where these were foregrounded.

It also felt intensely vulnerable. The main reason by far that I wanted to write a second edition of Rewriting the Rules was because when I wrote the first edition back in 2010 I had barely engaged with intersectional feminism. This has been something I’ve done my absolute best to address since then to the point that the vast majority of the thinkers I now engage with come from this approach, but I realise I still have a hell of a lot to catch up on. As a white British author to be invited to speak at a conference alongside the likes of Kevin Patterson, Dalychia Saah, J Mase and Feminista Jones is a huge honour and one I really hope I can do justice to.

This is why I haven’t taken the easy road with this presentation. I could’ve given you my standard hot take on non-monogamy talk that I’ve been giving the last couple of years, but you deserve more than that. So I’m going to heed the words of one of my heroes – Mollena Williams-Haas – from the incredible talk she gave at the Non-Monogamies and Contemporary Intimacies conference in Vienna last year (available here if you haven’t seen it – please do check it out). She said that the gift we need to give to the world is to go into the places we are most vulnerable and to work – whatever our work is – from that place.

I’ve been holding those words close ever since then. It is why I’m finally dropping my academic and therapy work to focus on writing. It is why my writing now includes memoir and erotic fiction as well as self-help: so that I can be transparent about where these ideas come from and why they mean so much to me. I guess it’s about showing my workings instead of just the polished advice that comes out of all that painful experience.

Because if I hide that part of it away I can be just another shitty self-help author holding themselves as a point of comparison to the rest of the world as somebody who has it all together and is going to lecture you on how to get it right just like them. This is one of the things I hate most about self-help and I’m committed to doing something different. A major theme through all my work is that relationships are extremely fucking hard and we all struggle in our relationships with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world. I’ve heard it said that your mess is your message. Perhaps the message is stronger if you also share the mess.

So I’m going to give you a short introduction to the key ideas of Rewriting the Rules, and then spend the rest of the talk telling you about what I’ve learnt about relationships since the first edition: by going into the mess.

Rewriting the Rules

Most relationship self-help books make a lot of assumptions about what a ‘successful’ relationship looks like, and how you go about having one. They sell the reader the dream of happy-ever-after, and put the blame on them if they can’t achieve it. That’s why I called Rewriting the Rules an anti-self-help book. Instead of locating blame in the individual it starts with the shitty cultural messages we all receive about relationships, suggesting that they are primarily responsible for the difficulties we come across. Messages like the idea that you have to find The One perfect person who will complete you, that you must hide any relationship conflicts from the rest of the world and pretend like everything is awesome all of the time, that you should have hot sex with this person for the rest of time, and that that must be in a monogamous relationship.

For each theme in the book – love, sex, gender, conflict, etc. – I asked four questions:

• What are the rules that we learn about this aspect of relationships?
• Why might we question them?
• If they don’t work for us, what might we put in their place? and
• What if we went beyond rules to embrace the uncertainty of this thing?

So, for example, in the monogamy chapter I look at the rules that suggest monogamy is the one true way of doing relationships, and how we can question that by looking at the statistics on non-monogamy globally, and on secret non-monogamy in countries like the UK and US. I explore the pressures that the monogamy ideal puts on relationships, and the diversity of monogamish and non-monogamous relationship styles that now offer alternatives to this. However, I also explore the tendency we have – when stepping away from mainstream cultural rules – to put new rules in their place and hold onto them just as rigidly. I suspect we’re all very familiar with varieties of poly-normativity and polier-than-thou tendencies to put forward the one true way of polyamory – or the poly grail, as I call it. Unicorn hunting, treating ‘secondaries’ as lesser human beings, and becoming so poly-saturated that you have no time for friends or self-care are three examples that spring to mind (not that me or anyone else in this room would ever do anything like that I’m sure!)

In Rewriting the Rules I try to steer clear of suggesting that any way of doing relationships is inherently better, more normal, or morally superior. It’s more about appreciating that different things work for different people, and in different relationships. We need to start by unpacking all the cultural rules that impact us all – whether we’re inside them or outside of them.

What I’ve learn about relationships since Rewriting the Rules

So that’s where I got to in the first edition of Rewriting the Rules, and I am still proud of that book because that cultural piece is missing from so much self-help around relationships – even polyamorous relationships.

However it could be argued that I went too far the other way. Focusing on wider cultural messages is also a good way of avoiding looking too carefully at closer-to-home reasons for your own relationship struggles.

Also, while I wrote a lot about the need to look at wider culture to inform our close relationships, I didn’t make enough connections in the other direction. How can going into the mess and vulnerability of our relationships help us make a better contribution to wider society? In the last five years this seems to me the most urgent question as we all try to make sense of a world of Trump and Brexit, to deal with the vital questions raised by – for example – #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and the current moral panic around trans.

Here are four key ideas that I’ve woven into the new edition of Rewriting the Rules which I want to share. Obviously there’s only time to touch on them here – what they are and the implications they have for our relationships with our close people and the wider world. Hopefully they might be a jumping off point for more conversations and reflections though. There are free zines on my website covering most of these themes in a lot more detail if you find them useful.

1. Relationship patterns and intergenerational trauma

The first thing I wanted to include way more of in the second edition was relationship patterns: how they get formed, how they impact us and the people around us, and how we might be able to shift them. That involved taking a long, hard look at my own relationship patterns which have been something like this…

Did you see this show? It was one of my favs growing up. Every week this dog finds a new person and home, he helps them with whatever they’re struggling with, but once things are sorted he can’t stay and he has to head off down the road again. He’s basically a manic-pixie dream dog.

This was what I was doing in relationships of all kinds my whole life. I tried to figure out what people wanted me to be, and then I gave it to them. Initially that resulted in huge validation – I was good, and I was good for people. Once I was polyamorous I could be good for many people. What a good Littlest Hobo! But it’s unsustainable. And it hurt people and it hurt me, a lot. I’ve lost so many homes, people, companion animals. Too much loss. While I definitely don’t think the only relationships of value are the ones that last, I wouldn’t mind the chance at a relationship, home, family, or community that lasted longer than five years.

The cultural piece was part of this of course. The promise of being – and getting – The One definitely had a role to play in my struggles, as did the Hollywood promise that true love is the path to lasting happiness – whether in its monogamous or polyamorous form.

But – as with all of us I suspect – my history was also a big part of the picture. Perhaps the major piece of work I’ve been doing the last couple of years has been on this. Interestingly #MeToo was a huge part of it. My sisters and I started by sharing our experiences of sexual assault – growing up and in more recent years, including in polyamory communities. This opening up led us to sharing stories of our upbringing and identifying the impact of intergenerational trauma and how it had left all of us feeling that we were unacceptable unless we covered over our emotions and pretended to be something we were not. We now talk on Google hangouts between San Francisco, LA, and London every few weeks, committed to building a different way of relating, at least between the three of us.

2. Self and other consent

How can I challenge this pattern – which I suspect many others share – of trying to be what others want me to be? Self-consent is the key here. One of the main books that I drew on in the second edition of Rewriting the Rules was bell hooks’s All About Love.

My main takeaway from this was that love can’t happen – isn’t even love – unless we value ourselves and each other equally. That’s where you get to if you apply the same thought processes to social justice and to interpersonal relationships.

Learning self-consent is every bit as hard as learning how to – really – treat others consensually in a world of massive power imbalances and insidious social scripts, as Zach Budd highlighted at the Poly Dallas conference. It’s still a work in progress for me: a lifelong process I suspect. But it includes noticing when I let desire for approval, fear of failure, or a deep-down belief of my unacceptability override what I really feel. It requires cultivating kindness and practicing self-care: not the neoliberal capitalist bubble-bath kind of self-care but the Audre Lorde long-hard-look-at-yourself self-care that we all need to make a daily practice if we want to stop harming ourselves and others on an interpersonal – and a global – level.

3. The drama triangle

The other idea I brought into the new edition was Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle. If you’re not familiar with it it looks like this.

The idea is that, in relationships, we often get drawn into stuck dynamics where we go round and round this triangle. For example my Littlest Hobo dynamic easily puts me in the role of rescuer – coming in and making somebody’s life all better so that maybe – in the immortal words of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – they will ‘rescue me right back’. The problem is if you get invested in the role of rescuer you easily put the other person in a double-bind. They must get better so that you can feel you’ve been a good rescuer. Also they mustn’t get better because then you’ll be out of a job. It’s easy then to shift from rescuer to persecutor because you’re actually treating somebody pretty badly. And easy to shift again into victim because rescuers really don’t like people pointing out that they’re actually being persecutors.

Sound familiar? I think that this triangle has so much to offer what we’re grappling with in our wider communities. When #MeToo 2.0 hit some of the polyamory communities in the UK it took a familiar form. One individual abuser was highlighted, survivors shared their stories of his behaviour, and others aligned themselves with two different forms of rescuing: either becoming saviours for the ‘victims’, or bystander-apologists for the persecutor.

If we’re going to get to grips with the abusive dynamics that inevitably show up in our relationships and communities – in a culture founded on oppression and unequal valuing of different bodies and lives – then I think we have to stay with our capacity to occupy all three positions on this triangle. We need to get to know our inner victim, our inner persecutor, and our inner rescuer. That involves a whole heap of self-kindness, as well as the intensely vulnerable self-care work of staying with feelings.

4. Staying with all the feels in all the relationships

Learning our part in drama triangles – interpersonal and social – involves staying with how it feels to be in all of those places. For example, the work that my sisters and I are doing involves going back into our intensely vulnerable victim/survivor places: recognising that the various kinds of experiences we went through at young ages was not okay, and that the strategies that we developed to survive them made all kind of sense. It also involves recognising how much of that intergenerational trauma came out of us being on the receiving end of other people’s survival strategies, and how our own survival strategies have also now hurt other people.

Staying with our persecutor potential is hard as hell of course. It involves being with the guilt and shame and fear of our potential to harm others and to harm again. It involves going beyond the temptation to focus on obvious forms of abuse and non-consent – that we may not have engaged in – to the micro level emotional gaslighting, manipulation, and non-consensual pressure that we all take part in our day-to-day relationships, and the macro level dynamics of oppression that we all benefit from and are implicated in whether we like it or not.

Staying with our rescuer involves recognising our tendency to focus on obvious abusers and villains to avoid looking at the damage we do – for example by setting ourselves up as saviours, by not addressing our privilege and power, or by failing to acknowledge our limits and taking on too much only to let people down.

It’s hard fucking work, but we have to do it. And it involves developing our capacity to stay with all of the feelings in all of our relationships. So many of our survival strategies, relationship patterns, and non-consensual tendencies comes from endeavouring to avoid feeling the feelings that scare us: shame, anger, fear, sadness, loss. And of course, like a hamster on a wheel, most of these tendencies will fetch us right back where we most wanted to avoid. As Anita Cassidy puts it: ‘Feeling shit doesn’t kill you, but the shit you do to stop feeling shit might.’

An important caveat to this is, of course, with all these things (being present, staying with feelings, being vulnerable) they have to be done in a container of huge self-kindness, self-compassion, and self-care. Those things always have to come first and foremost. It’s easy to do these things because you think you  should, and for them to end up being far too much. So taking it slowly, prioritising kindness over all else, and getting support with it, are all vital.

I think we all have to do this work, and I think that doing this work will look different for all of us. For me it has included a combination of journaling about the hard stuff, sitting with my feelings by the Thames, reading people who challenge me on social media, deliberately practising showing close people my vulnerability bit-by-painful-bit, and – perhaps unexpectedly – tuning into my erotic fantasies and writing erotic fiction.

Right now it involves the painful messy work of acknowledging my relationship patterns with existing – and new – partners, and how far I may – or may not – be able to shift them given how strongly entrenched and sneaky they are. I’m convinced though that this can be a joyful process as much as it is an excruciating one – often both of those things simultaneously. And if it’s going to make any difference it’s one we have to do together in our relationships, in our families, and in our communities.

Further Resources

• Rewriting the Rules.
• My zine on self-care.
• My zine on staying with feelings.
• Meg-John and Justin podcast on staying with other people’s feelings.
• Love Uncommon posts on how to do self-consent.

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I wrote my book for Routledge’s Psychology of Everything series before the #metoo movement hit the headlines. However, consent was a central theme of the book, both explicitly in the chapter on how psychology has delineated ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ sex over the years, and implicitly as a thread running through all of the other chapters. In this post I want to explore some of the main things we can learn from studying the psychology of sex to inform the current – vital – conversations that we’re having about sexual consent.

A key point to make before we start is that while non-consensual sexual behaviour is a huge problem affecting huge numbers of people, the question of how we should go about having consensual sex – and wider relationships – has been notable in its absence in both psychology and popular discourse. Mainstream psychology and sexology textbooks rarely include this topic in any depth, although it has been a key area of study in the more marginalised areas of critical and feminist psychology. Similarly coverage of consent is shockingly lacking in sex advice literature. When I studied the most popular sex manuals, websites, and newspaper columns I found that consent was rarely ever even mentioned, and when it was this was generally only in the context of kinky sexual practices, as if other forms of sex were somehow immune from the risks of non-consensual behaviours.

From my reading of the research, and the psychology of sex more widely, I would say that we need to turn this on its head. The conditions that make sex most likely to be non-consensual are all frequently present in what we might call normative sexual encounters, such as sex within ongoing heterosexual relationships or hook-ups. While kink communities are certainly not immune from non-consensual behaviour, the understandings and practices around consent within those communities often make it more likely that people will have consensual encounters.

What are the conditions that make sex less likely to be consensual? Here are some key ones:

‘Proper’ sex

• The assumption that people must have sex in order to be healthy individuals and to maintain relationships
• The sense that there is a set sexual script that must be followed, and that only that counts as ‘proper’ sex
• The feeling that if this script is not followed then the encounter – and the individuals involved – are failures

‘Normal’ sex

• A high level of fear and shame about ‘getting it wrong’ or being ‘abnormal’ which makes any kind of open communication feel dangerous
• Rigid ideas about the gendered roles in sex, and the ways in which bodies should perform

How Consent Works

• A ‘no means no’ understanding of consent where it’s assumed that people have consented if they haven’t actually said ‘no’ to what is happening
• The idea that consent is given in a one-off conversation – or implicit interaction – that happens at the start of the encounter
• Imbalances of power between those involved which make it very hard for one or more to communicate what they want and what they don’t want before, during and after
• A wider culture of non-consent in relationships of all kinds

Sound familiar? These are actually the conditions under which the vast majority of sex happens in our culture, and the psychology of sex itself has – over the years – contributed to many of these conditions rather than endeavouring to challenge or shift them.

These are the conditions under which it becomes easy for those who want to engage in predatory sexual behaviour to do so and to get away with it. They are also the conditions under which the rest of us who would never want to act non-consensually towards another person – or towards ourselves – might easily find ourselves doing so.

Let’s explore what we can learn from the psychology of sex to inform our thinking in each of these areas. You can find out more about them all in the book too of course! Read more…

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I can’t recommend reading over 60 sex advice manuals. I spent several months doing this and it results in a particular combination of sadness, anger and frustration that I’d rather never repeat.

The reason for my painful few months was my new book, Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture with Rosalind Gill and Laura Harvey. The book explores the changing forms of “sexpertise” and how they influence ideas and practises around sex. In addition to sex manuals, we studied blogs, magazines, reality TV shows such as Sex Box (which actually gets people to have sex in a box), newspaper problem pages, websites, apps, and more.

We emphasise throughout our book that it’s rarely a matter of any sex advice being all good or all bad. Rather, sexpertise often opens up some things – in terms of ways of understanding or experiencing sex – at the same time that it closes down others. And the same text has the potential to be read in different ways by different readers. For example, somebody might read sex advice to get ideas, to enjoy sexual images, to find humour in it – or a combination of these.

But it’s also important to acknowledge just how deeply problematic the vast majority of mainstream sex advice is. Especially in this moment of #MeToo, and greater awareness of intersecting systems of privilege and oppression, it’s most concerning how few texts even mention consent, and how many assume that sex equates to penis-in-vagina intercourse, often depicted by endless images of young, white, slim, non-disabled, normative male/female couples.

When the panic around the messages young people receive about sex so often focuses on sexually explicit material, it’s about time we turned our attention to the insidious and disturbing messages that people are receiving from materials which are supposedly designed to educate, inform, and advise about sex.

So – in true sex advice “top tips” form – here are the top five problematic messages that we’ve found are perpetuated by the majority of sex advice. Read more…

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Meanings of unrequited love

Like pretty much everything in life unrequited love will mean different things to different people, and at different times in their lives. However it can certainly often function as a distraction from the difficult stuff of life, as well as being a projection of something of ourselves – or something that we long for – onto another person.

In this way unrequited love is quite similar to erotic or romantic fantasies more broadly. These frequently stem from the difficult times of our past, and reveal a lot about what we fear and long for. We often use them as a way to distract ourselves from the hard stuff of our lives. But, like unrequited love, they offer another possibility – we could tune into them and use them as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves: what we value, what we dread, and how we relate to others. There’s more on how to do this in my zine about erotic fantasies with Justin Hancock.

Treating people as things

The risk with unrequited love is that we treat it as something that ought to be requited, and focus on pursuing the object of our affections instead of tuning in to what these strong feelings have to tell us about our selves. Unrequited love is rarely actually about the other person – frequently we simply don’t know them well enough to really know that they are all of the things that we think they are. Also there is generally a large amount of objectification going on – we want them to be something for us, rather than loving them in their full humanity (more about the dangers of this approach in my book Rewriting the Rules). Putting people on pedestals is rarely kind – they often end up falling off and being hurt by the experience. Why would you do that to somebody you love?

There’s also often something in unrequited love about hoping for a rescuer or saviour: ‘The One’ person who will come into our lives and make everything better: A manic pixie dream person. Again this isn’t a cool thing to do to someone, and if somebody does requite that kind of love then it’s worth being very careful because you may well find yourself in the drama triangle (playing out the roles of rescuer, victim, and persecutor – not a good recipe for happy relationships – again see Rewriting the Rules for more on this).

Tuning into ourselves

However hard it may be, I would encourage people feeling unrequited love to leave the other person alone and to tune into themselves – perhaps with the help of a professional and/or self-care practices. It may well be that this person represents important sides of yourself that you have disowned or repressed in your life. What the love feeling is telling you is that you need to embrace those parts of you in yourself, not in another person (see my zine – Plural Selves). If you can do this then you may well find that you feel a lot better in yourself, and that you’re capable of better relationships because you’ll be bringing your whole self to them in future.

It’s a hard path for sure, but the way to go with this is to try to stay with these heady, intoxicating feelings and to tune into what they’re telling us about the ways in which we’re unhappy with our lives. Then – ideally – we can start the slow process of shifting and changing those things ourselves – with the support and help of friends, communities, and others – instead of wishing for somebody to land in our lives and do that work for us.

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This is a clip from my interview…

And here’s the trailer from the conference as a whole…

Do sign up if you fancy it here.

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For me the choice of who to pick was an easy one. S. Bear Bergman is an inspiration to me as a gender warrior and as a writer, but more than either of those things, as a person who values – and embodies – kindness in their life and work.

The Queer Bible invited me to write a personal piece about what Bear means to me, so I wrote about kindness, and about writing and gender, and about how the relationship between writer and reader can be another kind of vital relationship which challenges conventional ways of understanding and valuing relationships (a theme that both Bear and I both write about).

On a grey London day in March 2014 I took my seat in a small theatre above a pub to see S. Bear Bergman talk. I wasn’t familiar with Bear’s work: a partner had invited me along. I was accepting every social invitation I received at the time because I’d just relocated to London and knew that I had to start the long, slow work of building up some kind of friendship network. I was coming out of several years of self-imposed isolation following a tough experience of media shaming and the collapse of relationships and community that followed. I’d just gone through yet another painful break-up. Things with my family were strained. I didn’t have many close people at all.

Bear was reading from his new essay collection. Like all of his books this includes stories which are funny, thought-provoking, poignant, and frequently all three together. This time, following the birth of his son Stanley, the focus was on relationships with family of all kinds – biological and logical – including people – as he puts it – who share bonds of blood, of marriage, of wine, and of glitter. Read more…

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This is a great time for me to reflect on writing. I wrote the 2011 post after I’d finished writing my first book for a general audience (rather than an academic book or textbook) but a year before it got published. Now I’ve published six of those kinds of books, including a second edition of that first book Rewriting the Rules.

I’m working on two more non-fiction books as well as allowing myself to return to fiction writing: something I hadn’t done for years and have never published. I’ve always had a dream to mash up genre fiction like ghost stories and erotica with self-help and memoir. I’m finding that fiction writing is teaching me a lot about writing style and process that feeds back into my non-fic too.

Having long defined myself as equal parts writer, therapist, activist, and academic. I’m now just going for writer first and foremost, and seeing the other three aspects as things that inform my work as a writer.

Becoming a writer

So what are my top tips for becoming a writer? Before I start in with the practical stuff it’s important to say that – as with so many things – privilege of all kinds makes it a great deal easier. It’s enormously hard to make a living from writing. Sixteen books in and my yearly income from writing is still in the low thousands, and it would be in the hundreds if it wasn’t for one of those books (Queer) being pretty successful. Remember that the writer gets only a small percentage of published book sales.

Personally I’m extremely fortunate to have a paid job – at the Open University – which includes public engagement writing as part of my role and gives me some time for it, as well as having writing (textbooks and websites) as a main focus of the teaching work that I do. If your job doesn’t pay you to write, or if you’re unemployed and dealing with the benefits system, it can be much much harder to find time, energy, and motivation for writing.

The other main block to writing – alongside paying the bills – for most of us is our inner critic. Writing tends to bring up all our old shameful messages and pretty much every time I start a new project I face an internal barrage of ‘who do you think you are?’, ‘you don’t know enough to write this book’, ‘you’re going to get it horribly wrong and offend people’, etc. etc. etc. There’s something extremely vulnerable about setting words down on a page: like it might capture our essence and set it in stone, and then if people respond badly it means that we ourselves are bad.

So what ways have I found to write in spite of everyday commitments and an often very vocal inner critic? Here’s a list but it’s important to remember that different things work for different people. As I said in my previous post, no two writers are identical, and you might well find it helpful to read a few books about different authors’ approaches to get a sense of the variety of writing practices that can be helpful.

1. ‘Write with the door shut, rewrite with the door open’

I got this one from Stephen King’s awesome book On Writing, which I return to regularly. How I understand it is that when I’m writing the first draft of a book I just write it for me. I try and put all my concerns about how it will be received, whether it’s problematic in some way, even whether I’ll be able to publish it, on a high shelf and just write however it comes. If I start to get anxious I remind myself that I will be going back through it with all of those thoughts in mind once I reach the end (probably after a month or two to give me some space from it). I make myself a bullet point list of questions to ask during the rewrite so that I can put them aside while I’m writing. I also remind myself that I’ll be passing it by a bunch of beta readers before it goes out more widely who will help me pick up on any errors or problems.

Knowing that I’ll be rewriting with the door open helps me to fully drop into the writing and allow it to flow, instead of that horrible jolting, slow process it can be if you’re questioning every word as you put it down on the page.

2. Apply your ass to the seat

I’m pretty sure Stephen King has this one too, as do many writers about writing. It is SOOOO easy to procrastinate writing. It is SOOOO hard to actually start writing, especially a big project which can seem impossibly huge when you’re at the beginning. When I wrote Rewriting the Rules the person I lived with at the time suggested writing for an hour at the beginning of every day, no matter what. No word counting, no worrying about how good it was, just keeping the hand moving – as Natalie Goldberg puts it – for an hour each day.

After an hour, if it was feeling painful – or if I had other things I had to do that day – then I’d quit. But if it was going well – and I was able to – I could keep going. The first three chapters of that first book were pretty painful and I mostly stopped after an hour. But by chapter four I’d got into the groove and, when I was able to, I kept on writing beyond the hour.

The other good thing about morning writing is that you do it while you’re fresh before the day properly kicks in. I would usually do it after taking some time outside with a cup of coffee to prepare myself. However, of course, not everyone feels creative in the morning, and you need to tailor your writing ritual to you daily rhythms. Perhaps for you it’s your lunch break, or the hour after you get home from work, or the hour before bed.

3.  Go out and write

For me in those early stages of a project I often find it hard to write at home. I can always find a million other things to do there. It’s often really good to take an hour or two out somewhere. Somehow I find it easier to sink into it that way. Cafes are great if you can afford them. I’ve become an expert in which London cafes will allow you to sit for 2-3 hours on one cup of coffee, as well as on free spaces like libraries and museums where you can go and write.

You can also think about whether you write better longhand or at a keyboard. For me once I’m into a project keyboard is fine, but longhand writing can flow more easily in the early stages. I’ve heard of current writers who’ve written their whole first drafts in journals.

4. Write when it’s live (if you can)

This advice is a bit of a contradiction to advice about finding your writing rhythm or ritual, but when  possible it’s great to write when your project feels live to you. It’s so much easier to plunge in at those times when you’ve just had a great idea, or you feel the hunger for it, than it is to force yourself to focus when you’re not in the zone.

You might find that certain things tend to enliven you – like going for a walk and thinking about your writing, or journaling about all of the things you want to write about, or chatting with a fellow writer. Writing when it’s live gives you the experience of just how joyful and thrilling writing can be, which makes it much easier to come back to than if every experience of writing is gruelling and hard.

For me, having a couple of projects on the go at any one time, as well as my blog, means that I can go with the one that feels most live on a particular day. I also find that fiction or memoir style writing can work as a good warm-up for other stuff.

5. Consider your ideal reader and write for them

Something that has cut through the blocks at the beginning of most writing projects for me has been imagining my ideal reader. When I was writing the Queer book I got totally hung up on what well-known queer theorists might think of it and found it really hard to get started. Then I imagined the people who I actually wanted to benefit from the book: people who thought they might be queer, people who were struggling to get their heads around these complex ideas, people who were really scared of getting it wrong with the terminology. Shifting into writing for them helped a lot. When Alex Iantaffi and I were writing How to Understand Your Gender, we often thought about the younger versions of ourselves who could really have used a book like that.

6. Consider collaborating

Speaking of Alex, you do not have to write alone! We have this image of the lone writer in the garrett, but some of my best, and most enjoyable, writing has been done with somebody else. Somehow writing with a colleague cuts through the inner critic, because you know that what they have to say is awesome, and they know that what you have to say is awesome. Also you can worry less about the things that you know you don’t know much about if you’re writing with somebody who brings those areas of experience or expertise that you lack.

If you do collaborate I’d suggest choosing writing partners carefully. It’s a very intimate relationship, and like all of those it will have its challenges. Make sure you chat up front about what your writing process will be and find a way that feels write to both/all of you. Personally I’ve found it vital to prioritise self-care first and foremost and to put everyone’s well-being at a much higher priority than deadlines, or even whether the book gets published at all.

Supporting (and surviving) a writer

Rena also asked me about supporting the writer in your life. Again this probably varies from writer to writer, but I would suggest the following:

• As with other aspects of relationships it’s helpful to think about what you can offer, and what you can’t. For example, just because somebody is a writer doesn’t give them permission to treat you badly (and we can get grumpy!) It’s okay to expect us to be present with you when it’s our time together. Us being a writer doesn’t trump the things in your life that are important to you, for example in conversations about how to manage finances, childcare, or domestic chores.
• It’s fine whether or not you’re into the kinds of things that we write. Just because you are our person, doesn’t mean you have to love our work. We can find other people for that. Don’t feel that you have to be our ideal reader just because we’re partners or friends, for example.
• Give us space! We will need time and space to write in. It’s great if you can encourage us in that, whatever it means for us, whether that’s carving out a space in a shared home where we can go without interruption, or reassuring us that it’s good to go off on writing retreats.
• Expect the rollercoaster of emotion. Sometimes we’ll be convinced our current project is a work of staggering genius and will change the world. Sometimes we’ll be convinced that it’s dross and we’re just wasting our time. It’s great if you can sit alongside us in those feels, and everything in between. You don’t have to fix it for us, just trust that as we keep writing we’ll eventually find more of a balanced perspective. If we become insufferable it’s fine to take some space from us or encourage us to get some support from elsewhere!

Find out more…

My initial post about writing has a few more tips, as well as links to my articles about more academic writing.

These are my favourite three books about writing:

• On Writing – Stephen King
• Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg
• Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott

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