This dark little prison

I have this recurring nightmare – sorry, it’s another dream saga – in which Frog and I have moved from our lovely semi-remote house with views into a village with – shock, horror – neighbours and no views. For a long time I didn’t understand it but when I wrote my autobiography* a few years ago it started to make sense.

    My parents took an instant dislike to Frog because he was the wrong class and because he had no money, and I’ve never quite recovered. That is one explanation for the dream – their windows overlooked ours, they interfered with our personal idyll, and still do (in my psychology, not in a practical sense).

    Another explanation – or perhaps it’s the same one, in a different manifestation – occurred to me as I was writing my daily pages this morning (sitting in a field while the dog rolled in something no-doubt-smelly in the distance). I’d got my knickers in a complete twist about the (small) numbers of people who read my blog. What was the point of carrying on? I wondered.

    Then I realised that I’m not yet ready to have lots of followers. The thought of that sort of pressure fills me with horror. I don’t want to have my psyche pulled this way and that (as it is when I’m with other people, as I’ve mentioned before http://www.belinda-whitworth.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/empathy.html  **, and as I imagine it would be if lots of people actually read what I wrote).

    Writing The Novel feels like a step into that big critical tumultuous world, which is why I’ve frozen, why my creativity in that respect has flown out of the window, why I feel like I’m blind at the moment.

    I can’t stay in this dark little prison forever though.

* Which I did as the result of a writing weekend with Roselle Angwin (www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk **), not because I think I'm a celebrity.

** And I do apologise for not being able to do links properly at the moment. I don't know whether it's Blogger or my computer.