Keep on keeping on

I've recently joined a gym.
It's not unheard of and in fact it's pretty common around this time of year.
The gym is very nice, spacious, not too expensive, is quite near my house and some of my friends are members too.
Despite this - on my first visit there something about it unsettled me.
It's not the fact that they have a 'young person's gym' though I find that quite disconcerting (why aren't they getting fit playing team sports like we used to). It's not even the fact that I have discovered that I am not nearly as fit as I thought I was. What has struck me as peculiar about this is how it seems to reflect my life at the moment.

The fact that I can barely decide what machine to get on seems to expose how indecisive I have become recently, constantly changing my mind, procrastinating and rearranging things, I seem to spend more time wondering what to do than doing it.

Then there's the fact that once I get on the chosen machine I seem to spend a large part of my time on it justifying the decision I've just made in my head. This is something I do in real life too. At an age where promotions, proposals and pregnancies are defining the life choices my peers have made I, in the absence of these things, have become used to defending my current position in life as the exact position that I always intended to be, regardless of whether it's true.

Finally, when I manage to get going on the chosen machine and I actually get to the point where I am too exhausted to care about whether it was the right decision or not I flip into 'Countdown' mode. This can be how long on the next machine, how long till the next gym visit, how long till my next deadline, how long till my next lie in...

And it hits me.

I am literally running on the treadmill of time.

Everything I do has become a series of 'I just need to get to X point in time then I can fulfill X ambition/desire' statements.
I am constantly sticking markers down in the road ahead as if when I arrive there the marker will turn into a welcome party with a balloons and a brass band. "You made it here in one piece - let's celebrate". Which would be nice, if it weren't entirely fictional.
Don't get me wrong, there are definitely occasions which don't pass by without some sort of ceremonial rites of passage (usually alcoholic) but it just seems these days I am back on that road to the next three markers before I've had chance to let the last one pass.

I don't mind life being busy, I don't mind the relentless, exhausting pace of London life but my recent adventures in fitness have reminded me that sometimes being too wrapped in getting somewhere means you don't ever really get anywhere.

Getting back on the treadmill made me realise that I want to get off the treadmill. I want to learn how to enjoy and celebrate where I am right now and who I am here with.
They do say it's about the journey not the destination after all.
I'm pretty sure whoever said that wasn't trying to get back into their favourite skinny jeans at the time, but you never know, if my trip to the gym brought a metaphorical revelation for me...just maybe it did for them too.

Mirror mirror on the wall...

A very wise lady once told me that it is easier to hold up a magnifying glass than a mirror and recently I have been thinking a lot about this.
Why is it easier to look through a magnifying glass at other people than it is to hold a mirror up to ourselves?
Why is it easier to criticise other people's behaviour than it is to understand your own feelings?
Why is it easier to see problems in other people's scripts than it is your own?
What is it about human nature that makes us this way?
Is it because our eyes look straight out ahead of us and so our points of view follow suit?
Or is it something more complex?
A friend of mine recently asked why he could give qualified advice to others but not follow his own and I replied that if we knew what was best for us there'd be no need to seek professional help from people like him in the first place.
Similarly, if we all had the ability to follow our own advice we wouldn't feel the need to drink wine with our friends, laugh at comedians, sing along to songs at the top of our voices, cry at movies and do a whole bunch of other stuff that helps us make sense of the world.
I don't think it's good to feel confused or sad but if we didn't feel these things there'd be no need to talk to each other, to enjoy a little light relief or seek out a hug from a friend.
Wouldn't we be lonely if this was the case?
We might be able to achieve a zen like state of mind but wouldn't we become a little numb?
Sometimes we do this - we get caught up in the fact that we know how not to get hurt and we forget to take risks that might not hurt us at all.
I wrote a script a few months ago about this and I still don't have an answer for it but when I think about it I think about the magnifying glass and the mirror.
I think the biggest part of the learning process is making mistakes, then seeing them for what they are and then not making them again.
So I've come to my own conclusion that they are not two separate things, it's a two-sided object.
Most of the time we face the magnifying glass side out but we should remember to turn it round and use the mirror every now and again.
If, as a writer, I can keep it turning then I might just survive out there.
If I manage to hold the magnifying glass up I will learn what works but then I need to just keep writing and do it knowing that I will make mistakes. If I then manage to use the mirror then I can try to learn what mistakes I made and not make them next time.
If you hold the wrong one at the wrong time you might never be able to write another word.
So if you're struggling with something, maybe try the mirror out.
Just ask yourself what you'd see through the magnifying glass if you held it up to yourself.
And answer with what you'd tell a friend to do about it if it was them.
It's good to follow your own advice once in a while...because who knows where it will lead?

Have a little...patience

To me patience is a virtue that saints have and if you are a patient person in this life you will be looked after in every life after this.
I am not a patient person.
I am certainly a lot more laidback than I was a few years ago but I've still not quite reached the saintly heights of having patience.
I wish I had, if my desire to be patient was enough I'm sure I would be granted the virtue tomorrow, but (as anyone wanting to be a writer knows) just wanting something isn't enough to make it happen.
I'm impatient about my work - I always want to be further on than I am and I always want to start the next project and make the next contact which, according to the Palumbo book I'm reading, is a common thing for writers everywhere.
He says writers are always in a rush to get somewhere and what they should do is be true to where they are at that moment because that, more than anything, will inform their writing and that honesty to the moment will one day give you patience.
It seems ironic but true that if you stop rushing towards the future and enjoy the present you'll get where you need to be quicker and in better shape.
Pretty soon it will be 2009 and, typically, I've been thinking about what I hope 2009 will bring and what my new year's resolution should be.
I think now that my resolution should be to enjoy the moment.
I have plenty of deadlines in the diary already - I don't want to focus on the future any more than I already have without really enjoying the moments that might otherwise just pass me by on the way there.
It might not make me a patient person but then again it just might, but at least this way I won't be in such a hurry to find out...

Age aint nothin' but a number...or is it?

I've been thinking a lot lately about an anecdote I have grown a little too fond of telling.
In order to explain the craziness of the last 18 months of my life I tell people the story of my premature mid life crisis at 26 years of age.
I was born 2 months premature so I have resigned myself to the fact that I am likely to pass through most life stages earlier than most but even if 26 is too early for a mid life crisis it was a crisis none the less.
At age 26 I was suddenly quite ill and was off work for a few weeks and trapped in my bedroom for far longer than is normal. I looked round the photos on my wall and the stuff I had accumulated and had a sudden desire to change everything.
At first I thought it was a kneejerk reaction to being ill, but it wasn't.
Then I thought it was because I had moved a lot as a child and I was scared of being settled, but it wasn't.
Before I could figure it out I had the urge to start making a list.
I made a list of things I wanted but didn't have, things I had but didn't want and all the things I thought I would have done before I hit 30 years of age.
It was quite extensive so when I recovered I got to work on it straight away.
A year later I had gone travelling to Thailand, done a 6 week playwriting course and moved house. Another year later and I had set up my own business, raised £3,000 to do a trek along the Great Wall of China for charity, got on a Creative Writing MA course and changed jobs twice.
Looking back now I think it was silly of me to do everything in such a short (and very intense) period of time but ultimately my self imposed deadline helped to kickstart my life, not my life as it was but my life as I'd always dreamed it would be.
And here's the thing, if you ask yourself if you are happy with where you are now you might say one thing but if you ask yourself if your ten year old self would be happy with where you are now you might say something completely different.
I think at 26 years old I found myself spending some time with my younger self and I didn't like the way I looked through her eyes.
Not that there was anything terrible about my life, there just wasn't anything inspiring about it either. There wasn't anything that made me jump out of bed in the morning or that kept me up late at night.
Nowadays I have more lists of things that do both these things than I have hours in the day.
It's pretty exhausting but it can be exhilirating too.
Sure, there's lots I still haven't done yet (my latest joke is it's easier to get an MA than it is to get a date in this city) but there's also something I've never felt before which is...a sort of connection.
I don't know how to describe what it is I feel I'm connected to, nature, karma, fate etc but when I look around my room now I don't feel like I need to change everything and when I don't know what the hell is going on deep down I know it's ok because the struggle means I'm getting somewhere - that I'm taking a step on a path that's heading in the direction I need to go.
At 26 I had a mid life crisis, by 27 I had disconnected from my life as I knew it then and now, at 28, I feel connected to a completely different way of life.
I don't know what my ten year old self would say about me now (though I think she'd wonder why I don't own horses by now) but I'm pretty sure if I were to spend some time with her again it wouldn't result in any sort of crisis this time.
My life now isn't the one she dreamed about living but it is more likely that it might become it.
I'm still 2 years off my deadline and I hope in that time life continues to evade, challenge and completely surprise me.
If nothing else it'll give me a better anecdote to tell.

Good things come to those who...try, try and try again.

Tonight was another reminder of why I chose to call this blog Burnley girl's blog. As most writers will agree titles are incredibly important for what you write. I guess I am made up of parts of many different things, part Scottish girl, part London girl, part Media girl, part Traveller girl, part Student girl...but I am, and always will be, for the most part a Burnley girl.

Burnley just beat Arsenal 2 v 0 in the quarter finals of the Carling Cup and already the headlines are celebrating the Burnley Big Mac or the Burnley Beast and rightfully so!
This is the first time in 25 years that they are in the semi finals of the Cup, the third time in a row they've beaten a London Premiership team to get here and the fourteenth goal (including penalties) they have scored to prove they deserve it.
Watching the game on my TV made me feel both incredibly close to Burnley and yet so far away from it at the same time.
I longed to be amongst the crowd, my voice coarse, my hands raw and my toes frozen cold.
I realised that me wanting to be there wasn't just excitement at how amazing the game was it was actually me wanting to remember who I am.

Recently, a couple of people have told me how they have left me to figure things out myself because they thought I was tough enough to cope without their help.
I had started to feel that they'd let me down or neglected me in some way.
I know that although on the one hand, everyone needs help and I am only human, on the other, they are completely right.
The tougher things are the deeper you have to dig down into the true nature of who you are and some, if not most, of that is determined by where you're from.
The characters in my latest play are from Burnley and I'm from Burnley and tonight I was reminded what that meant.
People from Burnley are not afraid to be the underdogs and relish the opportunities they are given where they get to work hard at what they love to achieve their goals.
I should not be afraid of the odds being stacked against me, of being left to struggle on my own every now and again or of the huge amount of hard work I have ahead of me to achieve my golas and neither should the characters in my play.
If I can't remember that then I will be nothing more than an exile who is letting the boys back home down.
But if I can live up to the challenges I face like the Burnley team keeps doing these days then I know I will have earned the right, regardless of where I live, to call myself a Burnley girl.

I think I love you...So what am I so afraid of?

Everyone looks forward to the weekend and every weekend usually brings along an exciting event or time to enjoy yourself.
This weekend for me will go down as one of the weekends to remember not because it was the most action packed or fun-filled but because it was turning point of all the things that have recently come to pass and made me believe that anything is possible.

Nothing conformed to convention but it all exceeded expectations and the relief of things not going the way they should have left me feeling lighter than air.
Someone who's honesty had upset me greatly in the past actually gave me inspiration, a person who thought they'd let me down gave me a great gift by challenging me to do something I never would have done and a person who's talent I admired turned out to admire me too.

Most of all I completely and utterly fell in love with writing for performance all over again.
I have been struggling with one of my projects so much recently I had forgotten all of the reasons I became so committed to creating it in the first place.
Through a complete accident I was forced into writing a small piece of theatre in a very short space of time and it made me realise that the most important thing is an idea, that the possibilities are endless and that discipline is half the battle. I found myself in position which gave me a kickstart to all those things and whilst I wouldn't exactly describe it as a walk in the park I would say it felt like a refreshing sea breeze - neither of which are easy metaphors to summon when you live in the middle of a city like London.
I re-discovered that what you write is like the start of a relay race and it must be passed on to the cast and crew who then pass it on to the audience.
If you have written something just pass it on, the worst thing that could happen might not be as difficult as creating it was and the best thing that could happen is that it could turn out better than you ever imagined it.

For me this weekend writing for theatre felt like kissing someone for the first time.
The desire can completely take over you but the fear can be crippling and whilst the experience can sometimes be disappointing it can also totally blow your mind.
You know how to do it, you've done it before yet you have no idea what might happen so you might think about it for ages, you worry, maybe even talk about it too much, perhaps you procrastinate but then you do it - this intimate thing that comes from your soul - and whether it is good bad or ugly; it makes you feel alive.

Once you kiss someone once there's usually a lingering question about whether you'll kiss again.
You want to do it, but you want it to be right and you're scared of what it might lead to, or worse that it might not lead to anything.
I don't know if the things that happened this weekend will ever happen again or if they do if they'll be as good but there's one thing I do know.
There's lots of reasons to love whatever it is you love but there's always more reasons to be scared of loving it.
The only way to make sure one doesn't overtake the other is just to keep doing it.
If you're doing someting big, take a break and do something small.
If things aren't going to plan, then plan something different.
But if you don't keep doing it then you might forget why you wanted to do it - and that is definately scarier than anything else that could possibly happen.

Evolution Underground

After a night out last week for a friend's birthday I found myself on the tube heading home, admittedly quite tipsy at this point, discussing evolution.
Not monkey-into-man type discussions, more along the lines of how as a single seasoned londoner you evolve, sometimes without even knowing it.
Take my man pal for example - I have known him 8 years and in that time I have seen him evolve into a kind, wise man full of passion and patience.
Not that he wasn't any of those things to begin with and not that he isn't still as much fun after two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc as he ever was...but it just seems like both his head and heart have a greater capacity to be true to himself than they did before.
The passing of almost a decade since I met him has brought about many things that I never would have dared to predict, a few things I wish I could change but also more good times than I can even begin to remember - and a fair chunk of them involve him, or at least countless messages to his voicemail shouting "I'm by the speaker on the left - where are you?".
I know at times he's taken flak for being my mate and I'm grateful that he never let it alter our friendship, so that no matter what we were always able to talk a lot, laugh a lot and usually do those things whilst drinking a lot too.
The one thing we've never been able to do is be anything other than completely honest with each other.
That's why on a recent random Monday evening I found myself attempting to dispense relationship advice to him and trying to explain all this to him in a far less articulate way.
It sort of came out as "you're the same person but also you're a different person, you know?".
I don't think it made much sense to him at the time or to me actually until I heard someone say that as a writer, you have to make growth your ultimate goal.
At first I thought they meant that perhaps you should aim to grow by shaping your writing into what people want but what they actually meant was the opposite, that to truly evolve with your work you have to stay true to yourself and keep doing your best. If you do you will grow with your work and if you send that out into the marketplace then it will respond eventually.
In other words, keep giving them you until you is what they want.
I run the risk of descending into a 'to thine own self be true' cliche moment but I think the two conversations are linked and when I realised that I felt relieved.
My mate has grown into a stronger person beacause he has asked himself what he wants out of life and has been dedicated and determined to finding the answer.
Writing can be inspiring, frustrating, satisfying, challenging, scary and crazy all at once.
As a wannabe writer I constantly feel like I don't know what I'm doing and I keep expecting it to get easier but it doesn't.
As a single Londoner I feel like things are the same as they have always been but are also completely different too and I sometimes wonder if that'll ever get any easier too.
Growth never stops so neither should you.
Keep writing, dating, talking and laughing.
Keep giving them you until you is what they want.