Time to grieve

Among the professional organisations to which I belong is the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. This, as you might expect, reimburses authors for the use and copying of their work. Last week’s email circular from the society included a link to advice from six writers (of television dramas) about staying sane during the lockdown.

You might think that lockdown is nothing new for writers. As Phil Ford says, for instance:

We’re used to isolation, and apart from the most fabulously fortunate, many of us are used to periods of not getting paid.

And Daisy Coulam:

You’d think writers would be in their element in these times. After all, we were working from home, wearing lounge wear and feeling anxious about work and our next pay cheque long before COVID-19.

Writers are suffering, however, just like everyone else, with the addition of writerly problems like working with children in the house and a short attention span because of anxiety. As one says, ‘Writing a couple of pages a day right now is a victory.’

Their advice includes the sorts of strategies we’re all using – routine, exercise, time outside, technology, comfort viewing – but the one piece that leaped out at me was this, from Paul Powell:

Allow yourself time to grieve the people/places/things you’re missing.

Some blogs – like I live, I love, I craft, I am me and Autumn Cottage Diarist – cheer you up. Others – like qualia and other wildlife and What’s cooking? – delve into both dark and light. And I’m going to admit here and now that I belong, I think, to the latter category. I see my blog as a place where I tell the truth, the whole truth (well, nearly), however difficult I find it to do so.

    I do try not to be depressing though, I do try to stop at a happy ending, but I can’t pretend that everything in my life is rosy all the time. I spend too much of my other life, my non-writing life, the one other people call real life, doing that (although I probably needn’t).

And when I read Paul Powell’s advice I realised that I could at last put a word to this heavy feeling I’ve been dragging around. It’s grief. And the thing I’m grieving most, I realised, is my novel. (See my post ‘Untethered’ for more on this, and maybe I’ll write in the future about why the end of a novel is a bereavement and why the lockdown makes it hard to move on emotionally.)

There’s a lot of pressure at the moment to be cheerful and make the best of things. After all, the people who are really suffering are the front-line workers. But, as someone brought up to believe that all emotions are wrong, just giving a name to my feelings, and giving myself time and permission to feel them, is helpful. And you can do it too if you want to. I give you permission.

It doesn’t mean I don’t count my blessings as well, or feel grateful for the work that’s being done by the few to save us all. I do so all the time.

Which is what we hope our new flag conveys, even though it’s different from the current norm.

Our new flag