Catherine Queen

I’m sure I’m not alone in finding writing therapeutic. It’s not just the act of committing thought to paper. For me, it’s about constructing a story from the chaos. Perhaps fooling myself that there is some kind of order to this. That I was meant to go through this.

The universe doesn’t really work like that, I know. The gods have their two buckets and they just chuck stuff at us randomly from either one whenever they feel like it.

They just feel like chucking quite a lot from one side at me, lately.

Anyway, been doing my research and it seems like someone with levels as low as mine doesn’t have very many good options when it comes to fertility treatments. Pending further medical discussions, obviously. But it may be that I need to use a sperm donor.

I guess I always thought I would be a mother.

Conversely, I’ve never imagined myself as a bride. I’ve sometimes idly thought about a song I might like to walk down the aisle to (Roslin and Adam from the BSG soundtrack, obviously), or what style of wedding dress I like while watching ‘Say Yes to the Dress’. But when it comes down to it, do I actually see myself standing in front of all of my friends, saying, ‘This is the life I choose/this is the thing I can’t bear to lose’? No. The thought brings me out in a rash.

But I have often pictured myself with my children. Small vignettes, like picking them up, rocking them, kissing them. Taking them to the museums or the park. Making them little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Playing hide and seek.

I’ve seriously procrastinated on this post, and I think I know why. I’m ashamed. I only read 27 books last year. That’s the lowest number since I left university! There are a number of reasons: ongoing pandemic, working from home, putting energy into learning languages, binge-watching the Sopranos, starting to write copy freelance, dating etc. But they are all excuses. I just haven’t made reading central to my life and that’s bad for me in so many ways.

I’ve been doing a lot of self-growth work through a meditation programme, and one of the cornerstones is deciding your ‘authentic code’. I’ve enshrined learning and curiosity in my code, but another thing that’s important to me is loving. And that includes loving myself. Since I was three years old, reading has been a therapy, an escape, a relaxation. And I should make more of an effort to prioritise that.

She said, having worked on her first job until 7.30pm the last three nights, and her second job until nearly 12.

Anyway, I didn’t read a huge amount of YA in 2021. The YA community has become very fragmented, with many authors shifting to MG or adult, so I feel like I’m a bit disconnected from what’s going on. Additionally, I feel like contemps have been more prominent/popular, and they’re just not my favourite genre.

I also didn’t read as much non-fiction as I would like. I LOVE reading gripping history. But since reducing my reading time, wading through a hefty tome can be somewhat intimidating.

Reading The Mirror and the Light took absolutely FOREVER so that wiped out a lot of potential reading progress…!

As always, bolded titles were my particular favourites:

For the last few months, I’ve wanted to write about the process of ‘coming out of’ the pandemic. A sort of ‘Covid is over’ retrospective. Although, of course, we find ourselves now in the midst of Wave Eleventy, in this funny kind of ‘personal responsibility’ quagmire that benefits nobody except the chronically selfish.

This year seems to have passed in an instant, doesn’t it? Perhaps because from November to March, I was in near total isolation at my parents’ house, in a city I have never lived in. It was a privileged position, in many ways: I had food, a warm, comfortable house to stay in, and the companionship of my family. We watched a lot of good TV and movies. We went to the beach for bracing walks, when allowed, and, when restrictions tightened, we limited ourselves to a loop around the block.

But in a city where I knew no-one else, my social world narrowed to phone calls and a semi-regular roleplay game in which I played a drag queen wizard with the stage name Glamione Danger. When it came to the spring and cases had at last dropped a bit, I was so desperate to come home to my own life, it was a physical ache.

As for the rest, I hardly know where to start.

Sunday

I came back to my tiny room this week.

I hadn’t reckoned with the difficulty of returning to the scene of the crime. To smells and sounds of another era. To a mountain of undone laundry, half a pack of soggy Bran Flakes, a love poem tucked into the back of my food cupboard.

A dog barks. The pipes groan. I’m thrown back to last year, when I had hope. Even the way the light seeps under the blind, the shadow of my towels on the back of the wardrobe door, my boots tucked under the chest of drawers since I last wore them over a year ago.