Giving myself permission to be messy

Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ displayed at the Tate modern.

It all started with a Groovy Chick notebook.

I was probably about seven or eight. I wrote a story - in the aforementioned notebook - about a girl who has to search for her best friend, who it turns out is stuck in a magic mirror. I seem to remember the character having to find magical gems that slotted on the outside of the mirror and once this was completed, her friend would be freed. I thought the idea was great and asked my Dad to read it. The only feedback he gave me was that I wrote about what the characters had eaten for dinner a bit too much. I remember feeling utterly stunned that he didn’t think the inclusion of a great spag Bol was necessary to the plot.

Needless to say, I don’t think I’m destined to write incredible fiction but I have been ‘writing’ in some description for a long time. (As I’m writing this I can literally hear my inner critic laughing at me, and this is often the point where I throw pieces of work out because my own inner monologue doesn’t let me get any further.) But I’m choosing to push through that onslaught today. I’m tired of knowing that I am the person in my own way.

There is a version of myself that I regularly use to torture myself. She is ‘put together’ and productive and always grateful. She is confident in her abilities and knows that her thoughts and opinions are valuable. She trusts that her contributions matter.

The real me is fuelled on affirmation. I need praise. I am quite vain most of the time and very vain sometimes. I resonate intimately with that quote from Little Women when Amy says that she’d ‘rather be great or nothing’. For years I have sat firmly in my comfort zone afraid to pop even a toe out for fear that whatever I try to create will be awful. That it will be criticised or that those girls from high school that I’m still slightly afraid of will read my attempts at creating and make fun of it. But writing is something that I want to do and something that I think I could be good at. And I want to write what comes into my head and let myself honour those thoughts instead of leaving them in a notebook for my future children to find and dissect.

Last week, I saw Tracey Emin’s ‘A Second Life’ exhibition in the Tate. My main takeaway from the exhibition was that art is allowed to be messy. There were spelling mistakes in her written work and paint splatters on her canvases that didn’t look out of place but couldn’t be considered as ‘neat’. She purposefully displayed intimate pictures of herself while undergoing cancer treatment and living with a stoma. There were close up pictures of her vagina - half of which she has had removed. Her famous bed held pride of place - the menstrual blood on her sheets, the empty alcohol bottles and cigarette butts…

I was stunned at the vulnerability of the exhibition; how refreshing it was to be presented with an imperfect person, an imperfect life and art that reflected that messiness. I have been waiting to be in the right place, for the right (perfect) words or ideas to present themselves to me in order to create anything. I’ve spent years pining to be the kind of person who creates out of the kind of authenticity and realness that someone like Tracey embodies.

I don’t know yet what this space is going to be, but I know that I want it to be something. A place for me to document where I’m at, at this stage of the game.

And maybe I’m posting this because I had an espresso and the caffeine is making me feel braver (jittery) but I’ve got to start somewhere.