black dogs

I began this year on a hopeful note, upbeat and glad to see the back of 2010 which was, by all accounts, one of the worst of my life. I tidied my desk, brushed the dust off my manuscripts and sat down to write. Things went fairly well, I wrote the prologue to a novel I’m redrafting and I was pretty happy with it. So why, at the end of the second week of 2011 do I feel that familiar and unwelcome heaviness pressing down on me?

I hate the fact that I spent so much of last year fighting black dogs as it was the first complete year of my daughter’s life and the expectation was that it should have been one of the best of mine. I’m having a little trouble reconciling with that. When I was a child, I remember my mother telling me that us kids were the best thing that ever happened to her. It makes me wonder if I have my priorities wrong. But the truth is that I feel as if I’m shrinking towards failure.  Each day that passes brings me closer the end of my life from where I’ll look back and see this stretch of darkness following the relative success of my debut novel. Last night I watched a movie. In it one middle aged guy says something about happiness being about accepting the life you end up with instead of pining for the life you’d planned. I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut. Is that really what it takes to be happy?  Do I need to let go of my dreams and aspirations and just live in small moments, find deep meaning in the unexceptional, accept my inner suburbia? Is this all there is left? For most it’s enough and I find myself questioning why it isn’t enough for me. I am exceptionally blessed, I have a beautiful child, a husband who loves me, even if it sometimes feels as though he’s stopped seeing me as a person, good friends. We have a home of our own, two cars, a flat screen TV and a SMEG oven with gas hob.  Then why do I feel like I have a shopping mall Christmas tree covered in sparkly decorations but with empty boxes wrapped in glitzy paper instead of real presents?

When I returned to South Africa four years ago, I thought I could carry the success I had achieved in London back with me. My hopes and aspirations soon turned to anxiety when I found that doors that had been opened to me in London were nailed shut in Cape Town. London was not an easy city to crack, but by the end of my first year I’d already made friends with other writers and poets and I knew, don’t ask me how, that I could carve out a life for myself as a writer. In the first two years of living in Cape Town, I went to every literary event I heard about; book launches, The Book Fair, The Franschoek Festival, Balidisha Poetry Exchange etc etc. I went alone because it’s hard to convince people with no interest in books to go to a literary event, even one with free booze. Looking around I didn’t see anyone vaguely approachable. It didn’t help that I’m shy, but it also didn’t help that the Capetonian’s reputation of being cliquey turns out to be true. So I clung to my only hope of carving out a new life as a writer for myself, a successful second novel.  Perhaps that pressure is what made it unpublishable. Whatever the reason, I now have no rubber dingy to cling to, and I’m reaching the point where I’m getting tired of kicking my legs to stay afloat.