I stumbled over the below in an old note book, and later an old blog post, its probably fifteen years or more since I originally scribbled down these words. Words written to myself, six novels ago, and at a very different time in my life. Its an old habit, writing notes to myself in any attempt to explain whats on my own mind. To explain myself to my self. I still do so from time to time.

I’m not sure where I picked up the habit. Certainly no one ever suggested I did so. I’d say its a form of self-inspired therapy but I suspect I read of it in a book somewhere and clung to the idea. I have always collected ideas and habits from books. This is one of the more constructive ones I think because taking the time to write yourself a note explaining yourself to yourself forces you to consider your demons, your actions, and on occasion consider how best to deal with them.

The place I write from is not a happy place.
This was a lesson learn the hard way, but a lesson learned hard, is a lesson learned well.
But all the same it is a bitter kind of lesson.
Writing is not one of the things that take me away from the unhappy place. That too was a hard lesson to learn.
But the hardest lesson to learn was perhaps that in order to write I need that well of anger, that core of rage, that distrust of the world, that unrepentant cynicism with which I find I view the world, when I reside in my unhappy place.
If that all sound a tad dark, that is only because you need the dark to make sense of the light, and writing is how I make sense of the darkness.
It is a strange dichotomy, writing is my light. My beacon. Yet for it to exist I must first be in the dark, for it is there I find whatever it is that drives me to write, the hunger and need to express my thoughts and ideas all stem from there.
There is, I hope, humour, hope, and humanity in my writing, and when its good I know it is good. When it works it flows like water, ideas become babbling brooks and serpentine streams rivers ever flowing into oceans the wash on other shores.
But it all starts in the dark unhappy places of my soul, the dark well spring, and my struggles to make sense of everything that life is…

I maintain no preconceptions that these words are in anyway profound, least not to anyone but me. They do however remain true, writing holds the dark at bay, for which I am ever grateful, and so while the world is not the world in which I wrote them, nor my life the life I was living when I did, the words ring as true to me now as when I first scribbled them down.

Often these days I scribble things down in other ways than tatty old note books, though I have many tatty old notebooks and if anyone tries to take them from me there will be tears… Sometimes I do so and I don’t even realise I am in effect still writing notes to myself. Notes to explain who I am. I scribbled the below as a comment on a friends blog, it wasn’t till stumbling across the notes in an old blog post a few days later above that I realised what I had done…

I like my anger, without it I am not sure who I am
I bottle it up in tight little jars. Seal it within myself.
Turn it, mould it, hammer it and temper it.
Then, when it can not be held down any more. When it has been refined to a glowing edge. I use it, and poor it into words.
My anger becomes creation, focused it becomes a positive force

Still writing notes to myself to explain my inner demons. As self-therapy’s go its less destructive than throwing Molotov cocktails.