The Frazzled English Woman

Tag: writing

  • Sol Orietur

    Today’s blog begins in a rather pretentious manner: I whip out a latin phrase and feel all smug and clever about myself (I know you are a tiny bit impressed).

    ‘Sol orietur’- the sun will rise

    Other than dazzling you with my latin, I thought this phrase particularly apt for this time of year.

    Picture the scene:

    It is February and that smudgy, grey, damp kind of weather which is quintessentially English. Everything feels like its going tits up:work is never ending, your shoes are constantly soggy and you cant remember the last time you left the house without your thermal tights.

    You just dropped your book in a puddle and now you’ve trodden in a dog poo. You have stopped saying ‘this is the last straw’ because there is already a flipping haystack.

    *big sigh*

    But alas! From behind the cloud an unfamiliar yellow globe appears. Warmth, light and, dare I say it, hope? You can feel that bitchy comment you were about to make evaporating into the air, a new optimistic personality defrosting.

    It’s at this point in the year, when there’s that first nice sunny, ‘springy’ day, that I start feeling that everything is going to be ok again. I start smiling at strangers and enthusiastically whistling songs by Tom Jones for no reason at all.

    But I forget all about this day every year.

    I forget because, in the depths of winter, it feels like it will never not be winter and that eternal sog and grey are inevitable.

    But it always arrives- no matter how soggy and grey the winter has been.

    It is easy to feel good when that day does come and the sun warms your back. You feel like it never left.

    But it is not easy to trust in that day before it comes because you do not know how many more soggy days you have to face.

    So whatever you are doing, whatever you are working on or struggling through, just remind yourself that that day is on its way. Keep doing what you are doing, keep going. The good will come, the hard work will pay off- you just have not seen it yet.

  • Pushing Past Perfectionism: An Exercise in Deliberate Imperfection

    In classic Frazzled English Woman style, I created this blog 5 months ago and have a whole 2 posts to show for it. Where are the blogs, you may ask? Well, the answer to this is plain and simple: I don’t know.

    It was never the perfect time to sit down and write; I was always a tiny bit tired, a little bit distracted. The perfect conditions for the perfect article had never aligned.

    But as we know, this blog is not about being perfect. Here we laugh in the face of perfection and champion ‘the messy,’ ‘the disheveled,’ ‘the silly,’ ‘the shabby’ and ‘the imperfect.’

    Eww, I just got the ick from myself, but you know what I mean.

    So, in a sudden strike of inspiration, I set myself a challenge: to write a whole blog- with no editing or rewrites- and post it in the same sitting. It did not have to be good; it just had to be posted.

    I felt so devious, so mischievous at the prospect of creating something that was deliberately bad and posting it on a website open to the public, even if it was only for two viewers (my mum, and then my mum again).

    I felt slightly nervous and nearly changed my mind almost immediately. But then I noticed something very curious indeed. The less I cared about the words I was writing and the standard I wanted my writing to be at, the easier the words flowed from me. The opening few lines of this blog (which would usually take me a good half an hour to think about) flew by. I wasn’t reading and rereading, dwelling on the past errors I had made, the clumsy blunders in my punctuation or choice of words. All I was thinking about and am thinking about are the words on this page, the present moment.

    But it did make sense. If I imagined my written words as people, it was no wonder they were more willing to come out when they were not being scrutinised or judged, moved around in dizzying orders before I finally settled on the right place for them. I was welcoming any words to the page wholeheartedly, even if they were, frankly, a bit ugly.

    Perhaps then the resolution I should be taking from this exercise is this: there are no perfect conditions, perfect timings or places to do what you want to do. The only person creating the rules is you. It is possible to push past the perfectionist voice in your mind, but first, you have to become comfortable with all the ugly bits too and accept the process as a whole. Otherwise, as we have seen (in the sparsity of vlogs on this website), things simply will not happen.

    So, there you have it. A rather unconventional, imperfect blog. Do I want to edit every single word of this? Yes. Will I delete it later? Probably. But it does not matter. For now, I have conquered my inner perfectionist.

    However, it will be interesting to see if I heed my own advice on this one. Maybe it’s safer to expect the next instalment in, let’s say…

    another 5 months?