My Departed Loved Ones Are Ruthless Motivational Speakers
Potholes, wordgames, and a Trimphone crow
Depression taught me to weaponize joy. Dark-energied people can’t spend more than five minutes in a room with me now. They get seared by the light and start melting, like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or, out in the open, they find themselves ricocheting off my energetic sphere like snooker balls.1
Your most powerful tool in these transformative times is to look after your emotional state. The greatest gift to you and your loved ones in a world aiming to sink you with chaos and fear is buoyancy and the means to achieve it.
As established, I’m joyful, in the main. Nevertheless, more often than I’d like, I fall into little pockets of despair. Potholes. Places the road got damaged and has not yet been repaired. I have spent the last eighteen years back-filling these potholes, but there are still a few that can burst a tyre.
I hit one this week as I started heading to my writing cabin for Day 1 of Proper Writing on the new novel, a novel that crashed through in the form of a title two years ago and now awaits me with 30,000 rough words and an opening chapter.
I acknowledged the building swell of fear on the horizon. I sat back down to do the work — clear the obstacle that threatened to push me into unproductive shilly-shallying. I tapped.
Fear? Yes, and under it, grief. Bereavement, even.
I am not over the last novel. The one that took me a decade of research, passion, hard graft, and revision. Half a million words written, a quarter of a million words deleted. Long hours on my arse. Nine months of long Covid when my brain didn’t work. Tears, hilarity, backache. My daughter growing all the way up. A horrible thing I can’t talk about. Maps drawn. Notes from my agent. Four months of restructuring. Finally: the best thing I’ve ever written.
But while, to keep us clothed and housed and fed, I earned a living teaching others how to write, my “hot new talent” reputation cooled. Plus Covid. Plus Brexit. Plus Tiktok. The book became unfashionably long for an industry wrestling with fractured attention spans and inflated paper costs. No one would bat an eye if I were Donna Tartt, but I am not.
The writing is very Demon Copperhead. The protagonist is a woman with serious balls. But, friend, I do not have Bestseller status. I do not have half a million followers on Instagram or the magic 10,000 Substack subscribers. The industry is risk averse, and I have a feeling I don’t look to them like a Sure Thing.
One day, maybe, I will be in the place where publishing that novel will make great sense to someone. I’m sort of hoping that place isn’t a coffin, but, yes, it could be a coffin. That place could also be my kitchen next week, but for this to happen, I have to let go of NEEDING it to be published.
This is why my coffin might indeed be the place. Say I can’t let go of this for however long I live, and then game over. Having left my body, the NEED will be gone. I will no longer be vibrating unhelpfully in the opposite direction, and like every frustrated artist before me — Van Gogh, Kafka, Proust — I’ll become a successful dead one.
I’ve started again after disappointment so many times, but this time? I don’t know if I can. I tapped, I cried, I worked through a whole load of negative statements, and after all that, I thought, maybe I should take the fucking hint? Maybe this is not what I’m meant to be doing. Maybe two published novels are as far as I get.
When you want something so badly that it’s hurting, you will never get it. I know this. I’ve played this one out in so many arenas. Like the time I wrote about recently when I desperately wanted a whole raft of things, including a lover. None of them could arrive until I gave up wanting them.
Want is a state of lack: see War on Want. It is all about not having. We get what we focus on. Ask, and it is given, even if you’re asking for a shitstick. Unintentionally, obviously. No one intentionally asks for a shitstick. (Though I had a friend—).
If we really want something, then we’re focused on being without it. What we’re focused on is lack, so we get more lack. This seems especially true if you want it in order to feel worthy. That means you don’t feel worthy of it now. And therefore, fait accompli. The universe reflects back to you how you feel about yourself. We are inherently worthy of all the things we desire, but if we don’t believe that, we can’t have them.
Everything about this process feels backwards, and Lord knows it isn’t easy. You have to feel as good as you think the thing you want will make you feel before it can arrive. You have to be in the vibrational vicinity of that level of worthy-deservingness. Real-life knockbacks, as time goes on, can make that harder and harder to achieve.
This is why surrender is so vital: genuinely deciding to be okay without it. Giving it up. Letting go and letting God, as they say in some circles. Or, as I saw in another note this week, Thy will be done.
Maybe I don’t get to publish any more novels in my lifetime because I’m too fucking grasping to stop needing that. Which honestly, makes it really hard for me to write another one, just for me, my daughter and my dog. My dog can’t even read.
With all this in mind, I decided on Wednesday that I would give up being a novelist. Farewell, the yearning for kudos and accolades. Yes, your mother didn’t love you unconditionally, but the publishing world will never love you enough to backfill that pothole.
I gave myself permission to ditch the new novel, even though it’s beautiful, and every time I open that first chapter, I fall in love again.
That done, with tears still drying on my cheeks, I opened (instead) the word game I’ve been playing for six years to do the puzzle of the day.
This was the puzzle of the day.
Did I laugh? You bet.
I am not unused to this kind of messaging. In fact, every time I decide (in a defeated sense) to truly give up, I get something like this. A loving slap in the face. “Quitter!” is the voice of my dead brother. With a laugh and a jovial barge into my shoulder. Time and again, Pete steps in to rib me and make me let go.
Laughter is really good for letting go. One time I was right on the verge of losing my house, completely at my credit limit, no income, and telling myself I couldn’t afford to have a cup of tea while I was out. Then I thought, what does it matter? The house is gone, Ros. It’s over. £2 isn’t going to make a difference. Have the damn tea. And also, spend that £10 on a Groupon voucher to have your feet nibbled by fish because you’ve always wanted to try it. It doesn't matter. Game over on the house. Have the tea and the fish pedicure.
That afternoon, my daughter and I sat in faux-leather chairs, our bare legs dangled into two aquariums, our feet being nibbled by fish. Laughing our heads off because it was ridiculous. Because it tickled. Because it was a little scary.
When I got home, there was a message on the answerphone. A message left at precisely the time I was a laughing fish supper. It was my agent. I’d been offered a high five-figure sum for The Marlowe Papers. I had let go and laughed, and the Universe had instantly delivered.
And that sum of money? At 4 am, half stirring, then remembering and smiling, I sat bolt upright. It was the exact amount of money I had asked for. The exact amount of my debt. The exact figure I had written down on a fake cheque from the Universe.
You can call it what you like, this big sea of Consciousness that everyone’s part of. Some people call it God, but that’s way too connected for me to religious repression and male supremacy. We get to play, for a time, in these physical bodies, but the connection to what lies beyond is always there. Maybe you’re tuned into yours, and maybe not. But I definitely have a team that’s batting for me in the ether (including my dead loved ones), and so do you. As I’ve eliminated more and more emotional static from my signal, the connection’s become clearer, and I’ve learned to take my signs as they come.
A recent example from that quiet patch between Christmas and New Year: we are driving to our daughter’s house for a Christmas movie. I’m flustered, feeling pressured. I forgot my crochet, the Christmas craft activity I’d taken up at my daughter’s insistence to try and relax when watching films (a salve for my ADHD). Though we are halfway to her house, I insist we turn back to get it. We were already late; now we are later. We set off again. Unwisely, while flustered, I read a message on my phone; a message that makes me panic about money. Now, I’m in a downward spiral. I know I have to stop, but I can’t.
Paul, driving, “This really isn’t helping.”
“I KNOW I KNOW BUT I CAN’T—” BANG!
Scary fucking noise. We pull over.
We hit a massive pothole. We burst a tyre. A pothole at a spot we had previously passed safely. Which we wouldn’t have hit, had we not gone back for my crochet. Or more accurately, had I not been shouting “I CAN’T [stop panicking about money].” Talk about get my attention!
Signs come in all kinds. Some slaps in the face aren’t so funny. And this one, of course, was going to cost. The jack collapsed. The breakdown service said they would be three hours. I left Paul there (I was freezing, he was not) and walked home in his borrowed coat, practising gratitude every step of the way to raise my vibration.
Last Sunday was a day of signs. Following an intense week, which included the funeral of someone who could talk to the dead (old Romany blood), Paul and I walked the dog in the Sussex countryside. It was Candlemas, the day after St Brigid’s Day, halfway to spring. We were crossing the Downs on a bridlepath between two fields when a large black crow swooped across the path, very close to us, and landed on a post. Then it rang, like a Trimphone. Three times.
“It’s for you!” Paul laughed.
“I think it might be,” I said. I’ve heard a lot of crows, but I’ve never heard one ringing like a Trimphone.
We walked past it. It took flight and, again, swooped diagonally across the path in front of us, landing on a post on the other side. Again, it rang like a 1970s telephone. Again, three times. We stopped and looked at it. It looked at us.
“What is saying?” I asked. “I wish I understood.”
Not knowing what else to do, we carried on. For the third time, it flew close to us in a long dip and rise, crossing our path, alighting on the topmost branch of a sapling. This time, the Trimphone crow rang twice.
We stopped.
“Perhaps it’s Claire,” Paul said.
I’ve read many times that the dead can come to us through birds. There are numerous accounts of close bird encounters following deaths. In the weeks after my brother died, I thought he was a seagull in the playground (long before I lived beside the sea).
“Are you Claire?” I said to the bird. “Hello, Claire! What do you want to tell me?”
The crow said nothing more. It perched on the hard-to-balance-on-twig for as long as we stood there.
“Maybe it’s just I am here,” I said.
“Okay,” I said eventually. “Well, thank you, Claire.”
We walked on, and the crow stayed where it was. And when we were out of its sight, we heard it take off, emitting a normal crow-caw, as if the crow’s body had been released back to its crow-soul and wondered what the hell it was doing there.
On the way back home, Paul pointed out a car driving obliviously, just behind us, in the coast road bus lane. For the whole three miles. We wondered why they couldn’t see the signs.
We turned into our road. And what was driving directly down the hill towards us? My favourite car in the world: a bright red, convertible, E-type Jag with the top down. Not a car I’ve ever seen on my road in 23 years. The car of my dreams.
“I think it’s a sign,” I said. “It’s a day of signs. Claire alerted me. And now this. My dream is coming down the road towards me.”
And let’s say it is.
If you enjoyed this piece, the most lovely thing you can do is share it with someone who you think will appreciate it. Or on Substack. Or on social media where no one gives a shit but you never know. It might be someone’s sign.
You can also, of course, soothe my sad, bruised, failed novelist’s heart and subscribe/upgrade. But whatever you do, hang around, because if you’ve read this far, you’re one of the special ones, and we all have to stick together, don’t we?
Over to you
If you’re thinking of jumping into the comments with unsolicited advice on the big novel front, please give yourself a kiss, and don’t. If you were going to say “Self-publishing,” then you’re new around here, and I’m sure you’ll catch up. This is a very old tale.
Do you look out for signs?
Have you ever had a wild bird message you?
Have you ever noticed well-timed negative feedback (like my pothole)?
If your dream was driving down the road towards you, what would it look like?
Do you speak Crow?
The melting Nazis bit might be invented, but for a real-life snooker-ball moment, check this out:
During the brief time I embraced catholicism (somewhere between the dawning of the age of reason and the age of fifteen when I actually did reason), I was often haunted by the image of a painting: "The Lord turned and looked at Peter" (Herbert Beecroft, 1927).
I mention this because since she died in 2013, I enjoyed much the same (imagined) look from my Mother on several occasions when I was, er Doing Something She Disapproved Of. This included ending a sentence with a preposition, given that Mother had once been a teacher of English.
But some years before that, I sat on a garden swing, late on a summer's evening, Chateau Goodenough in hand, asking the spirit of my Father (d 1979) why he wasn't sending me a sign for what to do next. The answer came through so clearly that I dropped the glass. Well, almost.
"How many bloody signs do you want, old boy? You're just not looking."
I’d wager that you’re familiar with the expression “birds before land.” In your case, it was a literal bird. I do look for signs. I still sometimes question whether what appears to me to be a very clear sign is actually that, or merely wishful thinking. But I’m getting better at going with my gut and accepting the gift.