This is a Sad Ruby Story, isn't it?
Musings on writing about big bad sad things
🚨 As the title suggests, this piece covers subjects that readers may find upsetting, read with caution.
It’s a bit of a joke now between me, my husband and our close friends. We’ll be sat together at a pub or café or round someone’s flat sharing stories from the time before we all knew each other, and just as we’re all really laughing, I’ll launch into a story I think is funny … only to realise it really isn’t. Slowly, I’ll trail off mid-anecdote as everyone’s smiles become looks of concern, sympathy, or mild horror.
We call them Sad Ruby Stories.
What I find oddly charming about Sad Ruby Stories is that they predate all my therapy, SSRIs and beta blockers, mental collapses and the years of denial, horrific coping mechanisms and lying through my teeth. Sad Ruby Stories have existed in some form since I was yea high. They demonstrate, in their lovely, hopeful ignorance, how when I – or rather we – don’t interrogate our lives and the narratives given to us, we are in danger of being trapped by them.
I could and will write so much about this, and about childhood trauma, PTSD, anxiety and depression –
– but this mental health awareness week I want to talk about…
🌻 Writing About Past Trauma 🌻
Hooray!
It’s taken Bad Things: terrible behaviour from me, career-damaging periods of sick leave, self harm, broken friendships, suicide attempts, hospital stays, time away from and fall outs with my family, most of my husband (Phil)’s sanity.
Hard, Frustrating and Complicated Things: over a decade on various NHS therapy waiting lists, crisis teams, CBT, private therapy, high-dosages of various anti-depressants, misdiagnoses.
And a whole lot of other Wonderful Things: that same family I fell out with, friends, books, music, the sea, greenery, cats, what was left of Phil’s sanity –
For me to feel safe enough in myself to really talk about what happened to me when I was younger. And if my mum hadn’t died in early 2024, I don’t think I would feel safe writing about it publicly.
But the big question I’ve been grappling with recently is should I even write about it at all? My agoraphobia and panic attacks are completely gone, my sad days are few and far between and I am “The happiness I’ve ever been” – a sentence I miswrote in my journal and have decided is dead poetic. Why relive the past?
Because annoyingly, I’m a writer. It’s the only thing I ever really want to do.
And this is it, this is my big story. This is the thing within me that wants to get out. I can write around it, I can give you rambles, imaginings and asides, but all I really want to do is say “Look, this stuff happened, can I tell you about it?”
Everything I ever write, even first words books and poems about woodlice, have the big bad, sad things and all their wonderful moments of accompanying joy running through them. If I don’t tell you about it somehow, if I don’t get the words out, it’ll just pour out some other way, or else I’ll bite my tongue bloody.
Which is why now, on top of ghost-writing, editing and working on my portfolio of children’s book texts, I’m half-frantically writing autofiction that’s also sort of a reimagining of Homer’s The Odyssey. Why?
“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues ... All of us, when in deep trauma find we hesitate ... The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.”
— from the incredible Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? by
I am letting ancient texts map my story, because Greek myths were the first stories that took me out of myself. Now in my reading and writing, I work to trace back through the breadcrumb trail of books I’ve read and try to use what they’ve taught me to write forward, to create my own path.
And how could I not choose The Odyssey? all my life has been about finding a place to call home; about feeling safe, trusting love to stay, learning to stop myself from pushing it away. My life now is my Ithaca, and I want to tell you how I got here.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, or as Phil describes it, like getting a job in a gun factory making triggers. I have faith though, now, that I have enough happiness and love in me to meet the inevitable waves of anger, sadness and fear…
But I’ll keep you posted.
This is beautiful, the happiness I’ve ever been ❤️. You articulated exactly how I feel about writing, my trauma actually fuels it, but like you said, it’s there always and I’m just finding new ways to talk about it. Thanks so much for sharing this