Dear reader,
Welcome to my blog! Thank you for being here, and for giving my writing a try.
I’m excited to finally be launching my website and this initial blog post will mostly be about that and an introduction to who I am and what I’m about. I have so many ideas, thoughts and musings to share and I’m eager to start doing so over the next few months.
This website has been in the making for a while and will be a somewhat one-stop shop for the services I offer, the reviews I receive, the book and literary event reviews I write and blog posts that I’ll be regularly adding to.
While I’m a writer, I am also a mum, a teacher and a tutor. I live with a chronic health condition that sometimes disables me in a myriad of ways. I’m from a working class background, born in Liverpool, grew up mostly in Skelmersdale, went back to Liverpool (my favourite city in the world!) for University, and now live in a small town in Cheshire. I come from a big, close family and I’m married with two teenage sons (although now one is 18, I guess he’s technically a man!) I met my husband when I was 18 and, thankfully, the 22 years since have seen us grow and change together, rather than apart, as so often happens with relationships that start in the teens. You might find that some of my blogs call to you more than others, you might identify with some parts of who I am, but not others, and that’s absolutely fine with me. We are all so many things and I hope that here you read something that fits with you, that ignites a passion, or that simply makes you smile.
As I write my first blog, I try to imagine who my readers might be. I suppose I envisage you to be like me, but I hope that many of you are not. After all, as the late (incredible) Jo Cox, MP, once said, ‘We have more in common than what divides us.’ And in a ‘post’ covid UK, under a new labour government that many feel unsure about (though it seemed so much better than continuing under a Conservative one), I feel this to be more true today than ever. I think there are few families unaffected by the cost of living crisis in some way, and many still dealing with the implications of covid. As a teacher and tutor, I know that the attainment gap between middle-upper class children, and working class children, is bigger than ever. And scarier still, some reports suggests that approximately 100,000 children never returned to school after the pandemic, causing huge safeguarding concerns.
I think I was a bit of a weird kid myself, and that I’ve kind of been chatting to my reader since I was 5, although I didn’t know it then. I remember putting on this knee length skirt and jacket/bouse type top (the uniform of every cool 5 year old right?!), that I thought looked like a business suit. It was navy blue with round gold buttons, at least in my memory. Whenever I was alone, I would talk to the people who I felt were watching me. ‘So I’m going to pour the milk into my cornflakes, but I like to eat them quickly, so they don’t become too soggy.’ I would continue this commentary as I went through my day, explaining my actions as I did them, hoping that I was doing things the right way so people wouldn’t think I was silly, never thinking too much about who those people might be. And this was many years before I watched The Truman Show, so I have no idea where this concept even came from. I have never asked my parents or sisters if they knew that I did this, perhaps they will confirm or deny this when they read my post.
One of my favourite quotes about writing comes from Hemmingway, who once said ‘The writer’s job is to tell the truth…All you have to do is write one true sentence Write the truest sentence that you know.’ This is what I want for my website, my blog and my writing, I want it to be true. I don’t aspire to sound brighter, or funnier, or more well-read than I am. I hope you will never read it and consider me stupid, but I think I’d prefer that to you considering me pretentious. I just hope you consider me honest. So, I will begin with a truth; I have had bouts of anxiety and depression, with one particularly bad episode in 2019. This is something I rarely say aloud but it the truest thing I can think to say right now.
I am sitting in a Costa Coffee shop in Bootle, Liverpool, awaiting the results of diagnostics on my car, and the news of the inevitable bill that will accompany it. I had to walk for about half an hour to find this coffee shop and was in quite crippling pain when I arrived. I tried to order the plant-based toastie that I know Costa make, as I’m vegan, and was informed that they don’t do plant-based food here as it doesn’t sell. Not being able to eat means I can’t take the codeine in my bag that I so desperately need right now for my pain, without being sick. This is something I’m still weighing up.
Sometimes I am a sat in a school with a child, or lost in the worlds of my fiction, and I can forget that there’s anything at all wrong my health. Life feels limitless, the possibilities infinite. And then there are days like today, when I’m limping down a road, unsure of where I am, or where I’m going, and the pains in my stomach threaten to make me double over. When I feel like this, my mental and physical health feel intrinsically connected. I hate to feel vulnerable, and the vulnerability creates anxiety in my head, in my chest, and in my every breath.
To explain my health, my condition may seem overplayed. I don’t have a disease like cancer, or Multiple Sclerosis, or Parkinson’s, or spina bifida, or Motor Neurone disease, or the many other life-altering, sometimes life-limiting conditions that people think of when they hear the words ‘disabled’ or ‘chronic health condition.’ I have a condition called Crohn’s disease, an auto-immune condition that causes chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, and, for me, has caused a cyst to grow in my left leg, that is wrapped around my common peroneal nerve. The pressure on my nerve, back in 2019, caused me to lose all function below my knee and so I developed total foot drop. In addition to the excruciating nerve pain, I began falling regularly and often in public. I recall the school that I was working in, doing a risk assessment to reduce my risk of danger to the children if I fell. I would cry with pain in a cupboard, then pull myself together, plaster a smile on my face, and walk out to the class of 6-year-olds awaiting my attention, my consistency and the need to believe that I was in control and they were safe from the world in my care. I had the cyst removed in 2020 and, despite the negative predictions of doctors, with a lot of medication and physiotherapy, I regained almost all of the function in my left leg. Less than a year later, the cyst returned. They are much more reluctant to do the operation a second time. I suppose if I’m someone who cysts grow back for, I am kind of a waste of their resources?
I feel like I have started off my blog posts in a negative (although true) way, unfortunately, that is because today, the first day I’m giving myself to write this, I feel a little consumed by the cramping in my stomach and the throbbing pain in my leg. In reality, another truth about myself, is that I am incredibly lucky. I’m not really a ‘#blessed’ kind of girl, but I know that in a world where unhappiness, loneliness, desperation and tragedy is everywhere, I have a crazy amount of things to be thankful for. I say ‘things,’ but I really mean people. My people are some of the best people I’ve ever met, I know I’m bias, but I think even objectively speaking you would have to agree. And I hope you do when you learn more about them.
Is it arrogant that I think anyone will be interested in any of my thoughts or ideas, my pain or my joy? Perhaps. But as I’ve believed in you all since I was 5, I hope that you believe in me a little too, and trust that something I write will make sense to you, in this often nonsensical world. I can’t wait to find out.
Much love,
Kerry Ann