coffee off the clock is a weekly column full of musings on life since i left my 9-5, and building a life around writing. join me for a coffee every week and follow my journey!

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i look around to the dust on the bookshelf. the unmade bed. windows have not been wiped, floors have not been mopped and this week, it doesn’t feel like an emergency. god, ailsa, who you’ve become? and for a moment, i actually smile. i breathe a little lighter. i’m a lot less militant than i was before. i’m lounging on a camp chair in the garden with my second coffee of the day in my favourite jumper.

i remember waking up to a phrase repeating in my head before i went on holiday: ‘an army of wooden soldiers’. i didn’t get it then. but god, do i get it now. i had marched myself hollow. i left no room for play or experiment. my shoulders had become stiff. my neck had formed new knots. no wonder that mirror project called to me persistently. it was telling me it was time to…play. and sometimes i find every excuse not to. i sit there with arms folded thinking ‘life is such a serious thing,’ until i feel the rupture of a wise french voice in my psyche that tells me oh no, ailsa, c’est bien absurde. i miss my albert camus era.

august is always the most financially tight month for us: i’m in between switching payment models for my writing class and majd is just about to start his masters in september. so, reader, galavanting for brunches will be few and far between in the coming weeks but i could’ve made that a really serious thing. but it’s no reason to stop enjoying the more ordinary things at home, beginning today. i didn’t have much of a sweet tooth or a big appetite so stuck to a homemade vanilla latte (that coffee machine was our best investment) and a wee slice of toast with butter.

the last time i wrote to you, i was in the depths of my struggle with my book, banging my head against the keyboard and wondering why the flame in my belly had dwindled in the recent weeks. but i know it very well. in fact, i taught it to my class: it’s the inner critic. ‘perfectionism is just fear in high heels,’ i heard liz gilbert (author of eat, pray, love) say in a podcast one time.

she talked about how we plaster ‘perfectionism’ on our CVs; how we proudly name it as our ‘worst trait’ in job interviews: “oh you know, i’m just such a perfectionist” we say with a wry smile and knowing eyes. but for creatives, it’s undoubtedly the sand we pour over our own flame. and every few months, i’m reminded that i’m not immune to it. but i do get better at understanding and remedying it.

if you’ve ever felt like you have a foreboding old man’s gaze inside of you calling you foolish or an idealist; or a stern old woman who slaps you on the wrist when you hit a wrong note, use a wrong word or colour outside the lines: then you’re encountering the shadow side of what Jungians call the senex, which translates into latin as ‘old man’.

like everything, the senex has a dual nature and the same archetype in us that’s needed for boundaries, structure, wisdom and long-term endurance, when unintegrated, when allowed to run rampant with no real understanding, becomes a tyrant obsessed with rigidity, melancholy and control. the antithesis to this i have found is to employ the inner child. play is an awfully annoying thing to the stubborn old man in you.

i tend to relate to the old man archetype more than the old woman version of the senex. i’ve always felt, even as a little girl, that i had a wiser grandfather type figure that acted like a voice of reason and guidance within me. and i always associated it with two symbols: an owl and the mountain.

i could never understand that when driving through the highlands, or even on the drive to my parents’ house at colintraive, i’d stare at the mountains in awe, feeling almost ‘fathered’ by them as odd as it sounds. i always felt like they were keeping a secret from me that i wasn’t old enough to know. i think it’s because mountains are all knowing. they’ve been here long before i. they’ve seen things i have yet to see. and they make me feel my place within this world, without making me feel…too small.

i think back to the poem i wrote a few months ago called play the fool. and poems are never something i can force, they trickle into my awareness fully formed but not in full view, and i just have to trace each part, bit by bit, into reality. they are never truly my poems. they belong to something bigger than me. i’m just grateful to be the medium in which it wants to flow through:

Walk with me,
while I collect my spilled sorries
like litter on the boardwalk.

Those small years I
forgot I count.

And I’m thinking,
maybe I could make
something of these —
the fragments of a forgotten self,
something that counts.

Let’s stroll a little while I think.
I’ll play the fool
and you, the wise man.

Will you give me permission?
Because I’m not fond of asking.
Oops, forgive me.
I’ve been compelled to ask anyway.

Can I make something of these years?

And forget the war and waves,
and the big blue hands on either side
of this spinning marble.

Can I just be glad to be somewhere,
playing in-between,
and getting it all so wrong?

The years that I was sorry for being alive,
and full of feeling,
when you were laughing.
And truth be told,
I should’ve been laughing, too.

You knew there was something
in here that counts.
You knew there was something made of meaning.

And you, wise man, knew
it all began by playing
the fool.

and poems to me are like medicine. so re-reading this, i felt like i was already given the medicine to my sad plight of struggling to write the book and struggling to continue my mirror project when my flowers didn’t turn out like i wanted them. it all began by playing the fool.

all this to say that after writing to you last week, reader, i was in a very desperate state. i knew my problem and i just needed the solution to smack me in the face. and it did. i opened my women who run with the wolves book and right there before my eyes was a paragraph i desperately needed to read, and these are the exact words:

“so what is the solution? do as the duckling does. go ahead, struggle through it. pick up the pen already and put it to the page and stop whining. write…shut yourself in a room with a ceiling or in a clearing under the sky. do your art. generally, a thing cannot freeze if it is moving. so move. keep moving.”

and so with a spontaneous gumption, i struggled through the scene i was scared to write. and it felt painful. it felt poorly written. i was heckled by a cynical old man inside of me. but i kept writing. and wrote myself all the way through to the next scene and almost couldn’t stop. what was once painful, became joyful, and slowly but surely, i unfroze. i reached 13,000 words. i now have 40 pages of A4 paper full of my writing. a book no longer in gestation, but in the process of being born. and that can’t happen without the labour pains.

until next week reader, may all your coffees come with the realisation that a thing cannot freeze if it is moving, so keep moving. or i might go a step further and say keep playing. ☕️😎

– ailsa x