Dear Kim,
You’ve just run out of the classroom in heaving, desperate tears. This feels like the worst thing that’s ever happened – and it feels like it’s all your fault. It seems that you’ve let everyone down – your parents, yourself, your school, and your lovely teacher, Mr Emery, who you’ve just told to go away.
Your head is spinning. Your heart is a bird beating madly against a window. You can’t catch your breath. The summer heat is suffocating – and it seems you’ve brought that on yourself, too.
But it’s okay. Really, it is. You’ve had an anxiety attack – that’s all this is. A trick of the mind. The world won’t stop turning because nerves have got the better of you and you’ve had to pull out of the public speaking competition. No-one cares about the competition. They only care about you. Tell the people who love you how you feel. Tell them what’s going on.
Holding these shadows inside yourself is going to cause you a lot of grief for a long time, and shame will cause you to make some fairly appalling decisions. Anxiety will trap you in its fist for thirty years, dragging you down, blinding you to your strengths and gifts. It will physically trap you in your house at one point, making you too terrified to go outside, making you unable to drive your kids to school.
It will cause you to not quite see the very brave and tenacious woman growing all the time beneath the shadows. The woman who gives of herself so fiercely: a mother, a friend, a lover. A writer.
You will do some outrageously courageous things. You will step out into the sun despite your
fears. You will even risk your life to save your lover and never quite understand how you did it. You will write out your heart every day – novels and novels of it – and although right now, here as you catch your breath outside the classroom, it’s unthinkable that you will ever be able to talk about your writing, you will overcome this fear too. In fact, these days it can be difficult to shut you up.
You still have anxiety – you will always have your struggles with anxiety – but you will learn to listen to those who love you, you will learn to speak through the shadows when you must, and you will never let anxiety rob you of the sun again.
Signed,
Your forty-eight-year-old self.
PS: And you really needn’t have worried about embarrassing yourself in front of Mr Emery. He can guess what you’re going through, and he’s a writer too. He’ll go on to become an esteemed Australian poet – and one of your biggest fans.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kim Kelly has written four novels and the acclaimed novella, Wild Chicory. When she’s not writing, she’s an editor and literary consultant – because too much story is never enough.
Her latest novel is Jewel Sea. Buy from preferred retailer:
CLICK: The Author People and for the next stop on Kim’s blog tour go to: A Bigger, Brighter World: Wednesday 14th September
Blog: https://kkauthorlady.wordpress.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KimKellyAuthor/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/KimKellyAuthor
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Wanting to honour the lost art of letter writing through this blog series, I also opened my fourth novel with a character writing a letter. And not just any letter. It’s a story — perhaps the most important he’ll ever tell.
The Other Side of the Season
Life is simple on top of the mountain for David, Matthew and Tilly until the winter of 1979 when tragedy strikes, starting a chain reaction that will ruin lives for years to come. Those who can, escape the Greenhill banana plantation on the outskirts of Coffs Harbour. One stays—trapped for the next thirty years on the mountain and haunted by memories and lost dreams. That is until the arrival of a curious young woman, named Sidney, whose love of family shows everyone the truth can heal, what’s wrong can be righted, the lost can be found, and . . . there’s another side to every story.
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