Day 10

Behold! the beautiful practicality of a door handle!

I have a problem: I’m really inspired to write. I can think of nothing else. I sleep late, very little, and very lightly; sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, with a half-formed thought trying to turn itself into a sentence (though, admittedly, this is often helped along by mosquitoes and/or coughing fits). I get up early in the morning, eager to start typing and deleting words on my screen. My computer is never off, and I’m never far from it. Today, I skipped lunch and anyone who’s met me has probably just gasped with shock: I never miss a meal. This is entirely unprecedented.

You’re baffled. You’re scanning that first paragraph again, looking for the problem. Inspired to write, you read. Surely that’s a good thing? Isn’t that what you’re there to do? You’re thinking she’s lost it; the poor girl has lost her mind. A little earlier than anticipated, perhaps, but it was inevitable.

I haven’t: my mind is exactly where I’ve always kept it. But I’m just as baffled as you. Because there’s something happening right now that I never saw coming, and it snuck up on me and it’s knocked me down. And that’s all I want to write about. Not my novel; not the half-written short story that sits in my Writing folder and taunts me with its unfinishedness. This.

I set out to do a thing for myself, a small thing, barely a blip on the radar of what people get up to every day. It was a big thing for me, maybe even monumental, but I didn’t expect it to matter to anyone else. I threw a pebble in the lake that was my life, and stood back to wait for the little plop! and the sinking feeling, but the thing spread out, in concentric circles, with me bang at the centre. What? It’s commonplace, to be at the centre of our own lives, and our actions often ripple out to those closest to us, but this thing is touching people I’ve never met before. It’s taken on a life of its own and there I am, still at its centre, blinking stupidly.

But I’m not stupid. I know this isn’t about me. I’m just a character in a story, the protagonist of this one, perhaps, but it’s the story itself that people are responding to. I seem to have inadvertently touched upon something universal, our need to believe in dreams, and to believe that our dreams will come true. It’s the Hero’s Quest, the backbone of every story ever told. The details may vary, but the quest is always, fundamentally, the same.

And though I’m obviously into the story – I’m living it – it’s people’s responses that I find truly inspiring. Because in the 10 days since I started this project, and in the 3 days since I launched the kickstarter campaign, I’ve been shown more support and kindness and generosity than I thought was in store in the world. People have literally gone out of their way to help me, stepped out of their own stories to join me in mine. Every day, they walk me a bit further down the path, saying nice things to me all the way. And more than that, more important, is that in starting along this path in the first place, in setting out to do this thing for myself, I seem to have made the path visible to other people. And in following my story, as I tell it, they are starting to make out a part of themselves, their own part in it. They may not be smashing windows to get past their locked doors yet, but they’re considering the possibility. This is what’s happening, and it’s incredible.

I set out to do a thing by myself. I thought it was a lonely thing, but I have never felt less lonely in my life. There is no shortage of adjectives I could use: Astonished. Astounded. Amazed. Stunned. And then: Grateful. Gratified. Moved. Humbled. But I struggle to put the words together to express how I feel: lost for words is another one. And yet I try. This is all I want to write about.

So that’s what I’ll do, until I get the words right, or until the words run out. This story is everyone’s story. And in writing my part in it, I’ve already achieved what I set out to do.

And on a metaphorical as well as a literal note: smashing a window to get past a locked door will only cost you 10 euro. Throw in another 5, and you have a brand new handle, so you can open and close that door, oh so casually, whenever you feel like it. It’s a small price to pay, for getting what you want.