I am awoken, like much of Edinburgh’s population, at around 3:20am by a rare thunderstorm. I get up and sit at the living room window with the cat. I have a view across the harbour to Fife, and I watch white roots of lightning appear in the sickly green-brown of the sky. I count the seconds to the ripping rumble of thunder, and I’m completely absorbed in the moment.
Two seagulls swoop up into the air together, and are silhouetted by a flash of lightning; the instant remains in my vision, like the phantom of the flash after a photo is taken. I had assumed that seagulls, like most animals would be frightened of a storm, so why had they flown towards it? The audacity of seagulls has been on my mind recently, and I cannot help but admire these anti-heroes of coastal towns and cities.
Months earlier, during my first Dramatherapy session, I’m asked to select what represents my hopes and fears from a deck of photo cards. I see a photo of seagulls sitting on top of bins on a promenade and I’m immediately drawn to it. I tell my therapist how much I admire that seagulls are unafraid to take up space. How they throw their heads back and call loudly and tunelessly. He recommends that I do the Artist’s Way, a 12-week course in a book, for those struggling to find their creative spark. I’m amazed at the synchronicity when I read Julia Cameron’s words, ‘Often audacity, not authentic talent, confers fame on an artist.’
When I was around 6 years old, I had two aspirations in life: to become a vet, or a writer. I quickly went off the idea of becoming a vet after watching a TV show in which a vet assisted a cow to give birth by inserting his arm up to the elbow inside of her to grab the calf. So, writer it was. And I found the written word thrilling. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in the back of the car after being at the shopping centre with my parents. I had been allowed two books by Roald Dahl. I remember clutching the two books with their shiny colourful covers, filled with immense excitement at what adventures might wait for me inside. I was not yet old enough to read them fluently, but I had more than enough motivation to get myself to that point.
I read anything and everything. The front and back pages of the newspaper while my dad was reading it. The cookbook I found on a side table. The backs of packaging, signs in front of shops. And I was always asking, ‘what’s “government”?’ ‘where is “Europe”?’ And so on.
However, I grew up in a culture that told me that it is only worth pursuing something if you’re one of the very best at it. If you can get a job with it, if you can make money from it. This was an attitude I mostly learned from my grandparents, who I spent a lot of my childhood living with. My granny would tell me, ‘Nobody likes a smartypants’ when I read out facts from my science books to her. If I drew a picture and showed it to my grandparents, my gramps would say ‘Oh, so you’re going to be an artist now? Are you going to Art School?’ In a mocking tone. It put me off of creating, he poured cold water on my interests and hobbies. School did not offer much more inspiration, as creative pursuits were largely seen as being for those with ‘natural talent’, or when it comes to music, those with parents who could afford an instrument. Speaking of music, in my early 20s, I started playing ukulele, and took some group lessons. Even then, my granny asked me, ‘what kind of job can you get with that?!’
Now in my 30s, I feel this surge of free will inside me, telling me in the words of Mary Oliver: ‘You do not have to be good’. No, I just have to have the audacity to do it anyway, even if I’m terrible at it, or middling; even if no one reads what I have to say. Even if I’m rejected from every magazine and publication that I submit my poetry and prose to (and so far that has been the case).
My therapist tells me to go out and find words in the environment and make something with them. I walk to a breakwater, pass the warning sign (and of course, write down the words from it). People walk along here all the time, but today it’s rainy and windy, and as fast as I can write the words down in my notebook, the raindrops are erasing them. I feel the gusts of wind catch my feet, and I’m so sure that I’ll be pushed into the water, the waves violently lashing up at the rocks. I keep going, and I see the seagulls, in full surrender to the wind. They seem to lean into the gusts, feathers folding away. They are completely unafraid, entirely at home here with the elements of water and air showing their full potential. I make it all the way along the breakwater, and back. When I return to the beach, I find a big heavy rock, and resolve that any time I’m anxious or afraid, I will give those thoughts and feelings to the rock. When I feel that I have filled it, I will return to the water and throw the rock in.
I make a zine with the words. I cut out a scrap of paper into the shape of a seagull and paste it in. I am a creative, and I always have been. It’s time to grasp that childhood ambition with both hands, and drop the fear that has kept me suspended in dissatisfaction for all these years.
Iona Grant 