What am I doing here?

A bit about me...

Hello, I'm Sue. I've arrived hereon Substack via Hagitude where Tanya Shadrick so brilliantly and lovingly curates the 'Growing our Creative Confidence' thread. Being part of that and reading 'The Cure for Sleep' has been a huge catalyst for change; I've become able to look at myself and my writing differently, to understand why I need to write and to be less fearful. It feels good. A huge thank you to Tanya.

I live in in a small town that doesn't quite know if it's in Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire, but it's not far from Hitchin which is about 30 miles north of London.

I grew up in the North London suburbs, went away, came back to London for a while and got married. After a while we settled in Potters Bar in South Hertfordshire where we raised our three children. It's only for the last year that I've been living where I am now.

I was a teacher for more than 40 years. I began in Islington, inner London and gradually shifted from teaching English and French to students with challenging inner-city lives to teaching children with severe learning difficulties back out in the suburbs. Later I became a nursery teacher, later still an Early Years advisor, suffering acute Impostor Syndrome throughout those 10 years and not fully believing that I had any right at all to tell others how to be good teachers. For the final 4 years of my teaching life, I returned to the classroom and taught Early Years, then English in a wonderful school for students with Physical and Neurological Impairment (PNI). That was an amazing 4 years, and took me back full cycle, right to where I started, teaching secondary English.

But by then my whole life had changed. A very long and happy marriage ended with my husband disappearing to the North of England with another woman. My father died two weeks after my husband’s departure, then my mother had pneumonia and gradually became more dependent and infirm. At the time, she was living in East Sussex, an area that I love and have strong connections with, but she has needed to move nearer to family and that necessitated selling her much-loved home and coming to live in a care home not far from us all. In the midst of everything, and it all happened suddenly and over a short space of time, I met the brave man who is now my partner. It's taken a good while to get to grips with it all.

And now I have 6 grandchildren , all of them living fairly close by. I spend a lot of time looking after them so my daughters - both also teachers - and my son can work and I love every moment. And at last, plenty of time to do all the other things I love too.

I've always wanted to be a writer. Secretly, I've always thought of myself as one although there have been many, many doubts and fears. The number of notebooks that I've worked my way through proves that I DO write, but it's never been an easy thing to share my words and there have also been long, frustrating periods when nothing at all seemed to want to be written.

Those notebooks are just sitting on shelves and in drawers, full of poems, stories ramblings, diary entries and goodness-knows-what else. They don’t deserve to become my own personal Miss Havishams, tucked away in a gloomy place with cobwebs trailing over them. Time to open them, have a look and see what’s in there. So that’s how I’m going to start using this space; by sifting through my archives and bringing to light some of the things I’ve written over the years. That doesn’t make me quake with trepidation as much as starting from scratch would.

And then we’ll see what happens.