Overcoming the insidious notion that is imbued within us, ingrained so deeply. The thought that we shall never and will never have anything worthy to say and thus we forgo the act of creating

There’s often a question that dwells within the recess of my thoughts, rearing its cynical visage each time I return or go to create something. An insidious notion that undermines the worth of that which I am about to create. Call it a feeling of unworthiness, or of self disdain or even a diminished confidence preventing me from pursuing the project or thought. Yet as I trace back this feeling I find no Freudian repression nor an answer rooted within the nonsensical fantasy of my dreams. What greets me as I locate a reasoning behind this irrational questioning of oneself is my working class upbringing and the mentality that it brings. A feeling of an imbued self-disdain, a thought that colours my approach to being creative and one which firmly roots me in the mire of self doubt. 

It is a rather normal human thought to question oneself, and even more vital to critique oneself and your work. No one wants to end up being a Tommy Wiseau, blindly bleating from the plateau of mediocrity about the validity of your masterpiece whose beauty is only in the eye of a megalomaniacal beholder. Though there’s a distinct line between warranted self criticism, trust in oneself and hampering your stride before the race begins. I often feel that I am prepared to run the 100m sprint once my proverbial ankles are firmly tied. I like to hinder myself with the initial thought that I shall have and will have nothing of value to add to the world with what I am about to undertake. Yet this belief began in school, was reinforced throughout my teenage years and something that all working class creatives have felt at some point in their life.

I define it as being intrinsic almost to the working class experience. So often are we reminded of our feeble toils to uplift ourselves spiritually and financially and spread that benefit to those we love. We’re depicted as a lager-loving gaggle of louts, particularly if you’re from a small town (well now turned city) called Wrexham. I found that not only had this mentality impacted my creative friends but even those family and friends who simply lived there. There was this overriding sense that our mouths were vessels from which only a philosophy and cadence of a vacuous nature could stem, nothing of worth would ever be heard from us because we are invisible. Call it projection, not that I wanted to bring Freud back into this, get back into the casket Sigmund! Or call it mere low self esteem, yet truly, when can esteem be separated from a shared through which sinks its fangs into the hundreds that I have met throughout my time as a child and teen in the town.

School seemed only to solidify this thought. I was told there were two routes in life, you were either a footballer or builder, and I certainly couldn’t kick a ball but then again I was too weak to lift a brick! So where did I find myself? Scrounging between the lines of the liminal zone for some degree of purpose to make all this writing malarky worthwhile. To admittedly little avail, for I had no faith in that which I wrote nor trust in my abilities to create something others would read never mind appreciate for its literary contents. The praise that was bandied around in school was reserved for the aforementioned careerists, the footballers, builders and the ‘inbetweens’, or is inbetweeners a better title for us? Well, we seemed to be greeted with the expectation that we would fade away or toil in agony to create that which no other soul would ever come to read nor see. We were all Van Gogh’s in our own way, just without the talent.

Yet the venomous sting that permeated our existence was not reversed for those who wished to create. As school came to a close and life began to get in the way, the builders went off and built and those sportsmen whose future once shimmered, began to wane in their ability and found themselves becoming ‘just another guy’. Akin to Paul Newman’s portrayal in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, they merely meandered about in day to day life until they found a purpose, or in the case of some found only a hollow reality beyond that which they were promised. I think this realisation is brutal, yet I started out with the belief that I was nothing to begin with. I was always ‘just another guy’ blindly placing his faith in the creative process he had selected to be his downfall. 

The solidification of this thought was ubiquitous though. The absence of self esteem was evident in all of those who never believed they had the abilities to leave the town and achieve or at least attempt to carve out a dream for themselves. And those who did retain the faith, well they never deserved they dream they longed for anyway. We were all hampered by the overriding thought of a diminishing self worth. Mere vessels with mouth’s whose tones fall upon deaf, uncaring ears. So we acted in retort, drinking, smoking, embodying the archetypal image of teenage nihilistic defiance. All for what though? To stick up the proverbial finger to a nebulous spectre, whose form we could never discern. It was not one sole individual who began to erode the confidence of the working class youth I knew, rather it was an inherited, bestowed, distilled and finely crafted formula of self doubt and negative self imaging. We hated what we were for the existence we had. We didn’t want this nor did we like the town or the people in it.

I found little in terms of solace throughout these years, resorting instead to walk the ordained path of school to college, college to uni and uni to… what? I had never held firm in my belief of what I could achieve so a dream job was off the table and the idea that I would ever make it as a writer of any kind was never a notion I could place any degree of belief in either. I was ready to settle down, to follow the path of life simply going on as it did for those fading, never to be sports stars in school. I had seen the mould of being ‘just another guy’ and it looked rather snug, the fit was perfect, but to cosy into it seems all too simple. Things were never that simple, nothing ever was. I declined to simply live in the cyclical cosy of the everyday back home, waiting for the weekends to come, seeing the same places, the same people, the same live’s, the same day repeating over and over again. For I always thought, then what? What after that? Is this really all there is? This? This is it?

I grew increasingly aware of the absurdity that the self doubt of my experience had bestowed upon me. It took a while, though a splinter only reveals itself when one prods and fiddles with the cosy it has made. I felt the sting of discomfort within the abode that seemed at once, home. Yet home was the launchpad, the thought was absurd and I wanted to, I had to find something beyond this town, beyond these thoughts. Thankfully, I did. I found city life, self belief in my work and trust in the undertaking of the creative process. Yet had I not first questioned what seemed to be the sacred prophecy bestowed unto us all, then I would not have taken the leap. I fear for those who never reach beyond the boundary because they were told that the grass could never be greener, and the promise of the greenery reveals itself to be plastic. Dreams were a hollow resource, for which one had to forgo in order to fit the mould. We had no self belief for we were never taught. I only came to realise that my mentality had hampered me when I read a poem to a friend I met in college and they met it with anything but the deafening silence of ambivalence. I had praise for the first time. 

It only takes a moment to survey your surroundings to know that what you deem home is instead a construct which binds you to a dulling existence. Yet home was comfortable, how could this be true? In comfort there is the everyday and the everyday that greeted me was one of repressed dreams and unlit minds. Beyond the home there were a thousand others, just like me, so sure that we would never produce anything of worth to the world and so, they forgo their dream, settling instead to be ‘just another guy’. This poisonous unspoken rhetoric plagued us all, a group told from their very moment they began to learn that life is a dogmatic path which is well-trod for a reason. The woods beyond present only failure, only confusion, though rest assured that the lamps that lead you home shall also be the ones that guide you to the grave. Stray from the inherited mentality that seems so solidified, nothing is concrete when it is a mere thought. A dream is a resource to covet and nurture, not to discard in order to accept the everyday. The worth that I found was in the doing of and the love for the process, not the impact I shall have, I wish for every working class friend of mine to think this way, though some shall always simply see the mould of being just another guy and find comfort within it. Even the comfort is something I find envious.

When a whole class of people are taught that the process of self-edifying is valueless, then all that they dream of seems vacuous. The countless times I could have, should have pursued a project only to find that before its beginning I was already doubting my ability is innumerable at this point. The antithetical logic I formed in retort to this was formulated by the advice I was gifted, rather than given by my parents. My friends with age seemed only to believe more wholly in this idea of life’s linearity and its dogmatised progression. Though my mum, through me, wished for something more. Had she not moved from the beauty of Australia, and subsequently found herself consigned to accept North Wales as her make-shift home, then this itching feeling that began to stir within me may never have come to fruition or perhaps it would have merely passed by, unnoticed or discarded. I see so many other creatives who suppress their abilities in order to follow on in the footsteps of the hopeless others around them that it breaks my heart. I see that we, as working class people are taught that we shall never produce anything of value, unless we are the cogs upon the production line. Yet I never yearned to create that which I would never see. The shade of the trees of my creation may one day benefit others, but happiness is a resource acquired only through the pursuit of your self-selected meaning. Or at least it is for me.