The Debonkerfication of Angelina

Seeking mind and body wellbeing to combat mid-life crisis and make me write more. Part 1 – Starting the process.

My notebook

Yesterday I made an appointment with AC, a hypnotherapist in London who uses a combination of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and Meditation in his therapy. I’m not writing his name here right now because what if the appointment turns out to be totally shit? I don’t want to badmouth someone who has worked for decades and cured many people both on and off TV just because I might be the possessor of the one marshy bog that is impenetrable (or the one broken teapot that happens to be chipped in the wrong place).

I was given AC’s phone number some years ago. I don’t know exactly how many years ago but I could find out by going and looking at the publication date of a signed paperback copy of Umbrella that I never finished which sits on my bookshelf. I went to Bookslam all alone because I was terribly lonely having at some time prior finished with a significant person and felt that I should carpe life and do things that I want to do by myself and learn to enjoy them alone. My mum had been in and out of hospital, I had signed up to do an online writing group thingy (I am a serial online writing group thingy non-practising member) and in the hope of taking it seriously I had adopted the temporary habit of taking a notebook with me wherever I went. I bought it from TK Maxx and it has a cat and dog dressed as the Blues Brothers on the front.  In this notebook I had written notes, phrases that had come to me at odd times including one written a few days before the Bookslam thing while waiting for my mum to be seen in casualty in the middle of the night, inspired by my surroundings: “A figure like a lumpen bolster cushion tied in the middle with a piece of string”.

So I went to Bookslam and listened to some authors including the great statue that is Will Self read passages from various books they had written. One of his included some reference to “a bolster of a woman” or something like that. I took this as a sign of my latent creative genius. I used the very same random metaphor that a literary great had used! (Yes, I realise that confusing coincidence for achievement is very sad.)

I am very short. I queued at the bar amongst chatting, laughing people to buy a drink and this made my smallness and aloneness very large; it made me sigh and blink back actual tears and then shout silently “Do not fucking cry in public you stupid cow!!” I sat on a high stool next to this guy who was also alone (though probably not the same type of alone as me) and in the break between authors we struck up a conversation. He was also a writer, of screenplays. He worked in a phone shop during the day and when he wasn’t working, was writing. He told me lots more about himself but I don’t remember it all. He asked me about myself and I told him about Sing and Sign, about the time I was on Richard and Judy and they sent me to see those agents that liked me but I got sidetracked by divorce and therefore that I’m a non-writing writer, apart from Mummy on the Edge in Families Magazine that I had, even then, been writing for lots of years. He insisted that I already had the bones of a book within this blog and that I should just stick it on amazon as is. I told him maybe that’s cheating and also my problem is I’m terrifically lazy when it comes to doing anything for myself.  And then, along with some recommendations for books he had read on writing which I wrote down in my notebook (and have NEVER looked up), he also gave me the phone number of a hypnotist he had seen who helped him a great deal.

I know what you are thinking. But well actually, I’ve never been to a hypnotist before and I never believed it would work for me. But the thought of someone flicking a switch (I KNOW it’s not really like that) in my head to fix me, remove all confusion and mental paralysis and make me sit down and achieve something for myself has ensured that the memory of the existence of this phone number in this notebook has remained in the sink drainer of my brain, not following most all the other details of the evening down the plughole, even after years that number more than one multiple of 2. And by the way this chap and I did not exchange numbers or last names, we just had a really deep conversation about writing and that gave this meeting that was mere happenstance, the quality of something greater, possibly even a turning point in life. Of course it wasn’t. But hell, it yet might be. Ask me after Tuesday.

The books he recommended in case you are interested in writing and can’t read my crappy handwriting:

Story is Promise – Deep Characterisation

How to write a million

How to write a screenplay in 21 days by Vicky King

Posts I will be writing next (not necessarily in this order):

More about why I’m doing this

More about hypnotherapy

CBT DIY!

“DEE AH ESS SEE O” (No, not really)

Love Your Belly Workshop

Mother Daughter Yoga

2 day Body Calm Workshop in May with bloke off the telly

Sensitive Skin (the TV show)

Real Housewives (I might as well include this as I’m bound to end up writing about it at some point.)

About The Debonkerfication of Angelina

I’m writing this for me but do please join me if you want to, for if you do, it means that I might be reaching someone who also exists on my small, yellow planet, populated by weirdos like me, who might also, like me, be in need of some mental salvation and who may actually find it vicariously through my own windy path. And, in that way, it may serve to justify this self-indulgent hike though the marshy bog that is my forty-something year old psyche and turn the journey into some sort of beneficent, self-sacrificing travail. In this way, the attempt to fix the broken teapot might not feel so colossally pointless.