Anatomy Of My Writing

I've been thinking a lot recently about that scene in Anatomy of a Fall. The one where the husband and wife, both writers, are arguing in their kitchen. By this stage in the film, we already know that he is miserable. His wife is a published, in-demand author, while he’s resigned himself to the role of house husband. Doing school pickups and homework sessions in the shadow of her success. Bitter, even, to the point that, in another scene, he obnoxiously plays an instrumental cover of P.I.M.P. (nice) at full volume to disrupt a magazine interview she’s taking in the living room below. In the kitchen scene, he sits with his elbows leaning on their counter, his hair disheveled, the light gone out of his eyes. He looks almost manic, blaming the limitations his wife’s ambitions have placed on his own. Refusing to take the bait, she mentions his pride and total aversion to failure. How her success has nothing to do with it. Those two things, she reckons, were enough to stop him from ever amounting to anything. 

That scene, lowkey, triggered me. 

I was sitting in the cinema, beside a guy I’ve been seeing for a few months. I thought about how this guy is a musician. He records and releases music for people to resonate with. He puts the time and effort into marketing himself and getting his name out there. He turns ideas into something tangible. I, on the other hand, am a writer that peaked with a job at a high-profile magazine at 23. The one who took a full-time job in copywriting, and tells people “yes, I still write on the side!” when really that means writing diary entries into my gmail drafts about getting ghosted because I’m too afraid to put anything out in my own name. If we were to be the husband and wife in this scenario, I imagined, he would be the strong, formidable Sandra Huller. The person that works hard and pulls things out of the ether and into public view. And I would be the husband. All ideas but no get up and go. The lazy, bitter writer that I am. 

As we walked out of the cinema, I squinted up at my date in the dark of the January cold and asked whether he thought the two writers wanted to be parents. He looked down at me smiling and said, “Well, you’re the writer. What do you think?”  My face went hot.  Sorry, why the fuck did he say it like that? Is he being patronising? Why say “you’re the writer” when we both know that I’m not really? Or at least haven’t been. Not properly, for a while. 

I felt a sudden impulse to open my mouth and quip back something sharp. Instead, I took a deep breath in, and then out, watching this attempt at staying serene turn into a grey fog in the winter night, evaporating before my nose could even make contact with it. I thought about his question calmly, rationally. I realised it was just that: a question. My inferiority complex had misleadingly laced it with a condescending tone. He was, actually, just being nice.

I think much of the reason why I put off trying to publish my writing is because I hate the fact that I can’t write about anything that isn’t from my own experience. I can’t seem to make up characters the same way other writers do, or fantasy worlds. Or turn letters into lyrics whose sentiments can be drowned out by a nice base line or guitar riff. I’m not creative enough to hide in my writing the way other people can. So when I write, I have to write about living in London and that woman I saw trying to defend a swan in St James Park by throwing an alarmingly big stick at another swan that was attacking it. And, sometimes, it’s whichever guy I’m seeing. 

And I fucking hate it. 

I hate the idea of one of their friends sending them a link and saying, “She’s keen…” I hate the fact that I’m letting go of my pride by insinuating that they’ve probably taken up more space in my head than I have in theirs. But when I really think about it, it’s never actually about who I’m seeing. It’s about what our interactions teach me about myself. About how I want to move forward after our names stop popping up on each other's screens altogether. When I first moved to London, lonely after a break up and knowing only one friend, I ended up dating a guy who grew up here. He had all the mates around him that I was used to having in Ireland. He never worried about what each weekend would look like, filled with birthdays and impromptu nights out and bike rides. I constantly drew comparisons between his full calendar and my perpetual lack of plans or basic feeling of belonging. I wanted what he had, so badly. 

Looking back, it’s strange that I was so taken with him. I could’ve tried to connect with any of the others who, like me, were new to London. I think I was trying to do the zen mind-work of following my envy, but went left instead of right. It felt easier to look at him and see a solution in the friendships he’d already created. Welcomed in and going on their curated nights out, rather than putting in the hard graft of making my own mates. And in some ways, I’m doing it again. There’s some primal instinct telling me that I’m better off just observing other people’s creativity than digging deep within myself to nurture my own. I think, if I’m being honest, I’m scared. Because doing that means having to show a lot more of who I am than they have to. They can turn their emotions into a nice enough beat that people dance and sweat and fistbump to. They don’t have to stand naked and bear it all the way I would. But that’s not to say that they don’t feel naked, putting those things out. By making that claim, I’m projecting my fear again. I’m making up excuses not to write. 

I was sitting outside the airport Pret the other week, £16 down (suitably) and listening to a Brene Brown podcast. At one point she says that the only thing people can offer to the world, that is 100% unique, is their creativity. Everyone has their own form of it. Whether it’s how you come up with recipes or teaching lessons for kids. Or even thinking up new ways to hide your dog’s medicine in food so they actually take it. 

I think, for me, it’s stringing together nice sentences about my own life experiences. And what they teach me about trying to get out of bed every day with purpose when I’d rather stay buried under the covers. I hope at some point this evolves. Maybe, eventually, I’ll even develop characters or alternate worlds. Like that bit in Everything Everywhere All at Once where Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis look like themselves but have hot dogs for fingers. Who wouldn’t want to see more of that? 

But for now, it’s the dates I go on and how I fill in the space that’s left after they’re over. It’s about my friendships and what they’ve taught me about fucking up and forgiving and always trying. A creative retelling of things we all go through that could, hopefully, help or resonate with other people. There’s a part of me that feels like if I don’t at least put the work into getting it out there, I’ll end up feeling bitter. My elbows on the kitchen counter looking up at a person I love deeply, but whose success I resent. Everything I need to feel fulfilled is already here within me. I just need to pull it out and turn it into something.

Niamh is a Belfast-born content creator currently based in London. She has written for the likes of Marie Claire and the Irish Independent.

Recently, she launched her own Substack. Here, she writes about little things she notices about living in the hope to resonate with other people. To join as a *free* subscriber, visit buckdaft | Niamh Katrina | Substack.

Paralysis

Which side?
Years of trauma
When will it subside?
Imbedded like a baseline
Glorify those who fought at the frontline
A feeling of constant decline
When will our youth get a chance to shine?

Our country
Who’s country?

Tension between generations
Conflict and segregations
Where is the space for our creations?
Our peaceful relations?

Our lives
Politicised
It’S oUr CuLtUrE !!!

Our lives
Deadlocked
By flags walls name-calls
By violence hate blood

It’s not over
What is the solution?
Revolution?
Evolution?
Tell us how
Tell me now

What is our now?
Our present relentlessly feeding on shock waves from the past
Never receding
Open wounds still bleeding
Can we start healing?

Bred in division but share this common fate
James Joyce’s blanket of snow still hasn’t melted
When will we be connected?

Broken people
Broken homes
Broken bones

I want a new now
New hearts
New love
New blood

All this rain, surely we can wash away the pain?
Waiting for our Spring
Where flowers grow from sorrow
Dreams replace screams
We dance like fuck with our friends
And think this could be the place
Where spirits are reborn
The hold of the past is torn

All this rain, surely we can wash away the pain? Waiting for our Spring
Where flowers grow from sorrow
Dreams replace screams

What more can I say?
How long will we pay?

The pavements we walk on
The posts we lean on
The bars that we drink in
Our minds that we think in

Original photography by Tolu Ogunware.

“Living in Belfast, I sometimes feel like there’s no space to grow. I have a lingering internal conflict with myself about loving where I’m from because it’s part of me, but I also have a desire to pull away from my roots. This is due to the rife transgenerational trauma that, I think, holds Belfast back. I’m stuck in limbo between hope and hopelessness. However, I believe our generation can create a new tomorrow, a new identity and safe spaces whilst acknowledging our past.”

Evangelia Zacharopoulou is a writer and activist. Links to other works are below:

Instagram - Walking Contradiction

The Courier Online - This Time

Instagram - This is It

Seen Not Heard

That without a name can't exist.
Like so many of us who remain
nameless and faceless,
to be able to hold a reflection
in your palm for the first time
makes you feel far less,
graceless.

But how to navigate,
how to respond,
when that name of ours
becomes a weapon,
by which we are wronged?
Take it on the chin
by now a jaw thick as kuih cake
frosted, sparkling and golden
trembling on it’s pillars.

So we can’t complain,
can’t beat on the wall,
can’t scream from our insides
which must remain inside.
Because to be seen and not heard
is sometimes better
than not being seen at all
and after all,
You gave me a name
and a name means
We mean
something.

I can’t hear past our laugh,
unravelling at the seams.
Quickly! Collect him up,
there’s less than you know
but more than three,
can’t see you staring back at me.
We’re lost if we escape the pain,
but would you do it all again?

He says, “Hold on son”
We’ll feed you till your skin bursts,
I climbed the trees,
saw all that I could see,
greens, blues and the filth in between,
the fool never knows
home is where it really hurts.
You’ll die if you stop looking,
I was good, I sat still,
now the boys are coming,
don’t stop running.

Come in close, you can choke
the hairs on my neck.
Deep below in your gut
and in that mind, now a wreck
You know you’re not them
and never will be,
cause
you can feel
each
individual
Rib.
But break your back,
bleach your hair,
dance the dark,
reject your Father
and pray to God
you wake up each morning
changed.

This curse showers you in sleep at night,
soaking the sheets
with nightmares and insecurities,
the gift of our ancestors
to compliment that of strangers,
it rises and falls, reverberates
within the walls,
shakes the bed you share with a lover
only to make haste
and sleep with another.
Now we are contorted
like the mangled clothes of
our predecessors suitcases
waiting to be opened once again
and made love to by the curse
of one another.

I can’t hear past our laugh,
unravelling at the seams.
Quickly! Collect him up,
there’s less than you know
but more than three,
can’t see you staring back at me.
We’re lost if we escape the pain,
but would you do it all again?

The boy in the blue dungarees stares back at me.
His eyes now crows
scars swallowed by wrinkles
but brown bullets piercing my skin
I’d recognise anywhere.
Fingers and toes, dirty and ragged
Wiggle against the plain of his own
reflection
like our memories, lost
in translation between time.
His eyes glaze sapphire and dust
as cataracts in old age, wonder
the space between us
Blinded, crumbling from missing pieces
While I remain, whole
watching the boy in the blue dungarees
shaking in the white light,
looking for sight in a bright room.

Maybe I’m not meant to exist
in the image of you, who
was born from blank reflection too
but live in this age
with fingers on the glass
watching you and our kids
turn our page, littered
with letters of red ash
and familiar empty spaces.

So, please, I beg
those beautiful faces,
clench your fists
spit words which
creak under your
unbroken voice
like robins of
the morning choir.
Shake your head,
crack it against the glass
roll into yourself
and rock between
filth and love
present and past
as it’s all one
one we are all
bound by it
brothers and sisters
children and men
mortals and gods
run run run.

Because even when I am gone,
somewhere in the black of night,
you’ll hear that familiar static
of a channel you once forgot
and once again
as if you never left,
it'll be like birds
waking you with a morning sun
singing
I am here,
no matter what.

I can’t hear past our laugh,
unravelling at the seams.
Quickly, collect him up
there’s less than you know
but more than three.
Can’t see you staring back at me,
we’re lost if we escape the pain
but would you do it all again?

Seen Not Heard is a work in progress that spans spoken word, dance and film.

It is being developed by writer/director Cameron Tharmaratnam and dancer/choreographer Clara Kerr.

Their previous collaboration was on the short, Hand Me Downs.

Hand Me Downs

Happy For You

Being happy for your friends who are also actors is part wonderful, in that the miraculousness at your joint-fulfilling prophecy is actually coming true, and part tipping point to your own existential dread. Wonderful, primarily, because you get to live vicariously through them on the internet and over coffee when you actually meet up, in person, once a year and they tell you about the magic of the sets and backstage gossip and afterparty tales and you remind them of the time in acting school you did a scene together from an American classic and butchered it so badly they got hammered and made out with a homeless guy later that night and then they don’t see you for another year. But the real truth is that no matter how happy you are for them you’ll always have a grinding sense that they too will drift away into that mysterious ether of consistent acting work that seems so excruciatingly untouchable that you can’t help but also always feel so incurably envious. It’s the Yin and Yang of being an out-of-work actor. Like everything in life, it’s great when you’re losers together, staggering in and out of dive bars like rats to a downtown kitchen, however; you’ll always exist in a realm that is completely reliant on knowing that they too are not working and once one of you, hopefully you not them (sorry not sorry), gets that golden goose of a role it’s game over chum. 

This is made even more gruesome by the reliance we, as artists, have on social media. From castings to industry news to spamming directors with your unpublished scripts, it’s important to be informed (knowledge is power) but being informed means being hyper aware of everything and everyone who is working slash is in production and, in turn, being even more self aware that you are, in fact, not working. This creates an endless loop that wears you down until it feels as if you will forever exist in the childhood version of yourself that had other actors posters on the wall but, instead, it’s the adult version constantly staring at your colleagues faces in articles for Vanity Fair or the Belfast telegraph who also happen to be 5 years younger than you. Welcome, once again, to the childhood trauma every actor feels and why they turned to being an actor in the first place - they weren’t invited to the cool kids party. Not being invited to the CKP (abbreviating it makes it feel like a members club and, therefore, less pathetic) in school was basically like being told you don’t exist in the eyes of anyone that really matters, bar God, who, as we were told in our uber Christian Northern Irish school, loves everyone bar my brown dad because he was Hindu and according to the religious education teacher he doesn’t belong in heaven’s CKP. I’ll get to where the religious studies class experiences correlate in another post. So, yeah, not being invited to the alco pops and truth or dare party as a pre pubescent 12 year old was definitely on par and so we (I) became actors to garner the attention and validation we so desperately craved by sharing these very traumas with everyone or anyone who would pay us.

It’s sobering to realise the immortal words of Bowling for Soup were spot on because high school never ends, at least not in our industry. We’re still not invited to the CKP’s and, what’s worse is that, more often than not, I’m not even aware the party happened until the wrap pics go up while I’m drinking the dregs of my off-brand instant coffee on the toilet of my flat-share on a Monday at 11am. All in all, my dearest, successful, lavish artist-life leading friends, we’re happy for you. Although, just know, that despite the many, great, deserved reviews and cover stories and instagram mentions…I will never stop telling people you tongue wrestled bridge guy while drunkenly spitting bars of Shepherd beside the M train in our early 20’s.

Cameron Tharmaratnam is a South Asian-Irish actor/writer/filmmaker based in London.

Links to films and Socials -

Where You Really From?

Hand Me Downs

French Picnic

Instagram