The very kind and generous spirit that is Lisa Fransson tagged me here. She and I have had many chats here on Notes, and in a zoom meeting she dropped the link to her book The Shape of Guilt, and I ordered it before the meeting ended. It is a beautiful, gut-wrenching work that I could not put down.

Me? I’m Kay, a single mother to a disabled, adult son, who has written in various forms her whole life. I worked in PR, advertising then music licensing — negotiating deals and contracts to include tracks on compilation albums.

I started a Wordpress blog years ago, and it became my place to exorcise some of my demons — I wrote about the terror of violent abuse, the loneliness and desperation of parenting a child with complex needs on my own, with no family support either. I wrote about the stuff that hurt. I needed to do it for me, and I never thought that anyone read it. I never wrote it for the reader.

But some people did read it. One post about the use of “the n-word” in my son’s school class, appeared on The Times online. Another post was included in an anthology of stories by mothers The Mother Book.

So, I kept writing. I found an online writing community — London Writers' Salon — I wrote in their early Writers’ Hours, as we all tapped away on keyboards or wrote in journals to get ourselves through lockdowns. I made friends, real friends through there, I found the perfect editor for my hybrid memoir project Jayne Marshall.

Writing, alone, feeling isolated in my home, but in community with other people, across the world, I felt part of something. I finished my memoir — Crazy. Stupid. Bitch: a memoir of life and language — and it is now in the stage of being sent out to agents, in the hope that someone will see the magic in those pages.

The memoir started from the blog. I put together a story of a part of my life that captured the toughest challenges I have ever faced, and then after it found its form, I pulled on a thread from my academic background in linguistics and it became a hybrid investigation of the words we use and how they build our experiences. Our language informs the world around us. The words hold power that we often wield, unknowingly, to detrimental effect.

Words like victim, survivor, disabled, the language around mental health, the explosion through social media of people self-diagnosing (at alarming rates) with often disabling conditions. The pathologising of every human emotion muddies the waters and often does more harm than good. Language matters, all of it.

My substack is a look through the telescope I point out into the world, an insight into language, feminism, disability, mental health, domestic abuse, with the filter overlaying everything is women. I also have a co-author on here, Maeve, my rescue beagle.

I swear. A lot. And I do it unapologetically. I’m Scottish, it’s how we communicate.

I’m making a space to meet and support writers and other creatives, in a way that no other social media platform can.

Here are some that I urge you to connect with:

Jayne Marshall

Kristi Joy Rimbach

Ros Barber

Anna Wharton

Caro Clarke