Permission Granted

Yes, it has been nineteen months since my last blog. Was that intentional? No. Am I going to spend longer than this sentence worrying about that? No.

This weekend I went to a Writing Workshop run by the glowing Liz Gilbert. For those of you unfamiliar with LG, she wrote Eat, Pray, Love about two lifetimes ago then wrote a bunch of other things including Big Magic and has been living and loving and inspiring women ever since. Married and divorced twice, recently bereaved of the love of her life (her female soulmate), asking the difficult questions, owning what she knows and acting accordingly, she is my hero. To say that I would leave my cosy little existence and follow her around the world if she asked is an understatement. I adore her.

So, this Saturday brought an auditorium of like-minded Liz junkies to London to hang off her every word. The love in that room was pulsing. On the way in, I found myself randomly offering to hold the coffee of the woman in front of me while she searched for her ticket in her enormous handbag. As I sat down in my seat, the girl next to me introduced herself immediately and there was connection. Connection everywhere - we all knew that we all loved Liz and that meant we all must love each other too. I could feel the nervous cynicism of the friend I'd brought with me slowly thawing. At that precise moment in time, the entire country was sat on the edge of their sofa waiting for Meghan Markle to arrive for her Prince but our focus was the door beside the stage and when it would open for our own beautiful American.

She appeared - all smiles and white teeth and comfy clothes. As is her neat, contained approach, she had divided the day into the six voices we all carry in our heads: Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust and Divinity. We would be writing letters between these voices with the emphasis on listening to what each of them wanted to say when they weren't being interrupted. While every letter brought, by turns, tears, deep breaths, head shaking and stranger hugs, the most powerful for me was letter number three. This dealt with permission. Liz talked about tribal living and how we all have elders in our tribes who set the expectations. If we fall outside these expectations, we are out of the tribe so we follow the tribal script. These tribal elders could be your father, mother, spouse, friend, the Pope - anyone who lives in your head making you think you need their approval.

For the sake of ease, this ultimate authority was called 'Your Headteacher'. We were asked to write a letter to ourselves from 'Our Headteacher', giving us permission to do the things we really wanted to do. What followed was a handful of brave women standing to read out excerpts from their letters and the auditorium responded with a heartfelt, 'Permission granted!' Powerful stuff (and, ironically, rather tribal but we'll let that slip because of all the love in the room). One lady wrote, 'I give you permission to have another baby.' Another: 'I give you permission to not visit your mother on her birthday this year.' Another: 'I give you permission to stop inviting Barbara and Audrey to the group dinners because they NEVER INVITE US BACK'. Permission granted! You get the picture. Liz, in all her sweetness and badassery wrote, 'I give you permission to buy a tent, in whatever colour you like, and keep it in your car backseat for spontaneous camping trips.'

There were two interesting points about this exercise for me. Firstly, who is your tribal elder? Secondly, what would you do if you had the permission? I struggled with the first one and I think this is because I have accumulated so damn many over the years! Pretty much everyone who has presented with an ounce of confidence had me believing they were in charge. I'm am pleased to report I am getting MUCH better at policing this. The second one was simple. I would write. I would quit all jobs, any need for jobs, stop fannying about and bloody write. So I'm back. Not quite brave (or anywhere rich) enough to quit all my jobs but I'm writing. Permission has been granted.