Last time I published a blog online, it was reflecting on my first full year as an unpaid carer. Since then, I’ve let the virtual cobwebs gather, which for someone who writes because they need to is a problem. But, as I noted last December, I am incredibly busy these days, so finding the time, space and energy to write has been a real challenge.
I did take on a meaty writing project at the beginning of 2025; an entry into The Curae Prize, which is specifically for writers who are also unpaid carers. The Personal Essay I eventually submitted was not the project I thought would go forward. I spent a long time researching and drafting some Place Writing about the town we live in, but I just couldn’t make the piece ‘pop’. So, I switched tack and after winning an appeal against the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) and getting my Personal Independence Payment back, I channelled the anger, the sense of injustice I felt having been dragged through the appeals process and the vindication of victory into an entirely different work. I can’t share it here, because the judging process is ongoing, but I am very proud of the piece. I asked someone whose opinion I value greatly to read it and their feedback was that it was a “riveting, and at times upsetting, read”. Knowing that the piece has moved at least one reader gives me a huge confidence boost and the energy to at least try to keep writing.
While I was completing my Master’s with the Open University, I had fixed deadlines and clear tasks, which made setting aside time to write much easier to justify to my wife and children. It can be hard to ask for the space to work on an open-ended project ‘just because’, especially when you’re an unpaid carer. By the time everything else is done and you have some peace and quiet, as often as not you’re too tired to do anything. But I am a happier person when I write and my mind is healthier, so I keep plugging away.
During my studies, I had to reflect on the work of a writer who had influenced me. I chose George Orwell and, in the assignment, said:
“I write because I have to and this compulsion has driven me for as long as I can remember. Orwell also felt this way and in his 1946 essay Why I Write, Orwell asserted that there were four main motives for writing prose, specifically:
- Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.
- Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.
- Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
- Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”
I am not, of course, directly comparing myself or my work to one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century. But my best writing usually has ‘something to say’ and I think the fact that Orwell’s sense of purpose is something that draws me to his work. In Why I Write, Orwell made this observation about the four motives:
“I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books” (1946)
Certainly, my best writing usually attempts to “push the world in a certain direction”, whether that is out of concern for the health of a special interest or delving into my lived experience, as I did in my entry for The Curae Prize and for most of the assignments undertaken during my Master’s.
It was eighty years ago that my literary hero published Animal Farm and I wonder what Orwell would make of the current Labour Government’s plan to take up to £5 billion per year out of the social security paid to disabled people? I can’t help but hear “four legs good, two legs better” in my head as I observe a formerly socialist party veer further and further to the right. Swap the whiskey favoured by Napoleon the Pig with Sabrina Carpenter tickets (Rachel Reeves) and designer glasses (Sir Kier Starmer) and perhaps life begins to imitate art a little?
While I cannot dream of creating the kind of body of work Orwell did, my writing is often therapeutic during times of stress and, this coming weekend, brings its own reward when I travel to London for graduation. The reason for choosing to travel so far is the opportunity to meet with other students from our Tutor Group who are journeying from all over the UK to be at the Barbican this Saturday. To be able to personally thank people who, for two years, critiqued my work online, sent supportive WhatsApp messages at times of creative crisis or just inspired me to be a better writer could not be passed up.
I may not win the Curae Prize, or ever sign a traditional publishing contract but, by passing with Merit, I have proved to myself that my writing has worth. At times when finding the energy and motivation is hardest, that is what I shall remind myself.