Yesterday I escaped unintentionally without really revealing, to your eyes I appeared unrevealed, non-appeared. Not sure today will be clearer. A Kick in The Gurus had to be written by me – that’s the sort of thing wordpress is telling me to disclose, that I was qualified to write the story more than anyone else. Which is true. And not true, or at least, we’ll never know. If someone else had been in the wrong place at the wrong time so many times, they might well have felt the compulsion to bleed the words burning inside the skull out onto a page. Someone else might have written Macbeth, or The Godfather, or 50 shades, trainspotting, eventually. You can’t really prove it either way.

But, I have been in the wrong place at the wrong time a lot of time, at least to anyone seeking peace, which is actually me. I worked for 15 years in psychiatric wards across London as a care assistant, then when someone re-branded us, as a support worker and senior support worker.

Mental Health is about many things I will never ever understand, but one truth is undeniable and beautiful: it is a lot to do with words.

Talking, conversation, spontaneous, planned, measured, strategic, interrogating, empathising, therapeutic, warm, human – trying, aiming, hoping, believing that words can do good.

To a writer, mental health nursing is beyond a gift – surrounded by, intoxicated by, fuelled by words. Thoughts, whether ordered or disordered, are as much about words as pictures. Hallucinations are sometimes words, and are always described in words. Feelings, helpful or unhelpful, are described, clutched at, moulded, expressed, with words as well as actions. Although actions often express before words, it can be more helpful to reshape dangerous or unhelpful actions through talking, retraining the mind to think different words.

I am so in love with words, I was so mesmerised and in awe of the good that nurses and patients were trying to do with words, that my 3rd Year English Literature research project at Queen Mary’s was The Rhetoric of Psychiatric Nursing. My own brain was near feverish during this project, so taken was I by the evidence of words at work.

So the first reveal is done, that writing a psych-atirical, anti-hero, tragic, hallucinatory, philosophical novel with one central premise – What happens when a mind that doesn’t know right from wrong is accidentally hypnotised by a motivational CD found in a stolen car? – began in part with the need to make sense of the stems and roots, the un-erasable imprints left by so many patients and nurses, so many extremes and mundanes of behaviour and emotion inside the intensity of ward environments.

A layer of onion-skin is removed. Get reading here.