"Who is it who can tell me who I am?"
Possibly not a 'brand strategist' on a 'discovery call'
I’ve had a little break for half term, although all the time, thoughts about chapters 3 and 4 have been percolating around my mind. I’m moving in to more familiar territory with these two chapters, my focus shifting on to pregnancy and birth, for a little while, at least. And my editor has given feedback on chapter 2 - plenty of notes and queries but overall, ‘I love it’. Yippee!
I’ve also been thinking a little bit about myself and my own identity, online in particular. The eagle eyed of you will notice that I’ve changed the URL of this substack back to ‘millihill’ rather than ‘thebookforge’. This has been born out of a growing understanding of how substack works, its strengths and its limitations, but also out of a growing understanding of my own strengths and limitations. I like to create new things all the time and be multi-dimensional, but then I find myself struggling to focus and feeling thinly spread. I have to learn to just keep coming back to myself, ‘millihill’, and reminding myself that I am ‘enough’.
The experiences of the past couple of years have knocked me off kilter, and I have to also keep being honest with myself about that. I have developed an ‘I’m absolutely FINE’ aspect to my persona, if nothing else as a giant public fuck you to the people who worked so hard to destroy me, but it can sometimes be powerful enough even to convince me that none of it ever really happened or mattered in the slightest. Recently I had a few different ‘discovery calls’ with branding, marketing, coachy type people, which forced me again to think, ‘Who am I?’, and to realise that I can’t just style all of 2020 out and pretend it was a dance move. The first ‘discovery call’ I had immediately said, “Oh hi! I see you write about birth! Do you know XYZ person and their organisation?”, and I had to explain that yes, I do know that person, that I used to be friends with them and was indeed a small part of the initial set-up of that organisation, but that now, none of them ever speak to me and presumably never will because they think I’m a hate fuelled bigot. This must have been a bit awkward for the brand coach, who probably just thought she was going to have to create some nice floral icons for a ‘birth expert’. But me - I’m a bit more complicated. I’m millihill.
Like me, book 4 is in need of some branding work, and does not yet have a title. Book titles are a complex and mystical beast - do you want the Ronseal effect (I think The Positive Birth Book falls into that category!), or something more cryptic and enticing, like The Body Keeps the Score, Women who Run with the Wolves, If Women Rose Rooted. Or perhaps a mix of both, the perfect example of this being (and hands up who isn’t looking forward to this one, and yes I do have a copy already, and yes, it’s brilliant) Hags: The Demonisation of Middle Aged Women.
As I write book 4, I meditate constantly on what the title might be, partly because a great title can make all the difference to whether people actually want to buy a book, but more so because the title can give you the essence of the book, and as a writer, it’s good to always have that uppermost in your mind. The other night as I helped my 15 year old daughter with her homework, I had a sudden flashback of the way you had to constantly keep turning your exam papers over to read and re-read the titles of essays and questions, because that’s how you got the points, by sticking to the brief. It’s the same with a non-fiction book, you have to deliver what the title promises with absolute clarity.
Then there is the ‘title regret’ you can have, because once it’s published, your title is pretty much carved in stone (although, in the picture above, you’ll see I have a copy of Raising the Skirt: The Unsung Power of the Vagina by Catherine Blackledge, which started life as The Story of V, in no small part due to the publisher’s unease at the word V…V…Vagina being on a book cover). With Give Birth like a Feminist, I sometimes wish I’d called it Birth is a Feminist Issue, because so many people assume it’s a book only of interest to pregnant women. When I wrote it, I very much wanted it to be a book that opened everyone’s eyes to the way women are being let down in the birth room. Perhaps it will do that yet. I still post on the Positive Birth Movement socials (yet another identity of mine) and yesterday some edited stats from Give Birth like a Feminist on ‘tearing’ in childbirth got some attention, following a discussion about the topic on BBC Woman’s Hour. The theme is there again (and it runs through all three of my books) - why do we assume the female body is not fit for purpose? Have a read:
In spite of my mixed feelings about the GBLAF ‘brand’, I went ahead recently, as some of you already know, and turned it into a podcast. Give Birth like a Feminist podcast episodes come out every Monday and it’s on all the main podcast platforms, plus a video version on youtube. If you missed it, the first episode was right in there with the recurring obsession I have with our cultural acceptance of the idea that ‘women’s bodies don’t work very well’:
Episode two was with the wonderful Hannah Dahlen:
and here is the youtube version of the most recent episode, with the lovely Mara Ricoy Olariaga. Remember, you can listen to any of the episodes as a podcast on your favourite platform OR watch them on youtube!
Identity crisis is certainly a facet of Hagdom, as the world changes how it relates to you as a ‘middle aged woman’, ‘terf’ or ‘Karen’, and you suddenly have the space you didn’t really ask for to take a step back and regroup. And, as you pass 45 and Life Version 2.0 begins, you can also suddenly see the profound impact of all your past decisions, and how you must think carefully now about what you want to be when you grow up, in a way that you never really bothered to do when your time here seemed infinite. This realisation can make you hesitant.
This book I’m working on as I contemplate all this will at some point be something separate to me, perhaps even it’s own ‘brand’. But for now most of the book remains as part of my own internal world, and as a part of my own process of discovering who I am. And the answer to that question is a bit of a minefield for an unwitting marketing coach, let’s face it. Everything has to be labelled and given its own flag at the moment, though, perhaps simply because these business guru’s have decided that’s how you sell stuff. So what am I? A birth expert? I absolutely hate that label, and resist it at every opportunity. A feminist? A mother? A writer? An activist? A journalist? A psychotherapist? A cancelled woman? A TERF? A Hag? Some of those labels sit better with me than others. For now I guess I shall just go on resisting being labelled or branded and just be the work in progress that is ‘millihill’.
One of the most interesting things about aging as a woman is how your relationship with the world around you changes. Older women such as me are largely invisible because we are considered "no longer fit for purpose" (as in no man is figuring out how to get our pants off). But being older means that we can listen to our inner wisdom that we may have tried to ignore at an earlier age when we were more focused on our children and others. One of the things I most admire about you "millihill", is your ability to do both at the same time.
You are unique and I think Millihill is all you need to be. We know and love you.