Thank you ☺️

You don’t need to say a thing! You do all the lovely! 🥰

So thank you @bookwormvaught.bsky.social because the prizes and visibility #Curae gives are amazing, but it’s also much more than that, and that value helps lift all of us skywards, sometimes by increments but we are rising.

Owning the impact of caring on our lives enables us to own the depth it brings to our creative perspective, and more, it enables us to own who we are in a relationship with a status that can become one-sided and all consuming. #Curae is the only opportunity out there that does this so explicitly.

but that also takes back a piece of ourselves by saying ‘I am a carer. I am a writer. I am both and they can co-exist’.

I think that’s the most valuable thing about Curae. It is a point where we can inhale deeply and click ‘submit’ on something that doesn’t just send a piece of ourselves into the electronic ether for judgement …

In that moment, we have a choice as carers. We can lose ourselves entirely to the all-consuming, daunting cascade of responsibility that becomes our day-to-day, or we can find some path to owning our creativity in a new form, a different incarnation.

Until we can’t.

Until we realise, suddenly or gradually, that trying to carry on as normal in the torrent is like walking into the waves of the 100 Year Storm with a laptop and a saucepan and expecting to float.

Yes, I have to do more around my previous life … but that’s just life, right? We all pick up a bit extra here and there. I can do this. I can spin all the plates. I can care and create and work and not lose myself in the torrent.

For a long time, many people ‘just keep swimming’. We minimise the impact on us personally and creatively. We think the only way to keep our previous sense of self is to embrace the ‘doing it all’ mentality.

No matter how slowly or suddenly the condition of those we care for changes, our sense of self and understanding of our new identity, one that immeasurably changes us and entwines us with the responsibility and care of another, isn’t guaranteed to arrive on schedule with the responsibilities.

There is something more valuable than the physical prizes #Curae provides. It means that everyone who submits to the Curae Prize wins.

My experience is that becoming a carer isn’t an event that happens to you. It’s a mindset change that creeps up on you slowly.

… but then publishing is not inclusive on so many levels, and honestly doesn’t seem to want to be unless it’s by publishing a niche the machine thinks it can profit from.

This isn’t politics. This is a regime modelling itself on an ideology we have already had to deal with the consequence of in Europe.

I bloody love my vibrant and neurodiverse people. I see you. You do not deserve this

When does ‘eradicating autism by September’ become eradicating autistic people? Then what? Are they coming for all the neurodiverse people? Then are they going to chase down anyone with an SLD? Can we expect those with dyslexia to be up next for the curative cull?

What’s next? I mean, we know there can be a genetic element so when can we expect the forced sterilisations and reproductive restrictions that the next ‘Nazism for Dummies’ chapter deals with?