1 post tagged “changing event”

Tell us about an event that changed your life forever.
Submitted by Miss Scotch.

Discovering playwright Sarah Kane.

It was early 1995. I was 23, two and a half years after graduating from university, drifting along in a dead-end job and increasingly prone to depressive tendencies. This particular morning I was just coming off a night shift, at a time when I was extremely radged off and frustrated with work because I'd received no support over an incident where some cocky kid had basically shat on me. My anger and frustration needed expressing, and my confidence was nose-diving to nil because I was surrounded by people who just fed me the useless drone 'just forget all about it' - as I had been all my life. That was the real problem - the bigger picture.

It was against that background that I opened my morning newspaper and read an interview with a new playwright, Sarah Kane, who'd been making waves in the London theatre scene with her graphic portrayal of sex and violence. What struck me about her was the revelation that her literary career was built on writing to express her emotions about things that made her angry or frustrated - and that it was her writing which kept her sane. While these, at the time, were world issues rather than personal ones, I found myself also agreeing with the views she stated about many other things. And she and I were the same age, so I felt even more of a kinship. She was my sister.

Boosted by Miss Kane's catharsis success story, with renewed vigour I began again to pursue my own literary works as my means of expurgating the feelings I needed to express. Discovering Sarah Kane took me off a downward spiral that I know would have ended up sending me into full-blown depression had it continued. For that, and for the many poems and other works I have written under her influence and that have kept me sane, I will always thank her.

I was later to meet Sarah on a number of occasions, and she was really lovely. We looked set to become friends, until her suicide intervened.