GUEST SPEAKER

Sarah Hepola was determined not to be a cliché. It was only when she stopped striving so hard to be different that she found a sense of freedom

Author Sarah Hepola writes about the beauty of being ordinary

I NEVER WANTED TO BE ORDINARY. I GREW UP WANTING TO BE DIFFERENT FROM OTHER PEOPLE,

with their cookie-cutter worlds and their cookie-cutter problems. As a writer, you learn to avoid the words and phrases that have become tired from overuse, and that attitude becomes something of a blueprint for your life. Stray from the commonplace. Crack open new beauty. Whenever I slipped into language that was too humdrum, my English professors would circle it in that punishing red ink: Cliché. But being determined to defy the typical routine can lead you down a tough path.

Alcohol was an early step away from normality. As a teenager, drinking made me feel tougher, cooler than the kids standing on the sidelines, waiting for excitement to begin. At university, alcohol gave me access to a bravado I never found in class. But at parties I was a woman to be reckoned with.

Drinking came with problems of course. I blacked out too often, poured beer on people’s heads and had unwise sex with men, but I woke up the next morning and laughed it off, because who cared? The next 15 years can be seen as a slow slide from controlling the punchline, to becoming one. I fell off barstools. I yelled in the middle of the street. By the end of my drinking, there was less laughter, more tears. Less bravado, more paranoia. When I gave up booze at the age of 35, I felt like many things – a failure, a loser. I also felt like a cliché.

There should be a term for this, the additional insult that not only are you sad and lost, but you are not even original in your pain. The woman weeping through the night with an inconsolable newborn; the middle-aged man struggling with fidelity; the single career woman who would trade half her accolades for a partner. Haven’t we seen these movies? Don’t we know these tired tropes? I was stuck here for a while, in the trenches where ordinary pain thrives and, in those hellish and uncertain months, people tried to comfort me. Easy does it. One day at a time. Be kind to yourself. And I sneered at them, because those are clichés. Get tired and desperate enough, and you will reach for any hand. What I discovered over the next years was how useful clichés can be. The real world is overwhelming, but these sayings boiled the complexity of the world down to one forward motion: keep going. Clichés are the narrative of our time on earth. I miss you. I love you. I need help. And using a cliché, or becoming a cliché, makes you human.

In time, I could see how much of my youth was a cliché: the suburban girl shaking off her conformist youth, the store-bought defiance in a can. We are all clichés. You live, then you die. As a writer, it is my job to dig past the ordinary and alight on the startling detail, but as a human being, all I needed to do was build a life I did not want to drink away. Alcohol had overtaken me and I’d stopped noticing how much beauty was around me. I started to see it again: the birth of a child, a puppy licking its paw, the sun sinking at the water’s edge. Clichés, all of them – and the small, perfect miracles that are ours for the taking.

It was only when I stopped striving to be different that I found freedom. For so many years, I thought it was uncool to be ordinary, not understanding that being ordinary is a great gift. Now I think it’s a cliché to shape your world based on what’s ‘cool’. There is peace to be found in embracing life’s mundanities. There is peace to be found in embracing the cliché. You can stop choosing the opposite of what other people are doing – and choose the life you want. Blackout: Remembering The Things I Drank To

Forget by Sarah Hepola is out now

‘THERE IS PEACE TO BE FOUND IN EMBRACING THE CLICHÉ’