This newsletter is free and requires a fair bit of emotional labour *laughs maniacally* - please consider getting a paid subscription, or supporting me with a one-off contribution on Ko-Fi to keep me going.
No money? Oh babe, I relate - please do like and share this post with a friend, instead. Every Little Helps! *twerks to the Tesco jingle*
They say you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. They say if you haven’t got anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk, they say. Ask yourself three questions before you speak, they say:
Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?
Well - good or bad, I’ve had absolutely nothing to say lately. Writer’s block has been a bit mad, ngl. Nothing makes me feel more down than being too uninspired to write; I lose all sense of being, and I get very, very angry as a consequence.
Life has so much to offer and yet I haven’t found any inspiration these past few weeks. Does that make me the boring one? I started to think about ayahuasca, psilocybin - hell, pass me some acid - I need to feel something new! I need to take my consciousness to another level! Make me feel something.
The key to sound mental health - at least, a large part of said key - is to live in the present moment. You’d heard it all before - don’t obsess about the future, don’t fret about the past, just embrace the now and feel gratitude for that. As a writer you can’t really live in the moment often enough, because you have to envision a future and analyze a past in order to create a story. The constant time traveling in the brain - letting the mind leave the body to disassociate back and forth in time - eventually leaves you a little discombobulated. From a psychological textbook view, it makes sense that writers are more likely to die by suicide (Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Yukio Mishima, Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Qiu Miaojin…). To capture life, you must look death in the face and question it, embrace it, dance with it.
*
Truman Capote had to spend years at a murder scene (bringing along his friend, Nelle Harper Lee, author of How To Kill A Mockingbird) to create his bestseller In Cold Blood. Mary Shelley had to be locked in a house (in Geneva, due to poor weather conditions) and get into a horror writing competition with Lord Bryon to create Frankenstein (she also carried her dead husband’s calcified heart around with her? It was found in her writing desk after her death. So yeah. There’s that). Gay Talese risked his life following the mafia for seven years to write Honor Thy Father, a book that inspired Mario Puzo to write The Godfather.
Hunter S. Thompson… well, just google Hunter S. Thompson. (One fun fact - he once left a fresh elk’s heart on Jack Nicholson’s doorstep as a birthday present, because he was utterly insane. Nicholson was so scared it was from a murderous stalker that he called the FBI and hid in the basement all night).
Victor Hugo - author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame - made his aide confiscate all his clothes so that he couldn’t go out. Come winter and the man was still there naked, writing. That’s one way to get it done. Charles Bukowski was said to partake in Russian roulette. Charles Dickens loved hitting up the Paris morgue to stare at dead bodies. Leonardo da Vinci’s art would not be as significant as it was if it wasn’t for his early anatomical studies - he was deeply fascinated by the brain, heart, and lungs in particular - organs that he called the “motors” of the senses and of life. I mean, literally - the man would dissect dead bodies. Death and creation are undeniably one.
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” - Oscar Wilde
One of my favourite books is Notes On Suicide by Simon Crutchley. One of the closing chapters reads:
“Perhaps the closest we come to dying is through writing, in a sense that writing is a leave-taking from life, a temporary abandonment of the world and one’s petty preoccupations in order to see things more clearly. In writing, one steps back and steps outside life in order to view it more dispassionately, both more distantly and more proximately. With a steadier eye. One can lay things to rest in writing: ghosts, hauntings, regrets, and the memories that flay us alive.”
*
A few weeks ago (just before the writer’s block hit, actually) my therapist gently suggested I get myself tested for ADHD.
I always used to joke about being a commitment-phobe; I couldn’t stay in one job long, I rarely finish things - I have around 250,000 words worth of unfinished book drafts - keeping focus feels like an infuriatingly impossible task at times.
I don’t know what to do with my hands. I remember when I met my husband and we were in the early stages of dating; we were sitting on the grass in a park one July, just chatting, when I slammed my hand into the mud. He looked at me inquisitively - he asked what was up (or something along those lines) and I shrugged, embarrassed. I dunno. I was just slamming my hand into the mud, init. My actions are impulsive and my body acts out of turn. I clench my fists, pinch my arms until my nails leave crescent dents on my skin, and maybe I do that to myself to stay in my own body, to control my body. Maybe it’s a defensive action to stop myself from dissociating. How bizarre it is, to look at yourself in the mirror and realise the inner voice is separate from the body it sees in the mirror, to realise you are a ball of energy that will never die living in a fleshy vehicle largely comprised of water. What the fuck, man.
I don’t know how people survive in 9 - 5 jobs, because I don’t know how they stay still for eight hours. I remember having to find an empty meeting room in my last 9 - 5; I’d go in, turn off the lights and lay on the floor, stretching my limbs like the Vitruvian Man, sometimes screaming into my jumper to muffle the sound. I struggle to mentally stay in one place. I couldn’t stay in education post school - I didn’t have the attention span for it which was painful, because I so wanted to learn. My therapist said I act like I’m all liquid, just floating through the universe. She’s not wrong; I rarely feel the ground beneath my feet. The 54321 method (thanks for this tip, Nadia) helps me calm down and ground myself when things are tough sometimes.
Acknowledge FIVE things you see around you.
Acknowledge FOUR things you can touch around you.
Acknowledge THREE things you hear.
Acknowledge TWO things you can smell.
Acknowledge ONE thing you can taste.
One symptom of ADHD is putting yourself in dangerous situations. Studies suggest those with ADHD lack dopamine. “Risky behaviors can increase dopamine levels, which may be part of the reason some individuals with ADHD are drawn to them,” says Stephanie Sarkis, PhD. She is the author of Adult ADD: A Guide for the Newly Diagnosed.
ADHD makes you up to six times more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, which at least explains the urge to try ayahuasca (lols). A life worth living requires risk taking, I always thought. Or maybe I’m just a fiend on a dopamine hunt. Yeesh.
Surely we can’t have processed the detrimental effects of the pandemic lockdown yet. Our ability to live has been so restricted. I miss impulsively booking a flight, I miss travelling on my own. When you get on a plane on your own and the engine rumbles and it dawns on you that you’re going somewhere strange where no one will know you and you can be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do, man - I don’t know a better high. My first solo trip was when I was 21 and bummed out over some insignificant dickhead. I was in my living room, curtains drawn, dressing gown on at 2 pm, when I hit up Skyscanner and booked a flight to New York. I turned up with no accommodation booked, stumbling into a YMCA on Columbus Circle opposite the Empire Hotel (any Gossip Girl fans out there? Cos mate, I SQUEALED when I saw the neon ‘Empire’ sign), booking the cheapest room in the hostel and sleeping on a bed with wheels that would slide across the room everytime I moved in my sleep. Not that I would have slept well anyway, because the door wouldn’t lock properly.
Waking up and brushing my teeth next to a row of women from all parts of the planet in the communal bathroom, going to read in a bar across the street at 9 pm and bumping into a group of Pakistanis born in Queens, having that transatlantic ‘diaspora connection moment’ and walking through the Meatpacking district with them at 1 am smoking weed and trying to get into a club, failing and walking over the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun rose to get breakfast, becoming Facebook friends and never speaking again, even though I thought of that night often.
It’s a first-world problem for sure, but aren’t we allowed to be raging at the life we’ve missed out on since 2020? Our lives are so short - soon we’ll be ashes or six feet under the ground being consumed by fungi, nourishing the earth and that, *insert the science here* because I don’t know, G.
So much life to live, so little time to live it in. Being deprived of our lifelong privileges - like travelling - at least revives a sense of gratitude, boosts your lust for life, and reminds you of the burning desire deep inside to see it all. If only I could get my thoughts in order to actually live a little more efficiently.
If you like what I write, please consider financially supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber or supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you can’t financially support the newsletter, please share it with others and like and comment. Writing is an arduous process, but your support maintains my will to continue.
If you already have a paid subscription - thank you! Your support helps me a. literally survive and b. keep my newsletter free and accessible to all. So thanks, I love you, dear stranger of my heart.
A.D.H.D
Another great piece, totally understand where your coming about ADHD and can very much relate. Being a fellow creative when you have a block, i totally get that feeling especially when your talent provides the bread. But you will get there, the block is only temporary. Love your writing, speaks volumes ❤️
Oh nooo at Mary Shelley and her husbands heart 😂😵 *remembers our English lit class at college reading Frankenstein*