The Other Me
‘Shut In’ vi. Do things long enough, and they become your routine. Get stuck in a routine, and you don’t think about what else there is. Your routine becomes your life – your world. For most who work, the break in the routine is the weekend, when they might go out, unwind; for me, the weekend was just another two days. So when a cousin’s wedding approached, I advised my mum months in advance that I wouldn’t be going. This was unlike the couple of times I’d been out, chaperoned in a controlled environment to buy Wolf, or see Mike – two excursions that were brief and which, if worse…
The Other Me
‘Shut In’ v. Writing was my best therapy. It had always been my best therapy. I could live vicariously through writing, but I could also vent and make sense of the thoughts tumbling around in my head; I could be biographical, through events, through characters, through emotions, whilst writing fiction; I could tell and share stories with the world around me … if I could ever make it. Because making it was another matter entirely. Once, there’d been an unassailable self-belief that it would happen, but now I was pushing past my mid-20s, had a couple of (unpublished) novels, a handful of screenplays, and lots of short stories behind me,…