• The Other Me

    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there’d been an unassailable self-belief that it would happen, but now I was pushing past my mid-20s, had a couple of (unpublished) novels, a handful of screenplays, and lots of short stories behind me,…

  • The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘Shut In’ iii. The one problem with my sphere of comfort was that inside it, time was almost static – at least for me. Things happened, to indicate time was passing: Wolf grew from a puppy to a dog, we all got older, the clock kept ticking, but when you’re inside the world where these things happen, everything moves along almost imperceptibly, or at least in a way where you don’t question it. It was a lot of work to function in any sort of social capacity. One time, my friend Bruce visited. Bruce had visited so often in the past – I’d known him for over fifteen years. Now,…