Michael Walters

Somehow the year has tightened all the bolts on my rickety life, and I’m hitting the Christmas holidays in a good place. Dad is home from hospital with home care support — that didn’t look likely a week ago. My new job is going well. All the usual Christmas tasks are done or planned. It’s Christmas Eve. The kids are home and happy.

We won’t have my father-in-law at the table for dinner tomorrow, which is still difficult to fathom, and will only hit fully when we sit to eat. It’s been a difficult year all round, but that’s the biggest blow by far. And yet we are all okay, fundamentally. We are coping and looking after each other. This is part of life.

I haven’t written any new fiction this year, so my Patreon account has lost its way. The idea was to create a channel for publishing short stories, blog posts and photos to a smaller audience. I’m no longer sure I want to write stories. I’ll always write, I just need to think about what I want to write. I’ve had to step back from it this year, so it makes sense to look at the bigger picture and decide what I want to put my creative energy into in 2024. I posted a thank you and farewell, and I’ll delete the account before the next subscription payments are taken on January 1st.

I’m going to publish a ‘Seen, Read’ list for 2023 next week, and also some lists of my favourite films and books. There’s a week of 2023 to go, so there could still be some surprises. These lists help me tie the year off and look ahead. I hope you have some time to do whatever you need to do to feel good about the end of the year, or at least good enough. Happy Christmas. 🎄🕯️🕊️

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The year keeps passing me surprises. Last week I was celebrating a new job back at my old employer, and I was looking forward to an unexpected week’s holiday before starting, then my father fell at home and went into hospital, and now I’m going to be living with him for a week to (fingers crossed) get him back on his feet. It’s like the universe lined my free week up for this task.

The transition between jobs, and sectors, from consultancy back to higher education, is an opportunity to reflect. I want to light a fire under my writing projects, and while I can’t say consultancy was bad for my writing, because I wasn’t writing before that either, getting that job did prioritise my tech career. Work consumed my attention in ways I didn’t expect. The pace, complexity and cultural differences filled my brain with unprocessed material that I had to diligently chug through during evenings and weekends.

In the strange weeks after handing my notice in, I found myself (once again) casting a net over all my creative interests. Guitar! Piano! German! Cooking! Coding! Reading! Writing! Yoga! I picked up Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, by Oliver Burkeman, which I’d read before, and Zen Guitar, by Philip Toshio Sudo, a book that I’ve owned for twenty-five years and never read from cover to cover.

Zen Guitar is slim and conversational, but has a faintly formal tone that suits the subject matter. It applies principles of zen to learning guitar — doing things with the right spirit, from the inside out. Burkeman is funnier, taking apart the modern cult of time management and railing against the endless distractions we take up to avoid the work we want to do. We can imagine infinite possibilities for ourselves, but we have limited time, and we can only walk one path in the unknowable amount of it we have left to live.

Back in 2000, on telling my grandfather I was moving to London for a new job, he told me that he didn’t care what I did, as long as I did it well. I didn’t know then that he was in the final weeks of his life. That advice was sound, and moving coming from him then, but it bothered me, and I didn’t know why. I’ve come to know that doing things well is important, yes, but doing the right thing is more important. He gave me one piece of a two-piece puzzle.

After a rough year (which isn’t over yet), I’m setting myself up to do more of the right things in 2024. And why not try to do them well? It’s getting late. I want to make my ghosts happy.

I was caught in a work storm for a few months over the summer. Things settled enough for me to take a small risk, which paid off, and this, along with a tremendous lucky break, means I am finally able to tack for calmer waters. I’m being deliberately opaque. I’m sitting in relief’s front pocket like a joey in his mother’s pouch. Brief bliss.

That’s one part of my life. In another my father-in-law died. My wife went to live with her mother in his final weeks to help tend to him. Another storm, separate but overlapping, that eventually blew itself out. The hole where he was is stark, but he’s no longer suffering. It went from a small lump in June, to radiotherapy in August, to palliative care in September, to gone. The nurses had never seen anything like the wound on his neck that grew big enough to swallow him. Nature can be brutal.

He lived a full life and fought for it to his last breath. His death brought a different flavour of relief. I have my life partner back. We haven’t lived apart that long in the twenty-three years we’ve been together.

When you’re fighting to keep your ship afloat, you’re not thinking much beyond the next hour, the next day. Calmer waters means time to look after yourself. I’ve been limping around with a ridiculous injury that I’ve carried for over a year that I made worse with golf lessons. Golf! The least taxing of all outdoor sports! (I was wrong.) Deep gluteal syndrome. Too much sitting down, a lack of glute strength in general, and one side weaker than the other equals excruciating cramp in my right buttock. It’s funny when it’s not hurting. I found a physio and I’m doing the exercises. This was the third storm.

The final quadrant of my life, writing, is becalmed. (Work, family, health, writing - yes, four.) How could it not be with every other part in flames? Instead of writing, or even reading, I chose to lose myself in horror films instead. This worked well. It was soothing. Unreal.

This is what I wish for in 2024. I want to be fit and healthy again. I want my family to be well. I want work to be stimulating, but not overwhelming, which will allow time to stir the embers of my writing. The novel hasn’t gone away. I can feel energy for it. I want the words to flow. It’s sad that it feels like a luxury, or even a privilege, to be excited about life. I do appreciate it. I’m excited again!

I’ve been reading more this month. I decided to read a novel for thirty minutes uninterrupted at least once every day. I had to dig around to find the motivation to do that because I’d fallen out of love with reading (again). I wanted to break the cycle. I wondered (again) if reading was a waste of time. This is a terrible trap for a writer to find himself in. My head was already full of coding, podcasts, films, and catastrophising (of course). Eventually I decided (this took quite a bit of thought!) that reading was something that lifted my whole experience of living, and luxuriating in literature gave me far more felt experiences than I could have in my physical life, so why wouldn’t I drink deeply from the well, as long as it was balanced with being active in the external world?

Today I was asking myself why I kept struggling with sticking to the habits that keep me physically healthy. My right glute flared up at the end of last week, and I struggled walking for an hour on Saturday. I’ve gained weight because I’m emotional eating again. Looking for ways to eat more healthily, I wrote:

… It needs organisation and discipline. Like writing. Like making anything with complexity that’s of worth. Worth. Work. Worth work worthwork wrthwrk

The worth lifts the work. Knowing the reason makes the task more than just an item on a list. Understanding the purpose, feeling the importance of it, makes me engage creatively, and forgetting the reasons why I read led me to stop reading. The same with writing, eating healthily, and exercise.

I can be aggressive in asking why I’m doing something. I talk myself out of all sorts of potentially valuable things. Creative engagement is an elusive mindset. I’m terrible at taking orders, especially from myself, and after one too many compromises, or if I lack clarity of purpose, my unconscious swiftly calls on the gods of mutiny and self-sabotage.

All I can do to find my way through these defences is to keep doing the slow, thorough work of bringing the defences into the light, and as the saying goes, to ‘give them a good listening to’, with kindness and respect. The forces at play deep under the surface of my conscious mind are powerful and can work for me as well as against. The trick is to realise when I’m using ‘the work’ to avoid action. I want to change, but I have to bring my shadows with me, because they are the ones who will make the changed life worth living.

I’m deep into my summer break, which has not gone to plan. Instead of being in an AirBnB near Lake Geneva, we had to stay home to take my father-in-law to daily radiation therapy for a fast-growing lump on his neck. The speed of his decline is hard to absorb.

He noticed it in June, got an urgent referral in July, and started radiation treatment mid-August. He was driving a week ago, even as we wondered if he should be. His energy was fading with his appetite. Last week we drove him every day to his appointments, and each day he found it harder to get in and out of the car and walk through the hospital. On Friday he agreed to use a wheelchair. At the weekend, he became delirious and fell at home. An ambulance came. It doesn’t look as if he’s strong enough for the necessary treatment. There’s a rough month ahead.

Against this backdrop, as awful as it is, I’ve been able to recover my mojo after a torrid year with my own father and a tough work environment. Dad’s okay and managing at home well enough, which is a relief. I’ve written a lot more in my notebook about films, books, writing, technology, my desires, and all the good things my creative practice needs. Being able to help other people energises me, and I’m excited for September and October, my favourite months. Bring on the leaves, cooler winds, patterned jumpers and the rejuvenation I experience every autumn. It hasn’t been much of a summer in the UK, but autumn can’t disappoint.

(A grim duality. There’s loss coming, it’s in the air, like the sound of the steam train in Something Wicked This Way Comes.)

This is my new website design. It’s a bit like a newspaper, which wasn’t the original intention, but I’ve come to really like it. So, farewell to the old website! Welcome to the new!

I’ve arrived at an approach to posting online that I’ve been resisting for years, but has become inevitable with the slow death of Twitter: one place for my stuff, that I control, with cross-posts to the social media platforms as appropriate. I’m a writer, and readers are scattered ever more widely — Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, Twitter/X (hopefully not for much longer), Substack, Tumblr… I want to spend more time writing new material and less time on social media. Going all in on one place doesn’t make sense anymore. Farewell Twitter. I wouldn’t be here without you.

And hello to my website. I could have switched to Wordpress, but I wanted to build my own thing, in this case using Jekyll, a static site generator. That means all of my posts come from Markdown files in Github and are mixed together whenever the site is built and released. There is an RSS feed, which is from the past but also part of the future now that social media is fragmenting.

Websites are coming back. I might even create a category for tech/coding. We’ll see. I’m planning on interacting with people on socialz, posting ‘notes‘ to my website, and putting fiction and behind-the-scenes stuff on Patreon. It’s all new from here.

I hit an emotional wall a couple of weeks ago. Looking back, it’s been coming for months, but when you’re in a storm for long enough it begins to feel normal. This is mainly a day job thing, and I don’t talk about that here, but emotionally everything is connected, so of course there are knock-on effects. Anxiety got into every nook and cranny of my life, including family, walks around the block, meal times, evenings, weekends, and dreams.

Some part of me pulled the panic cord. For days afterwards I woke at night with memories of real conversations blended with imagined responses, alternative choices I might have made, alliances I could have struck, things I could have done differently. As a partially-reformed people pleaser, I’m wary of my tendency to always wonder what I could have done better. Asking for what I need doesn’t come easily. Boundaries are hard-won. Part of me was wise enough to jump out of this hot pot before I was boiled alive. I’m grateful for that.

It’s been ten days and I still feel shaky. Before this, I would have said I was an above-averagely anxious person who managed it well enough through tools learned in several years of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. I think that is still true. I suspect those tools, along with strong support at home, have prevented me from having a more seriously damaging experience. When I am not thinking about my job, I’m okay—more lethargic than usual, a bit down—but when I find my thoughts drifting to work conversations, and the fast-paced interactions, the big personalities, adrenaline floods into my body, my heart rate accelerates, my stomach churns, and I’m overwhelmed again.

Dad went into hospital just before I started this project. (My last project went so well!) His vulnerability, three hundred miles away, and his reasonable requests for help at random times, have taken a serious toll on me. So much driving. So much sleeping in a ghost house, away from my family. I feel blasted, roasted, blank and exhausted.

What’s the route forward from here? Keep letting the anxiety go, listen to intuition, ask for help, be patient, be kind to myself. Go gently.

The year barrels on and tomorrow we hit July. It’s the halfway point. The summer solstice has passed and the hottest months are ahead. Time doesn’t take a break, even when I ask politely.

Dad gave me some of his old golf clubs. He took me to the Steelworks golf club when I was twelve and taught me to play, but then when I was fourteen I chose tennis over golf, and I haven’t played since. I still play golf video games though, because I’ve always loved the curve of a ball through a landscape. Tennis gave me a similar thrill. Angles, curves, spin, and the laws of physics.

I booked a beginners course at my local golf club. The club has always been there, but I’ve never wanted to visit. Five Saturdays, nine am, one hour, all equipment provided. I know I’m going to be sucked back in. That’s why I’m doing it. Perhaps it’s part of the process of letting my father go.

Got a nice little string of blog posts going here. Here are the May headlines:

• my father is out of hospital (eight weeks!)
• the cinema finally opened

Dad’s bounced back well. He looks his eight-eight years, and he’s anxious about his heart, but he’s happy to be home, able to make meals and potter around the house, and he’s back to sending me the occasional wry message. I’m starting to relax and let in some joy and relief. I just want him to enjoy whatever time he has left.

The new cinema was announced in 2019, and I’ve been boring everyone around me about it ever since. A monthly membership lets me-plus-one watch unlimited films, but in the opening week I was faced with Fast X (shit), The Little Mermaid (not for me), Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (possibly fun, but IP-driven nonsense) and Super Mario Bros (um). This was not how it was supposed to go.

There are throwback showings on Sunday evenings. Last week it was Heat. During the final chase, I could feel the rumble of planes in my stomach, and my wife now has the hots for nineties Pacino. He’s a very sloppy kisser on a big screen. It was all unexpectedly intimate. I’ve become used to television-sized screens for films. Last night it was Fight Club, and they gave out free wine and popcorn. What a film, but, you know, we all know the first rule.

I walked slowly through the centre of Swansea this morning after listening to Marc Maron on his podcast talk about Sweaty Marc, the version of himself in New York from the eighties that he remembers as he walks there today. In the nineties, I was mostly lonely and lost, and Swansea was my stomping ground, but Lonely Mike doesn’t haunt me in the same way Sweaty Marc does Maron. It’s an apt image though, because I’m a little lost now, twenty-five years on. The novel isn’t coming on its own, and I’m not doing the right things to help it along.

I made the decision to concentrate on my software career this year. I started a new job in September, and I’ve passed my probation, but there are redundancies happening all over the technology sector. I don’t feel particularly safe yet. At the end of March I started on a hectic, high profile account, so it’s been vital I get to grips with everything quickly. I’ve been waking up at five am thinking about work problems. I haven’t been in a job where I’ve felt so challenged in a long time. It’s taking all my energy.

But I had a dream the other night. An elegantly dressed woman is with me and a man on a balcony in a nightclub. The man is very drunk. She whispers to him that they should go on somewhere else. She’s sober and taking care of him. I want to go home, and I think the man’s had enough too, but if I don’t go with them they’ll be alone without me, and that feels wrong in some important way.

Perhaps I need to readdress the balance after a month that’s demanded everything I have. The man in the dream is a bit of a battered shell, and the woman is trying to look after him, but I need to step in and suggest… other options.

At the start of the day a deployment of code went awry and at the end I was a go-between over my still-hospitalised father’s boxer shorts. Life can be ridiculous.

On Monday I went to see John Wick 4 and ate a terrible hot dog. The person serving sprinkled it with dried (!), crunchy onions. Then yesterday I watched the first half of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte. The two films serve different parts of me. Michelangelo Antonioni — I am Michael, my uncle was an Anthony who is now with the angels. He was rich, although he might have denied it. Our last conversation was an argument over Brexit. I told him it would cost the country untold damage, and we’d be back in the EU eventually. He made some argument about the unfairness of laws on unpasteurised French cheeses. It’s a sad memory.

My new work account is the mobile app of a well-known supermarket. On the train home I read A Study in Scarlet, my first Sherlock Holmes novel. All I could see in my mind were Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson. I need some sleuthing skills to unpick some work puzzles, but first I need to discern the important ones. Not all puzzles are created equal. (Hm, that reminds me of other things. Sigh.)

Walked to Southside for a coffee. Why? I’m thinking of Gwen Bell, then Neo/Keanu. I deliberately left my notebook at home. I need some time without a pen in my hand. Re-balancing… something. Gwen, Neo and Keanu are seekers of different kinds.

I told myself yesterday to put the writing weight down. There is too much else going on to add the pressure of writing a novel. Life before art. Life is an art, yes, but you get my drift. I’m chaining myself to a rock when I need to be swimming.

Dad’s hoping to come out of hospital this week. He’s always on the back of my mind. And I started a new account in work, before I had completely finished the old one, so I’ve been doing both until today. A mind-stretching exercise and I’m glad it’s over. It’s a short week. I’m looking forward to the Easter break.

Maybe I can put some of this Neo coding energy into a character in the book. (I can’t help myself, but there’s a gap between thought and action.) If I’m stuck in a matrix, what sort is it? Writing? Capitalism? Our budget spreadsheet is a matrix. Reality? (There’s that word again.)

Keanu Reeves is in a relationship with Alexandra Grant, a visual artist, who on her website says her work asks the questions:

How do the languages we speak and the images we see form how we think and exchange ideas? How can artists and writers work to create and influence culture in an increasingly technology-driven world?

My father is in hospital again. Both his legs are swollen, which is fairly common with heart failure, which we’ve known about for a few years, but one of his arms has also swelled up, and he’s out of breath doing the slightest things. The practice GPs thought it was better to treat him at home, but the lymphoedema nurse was adamant it was something else. My moderately stressful trip shoehorning Dad into a VW Polo for an assessment in an inaccessible part of one hospital became an eight-hour wait with the triage team in a bigger hospital. As part of his admission he did a Covid test… which came back positive. The only people he sees are the district nurses who dress his legs, so it was probably them. He’s asymptomatic—I took him for his last vaccination in November—but after a whole day face-to-face lifting him in an out of chairs, I feel like I’m playing Covid roulette with a full chamber.

I’m letting off steam. He’s in good hands. I hope he’ll be home in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’m working from (childhood) home, I miss my family, I’m tired, and I feel vulnerable. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a full-time carer. At the same time, it’s a privilege to be able to look after him like this.

Hospitals are emotional places. There’s nothing like an admission ward to make you feel grateful for your health. Dad might be old and ill, but I’m still young and well. I have to remind myself because my boundaries in this are both hard-won and ever-fragile.

This is the tipping point. I’m fifty in two weeks. I’ve watched fifty percent of the 800 films I own, and even less of the books. The amount of time I have left is constricting, but the number of books and films I own keeps expanding. Something has to give.

I need a new philosophy. What I consume (bleurgh) must feed (this is family trauma speaking) whatever I am creating. I envy those who have perhaps always done this. Collecting and list-making is the hoarder’s comfort. Part of me wants to watch and read everything, to learn every language, to play every instrument, but the excess of wanting all this, never mind getting it, is enormously destructive. It’s like over-eating. It’s a form of nihilism. It’s choosing not to choose because I’m afraid of getting it wrong. Instead, I could consciously make a path and accept the consequence—choose an author, a book, that feels related to the novel I’m writing, or pick a film that speaks to something bubbling under the surface that I can’t yet grasp. Maybe it’ll be useful and maybe it won’t, but I’ll have severed my chain to the immovable boulder of infinite possibilities.

Elizabeth Filips, my current YouTube guru-crush, preaches ‘soft discipline’. She means, trust your intuition as to when you do things, and don’t get bogged down in systems and rigid structures. That same knowing-what’s-right works for picking books, tweaking a sentence, choosing clothes in the morning and improvising a meal. It requires being sensitive to how I feel and what I think, and to wonder why I feel and think that now. As a straight man who loves intelligence and empathy in others, Elizabeth Filips is ripe for anima projection. Libido flows through the anima—life force, creative energy, motivation, call it what you will. Intuition is my inner feminine.

Films are a safe way to experience the extremes of life, and books too, probably all art, but in excess they can also be a defence against actually living. It’s time to make some choices. All of my watchlists and TBR shelves make me feel like I have a plan and a project, but this leads to my father’s version of my predicament, which is thirty-eight more years of reading and TV. It’s a decent life, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want it. I can imagine other options.

I’m staying with Dad for the weekend, and because he’s having some new health problems, it’s quite hard work. My mother was always the anxious one. I wonder now, in her absence, how much she was anxious for everybody, in the literal sense of taking on other people’s anxiety. Dad is getting more and more anxious as he gets older. He hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he’s eighty-eight next month. He’s doing amazingly for his age, but he’s rarely been ill, and has escaped most debilitating conditions until now.

I made a list of the reasons this is a tricky situation for him, me and my sister, which I’m not going to share here, but this weekend more than ever I find myself influenced by the emotional weather in the house, which matches the drizzle coming across the Atlantic. He’s miserable, frustrated, afraid and generally grouchy, but in between he is also drily funny, easily distracted by sports, caring and good company. We watched Bullet Train last night, which we both found gross and very amusing. These are the breaks in the clouds.

Today I’ve spent solid time with him, but also escaped to Swansea, Porthcawl and Aberavon. My part of North Yorkshire is much colder and drier than South Wales, and I forget how these weather fronts can define the days. It finally stopped raining mid-afternoon, so I went to my mother’s grave to say hello. A woman left the children’s graveyard with her hood up, hiding her face. I spotted a hawk floating over the nearby woodland. It was quiet.

I’ve still got time with my father, but this stretch of illness feels different to previous ones. I can’t tell if this is my misery, or if I’m infected with the gloom over this house. Caring for others is also a seemingly endless exercise in reinforcing boundaries.

It’s been a year of three big creative adventures: getting a new job (first in fourteen years); a family holiday in France (first to Paris for a week, then to Morzine in the French Alps); setting up my Patreon (experimenting with a patrons-only podcast).

There was very little fiction writing, but plenty of reflective writing, a lot of films (131), and some books (26 of which were fiction).

In time-honoured fashion, here are my favourite discoveries of 2022, in chronological order of publication or release.

Favourite books of 2022

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Douglas Adams
• Climbers (1989), M John Harrison
• A Patchwork Planet (1998), Anne Tyler
• Nod (2012), Adrian Barnes
• I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016), Iain Reid
• The Spirit of Science Fiction (2016), Robert Bolaño
• Saltwater (2019), Jessica Andrews
• Braised Pork (2020), An Yu
• Dead Relatives (2021), Lucie McKnight Hardy
• Seafood & Cocktails (2021), Eygló Karlsdóttir

Favourite films of 2022

• Stop Making Sense (1984), dir. Jonathan Demme
• Morvern Callar (2002), dir. Lynne Ramsay
• The Consequences of Love (2004), dir. Paolo Sorrentino
• Oslo, August 31st (2011), dir. Joachim Trier
• Columbus (2017), dir. Kogonada
• The Empty Man (2020), dir. David Prior
• Palm Springs (2020), dir. Max Barbakow
• Undine (2020), dir. Christian Petzold
• The Sparks Brothers (2021), dir. Edgar Wright
• Top Gun: Maverick (2022), dir. Joseph Kosinski

Time to wrap this year up and store it with all the others.

I’m excited about 2023. There’s a lot I want to do next year. (This is the case every year.)

I’ve just broken a wine glass. I’m at my father’s house, and it feels auspicious, although I don’t know why. He has cheap glasses because we are his only wine-drinking visitors. He rarely drinks alcohol anymore, and when he does it’s either lager or a glass of whatever we are having. Anyway, the glass broke neatly at both the top and bottom of the stem, so there were three pieces of glass on the tiled floor. I hadn’t poured anything into it, so it was a cinch to tidy up. I got off lightly. I’ve put the pieces in a padded envelope, as per instructions, taped it closed, as per instructions, and dropped the package in the outside bin. It made a satisfying thunk as it hit the bottom.

We brought what was left of the Christmas dinner Chardonnay with us, and it had been in the fridge since we got here earlier today. I’m sipping it from a new glass. There are only two left. Somebody else must have broken the fourth. Maybe I did, but I can’t remember breaking it, not that that means anything. I’ve got a terrible memory for details. Some details. Unimportant details. Important things stay with me.

The nick on my hand has already scabbed over. Dad’s finger started bleeding yesterday. He’s eighty-seven. Thin skin. He didn’t know how it happened and said it had just split. I didn’t believe that, but who knows? I hope I get to be eighty-seven and discover my skin can just split like that. Getting fragile with old age is a gift. Perhaps there’s a connection between his cut and mine, a tunnel through time and space, and my broken wine glass somehow cut his thumb in the past.

The truth is, I try not to think about him too much when I’m home, and he is here, because he’s vulnerable and old, and he won’t move nearer to either me or my sister, and he won’t talk about alternatives, or support options, so forgetting is easier. But having him with us for Christmas reminds me how much I love him, and how much I’ll miss him when he’s gone.

I thought I was going to write about the exciting things I want to do in 2023, but instead I’ve written about bleeding, breakages, love, helplessness and loss. There’s always tomorrow, I guess.

I’ve made some tweaks to the styles and layout of this website. I’m thinking about the future.

I went for a walk and the streets were quiet. It’s Halloween and dark outside, but it was too early even for the youngest children to be out. My daughter had friends around for a spooky-themed tea, and now they’ve gone out to ask for treats. The door knocking has begun.

Yesterday a sentence came to mind while I was writing in my notebook. I was in the sweet spot where each sentence starts effortlessly after the one before. I wrote, “The most important thing to do is”, and I expected the final word to be writing, but instead I heard a voice in my head say “disconnect”. It stopped me in my tracks. So I wrote:

The most important thing to do is (disconnect) write.

The idea of disconnecting filled me with relief. It reminded me of something I’d posted on Twitter:

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy you have to accept uncertainty, live with it, and eventually perhaps enjoy it. You also need to access intuition and be willing to follow wherever it leads. It’s pain that becomes joy, if you can stick with it. (Stick with it.)

At the time, it was an encouragement to someone online I had in mind, but it was also a call to action for me. I’ve cobbled together a creative process from my therapy experience, but I often forget to embrace the uncertainty of life, and I pile pressure on myself to finish things. The truth is, I’m afraid I will die before I finish the next story, and the anxiety is paralysing. Or perhaps I think I’ll die when I finish the story. While a story is still being written it is neither good nor bad. Nobody can judge it, it’s out of sight. I’m safe.

There’s another knock at the door, but there’s nobody there, and our empty milk bottles are gone. I had treats, but it looks like somebody chose to play a trick. Or did I forget to put the milk bottles out? And is that laughter in the bushes?

I want to enjoy uncertainty. I want to follow my intuition wherever it leads. I want the pain to become joy. I want to stick with it. I want to disconnect. I want to write.

When I visit my father, I always love to walk around Swansea and get an early morning coffee. We used to come as a family on Saturday mornings when I was growing up, so with my existing coffee and writing habit it’s a double comfort. It also gets me out of the house, which is frozen in amber and not somewhere I want to hang around while my dad gets up. This time I walked past the Kardomah, a Swansea landmark famous for its links with Dylan Thomas and his ’Kardomah Gang’, a group of intellectuals who met there in the 1930s. I wish the neon in the photograph was lit. It’s a lovely list.

The summer seems to be accelerating beneath my feet. Being in Port Talbot always puts me in a reflective mood. I brought with me James Hollis’s amazing book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, as well as the rather more prosaic Essentialism, by Greg McKeown. I’ve read both before, but they jumped into my hands from the bookshelf as I was packing. Hollis’s masterwork is a Jungian take on how to engage with yourself to live a meaningful life. That ‘yourself’ is the key to the book—the psyche, the soul, the unconscious, however you label it, it’s the part of us that knows what we need to heal,flourish and grow, but as adults we’re often conditioned to ignore.

Right now, I’m questioning my excitement over my new job in September, and my guilt at not wanting to write. It should be the other way around. I’ve always put writing first and felt guilty at not being as into my day job. There is some sort of correction going on, which is interesting and a bit scary. Anyway, the book is a reminder of what’s at play under the surface, and perhaps I can use what I learn in my writing.

Essentialism is much lighter fayre, a reminder to say no to most things and yes to very few. Where Hollis advocates conversations with the psyche, in whatever way we can, to find the things we truly want to do, McKeown is saying to go all in on one thing instead of diffusing energy into many things. That’s the same advice, but without the depth. I can see now why I brought them.

I’m sick of beating myself up over not writing. It’s exhausting and ridiculous. What is meaningful and essential to me this summer is to be healthier, be fully present with my family, do a good job of moving jobs, enjoy our first family holiday abroad, and keep my literary life ticking over. These are my current priorities. Perhaps I need to switch some of them around, and perhaps I don’t, but this is where I am.