23/100, Sometimes it helps to hate yourself.

No really.

Wake at 5am. Outside, the sound of cars; inside, my seven year-old snoring next to me. Away for five days, I got back yesterday afternoon. The Patron Saint of Elsewhere again. Each of us thinking we’ve got the short straw; him with the children, me with work. Each convinced the task at hand was the most arduous.

I’m sore from working. No one tells you about the physicality of writing. What it takes to sit for hours on end, battling every urge to get up. Sun all weekend. To not go outside and sit in it. The mental stamina or sheer stubbornness needed to follow the same through line the length of a project. No hesitation. No deviation. It’s a fucking discipline.

Arrived in town on Wednesday. By Saturday, my demons had come out to play. You think you can do this, my own voice said to me. You think anyone will like it, the same voice said. You think you’re the one to tell this story, you think you know how to do this, you think you could stick to something safe, people want a brand, don’t you know and so my own voice droned on and on and just give it up, just go outside, just phone a friend, just get dressed up, just eat a nice dinner, just say it’s too much and you’ll stick to writing about yourself ad nauseum and there’s that exhibition you want to see and when was the last time you went to the Barbican and you’re hungry are you, why don’t you just get something else to eat and it went on and went on and it looped and repeated. It’s hard when it’s your own voice saying it.

They say you’re not meant to hate yourself. Be kind to yourself. They say it you can’t love yourself you can’t love anyone else. I say that’s bullshit. It’s my self loathing that gets the job done.

If I didn’t finish it, I’d shit talk myself for a long time. This project, I’ve put off because I’m scared of it, it’s big, I’m not. I saw Chris Power and someone else talk and I wish I could remember who else it was, but I can’t. And Chris said when you write you have to feel like you’re out your depth but you can still touch the bottom with your tiptoes. With this, there’s been none of that. For a long time, I was all at sea. Other people believe in it. People are waiting for me to finish it. I feel like I’m on borrowed time with it, keep promising to deliver and never do. Feel like a flake, a fraud, a joke. So I tell myself to sit still, work 8 hours a stretch, switching screens between old newspapers and the document, tiny font taunting me as the light fails.

And I feel like I’m walking a tightrope, trying not to fall and I do not have the stomach for acrobatics. I like my feet on the ground. But they are not. I am up there, trying not to fall, trying to make a story out of all this, trying to find the throughline, trying to stick to it, my stomach flipping, trying to tell all the voices to shut up apart from the strongest one, the one telling me I’ll be an eternal disappointment and failure if I do not finish this and see, the fear of failure is just fine if it keeps you moving.

And then, it arrives, the sense that is just that. An intuition that you’re on the right path, and you could be flying as suddenly the scenes and the hours pile up at the same time and you can hardly keep up with the characters and you disappear; it’s like falling in love, it’s like falling off a cliff, it’s deep knowing when usually you know nothing at all, and the world goes away, and you feel it contract as it takes its proper shape and nothing, not the sunshine, not the galleries, not the friends, not the dinners, not the parks, none of it, could ever match this. It is the most alive you’ll ever feel, even if after, you’ll blink, wonder where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing.

And then you get to the end. Type your grandmother’s name in dedication, remember the day she drove you across a ford, cow parsley crowding the lanes, the air thick with pollen, and she first began to tell you this story and you let yourself cry for a moment because finishing is loss. A specific sort of grief.

And then I wake, 5am, sore wrists, and let’s do it all over again. Some compulsions aren’t so bad after all.