april camera roll

is it just me or has april dragged on for you too? looking at this, i’m like ‘wow, these feel like 4 months worth of Activities’ – maybe i have literally packed a lot in? i mean, lowkey i don’t think so! we’ve been squirrelling away on book (secret) bits. lots of writing and hard work. i’ve spent most weeknights staying at the office late – i remember having a conversation with my ye olde therapist from 2020 about this. he was insistent that i needed better work life boundaries and i remember saying ‘OK DANIEL. YES. I KNOW. BUT I LOVE WHAT I DO AND I WANT TO DO IT WELL.’ he didn’t seem to think that was a particularly good comeback, and i tend to agree. but i also know i will continue to work hard, head down etc bc i love my job, i love my life, i feel so LUCKY! to be able to love my job – dyou know how rare that is!?!?! for your passions, interest, source of income and 9-5 to intersect??? to be the same thing??? i feel lucky. i feel like the luckiest girl in the world most days, even when it is 10.30PM and i am the only person left in exchange, and i am tip tap typing away with only the mice for company. me and the mice, ahhahhahahaa.

yeah. i still feel lucky. we have a soft deadline for end of may and i am looking forward to another really long month ahead. because a long month means i am having the time of my life, tip tap typing w my pals, the mice. idk daniel! idk!!! i look back at my journal for the month and all i seem to have written about is ‘this chapter is going to be this, i have had this idea, i can’t figure out this thing, gabrielle said this and this and i think this’ – non-stop writing shop.

it’s not just long hours in the office, my brain never switches off. i have bought a pocketsized notebook so i can always make little notes (this month i also reached the LIMIT, maxxed out the number of notes i’m allowed to make on notes app, so i’ve switched over to pen n paper bc my phone literally will not allow me to make one single note more). i gasp! and run to my notebook at the weirdest times – on the loo, on the treadmill, when i am stomping down the strand to get a little sandwich. i read deborah levy’s things i don’t want to know, where she mentions having a writer’s notebook that functions like a (ACAB but,) police detective’s notebook. she hunts for clues out in the world and when she sits down to write, the contents of the notebook and her life become transformed into a kind of material she can collage against the content of her mind and imagination. i liked that because it tracks with something i already think: that you don’t just sit down and power your brain up like a modem, let the words pour out of you as if by magic. writing is not as opaque or mysterious as that. my brain isn’t generative like a magic machine, spiriting words and things up from literally nowhere, the ether. it is a great big tumble dryer processing machine. i am a little hunter gatherer and bits of culture, life, the world sneak into my pocket and i scurry away with it all to a quiet corner, where i make those gubbin-y bits into a clusterball of a thing. it’s like i am chewing! writing is like chewing or – i think i’ve lost the plot. writing is obviously just writing. my point is that words and ideas don’t come from nowhere. sometimes to create things we have to take lots of little things from other places that already exist and chew them up till they’re all gummy and ready to spit out, gummy spitty new shit. THAT’s magic.

april has been a RIDE. i have opened up another synapse in my brain and i can think on max volume. i am IN IT. i feel alive! (fulfilled). i think i just love being a writer who writes in the way i do. i love working with gabrielle! i love working out the complex puzzle of a thing i’m working on, playing with shape and trying to wait for it all to click together. the click is this moment of like, deep soul satisfaction. i’m so sorry to everyone and everything else in my life, i don’t care about anything as much as i care about that and i never will!! hahahaa. i’m not actually sorry. when that click happens, my brain feels like the clouds part, the static clears. it’s like cracking your knuckles. like popping your ears. it’s like a little bit of pressure, that you didn’t realise had been building, gets released. luckiest girl in the world, see? i stg!