My bio states that I write about stigma, sex and shame. And that’s true.

At home. In the dark.

I have a thesis, a half-finished manuscript, and a bunch of essays in progress, all centred on the invisibility of women’s mental illness.

False bravado is easy. Publishing is vulnerable, and hard. And yet, this piece was accepted by the first magazine that I submitted it to. That alone tells me that these stories need to be told.

This story isn’t complete. Nor is it a redemption narrative. These are just the fragments I am currently able to lay bare right now.

Thank you Island magazine for giving me a space to share them.

Edit: Since we moved, the orchid sits on my desk and is about to bloom for the second time. Every day it reminds me that I’m still here. x

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to have my lyric essay The High Road published in Issue 10 of Stylus Lit – written a year ago when we were in Cairns. My father had taken a turn for the worst, and became momentarily unresponsive, and we had begun to prepare for an end that seemingly would never come. For the first time, I began to reconcile our estrangement with my own self-acceptance and come to come to terms with my Scottish heritage – something I had routinely blocked out my whole life.

Last Tuesday he finally passed away. It’s not lost on me that my very first published essay was about waiting this for day (and yes I did drink the last of the scotch that I took from his apartment. I then bought another bottle). For the most part, I wrote everything that I needed to write in that piece. It was purposefully crafted, lyric and sparse. I didn’t (and won’t) going into the trauma and violence that we all experienced – I will only write about it when I am able. But I wrote this the day he died – it fills in (I hope) some of that sparseness.

There are about half a dozen blog drafts languishing on my hard drive. In my bid to put distance between first and last drafts (is there ever a last draft?), by the time I come back to edit them, the moment has passed. If I can be absolutely honest, I feel guilty about working on anything else right now that isn’t my manuscript. Even my personal diary has been relegated to a few dot points about dreams, or scraps of thoughts that occur to me throughout the day. Sometimes I diarise through playlists. Spotify informed me that I made my 400th the other day. Whoops.

On that note, here’s one of my new favourites. It’s not finished yet, but I suspect it never will be.

I spent the summer inside, shunning the sunshine because I wasn’t spending it in paradise. And now I am here and the temperature isn’t even creeping, it’s dropping; every morning this week, I have felt it touch me before I am ready. My northern hemisphere friends are waiting for Spring, and I think, so am I. And yet it feels as if Spring was just here, within reach.

I miss writing, but for once I’m not sure what to write about. All of the prose in my book is being hammered, refined. Lately I have I wondered what I will write about once I have this book out of my system. Like, is that it? Am I always going to be writing in retrospect? I mean, I admire anyone who can write about the quotidian, but I’ve always had trouble writing the minutiae of my own life.

Today in a memoirists group, everyone is talking about the righteous rage in Gina Frangello’s book Blow Your House Down, and the scathing New York Times review that sent most of us scurrying to check our own work, comb through it for knots of our own ire. But the conversation has changed today. Many who had already published, wished that they too, had allowed themselves to be angry. I can’t stop thinking about it.