[6] Shower thoughts
Friday, 28th March, 2025, started writing around 12:14 and finished at 13:38.
I think I’ve climbed out of the depression hole.
A single shower thought did it. We’ll get there - I want to chat about some other stuff first.
Some lovely things have happened over the last month-and-a-bit I’ve been away that I want to get down.
23/02
Met up with my dear pal Harvey while I was in Bath for my mum’s birthday. We played Beacon Patrol at Thirsty Meeples. Harvey and I keep in regular touch online but it always wonderful to meet up with them in person.
Beacon Patrol is the perfect game to play between bouts of conversation - not too demanding of you when you’re also trying to catch up!
01/03
Harvey and I met early into our first year in university and formed a close-knit friendship group with two others. One of these people was Alex.
Alex and I hadn’t talked in over a decade in that way that happens, but I reached out to him and we met up in Oxford. We picked up where we left off, and it was easy to remember why we got along so well all those years ago.
15/03
I met my brand new baby cousin for the first time. His name is Santiago and he is adorable.
I love seeing my mum (pictured) with young babies. She’s a high-powered project manager with a lot of responsibilities and a lot of stress as a result, but absolutely melts around little humans. She becomes still in a way we don’t usually get to see.
17/03
I turned 30. It feels the same as 29.
There’s a lot that I wanted to do before I was 30, but much of it was derailed by my late 20s autism, ADHD, and non-binary discoveries. To head into my 30s knowing these fundamentals about who I am is a worthy trade.
My partner Fergus made an incredible red velvet cake. Holiday block-outs at work scuppered our plans to spend my birthday in Edinburgh, but he worked hard to make sure my 30th still felt special. I am very fortunate.
While depression sucks, unanimously, in every form, I feel strangely lucky to have the on / off manic type that allows me to glimpse the sunshine from time to time. Being reminded that it’s still there - always there, in fact - waiting for you to step into it, makes it much easier to open the door to a happier mindset when I’m able (and to even remember there’s a door in the first place).
The moment the latch unlocked was that shower thought I mentioned.
I’ve got a story I’m working on. A book. A novella, maybe a novel? We’ll have to see. Writing a book was one of my pre-30s goals that I didn’t quite achieve, but I’ve been working on a project called ‘Static’ that was the strongest contender to be that book, and it remains the strongest contender to be a book at all, out of all of the stop-start story projects I’ve got going.
For me, ideas either come easily, in absolute floods that crest so fast I barely have time to get them down on the page, or… not at all, in any way. I can’t make ideas happen. Static became stuck, an idea I loved in creative limbo as I tried to work out where the story wanted to go; what needed to happen next. It’s been months. A similar amount of time as the depression, actually, surprising no-one.
I’d stopped thinking about Static all that much, and that was a conscious decision. I knew that tormenting myself with the lack of progress I was making wasn’t going to make the ideas come any faster. I’ve been creatively void in every capacity for a while, now, and had stopped holding myself accountable for that feeling as it’s beyond my control.
So, when I least expected it, shampooing my hair earlier this week, my brain decided to bring two ideas together which hadn’t spoken before. Two concepts which I viewed as separate were actually supposed to be linked. It’s one of those ideas so powerful and perfect that it wraps up many disparate pieces of narrative and ties a great big bow around them, and suddenly the next steps are clear.
The job now is to get this written down somewhere before I forget the intricacies. I’ve been keeping a sketchbook for Static to try and help with idea generation. It is not very full, but now I have a reason to open it and start a new page.
Pictured on the left is a relationship chart drawn between the three characters. Static is primarily a story about human relationships - how important it is to socially tie oneself to this plane lest you become disconnected and float away. It’s weird, in a Haruki Murakami kind of way, I hope.
I’ve got to write the actual story too, of course. We’ll get there. Baby steps!
Thanks for reading.
My parents got me House of Leaves for my birthday. Haven’t read it yet, but I’m looking forward to it because it’s supposed to be bonkers.
I read The Housekeeper and the Professor and Our Wives Under the Sea, and I’m in progress on Adventuring with Beebe.
They all got me thinking about Static in different ways, as there’s a variety of thematic overlaps.
This set of books go together as well as a tasting menu, to be honest. The Housekeeper primes you to consider the validity and necessity of relationships with the weird and disquieting, especially when those feelings are associated with people.
Our Wives capitalises on this, forcing you into the deep end - almost literally - stretching this consideration to its limits with aquatic discomfort.
Adventuring is the return to the surface, placid observations of nature’s omnipresence despite and to spite us, and how life and nature go on being predictable and unpredictable in equal measure regardless of what humans are up to.
