Article voiceover
Do not mind me. I’m just a bitter, unpublished “writer” who once promised her grandmother a Booker. Said I’d be the youngest. Believed it. Now I google: is 40 young? They say 40 is the new 20s but that’s not really the same, is it? Up at four. Write till seven. Walk till nine. Oats, no sugar. Tea, no milk. Read the dead. Read yourself. Lunch. Nap. Think. Play chess? Swim? No yoga: too many people doing it. Five to nine: write. Boiled dinner. Old music (classicer the better). New music (keeping up with the times). Be in bed by ten. Rinse. Repeat. I want to be that author. Instead I’m a bitter “writer” with Google Drive notifications, folders of rejections, and reels instead of dreams. Delete the Gram? Eventually. Wake at the sixth snooze:5:30. Remind myself: weekday. Remind myself: school run, packed lunches, commute. Convince myself I love my job. Like it. Don’t hate it. Serve capitalism in lipstick and flats for the only green tick on a red-ink month. I write in Notes app at red lights, in the margins of meetings, on buses when the car asserts its inertia, in the quiet scream of too much. Siphon it. blue-black, brown-inked onto yellow books and gifted diaries stacked like broken teeth on my desk. On my drafts. In my bones. Until I have “Author” next to my name, I swear it: I will never sleep before ten. (But I do. At one. Sometimes two.)
Gosh! How well you speak my heart.
love love this 🙈