All I Want For Christmas is An End to Despair
A totally personal and selfish gift request
This isn’t the post I planned.
Yesterday I hit a wall of despair. I’m not being poetic. Every time I even attempted to head to my desk, I started weeping and had to sit back down on the sofa.
I’m a writer, so naturally, this is not my first wall of despair. I have hit this wall many times before. I remember in 2001, navigating frozen clods of mud on a country walk, expressing my hopelessness to Paul, saying “I should just give up,” and him saying, “What else are you going to do?” And that’s the problem. There’s nothing else. So in the end, after hitting the wall, I cry for a while, and then I clamber over it.
I’m a writer to my marrow. I believed I was a writer from the age of 4, long before I had written a word. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a writer, like children wanted to be firemen and astronauts, and now want to be Youtubers and Instagram Influencers. I knew I was a writer. I asked my mother to teach me to read and write, so I could get started, and she …
