Today was hard. Really hard. I had an appointment with a lawyer, and by the time it was over I felt psychologically exhausted. It has been an incredibly difficult period of my life, and today was one of those days when everything felt particularly heavy. And then, completely unexpectedly, something happened that changed the shape…

The last few weeks have been incredibly difficult. There are things happening in my life that I don’t want to write about here, but they have required an enormous amount of emotional and psychological energy. For a while I just kept going because there were things that needed to be done. Appointments, decisions, conversations, practical…

I’ve been reading Kokoro by Beth Kempton, and a few pages about time stopped me completely. Not because I had never thought about time before, but because I had always thought about it in the same way most of us probably do: as something outside of me. Something I have. Something I can spend, save,…

If there is one thing I am beginning to understand from writing these last few Artist Diary posts, it is that I am going through a period of enormous change. Not necessarily the kind of change that can already be seen from the outside. A lot of it is happening somewhere underneath. I can feel…

In my last relationship, I often felt as if I were under examination. My appearance was criticised in many different ways, and over time I became increasingly aware of myself through somebody else’s eyes. My body, my face, different details of the way I looked — things that perhaps I would never have thought about…

Last night I watched a video about what to remember when life gets difficult. And there was one idea in it that touched me much more deeply than I expected. The person in the video said that when we are in the middle of a storm, we tend to identify with our problems. We become…

Last night I came across a video by Flanzella called Can You Write Yourself Into a Better Life? I clicked on it because the question itself fascinated me. Can you? Can the simple act of writing about your life somehow change the way you live it? While watching the video, Flanzella started talking about The…

Last night I watched a Gabor Maté masterclass that I had bought months ago and never finished. At one point he talked about something that stayed with me: what happens when, as children, we learn that love is not simply there, unconditionally, but somehow feels connected to what we do. A child needs love. There…

Today I did nothing. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. My head was full of thoughts, anxiety, things going around and around without really going anywhere. Eventually I moved from the bed to the sofa, and somehow that is where most of the rest of the…

This morning started badly. I had another terrible night, woke up exhausted, threw up, and my whole body felt tense and painful. Normally I go for a walk in the morning, but today I kept postponing it. At one point I genuinely thought: I can’t do this today. I just want to stay on the…