When I think back to days gone by — you know, the days before voluntary 10pm bedtimes, a strong aversion to teenagers, the discovery of more than a few grey hairs, and a tendency to feel every single ache under the sun — I remember being a 19-year-old caffeine-fuelled creative powerhouse who didn’t stop until the sun started to bleed into the night. Sometimes I was convinced it even rose a little later just to give me more time to myself, but maybe that was just me thinking the world fell at my feet whenever I willed it. That I could have anything I wanted. I was right, though; I could.

Unsurprisingly, it would take more than a spell of dizziness, a gnawing stomach, and tired eyes to break me from the almost physical connection I had to the keys on my laptop. Writer’s block? I didn’t know her. I wrote when I wanted to write, and my day ended when I wanted it to end. I was juggling a million different hobbies and somehow still able to squeeze twenty-five hours from a day for everything I wanted to do (and all the things I didn’t). My skin suffered, I was a little underweight, and everything I created was borne out of some sort of affliction, but I always had something to be proud of at the end of the day. That’s what kept me going – I was addicted to the dopamine I sorely lacked. In truth, I was never really living in the real world. I was living through each piece of art I created, and it showed, weighing heavy on my entire being, scrawled all over everything I produced. I lost touch with reality; it started with books, which plagued me with a billion different perspectives of the world and only managed to feed my cynicism, and then I turned to writing in an attempt to drain myself of all the excess poison in my mind. I’m not sure if what I wrote was good, or I just needed something to relate to – whichever it was, I made it appear, and it worked. I dare not revisit the things I used to create, but there was a lot of it. Read more