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  "description": "To be precariously creative - finding creativity through addiction, and whether it was ever really mine.",
  "path": "/blog/precariously-creative/",
  "publishedAt": "2025-07-19T19:33:00.000Z",
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  "tags": [
    "CHILDHOOD",
    "MENTAL HEALTH",
    "NEURODIVERGENCE",
    "PERSONAL",
    "PSYCHOLOGY",
    "INTROSPECTIVE",
    "TRANSITIVE"
  ],
  "textContent": "All of space and time is balanced on a rhythm of lemons and lime, a puppet-master’s elusive rhyme, of a precarious design, now ponders from the bottle of cheap red wine. I’ve written before about growing up being labelled stupid. It wasn’t just something people called me – it became who I thought I was. So when I got to college and found myself in a place where nobody knew my history, I discovered I wasn’t actually stupid, and in that realisation, my world fell apart. I had spent so long being the most stupid person in the room that I had never had to ask myself what I was without it. There was a strange comfort in the label, for I knew how to exist inside it, and when that was taken away, what came in its place was something I had never really known before – social anxiety. As a child, I probably appeared shy, but it wasn’t a lack of confidence, I had no real sense of being judged, because I had already accepted that I was beneath everyone anyway. For it wasn’t a ‘worry’ that other children would not like me, it was the knowledge that other children did not like me. And there was no shame in it, – it was just a fact of life. But once I realised I wasn’t who I had been told I was, I suddenly became aware of myself in a completely different light. People ‘could’ like me, and I cannot quite pull the right words from my head to describe the severity of that anxiety, only that it hollowed me out. That is what led me to alcohol, and once I was there, I stayed, – for ten years of my life, every single day, without fail, I was drunk. I would wake up at six in the morning, walk to work, and drink on the way there. Around that same time, I was trying to teach myself all the things I had missed in education, trying to catch up, trying to find who I was. Somewhere in that, I discovered Edgar Allan Poe, not through any romantic or scholarly path – I had just seen The Simpsons Halloween special with The Raven, and from there I went looking for his work. But something about it made me want to write. At first, poorly, for I was attempting to mimic him, but slowly, that imitation started to turn into something of my own. A style began to emerge, or at least, a voice. The trouble was that this creative awakening seemed to exist almost entirely when I was drunk, which, to be fair, was the only room available. But it meant that alcohol wasn’t just an escape from anxiety, but it had become tied up with creativity, with expression, with a version of me I had never known before and was terrified to lose. I had already lost one identity, I wasn’t in the market to lose another. So I kept drinking, and in my mind the two things became intertwined – the alcohol and the writing. But I guess, all addiction gives you something. Addiction is a trade, and at first it feels like a bargain. It gives freely, almost generously, but once it turns into dependence, the generosity dries up. You give more and more for less and less, until you’re throwing everything you’ve got at it just to get a glimpse of what it used to give you. For some people, that’s pleasure, for me, it was writing. But eventually, you wake up to the fact that you’re trading everything for nothing. My writing began to lose its flair, but I hadn’t really noticed. I only see it now when I look back at what still remains of it. Eventually, I stopped writing in exchange for no longer being dependent on alcohol – a trade I only considered because my daughter was about to be born. And ten years later, I came back, which is basically what this blog is, and fitting too, as its taken the same amount of time to return as it did to disappear. The flair in my words still hasn’t returned, but occasionally, when I write here, a small snippet slithers near the surface, teasing me that it is still in there, somewhere, I can feel it, like I just need to reach a little further. So I’m hoping, that maybe, addiction never truly gives you anything. Maybe it just sneaks you in through a backdoor to something you already had. Because if it was mine to begin with, and if I can find it again, however long it takes, then perhaps this time it will be better, because this time, I will have earned it.",
  "title": "PRECARIOUSLY CREATIVE",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-17T08:54:46.000Z"
}