It’s funny publishing The Purloined Princess. I have to shut off entire wings of my brain to find the courage to do it. So many doubts. I wrote it eight years ago, and I feel very differently at 32 than I did at 24. I read my old writing and I think – good lord I had a lot of zeal. The confidence! The hubris!
The temptation, before publishing a new chapter, is to heavily edit it. I’ve rewritten a couple of sections that didn’t sit right with me tonally, and removed some bits that seem a bit over-keen and juvenile. But I don’t want to change it too much of course, because – I dunno. Like a time capsule, innit.
It’s good though – it’s an exercise in not giving a shit. A 32-year-old man publishing a novel called ‘The Purloined Princess’ – it’s pretty bonkers, of course. I put each new chapter on Instagram, as a post and a reel, and I look at the stats of which of my friends have viewed it. People I haven’t seen in a decade, random people I met in hostels, old colleagues, old managers. If I sit and think about it for more than a couple of seconds, it freaks me out. There’s one girl, for example, who I met in a hostel several years ago – she’s strongly, radically left-wing and incredibly passionate in her beliefs, regularly calling out public figures for their colonialist biases (even some people I consider to be very left wing themselves). If I sit for a minute about think of what she might think about my story – a king going to rescue the kidnapped queen* – I could easily collapse into a puddle of anxiety.
*When I first titled the book ‘The Purloined Princess’, I’d written Astra as a princess, rather than a queen, but then I wanted Athelstan to be a king rather than a prince, so – oh whatever. I’ve always thought the title was a bit pants. But hey! We continue.
Or my Irish friends, and their bone-deep resentment of the British monarchy and all its symbols. What must they make of it – of my silly parody of kingship? And what about all the blokey men – the lairy football men and the teabag-your-mates-while-they’re-sleeping rugby sorts? All those blokes with strawberry noses and banana palms – what do they think when they see I’ve thrown up another fairytale chapter?
I’ve been meditating recently. My brother put me onto it. The first two or three weeks after being made redundant were rough and dark; despair crept in, arm in arm with exhaustion and the overwhelming sense that life wasn’t fair and the universe didn’t give a damn about me or anyone – all that stuff. Without a partner to talk to, a main confidante, I kept posting my woes in the family group chat – on bad days, in all caps. I’m poetic with my sorrows; I get all literary and grandiose. I call down the skies, I blame the gods, I crack open the ground beneath me and declare everything infinitely shit. And then I feel bad for being dramatic – and I wonder why I can’t be composed and normal – and so grows my list of woes. A whirlpool of woe. A woepool.
“Are you drunk?” my brother said, as he listened to me vent and groan down the phone one dark autumn evening a few weeks back. Bonfire night it was, actually. I was walking around the edge of Ruskin Park.
“Huh? No, why?”
“You’re talking weird.”
“No I haven’t been drinking. I’m just sad. I feel so heavy it’s hard to find the will to even speak.”
It was true; for several days in a row I’d felt tranquilised. So defeated, so wronged by the world – losing the job after such a fight to get it in the first place, so many years striving for a foothold in London watching my friends soar ahead in their careers – planning holidays, buying houses and vans, falling in love, getting promotions – while I sat still, stuck, like in a film where everything speeds up and life blurs around one unmoving person on an airport bench. It had siphoned the life from me, left me a zombie void of hope that anything should ever get better.
“You need to work on yourself,” my brother told me, after twenty minutes of listening to me articulate, with the force and breadth of a shotgun, the many causes for my despair.
“Work on myself?” I said. “What do you think I’ve been doing the last two years? All I ever do is work on myself. I’m constantly working!”
“Look, I know. Don’t get angry,” said Jack. “I know you’ve been working hard. But you’re not doing the work on yourself. You don’t have to break down every time something goes wrong.”
“But it’s just… I feel like my cup is just full. It’s full to the brim with bad things and worries and disasters. I know that, like, dropping a plate of food or having an appointment cancelled, doesn’t matter much. But sometimes I feel like it’s just one last drop that makes my cup overflow, and everything pours out at once.”
“But it doesn’t have to be like that. You can empty your cup. Or stop those little drops going into it.”
I kicked a rock, watched it bounce along the pavement and clack into an iron fencepost.
“How?”
“You can get therapy, for starters.”
“I was going to, in case you’d forgotten. I had the first session booked in and then I lost my job and ran out of money.”
“Yes, okay, and that sucks obviously. But you can start on your own. You can sit and research ADHD and how it affects emotional regulation, so at least when you begin to feel this way you know why it’s happening.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“And you can start meditating.”
By this point I’d reached the edge of the park where the gate is, in the south-westernmost corner. People were gathered there to watch the fireworks on London’s skyline. I looked at couples sitting on blankets on the grass with bottles of wine, and groups of friends clustered on benches with speakers playing music. Why didn’t I have anyone to sit on a picnic blanket with? Why didn’t I have a group of cool hipster friends who wanted to sit on benches playing music and watching fireworks?
Showers of red and gold sparks bloomed across the cityline, their pops and booms delayed by wind and distance. I sat on a felled tree and swapped my freezing cold phone to the other freezing cold ear.
“How do you meditate?”
“It’s just breathing man. You can get the Headspace app and–”
“Ugh.”
“What?”
“So many of my troubles are caused by technology. AI has taken all the writing jobs, social media makes me feel shit, I spend most of my life looking at screens. I’m just sick of apps.”
“Alright, that’s valid, but just allow it for the moment and listen. You use Headspace and do guided meditations. A guy talks you through what to do, just sitting and breathing with your eyes closed for ten minutes, and you let the thoughts pass you by. Like, imagine each thought as a car travelling down a country road while you sit on a bench. You see it coming, and it passes. And you just let it go. You don’t get in the car, you just watch it pass.”
“Uh huh. I’ve done it before in yoga classes. Treating thoughts like passing clouds.”
“Yeah. And you begin to notice what’s on your mind. Sometimes you see the same car go past a few times in a row. And you just let them pass.”
A family of five arrived in the park, hatted and mitted; they strode into the middle of the field and the father took out a large plastic bag and began planting little rockets on sticks in the soil.
“You just focus on your breathing,” said Jack. “And it really helps. I did it for years. I can meditate while I’m walking down the road now. It’s amazing.”
I snorted at this. Then I sighed.
“I just… I have to move out of my house in January and find new people to live with. All my friends are going separate ways. And I just lost my job for no reason and without warning, and I have no savings, I have no girlfriend and everyone else is getting married, and the career I spent ten years building is being erased by AI, and this city steals all my money and crushes my spirit. How can fucking… breathing solve any of that?”
“It can’t,” said my brother. “But it can help keep you sane while you solve it.”
“Ugh.”
“Just promise me you’ll actually try it. Don’t just nod along to get me off the phone and then go back to doing what you usually do.”
“Alright, alright. I promise.”
When the phone call ended, I sat in the park for another twenty minutes. The family of five lit their fireworks, and one at a time, with long delays between each, they zipped into the sky and burst. Some of them boomed and rattled my heart, and the children cheered. Some of them puffed out in a pathetic wisp that made the couples and onlookers chuckle.
That was three weeks ago. I went home that night and I kept my promise. I downloaded the app, did the introductory meditation. I did it several times over the next week — not every day; sometimes I was too busy, or too cynical, or I forgot – but I did it when I had space. And each time, I was astounded to note a marked difference in the before and after. Some days I would wake up with a bees nest in my mind, or else a gloopy sort of tar over everything, and I’d think the usual thought: nothing can sort this out. I’m toast. But I promised I would try: so I sat down reluctantly and opened the guided meditation and closed my eyes for ten minutes. Then I got up and went about my day.
It’s hard to quantify it exactly – I’m a hell of a sucker for placebos, the kind of guy who takes a single antidepressant and feels jolly for weeks – but I swear I can feel a change. It’s subtle, but I feel… better. I feel… okay. Not elated, of course, not euphoric (but then I never really trust those extreme emotions anyway – there’s always a crash after), but just… calmer.
I read up on it, loathe to dive into any hippy mumbo jumbo without empirical evidence. I read a few scholarly articles that claimed meditation really does work – something about the plasticity of the brain, neural pathways and all that. I saw a picture of two MRI scans compared – the brains of a control group vs a group who’d meditated daily for eight weeks. Introduced to stressful stimuli, the brains of the control group flashed way brighter – a neural firework, a hand grenade. The meditating group – a little sparkle, nothing more.
I guess it’s just about acceptance, isn’t it. Seeing the thoughts, not being the thoughts. Sometimes I’ll be watching TV or washing up, and a song comes on and reminds of me of an ex girlfriend, or my mind swivels unexpectedly to some terrible regret I have from years before, or else I lurch into thoughts of where the hell it’s all going, society, and what on earth the next twenty years will look like and how the hell am I going to be okay – and gradually, through occasional conscious practice, I’ve found that I don’t need to wince and run from these thoughts. I can instead just sort of… watch them pass through, with a little nod of recognition.
Washing dishes – idle ponderings – argh, painful thought – okay, fine, that hurt but whatever – now back to the dishes. Walking through London – GUH, nostalgic gut-punch – alright, that wasn’t very lovely – now on to the next thought. And on and on.
It’s leaked into other areas too, this sense of acceptance. My future, for example – I don’t know what will happen, really, or where I’ll end up. I’m interviewing lots at the moment, and some of the roles I’m going for would be a dream come true. But of course, I might get none of them. Whatever happens, I’m telling myself that it’s all good – I’ll allow it and move on and figure it out. If this redundancy has taught me anything, it’s that life is a bull: the tighter you hold on, the more it bucks. You can make all the right choices and fail for reasons beyond your control – but it’s not the universe smiting you. It’s just what happens sometimes.
So yeah. I’m publishing my book, even though it’s scary. And every time I feel scared as my finger hovers over that great glowing ‘publish’ button, I give the fear a little nod – and I go ahead.