Not been a vintage week, this. But it has at least given me material for this TinyLetter (Tinyletter? tiny letter?) and I am, in fact, writing this as a way to try and pull myself together so let’s begin. This'll be a little longer than my self-given limit of a thousand words but I'll do it in three parts so you can dip in and out as you like.

Writing work aside, this was a week of meetings and pitches. Both hearing them and giving them. I always find this a bit exhausting. They might well be interested parties, but so are you and I’m never really sure who should be asking the questions.

What I do like, however, is that in some ways I’ve come returned to the writer I was around five years ago. I think when you’re first starting out, everything matters, everything feels huge and you’ve got a back catalogue of stories you really want to tell. Some of those will get you some notice and it’ll feel incredibly validating.

It’s around this point you feel a great need to do things properly. I recall with fondness that I bought a cheap suit to wear to the library just so I can fool myself that I was doing a real person’s job. I would get dressed up even for general meetings and would always have three printed pitches in my bag, every single time.

Then what happens is…well. It’s positive I suppose. But most of the affectation burns away, and it’s just about the job. Can you write the thing or not. Can you do it well. Can you do it to time (more on that in a second). You also go to a lot of general meetings. A lot. And you realise that they’re more for you to get a feel for the person and see if they’re someone you’d be happy to work with for years at a time rather than sell a specific idea. In fact, more often than not, you’ll spend a few years working on other peoples ideas rather than your own, be that an adaptation or getting hired to write an episode of someone else’s project. At this point, you’re desperate for work and will more often than not take what you can get. Any job in which you can learn and prove yourself feels worth it. You’re breaking through but perhaps not quite trusted to pull off your own show. Yet.

Now I’m a little more established, the prospect of my actually getting things away feels a little more like a reality. So now everything feels huge again. Every decision I make will shape perhaps the rest of my creative career. This has been a week where a couple of those decisions have presented themselves and they are daunting but also incredibly enlivening. I haven’t bought a suit again, but I have started to wear trousers more than jogging bottoms. Progress.

That was the good part of the week. There was however, as previously insinuated, quite a bad part too. Specifically, I’ve had a terrible week in my head, definitely the worst this year and it’s been capped off with becoming physically ill too. Insert swear words here. This is particularly frustrating because as discussed in my earlier letters I’m probably fitter and healthier than I’ve ever been. The work stress load isn’t even all that great yet. Environmental factors can obviously be triggers and they make everything more understandable to people around you, but that’s not always how it is.

I want to give a sense of how this isn’t just about being in a low mood, but how it practically affects my working practice. To begin with there’s the lethargy. I’m so tired, all the time, and no amount of sleep seems to boost the baseline energy. Activity does help a bit so am pushing myself to keep up the exercise. When I do manage to drag myself to the desk, I specifically find it near-impossible to visualise. Dialogue, characters, scenes. It just doesn’t happen. Can’t see or hear any of it. When you can’t visualise, that in turn chokes off your creative focus. Without the rhythm of cascading images in my head, I find it impossible to get any flow. Everything is disjoined. Everything takes forever. This isn’t the same as writer’s block or lacking inspiration - I don’t think. I can still write analytical stuff like this and do the more mundane tasks like replying to emails. They’re definitely harder but I can do it. 

That lack of ability to visual has a knock-on effect to my personality too. It’s been a curious discovery to realise how much my capacity for creative thought affects my positivity. The ability to see a way out of things, both on a personal and beyond, feels to me a creative act. Darker thoughts aside, the upshot is that I’m not a huge amount of fun to talk to when I’m like this.

So far it’s been a blessing to not encounter this situation too close to crunch time (I mean - I’m pretty close to crunch time with something right now, but it’s not imminent). Also, I take some solace from knowing these times have become a lot less frequent since I started shifting my habits and I’m far more productive because of it. Somehow this has coincided with my becoming physically ill more frequently which just feels unfair (Perhaps it’s the cats? Bastards).

Anyway, let’s try to be forward looking. While it’ll take me longer than I had promised or anticipated, I’ll get the work done. I think I just needed to recognise that having struggled across the last week and failed to finish what I’m meant to have, the best way to sort myself out was to take a day - today in fact - to just pretend like the pressure isn’t there and let things reset.

I used to really, really beat myself up about this when it would happen before. Now I trust that my collaborators will understand that I’m trying my best and don’t like it anymore than they do. In that regard, I’ve been fairly lucky. Hope you are too.

A small tip: To combat that disjointed feeling the work you produce when you’re like this creates, I try to schedule a couple of hours to scan over the work from start to finish specifically to improve the cohesion in the text. A pain in the arse and a bit paradoxical when you’re already late but I find it does wonders. I couldn't do it for this letter (I only given myself 90 minutes tops to write them) so maybe try and take the jumping about as a charming quirk.
 

The last few months have seen me miss a lot of theatre because of work, one of which was My White Best Friend (And Other Letters Left Unsaid) at The Bunker (although I did see Rachel De-Lahay's original's piece at the Bush a couple of years back). Despite not having experienced it myself, I liked how it provoked such a range of interrogated and creative responses and something of the title of the festival had stuck with me, was so familiar, and I hadn't figured why. And then, last Sunday, I remembered. Many, many moons ago, I was talking to a publisher about the possibility of my writing a book. Considering what said book might be, I told her that it felt like a lot of the work I'd done so far was me trying to write a letter to my old best friend. So, to close out this letter, let me recount this story.

There's a big scar on my left leg that I tend to forget about. Partly because it's faded heavily but mostly because I received the injury that created it when I was about eight years old and time has done it's job on my memory as well as the skin. The person who gave me that scar was my very first white best friend. Let's call him Danny.

I met Danny on my first day at primary school, we ended up at the same secondary school, and he would continue to be a presence in my life until I was sixteen. I grew up during the 90s in the suburbs of South-East London, which is an area that's pretty white. The minority presence is notable, it's in no way super heavy.  Some of you reading this will know that at the time the British National Party (BNP) were headquartered* in this part of the world, so the tensions around race and different were pretty hard to avoid. Even if you're a kid.

My first understanding of racial difference was Danny telling me when were five maybe that: “You’re chocolate, I’m vanilla”. Which seemed fairly harmless, but I distinctly recall my aunt who overheard this exchange being unsettled. At the time, there was a great hope that difference would be erased. It's partly where, I think, the familiar and problematic Asian lust for a proximity to whiteness comes from. Act and dress and talk the same and there will no problem. We will be the same.

The thing is though, even kids will see that's not true. They do notice difference. Especially so if your father is a member of the BNP like Danny's was. And, in hindsight, it's easy to see that it was on this line of difference that my friendship with Danny began to fracture. We quickly went from being inseparable to him becoming increasingly wary of me. I found this distancing and increase in aggression hard to fathom. I had no idea where it had come from. This culminated in him raking his studs down my left leg during a football game, exchanging that scar for our friendship.

At secondary school I did my best to stay away from him. His hate was a little more full-throated now. We did encounter each other though in yet another football game during P.E. I - for some reason - was playing striker and he was the opposition goalie. I managed to skip past him and knock the ball into the back of the net. I slipped in doing this He gave me a massive kick in the back for my trouble. Luckily, I had other friends by that point and they stepped in. (I should note our PE teacher did sod all).

So yeah. Me and Danny were definitely not best friends anymore. The last time I saw him was in Bluewater shopping centre when I was about twenty. He had a pram and I remember laughing and thinking "Hah! You ruined your life!" which was a pretty ugly instinct I'm not proud of. In that period of my life I think I felt a need to prove myself. That people like Danny hadn't gotten the better of me and I had done better than they ever would and in knowing that, I could exorcise him from my soul.

But Danny has never left me. He has, in fact, consistently haunted me and what I was trying to express to that publisher was that I did in some sense want to understand and reconcile with him. I understood, intellectually, how he had turned out the way we had but knowing that we had been best friends once gave me the proof I needed that neither he nor anyone else like him were intrinsically the way they were.

In that sense, I guess I've always wanted to create work that seeks to create mutual understanding and, with that, forgiveness. I always been super aware I’m not as galvanised as many of my other creative friends. I’m rarely an angry writer. Not that there is nothing to be angry about, personally or political. I just find myself cowed by it in what is probably not a healthy way. Even when I was at an age when I was regularly attacked I rarely hit back. I felt like I'd have lost if I did that.

Maybe I’m not that noble. Maybe I'm just scared of what that anger would do to me. Or maybe I find it hard to respond to anger in work and create it myself because I can't stomach putting more of it into the world. To be clear, I'm not saying anger isn’t valid or galvanising in or for others - just it feels like it's been a backdrop to a lot of my life and it makes me wary and weary. Which is a privilege in itself I suppose.

I'm not sure if I ever physically need to write Danny a letter or if him being a question is good enough. Whatever future country I hope to have a part in shaping, the Dannies will still be living in it with me. If one day I had some small amount of power - over culture or politics or even just a bake sale - what offering can I make to them to feel like this is their place too? How do I make it work. Maybe it's impossible. Maybe there is no offer good enough except the erasure of people like me. And it's not a priority of course. So many others you'd want to care for and be concerned with first. But Danny's always lurking somewhere. Always a question I'm hesitant to answer.

So that's that. Got some words down. Now. Back to work...

*You know on Twitter there was that meme of telling the most indicative story of who you are from your youth? Mine is this: When I turned eighteen, I wrote a letter asking Nick Griffin, the then leader of the BNP and the Cambridge graduate you never see in the brochures, if he wanted to have a pint in one of Bexley's many pubs. I figured I could talk him out of being a gigantic racist. He, funnily enough, never replied.

P.S. - Next week you’ll get a much more craft-based letter because I’ll have handed in a couple of things between here and now so rest assured I’m still doing that.

P.P.S. - Before anyone mentions…I’ve had my adventures with medication to deal with my particular issues and always found the side-effects worse than what it gave me. I realise that’s not the case for lots of others, but it was for me. No shade to how anyone else manages themselves intended.

P.P.P.S. - I’m looking outside right now and it’s so bright and the sky is what I’ll call “blue, with some doubts.” Even if I can’t be out there, it’s a much nicer backdrop with which to work. Summer cannot come soon enough.