My earliest memories involve a patent black handbag filled with scraps of paper, and lidless, dried-out felt tip pens. The bits of paper were stapled together to form booklets. Before I knew how to write, or read, I scribbled in these, play acting the life I would one day live, that of a writer. I slept with the handbag at the foot of my bed. I dulled its faux crocodile skin with my sticky little hands.

Pretending to write, however, is much easier than actually writing. In some ways, writing induces terror. As an adolescent I found it embarrassing. In my twenties, the humiliation deepened along with my ambition. I wrote only in snatched bursts, chain smoking frantically. Writing felt demonic. Back then, I could only do it at night, and only when I was exhausted. My palms would sweat and my heart would race. It scared me, but somehow I couldn’t stop myself from trying to form a sentence, shape a scene, and slowly, create a rhythm. No matter how many times I abandoned writing, something would make me take it up again: an unknown voice would say ‘Listen’ or ‘Look’’ and I’d write down the things I could not ignore. I’m no longer scared of that voice, or writing, but I’m not unmoved by it. What I feel now is still terror, but with practice, it’s transformed into something holy: a holy terror, or awe.

My longest and most recent bout of writer's block coincided, not insignificantly, with a period in my life in which the holy disappeared, and terror is all I felt.

By the end of 2023 nothing was sacred. A fateful encounter with a man I loved revealed itself to be a sham. I stopped eating, I lost my job. By then the genocide was in full swing. Images of bombed refugee camps, footage of a tank rolling over a body, massacres at food distribution centres and soldiers parading around in the underwear of the women they’d murdered were all we saw. They said Israel had a right. And we watched with terror.

Like eating, reading felt wrong. For over a year and a half, I picked up books, and put them down. I tried Cortazar’s Hopscotch, but couldn’t stomach it. Even short stories, which usually act on me like pure, clarifying shots – all intensity, all narrative – no longer worked. I felt estranged from myself, my thoughts became circular, my desires took on one sharp point: distraction. I slept a lot, I chain smoked, drank cold glasses of milk when I got hungry, I listened to techno and I wrote nothing. In the face of terror, I found I had nothing to say. I went to protests and screamed slogans, but couldn’t hear my own voice above the drone of Nuke Me in my ears. I abandoned everything in my small flat and lived in my bedroom, and stayed up late watching my favourite Kiarostami films. It was the closest I came to feeling anything.

His most famous film, The Taste of Cherry is about a man who has decided to take all his sleeping pills, and lie in a shallow grave he has dug for himself that night. All he needs is someone who will bury his body, should he succeed in dying, or pull him from the pit, should he fail. Ershadi, the lead, was a non-actor Kiarostami discovered staring listlessly ahead of him in a traffic jam in Tehran. In the film he drives through the hills surrounding the city and picks up unsuspecting strangers, all of whom reject his proposal. Then, at a key moment, a passenger asks him, ‘Have you lost all hope?’ Ershadi doesn’t reply, keeps his eyes on the road. The passenger, an old man, pushes him, ‘Have you never looked at the sky when you wake in the morning…. The night of the full moon, don’t you want to see it again…. You want to give it all up? You want to give up the taste of cherry?’ It’s the simplicity of these images that gives them their power. The film, like all of Kiarostami’s work, made me pause, slightly breathless, inarticulate with feeling. Perhaps the same pause acted on the protagonist, and made him reconsider his death. We’re never quite sure, as the ending is like so many of Kiarostami’s films, ambiguous. For me the pause, however inarticulate, was a holy thing. A small defence against the terror I felt.

Between the end of 2023 and winter of 2025, I wrote just one, very short, story. It’s a story about Gaza. In it, a boy removes stones from his eyes one morning, and discovers the world around him has disappeared. As he follows his mother to his grave, he fears the sky itself will fall down on him. I shared it for the first time in March 2025 at a fundraiser for Palestinian booksellers. Later that day, Ahmed Masoud, the British Palestinian writer, stood on stage, slowly tore up his book, and sat back down again.

It was too late for stories.

In the face of terror, there is nothing left to say.

In his influential work, A History of Religious Ideas, the Romanian historian Mircea Eliade wrote, ‘Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful, and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances’.

Losing my sense of the sacred meant I was vulnerable to the chaos he describes for a long time. I wasn’t a writer anymore, I decided, but I didn’t know what I was instead. To find out, I went to see a psychic medium.

In the Summer of 2025, on the hottest day of the year, I took the train up to Hampstead Heath. I’d been given careful instructions not to reveal any details about myself. She had my first name, but kept her eyes downcast after glancing at me when she answered the door. From the sofa, I stared at the glossy harp I could see in the adjoining room, the bouquets of flowers, and candles arranged on the tables. She breezed through the open doorways in a long white dress, told me to make myself comfortable, placed a glass of water in front of me, and seated herself on the sofa opposite. I sweated silently, rearranged the cushions behind my back. 

She worked with her eyes closed, but bent her body towards mine. After a while she said ‘Something happened to you, and everything got pushed down, depressed, frozen.’ She gestured with her hands, compressing an invisible object around her middle. I was instructed to remain silent, so I said nothing, I did not react. Then she said, ‘The Guides are showing me your fingers, and every one of your fingers is a pen.’ I held my breath. ‘Every pen is coloured,’ she went on. ‘There’s yellow, that’s heightened emotions – think bright new day or Van Gogh’s despair. There’s blue, that’s wisdom, intuition, spiritual insight. There’s green, that’s fertility, new ideas. But where’s the red?’ At first, I didn’t know what she meant. Vaguely I thought of Jung’s symbolic conception of alchemy. In the first stage of alchemy, nigredo, or ‘The Blackening’, everything is broken down, dissolved, made chaotic. In the final stage, rubedo, or ‘The Reddenning’, the Philosopher's Stone is discovered – that great secret, self-knowledge – the magnum opus of analytic work.

After a pause, she went on ‘The Guides are asking, Where has the red gone?’ As if sensing my confusion, she explained ‘Red is everything you think it is – fire, passion, excitement, energy, drive – The Guides are saying, bring the red back in, give yourself to your life again, find a way to live on the edge of your blood again.’

Slowly, after this meeting, I began to read again. Then, something made me write again. 

This is how writing begins.

I hear a voice. A low, quiet laugh.

Then, someone takes a deep breath, clears their throat, and tells me ‘This is how it is’.

I’m shown random scenes charged with a strange power: a girl in a red homemade dress and patent black shoes is sitting on a sofa covered in a flowery fabric, her feet are resting on a low coffee table in front of her, her eyes shine like she’s about to cry and her lips are smudged with brown lipstick. At the sound of a door opening she jumps from the sofa and in that instant, she’s transformed into a chicken. She clucks, raises her useless wings, and refuses to take flight. I’m shown a dark bedroom in which the low hum of a refrigerator can be heard above the deep even breaths of the four men sleeping there; a fifth man sits up in bed and lights a cigarette. I’m given a smell, like petrol, sour milk, or burnt cumin seeds, and a flashing green light. I’m given a colour: blue, it is the hour after sunset, and a tree is stencilled against the sky.

Over the many years of writing, and not writing, I’ve come to know that there’s a voice, a ‘something’, independent of any conscious desire on my part, that speaks to me and makes me write down what it says. It comes and it goes. But crucially, it always comes again. I keep a little black notebook in which I collect these strange communications. Then I wait. And something else, a connected image or idea occurs to me. Nightly in my dreams, daily on walks to the shops or the park, in random books I pick up, or podcasts that are recommended to me, in films I watch or conversations I have, I encounter turns of phrase, symbols or ideas that share the same texture of the original ‘something’, that first image I saw or voice that I heard. These clues point towards a narrative I have to uncover, and because they come with an undeniable emotional charge, because they’re so specific to what I’ve been trying to articulate, they’re more than coincidence. They’re synchronicities. Something, it seems, says ‘pay attention’. Something, it seems, helps me tell a story. I can’t remember how, but a while ago I arrived at a mantra I repeat to myself when I’m working on a story:

‘Something, if I give myself to it, gives itself to me.'

It works like a spell; the more I say it, the greater the simultaneously unsettling and reassuring feeling that I’m being guided, and the more active my relationship with writing becomes. Somehow, through consistent repetition a hallowed space is created with the mantra, and from it, voices and images and smells arrive. This arrival is a mystery: they emerge from nowhere, and take me somewhere I can’t at first understand. For this reason, I’m never sure how a story will end when I begin writing. But gradually, with patience, draft after draft, disparate images and voices join hands and reveal an inner logic. First the story exists. Then it makes sense. Yet, even when it makes sense, has a beginning, middle and end, texture, rhythm and colour, something tells me it isn’t enough. More often than not in the first few drafts, a story somehow fails to go beyond itself, transcend its own telling, become something holy. Because what I really want from a story is music and blood; something true, something undeniable. To draw blood, I retreat into my solitude.

‘Something, if I give myself to it, gives itself to me’, I repeat. I cancel plans. I stay in bed, I read, and I dream. When I wake up, I write down my dreams. Sometimes, I plant my feet on the ground and I shake and growl to empty myself of an excess of feeling. These rituals are an active engagement with ‘something’, a deep listening, an emptying, a willingness to receive.

I ask myself, ‘What are you afraid to write?’ and I wait for an answer. The answer always changes. Sometimes these fears are strange. I’m scared of the way plants blindly grow, upwards, towards the light. I flinch away from the image of my guts, pulsing inside of me. It’s the things I can’t bear to look at that propel my writing. When I find words for my terror, it reveals what I’ve been trying to express all along. Like this, the true story – the thing I’ve been avoiding writing, the thing I’ve been circling around, appeasing with images and metaphors – reveals itself. This new knowledge colours everything. When I redraft, having successfully answered this question, the story finds its pulse, its blood, its music, and then, something in me settles.

Because somehow, by shining a light on my terror, I make it holy.