Gayle Burgoyne

If you’re lucky enough to be overlooked by the powers that be, incredible things can happen. As you continue to write, little by little you have a series of insights that, like different sized bubbles, pop into one another and merge; and you begin to separate yourself from the need for external recognition. You realise that other people’s approval is really just a middleman for your own approval of yourself. And so you wonder, What if I can just approve of myself and not need anyone else to tell me that I’m good enough? What if I’m enough as I am and don’t need to change to fit? What if I’ve always been just what I ought to be and I’ve wasted all these years trying to be something I’m not?

You test out these ideas in small ways and the evidence suggests you’re onto something. You begin to feel strangely excited for no particular reason. Occasionally you have a sickening lurch that you’re deluding yourself and everyone is laughing at you or talking about what a sad case you are, and what a pity, what a shame, what a waste, when you’d started out with so much potential. But you don’t care because the strange excitement has appeared again from nowhere and you think, Maybe I’ll have another go at that story I decided was rubbish, because now I think about it there was something in there – only a phrase really, but it makes me feel alive in more dimensions than I think actually exist.

Then one day you go into the giant Foyles on Charing Cross Road and instead of your chest constricting with the rising panic that there are so many books in the world you’ll never find your place, you discover that your chest doesn’t hurt and in fact you have no pains anywhere as you usually do. You scan the shelves and think, How wonderful that all these people are using their creativity too and maybe someone of them are also no longer succumbing to the belief that the void can be filled by buying crap off the internet. And you realise you don’t need to worry about finding your place in the world because you’re already in it, you always have been; it’s just taken a very long time to come back to being yourself.

Right after that another feeling emerges and for a while you can’t place it, but gradually it dawns on you – this is what it feels like to be free. At least, this is my experience.