Like most writers, I’m always half terrified and half crazy-brave, wanting to throw my heart at the world, and wanting to run away from it.

It’s this kind of tension between fear and desire that keeps us fronting up to the page, to attempt to say something meaningful, to ourselves, to others. It’s the friction between not knowing what to say and having galaxies to say that forges the spark of first words and the thousands that follow.

There are some things I never thought I’d say, and forms of expression I never thought were for me – like memoir. The idea of writing about myself for anything longer than a blog post seemed too much, too personal, too fraught with doubt that anyone would find any of my slippery truths useful or illuminating.

The idea of writing about my deepest truths, about the anxieties that have clouded all my realities since forever, seemed impossible. How do you catch a shadow and pin it to the page? What is anxiety? Clinically, it can be a tricky thief, often difficult to diagnose and treat. And in the everyday, for all of us, anxiety is everywhere: we can hardly look at our phones without plunging into dread or grief, for the future, for the suffering of others.

What could my small story possibly do or say about any of this?

For whatever my smallness might be worth, I have tried to capture what anxiety is for me; the family and cultural history that has shaped my experience of being; the threads of terror and hope that pull me into the light and the dark all at once; the love and the words that keep me coming back to this life even when I want to leave.

Miraculously, the judges of the Finlay Lloyd 20/40 Prize saw the spark of something meaningful in my attempt. And now it is published. It’s called Touched: A small history of feeling.

Find a copy of it here: https://finlaylloyd.com/20-40-winners/

Image; Photograph of me by Sarah Bunn, 1986.