Natural Inclusionality: From Self Recovery to Self Discovery
An essay for Occurrity, February 2025. The one that led me to the work I do now.
I write most often in the darker hours.
I handed in my dissertation, a short novel about my own life, and the feedback was a sentence I had to ask about. Your writing is unyielding. I asked what unyielding meant. They told me. It was relentless from start to finish, and it left the reader exhausted. I left university feeling my degree was a failure.
After that I wrote books and destroyed them. Eighty thousand words open on the screen. Control, shift, delete. Then control, shift, save. Gone. I did that loads of times.
I’m not doing that with this one. This one lives. It has to live.
Wholeless Nights
Bipolar & the included middle
Mathew Pay
It’s 4:16am. His heart is racing, the dream is already fading, and the only thing to do is write.
Mathew Pay first heard the words “bipolar disorder” at eighteen, as a soldier on leave. He has been writing this book for seventeen years. Then, in a Johannesburg bookshop, a historian inscribed a book to him in isiZulu. When she translated it, it read: “The soldier who does not know himself, who does not have his own house.”
Wholeless Nights is written in 27 watches: nights spent awake, restorying old memories so they survive.
A journey across continents. An ancestral soldier who, 150 years ago, dropped the name Pay and enlisted as Bushell: the basket a light was hidden under. A dragon and a phoenix inked on one body. A circle of writers and a library of books that changed his world.
Wholeless is a boundless wisdom that keeps what is wholesome in mania, depression and the ground in-between.
This is a book that builds a house and calls it home.
Twenty-seven nights. Every watch in first draft before Christmas 2026.
4 written2 still being written7 drafted, waiting for my voice3 arranged11 still to begin
Books have a habit of changing me. A book passes into my hands in almost every night of this one. Take one down.
Paulo Coelho
Given to me by an old friend around 2008, in a difficult time, before university. Santiago’s pilgrimage was how my journey felt. Just messier. Way messier.
University. Keep your hand moving, she says. It’s where writing for therapeutic purposes began for me.
Maris Ross and David S. Jeans, 1974
Maris called me into her room and handed it to me. I’ve carried it ever since, all the way to Africa. Twelve chapters, each ending in the word Man. Chapter 10 is Travelling Man.
A. N. Whitehead
June 2011. Adam Blatner named him in a letter, so I went to the university library. By my own letter that week, I was the first person ever to borrow it. There was a tram ticket inside.
Terry Lynch
And then the correspondence with him. The books kept leading to people, and the people kept writing back.
Frances Masters
She trained me as a therapeutic coach, and she gave me her book. Two kinds of handing over, from one person.
Elizabeth Smart
Fifty pence at Hatchard & Daughters, a second-hand bookshop in Haworth, 2022. I’ve been rewriting her title ever since. By Farrer Terrace. In the portico of All Saints.
Hlonipha Mokoena
Love Books, Melville, Johannesburg, 9 September 2025. The one with the inscription. It’s why you’re reading this.
Dr Andrea Vassilev, 2026
I was a beta reader. My best achievement so far.
Armistead Maupin
I read it years ago and it woke something in me for a while, and then it fell back into the abyss. It woke up again on the first watch of my own book.
It began at university, with Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and a conference I volunteered at as an ambassador. Inspiring Transformations brought artists, writers and actors to the University of Northampton, to work with doctors, occupational therapists and psychologists. They spent the mornings on the evidence. In the afternoons the same people wrote, danced and took parts. In the evenings they sat at one table. Shaun McNiff was there. I’ve wanted to go further with it ever since.
It’s why I keep watch. I write what comes. Then I pause. Then I return to writing. Otherwise I can’t unfreeze myself, or stop myself. Not writing things down, to me, is giving up. Walking is a little like writing for me. It’s a chance to really account for the moment. I just have to go even more slowly to write anything that makes sense.
An essay for Occurrity, February 2025. The one that led me to the work I do now.
My review of Inspiring Transformations, the University of Northampton’s applied arts and health conference, in September 2009. It came out in the journal’s second issue, and it was my first time in print.
A reflection for the Presence in Action community, after four days in Portobello. Not mirrors. Windows.
Step. Another. One foot follows the other.
A chapter of mine for Matthew Green and Chantal Dawtrey’s coming book.
Articles in newspapers and industry magazines. Poems and short stories. Plays that were performed. And the posts on LinkedIn.
Anyone can read what’s left here. Nobody watches it as it comes in, so it’s not the place for an emergency. Finding support is there for that.