for when you feel small

(an extract from my secret diary)

I’m an over sharer, an anxious mess, an ex publishing professional, a screenwriter, short story writer, personal essayist and a novelist (The Lamb & more soon).

This is where I come to pass and receive nervous notes and be transparent about my writing and my wobbles. It’s part diary, part scrap book, but mostly a collection of extremely nervous notes scribbled down.

I don’t have a paywall (bar one handwritten letter I write to paid subscribers every year), but if you’d like to support me, there’s a paid subscription option with a couple of small perks.

This month, for the first time since I was thirteen, I decided I would keep a secret diary. I write in it every time I’m battling negative feelings that are too big to tangle with a (ir)rational mind alone. I tell myself the thing I desperately need to hear in that moment, I try to untangle why I feel strange, I try to understand what horrible thing from my past is reaching into my future. Every entry is titled for when you feel (insert big, scary emotion here) and, in the middle of July, I found myself wanting to share a small excerpt of this one with you.

for when you feel small

July 14th, 2026

Having bad feelings is important. Here is why:

If you already had everything you ever wanted (eg. all the love you were starved of in those years of your life you don’t talk about, and the acclaim and success and creativity and stability of an amazing career), you would be numb to the joy of every single one of those beautiful human experiences. Nothing would drive you forward. You’d drift, with no momentum, and live an existence that feels like still water - which is common in deep caves and abandoned buildings; a place where no life really grows or prospers (besides the deadly, brain-eating bacteria that slowly turns your mind to mush).

Instead, life should be like the sea. It should be unexpected and filled with crashing waves and tides pulled out, only to be then drawn back in again. There should be frightening rip tides. Life. Ecosystems upon ecosystems of possibilities.

Feeling small is frightening and filled with unpredictability, but lots of amazing, beautiful and important things are small. Butterflies. Hobbits. Atoms. Cells. Lady birds. Plant seeds. Plankton that feed the great big whales that sing their songs and roam our deepest seas. Even dandelion wishes are only beautiful once they have been blown into small fractures so they can float across the wind and land on someone’s favourite jumper. And, my favourite, one million tiny, individual, impossibly small grains of sand form the beaches our ocean’s most beautiful waves rush to.

You feel small. That is okay. Doesn’t make you any less remarkable.