The Obsessive Diary

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On the tube yesterday it struck me, this splintering of reality, so many versions, one for every passenger moving along the platform. It wasn’t always that our politics divided us, there have been eras when a shared reality went all the way up the tree and only at the very edges did one person say the world is flat while another said it was round. Mostly we shared a lens. Mostly we saw things, in...

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Increasingly, there is poetry. From Andrea Gibson ‘s every time i ever said i want to die , to Sherman Alexie ‘s Black Box . Yesterday I met with the man who chose a phone call while 4,000 miles distant as an apt way to end an eight year relationship. We hadn’t spoken since that moment. I needed time to calibrate. Our relationship had been so fuelled by rage and passion, such complicated and huge...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

I’m tired. It’s been a lot. It’s only January. And then I speak to my friends in the states and the grief and rage comes in pins through their faces on the screen and pierces me too. It’s only January. Yesterday Jojo came for lunch and we laughed about stupid funny things and she told me some tragedies and we shared vegetable soup and sausages and lemon drizzle cake and walked in the easy cooling...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Be a winner! Pre order Geraint Anderson ‘s latest book, How To Con Friends And Manipulate People This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

“Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” said my friend on the phone last night. We’re in the era of 18 - 25 when they’re not kids anymore that can be reined in and put to bed, when they have the reins themselves and are learning to use them. You wouldn’t hand a new driver the keys to a Ferrari, would you? They have to start on a moped at best, “a Reliant Robin” as Margaret co...

Dear Everyone, These last three months have been hail stones, this diary an entry of sorrows and however much I’ve wanted to turn up with ta dah! a break in the clouds it wasn’t possible. (Isn’t the urge to please crazy?) But I can turn up with thanks. I know what I’ve been going through is the same as everyone else. I know my hurts have matched yours. I’ve been expressing it all here and people h...

And so it goes. I seem to have drawn to a halt. It’s winter. Hibernation is obvious. Christmas was incredibly loving in the arms of my Somerset family. They filled me with the good stuff. I’m grateful for them. I love them so much. Me and Margaret cooked up a storm, everything was delicious. We talked and walked and opened presents. We put on glad rags and toasted our fortune and love for one anot...

Throughout the funeral I saw her swooping over fields, laughing, arms outstretched, doing double backflips; that was the Jeanetta I knew. Elegant and social. In jeans, outside, hair tousled. It was supposed to be a private gathering, just her family and her closest friends but then it grew and I got the call and my Friday which was supposed to be have been in London with Beth, and lunch at my brot...

I’m not sure when my dislike of Christmas set in. Was it as a child? I don’t think so. I remember the excitement and routine, the stockings and tinsel on my parent’s bed, the marble run set up in the upstairs hall, the chairs we were allocated, the annual argument over whether to eat lunch before or after presents. I have happy memories of Christmas. And yet. Everyone in my family is the same. We...

I have the sensation of roots being pulled from my heart, dead roots that have been cut off from their source, no longer alive roots but tangled entanglements that no longer pump the drug. It’s visceral, the sensation of withdrawal. I’ve been putting out fires for decades; crystal meth, cocaine, alcohol, nicotine, sugar, needles, anger but this is the smouldering heart of the matter. If I were a t...

When I was a very small child I witnessed a terrible violence. Its flashback was the domino which set off all the others, it was the key waiting to be fitted in the lock, and when that happened, when the black box opened in my head, all that had been crazy-making made sense. This week I’ve been drawn again to that moment, it’s been present, and it’s helped me make sense of something else. In the v...

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