Writing and mental health
You don't have to be mad to work here.
I have slowly come to understand that my main job is staying sane. I have been a professional writer since 1992. I haven’t had another job since then. In the thirteen years after I left college, I did…
Eleanor Anstruther
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Jun 5
I long ago realised that everything I write is in some way intended to get my parents to notice me. Sigh. (I'm 53, one of them is dead and the other is well on the way out the door) Hey ho and onward. There's no unpicking pre verbal hard wiring. I live with it (and sometimes find it funny.)
Richard Flohil
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Jun 5
I'm more of a typist (with shitty keyboard skills) than a "writer," but I've been typing for a living since I got my first job on a newspaper when I was 16. In the years since I've edited magazines, written thousands of record reviews, been a publicist, freelanced, and now I'm almost 90 I write a Substack and cobble together the occasional press release or artist's bio. Your post was so inspiring and true... Gave up smoking years ago, stopped drinking alcohol a year and a half back, and I'm too old to have (much) sex. Thank God for coffee and music.. . and I wish I could pay for all the Substacks I read, including yours. But, as John Lee Hooker famously said when he was 88, "It's too late to quit now!"