Category: Behind the Curtain (Page 1 of 4)

Why people with depression are better at self-isolation than you are, and why that’s bad

5th May, 2020 / Zoë Harris / 0 Comments

Content warning: depression, suicide

Did you ever hear that story about a guy getting mauled by a giant panda and having to hold his own intestines in until help arrived? That’s kinda how I feel today. Just holding myself together until help arrives. Except there is no help. This is just how it is now.

At some point, my arms are going to get tired and I’m going to have to let go. Then all my guts will come spilling out like spaghetti from a can and I’ll sink to the floor.

And when I’m on the floor, I’ll know there are people on their own floors who got mauled worse than I did. Whose floors are colder and harder. And that’ll make calling for help harder.

And no one can put the intestines back in anyway. That’s my job. I’ll reel them in, wind them into a ball and stuff them back inside. I’ll peel myself up off the floor and sew myself back together. And no one will see the stitches.

I’ll do all this before 2pm today. That’s when I’ll be needed again. I won’t have achieved much else. Because it’s hard to do things when you’re holding your intestines together with both arms. But the floor, the reeling, the sewing…that will feel like a big achievement anyway.
@zoeselina

What a difference two months makes

28th January, 2019 / Zoë / 4 Comments

My last post was about staving off depression by posting exclusively positive content on social media throughout November. Shortly after November ended, I hopped a plane to Australia for Christmas and had one of the best visits “home” in my almost-13 years of living abroad.

After three amazing weeks of sun, family, laughter (oh, the laughter!) all my favourite nostalgia foods and finishing it all with a new year’s eve karaoke pool party, coming back to cold, dark Norway hit me pretty hard. My daughter went straight back to her dad, and thanks to jet lag, I worked from home those first few days back, which meant being alone at home with only my kitties for company. I started to sink again, hating my adoptive country for taking me away from the warmth of the Australian sun and my Australian people, who took such good care of me while I was away.

Oh, November

13th November, 2018 / Zoë / 5 Comments

It’s no secret that I hate November in Norway. It gets cold, but hovers above zero with moisture that hangs in the air until it finds hair to frizz, at which point it turns me into Cyndi Lauper circa Vibes, but without the invisible best friend.

One year on . . .

15th September, 2016 / Zoë Harris / 0 Comments

One year ago today, my life exploded. On that day, I didn’t know what to do, where to go, or what would happen next. Friends urged me to look forward without worrying about how I’d get there—to look to the light at the end of the tunnel, not at the road beneath my feet. But I like details. They make me feel safe and in control. So, I concentrated on the details, and bit by bit, I built a new life.

Return to Djerassi

30th March, 2016 / Zoë Harris / 0 Comments

Two years ago I cracked the sads when I had to leave Djerassi. On my return home, I was bereft. Looking back, I think a lot of it had to do with the state my life was in at the time, but it was also due to the fact that it was the first time since I’d started seriously writing that I let myself be only a writer, one hundred per cent, if only for a week.

I started my first novel before I got pregnant, but at the time I was working full time as an IT project manager; writing was just something fun to do when I was stuck on an aeroplane or in a hotel room and didn’t feel like preparing for my next meeting. Then, I pretty much stopped writing for a year and a half after I found out I was pregnant, and when I picked it up again it was only for one day a week. The first time I went to Djerassi, I didn’t know anyone and spent most of my non-workshop time alone in my studio, revelling in artistic freedom and inspiration. Leaving was hard.

Swallow, swallow, little swallow…

28th February, 2016 / Zoë Harris / 0 Comments

. . . will you not stay with me for one night and be my messenger?

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde is one of my great pleasures. I love it the way you love anything that set you on your path.

As a child, I had a reading of it on cassette that I listened to every night to fall asleep. I loved (and still love) the other stories—The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend and The Birthday of the Infanta among others—but nothing quite touched my heart like the plight of the Happy Prince and his little swallow. It is a love story in its purest form. The prince’s love for his people, and the swallow’s love for the prince, are selfless, and tragic, and painfully beautiful. I don’t remember now who the voice on the cassette belonged to, but it was a lovely reading, slow and musical—the way I always hear the story in my head when I read it.

I’m sure there are millions of writers the world over who have been inspired to pick up a pen by Oscar Wilde for more than a century. He was, and remains, incomparable. I am no different to those millions, I suppose, but it was specifically the story of the prince and the swallow that made me want to write. The way the words flowed like water, the way each character, no matter how insignificant—and Wilde is a master of tiny yet complex cameos—pulled at my heart. Even as an eight year old child, I knew I wanted to create beauty like this through words of my own. I wanted to write.

Fighting the Inner Impostor

22nd May, 2015 / Zoë Harris / 0 Comments

“You don the disguise long enough, and you can’t even recognize that you are acting. That you are behaving inauthentically, from a place of fear and insecurity. That you can’t figure out how to reconcile the real you with the pretend you.”

So writes Facebook’s Product Design Director, Julie Zhuo, in her article The Imposter Syndrome. She talks about the insecurity and fear she used to feel while she studying and working in software development. It spoke to me because not only have I felt that way working in software development myself, but because even after a change of career paths, I still worry that I don’t belong, despite feeling all the while like this is what I was born to do. And I’m not the only one; so many of the writers I’ve come to know have these thoughts all the time.

YA and Proud

2nd December, 2014 / Zoë / 0 Comments

When an author says, “I write children’s books”, the reaction is often one of approval and respect. After all, what more noble pursuit in literature could there be than creating the foundation for future generations of life-long readers?

But when a writer says, “I write young adult books” the reaction can be, sadly, quite different. And the more I talk to other writers of young adult fiction, the more I discover how many of us are still having to defend our choice to write it.

NaNoWriMo. Again.

6th November, 2014 / Zoë / 0 Comments

It’s November again, and for the second year running, I’m attempting NaNoWriMo. That’s the thing where you write a whole novel draft in thirty days. Okay, technically you only need to get to 50k words to “win”, but we call it a novel. Last year I wrote daily throughout November and December and completed the fourth book in my Eidolon series, but this time I’m attempting something completely new. And something I’m keeping completely under wraps until it’s finished, my agent has had a look, and we decide what to do with it. All I can tell you is that it’s contemporary (i.e. no dead people walking among us like those cheeky eidolons), and that I’m very excited about what it might become. For the first time, I’ve decided to write about something I’m personally passionate about—which is kind of terrifying.

Retreating

10th October, 2014 / Zoë / 2 Comments

Last weekend, two of my best friends (also writers) and I went up to a cabin in the ski resort town of Hemsedal, about three hours north of Oslo for a mini-writing retreat and jentetur (girls’ weekend). I had a plan to finish revising one of my novels, Audrey had some school work to do before heading off to a “real” writing retreat in the States the next week, and Chelsea just needed some inspiration to get started again.

Chris had generously offered to drive us up there, and his ears were likely throbbing by the time we arrived due to the incessant chattering and laughter that made the four hour journey (we stopped for lunch and grocery shopping) seem so much shorter. We talked about everything from inadvertent climbing expeditions to a nine-year-old boy’s fascination with googling pictures of butts.

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