On the Seven-Year Silence

A personal dispatch on chronic illness, fatherhood, and why I've returned to writing.

You’re probably not asking where I’ve been in the seven years since I published my last novel but I’m going to tell you anyway. In that time I developed a chronic disease, had two children, left London for the coast and had life-saving surgery.

Strangely, it took being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes for me to understand that I had become a happy and well-balanced person. In the run up to it, I thought I’d just been getting old - feeling weaker, tired, losing my edge. I’d been telling myself, “Everything is fine.” “I’m going to let this miserable feeling go.” “Just ignore this pain and carry on.” It was positive denial, misguided stoicism, part of the mental apparatus I had developed to maintain a pragmatic positivity - but working against me.

As it turned out, my pancreas was shutting down and my body was in grave danger. My hard-earned positivity made me miss the signals for over a year. This was one of many lessons the disease was about to teach me.

Type 1 diabetics usually get diagnosed in childhood or early adolescence. My symptoms came much later and escalated slowly over the course of twelve months: severe weight loss, waking three or four times a night to urinate, a deep thudding heartbeat, unquenchable thirst, constant hunger, headaches, blurred vision, cramps in my legs. When it was finally undeniable that something was truly, physically wrong, I went to the doctor’s to have some blood tests.

He called me in record time with the results and told me to go to the nearest A&E immediately. The glucose levels in my blood were over six times those of an ordinary adult. He said it was surprising that I could even stand up. When I got to the hospital, I remember the phlebotomist flinched and grimaced when she saw my blood filling the vial - because it was so syrupy.

Everybody at the hospital kept telling me how hard an adjustment it was going to be. The diabetic specialist tried to ease the news of a lifetime of days with at least four insulin injections and eight finger prick blood tests by telling me that I was finally going to start feeling better. Of course, the diagnosis and the extent of the treatment was a shock but I didn’t find it particularly difficult to accept. My partner was more distressed than I was.

She couldn’t believe how well I was taking it. I had a lifelong autoimmune disease that was changing the way I had to think and behave around all foods and activities for the rest of my life and I was fine? She was beginning to suspect that I was repressing a deep primal anger or about to plunge into a bottomless depression. Her worry even made me suspect myself but I couldn’t sense anything ominous. I had to adapt, or die. It was simple. Somehow, I was ready.

In fact, contrary to the warnings, I found a quiet serenity creeping in. A love of people and things and the world that I had never quite managed to fully realise before. I wanted to live and flourish, enjoy beauty and being. I was feeling mortal and vulnerable, but open and full of love.

The thing that made me crack was when I read that the average lifespan for a Type 1 diabetic was 66. What got to me about this, made it all come tumbling down, was how little time there was left to spend with her, how terrible it was that we might not grow old together, and that I would have to leave her alone in the world. I wanted as much time as possible, and I wanted to broaden the circle of our love. I wanted a family.

It was a powerful realisation: the depth of our love, my hunger for life, and the desire for children. It also revealed how long I had ignored simple truths, how little I’d listened to my body or my heart. The diagnosis showed me that I’d already begun telling myself different stories about who I was, and living them out. Something deep and positive had been building for years, and the jolt of illness finally brought it into view.

Meanwhile, I had to constantly count my carbs, monitor my blood sugar and be careful about every bit of exercise I ever did. I had to never get too drunk in case I slipped into a coma in my sleep, or get so carried away that I’d forget to inject myself or take glucose tablets with me. I had to keep focus and control every day or face a much higher risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, foot amputation, and early death. Yet, how lucky that I’d got to 35 without it when most people get it so young. How lucky that I was the kind of person who had all the mental faculties needed to deal with a disease of this kind. How lucky that it had been caught before serious damage had been done. How lucky to be born in the age of modern medicine. How lucky to live in a country where medical treatment was free. Added all together, the equation came in fairly balanced.

I’d been given a second life.

By the time I’d got used to acting as my own pancreas, COVID came around and I was told I was part of the “at risk” community. Type 1 diabetics get every illness that’s going around and take a lot longer to get rid of them. I was pretty anxious about leaving the house and getting caught out by hypoglycemia as it was, and now some nasty respiratory disease was adding a second layer of mortal threat to any attempt I might make to simply be out on the street.

My job role was also deeply affected by the pandemic. While everybody else was getting furloughed my workload was doubling. I could work from home - which was a relief - but things were intense. Despite that, me and my partner actually had a pretty nice time, as far as pandemics go, and we got into a great rhythm with each other. By the end of lockdown, she was pregnant.

The five years since then have been a wonderful (and tiring) blur. Our daughter is four and just started school, and our son is twenty months and just emerging from his angelic phase into toddlerdom. Fatherhood is a topic drowning in clichés, most of them true. But the reality isn’t a cliché; it’s the surprising lightness of a newborn baby, or the sight of a four-year-old girl doing an avant-garde dance to the wedding march.

During these years I still wrote hundreds of thousands of words and got a long way into many projects. Writing was still something I turned to in the brief windows I had, but it no longer felt meaningful. Maybe a better way to say it would be that its meaning had been supplanted by reality. Yet the words, and characters, and worlds kept coming…

From being eleven years old, I used to scribble lyrics and stories in a notebook before bed and nervously pass them to friends the next day. One night, when I was seventeen, I was talking to a close friend about what we were going to do with our lives. I had no idea. Then he turned to me and said, “You should be a writer.” And, as they say, suddenly everything became clear.

‘That would solve all of my problems,’ I thought, ‘because that’s what I already am.’

It has taken years, illness and family to understand that again. For a long time, my perspective shifted from simply being a writer to obsessively trying to become one - grinding toward success, status, legacy. That fixation no longer gives my life meaning. What matters now is the truth I knew at 17: I am a writer, and writing is an act of sharing. That’s why I’m back, writing publicly this time. Living has given me meaning; writing lets me share it.