The final full stop on the keyboard arrived with little fanfare, muted fireworks, and no flag-waving, but signified the end of my memoir which had taken six years to this ‘hallelujah’ moment to write. And the typing of this innocent punctuation mark punched deep and hard in the guts, leaving bruising which would later feel like almighty release.

Six years ago today, a month into the Lockdown’s, I began a transformative journey down a rocky road of writing in the shadows of rehabilitation and recovery, following a life-changing moment tuning into a YouTube energy channeller’s broadcast.

Sitting today, in the same rusty deckchair, where on this six year anniversary of heeding the call to begin writing once more following thirteen years in the Trenches, so my memoir of love, hope, and recovery, The Soul Asylums, was born, as a mystery virus spread from coast-to-coast across a world at war with itself.

While the final full stop had marked the end of this writing project, demons exorcised after a deep and dangerous descent to the dark core of my inner world, gifting a second chance at a writing career to a man on the ropes, so the real work was about to begin on the memoir’s own journey into a murky world of bookshops, buyers, and broadcasting the truth.