You don’t owe the Internet sh*t.

A lesson in personal essays, shilling your pain and living with it.

A page from a zine won from artist and author Rubyetc, around the time I wrote The Bathtub.

It’s a cold night at the end of January. You’re in your last year of University, back at the house you live in with six — then five, then suddenly six again — housemates, and you’re not well.

You haven’t been well for a long time. Over the Christmas break you’d been baiting yourself with images of graduation, the final goalpost in the agonising stretch that has been the past five years. There’s nothing left to give.

But there is. Slightly abandoned are the bare bones of a piece called The Bathtub, a strange sort-of-fiction-sort-of-not that you tried to submit to a writing competition, but ended up salvaging after it pended for three months.

Later you read that it was rejected anyway, but by then you’d hacked the poor thing to death and replugged its organs.

The piece is skinned, cleaned, prepped. All the shite goes in it. You work on it for a whole night (because that’s what you did back then, getting through a whole bottle of white wine like a real writer) and collapse on the unedited piece at 8am.

You hit publish and crash.

The thing about personal essays is that they are, by nature, deeply introspective. You go digging for…