I am learning that there is a gulf of difference between being happy and being entirely fulfilled; I have felt happy almost every day since I arrived in the USA, because I’m with the person I love and constantly making little steps forward and there is an overall lack of anxiety when you aren’t waiting for the worst to happen. All that said, I haven’t written in months, and even saying that feels like an admission of guilt.

It is a weird thing to realise that the thing you consider an essential part of you doesn’t necessarily have a bearing on your happiness. I wrote most of Dystopolis in the three-month gulf between submitting a visa petition and waiting on the results; I was definitely fulfilled at the time, but happiness was a distant blip on my radar. We assume that these things go together, because more often than not they do, but I don’t think correlation proves causation in this case. I don’t think that the inverse is true - I don’t think that I need to be tortured to produce art - but life has been moving so quickly that it’s been a long time since I really got to grips with myself.