I did not intend to write a third book. But started I have. The third, and hopefully last, of three.
The first book was Serious. Big S serious. Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge began in September 2021, when people started appearing in the forests along Poland’s border with Belarus and I began travelling east from Warsaw to see what was happening. It took years. There were fences, soldiers, activists, Border Guards, migrants, legal categories, political arguments, forests, rivers and bodies. There were footnotes.
The second book, Out of the Loop, arrived much faster. By then the border was no longer the only thing I was trying to understand. I was falling apart in most conceivable ways. That book had fewer footnotes.
It did have tears. Many of them.
For a while I thought these were two different books written by two different versions of me. One was political. One was personal. One looked outward. One looked inward.
That distinction did not survive very long.
The border book was full of walls, exclusion zones, forests, checkpoints, crossings, inside and outside. The personal book was full of houses, doors, beds, departures, messages, lovers and the recurring conviction that somewhere there must be a way through.
The temptation was obvious. Turn the border into a metaphor for the self. Turn the self into a theory of the border. Explain one through the other.
That would have been too neat.
A migrant is not my childhood. A state border is not a mother. A lover is not a frontier. Nations are not patients waiting outside a psychoanalyst’s office.
And yet the images travelled. As did the questions.
What are we asking a wall to do that a wall cannot do? What are we asking another person to give us that another person cannot give? What happens when an object becomes responsible for making an unstable world feel whole?
The answer was not that everything was secretly the same. It was that the two books had begun disturbing each other.
The political book made the autobiography less innocent. The autobiographical book made the political analysis less innocent too.
That is where this third part begins.
I know, and I still do
The sentence that followed me through 2026 was embarrassingly simple:
I know stuff hurts and I still do it. I could identify a pattern, name it, explain it, understand why it was destructive and then reproduce something remarkably similar a few pages later.
I knew that waiting for an unavailable person was organising my day.
I still waited.
I knew alcohol made sadness darker, desire more urgent and anxiety louder.
I still drank.
I knew I didn’t need to turn rejection into an enormous verdict on my value.
I still did it.
I knew writing could keep something alive long after reality had begun asking me to let it go.
I kept writing.
This became the uncomfortable lesson. Understanding is not mastery.
That sounds banal. It was not banal to me. I had spent most of my adult life being rewarded for understanding. Journalism required observation and compression. Political science required concepts. Writing offered the most seductive promise of all: if the correct sentence could be found, perhaps the confusion would stop.
Sometimes the sentence did help, but sometimes it became part of the loop.
A relationship could be kept alive by analysing why it needed to end. An addiction could absorb the knowledge that it was an addiction. The writer could become deeply attached to the interpretation that attachment was the problem.
At that point the cleverness becomes suspicious.
The analysis begins staring at itself in the mirror.
The missing guarantee
A lot of my emotional life had been organised around things that were both absent and promising.
The almost.
Almost secure. Almost home. Almost recognised. Almost loved. Almost the right job. Almost the right country. Almost the right book.
Complete absence eventually forces mourning., complete presence makes a person ordinary, but partial availability can keep desire alive for years.
That was true in relationships. It was also true in work, in belonging, in the fantasy of recognition.
Someone, somewhere, must know what I am worth. An editor. A university. A publisher. A lover. A country. A family.
Lacan has a grand name for this sort of thing, the big Other. Strip away the jargon and the idea is quite human: the belief that somewhere there is an authority capable of issuing the final verdict.
There is not.
People know pieces. Institutions certify particular things. A publisher can accept a manuscript. A lover can choose or refuse. A court can decide a case.
None of them can make a life whole.
That is not tragic.
It is in fact a relief.
A reckoning
This does not mean responsibility disappears into theory.
Quite the opposite.
One of the useful things about writing Out of the Loop was that it eventually stopped allowing me to remain the injured observer of my own life. There were things I had done. People I had hurt. Choices I had made. Alcohol did not make those choices unreal. Childhood did not cancel them. Depression did not turn consequence into metaphor.
The point is not to prosecute the self forever.
The point is to stop confusing explanation with absolution.
I did this. I did that. They had consequences.
I do not want to do it again.
That may be enough.
People become people again.
That may be one of the least dramatic and most important outcomes of the whole process.
Ending the loop
So what counts as progress?
It has to be visible somewhere other than the page.
A thought arrives and is not converted into a message.
A list of reasons why somebody ought to regret not choosing you gets written in a notebook and stays there.
A sad evening remains sad and does not require wine to become meaningful.
The phone stays on the table.
The body starts to feel less besieged.
Sleep improves.
The back hurts less.
Football becomes possible again.
A class begins and other people enter the week.
Children arrive and require pizza, cinema, noise, attention.
The ordinary returns.
This is not cure.
It is a changed relationship between feeling and action.
The loop loosens when repetition no longer has to produce the same ending.
The world comes back
The irony is that I had already written the actionable part before I knew I had.
It was in another set of essays, written in Sussex.
There the attention began to move away from the self.
Wind came before theory.
Chalk before diagnosis.
Fish before autobiography.
On the coast the white cliffs look permanent, but they are not. They are soft enough to scratch with a fingernail. They were made from microscopic sea creatures compressed into stone long before even Asterix rowed over to England. Rain dissolves them. Frost opens them. Waves undermine them. Sometimes the cliff simply falls into the sea.
No failure.
Just geology.
On the beach, bottle glass is rounded by years of collision. Flint sits in walls, black and hard, older than the country built from it. Gulls hang above Newhaven harbour waiting for chips. Beneath them fish move through a geography that human beings have divided into territorial waters and exclusive economic zones.
I lived on this beach for a year as a two-year-old in a caravan. The salt perhaps never quite washed out of my skin.
The sea never asked.
Herring gather in shoals and cross lines drawn on government charts. Eels leave the Sargasso Sea, travel thousands of kilometres, enter European rivers and later find their way back again. Nobody taught them the route. Nobody knows exactly how they do it.
The fish continue swimming.
That line is better than quite a lot of psychoanalysis.
The world contains things that do not require my interpretation in order to continue.
The tide comes in.
The wind crosses.
The cliff gives way.
A child builds a wall of wet sand and the water enters from the wrong side.
They build another.
The world becomes interesting again.
An unfinishing
Perhaps that is the real ending.
Not synthesis. No Hegel, please.
Not recovery.
Not the final explanation.
An unfinishing.
The first book looked at a border. The second looked at the man who kept returning to borders. The third asks what those books actually produced.
Not wisdom.
Space.
The ability to see more without demanding that everything become evidence about the self.
The ability to act before understanding is complete.
The ability to admit that a feeling is real without turning it into a command.
The ability to stop.
There is work to do.
There are trains to catch, bills to pay, coffees to drink, clothes to buy, cities to walk through until the feet hurt.
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