My interior critic is as seductive and honeyed as warm baklava. It tells me I am a terrible person and the worst writer in the world, and I believe it.
It took me nearly thirty years to understand the robustness of my premenstrual pattern, but these days I know the week before my period will always include a single day in which I fantasise about murdering strangers, most specifically slow drivers, and another in which everything can reduce me to sentimental tears: supermarket adverts, the polished corner of an oak table glowing in the sun, a pigeon taking off from a hawthorn branch into the wind. For much of that week the voice of my interior critic is as seductive and honeyed as warm baklava. It tells me I am a terrible person and the worst writer in the world, and I believe it. But after decades of bafflement, these states are now something like old friends, and I greet them with a deal of archness.
— Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights (Grove Press, August 25, 2020)
