Instead I had…

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I went to see The Drama in the cinema. I’d watched the trailer so I didn’t join many of my fellow cinema-goers who were shocked when their gorgeous Zendaya/R-Pattz rom-com took a difficult, loaded turn towards the end of the first act and then only kept getting more tense. I already knew the moment was coming when Zendaya, R-Pattz and their two be…

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1) Flat

I feel like A5 at the moment pals- flat, pale, barely useful. It’s not a surprise to me to find myself as paper. I knew I was using up all of my energy reserves and useful thinking while I was finishing writing the book, and I knew there was no other way. But still- it’s so hard to write…

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A lot has changed in my life since I started writing here. Then: freshly 30, in…

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This is an overstatement but not by much. I’m at the precipice of routine and structure and even as I crave it, I’m very unhappy. I’ve decided everyone is either cross with me or has forgotten I exist. I’m worried I don’t have enough time for what I want to do. I worry I don’t want to do anything. I worry I’ve had too many sparkling wines, slept too many long mornings, eaten too beigely, lived too deliciously. I have made the work of January too hard and I am dreading its real beginning.

I blame the scourge of New Years resolutions for a lot of this. There’s a frantic, desperate, faux-chipper energy in the air online. Everyone is at it! Booze is being poured down the drain, leftover cheese flung into black sacks. Advertisers are putting me in a chokehold and trying to pull my trousers down, a hundred ripped influencers want to sell me courses on how to make my middle section small and hard and from the hills an unsettling whisper comes…. new year new me, new year new me, new year new me.

In the past I’ve answered the call of newyearnewme and have tried to offset the New Year / Hate Myself feeling by strapping myself to some enormous and punishing goal and aiming towards the future. I’ve gotten up earlier and earlier, stood under cold water, run until my legs hurt, read until my eyes felt cloudy, written three thousand, four thousand, five thousand words a day. It wasn’t all to my detriment, but it did almost always end with a crashing and a burning sometime around mid-Feb. It doesn’t suit me, it doesn’t feel right. Winter isn’t, and never has been, my time for new beginnings.

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I have thus eschewed the Gregorian calendar on matters of openings and closings. It’s bad enough having to listen to the men alive now, without bringing a 16th Century Pope into the mix. It’s wet, it’s cold, I’ve no money, no prospects, I’m already a burden to my parents, and I’m frightened. So no, I’m not fucking doing it Greg! I’m not letting this be my blank slate. I’m not making a list of my flaws and then seeking to destroy them this month. I’m not hanging up the cheese, the wine, the lie-ins where possible, the slow use of my body, the measured pace that was so delicious over Christmas.

I want to change everything, which is why I am changing very little. I think I hate myself but really I’m just afraid of spending my time incorrectly or being left behind. So I am pausing at the threshold of 2026, ignoring the tug of IMPROVE, OPTIMISE, ALTER BEYOND RECOGNITION and resisting the impulse to barrel into this year without sense or emotional clothing, a streaker through my own life.

The period from now until mid march will instead be for gathering- gathering strength, ideas, courage, resources, curiosity. I’ll remain close to the things I know make me feel well- good sleep, limited screen time, reading books, writing here, taking long walks, talking to friends, eating colourfully, clearing away clutter- but I won’t attach a checklist or a number. My new year will begin as always, in the spring.

The conditions were just so for a weekend of intentional internet poisoning. I arrived back at home on Friday evening after a 6-hour journey from my boyfriend’s flat in London to my parent’s house in Wales- a coach then car trip spent mostly opening and closing different social media apps. It was wet and cold and I was already feeling a little under the weather; a winter bug, the remnants of a hangover from Thursday morning, exhaustion from the travel and general malaise about the fact that at 32 I still find myself pin-balling between houses that are not mine. So I got in, took off my outside clothes, shrugged my tired body into one of those revolting but irresistible wearable blankets- not quite a Liz Lemon slanket but close enough for Government work- and fell headfirst into social media.

And girls- I’m only just climbing up now.

It was a fever dream of content consumption. Time bent around itself and tied me up inside. My left arm ended in fingers, my right arm ended in phone. I woke up, I drank from the internet and some hours later I fell asleep gasping. I was the old lady at the casino, cranking the lever for 16 hours straight with no bathroom breaks, not even really expecting a payoff because she knows the house always wins in the end.

I felt so unwell after my weekend of Phone- monstrous, ashamed, weak, strange, strained- that I squirmed around unsleeping until 2AM on Monday morning. I had gone online to try and escape my difficult feelings and instead downloaded them like a virus onto my own software to replicate, replicate, replicate.

My relationship with Online is fraught and longstanding. But whose relationship to Online isn’t? Oh, a lot of people? Still- let me tell! Let me tell about it!

For myself and other well-followed Twitter over-users, an internet addiction was requirement #1. During the mid 2010s and early 2020s we gave the bird app our time and attention. We fed it our best material, our praxis, our zingers about that day’s main character (sometimes a dad, sometimes a giant container vessel, you really could never predict). And in return we got what we got- some opportunities to write, act, make art, shag some small-time celebrities, become enemies with others.

I was good at Twitter because for a while it was the limit of what there was. I was at University and so deep in depression that for weeks at a time the internet was the only place I was able to socialise. From my bed I overshared. I fed the timeline my biggest emotions and my stupidest jokes. And when people didn’t like me (so often they didn’t like me) I didn’t flinch. I posted through it! And I was rewarded for that. For years and years and years I did this.

And then The World’s Undisputed Loser bought Twitter, and the well began to dry. The sun set on That Internet and rose on another. The reward system changed, the town square became rubble and the vibe is now so off as to be unholy. (I will say- it still has its days and there are still users of that app doing a commendable job of standing out as unique and interesting voices among the zombie-hoard of AI-slop, porn bots, bigots and engagement farmers re-uploading the same photo of the same empty corner of the same ugly American house asking us to tell them how to fill it.)

But even as I’m giving less and less of myself to the internet, my phone is taking more of me than ever. I am not feeding it biography or opinion or even my own face- I am instead handing it my time, my attention and much of my optimism.

So much of my work still happens online that it’s easy to convince myself that my logging on is as simple as clocking in. My twice weekly podcast Everything Is Content is about digital habits, the way we metabolise and respond to viral moments, big moral questions, celebrity haircuts. So I have to know! I have to scroll!

I think this is called bargaining.

A phone is a necessary thing to have and the internet can be a normal place to go, a destination planet that doesn’t have to wreck me on re-entry. Is it just me who can’t be normal?

Symptoms of Phone Sickness: thick head, sore eyes, dry mouth, hand cramping, general unease, creeping dread, a frantic desire for Just The Right video, just the right bit of content, just the thing that will make this all worthwhile, that will unsink the every cost.

I found myself longing for some “good old internet” over the weekend, and perhaps that was what I was scrolling and scrolling in search of. Something that felt like the pre-AI peace times, the internet during one of this century’s few-between gasps above the rising tides of what is coming- what is already here. Not that the good times were ever really that good- I just don’t think they were quite this bad.

But what would Good Old Internet actually mean? Is it me as I type my last message on MSN, then my second to last message, and backwards and backwards until I am saying hello to my best friend for the first time? Is it me Asking Jeeves, or my little hand carefully dragging mouse across mousemat to put 2D clothes on a 2D cartoon celebrity? Or as the monitor starts wailing because someone has dialled the house phone?

I’m letting nostalgia do its sleight of hand. Like when someone says that Christmas definitely used to be better in the 90s but what they actually mean is: I have noticed I am not a child anymore.

But no, the internet (and Christmas) did used to be better. Or at the very least it was bigger. 38% of websites that existed in 2013 no longer existed in 2024 and 54% of Wikipedia entries contain at least one link that leads nowhere. This is digital decay, link rot, an internet narrowing, the arc bending away from possibility and innovation and towards e-commerce, to a small and final box for you to fill with your credit card information. And I just… can’t be arsed anymore. This isn’t the party I arrived at all of those years ago. Get that fire exit door- I’m off!

Last week I re-read Patricia Lockwood’s excellent debut novel No-One Is Talking About This, which itself is as good an argument for a screen-free life as any of the scientific research that says we’re all becoming soft-brained lunatics because of our screens. There’s not a single bit of the book that’s unworthy of repeating, but to avoid being sued here is just one:

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”

Lately I am feeling more of a rat than ever before, but also something else as well. Something not fully real or really full. A hungry ghost in my own machine. Ms Pac-Man if she didn’t slay.

Compassion is necessary for curing myself of this Phone Sickness, but so is discipline. I’ll need to be a gentle parent and not a permissive one (when you’re a woman in your thirties the internet feeds you lots of content about parenting whether you seek it out or not.) It works a bit like this: you seek to understand the child, give them grace, resist demonising or outright punishing them for their unfurling urges, but you do not give them limitless room in all directions to misbehave. A boundary is a boundary, a negotiation is on fair terms, and no amount of screaming or feet kicking changes your mind. Okay, I regret making myself into Baby for this point, but something in it rings true. I am the custodian of my own worst impulses, the only person capable of taking a different route, of putting down the phone and spending my time differently, of loving myself through the doing of Hard Things (the internet tells me I can and for once I am choosing to believe!). I will not be the adult iPad toddler. I will not eat rage-bait for dinner. I will not lose my ability to think to a product made in El*n M*sk’s ghastly image.

What else to say but Log Off? What else to do but Touch Grass? The young people are rawdogging boredom to fix their attention spans and for once I am not having ironic feelings about that. I feel tenderly towards them for trying, even if they are filming it all for TikTok.

I also dread doing it myself, dread the reality that there is no other way to get clear of this semi-dependency that putting down my device and greeting my own boredom like an old friend. What if we can’t get along? What if all of this is leading to something and I am quitting at the final hurdle? What if I’m the meme of the man with the pick-axe who gives up his digging just feet from his treasures- by which I mean what if the answer to myself is inside my phone and discovering it requires me to keep lifting the axe of my attention and then bringing it down?

What if my phone, so used to the warm cradle of my hand, feels abandoned?

But that’s not the truth, Ellen.

It is me who is abandoning myself to my phone. I am giving up so, so many waking hours to something that doesn’t make me happy. I am seeing too many faces and it is making my own face feel wrong. I am teaching myself that hard things are not worthwhile, that the imagination that saved me in childhood is no longer valued in adulthood. I’m eating dinner and a human being is saying something to me and I am saying uh huh yeah one sec while glancing down at my phone. It is embarrassing. I am embarrassed.

On Monday morning I woke up sad and my phone glowed. I thought: just one more anaesthetising scroll. Just one quick look while I wait for the hot water, the coffee, the toast, the day to break. Just one tour of my digital neighbourhood- the green circles on Instagram to be opened like letters, the ungenerous discourse of the day to be read like a newspaper, the good content to be sifted from the bad like gold flakes from sand.

Instead, I downloaded one of those digital addiction apps- literally the first I saw- and put every social media on it and locked myself out for four hours. It was bliss. I’m not joking. I’m not “doing a bit”. It was just uncomplicatedly good and relieving to not have the option to be mindlessly entertained at any given moment. All this time it was not relieving my itch: it was the itch. I did my work, I read my book and my attention went un-splintered.

Perhaps it’s also that time of year, the 2025 progress bar almost full and then full forever. And what have I done with the apparently wild and precious minutes and hours of my life? Stared slack-jawed into the pocket computer that severs me from myself and makes me distrust others? Do I not know that I’m going to die someday, when I see a comment from a fast food chain talking like a sassy teenager, as I read an Instagram caption that begins “Sure! This time I’ve given it a more authentic tone”, as I load up another stranger’s face and watch it tell me a 26-part story about a lying husband, a cheating business partner, a sort-of bad experience with a waitress at a chain restaurant? I must not know, or surely I wouldn’t be doing it.

But I don’t want to do it anymore- at least not as much as I want to be in the world. Because time spent idly online is real time. None of it is later returned. Months and years across a life to read or write or walk or cook or experiment or kiss or flirt or think or rest or cry or see a film or read an article or look out the window or send a funny email to someone you love. To do something beautiful or interesting or novel or hard and not consider how best to frame and edit it for release. To be with people and give them all your attention. Because what’s the line from that Mikko Harvey poem?

The number
of hours
we have
together is
actually not
so large.

Yeah, that.

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You can also buy me a coffee here. Thank you!

Things were going quite well here, all things considered. I was writing something every few weeks and was finding myself improved by that exercise, the routine of it, the freedom to make as many or as few edits as I wanted and for nobody to be a cow to me about it (at least nobody who was paying my bills). It was also helping me to think more about myself and my life and the decisions I was making and not making. For a woman in her thirties, living at home, zero fixed income, not quite sure of what she wants to do or where she wants to go beyond here- this kind of gentle interrogation was needed. It was great. So why did I stop doing it?

I turned 32 this summer. The second year of my thirties. Wait, no. My third. My third go of making my thirties the decade of Beth, and not the decade of [crackling radio, haunted wood pigeon, sounds of dishes shattering in a nearby kitchen, Wilhelm Scream]. It’s been a mixed bag. I actually spent the days before and immediately following my birthday crying in different spare rooms around London with a brief break to cry in some five star hotels before getting right back to crying in spare rooms. But then I spent the weeks after it falling in love (will tell about this soon). I may not have solved my own life but this was all personal-essay-Substack GOLD. So why did I stop writing here?

In an answer that I would dread to give anywhere besides here (and still- bit of dread)- I stopped because my unmedicated ADHD continues to take my life apart at its seams, my PMDD is no longer only a one week a month deal and my autism has left me in a state of exhaustion, overwhelm and depression that I am struggling to find any way through. My work life has been held together for a decade+ by slightly fuzzy sellotape and chewed up bubblegum, but this spate of mental ill health and overwhelm was new and unknown. Something had to give, or everything was going to.

In the months since I hung up much of my life online I’ve found some peace in doing the Things I’m Meant To Be Doing. Slowing down, resting, not using social media to compare myself to others, talking about my feelings, being honest when I’m not coping, not screaming into the abyss when my requests for medical help go unanswered yet again. The goal is APPARENTLY not to do this with any outcome in mind. The goal is to do it and for it to be done, rather than to do it and for me to be immediately better. So I am doing it (mostly) and it is getting done (mostly).

I am getting restless, though, and now that my close personal friend Charli XCX is here I am going to try and be here, too. And not because I’m thriving or because I’ve made any particular breakthrough, but just because I need places to be and ways to write about what’s happening and to talk back to the answerphone message in my brain that is telling me to shut up shut up shut up until I feel properly well, until I’m normal, until I can manage. Because- as I’m encouraged to accept and grow around- those things might never happen. And I’ve got bits to say!

So thanks for hanging about & talk more soon,

Beth

Image: Raffaele Mainella

Every month I mark my calendar with single black dots on the days when my PMDD is at its absolute worst. On a good month I might mark only three or four days. On a bad month it can be half the days or more given over to that rock-bottom feeling, that dread, that exhaustion, that anxiety. I can usually track its arrival- knowing that it’s on the way soon even if I can’t pinpoint exactly the morning when I’ll wake up and find myself totally unable to get out of bed. I’ve had PMDD for about as long as I’ve had a period and was diagnosed years ago, but still- somehow- it always feels like the first time, and the worst time.

The basics

Here are the phases of the menstrual cycle just so we’re all on the same page before we get into the thick of PMDD. Usually lasting between 21 and 35 days, a menstrual cycle begins with the menstrual phase (the bleeding bit. 3-7 days usually). This is followed by the follicular phase (starts on the first day of your period and lasts for about 14 days as your uterine lining thickens and follicles grow on the surface of your ovaries). Then comes ovulation (the release of a mature egg that hopes to be fertilised- this is when people trying for un bebe will have most chance of conceiving one). Finally, the luteal phase (that mature egg travelling down your fallopian tubes into the uterus, which has continued to thicken in preparation for a potential un bebe. Anyone who doesn’t fall pregnant at this point will now have a period and the cycle will begin again.)

What is PMDD, then?

PMDD = Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder and is, in essence, a very severe form of PMS. I wish I could give you so much more- but wider understanding and research still feels scant, despite the huge numbers of us going through this. When describing it I say: I have a cyclical mood disorder that affects me differently during the phases of my cycle. Some doctors will refer to it the same or call it an endocrine disorder (e.g. relating to hormones and hormone secreting glands). You’ll likely know (or come to know) yourself what feels right and most accurately describes what you’re going through. I sometimes think of it as being allergic to parts my own menstrual cycle. It begins and my brain goes HEY???? OW?? NO?? Again, not biologically sound but feels pretty bang on.

Symptoms of PMDD usually peak during the luteal phase (e.g. egg whiffing down into the uterus prior to your period). I learned recently that PMDD was once referred to as LLDD- e.g. late luteal dysphoric disorder, so there you go. Symptoms can include severe anxiety, irritability, deep depression, suicidal ideation, anger, disorientation, confusion, dissatisfaction in your relationship or your life, tearfulness, paranoia, fatigue, dizziness, changes in sleep pattern and sex drive, sensitivity to rejection, difficulty concentrating, bloating, weight changes, digestive issues, swelling, headaches, physical pains and more.

My experience with PMDD

Not to brag, but I experience most of these symptoms to some degree each month during my luteal phase. The physical symptoms come first- my energy takes a massive hit, my appetite careens up and down hour to hour and my joints start to burn like I’ve run a marathon without any training. Currently I’m poised around here- unable to pull myself easily out of sleep in the morning, head beginning to fill with fog, aches building from discomfort to real pain. My mood is dipping, too, and I write this now knowing that by close of day today or tomorrow morning I likely won’t be able to write at all. I’ll spend most of the day in bed, getting up only to use the bathroom or get a drink of water. Work will be done horizontally if there’s no option to postpone it.

PMDD has ruled and shaped so much of my life for more than a decade. It has curtailed my ambitions, harmed my relationships, hurt my prospects and time and again undermined the trust and love I so want to be able to feel for myself. I don’t write that for sympathy- I write it simply because it’s true. The more I seek answers and understanding and ways I could better cope, the deeper my understanding goes of just how much damage has been done.

Diagnosis

Getting a diagnosis of PMDD requires patience, persistence and careful tracking of your symptoms alongside your cycle. I won’t sugarcoat it- it’s very hard work. My advice for someone pursuing a diagnosis is to start your records now, backdate them as necessary, and then take hard copies into your GP (or present them over the phone if you- like myself and most people I know- haven’t had an in person appointment in years). Let them know what you’re coming in to talk about, insist upon being heard out and if you don’t feel listened to or taken seriously, make another appointment with another GP the moment your first appointment ends. There’s no single definitive test they can run, so the criteria for diagnosis usually involves tracking your mood and physical symptoms alongside your cycle. You may be given an exam or go through some tests (usually to rule out other possible conditions), but in my experience it usually comes down to the severity of your symptoms and how those symptoms align with your menstrual cycle.

Treatment

The advice I’ve heard again and again to ease my PMDD symptoms is to build good eating and exercise habits into my routine. Having done this I can say- sure, helpful. But considering the depth of my depression and despair during the very bad days, tracking my protein intake and getting a jog or even a short walk in becomes virtually impossible.

Personally, I’ve found antidepressants to be very helpful when managing my own symptoms, though this isn’t always the case and requires careful thought and proper discussion with a helpful and trusted GP. My approach is less standard and involves taking a very low dose of an SSRI (a type of antidepressant which usually has fewer side-effects and is usually the first to be offered for depression) in the few days preceding ovulation and throughout my luteal phase until I begin to feel better, when I will then taper off for that month. Full disclosure: I’ve only ever come across a few other sufferers doing this. I started doing it at the advice of a GP, though some psychiatrists I’ve spoken to since have cautioned me that it is quite unorthodox and they’d be reticent to recommend it. In other words, this is not something I’m encouraging anyone to try, but for transparencies sake this has helped me somewhat in my battle against the lowest of low moments. A good vitamin regime is something I’ve also built into my routine and it hasn’t done me any harm- again, do ask your doctor which they’d advise and what to expect.

I also arrange as much of my life around my bad days as possible. I’m self-employed (largely because I live with this mood-disorder and have other not so groovy things going on with my brain) and so I’m broadly able to schedule important meetings and deadlines for times when I’m not passed out, sobbing under a pillow or lying catatonic on the sofa. I work weekends and evenings instead and have had to be very open with editors, clients and my gorgeous podcast co-hosts about what I usually am and am not able to do during the black-dot days. It’s not always possible, though, and when I do have to perform on bad days I make sure to give myself as much rest and recovery time afterwards.

I’ve talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of other sufferers by now and there are many other remedies at play. Magnesium, microdosing, marathon running, multivitamins, contraceptive pills, acupuncture, veganism, anti-histamines, total diet overhauls- none I am advising you to try, all I am simply passing along as heard from others. We’re all basically all in Hell together, trying this and that and hoping to feel better. That’s PMDD care, baby!

All of that to say…

…PMDD is a bastard of a thing and every person I’ve ever met who suffers with it has to perform their own set of superhuman feats every month just to live. As my own mood spirals downwards yet again I’m doing my best to keep that in mind and resist the impulse to turn on myself. For a handful of days I will rock and cry and rail against the world and doubt every decision I’ve ever made. It will be very hard. But then it will be slightly less hard, and then even less hard than that, and then I will be up above the surface of things, breathing the air and feeling okay, then alright, then good, then happy. This is not enough, not really, not for a whole life, but for now I hold onto it with all I have.

Image used:

Terrible fate of a young woman who after a calumny was snatched by the devil and dragged to hell / José Guadalupe Posada

An odd thing is happening- I’m beginning to feel at home in Wales.

The weather there has been beautiful for the last month or so, which has no doubt helped. I’ve talked to strangers often, all of us encouraged by the sunshine and blue skies. Nothing momentous- a smile and a hello as we pass one another on the narrow canal-side path, small talk about some local event in the queue at the supermarket (long because the cashiers are never in a hurry and love a chat themselves), a meandering conversation in the town square where people can sit with their drinks from this pub or that bar or food from the local chippie. A few Friday evenings ago I sat at my dining room table until 1AM with my 75 year old neighbour, the candles burning low, the conversation turning from anti-trans legislation to local music festivals to grief to love to womanhood to whether we should open another bottle of wine. I see fewer people here than in London, but I connect with more. Nobody is particularly suspicious of one another, I’m finding. The pace is slow, deliberate, quite strange for someone who spent nearly a decade in a city. Where am I going? It doesn’t matter. I know I’ll get there in time.

Nine months after arriving, I finally feel like I’m at my beginning in Wales. I moved at the end of one summer and now it’s the start of another and I am no longer racing the clock to get “home”. London isn’t home now, just somewhere I used to live, somewhere that many of my friends still live, somewhere I love very much but know less and less. I’ve accepted that my next step will most likely be somewhere entirely new.

I’m in London at the moment, housesitting for a friend. It’s been… challenging. I was so excited to come, but now I’m here I feel uncertain of myself, a little fish in a big loud pond with lots of traffic. I’ll be entirely honest with you now: I’ve cried every single day I’ve been here. It’s both related and not- I’ve got PMDD and this is my tearful time. Still- it’s not just the hormones. Everywhere I look is loaded with memories and in this state of mind they’re all making me weepy. It’s hard to argue when my brain says “this is what you could have won!”. Everything I wrote above is still true, but it’s being delivered through a crueler lens. I’ve settled and there’s peace in that. I’m happy because I’ve given up.

How exhausting having a brain can be.

In reality, I couldn’t have stayed. When I arrived in Wales last September I was fractured in several places, running headlong towards a breakdown which hit not long after. For weeks I didn’t go to work and alternated between sobbing and staring numbly at the wall besides my bed. I seethed at myself from the minute I woke up until I eventually collapsed into a restless half-sleep. I was as ill as I’ve ever been. As my relationship ended in the autumn, I begged my boyfriend to send me to hospital, to get me help, to tell my parents I was going to die. I wanted to die and it felt very likely it might happen.

Here’s something I wrote last October, right in the eye of that storm:

Every time I sit down to write, I end up writing about how bad I feel. Something isn’t working very well in me and hasn’t been for a long time.

It is so dull to feel so bad. It is shapeless and murky and without proper form. It’s a fog that I wake up surrounded by. I clear my throat and cough more up. It gets out of bed with me, fills the air as I fill the mug with instant coffee grounds, as I clatter around the kitchen, as I move things around in the dishwasher, as I squeeze the toothpaste onto the brush, as I open my laptop.

I want to write about things I’m excited for, the crisp weather, the book I’m working on, the new life I’m building for myself outside of London. Instead, this endless foggy sadness that I can’t shift. I don’t want this endless foggy sadness that I can’t shift. I’d take another kind of sadness, easy. I want sadness with some kind of form. I want to slice through the bad feeling and get to whatever poison lives inside and let it rush out.

I’ve been beating myself up about my low mood. I haven’t been any fun, haven’t been good at replying to messages, haven’t had the energy to do more than the bare essentials to remain fed, watered and washed. I’ve shut myself away. I’ve hunkered down in my bed. I’ve been monosyllabic on the phone. I’ve said no to plans, yes to endless hours of TV that I don’t really pay attention to. I’ve been absorbed with my own problems and my own emotional crisis, which has meant I’m not able to give much of anything to other people.

A few weeks ago I thought I was through it, thought it was no more than an end of season wobble, but it’s still happening. It’s heavy. I’m picking fights. I’m ignoring important emails. I’m festering in self-doubt. I’m putting off tasks because I can’t face them. I’m sleeping later and later. I’m trying to be happy and well by force and it just isn’t happening. I feel bad and I don’t know how to feel better.

—

It’s hard to read that. I am glad to be alive and I love so much of the world and the people in it. I was just exhausted, completely lost, buried and burnt out. I had to go there to start to come back. I had to leave my life. There was no living left in it. I was angry all of the time and I was tired. I don’t fool myself that this is my life from here on out- sunshine and canal walks and smiling at strangers. I live with a serious cyclical mood disorder and a neurotype that makes operating in the world especially tricky. I will feel that bad again. Still though, and even as I wobble my way around South London fighting tears, something is shifting.

Living in Wales no longer feels like a lapse or a mistake that I need to right as soon as possible before everyone finds out about it. I’m not here because I fucked my life up irrevocably. I came here to put myself together and set myself up for a future where I (hopefully) don’t feel flayed and broken and run down to nothing. Finally, finally, I feel like that might be happening.

This is the lesson I take again and again from my short career as a thirtynothingsomething- life will constantly not look how you thought it would look. Things will happen and they will be what they are- good, strange, difficult, gorgeous, very funny, miraculous, devastating. You will live around them and through them, shape them into great stories or simply endure until something else arrives. I wish I had a softer and less painful view of London and could visit without feeling like there are ghosts trailing behind me at every step. I wish there wasn’t so much longing left in me for a life and a love and a person and a place- but I also suspect that I might miss those feelings too, eventually, once they’re gone for good.

I’ve written here again and again that I want a home for myself, that it’s the only concrete goal I have for my future. I think perhaps I’ve found one, and for as long as it lasts I should try and enjoy it.

[image: Conwy Castle, North Wales / Thomas Girtin]

1. Nobody besides you can or will undo your own brain rot. You can, if you want, spend most of your free time for the rest of this decade staring again and again at your phone until you feel woozy and detached and cognitively fried. Many of us do …

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Q: I recently ended a situationship. Do you have any advice for moving on from it?

A: Treat it and yourself with dignity. Situationship, fling, casual relationship, whatever you call it; you had an intimate connection with another human being and it meant something to you. Appreciate it in its fullness- what it felt like, what was lovely about it, what was hard, what couldn’t have lasted long term- and then try to release it. Take what there is to take, store something golden in memory, and then trust the rest to become smaller and lighter in time. Remember too that we’ve all been there. I know so many women who took twice as long to get over a four month situationship as it took them to get over a years long relationship that had run its course. Sometimes these things just get under our skin. Maybe it’s the brevity of it, the way so much existed and then stopped existing in potential and possibility. Maybe it’s easier to attach to someone you don’t yet really know. Imagination and fantasy and your own brain doing the work of creating a loss. Best not to make too much of the investigations. Instead, go easy, be grateful, face forward and let it pass.

Q: Tips for a first break-up?

A: I see that you have crash landed on this new planet. Welcome, welcome. It is not an entirely unfamiliar landscape, I’m sure. You’ll already know about hurt, loss, abandonment, loneliness, grief etc. and this is all of that in just a slightly heartbreakier form. It’s all brand new and as bad as and as discombobulating and disconcerting as it feels. Or maybe you’re numb. Or maybe you’re feeling nothing else besides this. When I think of first heartbreaks I think of two- one when I was a teenager and one when I was 24. The first ended things on the driveway of my best friend’s house in the first week of August 2009 and I felt like someone had skewered my heart, boiled my brain and hijacked my personality and innocence and future. Sounds a bit dramatique perhaps but I was sixteen and it was enormous! The second was dark and adult and so long in the making I feel audacious still for being as shocked as I was. It annihilated me. I was levelled and broken and unravelled. It made me, though. I had to learn to be singular, to live in a world where I knew that love could end, could go wrong, could sometimes not be enough. My advice: talk about it, write about it, cry about it, allow it be a compass for all kinds of extracurricular activities and moments of wanky self-exploration (which will not be wanky at all!). If you can be curious about it then do that, too. This is how much a heart can hold. Impossibly, you will heal. Try not to predict how this will happen and how you’ll be changed, just know that already your heart and brain and life are working to make it happen.

Q: Do you have a least favourite tattoo?

A: Everything pre 2017 is a bit of a crapshoot. I don’t like to rank my tattoos because it might make some of them feel bad, but I do think there should have been an intervention before I was allowed to get an enormous and very dark rose tattooed on my virgin inner arm at age 22. But life goes on and it is a part of my appearance and just as deserving of respect and/or indifference as the rest of me.

Q: Do you struggle having people share personal things with you off the back of them consuming your work?

A: No I genuinely do enjoy it! The tough part is to miss messages and to know I can’t talk to or reply to everyone. God what a wanky thing to say! But really! It’s true! I think it’s lovely how willing people are to open up and be vulnerable and it makes me feel like I’ve done something valuable in writing it.

Q: How do you deal with being at a different life stage than your friends or people your age?

A: No, but really it’s been a huge challenge for me over the last year especially. In the months after turning 31 my relationship ended, my living situation changed, I left London, my career faltered and my mental health crashed spectacularly into Hell in October and is only just now returning to somewhere in the vicinity of stable. All the while I have pals buying houses, getting married, considering when to have kids, getting promotions in fields they’ve been collecting accolades in for a decade or more. I’d be lying if I said I never felt like a total fuck up- which is a hugely difficult thing to bring to the table, even if the table is surrounded by people who I love and who treat me with nothing but gorgeous respect and buckets of support. I deal with it by letting it happen and sitting with it. How I feel is how I feel and there’s no use in giving myself grief for that. It also helps to seek out other people who are taking a different path, who aren’t on course for marriage, 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs, who would also be described (likely erroneously) as late bloomers. The only wrong way to live is by ignoring your desires, taking the blame when things don’t happen as expected and directing cruelty at people who are living in other ways. Basically I’m determined to enjoy this time in my life no matter what comes next. There are all kinds of rewards, too. I’m free to travel alone, to meet new people, to reinvent my career, to rediscover my desires and then follow after them. On good days that’s enough.

Q: Struggling at the moment with a little bit of loneliness and emptiness. Any tips on getting through?

A: Oof, yes. The thing about loneliness is it both begs you for connection but also begs you not to dare reach out and speak its existence aloud. Where possible, mother your own loneliness and be instructed by it. If you’re lonely, you must be with other people. You must make plans, go where the people are, reach out, ask for time with anyone and everyone who matters to you. Empty and lonely are hard, but they’re invitations and they’re cues to act. And it might not be an immediate remedy to be around your pals- can actually sometimes make it feel worse. But that’s still the place to start. Spend more intentional time alone, too. It’s one thing to be sad, empty and lonely in your bedroom, on your commute, in the familiar groove of your routine- it’s another to take your sadness and emptiness somewhere beautiful, somewhere with a good book, a favourite album, a camera, a lovingly prepared picnic. Only way out is through- for you and for me too.

(two I did answer ICYMI)

B x

It’s not even that I spend all day holding tears in, barely containing my angst and my sorrows. I think I’ve been living quite levelly, in fact. I get up between 7 and 8 in the morning and I make the first of the two black instant coffees I allow myself to have (this is due to caffeine sensitivity, not some strange withholding ritual). I shower, I brush my teeth, I sit at my desk, I work, I talk to the cats in my normal voice sometimes and sometimes I talk to them like they are babies. I work on my various hyphenate jobs, I mark emails as unread, I listen to ASMR when my concentration strays. I make lunch and eat it at my desk. I work as long as I can and as long as I need to. I watch TV or read in the evenings. Sometimes I find myself working again. I talk to my parents. I eat dinner. I get into bed and try to resist the lure of TikTok. And then, sometimes, late at night, I cry.

I feel compelled to say that my life is not all that terrible and I am not writing this from some rock bottom place. Still, my life is one reason why I am crying. It is a different shape to the shape I’d imagined it would be. I feel both scrutinised and forgotten out here in the Welsh countryside. My layover at my parent’s house is stretching longer, the three months became six months became nine months and now I’m in touching distance of one whole year spent here. The questions this raises are many. Am I within my real life or outside of it? Am I ever going to find my way back to the independence that I fought so hard for in my twenties? Have I been foolish in trying to hand my life over to writing? Is writing now handing it back? Are my options really either to live constantly on the edge of a negative bank balance or to rely this heavily on the generosity of my family? (This is called rumination and therapists have given me a wealth of worksheets for it over the years. May I offer you a mindfulness exercise in this trying time? What about keeping a journal for worrying thoughts? Might you stand at the window and watch the sky? Or spend time in the company of a beloved houseplant?)

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To state the obvious, the show isn’t aspirational. I don’t think anyone watches it and thinks, you know what? I should spend a lot more of my one wild and precious life binge-drinking in body-con dresses. But there’s always a part of each episode where they are having fun, where they’re cutting loose, laughing uproariously, getting ready together for an evening out, throwing on a costume for a house party (NB: these are great episodes- someone always tries to kick their way out of their warehouse accommodation via an upstairs wall) and watching these moments I’d find myself thinking: am I having enough fun? Am I having any fun at all? Or did the party end while I wasn’t paying attention?

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Lately, I found myself back in the grey. I’m feeling slightly better now so I don’t feel too glum writing about it. (Reading about it though? Let’s see!)

The rare bright mornings I had would skew grey by 11AM, midday at the latest. Most of the time I’d wake up already in it and stay put there. I talked to my parents when we crossed paths around the house and I hoped I made sense. Emails were hieroglyph. Walking was hard. Food was ash.

The grey is depression but it’s also not. It’s the grey. Its mood made viscous. It’s bad and I don’t like to go there. I’m guessing I’ve been there lately because I’m 31, living at home, still heartbroken despite my best efforts and the only support I have for my mental health is a scheduled 10 minute phone call with a GP in three weeks time. As I say, only a guess.

A few things have made me feel better. Reluctantly I tell you that cold water has played a role. And look, I’m annoyed as you are that this works. I could batter Wim Hof for making me stand in the shower and turn the knob, exchanging the soothing warm-hot water for 30 second shocks of cold. The resulting regulation and energised feeling sort of does make it worth it but barely. I’ve also been walking more, and finding reasons to leave the house- combining a trip to the supermarket with a short walk or a mooch around an old bookshop or a little sit down in a cafe to pick at a sandwich that inexplicably costs £6.50.

By chance I just read this piece by her about happymaxxing and she recommends many of the same things. She also advises having a conversation with another adult about something that isn’t your problems and trying to find the joy in the little things- something I wrote an entire book about two years ago and manage to constantly forget about entirely.

The grey turns me into little more than bones in a body. To be more than that I must do the above. I must do the nonsense and the rigmarole and the chores of being a person in the world.

It’s been going… alright. Earlier this week I completed an entire morning of Being A Person before it came crashing down and I lay on the sofa and wailed in a way that- even in the midst of my distress- I recognised as a bit much. I wailed and howled and then I got tired of wailing and howling and I made a 7 minute video on TikTok talking about it (I’m a millennial so this is actually what healthy processing looks like.) In the video I talked about the value of talking about the bad thing while the bad thing is ongoing. Sure, I love to hear from people who are through the worst of it and have lessons ready to share, but I also want to hear from people who are wading through the shite parts of life, no clear idea of how- or if- they’re ever going to get out of it. I have been on the lookout for my fellow walkers in the grey wild and I have found so many of them.

There was no point to the video but to say it and there is no point to this entry but to do the same. I am speaking from within and when I am through, I will speak again.

Thank you for reading.

One part of me is finding it empowering that I’m not actively pursuing a romantic or sexual life at the moment. Another part of me feels like it’s a deprivation that hurts only me. Maybe this strange time in history is exactly when we should all be seeking sensation and pleasure, throwing caution to the wind and just getting down. If nothing else, it’s free! But then I think of the motions required of me, the words and the actions- the eye-contact at a bar, the downloading of the dating apps, the building of a profile, the choosing of photos, the transparency about my recent break-up and mental health woes- and my head fills with loud, discordant notes. Not this, not yet. Maybe sometime, maybe next month, maybe in the spring or the summer or the early autumn when our jumpers are warm from the radiator and there’s not much else to do. Maybe then, maybe soon.

I know people who find good casual sex easy to come by, but I’ve never felt totally comfortable among their ranks. I tried it in my twenties (I’ve shagged, I swear! I’ve shagged plenty!) but I wound things down at 27 to try dating and then really hung it up at 29 to have a loving relationship with someone who I knew, who knew me, who learned with me what we both liked. Now single, it doesn’t feel like pursuing hook-ups would be returning to freedom and excitement. I am older, the landscape has changed and I can’t seem to summon the appropriate excitement to begin the task.

I mentioned once in an essay On Here that my libido has been often tanked by depression and then the various SSRIs and SNRIs I’ve deployed to help deal with said depression. Where I would otherwise feel regular spikes of sexual curiosity I’d instead feel a peculiar numbness. I’m currently unmedicated, and so it’s not that I can’t get things over the edge so to speak (she means wanking, officer), it’s that the impulse feels like it’s coming through to me in a totally different language, one I can’t speak nor hope to translate. It’s static on the line, a distorted waveform.

I recently drove an hour from my home in rural Wales to watch the film Babygirl. If you’ve missed the promotional material and the online discourse, I’ll explain. Babygirl is about a CEO called Romy (played by Nicole Kidman) who has an active sex life with her handsome, creative, devoted husband (played by Zorro) who loves to touch her body but does not make her orgasm. During an apparently endless Christmastime Romy begins a relationship with an intern at her company, an unpredictable younger man who tells her to get on her knees, who plays with her, who scares and frustrates her, who does, from their very first sexual encounter, make her come. Leaving the cinema I felt charged, driving home along misty mountain rounds feeling wired and oddly focused, driving a little closer to the speed limit than I had on my approach. Sex, I thought. Sex…?

But it’s hard to bottle that feeling, especially living as far as I do from a place where I could feel safely anonymous enough to consider pursuing singular sexual encounters. Also- and crucially- I am me wherever I go, and me is a person still trying to separate seeking pleasure from having to then seek forgiveness for it.

I wrote this recently on the subject of shame. For a long time shame has been my compass and my God. Everything I touched was Shame, everything I longed for, wanted, feared. What I did in public was wrong, what I wanted in secret was worse. I am making progress, but the work of pulling its needles from my hands is new. There are so many left. Pleasure, of course, is a way to do that, to feel your way clear of hating your body and your heart, to no longer fear the shape of your desire, to pursue a life that looks so different than the life you were told to want. I know this, but I also know pleasure as a way to incur more shame.

And so, I have put sex in the corner and turned its eyes away.

This week I started reading Miranda July’s All Fours. In it a 45 year old woman leaves her family home in LA for a solo road-trip to New York. She makes it only to the next town, where she begins a non-sexual affair with a younger man. Her view of sex becomes painfully altered as she spends time with him, his body a thing she cannot have in the way that she craves. This part:

“Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but be with it… Without knowing it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth.”

It’s a wonderful book and agony to read. I don’t want what the woman in the story has- the madness of lust, the bodyhunger for something I can’t have, a life so close to blowing up. But nor do I want the absence of lustmadness, bodyhunger. I want to be in the world of sex because I want to be in the world of living. I want to be whole, for pleasure to be a balancing object instead of the thing that tips the scale, that demands penance.

Moya’s titular reference- Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again- is a small and excellent book that I return to whenever I feel this internal misalignment, this sex-shame that is so at odds with my personal belief system and my upbringing (“for someone raised so agnostically you can be SO Catholic to yourself” a friend told me once in a conversation that was not about sex.) Many women don’t come to understand desire until two, three, four decades into their sexual lives, or we learn it upside down, as convinced of our own sexually calculating ways as the men who hate us. Angel writes of the language of “reasons” that is often employed when talking about why women fuck- asking if this is even the right language to use. She says:

“It conjures women as rationally weighing up considerations, rather than driven by the strange, complex phenomenon that sexuality is, and which we take for granted in men. It chimes with a trope of sexuality as external to women, as separate from, if not always in opposition to, their personhood.”

Maybe, then, I don’t want to have sex because I do want to have sex. Maybe I am anticipating not the act and its aftermath as too layered and too strenuous- but rather the dialogue it might spark in myself?

I started running again recently, and it’s as close as I can get to being just a body. Thoughts are only reports of sensation, rather than analysis of what those sensations might mean. This is hard, this hurts, now it’s easier, now it hurts less, now I am speeding up, now I am slowing down, now I am flooded with a feeling and it’s so, so good. I am a knee, a hip, a heel, a burn beneath ribcage, a damp forehead, a laboured inhale. In the past sex has achieved the same and at the climax of my last good 5K I thought- why not go to it, then? Why not pick it up again the way that you’ve picked up this? Because of course, I never want to go running until I’m already running, and then I never want to stop.

I’ll end on this, from Sophie Mackintosh’s ‘Slutty new year’. (You can read it here.)

“Drawn to writing about desire as I am, it’s easy to slip into writing about the abject – about prostrating yourself for love, about dogged obsession, unhappy endings. And it’s true that in abjection you can achieve transformation, that desire slips between pleasure and pain. It’s true that you can find self-knowledge this way. But I’m finding myself more interested in writing about pleasure’s potential, about desire’s radiance instead. About a place with no shame. There’s room for both, there’s room to move between them. Between-ness.”

I have leant into the comforting but neutering narrative that I am between in my own life at the moment- no home, no direction, no partner, no front door key. But I am not between, I am in my life and will remain in it until the end- and I so want it to feel good. I want it to feel so, so good.

[Image from The Woman In The Waves by Gustave Courbet]

I don’t want to pollute the space by adding a screenshot from That Place, but these are the words that I used-

‘no bad time to remember that as an adult you can’t actually be in trouble with another adult. they can be annoyed at you, misunderstand you, dislike your choices, dislike *you*- but you’re not in trouble! because you can’t be!’

I was having a nice weekend when I tweeted it- I’d taken myself to Bristol to see a gig, the first nice thing I’d done for myself since the end of my relationship, which I had taken very hard and had fought a lot of shame and anxiety over. I remember that after I hit send on it I hoped that it would find the eyes of just one person who did feel that they were in trouble, and that it might help them to unknot, unclench and uncoil. 113,000 likes, 11,000 retweets and hundreds of replies later (so many of them trying to find a loophole that meant they actually were in trouble)- I almost wished I’d never said it.

Going a small bit viral on Twitter is not new to me. I was there when people would give you trophies for your tweets and make you go to another website to look at those trophies. I was there when it was, broadly speaking, an entirely fine experience for tens of thousands of people to interact with something you’d said on the bird app. That’s no longer true, of course, because it’s no longer the bird app. The experience is heavier now- and uglier. I don’t want to revise history- there were absolutely reply guys, mansplainers and incels in days gone by, but I’m sure they weren’t ever so cruel or so numerous.

The replies to the above tweet weren’t (I don’t think) from incels, but they were from people who thought I was incredibly dim and needed the concept of law enforcement explained to me. Basically, my tweet about nobody being in trouble very almost made me feel like I was in trouble. People were that invested in disproving it, in delivering a gotcha, in being able to say “look, I told you! I actually can be in trouble and so can you and in fact… I think we both are!”. It was an exhausting weekend online and by the end of it I’d said so many small prayers that those people in my replies might soon find their way clear of the circular thinking that I had been been trapped in for most of my life. The thinking that says: you are in trouble. There is something the matter. Your responses do not make sense. Your emotions are faulty. You are making a choice that others will- and should- judge. You are doing something that will cause anger, disgust, ruin. You are inexplicable. Your shame is justified. You will be found out.

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None of the replies changed my mind. I know it to be true in a way that is pure relief. I can believe otherwise, act otherwise, forget and still it will remain true. It is a frame of mind that has saved me in ways that are hard to articulate. For a long time I was a person who believed their shame was useful. I understood shame as the product of bad choices, of an internal well of poison that must be felt to be used up. In this way I simply made more shame, more shame, more shame. And I would have gone on doing so, forever probably, if not for a series of perfect sentences, collected over years, that came together as a single booming instruction that I couldn’t ignore: stop insisting that it is all your fault. You are not that important.

So no, I won’t waver on this. You are not in trouble because you cannot be.

I don’t say any of this because I want people to feel less obliged to one another, less concerned with doing the good but difficult things that keep us safe and alive. It is a dark world through the window, made bearable only by the efforts we take to be decent and protective and brave. Put simply: the ‘in trouble’ feeling doesn’t help us do anything useful. Put it down whenever you notice you have picked it up.

I think to truly know this means also having to rethink a lot of the difficult parts of life and human interaction. If someone disapproves of a decision you’ve made or simply the way you are then if forces you to ask: does that matter? Can I bear it? When someone behaves as though they are your parent when they are simply your peer, you must understand that it is a behaviour that is about them and not about you. You have to make a choices about how you relate to the experience, where exactly you catalog it. When you make a mistake or act outside of your values, you can no longer cloak your feelings- or the wronged person’s- under a blanket of that familiar Troubleshame. Instead you must acknowledge that you knew better and did not do better, than you were an adult who did wrong by another, that you can only do what you can do to make it up to them. Because consequence is not you being in trouble. Other people’s anger or judgement or disgust- misplaced or justified- is not you being in trouble. You being unhappy and dissatisfied is not you being in trouble, it is just evidence that you might need to negotiate with yourself a different way of living.

As I said in my follow up:

‘this will either make sense to you or not but if it does make sense: i hope you can find the part of you that constantly feels like it’s in danger of being told off and then be very nice to it.’

I meant that, too.

If you like my writing or my posts anywhere on this here internet, the best way to help me keep it up is to become a patron.

You can also buy me a coffee here. Thank you!

-Focus on pleasure and experience in 2025. You live well by living well. So eat plenty of great meals. Try new things- every kind of oyster, every variation of tofu dish you can lay your hands on. Go and see live comedy. Laugh like a child. Run from icy open water to a steaming sauna. Walk in beautiful places. Listen to new old music. Get super into tea. Have an ice cream every Friday. Burn all of the candles you got for Christmas. Follow your senses through this year. Have loads of orgasms.

-No more wasting our money on fast fashion. Listen: being bang on every micro-trend makes you look a mug. I'm sorry! I really am! But we must break free or else we will go on living like cash cows being milked by bald CEOs who would happily wash their twelve supercars with the melted ice of a dead polar bears home. Let's not be separated from our currency so easily this year. Hold strong. Find your actual style, instead.

-Think before you say yes to invitations. Once you’ve agreed to be somewhere, do everything in your power to show up. Disallow most of your own excuses. Because yes, being in the house scrolling on your phone and watching TV is so easy and so appealing- especially with the world as cooked and crooked as it is right now. But it also holds none of the potential rewards that Being In The World does. Seek a good balance with it. Show up when you’ve said you will, but maybe be slower to say yes to every single thing if that’s been your problem in the past.

Overall I’ve always believed good years to be largely fake. Bad years, though? Incredibly real. I just had one and I am not feeling normal about it. As such, I’ve been reading a lot about resolutions and challenges and changes. One key to thriving seems to be not demanding it of yourself. Instead, if you want to arrive at December 31^st 2025 without feeling like a husk of a human being then you must try and take each day independently of the last day. Ask: what single decision can I make today that steers me away from the habits I’m trying to leave behind? Ask: have I felt any hope or happiness in the last 24 hours? Ask: have I given myself credit for the ways I am striving, all of the time, to stay afloat?

I just read this piece by excellent writer Amy Key where she talks about looking back through her phone’s camera reel and seeing within them evidence of so much living in 2024 that otherwise might not have been recalled when summarising the year just passed- the travel, the new friends, the daily brilliance of cats asleep in “delightful arrangements”. I’d like to try and keep good records this year of the big and small wonders. Perhaps in a notes app, perhaps in a written journal. I’d like not to let too much of the very good stuff slip beyond memory. It is too much to hold, and so I should probably write it down.

I also believe a good year can be made up of decisions not taken. To not commit to punishing exercise and diet regimes. To not exchange your hard earned money for flash in the pan trend items made to fall apart in the wash. To not unblock your ex. To not arguing with people who hate you and don’t think you should exist. To not follow people on the internet who make you feel bad about your life, your career, your face, your neck.

I think new year’s resolutions, though well-meant in January, can quickly end up feeling like hostage negotiations. You will finish your novel, save £5000 and arrive in June looking like a Victoria’s Secret model or else the happiness will not be released. Try again in 2026. A miserable way to move through time that was never guaranteed, that is a gift even when it is not.

This reminds me of a controversial approach I heard about on TikTok, which involves living this year like there’s a chance it could be your last. A little morbid, maybe, but also inarguably true! I’m not entirely sure this one will work for me because I am prone to a fun touch of the ol’ Death Fixation, but it might be a fit for someone else. Making decisions like you want to be remembered for them, using your allotted time mindfully, taking chances on your happiness and fulfilment etc. So crazy it might just work!

One thing I’ve been resisting is doing a full and detailed analysis of last year. I lived it once and I’m reluctant to do so again- not even on the off chance that there’s some hidden thread that, when pulled, will reveal all of my mistakes. Life is not so straightforward as all that. In 2024 I almost had a breakdown. In 2025 I would like not to approach a place nearly as dark as that. For now, that’s most of what I know. I tried my best with the information I had- I was unwell, I ran out of money, I lost work, my relationship ended and I kept moving with as much hope and sense as I could muster. Would it really help to pore over that all again in search of a unifying error or maladaption?I think not. I think instead I’ll rely on my guy and my emotional memory. Does this feel good or does it feel bad? Have I tried this approach yet or no?

Is that a smell of dread on the air or is it hope?

—

(A little late but here are my ins and outs for 2025)

In

Cooking dinner for a friend

A single person dinner party. A catch up that goes beyond ‘lets go to a bar and try and talk about new hair cuts and parental mortality over increasingly loud music’. That’s its own lovely thing, but for connecting well and showing someone you love them: an invitation, a dining table, two plates, two glasses.

Dancing in bars

I’ve been watching Ally McBeal with my mum and the thing I most long for- aside from my own brownstone and to fall in love with Robert Downey Jr- is to dance in a bar with my pals. Luckily, this exists- even if it does take a little looking for.

Un-monetised hobbies

We were put on earth to make things with our hands and to not always create an Etsy account about it. Doing things that you’re not very good at, doing things that can’t be sold either as packaged product or content opportunity will make you feel more human and real- I promise.

Scheduled phone catch ups

I’m tired of missing messages or forgetting to reply to texts or taking it personally when someone forgets to reply to mine. Instead, lets try giving each other a call on the phone. Organise a time, put it in your diary and be warmed by the exchange of human conversation between yourself and someone you love and miss. What else are we here for?

Out

Following mostly celebrities online

It’s not even about the celebrities themselves at this point, it’s about the moments of your life and the degrees of attention you’re handing over to people who aren’t returning interesting ideas, entertaining content or really anything of value at all. Also it cooks your brain to only look at people who spend five to six figures a year on dermatology. Next!

Being busy with everything besides your life

I can say little more! Some of busy is real and some is an illusion. Do your best to separate the two.

Overconsumption.

Babes it is so over it’s not even funny. We tried it, we singed the edges of the world and made ourselves happy in only superficial bursts. So get in loser, we’re being normal about shopping again*. (*I’m doing a Mean Girls thing I do not think you are a loser.)

That’s all for now.

Beth x

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I tweeted last night about how every single January I feel the ugliest I’ve ever been- ghostly pale, sleep-deprived, fried around the edges- but that, on balance, I think it’s good for my character. “I feel butters and yet still, this beautiful year is mine.”

I really wasn’t fishing. I just wanted to say it and see who felt the same (e.g. my entire internet career). A few people did. A few didn’t.

Perhaps I feel it more this year because it’s the first time I’ve entered a new year as a single person over thirty. Last year I was in a relationship and the year before that I was 29, footloose and totally fancy free (bone tired of dating & plotting for a future living alone in a lighthouse). It’s a strange feeling! Mine is a situation that many people hope not to end up in. Thirty-something, unmarried, single, childless and living at home. I’m glad for a lot of how I’m living, of course, but it’s fascinating to think how many people would dread this. At 31 I am in the unique position of being incredibly old while also being young. I am the ancient baby the prophecy foretold. I am in my cautionary tale era, as close to the witch in the swamp as I’ve ever been.

I like feeling invisible more than I thought I would, though I do long for particular moments of visibility. A held look across a busy bar or lamplit front room at the house party of a friend of a friend. Another woman admiring my shoes or bag. I like the ritual of it, the sophomoric excitement of getting ready in the same room, the pleasure at having chosen the right outfit.

I feel pulled taut between enjoying not dealing with harassment, but also wanting to feel sexy, powerful, alluring- indeed, all of the 90s aerosol body spray adjectives. Most of my nice clothes are vacuum sealed in my parents’ garage and will likely remain so for the foreseeable. I dress for comfort and warmth. I turn down nine out of ten invitations to events because they are happening hundreds of miles from where I live. My relationship to beauty is changing- whether temporarily or more permanently is yet to be seen but for precisely right now: I care less than I ever have about my looks. I dress like both halves of Oasis, leave the house, complete my mission and get back in the house.

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