#BRINGBACKSWAG

I know, I know – I’ve been a very bad girl. A very, very, bad, bad girl, Gaga. I promise that I do have excuses. That is, I, for the past five months have been convinced of my own personal justifications for refusing to put metaphorical pen to metaphorical paper. After all, haven’t I been through enough? Ten thousand words on one of the worst takes on Hamlet since The Northman, regardless of the other hundreds of thousands of words I’ve surrendered to the university institution throughout the past four years. Three separate humiliation rituals involving bowing and scraping through academic references, script submissions, panel interviews and the most performative acts of pseudointellectualism I have ever stooped to. A near-death experience, a half-heartbreak, a foreign hospital visit – I could (and ultimately do enjoy) listing all of the reasons I have not found it within myself to publish an essay on Substack dot com. None of them are particularly interesting. It most just boils down to the fact that, not that you’ve noticed, but it has been almost six months, and I’ve become a neglectful lover.

I’m graduating – so is everyone – and so too is everyone making their own Substack. This is fun and exciting. Substack as a CV booster is of course pragmatic and commendable, and I would be woefully hypocritical at trying to poke fun at anyone doing such a thing. In my case, this will not work super well. I mostly just hope this does not come up when you google my name, considering that most of these essays are just trauma dump diatribes. This brings me to my real excuse – I think over the last couple years, I’ve really boxed myself into a bit of a serious corner on here. I didn’t feel as though it was worth posting anything unless I had some kind of profound personal epiphany that seemed essential to publish on the internet. Some of the time this worked, but most of the time it didn’t, and I’ve felt as though my posts on here had been getting proportionally inverse in their length-to-actual-meaningful-substance ratio. This is the problem with writing personal essays – it turns you into a sort of nostalgia farm, in which you are constantly diarising and notarising insignificant ordinary occurrences in order to try to build them into a wider meta-narrative over your life. As an almost nine-year psychoanalysis patient, this is of course, my bread and butter. But surprise surprise – it gets boring, and it gets unsustainable. I’m done being boring and unsustainable. I’m going to bring back swag.

Truman Capote says that all fiction is gossip – and certainly, the pieces of my personal life that usually go on here more or less translate to just that – but the problem with that gossip is that it does reference people that I do actually know. And though my friends and family have all been nothing if not infinitely gracious about this, I do feel that I’ve been overly gratuitous at times, and for that – I apologise. That’s not to say I’ll never do it again (I’m sure I will) – it’s just to say I’m cooling off for a while. Not until my sisters start paying me to write a dating column, which is the only context in which I will acquiesce to their demands. I want to be interesting, of course, but I just don’t think I need to be quite so honest – Octavia E. Butler, (who is incidentally much better than Capote), says that ‘the best and most interesting part of me is my fiction,’ and I think that I would rather be the kind of writer about whom this is true. I am still a narcissist, and I am still going to talk copiously about myself – I’m mostly just warning you that I’m going to start being a bit more liberal with the facts around here. Not to quote myself, but an essay from a couple years ago had something along the lines of ‘I don’t owe you the truth, I just owe you a good story’ – so I’m just warning you that I’m really going to try to recommit to that principle.

So, here’s what I’ve got for July. I’m not going to be so presumptuous as to imagine writing something every month, but this is what I have for you, I suppose. It has no moral, no through-line, and no real narrative, apart from being overly self-conscious of its own construction. It’s just kind of an update on what I’ve been into, and kind of what I’ve been up to. It’s nowhere near as edited as usual – I am giving myself three days instead of the usual five weeks – it’s completely farm-to-table. There is no point to this one apart from as an exercise – I’m just doing it for the love of the game.

‘Women are not prepared to have “everything,” not success-type “everything.” … There’s no precedent for women getting their own “everything” and realising it’s not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood “everything” in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project into the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They’ll only give you “everything” if you appear to be totally confused.’

This is from an essay by the greatest memoirist of all time – Eve Babitz. I came back to it recently when something completely shocking and notably out-of-character happened to me: I got everything I wanted. The past year or so has undoubtedly been the most difficult one mental-health-wise in the past eight years. I've been diagnosed with a frankly ridiculous shopping list of different psychological defects. I have had to start asking my friends to touch me on both sides of my body to make sure I feel even. Recently, however, I looked up in shock to realise that everything has worked out pretty well considering. I received my desired result for my degree. I was accepted into every writing program I applied for. I got to pick the one I wanted the most. I did most everything I wanted to do, and lots of things I didn’t think I was capable of, especially considering the circumstances. Next year, I am living in London. I have meaningful and important relationships that fulfil and excite me. I really am doing the cringe thing that involves living the life that would explode fifteen-year-old-me’s little pea brain. Nothing is wrong. In fact, for the first time ever, everything is actively right. I am for all intents and purposes, practically Panglossian. I have no idea what to do. I certainly have no idea what to write about. I don’t want to sound like an insane person, but this is the first time in my entire life that I’ve ever felt cloudbusty – I just know something good is gonna happen; I just don’t know when.

I’m exactly as Babitz predicted - completely unprepared. I keep waking up in the middle of the night just waiting for the bad news to come crashing down, like I’m Carrie Bradshaw when she first started going out with Aidan. I keep refreshing my email because I’m 90% sure that my acceptance letters were accidentally mailed to me by mistake. I’m half-convinced that writing an essay about feeling happy will lead to some kind of cosmic reckoning in which everyone I’ve ever known or loved will die in a horrific accident. I have nothing to do but worry about my lack of worry. I’ll still find something to complain about - that’s something you can count on.

Aside from this abstract existential anxiety, I’ve been putting lemon in pretty much anything recently. I love lemon in everything. Houmous, water, diet coke, scrambled eggs, soup, pasta, hair, ice cream, perfume, broccoli, margaritas, beers – the list goes on. I don’t really like it in sweet things; I just like adding it to savoury stuff. It’s really good by itself as well – a cold, sour lemon fresh from the fridge first thing in the morning is something a person from California would call a radical sensory experience. I’ve been listening to the new Lorde album and being brought to tears by it. I think that it’s related to the lemon thing somehow. I think that being a Lorde fan is one of the greatest things you can be. Every four years your life is just irrevocably changed. I keep thinking about the girl I was when Solar Power came out in 2021 – eighteen and so angry I didn’t know what to do with myself. If I were you, I would get on a train with a pair of headphones and listen to it in full, with no interruptions. If I were you, I would walk across the heath at dusk doing the same thing. If I were you, I would repeat these two activities several times this summer – I know that this is my plan.

I think that I am growing up into a real person because recently, for the first time in my life, I have been wearing red lipstick. It’s really fun. It feels like dressing up in drag or something. Real high femme drama. Bonus if it is super sticky and gets all over your phone, your fingers, your cigarettes, your lovers. I watched Mary Poppins on my twelve-hour flight to Paris last month, and I really think it is one of the greatest movies ever made. You probably haven’t seen it in a while, and I would recommend it wholeheartedly. Every single scene is beautiful. It will make you cry. I’ve been crying a lot this month as well – I’ve been in hospital for a bit of it, and though it was overall more dramatic than life-threatening, it was still scary. It was nice to be scared in that way though, the kind of easy, childish fear that is so obvious it doesn’t need to be interrogated. There is a source of stress, and there is a clear solution. It is so much better than the kind of adult dread I am used to. It is nice to come home after things like that. It’s nice to hang out with your siblings once everyone is a little older. Me, my sisters, my brother - all smiling out of the same eyes. I’m really glad I never killed myself because now I can go to all their weddings.

I need a long book to read this summer. I accidentally started my long book in the spring, and now it’s finished too early. I’d love a recommendation. It will ideally be 800-1000 pages long. My summer reads for the past four years have been (in order) Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, William Makepeace Thackery’s Vanity Fair and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. I would wholeheartedly recommend all four. I am also looking for a winter recommendation, but this must strictly be a Russian novel. I’m cutting up yellow-skinned mangoes and eating them with lemon. I have all the windows and doors open in my bedroom, so the wind can move through it. I’m thinking about my Grandpa. I’m missing him, and I’m wishing he was around. It feels good to do it nowadays, it feels less painful. I want to be a person he would be proud of. I want to go see the Yoshitomo Nara exhibition at the Southbank Centre, and I’m okay with that making me seem like I’m a slave to my instagram reels algorithm. Sometimes I think I’m too present in the moment and I don’t take enough pictures. I am constantly trying to remind myself that there is something in me that wants to be here. I want to be here. I wake up and choose it every single day.

I think I am going to start praying. Not because I’m bad, because I’m good. And because I don’t believe in God, and I have never felt a psychic pull towards a higher power. I went to see the Nazca lines and I remembered how long people had been around, and how we have always wanted to make things. It’s important to know how small you are, and to try to place yourself into some kind of cosmic order. I’m being really serious when I saw I’m unironically going to get really into humility. I have two mirrors that face each other now, so I don’t have to film videos of me turning around really slowly to check what’s going on with the back of my head anymore. I can’t remember if two mirrors are supposed to be bad luck or not. The hallway that leads to my Grandmother’s flat is filled with mirrors facing each other. I can remember being seven years old and staring down the infinite versions of myself. If those mirrors didn’t make her a witch, I don’t know what would have. Most of all, I’m recommitting to my belief that a pint in a beer garden with a friend you haven’t seen in a while is the greatest invention in human history. I saw Ami last week for the first time since December and I was so excited I almost cried. I want to pintmaxx with you. Let me know when you’re around, because I’m only working Tuesday through Thursday and I’d love to see you.

I’m not back, per se - I never left, per se. I have been here the whole time. I’m just not going to be so dramatic. Only sometimes, when I feel as though it is absolutely necessary. Mostly I am here to have a record to this feeling. I have to type it out and post it to remind myself that there was a moment where I felt it. I have to remember my belief. It really will all be okay. It really will.

I didn’t know what to put at the end because I think a painting is a bit too pretentious and I have no pictures of anything else that seemed relevant. here’s a selfie I took on the day I submitted my dissertation. It was sunny then and it’s sunny now, so how’s that for continuity?