The Productivity Paradox
Why do we feel everything must have utility? I have felt varying degrees of dissatisfaction within myself for as far back as I can remember for my inability to be…good enough, work hard enough, make enough money, and have an adult enough looking life. Enough enough enough. What is enough? Is anything? When people ask me what I want in life I feel I have always been more of a shoulder shrugged “oh you know…meaning I guess” kinda gal. What I want is to not feel anxious because I am failing something I can’t quite name and it’s tearing me apart inside. Can you give me that world?
This constant battle for a sense of self-worth, one that feels externally validated in a way that internal validation just doesn’t cut it, is directly related to my output. My ability to check off tasks in a never-ending mental to-do list, which drowns me in its endlessly growing grasp, is the only standard that eases the pressure I feel in my chest all the time. A list that nobody except me designs or sees. That’s the kicker kids, no one person has made or enforced this list for me. I am my captor and I am the prisoner. I prostrate myself at the feet of some little voice in my head saying, “Just get the next thing done then you can rest, oh but not until the next, and also don’t forget that other thing and honestly you will never have it all done you will forever be playing catch up so why bother?” Catchup to who? The more I talk to people and try to pin down exactly what it is that makes them tick, makes me feel they are the real adults and not I (a 32-year-old woman with a child for god’s sake), the more I come to find that most people have very similar internal dialogues. The majority of us are trapped in a cycle of trying to prove to the elusive ‘world’ that we do matter and we very much believe we are the only ones who feel that way.
Not that I am 100% purely at fault for this trap of terror I set myself in. I, like most of us, am influenced, shaped, and written upon by the whims and will of the world at large. I am a consumer, an organism that spends moneys and gets into debt and consumptions and exists as a product to be manipulated into:
1.) Acquiring other products; ever more products in a never-ending search for the ‘missing link’ that is all tasked with filling a very deep hole inside myself that can never be satiated. Also known as The Void.
2.) I am also a tool to be shaped with ideas and beliefs to be guided, coerced, and manipulated into living out these ideas which beget beliefs which beget values (or maybe it’s the other way around). Thereby, I ‘influence’ or affect those around me by either succumbing to their broken value system or passing mine on, generating a massive, never-ending cycle of comparison which leads to consumption which leads to production which leads to exhaustion and heads back to comparison.
See my handy dandy little diagram here. So technical.
The most important component of that cycle is ‘It’s never enough’. It just isn’t. We can’t buy our way into feeling like a person of value just as we can’t work ourselves into a place of inner peace. I say this as much to myself as I do others just as it’s so much easier to believe it for others than myself. One only has to look at my daily life.
As a mother person not currently in employment, I have now found myself in the position where I am no longer deemed ‘relevant’ to those who are ‘highly productive members of society’ which means they get paid money for their labour. Thus, I have been privy recently to what is a notorious waste of a brilliant resource. That is, the world not bothering to see the wisdomous gold of a mumma or dada who is at home raising a human and whose labour is largely invisible to anyone not doing that work. All anyone asks me is about my child, or am I enjoying my ‘much needed’ break from work? Three times in the past week I have heard variations of, “Must be getting plenty of R&R now aren’t we? Good thing your husband is working hard so you can really enjoy this time at home. Isn’t he just such a good dad”
blinks slowly, silently, withers and dies inside
Listen, not that my daughter is not great, she is literally a goddess and I worship everything about her, and yes my husband is a great dad. I am also a great mother and for godssake if my value and being can only be measured up against what I am producing in a non-family context and taking home financially then I guess my value is zippo. In fact I should just give up even talking with other grownups because what do I have to contribute? What is my social currency?
This is where the paradoxical maniacal madness of my mind sets in. I spend my days FIGHTING to prove to myself that I am someone of value especially when the work I feel like I am doing is not defined as work by those whose production earns financial recompense.
My spiralling thoughts:
Point A
I see the mental to do list floating in my head and realise that I need to get started on it in order to check off a task and earn my prize of…let’s say… going to take a piss. You see I, like many women, don’t allow myself the luxury of fulfilling basic needs without assigning it the status of a reward I have to earn through good behaviour and getting work done. How fucked up is that muchachos? Society conditions us so deeply down to the deepest canyons of our primal bodies to operate within a framework where we conflate essential need with earnings and methods of earnings with ‘tasks’ and ‘work’ and ‘to do lists’ that are dictated by conceptual ideas of a future version of us who is healthy, happy and whole because she/he/they have done all that needs to be done. BUT IT IS NEVER DONE.
Point B
I feverishly attempt to set my mind and body to perform a task on my to do list with the hope that completion will lead to satisfaction (heh….heh) and begin said task. UNFORTUNATELY, I am part of the modern day human race who is assaulted at every turn by a culture of distraction, attention deficit, disassociation and the conflation of inner peace/meaning with obsessively scrolling online and softening emotions through spending money. Sadly I completely disengage from Le Task within a mere 4-5 minutes and start thought spiralling. Time passes and suddenly in a panic I look to the list to start another task because here comes the emotional onslaught of shame and fear and the inability to return to the original task because I have now ‘failed’.
Point C
This cycle continues for however many turns it takes for me to give up completely in a tizzy. I am so bound up in the sense of my own inability to get things done that I am crushed by the expectations of the world that tells me (or I imagine it does) that I am worthless and will never be a real, successful adult because I cannot get on top of…
gestures wildly around room/life
…all of this shite. BT dubs friends this hellscape of productivity obsession happens usually ON MY DAY OFF or when I get one hour of free time because I have managed to get my baby toddler to nap. Aaaaaand I bet it happens that way for you too. Our global disease is one of obsession with quantifiable production. A self-improvement ideology controlled and curated by corporations that profit off of people becoming disembodied and internalising the belief that our validity in adulthood is defined by our doing. We believe we can’t measure up to these shallow concepts of performed life and we begin to drown in our minds because the mental load gets heavier and heavier when we feel like we can’t catch up. This robs us of our joy my precious, yes it does.
“.. internalized so much toxic capitalistic messaging such that sometimes I feel doomed to a life of burnout because even if I get these spare moments of clarity where I’m like oh my God I am not this person whose entire worth is based on my goal setting and productivity and ability to be this person I think I should be. At some point that messaging starts to take over again it is so deeply entangled in my body.”
I do, however, so love me some good tasty planning and organisation and here is another paradox. Restrictive (or maybe external results oriented) productivity is toxic usually because the parameters for success are not from us. They are forced upon us by a patriarchal, abusive capitalist society designed to keep us busy, keep us in shame and keep us distracted.
Et cetera et al. et tu?
Productivity can also be a positive dynamic in life particularly when it is part of your self-systems that help you with framing your space and time in order to curate an intrinsically defined reality. When the habits of productivity are implemented in a healthy, sustaining, and non-choking way in your life it enables you to find more freedom, it generates structure where things that are ‘work’ oriented stay within a boundary of work and things that check different boxes of life are given focus during times that make sense without a feeling of overwhelm, incompleteness or chronic depletion. Sometimes becoming adept at setting parameters around your motivation and production can help you to relax and truly enjoy the state of being; being in your body, being in nature, and being with your baby without trying to capture every cute moment on Instagram stories. When you are not weighed down by anxious, overthinking and you can fully lean into a task for the present moment it
Really I am just out here trying to figure out how something can remain valuable even if it doesn’t yield….results in the traditional sense. The overwork culture we are brainwashed into from childhood has us believing that our activities of being are pointless unless monetised. Just look at everyone on social media turning the minutiae of their daily life down to the time stamp into cute, aesthetic, marketable videos.
It doesn’t have to be that way for all and it hasn’t always been that way. We can find balance and a level of productive engagement with work, play, child-rearing, chores what have you, that doesn’t have us spiraling down a hallway of obsession and panic. Boundaries are good, I think, and standing up for clearly defined roles and expectations within your workspace and your home life helps massively too.
A shower of inconsiderate bastards
Credit goes to my darling, brilliant sister for this title. This little (d)evolved mothering brain of mine has me hard done by and cleverness, when it comes to snippy turns of phrase, continue to elude me.
Me in all my rodent glory during my last shift at work on Maui :(
So it’s been a while hasn’t it dear readers. About three~ish months or so to be exact and I am the worser for it. The great folly of the perception of creative value in the world is that we as a society believe that making, writing, doing etc. is all done with a goal of selling to the consumer and as a result the creator benefits off of their consumption and uptake of said production. I have found it’s an inverse of that. I make for me as a way to feel real and then the byproduct is that there is a niche of consumers (in my case ,reluctant readers) who derive some positive experience from what I make. I am at your mercy really not the other way around.
Without this silly little blog as an activity of self-sharpening and grounding in the present, I have felt myself unmoored from my life. My family went through a massive move once again and the whole process knocked me back and pinned me down under a crushing load of anxiety, stress and grief. It’s been a herculean effort to pull myself out of the pit and it’s going…ok I will say. I am not in the clear yet. Living with mental health issues, as most of us well now, can be mightily debilitating. It is made even more so in a world that thinks you should just shut up and put on a brave face/be grateful your shit isn’t quite as shite as someone else’s. Totally unfair, as we all have shit and comparison is not a nice game to play. I share these things in the hopes that it normalises talking about the challenges of living in our world in a realistic way. I don’t want to bypass the sadness that flows alongside the joys. I want to sit here and make a space that feels like we can be both grateful for the good and resentful for the suck. Among all the other insane financial and emotional-personal costs that come with moving to a new state, the physical act of bringing ourselves, a tiny human, two giant ass dogs and one cat god across to the mainland to begin a whole new life was incredibly challenging and this is the second time we have done it. Last time we made a move like this, I wrote a pact to the universe I would never do it again. This time I experienced a full 24 hour panic attack as my PTSD from the last move was triggered and I had to push through it in spite of the crushing sense of doom because…well I’m a mom and what choice do I have.
Listen, jaysus, sorry for the rambling darkness there just we don’t want to be sugarcoating reality now do we precious? Things are really hard, and I have a lot of grief in my heart for having to say goodbye again to a beloved community of people who were my Ohana, my kin, and it’s all just very tender. What with all the labour that went into this move, months of planning and packing and selling and cleaning, I let this site fall to the wayside. I let myself fall to the wayside. It is very easy to do that when you have that pesky little issue where you conflate your value with your productivity. You know beloveds, the one where you have learned a masochistic measure of reward in that you delay the good thing (be it rest, peeing, eating or play) until you meet all the random expectations you have set for yourself based on the world’s external notions of worth, in order to determine that you are worthy of life. PHEW say that ten times fast standing on your head with a mouth full of jellybeans.
So…now I live in an apartment in Southern California. We are significantly nearer to family which is delightful for both our amazing daughter and her doting grandparents who are but an hour away. Living in an apartment sucks balls. Years ago when I moved to a house I vowed never to return to the hamster wheel of hellish doom that is being sardined into a box of human existence aka apartment life. Yet, here I am again. It’s fine, I am fine, my daughter who cannot sleep anymore because of the ignorant people living their human lives stomping about our heads and waking her up is fine. They are the ‘inconsiderate bastards’ in my life right now. To be fair they are simply existing, they know not what stress they awaken in me. I forgive them even as I silently mouth “FUCK YOU” to the ceiling while I nurse my crying baby.
We will make it through this. I tell myself this in every hard experience, I have made it through all my worst days thus far and I will this one and the next and all that is awaiting me. So the sun will set and I will keep on and as time goes on the pain will soften and life will fall into a pattern of peace to some extent. I am trying my best sweet ones and I hope this gives you some encouragement that if you are going through hard times you are absolutely not alone and I hold you in my heart as I hope to be held in yours. I missed you. Together we will see the sun rise.
9 months to Re-Form Myself
Am I one of those people who achieves something, say finishing a half marathon, and then cheekily talks about it for days after forever finding ways to bring it up, refer back to it, remind people that I DID? Yes, yes I am. Forgive me for my bragging but I truly don’t feel all that apologetic. I am immensely proud of my little run that I did this past Sunday for several reasons. One is that I really truly enjoyed every minute of it and felt both strong and capable for the entire run. I am certain at some point I was simply floating with happiness and I am now appreciative of these past few months, of having no choice but training crippling uphills at a high altitude, for equipping me with the physical capacity to undertake 13.1 miles at a consistently relaxed pace. Exercise used to be a way of punishing myself and making myself smaller. Now it unleashes me and allows me space to expand and breathe and feel powerful. Secondly I am so proud of being able to do this after having had a human child expul itself from my body. Childbirth is like nothing I could have ever comprehended before going through it. One can only imagine that something of the magnitude of forming the complexity of a human life in your body and then releasing it in an act of extreme physical strength changes you beyond reason. I grew up in a life with very few wins. My longest internal struggle has been one long feeling of being nobody of note. Now in two ways I feel significant. The first being completing the half. What a love letter to myself that was. The second is becoming a mother.
It takes around nine-ish months for a baby to be ready to come to this side of existence. After that it’s both go-time and slow-time as your entire life reshapes itself around this new centre of gravity. After I had our squish in my arms I wondered often how I would feel attempting to crawl back to a version of myself from before. Currently, I look back at videos and photos of myself and think I do not recognise her, or feel any sense of connection to her. Is this matrescence in action? After one goes through puberty and all that adolescent goodness and hormonal to-and-froing and body stretching and growing, you emerge more or less entirely reformed. Pregnancy is fundamentally physically similar and mentally/emotionally as profoundly disruptive just packed into a shorter period of time. Now I struggle to know if the goal should be to ‘get back to myself’ or endeavour upon this path of my new self and allow the river of change to sweep me along to an unknown and terrifying destination. When my childless coworkers talk about their days, their plans, their….ease at which they move through the world I feel a deep stirring of jealousy and confusion, grief and nostalgia. Honestly, I also feel a disinterest and if there is ever a moment I feel farthest from myself-and them-it is then. I used to be one of those people to the community of parents in the world. Now I will never be just ‘Ned’ with all my routines and patterns of life before baby and I am confused by the messaging of the world which is suggesting that the point of ‘after’ baby is to bounce back to that old self. I am not sure internally if I have grieved that death of my previous iteration fully. Not to be too dark about it, but evolution does mean there are selves left behind as we move forward.
Loves, I am trying to be wary of my content (HAH my content, who do I think I am?) becoming too centered around child-rearing, mothering etc. I don’t want to alienate those who have no interest in this mundanity. At the same time, I feel alienated from the mundanity of a life without a miniature human dictating my every move. Plus I am not so sure I can cleave myself into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ as if it is two poles on the ends of the earth, just as I can’t represent myself in my writing as simply as the ‘old me and her interests’ versus the ‘new me and her priorities’.
I am someone of note to my child. Well, I will be when she realizes I am not just an extension of her and the provider of the milk of human kindness.
“24/7 boobs on demand at your wish, m’lady.”
In all seriousness though after a lifetime of craving a feeling of….purpose in communion with others or rather, a satiation of the deep need to feel seen, known and loved, it is pretty profound to receive that from the flesh of my flesh. However, I want to stress the point that nobody should feel they must allow their entire selves to become subsumed under the identity of being mother, father, carer of any kind. We are infinitely more dimensional than just simply what role we play to the others in our lives, or our work, and for me it’s a new journey of self-evaluation that I have begun to embark upon. Nine months post-partum feels like a significant milestone. My baby is cartwheeling into toddler hood and is no longer new new, and I am crying behind her as I attempt my own first steps on this very long journey of living which has no end goal really except to be with the ones I love and to be within myself, who I want to learn to love. Every mile I ran in the half was dedicated to a beloved person in my life. My husband asked me if I had dedicated a mile to myself, I did not because I am still after all these years unable to fully turn towards myself and show her compassion.
Now crossing the nine month mark, the ninth mile was the turn around mile on the run, I am turning back to go forward. I am sure I will do it bumpily, with many detours, tears and feelings of fond regret for my sweet childless self who did not realise how very lucky she was to go to bed whenever she wanted and wake up whenever she wanted. I will also do it gladly for the marshmallow baby I get to hang out with every day, and when things all get to be too much, mama can always go for a run.
July 4th 2023. Nine months preggo and ten days before little Shark Tooth arrived.
“Just a runner…”
I am at mile 5 ish or so. A downward trajectory before the mega uphill that informs me, I’m basically home. I call it Mordor-the hill I must scale before I have that delightful reward of falling over the doorstep into my house. Seems fitting considering I live on a volcano.
I pass by a woman pushing a Jeep brand wagon stroller-one of those cool expensive ones that seem to be really in with bougie crunchy parents at the moment often spied at farmers market and hip family activities in public spaces. “That is no child in there,” I think breathlessly to myself, “tis a tiny purse dog of a sort”. My assessment is correct, she has an old chihuahua in the wagon and a second, beautiful Pomeranian walking alongside it. The kind that looks like it would be the head cheerleader in a Bring it On film from the 2000s-all shiny, groomed highlighted hair unnaturally straightened with a pink bow telling me that they don’t usually accept emo girls like me on the team because they are winners and I a loser but damn does my gymnastics background KNOCK them out of the park :P
As I slowly hobble to overtake, the Pomeranian freaks the fuck out losing its shit barking at me. I startle while the older lady dog mama hushes it saying in a soothing tone “shhhh dear it’s just a runner”
A runner. Me.
Running has never been easy for me…I suspect it never will be. I am one of those immediately sweating, red faced, heavy breathing types when I run. I don’t LOOK the part of a Lulu Lemon ambassador, all leggy and lean with that perfect sheen of sweat that makes those beauties effervescent skin glow. I am short, I got violin hips, hip dips whatever they are called, a wobbly bum and triangle shaped thighs. My ankles like to cankle a tad, and I don’t wear cool brand name gear but an old pair of baggy shapeless shorts, the only pair I have found that don’t get gobbled up by my thighs, and whatever t-shirt I can find that’s clean and covers my butt and belly pooch just a little. I tilt a little from side to side when I run, I REFUSE to call it a waddle, and in the words of the great Baymax “I am not fast.” For years since I started running for mental health reasons I have been met with constant surprise and the usual roving eye assessment from others when I tell them I like to run and lift weights. “Oh you are a runner, you do yoga/crossfit/weightlift?” they say as they try to contain their surprise that this soft, bookish body of mine works out. I always clarify “oh no I mean I like to go for run but I am not like naturally a runner or athletic or anything.” Usually that gives them an out and all is well. They don’t have to look any further into themselves as to why they assumed someone who looks averagely normal doesn’t fit their expectation of a ‘fitness’ person and I don’t really have to self-analyse what I mean by a ‘natural runner’ because it’s all a little joke, a bit, a ‘aw she probably jogs but she doesn’t RUN run’.
Imposter syndrome is a plague and a curse and is something that seeps through all of our souls annihilating our ability to feel confident and content in who we are and how capable we are of doing and being. I am certain we have all been intimate with this sensation and I hate that I contribute to this weird social game, this facade, of discounting my own self and my own commitment in the face of an assumption or stereotype that others hold.
At the core of it I don’t believe in myself. What does it mean to be a ‘natural runner’? In my heart of hearts, I think I don’t claim the term because I, like others, am conditioned to assume athletic people look a certain way or smash certain goals. Since I don’t, I am not one of them.
Yet, I have run a half marathon. I am running a second in a couple of weeks. I have been consistently committed to running for about 5-6 years now. I have healed my mind and body from anorexia, and I have the incredible talent (if I do say so myself) of not getting bored for hours at a time while moving slowly in a forward motion. I moved my body with intention and lifted weights up until my third trimester of pregnancy when carpal tunnel and fluid retention destructified me. I’m not sharing these things as a means to brag but to draw attention to the fact that exercise used to be a tool of self-punishment and a brutal way to silence and shrink myself and now, I engage with movement joyfully. In this season of life, it is one of the only opportunities I have to get alone time as a parent. I crave it to connect with my thoughts and process a lot of the stress we are under in our family; it lets me feel powerful in my body and it is encouraging me to take up space in the world. When I run, I get fresh air, I feel the sun on my skin, I see the world in motion around me and I feel like I’m part of something bigger. So, the fact that the random dog lady called me a runner…why I think that’s pretty darn accurate, and I am proud of that fact.
I am tired of the social agreement we have all made to think and make less of ourselves because we don’t fit a pre-ordained mould as designed by those who are attempting to profit off of our sense of belonging or not belonging. When I run, I may not always be smiling, mostly I am grimacing and huffing/cursing to myself lol but I am exactly where I need to be for me and who I need to be. I hope dear readers there is something in your life where if you feel that little niggling voice of self-doubt creeping in you can turn around to it and shout NO and embrace that you belong to you. Your power is in your own your choice and if you feel like you belong to something because it frees you or leaves you feeling alive then you belong. Likely to all of us on the outside looking at you we see you for what you are even if you don’t. Someone worth celebrating.
Tomorrow I run my longest run of my half training before the run in two weeks. Pray for me I am nervous as fuck.
9 Shower Thoughts Nobody Asked For (NSFW post for the fuddy duddys)
Tell me why this looks like my husband? >_<
“Will my tummy always look like a saggy, old vagine? What the fuck are these wrinkles? Ugh do I even care? IDGAF live and let live baby I MADE life I am stunning…..I miss my old body.”
“Fuck am I pregnant?”
“oh wait you have to have sex to get pregnant..ha…ha…”
cue tears
“oh I forgot the monitor. Am I a bad mother? What if she is suffocating and calling out for me to save her and she is dead?
“It’s kinda nice though the not knowing, the quiet feels like the old days. What was that noise?”
jumps out shower and runs sopping wet to grab monitor before jumping back in shower shivering
“hmmmm when was the last time I showered?”
“oh god now I have to get dried and moisturised and blah blah…can i just wash away down the drain?”
“Can I ….bend water? What if I am….special?” attempts to manipulate water with mind “ha no just kidding…sort of. I am not special…what even is the meaning of life?”
“Wait. Am I peeing right now?”
And that marathon of anxious thinking, ladies and gentlefolks, is why I rarely shower. Or maybe it’s because I am just one gross peoples. Who knows?
For the ones who just cannot with paywalls
Oh, gee thanks so much Substack. Once again, I have been blessed with a tantalising taste of what I could be intellectualising my mind and broadening my horizons with if only I had some nice casual spending money to lob around in support of my fellow darling artists and writers.
Look, le sigh, I get it I do. Being a creative is often the worst. You have all this big, beautiful energy swurdling (I am coining this word isn’t she a beaut) inside of you like a maelstrom of madness. There is a way of seeing the world that you possess that feels revolutionary and brilliant and you have a burning loins-er oops-I mean drive to share it in some way with others because it feels meaningful and right and sublime. However, we live in a world where you need money to like breathe and shit so naturally your time must be monetised in some regard in order for you get by. This is all well and good BUT creative work is historically undervalued, creatives are en masse underpaid or not paid at all and regularly have their work stolen or used without credit or permission. Almost all creatives have experienced that expectation of churning out art for the world for free because it’s a ‘vocation’ and the ‘exposure is payment’ so basically you must resign yourself to being a starving artist if you want to spend your one wild precious life doing the thing you love. The alternative is for most that you do what I did and get a boring, meh meh means-to-an-end job that (barely) pays the bills and create for yourself when (if) you can and hope to the universe that you one day be discovered.
BUT WAIT, along comes the I N T E R N E T, the friend of the masses awaiting accessibility and power. The dimensions of sharing, creating and profiting have quite suddenly expanded, and we have this new profound opportunity for humans to pursue their passions and dreams in a realistic, viable way. This is where platforms like Substack shine. These landing pads allow for writers et al. to produce and share their work for free; as far as I know users don’t pay to use Substack’s platform unlike traditional website hosts. Using a tiered subscription-based service the writers create brackets of financial support for their readers to opt into which allows them to produce work targeted to the different levels. Your commitment be it free or a certain amount a month unlocks different perks or means of accessibility. So basically streaming?
I know I sound like a dick but a social media platform by any other name is still a business first and we live in a consumer driven society where relevance is dictated by financial viability. Substack (like all others that came before ehhh RIP Patreon?) and its best interests will always be economic sustainability so at the end of the day money talks and gets you noticed. The more profitable a writer is the more likely their content will be pushed on the layperson’s page. Substack succeeds in a sort of commission-based way charging a ten percent fee on the user’s monthly earnings. That means no advertising. Which is nice. Although it does mean that there feels like an underlying goal of profit for most of the artistic production occurring and are we not tired of a world where everything revolves around money?
I will counter my little complaint with the big positive. I do think it is great that there is so much gorgeous writing out there and it is proliferating our world in a ever expanding, breathtaking manner. I have already found and followed a number of new writers I did not know existed and have been impacted juicily by their contributions to the canon of human thinking and observations. People can write and be supported through donation by their beloved readers and it’s quite a lovely thing actually because makers can now eke out a living doing what they love. Until we get to the inherent flaw that I personally feel victimised by. That is, I just don’t have money to pay all the incredible online writers I love reading and I am tired of every one of them dangling their proverbial carrots in front of my nose only to yank it away behind a paywall I legitimately can’t cross. Essay after essay I spend my precious free time starting to read, get hooked and then “oh thar she blows the great paywall” and I will never get to know resolution. Is this a form of intellectual cock-blocking? Or am I just being a baby? As my hairy husband pointed out while I was right at the peak of my witty and faultless (to me) tirade on the unfairness of subscription based services, “those writers have to eat too though? Don’t you think they deserve to be paid for their work?”
Ugh obviously he’s right (don’t tell him I said that). I do really hope that all artists get paid for their work if that is what they want of course I do.
I have long been reflecting on the prevailing issues of living in a society that has still not truly reckoned with the inherent classicism that is a felt invisible line present for so many. It’s hard not to become bitter if you are caught within the lower bars of the economic ladder especially as the cost of living has been rising in a paralysing way. I don’t want to blame others for what they have that I do not but I feel myself falling back on resentment a lot. If you have never been intimate with the gaping maw of poverty how can you truly know that your actions might be reinforcing or sustaining it in creative, subversive ways?
It just all feels a little too reminiscent of the social construct that the things of the mind and heart-joy, pleasure, art, music, fine dining-are still reserved for the elite who have been the gatekeepers of these forms of elevated culture for time immemorial. Not that the many writers using Substack are the modern age art world Illuminati or anything. I just don’t agree with how the majority falsely market their writings as free and entrap those of us who can’t afford to pay up by giving us the first half of an essay happy as anything only to insert the paywall once you are a few paragraphs in. It feels like a bait and switch.
I suppose I am trying this new thing where I attempt to hold the most generous assumption I can of other people’s motives, purposes, general intention etc. So I will apply that here. These beautiful writers don’t know really how the decisions that honour their labour can trigger feelings of exclusion and failure for those of us with a history of generational poverty. It’s not their fault I have an issue, they are just doing what they should do to get paid like they deserve for all their hard work. I might do the same in their position. I certainly entertained the idea. I don’t mind that aspect at all, I just want to not be misled.
So I implore you dear fellow writers, your work is worth being paid for but I don’t know could you just tell us beforehand that the article is not free? Maybe one day I will be able to give and give and give and that would be amazing. Sadly, that day is not today sir!
Sincerely,
A broke bitch
AWOL
It has certainly been a while my darlings hasn’t it. I am afraid I came to a complete halt with writing/reading/creating in general at the end of April due to experiencing debilitating carpal tunnel as a result of entering my third trimester of pregnancy. Sadly anything involving wrist action (eh hey you….you get yer mind out of the gutter alrighty this is a ‘family’ business ‘ere :P ) was off the table. Doing anything beyond working and keeping my fluid filled ankles elevated when not at work was a no go. Basically I was a useless blob until my baby was born, carrying the pain and swelling away as her teeny body exited ma shocked, sweaty and split wide open one.
So it has been a helluva couple months; the old me feels completely lost and bound up in this maelstrom of physical and emotional rewriting of the self. Finding the time to return to the activities that bring me joy has been…difficult to say the least. Today*** is my 32nd birthday so I thought perhaps I shall attempt to write a little something, to feel a connection to the me of old and to encourage myself on my path to creating space for balance in my life as a new mama. I am sitting in Starbucks drinking my free birthday frappucino milkshakey comfort beverage and allowing my mind to traipse languidly through all the memories of birthdays past and just feel so viscerally the bizarre passing of time. My daughter (AYY it’s still weird to say that) is dozing in her pram after drinking some good-good milk from my body and I can’t believe it’s been almost two months since she waltzed her way into this earthly plain. I am both overcome with the love/grief for the impermanence of my teacup human’s babyhood but also exhausted by the concept of a forever of mothering and what it means for my identity which let’s be honest up till this point in my life still has no concept of who it really is.
With that being said, I hope I can find a way through the deep well of this season to the rich source of my selfhood and I can begin to embody me once more. Not only, however, the old me because I have been many selves and free fallen through many iterations of ‘I AM’ statements and, well I want something more than that. I want to really engage with what all of life is offering, to greet both the dark and the dawn me and sip tea with them as we reflect on where this life has come from and how we want it to go onwards. I am hoping there will be lots of silly dancing, yummy foods, tears and big emotions, moments to grow in, rainfall, nose kisses and nature. You know, just the usual stuff of the sublime life.
See you shortly beloveds.
***I wrote this post on the 12th which is actually my birthday but forgot to hit publish because mama brain so hence why it’s a day late lol
Guilt [shame] is the thing with a hunger that eats away at your soul
Catholic guilt, mom guilt, work/life balance guilt, eating chocolate guilt, post social event anxiety induced guilt, baby registry guilt etc etc. It is impossible to list the many different turns of phrase we have conceived of in order to try to put a name to the gnawing, beastly thing that hunts and haunts all of us to varying degrees throughout our adult life. We often conflate the word ‘guilt’ with an emotional experience that might be more correctly identified as ‘shame’. Much of this has to do with an accelerated changing in the linguistic landscape over the last few decades where nuance has been de-emphasised over time and words that are fast, memorable and fun shells are popularised for their commonality and approachability on a more global scale. The issue with this is we are coming to a place where it is harder to discern what the true emotions we are experiencing are and how to name and begin to work on and with them. We are also facing the reality of over simplifying complex, structural issues in our own lives by boxing them in neat little social media ready identity packages that can hold us back from doing the deep, long term and often private work on our internal environment.
Guilt has two faces, like the Roman god of duality Janus who presides over January and is the god of beginnings and endings, openings and closings. There is the guilt that comes from a moral and or spiritual conviction of wrongdoing that motivates us to shift, change, atone and can be “the beginning of knowledge” as Audre Lorde so beautifully puts it in her essays. Wrestling with this is lifetime work; learning how to navigate guilt without self-derision and how to respond in a way that honours the emotion and reflects, counterintuitively, a positive growth from the experience is a worthy effort.
Then there is shame-guilt which is something that I personally feel an over familiarity with and inevitably dis-empowers and drives us into a place of longing-that-pains and desperate self-serving. This shame that arises from unhealthy guilt absolves us of responsibility and true growth. It leads us into a place of dark and destructive thoughts and it pushes us down into a pit of despair that slowly grows over with vines that choke us from ever reaching the light. It is the kind of guilt that follows us as we try to rest when we work multiple jobs just to make ends meet and we fret away our days off thinking we are 'not doing enough’. It’s the type of guilt that leaves us wallowing in the sweet, positive memories of times past for how nostalgia paints them with ease and prevents us from living fully in the present and leaning into new experiences because ‘the doors are always shut in my face so why bother anymore’. It neuters us and numbs us or it holds us in a place of shallow, armchair opinion spouting that develops into half arsed attempts at virtue signalling. This form of guilt has been weaponised by industries that profit from us human people being worked to the bone, full of hatred for our beautiful little bodies and afraid of aging and the quiet of the natural world. It makes victims of us and we all see it growing in people and the world at large, spreading through a global discontentment, targeted malaise and divisiveness that has become violent. I have been personally fighting this for so long and these past months it’s been resurfacing time and time again especially as the reality of this broken world and system keeps making itself known in so many ways
Shame-guilt is not the end of the story. While these are some heavy thoughts to start a week on this Monday morning we can hold on tight to it’s opposite force-hope. I am trying to hold hope in the palm of my hand and shelter it from the exhaustion and overwhelm I feel. Part of that is in searching for practices and thoughts to strengthen my mental resolve and fortitude and to provide myself with safety rails to hold onto while the storm tries to sink my boat. Part is in acknowledging aloud to others that I am struggling and accepting that life is both the good times and the bad and I have been here before and made it through and sometimes it’s about patience and vulnerability. The largest part is telling the false narrative of shame-guilt that it is not true and refusing to allow these emotions that do not belong to us to dictate the story of our self worth and value. Next week I’ll chat a little about hope and how some of the things I am trying out this week to build that muscle back up in myself have worked out for me. In the meantime my dears let us all try to face down this reflexive response of shame-guilt that is so quickly to the trigger in ourselves and refuse to let it control us.
“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before—more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”
Slán abhaile [Safe Home] 2022
Every year I get to the end of the year and I think “Holy shite what just happened?” I don’t think in the last decade I have had a single year where that has not been the case. Life is curious like that, even though there are ebbs and flows of chaos and the mundane, I wander inevitably into a place where I look to the next year and find myself being consumed with thoughts of the wildness that is living a daily, beautiful life. I love the incoming New Year, I love the end of a precious, Previous Year. Sometimes I find people forget, in the plodding way that days unfold, that all of this is limited and we don’t even know by how much. Every day that has left us is a day that won’t get lived again and as I have been reflecting on the cycle of life, death, seasons, the here and not here; I get all weepy and nostalgic and seek out mindful ways to reason with the memories of sufferings past and mitigate fears for the future that surface.
The beginning of 2022 opened, as it has the past five years for us while living in the Midwest, with my husband and I traveling back from sunny California time with family to our snowy, ice-cold home in the unexpectedly beautiful city of South Bend, Indiana. 2023 is the first time this ritual is different. In fact this next year will mark a shift for us unlike any we have experienced before and considering it has been an incredibly tumultuous life thus far of unbearable strife and great joy it is shocking that I have not yet reconciled with what this incoming time will bring. I am a person, with my dear siblings, who came from a childhood of extreme chaos and trauma. For many years I have been living as a survivor who rode the wave of ‘barely functioning adult but make it a comedic character trait’ as my defense mechanism of choice. Even the first year of my marriage life felt spontaneous and adorably unplanned with a dash of irresponsible recklessness. That all changed when we moved to Indiana. Life was different there, winters harder and longer than any I had known before, people hardier and rougher around the edges, and life felt like more of a struggle that I couldn’t avoid by frivolity. After two years it became home through the usual means; community, meaningful work, food that nourished my soul, a running practice that kept my body warm and taught me how to feel gratitude for a different environment and of course the accumulation of fur children. Our last true winter/spring passed by in a blur. I had a season of wonderfully challenging lessons in art school and I produced some of my favourite pieces. I began to learn how to oil paint, a slow process that made me feel like a real artist. We made the decision to act on our opportunity to move for my husband’s work. Grad school was wrapping up for him and he got a dream offer that meant we would uproot once more our entire lives. Winter has always been about rest, reset and burrowing. Spring of 2022 was one of action, appreciation and embracing every moment as the last in our home which we would not see again.
Summer carries the most anticipation of freedom and warmth. Of bike rides and crisp salty air, ice-cream every day and the tangy taste of sweat during a morning run when the pavement is emanating 80 degree heat at 6.30am. Every part of it is such a vivid collection of sensations and colour. Summer brings us home to the child we once were. Our time in the Midwest shaped me into the person I am and gave me the first place I have called home since leaving Irish shores. Summer 2022 found things in our life moving with hasty pursuit to the reckoning of our leaving at the end of July. Every path I walked this summer, every run, every bike ride and mundane drive to work felt oh so precious and as joyful a season of life as I have ever had. Indiana was the place I grew up into myself. It was where I learned how to take responsibility for my choices and my life. This small rust belt city of South Bend has a huge heart for redemption and redefinition and in all the years of living there I found my way through some hard lessons to live a type of life I was proud of and become the kind of person I enjoyed being. Saying goodbye in the vivacity that is summer was impossible yet we did it. Thinking on it now my heart is as full with fresh grief as it is tender nostalgia. Working in the service industry as I did for so many years there, you inevitably move closer to the heartbeat of a place and come to find yourself occupying a tiny role associated with the joy of good food and sweet memories for many of the locals. I felt like a member of the community especially as part of the indomitable and inimitable team of the restaurant Roselily. Leaving my closest friends, who also happened to be my coworkers, has left a path of deep emotion I can’t walk down in my mind because the love and the pain is too raw and fresh and happiness is bound in that usual way tightly to sadness and being a messy, emotional human means that the contradiction of excitement for a new life and resentment for the loss of my old life are as alive to me as can be. Summer is like that. All gooey reds and yellow golden hour dipped leaves, azure blue sky dotted with puffy clouds and lemony green leaves draped over cracked, onyx asphalt. Which you know won’t last. A deep seated warm joy at the glorious freedom and memories of old while feeling a faded, peculiar sadness that the precious times are gone and won’t come back.
In the deeply nourishing season that is the autumn and winter phase I took a number of social media breaks, certainly feels like everyone is doing that these days. However, maybe it’s finally come to that time of life for me and my age group where we are just getting older and are handing over the reigns of shaping ourselves and the world through one cute filtered photo (or cleverly edited short video) at a time, to THE YOUTHS. Truth be told, I don’t have the mental capacity to do it anymore. I’m not going to speak for the rest of my peers but I know I’m just…disenfranchised. I turned thirty one this year and find myself making more and more decisions about my life that 20-ish year old me would find unrecognisable and frankly, abhorrent. Since our move to this beautiful and challenging place life has gone much the way it does when the autumnal shift comes. Stark and wild, breezy and sudden, everything is different and beginning again is really hard. Much like the colour changing leaves of home there has been lots of lovely things in this season-endless beach days, warm water and sunsets in paradise. Yet, like the cyclical challenge of autumn/winter hibernating there has been so much difficulty and bleakness-loneliness, job failure and frustration, lack of community, high cost of living. It has been a daily task to remind myself to hold space for both truths in my mind, just as we can hold space for every season in a year and every year in a life riding the upswings and plodding through the down. After all life is life and death is death.
As we put 2022 to bed, many people globally are filing it under the umbrella category of ‘the endless dumpster fire 2020’s’. I find that each new year that begins to ripen is so exquisite in it’s as of yet lack of identity, it’s potential and for what it shows us, reveals in us and how we just keep going on as steadfast little humans. Every year I embark on a path to try cultivate a deeper and more delicious understanding of the tenacity of people, and try to honour the power of narrative in cultivating both resilience, and reverence for the tough, dark seasons of one’s life. I look forward to seeing what comes my way over the next twelve months and how the earth tells her story. If it’s a wonder or a worry of a year, well I am immeasurably grateful that I get to live it one way or the other.
Here’s to the New Year my loves!
“ We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
Dear summer running...here are ten things (of the zillion) I hate about you. Goodbye.
One cursed summer day four years ago I looked at my dog and said to myself “Maybe I should take up running?” and so I did. I am sure past Ned had her reasons, reasons that present Ned cannot recall in the slightest on each and every sweat-tasmic morning I trundle along the brutally hot road and willfully chafe my own thunder thighs. God forbid I choose an extracurricular activity to devote myself to that involves lounging and relaxing, maybe some passive snacking.
No. I had to pick placing one foot in front of the other in a forward motion for miles no matter the weather, at all times of day as my fun thing I do for myself. Stares witheringly at own reflection in mirror.
Here is the thing, I am going to talk about running a lot in these posts and guess what:
I’M NOT EVEN FAST. I’m like moderate to slow paced but what I’m good at is staving off boredom for long periods of time so thems is the situation.
On my most recent long run I composed an ode to running…an odour of a sort to the odorous thing I find myself loving in theory and hating in practice and admittedly loving in practice maybe once every couple of months.
1.) When you are an hour in dying of thirst so you swallow the saliva pooling in your mouth from being an open mouth breather cause sure it’s water. Only to realise it’s salty AF because of the sweat pouring down your face and collecting in aforementioned gaping maw.
2.) When you have a deep wedgie so you try to keep running while adjusting. But your underpants are soaked through with sweat and stuck to your bum so you start doing a hop jiggle move to try to pull them out and end up with a front wedgie instead (if you know you know).
3.) When you wear glasses while running because you can’t wear contacts and they fog up so you take them off but realise you can’t really see oncoming cars on the road so put them on and they fog up and you repeat this process 3-4 times before deciding to succumb to whichever is less troublesome.
4.) When you have one mile more and think oh thank god one mile more and round the corner to see a straight asphalt run in direct sun with no shade and think oh lord one more mile.
5.) When you are at the end of your long run and your house is across the road from you and your body is shutting down and your brain is like SQUEE HOME but you have to wait for the cars to pass and suddenly you get a little too excited about using the potty and you think ah fuck thar she blows.
6.) Those runs where everything is perfect and you feel like you are flying and that you are a run goddess with golden wing tipped shoes and the sun is the ultimate source of energy and life and we are all connected. And then you get home and realise you forgot to unpause your watch after you paused it five minutes in to the run to let the blasted doggo poop and therefore run wasn’t recorded and you don’t know what your pace or time was and it counted for nothing.
7.) Humidity and dew point. Do you dear ones know what a ‘dew point’ is? I did not. I do now.
dew point
noun
The temperature at which air becomes saturated and produces dew.
The temperature at which the air becomes saturated and water vapor condenses to form dew.
My definition: Dew point= the moment when temperature doesn’t matter because now air itself is literal water that you must wade through and it is saturating everything. Underpants? Gone, they are now swamp rash pits. Socks? Gone, they are now blister puddles. Dignity? Gone. You are trundling one foot in front of the other swimming upright in the hopes of making it home alive, breathing audibly as if you have been smoking for 75+ years, verbally cursing aloud without a care for any other living thing on the road.
8.) SWEAT + SUNSCREEN=running straight fire salt into blinking eyes. Trying to wipe eyes with tshirt which you can’t even peel off your skin and now eyes are swollen and you can only squint and pray it ends soon.
9.) Is it sweat or is it pee?
10.) Chafing—>Running shorts that get gobbled up by thunder thighs and now there is a burning rash that rubs everytime you move your legs and now it’s bleeding. I call this the Season of the Perma-Chafe.
That’s all for now folks I am sure I will come up with more now that I live in a place that has forever summer and I no longer have an autumn, winter or spring running season. I may compose a farewell to those lovely times. For now here is an unfiltered photo of me post-summer run approx mid June this past year. Note the fogged glasses, water logged hair and glistening sweat crystals.
Have we gone too far with media censorship? Or not far enough?
I don’t actually have a fully formed opinion to answer my title question (yes misleading I know) I just wanted something clickbaity so you might be enticed to read. Audience Manipulation Powers I choose you!
So I absolutely HAVE to share this image here because IT GOT FLAGGED by fact-checkers who reported that it was ‘altered media that could mislead people’. So guess what my loves, I am part of the problem of perpetuating fake news. -_________- heeheheheheeh.
LOOK AT THIS PHOTO! I mean god I honestly just adore the chaos of the current world of media, censorship, and social nonsense today, it’s just laughable. I actually had to log back onto my Instagram to get this photo because it’s literally hidden from viewers. Be careful now because this picture was photo-shopped LE GASP and it may influence you to….I dunno think nice and positive things? Spoiler alert Bob Ross was never on Mr. Rogers t-shirt. I FEEL BETRAYED o.o
Ok wait here is another meme I found in my phone. Is this page just going to become a collection of memes? Probably. Honestly I love a good meme, I think it’s one of the good things to come out of the sexual unification of culture and internet starting back in the 80’s.
WAIT WHAT? Did she say sexual?
Yes my friends internet culture made sexy babies and it’s us. Embrace it, be it, know it in your bones.
I mean who cares if it’s true or not….it’s a fucking meme. We have become the opposite of critical thinkers and it’s honestly a little depressing. We have gone so far into information saturation that we have circled back around and devolved into endorphin chasing, app hopping, swipe monsters with clickbait induced hyper-mania and reactivity. Also seriously do the powers that be have no respect for our autonomy or ability to interpret or communicate or simply look at a picture and draw our own conclusions? They are making it worse with their curbing of (OH GOD DARE I TYPE IT) freedom of speech? Ayyyyeeee please don’t come for me little troll cancelerinos I am just wondering is all.
Ok back to silly. I am giving you one more meme because this made me giggle so hard. Child labour laws with film and television were never something I considered or noticed till I hit maybe 25 years old and I had to start thinking about appropriate ages for a crush. Since then whenever I watch things with ‘The Youths’ in it I am quick to dialogue and conversate with my sisters. These chats go along the lines of “um that 15 year old from this show has a full beard and like his back is so tight and I am attracted to him cause I want to drown in his eyes but I’m confused because WHAT EVEN AGE IS HE?” or “Is it illegal for me to have a crush on him when he is 22 in real life and is playing a 16 year old?”.
I am turning 31 in three days. How far back age wise am I allowed to find a human attractive? This is an ongoing debate my sisters and I have been having. Yes, we are intellectual and mature grownups, they are both mothers, but you know readers we humans all have these same thoughts and I just would love to have some clarity on this.
That’s all for this word vomity post today. I don’t really know why I felt motivated to just write all this random stuff. I want to inject some life into my site and just make myself laugh mostly. I hope it makes someone else laugh.
Blogging is a lot like a long-term relationship...effort dissipates? Until the annual reminder that shite it's still there cause now I see I am spending some money on you. *
God it’s been a minute hasn’t it? I was recently jolted into recognition of my laissez-faire approach to this site when I stumbled across a newly published fiction book that was originally my idea. Ah I am so annoyed with myself. Missed the boat on that one so I did. I have proof…the draft is sitting here in the invisible ether on this site unpublished, unfinished, unedited yadda yadda yadda (thank you Seinfeld for putting that in my head). I read the book and really enjoyed it and I am gonna attach a link here so if you are interested in reading what I could have been the vessel for please go right ahead. It is called The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E Schwab. If you like magical realism then this book is for you.
So anyway why return to this site Ned? I hear nobody ask me ever…well I will tell you invisible audience of zero, because I have been paying for it. Ooops don’t tell my hairy fella as he will probably just laugh at me and add it to the list of many ridiculous things I have done over the years that he loves to tease me over. So there is that. Money been going out, page been remaining static. I realise how website hosts make all their moneys now, it is off silly humans like me. Well no more internet gods. I think I am back here because my Instagram decided to transition fully over to being tiktok without my consent and I am sorry youth of today I do not want loud blaring videos screaming in my face at all times trying to sell me something or make me numb out. I don’t want to watch people pointing up and down bobbing to floating words that tell me things about what I should and shouldn’t believe about the world and them. I don’t even want to watch some sweet woman’s face tell me empowering, life coach-y things to soft music while cutting to clips of her pouring coffee and then at the end of it all it’s a sponsored ad for a fricken’ bidet of all things and honestly it’s just too much. God I am grouchy this morning. Sorry darlings I have personally been sleeping on an air mattress for a month and my ass is killing me and not in a good way, maybe I should be a pretty influencer promoting mattresses with a sponsorship code smirk, I digress. I liked old Instagram, I like photos that didn’t have to be some artistic declaration or lecture and I am so so tired of the social media power over my life, my peace and my time. Is it ironic I am going to another form of media to make my own declarative stateent of opinion? Yes it’s ironic and I don’t give a fook. So I am deleting it, shortly. I just gotta take all my pics back. Please please feel free to applaud my holier than thou pronouncement I just love to virtue signal how alternative to the mainstream I am.
With all that being said, I want to invest back into this site with some of the free time I recently had open up. Our family recently made a big move across country and so many things have shifted in the last two years personally and globally. I think what I had started here was good, it was fun and was a way to feel connected to my family and friends who are so so far away. So as Mr. Bogart himself ad-libbed to the (much younger) and arrestingly captivating Ingrid Bergman-in a very much unsentimental manner- in the brilliant 1942 production Casablanca, “Here’s looking at you kid.”
*Title is sarcasm friends my relationship is fine. Darling we do like a comedic witticism over here.
Please check in online then approach the counter to drop your bag.
Honestly this title is not really relevant to the content but I thought it was funny. Listen I have a joke, shes a little dirty so NSFW warning I suppose, but I pee a little every time I think of it so I am sharing. Note to my Mam if you are reading skip this next part!!!
(READ ALOUD FOR FULL AFFECT)
Me: “Why are hurricanes named after women?”
You: “oh…why Ned??”
Me: “Because when they come they are wet and wild! And when they leave they take your house AND your car”
*Pause for laughter*
I’m not very good at jokes I will admit but this one kills in person I promise. Anywho, I’m checking in here to give you all a little update. I know you are sitting on the edge of your seats waiting desperately for my next post. winky winky
The start of this month has been a little busy for this ma’am right here. I have been trying to sign up to go to college, virtually Mr. Covid-19 thank you very much, so my plate has been a little full. Figuring out a schedule to fit in all my responsibilites-multiple jobs, doggie duties, intentional movement for mental health reasons, facetiming international fam-a-lam, and being active in producing creatively-without becoming burned out or transforming back into the overwork dragon has been a doozy.
I'm getting there though, I think by the end of this month I should have a good schedule locked in and that’s exciting! Last week I did an online workshop called the To-Do List Makeover by Mara Glatzel. Oh my heart I am enamoured by this transformative and energetic life coach, writer, wise druidess. The workshop has really helped pivot my direction with balancing energy input/output and organising my day to get done what I need done while responding to the needs of my own heart in regards to rest and restoration.
So where does that leave this site? I will be experimenting with a random posting schedule till I figure out a more consistent backbone but this week you can look out for a few silly profiles on some special little cretins popping up (obviously I couldn’t create something about celebrating audacious living without centering some of my audacious lovebugs). A couple of guest posts should be creeping in alongside a book review of a short story that I gobbled up in two days and left me reeling with it’s profound historical relevance, cultural significance and cold, wild imagery.
Cheers my dears to following along. Any suggestions for content or a good schedule idea are much appreciated and you can reach me down below where the little ‘Contact’ fella dwells.
Stay safe lovelies.
Hi how are ya hello hows it
What’s this all about then Ned? Well I’ll tell ye. I moved to America nearly half a decade ago and I lost something precious to me. Not literally mind you, I gained a scruffy love, had me some fur babies and a whole new sun soaked family, but I lost a sense of self and a lightness of being that I had begun to live in back home. I parted with some friends and gained a whole new cultural identity. From young Irish woman eager to emigrate to tired green card holder entirely ill at ease in her new adopted country, it has been a whirlwind of change.
Now sure don’t I know you are absolutely delighted to be here. “Oh yay”, you’re thinking, “MORE creative social content being forced on us by a self-aggrandising millennial”.
Yes, the eager striving to be seen and heard of our generation is outrageously vast and visible. Duh, I get that we are all tired of the sameness and repetitive over-sharing and our minds are over saturated with internet identity culture wars…but hear me out, and then you may proceed with judgement and eye rolling.
Aeons and aeons ago, about 8 or so odd years maybe, I had a ‘transformative life experience’ that altered my mind, body and spirit and propelled me into a space of sappy delight. I was whole and had to share it with the world so I did what every 22 year old back then, I started blogging. Face meet palm. Now, don’t get me wrong, I had heart and buckets of genuine innocence and good intentions. So sweet, so vulnerable, so christian-trying-to-make-jesus-cool. The need for affirmation was strong in this one.
Jaysus Christo.
I look back now with a slightly more critical lens and I cannot even get through half of those behemoth blogs before I turn scarlet and vomit at my own words. I can see clearly that while I started blogging because I loved writing and challenging perceptions, I got steamrolled by my own insecurity and desperate hidden desire for validation. So I stopped and a little crack appeared in my armour of confidence. A voice, questioning, got louder. Why was I penning these extortionately longwinded think pieces and for who?
The noise of everyone else striving so visibly, missing the point so clearly and hopping on that blog bandwagon eventually exhausted me and honestly it frightened me because I saw myself reflected in their centering of themselves. I knew the true shallow nature of my ‘altruistic art form’ and that’s when I realised I needed a break. Initially I wanted to re-focus myself and do some deep work on my conscious contribution to the world but it backfired. I spiraled into doubt, self-consciousness and apathy and I let shame hold me back from continuing on in my writing, both publicly and privately.
The worst thing I ever told myself during my ‘writer’s block’ years was “If I can’t make a living/money off of it then it’s not worth doing because it takes from my valuable time.” How about that for some psycho unconscious conditioning of the industrial rat race complex.
With all that being said, I have come to a place now where I want to create again. Funny that Mr. Spock.
A little smuttering here, a dash of pottering about there, a humming and a hawwing and a scitter and a scatter…eventually I just decided fuck it. Make a space to celebrate the creativity in all of us. Who gives a damn what people think?
Well ok, I still do but that isn’t all of me nor is it the true me. It’s not the me that is original but the me that was shaped and moulded by the will of societal structures waiting to profit off of my disatisfaction, discomfort and loneliness.
Listen now, I do not expect any one to care or really get too invested in my little rants about the place. But sometimes you just have to let a little of what’s inside of you out in order to feel satiated existentially. Sometimes we are visited by ideas and we create. Sometimes we sit and think ‘I’m blocked from seeing this right now’ and we don’t press on. And then the not pressing on becomes easier because the fear of pressing on and failing is so great. That lasts for a few days and turns into a few weeks, months and yonks and yesteryears and god it never stops does it? This ability to find an excuse to quit.
So that’s what this is. Some writing by me for no other reason except simply because. It’s my stand in for therapy (I’m sure my ex-therapist will be mightily pleased), some arty farty things and some heart warming contributions by the loves in my life. The layout of this site is convoluted and random so I’ll give you a brief rundown here.
Éire: the homepage seeing as that’s the old motherland and all.
St. John’s Wort: possibly an antidepressant of sorts? Hopefully the works of written ok-ness by me and also excellent works of prowess by my contributors will cheer everyone up just a little bit.
Bluebell: the home of the arty shite cause they are a great beauty and I am shallowly an aesthete.
Bramble: all the interview and conversational stuff cause it rhymes with ramble so there’s that. Here I will feature bants with my lovely contributing creatives, people I find interesting, my fur babies etc.
This is me then, where I am at. I’m doing it, I am pressing on and getting uncomfortable once again. I am saying fuck it and I am going to indulge my ego and strive for this diluted hyper-visibility because it makes me feel powerful and seen and purposeful. I’m going to treat you lovelies as intelligent because you are so I promise I’ll try for no lies, give ye lots of messy writing and I’m going to let the beautimous works of the babes around me speak for themselves.