Things changed when I told Beth. We wore matching trench coats as our lives simultaneously collapsed. Both on the way to the station from different directions, she text in a panic “hurry up, I just saw a guy that looks like Bob”. When you’re shrinking under a stress dream, weighted like a feather, you’re easier to crack open. Bob is a scary slither of light under a door you don’t remember leaving unlocked. In bad times, I am swung wide and careless. In bad times, I couldn’t care less. A man broke into my house and I looked at him a moment and sat down, surrendering. I hear a footstep familiar to that some nights, and I pull my duvet closer and just close my eyes. There he is. Double denim demon.

Right now, I am fraught and fearful. I have been snoozing my alarm to stay a while and contemplating deleting my baby name notes page for more storage for stuff like this, for passwords and reminders I’ll forget I noted down. I am laid with my head limp in the cinema feeling cursed after laughing at something happy. I am two beers tipsy and I don’t deserve to be. “He’s been having me since I was 12”. I have spent thousands on prescriptions. Bob comes like a spectre when it’s time to call the doctor.

“I’m always looking for the exit
I’ve never been afraid of heights
Now, I don’t want to live forever
But I don’t wanna die
Before I take you to Coney Island”

On a particularly hungover and painstaking moment, my niece smiles at me on facetime. She’s started to finally get to grips with the idea that I am both a face on a phone and an actual person, and that those two visions are the same person – me, someone she knows. She smiles and tells me my hair is pink. It is, and my 1am panic dye job, clinging to the control of a self-made change, feels good.

In my fridge, there is a home-made tiramisu. My kitchen is in beautiful disarray, glasses are scattered everywhere with blood red stained orange peels, insides ripped out by teeth. The wax on the table is blood red too. My friends sat there, laughing, breathing easy, until the candles burnt down to nothing.

They come back the next day with more cheese and encourage me not to hide my body, to wear the shorter skirt. Zoey places her hand on my back in the crowd right when I needed her to. “You won't have to open a heart that's broken, water's gonna flow in either way, my heart is growing either way.”

Don’t die, Bobby”

Across Phoebe Bridgers’ third album, she calls out again and again and again to “Bobby”. Five times. If Bob is the image of a curse, lingering at the end of the bed in a nightmare. Bobby is a vision of hope, sat by your side as you wake up.

Bobby is Bo Burnham, but that means nothing. Bobby, in the world of Lost Weekend, is the personification of a grip to life and a desire for it. The album grapples with pain in the most visceral and serious way a Bridgers album ever has, dealing head on with intense grief. It is layered on itself in various devastating shapes. The loss of love, the loss of a parent, the decision to end a pregnancy, the very idea of future parenthood, and the very idea of the self amongst all of it. “Being myself wasn’t easy,” she sings, “do it, for me.”

The album is Laura Palmer laid on a sofa. In Fire Walk With Me, she is trying and failing to escape while at home, the angels disappear from the photo on her wall. Lost Weekend speaks to a sense of running away, by Phoebe isn’t getting anywhere. “Let’s go missing” she begs on ‘Kill Me’, but there is nowhere to turn on this album where a memory can’t find her, where a vision in a dream isn’t still there, smiling.

But there’s hope. Always is. On ‘Graceland Too’, on the last record, she wrote beautifully of another’s hope. Here, she finds her own. And I don’t even think it’s about Bobby, definitely not about a boyfriend, it’s about the spectre of it – a twinkle at the end of a tunnel, a reason to stick around, a desire to be alive that outweighs a long-held, even life long, death wish, the kind that depression can pin onto you.

“The past is looking brighter all the time,” she says, things easing, the sense of doom loosening. “This could be the end of wanting,” she says, making peace. Maybe the clearest sense of it – “Now I can’t see any stars in the sky, When a dream comes true, a fantasy dies, But we’re gonna be alright, me and you, You love me and I won’t еver let you forget, not yеt.” Hope to hold to. Holding that makes things better. Something else, something fated and light and not doomed.

When I see Bob in my dreams, I feel cursed. When I hear Bobby, I hear a reason to hope, if not believe, I’m not – a hope to hold babies and kiss and go on holiday and cook dinner for my friends and burn candles out and call home.

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The whole house was garish and beautiful. When I was no longer a kid and my grandma died, putting the place I’d known forever on the market, I went round and photographed the textures and wallpapers. Pink with punched out flowers. They were spongy under my little fingers and some wore the marks of my sharp child nails. The coffee table would paint lines in a floral carpet and my small feel would shuffle them away. I’d clack on a typewriter, spending more time on the menu than on the make believe of the café. Breakfast then toast then homemade chips at lunch then cornettos before mum picked us up. They would smoke together in the shed before they stopped. A motorbike was eternally in bits in the garage, I never knew him to drive one. I remember his hair thinning, but mostly, I remember the fear and the embarrassment at it, not wanting to upset anyone with my upset as I held my bladder and refused to feel at home anymore.

Maybe that’s it. Grief is a not feeling at home anymore. My nana and grandad’s house is not there anymore for me to be comfortable in, and I find myself sitting weird in the same arm chair now in a care home room, because there is always, eventually, a goodbye and a drive home to be done. Eventually, one day, the building will be a place I will never pass again. Corners of my hometown has been cut off. There never seems to be a reason to go to Stockton anymore.

There never seems to be a reason to go down Shacklewell Lane, to be on the Jubilee Line that used to carry my life back and forth in blissed out or exhausted journeys. For a period, I was always in Gladstone Park, can you believe? There was nice cake there and a lot of comfort and now it is dead and ghostly and basically never spoken of. Like Archway, or The Victoria, or hotel rooms. I talk little of Manchester when at times I felt like I was reborn there, or at least that its years and memories were foundational, for something.

There is a photo of me in a flat on Tib Street where I lived from 21 to 23, the first place I lived with a real job and real rent, the first time I moved city just to move. In the photo, I am 22 and I am using a coffee machine for the first time, setting it up in my then-home as my then-boyfriend takes a picture because it felt momentous. Homemaking. Lifemaking. Things feel like forever. I thought one day I’d be showing kids, handing them a snapshot of their mum and dad playing house or something, some little frozen piece of youth playing adulthood when it thinks it’s already there but is really only on the brink. Now, I wonder where a photo like that will end up. The love is dead and the flat feels irrelevant and the machine broke. 22 making a coffee and you can hardly see my face, who keeps the picture?

My nana keeps asking us to bin photos and we keep refusing. Sometimes she has these momentary fits of organisation as if she’s cleaning up for us. I sat fidgety and weird in her too hot little room and looked through a box of postcards from a lifetime of holidays and trips. She tells us to throw them away. Last night I tore a faded and ratty paper wristband off and carefully placed it in a box under my bed.

Grief is things losing their home, feelings and photos and people and grandkids. Held hands and ikea bears. Parts of the self stuck in rented hoovers. Photos burnt in the soil of a backgarden no longer your own. I buried spells in places I don’t have the keys to anymore, so there are no take backs. A curse left in the freezer like a fearful dream of a dead grandad in a bathtub – a weird thing that sticks.

I think I’m just wondering what they’ll do with my stuff. I think I’m just wondering what to do with the photos of him. I think I’m just putting off decorating my room because grief is the not feeling at home though there seems to be no getting through to my gut to say that nothing and no one has died here, yet. I don’t actually have to be thinking about these things. I can try to have a nice day, I can get more photos developed still.

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It’s an episode full of front door kisses, of men driving women in cars and taxis across a city all for the chance at one. Across the entire show, it’s a common situation. Big appears in his slick black car and drives Carrie home. People are saying things like “are you going uptown” or whatever, but it’s also clear that direction means nothing. Carrie (fictionally) lives on the Upper East Side, but the building is actually in the West Village. Those guys could live in Brooklyn or beyond and they’d still drop her home, nervously walk the steps of her stoop and try their luck.

Of my last few first kisses, here are some locations – Highbury and Islington tube station at rush hour, a bus stop by Tottenham Court Road, on a random pavement in Dalston, outside some else’s door, down the street from my own where they had to turn one way and I the other.

Maybe London is simply a bigger city and getting bigger all the time. No matter how much you limit the distance on dating apps, there is always a chance you’ll end up on a date with someone who would basically end up being a long distance relationship; them in Brockley, you in Hackney Central, you in Peckham them in Finsbury Park, whatever.

In the logistical planning stage, someone will likely say it, “where’s a mid point?” I’m sure that’s literally the only reason why anyone has ever ended up on a date somewhere like London Bridge or Camden. Islington always feels random to me, just a good meeting spot where overgrounds and tubes collide, then maybe you wander towards Angel or something. I love Soho but I’m only on a date there when they live in the opposite direction, and I’m only on a date there when I’m sensible and I know it is wise to be somewhere neutral.

No man’s land is where all the good excuses are, and so really all the safety. In no man’s land of a mid point, you can have work the next day and need to leave now. If you have trekked all the way to Brixton, it suggests a free run. If they’d come all the way East, there is surely always time for just one more, given you’re so close to home.

Or perhaps they’ll offer to walk you – the time honoured tradition. But do I want this person knowing where I live? Did Carrie think about that? or was romance brighter in a time pre-true crime podcasts?

So I’m having first kisses in tube stations, me going one way, them going another, by my choice or theirs. And it speaks to a change, it speaks to a death.

In Sex and the City, they never once discussed the economics of dating. A date for a woman was free dinner, free drinks, and it’s not anymore and that’s maybe a whole other conversation. In a squeezed economy, a date is a gamble, and Actively Dating, as in regularly with the hope of building something bigger, is a risky investment. With the £30 I might spend on my two rounds of drinks, matching theirs, I might have a good time. With £30 in my pocket with my friends, I definitely will. Maybe that’s a factor contributing to the rise of Feeld. Spend your money with your mates, have a foolproof Friday night, then call someone for the ending – it can be that simple and it can cost nothing.

But if you’ve met in the no man’s land, then what? Does £30 become £33 to travel a few stops the wrong direction to say “I had a really nice time” and lean in at the door? More than that, £36, £39 even. To the date and to mine and to theirs – so much tapping in and out. The front door kiss costs the same as a coffee, maybe they should just plant one on me in the station and bashfully part ways.

It’s better than the pathetic look in the eyes when I repeat my reason to go inside alone. You know, when men look at you like you’ve robbed them of the money they willingly spent.

One time, after a first date where the guy did walk me home, though did not kiss me as I fumbled with my keys and go away fast, he proceeded to send me a photo of my front door several times over several weeks after. I know with full certainty that I would never straight up send a man my address on a first date, but walk me there and then you can probably just find it on Google Maps. It is cynical and unromantic. But we are reminded often that we should be at least a little scared.

The carrying of the bags, the paying of the bill, the paying of the compliment. I’ve read think pieces on it all. We have analysed dating from every angle, and then revisited with each turn and each collective trauma of a body in a suitcase. I am thinking about first kisses through social and economic lenses, turning bars into seminar rooms as I spend my £30 safely and wisely with them. I feel just like Carrie Bradshaw as I lean back in my chair, take a sip of my drink and deliver the line – “I’m out of work in an expensive city. I just want a guy to pay and kiss me at my door but without feeling like I’m now in debt. Sue me.”

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I remember his friends getting high in my garden, remember my own in a rare sight; smoking cigarettes, futile attempts to keep up. I remember his suit and my bare legs and marker ink stains on white t-shirts. I remember that summer was a sleep deprived one but I do not remember the tiredness that feels like all now. And so I talk of it like I’ve never known it before.

I do not remember how he said it or how I said it back. I do not remember how they landed in my chest or how they felt on my tongue.

In a café in a smothering July, I was working and then I could not breathe, gripped in a panic that I don’t remember the words in anyone’s voice. I couldn’t tell you now how love has ever arrived. I am aware in logistical terms of words like happiness and joy and lust and desire, I am aware of the way its cliches translate pounding hearts into butterflies and such. I can squint my brain and focus in on loose possible locations, exposed brick flats and pizza expresses. But it is gone and so I talk of it now like it never happened. All old love alien, though sung over and over like a foreign tongue.

This summer has been barren and unbreathable. The air is too much to call fresh so mostly we are inside with the curtains drawn and we are not touching. ‘We’ is the world and I stretch my experience over it. I know some of my friends are in love, some freshly and tenderly out of it, but I am quiet, watching tv and the lack of feeling in my gut says it cannot relate. I can last a few days like that, maybe a week or so, until I am up at 2am trying to write lists of the facts and foundations of every romantic incident.

In the MRI machine, I tried to conjure up all my first kisses. Age 15. His house was nice and far fancier than my own but I remind myself that it was not the one I came to know, I remind myself he moved. My brain conflates the two homes into one, messes with the architecture between one’s marble mosaic on the entry was floor and the other’s long corridors and spanning garden. I can’t draw a line between the two and I worry about it like it matters, essentially matters, that I remember exactly the place where I first saw a boy take his shirt off just for me. But I blink it away and refocus. I was kissed for the first time in a living room while Titanic played. We were clunky out of nervousness. He said something to the effect of, ‘should we get this over with?’

I told a doctor once that attempting to recall memories feels like trying to watch them on a tiny TV that is really far away, and the distance between is filled with sludge. I’m straining my eyes through tears trying to remember if the man I think I’d still call my great love kissed me on white plastic garden furniture in the pub’s concrete car park beer garden, or if we simply stopped walking, drew ourselves into one another, and kissed by the bush he picked me a flower from.

As the machine whirred, I wondered what recalling pain would do to the picture and so, I tried. I remembered the orange wood of a court room and visions of how out of control I was; snapshots of phone in hand, greyed out profile, Sophie’s dog in her garden, Jessie’s supervision, theatre ice cream, bones, no feeling though. I remember our first kiss down to the second, both of them. I remember now that he let slip he loved me for the first time while inside me. I thought perhaps the most effective way to impact the image would be to try and fail and fail and fail to recall the first time he looked at me, clothed and in day light, and said it. The results gave me no answers.

I lay it out. Shards of things. Leaf necklace, typewriter note, train platform crying kiss. Strange beards and unknown breath. Bruised collar bones and bite marks; 2019, 2025. I remember the words of shock, sadness. Bigger. My body was abject. The first time at least. I remember abjection. The second, I remember fascination, sickly and adoring monitoring of colours. Like first kisses fading over and over, when they were gone, I would have forgot how they arrived and I would call him back for more, vowing to really pay attention.

I do not remember how it felt in my gut to want. To want for anyone or anything. I do not remember how it felt to be annoyed or saddened by rain, or cold, at all, for that matter. I do not remember how it felt to turn feelings physical, to clutch my chest and cry when they leave or flutter weightless tethered to the ground only by the gaps between someone else’s fingers.

And from the sludge what emerges is once again just a messy piece of myself like a prophetic post it note of something I wrote before. I am relieved in some way and embarrassed in another reading back my own words like they’re new, refreshing the knowledge of myself through a public forum like I stored it all here so I wouldn’t forget where I put it.

A wiser voice in me sounds like Beth, like friends, like therapists and asks why I want to hold onto pain. I reply with arguments about honouring, bricking bad feelings into monuments so the perpetrators can see and I will have at least built something. I reply with arguments that it’s mine and I hoard tickets under my bed like the holiday trinkets that bow the cupboards of my childhood room. Then the most truthful one whispers; I’m scared everything is fading as someone accustomed to cling.

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In Odysseus’ homecoming monologue to Penelope, his fears are revealed that his own ambition, his devotion to the mission, made him blind to the violence and evil within it. He realises he was blind, foolish, guilty.

In 2023, he told the story of Oppenheimer and his men, of how they convinced themselves that their giant bomb would bring about peace. With each reverberation of the real life explosion, Oppenheimer faced up to the same things – foolishness, guilt, the responsibility and role he played in something horrific.

But then again, it’s easy to miss that because Nolan is busy blasting the background music over it all.

Not to brag, but I’ve read The Odyssey. I’ve even studied various other adaptations and retellings, looked at the way that epic story has echoed through books and movies forever in things like the Coen Brother’s O Brother Where Art Thou which is more of a comedy, capturing the fact that, really, The Odyssey is about men’s stupidity, or James Joyce’s Ulysses leading to Kate Bush’s ‘Sensual World’, a somewhat reclamation of the women’s role in the original text, or further lack thereof in Joyce’s rework. Homer’s is a blueprint – but it’s a blueprint because there is so much moral bite to it. Each chapter is essentially its own fable as they meet some new character or figure who is essentially a metaphor, a lesson.

But then again, it’s easy to miss that because Nolan is still busy blasting the background music over it all - Over Circe’s brutal reminder that men are pigs, that war has always been used as an excuse for simple, animalistic brutishness and so no war is ever noble, over anything Athena has to say.

A lot of thoughts come up again and again while watching the movie and the prevailing one is something like, ‘Imagine how easy this could’ve been if Odysseus just went the right way’. The movie tries to sooth that with the fate of Agamemnon, seemingly making some point about how, either way, homecoming was doomed and dire. And the music once again plays over the story there – of how his wife, Clytemnestra, murdered him for murdering their child, being a figure of rightful vengeance and making the point that all the women in the book are making, which is that men use gods as excuses for evil. Gods punish them for it, but then they see that punishment as further tests to be noble and ambitious about, as further challenges to be strong through, to be tough.

And of Helen of Troy? We meet her with her face, that face, slashed. No music needs to play her. Instead, the men just straight up interrupt her and tell her to shut up when she tries to protest the idea that she launched the war, as opposed to the enraged husband who started in when she fell in love with another.

Nolan is uninterested in all of this it seems. Because surely if he was interested in a film about the way men’s ego and power brings about destruction, he’d have done it right the first time, or at least listened enough to realise he’d already done it before. Or simpler than that, if he was interested, he wouldn’t make a movie in a format that can barely be screened. To sacrifice the art, to crop the view of most viewers, in favour of what is, realistically, a gimmick? Delicious irony, deliciously Greek tragedy.

I guess it’s okay though!! The boys need their war films! He made the point didn’t he? When Penelope spits about how she’s sat on the throne for 20 years, but only a man can be recognised. He sure gets close there! So, so close. But it’s tough you know, tough to find the time for her character’s intelligence and power and plot in a three hour movie. You know, the book was 500 ish pages long!!! It’s hard to find space for the vital women in it!!! So much content, something has to be cut. Sorry Calypso, you had to be drowned out by the score!

Maybe this time it’ll work. Maybe men need other men to tell them, need Matt Damon to has a realisation and monologue some of it out to hear. Piece by piece, a little not to overwhelm, a taster of a message.

I wonder if the boys obsessed with filming dating rejections on their Meta glasses have got the point yet that girls don’t like that? Or if the finance bros with their tough, lonely masculinity have realised that their smothering schedules and drug habits to prop it up don’t actually make them happy? I wonder if Penelope ever told him he was an idiot – just go the right way next time, don’t try to be a hero when you’re just a man. That’s the point of the book. The film ends like it’s not - sailing away on a boat, blissful while a voice talks exactly about fools not listening and repeating - the finale of what feels like an ego project from a director still with no real, good, proper female character.

Maybe he’ll get it next time. Or at least, he’ll commission some more loud and intricate background music.

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I’ve been aware of Charli probably about as long as I’ve had access to streaming services. For my entire teenage and adult life, she’s featured on playlists, and that’s only a minute proportion of the career Charlotte Aitchison has had, which has involved writing for bands like Blondie, being alongside Sophie as hyperpop was invented, and then taking that teaching and making a cultural phenomenon with Brat.

This is what has always frustrated me – Brat is not a commercial album. When listening to Brat versus Crash, its predecessor, especially, Charli was trying far harder to hit the mainstream on that earlier album than on the sound of Brat. If there is one take I commit myself to whole-heartedly, it’s that Brat happened without Charli, as an accident she had to go along with – was obviously thrilled to go along with and drag out, but that she didn’t plan.

But still, it is only through the sheer amount of conversations I’ve had about that - with new Charli haters, who don’t even know her enough to be educated on her earlier work or have an argument as to why they hate her beyond the Brat industrial complex – that I’ve become a card-carrying Charli fan.

It is only through the tiresome conversations I’ve had with men about Charli XCX that I’ve become a devoted Charli XCX fan.

It is through these conversations that I hear Music, Fashion, Film as a defiant masterpiece. An album of feminist rebellion against a world that would like to tear her to shreds at worst, freeze her as she is at best.

Though ‘Rock Music’ was stuck in discourse about genre, what she essentially served was a song about ambition. “Yeah, maybe jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t, it’s okay,” she sings, imploring people to simply take a chance. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.

‘Camera’ is the same, times a million. To me, ‘Camera’ is a world-quaking song that should be played to every child as a hymn for living a life big, beautiful and bold. It is a truly moralistically important song, a song about refusing embarrassment in favour of your dreams as she sings, “I don’t feel embarrassed even if I suck” in a song about chasing a dream regardless of how she thinks society will make her feel about that. In a world obsessed with nonchalance, this is the moment when Music, Fashion, Film takes shape as an object of vital destruction against that attitude.

I could sit here devastated about all the ways that my career might have been helped by shutting up and going along with it. I’d be doing better on paper right now if I cared less about my own dreams and opinions. Ambition in a woman is a tricky and taboo thing, handled like a bomb or like something that stinks when it becomes too strong. On this album, as Charli plays around in genres beyond her ‘usual,’ calls in icons beyond her ‘realm’ and steps into something ‘new’, she’s taking a powerful hammer to all that – to all the self-destruction, self-minimising thoughts so many women know.

“I’m a wife, I’m a kid / I’m destroyed, I’m a bitch / I’m too drunk, I can’t sleep / I can’t feel, I’m afraid / I’m afraid, I’m afraid / I’m nothing without him / What if I ruin it? / Take the ring, take the ring…”

There isn’t a single limit on this Charli XCX album. In its rockiest moments, she busts down the walls of the sonic space she’s parcelled into. In the collaborations with David Cronenberg, inspired by one of his deepest, darkest memories that he willingly shared with the artist about another familiar experience of being aware that, in the end, art doesn’t actually really matter in the face of mortality, there is no point blowing yourself up over hedonism or art, or with Martin Scorsese’s position on the cover, or with the cinematic references undeniable within, she breaks into the film world that a whole pack of bros would love to block her out of. In the concept of Music, Fashion, Film, Charli is laying out her ambition, and as she delivers her most introspective yet expansive album yet, a project powered distinctly by limitlessness, she’s making the point that she can do it all – and so can any woman, regardless of what we’re told.

To vocally defend Charli XCX as a woman is often to be shruggled off as a party girl, a pop girl, a girl. Music, Fashion, Film feels aware of that, but isn’t an antidote swinging against it, but instead, opens up a secret diary. Charli gets it. Every creative, ambition woman does.

“Don’t fucking choke on your ego when you see me coming / I know you’re performing, I know that you’re hurting / So you try to hide it when you see me coming / Don’t wanna confront it, I’m scared I’m annoying…

Deflect and then shower me in adoration / You think you’re so clever, I think you are too / You know I see you when you see me…”

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“Sick of second-guessing my behaviour
And what I want to be
Just let me lie here on the sofa
And put the reruns on TV”

I know things are bad when my phone is propped up against an olive oil bottle playing a TV show I could quote while I fry an egg. In 2023, when things were really, really bad, I watched The US Office for the second time, starting again at season 1, episode 1. It soundtracked any quiet moment of my life; dangerously balanced against shampoo bottles at the edge of baths, against cleansers above sinks, near bubbling pots. It played in my headphones from the other room, and if that wasn’t possible, I even sunk so low as to start listening to The Office Ladies; cast members Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, talking about the show, episode by episode.

For the second time, I neared the end and turned back. It took me three times of watching 8 whole seasons of around 26 episode per season, three times (approx.) 7020 minutes, before I left myself watch the final series. I could not, and would not, be left alone.

It’s changed lately. I’ll admit things are bad at the moment and I confronted that mostly when I started rewatching The Summer I Turned Pretty. Last summer was when I watched the tween romance drama for the first time, very late to the party. Then as I broke up with a boyfriend during the time I watched the final episodes, going through all the various shades of sadness and anxiety and denial and whatever else, I did a U-turn. I resigned to not do it in life, so I did it with my viewing. The finale credits rolled, I scrolled back up to the first ever episode.

The edges were smoothed out. Belly was young again, hopeful. I knew what was to come and I could trust her thing time to figure things out. The drama still entertained me as, admittedly, I’d already forgotten a fair amount of the pettier goings ons. But in knowing the big stuff, the soft stuff remained pure; the blushing dialogue, the sweetness of the mothers, the giddiness of the romance. The Summer I Turned Pretty is a cotton wool world that cannot and will not hurt me.

Things are tough and I find myself cooking, putting on makeup, tidying my room to the soundtrack of the show again. I find myself sitting on the sofa and putting Girls on again, seeking out the episodes I know best. There’s a slight embarrassment to it – my housemates float in and out and lately I seem to often be in the same position, the volume like a revealed comfort blanket.

But then it’s night time, movie time, and I’m seeking out something new and horrific. Last week, after a particularly sad day, I queued up Titane for the first time. I cried on the way to Hackney Picturehouse and I felt better after seeing Rosebush Pruning. The same anxiety I am coddling with familiar, harmless TV shows is medicated by searching “fucked up films”, asking my friends for recommendations for the nastiest piece of cinema they’ve ever seen. I lay on my side, stroking my ribs, watching Black Swan, watching Crash, watching The VVitch. I don’t know what to tell you about the fact that I’ve seen Blink Twice three times, or that I count Secretary as my go-to comfort movie. I don’t know what to tell you when someone says Requiem For A Dream fucked them up so badly they vowed to never see it again, when I don’t really even remember it, it washing over me like an exhale.

Day nurse being something sweet, night nurse being something harrowing; my treatment plan makes no sense but I’m sure is familiar to some. One of my closest friends said her comfort film is Saw.

There are so many paths to unpacking it. The desire to witness something triggering as an odd kind of comfort strikes me as a distinctly feminine habit. It exists in the same realm as women’s fascination with true crime and psychologists explaination of this phenomenon as being one in which women often find a strange kind of comfort in confronting, or even familiarising themselves with, the absolute worst case. Perhaps I seek out a thriller as the end of the sad day for a sense of perspective – surely, I am in a depressive episode, but I am not losing my limbs to addiction, I am not possessed by a demon, I am not sexually attracted to car crashes.

There’s also the fact that women require playgrounds for their emotion. When I move through a day in a state of fight or flight, society tells me to keep moving. My mum stresses about the idea of me crying on the tube, saying it makes me look vulnerable and therefore makes me a target, so in 2023, I was locked and loaded with Jenna Fisher talking about to-camera fourth-wall breaks in my ear, sucking those tears back in. But at home, day drawing to a close, I lay in bed and I watched Suspiria, the newer and scarier one, for a two hour slot of allowance. Perhaps we seek out distressing, scary content to allow ourselves time to be distressed and scared, bubble all that lid-on upset to the surface, assign it to a devil in a dance school if you can’t yet assign it to what it really is.

I’ve talked about all this before – “On a day I’ve been too quiet, I turn MUBI into a defibrillator. I find the most fucked up film I can to shock myself back to life, I don’t watch the trailer; anticipation kills the buzz. I want to be surprised, only then does my voice jump out at me from round a corner of myself, only then can we laugh a minute at it, take a deep breath, only then can we go back to normal.” It was the second time on my Substack that I’ve used an image from Promising Young Woman as a header image. I don’t yet feel like I’ve found the words to explain the impact sexual trauma has had on my life, the way all of this surely connects to it, but the memory of watching that movie for the first time at the end of some other anxious day sums it up.

But I’m on the sofa and its 2pm and I’m wondering why I’m watching Hannah take drugs for an article assignment, dancing around in a string vest with her nipples out, and not watching one of those four part fucked up limited series about murderers, or why I’ve never once really been intrigued by a drama series that isn’t to do with a teenage girl on a summer holiday going through simple trials. But then if what I was seeking in a comfort show was merely mind numbing ease, I’m curious as to why I don’t descend into more brainslop options – reality TV, cartoons, Friends, god forbid.

Maybe that all comes down to the rinse-and-repeatness of television. The fact that despite being shorter form out of TV and film, television characters are built to last. I have lived alongside Belly, or Hannah Horvath, or Pam, or Carrie Bradshaw. I have comforted my own trials through theirs, I have been assured of my own growth, or the fact that I will grow, will in some way overcome, through the simple act of series moving to series. A film is an electric shock to jolt something out. When I’m sad, I have not the time to trust in new hope. To keep it moving, I need familiar wins and loses and assured wins again.

Maybe that’s it. I have no answers, just an unfaltering trust in my shipping of Belly and Conrad.

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Along with Charlotte, the dreamy gallerist, Miranda, the tough-fronted lawyer, and Samantha, the sexy, confident PR woman – Carrie and her friends are supposed are archetypes. They were supposed to be stereotypes, but as we look at the modern media industry, it is clear that Carrie Bradshaw, as she did in the 1990s, is not compatible with today. That stereotype no longer exists.

That was proven by And Just Like That. When the very creators of this archetype, this dream, brought her back in the 2020s, she’s a podcast host.

The very finale of the first season of the reboot is seen out with the happy ending of Carrie being a success on her own podcast. We hear very little of her writing. Her column is barely even addressed, the audience is simply supposed to work on the assumption that it is now defunct because, duh – this is the 2020s, who’s reading a newspaper?? Who’s reading at all??

The creators of Sex And The City, the creators of the very blueprint of the ‘magazine girl’, the columnist girl, the dream of girls worldwide who want to write and be known for their writing, know Carrie Bradshaw could not exist now. Instead, she must be an influencer.

Last year, as I struggled with the end of my novel, someone told me that I should really consider posting more on socials and growing my audience if I want it to sell. I felt betrayed, I hated them for it – and I hated even more that they were right.

There are depressing realities that force us to confront that this is really the case. First, the digital world has pivoted almost completely to visual media. Articles are now Instagram carousels, or sub-60 second videos. The golden rule for journalism used to be that you couldn’t give the hook of your story away. Any social post would be a teaser to lead people to click the link. Now, publications know that the link isn’t being clicked. Instead, socials and the site run as almost two separate things. A good piece is written and then it is adapted to social, told basically in its entirety in a way that would look in short attention span audience members who may follow the magazine on Instagram, but almost exclusively engage with the social posts, and basically only ever in passing. The hook is pointless, its all offered up front in bite-size bits.

That bite-size bit is basically always video – needing sound and moving image to up the grab for scrollers. The depressing reality is that a well written article will never do as well as a TikTok can. And so where does that place a great writer except at a complete disadvantage now to a presenter, a nice face, a good voice - with that effortlessness in front of the lens sitting at complete odds to the eternal characterisation of the elusive writer with their interior curiosity and shy intellect that makes them great .

Another depressing reality is that media is underfunded to the nth degree. The change in the digital world has worsened that – publications need website traffic to run, less clicks equals less money from ad space, less buy in from sponsors, less willingness to keep the office lights on from the corporation that own it.

The death of the website makes the idea of staff obsolete. Few magazine now hire full time roles beyond the essential editorial staff or commerce writers who help bring in money. The rest is done freelance, which brings in a whole other can of further depressing realities about the class inequality of financial instability, meaning that some of the best writers around are being pushed out of the industry as they’re unable to afford the uncertainty of this expensive world without the protection of a contract.

But with the underfunding of media, it also means that publications, that publishing houses, that film studios, that any art-adjacent company, requires a level of assurance. For a publication to pay a freelance fee, or for a publishers to buy a book, they’re looking to make their money back. If you’re a writer without a platform, no matter how brilliant you are, you cannot promise that.

That’s how today was built. Increasingly, book deals go to influencers with a solid audience, and that audience’s spending power, already there. Magazine column slots also go to notable people, like Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, briefly writing for Vogue, or again, to influencers with a following to bring along with them. Substack felt like a place that defied that. But then a few weeks ago, I saw my first sponsored #ad post on here.

It means that more and more, when a publication are looking for someone to send to a press junket or to a festival, they’re commissioning influencers – look towards Max Balegde in the UK, or the shit show that was Quen Blackwell and Jake Shane interviewing people for Vanity Fair at the Oscars. Look towards Hannah Townsend who somehow managed to move from a job in fashion marketing to interviewing Stanley Tucci because she got big on TikTok. Look towards literally any influence doing an interview with film stars, awkwardly reading out the question they’ve been handed, or even more awkwardly fumbling through a silly game that brings absolutely nothing of journalistic interest to the table, but does get social media clicks.

@popcultureiscoolit feels like i’m watching two people not understand the language they are being spoken to lol #juliafox #jakeshane #quenlinblackwell #oscars #fyp

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It spirals it all even further. I’m a journalist, a lot of my friends are journalists too. Each year, one of my friends basically decamps to Cannes film festival where she works, tirelessly, seeing films, attending press conferences, writing pieces up to tight deadlines, all while still being on call for her usual editorial role and being expected to attend events and represent the magazine. All around her, influencers are flown in by brands, put up in luxury hotels, taken out for dinners, allowed to see the movies AND given the opportunity to interview people. Then, as artists and actors and film companies and labels get more and more used to influencers asking harmless questions that they can somewhat control, knowing that an influencer, who is also treated as ‘talent’, won’t want to rock the boat – it gets harder for actual journalists to do their job, to get the junket slots, but also to be allowed to move with intellect and integrity. And all of that is all to do with on-camera work, which is now basically the expectation of how these things run.

It’s the way it’s going – so what about the writers?

Over a glass of wine, Sophie Wilson, a writer and journalist I’ve admired for a decade now, said something to the effect of, ‘each time a writer I love picks up a mini mic, an angel loses its wings’. We laughed through the anxiety of where the industry, and thus our financial situation, is going, saying that we must hold strong, fight against the flood of short form and video content, defend the page-only, off-camera sanctity of the great writer.

A month later, I made a TikTok.

Now, I’m trying to teach myself video editing, trying to get better and be consistent though any time I talk to a friend about it, I say that filming them feels like being held at gun point.

I’ve analysed the obvious question of ‘so why are you even trying?’ The simplest answer is the saddest one; I feel like I have to. My whole life I’ve said that I have one skill and one skill only – writing. But now, as AI creeps in and everything turns to video and journalists are booted out for effortless on-camera faces that can serve up said video content with ease, writing no longer feels like enough.

I’ve also confronted the grosser side of it, asking myself in the dead of the night, ‘what do you actually want?’, or, more repulsively, ‘Is what you want fame?’

I’ll admit it - I have an intense drive to succeed, to be notable, to leave behind some kind of legacy. Like everyone else, I want to be Carrie Bradshaw. I want to be Joan Didion. I want to be Eve Babitz. I want to be known like they are, celebrated. I want the lives they lived with doors open and their name out there. I want the respect they had. Yes, to some degree, I want their fame.

But every time I film a video and spend hours editing it, exhaustingly hating the way I look and thinking about that ten times more than anything else, or resenting having to edit a written piece that I felt said it all perfectly into something shorter and simpler and, realistically, lesser – I remember that I want to be Bradshaw, Didion, Babitz as they got to be, not how they’d have to be today; talking to a camera, making everything bite-size and easy, when all the best written work ever, and all the best writers ever, know that magic and power is in the chew. I want to be a writer, I want that to be enough.

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By the mid-point of June, my friends stopped cooing over it. At first, as the spring was heating up, bringing more skin out at dinner, we’d all giggle and blush at the etchings of passion spreading across me. I felt 16, gathering my friends up and bragging about my new experiences. I felt superior, like I must surely be being loved, being touched, in a grander way, a realer way – just look at all this proof. He’d leave a mark on my neck and I’d call it a love letter. I heard myself start to ask for it, a way to make it romantic when puddled finger prints were already always rained across me. If something was parting us - a holiday, something - I’d ask him to leave a note on my body. I made my eyes doe-like and asked for the ownership. The marks came to be a foundation. In a situation so murky, at least I had the purple. I had proof it was real.

The week I met him, I made a playlist - Bruises. Love songs then sad ones. How foolish was I? So far past a teenager but still believing that acts of violence can ever be acts of love.

But I laughed at the dinner table. I joked about just how bad my iron levels must be. I joked in the late mornings - laid out on my garden, skin already looking violent - I joked that he could just look at me and I’d bruise. (That was true, in its own terrifying way. The eyes of a hunter, my friends refused to hold his gaze. They said they watched him, looking at me like something to eat, pushing his fingers into the back of my neck, into theirs when I wasn’t around).

I joked that was all it took. A mere brush, a caress and I’d bloom. But by mid-June, they wouldn’t allow me that. My chest was be neon yellow - a strange and moulding state. Just visible under my skirt, my thigh was basically black. One time I bruised so strangely that the hem of my jeans imprinted onto the violet like white stitches – all that from a bite, the first time he ever took me home. I took photos, that was my first message. He told me from then on, he wanted to see every mark he left.

Here you go. Show her. Please.

I contemplated taking a picture daily. Hourly. I wanted him to see the shades change and kiss them and share in them. My body hurt, bad. My skin felt tight and weird, my muscles felt torn and bobbly. My chest would ache and ache and scream and feel smashed in if I laughed. I felt heavy and some days I felt so beautiful because all of it was from him. I was something chosen and here was the certificate.

We all come to learn these things aren’t special.

I hear of girls around town, also googling if bruises can scar. I hear of friends who stopped the laughing, averted their gaze. It was supposed to be our intimacy. A fleshy whisper of adoration. It was the way I made it okay.

Love, you’re so lucky I was mad. You’re so lucky I had ribbons in my hair, the prettiest of bras, believing myself a muse, a canvas. You’re so lucky I pouted my lips and jutted my collar bones out in the photos I took of my chest; the battle ground.

I looked at him and felt like I’d never seen a man before. Surely made of something else, only impact and never impacted. He’d force my head and squeeze me and pinch me and egg me on to bite and suck and scratch, harder, laughing that no matter what, I was too soft to last. The one time I did - leaving the tiniest red kiss on your neck - he was angry. I applied hot flannels, scrubbed it with a brush, did a cold press, repeat, repeat, all while he text an ex and I began to wonder if she was as black and blue as I was. When he told me to wear long sleeves to the show, was it because she’d be upset at the thought of us touching, or was it because she’d remember how hard a grip can be?

We all come to learn these things aren’t special.

I saw a picture of the next. On her tanned arm there is a bruise. A broken oval, a fault in the front, one crooked tooth. A bite in her skin, pulled up and purple. Marked. Put her in his jaw and carried her across a line. There is only before and after - during is fiction and tender feeling. Literally. I never knew skin could be so colourful, so repulsive, so manipulated. The hand of the artist, now terrifying and elsewhere.

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In 2023, Olivia Rodrigo sang with a smile on her face and choreography of Disney channel knees, “love’s fucking embarrassing.” She was 20 then. Now, at 23, her third album was quite clearly forged from an experience so shattering it forced her to break form. She had intended to write a love album, a complete collection of adoration in the same way that so many of us were young and set about writing poetry collections all addressed to one person.

It didn’t work out that way. After the break down of that relatable first adult relationship, the loss of the first person you genuinely could have started a life with no parents or social boundaries there to block you, the rumour was that Rodrigo took that album and put it straight in the bin. Instead, in an act that hums with bravery in every smile during every interview were she talks carefully about the project, she looked at the wreckage, dug about in it. Side A is love, Side B is loss – that’s how it’s being sold as she said, “It’s my attempt at capturing love from both sides of the coin.”

The result is something interesting. When you know the end, the start is something different all together, but as Rodrigo wrote, and potentially even recorded, these songs in the moment, it’s a confronting document of back-and-forths and mirrors. Side A is just as much of a tragedy as side B.

It’s a tragedy in the same way as when your friend tells you that forgetful, careless guy asked her to be his girlfriend, and she said yes. It feels like a horror movie; like watching your friend walk away in the arms of a man you know she argued with only a day or so ago. It is a tragedy in the most basic way, obviously, as Rodrigo pens her most gut-wrenching memories to date, able to conclude only with a devastated beg for “the memories [to] go dark”. But in the interaction between the two halves, it feels like a tragedy of inevitability, a tragedy in the loss of hope because of that. Even if we didn't know what was on the other side of the record flip, I feel certain most of us would be waiting for it.

On my first listen, I found myself wincing. I listened to ‘u + me + <3’, and it felt like she left it in as a slap to her own face, like reading back an adoring apology text after it all and thinking “I’m an idiot.” ‘Purple’ feels like a straight up dead wife montage in a true crime documentary about to reveal that her boyfriend was the killer as lines like “we fight over who I’m hanging out with like a real couple” feel truly sinister.

I wondered what the album would have looked like if it had been completed and released when the love was intact. She said in an interview that ‘What’s Wrong With Me’ was initially written as a sanguine love song about missing something before looking back to realise what the real diagnosis was. The fact that the record now works in reverse, that we’re called in to spot the symptoms in the good times, says a lot. Thinking about what the opposite might have been, I can’t shake the feeling that Olivia Rodrigo’s full love album would have flopped because it’s just not where we are. It somehow would have felt inappropriate.

Love doesn’t feel embarrassing anymore, it feels doomed. This is no longer just a Sex and the City-esque comment thrown out by the recently rejected or lonely. Currently we’re seeing mass migration from dating apps, swift increase in women actively and purposefully committing to voluntary singlehood, and even globally plummeting birth rates, falling to the lowest levels in 50 years. Broadly, overwhelming, the game is changing, and the game is being given up.

In 2024, I wrote, “I mourn each time one of them deletes the apps. The ranks drop off all pathetically gangrened and malnourished. Injured by nothing and no one but the staled, unclean waiting in the pits though no one admits it. Because, really, isn’t it fun? Isn’t it a thrill? ‘At least you’ve got a story!’ we say over dinner.”

It’s the same but it’s completely and utterly different. The gangrene is reaching the point of amputation, a complete cut off. The stories no longer even feel dinner worthy because they’re repeated and dull. There’s no arc to them anymore, not even a little semblance of excitement in the crash because there wasn’t even a moment of hope to get it off the ground.

Even in the most glimmering of circumstances, it feels like a cleaver, a guillotine to the head before you can even dare to smile. A friend met a guy at a party and he did an extended speech about how disgusted he was that some guys wouldn’t text after a hook up. He laid next to her in a suspiciously tidy room with a Dolly Alderton book on his bedside, talking eagerly about what he’d take her. She left his house and never heard from him again. It was as if you could hear his cackle echo across Islington. But even the second she left his place, she text me with an uneasy feeling. There wasn’t a single split second of optimism that maybe, just maybe, this could be something. Overwhelmingly now, it is better to operate on the idea that everything will end badly.

Worse – it’s safer that way. Romance doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Love doesn’t feel embarrassing, it feels terrifying in a terrifying world for women.

At the same time of growing more cynical and disconnected from dating, I look on my phone and see a video about weaponised incompetence by fathers, the hefty emotional and physical labour piled on new mothers. The news tells us that there were 62 million views of a so-called ‘rape academy’ in a single month. We hear that cases of sexual assault and abuse have risen by around 25% in the past four years, and that’s just the reported cases. The public are given three and a half million files relating to the world’s most powerful people being involved in a global sex trafficking and paedophilia ring, and we’re told names won’t be named, though also that this is only half the content. We know Trump is referred to over 38,000 times in the Epstein Files, and world leader coddle him, look at him like a difficult child. Then we’re told to still love; “I’m cool and forgiving, I’ll take what you’re giving.”

Somewhere in my girls group chat, where I thought there should be giddy chatter, there is information on how to report abuse. Olivia wanted to wear a cute babydoll dress like Courtney Love, like a riot grrl – she was accused of sexualising children in discourse that smacked of ‘but what was she wearing?’

How do we have hope? I saw a video of two gym at a gym event, smiling with pride until all the men surrounding them started doing the weird manosphere hand signal. We pile into cinemas to see Obsession and then watch men online fail to see the sexual abuse the horror is built on. I see five girls in the same café all reading Famesick, where Lena Dunham writes of her complex connection with Adam Driver and how her feelings could not be separated from sexism, writing that had anything happened, “I’d be minimizing any authority I still had, and that, however it went, my heart — bruised but improbably not yet broken — would crack.”

No matter what, she would lose. Isn’t that how it’s all coming to feel? To be in a relationship feels like signing onto a risk, when its always been sold to us as security. We watch on as politicians take our rights away, giving our vote to fathers and husbands. We sit and watch a documentary where ‘red-pill’ manosphere ‘influencers’ spew violent, dangerous rhetoric and we’re reminded that they have millions upon millions upon millions of followers between them. We see reports about teenage boys raping teenage girls and getting off with little but a £26 fine.

On side A, in ‘Purple’, a love song, Olivia writes, “I had big dreams till I tied myself to you”. The lesson to women has always been that love requires sacrifice. “Some nights can be so fucking lonely, but it’s better than begging for you to stand up for me,” Olivia sings in the final song – the sacrifice is now too much. Is this it? Have we all had enough? The final death knell sounded by the teenage starlet? There is no love no more, the game has grown too sinister.

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My friend Zoey also only looks at Instagram.com, not the app. She doesn’t have TikTok. What she does have is an ability to talk to anyone, in any room.

Whether she’d agree or not, as homesickness for America often sparks up in her, I look at Zoey and I see someone who has built real community. The making of that has never involved cutting London off into a smaller, easier-to-consume chunk, she doesn’t just stick to her local area. Instead, it’s simply the building of a map, and a dedication to balancing exploration and putting roots down. Sometimes she goes for dinner somewhere new, but she always remembers to stop in at her favourite counter seat, talk to the staff more, make sure she knows the new people’s names. We can go dance elsewhere, of course – but all roads lead back to Trishas’s and to the regulars status she has more than gained by now.

Broadsheet wrote a piece about how members club culture is seeping into bars and restaurants. In Zoey’s world, I don’t see the isolating exclusivity that they talk of, claiming that good atmospheres are now kept hidden behind secret phone numbers as owners tightly and carefully vet their own crowd. Instead, I see a simpler, more timeless solution to the problem they pose, writing about online bookings systems and social media buzz over spots, “it can leave those restaurateurs who had hoped to cultivate a crowd of returning regulars with a satisfied but transient, hype-chasing audience.” Zoey is the opposite transient - if she likes a place, she is out to become part of the furniture. She is out to make friends there, because, as has traditionally been the case - if you like a place, like its find, feel aligned with it, chances are you’ll surely align with its other clientele too.

Now, that’s perhaps dead though.

We’re in a crisis of recommendations. Her Grand Tour wrote about this incredibly in a place called ‘This place was better before you posted it’, stating that while not being “anti-sharing”, not being out to gatekeep at all, the position we’re in where everyone is sharing ‘must-go’ spots after a mere moment spent through the door is ruining the vibe. “Good travel writing required in-depth research, cultural awareness, and - crucially - visiting a place more than once,” she said, ushering to the past. But to the present; “What we have now is by and large a brief first impression dressed up as expertise.”

These are not good recommendations. I’d even go so far as to say they’re not recommendations at all, but simply a new type of showboating, a ‘look where I am’ dressed up in an attempt at humility as ‘omg you need to go here’. Even just the labelling of a place as a ‘viral’ spot, using that in place of any other real descriptor sums up this entire issue.

No where is that clearer than in the new tier of recommendations, the ‘cool girl’ spots.

Cool girls are drinking martinis as X, cool girls are getting matcha at Y, cool girls are spotted eating Z outside BLAH wearing BLANK.

The details change, morphing from aperols to spicy margs to dity martinis. The food and drink choices switch up as quick as the uniform, and as recommendations are part of the whole packaged up image, they too become part of this fast fashion-like, hyper-speed trend switching. Restaurants and bars are now part of the whirring machine of fleeting obsessions.

The problem with that is that there is absolutely zero investment from the customer for longer than a blink. There is no settling in, there is no community, there is no real atmosphere; only the illusion of one for as long as the trend lasts. Go the week a place blows up and its bustling. Go back to the same place a month later, and it’s dead.

@infatuation_londonOne thing about Londoners: we will romanticise a pavement. 📍Ellie's, Dalston

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Ellie’s is one of the places that epitomises that. The Infatuation dubbed that strip of Kingsland Road, between Dalston Junction and Haggerston, “London’s sexiest stretch of pavement.” Maybe it’s true. Times when I’ve gone to meet my friend there for a quick post-work drink, I’ve felt the need to put makeup on, put contacts in, carry a nice bag. To sit outside Ellie’s often feels like to sit inside a moving portrait, an act, a cast, a living stereotype – others would simply say it’s a ‘scene’, Time Out would say that the bar is “big on vibes”, but is it?

This isn’t really about Ellie’s. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ellie’s (ish - the martinis are tiny, never cold enough, come crystal clear and with only one olive plopped in the bottom no matter how filthy you ask for it to be.)

But currently, it captures the look, and problem, of the ‘cool girl’ spot. There is no one palpable energy there, no clear sense of identity, no real atmosphere. It would never, ever, be a place I’d chose to go on my own with a book to enjoy a drink and soak up the spirit. It has never been a place I’ve ever fallen into conversation with a stranger, or ever even go the vibe that the people at the table next to me would want to share a smile. You notice heads turn quick when the door opens as people walk in - there is often a palpable sense of watching and being watched. You can spot the self-conscious act as people take their photos of their signature £8 dirty martinis, purposefully sitting on the curb even if there’s space at a table, for the shot. Afterwards, you watch them look like they’re having a really nice time but something always feels a little off.

It doesn’t feel like a fault of the owners. It’s very clear that the owners have the dream of Ellie’s being a community hub – their menu is changeable and utterly dependant on the day, responding to the context. If its sunny, there might be ice cream. In winter, on a snow day, maybe they might make some mulled wine, open some new nice whisky. One day, they announced that they simply fancied opening up some of the expensive bottles of champagne they had, and so they’d be selling glasses cheap. The comms from the business always have a lovely kind of “come along!” feel, but I’m unsure how many people are engaging with that versus simply coming along to get the signature photo of the Wednesday happy hour crowd spilling into the pavement and to say they’ve been there, tick it off the list, be where they think they ought to.

I had one really amazing night at Ellie’s. The week before Christmas, they hosted carols and me and my friends got down early, embarrassingly early, thinking it was going to be rammed given the buzz of the place. But instead, it was oddly quiet yet as we gathered round the piano. It felt like how it’s supposed to feel; like locals at a watering hole. People chatted, groups mingled, the windows steamed up. People were bringing themselves to the space, taking part in it – suggesting songs, passing around donuts, chatting, mingling. I wondered why, if this spot is so popular, more people hadn’t come along to be part of what was a clear attempt to foster community around it. Why hadn’t all the people busy posting pics of the bar on their socials, aligning it as part of their visual identity, come along to align with it on a personal level too?

It was cool in a whole different way that night, while on the average Saturday, it can feel like the very idea of ‘cool’ pervades it in a way that seems to stunt the fun, seemed to stunt it before the doors were even really open as Charli XCX hosted her wedding party there.

After that, the bar blew up into a viral ‘cool girl’ recommendation before the soft opening hardened into its own self-made reputation. Before it even had a chance to know itself, it was busy, and it was ‘cool’ – the place where the ‘cool girls’ are. The bar had yet to prove any reason as to why, or curate at atmosphere to be ‘cool’. It simply was.

I always feel like London’s buzziest ‘cool girl’ spots lack heart – why the fuck would I want to eat ice cream stood up, leaning against a cold metal counter with the big light on? Is anyone going to The Dreamery for literally anything other than a nice photo of the pretty ceiling?

Maybe that’s a better example than Ellie’s. Has anyone ever seen a recommendation for The Dreamery that sells you on literally anything other than a pretty photo of the place? Can anyone tell me a single flavour? Say anything at all about the menu? Are half of the recommendations even trying? No.

@yanazendykwine & ice cream bar in east london that everyone were talking about 🤍🤭 ice cream sooo delishh 🍨 #london #londoncafes #londonbars #londonfreethingstodo #thedreamery #eastlondonbar #eastlondonplaces #londonlife #londonfyp #londontiktok

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‘Cool Girl’ spots are still lives. What it all boils down to is social media peacocking. A cool girl spot is really all in the aesthetics, less in the flavours or the energy, but more about how that drink looks in your hand and how you look holding it there. ‘Cool girl’ spots aren’t recommended based on the social atmosphere, but the appearance of an atmosphere. They’re the further commodification or commercialisation or minimisation of ‘girl’ to something vapid, pretty, sellable - and still.

But also, it’s less in the ‘girl’ and more in the ‘cool’. When a spot blows up online, with this happening more and more right as the place opens and before its even settled into itself, it is granted the ‘cool’ label and so the crowd feels free of responsibility. Everyone is descending on a bar or restaurant with its vibe seemingly already locked in, so it’s like no one feels like they have to contribute to building it.

Though if you ask Anthony Bourdain, ask any great food or travel writer, ask my friend Zoey, and you’ll be reminded that ‘cool’ is a communal act - that true, enduring coolness and the beloved reputation that comes along with a good atmosphere, can only ever come down to the people. A great place will transform its clientele into a cast. The people lead the way, bringing in more likeminded people – with likeminded not needing to look the same way, or even be in the same age category.

It makes me think of Bourdain so much. As he implored ‘be a traveler, not a tourist’, he directly fought against the idea of going where you think you ought to be, of popping in once, of merely being witness to a spot. His entire philosophy came down to connection and to people, to community, not really food. The idea of viral, trending, ‘cool’ places is the same as tourism. It’s not true engagement. It’s simply passing through, playing a character a little while, witnessing, photographing, not engaging.

Zoey is sat at counter seats or is yelling over bar tops talking to old men about music, or about the book she’s reading. Zoey is dancing with a group of strangers, Zoey is being recognised by random people the next week because she spoke to them last time. Zoey is making conversation, putting her phone away, because she recognises and respects the kind of deal you make with a great place, the promise to play your role and get involved if you want to be involved.

If you want a good scene, you want to be part of a good scene, you have to help create it. If you want to have fun, you have to be out to have fun, in a real way – take part in making a place fun, not just dress to suit and head down to get the same photo and post the same recommendation, trapping it in an monotonous, monocultural cycle that actually contributes nothing to the vibe, or to reaching the right people for the vibe, which is what true, good recommendations are for.

To get a recommendation from Zoey, to hear from her own guide of ‘cool’ places, is to be given far more of a guarantee. It comes tried and tested, repeatedly tested. If it passes, you’ll find her there often, playing her part in making it great, or basking in the solid coolness that regulars, that clientele of past and present, have built through the simply act of all finding the spot, or hearing about the spot through someone they like and respect, and naturally building a scene – not descending on a spot en masse because someone online went once and accidentally made it the place du jour.

No, cool is a community act – not a sticker slapped on the door based on some photos a week after opening. A good atmosphere is built as a collective responsibility – the bar makes a good martini, the crowd serves the rest.

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That’s exactly what makes art exciting. The thrill is that everything is at risk. This is fiction, after all, the world of the characters doesn’t actually exist and so can be broken. That’s the allure of it all – what brings audiences in, what makes more artists.

But more and more, that feels like its weakening. More and more, people keep tying art so closely to the real world that it risks being strangled.

A prime example? The conversation that claimed Sydney Sweeney was being degraded by Euphoria, the calls expressing outrage that she would agree to be in the positions she’s in during this latest season. The key fact forgotten is that Sydney isn’t in those positions, Cassie is. Sydney Sweeney is a high paid actor on a protected set with an intimacy coach, a team of managers and probably months prior of reading the script in order to prepare to be the person pretending to be in that position.

The discourse should be ‘is Cassie being degraded or degrading herself?’ but for some reason, it’s scandalised headlines, claiming Sydney Sweeney is being degraded, even that she is degrading all woman.

How do we get there? Seeming taking a huge leap as a first step, what’s missed in the space between is every single conversation the art and content could bring up.

As people freak out about the major role sex work plays in this season, they cast aside the real point. When are characters are a transwoman, a drug addict and a first-gen daughter supporting immigrant parents; sex work is a common mode of survival. As for Cassie; the already middle-class white girl hearing about OnlyFans as it hit the mainstream, seeing it as a magical cash-grab, represents its controversial broadened popularity. Sex work is everywhere, it is closer to you than you would think - discourse seems to forget this. The fact that so many characters exist within it, or in its orbit, is not all that shocking for their contexts. That’s what we’re supposed to be discussing.

But instead, conversation lands on ‘Sam Levinson is a pervert’ or ‘Sydney Sweeney has no self-respect’. Those conversations might have legs, but I’m uninterested in them. Instead, I’m mourning for what the audience seems unable to focus on.

I’m mourning for an audience who can be suspended in the non-reality and be curious about it. This inability to see actors and characters as separate, or put aside celebrity names to focus on the plot feels like the end times for great fiction. It also feels like a threat to the allure of art – where is the call to arms for creatives if the future reality is that everything they do will only ever be discussed through the context of buzz words and big names?

Where is the call to arms if the audience outright refuses to be made to feel uncomfortable?

When I learnt about that idea of the contract between writer and reader, I was studying The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald’s decision to kill off Gatsby, to slash all hope of any happy ending or any hope of the society Tom and Daisy represent, is not the ending the reader expects, or hopes for. We naturally hope for happy endings; nice, comforting conclusions. Gatsby floating dead in his pool is the uncomfortable reminder that we don’t always get them. That’s exactly what makes it impactful. It’s Romeo and Juliet over again - a contract fulfilled, an expectation denied.

If Romeo and Juliet was released today, you’d go on TikTok and find a fan edit of the couple with a comment section full of people claiming that Shakespeare is an idiot, that he ruined his own characters, that he left them down.

That’s what I saw the other day about Rue and Jules. A full comment section, hundreds and hundreds of people, all claiming that Levinson is a bad writer because their favourite couple didn’t get back together despite the fact that 1) Euphoria is not a love story 2) The entire point is that Rue’s addiction ruined any hope of that, the show focussing on how addiction utterly destroys lives. In any English class studying the show, they would be some of the first points made. Are we really so far from the exam hall? Did we leave all our deeper thinking skills there? Have we rotted our brains that bad?

While the internet has spent that last eight weeks in a fire storm of discourse claiming he did, Sam Levinson didn’t break his contract. Euphoria ended not only as it needed to, but beautifully with so many strings tied up so neatly. The repeating question of why a dealer would want to kill their customer got its answer with Rue, Ali’s book of names came back around, Cassie is surrounded by the flowers that got her, and Nate, into the mess. As we zoom out on a non-distinct house and an American flag, Rue’s voice saying only “god bless us all” is the final remark and the signing of the contract, neat and complete – it reminds us that Euphoria got batshit insane because America, and the world, is too.

But still, it’s been hard to even engage with that over the deafening choir claiming that Levinson, the writer and creator of Euphoria, somehow ruined Euphoria in this final offering. Under the noise, moving points are being made. In Interview Magazine, Levinson reflected poignantly on the decision to have Fentanyl ultimately kill Rue. For all of the incredibly rightful hate Levinson gets, what he was doing here feels important.

“When Angus [Cloud] died of a fentanyl overdose, I was so heartbroken by it because he was someone I deeply loved and tried to keep clean for quite a few years. But I thought, this is what 75,000 families are experiencing a year in the United States with fentanyl[…]I thought if I can mirror the devastation that a family can feel with losing a loved one to fentanyl, then it’s worth it.”

Through all of the absolutely insane brushes with death Rue goes through, in the end, she dreams of her mother keeping her plants alive, representing the hope she held onto that others maybe held out hope for her, then she dies, quiet and alone and by complete accident. Levinson even commented on the decision to not show her dead face. The show resists the urge to show big, dramatic, devastated reactions. Instead, Rue becomes a name in a book of the dead, a few tears, but ultimately, one of thousands upon thousands upon thousands.

Levinson is denying us something to make a point – just as he’s making us feel uncomfortable or shocked or disgusted throughout whether it be from Cassie’s giant tits or the gilded yet boring entrapment of Jules. These are things to think about, but in the absence of doing that, the noise simply says – ‘that was shit’ or worse, feels the feeling the show aims to create and refuses to engage with them.

The scandal surrounding Cassie’s plotline reminds me of another key example of the death of media literacy – Poor Things. When Yorgos Lanthimos’ film came out to the most mainstream attention the director had ever got, immediately people are raging against the movie, claiming it was disgusting and problematic. You didn’t have to go far into a comment section before you hit something like ‘this made me feel so uncomfortable I had to turn it off’ leading to a comment like ‘why would someone make this?’ Then there would be a wild leap, someone claiming that Poor Things is paedophilic.

It’s the Lolita controversy all over again – Lolita isn’t paedophilic, it is fiction about a paedophile made entirely to make the reader uncomfortable. Poor Things isn’t paedophilic or problematic, it is fiction, science-fiction, where Bella Baxter having the brain of a baby, developing in real time as she witnessing the darkness and light and corruption of the world, is quite literally the entire point. Euphoria is not an inherently degrading and problematic show because its characters are in arguably degrading positions. The very purpose of art is to question and challenge – how can it do that without depicting something uncomfortable? Without making the audience uncomfortable? Do we not get this by now?

No - more so than ever, uncomfortable art is treated as an affront. It is treated as bad art, as “jarring” and therefore shit.

I wonder if it all comes down to our phones. In a world of algorithms and swipes and 2x speed, we don’t have to linger long were we don’t want to be, and we’re coddled by things computers predict we’ll like. We can live in cosy worlds of our own making, choose our own adventures.

With film and TV, we are back to being a basic observer, denied any control. As the comment section complains about the lack of Rue and Jules as a couple, the fact of the matter is simply ‘tough shit’. You are not Sam Levinson, Euphoria is not your show. But the digital world seems to leave people throwing a fit over that, leading to things like webs of odd cosplay Instagram accounts where people pretend to be Gossip Girl characters and rewrite the ending by pretending Serena eventually ended up with Nate instead. Or, leading more simply to dumb take after dumb take, clutching at faux-moralistic or faux-intellectual straws about how the characters are treated, rather than stomaching that the writer simply didn’t write the character how you wanted it – the fulfilment of the contract wasn’t completed in line with your expectations, but it was, in fact, completed.

There is so much at play. The all-consuming noise of it speaks to the idea that everyone sees themselves as a critic, but won’t even pause a second to consider first.

People’s outraged upset when a plotline doesn’t go their way speaks to the rise of parasocial – the viewer wants to be involved because they think they have the right to be, they think they know best. The intense shock at things that really aren’t that shocking speaks to both the backslide into conservative culture and also the faux-intellectualisation and morality of everything and the idea that we’re now too ‘woke’ for our own good, and in that atmosphere, no art can be challenging or sinister or disgusting.

But overwhelmingly, it speaks to a boring and bleak timeline where fiction is limited. Imagine Rue and Jules get together, Rue gets clean, Cassie simply left Nate and made up with Maddy, Lexi works in TV – Yawn. Imagine every film and every tv episode and every book only ever goes the way you expect. Imagine every artist holding your hand and saying ‘okay, if that’s what you want’. Imagine no conversation about meaning, ever, because it’s laid out and clear just in case you didn’t catch it. Imagine nothing deeper, all to save your tired arms and distracted brains the effort of digging.

Keep this shit up. It’s what we’ll get.

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Launched in the limbo between Brat, where critics would claim she was nothing but a messy party girl talking into autotune about drugs, and the coming Wuthering Heights soundtrack, where Charli and Emerald Fennell would be painted out as an illiterate tag team with people claiming they surely hadn’t even read the book - She knew exactly what was coming.

Chances are, by the time she wrote this piece, ‘Rock Music’ was already in the can and the coming era was beginning to take shape behind the scenes. More so than any worry about sales or getting attention anymore, really the only thing Charli has to prepare herself for with each new move is the tired internet takes constantly thrown at female artists, where the baseline always lands at ‘she’s dumb’.

With Brat, those claims always had glaring omissions and surely could only come from people who didn’t listen to the full album, or refused to listen to it with any kind of intrigue. I’m unsure how anyone could hear ‘I think about it all the time’, a song where Charli unpacks the back-and-forth contemplations about having kids that any working woman does, and think the album lacks intellect or nuance.

Even with hits like ‘Sympathy is a knife’ or ‘Girl, so confusing’, these are not stupid songs. Sure, maybe the language used is simple, hyperbolic, but critics often wilfully forget the fact that it takes intelligence to take experiences and emotions like jealousy, or specifically a conversation about how the music industry is unwillingness to recognise the worth and autonomy of more than one leading woman, and put them in a pop song. As a fact, it is hard to write a good pop song - it takes skill. It takes smarts.

A critic out to tear Charli down will hear a lyric like “think you should come to my party and put your hands up” and switch the song off, roll their eyes and chalk her out as nothing but a vapid idiot. Real attempts at understanding an artist, real nuanced consideration, would consider the interplay in ‘Girl, So Confusing’, between Charli wanting to appear like the cool, unphased girl she’s depicted as, while revealing she’s the opposite. When she throws in a line like that, it’s the artist playing around with her own mask – ripping it off, putting it on, holding it out and looking at it, wondering what it all means, how much it traps her – which is also the entire premise of The Moment.

The building of the mask is something the public plays a role in building. Specifically, I’d argue that the constant conversations belittling Charli to nothing but a brainless party girl plays a major role in building it. It leaves stars with a choice; to be or not to be – to play into the role, or rebel, heavy, against it.

But, for women, that is proven to be a Catch 22. Play into it and they’ll take it as a confirmation that you are exactly that person. Rebel, and they’ll say you’re a phony.

Enter ‘Rock Music’. While there are plenty of voices screaming the absolute opposite, I’d claim that ‘Rock Music’ is the sharpest proof of Charli xcx’s intelligence.

The entire campaign around the sub 2-minute song is an inside joke against the critics quick to call her stupid. First, there was the clickbaity lines, carefully put to Vogue as a way to plant them in a profile she clearly trusted and had a level of control over, but knew other publications would pluck out of context. Laura Snapes, the writer of the piece and one of the best music journalists around, wrote the twee line “Charli xcx is ready for her rock makeover”, and the second I read it, it seemed clear that Snapes had been chosen for a reason, and brought in on the joke. In the piece, Snapes is carefully dancing around the music she’d making clear she’d listened to. The idea of rock comes up over and over, but if you read it back, you’ll notice that never once does Charli mention it, later writing on Instagram – “I never said I was making a rock album.” This isn’t Snapes taking her out of context. This is purposeful.

To whip up a frenzy making exactly those kind of music bros get their back up that party girl Charli xcx is about to break into their rock world, and then to release a song literally titled ‘Rock Music’ that’s about as long as a TikTok sound and pokes fun at the whole thing is ragebait – high art level of ragebait that will thrill her fans and probably give her a kick.

But there’s more to it than that. Quickly people started going on about how ‘Rock Music’ was a terrible rock song. Ignoring the debate on whether it doesn’t qualify for the genre, or what genre even means, the lyrics of ‘Rock Music’ is so blatantly joking about exactly that – “wow I’m really banging my head, I’m really hurting my neck,” she sings, taking on the voice of a first-timer. Talking about taking Instagram pics with her friends, thinking the trend of the ‘dancefloor is dead’ and making it out that she’s now just dipping over to rock as the new thing, packing the music video with cigarettes, leather and even a rare cameo from her rock star husband – she knows exactly what she’s doing.

This is a song where Charli is making it out as if she is exactly what her critics think she is. She’s taking the character they’ve written for her, and she’s playing it, and playing it against them.

All of it reminds me of Marilyn Monroe.

In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Marilyn Monroe is Norma Jean playing Marilyn Monroe. Her character of Lorelei Lee is a showgirl who needs money, and is using men to get it. She already knows that men are inevitably going to fawn over her, want her, exploit her. She already knows those men think she’s stupid – so she pretends to be, and basically robs them blind, batting her eyes to get credit notes and tiaras.

Throughout the film, Monroe’s comic timing is immaculate as it always way – though people rarely talk about that. Her character switches on and off based on who enters in the room, outsmarting them all with her chameleon-ing, and when watching it, it feels like watching exactly how Monroe herself acted.

Monroe was a woman with one of the largest private libraries in America at the time, who read philosophy textbooks and notedly got surgery and changed her look knowing it would advance her career and get her out of the harsh childhood she was raised in. When Norma Jean became Marilyn Monroe, she crafted the dumb blonde persona because she knew it was already there and ready to be used against her. When it was, she capitalised on it.

‘Rock Music’ feels like Charli’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Both are projects where the star plays on their public perception, mocking it in a way that makes anyone who doesn’t see that the butt of the joke.

To suggest that Charli xcx knows nothing about rock is insulting. To imply she is anything than a smart, informed, well-versed artist is insulting. Growing up performing at raves, selling a song she wrote at 14 to Blondie, building a powerful song writing career across genres, helping to pioneer hyper-pop and chance the sound of the mainstream when she cracked it, creating a global cultural phenomenon and earning the respect of her idols, including John Cale of The Velvet Underground, a band she has discussed loving for years – you don’t get all of that by being stupid or clueless. You surely cannot read that and still believe that she knows nothing about rock, and just released a shitty attempt at a rock song, rather than a purposeful half-mockery rooted in love and knowledge.

The problem is that you have to want to understand, you have to actually listen – you have to want to respect her. In the harshest take downs and the quickest brush offs, it always comes down to a lack of interest, lack of knowledge and a lack of motivation to do anymore digging. Instead, it comes down to a knee jerk reaction rooted in sexism– people are so desperate to claim Charli xcx is stupid, that pop stars are stupid, because pop stars are most commonly women, and the loudest voices against them will be men who think they’re smarter, or at least cooler.

Perhaps the reason why pop fans, and stars biggest defenders and documenters, are women is because we get that. Every girl knows well the power of playing stupid. The ditsiest girl in school is probably a lawyer now. She was never dumb - just playing the game.

But then the people baffled by that, or annoyed about it, would be men. After a photo of Marilyn Monroe was taken of her reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, despite the information about her love of books being easy to find, people passionately argued that it was staged to the extent that the photographer had to come forward and confirm that no, she was actually just reading the book – just about the finish it in fact.

Throughout history, in every vein and every lane, a woman’s intelligence will be doubted – but nowhere more so than in pop culture.

Who set that system up? Men. In a world where men have historically claimed to be the dominant and smarter sex, the desire to claim that female popstars are stupid feels animalistic, ancestral. But so too does the act of a woman using that, turning it against them, and winning.

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Throughout my own secular life, I can trace a pattern of God seeking. With every big, bad battle, curiosity in the idea of God sparks up. Each time, I chalk it up to her – her endless positivity, her hope, her trust. I look at myself and see quite the opposite, inclined to ever cruelly say about myself that in the face of hardships, I have overwhelmingly been weak – I have laid still and quiet, I’ve moaned and not screamed when I should have, I have never kicked. I think perhaps I was built defeatist and built sad and when I look at my family tree of antidepressants all around, I think of the apple of my aunty, the one given the toughest of all the fights, and I wonder constantly at the glowing, vibrant, joyful red she is always remembered as being.

I’ve always wondered if it was God. I wondered it at 12 or 13 when depression first put a tight grip on me and I tried first to soothe it when the catchy songs at an Americanised church on the industrial estate, going to the youth club and getting existential about what here was helping; whispering amen or just talking to people. At 19, I revised for my uni exams, heartbroken to the point of collapse but propped up on free biscuits in a warm church meeting room. At 25, I ate the body of Christ at the Sacré-Cœur while out of my own – at 27, more disassociated than ever, I decided to return and stay a night.

For over 140 years, there has been continuous prayer at the Sacré-Cœur – all day, all night, endless. During its public opening, the job is covered by the near 30,000 people that enter the building each day. But at night, there needs to be pilgrims – devotees, people with work to be done or need to be dealt with. When I read about what they call the ‘night of adoration relay’ for the first time, it struck exactly the cord the idea of religion always has – the idea of the all-night queue felt like a depiction of desperation, something active to do in bad times, god’s soldiers all in a line going to ask for a bit more strength for the battle.

I needed that, but I didn’t want to say that to most people, so I told acquaintances and colleagues that curiosity sent me – for €55 you can have dinner with the other pilgrims, a single room for a night and basically backstage access to the landmark. All you have to do is agree to pray for one hour.

After a bad week, I booked a trip.

At 4:45am, my alarm rang into the pale room. With a single bed, a desk and a broken crucifix of the wall, it fulfilled all the aesthetic desires of humble pilgrims’ quarters. From my window, I looked out over a view of Paris few get to see, but when I woke, it was all and only dark. Walking down the secret corridor that connects the guesthouse to the main landmark, all I could hear was the pad of my pink satin ballet shoes – a sartorial choice that, along with the sweatshirt I stole from a boy I almost loved, now felt silly. Through the heavy wooden door, the Basilica was cast in darkness except for a trail of little lights that lit certain looming corners of the decorative ceiling and guided a path down to the crypt where the night of prayer would happen. I paused at the top and noted that for the first time in several years – I was scared.

The crypt was busier than I expected. Lit by candles and low lights behind stained glass panels, I chose a seat in a pew on the left and felt guilty as the creak of the wood echoed.

Despite my forays into religion, I had never really prayed. At 13, when I’d begged my parents to let me get baptised, I don’t think I really, actually, ever did it then – only closed my eyes when instructed and thought how much I wanted to be part of this thing. On my night in the crypt, it was a Monday, and so the nuns’ day off, meaning I didn’t get the brief prayer tutorial other visitors reported getting. I’m sure if you’re already there on a pilgrimage, they assume you know how, but as I sat down in the silence, looking around the room at other people in various poses, some with their eyes closed and their hand clenched, some looking up at the Jesus statue hanging above the podium, others on their knees, I felt like a phony.

I didn’t bring my phone down, obviously. I wasn’t sure if I could bring a notepad, so I didn’t. But the man sat in front of me was shuffling through several bags of papers. Some had prayers written on them like cheat sheets, others were old photos. I wondered if people had passed on requests, as if this was a bag of gathered favours and perhaps he was here on behalf of a whole village. When I arrived, he already had a significant stack in what I came to realise was his completed pile, but then even when I eventually left, he was still going. Of all the people in the crypt, there were several who had been there before my time slot and seemed to have no intention of leaving until dawn.

On the other side of the aisle, I noticed a woman with a notepad and was distracted by jealousy. I considered, for a moment, leaving, going to get my own and restarting the timer. I thought that I could write prayer like a letter but then I thought, ‘isn’t that the problem?’ I am always elsewhere as I put where I am into word.

So I thought about that, and I guess that thought was prayer. Beginning with a quiet, internal hello, I was a cliché apologising to someone for my absence before going in with my first and loudest beg – please God, let me be present. Please God, let me stop with the constantly fear of losing anything I don’t freeze. Please God, let me stop looking at that woman over there, zoning in on the sound of her pen, and feeling complete jealousy.

I think if anyone sat for an hour in silence with no distractions and no devices in the modern age, it would end up close to prayer. After a time, your thoughts naturally turn deep and introspective and I zig-zagged topics, unable to keep a throughline in my internal conversation. Sometimes it was heavy, sometimes it was harrowing, I cried a little, and then sometimes it was nothing but distracted noticing of the room. I stared up at Jesus and tried to figure out if the heart on his chest was glowing red through my tired eyes or was actually painted that way. I looked at the tall candles and wondered if the church required them to be a grand sort of height, how short they’d have to get to be switched out and how long that would take. Routinely, I felt guilty and I felt sad – struck by the familiar feeling that so often comes with any hunt for something bigger – I felt like I was doing it wrong. Watching a woman I’d met at dinner collapse her entire chest onto the floor, her head on the stone, her back bucking with silent sobs, I felt everything I’d always felt about religion; moved, awed, confused, curious, and utterly jealous.

A week after it all, I sat in my living room with my friend Beth. I said I wasn’t sure if it was the distance from the event, my disassociation kicking in or what, but I think maybe I felt nothing. Looking at the leaflet I’d been given by the woman on reception beforehand but hadn’t read, Beth picked a quote from the page;

“The life of prayer is a life of faith, not of feeling. Being bored or feeling nothing during adoration does not mean that nothing is happening.”

Certain moments from the night stand out. The man at mass holding one frail arm up with his stronger one. Standing out side the Basilica at night, listening to ‘Both Sides Now’. The bright sunrise that lit the corridor as I left. The old woman on her knees by the alter for well over an hour, and the feeling in my own when I decided, once I knew my time slot was over, I would kneel on the wood until I physically couldn’t anymore, knowing at least then I’d have little bruises as proof that something had happened.

Overwhelmingly though, I find myself wanting to talk more about dinner.

20/4/26 – ‘Dinner at Sacré-Cœur’

“I’m realising that all omelettes are the same,” an old man called Pete from the Philippines says as we stay once the fruit salad is finished and the carafe of red wine on the table is basically empty. We stick around at the table talking travel, work and food – myself, Pete and his wife, a Parisian woman who is simply here for the night in between two days of work like a godly sleepover.

On my left, there was an Austrian family with two young kids, and an Irish mammy and daughter who have been here before. They’re before and after me in the prayer line so I can use them as timers. The daughter (I wish I could remember their names – I can ask in the morning if I see them) shared some blue cheese she’d bought with us all, passing it up and down the long table as food is shared family style…

…I already know something special had happened. I already know in a life of reflection I’ll think about that scene in the overhead lighting of a strange church canteen – the table of multigenerational, international strangers and the buzz of easy chat, thank yous and sweetness.

Is that not it? is that not godly love?

★

Out of everything, the dinner was the part I was most scared of, gulping a heavy mouthful of wine before I got the courage to go down to the dining room for 7:30, scared my lack of any real faith would be sniffed out and be seen to make a mockery of their own.

It’s a scientific fact that sharing food makes people more open. Passing round big jugs of soup, baskets of bread, trays of fish and vegetables, that was proven as the small cast of the night’s pilgrims chatted with so much ease. Thinking about the crypt now, no feeling rises in my chest. But if I think of Pete, taking his selfies with us all, think of hands around the table topping up each other’s water or wine, of the Irish daughter sharing her cheese or the genuine interest in the conversation, the light humour, the care in the sharing of tips for travels, I feel warm.

Feeling like an integral part of this odd cast, I felt more there than in the church trying to talk to God through what’s seen as the direct line. As I returned to London to the battles still going on, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the hour I spent prayer could be replicated in any silent hour anywhere; I’m sure it could still feel devote and therapeutic even if you did it in a sex club. The next night, I stayed in a hotel with porn on the walls, listened to the radio and drank a cocktail a friend set me through room service and I could call that divine.

So what? What is God for? A true, loud question amongst global destruction too brutal for any argument for an all knowing, all powerful, all loving thing.

But what about dinner?

It was really only when the dishes were all cleared away and no one left the table that I felt it – that this was God, this was surely it – nothing but community, like the cast at my aunty’s bedside, bring hard-to-find gluten free snacks. If God is love, he’s at dinner when you’re chatting free and easy despite the battle. When I feel it at Cafe Boheme, unpicking a knot with friends, when we all pile onto a double bed the morning after, when conversation breezes light and lovely with a postman, barista, stranger on the bus - Religion is surely in the laughter.

If you want to believe in this world, can there be another conclusion?

★

God is in the Sacré-Cœur, I know.
probably somewhere in the glowing heart of the crypt,
but clearer in the world of lit candles
for a world of private reasons,
the scent like bonfires and oranges somehow.

God is in the smile of the receptionist,
letting me double up on a time slot
because God is 24/7.
A silent room, the creak of wood,
I begged my knees to bruise.

God is in breakfast,
at the bottom of a bowl of coffee,
at the bottom of a beurre et sucre crepe,
just decadence in its simplest, drip down your fingers
after putting on lipstick in the light of sunrise, level with the window.

God is in the moments that make decisions,
like finding an old metro card already loaded

and going to the other side of the city just to eat a steak in the sun,
noting that there, you have no complaints.

God is in Pere Lachaise,
not in the dead, but in the lived drama,
towering angels, mossy stone,
collapsed and over grown, wisteria ruined.
God is in Edith Piaf being shown up by the floral display of her neighbour.
God is in the congregation so big they don’t even fit in the crematorium.
God is in the lily in the man’s right hand, in the cigarette in his left.

God is not in the tourist trap terrace views of the Eiffel tower,
but he is in the smile when a stranger hands another strangers camera back.

God is a French bar tender making a cherry martini,
talking about Scotland.

God is a green-haired girl called Lauren, God is a friendship,
God is a dinner table, God is the empty seat,
God is crumbs on cloth, wine-stained lip,
God is tiredness in eyes and feet.

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I’m purposefully saying Cassie here and not Sydney Sweeney, because Sweeney feels no where to be seen. Obviously, we are seeing her – this is her face, this is her acting, this is her talent. But her face gives way to the character. In this one shot, her eyes are painfully bloodshot and almost bulging from her face. Her forehead is strained and strange, capturing exactly how Cassie is clearly crumbling, her face desperate to give way into tears, but her will stopping it, keeping her literal muscles in a state of push-pull that spreads across her face, through her cheeks, her lips. She refuses to blink, even subtly flinches in panic when a tear does fall loose. Sydney Sweeney is giving her entire being over to the character in this scene, and really in this entire episode. She’s giving every single facial muscle she has, every inch of movement and control she has – all of it is being channelled. Sweeney’s talent exists in her manipulation of all that, her ability to turn character motivation into the slightest wrinkle by her mouth.

In this climate and after some less that favourable press leading to her being deemed MAGA Barbie, praising and defending Sweeney feels contrarian. But here, I couldn’t care less about Sweeney as a person.

Thinking simply about her as an actor, as an artist, this current series of Euphoria, for all its flaws and controversies, feels like seeing a performer on a master run. Cassie is hateable, loveable, loathable, all at once. She’s utterly pathetic and completely captivating, and all of it comes down to Sweeney not only knowing that character inside and out, but being complete devoted to it. Then, I’d argue, so much of it comes down to Sweeney’s devotion to her own face, and the recognition that her face is the ultimate tool of her craft.

“I have never gotten work done,” Sweeney said to Allure in 2025, “I am so scared of needles, you have no idea.” There are constantly comments that she’s had lip fillers, nose jobs, boob jobs – I literally could not care less, really. What is obvious from Euphoria is that Sweeney clearly has not touched her face. No one with botox could pull off a facial expression as pained as that wedding scene.

For proof, fast forward a few moments on. In a tense conversation, Cassie is confronted by her friend Heather who has just realised her and her husband load a lot of money to Nate, who has clearly lost it. To confront your friend at her wedding, to be in a state of rage like that, you’d have to be kind of manic, at least seething to a point of ugliness. As Cassie’s face is still contorting, now with tinges of bitchiness and embarrassment, Heather is still – because Heather can only look like Jessica Blair Herman, because Jessica Blair Herman, the actress, can’t move her face because of botox.

This is where the issue often hits a wall. This feels like something we shouldn’t talk about. We’ve spent so long trying to remove conversation about women’s bodies from cultural analysis and rightfully trying to quiet the critique of how women in Hollywood look, but there is danger in complete apathy. There is danger in turning a complete blind eye to the way that, overwhelmingly, our biggest stars are looking more emaciated by the day, not saying anything about it because now no one else would really dare, and if they did they could quickly be shut up with a retort of ‘I thought we were done with talking about women like this,’ playing the moral high ground card as they go on dangerously shrinking and shrinking beauty standards with them. Even though the way celebrities, as a mass, look and act trickles down to the everyman (read: woman) as new standards, expectations, even as how high street shops literally make and cut their clothes to the prevailing ideal body type du jour, we’re expected to not say anything.

It’s a nuanced and tricky line that, again, the balancing keeps us quiet. Even though the way women like the Euphoria leading ladies look does effect me in a broader societal way, I don’t care about how they look. My gripe with Herman isn’t her appearance – I have no real thoughts, or no interest at all in having thoughts, on if her botox looks good or if I think she looks beautiful or what. I especially don’t care to have thoughts on the way that intersects with age, and youthfulness, which is a whole other can of worms where people praise Sweeney’s untouched face as if it keeps her infantile. I don’t even really care to get into some big grand debate about whether plastic surgery as a concept is right or wrong.

What I care about is entertainment, my TV time, and Herman’s inability to move her face impacted that, weakening the scene, letting Sweeney down with a performance that could in no way match up to her own. I think this often – the way Babygirl would have been endlessly better if Nicole Kidman could have used her face to show Romy’s conflict, how Margot Robbie’s Cathy should have been painted in anguish, the fact that Ariana Grande’s performance as Glinda would have been so much stronger if she could move her face in more ways than just that one eyebrow thing she does, later thanking botox in her Palm Springs International Film Awards acceptance speech, as if it’s not the thing that will likely keep her from ever winning an Oscar. I think about Demi Moore, who gained new respect for her brilliant, ugly, contorting performance in The Substance, only to reappear the next award season thinner and with a freshly frozen face, leaving me to mourn that whatever role she takes on next just clearly will not be at good.

I won’t even argue that fact, or hear any arguments back. It will not be as good because how can it be if you’ve put a blocker on one of the most essential tools an actor has? How can a performance possibly be to the best of a person’s ability if there are physical limitations on their facial movements, blocking the true lengths of the human emotions written into the work – likely written for characters who don’t have 20 units of botox injected into their face every six months or so.

To be an actor is to use your body to tell a story. The issue with botox isn’t anything to do with appearance. The problem is that for the first time in Hollywood history, we are now seeing beauty standards impact the actual performance. This is no longer just an issue of celebrity culture or a tabloid issue – this is now a threat to art.

There’s another obvious threat on the rise – AI. Hollywood is luckily responding to that one as the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike was the longest in movie history, held, in part, to protect performers from the rise of AI manipulating and using their voice and likeness. In interviews, actors are rightfully talking about the worry of AI as we see news stories of generated actors like so-called Tilly Norwood. Actors are quick to respond to that with outrage, but I’m waiting for them to realise that perhaps the ultimate way to protest the rise of the computers is to keep their faces as human, as moving and as nuanced as possible.

When AI has a hard enough time still nailing the movements of a human hand, it’s got a long way to go before it could pull off generating a face like Sydney Sweeney’s puffy eyed, holding back tears, terrified, angry Cassie. I’m wondering when in the conversation about AI that will be realised. The strongest way to fight against the machine is to be soft, squishy, wrinkled. To be too real for it to even hope to keep up because a computer has never known feelings and so can never know the actualities of the way they translate in subtle, nuanced, subconscious ways to a face. It can understand the prompts someone tells it but only to an extent against its limitations – much like an actor, blocked by a few units of botox, or some stitches from a face lift.

When I think about my all time favourite performances, they really all come down to the humanity of a face. I think about Julie Delpy in the Before trilogy and the way she ages over the years but her expressions stay the same. I think about Kate Hudson’s smile in How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, the transformation of Charlize Theron in Monster, Mia Goth at the end of Pearl, Sheryl Lee shrieking as Laura Palmer. I think about the classics like the internal conflict of Holly Golightly captured across Audrey Hepburn’s layered expression, the mania of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. All of them as made brilliant by the actor’s moving face, and by the talent it takes to do that moving.

I think about the way stars all looked different and now don’t, how they already feel less human and less real because of that. I look down the barrel at how Hollywood, and art at large is at threat, from the machines, yes, but from the needles too as beauty overtakes devotion to craft more and more.

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I feel pathetic that there’s a strange empathetic reaction somewhere inside me. ‘Men are so desperate for community,’ I hear that voice whispering, as if these men are simply so lonely they had to join this group. Is that what women have been told to say? What we’ve all been trained to consider.

A few hours later I see somone desperately defending old men at gigs while female artists try to start a conversation about the way their front rows are always packed with men photographing only them. I see a TikTok of a man passive aggressively cutting into some sourdough bread his wife made and let him each, with the only requirement being that he at least filmed it so she could see how it had turned out. He mocked her and rolled his eyes as he did it. I repost the fact about the 62 million to my Instagram story and someone replies ‘I can’t even fathom this’, I reply ‘I know’ and in my gut its true – I feel absolutely nothing, I cannot fathom it.

About mid-day I feel a bubble of angry sadness though. The thought enters my mind that most men won’t know how this feels. I look at any social media app and I don’t have to go far before I’m reminded that I’m in danger and always will be. 62 million is close to the entire population of France, I think about that as I book my hotel for Paris next week. I think of my ex, as I so often do, still piecing together awful bit by awful bit, still dreaming about it all sometimes though now I’ve basically shut up about it.

I’ve basically shut up about all of it. I ghosted my therapist because I was exhausted of it, the constant saying of “I haven’t spoken about this in so long,” because when do we ever really? I don’t sit at dinner with my friends and rehash all the times the threat became real either physically or emotionally or sexually. We all just sit there knowing everyone has experienced it because they say 97% have but come on, who gets out alive?

And we don’t talk about it because what is there to do but nothing? I look at the news and I repost it to feel like I’ve acknowledged it in some way but I don’t really, because I can’t, because nothing can be done and slowly all it becomes is apathy.

It has to. I have grown so numb against experiences I know should be life shattering. I sit at bars and hear other girls say the same, whispering about some new attack and how they’re disassociated from it, or talking about Jeffrey Epstein for a while before eventually, we just have to move on when there is no conclusion.

We grow numb about it because that’s how it goes. Break a bone and keep irritating the healing and it just won’t fix, it’ll have to be cut off. The world keeps its fingers directly in our wounds and it’s barely even an infection by now, it’s just maggots all the time, just rot and dead, so I guess it doesn’t hurt.

We are not allowed to walk round in rage and we never have been. Should someone randomly grant us the permission, who would even scream? 62 million, that’s more than the entire population of England. Lie back and think of it, this whole country wants me subconscious and splayed out. Eat dinner, watch a film, go to sleep, wake up, all again. Maggots, sometimes phantom limb pain in the rare moments you actually really think about when he did that, and he and he and he. Maggots all the time, rotted to not being real at all. What else is there to do except nothing?

Why do I feel like I should apologise for saying anything about it at all?

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It hits me then. Not a slap or a punch. It hits me like a light tap on the shoulder, or at worst like the harsh bite you used to deliver to my bicep to announce your return with a beer in each hand, on a good night, with people around to impress with our affection. To impress with our seeming obsession with each other, blooming into my skin with teeth marks. It is 8pm, half way on the walk to Shoreditch, when I think of that photo – blue sky and lavender fabric against it. every centimetre of my skin looked happy and I am smiling and you can tell, though my face is thrown away from the camera, my hands just about to clap, and you, overjoyed. It was the first image my mother saw of you. She replied and said “Nice to see you both so happy. He’s handsome, I hope he’s nice.” In my bed next to me, eating ice cream that day, watching movies, you were.

Can I call you you a moment? Can I let the concept take your shape again? Can I balance that with prayers on evening buses to not see your form in a door way? Can I leave the nuance in understanding hands if I say too, I wish I could see exactly that? Feel exactly that ghostly tap, sit across a table, lean against that same smoking area wall. Then I would put the weight of the strangeness down - of the photos that line last year’s photo album and all the captions on the back written with love and hope, now of a stranger, who maybe one day people who look like me, and not at all like you, will ask about. I would put the weight of the strangeness down and simply listen to my music all the way to the cinema, talking to no one, rehearsing nothing.

When I think fondly of you, I go directly to your words and find a cure. I wish I couldn’t. Can I tell you that? Safely? Can I tell you that you were right? I didn’t love you as you were - I loved you as someone better. I hear that when I look for your voice somewhere in my gut, singing above my headphones, 8pm, 10:30pm as the girls chatter by the sink.

Can I lay it out? What do I do with the love that I couldn’t safely hold to any real form but sometimes still feel the weight of. I’d sit in a grieving circle with the other girls if I could but all of us would only look side to side at the empty palms of the other to see how solid each other’s almosts were, feeling oddly jealous of the brutality and the gore of the mess. I’d look down at my something still birth, something formless but still real and beating somewhere in it. Something only concrete in under-linings in books, something remembered in empty cigarette cartons and long dead and binned eucalyptus, and in the shadow that is still there on my thigh from when you bit me the night you met me and made a poem in just that.

It needs nothing else.

You bit me and it scarred. You bit me and it was bright red, I spent a summer bright red and purple and yellow, and now I am pale and clean and not where you remember me and not anything to you nor you to me. But there is a shadow on my thigh from the damage and I don’t even know how real it is. But I remember how the bruise felt.

Maybe that’s all it is. 8pm, half way to the cinema. I remember how the bruise felt.

But I’ve written all this before. Shoreditch, Holborn, Meersbrook, two roundabouts over from my childhood home though the location is hazy by now. “I’m rotted. I’m rotting. I’m scattered limbs I won’t go looking for. I’m dead there but I’m here, aren’t I. On the top deck of the bus and you’re here in Moorgate because I thought I forgot but I never seem to.”

I remember how the bruise got lines through it from my jeans, and how I never knew a bruise could even do that. But I’ve written all this before, just different images on a theme – the loss of love maybe always the same. “I let the thought exist in me as a weathering thing. Sometimes venomous, sometimes sad, always wounded lately, sure to steel in time but forever with a weak spot.”

I think I can find something beautiful in it, all the bones scattered countrywide, the gruesome map that’s a marker just the same. I think I can find something pretty now in the tripping and falling on the way to the cinema, but maybe it’s only because summer was in bloom in purple on my skin. The violet still romantic, the stain of colour against the silence of the death.

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The self-harm problem of my teens wasn’t something I really had to fight my way out of. I grew out of it, somewhere between wanting to show my body to my first boyfriend and Effy Stonem being the butt of the joke by third year of uni. It seemed to be the same for the majority of my peers, because in our youth, it was endemic.

In the midst of my early teen hood, I think I thought of myself as one of a few afflicted. The few included my best friend, who taught me how to crush cheap pencil sharpeners under the leg of chairs at school to smash the plastic away from the blade. That came after she taught me how to bite the rounded end off a hair clip to reveal jagged metal underneath. We followed each other’s anonymous Tumblr accounts, re-blogged the same black and white GIFs of wounds, talked to strangers online, walked to school in a drama of how to hide cuts under trendily rolled up sleeves, and drew butterflies on each other’s arms, signing our names on one another with a promise to not hurt them even though the entire point, really, was that we would.

It’s not that I wasn’t depressed – I was. Over time I’ve come to see it as the onset of a familial affliction that in fact isn’t rare at all, couldn’t be further from rare. But I went through the motions; wrote my mum a letter, got referred to CAHMS, got called an attention seeker, smothered my arms in bio-oil and, basically, kept it moving.

In hindsight, the more intense eye of the storm of my problem is the least interesting bit. The times when harming myself was a regular and all-consuming thing make sense when I was deep in the wild west of Tumblr and the entire thing was one big competition, similar to the toxicity of pro-ana forums where illness is sport. Nothing will make things worse like having a friend in the same boat and in the worst period, before my mum took my access to the internet away for a good while, the cuts on my arm were the markings of a team, egging each other on towards what was seen as the ultimate dare – cut vertically, bleed out, like those GIFs of Skins season 4 episode 5, or Hannah Baker in 13 Reasons Why.

That’s the least interesting bit now – I understand that teenage girl but I don’t really feel her inside me, too grown up now to fall so in line to what was basically an online trend.

I mean, did you even come of age in the 2010s if you didn’t dabble in a bit of self-harm? Between Sia’s ‘Breathe Me’, American Horror Story and the crippling underfunding of mental health services reaching a fever pitch, we were a generation seemingly breed to want to get rid of our selves. It was so endemic that I, perhaps wrongfully but admittedly, assume everyone around me can relate. I’m writing this assuming that really, it’s not that big of a deal – people will get it.

The interesting bit is the way it rears its head long into adulthood, long into recovery, and long into the safe trust that I will never do it again – said as confidently as anyone can say anything about these sorts of things.

“I run towards it, to evil boys in basement venues, to galleries exhibiting the ghost, tube map areas and Instagram profiles. God how I loved the blades.”

“…to hear your voice and be cut by it and still call for more.”

“I think I want to cut my hand and hold the wound on yours to it.”

“I have cut myself open, bloodied my fingers keeping the wound wide as a window, pouring in bleach to keep it clean and clear to view.”

“I’d paper cut and paper cut and paper cut on gift wrap until I was red raw and split open, stay that way until February and then finally heal when it can feel proper with trees to refresh alongside me.”\

Time and time again, self-harm crops up in my writing. It crops up in all writing as the idea of wounding yourself, cutting yourself open, bleeding for something is a timeless metaphor going back as far as the romanticism of Jesus with nails in his hands, priests self-flagellating, Shakespeare writing Julius Caesar and having Portia cut a “voluntary wound, here, in the thigh.” It is perhaps the ultimate symbol of self-punishment and even devotion in a lot of ways, even if the thing the person is devoted to is merely depicting their own mental pain.

It comes up over and over because of a simple fact that is often hard to reckon or reason with – self-harm makes complete and utter sense. Self-harm is scientifically proven.

Unlike other damaging addictions, like drugs or alcohol, that provide an escape, self-harm is really an instant out of a spiral. In our brains, the pathways that handle physical and emotional pain overlap, especially the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex which are key structures that essentially deal with external stimuli, both emotionally and cognitively – which means everything from tough mental situations and say, an itchy jumper that’s pissing you off. These things are basically knotted together, so if you hurt yourself, sparking the physical pain pathways, it’s like they strangle the emotional one, or blast it quiet.

At the same time, the spike of adrenaline is releasing endorphins which are sent out to neutralise the pain, but also give a boost of good feelings. And then, on top of all of that you have the fact that human bodies jump to react – when your skin feels pain, everything wakes up.

Under all of that, depression or anxiety or feelings of numbness stand no chance. Suddenly, you’re in the room and you’re sentient, your body gives you no way to escape as it keeps you alert. There aren’t any more black clouds, your body is too on fire.

Writing all of that sounds like an endorsement, but obviously its not. The endorphin spike is what leads to addiction, leads to a completely dysregulated stress system and leads to an inability to let your emotional pathways do their job without wanting to speak over them. It also leads to injury and while I got out safe and fine, we cannot ignore that so many don’t if the pattern is never broken and is left to only worsen when that demand for sharpness wants more and more, and the desire to wipe yourself out is growing with it.

But the fact remains – it makes sense. Thing of tens machines that send little electric shocks through your body, sparking your pain receptors as a form of literal pain relief. Pain in one place eliminates pain in another, and it works for the mind too.

I’m curious too about how that connects to the fact that overwhelmingly, self-harm has been thought of and branded as a girl’s affliction. In films and TV shows, its almost exclusively young women and teenage girls doing it. Secretary comes to mind as an interesting example, as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lee Holloway cuts herself until she gets that sparking feeling from BDSM instead. In the film there’s an awareness that Lee needs to stop actively wounding herself, but her boss, and lover, E. Edward Grey, seems to understand that she needs that sensation to keep her going, keep her productive and keep her from falling into mania again as the film begins with her leaving hospital.

I’m curious about the branding of self-harm in culture as a thing that keeps a cap on further insanity, as a bandage that’s bad but not as bad as a truly raving mad woman. It is a quiet and calm and private form of violence – and in that way, it is deeply ‘feminine’. I’m curious about the fact I can brand and talk of my attack on my own body as ‘casual’, brush it off as epidemic amongst my mostly female friends due to its glamourisation, and I’m curious how much of that is a modern Yellow Wallpaper, Tumblr our infirmary and this mass-craze of mutilation a way to keep the mad girls at least quiet in their madness, at least a little coquettish about it.

On a bad day, when the clouds are all over me, I find myself analysing this – not craving it anymore, just thinking on it. I think of my younger self in those moments when a spotlight always seems to shine on that old coping mechanism, more as a remembrance than any sort of desire. Now I sip a coffee I buy myself, go for a walk, call a friend, or maybe run my wrists under cold water as the closest thing. But I still think often about how I use to harm myself, noting the knowledge that it helped, that it would help in the moment, wondering if I only think that because of 2013 Tumblr, or because of Shakespeare, or because of science.

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They look at me and I lose my place, forcing me to rewind back. To the beginning of ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’ when the tambourine kicks in, to the bridge of Geese’s ‘Mysterious Love’, to the best bits of any given track I’m rinsing at the moment; Lonnie Gunn’s ‘Dog In A Hot Car’, Imogen and the Knife’s ‘Mother Of God’, Dora Jar’s ‘No Way To Relax When You’re On Fire’. I can’t miss it because I’m busy – I’m literally the one performing it.

A star walk is stage time. The cue comes and I’m ready. I’ve never listened to a song on a walk and not cast myself as the artist.

“DO YOU LOVE TO FANTASISE ABOUT BEING GREAT?”

“So how many of you when you were younger, and even still today, when you’re listening to a piece of music that you really like, you fantasise and imagine that you’re performing the music in front of people and that you’re impressing people?” I gasp a little. That’s the specificity. On my star walks, I’m the performer, I’m viewing myself through the crowd’s eyes but specifically, I’m almost always viewing myself through the eyes of who ever I fancy at the time. This is their first time seeing me perform, maybe no one even knew I was a performer like this is some Hannah Montana moment. But the key, each and every time, is that they’re amazed, and I’m amazing.

I listen. Not even on 2x speed, I listen – “That is a very, very, very well know psychological defence against an inner core fragmented sense of self.” Oh. The man on my screen lays it out; a solid sense of self is one that trusts it is good and all is well. A fragmented sense of self bounds endlessly between feelings of self doubt, of insecurity, of worry that everyone thinks your weird, and of believing that people will only like you or care if you’re good at something, but the mistrust that you’re good simply as yourself is too weak. It’s splintered along those lines and he says that makes it too uncomfortable to merely sit with yourself because you fear being ordinary and insignificant. So you put music on, and even in the act of listening to that music, you’re casting yourself in a role you see as better by imagining yourself being great, and specifically – imagining yourself impressing.

I swipe and distract myself with the itching notion that I’m proving him right. Then the next morning, I go for a walk and the story is back.

When I listen to male artists, it most commonly goes like this. I’m performing the songs in a small venue at a mysterious show. These are still the band’s well-known, famous songs, like say, The 1975’s ‘Robbers’, but here I am, singing them at my favourite local venue at this odd one-off gig where the band are backing me up, because the revelation is about to drop that I actually wrote these songs. I’ve never quite pinned down a reason; maybe something about how I was so young and I didn’t want to be defined by some famous male musician, but the truth is out now – Matty Healy didn’t write that hit I’ve loved since I was a teenager, I actually did, and now I will get my recognition.

I clock myself and think – ‘I’m insane’.

Now analysing myself like a therapist, there’s so much to say. The man on my phone screen already made sense of the insecure desire for greatness and recognition and the reasoning behind fantasising it into reality as a frantic comfort blanket to an uneased mind.

But the sting brings up another line, one I can’t pretend I sing because my friend Nancy does – “sinking my nails into the backs of men who kind of made it, screaming ‘take me with you’”.

I can’t ignore the fact that every man I’ve ever loved has been a musician. I can’t ignore that I have never loved anyone without standing in a darkened room watching them under the lights and going googly eyed with admiration. I can’t ignore the fact that I’ve made a career out of a form of that same kind of worship, bought a ‘groupie’ t-shirt and wore it in the press area calling it ironic. I can’t ignore the my life-long yearning for greatness has taken many forms, through a childhood desire to be on the West End, a teen-hood spent teaching myself Taylor Swift songs on guitar, and then a settling here, striving to be seen as a Writer and an Artist with capitals and respect, but yet always feeling like I fall short of the men I lay next to.

When I was 24 I sat in a therapist office and said it outright. I was already working full time as a music journalist and my boyfriend at the time was working as a session musician and we’d spent our weekend at at a party, and then hungover from a party, at a recording studio with a producer and his harem of artists. When demos started to be played, I gave my complimentary opinion on one, talking reference points, and I’ve never felt stupider. Then a band of boys began talking about how it is to be ‘an artist’, about creative processes and the way being in the creative zone feels, I stayed silent. One of the woman made eye contact with me and I remember smiling a little shy smile and I remember my mouth tasted like vermouth and I remember thinking I was going to throw up in the taxi home while my boyfriend felt happy, excited, to have finally fully established himself in this crowd.

I cried to my therapist that I wanted to be taken seriously, seen as an artist too. I cried that even my cool job seemed to put me in a different place, like I was in music but in a factual kind of way, an analysist on the side, writing in a way that was only a skill. I cried that I didn’t seem to be in their realm where my writing was an art form and I was in those magical leagues. Mostly I was crying because I felt like they got to be great, I got to be good – and no amount of achievement or ability or success would change it.

At the time, I chalked it up to those people – that ex who was never really artistic in a flouncy or spiritual sense in the world, but was just very good at guitar and very good at crafting music. I told myself that I wasn’t being allowed to truly feel like an artist in a Patti Smith type of way, or some freewheeling type of way when we’d spend every evening watching Netflix limited serieses.

But then we broke up, and I felt better for a while, and I wrote a lot and then I got another boyfriend who was that woo-woo kind of artistic and I felt the same and no amount of him introducing me to friends as a writer or doing speeches about how much he liked my work at the start of things changed it. It eventually ended up in the same place; he sat in my garden playing guitar at me asking my advice, he asked me for work contacts and my help with music stuff, I checked my Substack subscribers list and despite claiming he’d been a fan for a long time, his name wasn’t on there. I stood under the lights of his gig barely able to breathe with admiration. I knew in my gut that if my novel was published this week, he wouldn’t read it.

Imagining yourself singing along to songs as if you’re the artist is a sign of a fractured sense of self the man said. I could sit here and rip myself to shred about how my case feels even more pathetic as its so male-centred, craving that specific kind of respect and admiration as an even deeper sign that my foundation is cracked.

But I think by now I’ve come to chalk not feeling like an artist up to men, full stop. Men as a machine and the way the image and ideal of an artist has been made in their shape – staying up all night writing with whiskey, running reckless, taking risks, going all in all the time, completing a whole manuscript over-night. Artistry has been shaped into ex boyfriends drunken and yelling and egotistical, kicking walls backstage and then swaggering onto them limping before the adrenaline makes them forget it hurts. Artistry has been shaped into the misunderstood boy with the long hair in the producer’s basement, his rich family’s money burning a hole in his pocket, but somehow his angst and his cheekbones hide that. Nature poets telling me to not use “I”, modern day beat poets leading punk bands, pretty boys reading pieces about feminism over piano music. Hunter S. Thompson, Ted Hughes. Bob Dylan is a god, Cameron Winter is his next of kin. Cast Paul Mescal again because he can cry, tell the popstar she’s “overexposed” and please talk about MJ Lenderman again!!

I cannot be like that – I am tired and bleeding and have to be home before it gets too dark and if I take myself on a solo writing trip I need to be careful in that bar and if I talk about my work with sincerity and seriousness I will never see you again and if I suggest a better lyric, I’ve hurt you and you’ll go quiet. But I want to be. I so badly want to be like that.

“Decentering men is impossible when you’ve had your center cracked by one,” a woman on my phone screen wrote.

So I’m singing Matty Healy’s songs in my head and they’re mine, because I was too shy to start a band and I grow shier and shier by the year – “digging my nails into the backs of men who kind of made it”, going on a star walk to air out the cracks in my sense of self, wondering what's to blame, wondering where to start with cementing.

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There’s a congregation at the foot of my bed on a random weeknight and they’re whispering a plotline into my ear. I can always tell the chapter by their outfits – 2022 is full of purple and leopard, 2023 pinstripe and small, 2024 mildewed and worsening and worsening. 2025 is MOA. I wake up and spit out some fabric knowing you, one of you, was here. So I’m playing Tetris with my life, getting it all under my finger nails and coughing on the end of 2021 when I was a whole other girl.

I kept writing my death scene from this side of the bed. I can’t stop thinking about it as I dust things…

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2022 – a word doc titled, ‘Widowing’

“What is it about sheets that make me a liar again? When we watched that series in august, there was a distinct feeling every night that I was hiding my death. Like there was a body under the bed while I lay around in my underwear, and the heatwave could only hold the smell for an hour at a time. One touch and I’d confess, and I pulled the straps up onto my hip how he likes and prayed his fingers would ask.

I don’t want to make him an infidel but I think he’s been fucking someone else since last September. I hide in the corner of myself and watch for as long as I can, hoping I’m still warm and wet, trying to remember how I used to close myself off to the friction of skin and let my body be a tap. I wish I didn’t have to think about that – and that thought ruins the act. I’m cold and grey when I notice myself in the bathroom mirror. I’m the sexiest corpse swallowing tears like secrets, daydreaming about-

-He keeps finding the corners I hide in and touching me there. I’d pay far more to love it. Once I debt collect my limbs back from Peterborough, I’m going to rock his world. I’ll know how to moan for real when I find my throat again and until then I’m talking to him in Green Park, I’m kissing his cheek more than his lips, I’m making him dinners like the potatoes are poisoned with a love potion, and I’m making him a widow every night, laid like a doll while he searches for my body.

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Note to the eyes: you won’t know where I am anymore.

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…I’m packing up boxes around the corpse and trying to be okay with it and trying to figure out how to tell my friends I’m not. It’s ridiculous because it’s not there. I’m not there, there isn’t even space for me. I’m here - whole and alive and 27 and thinking things and dancing and laughing with all the people I love now that I didn’t even know then.

But I died I death in this bedroom a million times over. I died for real three times. I died properly once, so properly I decayed and I wrote a novel about how sure I was that everyone could smell it, so sure that he came to set fire to the body to get rid of the lingering, so sure that a big part of me is a ghost now, which is why it’s so hard to put into words because I’m only really imaginary…

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A selection of playlist titles, 2021 to today:

Beep beep vol. 2, 3 and 4 - collaborative
That Sunday
Onward yay!!
Everything is supposed to be fun for me
Songs for my niece
Afters with the fantasy
Soundtrack to a crush
Justified
Book
Book refresh
Costa del Dalston
Bruises
Nothing nice to say about that
Book 2

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…But then sometimes I think I feel the dent of my hip in the mattress when I lay on my right. It’s the dreaming side. On my left, that part of my brain is crushed and can’t breath enough, keeps me here with the gash of light under the curtain and the replaying memory of a man pointing out that he can see me through there, if he crouches just so. On my right, in the mould of myself, I have rested for years in stories lasting months. Stories that have seen me age. Stories with cadence timed to my right hand tapping my left shoulder. A rhythm of its okays. Resting footsteps through the times when it wasn’t but I kept living and I kept living in that room.

I keep asking the walls how I pack up and leave her. The walls say nothing and never really have. I write regardless, she whispers over my shoulder, she sits like weights on each knuckle, she cramps the base of my wrist, she twists my veins into an ache at the end of a long day. I will unpack my bags, think to hold a seance but likely find her already waiting there setting up a desk.

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Scents:

Lush Karma, lavender fading over time, cheap incense, burning plastic, garlic down the hallway, eye-stinging oven, paper set alight, damp, dehumidifier dry, sex, spilt wine on the counter on Sunday morning, cinnamon for prosperity and hot water poured clockwise, rose, whatever they mix with rose in that & Other Stories shower gel, the perfume Ele wears, the perfume Sophie wore that summer, church candle at Christmas, whatever it is on me that he remember for years and that followed me from that city to this

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The man at the shop smiles at me. He has smiled at me several times a week for more than four years now, and I’ve smiled back. I think about telling him I’m moving, wonder if he’ll notice I’m gone. The pile of books I left outside my door an hour ago had already disappeared. I note with my key in the door how this could have all scared me so much more before. Mum reminds me the body can’t tell the different between fear and excitement, so I leave it at that.

I’ll put my keys through the letter box. I might tattoo the number on me as a homage to the way I lost my grip on memory here.

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