My friend Martin and I have been talking a lot lately about YouTube essays, specifically what he’s coined self-help essays. You know the ones, promising an alteration of perspective so profound, your life will change, delivered in, ideally, under 20 minutes. I have a couple dozen of these videos saved on my “Watch Later” playlist on my YouTube account, bookmarked during times where I feel a surge of wanting to make things better, before falling into another pit of paralysis and uselessness.

A few examples of videos I’ve saved over the years: “the paradox of being ambitious but lazy”, “The BEST Productivity Method Ever for ADHD”, “How to Enter Your ~Discipline Era~”, “Write Notes Like Joan Didion”, etc. etc.

However, the videos in question that Martin had linked me1 is called “you want to be everything so you become nothing | the paradox of choice” by nina montagne and it actually was one of the things that helped me push through with my search for full-time work. (This isn’t the place to distill the contents of the video, but I’ve linked it above in case you wanted to also be inspired to commit.)

Anyway, another video was called “how to make yourself do it: 100% success rate,” and the creator, Gabby, essentially speaks about making it as frictionless as possible to reach your goals. It bears saying that it was a great watch and was very encouraging, in terms of making your goals feel achievable, essentially through doing small steps.

So, reducing friction. What to do?

All of us have different sort of levels and quirks when it comes to getting things done. This is very apparent, especially with the amount of hacks, planning systems, routines popping up online, even after the rise of GTD — can you believe I just used to carry around a stack of index cards as a planner and made it work? — and the Bullet Journal. I think what Gabby’s video really helped me with was demanding honesty from me, right off the bat.

Determining what I do now vs. what I’d like to be doing presents a clear difference, and locating that difference makes it easier to think of ways to change them, no matter how small the step is.

Here are a few things that have helped me lately, divided by arbitrary categories.

HEALTH

My goals for health are very simple. Eat more whole foods. Make it so that I don’t dread the clean up after cooking. Don’t order takeaway. Move more (we’re still working on this one).

1. Make a Fibre Jar — this is the easiest thing. I add sesame seeds, flax seeds, pumpkin kernels, chia seeds, and sunflower seeds in a small jar. I give it a shake, and I spoon a generous amount over food I’m going to eat anyway. You add fibre, texture, and plant variety to your diet instantly.

2. Find one-pot recipes — a recent favourite has been a one-pot Hainanese chicken rice recipe from [@cassyeungmoney] on Instagram. I made it twice last week. Minimal prep and active cooking time (especially if you utilise a food processor or microplane), easy to adjust levels of oil and sodium, easy to clean up after.

3. Write expiration dates on the fridge — I put the expiration dates on produce (especially meat and protein) on our fridge door so that I don’t forget what we have, and also because it dictates what I need to cook first.

HOME

I didn’t grow up doing chores, which probably makes me a spoiled child lol, but the wakeup call when I moved overseas? Deafening. I do like doing housework (it clears out my brain and calms me down when I overthink), but sometimes the rest of your life catches up to you, and now you live in a dump again.

1. Clean As You Go — Obvious, but effective. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the dishes piling up all around me. It’s the worst because it’s a REMINDER of your failure to be a typical functional adult. Another reason why it’s the worst is because it’s so much harder to wash the dishes when every dirty pot, pan, cooking utensil is piled up all around you.
   
   So, now, when I cook and there’s a waiting time (for things to boil or sear or reduce), I just do some of the washing up. Just finished folding the laundry? Put it away. Did a food shop? Put it away. Unpacking the tote on the dining table does not count.

   1. Clean As You Go, mini version — whenever you leave a room and there’s something that doesn’t belong in that room, take it with you and make the world right.

2. Time yourself — One of the things I also hate is putting away the clean dishes. Sometimes, when I put the kettle on or there’s an ad on the YouTube video I’m watching, I race through the putting away and realise that it took no time at all.

3. Make the bed — When the bed is made, I’m deterred from climbing back in for the rest of the day.

PERSONAL

This is a bit general, but this category is for addressing some deep behavioural and attitudes I have. Again, be honest with the kind of person you are and the bad habits you have cultivated over the years, and then think about what would realistically help you to not be that person.

1. Have a place for everything — Remember: this is about reducing friction! And I have observed that a major reason why I don’t do the things I intend to do is because these things are always, somehow, in an inconvenient place. I want to complete my 5-year-journal as best as I possibly can, so I put the journal by the bed with a pen I like to use. I want to read more, so I have my Kobo reader under my pillow. I want to drink more water, so I use a flask instead of a glass so I don’t have to fill it up every single time, etc. etc.

2. Plan your outfits in your head — This probably sounds dumb, but it helps me calm down about future events. I don’t lay the clothes out for the next morning or whatever because that stresses me out, but I do ruminate about what to wear a few days or hours before said event. If it doesn’t work, then I make a swap, but thinking about it ahead of time does relieve untrue thoughts of “I have nothing to wear” and the panic that ensues.

3. Plan your day as if it’s your worst day — I have insane energy fluctuations, and I am a fool that says yes to everything. I’ve limited my “big” tasks or events to 3 a day now, and if there is no room for a new thing, then there is no room. This was a hard transition at first, but being honest with my capacity as a low energy person definitely helped alleviate the inevitable guilt and shame that comes with being unable to deliver or show up.

4. Habit stacking —A classic, because it works. Say you want to lessen bedrotting. Get out of bed, make your bed, put on the coffee machine, write your morning pages: ta-da! You’ve now started your day. The completion of each action signals another action, or should anyway, and before you know it, you’ve completed the morning routine of your dreams. Friendly reminder: your phone does not belong in this stack!
   
   I’m so bad at this, but it does work so well when you just try and not reach for your phone, first thing in the morning. Do I mostly do it under the guise of “checking the time”? Yes, and now, I’m trapped.2

STUDIO PRACTICE & WORK

1. Just get ready — Jumping off the above: those habits are stacked and that stack signals your brain that you’re getting ready. I dread getting ready, especially with the idea of having to do something, time so by getting ready regardless, I have eliminated this weird psychological aversion I have to getting ready.
   
   For me, “getting ready to go to the studio” is a very big block. Sometimes I spiral about the thought of getting ready so much that I don’t even realise that I’d been finding other things to do, and then it’s 4 p.m., which is an unreasonable time to head out to go to the studio and attempt at some semblance of doing work. Just get ready. It doesn’t matter if you’re going to be staying in all day. The point is that if you needed to head out, you won’t be trying to avoid the getting ready part.

2. Make it granular — As you can probably tell, get very easily overwhelmed by Big Tasks. I like to break them down into really, really small tasks. Like, stupid small. And I get a dopamine hit crossing off those small tasks. “Write a book” is obviously way more daunting than “finish writing one chapter.” Heck, “Finish writing one paragraph” is good enough, honestly. Is it a small step? Yes, but it’s a step that you actually took.

I feel like we expect way too much from ourselves, and it’s hard not to. When your primary thought often is “how do I pay my rent and feed myself next month?”, the driving force is, obviously, trying to earn money. And the job market is bleak. And the things people seem to place value on are, in the kindest of words, strange. And this weird environment perpetuates overconsumption. Even though we literally cannot afford to be buying more stuff, both financially, and just general human capacity. And this disconnect and dare I say, despair, makes you feel so incredibly far and detached from everything else in your life that it feels impossible to move forward in the ways that feel valuable to you.

And like, maybe these are silly little tips. The world is burning, and your voice feels impossibly small. How can you think about self-improvement when there are wars and injustices you don’t feel like you can actively contribute to righting? How can you even think beyond trying to survive within a system that rewards people who constantly seem to break people like you down?

Making a fibre jar feels quaint, in the face of everything else. But it is an action that takes care of you and your body. And I think that these tiny acts of trying to better your life is an act of resistance, no matter how small.

Share

Naturally, when I wanted to kind of get better at learning how to make content that performed well on social media metrics, I looked into some courses… and then was subsequently bombarded with ads for similar programmes. While the course I ended up purchasing wasn’t exactly completely aligned with what I envisioned for myself in the content creation realm (and TBH, TBD on what that is anyway because cringe aside, I don’t know if I can, in good conscience, pursue an influencer consumption route, but that’s another story), some parts of it were useful in how I approached this new fixation on “creating value” and “engaging others” instead of just constantly talking about my personal life.

I’m on the journey of getting an ADHD assessment (as in, I have submitted a request for a GP referral for a Right to Choose scheme and have an appointment booked in… in two weeks time) but I have never met a hyper-fixation that I couldn’t clock. And “content creation” has been a big one for me, in that I wanted to make carousels on Instagram that were interesting and not necessarily about me yapping about my life, which is what I’ve mostly done on there thus far. A natural progression from relentlessly blogging from 14 years old, if I do say so myself. What I noticed was that a lot of these tactics of making money off of this are just so MLM.

If you’re new to the world, MLM means multi-level marketing, which is basically a corporatised way of saying “pyramid scheme”. If you’ve ever been approached to buy goods to sell to people you recruit who in turn sell more product, and therefore then offsets your initial investment. But then, they have to offload their own investment, looking for their own recruits, and when they don’t, they’re stuck with unsold products and unrealised dreams of wealth.

(This is also the model, I realised, of our evangelical “strategy” at my old church where we were expected to lead a group of 12 — because Jesus had 12 disciples — who then lead their own group of 12. But, again, that’s another story for another day. Maybe.)

And, like, there are courses that actually try and help you get to where you potentially want — ALL YOU NEED IS A HOOK, GOOD SEO, ETC. ETC. — but I’ve come across some (too many, really) that flaunt a certain kind of “passive income” that preys on unsuspecting people who want to try and earn money doing something on the side. I don’t know what your algorithms look like, but it’s usually a text overlay over a video of someone doing something leisurely like lounging on the beach, travelling the world, or enjoying a matcha (because of course) that says something like, “I made $127,540 while on holiday selling this PDF-or-app-or-Claude prompt to suckers (like you). Click below to set up your own system. No coding, just vibes.”

Personally, a well-structured programme is different from selling “low-ticket” PDF files or methods that essentially give you a formula to dupe other people into buying a repackaged version of the how-to guide you just checked out on. I’ve bought a lot of courses that are not 100% helpful — and hello, my masters tuition has decidedly given me zero ROI — but that doesn’t mean they’re completely useless. I’ve learned something, just not earned something at the expense of other people’s hard-earned cash and desperation eagerness to earn more.

And, like, I’m not against automation as a concept. I love automation. One of the best things I introduced into my workflow as a designer who had to batch edit a crazy amount of photos in different sizes for socials (lol) was custom Actions on Photoshop. I think when you use psychological tactics to hook people into buying something useless to pass on to others who will then make more useless “vibe coded” apps and PDF files to peddle to others, ad nauseam. When does it end???

To be honest, probably never. It’ll probably get worse.

I understand the appeal of easy money. Like, why would I put in three times as much effort to make a fraction of what these modern-day snake oil salesmen make? That’s just been an attractive option since time immemorial. Like, I get it. I get that life is hard, and you want to get your bag and actually enjoy life, or even be able to afford good groceries and whatnot without spiralling into a panic attack over which brand do get because the other one is 20p cheaper per litre.

My (quickly deteriorating) dream has always been to own property and actually feel settled in a place, but that’s literally never going to happen with an on-site 9-to-5 at £36,000 before taxes. It’s probably not going to happen at all, to be fair. But, the scumminess of the language of how they hook people into this model of wealth generation is still so icky to me, and no matter how much I dream of a place to call my own — unfortunately in one of the most expensive cities in the world, possibly on the brink of total economic collapse — I can’t bring myself to extract money from people this way.

I’ve had to ask myself: how different is this business model, really, from shilling unnecessary stuff to people, though? I’ve worked in marketing for way too long, and no one needs to purchase a pair of trousers for £400 or a bikini for close to £200. But, my job was to make you think you had a gap in your closet (and potentially, your heart) that these products could fill. We all know Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and if we haven’t even addressed the fundamental layers, I don’t think a sample sale visit is going to fix anything deep.

Essentially, what bothers me is that making money using this method is often contingent on you suckering people into buying your generic, AI-generated get-rich-quick scheme, who then have to look for other people to buy into it. A bit of a deep cut, but it’s like this episode of Veronica Mars where she uncovers the bogus performance of stocks her teacher invested in, in hopes of early retirement. Veronica urges him to dump the stocks before they plummet (which, insider trading, hello), but he falls on his sword because he doesn’t want some other sucker to be saddled with the loss.

So, a) there’s nothing wrong with selling goods or services (even stuff people don’t need, because we all want a little treat sometimes), but b) MLMs still exist! Like, I could even argue that branding is a little bit entwined with this whole situation because what do you mean a change in brand colours and implementing a more readable typeface means I can charge premium for the same thing? I’m not going to lie, it’s also crazy and a little bit humiliating to admit that I’m being targeted for these schemes.

One of the courses I got had lessons on “attracting” dream clients using the sheer power of your energy and essence as a woman. It’s a repackaged version of manifestation, law of attraction, and even the prosperity gospel being taught by people who got rich by charging other people to learn how to get rich. And then if you feel a little suspicious of this “strategy,” you’ll get told it’s your own attraction of negativity and subscription to mindset of scarcity rather than abundance that is holding you back.

“There’s enough to go around for everyone,” they’re saying, but the people who are buying into these online courses and content creation tips aren’t the billionaires or the people who are already rich. They’re propping their wealth on people who are so desperate for some reprieve of financial instability that they’ll try anything, often alongside another job or another responsibility that keeps them from making more money more conventionally.

There’s enough money in the world, true, but a lot of it never crosses the threshold down to the have-nots. Not without someone else getting exploited. These models only work if you have such a lack of consideration for what this money means to other people and have no problems taking it from them. After all, it’s their fault for not utilising the priceless knowledge you’ve imparted on them.

I’ve sat through a literal “master course” on being an influencer (lol) before I figured out it wasn’t quite right for me, and that’s okay. There are lessons in there that I can adapt to what I actually want to do. My life has been a long and meandering journey of acquiring transferrable skills. I’ve sat through hours and hours of free content whose sole purpose is to get you to convert to a big ticket item they’re trying to get you to buy into, so that you can “make back the investment x times over.”

They all say different things. Pick a niche. Don’t niche down too much, actually. BECOME THE NICHE. People like to sell you a formula that leads to a life you think you want, but there’s no formula like that. And at the end of it, when things don’t feel quite right, you realise that the life that this formula worked out for isn’t one that’s quite what you wanted for yourself.

I guess you have to draw the boundary somewhere and commit not to cross it. I’ve committed not to use AI for any generation of creative output, and I will commit to not scamming people out of their money by selling them repackaged and useless AI-generated tips and tricks for £17. And sure, you could argue that people have the agency to say “no” to things they feel like are scams, but as a person who has literally been scammed (as in like, actually scammed, and not in the “I didn’t get what I feel like I paid for” way), it just feels like a moral obligation to not partake in that.

I read recently that a lot of people don’t find value in higher education, even. I think that could be a scam, too. In the U.K., 13.9% of new graduates face immediate unemployment. That’s way too many people in precarity when they have invested in and gone through the route that promised stability. Do I feel scammed by my research masters? Kind of. And I got it from a university that is ranked 2nd in the world for art and design.

What’s my point? I don’t have one, to be honest. This was a 1 a.m. thought my brain couldn’t get rid of. Because how can I earn a living doing stuff I like doing without feeling like a grifter? Does my devaluation of own work reflect my own thoughts about creative output in general? Is a creative practice closed off to people who can’t afford to “buy into” it or even take the time off to pursue something beyond their 9-to-5 (who in some cases, have to pour time and energey into their side hustles because the average wage is just not enough to live on)?

I was privileged in that I didn’t grow up having to think about money in the way that I think about money now. It feels like it’s running out all the time. Every purchase that feels outside the bare minimum feels like a splurge, even though it’s just a literal flat white. And these worries trickle down to whether or not I’ll be able to live in a house I’d actually own, to if I’m able to keep working as an artist, to questioning if it’s fair to try and have a baby if I don’t feel like I’ll be able to give them the same comforts and opportunities my parents have and continue to give me.

I don’t mean to catastrophise my situation at all. I’m sitting in my flat in the middle of a workday afternoon writing a Substack essay, after all. But, just… are these schemes the only viable way to make money these days? How many influencers do we really still need, and if you don’t want to shill products for other people to buy into, what value does your influence have to companies who can pay you?

I suppose maybe most types of wealth generation are just sometimes incongruous with one’s values. And maybe my deep-seated insecurity about money is tied to that acknowledgement of resisting these tactics. The numbers of promised wealth are attractive. I believe the things I want are fairly simple, but the way everything is going up in price pretty consistently, I’m not sure there’s a path towards getting those things in life that doesn’t involve some type of scamming or like, incredible patience. Maybe I’ll get my dream home when I’m 65.

Highly unlikely, but at least I didn’t get there selling automated crap to people who are trying to get out a financial hole like I am.

What’s frustrating is that the stuff I’m working on and pouring so much of my time and effort in is probably what’s going to not be doing well in terms of financial returns. Like, these things probably do work — I don’t know, I haven’t tried — but just because they do probably work better at creating profit, especially when the effort you need to pour into it is a fraction of what you would put into making something meaningful, that doesn’t automatically mean that’s the better course of action. I don’t want to participate in creating an environment where that’s the norm.

Selling courses, especially those you’ve built yourself, isn’t evil, obviously. There’s an insidious feeling of just wrongness when you’re teaching people to use AI to scour the internet for information on a niche you repackage and sell when they could probably have used that money on something else that would have genuinely helped them more meaningfully. That’s just me, though. I don’t know, it’s a hard thing to navigate, and I can’t figure out how to wholly reject these tactics, but I can’t subscribe to them myself, personally. I welcome any and all thoughts on this. The world is so hard to live in right now, so I don’t feel I can grandstand morally and judge everyone who does this. But at the same time, I do think we have a responsibility in shaping the future by what we choose to do and champion.

Leave a comment

I picked it up because I loved the cover. The premise hit a little too close to home (but also not really because I moved to London when I was 29, whereas one of the main characters, Joey, is 23. But 29 in sheltered Filipino years is more or less early 20s, in my humble opinion) and very contemporary, especially after reading a Brazilian novel from the 1970s and being knee-deep in high fantasy for the past year.

But, like I said in my last letter, Leslie Jamison’s blurb was really what sealed the deal. “Its world became more real to me than my own,” she wrote. If you haven’t already read Leslie Jamison’s work, I highly recommend these two collections: The Empathy Exams1 and Make it Scream, Make it Burn.

Calder’s characters, Chuck and Joey, meet in a bar in London. Chuck is a 35-year-old man who works in advertising (as a lead copywriter, as he so often likes to specify), but believes that he has a Great Novel lurking within him, if he can just find the time to get back into writing it. Joey works at a small, independent café, barely scraping by. She is 23 years old and writes poetry when she finds the time, but it’s hard to write when you need to take all the shifts at work to live in London. And also when you need to see the world and have some fun when you’re 23.

Anyway, they meet at a pub (or something) that’s fairly distinct enough to be familiar, but also vague enough to be anywhere.

Chuck is in the middle of a big breakup with his fiancé, Sarah, with whom he had been with for 12 years. They shared a very bougie flat in a building that has windows big enough to have a picturesque view of the city. (We later find out that Chuck has puffed his chest up a little bit and that his ex, in fact, had been paying for the lion’s share of this flat, which is slowly draining his lead copywriter salary.)

In my head, Joey was inexplicably fancast as Kitty Lever, who I follow on Instagram. It was the poetry and the blonde hair, and the youthful exuberance of someone who sees magic within the grime, you know? Kitty is American, and Joey somehow feels American in my head, even though she is from London; we even meet her mother at some point, who is very much from here. The novel had a few of what felt like Americanisms, and so, anachronistic, but also, I’m sure that was on purpose, but I can’t really pinpoint to what end.

But anyway, if you are or ever were caught in the trappings of love in the age of text timings, tone policing yourself, and working around a work schedule that never furthers your career, then this book will feel like it’s written, probably, by someone you know.

I read a review somewhere that this book isn’t really for you if you need to like your main characters, and certainly, if you read this and you find yourself absolutely loathing one character, it’ll likely be Chuck. (Unless you are Chuck, in which case, maybe try therapy?)

Interestingly, a lot of the novel is centered around Chuck and the reasons for what he does what he does (as in, there are no reasons aside from he’s 35 years old and bored). However, I will say that Calder’s Joey was a very clear character in my head, too. As with a lot of these novels, nothing really happens, but the interior worlds of both characters are in, more or less full, view. And that’s what’s important.

Because even though you probably won’t relate to Chuck, or admit to relating to him because he’s a weasel, you will have had encounters with a Chuck-like figure in your story, who you will likely feel like ruined your life, at least for a couple of months. I had a Chuck in my life, though at the time, I was newly 30, but he had a job, passions, and an open relationship.

Similar to the humiliation of knowing what blue razz ice is (as well as the other markers of the current London Zeitgeist on the cover), I felt the humiliation in recognising these feelings of yearning and longing in Marie Jacotey’s work, an artist I discovered while I was going through the motions of what ended up feeling like love held at arm’s length.

Marie Jacotey is a French artist whose work I believe I encountered when I went to It’s Nice That’s Nicer Tuesdays in January 2018. She was presenting her current project on the same night as my bosses at the time were unveiling their newest “impossible book”, Breathe.

Jacotey’s work have a slight diarist feeling to them, an illustrated collage of emotions, which caught my interest because of the segmentations and framings, intentionally demarcated on the pictures.

For me, she understood the interiority of a space, and these pictures felt like vessels that held enormous feelings. Thematically, I had been drawn to Tracey Emin’s work as a counterpoint for this book; particularly, with Joey’s grappling with yearning and lack of clarity from a man who is twelve years older than her but still can’t admit what he wants, but the specificity of place in the novel made me think of Jacotey.

Both I Want You to Be Happy and Jacotey’s work — particularly, here, are images from her shows at Hannah Barry Gallery in Peckham — are so present that it’s hard to look away. Part of you goes, “Yes, that’s me,” and you can either feel relief or ashamed at being seen so clearly.

There’s a slight sort of humour, slightly self-effacing and yielding to the absurd, that’s present in both Calder and Jacotey’s work, kind of how modern life can feel desperately too much at times that all you can do is laugh at it like a joke.

In both instances, no big questions about life or happiness or love are answered. Even the small questions feel too big to ask.

In early college, I was on Tumblr, which really began this sort of nature of having a thought, reblogging it, and then discarding it immediately. I would file Tumblr posts under vague tags like #remember this and not-so-vague ones like #my wife (my tag for Kristen Stewart). Anyway, my point is that now this sort of letter is a consolidation of some of my thoughts and feelings throughout an unspecified length of time, and will go on for as long as the trains of thought coalesce into something that feels reasonable. Substantial.

Election (1999)

My husband, Mark, and I have a very casual attitude towards film programming, which is surprising because he loves movies. Although, perhaps, what made me feel really safe regarding my decidedly selective tastes (less “auteur” and more “stuff that reminds me of a simpler time in my life”) is because there is never any judgment and also an occasional relenting to watch dystopian young adult adaptations. Sometimes, there’s even mutual enjoyment.

I’ve been trying to find the middle ground between his love for Kathryn Bigelow’s 90s psychosexual thrillers and my love for Torrance Shipman and 90s nostalgia-bait, and one of my picks for movie time was Election. I’ve been begging him to see it with me for ages, but for some reason, he just wouldn’t say yes. Not until I kept “joking” about wanting to watch Twilight again. Long story short, we both enjoyed it, and I was right.

But also, about a week after we had seen it, I asked him who the worst character was. Before I let him answer, I said that it was Matthew Broderick’s Jim McAllister. If you’re unfamiliar with Election, stop reading now and scroll down. If you have seen it and don’t care about spoilers (for a film from 1999), please indulge me.

Spoilers begin now. You have been warned.

Essentially, Election is about one for the student body president of George Washington Carver High School. Reese Witherspoon magnificently plays the quintessential overachieving kiss-ass, Tracy Enid Flick, who begins the film as a shoe-in for president, mainly because, thus far, she had been running unopposed. Jim McAllister, or Mr. M, is a social studies teacher who is simply just irritated by her entire being. You know that trope of a teacher looking derisively at a student who is not only smart and actually does the work, but is keenly participating? Mr. M has that perpetual attitude towards Tracy, because she’s “too” engaged. But, also, we find out that Tracy was involved with one of Jim’s friends, Dave Novotny — a math teacher — who ended up getting fired from his job (which is like, the bare minimum, truly) and then divorced by his postpartum wife, Linda. Dave had to move back in with his parents out of state, and Mr. M has hated Tracy’s guts ever since.

Which, to me, is weird because a) you’re an adult, b) she’s pretty much a child, and c) YOUR FRIEND WAS BANGING HER AND TELLING YOU ABOUT IT.

The whole film is about how Mr. M sabotages Tracy’s run for high school president by convincing injured football hero, Paul Metzler (played by, to my mind, a Keanu-esque Chris Klein), to run against Tracy because he’s so sad about his thwarted football plans. Mr. M makes him feel like he student body president is Paul’s new purpose in life. To a high school student, Paul is probably a more palatable candidate. He’s popular, but he’s nice. He’s not too smart, but who cares? He’s fun.

As if that weren’t enough, some internal drama within the Metzler family (a bizarre love triangle if there ever was one) adds another candidate to the presidential slate: Paul’s sister, Tammy (played by Jessica Campbell, RIP), who runs against Paul out of spite for unintentionally stealing her secret girlfriend, Lisa, who then also signs up as Paul’s campaign manager. This turn of events lowers Tracy’s chances for the seat from 100% to 33.33%.

And I remember spending my entire childhood thinking of just how annoying Tracy is and how funny it was that Ferris Bueller is going through such great lengths just to see her lose. However, the 37-year-old me is looking back at Election in absolute horror that a teacher who has lessons on ethics and morals is doing all of this to someone who is just very driven and involved. No one else wanted the job in the first place.

Tracy Flick was painted to be the villain of the story because she’s insufferable and tries too hard and because she’s particular. And, sure, she also did a proto-Mean Girls red herring sabotage move, where she accidentally damages a campaign poster and then proceeds to tear down everyone’s in a fit of rage, including her own, to throw investigators off her scent, of course. Mr. M is suspicious because no one else was at scene of the crime. Tracy was only there late one weekend evening to work on extracurriculars, because of course she was.

But — and I don’t even remember being bothered by this too much when I was watching it as a young person — her math teacher was fooling around with her (making her crouch down in his car on the drive up to his house that he shared with his wife and infant son) and wrote her declarations of love that incriminated himself. She didn’t even press charges, you know? All this time, Mr. M knew about all of it because his gross middle-aged friend would talk about their sexual activity so obscenely, and he didn’t report his friend.

All of this fucked up stuff happened even before the election chicanery, and he didn’t even stop there.

Because despite all of his meddling, Tracy still won. AND HE DUMPED TWO OF HER VOTES SO PAUL WOULD WIN. Like, get a life, Mr. M.

(Granted, Paul voted for Tracy because he didn’t want to vote for himself, but that would have just evened out their votes.)

Mr. M can’t even do a good job of electoral fraud, and the poll workers, who are pretty much future Tracies, did a little sleuthing and exposed the hidden votes tucked in his waste basket (helped by the janitor who Mr. M has also unknowingly slighted). Meanwhile, he still found the time to invite his ex-friend’s wife, Linda, who’s also friends with his own wife, Diane, to a motel in the middle of a school day, even though she’s going through a rough divorce (from, again, his ex-friend!) and navigating single parenthood. Did I mention that he also had visions of both Linda and Tracy while having sex with his wife, with whom he was trying to conceive a child?

I don’t know if all of this was evident to everyone else who watched it at the same time I did, but I was about 11 when it came out, and all I thought then was that Election was really funny, and that Tracy was annoying, and that her plans of being president deserved to be thwarted by this married, adult man. Did I find it weird that he was meddling this hard for a high school election? Not really. I wasn’t even in high school yet.

All this to say that Tracy Flick was unfairly villainised. It’s possible that that wasn’t the intention of director Alexander Payne and the original novel’s author, Tom Perrotta, but Tracy Flick was (is?) widely considered a villain. I looked through pages and pages of commentary and all I kept seeing were lists where she’s named one, comparisons to actual female politicians (not in a flattering way), and even Reddit threads from a year ago, where a user says, “Can you explain how he’s ‘sad, pathetic, and sexist’? I’m not saying he was a perfect character by any means, but we’re making it sound like he’s the villain.”

Um, he is the villain, my guy.

Apparently, in the 2010s, her character was rethought in the wake of Me Too, pretty much reframing her as… not exactly the victim, but certainly not the villain. (Here’s a link to an NYT article, in case you need more convincing. )

And even if you still thought that she was, her villainy is a hundred percent dwarfed by Jim McAllister’s. And his friend, Dave’s. At most, her crimes were relentless perfectionism and also being a girl in high school. What are these men’s excuses?

As you can tell, it turns out I had a lot of feelings about this. If you ask me, Mr. M’s bee sting to the eye is but a fraction of what he deserves. I almost can’t believe how much I was stewing in hatred for him until I listed everything down.

But anyway. I was planning on writing about more things I had in mind, but as I mentioned in the beginning of this letter, I will write until it feels long enough. I will, however, give a small update on what the next Arts & Letters edition. It will be on the last novel I read that’s not part of The Wheel of Time world: Jem Calder’s I Want You to Be Happy.

This was a blind buy from a lovely small bookshop in Hastings that turns out to be owned and ran by Jeremy Atherton Lin’s partner, Jamie, who was the bookseller at the time of purchase and who was also very lovely and friendly. The shop is called The Waves and it had loads of other printed matter on sale as well as works of art (I really wanted one of the book-shaped paintings). It also had a free tote with a purchase of Jermey Atherton Lin’s new book, Deep House, which I unfortunately did not buy because I was trying to “save money”. Train tickets are not cheap, especially when you are too old for a rail card.

Anyway. I Want You to Be Happy is not for everyone, and it especially not for you if you need to like your main characters. I did have a soft spot for one of them, but the other one can leave the plane of existence. Not to get ahead of myself, but the book was very easy and quick to read (I finished it in pretty much a day), and although Calder takes care not to be overly specific about locations and such, it still feels so much like the London I know. The blurb that got me to buy it was Leslie Jamison’s (“Its world became more real to me than my own”), which is very high praise.

It did remind me a lot of the shit you pretty much have to eat when navigating the dating world. I can only imagine that it’s worse these days. But anyway, I already have my artist(s?) pairing with it, and I can’t wait to share. I wonder if any of you can guess whose work I’ve been thinking about alongside this book.

For me, this project is a matter of finding these threads and really sitting down and processing things. One of the biggest revelations for me throughout my many years of writing, both personally and professionally, is that the main way that I think through things is writing about these ideas. I’ve only recently climbed out of a very severe struggle with public speaking into just a reasonably-sized discomfort, but I’ve always been much better at verbalising my thoughts as written work.

I will say that I have started a lot of series that are numbered or timed, so the embarrassment of releasing only a single “issue” of this series isn’t something I consider at all. I have learned how to live with various humiliations of many degrees, and to be honest, the ability to find humour in these situations (or, even, the ability to ignore the embarrassment after a while) is kind of impressive, even for me.

I will also say, however, that I am truly treating this as a writing and creative exercise. I have the first couple of pairings already lined up, and I believe I’ve selected a cadence of a new instalment every two weeks, which is not overwhelming for me, as a person.1 So, the structure is as follows:

1. An essay pairing of a book and a work of art or an artist’s body of work.

2. A collection of images that visualises themes, moods, connecting threads.

3. An atmospheric experience (lol, more expansion on this later, in a letter between to Arts & Letters posts).

Lately, I’ve been talking on and on and on about how everything is interconnected, and it’s something that is so clear in my head, but something that I want to be able to address more and exemplify. I feel like this is a good way to do that, but I suppose it remains to be seen. Anyway, here is Arts & Letters No. 1: The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector + Lygia Clark’s Bichos series.

Subscribe now

Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star was a little tricky for me to investigate and inhabit, which surprised me since it mirrors the state of poverty that’s prevalent in Lispector’s Rio and my own Manila. I’ve read some short stories of hers before, from that Penguin edition that republished them in a slim, Tiffany blue volume under the name Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady. Truthfully, I’ve found it really hard to completely comprehend Lispector. When people are celebrated and my encounters with them are less life-altering than I expect them to be, I feel confused and a little dumb. Like I don’t get a joke everyone else finds funny.

And this introduction sort of seems like I didn’t like the book, which isn’t true. What I real difficulty is trying to encapsulate a work succinctly when it so skilfully elides a straightforward summary. Objectively, the novella follows a poor typist, Macabéa, who moved to Rio from the more impoverished Northeastern Brazil, but even Lispector states that the story is not so much about “a girl who was so poor that all she ate was hot dogs.” Rather, The Hour of the Star is a story about “a crushed innocence, about an anonymous misery.”

It was not so upon first read, but when I revisit my notes and my annotations, I can see how much this little book has actually moved me. I liked it a lot, but on my first read-through, I think I was waiting to be really irrevocably changed by it, which is an unfair thing to put on a book.

It’s also easy to equate this sort of story with an obvious one-to-one relation of social realist depictions of poverty, but while the novel doesn’t hold (at least, to me) the most dazzling of premises, everything it questions beneath this narrative thread is exquisite. For a volume so slim — 75 pages in my edition — its Rio is fully-formed and easy to visualise, which makes it a little hard to look beyond this environment and find art that resonates without being too on the nose.

The Hour of the Star (which has a total of 13 titles2) follows the narration of Rodrigo S.M., who is described as a writer and is inexplicably privy to Macabéa’s life. All throughout these pages, Rodrigo is both enamoured by Macabéa and feels unsure about the time he spends telling her story. Lispector, through Rodrigo’s interventions, questions who is deserving of our attention.

At the heart of it, the novel is about social invisibility and notions of identity, existing in a world and society that feels perpetually skewed towards a select group of people. Objectively, Macabéa’s life is tragic. She is an incompetent and illiterate typist (although I loved that she has a distaste for consonants existing beside each other) who loves Coca-Cola, and waking up early on Sundays because it gave her more time to do nothing. With an unconventional upbringing and a truly isolated life where she has no one to lean on for support, she is oblivious to her unfortunate circumstances, taking these inconveniences as merely givens in her life.

While looking for art that felt like The Hour of the Star, I came across Lygia Clark’s body of work. Also Brazilian, Clark worked somewhat alongside Lispector, in that both were active in the scene at around the same time, though never really quite intersected in their circles, from what I’ve read. However, researching both brought about some pieces of writing where they are both examined alongside the other:

• Breathe with Me, a Breath of Life: Material Mysticism in Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark by Charles Stankievich for Afterall (paywalled)

• The Brilliant Orbit of Clarice Lispector by Meg Weeks for Frieze (exhibition review)

In this review of Lygia Clark’s retrospective at Neue Nationalgalerie, writer Louisa Elderton refers to it as Clark’s “architecture of feeling.” This phrase is particularly resonant for me when I think about The Hour of the Star because of how Macabéa’s interior life and Rodrigo S.M.’s insertion in it are embodied in the city Lispector writes about.

Curiously, Clark’s work — at least her objects and spatial interventions — really feel detached from humanity to me, in a way. Her Bichos series appear cold and geometric objects (she was “a central figure in the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement”) at first, but once you realise that she meant the objects to be viewed as “living” beings (bichos is Portuguese for “critters” or “animals”) that audiences are invited to interact with, it changes the meaning of this body of work immediately.

In the hands of a participant, this bicho — an unassuming, static form — is transformed. Through the eyes of Rodrigo, Macabéa is made visible, the life of someone ignored and discarded is witnessed.

“As for the girl, she lives in an impersonal limbo, without reaching the worst or the best. She just lives, inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. Actually—why should she do anything more?”

So, to subvert my own notion of what this instalment of this series was going to be, I’m rereading my own reading (ha) of The Hour of the Star and Macabéa’s story, and rather than looking for something to propose alongside it, as a mirror, I’m putting with it a companion, what I wish Macabéa had in her life.

Oblivious to something “better” — “Macabéa blanched: it never occurred to her that her life was that bad”, after a visit to a fortuneteller who saw the life she had thus far lived — she was never looking for happiness beyond what she felt, and she had, really, no one to go to for some semblance of those feelings.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about community and real support. Although Rodrigo was a looming presence in how we perceived and receive Macabéa’s story, he had no power as a spectator in how the events of her life unfurl. Similarly, there is a certain helplessness, sometimes, when you are merely viewing a work of art. Some meaning may be generated in your brain, but the embodiment of the piece itself, as far as the artist is concerned, is final. In contrast to this, Clark’s Bichos require the intervention of someone in order for them to take shape beyond the folded up versions.

“The Bichos are fundamentally unstable structures. They question the physical certainty of the user, as they are at all moments at the brink of collapsing. They don’t have an ideal shape. They don't have front and back. They are fully manipulable. And they unfold as potential multiplicities, structurally as well as organically.” — Luis Perez-Oramas, for MoMA.

“What can you do with the truth that everyone’s a little sad and a little alone”, Rodrigo writes, more as a statement of resignation and acceptance, rather than a question to which a solution can be found. Again, I’ve been finding that both showing up for people and asking for community to show up for you have had profound effects on my life, not just for the aspect of social exposure, but for the kind of modern life that unfailingly feels increasingly detached. I’ve yet to look further into Clark’s body of work — an update I hope to supply in between this and the next Arts & Letters letter — but it does go into more participatory work as well as art therapy.

It feels a bit like kismet to have these two works of art by two Brazilian women making and creating in the same sort of time period, shedding light on and addressing notions of social invisibility and community.

———

One last note: I wanted this to be the first book for this series, and it was a pleasant surprise to see art used as a device for description: “I write in bold and severe painter’s strokes’“; “I swear this book is made without words. It is a mute photograph”; “Because all of a sudden the figurative transformed me… I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints in abstract colours but want to to show that he does so”; one of the characters sculpts. Not as a sculptor, but just as someone who makes them because he derives some sort of pleasure from it.

Part of me had notions of what this series was going to look like. Like I would just be writing about topics I was obsessed with and knew a lot about, so it was really so refreshing to be looking into new(-old) things that have existed but I’ve never encountered. It felt like being back in school again, but in a good way.

Here is a colour palette in my head of the book: grit, a middling beige existence, Coca-Cola red and nail polish: her indulgence, rain on pavement, and “that swooning longing and lilac.”

A few prompts for you to end this with:

• Find one person or thing in your daily life that you move past without really seeing. Look at them for longer than feels comfortable. Notice what changes.

• From the book: “What is the weight of light?”

For full transparency, I will be turning on a paywall for this series of posts at some point, just because while it has been fun and beneficial for myself (practising my researching and thinking muscles again), they do actually take a lot of work to pull together. The first two or three I’ll leave up for free. I want you to know the type of work you’ll be supporting, and sort of proof of concept that it’s not arbitrary or random.

I’m still undecided on whether to turn on the paywall immediately or a week or so after the initial publishing (sort of like a paid archive), so any comments or suggestions are welcome. All other content — and future iterations of these — will remain free to read and access.

The paid option was a default that was toggled for posts when I did have the option for paid subscribers. It didn’t seem quite so reasonable to keep that going, especially because my presence has been sporadic. Yes, there were things in my life both interior and exterior that had been plaguing my :) sense :) of :) expression, but that didn’t mean I should really offer subscriptions to essentially the same free content I’d been writing, especially when I couldn’t even be super regular with it.

Anyway, here’s an attempt at regularity. Two letters per month, as promised.

It didn’t seem really lofty at the time, but obviously, life gets in the way. And, like, I didn’t really want to keep regurgitating the same offering of “hello, I’m still here!”

The truth is, I’ve just not been “feeding myself” as many creative practitioners like to call going to galleries, museums, watching theatres, and so on and so forth. I have been in the middle of reading books that are not from The Wheel of Time — so, a bit premature to write about them — and I have been working on just putting things that are a) still what I would have written anyway, but b) adds some sort (any sort!) of value into people’s lives. Especially when everything else is kind of a little bit crazy, and when there is so much noise in the world.

The fact that this meme from ten years ago is still resonant and accurate makes me feel kind of miserable.

The comic is by artist, KC Green, and if you didn’t know or knew but forgot, it actually extends to four more panels.

If you follow my on Instagram (which, I feel like is how most of you have found this place anyway), you’ve probably noticed that I’ve really leaned into still yapping, but perhaps with a bit more direction. And helpful things to offer.

Maybe it’s a bit icky or cringey — I’ve actually asked a few people close to me if it is, lol — but this is actually sort of me warming myself up to some dreams I’ve had of teaching. I think I have had the impression that if something doesn’t provide a skill that’s actionable, and truthfully, financially viable in the future, then it’s not really worth exploring. But the better part of me knows that that’s simply not true.

When I first moved to London, I took so many courses. A lot of them were so I could learn stuff: bookbinding, Japanese woodblock printing, darning and visible mending, risograph printing, black and white film development, letterpress printing, bundle-dyeing, etc. etc. However, I do remember now that one of the first classes I signed up for was Sophia Kosmaoglou’s Art & Critique course. This was essentially an extension of the MRes I was taking at the time, but slightly more obviously applied to the realm of art.

I know not everyone does, but I do love learning, and I’ve always felt like I should have been a teacher. Most of my charts (natal chart, saju, MBTI, etc. etc.) kind of already point to that direction.

When I was asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, I never said writer (even though I kept writing stories and my autobiography, lol) or artist (even though I grew up pretty much fated to take this path). I had said I wanted to be a teacher.

I have taught a few times in my life: Sunday School (for real), a lecturer at my university (for real, and also I was not asked back), some workshops here and there for bookmaking. I’ve been asked by people to teach them stuff, and I’m not trying to qualify myself for this new direction I’m very slowly going into. I’m really not. I think I’m writing these out to allow myself to see this future for me in a way. Not a complete pivot, but just a pretty much natural extension of my practice that addresses a lot of the things I feel like I could build upon more.

I’ve really been thinking about how to make my social media usage make more sense and be more aligned with what I believe in as a person and as someone who makes things, sort of as a compulsion on necessity, to be honest. I know not everyone is creatively-inclined (or so they think!), but learning to truly look at something, to pay it more than enough attention, and to alchemise some sort of dialogue or something can be so powerful. In the midst of all of… this.

I’m definitely guilty of seeing art as something that is not “necessary” and like, if you want to look at it granularly and start comparing it obviously doesn’t serve the same function as medicine or public service. But it does make life better, whatever shape “art” takes for you.

I’ve always shared aspects of my life ever since I found out what a blog was. Some may say, at times, I’ve overshared. But I guess I wanted to recalibrate that as a more directional and relational sharing, rather than continuing on this thread of (I want to say, occasional) navel-gazing, overly interior, inward-facing word vomit. You know?

So that’s where I’m at.

I’ve been trying to write more regularly, and edit, even, rather than opening up this window of a blank page, making sense of my thoughts and feelings in a way that is somewhat more processed when these letters come out to you. Although, admittedly, I am just writing on the Substack platform as we speak.

Share

In the spirit of value-sharing and to thank you if you’ve read this far into it, here are some things I’ve enjoyed in the last few weeks:

• Widow’s Bay

  I’ve missed Matthew Rhys so much, and he is just so good in this. It’s set in a small island town where creepy shit happens, but it’s also so fucking funny. We recently watched The Wicker Man (1973!) and a lot of elements and situations reminded me of it (compliment).
  

• Battle of Fates
  I’ve never really succeeded in convincing my husband to watch Korean dramas with me, but he loves a Korean survival show. Battle of Fates has the absurd premise of making tarot readers, saju readers, shamans (!), and yes, even a foot reader, duke it out to be named the best fate reader. I went away from it, looking for a saju reading for my birth chart, and I’m still reeling from just how wildly specific and accurate it is.

• Survivor 50
  Filed under things that aren’t art but feel like art. I’ve caught up, and I’m upset, but this was genuinely one of the more enjoyable “new era” Survivor seasons. The celebrity “cameos” and insertions are super random and funny, but ASIDE FROM ALL OF THAT, wow. I’ve actually changed my opinion about some of the older players in that I hated them a lot and now I really love them. (To Survivor fans, any guesses who?)
  

• Below Deck Down Under and Summer House
  I mean, you can’t be reality T.V. trash and not be tuning into at least one of these shows. For BDDU, it has been really nice to see Daisy be competent and authoritative in a way that I never felt like I saw she was on Below Deck Sailing Yacht. Cons: incompetent social media plants, genuinely strange dynamics across the board, hearing Chef Ben’s laugh. For Summer House, it’s been nice to see Carl’s sober journey (!), the Mia-KJ-Ciara trifecta, and Kyle’s hilling journey. Cons: hearing West’s infantilisation of the English language, seeing Amanda cosplay as West, Ciara’s lack of self-love.
  
  A caveat: I have flown in a rage during both shows. For BDDU, mostly because of Mike and early Alesia. For Summer House, just from watching the episodes in tandem with news sources (i.e. TikTok and Instagram reels).

• making my little carousels
  I’ve often written long-form where it didn’t need to be long-form, so this has been a really lovely creative exercise for me, both in distilling what I want to say (unlike here), and arranging them in a structure that is easier to digest and refer back to.

  

  And, obviously ~external validation~ is never the goal for these things, but I’m taking all the saves and shares as proof that they’ve been helpful for a number of people, which really makes me glad.

• My Traveler’s Company Notebooks
  So one of the things that I’ve been doing in the morning is sitting down and taking online classes. After a strange period where I had a hard time reincorporating the regular size TN notebook into my system, it finally clicked for me and that’s where most of my course notes go. Which is amazing and cool because I’ve had this black standard TN for 10 (!) years (proof, lol) and it’s still lovely and really held up.

  
  I have a post here from the end of last year about my writing stack, but a mid-year update of how I actually have been using them is in the works.
  

• Simon Critchley, Mysticism

  I needed a break from The Wheel of Time and picked up a different fiction book that I was mostly enjoying and then sort of stopped enjoying, and so now here we are. What I like about Mysticism is that Critchley approaches this notion of the sublime and devotion often associated with religion in an everyday sort of philosophical way. I’m only about a quarter through, so I’ll check back in, but so far, it’s making my brain work in a way that has been enjoyable rather than taxing.

Not to put the cart before the horse (or as my freshman uni professor put it “put Descartes before the horse”), but she (i.e. me!) is so back.

One of my astrology readings of late has advised me to “start a new book”, which is obviously a call for me to begin anew, etc. etc., veiled in somewhat mysterious language. And, truthfully, I think I will sort of read it as literally as I possibly can. I’m coming up to a year of only reading Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series and I’ve finally reached Crossroads of Twilight, which is the 10th book of the series and notorious in the fandom as the sloggiest of the series’ slog: a stretch of very hefty books containing very little plot, including but not limited to a very posh-coded character that spends most of it in the bath, ruminating. A very long-winded paragraph to say that I am planning on restarting How Should a Person Be?

I read Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries when it came out, and I loved it a lot, and if I can love something as experimental as that, I think I’m at the position now where I can relate to and really comprehend the aforementioned novel. Is it a good idea to stop a quarter of the way through the dreaded slog? I don’t suppose so, but I really don’t think it’s good for me to only be reading very dated fantasy written by a man who very likely knew Patricia Altschul.

I have other books to read, honestly, but I have been really struggling with the question posed by the novel’s title. I don’t expect to glean any practical insight, of course, but I do think I need to be closer to a character or even mindset of anyone who would even ask such a question. Because I’ve never really known the answer to that, and lately, I’ve found myself farther away from answers that feel true.

I’ve had kind of a shitty couple of months. Which I say not to sound ungrateful, because the shitstorm came with really great things, too.

I’ve not processed the loss of my pregnancy, I don’t think. Some days it’s fine to joke about, and other days, I feel the loss more acutely. I think I try to keep it unserious because it’s so uncomfortable for other people, because it feels like they never know what to say. And it’s not really something I want to talk at length about either. It’s coming to a year (July) and we’ve been casually trying again, I guess — not in the way you get fertility tests or what have you — but obviously, it hasn’t happened yet.

In September, I travelled to Sicily with Mark’s family, and then I spent a month shortly after travelling across Spain with my family, which was an experience in itself. Again, mixed bag, but I suppose that’s just how it is with everyone. I just had a lot of big feelings during that trip — especially when I was away from my studio and from my husband for so long — and I didn’t know how to process them.

I was in New York in January for my first exhibition in the U.S. which was so exciting. I think it deserves to be a story for another day, but I spent two weeks there — essentially with anxiety-induced acid reflux the entire time — but so, so overwhelming and unforgettable.1 I still can’t believe it happened, truthfully, even though there’s proof everywhere.

Two weeks later, I flew to Manila for ALT Art (an art fair-type programme my family’s gallery was a part of) and another solo exhibition at West Gallery. It was a really intense trip. Our dog, Noah, was extremely ill and passed away while I was there.2 I extended my trip to be with family, only for my later flight to be cancelled because of the airstrikes. I managed to get a one-way ticket about five days later, going through a different route, and for way more money than I’d ever spent on a plane ticket (or ever will, hopefully).

I’m the kind of person who needs a lot of time to recalibrate, which is why I’ve increasingly rethought my excitement for travelling when I was younger. A bulk of what I had posted on my blog (which is still alive, by the way, insofar as the domain name is still up) had been travel photos and recommendations and navel-gazing about “seeing the world” but lately, it just takes so much out of me.

All this to say that it feels like I’ve truly forgotten how to be a person.

I’ve been back in London since the 10th of March, I think, and I don’t quite remember how to do anything. And I’ve fallen into “being productive” and “doing stuff” by doing housework. Building flat pack furniture. Making Filipino bread rolls from scratch. Finding another load of laundry to do, somehow.

Subscribe now

Before leaving for these many trips, I had developed a more or less good routine of going into the studio, taking walks, doing at-home exercises, meal-planning, morning pages, et al. Recently, I’ve been having to give myself a pep talk to go to the shop three minutes away. If that doesn’t work, I order my groceries, and then complain about how expensive everything has been.

I don’t remember how to be a person.

Or how to be the person I had been before I got back. I’m sure I’ve been annoying my husband, even though he’s assured me that that’s not the case. If there isn’t a reservation or a person tied to the other end of a plan, I’d likely not make it. The other week, the highlight of one of my days was the walk to and from my GP for an asthma review. And then the day improved once they’d asked me to come back later that afternoon for a blood test. I remember thinking about how nice the day had been and how much I loved being outside. Have I gone outside for the sheer thrill of it since? No.

I realise this is not quite about art. Or anything else really important. But it is about this block that I have been having for the past month and a half. I don’t know how to get rid of it. I had a good cry yesterday — likely from the back-to-back socialising we had committed to over the weekend3 — and I couldn’t articulate it to my poor husband who then had no clue how to help.

My morning pages have been page after page about how unfulfilled I feel, but just because I unload it onto paper (and now, on you, an unsuspecting audience), it doesn’t mean I know how to course correct. This sort of writing doesn’t even really belong here, but I know that if I don’t write this down as a sort of break of a break, then I can’t write about anything else.4

I have a medication review for my SSRI on the 1st of May, because although health care is essentially free here, you have to wait for ten million years to be seen by anyone. Even if you need an inhaler but don’t have a prescription yet <3 My meds aren’t going to last that long, to be honest, and I don’t really know what I would do if they suddenly decide I don’t need to be on Lexapro. Does it help to be worrying about that now that I can’t really do anything about it yet? No, but it feels better to complain about it in the privacy of my own Substack newsletter.

I do feel better now that I’ve written all of this down. I’ve not been so responsive to people or all that online. I’ve always been introverted and hermit-adjacent, but lately, I’ve just felt so disconnected from everyone. And also I have some baggage I have to work through about relationships and friendships that is, again, another story for another day. I get so in my head sometimes, it’s hard to find a way out. When I get real deep in there, sometimes, I don’t even want to.

Share

Stuff I’ve been enjoying so that this doesn’t seem as depressing:

• Putting on podcast recaps of TikTok influencer culture (so I don’t have to do deep dives myself) while I’m cleaning or cooking or working on my freelance projects. I mostly watch Do We Know Them? which goes into unspeakable depths of TikTok trash drama. But I love.

• Knitting again. Helps with reducing phone screen time. I finished a top for spring (the first garment I finished in about a year) which was exciting.

• Doing fun eyeshadow looks again. I bought Byredo’s Vesuvio palette and made a custom Issy palette with mainly shimmer shades anyone over the age of 37 who had a beauty blog in the 2010s would tell you not to buy.

• T.V. shows: Beef season 2, Below Deck Down Under (such a class season), Survivor 50, Summer House (as an investigative journalist for Scamanda clues), Last One Laughing season 2 (apart from the last episode). We also finished the latest season of Married at First Sight Australia, but I cannot in good conscience recommend it, because while it was fairly dramatic, it was way trashier than usual.

• Freezing leftovers in those silicone trays so that we have food for days when we’re like, “Oh no, we don’t have any food.”

Like the rest of us normal people, I came across beautiful Rama Duwaji through her husband’s very pervasive online presence during his mayoral campaign, and I was instantly enamoured. First of all, she is objectively stunning. And then I found out that she was an artist, too1 so I followed her on Instagram (which I know I said I wanted to quit, but look! This is why it’s so hard for me personally to leave the app.2) and one of the things I actually look forward to seeing is the monthly round-up she does of the things she has seen that has made her want to make art. So, that’s what I’m doing now, except I’m doing a round-up from last year because I saw some really cool shit last year, truth be fucking told.

This was difficult and obviously, by no means an exhaustive list. I just answered a couple of interview questions for an amazing creative platform3 and one of them was about sustaining a creative practice. Perhaps this isn’t like, such a revolutionary idea, but I realised that I hadn’t been taking stock of the beautiful things I had been seeing and experiencing beyond taking photos to file away “for later” and then never coming back to them. For a person with such a slow pace for living, I really do not reflect enough. Not in this manner anyway.

Anyway: I think a creative practice needs to be fed. And this needs to be digested and processed. I do the “eating” a fair bit, but I just don’t… ruminate enough. It’s like saving Instagram posts or a sky-high TBR pile or saving articles on Pocket back in the day. Something piques your interest enough to be saved, but for later. No more!

For transparency, I started this post in January. It is almost the end of February, but, you know… baby steps. A lot has happened in the last couple of months (more on that later, as in tomorrow), so please excuse my procrastination.

1 — Robert Motherwell at Fundacio Joan Miró, Barcelona

2 — Clyfford Still at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

3 — West Papua textile along Dalston, London

Saw this while walking home from a trip to Jackson’s Art.

4 — Joan Mitchell at Tate Modern

Also in my October favourites post.

5 — Shen Xin at Tina Gallery, London

6 — Richard Serra at Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao

7 — Hiroshige at The British Museum, London

8 — Jenny Saville at The National Portrait Gallery, London

9 — Bruce Conner’s “Crossroads” in flipbook form, from Museu Tàpies, Barcelona

I haven’t photographed it and it’s in London, so I’ll leave this here for now:

10 — Waterloo Station, London

11 — OK-RM Book Launch at Maximillian William, London

12 — Andreas Eriksson at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

13 — Photo of anabranching by Allison Nussbaum at Royal Observatory Greenwich, London

14 — Do Ho Suh at Tate Modern, London

15 — Ed Ruscha at Gagosian, London

16 — An island we saw at the top of a hike in San Sebastian

17 — Robert Rauschenberg at Fundación Juan March, Madrid

18 — Fernando Mignoni at Galería Elvira González, Madrid

19 — Looking through the windows to the mountains, Museo de arte abstracto español de Cuenca

20 — Tiled work in an alley in Valencia

21 — Tiled work in an alley in Palermo

22 — Pablo Picasso’s pigeons series, Picasso Museum, Barcelona

23 — Thomas Demand at TFAM, Taipei

24 — Cy Twombly’s signature at Guggenheim, Bilbao

25 — This Rothko, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

While making this, I kept finding stuff I wanted to put in the list but even 25 is too much for one letter, I think. I would also like to say that I went to Hong Kong Basel that year, too, and have not included any of the work there. I don’t know why — some have certainly made me feel one type of way or another — but it just felt like I was choosing between children. Also, if you noticed, I didn’t include any reading material or text. Like I said, baby steps. I think I’d like to keep this “series” going.

I would love to see cool stuff that have inspired you lately, in one way or another. This is an exercise in paying attention and digesting things instead of moving on to another thing. Kind of slowing down, and truly incorporating something into my life. Making something beautiful less fleeting, maybe.

Subscribe now

In a way, it’s kind of nice to not have the pressure of making a place or my life seem more romantic than it is. It seems an unspoken agreement across the platform that photo dumps are kind of the place to be more casual and effortless, though sometimes the effortlessness comes across as something one has tried to achieve carefully. A much more polished successor of the “picspam” under an lj-cut or in a Facebook photo album, no editing required.

My worry is really from the way generative AI is occupying these spaces where I have lived. Prior to Instagram, I’d shared everything I could about my boring life and less boring interests, a 14-year-old Christian girl who went to an all-girls Catholic high school (and then a Catholic university) and never went out because her parents were strict and she was too afraid of conflict and nighttime cab rides.

I would lug around the camera I had at the time — a Kodak digital camera that used 3.25-inch floppy disks as memory cards, a massive Olympus point-and-shoot, a Nikon DSLR I nicked from my dad, a slew of Lomography toy cameras and SLR cameras — a very large 500-page soft-cover journal, my 12-inch white iBook, and at one point, a handycam, and I’d pour my heart out into the ether. First it was LiveJournal, then my own hosted and self-hosted blogs (the latest of which is still alive! Sort of.), then a stint at microblogging on Tumblr, which did capture some aspects of LiveJournal that I missed, though not really.

Obviously, I had a journal, but this was less like talking to myself and more like finding people who felt the same way about the world as I did, no matter where in the world they had been living in. It was — is, still — really quite magical how genuine and comforting these relationships ended up being.

Because, I wasn’t the most social person growing up. I had friends and went out, but some of these connections with strangers from the Internet ran so much deeper, even though the initial bond was forged by a shared love for Harry Potter (R.I.P.), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (…R.I.P.) or music blogs like Said the Gramophone, Aquarium Drunkard and Gorilla vs. Bear. I got more “film-y” around the time I was in college and also on Tumblr. But beyond these interests, I really just did share my life to the handful of people that listened, and somehow, even though sometimes all I shared were my homework to-do lists and the mundanity of a high school physics lecture, it felt like I wasn’t alone.

With all the dangers and problematic issues entwined with Instagram and similar platforms, it really should be easy to quit them. And yet it hasn’t felt like that for me. At times I find myself pre-mourning this loss, because it really would be in my best interest to just leave. There’s these issues of privacy and data and AI, but also, there’s a cultivated environment of just seeing everything as content that’s only valuable if it reflects engagement. You start looking at things that you could potentially monetise, if only you could garner enough attention. In the end, it doesn’t even matter what kind of attention it is, if you got enough clicks.

That’s what’s made this whole thing icky. I think I’ve approached it, still, from the way I have been approaching this Internet oversharing for 23 years. In pursuit of connections, selfishly, sometimes, for release and relief, though sometimes it has resulted in people saying that what I’ve shared has resonated with them one way or another. So, when I see posts and videos of things — and at times, a kind of life — I’m being sold, it makes me feel, at first, a little inadequate. Like I’m not doing enough or well enough, as evidenced by me sitting on my ass and scrolling to oblivion, mindlessly consuming content, mostly of things I think I need. And then when I’ve gotten over that feeling of uselessness, I feel a little sad.

Because why are these social platforms so focussed on consumption? This isn’t anything new, I know. We live in capitalism, etc. etc. And yet, is it wrong for me to cling onto these places knowing that connection is still a possibility? Is the price of privacy and “playing the game” worth these little glimpses of community? Because I’ve seen it. Under all the dregs of “more, more, more!” sandwiched between a livestream of genocide and documented violence, I do see glimmers of what I hope to find.

Like, I’m still on Instagram. I don’t particularly like that I am, but I wouldn’t be in touch with as many people on there if I didn’t have it. I don’t particularly like that these points of connection are consolidated on a platform that will probably ruin all of us, if it isn’t already doing so. I don’t wish to be defeatist, but I’m finding it difficult to not play into all of this, despite knowing it’s probably for the best. And as much as I miss just yapping on my little space on the Internet (where no one really accidentally stumbles upon it like they would my Instagram posts), the truth is nobody reads these things anymore. And that’s so fair enough.

Everyone has such little time and energy to devote to clicking through blogs or checking in on each person individually. (Probably because they’re on Instagram or TikTok. Just kidding.) I’m not going to be able to sustain 20 different meaningful email threads with people, if I could just go on Instagram and check in on them in like, 10 seconds. And I don’t want to lose these relationships. I truly don’t.

It sucks that if I don’t have any other means of communicating with you other than Instagram, I literally wouldn’t know how to reach you. And while I’ve been lamenting how fucked up Instagram is, the way I use it is, essentially, on me. I just need to figure out a way out of this dependency on it as a platform for communication. I like having Instagram because I can check in on people I don’t often keep in touch with. I like being able to reply to a story to say happy birthday, or sorry for your loss, or you are doing so, so well. I know messages like that from other people mean a lot to me, too.

And as much as I love the convenience of just broadcasting my life to my friends and family in a way that seems less attention-seeking than a mass email or group chat message, there has to be a better way.

Right now, because it’s January and the year feels shiny and new, I’ve resolved to write more letters. I know I said that emails are hard to sustain, but I feel like letters don’t have the same urgency attached to them as these other forms of communication. Maybe that’s what we need in the end: a slower pace of life, a more intentional way of keeping friendships going, a more concerted effort at being a good friend.

I’ve also toyed with the idea of getting a dumb phone at some point this year. Maybe when my current one dies (which it won’t soon, because it’s an Android phone and those last forever). You know it’s bad when you have to set a screen time limit for yourself.

You know when people smarter than me have come up with the conclusion that the reason why we all feel so overwhelmed all the time is because our brains weren’t meant to handle this much information so quickly? We weren’t meant to be remotely celebrating someone’s baby shower, lamenting a genocide that’s going on its third year this year, seeing two people get shot from different angles, and then be bombarded by sales from companies whose products we don’t actually need, all in 2 minutes. It’s exhausting, and we really aren’t built to constantly absorb an endless stream of information like that.

I think it’s easier for some people to just disappear from the Internet, but I’ve unfortunately developed a sentimentality for these places. They hold different versions of me from different times, and saying goodbye feels oddly permanent and final. And, truthfully, I’m on so many other places that if anyone did need to reach out, they would be able to. Is part of my fear that no one would? That I would be left on a literal island, cut off from everyone, and no one would look for me.

I’ve said it before, but as much as I love living in London, and as much as I’m actually not alone because I live with my husband, life does often feel really lonely, especially now that I’m essentially spending most of my days by myself. Living your life in an expensive city is very different from going to one on holiday; I don’t have the time, the luxury, or the money to be seeing all the cool things and meeting all my cool friends and eating at all the cool restaurants.

I’m sure you all know that being alone and loneliness aren’t quite the same thing. And maybe that’s where the difficulty lies with me. Instagram, for all its failings, does actually make me feel less lonely, and having to think of how to quit it without falling into a deeper loneliness is hard.

Going through my old LiveJournal posts, I realised though that I haven’t actually been in touch with a lot of the people who I spent most of my time with. Unfortunately? I don’t know. But, even with Instagram, the tether that holds us together has frayed or has even broken off completely. So, like, it happens. Regardless of platform or circumstances. I’m still in touch with a lot of them, albeit sporadically. I actually met one of my friends on there for the first time in New York, which was really nice. (Hi, Cindy!)

But looking for pictures to put into this post really kind of clarified the purpose of these platforms, and the future I couldn’t fathom if I did quit. Life moves on, and it’s okay. However, although I’ve come to this conclusion, I’m not sure I’m ready to cut the cord just quite yet, but I do feel better about the possibility of saying goodbye to it forever. Again, just not yet.

Share

In honour of the assumptions early Internet writers (bloggers) had that people cared what they loved, here is a new instalment of MONTHLY FAVOURITES (woooooo!).

The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan

Okay, so I’ve been reading Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series since like, July, when Amazon canceled the series just as it started to get really good. I’ve probably written about it here, but truthfully, I’ve been unable to read anything else while I’ve been in the middle of it. Which means that I’m stuck reading this giant series because there are fourteen novels in the series (!) and they average about 826 pages (not including the prequel, New Spring, which is only about 400~ pages long) each. I’ve finished Lord of Chaos, which is the sixth book, and am in the middle of New Spring, which is like, so short to me now that I’ve been reading 900+ pagers.1 And I’m so mad that it’s so good because there probably won’t be any more live adaptations in my lifetime.

It’s a bit standard high fantasy fare, but good. I love fantasy, but I don’t think I’ve really hunkered down a series this intense and sprawling. So, I would say that my feedback is from a perspective that I would consider n00b-y. I am and always have been a big reader, however, and I will say that this series has captured my attention in a way that not many series has done. (I gave up midway through the first A Song of Ice and Fire book.)

Also, one of my favourite facts is that Robert Jordan lived in Charleston when he was alive, so it’s funny imagining him him writing these books in the same place as where Thomas Ravenell, Shep, and Whitney from Southern Charm are picking up girls half their age. Like, do you think he’s had dinner with Patricia Altschul?!

Honorable Favourite Mention: the Kobo Mark gave me for no reason this summer, as he now struggles to think of what to get me for Christmas.

Cecilie Bahnsen x The North Face bag

Okay, so I really wanted the tiny blue one from the Porter Yoshida collab, but I’m not made of money.

Really, I was trying to be good and not purchase anything but they dropped this in a new colourway (I’d missed the first drop because I was being Good) and I was in a very stressed out state, and so IDK, I bought it. And I’m happy about it! It’s actually a much better size for me, a Bag Lady, than the Porter Yoshida one that I could afford wanted.

It’s such a good travel bag, because I refuse to wear a fanny pack and I’m not in the mood to wade through a cavernous tote, especially when I need to locate my passport, train tickets, et al. I’ve brought it with me to Sicily and it’s now my main bag for a month-long jaunt into our oppressor’s (very beautiful) land.

I know you’re wondering: “What do you keep in the little keychain bag, Carina?”

I have my lip products, a blush, bobby pins, an eraser, and anti-anxiety medication, of course.

BAO’s Horlicks Bun

I’ve had this twice in October. First, per Mark’s sister, Jane’s, request when she was visiting. And then again when Mark and I had lunch in Borough after seeing the Cai Guo-Qiang show at White Cube (by chance, I had an errand! Justice for Tibet!2). Anyway, it sounds kind of like a dodgy dessert, to be quite frank. It’s essentially a gelato sandwich with deep-fried bao bun and a malt flavour. However, it’s pretty perfect, actually.

The gelato is rich and creamy with a familiar taste, if that makes sense. But it’s not crazy sweet either, or sickly, like how some chocolate or caramel desserts can be. And it’s sitting between two halves of hot bread that’s crispy on the outside and pillowy in the middle. Perfect.

Hobonichi

I fell swiftly and deeply into Planner Internet about two months ago. Again. However, I will say that I have actually been using a Hobonichi since purchasing one in Taiwan in 2015, and it’s nice to see that it’s still mostly working for me.

Currently, I only have the Hobonichi Weeks Mega for planning for 2025. Predictably, I’ve bought the other two sizes (Cousin and Techo) for the new year. While I’ll mainly just use a Hobonichi Weeks (not Mega, so no exorbitant number of blank pages, sad) for planning my life, I’ll be using the Cousin as a journal of sorts. A bit like a dated commonplace book and Project Life or something. The Techo was actually a 2025 one I got on sale, but I was going to do my daily comics on there as well.

I KNOW. Who has the time? Let’s see if I do, lol.

Some have asked for a planner set-up, which I will have up at some point before the new year, so stay tuned for that.

Sicily With the O’Connors

I went on holiday with Mark’s family towards the end of September, and it was the first time I’d gone into a Schengen country since moving to the U.K. in 2017 (!). I’d never been to Sicily, so it was quite amazing Italy with a sprawling landscape rather than the cities I had seen a decade and a bit ago.

The food was gorgeous; anywhere we went, the food tasted amazing. I had hoped we could have swam a bit more in the ocean, but a lot of the beaches we went to had some rocky shores and the waves were quite strong.

I spent my 37th birthday there, too. Incidentally! So it was nice having family to celebrate with. Jane made a lovely spread for dinner, and I really appreciated her cooking for 6 people on her holiday.

Painting Like This

This is for a commission, and I loved kind of going back to the way I used to paint, but also not really. It’s gestural and therapeutic and scratches a wholly different itch than when I finish a “pour painting”, which is where most of my work has been headed for the past two years or so.

This is also the biggest piece I’ve ever made. It’s a tetraptych, but the final size is a bit over 8 feet by 8 feet.

Joan Mitchell’s Iva

I barely get to go to the Tate anymore, so it’s kind of handy when people are visiting because a) that’s an easy place to take them, and b) it’s where they want to go anyway. They’ve rearranged a lot of the permanent collection, actually, and I loved seeing the Pacita Abad acquisitions displayed so prominently in London, since I just saw them in a small room in Tate Liverpool when they first bought the pieces.

However, just across my favourite room (the one that houses Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals), they’ve hung up Joan Mitchell’s Iva. Which is fantastic.

I’m trying to remember what was hung in that spot before, but I can’t recall. It was either Agnes Martin or Gerhard Richter, maybe. Both great choices, but I was so drawn in by Iva.

Tasting Menus, Occasionally

Whenever my sister visits London with her partner, they’re always kind enough to bring us along to their fun meals — usually somewhere we wouldn’t go unless it was a special occasion. This last trip, we were able to taste Cornus for the first time!

One of the people we met at Akoko the last time we all ate there started working at Cornus, which is how they found out about it. Like Akoko, it has one Michelin star.

My favourites were the crab and scallop, if you were interested, but everything was lovely.

Going Shopping But Not Buying Anything

The thing about shopping shopping is that you keep the stuff you buy, and you have to live with all of that stuff. And when you move? You have to pack all of it up and find a way to bring all of it with you.

I used to find it a waste of a trip to the mall if I came back home without buying anything; the treat meter at a zero was unacceptable. However, since I’ve had to keep my own spaces and make sure they’re (more or less) tidy, I’ve just been so overwhelmed with the amount of stuff I have. That I bought and can’t keep track of. How dumb!

I still enjoy going to shops and looking and trying stuff (not trying stuff on. A detestable exercise). I do not, however, have that desire in me to own everything I want. What a blessing to be in this place. Obviously, I still purchase stuff, but I was speaking to my brother recently about having no appetite for shopping like we both used to. He mentioned that while that was true, he did still want things, but very specific things that he wants because they fill a gap, a void, what-have-you. Not necessarily necessities, but things that aren’t redundant or a duplicate. I think it’s the same for me. Mostly.

I loved going around DSM and Liberty with my sister, and I loved walking out of those places without the compulsion to get something just to get something. You know?

I’m actually in the middle of a very long holiday with my family right now (we’re in Spain!), so I’m in a sort of time delay in terms of favourites in my mind. As in, I have an updated list that I’m really, really wanting to share. The problem with growing up documenting everything to share online like a natural reflex is that once you hit your 30s or something, you just have a bunch of pictures that no one sees. That you’re always meaning to share. Even though you don’t.

My “main blog” where sort of “evergreen”, SEO-friendly (lol) things like travel posts, photographs, and reviews should go has been languishing since before I even moved here. But I think I’m clearer now on where things should live. I think. If you’ve ever had a self-hosted blog that was like, your only friend, you’d know what I mean.

If you find yourself in Manila, please drop by my solo show, Eight Views From the Border, which is my first one with Silverlens. Which I’ve been wanting since 2015, lol. It opened on the 20th of November and runs until the 20th of December. I’m not going to be able to be there (boo flights, boo work), but I hope you will be?

More importantly, I hope you are all doing as well as you can be and are enjoying small (and even big!) things in life that make it bearable and, also, joyful, too.

2

Speaking of Cai Guo-Qiang at the White Cube, there was a documentary of his site-specific works at all these places like Moscow, Philadelphia, Japan, etc. But they conveniently omitted the spectacle he made for Arc’teryx where they set off fireworks alongside a protected mountain area in Tibet.

There were protests when the show opened, and there seems to be no accountability really from White Cube. Speaking of the documentary, I really enjoyed the matchbook landscapes his father made.

I was also a very :) shy :) 29 year old living in halls with kids who were easily 10 years younger than me. Perhaps more. I felt uncool — everyone there went to an art or fashion uni — and I literally avoided going into the kitchen if someone else was there, lest I had to make small talk. We all shared a small fridge and a small freezer, and like I said, I lived with 19 year olds unleashed into the adult for the first time, so obviously, no one cared about washing up.

Needless to say, I was very ill-prepared for the really intense work of taking good care of one’s self.

I’d like to think that in the 8 years since, I’ve learned how to actually cook. I’ve lived in Brockley with two couples (hell), Bow with Laura (amazing, but also we lived through COVID lockdown together), London Fields (for a month with an architect who kicked me out after a month because his girlfriend needed the unfurnished room!), somewhere else in London Fields (half-hell because Sandra and I lived with an insane woman for a bit, but then she moved out and so it was half-lovely because Jemima moved in), and now I’m in Bow again with Mark, my husband.

I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken about this but Mark used to be vegan. I want to say that he was a chill vegan and never made me feel bad about eating meat, but of course, when he was over at mine, I would have to make nice vegan food. Man cannot live on takeaway alone. First, because the variation you seek in the vegan world will likely cause you to run into pretty unhealthy territory. Second, London takeaway is often both underwhelming and very expensive.

Laura, my Swiss Bow flatmate, actually taught me the wonders of tofu, so in a way, I feel like she’s prepared me for my lot in life: to be a girlfriend to a vegan. I made it my life’s mission to feed this man Good Vegan Food. And we spent our time more often at mine, because he was a lodger at the time, and his landlady was a woman in her 80s who was very nice but also grew to be fairly nosy.

I’ve crumbled, shaved, pressed, frozen, pan-fried tofu. I’ve made tiramisu out of tofu. When I moved to London Fields, it felt like a blessing to be so close to loads of Asian supermarkets because that’s where the good tofu is. The best tofu dish I’ve made is one I made up where I cubed the tofu and covered it with cornstarch seasoned with salt, pepper, white pepper, and mushroom powder before frying them — on all sides — and serving them with knife-cut noodles dressed in a gorgeous tangy sauce made with Kusi’s sisig seasoning, Chinkiang vinegar, soy sauce and sesame oil. Another mainstay was a dandan-adjacent sesame noodle dish I made and Chiara’s tofu sisig.

Once the tofu was exhausted, I moved on to different things: charred miso aubergine, pajeon and Korean bulgogi made with sliced abura-age (!), plant-based ramen, focaccia, tacos. I even looked to beans — butter, garbanzo, white beans — and now I’m a convert. I veganised a lot of Filipino dishes, too, which I’d like to think that many would confirm is not an easy feat.

I remember all of the dishes I’ve made for him, but I know that I’ve never made all of this effort for myself. Whenever I have to feed myself, I always think of the quickest thing I can eat, so it’s been a lot of tinned fish and leftover rice. Before I was cognisant of how much protein I had to actually eat, I would settle for adding furikake on rice and calling it a day. Asako Yuzuki’s Butter encouraged me to add butter and soy sauce on a mound of hot white rice, and that even felt indulgent.

On okay days I will muster up enough energy to boil some eggs. I’ll eat two or three with celery salt and I’ll call that enough. Breakfast for Mark is garlic fried rice, some corned beef or leftovers, and obviously, some homemade pickles or onion and tomato salsa. In the throes of my depression, I would mix powdered sugar and milk and eat a bowl of icing. Cooking instant ramen in water felt “too much” so I would crush the noodles in the bag and pour a bit of the seasoning in. I’d shake the bag to cover each noodle in the salty flavouring, and then I’d save the leftover seasoning for a “soup” the next day.

Now that Mark’s not vegan anymore, my meals have grown more elaborate, but still, I never cook like that if I know mine is the only mouth I have to feed. It’s a little bit sad, but I’m trying to be better to myself. I’m not really sure what the psychology is around that but I do tend to not give a shit about feeding myself. Or less so than I care about feeding others anyway.

I’m currently on a family holiday that will take me away from my home for about a month. Because I’d been cooking for Mark’s lunch and dinner ever since he started working a very physically strenuous job, I was terrified that he was going to go hungry. Even though he had managed okay before meeting me. I just couldn’t wrap my head around not being there to cook for him. A bit gross, optically, because we are strong, independent women, rah rah rah! But at the end of the day, I know my cooking makes him happy, and he appreciates it so much. I feel like anything I can do to make him less tired or have one less thing to think about, I’m glad to do. Also, it’s not like I don’t eat what I make for him. I just don’t want to go through all of these steps just for me.

Recipe 1: Boneless Air-fried Chicken

This is a staple in our household because it’s easy, simple, and, frankly, delicious. The ingredients are a guide because truth be told, I kind of just eyeball everything. The important thing is that it tastes good to you.

Ingredients
8 chicken thighs with skin on, deboned
6 garlic cloves, minced
1/3 cup fish sauce
2 tbsp. sesame oil
1 tbsp. soy sauce
1/4 tsp. white pepper
1/4 tsp. black pepper
1/4 tsp. gochugaru
Knorr liquid seasoning (optional)

Method
1. Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl and put the chicken in, ensuring each crevice (!) is covered. If the above liquid is not quite enough, don’t be shy about putting more fish sauce.
2. Marinate for at least an hour. I typically cook a batch of 4 for dinner and lunch and then leave the rest to chill in the fridge until the next evening.
3. Air-fry for 10 minutes at 220°C, skin side down. Sometimes I spoon some of the marinade mixture on top of this side, if I want it slightly more flavourful. Flip skin side up for the remaining 8 minutes at 230°C. Spray some oil on this side before returning into the air-fryer if you want it crispier.
4. I usually cut the thighs into strips, but you don’t have to do this, lol. Usually served with rice and a side of homemade radish pickles, blanched pak choi or Korean seasoned bean sprouts (Sukjunamul-muchim).

To be honest, you could also do this with bone-in chicken. It just won’t be as fun to eat. I would add an additional 2 minutes to the cooking time.

Recipe 2: Minced Beef in Sesame Sauce

I don’t know what to call this but I know it’s not appetising. To be honest it also doesn’t look great, but it’s amazing. This is essentially the dandan-adjacent sesame concoction I’ve been cooking for like, 3 years. I think I’ve perfected it this time. Often served with rice, or if made extra saucy, with knife cut noodles!

I use ratios for the sauce because I use whatever spoon is there, but again, go with your taste.

Ingredients
400-500g minced beef or pork
— season with white pepper, black pepper, and salt
6 parts tahini
1 part soy sauce
1 part fish sauce
3 parts sesame oil
1.5 parts Sichuan peppercorn oil (this is generous so if you don’t like the numbing sensation, go easy on this or omit altogether)
1.5 part Chinkiang vinegar
2 parts water
5-7 cloves of garlic

I used to make a vegan version of this. In place of the beef or pork, I used crumbled tofu or chopped up oyster mushrooms. Both good, but obviously texturally different. Omit fish sauce if going vegan, and sub with more soy sauce or add rehydrated shiitake mushrooms (chopped!) to the mushrooms or tofu if you need the umami.

Method
1. Brown the seasoned beef or pork in a skillet. I use high-ish heat to sear the meat.
2. Chuck all of the ingredients in a blender or food processor and blitz until smooth. If it’s too thick (has to be quite runny but not watery), add more water. If it’s too thin, I would just let it reduce in the pan.
3. Lower the heat to medium and add the sauce in the pan. Toss everything until well coated.

For a tiny bit of a kick, I add a bit of gochugaru while mixing the sauce in with the beef or pork. I used to add Lao Gan Ma, too, but I find it can overpower the rest of the flavours. Again, go with your taste!

As you can see, both recipes are quite easy and not really labour intensive (except if you want to debone the chicken). For someone who has literally no energy for anything beyond the minimal, I’d like to think of these dishes as a labour of love. A very tasty labour of love.

I was recently part of Sa Tahanan Co.’s Tindahan, which delves into the role of food within the life of a Filipino immigrant — partaking in meals, carrying one’s heritage, making a home away from home — and I really thought about how making food has become my way of getting to know myself through flavours that really feel like home.

Increasingly, I’ve felt homesick, and it’s truly not been a problem for me (strangely) up until I was told, during COVID lockdowns that I can’t go back home. Obviously that’s no longer the case, but the two years I spent not being able to see my family face-to-face really altered me, I think. In ways I can’t even really articulate.

For my photographs, I collected some staples I’d get that weren’t quite what I would find in grocery stores back home. But they’re still reminders of certain things I miss. I called these images Approximations of Home, because that’s what they are. Near translations, but indirect and not quite the same. Still good, though, and part of the language I’m developing to refer to as home, trying to navigate what it means to inhabit two places and two realities that are so close and inextricable to me and my being, albeit hundreds of miles away.

I’ve been a massive fan of Jenny Saville as one of the first living and working artists whose work I discovered and followed since. She went to the Glasgow School of Art and mounted a degree show that thoroughly captivated Charles Saatchi who offered her enough financial stability for two years in exchange for her painting full-time during that period. The paintings at the end of this period would then be mounted at his gallery1. This wild opportunity gave Jenny (then in her early 20s) the freedom to paint, without the precarity of financial instability looming over her. Even at a young age, her work was magnificent and inspired, and thoroughly unpretentious. She painted bodies — often the type of bodies that people avoided looking at because of discomfort, maybe, or simply the unease of being confronted by such unfamiliarity — but the way she rendered these subjects was so arresting that one felt like there was no other option but to look. To hold the gaze of that painting and really see.

Through her work, and revisiting it in person, I realise the potential and power painting held. That beautiful things need not always be something pleasant or palatable. That rawness and the real — especially when painted in the way that she painted — was beautiful.

I’ve been having my own dilemmas as an artist who primarily paints. Speaking with two gallerists with whom I will be showing soon, I expressed my concerns about only ever really being a painter. I’ve dabbled in things like video art and some installations, sculptures, but truly, my main medium for the past ten years or so (!) has been painting. I think that’s the mode of making that feels most natural to me, in terms of serving as a funnel for all that I want to express. I distill everything — every experience, every thought, every sensation — into colours on a canvas, and even though what I make now is the closest to abstraction than any other “genre”, I feel like these images encapsulate everything that I want to say. I was insecure about being just a painter when there were so many other things an artist could be.

Anyway, they said that that wasn’t necessarily true: that painting was boring, or that it was obvious, a cop-out, almost. They said they did notice that sentiment to be something more prevalent in the U.K., which makes sense as the contemporary art shows I’ve been going to really try and stretch the boundaries of what art is, especially beyond more traditional forms like painting. Certainly, it’s not true in the Philippines, where my audience more or less is anyway. That’s what I get for scrolling through too many region-specific art meme accounts. (Hello, artreviewpower100.)

I came away from The Anatomy of Painting kind of really invigorated. Encouraged. Optimistic about the work I had been doing. Not because my work holds a candle to what she’s doing and what she’s done, but because I could see my work sort of in relation to hers. That there was space, still, for paintings — especially contemporary paintings — to exist in this world that’s oversaturated with images and detritus.

My worry was that painting is the most linked to capitalism and ownership. And that because it’s the easiest digestible medium, it would be dismissed as conceptually barren. So really, all these concerns are mostly my own insecurities of creating work that felt like they had no substance even though that’s not always necessarily true of painting. I think it’s easy to “understand” painting on a surface level, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing that exists beyond this first initial encounter. Although it is easier to understand and accept than, say, an installation or some esoteric moving image work, it doesn’t mean that painting is inherently devoid of thought or concept.

I think that approaching the materiality of the painting — the way the colours converge and interact, not just blending together, but even reacting to different environmental elements like gravity and mixture and the canvas — is such a rich thing to witness, both as an artist and as someone who’s always found the way paint creates something out of many disparate things so mystical.

It can be kind of really magical. I think that I’ve felt pressured to over-intellectualise some parts of my practice that don’t need to be validated in that way. A painting can just be a painting, and a painting can just be beautiful.

Jenny Saville’s newer work didn’t quite resonate with me as much as her earlier pieces. Not aesthetically, at least. But I can see her play with paint and see the joy and wonder involved in the making of these pictures with bursts of colour, not necessarily to create an image or evoke a feeling as an end point. But to paint just because you feel compelled to. To paint because you feel as though you must.

r/bald is like a support group for people with receding hairlines. It’s mostly men who’ve grown their hair long to compensate for the hair loss up top. Some of the hair is luscious, a lot of it is wispy, but most of the posts that get served to me are of before and afters. In these posts, the people are visibly so, so much happier once they shed all of the weight of their hair along with the burden of holding on to something so dear to them that ultimately was blocking them from reaching their full potential.

I personally love it; it’s often so wholesome. I already love displays of genuine, warm male friendships, but it’s so great to see people — strangers, really — respond to these acts of freedom with such encouragement. It resonated with me, because I feel like I’ve been carrying a lot of things that have made me feel stuck. In one of my last letters, I talked about the recognition of bad things people think about me that plague my mind, too. It’s almost as if other people thinking it make them truer. And, it’s honestly been such a struggle coming to terms with living a life that doesn’t quite align with how I pictured it to be, even though there are aspects of it that are truly wonderful.

Recently, the shortlist for the Ateneo Art Awards was released. It’s a recognition of particular solo exhibitions for early- and mid-career artists that’s given by Ateneo Art Gallery, which is an institution affiliated with my alma mater, Ateneo de Manila University. Even before my first solo show in 2011, it held such a prestige in my head. I remember seeing Yasmin Sison’s show that was nominated in 2007 and Bembol dela Cruz’s paintings at one of the showcases the year that he won, and I remember wishing I could be an artist that good. Every edition of it since then, I’ve enjoyed seeing different artists get acknowledged for the good (or bad, lol) work that they do. It’s a good way to revisit these exhibits as well, as the shortlisted artists recreate these nominated exhibitions for a period of time, before the winners are announced.

Anyway, this year was my last chance to get nominated, and I wasn’t. Unlike the UK’s Turner Prize, which did away with age limits in 2017, the AAA has a strangely specific cut-off age of 36 years old. Truthfully, it wasn’t an expectation on my end. I suppose it really only dawned on me that I missed the boat when they announced the shortlist and my brain went, “Oh my gosh, I’m too old now.”

And then a short mourning period happened. And then I thought about my mortality. And then I thought about another award in the Philippines that I was about to get aged out of. And then I thought about my imminent death again.

And of course I was sad. You can’t help but feel like you’ve been doing something wrong.

In case you didn’t know, the other members of my immediate family are also artists, and whenever we do interviews, the question of comparison always comes up. Sometimes it gets brought up in casual conversation or even when I’m just standing at an exhibit opening. I don’t blame anyone; it’s a fair question to ask. I’ve really never felt in competition with any of them, and I’m always happy and proud when they do well. It’s just inevitable to question where I place on this hierarchy. Is that healthy? No. But it is normal.

Biases aside, I do find my family very talented. However, when they achieve something significant, I think about what other people must be thinking about me. “Well, what is Carina doing? Why can’t she make it like the rest of her family?” And like, here I am, yapping on a Substack, watching a dumb show in the background, and putting off chores so I can psych myself up to go to the studio today, because, well, I have to.

It’s hard. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that. It’s not really something I can stop doing, either. Not easily, anyway.

My horoscope readings lately have been talking about “blocks”. I’ve been getting these readings pretty consistently. On Saturday, I was told that thoughts and ideas left unchecked “can turn into prisons.” “What looks like a roadblock might be an invitation to learn something new.” For this week, I was told to not focus too much on expectations and try to recognise possibilities in front of me. Allegedly, the general theme of my life right now is to free myself from past restrictions and, again, allegedly, this time is a transformative one for me.

I read about three readings (two everyday, and another one for a third opinion) and these are the most frequent findings for the placements of the stars in relation to my life. Sometimes it’s a little hard to think about how these could apply to me, especially if I’m in denial or have my own blind spots, but I’ve also been trying to meditate and I’m still doing my morning pages as per Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. Most days I have nothing to say, but sometimes I uncover an answer when I least expect it.

When you give yourself time to ruminate on things, it’s easier to figure stuff out, too. When you spend time sitting with uncomfortable feelings, you make space for better responses or ways of thinking. There’s peace there, as well, in the acceptance of the things you can’t change. Letting go of the burden of winning awards was sort of really pivotal in me being happy in the work that I make.

I’ve been doing a bit of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy through Headspace too, and it’s helped me a lot in terms of locating my real feelings and healthier ways of responding to “bad” news. I don’t know. On one hand, my personal growth has been going positively, I feel. I eat healthier, spend some time exercising (not a lot, because I am who I am), and I feel like I’m actively trying to be someone who is more understanding and less angry.

As a previously very angry teenager and young adult, I’ve come to the realisation that anger is a feeling that’s difficult to hold onto, especially when it’s misplaced or unhelpful. There is a rage that I think can be productive as a motivation and driver for change (which is why I stand in solidarity with my fellow Filipinos who have been showing up again and again to fight for the rampant corruption and theft in the country), but I think, in terms of making and working, it’s not a good emotion for me to carry around.

I’m still working on it. I’m fuelled by the possibility of feeling a freedom from letting stuff go. I really would like to become the type of person who is able to keep her head down and let my work speak for itself. (The toxic part of my brain just said, “Okay, but what is it trying to say?” Begone, intrusive thought!)

I think I’ll keep my hair, though.

Share The Second Structure of Feeling

Incidentally, I’ve also written two things recently: a Q&A with one of my favourite artists right now, Corinne de San Jose, for Rolling Stone Philippines, and exhibition notes for a new show at Ateneo Art Gallery for my grandfather, Mauro Malang Santos. My dad selected a collection of drawings from when he started his career in the 60s to near his passing in 2017. The show opens on the 28th of September, and I really wish I could be there.

In an attempt to break out of my The Wheel of Time rewatch loop, I tried watching new shows, including a full rewatch of Lost (which is literally still so good) and some X-Files here and there. Other shows I’ve watched are:

1. Pop Star Academy: Katseye — I didn’t watch this when it came out but I kept getting YouTube recommendations for their videos and they were so cute. I don’t know if I like the format of the show — though I must have, as we sped through it — but the talking head of Mitra, the president of Hybe x Geffen, was so revealing of how execs think, particularly with reality T.V. and manufacturing drama. “It’s our most-watched video, so who cares about all the young women we traumatised?” I mean, deep down, I knew this was the case anyway, but pitting kids against each other is just another level of icky.

2. The Girlfriend — Okay, so this was kind of bad, but it was a great companion for doing housework around the flat. The kicker for me was Hunza G figuring as a massive clue when they were figuring out if the main character flew first class or not, lol.

3. The Summer I Turned Pretty — I read these books after I enjoyed To All the Boys I Loved Before and I absolutely hated them. Which is why it took me so long to watch the series. WHICH, TO NO ONE’S SURPRISE, IS ALSO SO BAD. As someone who was shaped by young adult fiction, I thought I would like this more than other people who didn’t care for YA. However, it was just as bad as I remembered it being. Maybe slightly better; I was less mad than when I had been when I read it. I do think it’s tonally quite strange, but it’s also really telling that I found the parents’ stories way more compelling and wish there was more of that. AKA, I’m too old for this.

4. Coldwater — This was also not that great, but I thought I should mention it as I did watch all of it. I think I have very little patience for snivelling protagonists and, honestly, there was very little reason to root for anyone. For me, it was just a story to watch unfold, though I was not shy about expressing my frustration and disgust at each turn, because my goodness, was the main guy spineless.

5. The Traitors Ireland — Look, this is so funny. I know people don’t seem to like the US version of this, but I love how they actually play, whereas I find that personal relationships often get in the way of gameplay in the UK version. (To be fair, they are also playing for the money, and so I can see why everyone is so despy.) The Traitors Ireland is similar to the first season of Australia, but with a whole lot more cussing. It also didn’t feel like people took things too personally. WHICH I APPRECIATE SO MUCH. No one has cried at the roundtable yet, which was refreshing.

6. Survivor Australia: Australia vs. The World — Greatest Survivor season in recent memory. Highly, highly recommend.

For Jumalon, the garden inside the chest is personal, alive, and growing. Everything is entwined and tangled, but held inside and controlled. To focus on a puddle — that which reflects, distorts, absorbs, and remembers — forces a pause for internal reflection. Grown from the personal need to find stillness in the face of overwhelming experiences, these images steer one towards moments of contemplation, serving as small, quiet spaces that still hold something powerful.

By imagining these landscapes and capturing them in images, Jumalon distills personal reflections into spaces that are familiar but slightly out of reach, in terms of absolute recognition. These result in images of places that feel known but not quite nameable. Based on the artist’s own photographs, the images are wrought through a process of fragmentation and aggregation. Meant more to be held than seen, these paintings contain memory rather than memorabilia, eliciting personal specific tethers, depending on who views them and what they take from the work. Destabilising the perceptions of the viewer, these images recall certain memories, but do not quite reflect them precisely, the full meaning of the work shifting with the viewer.

Approaching these new works with a sense of naivete, Jumalon recalibrates her process and reintroduces old methods and mediums, recalling how she used to draw. She is deliberate in communicating in a visual language that favours crudeness and rawness to polished perfection.

Playing with scale displays a range from the personal and intimate to larger and more encompassing feelings, and Jumalon has created these works as places of personal refuge, providing geographies of commonality. Here, small and internal experiences commune together as shared common ground. Larger representations of space may create a feeling of awe and the grandiose, but this collection of new work shows that capturing both grand and smaller feelings in a puddle is meaningful, too.

Constructed from memory, observation, and a process of intuitive arrangement, each piece communicates the artist’s personal journey both physically (be it on foot, on her motorcycle, or on some other type of transport) and internally. Some compositions are moments of pause and refuge, while others lean into structure, repetition, and a quiet tension.

“This act of piecing things together becomes a way to hold what cannot always be put into words,” she writes. A Garden in the Chest explores how internal and external environments meet, often within ourselves, and how we carry fragments of the spaces we inhabit within ourselves. How form and feeling can overlap through the art of making.

Photos courtesy of MO Space. More information on the exhibition can be found here.

—
Sitings is a series in which I publish texts I have written for artists’ exhibition notes. Here are some of the other shows I have written for and published here:

• Nilo Ilarde’s unpainted painting

• Luis Antonio Santos’ The Flowers are Blooming Again, But They Have No Scent

• Allan Balisi’s To Our Friends

Today, I wanted to talk about the time when I learned of a mean thing that someone who I thought of as a friend said. They were an acquaintance, at least. Someone who I thought of fondly, even warmly.

For the almost-eight years that I’ve been here, I have thought about how stunted the progression of my practice has been. It’s not grown as quickly or as enormously as I would have liked, and truthfully, coming out of the haze of a masters programme at a university that’s ranked higher for arts studies than most, I did expect some sort of jumpstart to my career. A little nudge, even.

Instead, I’ve found myself working random jobs not at all related to my skillset or my pretty established career in design and publishing back home. I’ve shared this on other platforms, but just to humour you, I’ve worked as the ff. during my time here in London:

• retail assistant (COS Regent Street)

• “book designer and production coordinator” for a photographer (I was a PA who could use InDesign for a fixed daily rate under London Living Wage)

• design intern, then design assistant for a creative agency

• production assistant for a candle company (as in I made the candles, and when we had a shop, I also did retail work and made coffees!)

• marketing, sales, and brand assistant for a jeweller (I was a shop girl that could use Photoshop, Shopify and make emails)

• ceramics assistant for a friend of mine (I minded the shop while wedging old clay)

• shop assistant at a provisions store

Most recently, I was a graphic designer (and then promoted to senior brand designer) for a swimwear brand. I quit in April. I’m currently about a month into a new job that’s art-related but also not at all creative.

All this to say that it’s really, really hard to keep on top of your art practice and growth in that area, when you are constantly trying to make rent. I have my residence rent and my studio rent. Admittedly, my parents have helped me through some of the more financially difficult times here. When I graduated in 2019, I had to apply for a non-student visa to be employable because at the time, you only get about four months post-graduation on your student visa to try and live and work here.

I was in the process of looking for work after I got the visa in late 2019, and then COVID happened. Absolutely no one was hiring.

Even then, it was really difficult to find a job that I felt suited for. A lot of the work I ended up doing, I had no experience in, or were really labour-intensive (making candles and handling deliveries are not quite as zen as some people may think), or were set up around an unpredictable rota that changed weekly, making it hard to set a schedule and routine around.

It was hard. And tiring.

I’m very lucky that I still have some presence in the art scene in the Philippines, because it’s been really hard to make headway in the scene here. Again, I’ve not quite exerted myself 100 percent in trying to make this happen. When your brain is literal mush after a workday, all you can do is make dinner when you get home, if that. On your days off, you can’t think about going to your studio or on a nice gallery hop because all you can think about is all of the laundry you haven’t done or the bathroom you have to clean or the sheets you have to change.

In doing all of this, you still have that voice in the back of your head that says you aren’t doing enough for your art. Because, in all honesty, you aren’t. It doesn’t mean you aren’t doing anything, but you aren’t doing anything for your practice. Your flat is clean, so your stress levels have lowered, but once again, you’ve failed to go to your studio. Ad nauseum forever and ever.

Anyway. That’s what’s been going through my head. So when someone who I thought of as a friend confirms these thoughts about myself by expressing them to someone else, then I just feel doubly bad. This is one of my favourite quotes from Girls, because this is exactly how that felt:

Like, I did think about it myself, but you said it because you thought it, too. In this scene, Hannah says no one can make her feel bad because of it. Kind of like, she’s beat someone to the punch because she’s already thought it about herself. However, that’s not the case for me. Because someone else verbalising my innermost, horrible thoughts about myself then makes my worst thoughts true. It’s kind of like every time I go home and an auntie (and at one point, our security guard) says that I got fat and gained weight. Yes, I know. I have eyes. I wear my clothes. This is the body I have to move in.

So, yes, I could be doing more, technically. Most days, I really don’t have the capacity to do anything else than try and survive. I’ve whined about self-care (in the sense of caring for yourself) before, and it still applies. Lately, it’s felt really acute and in focus. In addition to general day-to-day upkeep, up until recently, I’ve had to contend with the arduous task of looking for employment and my miscarriage. And have I mentioned my severe depression and anxiety? It’s a hamster wheel of doom, and all I have to battle these things are mindless mobile games, breathing exercises, and my meds. Truly, in the depths of my depression, not even my husband can do anything to help me, even though he tries very hard to and I love him for it.

I’m not completely sure what the point of this letter was. I think I wanted to confirm, somehow, an awareness of what I do perceive as a lack. I wanted to say “Yes, I know I suck.” I wanted to show that the “stagnation”2 has not happened in a vacuum. That outside of my practice, I’ve done other things, too. I got my degree (an expensive sheet of an ugly printout). I stayed at a job for almost two years. I made amazing friends. I got married. I got permanent residency here after over seven years. I tried my best to be able to live here, to afford the exorbitant cost of living, doing many jobs that I was happy enough to have though probably would rather not have been doing. In small pockets of time in between, I kept making art, I kept writing, and I kept showing up.

I’d rather be painting. Reading. Going to galleries and museums. Watching films, bands, (some) theatre. Eating good food, having good company. But it really is so expensive here (and, at this point, anywhere and everywhere), that I can’t just be doing fun stuff all the time.

Growing up, one realises that many, many different things constitute your life. Many of these things are responsibilities that you can’t pawn off on someone else. Kind of icky that I’m 37 soon and this is only just becoming evident, but I do think there’s a difference between knowing this as a thing you can acknowledge as true, and knowing it after each and every harrowing experience.

The thought that it never ends and likely gets harder and more serious as we age terrifies me more than Weapons (which I just saw, and was gross, somewhat goofy, and fun). Mostly because the former is an inevitability for me, but still. I think that the more we face these problems, the easier they are to handle.

The drop in your stomach is still there, but hopefully, you’re more equipped to handle it and find your way out of trouble when it comes.

TL;DR: Someone was mean to me, but it was true, and now I feel worse about it.

In my last letter, I had written about having lost an early pregnancy. This was written about a week after I had started miscarrying, and I write this now about about two weeks after that letter. A few days ago, I “completed” the miscarriage, which is the term used to indicate that the hCG levels (the hormone that indicates a pregnancy) in my body have lowered, that my body is back to “normal.”

I took a home pregnancy test to confirm the above — even though it was obvious to me what had happened, and although it’s still displaying a faint “positive” line — and it felt like such whiplash to be told by my pee that I was no longer carrying a baby.

Well, a couple of days after my spotting stopped, my period started back up and it’s way heavier than it usually is. Which is heavy enough. (I once bled so much, my menstrual cup overflowed and blood dripped down my leg in front of a coworker and I had to waddle home on the Tube and DLR in my wide-leg pants, which thankfully, were a very dark grey that was almost black. I started wearing incontinence pads during the early days of my period after this incident.)

I find it a little insane that no one tells girls what to expect from something so common as pregnancy, of which one in like, four or five ends in miscarriage. The only sex education I really ever remember getting from my private all-girls Catholic school was an anti-abortion film called The Silent Scream, where it showed the process hidden behind a flimsy curtain, presumably to deter us from having any sex at all.

We had biology lessons, of course. But learning about important parts of your body through diagrams can make one feel quite detached from your own vessel. When I met up with a few girls I went to high school with a few years after we graduated from high school, they reminded me that I once told a group of them to try and look at their own vagina with a hand mirror, because a book called Deal With It! released by gurl.com (I miss it everyday) advised it was good to learn about your own body parts. I had no recollection of this… erm, encouragement on my part, but I still stand by it. Countless posts on Twitter and Facebook by people with such limited biological and sexual knowledge is, for lack of a better word, concerning.

Anyway, my point is: no one talks about any of this. It’s such a disservice to not educate young women about their bodies because it’s felt so uncomfortable to do so. I obviously knew how conception happens, but I had no clue about my pregnant body beyond that. I knew I shouldn’t eat alfalfa sprouts or sushi and that I should take folate (thank you, The Princess Diaries), but other than that, I was so clueless. Imagine how much panic-scrolling on Reddit I had to do when I started miscarrying.

My body was so fatigued — all I wanted to do was nap — and it came at such an unfortunate time, as I had finally started working again, albeit part-time. My mood was at a low that was comparable to that of my worst depression. I didn’t want to see anybody, and so I had to cancel on people. My need to be liked was overridden by the overwhelming sense that nothing really mattered anymore.

And like, we didn’t even plan on the pregnancy. Our first try, we weren’t tracking ovulation or anything, so the pregnancy didn’t take. I was late for a few days, but my period came and that was that. We received a positive result after the second time, and we were floored. And just as we had started wrapping our heads around the big change about to happen in our lives, it was over.

So, I’ve been a jumble of emotions and, really, I just feel a lot of confusion and, in many ways, grief. Everyone has been really nice and supportive. I felt a bit weird writing about it, but because I did, I’ve connected with a number of friends and acquaintances who have graciously shared their own experiences, some of which I never even knew they’d gone through. No one talks about it, and I don’t think it’s about shame or embarrassment. It’s kind of the sort of sadness and loss that is so hard to explain unless you’ve been there, too.

When you find someone who understands, though, there’s a little feeling of relief, almost. As though you’ve been waiting for someone who got it, beyond empathy and the general care a friend would extend to you. Though very much appreciated, it’s really so different when you feel your grief and loss is seen and understood by someone else, innately and completely.

I told Mark that maybe I didn’t want to try again if, after the next one, we lost the baby again. I truly was unprepared for the heavy weight that came with this loss. I really don’t think I want to go through it again more than once again. A woman on Reddit miscarried 14 times before she had her baby. I do not have the strength to go through that, nor do I want a child that badly. And I don’t mean to sound flippant, but it’s true. My life does not feel incomplete without a baby.

We’ve always sort of discussed having children in a quite casual way: “If it happens, it happens.” Don’t get me wrong, we’ve discussed it at length. This world is so cruel. But what I mean is that I would feel happy about my life with Mark without a baby, and I would feel happy, too, with one. They would just be very different lives, but I’d be happy all the same. It wouldn’t be incomplete, as such.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to get back to normalcy as best I can. As I mentioned, I started working (as an art collections manager for a private collector) and I have a few commissions I need to work on, and some websites I’ve been building. If I ever manage to find the will, I would like to go to my studio more frequently. The deadlines are usually kind of drive enough for me. I simply do not want to explain to people that the reason I’ve been M.I.A. is that I lost a pregnancy. Still, sometimes, all I want to do is stay in bed.

These are the things that have occupied my brain in the idle moments:

1. Yellowstone — Somehow I thought this was going to be ““prestige”” T.V., but it is essentially a soap opera for cowboys and conservatives. The family dynamic reminds me so much of The Righteous Gemstones, except somehow the Gemstones are less morally corrupt than the Duttons? Funnier, too. Do I recommend it? Not really, lol. But it was a good enough series to fall asleep to.

2. The Wheel of Time — Ever since the show got canceled, I’ve started reading the series by Robert Jordan. There are 14 books and I’m on the fifth book, The Fires of Heaven, which is over 900 pages. I’ve also put the series in the background when I work, and I’m now on my fourth rewatch, lol.

   

   If anybody has a rec for a similar show, please let me know, though I’ve probably watched it already.

3. Okuntakinte!!! — Listen. I followed this man when he began documenting his journey towards assisted death in the Netherlands and launched something called The Last Supper Project, where he dines with strangers to share his last days. It appealed to my tendencies to find beauty in pain and connection, despite the sadness and hopelessness. HOWEVER. This man’s numerous scams and grifts and controversies have been meticulously documented by a number of people and diligent researchers.

   

   In the last week, he: a) got engaged to a man he met at one of his supper club dinners (which is called Fucked Up Individuals, named after the clothing line by his “best friend” Illi, who he runs it with, and which costs €150 per head), b) traveled to Poland to see this fiancé, without a valid visa, and got caught the German border with weed he’s brought with him from Amsterdam and then, got sent back to Poland and was detained there, and c) is no longer seeking medically assisted death, even though it turns out he never qualified for it anyway. It’s a lot.

4. Cooking good dinners — So, Mark’s got a 9-to-5 as a garden hand at a place in North London, and I’ve been doing a lot of meal prep for dinner and lunch. I wrote in a recent Instagram post that I can’t be assed to cook elaborate meal for myself (literally had chopped tomatoes and a can of tuna for lunch), but I do enjoy making sure Mark’s well-fed and nourished. I will make a post on the meals on our rotation, if that’s interesting. Though, let’s be honest, I’ll probably write one anyway, even if it wasn’t interesting.

   

5. Mobile games — unfortunately, I’ve been on my phone a lot, playing games. I don’t even want to say what games because they’re not even that good, but I’ve enjoyed the distraction. I will say I spent money on them, and this admission feels like the most private thing about me that I’ve bared, even though that’s obviously not true.

I’ve also been in the middle of The Artist’s Way, which I feel like I need to restart because I feel I’ve been quite uncommitted to it… like, understandably, as my life has been a little crazy. But I think this coming week is the week I try to reset and try to do it again from the top. I’ve only been doing it for three weeks (out of 12!) anyway, so no big loss. It feels like the kind of thing I need to take seriously for it to “work” though I have been doing the Morning Pages more or less regularly.

I’m a little sorry this has turned a little bit into a trauma dump. I think my big vision for this newsletter was to share about the media I’d been consuming, and really thinking about art and culture in the way that I had been when I was doing my masters. And then writing about it. Like a real intellectual (lol).

But, real life doesn’t really allow for a lot of these deep thoughts. Or they haven’t been lately. Apart from the aforementioned Big Drama in my life, I was also unemployed for three months (goodbye savings in my ISA), and before that, all I did was work (full-time and onsite) or paint, and quite frankly, encompassing all of that, I was feeling really quite torn up about the world, and really guilty that with everything happening, sometimes all I felt was really fucking lonely.

I know it will take a bit of time before I “get over” all of this, but, thanks for reading all of that, if you read it. And I hope you are doing well, despite everything.

* An earlier version incorrectly worded to say “one in four of five” pregnancies end in miscarriage. It's one in four or five, depending on the source I read.

I have a strange, personal superstition where I don’t like to tell many people about big things happening in my life until I’m very sure that they are going to come to pass or that they’d happened already and couldn’t be taken back. In 2017, I didn’t tell very many people that I was moving to the U.K., because I thought it was going to decrease the chances of it happening. After a long, long, long wait, I got my visa a few days into the first term, and just left for another country as soon as I could. Aside from my family, a few friends, and my flatmate at the time, Laura, no one really knew that I was applying for my long-shot visa in 2019 until I got it. And it took me a while to tell people I was seeing Mark, until it was obvious that we were exclusive.

It’s a bit like The Secret, but in reverse. If I put forth hopes for a good thing, instead of manifesting it into existence, I threaten its possibility for happening.

When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t really tell anybody who was physically far away from me. It was so early anyway, and the prevailing advice was to wait until the first ultrasound (which wouldn’t have happened for a while). I was dying to tell somebody our good news.

Because it was unplanned — though, admittedly, we were casually trying — it didn’t feel as real as it was. I had a name I wanted to use, if the baby was a girl. We were still looking for a good name for a boy.

I feel silly crying over something that didn’t grow beyond the size of a sesame seed, something that I didn’t even really know was growing until that missed period. I feel heartbroken for all the women I’ve seen miscarry, especially those who were much further along than I was. Because the weight of it all was so heavy, and I barely spent time with the thought of pregnancy and motherhood, These women were all waiting and ready, and inhabited that space of expectation much longer than I had been. I can only imagine the difficulty.

In my case, I never really thought about motherhood in a concrete sense. I never read any books; just trawled Reddit when I couldn’t sleep and somehow found my way deep into pregnancy and motherhood subreddits. I truly didn’t know anything about it, beyond biological and basic knowledge. Every little question and concern I had, I tacked on “reddit” after, in the search query bar on Google. The result was a mix of horror and comfort, and a little embarrassment about how little I knew.

I found out spotting was normal in early pregnancies, and that you’d know if it was a miscarriage. The NHS website said to not worry about a little spotting, especially if it was more pink or brown in colour, and I thought it was vague when they wrote that you’re fine as long as you don’t “soak through a pad” within one or two hours or fell over from a fever.

I wasn’t prepared for the amount of blood I was going to pass or the pain of passing so much tissue. I took note of how faint I was feeling (fine, all things considered), if I had a temperature (none), if the pain was manageable with paracetamol (yes). I didn’t take ibuprofen, because it was bad for the baby, and I knew I was probably miscarrying, but what if the baby was still hanging on and the ibuprofen somehow made the situation worse.

I know it’s an embryo, not even a foetus. But truthfully, in those few days that I knew it existed, it was already a baby to me.

I’m still bleeding a little bit; it’s been a week and two days since I first felt the abnormal, miscarrying kind. I finally reverted my period tracker to tracking periods rather than a pregnancy, clicking the CTA button in all caps that said: “I AM NO LONGER PREGNANT.” The app said, if I was still carrying, my baby would have been the size of a lentil now.

I have a natal scan scheduled for 13th of August, which was the soonest the NHS would give me. I would need to bring myself into A&E if I feel an infection coming on. It’s crazy how well your body knows what’s happening to it, and it’s crazy how often we don’t listen. How much we downplay these big things so as not to inconvenience ourselves or other people. Really, I should have gone into A&E the minute I felt the clots, but it was a Sunday and it was hot, and the cramps were gone the next day anyway. I have such a long wait ahead of me for medical confirmation, but I do know in my heart that it’s true that the baby is gone.

On Friday, five days after bleeding out clots, I felt my first bout of morning sickness. I feel tired and heavy and empty all the time. It’s unfair to feel even more pregnant the moment that you aren’t anymore.

I’ve been doing my best: working on stuff around the flat, doing errands and ticking boxes off a list. Getting as much stuff done, to drown out the quiet, so I don’t flounder helplessly in the void I imagined myself in. It’s not easy. I still haven’t found the will to see people socially, and have felt awful constantly cancelling on people. But I know if they ask me how I am, all I can say is that I miscarried. Lost a pregnancy. And, before writing this, I didn’t really feel like telling people so.

I still don’t even think I want to, or that I’m able to articulate all my feelings about this. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready, or that I’ll be able to write everything I’m feeling down. I still don’t know. It still doesn’t feel like a real thing that happened.

I don’t think we were ready for being parents, the way no one is ready for it, but I was on my way there, and now I just feel a little bit lost again. I’m trying to find my footing, but it’s been harder than usual, and I don’t know where to begin.

In the Mood for Love was set in the 1960s British Hong Kong, and it’s mostly short scenes of two neighbours passing one another, both left alone by their respective spouses who seem to be preoccupied by their careers. After some time, they realise their spouses are having an affair, and they come together to imagine how this indiscretion came about, but not acting upon anything themselves. In the slow motion haze of Hong Kong in the rain, down alleyways and in the midst of atmospheric smoke, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan keep missing one another, locked in the trajectories of their own lives.

At 18, I thought it slow and a little bit boring; it was one of those films where nothing happened.

I saw Chungking Express (1994) after that and brazenly declared it my favourite WKW film (despite only having seen the two), cockily saying I didn’t understand why people liked In the Mood for Love so much more when Chungking Express was clearly superior. I hadn’t reached the level of longing the boy I liked must have had, for In the Mood for Love to resonate with him so, but I had wanted to be with him, armed with the optimism that Chungking Express offered me.

We didn’t end up together. He was still in love with a girl who was beautiful, and mysterious, and perhaps, wounded in a way that was more appealing than someone like me: fresh out of high school, full of emo-led angst, worried too much about guilt and punishment to do anything I may have wanted to do.

The second time I remember seeing it was over ten years later, rewatching it after I’d transplanted myself in another country. Now, the tones of loneliness and distance rang through my body more potently. I was alone in the world, I thought, and I would have to make my way through life like so. At the time, I had been seeing a man I met on a dating app, predictably named after one of the Gospels. We could never be together, not in the least because he was in an open relationship with his girlfriend, with whom he had been since he was sixteen.

They lived together! In a house they paid the mortgage for! Still, we saw each other every week, always at my single bedroom in student halls. Sometimes, because he taught secondary school, early enough to hear the call to prayer ring through the air from the nearby mosque close to Whitechapel station, around which was where I lived.

Subscribe now

Living eight time zones away from home, and in a masters cohort of about 12: this was my first real understanding of loneliness. Truly understanding how alone one could be. I didn’t leave my childhood home until I was 29. Up until my late twenties, I had shared a room with my younger sister, and so even though I felt pangs of aloneness as teens are wont to, I never had to navigate much of life by myself.

Moving here, I had to take care of everything myself, solving problems that I never even really had to consider before. Being so ill, but having to be the person to pick up medication, because there was no one to call or care for me. Riding public transport to the A&E. Losing weight and going down two jeans sizes because I was sick of eating the three things I knew how to make. Thinking about my credit score.

Granted, this brand of loneliness and — allow me to be dramatic here — desolation is a whole other different brand to the one in the film, but slowly, I began to understand what it meant, and the time away from everyone allowed me the time to truly sit with all these new feelings.

My world opened up, but it proceeded to make me feel so small.

I ended up seeing this man for three years. At least once each week, sometimes more. I’ve even been to his house that he shared with his partner. He’s spent the night. I kept seeing him even after he told me they were expecting a baby. We said we loved each other, and for my part, I meant it.

When we stopped seeing each other, he had blocked me on all channels of communication, even though he had promised not to do so. I didn’t attempt to contact him, out of respect for the guy I was seeing then, who is incidentally, my now husband.

The last I checked (and unfortunately (?), I do check up on people from time to time), they’ve sold their house and moved up north. I don’t have a lot of things left to say to him, except maybe that I’m sorry we couldn’t be friends in the end. I don’t know why I feel the desire to keep in touch, but sharing your life with a person consistently for three years would form an attachment that’s not so quite hard to shake off. Especially if you’ve felt quite alone. Especially if the shape of a new city was built around this person. This is the type of thing I would maybe whisper in a hole and bury, though I guess I’ve decided to write it here instead.

The third time I saw In the Mood for Love, I was already with Mark. I watched it again after seeing, if you can believe it, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). I remembered how much I loved Tony Leung, and the gravitas he lent to a B-tier Marvel film was almost unfathomable.

At that point, I’d been seeing Mark for about a year. And the points of longing I could reach were different from the ones I had latched on to before. It became less about the inevitability of travelling parallel lives and never intersecting again, and more about the want of never losing something too beautiful to be true.

I still believe that. Despite arguments and disagreements, I am often in awe of the person I somehow ended up with. How lovely he is, and how kind. My mother has asked me more than once how it is that Mark is so nice to me. I still don’t know; I know I’ve done enough things to not deserve it, but kindness often doesn’t operate on merit.

In my perfect world, Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan should have been together. And it’s painful to think about, because I live in my perfect world. I didn’t know it then, but now, three years after seeing the film and feeling good about my own relationship, I know this intimately.

I saw In the Mood for Love for the fourth time at Prince Charles Cinema with Niña. It was about a month and three weeks after I had left my job, and I found myself having difficulty leaving the house and interacting with people. Still, I went. I loved the film, and I loved spending time with Niña. I took an anti-anxiety medication a couple of hours before leaving just to calm my bodily reactions, because I wanted to be there. If I could only just stop panicking.

I knew I was going to have a lovely time, in the same way that I knew I loved the film I was going to see.

This time, it felt like watching a different film altogether. You spend enough time with longing and loss, the other aspects of life will appear to you more starkly. Perhaps it comes with being with someone I know will not leave me. Or maybe, seeing it in a packed cinema has forced me to focus on all the its parts. Not just the sad ones. I don’t really know. All I know is that I laughed at the film more than I remember ever laughing at it before. “I never realised how funny it was,” I said. “Maybe it’s the meds.”

Perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s less painful now that I’m happier.

By self-care, I don't even mean weekly bubble baths for relaxation or like, lighting 7 million candles, or spraying my linens with something perfumed. I don't even remember to make the bed half the time, because as soon as I get up to do something, I want to just get back into it.

And, look, it's not for the lack of trying. I have bought into countless systems that promise organisation and methods that guarantee better results for productivity. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to talk myself into getting out of bed to pee because I really need to. (Remember that episode of Euphoria where Rue had that internal battle about literally going to pee? That's me a lot of the time.)

It's easier to rot in bed, of course, and I know that in the long run, it's not what's going to make me feel good about myself. I know that starting your day with the infamous morning pages (writing 3 pages in longhand in the morning is really hard and hurts, by the way) and a morning workout or whatever is probably going to make you feel better as the day goes on, but I am a slave to my basest desires most days.

And my basest desire is often just to lie in bed and ignore the things I should be doing. This leads to a lot of internal battles, to be sure, and it makes my anxiety worse. But the thing about having mental health issues is that they're really hard to push through, especially when you're in the trenches. I'm not going to "take care of myself" when all I want to do is sob.

Having a job onsite helped because I was expected to show up at the office between 7 and 10 a.m. And then I get to go home after eight hours, and then figure out if I can be bothered to cook and clean or if it's time for "snack dinner", which is something my sister's boyfriend's son calls eating crisps in bed instead of having a meal. I feel a bit lame that I need external structures and systems to get myself out of bed. I haven't been going to the studio as much, for instance, and I know that's something I wanted to do more of and partly why I left my job to be able to do. And yet.

Being your own manager is hard. Especially if that manager is really good at making excuses.

I've been trying to incorporate things like habit trackers since I first discovered what a Bullet Journal was in the early 2010s or something, and I still don't remember to take my medication every day. I, for the life of me, cannot bring myself to exercise. I know endorphins aren't a myth, but I've just never felt enough of them coursing through my body to feel good about exercising. I also don't like it when other people, who only care about me and want what's best for me so I'm healthy, tell me to do some exercise. It makes me want to rot in bed more. I am a people pleaser, but also I resist what is genuinely helpful advice.

The thing I have been doing a lot more is reading and writing, which are two things I've not been able to do as much as when I was younger. I'd not been reading, because I have somehow shrunk my attention span into an embarrassing length of time. I'd not been writing, because I find myself second-guessing the things I want to say, and if they're things that are even worth saying.

I started writing about my life when I was 14 because my best friend at the time started blogging (on DeadJournal first) and I loved reading about other people's lives. I remember begging for a LiveJournal invitation, because you could set an account up with an invite. My first username was an Egyptian name a friend from high school decided to give to me. I remember joining communities on LJ and making entries just to say "hi, I'm new."

Writing stuff online was such a big part of my life and, in a way, remains so. I still assert that the advent of Instagram carousels and long-form captions really fucked up how we interact on spaces outside of these social networks. Every couple of years, people lament the demise of blogs, but really, people still write; it's just that a lot of people have no capacity to engage anymore. Everything is so much easier when they're in one place, which is why I'm still mad that Google Reader died.

But, I get it. I have really have such low energy these days. I'm looking at supplements or eating more whole foods, but it's so hard to incorporate new things that allegedly make your life better when you can't even handle the regular "drink 8 glasses of water" or "stretch a little bit when you wake up." I've gone an astonishing number of days without taking a shower, and that's terrifying to me in a deep way, and yet I don't do anything about that. "I'll do it tomorrow" is what I tell myself ad nauseum.

We often feel sorry about Sisyphus being forced to roll a rock up a hill only for it to roll back down. But, waking up, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, making the bed, deciding on breakfast, lunch, and dinner, doing some form of exercise, making sure the toilet paper is at a healthy stock level, drinking enough water, hoovering the floors, wiping the counters, being a good friend, doing a good job, keeping in touch with your family: these are just some of the baseline things we need to do until we die, while trying to cope with the world burning around us.

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy." I read this for my first philosophy class in 2009. I was 20. I'm 36 now, and have somehow managed to get awarded a research Masters in philosophy, and this is still such an important idea to keep in mind. In the face of all this shit that makes me sad, both inside and outside my body, caring for myself — no matter how minutely — is an act of resistance.

I'm lucky to have a husband that cares about me and how I am. I don't know if I would get out of bed otherwise. I'm lucky that I get these pockets of clarity that snap me out of, at times, all-consuming despair that comes with living in a time and place where basic human rights seem to be out of reach. Persisting despite all of this is an act of hope. Despite all the things that make me feel alone and hopeless and sad, the fact that I still do all of these things is a signal that I still want to be here.

The last time I posted here, I had just started working full-time at a swimwear company. I still feel weird saying “I work in fashion” – or worked, as it were – but I suppose it technically was fashion, or at least fashion-adjacent. About a month and a half ago, I left that job, and I’ve been rudderless ever since.

That’s not entirely true, but it does feel that way a lot of the time.

From showing up to a desk-bound 9-to-5 job every weekday, being surrounded by mostly women who love to yap, but like, productively, to being the MASTER OF MY FATE and having only my poor husband to yap to has been a big change. And even when I do make it to the studio, it’s not like I can yap to anyone there.

I opened a new solo show at Blanc Gallery between my last day at work (8th of April) and the point of sad desperation (9th of April until present). The job market is so horrific right now, to say the least, and it’s kind of mind-boggling because I’d like to think that I have a pretty good amount of experience under my belt. These days, the hiring teams are nicer and way more of them reply with rejections instead of just airing you forever. It was also a pain to have to update my portfolio, which I hadn’t done for over two years, but it’s nice and neat now, so there’s that. (carina-santos.com, if you care.)

Anyway, the show is called The Gesture is the Prayer, and you can view the works at Blanc Gallery at 145 Katipunan Avenue until 31st of May, or just go to this link if you live elsewhere or can’t be bothered.

Between my last post (the dream of writing for Nilo Ilarde realised!) and today, I also got married. It was very cute and low-key, but I still get shit from my family for us not having family around the day. Which, I get why they’re upset, I just didn’t want to make them apply for a visa to the UK again only to bring everyone to Lahore and the pub and our flat after the ceremony.

It was kind of dramatic at the time, and I fully prepared myself for an earful the next time we went home. But then when we did, my grandma died. We flew in for our family’s show (To See a Landscape As It Is at Silverlens) and the minute we sat down to eat our chicken inasal after our long-ass flight, my mother got a call that her mother slipped into a coma, shortly after which she passed.

The first week of the trip was spent in the hospital, while my grandma was in the ICU, and then her cremation, wake, and burial. It was kind of crazy and sad, but it really felt like fate that we happened to be able to be there. I was especially happy I got to be there for my mom. I wasn’t particularly close to my grandma, and I realised most of the sadness I was feeling was sadness for my mother.

I don’t really know where to go with this, but I thought I’d say hi and let you know how things have sort of been. Of course, there have been other things in between all these big things, but there is no time or reason to do a big rundown of events from September 2023 (!) to now.

A few things I’ve been enjoying:

• Overcompensating – scratches the itch of aughts-era comedies set in college, and it’s kind of refreshing (?) to see how precious some people still are about coming out. I know it’s not the most cutting edge or like, groundbreaking story about the queer experience, but not everyone grew up in liberal households, me included. Adam DiMarco: a revelation as a douchebag, and also I did not realise he was in The Magicians.

• Death’s End by Cixin Liu – I actually still have about a hundred pages left, but the third instalment of The Three Body Problem trilogy has been such a ride. I think people get scared off by the very heavy science it’s based on, but Liu actually takes the time to explain it to his readers like they’re 5 (or at least, like they’re laypeople).

• Rewatching stuff that’s very “of their time” – cases in point: How to Make it in America, Girls, Desperate Housewives and Gossip Girl. I read a while ago that people with anxiety like to rewatch things because there’s nothing new to uncover that will cause trepidation, but I still hollered a lot at jokes I’d forgotten about.

• It’s kind of a funny thing, but I got into relatively louder music as I was rage-designing at my last, very commercial, very girly job. I’ve really enjoyed Joyce Manor, Title Fight, and Turnstile, who we are seeing at Outbreak next month.

• I feel compelled to say that I’ve cried a lot these past few weeks, but some notable occurrences are when Pope Francis died (btw, Conclave was so good, I watched it twice in a span of 6 months), when “Wolves (Act I and Act II)” by Bon Iver came on at the last scene of The Place Beyond the Pines and also when we were watching Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.