But I have learned how to navigate a doctors office. How to be the STAR patient of the waiting room. Being star patient doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get star treatment, in fact sometimes I wonder if my chronic need to be likeable impedes the care I receive. I come from a long line of women who are “fine” whilst haemorrhaging from a large artery and/ore actively sporting a broken bone.
But, I gotta be the most fuckable patient at the pain clinic. Think of it as the “pleasure to have in class” of the medical world. Except there are no grades and you slowly kill yourself with your own inability to articulate your needs.

1. Be highly agreeable. This plays out most effectively in scheduling. Waitlists are hell, ask to get on a cancellation list. I had an MRI scheduled for 8:30pm from a call at 8am that morning, which sounds like a weird excuse to fuck with the booker at the brewery I was performing at that night. Walking up to a grown man while it’s dark outside asking to go on stage earlier because you have a “doctors appoint”, sounds fake as hell. Bonus: I brought a really weird energy to both the comedy show at the brewery and the MRI clinic.

2. Arrive Early. Here is one this I can promise you about whatever medical establishment you’re about to walk into is going to be situated in a plaza. Or a medical building. Or an office building that used to be a Tim Hortons that now houses a life labs and a optometrist and is part of a plaza. I can also promise you you will get in an elevator at the ground floor, take a set of stairs up and still somehow end up in the basement. It’s backrooms. But much worse because Doug Ford is trying to privatize it. Give yourself an extra 20 mins, lest you conjure the goblin king and he sends you trials via a mystical labyrinth (outdated medical building.)

3. Don’t look sexy. Now this is admittedly very difficult for me because I am naturally stunning and have a rockin bod, I am also usually the youngest person by about 40-50 years at the pain clinics I attend.
   Being the sexiest one at the doctors doesn’t work well in your favour you will seem undeserving of care and everyone will be mad at you for seeming like your life is together enough to have a blowout while also needing 30 cc’s of lidocaine injected into your spine bi-weekly. Don’t be a bitch.
   It is important you seem and act, sick. People already think disabled people are “faking it” so give em a show! Wear your frumpiest t-shirt, arrive unshowered, and dribble a little of your breakfast on your pants. It’s called operating theatre for a reason!

4. Be kind to the nurses. Even when (and especially!) they act like cunts. It is a well documented phenomena that all nurses are ex highschool volley ball players recruited by the military for their expert hand-to-hand combat skills and ability to incapacitate a target (teenage girl) with their biting wit. Nurse Sydney-Jessica-Kaylyne with the asymmetric bobs runs this ship. You suck up to her and never ask trivial questions like “when can I see the doctor”.

5. Meditate! Very classic white lady of me to recommend meditating through medical exams. However, it’s the only time I really have to myself to sit and think. I had the worlds best mediation during my most recent MRI. I thought the machine was god and I was being 3D printed and then I was going to be spit out of the machine with a new body back onto earth healed. But instead a man named Pete slid my body out like I was a cadaver on Criminal minds and then i flashed my my fanny when I got off the table and the static of the hospital clung to the machine. Some call is dissociation. I call it nirvana.

6. Come ready with chit chat. Small talk is the name of the game here and for cripe sakes keep it light! It’s also best if you lie about your job, especially if you work in the arts/are a gig worker/anything that doesn’t fall into a drop down menu/you could imagine a fairy tale animal doing (think Dog Cops, Bear Bus driver, etc). I lived to tell the tale, do not tell the student doctor you’re an artist. The best response I’ve gotten to that has been “I should have guessed” which is actually a read.
   If you get caught in inter-patient or doctor chit chat, a couple of back up options I like to keep handy. “What are you in for?”, “I’ll have the regular!” and “who did you vote for?”

Good luck! And think of me next time you have a speculum hanging our of your hole. 🧘‍♀️

Think I’m a funny gal? COME SEE ME IRL!

HAMILTON // Monday Sept 8th! at Levity tickets are HERE I have been selected to compete in CANADA’S NEXT BEST COMIC! This round is “audience selection” meaning... having people in the room to cheer for me is REALLY HELPFUL. I can guarantee a great show because 1. I am wildly talented 2. I am competing with some truly talented comics!

TORONTO // Friday, September 18 The Roast of Awkward Adam Wolch

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Thanks for being here, I love you all

xx

Phoebe

One of my favourite jobs I ever had was as a cleaner. I’d leave work each day with a bag of dirt, proof of my work. My body sufficiently tired and heavy feeling, the following 6 hours I’d spend watching reality felt decidedly earned. I do not wish to be a cleaner again, when I was a cleaning I’d spend time wishing I could be in my “studio” (a closet I cleaned out in my bedroom) moving the needle on the 73741 projects I had swirling in my head. But in a the grass is always greener sense, I miss the straight forward nature of that work.

I do not feel that same sense of completion after going for a walk next to the lake, looking out over the horizon, finding the ending to my solo show in the ether and jotting it down in my notes app (an oversimplified Nancy Meyers-esque interpretation of the creative process, but I digress.) This is capitalisms fault, I know. That the soul gratifying work just doesn’t quite hit the same way carting vacuum bags of dirt in the back of my Chevrolet lime green spark did.

I get a bit annoyed with my fellow artist when they lament about social media being part of the job right now. As if any other time of being an artist is…better? As if shaking ass to find a patron wasn’t a thing 100, 200, 300 years ago. As if promoting your work is a new.

It is however, tiring. Not in the way my body felt tired after lugging bottles of vinegar down the stairs to clean with. But in the way it’s another thing to do after I did what already feels like the hard thing (write a joke.) It’s never been enough to just be a great artist ™️. Artists are so embarrassing, but not in the way we think we are. Or worry we are. We’re people with god sized holes in our hearts, people that despite how much we may have been hugged or loved, want to be adored that much more. It’s not enough to just have the idea, or make the thing. We want the stage (please see previous notes re: capitalist train barron.)

While passing out posters for my Fringe show the barista said to me “wait, this is your face, are you famous?” The man next to me at the bar all of the sudden perked up to take interest, common sense would say that no, the person handing out flyers of their own face is not famous in any sense. Famous people have someone else to hang flyers for them. But what did I say… “one day”.

I am rarely, if ever embarrassed after I get off stage (hhmmm this seems like something for my therapist.) Even after I mime insert a diva cup, or crawl on all fours moaning out compliments or do a strip tease to a doctors note (come see my fringe show!) I feel fine about all of that. But walking around my city hanging photos of my face telling people I have art to come and see. Feels… intimate.

Part of this feel dorky to say when my “day job” is quite literally creating launch strategies and writing business plans for artists projects. But what I think is actually “tiring” about being an independent artist is constantly being the person who believes in you. Believing in yourself even when you don’t want to, or your tired, or you feel embarrassed, or the barista asks if your famous. I am the court jester.

Come to my Fringe show 🤡

If you are in the GTA (Southern ontario) area this summer. Come see ME at the Hamilton fringe festival. Tickets on sale now for shows July 16th-26th!

Thanks for reading weird girl, my mostly monthly-ish dispatch on disability, art and the shit white women are talking about in their group chats. Want weekly Phoebe? Listen to my podcast Do You Ever Feel Like, wherever you find your pods (or here on substack )

Do You Ever Feel Like

Gossip is a life matrix

Are we two women hot off the heels of a complicated fathers day foul mood? YES! But we have much to discuss this week as the gossip series CONTINUES! Plus, new life meaning making system just dropped. Gossip + morals = life decision. Perfect 👏 plus we chat…America (sorry u guys it’s just giving flop rn) D…

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2 months ago · 2 likes · DoYouEver

Thanks for being here!

I love you all

Phoebe

YEARNING.

Women want to yearn again.

Now we know that I am really onto something because we recorded this ep of the pod (where I proposed such theory) the same week this Chris Fleming interview came out. And not to get all 1st-year-philosphy-student-collective-unconscious on you, but there is something in the ether, a desire to lust, a collective horniness, a burn to yearn. So let us discuss.

Evidence for submission 🗂️

Heated Rivalry (duh)

Do I need to write anything here? Do we need to discuss it further? There were so many odd think pieces as to “why the hell do women loOOoovvE these gay guys FUCKIN?”. The answer is obvious baby, TIME! Distance.

6 weeks.

6 months.

Years! Years go by in this show. Waiting. Sexting. Distance. Tension. Now while Connor Storries glute max really is doing some incredible work, nothing is hotter than sexting a man in the locker room next door only to not kiss for another 6-18 months. Tension is not being utilized often enough in the hetro landscape and time is the easiest way to do so.

Mr Darcy Hand flexing

We all know this is the single greatest scene in all of cinema and makes me, (pardon my french (mother stop reading this now)), flood me drawers. We have a few things going into our yearning soup here. Class provides tension here, an opportunity for both Lizzie and Mr Darcy to feel “out of place” but space. We also have general distaste for the other. Perfect. Mr Darcy walking in that trench coat through a field feels like 10482 years long and it is because of that juxtaposition 💆🏻‍♀️ . Additionally, our hand flexing allows for small discrete way to let some pressure out of that yearning value, but not enough for me to not-almost-kiss this man under a historical monument in the rain. 😈

Bridgerton

Season 3 fumbled the ball hard, and it is because they didn’t give us the yearning we desired. Penelope got fingered in that carriage way to fast. I don’t know if anyone else has ever had the pleasure (?) of being fingered by a teenage boy, but even the fumbliest and driest of rubs at a 9th-grade-pool-party-basement-gridning-romance have more heat than these two perfectly symmetrical-faced hotties. And thats because he have time. I needed a whole other season of raggedy breath encounters before they deserved that carriage scene.

BUuuTTT contrasted by season 2’s mix of time + contempt = 🥵 AND Season 4’s Class (again, a great literary tension device!) + Forbidden love = 🌕🐺🐎🫨🤑🐬🌹✨💦⛈️💋, ya know?

Fashion

You guys we’re so h0rned up we’re yearning in the streets. Some may say (men) hemlines get longer during economic uncertainty because of general bad vibes and sadness of not having cash in the account. But they don’t understand the playful tension of getting your ankles to entice a love with a little peekaboo in the aisles of line one on the ttc. Some of this also is playing out in the latest runways. Cravats, silks, and metallics, our clothing is asking for more storytelling and world building – we’re looking for more meaning.

Yearning feels human. 3D, deep, honest. And quiet frankly embarrassing. When you’re deep in the yearn its all consuming. Try as you might to hold it in, the yearn comes out in spurts (IE: hand flexing). Like holding in a fart at a party, people will catch you crop dusting.

During a time of perfect teeth, iphone face, chat gpt email threads, we as a culture are yearning for texture. It’s human. And tbh a robot could never yearn the way a teenage girl yearns in her bedroom for the weird poster of Johnny Depp on the cover of rolling stones on (literally WHAT was going on with teenage girls and johnny depp in the early aughts… we don’t have time!). Wuthering Heights, Baby Girl, All fours… I could go on, so much of our media the last 3 years and what we turn to has been MASSIVELY H0rnY baby! 🤓 So while I experience another once-in-a-life-time-event, I’m gonna get a little sexy with it, at the very least to withstand the horrors. Titration baby.

But what I really wanna know in the comments…

Like my lateral thinking and general penchant for whimsy? More of me on the internet here!

ON THE POD 🫛

• Men Are Cringe

• the tech drama is TOO MUCH!

• Oscars ep incoming this week to stay tuned at HQ

Work with me 🍊

Me Lore // I posted on the internet for 30 days and didn’t hate it (or myself!) 30 days of social hooks, prompts, and inspiration so you can talk about your art online (and have fun doing it!)

Creative Advising slots open for hot people with a stack of stiky notes and a dream, but like no clue where to start.

Ok thats it from me. I love you all, please let me know where/how/who you’re yearning in the comments 💋

big love

Phoebe 🌷

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But what I think it important to highlight in all of this try-hard-behaviour is I wasn’t really good at any of this. Especially not naturally. I try really hard, all the time.

📓 January flops

I used to pride myself on my high batting average (not excuse me while I walk into a sports metaphor here I have no business doing.) I’ve been batting 100 the last few years, works gone viral, contests won, pitches accepted. And it’s because they were softballs. I was trying, but I was submitting/pitching/trying for the stuff I knew would be an easy get.

I have been rejected from every single pitch I have put out in the last four months. Work proposals, residencies, magazine pitches, lit mags. You name is. All a big no (or more infuriatingly ghosting me, which wtf is with that?). I’m punching above my weight. I am am putting myself into bigger rooms, asking for more money. I’m getting rejected a lot (big w for exposure therapy) but I am trying.

And also I feel I am making some actual traction. Each rejection feels like it hones my blade a little more. “that didn’t work, time to try it another way”. I sometimes think what doesn’t work allows you to gain more information than what does. I went to hair dresser school for a full day, left a cried on the sidewalk next to the king street streetcar. Don’t wanna be a hairdresser ✔️ got it.

I’ve been on a 30 day self-inflicted-quest to try for 30 days. Specifically to just talk about my work out loud for 30 days online but it’s had some ripple effects.

Sister Cortia Kent says…

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

but… I’m going to! Also when you’re in a “throwing spaghetti at the wall” phase I think it’s worth while taking a moment to reflect.

🌷People Notice (even if you don’t think they are) 🍊

I’ve been getting it the last few weeks around town “Oh Phoebe I’ve been loving your videos you’ve been putting out”. Last week I was intro’d on stage as “a good instagram follow”.

These aren’t people I have talked to online, I don’t see their face in a like count, but they’ve noticed. What I think works about this, is volume. It’s never just “hey Phoebe I saw this one specific thing you said online” it’s the generalized “hey Phoebe I see you there trying”.

Do You Ever Feel Like

Proceed With Uncertainty

IDK about you but I am a planner 🤓🔬. Now, am I planner in my heart because I need too much information to make a decision but because I am also on a 2026 ban from all my local stationary shops for coming home with the following collection of vintage stationary in my suitcase from London back in the fall…

Read more

8 months ago · 12 likes · Phoebe Taylor

✨ You gotta be ok with people disliking you 🍅

For at least 5 min at a time (TITRATION!)

I would much rather sing to a room of a thousand people than a room full of 5 people I love. And thats cause I care about what those people think. So block your family on instagram, create a private account, lie about what your working on at the dinner table. It’s fine (and like quite frankly i don’t really understand my brother in-laws job so he doesn’t need to understand mine, you know?).

Being palatable is boring, stupid and for ugly people

Be cringe. Be free.

Also while I am writing this I am watching the Free skate program (my fav!) and I could write a whole essay on the intersection of sports and art (I probably will!) Piper and Paul having been T R Y I N G. 15 year long career and they brought home the bronze today. Cause they tried. 🥉 🫶 I cried watching this but the moment right as the music cuts and they both start weeping 😫. Before the judging, before the scoring. Just going out and doing your best, because yourebest is all you’ve got. UGH! POETRY! I LOVE THE OLYMPICS 🥇!

Ok! Much more to come from this experiment. and I are working on updating our storytelling guide so watch this space for that coming in the next two-ish weeks).

🎭 SHOWS!

GTA I am all over you. Come see me doing irl comedy. Leave the house. Winter sucks! being in a room full of laughing people doesnt!

• Feb 13th Hamilton // GALENTINES show with an incredible all female comedy line up

• Feb 25th Kitchener // Rusty Nail Pro/Am night!

• Feb 26th St. Catherines // Uncloseted Showcase Spotlight Comedy Club

• March 7th Forest (free!) // Laugh-In Contest @ Forest Golf Club & Inn

• March 20th Burlington // Club 54 Pro/Am Night!

ON THE POD 🫛

Do You Ever Feel Like

A Quarterly Check-in 🐓

We knew we couldn’t get to the theme today because there was JUST TOO MUCH TO DISCUSS. So lock in girls we’re reviewing the year SO FAR…

Listen now

7 months ago · 1 like · Phoebe Taylor and Jacque Wills

Ok thats it from me. Mostly just a check in. A sign post to keep going! Let us all try

xx

Phoebe 🌷

Girls 👏, we’re obviously talking about Tessa Virtue’s and Scott Moire’s Free dance at the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics and Heated Rivalry. *cracks knuckles over keyboard* Let us begin with my qualifications and why I an uniquely qualified to discuss the above j0rk fodder Canadian media.

Growing up in southern Ontario, ice sports are thrust upon you. The preschool I went to was located above an ice rink, the second I could boot around the ice without a plastic chair to hold onto I was placed in a leotard for figure skating classes. My brother wanted to desperately play hockey but my mothers reasoning was 1. too expensive 2. she didn’t want to drive to the rink twice for my rehearsal an his practise 3. when my brother was old enough to compete, we were going to become sibling free dance stars. 👯‍♀️

I don’t care for hockey, I grew up in an arts and theatre household. Not a sports and ball household. My brother and I danced around the living room to the Chicago Broadway recording and I called sports uniforms “costumes” as a kid (I still stand by this one). But I also have sat in enough stands watching someones boyfriend play hockey enough to get me through a conversation with a 20-year old with a mullet. Which is to say, I have a functional-ish understanding of hockey and weird nostalgia for a slush puppy melting under that radiators on the stands of the Westoby ice rink in Dundas.

I loved figure skating. I love the outfits, the drama, having your hair scraped back into a bun, the frustration of trying to lower down into your shooting duck with out landing on your ass, wearing lipstick at 7am and having your mothers lace tying ridiculed by your Czechoslovakian coaches so they retie them and you lose feeling in your 2nd and 3rd toes. The Majesty of Art! I was a competitive figure skater until the age of 14 when I quit dramatically because my coaches wouldn’t let me dance to Queens “Fat Bottom Girls” with a pillow stuffed down my tights (yes, I am have always been like this) during a competition. There isn’t a lot of figure skating opportunities for women in their 30’s. It is a passion that lays dormant for 4 years. Until the winter Olympics pulls up and my knowledge of the history of the axel jumps, sizzle sections and what illegal moves have been added to the rule book, becomes relevant and pertinent information to unsuspecting passersby.

Especially if I can talk about Tessa and Scott.

Tessa Virtue and Scott Moire chose to open fire passion, intimacy, unwavering dedication and true craftsmanship and the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics. And if the phrase “cuntiflingus” (please see minute 2:31 of their performance for visual reference) isn’t enough to convince you they are STARS, they chose to free dance to Moulin Rouge’s El Tango De Roxanne. The exact moment of the film where Ewan Mcgregor is having a nervy b because his consumption riddled gf Nicole Kidman is off trying to save the Cabaret using her *gasp!*, body (this plot point is a muddy but this is to be suspected from jukebox musical plots BUT I DIGRESS).

Back to Tessa and Scott. It isn’t just their technical skill (which btw they are the current record holders for the highest technical score in a short dance with 44.53) but their storytelling. Every single move is purposeful, every flick of the wrist and glance crafts their world building. The trust and chemistry needed to preform and lift and flip while moving to Ewan Mcgregor shouting “it’sss moreee thann I cannn BAARReeeEEE” while a violin rattles out across the rink in a brisk latin ballroom beat, well, it’s enough to be consistently moved to tears by the performance of art 7 years on.

And you could say the same thing about Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, the stars of Heated Rivalry. It took me a moment to hop on the Heated Rivalry train but that is because I suffer greatly from “don’t tell me why to do or like”-itus. If anyone recommends something to me, or even worse, it becomes trendy, I immediately hate it because I am a Sagittarius sun/moon and certifiable hater.

@gqGo behind-the-scenes on the set of #HudsonWilliams and #ConnorStorrie’s #HeatedRivalry GQ HYPE shoot in Los Angeles. Read the full story at the link in bio.

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And as a certifiable hater, I didn’t want to like Heated Rivalry. But I love it. I love that a Canadian tv show is getting traction amongst that landscape of American imperialism media, I love that desolate and depressing Russia is 99% Hamilton Ontario and I love Connor Storries butt! But what I love and what I think all the (worthwhile) hype is watching some art that makes us fucking feel something. The last 15 minutes of episode 5 had me out of my seat texting the group chats in all caps “WE’RE GOING TO THE COTTAGE’. 2025 brought us a hellscape and we all found joy and community through two hot abs abs and some fictional hockey.

The prevailing takeaway and fan speculation with Tess and Scott and Connor and Hudson, our respective stars is, “omg they are so close and intimate how could you act like that and not be in a relationship?” To which I say, you’ve never been in a high school theatre production before, and it shows. Diving into the unknown with your scene partners and sweating, crying, laughing in a black box rehearsal room while you work on your blocking bonds you chemically to the person you met in a rehearsal room 6 weeks before.

Penetration? Pedestrian!

Sustained eye contact? Intimacy co-ordinators? Razor sharp choreography blurring where one body ends and another begins? The trust needed to give yourself to a performance infront of strangers and a nation? Now that’s intimacy!

Or, maybe it’s not that deep. What I think all art ever is, is just asking us to feel. Something, anything. And the more and more I see people descend into the “whatabout-ism” in the comment section, or pick things apart for not being the perfect representation of XYZ niche caveat, or the more I feel like people are unable to see how far into act two of “Cabaret” we already are, the more I want to feel. The more I want my art to move me, to blur the lines of passion and love in the “real world” vs on that the stage. Nihilism feels popular right now in the world, the “we’re all cooked” mindset. I think that’s a terribly privileged take, especially when I only hear it out of the mouths of people that have been and will be objectivly fine. Their rights aren’t being stripped away and allow themselves, instead, to sink into their own negativity.

What I think it precious about these two works is they make me feel hopeful. I didn’t leave episode 6 feeling emotionally decimated or hopeless. Prestige tv gives us the anti-hero’s winning, it chalks good feelings and happy endings up as “low brow”, sub-par, un-intelligent or simply “women’s media”.

Never in my life did I think I would be moved by two hockey bros stealing glances across the boards during a game. The backdrop of anything happening on an ice rink ups the anti, raises the stakes and reminds me that sports and art aren’t all that different. The drama, the laying it all out on the rink the performance and the costumes. It’s win or lose for someone. Sitting under the radiators breathing in cold air cheering for the athletes in front of you. This isn’t rehearsal, this is show time and the pit in your stomach if the home team doesn’t win feels heavier as the clock ticks down. It lets us feel hopeful. Buoyed for just a moment. Swept up in a roomful of people, a group chat or crowded bar, to feel a moment together.

At the very least can we all enjoy the fact that the Canadian government has funded some of the worlds most intense, chaotic and certifiable gremlin status love affairs, and fandoms. And that at least, gives me hope.

Thanks for being here,

xx

Phoebe

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I’ve been gigging a lot. Which is a terribly un-autism friendly experience. I am very tired all the time. I have no boundaries and say yes to everything. Which is fine until I am rendered horizontal and speechless while I watch super store on repeat for the [REDACTED] time. All that to say is I have been having a hard time sitting down to w r i t e. Writing is boring, all writers know this. It’s our fav thing to complain about. In order to stop trying to convince a google doc i’m hot and fuckable (I already am). And just get the pen moving.

So in order to not be scared of a blank page, piss off some extended family that reads this (questionable choice being here in the first place, but i’ll take the clicks!) here are some opinions. Things I’ve texted my best friends and generally cancellable opinions. To write we have to have a perspective, a voice, something to anchor ourselves into.

My opinions baby 💃. Argue with me in the comments below, give me your own highly cancellable opinions, the stuff you only admit to your besties over brunch. I am a gossip demon and I need to be fed 👹

1. Lip injections aren’t worth it on the basis of making you look cray while sucking through a straw alone.

2. On that note. Bring back ugly people. I am so tired of “beauty” and “hot” people. I want true uggos back on my screens.

3. You need to speak to a true freak on a regular basis. Everyone’s all fucked up by their only definition of art being block buster movies and met gala red carpet. You need to be surrounded by propers freaks, weirdos, people in their 60s in comedy clubs just starting out and trying. Professional clowns. Not some definition of success that happens when you’re 25 on HBO.

4. Divorce makes you hot

   

5. 9 times table is the best times table.

6. Walking my dog in the morning with my mug in hand, hair rollers in and half an outfit like frazzled 30-something British rom com character is a freeing experience.

7. Nurses are ex mean girls. The entirety of my high schools girls volleyball team went on to become nurses.

8. Drinking a diet coke for “health” is baby behaviour. Grow up and mainline sugar like an adult.

9. If more white people got more into their ancestry and discovered why their ancestors left their “home” countries we’d be way more radicalized against colonialism.

10. People act feral in the airport because it’s the only time a lot of people are actually interacting with the general public/using public transportation.

11. There WILL be a time where the owl necklace comes back. The moustache finger tattoo will wake for it’s slumber and I wait for its beck and call.

    

12. Phones should be banned more places. I was just as a thermal bath in Iceland and it looked like a scene from a black mirror episode. If you need to buy a waterproof necklace bag to put your phone in you’ve lost the plot.

13. We need to be telling people that use their phone speaker with no headphones off way more.

14. Amanda Bynes is one of the greatest comedic actors of our time

15. I have never ever heard an argument for ai that is remotely compelling or made me think “oh good idea” literally ever once 👼. I just think you’re a lazy dingle pringle 100% of the time. Why would I put the effort into reading something you “wrote” with AI if you haven’t even put the effort into writing it?

16. Leaf blowers are tools of the devil and those that engage with them are consorting with evil spirits.

17. There has never been a good musical to film adaptation. Just give us pro shots of musicals on the stage.

    

18. Texting is evil. It’s fucked up we have 24/7 access to each other. And people would be less overwhelmed by their texts if they replied to them like a victorian woman sitting down at her desk to do her correspondence. It’s your responsibility to maintain the relationships you want in life.

19. Camping is too much work for just sitting outside.

20. Being hopeless is lazy. People walking around saying “we’re all fucked” aren’t doing anything and will be objectively fine. Chose hope. Do something. Volunteer. Donate. You have so much more power than you realize.

21. Golf is for people in loveless marriages who don’t have interests or creative minds.

Ok that was fun and cathartic. I am a hater in my heart. 🫶 Tell me your opinions below, agree, disagree. DISCUSS!

More Phoebe

weekly opinions over on

Do You Ever Feel Like

haunted by Amy Sherman-Palladino for 25 years

Its the 4th annual GILMORE GIRLS EP! Little did we know what a MONSTER we were creating ooops! Join the girlies as they discuss the 25th anniversary of Amy Sherman Paladino haunting their screens with her banter and bad decision making. Are you Team Logan? Team Dean? Also 9/11 lore drop (it’s relevant we promise…

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a year ago · 2 likes · Phoebe Taylor and Jacque Wills

thanks for being here, I appreciate it. I love you.

xx

P

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My first interaction with this feral capitalist energy was instilled in me via Beanie Babies. Everyday after school in the church basement where I attended daycare Abbey J, Amanda, Rachel and I would pull out our beanie baby collections and lay them out on the floor around us. One of my most formative memories was watching Abbey J pull what felt like a seemingly endless supply of beanie babies from her spice girls baguette bag a la Mary Poppins. Except I didn’t have a beanie baby. After what I am sure was a hail mary my mother drove me up to turtle pond toys after work and bought me my first beanie baby. The only one they had in stock, Bruno. I hated Bruno. He was flat (?!), had a massive head, had significantly less stuffing than all other beanie babies, and most egregiously was, not a fun colour.

The next day at daycare, Abbey J’s Princess Diana beanie baby got married to Rachel’s Holiday bear, Amanda’s collection, Neon, Fuzz, Echo and Arielle, made up the wedding party. Bruno was assigned the role of “guest” at the wedding.

I didn't grow up with a lot of new toys, I had hand me down’s from my cousins. I am cousin 18 of 21, most of my cousins are in their 40’s and 50’s so my cultural references at a 30 year old are weird. I played with my cousins wrestling action figures, teenage mutant ninja turtles and Barbies from the 70’s. There is a whole other conversation about class that obviously is at play here but when you’re a kid you just know that someone else had the thing you want, and you don’t really understand why.

The cliff notes version of me + class: I occupy a bizarre intersection of having grown of poor and rich, at the same time.

During the week I would stay at my mum’s where we sometimes had food in the house, used garbage bags as luggage, and where we didn’t have enough bedrooms in our house for everyone so one of my brother’s slept in a what was effectively a glorified screened in porch with a defunct hot tub in it. On the weekends we would go to my dads townhouse and ski with kids that went to private schools and got car’s for their birthday.

I heard “we can’t afford” it often enough but didn’t understand why. “Maybe next paycheck” was something my mum would say to soften the blow. This reared it’s head when one Christmas I got up the gumption to ask for a Baby Alive. I rarely asked for anything as a kid so I think my parents took me seriously. I had never wanted anything more than a Baby Alive I cannot say Baby Alive without singing “🎵baby alive baby so real! 🎶”. That Christmas I got a Baby Alive. I tore the wrapping paper off, shoved the batteries up its butt, turned it on and…. it didn't work. On boxing day my father and I went to Costco to return it. On the car ride there I expressed my concern that we wouldn't be able to return the toy because it was a gift from Santa and how could you return a gift from Santa, at Costco?

We got to the front of the returns line at Costco and they had no more Baby Alive’s in stock. We returned the broken Baby Alive and my dad promised me we would go and get a new one when they came back in stock. I never got a baby alive. File this under the category of traumatic things my parents did to me, along with, getting rid of my dog, and as a consolation prize, promising me we would get a hamster. I never got a hamster. Selling my jungle gym at a garage sale while I was still playing on it. The compromise was that my dad was going to build a treehouse. I never got a treehouse. Now I go to therapy.

For the most part, I hate things. I am not a things person. Friends know not to buy me stuff. I feel the most love when I receive the following text “I just saw XYZ really cool knick knack and almost got it for you but I know you wouldn’t want anything, actually”. To be loved is to be known. I wouldn't call myself a minimalist by any standard, I love me a freaky piece of paper, or a little scrap of odd fabric from an 87 year old italian woman’s basement. My biscuit tin collection is one of my most treasured items. I would just call myself particular, discerning, and really stressed about my own personal consumption.

I had no idea what a Labubu was when my cousin desperately posted on Facebook a couple of months ago “I can’t believe I’m asking this but does anyone have a lead on available real Labubus anywhere, it’s Leena’s birthday next week and she won’t stop asking for one”. I was hooked, a limited edition little trinket you say? My 90’s baby spidey senses were tingling.

Now I'm 30, and I have my own disposable income and I want a fucking Labubu. But here's a thing, I do not want more things in my life. The environmental implications of our consumerism stresses me out on a minute to minute basis and I empathize with inanimate objects on a near clinical level (I cry every time I break a dish).

I do not need to spend $50 on some stuff that will inevitably end up in a dumpster in the next couple of years, and make me feel guilty every every time I look at it because the chances of a small child having made the stuffed demon hanging off my recycled leather purse, is fairly high.

So to curb my spending and beat the dopamine rush that would've inevitably occurred when tap my apple pay on the pop mart website. And are, like me, too old and stressed to participate in such a trend. Here are some Labubu alternatives to satisfy the capitalaist demon inside all of us.

DIY LABUBU ALTERNATIVES TO FILL THE GOD SIZED HOLE IN YOUR HEART 🕳️👹🐰

my friend sent me this one. It’s beautiful, it’s inspired. If I had a small child I would commission 10 clay labubu’s (did I just avoid child labour by requesting child labour?).

Maybe try BECOMING a labubu a la Drag Queen Blu Hydranga! One of my fav trick-a-loos to play on my boyfriend is to wait out front of the bathroom door quietly and scare him when he opens the door. I think this would really amp up the experience to be greeted by a life size fluffy creature with fangs. Everyone pray for Simon and his impending heart condition I am about give him!

@bluhydrangeaDid you see the tiktok live? 🐰 #labubu #labubuthemonsters #labubumacarons #dragqueen #rupaulsdragrace @Katkow Sewing Patterns

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this diy labubu approach could be great for upcycling a beloved childhood toy into something that could ward off potential suitors and protect you from your next crash out!

My friends and I tried participating in another trend (beaded fish) my plan was to put mine on my purse. They turned out, and I say this with love, busted. this was weirdly complicated however, I love mine. Maybe just gather some friends around to bead and gossip about people we worked with in our 20’s.

Thanks for reading weird girl, to stick around and probably hear me talk about my butthole and other things I mention to strangers at bus stops, SUBSCRIBE!

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For more summer trend avoidance listen to me on the latest ep of Feel like!

Do You Ever Feel Like

it's a girl summer

Girlies! It’s SUMMER, and we chat having an XYZ girl Summer, plus WHERE is the 2025 summer diva? Someone ring Charli XCX to save us, ASAP! We do a quick Gilded Age check in of our favorite clock twink, and discover the “culprit” to Phoebe’s knee pain. Also we chat Summer trends having an era, and the thin line to conservatism (we’re mega fun at a party…

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a year ago · 1 like · DoYouEver

Upcoming shows!

I will be at Sweet Action Theatre on Sept 5th with Jenna. Ticket link incoming but can be found HERE when link is live.

thanks for being here, I appreciate it.

xx

P

Hello! I really hate when artists preface their work, introduce it or caveat it, like shut up and get to the art already. It drove me nuts in critique in art school, especially when they’re making excuse for it being generally shit.

But this is my substack and I get to be as annoying as I want 💃. The following is a chapter of my manuscript I’ve been workshopping for the last year. It’s annoying to me how long this shit takes. And by this shit I mean sitting in cafes looking out the window pretending to write.

Also happy fucking mothers day I guess? Lmao I did NOT plan on this but 11/10 editorial cal vibes to me I guess. This is all I seem to write about these days. I wish I was so much less obsessed with should I or shouldn’t I but it takes up so much of my brain space, and I think thats largely in part to being so chronically ill with so many mystery chronic illnesses all. the. time. I don’t know how a child folds into this, I catch myself googling “how much ibprohen can you take when you’re pregnant” at 2am regularly. Because you can pull that shit (400mg of ibprophen) from my cold dead hands (you shouldn’t btw and I am not raw dogging 9 months of extra pain on top of my current 5 month long migraine).

Anyyyywayyy 💃 Enjoy! In the past I have been paywalling my sample chapters but idk im generous so if you want to chuck me a fiver for my oat mylk latte ways I canee complain.

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Felix walked in on me in the kitchen with Margot hunched over in pain. They both told me to go to the doctor “it just happens when I ovulate” as if crouching on your kitchen floor in pain is any kind of measure of normal.

I complained to my doctor about irregular periods, general tiredness and feeling like I wanted to fling myself off a bridge 9-5 days before my period. She took me seriously by way of sending me for some scans. A Trans vaginal ultra sound. A machine that took photos of all around my uterus, I laid looking out the parking lot windows trying to determine where I was inside the winding building I stepped into. The technician shook the almost empty bottle of goo and sprayed the jelly on my stomach in a way that got on my clothes and hands holding up my shirt, it dripped down the side of my sweater as she took photos of my uterus.

Then she showed me the probe and explained how it was lubricated, a cover slipped over it and more lubricant applied after. Double bag the probe, got it. I nodded appreciative of the thorough mounts of information and I put my feet in the stirrups. “scoot down a little more”. She stuck her gloved hand under the paper cover over my knees pulled my left labia aside and pushed the probe inside me. “You might feel a little pressure”. I felt like crying. The a formality of medicalization of vaginas doesn’t serve doctors, nurses and technicians well. I feel more comfortable having an esthetician stand back and staring down the barrel of my butt hole to make sure my wax is even, more than I feel comfortable with this thin tiny women operating a probe inside me. The woman that has been waxing me for years has got to be mid 30’s but looks much older. She gossips to me about her teenage son and growing up in a trailer on the east coast. She always calls me “hon” and tweezes stray hairs with precession and speed, I think she chats so much to distract me from spending $70 to have a stranger rip hair out of your crotch quarterly, it works. A perfect art form and dance of womanhood. What is more sisterly than having someone platonically part your labia?

A second technician comes into the room. I learn the technician that is currently shuffling around inside me is new here. She’s called for back up. The grey cold room I am stuck in feels cold, a series of water colour flowers are painted on the door and a set of curtains for modesty. I feel sick starting at some calligraphy words that look like they belong on a wedding Pinterest board. Not the room where someone might find out they have cancer or learn the sex of their baby.

The two technicians point at the screen and take more photos. There’s a hand off of the wand while its still inside me which feels like someone changing shifts operating a compacting truck, gears grinding inside me. I imagine the wand sticking out of me like a control stick, something to puppeteer me with. I wonder if I left my body now if it’d just keep going. Operated by two women inside a small dark grey room, eyes on the monitor in front of them. They say the words “irregular”, “thats an odd position” and “mmmhhmm?” To each other as if I weren’t here. I detach myself from my pelvis, leave it on the table and let the rest of my body walk back to the waiting room while they continue to rummage around inside the parts of me I left behind. I hope I don’t run into someone I know in the waiting room.

I wake up the next morning with the goo stuck to my legs and stomach still. I sit on the toilet with my phone and try not to google symptoms. This is my routine for the days waiting for scan results. Hold phone in hand, open browser, type in a series of words pertaining to the pain in me “uterus” “irregular” “sudden pain” “rare vaginal diseases”, I catch myself each time. Right before finger lands on button. There was nothing to worry about yet. I breathe with myself. I try to imagine what the bad news would feel like inside my body. I imagined the doctor telling me there was certainly something very wrong with me. Something rare, or something common but bad, or something rare and common and bad but not life ending. Serious at the very least. She would tell me I could never have children. I feel really hard into those moments. Dread doesn’t soak my body like I thought it would. Relief came in a sense. In a way that a decision was taken from me.

I couldn’t have children! A choice was made for me by two women in a grey room and a Doctor reviewing my charts. Everyone would feel bad for me. When the topic of children came up at the dinner table people would strain there eyes and jerk their head in my direction. Lips pressed to wine glasses to tell people to shhhh. It would become a sensitive topic, one I couldn't talk about and therefore everyone would pity me. I felt the same way I felt one day at the top of of a ladder one day at a job I hated. If I just flung myself off the ladder I’d certainly break both my legs and everyone would feel bad for me. I wouldn’t be expected to come into work for weeks. Such a relief.

The Doctor sent me a message five business days later through an app their office used where they could contact you with convenience but you still had to get on the phone and ring the office and get put on hold if you wanted to make an appointment. “We got your ultrasound results back and it demonstrated a tiny fibroid which could be responsible for your bleeding changes on your period. These are benign and nothing to worry about.”

Nothing to worry about.

Ugh.

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl. Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

I am still iterating on this piece to turn into a book on feminism, motherhood and autism. I am currently looking for a literary agent, if you are one or have any words of wisdom you would like to pass on please email me here

Other stuff I make on the internet

• New ep on THE ROMAN EMPIRE LMAO We don some robes and sip the sweet nectar of some canette du barbet and travel back in time to the ROMAN EMPIRE DIVAS!

• The DYE Cosmic Stacks 📚 // A resource for artists sharing their work with the world

xx

Phoebe

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*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Most weeks I have breakfast with my two best friends. It’s extremely Sex and the City vibes except we don’t make enough money to justify our hunt for the perfect eggs benny spot. We start with the usual check ins, life, parents, jobs, travel, boyfriends, art, recent books read, latest cultural phenomenon, etc and then they ask me “how are your siblings?”. I am the eldest daughter of the group, a role constantly reminded to me when I organize the beach trips, or teased for when I pulls trinkets out of my bag I found for them. Its a role I am trained in. Stunning at running. They know the gravity my sibling catch up, “they’re good, new job, new girlfriend, new house, just broke up, working too much, working not enough, broke, needs cash, trying to help us out, etc”. If the topic of future and babies comes up we joke, I already have children.

Although my name does not appear on their birth certificates, those are my kids. Your job as a parent never really stops, neither does your job as eldest daughter. When I still get calls about how to properly make a salad or advise of best laundry practices. When a single missed call at a strange time of day is enough to know there is something wrong, something about finger, something about work saw, the name of the hospital.

I am the eldest daughter of 4. I have had kids since I was 2. I always thought I wanted kids, something I wonder about actually feeling or if it was something instilled in me. Not a question of if but when, little girls become mothers. But when you are the eldest daughter it means your baby dolls are replaced with baby brothers. It means being gifted the responsibility and anxiety of children while still being a child. It means changing a diaper while wearing a diaper. I’ve got more responsibility as a daughter and sister. Therapists argue with me “but why do you feel that way”? I point to Beyonce, Oprah, Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris to name a few. Another article from The Cut, new best selling novel, interview on a Mel Robbins podcast, all explaining, the eldest daughter effect. The pressure to not just be good or great, but be great so you can take care of everyone else, first.

Like any eldest daughter I’ve felt this pressure since I was a kid. One of my first memories I have was waking up early the morning of my 5th birthday looking out the window over ostrich farm next door (another story for another day) and thinking to myself “you’re 5 now, time to grow up”. I walked over to my baby brothers crib in our shared room and sat there watching him breath, knowing I would take care of him for the rest of his life, my life.

At the age of 30 I finally feel like my life is starting to become mine. I raised my kids, they moved out, went to university, got jobs in their chosen field, travelled, loved etc. What else could I ask for? I have my shit together, or as together as one woman’s shit could be. A job I love, a job I am really fucking good at, an apartment I like and can afford to repaint the kitchen at my choosing. A boyfriend that loves me a lot, too much maybe and a lot of fucking free time to sit around in cafes to write, take classes in the city, visit friends in other countries, stay up late and work because I want to and pay the consequences for the next day by drinking too much coffee and then staying up too late again.

There is a stat I think about a lot, the average life span of an Autistic person is 36 years old. When I was diagnosed with dyslexia in the second grade I remember my EA saying to me “dyslexic people can be geniuses, the rest of them are in jail”, then bell for recess rang. The same goes for eldest daughter and Autistic women. You win or lose. Free or fail. If you didn’t feel the pressure before, the world will make sure you do. The only choice is to be good and specifically be good so everyone else can be good.

We are four. When there are four, there is three against one, a rotating tide of judgment you are never sure what side you may fall on. There is gossip and whispering between, there is holding each other close and there is denouncing the other. She’s a fucking bitch she is crazy I am never talking to her again. He is mad, he has no idea what he is talking about he never takes responsibility. Until the next Beatles song comes on and we drum on our stomachs in a circle laughing. There are broken promises and lost texts and inside jokes none of our loves could ever hope to penetrate. There are voices and dance routines, there are fake noses and knowing exactly who will take the melody so you sing the harmony, just to let their voices shine brighter than your own.

It’s easy to be a martyr, actually. Im fucking stunning at it. Serving everyone else around me is my training, gaslight my own sensations to make aunts cups of tea and wake up early to do the morning pick up. In the 8th grade I was awarded the Citizenship Award from the Lions Club, a gold plaque with “service above self” inscribed about the gold crest. Be less of yourself, in fact don’t be self at all, be selfless and we’ll reward you for it. The message is so clear it feels tacky to spell it out for you the same way it was spelt out for me.

I am at a fork in the road, grateful at the very least to see it as one. Pulled back enough to feel like I have a choice. There is a trail I’ve had a front row seat too and watched 100’s of women walk down before me. The grooves are deep on the trail and it’t easy to repeat the sequence. Not easy to walk on, but something like a slip stream I could fall into. A routine my DNA has already choreographed for me. I just need to dance the steps. I have kids on this trail, I manage the mothers day flower buying and the collective Christmas present we give our parents from the group of siblings. I am a martyr on this trail. I probably get divorced and then find myself again in my late 40’s. Pick up a copy of All Fours, join the Miranda July group chat, read Night Bitch, watch Babygirl, or any french movie where a woman blows up her life after breaking off a pieces of herself first. Or you could just go to the cafe, the park, join a yoga teacher training and see the real life women doing the exact same. “I lost myself”, “I don’t know who I am without husband/baby/child/proximity to man”, “I have nothing left of me”.

There is another trail. Maybe the outcome is the same. Maybe I have kids on this trail and maybe I get married and then divorced. But I never lose myself. Intention is the other part of the trail. It’s walked on, but less clear, less obvious. I resist co-dependancy and choose myself. Over and over again.

When you are the eldest daughter you feel the bitterness of their lack of responsibility. You flip coins in your pockets wondering what it might be like to be the baby. And when you are the eldest daughter you work to preserve and pickle your sister's heart from all the broken things you run your fingers over, when new boyfriends come for dinner. You wonder what it might be like if you moved to London, or Paris, or Beirut and leave someone else in charge of inevitable doctors appointments and the shit still piled up in the attic. Avoid sandwich caregiver. I wonder what it would be like to choose care, to feel able to have a small thing that is just my own, not something I feel I would be recommitting to. Motherhood feels like the burden of knowing when you are the eldest daughter, I’ve seen too much already.

My phone rings, it’s my brother telling me about a job, or an apartment, or girlfriend or an ex girlfriend. Sitting in traffic sun in my eyes and a little too honest when I found myself asking, “You know sometimes I don’t get where you come from, like we were raised in two different houses. Who raised you?” A pause, and exhale of cigarette smoke, something I tell him to stop doing every moment I get. He laughs,“you did”.

Thanks for reading weird girl. You can find me weekly over at my “day job” DoYouEver! Last week we had sweet on the pod to chat her latest album 💿.

Do You Ever Feel Like

making stuff for a billion years with Olivia Rafferty

Welcome welcome to a stunning guest ep with olivia rafferty !!! Olivia is a songwriter, podcaster, and creators of chaotic google docs, but most importantly she has a new album Typical Forever that you can listen to NOW! You can buy it on Bandcamp…

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a year ago · 3 likes · Phoebe Taylor, Jacque Wills, and olivia rafferty

ALSO I am teaching this workshop on April 10th HOW TO RUN AN ONLINE WORKSHOP (AT THE END OF THE WORLD) I would LOVE to see you there 🧚‍♀️

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl. Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

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I spend a lot of time in waiting rooms. I have multiple chronic illnesses, pains and stuff that generally leaves doctors going “well I am not really sure what to do…”. There’s a lot that makes me feel like an alien but multiple doctors scratching their heads makes a gal feel truly unhuman. The internet is really hot for liminal spaces but I think waiting rooms are closer to a nexus between human world and alien world.

All waiting rooms are a purgatory of sameness. A pulse to the line up of vinyl chairs and fluorescent lights. Wall mounted tv’s with CP24 switched on with the recent political news, or trade deal, or budget cut or a budget increase, disgraced politician or viral video clip of duck and baby in the bath together or a chihuahua at pride.

The community of the waiting room forms. There are roles to the waiting room community. The day players that make up the 10 minute to 3 hour wait we’re all about to endure. Man watching tik-tok on his phone without headphones (a demon from a hell-mouth), rogue child that seems to belong to no one climbing over the chairs with an uncharming amount of dried snot on their face, and overly chatty mother daughter duo that will talk loud enough for you to listen to their current family gossip.

In the waiting room, we all elect a leader. We are no autonomous collective, no democratic proceeding takes place. She arrives and her presence is known, felt, across the waiting rooms. She's 40-something, she’s breathless, sweaty and annoyed she has to be here in the first place. She stages her authoritative takeover, but we all agree that she, red-faced-white-woman-with-micheal-kors-hamilton-tote is the best representative for us, the people of the waiting room. She is relentless and just, standing up for the entirety of their waiting room experience like a junk yard dog pacing it’s grounds. Broken in blundstones heel striking across the terrazzo tiles that look slay in an instagram influencers kitchen backsplash but feel dated here in this brutalist medical office building. She keeps an eye on who has arrived to the waiting room after them and who has been called in before them. We all collectively do this, keeping track of where we are in line, but she is brave enough to walk over to an nurses station and ask “why that person went in before here”.

This is something I would never do because I respect nurses but that is because I am terrified of girls that played high school volleyball and went on to become nurses. I am also well versed in waiting rooms enough to know that the receptionist with gravity defying asymmetric bob pulls the strings around here, and I won’t be doing anything to jeopardize my spot by asking such trivial questions such as “when is it my turn to see the doctor?” or stating “I had an appointment at 2 and now it’s 2:30”. There are also the seasoned waiting room patients such as myself vs the people that haven’t been to their doctor in years. The wheat from the chaff. Seasoned waiting room patients arrive to the waitrooming and lock in. Trigger fingers light on the noise cancelling in our headphones to not miss our names but enough to drown out the woman arguing with her mother over speaker phone. We know which way to swipe our health card (stripe facing receptionist, right to left) and also know that if you learn the names of the receptionist (Cynthia M-W, Barb T-S) they know to send you through to the nurses desk when you ring for your appointments.

I have had pain in my body since I remember having a body. My doctor asked me last week if I have always had migraines. I told her I thought we all walked around with a buzzing in front of our brains. A tensor bandage and needle through our eyes. It’s hard to evaluate how you feel inside your body when we live in a world that asks us to constantly gaslight our sensations.

I wake up each morning and try not to evaluate how I feel or name it good or bad, just trying to exist for the first few moments of the day, even if it is with pain. I can manage one thing a day right now between the various floor beds I have made up for myself across my apartment. Leaving my bed bed as a sacred place to sleep only. It’s boring being sick so you need to distinguish areas for times of the day to break up the day and not let them blend together like a watercolour.

I read a few weeks ago that psychologists don’t know if alexithymia (the inability or difficulty identifying, and expressing emotions) is inherent to being Autistic or if Autistic people are just traumatized out of listening to our bodies and feelings so much that we don’t know how to feel or express feelings. I am not someone that lingers on alternative timelines but that hurt. If I lived in a world that was kinder to Autistic people I might know when I am at my limit. When a smell bothers me, when the sound at a restaurant is too much or that I even when I am in pain in the first place. I may understand what I need. I might not be a person that experiences chronic pain. I may not feel so far away from my body or at the very least spend less time in waiting rooms.

It’s hard to talk about disability in anyway that feels light. Human bodies are terribly embarrassing. It’s uncomfortable to be met with someones humaness and vunerabilty. Telling someone you have chronic pain is like ripping the worst fart on planet earth in front of them and then staring directly into their eyes without saying a word about it. Which is also usually true for me because the amount of magnesium citrate I take for my migraines really plays up my IBS!

Bodies are embarrassing. Pissing, shit, laughing till you cry, making out and drool stranding getting caught between your lips, dying and fucking are all awkward. That’s what disability asks us to confront, our fallible bodies. It reminds us that the goal in life is to become some version of disabled, but I am standing in front of you now reminding you that it can happen at any moment. And while my body isn’t ME it, it is the body and flesh suit I have been given for this earth spin.

It is also hard to talk about because people get tired of hearing it. If I ever answer the question “how are you” it very honestly would be “not great, I am trying really hard to sit up right and converse with you in any kind of normal way, the sound of you clicking your nails together makes me want to buy a looney toons gun and shoot you comically in the face and all this concentrating on not murdering you also is making my physically nauseous so now I am concerned about running to the bathroom on time ”! But that's not only not socially “acceptable” its “extremely rude” and “Phoebe why are you ruining Christmas be nice to your step sister”.

I don’t think I have a very high pain threshold but when you are in pain everyday of your life it just sits with you. Carving out a layer between me and the body I inhabit. A hum and buzz a tinge and stab. It’s with me when I am teaching, lifting weights over my shoulders to a room full of people. It’s with me when I sit around the table with my friends. It’s with me when I log into a zoom. It’s with me when I ride my bike to the coffee shop or toboggan down the snowy hill on my coat. It’s with me at dinner and when my siblings call complaining about our other siblings.

There's not cute bow for chronic pain, no lesson or reason or god. It just is. How absolutely unliterary and boring. And while I am annoyed that my spaceship sent me down to make first contact, I am using my time on Earth to make sure you bitches feel just as uncomfortable and weird as I do. 🤸🏻‍♀️

Thanks for reading weird girl. You can find me weekly over at my “day job” ! Last week we released our first Artist Study on Doechii! 🐊 We are also currently booking Studio Sprints for March + April! 🌱 (aka 6 weeks to birth a project, essay, book proposal, podcast, new website, song in your heart, into the world!).

Do You Ever Feel Like

The Universal laws of Doechii

Hello and welcome to our first ever ARTIST STUDY 🔬! I have had this episode half baked in my head for weeks but Doechii’s recent Grammy win put the FIRE under my butt. I am a woman in love and I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT! We’ve got our first Artist Study up for free.99 for a few days but we will placing these eps behind our stunning new paywall 💃🏻. You…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Phoebe Taylor and Jacque Wills

And the week before we were yapping about THE GREAT META EXIT/LEAVING THE APPS etc etc.

Do You Ever Feel Like

the apps won't save us

The girlies declared 2025 the year of the pod and then… swiftly ghosted the feeds. Isn’t that what having a living human body is all about? This week we chat THE GREAT META EXIT/the great substack intro/what is going on on the interent and can we all be ok? tbd…

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2 years ago · 1 like · Phoebe Taylor and Jacque Wills

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl. Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

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For the last three years I have written a X lessons by X on my birthday inspired by my sweet internet friend . It feels almost untruthful to call them lessons this year nothings has stuck onto me the way a lesson should. Or alternatively all I have are a pile of lessons I seem to forget, a mess of tied pink bows collected all around my feet, nowhere to stick them to, no platitude I’ve tried on that feels soothing for the moment. Instead it all sits in a slurry, the dregs of a cup of tea poured over my grandmas broken sieve. Something sloshing in the bottom of my cup waiting to be integrated, picked up, learned.

I wasn’t going to write 30 lessons, I had the idea of a list of things I wish i knew before 30. Things I missed out on, things that passed me by. But as someone that feels so untethered, so not of this earth, so alien and unwanting to be human, that list would be too long. And truthfully, I wish to know nothing really, I wish to always stay open. Trying to be human has only ever hurt me. I wish to be so moveable and trusting of the spirit of me that wave and wind could pick me up and swirl me together and I’d still be me.

I’ve had a year of grief, of so much loss. Lessons feel unimportant in the death of it all. Nothing makes you feel less meaning making then big spirits no longer being here. Of loss and hope extinguished. But I think thats whats really beautiful about artists, poets, writers, creators. We make something out of the nothing. When when it just feels so fucking bleak.

So a collection of lessons I’ve gathered, not all stuck, not all integrated, more often a concept then a goal post of objective. Something just as moveable as me. ✨

30 lesson by 30

1. writing doesn’t happen at a desk

2. go for a run

3. shift down

4. touch a tree

5. tune into what aches, thats a place of knowing to

6. tulips don’t try to control the weather, they trust in the soils conditions to grow

7. be a tulip

8. don’t wait to be inspired

9. creativity is born from anger

10. be angry more

11. enter the dance with the energy you have, not the energy that is expected of me

12. make the space for what you need

13. make the space for what you want to create

14. its safe to listen to me

15. i get to trust me

16. trust your timing is sacred

17. trust is a practise, its not something you say. You cant make it cute, its a very specific thing you do everyday

18. People are only ever doing their best

19. Peoples best ins’t always good enough

20. be embarrassing

21. be “too much”

22. wear red lipstick everyday

23. eat the good pain au chocolates

24. let it be easy

25. it has to be beautiful

26. the scenic route in more interesting

27. not everything is a lesson

28. I don’t need to share it all

29. and I don’t always have to learn it

30. there will be new lessons tomorrow

SOME OTHER STUFF

if you want to support my writing this year here are some paid essays you can read 💕

Liked this? You can read the latest edition of Weird Girl here

New on the pod we chat THEATRE among many other things

Do You Ever

everything is THEATRE 💃🏻🎭

We tried having a he he ha ha episode but we’re too insane for that! Do you ever feel like everything is THEATRE? Well yah duh, thats kind of our whole deal here! Like what if we played zip zap zop in the board room? I think the world would be a much nicer more fun place. We chat why a semester of theatre school is for the world and why the arts IS A TR…

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2 years ago · 2 likes · phoebe taylor and Jacque Wills

Ok thanks for being here, i love you all 🦐

xx

Phoebe

P.S and I are enrolling for our Winter ‘25 retreat to the Hudson valley, more deets here! Come not learn with us 🤸‍♀️

A quick hello before we dive into todays essay! I’m back from a much longer hiatus than I expected when I decided to take August off. To say I have had a “Weird” year is an understatement. Professionally I have had the most amazing opportunities, gigs and once in a lifetime experiances. Persoanlly I have had the most terrible year filled with health shit, chronic pain shit, loss and then obviously just the general dumpster fire that seams to be a person in the world. I know grief and magic are so intertwined but holy fuck is it exhausting.

I had written this essay back in August and truthfully have been terrified to share it. But I do really think I’d be much more embarrassed to lay on my death bed and think about the essays i didn’t write then the ones i did. And theres nothing like a week and a half wondering if you’re gonna die to help you get over yourself. 💃🏻

I’ve been dating the same guy for 12 years. It’s embarrassing to be turning 30 and knowing I’m a seasoned relationship veteran. This is not at all what I pictured for my life. I pictured bad relationships, bohemian escapades, silk scarves strewn over lampshades. Stevie Nicks type love affairs where I make the men that fall in love with me sing my lyrics back at me on stage while we make eye contact for the rest of their life.

We walk our dog on the weekends and plan where we want to go for lunch on Saturday. We’ve been together long enough to have fought out weather or not to get a cat, got a cat, and for that cat to have lived a long and happy life and for that cat to have died at an elderly age. We’ve both gotten sober together, instead of closing down the bars and dancing on the tables like we used to on Friday night, we got for ice baths and breath-work mediation classes and I love them. My boyfriend is also a perfect angel, he thinks im extremely beautiful and very talented and humble and does most things more me. I haven’t gotten a beverage for myself from the other room for over a decade. The only thing more embarrassing than admitting I have been hooking up with the same guy for 12 years would be to marry him.

I do not think marriage is an achievement or the ultimate expression of love. Shock horror, I am a child of divorce. Weddings, and I would argue subsequently marriage has devolved into the performance of it all. You cannot tell me 99% of weddings happen only for/because of instagram. Alternative, destination, elopement, family style or otherwise. All a production for the people from middle school that still follow you, a potential moment for #content and the opportunity to showcase how much power (money) you have. The manic string of engagement party, engagement shoot, bridal shower, bachelorette, day before, day of and day after wedding has become standardized for instagram. I could write another essay about the expectations of bachelorette culture (you do not need a 6 day trip to Charleston, South Carolina to celebrate marrying a guy named Joe, please) or the finances and debt incurred in order to be able to out perform Trish in finances euro-summer-wedding, let alone the amount of waste generated for these rituals. 

I feel as if I am on an ice float left alone in the ocean. All the other women in my life, a raft we all agreed to stay on, where we were safe as long as we were together, severed off one by one to go back to the island we swore we’d never return to. All thrown out, all “compromised”, in order to marry a man.

The cognitive dissonance required to say some of the most radical, powerful feminist things I have heard from the women in my life and to then choose to wear a white dress and change your last name to a man's is a stunning leap, I an Autistic women do not have the physical neural pathways to perform. Feminism feels likes a flimsy thing to try on in our 20’s only to shrug off in our 30’s.

What I hate most about weddings is watching women compromise their values because they think they need a man to complete their life, make it better, give them something they don’t already have.

I am not supposed to say any of the above. It’s bad feminist of me. We railed against the cringe capitalist mirror of Girl Boss feminism, and instead of pushing the needle we birthed Choice Feminism. A watered down version of feminism that allows us to be BFF’s with transphobes, and tolerate much more filler and plastic surgery than we think is ok, we’ve all sung out as “I wouldn’t do it but it’s her choice”. The degree in which we are asked to tolerate choice feels far from feminist to me. Choice feminism espouses the idea that any choice a women makes is inherently feminist. That just because a woman chooses to side with her oppressor and against other women makes that choice, fine? Exempt from criticism. 

White women have been doing this for centuries. I could point to the big ones, the women that voted for trump, the trad wives we all seem so enamored by, the women that side with their abusive husband over their own children. But I think “choice” is more insidious than that. The choices women make in the everyday uphold patriarchy as a way to bash other women with it. All while being good lefty liberals but with lip fillers, blood diamond on their ring fingers, credit card debt for a dress they’ll only wear once for the opportunity to change their last name to a mans. All in the name of protecting, ultimately, themselves.

Arguably it’s the only choice women are ever actually making. To side with oppressors or not. White women really are quite stunning at spinning this into victim hood. Intelligent, smart women I know get married to horrible men, men who hate them, who think that getting married means the women will “settle down”, quit their jobs. All men are Steve’s and when they marry Miranda’s they are shocked they don’t rearrange their lives for them, move to Brooklyn and mother their children. The self inflicted victimhood of white cis hetero women, the ability to be both oppressed and the oppressor, and unable to be accountable for the patriarchy they uphold day to day in the micro and macro movement they make. 

“Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause, it is also a personal affair. It is not only about “us”; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.”  - Cinderella's Stepsisters, Toni Morrison  

A couple months ago I was in the shower and felt two lumps in my right tit. I really hate saying breast. I called my doctor's office and ended up in a paper gown the next day. The dance of formalized medical performance begins. I in my paper gown, my doctor in her “this is serious but let’s wait and see” face.

I laid down on the vinyl table and made eye contact with Jesus on the cross. My doctor opens my paper gown and my right flopped to the side. To diffuse the tension building between the three of us I loudly ask my kind young Orthodox Christian Doctor with a too big engagement ring poking my in my armpit “what even are tits made out of anyway”.

While stilling prodding around in my armpit she says “the breast is made up of different glands and fibrous tissues”. Her ring get caught in my armpit hair I insist on growing up to let anyone that may catch a glimpse of my armpit hair, I am a feminist. She places the paper back over my chest and tells me it's a good idea to get some scans done. We skip mammogram and go right for ultra sounds. I go for scans the next day and my doctor's office calls me back that afternoon to tell me the results came back “weird”. A departure from the medical jargon of “different glands and fibrous tissues”. My tits are now, formally, medically “weird”. 

I go back for scans the next day again, they come back “inconclusive”, another scan reveals the are “abnormal”. This dance goes on for the next week.

Throughout scans and pokes I insisted on using the word “tit” much to the upset to many a nurse, ultrasound tech and Doctor. I remember having the forethought enough on doctor visit number three, when I could tell my she was preparing me for the worst case scenario results, to ask about what would happen to me if I couldn't make a decision for myself, if my autonomy was stripped from me. She looked up from typing her notes and asked me very sharply “are you married?”. My common law relationship status would not get Simon through locked hospital doors, it would not grant him the right to make decisions for me, we can pay our taxes together, but we cannot make life and death choices together. 

I very rarely talk about my boyfriend online. Mostly because he has nothing to do with what I write about, make, and quite honestly I think my relationship is the least interesting this about me. Women online share photos of their husbands glaring at them over the dinner menu and begrudgingly hold the phone to take OOTD photos. Their proximity to a man as something on par with the art they make, the songs they sing the businesses they run, their contributions to the world.

Simon got into bed at 11pm, after doing the washing up, taking out the garbage and cleaning the house (because I do none of these chores). He leaned back, closing his eyes like a porcelain baby doll as it tips back, and just as his head touched the pillow I took a deep sigh and with tears in my eyes “I think we should get married”. Throwing the last 12 years, my rioting every time someone gibed at a wedding “you’re next”, my staunch hatred of marriage, the implications that I would be someone's wife, all out the door all for the privilege of letting him change my morphine dose if I was in a vegetative to make that decision. True love. I will never change my name. I will never be someone's wife. And all of the sudden I don’t feel like I have a choice in the matter. It will be hard for my boyfriend to advocate for my health care unless he is my husband. That actually it is easier to be married to a man. Simon’s response was “ok, sure”. 

I can’t help but think marriage is a compromise of my feminism. I am sure I have pissed off plently of people that won’t make it this far into the essay, but I don’t think being married makes you inherently not a feminist, and I hate that the internet makes me feel like I have to caveat this essay with that statement. But I do think of my ancestors before me. The ones that would dance and cheer for me for this opportunity of a lifetime. Unmarried, childless, educated woman. Don’t fuck this up they whipser in my ear. 

The doctor called me at 5pm on a Friday afternoon. She asked loudly over my cars bluetooth “is this a good time”, it really wasn’t, I was driving and the car behind me was honking its horn because I hadn’t made my left turn yet, paralyzed with fear that it was cancer and that I was about to get in a car crash before I even got the chance to have chemo. But when a woman you've been harassing all week with your lack of medical jargon asks if it's a good time, the answer is “yes”. 

“Results are all clear, we need to monitor in 6 months but we’re happy with the results”. Click. 

I don’t remember driving home, the rest of the words my doctor said to me on the phone. I walked into the kitchen and saw Simon shaping two sourdough loves, folding the gluten stands under each other, flour dusting the floor of the kitchen and forming a little halo about his head in the sunlight. I wrapped my arms around his back as he twisted the little white mounds on the work top, “We don’t have to get married now”. 

Thanks for reading weird girl.

If you want more me while I kinda return to a usual schedule you can find me and my “day job” over at . We interviewed and they were so generous with their time.

Do You Ever

Everything is a dance with Cody Cook-Parrott

Too many intro’s for a person who truly needs no introduction! Cody Cook-Parrott !! We hopped on the phone with Cody the day after they showed back up in IG with personal practise. We chat circles, entering the dance first, and being generous with space. Cody's “deeply online” career has influenced our own creative practises and it was a true blessing to chat through th…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · phoebe taylor, Cody Cook-Parrott, and Jacque Wills

Ok thanks for being here

I’m feeling mucho back so you can expect regularly scheduled nonsense in all it’s forms back again 💕

xx

Phoebe

P.s

Some IRL stuff if you wanna hang with me!

Hamilton folks! IRL workshop at Bambinos with me Nov 28th, deets here, sliding scale come yap with me! We’re getting better at talking about ourselves, our work 🤸‍♀️

Toronto area folks I am performing some new work next week at Replay Storytelling Wednesday November 13th @ 7pm along with some other amazing storytellers!

I wake up and monitor my flesh suit in the mirror, what new grey hairs have appeared on my temple? During zoom calls I switch off “self view” only to watch my reflection in the monitor. The doctor pulls my right breast out of the gown to examine and covers the left. The play of modesty. I report on my digestive system to my naturopath and name each time I understand the expression from a list of eyes and eyebrows to the psychiatrist in charge of telling me about myself today.

I am feeling overly perceived. To be a person that writes online is already personal, I don’t want whatever I publish to read like my morning pages. Both because those are my paper cuts and open wounds, the things that sting to have looked at and commented on, but also because that would make for some seriously bad writing. To be a bad artist is any artist's worst fear.

I have an essay out in the world right now. It’s an essay I worked really hard on. Paid to be in circle where it could be workshopped, took it to my peers, had conversation and time spent in discussion, submitted it to a contest (also paid) and won. It is by all objective measures a “good” or maybe “successful” essay. Something I wrote that felt really hard and honest to write, something I wrote in early days of my Autism diagnosis where I was really struggling to be ok with my “new” reality. I wrote it at night in bed when I couldn’t sleep, spending weeks replaying the last 30 years of my life on a loop with a new perspective. To call the experience “crazy” is to put it extremely lightly. 

The only way for you to currently read that essay I poured over, is behind a paywall.

Part of me needs the safety of that paywall to show up and say the things I want to say right now. The part that feels overly perceived and poked and prodded by medical professionals and the DM’s from women I went to highschool with that feel comfortable sending to me their thoughts on my work. Other parts of me want my work shared widely. To stand on the page bleeding like any Tumblr era thought daughter Joe March-Carrie Bradshaw-Hannah Horvath embarrassing white waif phase. To be a quite terrible-not-very-good-writer, actually.

In the ever hanging question “what do I stick behind a paywal?” I can never land on something concrete. The balance of safety and the desire to be seen. I have been an artist online, making money from my work for a decade. I am not a viral or overnight success, I (hope) am still early career. No longer an emerging artist but something where I have stepped out onto the stage enough to get good stepping onto the stage. I have tried and experimented in 582 possible ways to make money being an artist, and in the current configuration I have cobbled together – it is working.

There is a certain safety in the exchange of money for art I feel and a certain pressure. I want to be an artist that gets paid to write, which is the reality of my life as an artist now when I let people pay me for my words. I speak to artists everyday and they all say some iteration and version of “I just want to get paid to be me”. I want to get paid to write. The joy and validation I feel from getting paid from my art is very real, not something I am interested in pathologizing. It doesn’t make my art better, but I can tell you paying rent with your art when your Dad sat you down at the dinging room table explaining to why being an artist is a “bad financial decision” – feels fucking good.

I also believe it’s important for artists to get paid. I don’t know how to convey to the world that artists are worth supporting. That the inherent value in cheering on another artist is worth it, valuable. Artists are left to dance around to justify their value, why the cost of something costs what it costs. But I also dislike the argument of “we’ve all got bills to pay” to be a justification for paying someone for their art because… WE have ALL got bills to pay. Including you. Including me. My need to survive is not different, we are all living under capitalism where for some fucking reason we need money to pay to live.

Simultaneously the pressure to be good mounts when I ask for money. To feel worthy and good enough to be in exchange with an audience. To deliver something I feel proud of and pay my rent with. 

I have been told by countless friends that have been through the diagnostic process “you’re gonna feel crazy for like a year or two”. I have learned a lot the last 8 months, what my body needs to be ok. My biggest goal in January was to find a way to lessen my meltdowns. Something I feel terribly embarrassed to even write down in this newsletter. Meltdowns are the least talked about part of Autism and something I live in a lot of fear of. Not just because they are wildly unpleasant to experience (they are) but because of what they have done to my relationships, the people around me and the hyper vigilant state I live in to not have a public meltdown that may find me hospitalized, institutionalized or dead. 

I will have been in therapy for exactly half of life this year. Half of my life showing up to sort through the gnarliest bits of myself with someone else. I have been a writing a blog since 2016, 8 years of showing up and sorting through the the less gnarly bits with an audience to share with. Decades worth of being perceived. 

The past 8 months I have taken me really seriously, I stopped drinking, took my vitamins, crafted routines, rested often and committed to only one social outing a week to give my body time to recharge. And I find myself in the familar place of burntout, exhausted, on my couch, eating plain food.

Artists need the freedom to fuck around, potentially never find out. To really truly create terribly horrible art and I think that can only happen behind closed doors. I don’t know where the line of sustaining a career as an artist and giving yourself space to hermit and hide is. The pressure of goodness and the wanting to be great. In the landscape of great writers on substack, asking to be monetarily compensated for my work and wanting to respect the people that have hit “subscribe” to my inbox. 

I am also of the mind that I trust people, I trust my readers know they want to be here and how they want to spend their money, that if they want to hit unsubscribe they can (and do). And that it’s not my responsibility to tell people what to read and how to feel. That this can be a space of not-goodness.

I haven’t had the space, to truly “wonder” to stick my feet up and as my sweet Anaïs Nin said “taste life twice”. 

Right now I want to commit to no schedule. To have the freedom I created this place for. To be the terrible-thought-daughter-tumblr-rebloging-gremlin-teenage girl-sequesteredto-her-bedroom my heart desires, and really actually needs right now. To find space in between the hypervigilant state I live in to not appear monstrous, blunt, rude, or what I have been socialized as “too autistic”, disabled, othered. To live life away from the constant perceiving my phone allows. 

All of the above is a slurry and mixed thoughts. But I do think what we’re contending with really actually isn’t new. I think of my artists ancestors, and have to assume the merchants an the crafts people before me struggled to find the line between commerce and pleasure and exchange and visibility. Now there are just more men living inside my pocket to profit off of it. 

I will be leaving my paid subscriptions on so folks can access paywalled content, and as a source of income to support me as I write my book (I have been workshopping with editors and folks to help bring this together so wish me luck!) I’m not leaving. I am just releasing myself from a TON of shoulds, specifically the ones I placed here.

I love you all

thanks for being here ✌️

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

P.s The essay in question can be found here and I am trying really hard to not put my subs on sale and instead just allow for the grace of people paying me for my art to wash over me 🌊

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl. Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

Subscribe now

I keep trying to be good. I keep trying to make my writing good. It’s an absolutely perfect place to start if you want to not write at all. I talk to artists all day about why they cannot write, what inside them cannot move the needle. It goes something like “laziness” or “time” or “i don’t know why I cant just… INSERT VERY COMPLICATED TASK HERE”. We simplify our “inability” to show up as something we are lacking. Not the external circumstances it almost always is.

I’ve certainly got methods and space to figure out how to move the needle. But I am not here to claim some kind of guru status. Some kind of faith in something better. I don’t have a potion or a trick. But I have getting out of my own way.

My goodness is wrapped in the performance of goodness. Of the things I have been told I am valuable for. My smile, my usefulness, my willing to make do, or trying, my eyes and the way I brushed my hair that day, my output for capitalism and the value I bring to the rooms I walk into. I am new to being likeable, though, I have enough evidence that the me that came naked into this world was not desired. I have become incredible at shapeshifting, elasticating to what you need me to be.

But I am tired. And when I am tired I cannot perform good. I have no good left to give inside me. Unable to find the threads to pull to weave myself together. Stitch up the seams where the stuffing falls out and dance pretty, fuck pretty or hold myself upright in front of the class.

My cat is sick. My geriatric cat has been sick since basically the day we got her. I picked out the cat that had been at the shelter for a long time, the cat that had been traumatized to hell, rejected multiple times, passed from shelter to foster to hoarding to shelter, lost her teeth and vision, and was told she wouldn’t live “past a couple of years”. A couple of years turned into 8 years. I don’t have a sweet lesson from Anjelica to offer, not anything new. There is the lesson in going slow, laying in sunbeams just because it’s a little bit warmer. There is screaming when you need something (food) and asking for a cuddle by placing your head in the hands of the person you wish to receive love from, sometimes to annoying degree.

Life seems to happen all at once. And then never again. A lesson I am constantly trying to remember but feel endlessly shocked by when it slaps me wet in the face. It’s spash back reminds me I am at least alive enough to feel the sting.

Grief pummels me. Pulls me down into a pit of myself where I meet the real me. The shrivled pieces of fetal materials, the gooey center where I am nothing, really, but a clump of cells, messed into flesh and blood. The me that existed before the rest of my body. The me that flashed positive on my mothers pregnancy test. Here I am something ugly tucked under the soil, pulled underground. My nerve endings wound tightly together around my muscles to bring me back, underground. Something to figner through the dirt, pull out of a clump, whisper ew, take a picture, text a friend, toss me back in the heap.

Grief makes me reach for sensation. Waving my arms around out into the dark for anything else that can save me from the drawing inside myself. A fuck or at least a cry. Something full bodied, all consuming. Something to rub, something just to feel.

Grief hits me like a bruise where I can walk to the cafe and only slightly brush up against the sight and smell of mellow creme pumpkin candies and have my purple bruise sting and stab me. A day derailed back into myself. Back underground.  

If feels silly in a way to grieve a living creature. Something that knows me as the women that cracks the cans of fancy feast, pulls her back from the edge of a porch or disrupter of perfect cozy spot to kick her off a pillow. But in all my grief, it pulls me back into the pool. A slush of every sadness my gooey centre feels. Dark mirror surface waters and hands reaching to pulling me in. The grief of people that loved me, their love no longer present in the world. Grief of where to put all my love for the people no longer here. Grief for lost glances and lives lived inside those lingering stares on the bus. Grief for who I was or who I was supposed to be or whatever I am supposed to feel about time. Grief for the squirrels, ground up into the side of the road, tail missing, organs and fat mixed into leaves where I pretend I do not care but actually I really fucking care. Grief for the photos of war on my phone never to photos of brunch.

It asks me if I am grieving correctly. Constantly checking my performance of good enough women. As life long weird girl I am no stranger to crying in the park, the trail, pulled over at the side of the road sobbing or in line at the grocery store. I am constantly shocked by my human bodies reactions to anything. Grief feels shocking to experience inside myself, as if I forgot I could feel in the first place. So much numbing of that gooey centre.

I don’t have a trick for goodness. I have walking, I have time. I have removing myself from the centre and feeling, actually feeling and words that only try to capture any love I have ever felt. So I feel it.

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl.Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

Subscribe now

I place each idea into a container. The container of an essay, the container of a poem, the container of a workshop or class, the container of a painting or song. They each start to take shape shifting into themselves. As if I were god and cast them down from the sky, their idea souls to land into their idea vessels. Their shapes taking form.

I’ve been trying to write a book for the last year, or I guess I have written a book in the last year but it feels less and less like a book the more I write. I can only call it a Dunning–Kruger effect where the more I write the less I know. The less of a shape it takes. And although I know a book has a couple hundred pages a few thousand words and is rectangle and heavy in my lap. My books feels oblong, shapeless against a word processor sky. It feels unstructured and flat and each time I type a word I feel closer to something but I cannot tell you what that final form is. Not because of a secret I keep with my ideas, but because it has not told me what it is yet. I feel what it might be like to chip away at marble a figure emerging from stone. Its rough edge only hitting at a form underneath.

I wrote a sticky note to place under my computer.

NO MAGNUM OPUS TODAY.

I open my computer and feel floaded with everyone else’s greatness. Their own magnum opus on display. I am so behind. I didn’t know there was a behind to fall back into but here I am, this is the abyss surely. An ad telling me the new wrong thing I am doing to my teeth, skin, hair, business, dog, relationship, bathroom towels. I am over being told there is a right and wrong way. I want to exists somewhere in the middle. Being Autistic is an inherently lonely experience. There is not imposter syndrome when it’s constant. When you are an imposter in the world thats built around you. Outside of you. I never feel like I know whats going on, I miss the beat or the meeting at brunch where we all decided we interrupt freely and make plans on the fly. I am so behind.

NO MAGNUM OPUS TODAY.

None of my good ideas come to be when I am searching for a good idea. I know writing doesn’t really happen at my desk, but in the long walk I take to a cafe. Peeling myself away from my desk feels like an act of god. A practise in showing up for what I am actually committed to.

The idea doesn’t come to me because it is an idea. It comes in the conversations I have with friends. The conversations I wished I had with friends. The missing piece I see in the world. An idea or shape of something to fill the void.

NO MAGNUM OPUS TODAY.

Too much pressure to be good. Or be funny. Or the next great writer. No overnight viral success is overnight (and if it is, it usually isn’t interesting). Too much pressure to make others like you or what you think it good. I write for Jacque, I think of what would make her bend down spitting oat milk onto the floor. I write for my sister and I, tucked into our bedroom drawing chest hair on on ourselves in eyeliner pencil and laughing under water in the apartment pool. I write for Heidi and Sierra leaned back hands over our belly’s full of food and conversation where we’ve been saying goodbye for the last hour.

NO MAGNUM OPUS TODAY.

Just showing up. Trying. Because thats all we actually have.

My roommate and LOML has been working on his manifesto of sorts. I love it, It makes me cry. A call for all the shit that says we’re wrong/bad/too much and most offensively “not creative”.

 Everyone is Creative

You're a human. You can't opt out of this. You can't take it away from others

Everyone's Creative

Everyone's Creative

Hi, This newsletter used to be called Robot Fan Club, and like I explained in my last post, that name had some issues — most importantly, it didn't really mean anything. I want to say things I mean, so I changed the name, and I'm refocusing what I do here…

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2 years ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Simon Peng

thanks for being here

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl.Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

Subscribe now

I am choosing to paywall this essay and paywalling more of my work here moving forward. I don’t know what the schedule or pace of that is yet, but it’s a gut check. Something that allows me to be able to write freely, knowing there is a container of actual reader not just the potential for some random to roll by a post and lemme know their feels about my life. Also I believe in paying artist for their work, and offering folks the opportunity to support me feels very in line with my values. 🫶

Get 20% off for 1 year

That button gets you a full membership for the next year for the cost of $8.80 CAD ( $6.40 USD) a month. AKA almost the cost of a cup of coffee (lmao recession 🫠, *cries in Canadian* etc etc) or less if you sign up for a year. You get the audio version of all posts, free tickets to the open studios I occasionally host here ,and the comment section. 🌸

Also a quick shout out, because nothing is made in a vacuum and reading the acknowledgements of any book makes me cry so 🫶. Part of this essay was born in workshop, with some shaping and molding from . Thank you both for your time, brains and artistry.

Ok! On with the show 💃🏻

There are Good Women. Good Women wear dresses and tied bows. Good Women sip from a straw and never chug from the bottle. Good Women smile and nod and blush and wear just enough lipstick. Good Women are small, but not too thin. Strong, but not too big.Good Women twirl when they dance and step lightly on floorboards. Good Women can melt in your mouth. You can pop them back behind your molars and forget you even consumed them, they go down easy and wash away with a glass of whole milk. 

There is only Good Woman, anything other than good is a failing grade. Bad Woman. I am not a Good Woman. I don’t know how to be a Good Woman. 

I wasn’t born on this earth. I was sent down. My space ship forgot me here, abandoned me,  or some other tragic tale to explain my situation. The seams pull tightly along my human suit, hinting at something terrifying beneath my styled exterior. The uncanny valley of puppeteering  a woman just trying to be good. Studying to be good. To learn the rules and operate the human suit as a Good Woman. 

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Every time I write about autism people leave. They leave the room, they leave the bar, they unfollow me, they don’t call back or ignore the dropping of a capitalized word, all together. 

Despite being pathologized countless times, told I am not good at recognizing people's facial expressions. I can always tell what they’re thinking when I drop my big A word.

She’s making it up!
She’s watched to many tik toks!
She wants attention.
She doesn’t look autistic.
She can't be autistic.

I know this because I left the room when autism came up. When someone showed a little but too much of themselves, offered me something I didn’t wanna hear, a diagnosis of chronically online. I rolled my eyes and tried my best to hold their humanity in the palm of my hand, only to stuff it in a snotty kleenex after the fact. It felt too cringe. Too close to my own shit to look in the eyes, to pay attention enough to care. To listen.  

I never planned on writing about being Autistic. I avoided the idea for years after friends and therapists suggestions. On the phone with my friend Alexandra and she asked “do you want me to tell you?”, she forwarded me a list and it felt like someone reading my diary at me. It was too much to ignore. A flashing light of a limit reached years ago. In a doctor's office a couple weeks later I was told I was “too pretty” and then “too anxious” to be autistic. I was given a list of forms to fill out, come back in 6 weeks with a letter from my mother and a stack of my report cards as a child. “Something is wrong, we just need to sort it out”. I walked to a park and sat at a bench for an hour, I think. I couldn't be autistic. A doctor just told me so. A doctor who didn’t listen to me, a doctor that said I just need to “try harder”. He didn’t think I was autistic. I couldn’t be and therefore I wasn’t.

I tick all the boxes of late diagnosed Autistic woman, in some sick medical system bingo card. I haven’t met another autistic woman who’s score card doesn’t almost exactly match mine. Threatened with hospitalization and institutionalization throughout my childhood and teens. Diagnosed with OCD at age 19, diagnosed with BPD at 21, prescribed too many SSRI’s in my 20’s and then not enough. Prescribed medications for epilepsy patients and heart conditions. I was “just evil” according to my family, a “bitch” to my peers and classmates. A diagnosis of weird girl at the back of the room, something that no amount of rubbing can ever scratch off. Once you’ve been branded, that’s it.    

In a way I don’t blame people. I didn’t stay when others told me about themselves. Cringed at the idea of saying the big thing out loud. Judged others for their blue hair and stim toys, rolled my eyes at the idea of #neurospicy (ok I still do, but now because I just want people to say Autism). To call it internalized ableism is not enough. Self hatred, loathing. If I could just muscle through, why can’t everyone else. 

I couldn’t muscle through it. I failed hard at my performance of Normal Woman, Good Woman, Capable Woman, Nice Woman. 30 years of masking has taught me that, I can’t hide it. People clock your weirdness, your otherness.1 I’ve been called enough names by men and criticized for the way I speak, dress, wear my hair, make eye contact or don’t make eye contact, that I know people know whether or not I tell them. I screamed in public, lost it at the mention of a changed plan or a loud noise in a cafe, and jumped out of more moving cars than I can count on both of my hands. Wrestling it down, pretending it isn’t in the room with us benefits everyone else. Never the Autistic person.

I don’t think people mean to leave. It’s not conscious. It’s a series of hearts on an instagram post or a comment of “you’re ok”. Anything to dismiss the capital A in front of you. It lumbers into the room to make everyone feel uncomfortable. Something to turn and avoid, something that inevitably highlights the ugliness of ourselves, and the room we stand in. Of course people leave, it's something to fear. Something that haunted classrooms and living rooms in the 90’s. The thing that steals little white boys away from very nice middle class family’s. Something writers and journalists feel they can weigh in on, poke fun of. A trend sweeping chronically online white women with coloured hair. (I am once again paging to do better after this article).

Any other tick of marginalized and people don’t just leave, they kill you. If you’re brown and autistic people don’t believe you, they hoops of diagnosis are far more challenging to run through2. If you’re Black and autistic you’re more likely to face police violence in the throws of a meltdown, or for simply just existing. 3

I don’t know how to tell the world they should care about autistic people. I know they don’t.4 I wish they did, I wish the needs of Autistic people were taken seriously. I wish we didn’t have to perform “disabled-enough” for people to listen. I wish we weren’t constantly told we’re “ok” or “fine enough” or “too much” and simultaneously not enough. I can’t not talk about it anymore. I spent too long not talking about it. Pushing parts of my face around until they made other people feel comfortable. It’s my operating system. And not talking about it quite literally kills us. Not because being Autistic kills you, but because people do not accomodate Autistic people and their needs (the average life span of an autistic person is 36, something I think about daily). 5

So I do now know how to get you to care about autism. But I have writing. I have a camera, I have a music and shouting. I have threads to pull. And since I started talking about I’ve gotten DM’s from strangers, telling me they feel the same. Conversations outside the internet with people to say “this helps”. A piece of my story weaving into theirs.

I don’t know how to tell you, you should care about Autistic people, but I won’t stop talking about it until people stop leaving.

thanks for staying💕

xx

Phoebe

P.S I want to give a quick shout out to and this week for the conversations I’ve had in developing this essay. This took a lot of gumption to put together and I wouldn’t be able to do it with out their cheerleading. 🫶

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Weird Girl.Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and breaking up with the wellness industrial complex. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

Subscribe now

On the phone the other say I screamed to my friend YEARNING IS BACK IN A BIG WAY. Maybe it’s the sticky summer mix of smog and humidity making the sun glaze over orange in the sky. The most recent Bridgerton season that had me STARVED for Mr Darcy hand flexing-equse moments (objectively the sexiest moment on film ever, we all know this). Or my current mood board titled “walking down the stairs in a long dress like Virginia Wolf”. Maybe its something else indescribable, something in the air, something we only taste as we lick our lips, like sweat on our tongue. But it’s the summer of yearning.

People are having less sex these days, or so says the current moral panic, and simultaneously the BookTok tables at my local book stores are FULL of romance books and the biggest show no one can shut up about (Bridgerton) where the fat weird girl gets fingered by the hot jock (someone finally read my high school diary)!!!! But, Yearning is back in a big way. And I could write this essay on escapism and why the world being on fire is the perfect time for longing. But I also think we’re all just fucking exhausted from being met with exactly what we want all the time. From overanalyzing. From pathologizing. I think we’re all wanting to simply just be.

Yearning is next to anger and obsession in the category of most fruitful creative forces in my life. Yearning is extremely poetic and when its hot out side and you don’t really want to be wearing any clothing, and the world is on fire, all the girlies really have left is sit dramatically in a long dress, ankles crossed on the window sill. It’s time to yearn. 

Every time I open my phone I feel absolutely shit about myself, my life, my skin, I thought my scalp was safe but then an ad told me yesterday my scalp ages 10 times faster than my skin so now I am absolutely stressed about that when I didn’t think I had to be. Yearning is fomo’s more fun cousin, maybe less ✨mentally well✨ but ultimately less toxic for the brain.

Yearning is a young woman’s game in that my best yearning was done at the age of 16 holed up in my bedroom scrolling tumblr #aesthetic posts and painting the same nail over and over again until the polish was perfectly thick and glossy. There is a lot of chat in the online wellness spaces about inner child but I find my inner teenager to be a more inspiring place of angst. Consulting that part of me feels like a more honest guiding light than anything anyone has to say on tiktok or the nightmare factory that is IG reels. 16 year old Phoebe would not put up with the gaslighting, she would think it’d be extremely uncool to consider buying an anti-aging-scalp treatment and that is the kind of contrarian advice I need to counteract the 47 billion voices of capitalism constantly telling me I am not enough, im too lazy, too stupid and too much. To be a teenage girl is to scream when the room isn’t right, when the crazy making starts, when the room start gaslighting you into leaving your sensations.

Ultimately what I really thinking yearning allows us to do is go slow. It be with ourselves and really, our feelings. Yearning doesn’t distract me from my 58282 ideas, it leans into the simmering. Yearning is ultimately for the poets and to yearn is to connect with my poetic ancestors. Yearning is in private, even if you are in public. Sitting alone at cafe tables staring off into the distance. Yearning is for closed bedroom doors and long sighs and lingering glances. Yearning means being with myself, someone I’ve been told I shouldn’t trust. But I am learning to meet her again, and she’s quite fun, and dramatic.

Yearning is for falling in love, but mostly with myself. ✨

FINDINGS

• Latest episode of Do You Ever Feel Like where I talk more about the disappointment of season 3 of Bridgerton and being a bonafinde Hater ™️

• Retreat dates for September here 🌳 join me in the Catskills + Trust your creative spark again 🪄

I just wrapped up How to Apply to Artist Residencies and Fellowships Class with and i cannot recommend this course enough for my fellow artists trying to get their shit together 💕

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Creators Dispatch. A weekly essay about the creative journey (whatever that means week to week)! Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and living in the dumpster fire of a world that says not to make your art. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

Subscribe now

A couple weeks ago substack announced another integration on their quest to bring video onto the platform. They want short form video creators to bring their audiences to substack.

I watched as the opinions from my internet colleagues (my fellow substack writers) filed in. How they wished the platform would invest in them. How they came to substack from [FILL IN THE BLANK SOCIAL NETWORK] to escape the content churn + noise. I watched as some of my internet co-workers felt they needed these tools to grow. That art, fashion, visual story telling co-creates meaning with words and is just as valid. The TLDR; the internet had its feels.

I’m about to do a thing I hate on substack: talk about substack on substack.

Mostly because feels a bit vapid and ironic to bitch about a platform while being on a platform. My analytics tell me only 6% of my audience reads in this inside suback app. Which means mostly like 94% of you have no idea what I am talking about and 6% are over saturated with the idea of talking about substack while being on substack.

Notes feels like a space of people evangelizing a platform I am already on, where people post about their viral – but will be quick to tell you simultaneously sustainable (???) and attainable – growth. Each week my substack recommends is filled with publications that promise to show you how they grew their newsletter list by showing you exactly what they did to grow their substack subscribers by talking about growing their substack subscribers. The math just isn’t mathin.

I came to substack like any other writer. To share my writing with my community. I watched as journalist’s and writers I loved moved their audiences to substack, like , and . I watched people who’s careers and work I admired speak about the growth they’ve had on substack and about their income being mostly generated by substack. Sharing my writing felt possible. Making money from my art felt possible.

But I don’t write because substack exists. I write because I am a writer. A compulsion. A connection with spirit. Delusion. Whatever moves the pen that day.

I am young (old?) enough to remember the internet being installed in my house. Over dinner with my friends we discussed our gratefulness that we really only had social media as we finished high school and entered university. When facebook was new and exciting and staying in touch with my camp friends throughout the year was novel. That also means I’ve been around long enough to see these platforms start to change. An update to facebook UX would appear and would be the news from 3pm-10pm that night as I scrolled my timeline. People would decree on their status “the facebook update sucks xD”. We’ve been victims of shitty updates on the internet since the inception of the internet. But each time a platform starts to change we’re shocked. When we raise our hands up in frustration, over a “necessary evil”, when we feel hurt by a tech organization that never had our privacy, wellbeing or user experience in their best interest, we’re forgetting that these platforms needs us, we don’t need them.

Ultimately, substack doesn’t care about writers. I am sure they would tell me I am wrong, but they care about their investors, the people they are in the business in making money for. They did exactly what all of these platforms have done before. Invite the artists, give them the tools to stick around, and start rolling out the enshitification of it all. Substack is here to profit off of artists work, like Adobe, Spotify, audible, Netflix, meta, Disney. Throw a stone and you’ll hit one of these billionaire giants insisting they need to cut funding of the creation of art to… idk what billionaires do aside from fly private planes, ruin the earth and profit off war????

The existentialist in me has a hard time not just seeing the capitalist hellscape for what it is. I guess put simply, substack told us she was not that girl, but is in fact that girl.

I will write wherever. I will post my work on the lawn out front of my home. I will sing my song in a park. I will preform my play at thanksgiving. Because here’s the thing about artists. We gather. We gather in book shops and in caves, and cafes and in salons and in basements. In revolution and resistance. In celebration and in comfort. There has always been writers writing, there was always been an audience to share. There hasn’t always been substack, and I am very ok with that.

I think summed it up best in her essay The elite capture of Substack

even if you jump through all the social media marketing hoops Substack releases over the coming months/years, there’s no guarantee of success and the psychological cost can be high.

And I am not sure if after a decade of being a professional artist™️ I am all that interest in any more phycological costs (I mean, when does it end?). Quite honestly I am tired of making other people rich off of my art we’re seeing it all across all arts industries. (A quick shout out to fucking mic drop essay last week)

I will always write. Substack makes it a little bit easier for me to write and share my work right now. I began writing this on a different platform and honestly my guess is that in my (god willing) long writing career, I bet I will end up on anther one. Even our beloved mother of personal narrative Carrie Bradshaw, changed with the times.

I love you artist, really. I think your work is important. Needed. and heard. We’ve been up against these dumpster fire systems before, and I believe in my heart there is a future without them.

You got this. Keep going

xx

Phoebe

*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸‍♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)

Thanks for reading the Creators Dispatch. A weekly essay about the creative journey (whatever that means week to week)! Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and living in the dumpster fire of a world that says not to make your art. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing 👼

Subscribe now

How are you? Really? I find it endlessly fascinating + magical we’re all still out here trying. I see you.

I ask that earnestly + selfishly. I am grateful to have this community to come to and create and hide in together. And create for the sake of connection and community and togetherness and beauty

Big love, chat soo…

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