There is no relief in having people “in the same boat” as you if it’s not the boat you wish to be in.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s on my mind again. I’ve moved to a new city and spent the first 2 months living in a hostel amongst what I would describe to be adults in their late twenties that are somewhat lost and rerouting their lives. To be honest, I am always rerouting my life and fit this description too. But something I have noticed is how much people excuse their ambitions through comparison.

People say things like “I’m 28 and I’ve never held down a relationship but there are so many people here even older than me in the same boat!”. Sigh of relief. “I have no idea what I’m doing with my life and don’t know how to actualise my dreams and just work in a café but everyone at my café is in the same boat!”. Sigh of relief. Don’t get me wrong, I do this too and totally understand the momentary relief that it brings. But the problem is that I keep observing this sense of “I’m scared to seize my life by the balls but so is everyone else so I’m going to keep putting it off too” that gets internalised.

Of course it is comforting to know that other people are broke. Other people struggle with relationships. Other people are lost.

But what do you want?

If you are unhappy with your state of affairs, should you not address this with urgency? Not to sound like one of those crazy gym bro “just get up and go to the gym” people, but in some senses this attitude beats the complacency I keep seeing. I started to use Instagram again after moving, and something I kept seeing pop up on my feed was this consolation content. For example, “here’s my list of failures as a 28 year old”, and it will include things like living with their parents, being anxious, never having had a relationship. This content aims to comfort people who feel lost, which like I said, I understand.

But if the new normal is being lost, lonely and dissatisfied, does that not make being “normal” and having lots of people “in the same boat” more meaningless than ever before? Consuming this kind of content is very soothing, I’m sure, but to be honest it’s probably more harmful than the “get up and go to the gym no matter what” kind of sentiments.

All you have is your agency and free will. It is so much easier to pretend that you don’t have these things. That you are lonely because “making friends as an adult is hard” and nobody has friends. That you have lost control of your body and your health because of “the demands of capitalism”. That you are single because all men suck, when they don’t suck more than they ever have. It’s just normal to expect a satisfying relationship to spawn from scrolling dating apps, rather than as a result of working on yourself and putting yourself in places where your dream person may be found.

It truly bewilders me how many people seek the consolation of being normal. The commiseration of common suffering. Suffering is still suffering, whether it’s from very common grievances or a very niche and personal trauma.

If you want to live up to the dreams you have for your life, you have to jump out of the boats that won’t take you there, even if there is community to be found there. If you want a real relationship, you have to say no to everything that does not meet your definition of this, even if it looks like a “normal” relationship.

You are so much better off jumping out of a boat and slowly swimming in the right direction, than staying on the wrong boat because the people around you aren’t choosing to swim in their own direction.

Again, I also find it comforting when I meet someone who shares the things I have struggled with. But I will never use it as a reason to stay somewhere that I don’t truly want to be.

Living in this hostel, I had so many people open up to me about their specific reasons for being lost. For whatever reason, people always tell me things, probably because I like to listen. I say this with no condescension; I have in no way swam far enough to make it to the right boat. But for the majority of people, there seems to be this refusal to truly reroute. To recognise that the normal that they are experiencing is nothing but a consolation prize.

Living with intention seems to be overshadowed by relatability. If your goals are not relatable or normal, why is the universality of your suffering enough to accept it? In this way, I truly think that nothing is more healing for one’s sense of self than prolonged alone time.

I started travelling by myself when I was very young, and it is, I think, the main reason I feel grounded enough in my sense of self to not find comparison to provide me with much comfort. Alone time does not just mean travelling alone, it means seeking no data from other people. No advice. No metrics of success. Scrolling social media, even if you are physically alone, is not true alone time. You need to separate yourself from others in a way that allows your compass to calibrate, unwaveringly, to your true desires. And then swim in that direction.

Everyone being tired means nothing. The person next to you might see it as a very worthy sacrifice for what they are getting out of their job. Everyone struggling with situationships means nothing if you want something real. That something real is probably not in the boat you refuse to jump out of, it’s probably swimming fiercely in the direction of its compass.

So don’t compare yourself. Comparison is not the thief of joy. Comparison is the thief of self. Comparison nudges you towards building a life from someone else’s blueprint because drawing your own from scratch is scary.

Go inward. Delete social media. Stop asking for advice, most people will simply commiserate rather than truly push you. Be gentle with yourself, but not to the point of kidding yourself out of your own autonomy.

Swimming in the right direction will always make you feel more yourself than staying in the wrong boat.

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Being a loser is excusing yourself, through any means, from operating at your full capacity. Or at the very least, moving towards your full capacity. You can be rich and a loser, successful with women and a loser, hot and a loser, interesting and a loser. The true measure of your personal loser-level can only be known by you. Only you know what your full capacity looks and feels like.

One of the main avenues towards loserdom is the line between reasons and excuses, or at least not being able to accurately find it. Most of us undersell ourselves when reasons become excuses, when we fail to update our capacity. Something goes from being impossible (a reason), to difficult (an excuse), but we stay stuck in the reality of it being impossible. The reason, even when it grows fainter and fainter, continues to hold weight. As an excuse. It is okay to toe this line, to hold onto reasons a tad too long. But knowing when to let go is what stops you from being a loser and allows you to reach your full potential.

I don’t actually think I’m a loser, just that I am yet to perfect my relationship with reasons. I have moved mountains and never been more confident than I am now. Yet, I’m still anxiously attached and I hold on for far too long. Nobody else sees the invisible transformation of my capacity, nobody else sees them turn into excuses. Nobody thinks I’m a loser, but I feel myself lagging behind myself. Not particularly far, but behind nonetheless.

The reason that I say “my friends think I’m cool” is because I am very adventurous and spontaneous. Outwardly, I am “high risk, high reward”. But to me, it isn’t high risk. To me, it is below the threshold. The threshold of risk and discomfort that is profoundly transformative. The threshold that alchemises our deepest desires into external reality. Society does not teach us to be alchemists, it teaches us to be hesitant and withheld.

For example, I have spent over 2 years travelling. Much of it alone. I have spent the last 8 months in Indonesia, the bank account running to the ground. A month ago, I nearly died in a motorbike accident and needed neurosurgery, but still I have not gone home. Outwardly, to someone who does not truly see me as I see myself, I am brave. I have spent these months hiking mountains in the dark, taking risks in the name of adventure. But to me, this is easy mode. I started solo travelling when I was 18, I’m 26 now. Flying to a country alone without so much as one night of accommodation booked, this does not disrupt me. Sitting still long enough to actualise all of my other desires, this disrupts me. Putting in the work to be able to sustain myself without having to return home broke, this tests me. Taking a risk not with my money or my safety, but with my time – this is the limit of my threshold.

Because I am still recovering from a serious accident, my teeth still broken, bank account empty and my concussion lingering, an outsider would not at all think me a loser for going into hibernation. Maybe even for a long while. But I know that, what was recently a reason, is now fading into an excuse. I feel myself fighting, with all the might of my ego, to excuse myself from operating at my highest capacity. That is why I feel myself toeing the line of loserdom.

I am using myself as an example to soften the blow. To invite you to investigate your own reason-excuse threshold and ask yourself if you are sabotaging yourself in the ways we are all prone to. My most famous essay on this platform, the gen z resilience drought, touches on this further. As a result of convenience culture and countercultural revolutions like the self-love movement, many of us coddle ourselves into submission. We love ourselves into staying stuck below the line, using training wheels when we are far beyond the need for them.

More importantly than loving yourself, you should trust yourself to make it past the finish line. If you don’t, then you are left loving the loserish version of yourself. Is this better than hating yourself? Of course. But genuinely loving yourself means looking your capacity in the eye and chasing after it every single day. A huge reason that I love to travel, other than the adventure and the freedom, is that it takes you into a neverland where day-to-day excuses cannot touch you.

There is no reason not to climb the mountain, you have no job to wake up for the next day. There is no reason not to talk to the intriguing person, you may never see them again. There is no reason not to grab your life by the balls, not in my experience. When I am home, I hear it in almost everyone that I know. I hear it in myself. Reasons becoming excuses. The friend with more money than I have ever seen doesn’t want to do the thing because of “the cost-of-living crisis”. Not an actual crisis for most of the people saying this. The friend with 5-hour screen time and a 9-5 is “too busy” to start the new hobby or go on a date. The friend with the terrible diet and sleep habits is “too tired” to live.

If this sounds cruel, remember what I said. Only you can be the true judge of when reasons become excuses, yet I also encourage you to observe this in the people closest to you. Not in a hateful way, but to remind yourself who you are actually taking advice from. You can love someone without letting them shape your decisions with their own cowardice.

In the name of being equally cruel to myself, I’ll give another personal example. I used to be chronically ill. When I was 17, I randomly fainted at school one day and then spent half of the time bed-ridden for months, constantly fainting and battling chronic pain. At first, it was absolutely a reason. But as most reasons do, it became an excuse. I got comfortable having a reason, wielding it like a shield. Demanding pity when faced with accountability. I started to slowly get better but took my sweet time to update my capacity. Sometimes, especially in the early stages, people would falsely perceive a reason as an excuse. Even when I was truly suffering, it was questioned. However, I think I would rather my suffering be questioned than blindly encouraged. I would rather be surrounded by voices that challenge me and overestimate me, than those who underestimate me in the name of being infinitely understanding.

As I have matured and become less and less of a loser, I have struggled with this in other people. Let go of friends who let reasons become excuses, every act of poor behaviour being infinitely excusable in the name of “anxiety” or “capitalism is hard”. Being empathetic and understanding is an important and beautiful character trait. But I fear we are facing a generational pandemic of being infinitely forgiving, self-loving, self-soothing, and ultimately, self-abandoning.

Calling out excuses, even when they are blatantly obvious, is often painted as being mean. You are a bad friend if you maintain expectations of people even when they experience hardship. It’s a subjective line, which is what makes it so difficult to draw. But just because it is subjective does not mean it must therefore lean so far on the side of being understanding to the point of expecting the bare minimum from ourselves and from others.

We should choose ourselves, rather than excuse ourselves. Every day. We should scrutinise every reason and stop it in its tracks the moment it fades into an excuse. We should close our ears to those who encourage us otherwise. To many people, this will sound mean, as did my first essay about resilience. I am not saying that we should not be gentle with ourselves, just that we should not rock ourselves to sleep.

It’s almost difficult for me to talk to people when they start excusing me from myself in the name of being supportive. I had a boyfriend a few years ago who kept telling me how much I had been through, overly impressed by me. Recognition of strength and suffering is important, but not when it numbs you to what it is to be human. Life is hard, you are supposed to go through things, but you are also resilient and can bounce back from infinitely more than you give yourself credit for.

Stop echoing the limits of your past capacity. Stop defending your reasons even as they become faint. Most people excuse themselves from actualising. They paint fear as a reason, uncertainty as a reason, excuses as reasons. What was a reason can become an excuse overnight. Don’t let it linger, don’t drift into loserdom. The only person who can splash cold water in your face and wake you up, is yourself.

I am writing this for myself, but I am also writing this for the echoes of excuses I hear around me like a symphony of suffering. You can make new choices every day. You can discard excuses without anyone signing them off for you. You will never feel ready if you wait for every reason to become untraceable.

After a few years of swinging the pendulum of my own resilience into the territory of abandoning myself, of loving myself into paralysis, I am trying to push it back into the middle. For me, perhaps I even prefer it to push me too hard occasionally. I would rather be overestimated than excused. It’s painful, to challenge yourself and to surround yourself with those who challenge you and themselves, but it is a brief pain compared to the ever-present pain of never becoming yourself.

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Love yourself, but do not postpone yourself a moment longer than you must. Trust yourself. Do not excuse yourself from your desires. Do not excuse yourself from yourself.

I looked ridiculous after the surgery. My head was so swollen it looked like a botched facelift. I remember thinking, “the TikTok story time would go crazy”. And it would have. I used to post on TikTok prolifically and had about 30k followers. I am sure that had I chosen to share my 8 months of craziness in Indonesia, this would have at least doubled. However, I deleted it at the start of my time in Indonesia and took a huge step away from social media. The years I spent consuming and creating did something to me. My life started to feel like content. A conversation on a date became a TikTok thought. Any interesting thought became content. I became blind to oversharing.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I once made a TikTok about how I accidentally brought a live spider back to Australia with me from Cambodia. It was funny, but also I got in trouble with the Australian Government because posting on the internet has consequences. I mean, this private investigator found an Instagram reel that I had posted that included a 3 second clip of me on a motorbike without a helmet drunk on my birthday. It was a reel of my trip to Indonesia. It was super cute, but perhaps it is strange to have so much of your life accessible to others.

My Instagram account is on private, which of course isn’t going to stop a private investigator. But still, I keep asking myself the question — why do we post on social media? My boyfriend has never had social media. He saw the reel a couple of months ago, and said that it’s cute, but why do my 1k+ followers need to see it? Why not just send it to my actual friends? I was defensive at first. Because I am expressing myself. Because I am a creative and that is intertwined with sharing on social media. Because it’s cute.

I privated my Instagram and deleted the app a few months ago after barely using it and noticing the changes. I don’t think there is anything wrong with sharing photos of your travels or of your life, but I do think so many of us are blind to the why. The answer is, because sharing on social media has reshaped culture and connection and to forgo social media is to become very unrelatable. It is true that sharing on social media is part of marketing yourself in certain industries. I was very much on the way to building a bigger following on TikTok and perhaps even on the way to becoming a paid freelance creator.

But that’s not why I posted Instagram stories. The truth is, I became addicted to sharing my life and the feeling of other people admiring it. I have spent most of the last few years travelling and adventuring, which leads to messages from friends and acquaintances saying “it looks like you’re having fun”. I am, but also now we skip the part where I get to tell you why.

Since deleting social media, I now get to ask my friends to send me a photo dump of their lives and tell me the personal edition of their stories, not the social media status update. One of my friends sent me a photo dump on WhatsApp and then sent with it a voice message explaining the stories behind the photos. It was so cute and so much more fun than passively consuming it through daily Instagram stories. It does also mean that I miss things, but that’s the whole point. We aren’t supposed to be witness to everybody’s lives at all times.

I have had many videos reach millions of views on TikTok. It’s hard to resist the temptation to share parts of myself when I know that internet attention is a currency that, as someone who dreams of being a freelance creative, can lead to a career. But what is the cost of this? I can share the story of my traumatic injury and perhaps because the stories are wild people will follow me. But they are my stories. I could share the story of how I met a crazy tarzan adventure man from the other side of the world one month into my trip and all of the adventures we’ve been on, but those are my stories.

When I was on Instagram, I saw so many accounts of people doing this. An attractive woman in her 20s living on an island and sharing her aesthetic and unconventional life. Maybe she has a boyfriend with an aesthetic and unconventional life too and they make money together. No judgement at all, in fact it was seeing old school travel youtubers back in 2016 that sparked my decision to start living like this. But again, it is my unconventional life. And I am an attractive woman in my 20s and it does happen to be aesthetic from time to time, but do I want my life to feel like content? To force aesthetic moments? To watch a sunrise on the top of a volcano and remember that I have to film it and be sure to catch my aesthetic hiking outfit?

What if I want to look like this most of the time?

Even though if I try a little harder to whip my phone out it could be more like this

I do enjoy sharing on the internet, but currently Substack is the only platform I am using much at all. Perhaps one day I will go back to other avenues again, but I need to keep sitting with these questions. I think that they are questions too many of us close our minds to. Is there a good reason to be doing this? Is it normal to share every crazy story? To film yourself crying? Do the benefits outweigh the consequences?

The consequences of having an internalised voyeur inside your mind, determining when moments become content. The consequences of consuming your friends passively. The consequences of stripping the intimacy away from your personal experiences. The consequences of slowly losing your realness. Of forcing moments to be aesthetic. Of bringing phones out, not for the sake of remembering, but for the sake of an attention-worthy moment.

It really hit me on this trip. The first photo, the one with the pineapple on my head, is from the top of a volcano that I hiked on a 3 day camping adventure. The last stretch to the top for sunrise was insanely challenging. Getting to the top felt euphoric. But after the intial euphoria wore off and I started to take some photos of the beautiful views that absolutely deserved to be photographed, I found myself thinking about content. They weren’t active thoughts. I would take a beautiful photo and automatically think of it as a good photo to share on Instagram. While I was still marvelling at the volcano with my own eyes. It made me feel awful and very unhuman.

I had a similar moment when I was scuba diving. I was 20 metres underwater with just my scuba instructor. I was swimming past a really cool fish and noticed that he was filming me with his gopro (the instructor, not the fish). Again, I was out of the moment and thinking about how cool this content would be to look at. To share. All the while the really cool fish is still next to me and I am literally breathing underwater!! These moments made it profoundly obvious to me that the consequences of what sharing was doing to my mind absolutely outweigh the benefits of engaging in modern social connection, gaining attention, and even the road to gaining money.

As a singer and a writer, I know that I have to navigate a relationship with sharing on social media. I have had so many conversations with aspiring creative friends that also grapple with this — that social media feels like less of a choice if you dream of having your ideas known. But for now, I am taking my space. Still taking photos, but asking myself at every turn what my reasons are for sharing.

I can convince myself that to share my life and travels would inspire people, and perhaps it would. I have had many people message me saying that they miss my videos, which were more focused on philosophy and advice, and perhaps I am being too much of a hater. But also, I did not gain the outlooks I was sharing from watching other people talk about their lives. True inspiration should be coming from life itself. From seeing someone wear something cool at a bar. From scuba diving. From watching a sunrise on a volcano. From falling off a motorbike. Even spending too much time reading books can be in avoidance of life, which is another conversation.

The first few moments after the accident, I truly thought I was very likely going to die. As I started to calm down, my mind went all over the place. I remember sitting in a local’s truck on the way to the first hospital, my boyfriend yelling where to go. I was just thinking about how I do not at all regret the way I have been living. Adventure until the bank account runs out. Minimal documentation. Only my close friends knowing my stories. What I do regret, is the years of high screen time. The minutes spent curating Instagram stories. Not that I regret ever using social media, but that we have reached the point where I am sure I am not the only one to think about Instagram 20 metres deep in the ocean.

I also, after months of barely using social media, was not thinking about the craziness as content. Not until days after my surgery. I have barely any photos, no videos. The private investigator asked me if I took any photos after the accident, I guess for evidence purposes. I looked at him like a crazy person. He laughed and told me “You’d be surprised. One time a guy lost a leg and still filmed it right after”. Insurance or no insurance, content was not a thought on my mind even well after I was stable and waiting for surgery. And thank God I have managed to rewire myself. Though it seems my life would have been easier if I were more like this guy and took a vlog.

I do miss the outlet of sharing on social media, and perhaps I will find a way to return to it. But I will never, not for a million followers or dollars, let myself think of my life as content again. If you relate to any of what I have described, I also highly recommend deleting social media for a few months. Maybe even challenge yourself to go on a trip and not post a thing. Your life is still exciting even if nobody is there to gawk at it. And gawking at other people’s lives is probably reprogramming you in ways you aren’t even cognisant of.

I make jokes all the time about how Eat, Pray, Love my life is. Perhaps because in this story she also landed in Indonesia and met a man from the other side of the world. But I think about how Eat, Pray, Love is a true story. But, perhaps because of it’s time, it became a book. Not a series of TikToks, vlogs or Instagram stories. It became a book. I’m not saying that I am about to write a book, but that perhaps sharing does not need to be so mindless and automatic. Perhaps my experiences will translate into an album I release 10 years from now. Maybe the anecdotes will bring my writing to life. Maybe I will even write a book.

Either way, I hope to never give myself away so mindlessly again. I hope to continue treating my stories, my photos and my life with the care it deserves. There are so many stories I am dying to tell, but I am waiting for the right moment. The right medium. The right way to do it. Who knows, perhaps I will return to making videos on social media, but for now I am staying here.

Staying real, or at least trying to.

To be an animal is to engage in the struggle of existence. Competing for food, shelter, territory, community and partnership. We did not evolve to live in a world where life could possibly be taken for granted. This is not to say that comfort and safety is bad, but just that to an extent it is unnatural.

Most people that live in Western cities and in privileged pockets of the world do not have much exposure to death and chaos. Tragedies feel genuinely unexpected and shocking. Retirement and aging are anticipated to the point where we start contributing to a retirement fund before we even start a family. Regulation is standard. Genuine survival is rarely a question.

Watching nature documentaries reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ concept of “The Selfish Gene”, that is, that the unit of selection and the force of evolution is the gene itself. If a particular individual is altruistic, it is likely that the gene for the altruistic behaviour has been better at replicating than the gene for being selfish. A flying fish has wings because the genes for flying were better at propagating throughout future generations than the genes for not flying.

Life is, at it’s physical foundation, the battle of existence between the smallest heritable units of replication. Everything, from the eyes of a lizard to the vivid imagination of man, has most likely sprung from this battle. The question of “what is life?” is not one that I can answer, but what life is not, is easy. Life is the primal effort, conscious or unconscious, to keep your genes safe by being alive and improving your own ability to reproduce them. Life is no passive thing.

Yet, unlike the leopard risking its life for a meal as it jumps down from a tree, we tend to view this existence as passive. Life is a thing that is so likely to continue happening, we have terms like “quarter life crisis”. A quarter life crisis implies the understanding that you will probably continue to live three times as long as you already have lived and because this is so likely, you must concern yourself over the best way to pass this time. Whether or not the time is yours is rarely part of this crisis. An absurd thing to explain to an antelope.

I am happy to be a human in a society with systems in place, like the welfare state, that keep people and their children safe. I am glad that death does not lurk around every corner for me and I am obviously sad that it still does for many humans. I do not envy the leopard. Yet, I do find myself frustrated at how easy it us for us to get used to existing. Cracking my head open in a motorbike accident is probably the closest I have ever felt to being a leopard. Survival, and the pursuit of my own existence, was the only thing on my mind for the first minutes after my accident. I was running on pure adrenaline for longer than I ever have.

Even once I was in a hospital, stable and waiting for surgery that I was pretty sure would go well, I was still unable to care about anything other than staying alive. I didn’t care about the enormous cost of getting neurosurgery in a foreign country, despite being broke. I didn’t care about how my wound would look. I didn’t care about a single thing that I had been spiralling about in the days before my accident. I cared about life and I cared about love. The squeeze of my boyfriend’s hand as I bawled my eyes out in panic, and staying alive. Nothing else felt particularly real.

Perhaps the last time I felt this way was as a baby, crying out for love and for life. For food and for my mother. Too young to comprehend my own safety.

I suppose this is not so far from how a mother bird feels as she risks her life to forage for her vulnerable hatchlings. Life and love. Perhaps to a bird these two feelings are inseparable, and perhaps this is what Richard Dawkins is on about. Perhaps love only exists because it motivates us to protect our genes and to duplicate them. It’s not a romantic way to think, about life or about love. That the little replicators inside us are the reason that these things feel so real. But regardless of the why, they are the only real things.

I do not wish to ever go through something like this again, nor do I recommend the experience. I also don’t wish to be a desert animal waiting for the rain as it drags its feet forward. Yet I do wish that this feeling, of life and love being the only real things. The feeling that to be alive is a miracle. The primal presence of a baby crying for a familiar touch. I wish that these feelings felt more accessible. That I could start my day with a burst of this feeling.

I suppose this is why people get addicted to drugs. Yet, it’s not quite the same. To feel this way on drugs is to exit yourself entirely. It feels good, but it doesn’t feel like you. Sex can absolutely be a portal to this feeling, but even so this is something that we expect just as much as our continued aliveness, making it is also easy to take for granted.

It doesn’t disconcert me to think of my desires as being driven by ruthless replicators existing inside my cells. The same way that the idea that I am a brain in a jar or living in a simulation doesn’t freak me out much either. But, watching animals do absurd things out of life and love, and questioning my own survival as I never have before, has me more certain of this than ever before.

We should never get too used to being alive.

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I hope that I can stay connected to this feeling for the rest of my life. Even when I am bogged down in the logistics of being a person, I hope to never feel passive in my own existence.

I hope I never get too used to it.

Two years ago, I went to Indonesia for just ten days. Despite getting food poisoning and my phone stolen, I had this profound sense that I had to come back for a long time. I am not the most woo woo person, but these senses are just something that I have come to trust and accept. The sense that life is urging you towards yourself.

The following year, I knew I wanted to travel and Indonesia was still in the back of my mind. However, two of my best friends were going to South America together and I was so sure that I was going to take the opportunity to go with them. I would have fun anywhere, why would I not follow them. My senses were still set on Indonesia, but I ignored them. Long story short, I had a health situation come up that took months to sort out and by the time I was ready to leave, it was too late to join my friends and the perfect time seasonally to go to Indonesia.

So I gave in to the flow of life and I went. I booked a one-way flight alone. I stayed for six months and had a life changing experience, moreso than any previous adventure. In the very spot where I had that urge to return, I met the man I am still with now. The flow of life, these uncomfortable roundabouts and urges, shows up in every aspect of my life, big and small.

I recently dyed my hair back to brown after years of being blonde, purely because out of the blue people kept mentioning that it would look good. After years of being solely complimented on my dyed blonde hair. A trivial decision, but still following this urge felt like taking a roundabout back to myself.

There is nothing more human than these often unexplainable urges. The urge to go up to someone at a bar. The urge to eat something you haven’t craved in a long time. The urge to leave when it doesn’t make sense, to stay against all odds. I am, on the surface, a very indecisive person. Being asked to choose where to eat makes me roll my eyes because I truly couldn’t care less. But, when it comes to the decisions that are borne from urges sitting behind my conscious mind, I trust myself fully.

I am back in Indonesia now, broke and not too sure what to do next, but I know that the urges will come and if I miss them, the roundabouts will take me back. It almost feels like a video game. You walk around, room to room, until an object mysteriously glows. You click on the object and it leads you to the next thing that glows. This is exactly how life feels to me. A serious of touching the things that glow.

You don’t see the glow in real life, you feel the urge. People confuse and bamboozle themselves endlessly trying to understand this. I was recently listening to a confused friend and giving advice, when he said “for some reason I can’t stop thinking about going to Argentina”. To this I say, unless the glowing door is locked and you need to find a key (e.g. money), open it.

A huge reason that these urges feel so confusing, is that we are out of touch with our inner signals amongst the noise of our external world. If you are scrolling all day, of course you won’t know which is your urge and which urges are coming from your algorithm. Even if you don’t scroll, talking too much about yourself with others or even reading advice like this too much will derail you. Urges are strongest when everything else is quiet.

When it comes to knowing yourself, nothing is more important than this quiet. Set aside time to stare into the abyss and let your urges surface until you get to the point where you don’t even want to scroll in the morning. When you wake up, your consciousness still liquid, let it flow.

Before returning to Indonesia, I went back to Australia for a month. Naturally, I felt lost and confused after so long living a different life. I deleted social media as soon as I got home and spent at least an hour every morning in this liquid, silent state. It was uncomfortable, but it kept my urges at the surface of my consciousness. No words from family or friends, or even ideas from a book, could dilute them.

I followed my urges back to Indonesia. I let life uncomfortably pester me into being myself. I have no idea what will happen next, but I know that it will glow. This does not mean that every urge leads to something pleasant, for becoming yourself involves a lot of pain, but it does mean that the choices are yours.

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So stare into the abyss. Examine that seemingly random desire to reach out to someone or try something new. It’s probably not so random. Desire is what makes us human. Desire is what bubbles up from so deep within us, we will probably never know where it comes from. Why we love who we love. Why we do what we do.

Why we are who we are.

Don’t question the desire that bubbles in the moments where your consciousness melts away. Swim with it.

“I truly admire your ability to quit. When you know that something isn’t for you, you act on it instantly”.

I hadn’t really thought about it like this. At the start of 2024, I was all over the place. I spent the first couple of months travelling and came home very confused. I got a job, one that I really wanted, and quit after 2 days. On the second day, I was almost shaking with surety, surety that this was not for me. So I quit.

I chaotically went back to Asia for 10 days and got my phone stolen, came back, and got a job. On the 4th day of this job, I walked past a business and realised that actually this job would be better and wanted to quit my new job. Coincidentally, I received a text the same day from the business I had walked past offering me an interview. I had applied months ago and forgotten.

I quit that same day. I remember the poor friend who had got me this job saying “surely you should just give it some more time”. I felt bad for my turbulence, but more time is something I am rarely willing to give. It’s not that I cannot delay gratification, it’s that I cannot postpone myself1. Unless I need to for someone I love, of course.

Capitalism instills in us a false sense of permanence. We have to remind ourselves on the stressful days that if we died, we would be replaced. It’s not just our mortality that is impermanent, almost everything is. But just as we so often forget that we will all die one day, we somehow also forget how easy it is to press the reset button.

I notice this internalised permanence in people the most when it comes to making decisions, even trivial ones. “Should I buy this?”, they say after a solid 20 minutes of comparing very similar shoes. They pace frantically, as if faced with the choice of whether or not they should give a baby up for adoption. You can’t sell a baby, but you can probably depop your shoes if you really change your mind.

In most cases you are either risking time or money, and only one of these is finite.

Capitalism, hand in hand with consumerism, has us taking ourselves so seriously. Has us forgetting our own agency. It shrowds us in a heaviness that makes things feel so permanent. The fact that I think every day about the impermanence of not just my life, but my everything, makes me feel lighter. Perhaps sometimes I am too light and float into delusion, but I have been too heavy before and I cannot say that I prefer it.

A lot of the gratification that we so diligently delay is just as much of a delusion as mine.

Imagine you are at point A and you want to arrive at point B. The fastest way to get to point B is by train, but the ticket is very expensive. Logically, you choose to do whatever it takes to buy a train ticket. Perhaps this is an enjoyable process for you, perhaps it doesn’t take you too long. Yay for you.

But what if, after years of trying, you are still miles away from affording the train ticket. This is where the permanence comes in. You consider giving up on the train. Maybe you can buy a horse? But you have already been waiting for so long at point A, why would you quit now.

Because time is the only finite thing.

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You see by not buying the horse, you are going nowhere. You are a victim of potentiality paralysis. The dream of a comfortable train ride overrides the pain of your present. Delayed gratification, as they say. The highest virtue. Unless you die worshipping it, that is.

Well, I would rather walk to the next station and meet you there. At least then I am getting fresh air. At least then I am always in motion.

I am getting lost in this analogy, but I think you get the point. For most people reading this, the train does stop at every station. Gratification does not need to be so aggressively delayed. You can start walking and jump back on it later if you really want to.

Like I said, I am delusional. I quit before I can even afford a pony, perhaps I am not one to give advice. But I love walking. Sometimes I feel behind, in many ways I am. But I am moving nonetheless.

Of course, there is some merit to delaying gratification. It is an act of self respect—to taste the fresh air and try to deliver it to your future self. To see glimpses of point B and start thinking about how to jump back on the train. But to stay at point A, or anywhere, for longer than you must. To let life feel permanent. To give time away to something you have barely glimpsed.

I struggle to see the merit in that.

Some people don’t have legs. Some people are too oppressed to use them. Some people are actually glued to the ground, no horse in sight.

But are you?

If you liked this, I wrote another essay called hedonism & the will to live where I expand upon the idea of tasting fresh air before you wait for the train, go check it out.

All of my writing is free, but if you wish to support me and my work you can consider buying me a coffee here <3

The real problem with time is not that it flies, it’s that it can leave without a trace. It can feel like it was never there to begin with. It can make us say “I can’t believe it’s already July!” because the months feel like days.

I feel so fiercely aware of the impression that time leaves on me. So much so that I can barely stand the naked feeling of time passing me by quietly. I am ruled by my desire to be pressed by it, even if it ruins me.

Time is a crazy thing. The passing of an experience is the passing of life, meaning we kind of die hundreds of deaths before we actually die. An experience stands before us, it lives, and then it dies. When it changes us, we feel touched by time. When it doesn’t disrupt us, we feel nothing.

I want to feel touched, always.

I am addicted to the feeling of being warped and wrinkled, for pleasure or for pain. I can’t contend with long stretches of time brushing past me politely and that is why I am insane. I can’t stay still.

I just returned from 6 months of living and travelling in Indonesia. I learnt how to scuba dive, ride a motorbike, speak some Indonesian and saw so many sunsets. I never knew what the next day would bring, constantly finding myself in chaos. It was incredible, but it wasn’t all positive.

I went to hospital 3 times. Got lost hiking with no food after dark multiple times. I got bed bugs on my second day. I was attacked by leeches trying to hike up a volcano in the wet season. I got frostbite from freezing my ass off on top of a different volcano. I had a parasite. I fucked up my visa and had to pay someone to bribe the immigration office. You get the picture.

It was wild.

It touched me.

But as all experiences do, I returned and it died. One day I was getting on a plane, now I just have a lot of photos. But it doesn’t really feel like it just flew by, because it knocked me over and left marks all over me. Time was bent. It jutted out and it engraved me.

The way I feel now as I look back on this last 6 months is how I so desperately want to feel at the end of my life. Like I bent time. Like it imprinted on me so deeply that as I trace my mind over the impressions, it almost feels like I’m time travelling. I want to sit there on my deathbed smiling at the fullness of it all. At how 3D my life feels.

The 6 months before I left were fine. My job was fine, my routine (not that I have much of one) was fine. I went out with friends every weekend. I got wine drunk and cried laughing. I went on day trips here and there. I went to some new bars and tried some new recipes. It was absolutely fine, good even.

But it was so much faster. Months crashed into one another.

I look back on photos from that time and find myself going “oh I remember that night”, but I have to think. I have to squint to see the fainter traces of time. I have to squeeze to feel the softer ridges. I still smile, but when I let my muscles relax I feel empty again.

I know I’m being dramatic, but this feeling haunts me. Knowing that if I sit with sameness, no matter how damn pleasant and full of love it is, life feels faster and milder. When I look back on 6 months of sameness and feel unmarred by time, I get so scared of what it could feel like when one day I am looking back on my entire life.

What if I don’t bend time enough. What if there aren’t enough dents and ridges to make an entire life feel vivid and real.

I have spent 2 years of my life travelling. I lived on a donkey farm in Croatia. I worked at a summer camp in Romania. I moved to Germany when I was 19 and got paid to look after and teach English to a disabled child with no experience whatsoever because I was broke in the middle of nowhere in Romania and needed a job. I had to inject him with human growth hormone every night, again, no experience. But hey, I can’t say time wasn’t bending.

Even when I am not travelling, I am constantly seeking anything but sameness. Sometimes it is unavoidable. We need rest. Cultivating real community demands presence. Some goals require routine and stillness.

But god is it surreal to feel time bend.

You don’t need to travel to make life feel slow, I just find it the easiest way to make sure you are experiencing new things. I know people who rarely travel but are still insane. Still chasing the grip of time above all else.

Perhaps it’s unhealthy to be so averse to the quickness of time. Perhaps it’s gluttonous to want to stretch my time no matter what it takes. Maybe it’s part of being young and I won’t need to be so battered by life to feel full the older and wiser I become. But for now I am addicted to the feeling of bending my time.

I have felt kind of crazy for years now, but it is only now that I can put a finger on the source. I thought maybe I was just a slightly manic person, but no.

I just want my life to feel slow. To be a bumpy and confusing mosaic of small deaths. A jagged shrine.

I want to bend time.

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That is, a creator is aware of the fact that potentially millions of people will come across their words, so they are careful with how they are construed. Disclaimers such as “I know this discussion comes from a place of privilege” or “this is just my opinion” are kind of necessary when addressing strangers on the internet that are unaware of your context.

This does not apply when you are talking with peers, friends, or even strangers in a one-to-one setting. Seriously. You’re wasting your breath.

Your friend or colleague knows that you don’t have a PhD in psychology and it is just your humble, human opinion. They know that you are privileged and are aware of which passport you hold and where you live. It goes without saying.

I just spent 6 months eat pray loving in Indonesia, half of which was spent in pretty remote places. People were not talking like this. I’m not sure if this sentiment is simply lost in translation when surrounded by people from so many different backgrounds, or if it’s the fact that people in these places are rarely chronically online, but people did not dance around discussions.

Coming back to a big city in Australia, this has been one of the most jarring differences. Why is it so normal to talk to your friends like you are presenting to a group of people who don’t know you? Perhaps it’s just my circles, perhaps it’s just my city, but it feels insane.

You can speak frankly with me about your depression without reminding me, a fellow privileged Australian, that you recognise your privilege. Perspective is so important, especially when regulating yourself. Don’t be an ungrateful, entitled ass. But also, pipe the fuck down. Why are you apologising for your feelings before you have even fully expressed them to me? Why do so many of us carry such a default negative assumption that everyone will assume the worst of them?

It congests conversation. I’m not saying that people should speak entirely unfiltered and fuck what anyone else thinks, but the level of self-censorship I am observing feels absurd. It’s good to recognise your privilege, but you don’t need to share it every time that you complain. I will continue to make disclaimers when I write and share content, it can be dangerous not to when the context is not familiar to the audience, but can we please stop giving Ted Talks in the privacy of our own friendships?

I feel so much more real and myself than ever before. Much of this is from touching grass and massively reducing my internet use, but it’s also from becoming comfortable speaking candidly again. Stating my opinion confidently without the insecure footnote of “but that’s just what I think”. Duh.

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Perhaps this really is just my circles, but I suspect I am not the only one exasperated by how it feels to share unmarinated thoughts and opinions these days. There is so much joy and authenticity in being wrong sometimes and letting someone mercifully correct you. That’s why we have so much to learn from talking to one another.

After 6 months of touching grass, I for one am choosing to move forward with more positive assumption and forgiveness as a listener, and more conviction as a speaker.

When I was studying music, it really felt like everyone on the planet was trying to make it as a musician. This was in 2020, so my screen time was at an all time high due to covid and all of my algorithms were telling me about how to sing, how to make it as a musician, you name it. I’m sure someone in law school felt just the same about making it as a lawyer.

This is one of the reasons I have quit social media almost entirely, because this feeling is not only suffocating, but absolutely misguided.

It’s not just social media, life also reflects our dreams back to us. I just got back from 6 months of travelling. While I was travelling I met so many people travelling full-time and living the most crazy, adventurous lives. I found myself dreaming of this and thinking, but everyone wants this Jordan. Everyone wants to go on crazy adventurous and constantly travel the world. Who are you to want this thing that everybody wants.

Nope. Since coming back and telling stories to my friends and family they almost all say, that’s cool but I would never do that like you did it. I don’t want to get lost in the jungle hiking and ride motorbikes in the middle of nowhere. 6 months is way too much for me. Etc.

Oh.

Once again, the bubble was popped.

Perhaps I am just insanely self-centred, but this is the pathway that my doubt always seems to take: there just isn’t space for your dreams.

Before deleting social media, my algorithms were very travel focused. I remember joking to my friend about everyone being in Kyrgyzstan right now because I scrolled upon so many reels of people travelling Kyrgyztan. There could be 3 people travelling Kyrgyztan and instagram will manage to show you all of them in quick succession. It’s not normal.

The reality is people have always been doing everything, but now documentation is extremely normalised and accessible. On top of that, our algorithms are insanely attuned to our dreams. Most people probably don’t want what you want, life just mirrors ourselves back to us.

Some fields are more competitive. There have never been more people trying to make it as a freelance creator on social media. But still, most people don’t dream of having a substack following. Even if they did, I doubt they want to say the same things that you do.

Perhaps this is obvious to everyone but me, but if you need the reminder then I’ll give it: your dreams are your dreams for a reason. Follow every urge and curiosity you happen upon, even if it feels like a universal urge, like living in Paris or being a DJ.

I promise you that most people do not dream of the life you dream of, that’s why it is yours.

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I knew that I would feel more focused and more in control of my thoughts, separating my true opinions from the white noise of my algorithms.

I knew that I would have to overcome the loss of friends who would only engage with me passively through instagram, but never call or text unprompted.

I knew that it would make my life feel more real.

But the biggest thing to come from it? Feeling bad has never felt so simple.

Everyone knows that feelings need to be felt, whether we choose to feel them or choose to hide from them. But I’m not sure that we know how this is supposed to go.

I thought that I did. I always made sure to sit with myself for a bit when I felt the tinges of anxiety creep up on me. Always made sure to go on walks without my phone when I was in a bad mood.

But I fear that our feelings demand much more than this. They demand a much lower screen time.

I have just come back after living in Indonesia for 6 months. It was an insane adventure, 2 weeks ago I was getting lost in the jungle on the way down from a volcano and now I am seeing friends like nothing ever happened. I feel crazy.

But feeling crazy has never felt so simple. This morning I sat outside with my coffee and stared at the sky for nearly 2 whole hours. I am processing what just happened. I am thinking about who I am and what I want to do next. I feel like I left my entire life behind and it is understandably overwhelming.

But feeling overwhelmed has never been so simple. This was the 4th long trip I have done so I am no stranger to these feelings. Nobody is a stranger to the feeling of being struck by immense change, whether it be a break up or a new chapter.

But every other time I have come down from a big change I have fallen into a temporary chaos. Often a mild depression, as many people do. But despite the fact that I have no plan, miss a lot of people and have a lot of demons to face, I feel almost serene.

Bad. And sad. But serene. Because if you let yourself languish for hours without letting the discomfort take you to your phone, you will recalibrate. I think we are not used to letting ourselves calibrate. Taking time away from your phone is great and most people try their best, but when you feel bad it is almost impossible not to over indulge.

Sometimes when I feel really bad I find myself opening my phone out of habit only to remember that there is actually no escape and then go back to staring into the abyss.

I started noticing this a while ago. How much longer I would sit with myself and how much more serene I felt even after a bad experience, but now I am feeling the change more severely.

It’s kind of wild how much more you will suffer when you run away from it. Social media is such an accessible vice that I don’t think many of us realise how much we are abusing it. We know what we are doing when drink a bottle of wine to soothe a broken heart. I don’t think we do know what we are doing when we linger longer on instagram on the days where we feel off.

Yes, I have more time than ever before. Yes, my brain feels sharper. Yes, my friendships feel more real. Yes, I can feel the grass. Yes, I am realising how unbearable chronically online people are. Yes, my executive function is suddenly back.

But I knew these things would be so.

I did not expect to discover that periods of inevitable suffering and sadness could feel so much lighter. That feeling bad could feel so simple. That maybe we are just meant to do so much more nothing than we ever realised.

That crying into the abyss feels a whole lot better than staring vacantly at social media, even if it feels harder.

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Sometimes, they absolutely do. I have had close friends ghost me for months out of nowhere after speaking every day and then pop back into my life with a “sorry I was anxious” as if that isn’t just lazy and negligent behaviour.

However, I do think that a lot of our generation has grown to expect our feelings to be instantly gratified and validated. We expect people to be online and available daily and if they are not, it needs to be communicated. A boundary needs to be set, not simply felt. You cannot disappear into yourself for even 2 days without announcing your retreat, without communicating.

I often think about how relationships, especially romantic ones, operated before telecommunication. It was standard to have feelings for someone and receive nothing but a letter for 8 months and simply hold patiently onto your hope. To deal with your pining independently. To delay the gratification and validation of your feelings. Distance in space meant distance in time.

Space no longer means space, it just means a shift from the physical to the virtual. There is no excuse for true silence. Perhaps you post on your Instagram story and feel hurt when that person doesn’t use it as a prompt to reach out—why should they? They didn’t ask to be forced into a virtual continuation of your presence.

Seeing someone’s Instagram story has almost become the equivalent of running into someone on the street.

“Fancy seeing you here! How have you been?” has become swiping up and saying “I had no idea you were back home! How are you?”

If people do not treat it as such, it’s as if they pretended not to notice you in the cereal aisle.

To be completely honest, I used to be an over communicator. I viewed constant access to someone’s inner world as a basic criteria of a close relationship, especially a romantic one. I know that I am not alone in this.

With the ease of communication, it is almost abnormal to go 24 hours without checking in with a partner. But what if you want to let your feelings fester before announcing them. To retreat from the world for 3 days without announcing “just letting you know that I am feeling feelings so I need some space and will be distant so don’t take it personally!”

When did space in time become inseparable from space in the physical? I have been in Indonesia away from my loved ones in Australia for 4 months. I love facetime. I feel so lucky to be able to travel long term and still see my friends smile and laugh from time to time. I am not at all saying that to be able to connect virtually is not a blessing.

But it is a blessing and a curse. A curse in the sense that there is no excuse for taking space unannounced. For keeping wins and losses to yourself for a moment. For feeling your feelings without “checking in” and reassuring.

Read receipts are absurd. I no longer give a flying fuck if somebody leaves me on seen, but so many of us avoid opening messages before we have the perfect moment to respond in case we offend someone with the dreaded read receipt.

The problem is that many of us have trained ourselves to operate from a place of negative assumption and we must preemptively sway these negative assumptions with chronic communication. Many people assume that to be left on read is to be ignored, so we avoid reading messages. People assume that taking time to respond comes from a place of annoyance or upset, so we halt the assumption in its tracks by compulsively checking in.

We call this healthy communication—but is it?

Romantic connections are the most heightened example of this. We don’t pine over letters, we like instagram stories and feel dejected when this does not result in emotional gratification. When I am seeing someone romantically and they take a couple of days to respond, I used to feel the unshakeable urge to hit them with an “is everything okay?”.

Perhaps it’s sweet and considerate, but perhaps it’s just insecurity borne from the over reliance on virtual communication. If I know someone in my life is not doing well, of course I will check in more often and let them know that I am there. But to automatically assume that virtual distance means something negative, whilst physical distance is often just incidental, is strange.

But this strangeness is commonplace. I am 26 and especially when it comes to younger friends, I have noticed how much unwritten narrative people attribute to virtual communication.

“He didn’t respond to my last message so I am just leaving it”. Okay yeah, sometimes you cannot ignore someone’s signals of indifference. But the amount of times I have seen someone be super interested in someone, but because said someone didn’t reply to a “haha yeah” they make the default negative assumption that they don’t like them enough? Absurd.

Half way through writing this, the lyrics from Sabrina Carpenter’s new song Tears popped into my head. It’s interesting how she groups “a little respect for women” and “remembering how to use your phone” together in this way. I am not criticising her lyrics, as they are clearly light-hearted and I am not sure if she is talking about replying quickly or sexting being hot. But still, I do assume that she is talking about how nice it feels to get a good morning text.

It does feel nice, but does that mean not getting one signals indifference?

To me, these lyrics are indicative of the increasing emphasis on virtual validation. I love a “how was your day baby” text as much as the next person, but that doesn’t mean we should view virtual distance as not knowing “how to use your phone”, as she puts it.

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It’s like a generation-wide case of rejection sensitive dysphoria prompted by a learnt habit of reading between lines, or story likes. Rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is when you experience severe emotional pain because of a failure or feeling rejected. It’s often associated with ADHD and autism, but even very mild anxiety seems to be enough to trigger this default negative assumption.

If there is one thing that maturity has taught me, it is to operate with positive (or at the very least neutral) assumption always. To assume that someone is busy living life and to go ahead and live mine. Yes, there are limits to this. To randomly not hear from someone you are dating for over a week out of the blue is, in the virtual age, abnormal. It’s almost impossible not to give a certain level of virtual space meaning.

But I think that perhaps some of us need to recalibrate our sensors. I for sure have, and it has made my relationships so much richer. It has made me more present. My urge to tell 5 people the second something happens is lessening. I figure out how I feel about something or someone before I rush to engage. I demand less from others, but not in an avoidant sense.

In the sense that we were never meant to live this way and I am not sure our feelings will ever catch up to it. In the sense that people used to fall in love and let the questions linger.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the lingering questions build the plot. Mr Bingley is cold towards Jane because she isn’t expressive of her feelings and Jane assumes he does not love her as she loves him. They each languish with these feelings in physical distance until they eventually meet and reconcile. Nowadays, if such physical distance was accompanied by virtual distance, the story would be over. The questions would not linger, but be answered by a read receipt.

There is no avoiding virtual communication. Like I said, it is a blessing and it can be fun and convenient, or as Sabrina Carpenter says, oh so hot. But it should not carry the weight that it does. It should be a playful extension of the physical.

I should not be able to say that I have had multiple connections end through virtual ghosting rather than a physical door slam or tender goodbye hug. Physical distance and virtual distance should not be synonymous. A read receipt should not feel like a doorslam, nor should it be used in its place.

One of the many allures of nostalgic early 2000’s TV shows such as Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl or even something older like Friends, is the intensity of physical space. It’s the interval between letter writing and Instagram story liking. When best friends argued they would slam the door in one another’s faces, only to come back knocking, crying and apologising 5 days later.

I recently started watching Sex and The City for the first time, and it struck me the first time Carrie gets “ghosted” by Mr Big. He didn’t call or visit her for a while. It was as simple as that. The questions lingered, no instant emotional gratification. No sending a meme to test the waters. No story likes. Just space and time.

Of course she still yearned and questioned her relationship with him, any woman would. But there was no easy way out, to call or visit was a risk she wasn’t willing to take, not yet. Nowadays, the risks are smaller and the meaning of every passive virtual action are bigger. I’m sure that if this plot took place now, she would have at the very least posted a targeted Instagram story.

We love these TV show because they feel real, relationships hanging by thicker threads. The thread being a voicemail, not a story like or even an unopened text. I’m sure that in the 90s it was just as uncomfortable to overthink a voicemail as it is to overthink a Snapchat story, but still, we are becoming further and further removed from the real meaning of communication.

We need to collectively undo our internalised law of negative assumption. Our expectation to have our insecurities relieved before they are allowed to arrive. Jane’s insecurity towards Bingley’s affections allowed her feelings to grow and solidify in silent reflection. We should be able to resolve our own feelings before announcing them and take virtual space alongside our physical space. Some conversations should happen in person, imperfectly. We are too reliant on our ability to craft an essay in our notes app, virtual presence safe from the vulnerability of real presence.

I am twining the threads of my relationships into ropes, ropes that cannot be cut by the dull edges of virtual distance. I am done with translating silence into unsaid words and expecting others to do the same.

Virtual communication is supposed to be supplementary and that is why it will never carry the conviction of a doorslam.

We must stop reading between every line and expecting every space to be read.

The other day, I scrolled upon this.

It’s cute, it’s easy to agree with. Especially if it validates your current experience. Perhaps you are finding yourself exhausted by other people, tempted to crawl into your comfortable turtle shell. A post like this, when it’s what you want to hear, is a sigh of relief.

But after 30 seconds of looking at it before scrolling on, I thought—you know what, nope. Absolutely fucking not. It had 5,000 likes, prompting me to save the image and write this.

Unless you are recovering from serious distress, it is not normal to be “so rooted in yourself” that other people do not sway you. If your feathers are never ruffled, that just means that you are never touched. It’s also selfish and sad.

To me, the popularity of sentiments like this and “protecting your peace” are symptoms of not only self-absorption, but also of a disembodied generation. To live in connection to yourself means to feel the world around you and let it impact you. To let it disturb you, deeply.

I recently realised that somehow, perhaps driven by lockdown and too much social media use, I had adopted the mentality that being impartial is a good thing. That I am supposed to be untouchable at all costs. Phrases like “he’s just a man” or “so glad I’m not crying over someone’s son” seemed to be recurrent not only on my feeds, but from the mouths of my friends and those around me.

Of course you should be able to validate yourself and find a sense of peace within yourself, but aren’t people, perhaps even men, supposed to make me cry? To uproot my sense of self from time to time? The friction of other people ruffling your feathers and leaving their mark is what changes you. Often for the better. Since when are we supposed to remain unchanged by any external forces?

If your self growth is only fuelled by forces within and you are undisturbed by the outside world, is that not the road to narcissism? I want to be ripped apart and build myself up again from scratch. I want to weep because I am that fucking disturbed by someone’s presence in my world.

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Real friends will disturb you

Something that all of the friendships I have ended in the past couple of years have in common is a lack of emotional bandwidth. I remember once I sent an ex friend of mine a 30 second voice message lightheartedly recounting a silly and annoying thing that had happened to me that day. I was frustrated by the situation, but I was also entertained and sharing it with my friend to laugh at my misfortune.

Hours later she responded by telling me that she needed some space from me and that she was overwhelmed by me sharing my problems because she was burnt out. She didn’t talk to me for days. An extreme example, but an apt one. Take all the space you need, but why do some people announce boundaries like a system update alert.

I once had another friend, when I shared that I didn’t feel like she was there for me emotionally, tell me that I am just too emotionally available. That I have too much space to be disturbed by other people. Perhaps she had a point, I am well aware that we all have different emotional capacities, but at some point you have to call bullshit.

I should also say that losing these friends disturbed my peace immensely. Because I am not rooted solely in myself. Because I loved them so hard that their absence made me shudder and weep.

“Catch flights, not feelings”

This sentence irks me. Not only is it overused, it’s just weird.

I am currently longterm solo travelling and with that comes a lot of tender goodbyes. I have noticed, especially when consuming solo travel content, that a lot of people use solo travel as a way to bypass accountability. To remain undisturbed, to “catch flights not feelings”. Temporary connections demand less of your peace, there is no onus placed on you to stick around. The second your feathers are too ruffled, you can simply fly away.

There is some merit to this, which I have written a lot about already, but it is not healthy to bypass all of the discomfort that comes with longstanding connections. I have met so many people who love to meet new people, but are scared to let anyone too close. People in their late 20s who have been to 32 countries but don’t know how to make a move, how to be vulnerable.

Recently, I said goodbye to someone (a man) and found myself quite sad for a few days afterwards. I noticed my mind unconsciously saying things like “why are you letting this get to you”, “focus on yourself” or “he’s just a man”. Again—nope. Absolutely fucking not. Yes, you should be able to pick yourself up after someone knocks you down, but you are supposed to be toppled over by the magnitude of other people. Even if just for a moment.

Even when I am not travelling, I have noticed how common it is for someone to tell me that they have not been in love for years, perhaps even at all. There is no shame in this, but the increasing amount of people claiming to be untouched, literally and figuratively, does not seem like a coincidence to me.

I’m quickly going to touch on the Gen Z having less sex thing.

Failure to launch

The term “failure to launch” refers to adults that are unable to find their feet whether that be staying in jobs, emotionally regulating or maintaining relationships. I recently encountered this concept in Johnathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. This book unpacks why Gen Z is so anxious, afraid and disembodied.

Haidt touches on the concept of safetyism (the obsession with childhood safety and regulation) that I think is the predecessor to choosing to live life on do not disturb. Children are not growing up adequately disturbed by life and turning into adults who genuinely believe that not being disturbed by other people is normal.

Many people even view this as healing.

This is the opposite of being healed. This is holding on by a thread, the thread being a carefully curated sense of peace.

I don’t need to show you a graph to demonstrate that people are having less sex, but here is a graph1 anyway.

There are many reasons for these changing statistics, perhaps some of which are good, like more education around sex. But 40% of grown adults, almost half, reporting that they aren’t having any intimate connections in the past 12 months is bizarre. It is clearly related to the normalisation of living on do not disturb.

People are becoming literally untouchable.

Peace is something to be made, not protected.

Peace is important. Sometimes we do genuinely need to priortise it and set boundaries. But some people seem to be living in a bubble so fragile that it gets popped by any innocent mouth-breather or loud noise.

The phrase “to protect your peace” is very strange to me. It makes it sound as if peace is a precious treasure and like Gollum, we must guard it alone in the depths of a dark cave. Peace is not something you keep, it is something that you make every single day.

You wake up tired because a friend needed you last night and you make peace with it, knowing that you can sleep more tonight. Your phone gets stolen and you make peace with it, knowing that you are capable of handling difficult situations. Someone touches your soul and their absence disturbs you—you make peace with it. Emotionally mature adults make peace with disturbances every single day. Again, unless they are particularly vulnerable and need a break.

I used to be so ungodly anxious. So much so that I developed a mystery illness. When people ask me how I healed it, I can give an endless list of things that I did, but the main thing was learning how to make my peace rather than defend it.

A couple of months ago I deleted TikTok and Substack from my phone and stopped scrolling social media. In returning to reality away from social media, this has been one of my biggest awakenings. As I said at the beginning of this essay, mindless scrolling without discernment does, to an extent, control who we are. I never bought into this protect your peace movement, but still I found myself with this unconscious desire to be untouchable.

If you want to be a whole, present and embodied human, you will never be untouchable. We are supposed to be hungry, horny and hopeful. We are supposed to be rattled, a house of cards rebuilt time and time again.

I am glad that we are recognising the need to take care of ourselves. That we are learning the limits of people pleasing. But there is a level of self care that is gluttonous. Addiction to not having any addictions. Letting go of all vices, even love.

Please, do not let anyone convince you to be so rooted in yourself that nobody’s presence or absence disturbs your peace. That’s absurd. Feeling a little bit too much whilst you learn how to manage the weight of the world is not worse than feeling nothing at all.

I know that a lot of people, at least on Substack, will agree with me. But this photo had too many likes, and I’ve heard too many people gloat about being unassailable, for me not to say my piece. My piece on peace.

Peace is the place you return to, not the place that you live in all moments. Peace is not hard work. Peace is what is left when you loosen your grip. Peace is something that you make, every day, by unclenching your fist and flexing your fingers.

Some things, some people, are worth clenching your fists for.

There is a place for making disclaimers and rebutting your own words, for instance when what you are saying is highly controversial or very susceptible to being misconstrued. But there is a power in just projecting.

In stating your opinion as a fact and leaving it vulnerable to the discernment of your audience. Because the thing is, your audience is supposed to discern.

“Taylor Swift makes bad music” is obviously an opinion.

“Taylor Swift makes bad music, but that’s just my opinion and you don’t have to agree” is coddling your audience, but this is what we are getting used to. This is what many people expect.

I used to be so bold, perhaps insufferably so. I remember realising this when I was 13 and my friends decided that we would go around in a circle and pick superlatives for everyone. “Jessica is so kind, Angela is so generous, Jordan (that’s me) is so...opinionated”. I quickly clocked that “opinionated” is not the superlative anyone is striving for and started to pipe the fuck down.

I used to do debating and I always opted for the third speaker role, as it meant you did not have to prepare your speech and just had to respond to someone’s argument on the fly. It’s more difficult in the sense that you cannot prepare for it, but easier in the sense that nobody expects your argument to be flawless. I absolutely loved spouting the first rebuttals that occurred to me and hoping for the best.

As my friends ascertained when I was 13, I am an intense person. When I was 7 years old and discovered climate change, I stopped using electricity for days and went vegetarian. I was decisive—annoying and intense, but decisively myself.

There is, of course, such a thing as being too intense. You should care what people think about you. People who are entirely resistant to feedback are insufferable. However, you should not let it govern you. I fear that the collective desire to be nonchalant, the move to short form content and the rise of cancel culture has us favouring being understood over being ourselves.

Being anti-intensity is being anti-authenticity. People who are truly themselves are always a little bit intense to the majority of people and absolutely electric to those that understand them.

Short form content does not give you time to be understood, let alone electric. I have about 30k TikTok followers, but I deleted the app a couple of months ago and stopped scrolling social media. Recently, I started to scroll a bit on Instagram and after my hiatus from consuming short form content, I found it so jarring.

You are attacked with context. I know, because I also felt the need to do this when I was regularly making TikToks. If you don’t attack your audience with context, such as “I don’t have a degree in psychology, but…”, then you will be demolished.

“Who are you to make this mild observation about society on a short form content app that does not lend itself to deeply researched conversation, a therapist? You’re really speaking in broad strokes”

Short form content is for broad strokes, and I’m not sure that the people incessantly criticising TikToks and reels have the attention span for more long-winded, specific strokes.

When you read a book, you are patiently aware that the context will reveal itself. Perhaps the books starts off with “I was awoken by a sudden knock at the door”. Scrolling social media, after not consuming it at all, feels like many people are saying “I was awoken by a sudden knock at the door and I am aware that having a door is a privilege but also I worked really hard for my door”.

Why are you yelling. Why are you saying everything at once.

I know that Instagram reels and novels are not comparable, but it just feels like everyone is loud, thirsty and impatient.

I have felt this convulsion in myself. The desire to interrupt someone’s story and ask for the context that they were about to reveal. The habit of trying to understand someone’s character too quickly. Assuming that someone’s words are malevolent just because they lacked your niche, perhaps chronically online understanding of them. I understand why people use the term “chronic” because I truly do feel like I am healing from some kind of syndrome.

But what makes me feel like I am drowning, and what prompted my distance from social media, is watering myself down. Speaking half truths that I know will receive praise and wrapping my whole truths in wreaths of ifs, ands and buts.

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The thing is, people who aren’t afraid to project their earnest opinions do come off as intolerant sometimes, but that is because we have forgotten how to have conversations rather than jumping to conclusions between the lines. Social media is not about conversations, it’s about context-laiden rants.

I am currently backpacking Indonesia and for whatever reason, I am encountering a lot of mostly offline people. I guess when you are travelling in this way you tend to be too busy adventuring to be so virtually present, and a lot of people choose to forgo social media entirely. On top of that, you also just meet a lot of people that would not appear in your algorithm.

I became unlikely friends with a 59-year-old American man recently and at first I was super taken aback by how unfiltered he was. Like many people who choose to be longterm nomads, he was eccentric as fuck. But, more than anything, he did not water himself down. He said a lot of things that were super “cancellable” purely because, when you live on an island and don’t watch TikTok all day, you do miss some of the memos. He was more than happy to be filled in and we had some good, sincere conversations.

The universality of heavy social media use, especially amongst younger people, has us expecting all of our peers to be media trained. Before coming to Indonesia, I did not consider myself to be “chronically” online. My internet use was similar to everyone around me—I would scroll a bit in the morning, a bit in the evening, scroll here and there on the train and on my lunch break just replying to messages and keeping myself in the loop. But, if like for most people, this adds up to multiple hours per day on social media, this is heavy use. Even if this does somehow equate to a below average screen time.

According to my lazy google search, around 41% of American teenagers report screen usage of over 8 hours a day.1

This would make a screen time of around 3 hours seem super lean in comparison. This is how I felt. However, passive consumption of short form content for multiple hours of most days does, for lack of a better word, rot your brain.

“Brain rot” does not solely refer to teenagers that doomscroll for 7 hours of the day. It’s the loss of focus, discernment, curiosity, tolerance, empathy and authenticity that stems from too much time spent inside of social media echo chambers.

We are losing the ability to listen to each other because short form content bypasses the need to listen properly. This is the problem—I no longer speak or write with the expectation of being truly listened to with curiosity and empathy. I find myself editing my words in real time to avoid the premature eyebrow raises and interjections. Social media has trained us all to react prematurely, rather than fully and presently soak in people’s words to extract meaning.

If you haven’t noticed it already, pay attention to how people respond when you tell a story longer than two minutes.

Many people will blame this on ADHD, which may be an essay in and of itself, but it is not just ADHD. It is a society-wide plague on attention, or at least amongst a lot of Gen Z and young people in Western society.

In Johnathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, he refers to studies that show disorders such as depression and anxiety as being somewhat contagious. That is, you are more likely to show signs of depression if you are surrounded by depressed people. He goes on to explain how this extends beyond physical environments and into virtual environments. If you consume a lot of content by anxious people, which tends to do well due to its more extreme nature, you are liable to become more anxious.

I think that habits, such as speaking to capture short bursts of attention from distracted people rather than to capture the full attention of engaged listeners, are equally contagious. Again, it’s not just people having ADHD—everyone interrupts more. Everyone speaks faster and less coherently. It’s something that I have noticed to be far less prevalent amongst older travellers in remote places. Perhaps it is the distance from social media, but who am I to say.

Anyway, I have decided that I am done with watering myself down for easy consumption. I don’t want to share my ideas in small bursts to be nibbled on, even if that is the easiest road to discovery and attention. I want my words to be chewed slowly. I want to focus on chewing everyone else’s words more slowly, too.

In his book Stolen Focus, Johann Hari talks about how the world is speeding up. Not just internet speeds, people are actually walking and talking faster. We watch content on 2x speed so that we can get to the next idea faster, perhaps hoping that if we consume more we will finally arrive at the penultimate idea that finally stirs something deep within. The piece of advice that finally clicks, that finally prompts us to get up and start that business and become a millionaire. Who knows.

We watch, read and even listen to loved ones impatiently. In a world so fast, every idea waiting to be turned into a side hustle, there is no time to be wasted. We have collectively internalised a sense of urgency. It’s making us sick. It’s making us scattered. It’s making us absent.

An absent audience does not carefully mull over your words to discern meaning. It wants to be yelled at and talked down to. I recently tried to read one of those TikTok famous romantasy novels and was kind of horrified by how the author did not let me imagine anything. I’m not hating on the genre, but I don’t think it’s timely rise in popularity is random.

I don’t mean this to be a holier than thou, kids these days are the worst rant, as I myself am guilty of everything I have pointed out. However, I do think that we need to fight back against a society that wants us to be vacant, reactive and easy to confuse. We need to digest what we consume, to sit with ideas and decide what they really mean to us.

I am mostly writing this for myself, to vow to stop undermining my ideas for the sake of being a consumable commodity. If you catch yourself doing the same in your creative practice or even in your daily life, perhaps this is your sign to stop listening to the little publicist living inside your mind. We are not, most of us, influencers or celebrities. The accessibility of social media makes us feel like we need to dance in the same performative way as those with millions of eyes on them, but we truly don’t.

I for one am tired of dancing like the world is watching.

If there is one thing that I love about backpacking, it’s that most of the people you meet live like they are going to die. Last night I was talking to a 29-year-old woman in my hostel about how we both spend all of our money on experiences rather than saving it and she said “I know I’m nearly 30, but I just can’t help but think that if I die tomorrow what was it all for?”

Currently, I am travelling through Indonesia. I have been here for 3 months living off of my very small savings and going wherever the wind blows me. Before leaving, I told myself that this time I would be wiser. I would leave just for 2 months and be sure not to return quite so empty handed—but what is the point of clenching my fists so tightly for a future still so uncertain?

Yolo, essentially. Not an original sentiment, but still I find myself constantly bamboozled by how many people (especially in Western countries) seem to assume that a long and safe life has already been granted to them. Life cannot be lived only for the present, but you have to spend time being fully present to know what kind of present you want to carve for your future self. Unless you find yourself already satisfied, experiencing things until you find that which is worth sacrificing your limited time for feels like the entire point.

I don’t say this with any sense of superiority, but the hardest part of living at home in a big city is how disconnected people are from their impermanence. Most people spiral and endlessly fret about how to correctly live their lives to the point where they get stuck in what I like to call potentiality paralysis. That is, standing at a fork in the road and imagining the outcome of every path rather than just walking.

People who wake up every day aware of their fragile aliveness, they think less and walk more. I don’t say this to glorify recklessness, but a lot of people who live this way have had near death experiences or at the very least have had moments where they are viscerally aware that they are just a beating heart in a mortal body. Again, I’m not saying that we should throw ourselves in harm’s way, but experiencing a flirtation or two with your transience really locks you in.

I started to solo travel when I was 18, but I was raised by risk averse parents who did not encourage this choice and I was once myself very future-oriented. When people ask me how I did such a 180, the short answer is that I got sick and suddenly woke up to the reality that my life is fragile and not to be squandered in the name of security.

About a month ago I hiked a volcano that had been recently closed due to a tourist tragically falling and dying. This happens all the time hiking, but perhaps because of how publicised it was, this made me really hesitant to do it myself. I spent a couple of weeks in a nearby village hiking some other mountains and trying to organise the trek with locals. One of them told me that before it became so regulated, people died quite often hiking this mountain. Again, I am not diminishing the tragedies, but the fact that people used to do this hike so unprepared and so aware of the danger was oddly moving to me. Free will at its fullest extent.

When I finally did the hike, which felt difficult but not particularly dangerous, locals would walk down past me giggling saying “don’t die!”. I know this won’t make sense to everyone, but to me there is a beauty in hiking a mountain with the awareness that there is the smallest chance you will die—because one day something will get you. I hope I live a long life and I take every precaution I can, but I do not want to live in a bubble so thick that I cannot feel the wind. I always ride my motorbike with a helmet and drive carefully, but of course I still drive. I won’t attempt Everest, but I will take small risks for beautiful experiences.

When people warn me of the dangers of hiking and motorbike riding and travelling alone, I can’t help but think about how willing people are to take risks when they aren’t in the pursuit of pleasure and adventure. Most people get into a car every day to get from A to B, from home to work to home. You don’t need to hike a mountain the way that you need to transport yourself, so people tend to view the risk as riskier, even though statistically it isn’t. Why not take a small risk to your aliveness in the name of feeling truly alive (emphasis on small, obviously).

I guess I am tired of being called reckless for refusing to put my eggs in the basket of my future self. When I have more eggs, of course I will do so, but for now I am just cooking and figuring out how I like my eggs. Many people know this, but many people save their eggs for a future that they may not even desire. They stand at the fork in the road imagining what the eggs would look like in each basket, unsure if they even like the eggs.

If I must choose between now or then, as opposed to now and then, I am choosing now. At least for now.

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This hedonistic life philosophy was first provoked when I encountered the concept of suicide as a child. Aside from being rattled, it just had me thinking that the present is absolutely the first thing to be taken care of. I wrote a piece on this called hedonism & the will to live, but it essentially just expands upon this one childish thought. If life can become so unpleasant that people don’t want to live it, surely a level of present pleasantness is step 1, and maintaining this into a pleasant future is the step 2. I was confused by how school and society seemed to so heavily prioritise step 2, even for dependent children and teenagers that have the greatest opportunity to be present.

disclaimer: I am aware that taking a risk on your future stability is a privilege, obviously. However, it tends to be the people with the greatest cushioning who are the most afraid to jump. I am not saying that everyone should quit their jobs and travel, but that 23 is way too young to give up on the present in the name of a future you aren’t even sure you want. If you are sure, good for you of course. If not, do something different. Anything at all. Too many people act like 26 is too late to do new things and stay numb and confused.

Bringing it back to death real quick, the impermanence of life should animate you. Knowing that I will die brings me to life. I don’t get to fall in love again after I die, so I will do the hard thing and break up with someone that makes me comfortable and happy because I am not sure of them. I don’t get to scuba dive in the next life, so I am about to try it next week to see if it’s worth some of my eggs. The more different things you do, the more you know yourself. You don’t get to know yourself again after this life.

It plateaus, of course. You try enough people and places and jobs and experiences to know what you want. You hone your intuition through expedition. I am feeling this already at 26. I know the type of person that I want, I don’t get confused by lukewarm feelings. I came back to Indonesia and stayed here rather than going somewhere new because I know that this is one of those places for me.

You calibrate a compass by moving it around so that the sensor can detect the Earth’s magnetic field in all directions and establish the baseline. Your senses must also be calibrated. I fear many people procrastinate this process of calibration for fear of the initial dizziness. The dizziness of being unrelatable, embarrassed, or even just alone. I would rather make no sense and flail around for a bit than spend my life walking in the wrong direction. I don’t get to make it to the end and recalibrate after I die, it’s now or never for me and my compass.

Perhaps this stems from living my teenage years so uncalibrated. Between the aforementioned sickness and my own shame, I did anything to avoid the vertigo of calibrating myself. I stuck to the status quo until it, luckily for me, became so unbearable that I had to rattle my compass. I think a lot of people sit on the precipice of being rattled. Uncomfortable, but perhaps not in pain. As someone who got rattled relatively young, I can tell you that the dizziness is always worth the peace of being calibrated.

In short, yolo.

Whether you are 20, 30, 40—it doesn’t matter. Risk aversion will not spare anyone from their transience. Don’t be reckless, but don’t be so careful that you forget to calibrate your one and only compass.

Before the explosion of short form content and infinite scroll, of course people learnt some behavioural cues from media. To an extent, we are all hard wired to observe and adapt. We watch TV shows and subliminally pick up obvious messaging such as cheating is bad, bullying is mean, etc from a young age. This has always had its problems.

However, it is one thing to extrapolate human experience from a film or even a 30 minute TV show episode. It is another thing entirely to extrapolate it from hours of scrolling through niche, short-form bytes of information that are algorithmically curated to your desires and deficiencies.

You’re insecure about your lack of friends, perhaps you linger on a video or two about narcissistic tendencies or boundary setting. Suddenly you are swarmed with information about how to be a person that talks to other people. Put yourself first, it’s not your fault, everyone is demanding too much from you, life is exhausting it’s okay to be reclusive, it’s capitalism—community is uncomfortable, maybe you are a narcissist, stop talking about yourself, capitalism is making you hyper-individualistic…

In isolation, a lot of these conversations are worth having. But it is so apparent when someone has made a mosaic of current online discourses to piece together an infallible facade of being a person correctly. It not only reeks of inauthenticity, but it’s almost impossible to engage with.

I went on a date with someone about a year ago and they told me not to be offended if they are bad at responding to texts because they are avoidant. I don’t even know if I want to text you yet and you are already setting boundaries?

Please, just offend me. Let me misconstrue your actions through the lens of my own experience and, perhaps, that will shape yours too. How beautiful. You cannot skip through the tension straight to the release. Character is shaped by friction.

How are you supposed to know who you are and be secure in connections if you don’t even let people rub up against you and change you? To be scrupulous you must encounter scruples. To be a good friend you must make many mistakes in the pursuit of strengthening your ideas of friendship.

It’s like learning sex from watching porn and then thinking you are an expert. Good sex is about presence, not performance. When you are present, time and time again, you become experienced. Present in sex, conversations, arguments, first dates, break ups, you name it.

There is no shame in being a novice, in possessing a heart that is yet to be broken or in experiencing something for the first time. I would rather face someone’s remorse than a performance of what they think I want from them any day.

Be too eager, be too avoidant, let your edges poke out so sharply that they become marred and blunted and reborn with every door you walk them through.

Essentially, I am saying that some people really need to touch grass rather than just looking at it and describing it.

This is not just about the chronic consumption of information, it is also about the fear of being misunderstood in a world where mistakes and personality traits are far too pathologised. The amount of times someone has told me I have ADHD after 5 minutes of meeting me just because of a hand gesture or something equally inane is absurd.

Again, touch grass. If I am the grass, experience me before you start describing me. It goes both ways. It’s exhausting to be found out before you are adequately fucked around with, and it is exhausting talking to someone who thinks they have found themselves out without having fucked around.

I don’t say this with hate, as I am sure I have also been guilty of this, but it almost hurts me to see so many people curled up in a ball because they have decided it is more palatable than the not yet perfectly rounded shape encased within.

Roll around a bit and your edges will round out, I promise.

Fuck around, and you will most definitely find out.

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P.S. Sorry I have been inactive on here (and everywhere)! I have been travelling Indonesia for over 2 months and spent most of the last month hiking and existing and barely touching my phone. My desire to exist offline has been overriding my desire to create, but Substack feels like a good place to leap back in and I am teeming with ideas. More goodness coming xoxo

If there is something that human’s are designed to do, it’s touch. Hug, cuddle, hold hands, elbow, cheek kiss—it doesn’t matter. We are social beings and thus we are drawn to one another.

Yes, we have a loneliness epidemic fuelled by lost connections, but even the connections we do have often feel…distant. Out of touch.

Why do people get so touchy when they drink? When they take substances? Because being standoffish is, for many people, just an inhibition. A learned diffidence.

Physical touch is not just a “love language”, it is a basic human need. It should not be so common for people to go days without being embraced. I understand that not everyone is tactile in this way, but most people crave closeness.

Not all of my friends are touchy and that’s okay, but thank god for the ones that are. Maybe it’s because I intellectualise my feelings a lot, but I need hugs far more than I need advice. I can give myself advice, but I can’t very well cuddle myself.

I constantly wonder how we got here. How there are people who have friends, but somehow have nobody to squeeze their hand and kiss their forehead when they are sad. How it is normal for a connection, a bond, to only be a physical experience when it is sexual or romantic.

I never used to be such an enjoyer of platonic intimacy. I grew up in Melbourne in a middle class white Australian family. Perhaps it’s different in smaller towns, but for me and many of my friends, the cuddles were implied. It wasn’t due to a lack of love, just a mild coolness surrounding the love. I craved closeness with people, but I didn’t see much demonstration of it. I didn’t really know what I was craving.

Then, I did a summer camp in Romania when I was 18 and experienced community in a natural, human way for the first time in my life. I was living in close quarters with around 30 other people my age from all over the world. Being standoffish is not customary of most cultures, and being surrounded by so many different cultures made me realise how other my platonic frigidity was. Not just other to someone from Mexico, other to myself.

Like…of course I want to be physically close to those with whom I am emotionally close. Again, I know that there are many people who prefer their space, but for me it was a learned preference. It wasn’t my preference at all. Every night when we were sitting around and chatting, I was touching someone. I was cuddling someone, on someone’s lap, someone was braiding my hair, someone’s head was on my shoulder. I was finally engulfed by community after a life time of feeling confused and undigested.

I cried more than I ever had in my life. Every time someone left, we would all weep and hold hands. I cry for my friends all the time now, but at 18 this type of platonic wholeness was new to me.

I had a boyfriend at the time, but I had previously felt alone in a bubble with him. This experience popped my bubble and filled it with warmth. I ended up breaking up with my boyfriend in Romania and it was partially because I realised that I did not need to be partnered in order to have true closeness, I simply needed to pop my bubble. The relationship, without its fragile enclosure, was no longer enough for me.

Closeness is no longer enough to form a romantic partnership for me, not now that I seek closeness everywhere I go. Dating has almost become harder, for the distance between my friends and partners has shrunk to the point where I no longer crave partnership as much.

Casual dating has also enlightened me to how touch starved many straight men are. Before gaining any casual dating experience, I was under the impression that men were the standoffish ones. That women were clingy and men were cold. I was very confused to find this to be the total opposite. Every time I have canoodled with a man in a casual setting, they always want to cuddle. In fact, it has often been me wishing for a bit of space. I can’t help but wonder if this is because for some men, this is the only space in which they feel engulfed. I will probably hold hands with someone next time I see my friends, they likely will not, so they do not let go.

I expand upon this idea in my essay why men need girlfriends more than women need boyfriends.

I actually do have some platonic male friendships where we cuddle from time to time (and I also happen to believe that men and women can be friends). However, I know that this is not exactly commonplace, at least where I come from. Even when it comes to non-male friends, spooning your friends is not standard practice.

If it’s not for you and your boundaries, that’s fine. But, I think a lot of people would be better off if platonic spooning was more standard. I think that the world would be a better place if we all spooned more.

Maybe spooning is a stretch, but we should at least be able to touch our friends without betraying our lovers. To be single should not equate to being touch starved.

I’ve also noticed that when you lean into platonic intimacy, it is often reciprocated. That a lot of people do crave physical closeness and just do not feel like they are allowed to grasp it. I’m not saying that you should start nonconsensually hugging people, but that perhaps other people are also wishing to be free of their bubble prison.

I hugged one of my relatively new and absolutely platonic guy friends recently, and now we hug every time we see each other. It genuinely feels like we are closer friends, like a layer of ice has been thawed.

Again, maybe it is an Australian thing, but people struggle to compute intimacy as being platonic. I used to be best friends with a girl before she moved home to Ireland and we were joint at the hip. We were always holding hands and, considering the fact that I am bisexual, people would always ask me if there was something there. There genuinely wasn’t, we were just two people who deeply enjoyed platonic intimacy. She lived with me for a couple of months during lockdown and we would cuddle and watch a movie almost every night. Sure, it could be construed as gay, but it wasn’t. We weren’t in love, just in touch.

I recently started rewatching Jane The Virgin and one of the reasons I find it so comforting is the warm portrayal of familial love. Being Venezuelan, the Villanueva family is affectionate in a way that simply is not common within white Australian families.

I’ve sort of reshaped affection within my immediate family and we now hug and say I love you way more than when I was younger, but it’s not how I was raised. Affection was a response, not a default. It came with congratulations and condolences, but not simply with presence.

I’ve noticed that a lot of my white Australian friends seldom hug their parents, nor do they even give them much casual verbal praise. One of my best friends is South American and not only is she one of the most loving friends I’ve ever had, but her family is much more affectionate. Affection is not perfection, loud love can have loud consequences, but it does mean that love is not simply an implication.

Every time I go to a latin club I feel so relieved by closeness not feeling inherently sexual. Sure, it can be, but being asked to salsa is not the same as a man grinding on you in a techno club. Sensuality is not inherently sexual.

My cats don’t even like each other, yet still they cuddle for warmth. Many people can’t even call upon their best friends for warmth. I don’t feel distant from my close friends that aren’t platonically touchy, especially after lacking it so much in my childhood, but I do find my connections that are more physically close to be more comforting. Some friends I would call after something upset me, but it is the friends without a bubble that I crave whilst being upset.

I think the reason that a lot of people prefer to cry alone is because it is a very primal and physical experience. If you are surrounded by connections that have separated the physical from the intellectual, it will feel unnatural or even unsafe to be so physically emotional.

I know that this is somewhat patriarchal, but men are less intimate in platonic friendships and they also cry less. I have had multiple men tell me that they seldom cry, only to cry readily in front of me. I can’t help but assume that this is because we are physically emotional with our romantic partners, not just intellectually emotional. Women do tend to have more physical platonic intimacy within their friendships, thus crying feels a little less foreign (though I don’t think only men struggle with this).

To bring it back to monogamy, I absolutely do not wish for a partner who is only emotionally and physically close to me. People tell me I am crazy for saying this, but I am not talking about sexual openness, just emotional openness. I do not want to be someone’s only hand to hold, someone’s only warm body. To me, it’s even more special to be romantically loved by someone who is already platonically engulfed. Someone without a bubble does not need me for warmth, they just love me.

I’m writing another piece on monogamy, but I have a podcast episode if you want more of my thoughts on it.

I just think that to be surrounded by people, but not able to feel held unless by a partner, is insanity. I know that many people and cultures do not uphold the same boundaries around physical touch, but many do, especially amongst straight white people.

If upholding the sanctity of monogamy and romance means that we are out of touch with all non-romantic loved ones, then perhaps this should be challenged.

Perhaps we should all just spoon a little more.

— Giacomo Leopardi, Italian philosopher

One of the many problems with convenience culture, is that it numbs us to the experience of relief. Being really hungry and finally eating is exhilarating. Craving dopamine all day and finally getting a hug from a loved one is bliss. We scroll, we snack and we experience satisfaction far more than we experience ecstasy.

Don’t get me wrong, comfort is a blessing. The fact that people living in privileged pockets of society seldom experience true hunger is a miracle not to be taken for granted. Yet, I think we have robbed ourselves of the frequency of highs and lows, spending the majority of our time comfortably numb.

Relief is one of my favourite things about being human. I feel my most alive when I am uncomfortable. I don’t say this in a masochistic sense—I don’t seek out suffering, but I do not wish to be numb. Suffering is the prelude to the euphoria of relief. I am infinitely grateful that suffering is not my default, but I embrace it when it inevitably visits.

I know that this is not profound thing to say, but I think a lot of people suffer greatly in their aversion to suffering. Pain feels worse when you avoid it at all costs, and joy feels smaller without it’s antipode. You will not clench your jaw at the traffic when you expect delay and inconvenience as readily as you invite pleasure and peace.

Something that I do when I am in the throes of pain is hold onto the feeling with all of my might, for the contrasting relief becomes even sweeter. The high lasts longer. I know that I sound crazy, but this really makes my life feel magical.

The first memory that comes to mind is when I had really bad food poisoning. I was staying in a tent in Albania with very limited amenities. No hot water, no bed. I lay on the floor of the tent, my insides screaming. I was writhing around and groaning for what felt like an eternity. I remember thinking how just a day before I was having the time of my life. Albania has some of the most beautiful water I have ever seen. I was swimming and laughing, now here I am at the mercy of my body.

I remember thinking to myself, “the relief is going to be euphoric”. It was. Like going back into the sauna after sitting in an ice bath. My tent was on a cliffside literally right next to the ocean, teasing me. My first dip after the pain finally left my body was heaven. Tears of pain replaced by tears of joy.

Everyone knows the feeling right after being sick of feeling born again when you can finally breathe through your nose, yet we let the euphoria pass us as quickly as it comes. Holding onto the pain is something that has made my life feel whole in a way that I am honestly struggling to describe.

I remember roughly 8 months ago I was having a truly terrible day at work. My chronic illness was flaring up out of nowhere (ended up being mould exposure). I was so tired, burnt out, bloated—I was on the brink of tears. I thought to myself, “I am going to hold onto this exact moment because this too shall pass”.

The other day at work I was standing in the exact same place and the memory that I forced myself to make 8 months ago came back to me. Tears in my eyes, the euphoria of relief. How easily we forget how far we have come.

I took things for granted a lot when I was a child, as I think comes intrinsically with childhood. Our memories are liquid. We stub our toe, have a tantrum, we cry, we forget. Suffering feels like death, joy feels like all there is. We are not yet aware of our transience. I love this the most about kids. The pure presence of their emotions bring me to tears easily. They mean it when they laugh just as much as they mean it when they cry. I cannot help but smile when a child smiles at me.

As an adult my memories are not liquid like the present. I know that smiles fade as quickly as they come. My present so easily feels like a memory, for I am keenly aware that it is fleeting. This is why we must hold onto the present for dear life. Once it is a memory it becomes fixed, solid. Only in the now can we mould ourselves.

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I mentioned this in another essay of mine, let yourself languish, but I love my menstrual cycle. It is the most constant instance of the euphoria of relief that I get to experience. My luteal phase, the prelude to my bleed, holds onto the past month of turbulence. I feel tired, bloated, uncomfortable. Then, I wake up on my period and my suffering literally flows out of me. Sometimes it hurts, but the relief of a completed cycle is euphoric.

It’s not so bad these days, but period pain is the worst physical pain I have ever experienced in my life. It trumps breaking my nose and my fibromyalgia. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad it has eased up and I would never wish it on anyone, yet it has taught me presence and relief like nothing else. To go from excruciating pain to no pain at all makes me feel more animalistic and spiritual than anything else. Again, I know I sound crazy, but it’s true.

When I was 17 my health became very bad very suddenly. At the time, I was suffering too greatly to maintain the perspective of impending relief. It didn’t feel impending, which unfortunately is the case for a lot of people. I am not writing this to glorify loss and suffering, but to point out it’s place in the experience of joy. There is no euphoria of relief when the suffering is constant. I would not tell my then self “this too shall pass”, nor would I say it to anyone that is stuck in a state of constant distress. Philosophical bypassing is toxic.

However, now that it has passed, I am forever changed. To wake up in a body that feels good feels miraculous. To remind myself of this, I hold onto pain as much as I do pleasure.

A good life is an inconvenient life. The rainbow follows the storm. I think we all know this, but the workings of the human mind make this very, very hard to embody. We have evolved to avoid suffering and to chase pleasure. This is all well and good when the suffering we are avoiding is death and starvation, but when we become avoidant of transient sadness and boredom, we become numb.

Let me bring it back to the quote I began with,

“Nature, with her customary beneficence, has ordained that man shall not learn how to live until the reasons for living are stolen from him, that he shall find no enjoyment until he has become incapable of vivid pleasure” — pain regulates our pleasure.

Unfortunately, in a world where even the most trivial of pains are avoided, pleasure becomes all the more elusive. If you dull the edges of a double-edged sword, you lose the pleasure with the pain. There is no easy way into a truly wholehearted experience.

I am about to go solo travelling again. Something that I love about travelling alone without a plan is that it sharpens my sword. I do not know where the next hug will come from, nor do I know where the next shower will be. It’s not about being somewhere new, it’s about being somewhere unknown. Anticipation rips us out of the present, it dulls the sword. Anticipation, along with it a level of hypervigilance, is a genuinely unavoidable facet of living and working under capitalism. We know when we will next see a friend, what we will have for dinner.

I love walking an hour in the sun with my heavy bag, sweating, to finally arrive at a place of rest and shower. I love throwing myself head first into the canyon of chaos. Travelling is addictive for me because I find the unknown to be the most powerful regulator of my peace. Perhaps I rely on chaos too much, but peace comes to me more readily now than when I used to run from uncertainty.

You absolutely do not need to sleep in a tent in Albania to sharpen your sword, you simply need to find ways to be as present in pain as you are in pleasure. Scroll less, stare into the abyss more. Strip back as many layers of anticipation and calculation as you can—talk to strangers on a night out, go on a walk without a destination. We may not be able to be present in every moment, but we can microdose chaos. We can make inconvenient choices and breathe through the discomfort.

We can do hard things.

P.S. I know that the philosophy I am sharing is a privileged one. This is not for those that are truly shackled by circumstance. However, I truly believe that the world will become a better place when we can come uncomfortably together and leave our new age, capitalist-driven chaos avoidance in the dust.

My favourite musical of all time is Les Misérables. One of the songs that always makes me cry is Little Fall of Rain, the song Eponine sings as she dies.

Don't you fret, M'sieur Marius
I don't feel any pain
A little fall of rain
Can hardly hurt me now
You're here, that's all I need to know
And you will keep me safe
And you will keep me close
And rain will make the flowers grow

I think the reason that it makes me so emotional is the contrast between love and pain. She is dying, but she is in love. Her love has been so immense, death feels small. Tragic as this is, I truly think that the way to get over fearing death is to make life so much bigger than it. Better to have loved and lost than to never love at all.

Better to have hurt, than to have never felt anything.

<3

“Do you think that’s realistic, though?”

No, of course I don’t. The future is not meant to be real, but realised.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a dreamer, perhaps you prefer “goals” to “visions”, your goals should not be within reach.

Where you are now, that is real. That is within reach. Your dreams are not supposed to reflect the material, but that which is yet to materialise.

We do not idolise our equals, we idolise those we deem wiser. A hard part about being an artist is that you constantly outgrow yourself. Your words, once materialised, no longer feel profound. They were profound right up until they were made manifest. Now, they are profound to someone else. What’s real to you, is a dream to others.

Why, then, does the world tell us to be our own sage. To dream within the words already written. To be realistic would be to project my past capacity into my future, to be a dreamer is to project the unseeable potential.

So no, I am not realistic. Not when it comes to that which is not even real yet.

There is a difference between being a dreamer and a fool. A fool makes the same mistakes time and time again, a dreamer uses mistakes to rewrite their visions. A fool chases dreams with egoic certainty, a dreamer chases them with humble curiosity.

To try to predict the future is the fool’s errand. In this sense, being too realistic can also be foolish. To be so sure that the future will mirror the past that you refuse to imagine new things leaves you crippled in the face of thwarted plans.

The dreamer is sure of nothing.

People often have an air of “and just who do you think you are” when you choose to share the magnitude of your dreams. As if you believe you are owed success and ease. To dream is to allow, not to expect. I do not expect my dreams to come true, but I will make space for them.

Choosing to be single rather than settling for a “realistic relationship” does not mean that you expect it to fall into your lap. It just means that you are leaving your lap free, at least for now, should you cross paths with it.

I am too young to stop leaving space for my dreams to come true. I am too young to choose idealistic over realistic. I am unsure I will ever be too old to dream.

One thing about me, which you will see throughout my work, is that I love would you rather questions. One that I often ask myself is this: would you rather your dreams come true, or your life feel like a dream?

I think that being a dreamer is wanting your life to feel like a dream and allowing the image of that to rearrange itself constantly. Being too rigid in your dreams is foolish. Who are you to know for sure what you will want? What you will choose?

I sat next to a woman on a plane once and I think about her all the time. We shared stories for the entire 3 hour flight. She was about 70 years old, her husband sitting next to her. She was a true dreamer. She did not expect, she allowed.

She told me how she had always wanted children. She travelled the world, learning different languages and moving to different countries for jobs and for men. But no man felt like a dream. Not until she met her husband at 45 years old. So, her dreams changed and she didn’t have children. Constantly outsmarting her “reality”. In my would you rather question, she was a dreamer, not a fool.

If she had held onto her dream of having children, she would not have had her dream life. Her dream love.

This is what being idealistic is to me. It’s not about being unsatisfied with reality, it’s about being open to what lies beyond it. Making room for more.

When people ask me what I want from life, I often choose not to say much. Sometimes I even lie, because the response to my honest truth will scorn my dreams. However, when I do tell people the truth, it is idealistic.

I do not think that I am entitled to anything, but why would I strive for that which is already in my grasp.

I often say similar things to the woman on the plane. I want children, I want the flexibility in my work to spend a lot of time with them, I want to live in nature, I want to grow my own food, I want to live by the beach….the list goes on. If following my bliss leads me elsewhere, then so be it. It would be foolish to assume that my dreams are my destiny.

But I refuse to dull my dreams in the name of a knowable destiny. In the name of gagging disappointment.

If you asked me in January what I dreamed for this year, it would not have been this. It never is. Yet still I move in the direction of my life feeling like a dream. Wading through the waters of disappointment instead of damming them with reality.

I think that a huge reason I crave alone time is that it is only others that reality check me. I do not reality check myself, life does that for me. I dream check myself. I let myself be absolutely absurd in the magnitude of my dreams. Because nobody else will dream check you, nor will life itself.

Reality will dilute your dreams and delusions for you, you do not need to be on top of this.

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I am not saying that I move without any caution, merely that I do not move with excess caution. It’s wild to me, how often the people with the most agency and freedom move as if their legs are about to fall off.

Being realistic is an awareness of your worst case scenario, not avoidance of your best case scenario.

Ask yourself: what is your worst case scenario? If the worst that can happen to you is disappointment and a setback, you need to throw a tad more of your caution to the wind. If it is being absolutely destitute, obviously you are going to have a different relationship with your caution and the wind.

I have a podcast episode about this

Anyway, I refuse to believe that dreaming is foolish. That the woman next to me on the plane with a crazy life story and the love of her life at her side was careless.

That the future is supposed to be real.

P.S. I have started to work on some paid content and have received a couple of paid subscribers (yay! thank you <3).

I understand that paying someone for content, especially on such a vast and relatively short form content platform, is quite an ask. Hence, I am not asking, not yet at least. If you are reading this and you enjoy my work and would like full access to it, I will grant you a free upgrade for 3 months (which I will happily extend). If you would like to upgrade yourself and pay, you can of course do this too.

Message me your favourite emoji and I will update your subscription.

It means the world to me that you are even here.

I hate alarms, hear me out.

As a living being, your one job (genetically speaking) is to take care of your vessel. Bar that, create more of yourself. To do this we must stay alive. There are aquatic parasites that induce suicide in their insect hosts simply to ensure their own propagation. The best way to stay alive is to maintain homeostasis as much as possible. For the parasite, this looks like making your insect host jump into a body of water. The power of nature is formidable.

Yet we live against the current. Intuition is an afterthought.

Something that I love to say is that I have beef with the concept of time. The thing is, my problem is not with time itself, it’s our rigid adherence to it. Our worshipping of it. What do you mean the first thing that I have to do when I wake up is check the time to give myself permission to continue my slumber? I can wake up, my eyes stinging with desperation to reach the climax of rest and bring me to sweet, elusive homeostasis, but because my phone reads 7am I must ignore this. Imagine explaining this to a giraffe. To an animal at the behest of its instincts. No, the big clock in the sky says screw you.

A parasite can make a grasshopper jump to it’s death and I can’t even finish sleeping most days.

If the flow of an animals instinct gets disrupted, at least it can regulate after. If it gets chased by a bear it can shake it out, take a nap, do WHATEVER IT WANTS.

But we only have the space between alarms.

I can call in sick for a week if I have the flu, but I can’t call in an hour late because I slept poorly? Surely 6 hours of well rested labour beats 8 hours of fighting for your life to keep your eyes open? Don’t even get me started on the fact that women need different amounts of sleep at every point of their menstrual cycle and cannot possibly thrive with an alarm set at the same time every morning.

Just go to bed earlier. Okay, but then I must forgo community to some extent, which my brain is also hardwired to desperately need just like the murderous parasite needs the water. Or maybe I can just forgo exercise and embrace my early death and poor mobility.

I yearn so deeply to be free of time. I am so insanely cyclical. One day I need 5 hours of sleep, the next I need 10. One day I need to be with people all night, the next day I need solitude. I am constantly ignoring my energetic rhythms. Exiting my flow state lest I be late for work or my friendship appointment. And I even care about work, and of course I care about my friends. But why does it all feel so rigid.

I recently visited my grandparents in their new nursing home. I couldn’t help but think what an ideal set up it was in many senses. You have your own quarters, but you can go to a communal space whenever you have the urge. You can dial up a friend and meet them in the lunch room for a cup of tea, join a communal board game or take time alone. You might even forget what day it is in there.

People often mourn returning home from college or overseas exchanges, and I can tell you why. Living in tight community with people allows your social brain to have it’s primal needs met without sacrificing so much to the clock. You are living with friends. Experiencing things with them, not just relaying experiences to them. You’re too young to need to work around the clock so desperately, to work around a 9-5.

Perhaps students and nursing home residents have some things in common.

I’m getting on a one-way flight to Indonesia in 2 weeks and I am desperately trying to see my friends as much as I can before I leave. It feels like I am frantically scheduling appointments, not engaging with community. My friends live all over the city, all different work schedules. I can’t even be mad about it, they’re also just suffering the wrath of the big clock. All with varying capacities to fight it. I’ll never be mad at someone for cancelling on me, but I am mad that community takes so much mutual administration. A balancing act of love and survival. Giving your time to those with less, asking for it from those with more.

Two years ago I spent a month living on a donkey sanctuary in the middle of nowhere on a Croatian island. I had to wake up at sunrise 6 days per week to feed and tend to the donkeys as this is how I was paying for my stay. Yet, I was somehow free of the clock. Aside from my donkey duty, nothing was demanded of me. I was so regulated that I naturally woke up at sunrise, if I didn’t the donkeys would yell anyway so there was no need for an alarm. I think one of the worst parts of exhaustion is the knowledge of what your exhausted body must do. Even if I was tired on the donkey farm, I still felt free for I knew I could rest after my modest two hours of work. I think this experience ruined me, for it gave me a taste of what life might be supposed to feel like, if there is even such a thing as “supposed to”.

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I was finished working by 10 in the morning at the latest and was free to do as I please with the rest of my day. Almost every day I would walk an hour across the island into town, buy a coffee and read or write by the beach. I got so fit without even trying. I remember one day I was writing and got so lost in the source that the sun went down and I had to walk back to the village in pitch black (perhaps too free of the clock). I was living with other travellers so my community needs were also deeply and easily fulfilled.

To feel this way in my every day life is out of the question. To fit in that much movement, effortless community and creativity. A privilege I was lucky to taste.

God I hate setting alarms. The fact that we even call them alarms is crazy. It literally comes from “to arms”, insinuating getting ready for war. A beautiful way to think of waking up.

I have always really struggled with sleep. Even at 8 years old I would often toss and turn all night, fearing the ever encroaching alarm. The call to war. My parents both worked full time so in primary school (elementary school) they would drop me off early to school at 7:30am for before-school care.

I got the train to high school. My train was at 7:38 every morning, it’s still burned in my brain. I started drinking coffee at 13. I was wading through mud. At war with the clock in the sky, always.

Now that I am older I recognise that my issue wasn’t sleep itself, it was the knowledge of it’s scarcity. Performance anxiety, in a sense. Knowing that I had just 8 hours to fall asleep, an alarm waiting on the other side, has just never worked for me. How can I be present and relaxed when I am being timed, always.

Honestly, backpacking is one of the only times I have felt free of this. I have never been able to nap, to sleep in limited gaps of time. Yet, I can when I am living nomadically. I have slept shivering on floors, on roofs, on buses. One time I made the stupid decision to nap on an empty beach in Malaga at 3am before flying to Morocco and I slept so soundly that I was robbed. I was using my backpack as a pillow and within my 20 minute nap someone opened my backpack and robbed me. I didn’t wake up during this, just to my backpack open, missing my phone and other belongings. I slept more deeply on that beach than I do in my bed before work.

I sound crazy, I know, but it’s just a truth I know about myself. I have beef with the concept of time. I feel shackled by it. Like an aquatic parasite trapped in an insect that just won’t jump.

I know that the society we have created requires a strict adherence to time, obviously. I don’t consider myself beyond this, just tired. I am not trying to “escape the rat race”, for that would leave all the other rats in the dust. I just kind of resent being a rat, I guess.

I have found my ways to combat the struggle. I have realised I will always be hypervigilant if I am in a rush, so I avoid rushing. I wake up earlier than I have to. I set myself up to avoid looking at the clock. I usually set an alarm 20 minutes before I want to get out of bed to let my mind find peace, I call this “nothing time”.

I also like to give myself what I call “werewolf time”. Werewolf time is basically a night where I can follow my whims and stay up until I feel done with the day and then sleep in, alarm free, the next day. If you can’t tell, it’s currently werewolf time. I am unsure if I would be half as productive in my creative pursuits if it wasn’t for my werewolf time, which I would say I give myself once per week.

I have so many more thoughts, like how I think that one reason people crave sex is because it allows them to worship something other than the clock. Something other than the future. It allows them to be purely present. It undoes hypervigilance. As does any act of devotion, but sex demands attention more fiercely than a painting or prayer.

But I think that’s enough tangential thoughts for now. I can’t wait to sleep like a baby, or I guess like my past self being robbed on the beach, calm in the knowledge that I have no alarm set.

P.S. I will probably write a more philosophical and cohesive version of this soon.

I never get too pressed about my purpose in life. Perhaps this is tied to my spiritual belief that this human life is just a blip in the journey of the energy that briefly animates my vessel, my soul. I feel that my purpose is to take care of my vessel so that I may continue to learn and to grow, and in doing so use my agency to nurture those around me.

Recently, I’ve had a bit of an epiphany regarding productivity as a creative person. My motion is often seen to others as paralysis. Today, I woke up and genuinely pondered for an hour. I spent half an hour staring at the ceiling above my bed, then I made a coffee and stared at the wall in my kitchen. Lazy, unproductive. My brain was whirring after a busy few days void of being creative.

I went from feeling uninspired and overwhelmed, to happening upon an idea for a story. I have spent the last hour writing it, but to an outsider it looks as if I have barely moved. If I’m honest, being outwardly paralysed and unproductive is always the precursor to my creative mobility. My biggest goal is to have autonomy over my time, to have as many days where I ignorantly while away the hours, lost in the sauce, as I can afford.

I think that all humans are creative, it is not some elusive quality held by writers and artists, but being a slow creative can look lazy to someone with a faster medium. Some people are creative every day in their corporate careers, some people crave hours of undisturbed pondering to reach manifestation. I feel crazy sometimes, like someone gritting their teeth whilst saying “no really, I’m having a blast”.

My brother is a physics honours student, his motion is obvious. When he talks about what he is working on and his eyes light up, I know exactly how he is feeling. Yet, I struggle to prove it. I lack evidence, I feel fraudulent. I cannot explain the soup I feel slowly brewing inside me to someone who is serving it up every day.

I dread talking about my aspirations to anyone who isn’t also harbouring their soup in secret. I feel pathetic, desperate. When I make the yearly trip to see extended family and try to explain that I am actually working a dead-end job because it allows me to spend so much time reading, writing and travelling, they hear excuses. I know what they really want to know: where is my soup?

They can see my brother’s soup, mine is a secret. A secret I am unsure I will ever stop defending. One of the hardest parts of keeping your soup to yourself, is that you must master the art of self affirmation. Literally nobody is going to tell you that it tastes good, you must simply trust your own taste.

Even with my best friends, I struggle with this. It’s not that they don’t believe me, it’s that we forget what isn’t in front of our eyes. Recently, after expressing that I want to avoid working full time a bit longer so that I can be creative, one of my friends said to me “you know that you can work full time and be creative”.

Of course you can, I have done it before. “You know I spend 20 hours per week writing”, I started. They looked at me, vaguely flummoxed. “Of course I can create and work full time, but if I want to maintain my social life I would struggle to manage 10 hours working full time”. This is no scorn upon my friends, why would anyone keep count of the cards I hold so close to my chest.

You have to count your own cards, taste your own soup.

We all know the tale of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady wins the race. But maybe it doesn’t, maybe it’s just a tie. Nonetheless, being a tortoise and promising the hares looking back at you that you will make it one day, isn’t exactly empowering.

Honest to God, nothing feels better than someone believing in me, though I have learnt not to need it.

Last year one of my best friends, someone I would consider a hare, called me driven. In fact, he said he “isn’t driven like me”. I was moved by this. A recognition of the invisible thrust required to keep the slow and steady tortoise in motion. This friend has more money than me, has a career in a way that I never have. A career that took effort and drive. Yet, his point was that he isn’t trying to increase his momentum as the pace has been achieved. By calling my tortoise activities drive, he recognised my invisible momentum.

I’m not writing this out of self-pity or gratification. I can be lazy. Sometimes the distance ahead of me makes me pause and tuck myself into my tortoise shell. Yet, I know I can make it. I am writing this for any other tortoises out there who maybe struggle to validate the strength of their stride. People will encourage you to sprint, but it is okay if this is not your journey. You do not need to flash your cards. You do not need to give out samples of a soup that is not ready to be tasted.

“Your garden isn’t thriving because every time a flower blooms you cut it down to prove to someone else that you’re a gardener”

No idea who said this first, but I think about it a lot. If maturing has taught me anything, it is this. I have sabotaged myself so many times in the name of impressing people with the premature fruits of my labour.

Something that I say a lot is that I know things in my bones. I know in my bones that I will make it. It’s not about arrogance or entitlement. It’s not that I feel special or that I am promised riches, it’s that I can see my garden. It’s that I no longer need other people to taste my soup to know that it is in fact in there, simmering away.

Potentiality paralysis is a real thing, having so many seeds to sow that you neglect to water the sprouts. But watering your garden in secret is not paralysis. People glorify the idea of “making moves in silence” until your silence lasts longer than others. Things take time. People used to dedicate their entire lives to buildings completed years after their death.

Do not rip out your flowers in the name of being seen.

I see you.