I'm Back!

Writing this in a moment of desperation. Two sides of my brain are colliding: the side that wishes to fix the printer for the good of the family, and the side that wishes to perform a guttural scream and throw it over the garden fence. Will report back on which side wins.

I've been thinking about what I would like to leave behind when I die. (Nothing like grappling with a printer to make you long for death.) Not in terms of assets, to be clear, because I don't have any. But in terms of legacy? Maybe. And then I started thinking about how often I think about my great-grandparents. Which is to say, basically never. I'm sure they were lovely people with rich, full lives. I'm sure they woke in the morning with their heads full of thoughts and plans. I'm sure they had routines, preferences, things that comforted them after long days. I'm sure they were important to their community, one small link in an endless intricate chain. And I hardly ever think of them. I know they're in my history and I'm grateful, but I'm not actively keeping their names alive. A couple of generations is all it takes to forget.

You could look at this in two ways. (Let's have another brain battle!) One side of me thinks that this fact is utterly depressing. Imagine everyone alive in the world forgetting about you. Nobody ever saying your name, or thinking of you, or wondering about your life. Isn't that kind of daunting? Isn't that a shame?

But the other side of me thinks that it's freeing. When you're feeling a bit nervous or embarrassed or worrying about what people think about you, you can just imagine what everyone will be saying about you in a few generations' time. Which is to say, basically nothing. With that in mind, who gives a shit, really? You might try a new hobby and make an idiot of yourself. You might go for a job and not get it. You might ask someone out and get turned down. All of these things will hurt, obviously. But hey! At least you only have to wait a hundred years for everyone to forget about it.

Some of us might leave something behind (other than new generations of people) in terms of art, or a body of work that people remember, or actions so extraordinary that people turn your name into a verb. But most of us are destined to live fairly ordinary lives, and thus don't have to worry about images like this

haunting us long after we die. So the biggest moment in which we can have an impact on the world is now. I keep thinking about being deliberate in the way I want to move in the world. What is actually important to me? It's easy to just bumble along without thinking about it. I want to move with grace. Humility. Protectiveness. Humour. Passion. An open heart. Curiosity. Creativity. And kindness. A lot of that involves opening myself up to other people and making myself vulnerable.

I recently started a joined a dance fitness class. The process was this:

• Step One: ruminate/daydream about joining a dance class for a year
• Step Two: spend a rainy afternoon researching dance classes. Find it overwhelming and give up.
• Step Three: weeks later, on an oestrogen-fuelled burst of confidence, call a gym and book self into a dance class.
• Step Four: realise lack of outside-appropriate gym clothes, go to TK Maxx, spend small fortune on leggings and trainers
• Step Five: spend day of dance class in fear/regret/absolute certainty that I am about to get my period early with no warning mid-dance
• Step Six: turn up to dance class. Have an absolutely incredible time. Leave buzzing with joy and confidence (and with ankles bleeding from new trainers, but womb lining intact)

And that's how it's done! You're welcome.

Obviously, I could have just done step three about a year ago. I'd know the routines and everything by now. But this is how my brain works. I can't just do a thing, I have to really convince myself to do it over a series of months and even years.

Nobody introduced themselves to me except for the instructor. It was one of those situations that made me a little bit nervous, because a few people were chatting and I couldn't tell if they were friendship groups I was about to interrupt, or just casual gym acquaintances. On my second class, I decided I'd push myself and introduce myself to at least one person. A challenge! A side quest, if you will. A new woman joined the group a week later. At the end of the session I jogged over like this:

and before I could talk myself out of it, I said hello, and told her how relieved I was that someone else was new and had to learn the steps from scratch. I told her my name, said I'd hopefully see her next week. Job done. I've now resolved to speak to at least one new person every week until I know all of them.

I keep thinking about how often I have failed at a social situation because I knew, deep down, that it would happen. Almost like predetermination. It was destined to be, and because I knew that, it made me act like a dork. I can't put my finger on why this is. Sometimes I try to shut that kind of thinking down, but it's just ingrained. A nagging little voice telling me that I can't function like an adult, with an impressive catalogue of hard evidence to prove it. It battles against the other side of me, the naturally social, caring, needing-people side. There's always been this clash, and when I was younger, I found it very hard to deal with the inner me being so much more vibrant than the outer one. It's taken a long time to pull her from the depths.

I have agreed to slowly organise my parents' photographs. It's a job that they've been dreading (understandably. It's quite a big deal to confront memories like that. Also the physical process of sifting through them is a bit of a pain in the arse and neither of them can ever find their reading glasses). I find it quite soothing with the occasional thrill of nostalgia/core memory unlocking.

I grew up in a big family. Like 'my mum is one of ten children' big. I have so many cousins. This creates a million reasons for parties; when you've got that many relatives you can't move for birthdays/funerals/baby showers/retirements. I have a lot of memories involving nodding off on two chairs squished together in the corner of a reception hall. Or reading a book and drinking a Panda Pop. Or cuddling my dad, listening to the steadying sound of his heartbeat, watching my mum and her sisters dancing in a big circle while belting out We Are Family by Sister Sledge. (They could have - and often did have - a huge row even seconds before this, and they would still sing it dutifully, even if through gritted teeth. Something about those opening notes made everyone come flocking together instinctively.)

Anyway. A good percentage of my childhood experience was loud, is what I'm saying. It was disco lights and the smell of beer and layers of cigarette smoke baked into soft furnishings. It was sharp bursts of laughter and a lot of movement. I was very shy. Fast-forward a few decades: sitting cross-legged on the floor among piles of photographs and newspaper clippings, I found this.

That's me, clinging onto my mother's leg. I'm smiling but I can assure you that my head was spinning from all the people around me. I was probably disassociating by thinking about Sesame Street or something. As an adult, I appreciate the benefits of having a big rowdy family. It's reassuring to know there are a lot of us. Like if a very localised war broke out between families, mine would win, based on numbers and mentality. But as a child I found it a bit overwhelming.

I also came across this photo of my mum (on the left, perhaps unsurprisingly):

This is how I think of my mum during my childhood years. Wearing some kind of power suit, or something with shoulder pads. Joking around, making people laugh. Not being afraid to be silly. Fully present, in the moment, the kind of person you want to have at your party to keep the momentum going. My mum knows, instinctively, the social importance of a good get-together, how being around people and celebrating, even after difficult things have happened, can prevent people from drifting apart, can give them a boost that steadies them long after the night fades into morning.

The thing is, that's not all of my mum's personality. Like every human, she's complicated. She can be a lot of things. The way she sees herself might not necessarily match how I see her. But in that moment, at a party surrounded by her siblings and with music and a glass of wine, she's a good presence. It's part of her legacy, of what I and many other people think of when we think of her. (She's very much alive, by the way. In case you were wondering. It's all sounding a bit funereal in here. She's well, she's as funny as she's ever been, she's learned to make a good flat white with her new coffee machine, and she has just recently discovered gifs.)

To be the kind of person that connects is to be a little bit vulnerable, I think. To be the person that initiates deep conversations involves handing out sensitive information, even if you're not sure how it'll land. To be the first on the dance floor risks other people's eyes on you. To share yourself with someone means that you might, in the end, get hurt. But isn't that the point of it? You can't love someone without taking risks. Ultimately, whether you're making jokes about the state of your hair with a complete stranger in the bathroom at a wedding reception, or reassuring your best friend via text in the middle of the night, it's all expressions of the same thing.

The reason why I'm talking about all this is because I'm getting a bit tired of the internet. Both as a consumer of it, and a creator on it. I have been writing for the internet and making websites since I was, what, 13? The entire time, I've been working out how I feel about it. Writing posts and ruthlessly editing them. Cringing at old work and removing it. Deleting almost all of my social media accounts. Much like the outer-people-person-me and the inner-shy-child-me, I have two halves, and rather than gracefully navigating them both, I swing extravagantly between them, making drastic decisions in the snap of a finger and hoping that the whole 'digital tattoo' thing isn't true in my case, somehow. And that's with my relatively reserved nature when it comes to what I should and shouldn't share.

That's not even to mention AI. Every piece of writing can be absorbed into the machine. Every photo. Every video. There isn't any realistic way of fighting it. It comes down to individual decisions; do I want to risk this, or not? There have been many moments over the past year where I've wanted to give up the internet. I've researched dumb phones. I've browsed r/degoogle. I've looked into buying a digital camera. I've read articles about how the internet used to be a place. I've observed the backlash against Big Tech and the backlash against the backlash and at this point it's becoming meaningless noise in my head. Do wise choices exist in a world like this? I mean obviously yes, but you get my point. There's no long-term thinking anymore. It's impossible to know what is best. For our privacy. For our sanity.

There are a few questions I've been asking myself over the last year or so, and they are:

a) even if the opportunities existed, would I want to freelance anymore, in the long term?
b) even if there's no money in writing anymore, would I still want to write?

and

c) whatever I create, do I still feel comfortable sharing it on the internet?

And the answers are:

a) no
b) absolutely, yes

and

c) yes.

I've been enjoying all the excitement about Backrooms. It's funny seeing something hit the mainstream when it has existed on the internet for ages. So many people in my life don't watch YouTube. To them, YouTube is where they go for DIY tutorials. It's the thing their kids are addicted to. To the established media, and a great swathe of the population, YouTube is for Content, not Art. So it's quite fun to see people who don't understand the ins and outs of the platform, who don't quite get the references and the language and the lore of it all, observe Backrooms (and Obsession) like they've dropped into theatres from an alien planet.

It's nice. I like seeing YouTube being used for what it's always had the potential to be: a leveller. An open platform for new creatives to access the exclusive (and expensive) world of film. The only problem is the visibility, of standing out in the chaos. But there's no realistic way around that. Any success online has always involved a stroke of luck; the right person watching at the right moment, a random blessing from the algorithm.

Recently there has been a wave of backlash against AI. I've watched videos of clueless executives giving speeches at graduations, talking gushingly about this new, AI-driven future, in front of hundreds of kids whose world these very companies have just completely upended. Astonishing that they thought it would go any other way. I was particularly struck by this one:

Firstly, the audacity of this man! To stand there and essentially say: we've dropped a bomb on your future, kids, but hey, you're in control of how you arrange the rubble. The people building the future will be you. On a macro-level, this is so untrue it's actually absurd.

But on a micro level, the way I choose to approach the internet is a choice that can, on a very tiny little scale, make it better. Ultimately, my passion is for the indies. I have a huge amount of admiration for people going it alone, or in a very small team, in whatever industry, in whatever capacity they can manage. Games, books, music, movies. It takes a lot of determination to finish a thing, as I am coming to find out. It also takes a lot of vulnerability to put that thing into the world. And the medium is, of course, the internet.

Recently we went to see Gabrielle Aplin live. She's a gorgeous person but I did not actually capture a photograph of her. I did, however, take a photo of her stage setup, complete with rotating disco chicken:

Gabrielle and her support acts all expressed their gratitude that we were there: they spoke of the rapidly shifting music industry, the terrifying decision to go independent, the burnout and the grind of it all. Jack Garratt said a similar thing during one of his gigs, about temporarily stepping away from music after the phenomenal success of Phase in order to recover his shattered mental health; even if you can break into the mainstream, it comes at a cost. Artists in all industries are making similar choices. Stay here and get treated like shit, or leave and become one of many, many others doing the same thing? And it sounds like a silly thing to talk about in the context of, say, war, or food shortages, or climate change. But it does matter. If you want decent art in your life, it matters. Sometimes I think of the enormous amount of talent, knowledge, and experience being lost in the video game industry in wave after wave of layoffs; it's the same thing everywhere. So many people are giving up. (Me included, in a way.) It's more important than ever to support people in their creative endeavours. Otherwise, the future looks even bleaker than it already does.

Blimey. I need to turn this back around somehow. The point is: overall, I think putting good work online is important, still, and given that my answer to question question a) is to give up freelancing, I will have to find other places to put my work even if I don't get paid for it. It will mostly be here. I plan to get back to the roots of the thing. I want to talk about good stories and how they work, and although sometimes I'll be talking about mainstream stuff, I will endeavour to give more time to the people going solo. I plan to do more deep dives into how narratives are formed. I plan to grab more interviews with people about their creative process. I plan to highlight the best bits of the internet, the bits that make the whole thing worth hanging onto.

Mostly, I plan to be a good presence here, an open one, a middle ground between too loud and too quiet. Somewhere between dancing barefoot on a sticky floor and sitting in the corner with a Panda Pop. Hoping you'll keep reading and hang out with me. <3

(I've settled on a fortnightly posting schedule over the summer as my writing time is significantly reduced when the kids are off school. See you in two weeks!)

The Ghost of Newsletters Past

This Time in 2025: I talk about stories upon stories and stories (and Blue Prince) in Human Transactions

This Time in 2024: I talk about one of the best games in recent memory in my review of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes