both things are always true at the same time.

i am overflowing. i am not.

but it seems even the thought of this has been too much for me as well. i feel deeply private now, like ive opened up my world a lot for a lot of time and now i want to take it all back and curl into a ball and become very very quiet. i dont want to share a thing and maybe ive got nothing really worth sharing anyways? but then sometimes there are little quiet moments where i think i want to tell someone this or that and this is one such moment. fleeting, and it will go soon, but here we are.

of course the irony is i cant actually tell you the things i want to share because they are too big and im still in the middle of them. so heres what i can tell you- i have found needle and thread again and ive been stitching my feelings into tangible things. i have been making little pocket altars -

and now ive decided to make this little quilt thing- its vintage japanese fabrics and ive kind of tacked them together and now im just randomly stitching over it all. im thinking maybe ill stick it all to a big piece of linen backing once ive had enough, but for now its giving me something to do and keeping my creative mind occupied.

the colours are, well, colourful. way more than i would ever choose really, but i am ok with that right now. im not sure what ill do with it once its all done though.

so there we have it. im sitting here waiting for the clouds to come over, praying for them to come over, because im ready to make myself a cup of tea and do some more stitching and maybe put on some more of the wild alaskan tv show weve been bingeing the last week. i dont feel ok doing that when the sun is shining though, so hopefully i get my wish soon.

till next time x

Fast forward a few years, and brands started sending me things for free, publications came to shoot the houses I designed and lived in, and my followers started to climb to what I thought at the time was a pretty high number… which ultimately meant I was “making it” online.

Then Instagram Stories became a thing, and I doubled down on my sharing. I made it my thing to talk to my phone like I was sharing my own journal entries. I would get all worked up about some random devastating world event, only to share in the next breath what I was making the kids for dinner or how my carrots were growing wonky in the garden. People started calling me ‘vulnerable’ and ‘inspiring’, and my god, I ate it up.

How could I not? In my real life, I tend to seclude myself from others. I like being in my own company. I don’t feel like i’ve ever really made any big career moves or done anything worth noting. But online, I knew how to make things look beautiful. I knew how to take the perfect image and align it with the perfect caption. Online, I felt better about myself, like I had a life worth sharing.

So I shared and shared, and for over a decade—a DECADE—I have let total strangers watch the way I move through the world almost every single day.

Writing that out feels insane to me.

I am notorious for not sticking to things. I will literally find a way out of my life’s passion three minutes after I’ve discovered it. I have moved my children around 25 times since they’ve been born. I have called myself all sorts of creative titles (my favourite would have to be shaman—oy vey). Basically, I am the poster child for undiagnosed ADHD.

But here I have been, sticking to one thing for 13 years. And if I’m being completely honest with myself, it hasn’t even been great.

In fact, Instagram has been a little shit,

…and I’m over it.

I’m so over it that I’ve set myself a goal of not having Instagram for the whole of 2025. Which really, if someone had said that to me even a month ago (that that was even possible), I would have shaken my head and said, “Whoa, it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t even scroll that much. And how would I keep up with my friends? How would my businesses even ‘make it’ if I’m not posting about them? I am my business. Without an online presence, they won’t work. How could they possibly work?”

Something happened a couple of weeks ago, though, that has changed my mindset around Instagram and how it’s both making me feel and working (or not working) for my business.

A random stranger sent me a message telling me that they really enjoyed “watching the shitshow that was my life, as I chase shiny thing after shiny thing,” and then that was closely followed by, “Get over yourself, stop showing your body online,” and then another, telling me that I was a joke and that they had “overstayed their welcome,” and then the doozy: that my loving boyfriend was “sickening.” Now, I don’t know what prompted four perfect strangers (and yes, they were strangers—I checked) to all send me kinda shitty messages around the same time, but they did.

And honestly? It was the best thing that could’ve ever happened to me.

Well, not before I felt extremely sorry for myself, became indignant, shared my angry response (which made me feel like that was exactly what they wanted), which then meant I deleted everything, promptly followed by reposting and then deleting for a second time, before finally removing the entire app altogether.

Oof.

If I hadn’t received those messages, I am almost 100% certain I would still be scrolling the app right now. As I would have as soon as I woke up, whilst I was on the toilet, when I was waiting for the toast to pop, the kettle to boil, my kid to answer their phone, and the moment I was doing nothing (read: breathing). I have been absolutely addicted, as I suspect most people are. There is always a reason to mindlessly scroll. We are all tied up over there. There’s always something to see, to read, to share, to consume. And it goes on and on.

But here’s the thing: what’s the cost of this unrelenting assault on our minds, to our personalities? The women who felt it totally okay to say what they liked to me (behind private accounts with no identifying features) were able to do so because, as Dylan Marron says in Conversations with People Who Hate Me, “Social media platforms flatten other human beings into two-dimensional avatars, making it all the easier to see our enemies—or perceived enemies—not as fellow people, but bullseyes on which we can perfect our aim.”

And someone like me, open and “vulnerable,” is really just another voice in a sea of boring, not really real noises. Open fodder. The perfect place to direct whatever shitty judgments they were holding at the time onto someone easy in which to do so.

There’s a flip side to this too, though, that’s been making me question everything I thought was right—maybe there’s a truth in what those random IG women said to me (other than the comment that my boyfriend is sickening. Sickeningly handsome, maybe, but that’s about it).

Maybe the truth is that I’ve been feeling that way about myself and how I’ve been showing up online for ages.

I keep thinking about Sylvia Plath’s poem when I think about this—the fact that social media is like holding up a mirror:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Social media became my mirror, a silver surface reflecting the version of myself I wanted others to see. But over time, I have been slowly realising it is not reflecting me—it was reflecting my need for validation. Just like Sylvia Plath’s Mirror, it showed me truths I wasn’t ready to confront. I have been grappling with my reflection my entire adult life. I have always been so desperate to be seen and told I am worthy.

Instagram has fed that beast, never letting it go hungry, every single day for over four thousand, three hundred and something days in a row. How fucking ridiculous. How exhausting. How sad, really.

And to be completely frank, the reaching out only required more reaching out. It never seemed to actually satiate me. And then, four shitty messages—and just like that, I was (am) done. No more.

If we require validation and then get the validation but the validation is not enough and so we seek more validation to feel only a tiny bit validated, then it seems to me that this is literally the definition of dumb.

Dumb and a complete waste of this one wild and precious life.

I was listening to a podcast—one of my faves, actually—and the expert, Dr. Anna Lembke, was explaining the role of dopamine in our bodies and the way social media interplays with its effects. She highlighted how social media platforms are designed to exploit this dopamine-driven reward system, making it difficult for users to resist constant engagement. But the problem is, social media gives big spikes of dopamine for little to no effort, and then it’s over. You require more. You post, people clap, and then they scroll on past. And you post again, people double-tap, you feel a little bit fed, and then it’s over.

And on and on and on.

It’s addictive. You almost can’t help it. Couple that with an internal yearning to be accepted, to be noticed, to be validated? Well, it’s no wonder I’ve been stuck on that train for 13 years. Gimme gimme dopamine all day long.

Here’s the thing, though—it’s actually not that hard to step off the train. You just delete the apps, and they’re gone. Literally.

All of that turmoil, and then it’s done.

It’s been nearly a month now, and I absolutely have no desire to go back. Yet. Maybe I’ll never want to? I’m not sure. But all I know is that it was literally that easy to get off. Delete. That’s it.

Now, there’s something I’m not telling you when I say all this, though, and I think it’s kind of important to tell you. I deleted the apps. I stopped scrolling. I stopped time-wasting (well, I stopped mindlessly staring at a screen; I still find other ways to dither about). I stopped reaching into the ethers…

But the need for validation? It’s still there.

Unfortunately, the magic didn’t extend to completely erasing some deep-seated, long-standing issues I have. I mean, rude, right? No one magic solution to solving all my problems.

Instagram is gone, and now I’m left with me. Me and all the same internal thoughts, all those specific needs still hanging on, still flapping about inside my brain. Which, to be honest, is kind of a bit exciting.

All these thoughts I have, I have with me. They don’t get distributed out. I’m not passing them on, stepping over them, having them lose their weight a little because the internet’s got to hold them a little while with me.

Maybe i get to do something else with all of this.

Yes, I probably need to actually work through a lot with an actual therapist. My need for validation can sometimes feel pretty debilitating, and its still as strong as ever and im not sure i completely understand why or where its stemming from... But also, having all these thoughts and words and ideas and needs have to be put somewhere in the meantime, so how about in art? How about I delve in and actually do something tangible with all of this?

WRITE THE BOOK I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE is what I mean to say.

Do the thing that I haven’t been able to do before because I’ve been handing out my energy willy-nilly. I want to write a book—or maybe I should say collate the book I have been dipping my toes in and out of for a decade. I want to do it and not be so totally distracted. I want to do it and not continually post little snippets on Instagram that I might be doing it so someone can validate me and tell me my book is fantastic and So Good! before it’s even really come into existence.

And maybe it might be good in the end, or maybe it might be terribly shit, but all I know is that I now have so much more time on my hands and space in my brain to create things, that this might actually happen.

Finally.

It just took me thirteen years to put my phone down long enough. Thirteen years and now here we are.

Watch this space (and dont clap till the end, ok?)

xxx

i was married for a long time. i met my husband just a few weeks after i had turned 19 years old, young and desperate to be loved, to love. we had babies and moved homes a lot, and i made lots of things and reinvented myself many many times. i figured if i kept busy and focused on whatever new and shiny thing was next, then my discomfort, the ‘itch i couldnt scratch’, could be kept as just that and not morph into an internal gnawing, an aching yearning for something else. i was so aware that there were so many elements of my life that i was deeply unhappy with, and also at the very same time i felt completely asleep to it all. its as if, when i try to dig into my memories, try to recreate instances, try to check in with how it was, there is absolutely nothing there. i can remember my children, i can remember car rides with them, and rocking them to sleep every night for years. i can remember all the rules i made to keep them safe and to ensure they would become good humans (that bit i know i succeeded in). i can remember cooking the same meals on a rotating buffet of boring, highly nutritious dinners that no one really liked but every one ate (this isn’t a restaurant kids). those bits are pretty clear in my minds eye, but when i listen to audiobooks and podcasts and the narrators talk of their own failed marriages, and how they’ve felt after it all dissolved…i have, well, pretty much nothing. theres irritation there, a sense of frustration underpinning whatever marriage memories lay dormant in my mind. but theres no fodder for stories. theres no guts for a poem. its like, because i was scared to tell the truth, i couldn’t write, and then because i didn’t write, there are no truths left.

i can’t seem to work out whether i’m just completely zen and i don’t have any trauma to unpack. there’s nothing i need to ‘go over’, or ‘ move through’, that there’s just my life then, and my life now. before and after, full stop, amen. orrr whether all that stuff is buried so deep, so far down that i have absolutely no ability to access it by myself, as i am.

the feeling i had whilst i was married, the knowing that i couldn’t, shouldn’t, speak up. that the ramifications in doing so might just be catastrophic to life as i knew it. that the truth can not be told so therefore i cannot do the one thing i have always wanted to do, has led to me to here. where i have no poetry left to speak, or at least the things i used to feel don’t feel so poignant anymore.

i wonder where i go with all this fence sitting numbness.

i wonder if something will come at some point and i’ll be free to write about everything.

so here we are, monday the 30th december 2024, doing it. ‘it’ is actually something i’m completely terrified to do, if i’m going to completely honest. i’ve always thought of myself as a writer, someone who will one day write an entire book, someone who has hoards of journals and little handwritten notes tucked into all the places she inhabits. the actual truth though is that that is merely an idea of someone (not who i am really in the day to day) but someone who i would like to be. Someone i will be when i have more time, more freedom, something more important to say. i’m coming to wonder though, is this just a very predictable, somewhat boring, trope that people just like me say when actually they are very scared that maybe the right time will never actually arrive, because they never were any type of writer to begin with? And really what i will continue to do is repeat the term one day… round and round and round until somehow here we are- going into 2025 and i’m about to be 42 years old with a silly little fear that is also very common and very uninteresting.

so, because its not quite the new year, which means this is very much not a new years resolution, we will begin writing and see where we land.

xxx