First of all, Will and I have NOT broken up, so if you clicked on this hoping for that particular brand of drama 1) I respect that bc honestly I would too and 2) I must apologise, for you will be finding drama here of primarily the internal kind. Today's pondering is wonderfully meta, and comes to us from the part of my brain that is constantly thinking about this blog. For a while now there's been something missing that, although I don't dislike the posts I've been putting up, is preventing me from feeling the sense of ownership and connection that used to make blogging such a natural outlet for me. I used to publish with reckless abandon, waxing lyrical on the significance of November, or the fact I was buying a lot of beige things that month, and I have been trying to figure out when and why that changed. My personal theory (and probs the only existent one unless ur group chat is theorising on why it is that my output is so inconsistent, in which case CC: me in next time) is that 2018 was such a colossal shitshow of a year and drastic change of pace for me that I withdrew emotionally from pretty much every outlet I have. Long Time Fans will know that I am compulsively open when it comes to my thoughts, feelings and never-ending torrents of trivial angst, but last year I really did not feel like sharing. To acknowledge the full extent of how unhappy I was would have meant facing my #1 fear - people feeling sorry for me on any level.
As a small child if I fell over I have been told by multiple sources that instead of crying like a normie I would stand back up and immediately glare at anyone present until they acted as though nothing had happened. This is a perfect metaphor for the way I, as an adult, handle any negative emotion or experience that I don't deem to be fun or romantic or dramatic or note-worthy enough to be useful - I will ignore it, and I expect you to do the same.
The thing about how shit 2018 was, is that it was shit in a way that wasn't funny or interesting, or even vaguely gritty in a way I could spin to sound like a forgotten storyline from Skins. It was shit because I went through an enormous amount of change very quickly, did not adjust well to being back in Australia and had my brain shut down as a result. By the time I emerged from my incredibly monotonous depressive hibernation of the soul, the practice of keeping my inner monologue to myself had turned into a habit that I didn't have the energy to break, and thus our predicament truly began. Mid-turmoil, but thinking I was post-turmoil, I went back to London for a few months. The second Will and I were in our car driving from Heathrow to Shepherd's Bush I felt like myself again, and that terrified me because I knew I'd given that feeling up. That sounds very dramatic, and I have since rediscovered an ability to be myself regardless of geographical location, but the sense that I made a grave mistake by leaving the UK has straight up haunted me ever since it happened, and the fact I went from literally not leaving the house to merrily pinging around London like an underground pinball as soon as I touched British soil presented an alarming juxtaposition.
By the end of those few months I had an additional regret to ponder in the form of whether I should have made an effort during our trip to put down roots and stay in London again. But realistically a) I was still too depressed to have had the capacity to pull that off b) Will and I were going through our own shit and I don't know that our relationship would have necessarily thrived under that specific kind of pressure and c) I knew in the back of my mind that there were good reasons I had chosen to leave in the first place. I just had to trust myself that those reasons would outweigh the loss, and that I would eventually stop feeling as though being back in Australia was, in itself, a failure. The reason I'm telling you this now is because it's important context to have. I am no longer depressed, #proudofme, but I still miss London. I am on track to hit a lot of big goals, but the daily reality of getting there feels very slow. I am impatient and hold myself and my life to incredibly high standards, so no matter how well my friends are able to rationally explain to me that I have indeed achieved things and need to calm down, when I wake up in a house I had never intended to frequent in my adult life, I am reminded of the gravity of the changes I've made and the fact that I don't yet know how or when they'll pay off. I'm back to feeling like myself and viewing the world with my signature terrifying sense of possibility, but it has taken a huge amount of work to get here.
This is all sounding very Captain Depresso, but it's necessary in order to create a sense of balance in my own mind, so that I can hop back into sharing my Important Musings and ranting about the phenomenal extent to which takeaway coffee can change one's life. I need you to understand how shit I have felt - how uncharacteristically low my naturally sky high self belief was for a chilly lil sec there - so that I can carry on with my current, much more upbeat narrative, in the same way that I would need you to know about a breakup before I hopped back into productivity listicles. Side note, I hate the word 'listicle' but it worked well syntactically so we're letting it slide. I need this platform to be transparent, so that it doesn't feel like work to update you on my road trips and hijinks, and I also need you to know that I had to google three different spellings of 'hijinks' to finally find the word I was looking for and not a questionably named regional theatre or improv troupe.
Innywho, this has all been a very long-winded way of saying hello, if you have felt there was something off about or missing from my #content then you are correct, but it is time to dry those eyes and stop journaling hypotheses because we are all on the same page now and the shenanigans will once more abound. If you need further evidence that my personality has reconciled with my physical body, I will share with you the piping hot piece of goss that last weekend at a Vidcon party I told Keith from the Try Guys that he looks like Ed Kemper, the Co-Ed Killer, complete with unsolicited visual aid. This did not go down well, but anecdotally is bang on brand, so let's take it as an omen from on high that my essence was not lost to the oppressive sands of time aka 2018, and that perhaps I might even manage to make my Grand Youtube Comeback before the year is through. We shall see. My mother's house is very dark and horrible, but maybe I'll be a big boy and film in the garden.
Finally, it will surprise no one to hear that I have been doing a lot of pondering re: recapturing various magics, and one idea that's really stuck in my mind is going back to a specific park near my old house. I rarely visited said park over the first 10 years I lived there, but after my Big Breakup I used to pop over in order to try and process my Many Feelings in an environment that didn't produce emotional noise of its own. I would go and sit under a tree and journal angstily and sometimes write letters to my ex boyfriend that I had no intention of delivering but needed to expel, and I would always leave feeling a bit different and a bit less lost. It's one of the only physical locations in this city that I associate so strongly with deep emotion and transformation - there are plenty in London and a few scattered around various other European capitals as I do tend to flee internationally when processing my feelings - and both my tarot cards and my instincts are telling me now is the time to seek that out. Is my compulsion to revisit the Sadness Tree a stroke of genius, or a masochistic subconscious attempt to destroy myself so entirely that there is no choice but to rebuild a great monument from the rubble? Only time will tell, and in the words of a peasant from the animated show 'Disenchantment', two things can be real.
I had not planned for this post to contain p much any of the intel it has, but I feel cleansed and ready to continue down this crazy little path we call life, dragging you behind me via strong prose and inconsistent narrative. The main takeaway here is not that the past year and a half of posts have been a lie, but that there was a lot more going on behind the scenes, which I am told is apparently the case re: everybody's lives, but we're talking about me right now. I did love Will and my trip to Cornwall, I did v much enjoy working in those London cafes, I have been pursuing multiple big goals at once and I have written about each of those things because I wanted to. I just was also re-learning to be The Best alongside those pursuits and neglected to mention it. Soz. All good now though, I promise.
If you have enjoyed this glimpse into my psyche, we would probably get along, as I too love knowing everybody's business. Raw human emotion is my version of hard drugs, or on a more PG level, Pringles. Once I pop one video entitled something along the lines of 'we are getting divorced. (not clickbait) (emotional)' I just. can't. stop. Gotta get that R.H.E. Moving awn, I'm not sure what my next few posts will be, but I should think at least one of them will be written from beneath my Sadness Tree. Unless I get there and find myself incapable of writing anything that's not addressed to someone who has romantically wronged me, which is a very real possibility. Either way we shall fight that battle when it doth present itself, and until then it is time to say goodbye. Many blessinz, x0x0.
