Tonight I finally did the splits for the first time in my life. It's not the achievement I wanted, or even expected, but it's the one I'm currently acknowledging. I haven't had a drink in 15 days. The last time I had a drink I had five or six large glasses of Sancerre and then got sick for the whole of the Christmas period. During that period I refused an invitation to my favorite bikini bar because I opted to stay at home and do laundry. The other night I rewatched Erin Brockovich, as I do once a year, and felt some semblance of faith resurging in my body. Via text message, a friend of mine recently referred to the human body as a “flesh prison”. I laughed aloud. I really needed that.
I saw a journalist on Twitter today do something journalists on Twitter are obliged to do, which is complain about how much transcribing they have to do. And I read the tweet and remembered the jokes I used to make about transcribing. Transcribing is the pits. You have to listen to the real sound of your own voice, and re-live the parts of conversations you'd have liked to forget, or you remembered slightly differently. And worse than all of that, with every second that goes by, your fingers are pounding the keyboard praying that what appears on your word processor might be useful. A journalist's home never looks cleaner than it does when there are transcriptions to be done. There is likely a cake in the oven. Most plants remain alive because watering them regularly was more fun than transcribing hours of a moment that has already passed. Oh wow. I guess I got triggered by a tweet about transcriptions.
If I leave Twitter and Instagram will I feel worse? I did it once. For a year. Back then I had bylines, and decided it didn’t matter whether or not I was tweeting the link out to the ELLE cover I just wrote. If I do it will I be cutting off my nose to spite my face? I have asked myself this question every day for weeks. How exposed is too exposed? Just before Yom Kippur this year I took a selfie with a fan outside Ralph's while shoving a Payday into my mouth because I hate saying no, even minutes before I'm about to fast for 25 hours. Social media did us dirty.
January 2023. On New Years Eve I was on the couch calling a friend who was already in bed. She was watching nonsense. I couldn't even be bothered to find the remote. We wondered why the only TV presenters on New Year's Eve are gay men. Someone needs to get to the bottom of that.
Every day, sometimes every hour, a different emotion. But those emotions are what keep you in it. It's what reminds you that you care, and you're still going to do something about it. Even if you think you might be too physically tired, or mentally fatigued. You still cared enough to react. So whatever it is you're inspired by, pissed off with, angry at, frustrated by, crying over or willing yourself to be different at, pay attention to the fact that you're feeling it. Raw is better than numb.
When I was little, I used to tell my mum that I was going to change the world somehow. To be the type of person who wants to change things you withstand resistance; publicly, privately, even within yourself. People think they want change, but most of them don't. Most people want things to stay the same. Most people are boring. If you're interesting you're probably going to suffer. Accept it.
That's not a resolution but it's something you can keep.
Happy New Year, Eve. May 2023 be a good year for you and all of us.
You're already have changed the world for the better by standing up some who really needed it against many that have little to zero common sense.
You also steered some like me towards Substack which I luv & can't wait to get back into my 🐺story that I still haven't finished.
Cheers