My 2025 playlist is DONE.
Fifty-two songs. No analysis. No liner notes. Just the year, as it sounded.
It was a shit year, but we got there in the end. I managed to make something warm and sustaining out of it.
And also there were potatoes.
Category Archives: Culture
Writing about music, TV, books and pop culture as a metaphor.
Pull me from the Upside Down
On music as memory, misdirection, and rescue
In another life I would have been a rock star. All ego and wild wardrobe choices, making an artistic choice to stain my fingers black à la Michèle Lamy, and crying at the end of every concert.
But the closest I ever got was being a radio producer, and occasionally hosting some lunchtime shows. We won’t talk about the disastrous time I had to read the news. Local radio really used to be all hands on deck.
I miss the radio show, the playlists, the variety of niche music programmes. I don’t get that much any more.
I love music.
Mixtapes Were a Language
I grew up in the era of mixtapes.
Actual tapes. Hours spent deciding what went where, which song opened, which one closed, what you were saying by putting that track after this one. You couldn’t skip casually. You had to commit. Making a mixtape for someone meant effort, attention, intention.
It was a way of saying this is how I feel, without having to say it out loud.
I was good at making them too. Handing one over with no track list, keeping you guessing with each pause between tracks. Could you pick out the theme before the end?
Why Covers Hit Harder
Cover songs were clutch at keeping folks guessing, but also making them listen, really listen, to the lyrics.
Hurt.
Nine Inch Nails? Melancholic. Empty. A song of absence. A quiet, furious piece that closed Trent Reznor’s live shows like a final fuck you.
Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt.
Ooft.
Tears.
Sinéad O’Connor — Nothing Compares 2 U
Faith No More — Easy
Yael Naim — Toxic
Muse — Feeling Good
I Fight Dragons — The Power of Love
I could go on, but I’ll save the Patrick Bateman monologue for another time.
I love music.
And I think that’s why the Upside Down idea lodged itself in my brain.
In Stranger Things, when one of the characters gets taken away, and they’re panicked, hurt, untethered from the real world, their friends don’t argue them back to safety. Nobody explains. Nobody instructs.
They play the song that knows them.
And they find their own way out.
Music as a tether.
Music as a way home.
What I loved most wasn’t the drama of it, but the simplicity. The idea that you don’t have to be clever in the moment you’re overwhelmed. You don’t have to articulate anything. You just need the right sound to pull you back into yourself.
And maybe after all this year’s therapy, a grown-up realisation: you’re allowed to choose that song in advance. You’re allowed to tell people what will reach you. You don’t have to hope they guess.
How You Find Me
So when I’m lost. When I’m untethered, overwhelmed, and unable to ask for help. When I’m upside down, this is how you pull me back.
You’ve Got the Love — Florence + the Machine.
I suppose it makes sense that it’s a cover.
I’ve always been better at saying things with other people’s songs.
Family Resemblance
On growing up, letting go of coolness, and finding yourself in the wrong Addams
The Dream
When I was younger, I wanted to be cool and mysterious.
I wanted to be Wednesday.
Specifically: Christina Ricci’s Wednesday. Deadpan. Central. Still. A child who never flinched and never explained herself. She didn’t need to perform charm or softness. She was sharp, contained, and unknowable. I wanted that kind of power. The kind that comes from silence.
If I’m honest, I also wanted to be Morticia. Angelica Huston’s Morticia, to be exact. Elegant. Serene. Untouchable. The sort of woman who moves through the world like she already knows how everything ends, and is fine with it.
That felt like the dream.
Composed.
Graceful.
Above it all.
What I Mistook for Strength
When you’re younger, it’s easy to mistake restraint for strength. To believe that if you could just be quieter, cooler, more contained, you’d finally be safe. That people wouldn’t see too much, ask too much, or expect too much.
The problem, of course, is that Wednesday stays a child forever.
And Morticia, despite the stillness, is not quiet at all. She is calm, yes — but she is also deeply, theatrically alive.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that.
The Family, Not the Centre
Growing up means learning that the characters you admire are not always the ones you resemble. Sometimes they’re the ones you reach for because you think they’ll save you from yourself.
And the other thing I missed, for a long time, is that the Addams Family isn’t built around any one person being the centre.
It’s built around belonging.
The family is huge. There’s room for everyone. Even the strange ones. Especially the strange ones. No one has to shrink to fit. No one has to justify their weirdness. It’s assumed. It’s welcomed.
My hair was far too frizzy to be Cousin Itt.
My cooking is significantly better than Grandmama’s.
And poor Pugsley — everyone forgets him, which feels unfair, because someone has to be quietly doing their best in the background.
I tried on all of them at some point. Morticia’s composure. Wednesday’s silence. Even, briefly, the idea that being aloof would make me safer.
It didn’t.
The Realisation
Because the truth I eventually arrived at is this:
I’m Gomez.
I am theatrical. I am earnest. I am all-in on the things I love. I have passions, and I honour other people’s passions too, even when I don’t understand them. Especially then. I try not to punch down. I do my best not to mock sincerity. I believe devotion is a virtue.
Gomez is ridiculous, yes. But he is also deeply principled. He knows exactly who he is. He loves fiercely. He shows up with enthusiasm and flourish and zero embarrassment about the size of his feelings.
That’s the part I couldn’t see when I was younger. I thought being taken seriously meant being restrained. I thought coolness was the goal.
But safety didn’t come from being untouchable.
It came from being seen and loved loudly.
There is relief in realising you don’t have to be the still, sharp centre of the room. That you can be the one gesturing wildly at the edges. That you can care too much, feel too deeply, laugh too loudly, and still be held.
The Release
The release, I think, is this:
Donnez-moi la joie.
Donnez-moi le chaos.
Donnez-moi tout.
Oh, ’Tish. That’s French.
Give me passion and theatrical nonsense and love without irony or shame.
I don’t need to be cool and mysterious anymore.
I just need to be home.
When I Think About Myself, I Laugh Too
Author’s Note:
This post was inspired by Maya Angelou’s poem “When I Think About Myself.” Her words come from a history and an experience that aren’t mine, but what resonated with me was her use of laughter as both armor and confession. What follows is my own reflection, a much smaller, messier version of that rhythm. About the ways I hide grief behind jokes. I hope you find something of yourself here too, whether it’s in the laughter, the grief, or the space in between.
The Spark
I read Maya Angelou’s poem “When I Think About Myself” and feel my chest tighten with recognition. I read it again, and it still catches in my throat. I read it today and it still fucking stings. Her laughter isn’t my laughter. Her history isn’t mine, but I know what it is to laugh so the crying doesn’t swallow you whole. My version is smaller, messier, less tethered to survival and more to shame. Still, the rhythm is familiar: joke first, grief hiding underneath.
My Version of the Laughter
I tell my therapist things that sound like jokes.
Like: “My sleep schedule isn’t broken, it’s just… creatively curated.”
Or: “My morning routine lasted three days, which is actually a personal best.”
She smiles, makes a note, and I try to move on, hopeful that I’ve kept it light.
But here’s the thing: I’m not really joking. (And my therapist knows that.) The jokes are just camouflage. They’re how I confess without admitting it.
It’s easier to laugh about my abandoned planners than to say I grieved the person I thought those planners could make me. It’s easier to make a crack about my Fitbit than to say I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever feel “normal.”
The laughter buys me just enough air to speak the truth, but only sideways… like I’m trying not to look it in the eye.
The Weight Underneath
The truth is, the laughter only stretches so far. Underneath it, there’s the ache of all the things I thought I’d outgrow by now: the scattered thoughts, the empty lists, the absolute fury at existing in the world, in general everything just being so fucking complicated.
I open an old planner and find week one filled with neat handwriting, hopeful doodles in the margins. Week two is patchy. Week three doesn’t exist. The book itself is heavier than it should be, not because of the paper, but because of the failure I’ve stapled to it.
It’s funny, in a bleak way, how much stationery can resemble a gravestone. Every notebook is a headstone for another version of me who didn’t make it. Another try at order, another attempt at “normal,” buried under tabs and trackers.
And that’s the part that stings most: I thought I was chasing productivity. What I was really chasing was proof I wasn’t broken.
Why It Resonates
That’s why Angelou’s poem lingers with me. She writes about laughter with a weight I can’t claim. Her survival isn’t mine to borrow. But the cadence of it … that rhythm of laughing to cover the pain, that part I know in my fucking bones.
Because every time I make a joke out of my mess, what I’m really saying is: “This hurts. This scares me. I don’t know how else to tell you.”
I can’t carry the weight she carried, but I can recognize the shape of my own.
Laughter, Still
So yes, I laugh,
The confession half-told,
Some truth wrapped in wit,
A joke that betrays more than I’d admit,
When I talk about myself.