This week marks six months of living alone… well not exactly, but also kinda. I share a house with five other people. We cross paths in the kitchen, politely ignore each other’s laundry, and share an unspoken agreement that we don’t discuss the quality of bathroom singing.
It’s not solitude exactly, more like a soft coexistence.
The Middle Ground
After nearly twenty years of living with partners and kids and noise, this has been my quiet middle ground. I still hear footsteps, laughter, the occasional blender. It’s reassuring. There’s life here, just not mine to manage.
I’m probably the oldest person in the house by a good stretch. Everyone else has energy that hums, it’s just a different frequency. One I can admire from a time worn path.
I joke that I’m the household cryptid: sightings are rare, but the evidence of my existence (mugs, tea, the occasional scent of toast) is undeniable. But I make the joke only to myself, gods forbid I engage in conversation… I have a spooky reputation to maintain.
The Comfort
It’s oddly comforting. I can be social on my own terms and vanish without explanation. There’s no loneliness in it, just the small luxury of choosing my own volume.
Six months in, I’ve realised this is the kind of independence that suits me. Not isolation, not reinvention, just steady, ordinary living.
The Aggressively Peaceful Bit
There’s something deeply satisfying about being a quiet part of other people’s world. The house hums. The lights shift. Someone else’s playlist seeps through the walls. And I’m here making coffee, answering messages from my people, and feeling, finally, at home.
Because peace doesn’t always come with silence. Sometimes it’s the sound of someone else’s blender at 7 a.m. and the soft, defiant joy of knowing you’re building a life that’s aggressively peaceful.
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.
There’s a pile of them on my shelves: passion planners, diaries, bullet journals, colour-coded agendas, Italian leather ones, Japanese ones from before they changed the paper. A graveyard of productivity promises.
I used to believe that if I just found the right one, the perfect notebook, I’d finally unlock my life. I’d become the kind of person who shows up on time, never loses track of deadlines, and doesn’t panic when someone casually asks, “So what’s your five-year plan?”
Crisp pages. Neat lines. Tabs for goals and dreams. The stationery version of a miracle cure.
I bought them all. Dotted notebooks. Lined notebooks. Planners that could probably manage a small government. Each one promised that this time, no really this time, I’d get my shit together.
The Imaginary Me
The perfect notebook was never just about pages and ink. It was about the imaginary neurotypical me I thought I was buying. The version of me who thrives on structure. Who remembers birthdays. Who completes her Self Assessment on time.
Capitalism sold me the fantasy. Pinterest boards sold me the aesthetic. Productivity blogs sold me the idea that my messy brain was just waiting for the right planner. 1990s mental health services backed them up.
She was supposed to be in there, hidden under the chaos, ready to be summoned by a 12-week goal tracker.
Spoiler: she never showed up.
What I Got Instead
What I actually got was:
Half-filled pages.
Colour-coded calendars abandoned after week two.
Expensive washi tape dots that stick to everything except the page you meant.
A cupboard that looks less like a productivity system and more like the stationery aisle of WH Smith exploded.
I wasn’t building a better version of me. I was building a stationery mausoleum.
Quantified Self
It wasn’t just notebooks either. I flirted with the whole Quantified Self movement. Habit trackers and bujos whispering that if I just paid attention to myself for more than 24 seconds, I’d finally see that commitment could make me a real person.
Pair it with a Fitbit.
Team up with a Nike+ FuelBand.
Add a Garmin to my wrist.
An app buzzing on my phone at hourly intervals. All of them promising that if I could log enough data points … steps, calories, sleep, water, moods, what colour my hair was… I’d be unstoppable.
Spoiler: I remained very stoppable.
What I actually ended up with was a drawer full of obsolete gadgets because I’d lost the proprietary charger, three abandoned apps that I’d only remember when the recurring subscription charges left my bank account, and the growing suspicion that the only thing I was really tracking was my ability to fail in new formats.
The Grief
And here’s the part I didn’t expect: I still grieve her. That imaginary version of me. The tidy, consistent person I was told I could become with enough grit, discipline, and neon highlighters.
It’s something that’s come up a lot in counselling lately. Grief and Anger.
The Grief of realising I’ve spent decades chasing someone I could never be. The Anger at how long I believed it, how easily the promise was sold to me.
Capitalised because they’re like the characters from an animated movie, driving me onwards to be handed off to the next stage in the relay race of emotions. These are just the first two in a seven character montage. Available soon in a limited edition Funko Pop set.
It hits in small, sharp ways. The sting of old photos where I still looked optimistic, still thought I’d find my way into “normal.” The ache of more recent ones where the exhaustion is written across my face. That me is suffering under the quiet heaviness of all those empty planners, each one insisting I list my “Top 3 tasks for the day” while my brain shrugged and said “Not today Satan.” Too many empty lists wearing heavy on the soul.
Letting that mythical version of me go feels like admitting defeat. Like giving up on the life that was supposed to be waiting just around the corner, if only I tried harder. If only I could use the perfect planner for four whole weeks.
It’s absurd, grieving someone who never existed.
But it’s real. I spent decades chasing her. Longer than my marathon career ever lasted.
What’s Left
So here I am. Surrounded by half-used notebooks, still inconsistent, still messy, still me. I don’t have the imaginary life I was promised, and I’m still figuring out how to stop mourning it.
But maybe the first step is admitting it: that version of me… She isn’t dead. She was never real.
And maybe the second step is laughing about it. Because if I don’t, I’ll just end up buying another notebook for the mausoleum.
So I ask you to please respect my privacy at this difficult time. The funeral will be a small private service for family and accountability buddies only. Afterwards, we’ll lay her to rest among the others in the mausoleum, the planners, the apps, the gadgets … a whole graveyard of good intentions. And maybe that’s okay.
Maybe it’s time to stop haunting the cemetery and just start living in the mess.
I’ve drunk more bad coffee than good, but I’ve never turned down a cup.
The Worst Coffee
When my local Krispy Kreme opened they handed me a cup of what can only be described as caffeinated despair. Burn shots of coffee poured over the water of disappointment. I didn’t complain, obviously, I just drank it and ate my donut. I even went back, just to see if I had been wrong, like it was some sort of Emperors New Clothes trick.
I left the second time absolutely aghast that somewhere could make coffee that was so bad, even I hated it. But I still drank it. Because having bad coffee in hand is still better than having nothing. Lynch knew.
The Best Coffee
On the other end of the spectrum sits Mr Bun’s Bakery, a café in Wellington, New Zealand where I had the best coffee of my life. It was a rainy day, the coffee was the right temperature, the sounds of Wellington just hit the right tempo, and it was just perfect.
Shhh. Just for a moment. Let me remember. FUCK.
I doubt I remember the actual coffee correctly these days. It was more than 20 years ago. If you’ve ever been to Mr Bun’s Bakery in Wellington, New Zealand you’re probably confused at how it’s the best coffee of my life. But every cup since has been chasing that high, and none of them have even come close. It hasn’t stopped me trying though.
Why I Keep Drinking It Anyway
Here’s the thing: it’s not just about taste. I didn’t describe the roast or the altitude the beans were grown at. What the mix of Arabica and Robusta was. Did I get a flat white, or a doppio? Did that matter?
For years I thought I just loved coffee. I’ve worked in coffee chains, opened my own coffee shop. In one place I worked you could plot the times I was away from the location by the change in the amount of beans used in that week. My coffee consumption literally tracked by the kilogram.
Turns out, I was probably self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD with americanos and loyalty cards. Coffee helped me focus. It gave me a ritual. It gave my restless hands something to do and my restless brain something to cling to.
The weirdest part? I’ve never had a caffeine withdrawal headache in my life. Not once. Apparently my nervous system just accepted that coffee is part of the package deal. Superpower, or giant red flag? Hard to tell.
Ritual Over Quality
Good or bad, coffee is less about flavour and more about existence. It’s a prop. A crutch. Proof of life. Even the worst cup can trick my brain into thinking I’m at least doing something.
So yes, I’ll complain. I’ll roll my eyes at the sludge in my cup. But I’ll still drink it. Because god forbid I sit here with nothing in my hands but my thoughts.
Closing Sip
Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.” – David Lynch
I’m fortunate these days that I don’t have to go to Krispy Kreme for coffee, my children don’t need to be bribed with donuts when we go to the city center. There are many great places to get coffee within a short walk, but non of them are Mr Bun’s Bakery.
I didn’t realise at the time, but I was starting my last marathon attempt. It was not my first long run. It was not my first marathon. But it was the last time I purposefully went running.
My previous marathon had been through my birth town. There were crowds, familiar scenery, and reasonable weather despite being on the coast. At the end I cried, some enthusiastic folks gave me my medal and a banana, and they ushered me towards a spot where someone took my photo. (The photo turned out to be very expensive, and I looked terrible in it.) But photography aside, I liked it enough to sign up for another marathon 3 years later.
And now we’re up to date for this story.
Thirteen years ago I started a marathon in my home town. I was excited, and I had trained reasonably well. I was never going to be a fast marathon runner, or in the top percentiles for any age bracket. I wasn’t chasing bling, it was always just a personal thing. Less than 1% of the population complete a marathon. It’s the only 1% I’ll ever qualify for.
But on the day, the weather was horrible. It shouldn’t have been surprising really. The location was once known as “the wettest city in England.” The drizzle was despicable, cold and unending. In stark contrast to my previous marathon, through a city, filled with people, this one fairly quickly went out of town and into the countryside.
The Lancashire countryside is vast and beautiful, but the sheep did not care for the 1650 folks who were foolish enough to want to run long distances on a wet day. The cows were not interested if this was a difficult run or not.
There are, I think, different types of folk who run marathons. There are those who are there to compete, either against people around them, or themselves. The time, the pace is important. It is a race after all.
And then there are those who are there for the experience. They have trained, just like the other folks, but there is less concern about time, and more about completion. I am one of these people. The overall experience for me was misery.
I think it was somewhere around mile twenty one where the first aiders pulled up beside me. I must have looked terrible. Worse even than the expensive finishers photo from my last marathon. I must have sounded terrible too, because I couldn’t even remember my date of birth, or my age.
So that was it. My last marathon. My heroic finale: shuffled off the course by first aiders, wrapped in tin foil like leftovers, and chauffeured across the finish line in a van. Not quite the epic tale of endurance I’d imagined.
And honestly? I let that day kill running and writing in one go. I failed at one hobby, so obviously my brain decided I wasn’t allowed to enjoy the other. Very rational. Top-tier coping strategies.
Thirteen years later, I haven’t run a single marathon. No half marathons, 10k or parkruns. No running anywhere unless it was across a convention center with XLR leads. But here I am, writing again. Because apparently I needed over a decade to recover from typing about exercise. Olympic-level procrastination.
So no, this isn’t some grand running comeback. There’s no training plan. No redemption arc, or even an inspiring 80s montage. It’s just me, finally admitting that one bad day doesn’t have to be the last word.
And if it took me thirteen years to figure that out… well, at least I’m consistent.
I bought a 35mm camera. It’s not a fancy one. You can’t change the fstop, or the ISO or other photography things I don’t know, or understand. You point it and click. It’s a Toy Camera, apparently.
It has a flash. I forget to use it. Forgot to use it. And on the roll of 36 photos, I used flash 7 times.
It took over a week to get the images. I don’t know, nor want to know, how to develop my own film. I sent it away. Queuing in the post office to ask a person to print a lable for me, and sending the film, with the shit photos hidden inside, away.
I had to wait. How did I have the patience to do this as a child? Taking analogue pictures in fast food shops, and theme parks, and waiting for all the exposures to be used, and then waiting to have enough money to have them deveoloped, and then waiting for them to be developed and printed and then waiting to see my friends and family to show them my shit photos. How did I have the patience?
Fuck. I missed it. Not the waiting, but yes the waiting. The waiting was almost the best part of the whole experience. Almost.
Getting the digital scans of the shots, the let down of seeing everything nearly black, the halarious resignation of thinking “oh, I fucked these up” when scrolling through, and the immediate wonder if I’m currently fucking up with the half used roll of film I currently have in the camera right now. Perfect.
