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.
Tag Archives: identity
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.
RIP to the Perfect Notebook
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.
Here’s the deal.
It has been a while since I’ve had the bandwidth to do this. So let’s not waste energy on the whys of stopping, and save the dramatic back stories for RPG sessions. I’m not here to explain, I’m here to make things.
I’m going to get back into using this space for whatever I want. Right now that’s gym trips, carving lino and knitting. But there could be a whole bunch of side quests, or nothing.
No niche, no rules, no schedule.
The deal is, if you’re into it, you’re welcome. If you’re not, you can leave. I’m not the boss of you.
No one wants to hear my voice.
I said this out loud this week.
“No one wants to hear my voice.”
I didn’t realise at the time, but it pissed me off.
It pissed me off so much I wrote it down in one of my many notebooks. It pissed me off so much I took the note book to my therapy session. So I could be pissed off about it some more.
I realised, through the medium of shouting at a person with a PhD, that at some point in the past few years I have begun censoring myself. Keeping quiet, because I’m tired of explaining myself.
I used to speak on live radio, I had popular shows, people did want to hear my voice. I used to be passionate about making content, and it was always content I wanted to consume. It didn’t have to be full and finished, and who cared how many folks listened to it, or watched, or read it.
Who cared if no one consumed your content? You just screamed at the sky and then danced in the moonlight.
But at some point I stopped. I decided that no one wanted to hear my voice. And that included me.
All my photos are shit.
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.
All my photos are shit. And I love them.