• There is a particular sort of exhaustion that comes from trying to be a decent person in a world that doesn’t always appear to reward it. Especially when you have to acknowledge that you haven’t always been a decent person yourself. Not a good person. That’s a different thing, and an altogether more complicated claim…

  • The unreliable narrator has been busy. I’ve been taking my little notebook out into the world, writing down some of the ridiculous things my brain tries to convince me are facts, and photographing them wherever I happen to be. It’s a strange little exercise. Some of the notes are funny once they’re out of my…

  • I can feel a grey veil falling over my mind. It sounds lyrical and perhaps beautiful. Like a classical sculpture of a human, sat in a reflective pose, with the most delicate of carving of a veil over their head. Pretty words framing a upcoming miserable period as something aesthetic. Clearly it’s not. But it’s…

  • I dyed my hair blue. A few weeks later I found myself wondering whether that meant I should be buying blue yarn too. An essay about masking, identity, neurodivergent rule-making, and learning that not every preference needs to become a personality.

  • It wasn’t even a big comment. That’s part of the problem.Not an argument. Not a confrontation. Just a sentence, dropped into conversation, the kind of thing that should have passed through me without leaving much of a mark. Except it didn’t.It caught, somewhere inconvenient, and now it’s here. Again.This happens more often than I’d like…

  • Notes on stubborn pleasure in difficult times A Tactic, Not a Philosophy At the beginning of 2025, I started using the phrase aggressive joy like a life raft. It wasn’t aspirational. It wasn’t curated. It definitely wasn’t gentle. It was something I grabbed onto at the start of the year as a way to get…

  • Or: how my brain keeps shouting “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE” during perfectly normal interactions. There’s a part of my brain that is deeply committed to my survival.Unfortunately, it is also extremely dramatic, wildly overconfident, and deeply uninterested in nuance. This is the amygdala. Its job is to notice danger and react fast. It does…

  • I’m 150 days sober. I didn’t mark it on purpose.I didn’t have a countdown or an app or a plan to announce anything. I only checked because people kept bumping into the edge of it, and it turned out to be one of those milestone numbers humans seem to agree are important. Or at least…

  • Tonight I am, against all odds, relaxed.* Not “scrolling while pretending to unwind.” Not “strategically multitasking rest.” Just… sitting. Knitting. Listening to music. Existing. And because my brain can’t leave well enough alone, I went to find a better word for how I’m feeling.** Something more poetic, more dramatic, more me. I opened a thesaurus….

  • Adventures are thrilling, but they’re also loud. For now, I’m choosing the softer kind of noise: kettles boiling, washing machines humming, toast crunching… The Highs August was incredible. Big trips, bright moments, the kind of days that deserve capital letters: The Fringe. The Theme Park. The New Head Office. There were late nights and loud…