It’s been more than a year since you last heard from me. I am sure you’ve all enjoyed the peace and quiet, but as you can tell from this email - that clearly hasn’t stopped me from dusting off the old newsletter today and pick up where I reluctantly left off once the demands of life as a financially-destitute twenty-something in London became too loud to ignore.
This was my year of rest and relaxation: minus the rest, the relaxation and the prescription drugs. Ottessa Moshfeghi could never.
Some of you may remember I took a break from this in early 2022 (a break or a breakdown? that’s for me to know and for you to judge). The event that prompted my decision was an ambitious yet time-consuming writing commission which resulted in me putting together a whole ass book, as this type of product is commonly referred to in publishing circles.
But let’s not dwell too much on the Ghost of Success Past, and allow me to turn your attention to the present (I tend to leave any speculation on the future to tarot readings and that one psychic octopus from Germany): I don’t write anymore. This isn’t a case of writer block, but the gradual breakdown of a long-running habit. I just got too busy with other stuff, and something had to give.
One could argue that the moment I stopped writing was also the moment I became a boring person. When the reporting mindset left my brain, I almost immediately lost any urge for observation and analysis and just started taking life as it is - in the worst possible way. Previously meaningful details of daily life became lost on me as soon as I gave up the need to register them for posterity (or to entertain the very exclusive club of readers who are surprisingly still signed up to this blog).
Maybe my friend Jessie is right, and it really is like riding a bike - a very unhelpful comparison since I’m a pretty awful cyclist. So I have decided to write again, because writing is the one thing, more than any other activity in my life, that gets me out of the house and into the streets. It forces me to pay attention to things I would ignore, speak to people I would not meet, and live experiences I would otherwise only hear about in a TikTok reel while sitting at the bus stop waiting for the 308 bus to Lower Clapton (some things, as you can see, never change).
The inspiration was accidentally gifted to me by my new surroundings: I moved into a room between Hackney Wick and Clapton - the area of London where I lived for three years between 2016 and 2019, which was around the same time I felt I had started to find my voice as a writer.
I spent the past two weeks walking up and down these streets. They haven’t changed much: I drink in the same pubs, walk on the same side of the road, shop in the same places. I am back where I was - which feels like less of a return and more of a defeat. So I felt bothered by something, a buzzing in my ear, the truth hanging in the hair like a mosquito waiting to pierce my already-frail sense of identity: everything feels and looks the same, except myself.
I was pretty cool at 22, you know. Of course, I didn’t know that then, but being back here has forced me to look back at a time when my naivete offered me clearly-defined ambitions and an almost unshakable belief in my ability to achieve them. I remember walking the length of Homerton Road on a random Thursday morning in June, laptop in hand, having just written 3000 decent words and thinking: ‘Hold on… maybe I don’t have to wait for my dreams to come true. This is the dream!’
Years later - I am fully detached from that childlike state of hope, visibly more sceptical of my creative abilities, my capacity to feel worryingly reduced (the very thing that powered most of my creative output back in the day - which is why I now find myself wanting to disown a lot of my early writing). On top of this, I am old enough to judge the life I have against the life I thought I’d have by now. Nothing has properly worked out.
So when I lay down on my beige rug and stare at Joni’s portrait (the one constant through all the 45 flats I have had to change in the past few years, the one reminder of home), I start to think in her voice, asking myself: “Are you just checking out your mojo or are you just fighting off growing old?” And if I’m not in the mood for metaphors I go back to a familiar statement, very effective in its disconcerting basicness: Fuck, this is bad.
Or is it?
I look around and see people live the life I once wanted for myself - but I feel no envy, as it couldn’t be further from what I need now. And maybe that’s convenient, or false, and I am just lying to myself: but when I look at my peers who have made it or are making it, I no longer feel that rush of of inadequacy. It’s all gone.
I have scaled back my relationship with the concept of happiness and accepted that none of those checked boxes are a guaranteed gateway to self-satisfaction. Quite the opposite. There’s no clear path, because the path doesn’t exist: every one of those standard journeys that have panned out in the way they should have are nothing more than artificial machinations, a display of conformity with what is normally perceived to be a Good Life. But if happiness as society proposes it is not achievable - you are left with one option only: do what you want, the way you want it, when you’re ready for it.
I don’t want to descend into banality but happiness truly is a transient state, it comes and it goes, sometimes several times in the space of a day. Buying into the happiness scam is a counter-productive exercise: I don’t want to be happy every day (there simply isn’t enough diazepam in the world), I just want to have fun when I can, do something meaningful for my community and, most crucially, I want to struggle a little less.
Things have not worked out, no - but this state of instability has produced one extremely valuable collateral effect: I am free. I am still free. The page is blank - and it’s all to write for.
N.b
Long story short: the newsletter is back, and when I feel like my life is boring and uneventful, that my stories are not worth telling, all I have to do is look at my arm to remind myself that everything is copy. So every week or so, I’ll come back to you with a mix of anecdotes/facts/opinions, dispatches from the East London frontier, where life moves really fast trying to catch up with the people who make this corner of the world a cauldron of great stories just waiting to be told.
Glad you back, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Staying afloat rather than costantly seeking happiness Is something i learned in my mid20s
Un abbraccio Vale