I wrote an essay-

(A terrible start to an essay, and a statement I’m sure my therapist learnt to fear)

-about being 6.

About seeing my entire childhood in one photograph.

At the time (of the therapy, not of the essay) that same photo was my lockscreen. I told myself it was a reminder of my child-self, that I should remember her, and live for her, and get in touch with that side of myself. In reality it was a well disguised method of self-torture.

I cut my life easy into segments, and with the income of a new one I took an entire span of consciousness, emotion and experience and quelled it into a single example. Take my childhood: a classification I would describe as since having active memories to the COVID pandemic (13). Many things, good and bad happened, yet what I did was create a nostalgic, painfully rose-tinted singular view. That I was a child who smiled too hard in photos. That everything I did that was too much (and trust me, too much was all I heard too much of the time), was soon to be crushed out of me. That singular photo was a constant scream that I once had joy and it was berated out of me.

Of course, that is not true.

I was also a very sad child.

My rabbit ran away, my neighbour died, I was bullied in school, I got a bad haircut- so many things happened that did not bring me joy. I was not always happy, just like I was not always smiling like that, and just like I did not exist for that time in the perfect carefree way that I now want to return to. But I cannot return somewhere that never existed.

My therapist told me that I needed to change that photo, and that first, I needed to talk to her. Yes, talk at my phone screen, how Gen Z of me, to say what I needed to say to that younger part of me.

The night before therapy, having put it off, then forgotten, I tried. Immediately bursting into tears, I struggled to form the words:

You did so good.

Thank you. You were never too much, or too loud, or too- whatever. You were also really sad sometimes, and you would be really sad again, I got really sad for a bit. But now I’m getting that joy back. Not that you had to be joyful. You didn’t. You weren’t. I’m trying now. To have everything; all the feelings. I don’t think you deserved what you got, I wish we never got separated.

Something along those lines.

She did well, surviving as she did.

She deserved thanks, for all she carried.

She did not need to feel a burden for having bent, and changed.

She did not need to be what she constantly was: grinning. Joyful.

-

I have a tattoo on my right wrist now. Joy.

Ironic, for what I’ve been writing. But it is a very important word for me: my great-grandma -a woman I was very close to and loved dearly- chose that name for herself over her birth name of Phyllis. It’s also one of my middle names. It’s in my high school English teachers handwriting, and I like to think of the placement as a boost to the hand I use dominantly, to create and to write.

This is inconsequential to the point of this essay: phases, but I think that a tangent was suitable, since we are about to undergo whiplash.

-

My housemate/best friend and I were laughing the other day about how this phase in our lives would be called “Carley got bummed”. Carley being our mutual housemate/best friend, and having got bummed. It’s now a fact we constantly remind her of, and we are in support of her continuing to see this man (although he is a certifiable asshole) as she wants to repeat the experience.

So maybe phases in this sense aren’t bad. I’m not a different person since Carely had this encounter, I still very much connect with myself a month ago, and I do not set a photo of myself from before as my homescreen and use it was a way to validate my anger with my mother.

In the words of Matilda (the not-bummed housemate/best friend) it’s a chapter.

Chapters are far better than phases. A continuation of the same story; the same characters, the same writing style, the narrator remaining constant. Me being me across chapters, not addressing myself as she versus I.

I’ve always known nothing in life is permanent, and loved that fact. Since I was younger I knew I wanted to change myself and that I could- a dream of hair dye, and piercings, and different clothes have been lived out and are still forming and being practised. I love my changing self, the way I know hair dye is 2 for £11 in the boots down the road, and the fact that I can take out my smiley any time I want to. I am not a creature that is stone, I am flesh and flesh moves and grows and can bend to accept so much, including barbells.

The one thing that’s hit me that opposes this recently is that I’m going to be gay for the rest of my life. I really struggled with my sexuality, growing up in the places that I did, and with the head that was screwed onto my body (I want to have a conversation with whoever made that join thank you very much). Yet I can say from maybe 15 I was confident enough to know that I definitely like girls, and would date them over guys. But it’s only recently that I’ve really properly mulled over the fact that this isn’t just something I can joke about with my friends, or throw in the faces of guys who creep me out in the club, or hold to my chest like a shield when my mother tells me she doesn’t like my hair, or my nose ring, or my tattoo. It’s something that’s going to stay with me until I die. Possibly the only thing. My gender identity could change, my label for my sexuality could change, my hair will change, and my skin will change, and my nose will grow and my friends will move on, and my books will yellow but I will always like girls.

I’ll marry one, one day, I hope. And she will walk down the road with me and people will look twice, I will have to teach my child that hate exists from an unfairly young age, I will have to correct every doctor that I go to, and maybe one day I will have to fight to be in the same hospice as her.

I will be gay, and have all of those complex, beautiful, challenging experiences, and no matter how much I change; how I smile, if my housemates get bummed, that will stay with me.

So I cannot have phases- I cannot cut myself into seperate characters (I am a year and 5 months and 27 days clean, thank you) and use these past-selves as blame for the feelings I hold now.

I can have chapters, I can be the same author partnered by my sexuality; by my queerness and all that comes with it. Defining things will happen to me -as they did to Carley- and I shall remain.

My childhood is coming up more in conversation, that and all the things it’s caused. I’m thinking about introducing my girlfriend to my parts, and finding that I’m having to explain myself a lot. I thought my family was mostly normal, until I came to university. It’s not, turns out. Actually quite fucked up.

I’m scared.

I’m scared she’ll think I’m fucked up. Or that I fucked them up. Or that I’ll go back to how fucked up I was when I was surrounded by them and I’ll fuck up our relationship.

But I won’t look back on a photo of me in 10 years and just use it to say that I want to be scared again. I’m scared, but I’m excited. I’m hopeful. I’m amused imagining their reactions to her. I’m proud to show her how far I’ve come. I’m not too proud to admit I do love them -my family- beratements and all.

I have a full range of emotions. I always have, and I always will. I feel them all, often too deeply, sometimes to my detriment, but usually now gratefully. I’ve felt numb, a year and 5 months and 27 days ago and I don’t want to go back there.

There is no version of me, even captured in a snapshot, that does not hold all the volumes of experience that human beings boast, and it is unfair to push all of that onto any part of me - including my younger selves.

I have always been me, just as I have always liked girls. I have not always have red hair, just like I have not always had scars, and both of these things will fade.

I am permanent to myself, as a narrator. My chapters, however, they fade through my present, and connect to form my past. My continuous, varying, joyful and sad, past.

Leigh xoxo

(I changed my housemates/best friends names, don’t worry)

It’s a weird feeling, this sort of failure. Because in so many ways its not, and I know its not. I’m not failing, and I can tell myself that, and it’ll be a darn sight better for me than believing any different. But at the same time I remember so vividly thinking to myself “5 years until I go to university”, so I was 13, and planning on how to leave.

Now I’m 18, and I’m coming back.

I say back because my house is not a home and hasn’t been in a while, a quote I’m stealing from an email to an old counsellor now working for a different job, but who said I could keep in touch. I’m doing good, Paige - the email has bounced back - I’m doing really fucking good.

Anyway, this is essay is crowd funded by my 16-25 railcard and tastes of acid in the back of my throat. It’s on leaving and not-leaving, and homes and not-home, but mostly it’s about how I’m not the same person as I was when I was 13, and I need to process through holding myself to these unrealistic expectations.

Freshers week.

I moved in as early as possible, wanted my parents to leave before my housemates came in. I wanted to be organised, able to help them move in. I wanted to be learned without my dad’s sweat patches, and my mum’s tears and their way of calling me. Ellie.

I hold out my hand to the first boy I see. Leigh, room 9, It’s nice to meet you.

It’s felt too small for a while, that name. I can’t find any energy in me to hate it, because Jesus Christ Ellie did the best she could, but she’s been retired, hung up on the wall like my old pair of riding boots. Something that taught me to love what became a part of myself propping up books. Leigh feels like I’ve got room to stretch out and wiggle my toes, to grow my hair out and cut it again and again, to wear platform boots and bullrings and everything that I repeat essay after essay because yes the two words of bullrings and platforms mean more to me than my actual boots that are an odd half-size too big and rub on the heels.

I survived freshers week, and the week after, and the week after, now I’ve been hit. A viral infection, I can barely swallow, I’m coughing up my lungs, my nose and ears are blocked and every part of me feels like 20kg.

Mt tells me to stop, to slow down and let my body recover, so I do. But relaxed for me is not relaxed and I feel worse. Eventually I go to the health service and I get told nothing except that symptoms may include vomiting and nausea.

It’s funny how emetophobia can erase years of clinical depression.

I’m coming home.

I’m a sick kid, hot homesick, but sick. And what do you do when you don’t feel well? You go home. Back to House. The place you left with all your posters, and most of your books, and none of your clothes, and half of your plants, and your old self sat on the bed with your teddys watching the door for you to return.

I wonder if I’ll fit through the door, into the bed. Of course I will, it feels dumb and self-centred to write those words, but please understand that the only thing I feel more than different is the want to feel different. I want to have changed, to have grown, just a little more into the name of Leigh. To have lived up to the girl I made up in my head when I was 13.

I have a girl now. She’s something, something that you can grow in 3 and a half weeks, maybe out of my heart, out of my eyes in cartoonish hearts when she does pull ups on doors, maybe out of the ground beside me, rooted into the soil. I think she’ll grow past me, she’s pretty fucking special like that, too cool for me in every way. But at least I don’t run red lights on my bike. She can ride hers without hands though. You win some, you lose some.

I have friends too, maybe more importantly. I have a sister, or something that feels too much like a kinship to be friendship with Mt. I have a best friend in Z, with her homecut (by me) bangs and breakfast burritos. I have friends who will lend me swimming trunks, and leave makeup pads outside my door because I mentioned I’d forgotten them, and stay up until 9:30 to have dinner with me when I get home.

Home. A student house? With a microwave that leaks black plastic into your food and a haunted corridor with a falling down ceiling leading to three locked doors and a bathroom whose sink is full of neon blue liquid and the stairs that are too steep for the end of a long day. A room with a sill that cracked when I sat on it, so I moved to the floor, the floor my new friends lie on when they work with me, when they come in and talk. When I stopper my door and circle forms on the floor.

I think of that tiktok audio, that video online “What do you want to do with this room?”

“Fill it.”

I think filling is the right word. It might not be achievable, but it’s a goal. I’ll filling up my room with new friends, I’m filling up my shelves, and my wardrobe even metaphorically so soon it’s not half my things there, half my things here. It’s my things with me, my old things there. I’m filling into my personhood, my adulthood, my daughterhood. Returning home when I claimed to hate it, hate them. I cannot hate them, the same way I cannot hate myself, it’s me. It’s me, they’re me, and I’m them, and that fucking sucks but no matter how much of a bitch she can be my mother can make soul healing mac and cheese.

I think at this point the cough syrup has infiltrated my brain. This may never see the light of day. I’m going to go and see if theres more episodes of Abbott Elementary available. And text my girl. Goodbye.

fuck theres a moth in my room

I tried to catch it and thought I held it in my hands and released it, but when I started to type I saw it squashed to the bit where my thumb connects to my palm and I’ve just had to flick it’s corpse out the window. It was an accident.

- anyway. I told my mother I felt uncomfortably pregnant about leaving school. I then told her I wouldn’t use that metaphor in this essay, and that I was not pregnant.

Only one of those is a lie.

I say I feel uncomfortably pregnant because I hurt, I have growing pains and growing scars from stretching far more than it feels one should in school. I want to leave, I want it to change, I want to go back to feeling at home in my skin again, I want to be able to curl up into my folds of flesh, into the room that this change will carve for me. But simultaneously I am loosing a part of myself.

I am 18 years old, and I have spent, technically, 15 of those years in education. For argument’s sake let’s say 10 important ones - pretty formative times in my life, and yet when I paint leavers 2025 across newspaper in red poster paint it feels like a rebellion in itself. I’m getting out I chant to myself as I search for my name on the back of my leaver’s hoodie. I’m getting away from here I sing as I count down how many times I’ve got to walk up the front drive again. I’m growing up I whisper as I push my feet into my school shoes and feel my toes hit the end.

It’s been a wild, unforgettable, traumatizing, uncomfortable, insightful, shitty ride. I’ve been bullied, I’ve bullied (far less than I was bullied, I’d like to add), I’ve got high marks and cried in front of teachers and cried in front of peers and I’ve won hundreds of pounds in competitions and played cards and gossiped and learnt how to suck m&ms up from a ramakin using a straw.

I’ve become a human being about three times over. It all comes back to this desperately separated feeling from own self at different ages which my therapist doesn’t really seem that bothered about.

I grew into a child in Oxford, then into a teenager in Bath, then a COVID person who suddenly woke up one day and was on the path to becoming an adult. I’ve been that person for a long time now, and I’m ready to become an actual adult. An actual human being.

On the author’s note of my favourite book of the moment All hookers go to heaven by Angel B.H it reads: -

theres another moth. I’ll leave this one be. I should shut my window but it’s frustratingly heavy heat for not-yet-summer, so I’m sweating from my palms

-“Angel B.H drew up in Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia. Her second birth was in a punk-lesbian bar in Montreal.”

I think now that I understand what this means. Maybe I’ve missed it - my second birth: sometime in the bookshop when I wrote Leigh on the rota instead of , the time I wore those boots out for the first time, the ones with the platforms, this morning when I called myself a lesbian cowboy.

Maybe it’s still to come?

I don’t know.

But I know someday, in the future, I will write somewhere, sometime:

She was born in Oxford, grew up in Bath. After her second birth she stood straighter, walking down the street, and when the heavy-heat abandons her, she will pull on the faded hoodie with the name she doesn’t call herself printed on the back. It’s tucked into the bottom line of the two, hidden among others she hopes to forget, and others she will never speak to again, but whose names will appear in her writing for many years to come. The two makes up a pattern on the back, screaming- LEAVERS ‘25.

I am leaving school, yes.

But I am leaving myself behind, leaving her to hitchhike her way back to a dorm room with my other selves, where they sleep under quilted blankets, and dream of endless, cotton candy skies.

This is a rough one, just me getting things out there. Be kind to yourselves (and me).

I sit opposite a baby.

It is very small, and rather chubby and altogether very babyish, occasionally blinking at me while it’s parents pass it back and forth, stretching, going to the toilet, walking around. The parents. Not the baby. It just yawns.

It is 11pm in the pediatrics A&E waiting room at my local hospital, and the inside threads my jumper are catching on the blood crusting on my arm.

The baby sneezes.

I stand up, walk into the teen room.

A girl was screaming in there earlier. Bloody murder.

You cunt! I hate you!

I think she was yelling at her mother.

Don’t do that! Stop it! Fuck you!

The baby had just blinked and wiggled its hand.

The teen room is small, windowless and is decorated in the same multi-sized spots as the main room, apart from the fact that they are monochrome grey and black. I return to the baby.

I turn eighteen in four days. Three, now that my arms have been wiped by my mothers tears and my sister has driven home with the eleven granola bars she brought after asking me if I’d left a note.

It’s 2:30am and I’m sitting opposite a doctor who is scrawling notes on a half folded piece of scrap paper.

“Have you ever seen the film Lady Bird?”

I ask him. He shakes his head. I shrug, my arms ache, my eyes ache and my dad is sat in the teen room waiting.

“There’s this bit in it: the daughter asks ‘do you like me?’ and the mother says ‘of course, I love you.’ and the daughter says ‘but do you like me?’”

“I think I’ve seen that clip online.”

I am put in a bed and told to wait until tomorrow. Today, later today, now it is 4am and the ward is dark.

“I’ve never been in the hospital before.”

The nurse is asking me dumb questions while I swing my legs on the table. She asked to see the cuts, to check nothing needed stitching and my dad looked away.

I don’t blame him.

I feel like my own arms are Frankenstein-ed onto my body, some burden I picked up along the way I’m not sure how to shrug off.

“Never?”

“Except when I was born.”

17 years and 361 days ago. Capricorn through and through. Slightly sick, taken away to the incubators. My mother sat on the ward on Christmas day without a baby, with only the Salvation Army Band. It’s the thing I relate to my birth, I showed up, got hurried away, and the Salvation Army Band made her happy.

It’s 11am and I can hear a trombone.

“The Salvation Army band is in the play room.”

The nurse pokes her head around the door of the ward. 6 beds in a neat row. My neighbor on the left is a young girl, complications from flu or something.

“I just don’t like vaccinations.”

Her dad says. She coughs.

I stand up and leave, my parents are in the parents room, drinking shitty tea. I find the play room easily, following the sounds of the band and stand awkwardly behind a group of nurses peering in the door.

The Band play to a few kids, young and generally un-well looking, and I hover and think about how upset my mum is, and wonder why The Salvation Army Band which brought me into the world is also here when I want to leave it.

“Oh, honey.”

A small nurse frowns caringly at me, at me and my tears.

“Are you visiting someone?”

“No, I- I’m here. I turn 18 in a few days.” This makes me cry more for some humiliating but very clear reason. “Christmas Eve.”

“Pet, do you not feel well?”

She pulls me forward and hugs me, and I can only nod into the nape of her neck, my tears soaking her blue uniform.

She thinks that I am ill, that there are cells inside my body that are dying, or bacteria in my lungs, or pathogens running through my blood. I wonder if she would hug me so hard if she was the one that took the bloody penknives from my outstretched hand.

The Salvation Army play on.

I’m not going to be referred. It was only superficial. The woman explains. Digging a knife into your own skin is not enough for the 9 month waiting lists on the NHS.

On the way back to the car my mum asks if we could still make our Sunday lunch booking. I think about how I am late to work. My dad walks ahead of us with his head down.

My jumper is still scratching but I won’t take it off now.

And the hernias back- the granddaughters over soon- poor Simon, loosing her so suddenly-

The last few weeks, the last month, the month before. This season, this year. This year. Hard. Rough. Tough. Painful and exciting and crammed full of achievements and tears and words and hard.

My Spotify wrapped top 10 is comprised entirely of chappell roan and noah kahan - perfectly illustrating my catastrophic swings between unbridled joy and horrific numbness: I’ve got two grade 8s, a uni-level diploma, a grade 7, 3 uni offers, a government scholarship with a guaranteed career; I’ve felt low, out of control and like driving into a tree or carving out my forearms, or screaming at my mother until her ears bleed like something deep inside of me does when she tell me I’m too -pick a word- loud, obnoxious, harsh, much, much. I’m too much.

I have been signed up to counselling by my head of year and I am called a name I can see in the mirror at a job that makes me feel safe. I have had panic attacks and felt the success of overcoming my performance anxiety. I have written hundred of words, of pages: my first long fics, novella length, two of them; essays that won me £500, creative writing pieces that made my English teacher nod, and I have written poems that call my thighs peaches and talk of segmenting them, that call my love unholy and myself monstrous.

I have hated 2024 deeply. I have hated the changes and the absences and the constant feeling of sadness, of sadness and the voice telling me that any happiness is fake. But with each sadness comes, trailing behind, a moment that it came from, or that came from it: my first heartbreak was accompanied by my first kiss, by curling up and watching tangled with someone whose hair I would run my fingers though. My dad leaving each week meant that we actually spent the weekends together; meant I learnt to change engine oil, and windscreen wipers and started to swear in front of him.

I hurt, and Jesus Christ it feels like I hurt a lot right now, but I am telling myself that it is worth it, and that it will be. Because it has to be.

“So, your nose piercing is a celebration?”

“Sort of.” -I spin my chair and wipe my nose on my sleeve- “Kinda.”

My mother hysterically cried at a restaurant terrace in Greece when I told her I was getting my septum pierced.

My head of year is slightly more understanding. Or, at least, doesn’t scream when I try and explain.

“Could you not get it done later? After exams.”

As head girl I should not get my septum pierced. If I wasn’t they could make an exception.

“It’s my 18^th. I need to get it done on my 18^th-”

There is a circle of words going around in my head like the text on a TV tower, but without a corner it cannot peel its way out of my mouth.

“- because I got there, you know?”

Please, please. Use your context clues.

“Because you got there?”

I nod. Wipe my eyes again. My nose. Think about how my eyes might be red in assembly when I stand up and speak as head girl. Head girl who cannot have a nose ring.

Something seems to click, or maybe it’s something she needs courage to say too, because I know that suggesting to someone else they’re -you know- is fucking hard.

“Was there ever a time you thought you wouldn’t?”

Button, then fly and they’re pooling at my feet, I step out of them and kick them into a pile in the corner. My shirt hits the floor a moment later and a roll out my shoulder.

My right shoulder has always been fucked, a dull thud very time I rotate it. I roll it back and forth, feeling it echo through my body and then turn my left, feeling the conscious difference between them, the built-in wonkiness that turns into a great party trick when people are comparing double-jointed thumbs.

I turn and stare over my shoulder, flexing my back. I haven’t been to the gym in ages, but there are a few twists of muscle that make me smile. My back’s always been one of my favourite parts of my body, ballet leotards sorted by backless, price low to high. Paired with a skirt.

A skirt to hide my thighs. The mirror doesn’t show them unless I balance on the side of the bath. So I don’t.

Only leaning down to itch my legs -fuck, I need to wax- and peel off my socks. I take off my bra, examining the red half-moons cut into my sternum and bend in the underwire in my hands, feeling it push back before I toss it onto the stack. My pants are added too, but not before I’ve picked at the torn waistband, hole gaping to bone.

This is a break. A pause. A moment to check my phone, skip a song, stare at myself in the mirror. A checklist of what I can see.

Mole on arm, check. Mole on arm, check. So many fucking moles on arm, check. My collarbones are still attached, legs still working, hands hanging to mid-thigh.

I press in my stomach until I feel the vacuum in my lungs and decide it’s time to continue.

Bracelets first. Two from the right, one from the left, beaded, making a small clatter when they’re put down on the counter. Cotton, knotted bracelet from the right, pink, navy, blue and white that I curl my hand into a cone and tug at for a few seconds. My right hand beats out my thighs for my most-hated body part. Warts crawl from the knuckle, specking across my index and middle finger. I have them on my left too, but they’re more forgivable; easier to forget.

I take my hairband off my wrist and unbuckle my watch. Now my arms are bare. My earrings are clipped around the bracelets to hold them together. First, hoops. Second, stars. Third, hearts. My thirds are stained grey from the cheap jewellery and a pick at the back until a small yellowish crust is pulled away under my nail. Necklaces, the horse one first, then a hesitation before the saint. Saint Maria doesn’t come off for anything.

Except this. She is folded into the ring of my watch, and I am bare.

I skip another song and, step into the shower, wrinkling my nose at the dried hair stuck to the wall.

The next part is easier, more relaxing.

I pick a hangnail until I can grip the curl of flesh and peel it down my finger; the skin separating from flesh. I wrap the skin around two fingers of my right hand, tightening my grip and feeling the resistance. Feeling the bonds breaking, snap snap snap, one at a time until the skin peels to my knuckle and I can see the muscles contract as I turn my hand to expose my palm.

It takes two nails digging into my age line to start the tear and soon my hand is dripping onto the bathmat. The blood makes my grip slippery as I turn to the other hand, levering until I can tear myself fingertip to elbow in a smooth tug. It’s difficult twist my skin over my shoulder, but a flap under my ear leads to one swift drag down my back.

I dissect myself with something edging onto practiced ease, knowing the easy pulls; how to pick each wrinkle out of my forehead. I step out of my skin and flick it from the edge of my toe, landing in a sloppy heap beside my clothes.

The bone snaps off with it, clattering onto the floor, only caught by the drain, so I pick it up and balance it on top of my hair mask.

The rest of my feet are dropped unceremoniously into the Ikea shower basket that hangs tilted on the wall, the smallest falling through the draining holes in the bottom, to be added to the hair mask pile. My shins are wedged alongside shampoo bottles; femurs shoved behind the neck of the shower; hips stacked on top. My pelvis used to hang over the shower head, but since I’ve grown it’s found a home over the drain, guarding it from blocking with the hair tearing in clumps from my skull. I hang that over the pump top of pineapple conditioner and cross the cartoonishly red lumps of my arms to grip under each rip, they creak as I pull them over my head, catching on the cartilage of my nose.

I have no nails left to lever under my eyelids, so I pick and growl until both eyeballs splash onto the floor and roll to rest under the arch of my sacrum.

I turn on the tap and run down the drain.

She sits on stone rafters dusted with cobwebs and

holds up the mouldy ceiling with one finger.

The church is corroding; God chews Her hair

and watches me watch her.

her is not God.

If she were God this would all be easier because

I can mess up Religion like I can mess up the adage.

I can step out, left foot first, sickled and syncopated and wholly unholy

and she will forgive my sins.

My sins dressed up in laddered pearl tights and tied with pink ribbons.

But my sins punched with bullrings and embroidered with inks-

(those that neither can forgive)

they sit, tapping their platformed feet, on the pavement under the arched doorway,

and above it the stained-glass windows that

God leans against each week.

Changement, changement and step, pas de bourrée-

I find God in a broken alternator bearing, the way is screams that I can go wherever I feel.

Coupe, step out a la seconde, développe through-

I find God in a bookshop, in understanding and being understood.

Spring, lean, arms to third, piqué turn en dehors-

I find God in holding people, pressing my fingers into flesh and moles.

Développe, stretch, petit battement retire, 7, 8, step-

I find God in tracing the line from her spine to the high windows.

The church is corroding; God releases the ceiling

and watches me watch her dance.

The idea of ‘fandom’ transgresses the socially accepted stereotype of nerdy, white, middle-class boys without many friends; in fact, you’re probably in one yourself - Swifties, Gooners, ARMY, Tories, Hamilstans - whether it’s a celebrity, sports club, political party, tv show or fictional universe, there is always a fandom behind a media object.

It's not hard to be in a fandom; there is no set initiation, and no necessary level of participation. They support hundreds of millions of people, 47% say that a connection to their fandom is a core part of their identity, and many describe the communities as literally saving their lives. This was especially apparent during the pandemic, when people gravitated back to nostalgic franchises to relive the comfort and joy of that media.

In this essay, I will be focusing on fandoms specifically derived from fictional media such as films, books and TV shows, exploring the dynamics of fandoms and the nature of the transformative works produced by (especially female) fans.

“Fandoms [are a] ‘gift economy’, based not on money or explicit exchanges of goods or services, but on giving, receiving and reciprocating.” (Turk)

Fandoms as economies is a fascinating and wholly possible concept: there is a constant, subconscious transaction between someone commenting on another’s art, volunteering to edit a fanfic, suggesting prompts, organising exchanges, planning conventions or creating websites. A fandom as a whole can be categorised as a ‘participation’ culture; a system “not just of reciprocal giving but of circular giving” (Turk 2014).

Jenkins’s states that fanfics are “a kind of apprenticeship”, evidenced by a study on fanfiction.net researching writer’s overall language ability that showed “accumulating roughly 650 reviews predicts the same increase in lexical diversity as one year of maturation.” This improvement of an author’s talents is usually to other users who frequently comment, leave kudos, or volunteer as editors/beta readers. This is popular in the Sherlock fandom, where authors would rely on ‘Britpick’ editors who would correct Americanised spelling and customs to suit the classically England-set fanfics.

Each hit, or kudos (measurements of ‘views’ or ‘likes’ on AO3) can inspire a fanfic author to publish another work, which would inspire another reader to start producing fan art, this art could inspire another fanfic, which a new fan loves so much they set up a fan page on Instagram, making edits, these edits are to Taylor Swift songs, so intercept Swifties who then join the fandom: there is a constant and unstoppable spread of creative processes headed by the free culture of fandoms.

There are levels within a fandom of - for lack of better work - geekiness, mostly ruled by different fans’ personal opinion. For example, a fan who goes to a fan convention might consider themselves geekier than a fan who only buys and reads the comic, but less geeky than a fan who cosplays. That fan who cosplays might consider themselves geekier than fanfiction readers, but less geeky than fanfiction writers.

“Geek Hierarchy” a flow chart created by Lore Sjoberg purporting to delineate the general rankings of what makes a fan more or less geeky.

“Fandom’s very existence represents a critique of conventional forms of consumer culture.” (Jenkins, 2009)

Archive of Our Own, or AO3 (The title inspired by A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolfe), is a Hugo-Award winning site for transformative works, which holds over 13.5 million fanfics across 67,000 fandoms. Initially started in 2008, it took over from FanLib, a website designed by men with the intention of monetizing fanfiction. Alternately AO3 is a “female-dominated, open-source coding project with a women-led development team” (Professor Coppa, founder). It’s run by bi-annual fundraising harbouring donations up to $620,000 (September 2023), which goes towards server hosting and maintenance. The site itself is run and managed by millions of dollars’ worth of volunteer labour. “Tag wranglers” manage the site’s search system, for example, allowing it to understand that “mermaid” “merman” and “merfolk” are constituents of the “merpeople” tag, as well as pairing ship names and their characters’ slash search, e.g WolfStar and Remus Lupin/Sirius Black, or BlackHill and Maria Hill/Natasha Romanov. Thousands more help translate fan works, making them more accessible globally. At the moment, translators are working specifically into Mandarin, resisting the turn of increasing restriction on free speech in China.

As well as combatting censorship of literature, fanfiction provides sex education in a social environment when the minor provision in (mostly US) schools is heterosexual, boarding on celibacy. Fanfics portray sexual as well as romantic intimacy, addressing issues of consent, sexual safety, communication and sexual trauma better and in far more depth than commercial offerings.

“Women often join fandoms because they provide a space for people to understand their identities and express themselves.” (Dandrow)

‘Curative’ activities, like collecting merchandise or memorizing trivia is associated with male fans, often as a method of policing other fans, especially women; while the vast majority of fanfiction writers are women, hence a naturally feminist subculture that transgresses or subverts the original narrative.

Transformative actions, such as fanfiction, fan art, fan videos, give fans the power to take narratives and characters they are emotionally invested in and translate them more directly to their “feminine, feminist and/or queer investments and desires”. It’s not coincidental that the modern age of fanfiction coincided with the women’s liberation movement. Fan fiction is an opportunity for women to bring female experiences into their favourite media, which are generally written by and about men, giving them a chance to challenge the norms of gender and sexuality.

Seeking a fandom is first and foremost seeking a community who will respect you for who you are, not always a thing women can find in their daily lives.

Although 80% of users on AO3 are women, the proportion of works and ships are predominantly centred around men and male pairings. This is true of most fanfiction sites (e.g fanfiction.net and Wattpad), however AO3 user centreoftheselights posts annual ship stats:

Table of top ships of all time on Archive of Our Own, centreoftheselights

In 2024, of top 100 ships, 63 are M/M, while only 5 are F/F. In the stats of all time, this inequality increases to 70 M/M, and 5 F/F. The top spot is held by Castiel/Dean Winchester from Supernatural (2005) with 105,322 works, while the top F/F ship is ranked 37^th, Kara Danvers/Lena Luther from Supergirl (2015) with 20,322 works.

Within these statistics we can find many trends: the majority of popular pairings are M/M. F/M and F/F pairing are far more likely to be canon and also more likely to be tagged as side pairings or background relationships.

The lack of female pairings (F/F, known as femslash) is fuelled by so many components: namely, a lack of female characters and relationships in the source material gives fanfic authors nothing to work with. There is also a lack of favoured dynamics, those which are more likely to be shipped such as rivals and close friendships are more likely to exist between male characters. The media is usually compulsively heterosexual, with female characters already canonically paired with a man, and misogynistic - female characters are separated from female characters who are not family members. Additionally, fan fiction writers can struggle writing about female characters as it forces them to confront issues like body image, everyday sexism and sexuality which they might find uncomfortable. Finally, straight women want hot guys - although a majority of the users are LGBTQ+, a majority of female writers are straight and write stories with their own preferences: men.

Graph created by centreoftheselights illustrating the possible explanations for a lack of femslash and how they might interlink.

“Fanfiction provide opportunities for fans to enhance the lives of characters they see themselves in, subconsciously imagining a better future for themselves.”

Fandoms are awe-inspiringly massive, All the young dudes by MsKingBean89, the epic, globally renowned Marauders fan fiction has amassed over 15.5 million hits on AO3, which is more than the population of Guinea, the 75^th most populous country in the world. At over 188 chapters and 526,000 words, ATYD has its own Goodreads page, ranked 4.87 stars, readers claiming:

 “As far as I’m concerned, this is neither a fanfiction nor a prequel. It’s the main thing.”

“this was the length of war and peace so it counts ok” (and it pretty much is.)

The Marauders fandom is a fascinating example of fans’ ability to create as a community, regardless of being split by languages, continents and time zones. A simple line in the entire series of Harry Potter has been almost infinitely extrapolated into its own universe, effectively a fandom grown from scratch. The relationship between the Harry Potter fandom and Marauders fandom is comparable to the divide between the Loki and MCU fandoms; they’re derived from the same source material, yet fans can expand on a small aspect of source material and show their affections for this specific element.

The enormous audience on sites for fanfiction has managed to terrify AO3 itself, the site tweeting:

“The Archive recorded 68.6 million page views on Sunday, which is a new weekend high. 448 million page views for the whole week, which is 150 million more than the same time last year. (Are you all okay?)”

Pro tip: never assume the fan fic readers are okay.

ATYD might be the most famous, but it’s certainly not the longest on AO3, that trophy belongs to “The Loud House: revamped” at 16,000,000 words. For comparison, the longest book in the word is Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of things past” with only 1,500,000 words.

All fanfiction is free, since they are derivative works, they cannot be officially published due to copyright. AO3 can be used anonymously as a guest or account user, and fanfiction is free to post without screening or restrictions - astonishing for the fact that it can provide significant opportunities for personal, social and literary development.

What's so wonderful about fanfiction specifically is that it’s easy to read (unless you’re on 294k slow burn sci-fi AUs at 3am). To make room for new characters, to remember their names, and their traits, their backstories and unique nuances is exhausting. You already know that you consuming this media world is worth the investment of your time and energy, so if you want to read something new, but not that new, just try sticking your favourite couple in a coffee shop, or ask yourself what if x had happened?

There are people literally writing books perfectly accessible for free online, taking comments and ideas by actively interacting with their audience. In a world where you pay for books, paper and pens - even water – here, you need a phone and some Wi-Fi and there are novels about your favourite characters for nothing. (Everyone say thank you to the local fanfic writer.)

“It’s far from a utopian entity, it has its own elements of toxicity.” (Govocek)

There are two very generalised images of fans in societies mind: the ‘obsessed loner’, who enjoys collecting memorabilia to store in their basement and methodically clean 8 times a day, and the ‘frenzied fan’ representing the screaming and crying teenage crowd, or the rioting sports fan. Both of these characterisations result in stigmatising and alienating fandom culture, easily stereotyping their participants.  

It is ignorant to blatantly ignore the faults within fandoms. They are inherently echo chambers, so toxicity and single-mindedness can and does foster, as well as criticism erupting from a lack of ethnic, disability and sexuality diversity.

Users can get aggressively controlling over their own specific head canons, or citing those head canons as fanon or canon, while those who publish works very separated from canon, like self-insert character (y/n), character/reader or AUs can face bullying for their own personal, creative decisions.

 Fandoms are spaces that are socially stigmatised into little caves of youth gamers and socially alienated men, divided by this us/them dynamic (possibly derived as fan is short of ‘fanatic’ conjuring an image of a crazed and uncontrollable person) when instead they’re thriving economies designed to bring joy, curiosity and community.

A person who is passionate about an academic subject can be just as passionate about that subject as a member of a fandom is about their media object, yet society views academia as a rational interest held by higher class members of society. The passion of fandoms is opposingly seen as an emotional obsession held by less educated lower-class members of society, which therefore is dangerous.

When Archive of Our Own won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work in 2019 (one, if not the most renowned awards in sci-fi and fiction) one of the founders Naomi Novik accepted the award and invited anyone in the audience who was part of the AO3 community to stand up and accept the award with her. It was a defining moment for fandom culture; in a room full of professional authors, editors, artists and journalists about a third stood up. It demonstrated that fans are not just passive recipients of work, but creatives and creators in their own lives, and second, it destroyed a stereotype of fanfic authors as young amateurs, yes, they are too, but they are also full-time workers in the industry.

I’ve been consciously involved in fandoms for 4 years, and I can sincerely say that if it hasn’t saved my life, it’s certainly changed it. I can speak to the community element first hand; my editor is American, Beta reader Australian, and a user who’s been commenting for 2 years is Spanish, and learnt English through “reading pure fanfics… not even kidding.”. Culture of fandoms is such that my writing a piece of work with representation I never got growing up helped someone else learn a language.

Fandoms are universes within universes; profound social and creative spaces where people can enjoy the media they love, explore their own identities and learn skills like coding, languages and writing. Yes, there can be toxicity and gatekeeping, but ultimately, they are there for people to find and be themselves, with others can relate to the same emotions, experiences or questions. We are all searching for a community, for the ‘found family’ trope within our own lives, and maybe you never expected it to come in the form of an online fandom (to be honest, I didn’t either) but if I’ve learnt one thing from years in fandoms it’s that the first rule is to welcome everyone in.

So go, find yourself a universe.

but alas, i am in amsterdam and i moved into the chair my dad just left because of the frame of sunlight blocking my vision and my mum reminded me to be a ‘kinder and gentler person’ before they left, so i am writing straight into a substack and it is going to be one of those posts.

i grew up in a small town outside of oxford and my home was a car, or rather two, we had a light blue mini with a double door boot and a landrover which i think was dark blue, but i think that one might have been later, so im not sure. i grew up changing and eating and sleeping and crying in the backseat designated to me by my sister when i was born: behind the driver in the big car, behind the passenger in the small car. its still the only places i will sit, even though she is at university and there is noone in the passenger seat.

the point is when i was little i started school after my sister, so my mum would pick me up out of bed, still wrapped in my duvet, and put me in the car, the seatbelt over my cocoon of warmth and dreams, and drive my sister to school as i carried on dozing, and i would wake up back in bed.maybe the backseat of a car was more my bed than my bed, and maybe my home was only my home when i left it.

because we left when i was 9 and since that moment i have called oxford my home, in a bitter ironic sense because i dont fucking live there anymore. i live somewhere else that i associate with people rhyming my name until i want to carve out my thighs with a melon baller and hills. so many fucking hills.

when i was leaving oxford i was too young to realise that home wasnt the address you pre-wrote on the envelopes of the writing sets you gave to your friends as goodbye gifts; you could not tell yourself a place was home, and with the wave of a magic wand it would be.

so home had to become somewhere different.

my family is lucky enough to have a flat on the coast of devon. or maybe not lucky enough- my parents worked fucking hard for fucking long and it made them fucking cruel- or maybe it was luck. anyway.

home was sand between my toes and cold water to my knees, then my waist as we wiggled in the freeing sea, daring our shoulders under until we’d scream.

the we was me and my sister. my sister and I. set back into our set places in our set relationship. i had the bunkbed on the right when you walked in, she had the one on the left. we still do. we still do for everything.

home became devon when i wasnt there, and when it wasnt oxford. home in the practical sense that i visited it frequently enough to pretend i could live there, i could make a life there.

i used to say devon was the only place i could breathe, floating on my back in the sea, arms starfished out, only seeing grey clouds and grey sea. i could breath underneath the water, wet, winged lungs inhaling grainy silence and the heartbeats of a million creatures around me. in the ocean you can never be alone, and you can always go deeper.

but breathing someone does not make it your home.

i got another chance when my dad moved to amsterdam. or rather, he only works there. hes only gone sunday to friday, but really its monday to friday, or sunday to thursday, and its okay because hes home every weekend, because i get to see him, because its not his home. the flat that we chose with my school picture on the island and his scarf on the peg is not his home. his home is where he leaves my mum and i during the week.

amsterdam is my final candidate for home.

its a home i could grow into. i sit in my open waistcoat, with my mismatched rings, having come back from the record store across the street. i am a different person here, i can go out on walks without the fucking hills, the canals are too dirty to breathe in and the address is in a different format- noone will write me letter here.

but it is not mine. it is my fathers. and while i am him in the most terrible ways and in the most comforting ways, i am not him in the way he lives. my house, with my mother is not my home. i am her too, i fear, but only in the terrible ways, in the ways of being not kind enough, not gentle enough, that home is for her, with her paper on the walls and her plants in the garden and her food in the freezer. devon is for my sister, i can breathe there, but she is one of the creatures in the water, she is the one that swims the fastest; that gets dolphin prints and goggles and starfish earrings for her birthday. oxford is for the version me that wrote addresses on envelopes i never saw again, and thats all there is to it.

i want to say my home is the ocean, because there you can scream and nobody hears you, you can cry and noone will know and i can breathe, i can breathe.

i am floating here, on my back, toes pointed out to where the sun is setting, body following their path through the lava trailing down the hips of small waves. i have a headcold, and my swim suit is rubbing, but there are creatures below me that have grown lungs to breathe salt and soon i will too. home is out there, floating, a brief flash of something on the horizon, so after i have rested i will roll over and swim. i will pick a direction and just swim, until i find my buoy.

“you do so much! how do you not break?”

like i am a cardboard structure they’re slowly lowering weight on until it crumbles.

she smiled and laughed because it was Funny and Concerned and Showed She Cared About My Welfare.

i smiled and laughed and answered:

"oh i broke when i was nine. im running on fumes now.”

because its Funny.

because i can’t remember the last time i wasn’t tired.

my economics teacher did the same thing last week.

“im going to be honest with you, child.” (she calls all of us child) “i am worried about you. you look so tired, so exhausted.”

i resisted the urge to roll my eyes. i have looked in a mirror recently.

i wonder when it just because some sort of awkwardly amusing thing that they can bring up to get a mental health check in tick box in there head. i wonder if they would give me less homework, if they knew i wasn’t sleeping. if they would let me go home, if they knew my dad was at home.

there such a one dimensional aspect to asking for help now, or at least in my school, anyway. they do it- they ask, we lie- and its done.

ive never liked to ask for help. my mum has always said this to me like it is a part of how i grew up, filed between the fact i play the saxophone, and my favourite book when i was a child.

i grew up with an older sister, and two parents who cared too much and too often but often in the wrong ways, so i swing between feeling everything in some catastrophically unmanageable way, and feeling nothing rather desperately.

no matter how im feeling, i have shit to do: how i feel isnt going to take that away. im not going to ask for help because all thats going to happen is im going to waste my time explaining something deep inside of me to people who cannot really understand and then have to do the damn work anyway.

i feel like that is what my world doesnt really get right, i feel like i cant ask for help because the help that they give me is a waste of my time and ill still have to do the things i wanted help with at the end of it anyway.

i dont want to someone to laugh when i say that i am broken, i dont want some to frown when i say that i am tired, i want someone to sit down with me and make a list of everything ive got to do, set dates on them, and give me the tools to get them done. and i dont want to ask for it, i want it to be a mechanism to replace asking teenage girls how they do not break, or telling them they look tired.

and while me myself and i could probably achieve this glorious, life-solving list in about an hour, i dont want to have to do it myself. i dont want to have to pull myself out of my own head and tell myself that no, traffic and trees and split knuckles are not an option. because somewhere in me i also feel that its not my fucking fault i feel this way, and therefore the people who broke me should hold some responsibility to fix me.

but im leaving school this year. im finishing, its okay. its been nine years since i was nine, ive been doing this longer than i havent so whats a little more?

this is not some sort of dramatic anonymous cry for help, because i do not ask for help (which is in my personality somewhere). this is me saying ‘hey, what the fuck?’ to my education system, my dt teacher and my econ teacher.

the thing is, when you dont ask for help and when you think you broke at age nine, you learn to roll with it. ive got good grades, good enough to apply for oxbridge, ive got two uni offers and a scholarship and five hundred quid in my bank account for an essay i wrote. im chill now, im sorted, im out of here in two terms, no skin off my back.

no skin off my back, but a metric shit ton of regrets.

on the fact that i worked so hard on the essay only worth one point, on that dumb thing i said to that teacher, on that oral exam i totally screwed up because i was stressed. i have regrets about my academic life, but none for the stuff i did to cope with it. i dont regret selling my soul to ao3, to writing and writing and prioritising writing over work. i dont regret starting this substack. i dont regret all my procrastinating or my breakdowns or my panic attacks. because i did it. i would take this weird ass, media dependent, tired life over any sort of perfect other person-dependent peaceful one.

ive become stupid and careless and exhausted enough to tell the girl i love that i like her, to write a 40 chapter love story because i never had one that fit my type of attraction when i was growing up, to choose a uni i want over a uni thats good and academic.

I am comfortable sitting with myself now. My body still doesn’t quite fit, but I’m piercing my nose on my birthday, and dying my hair after my exams, and getting a tattoo at some point: I’m knocking down some walls, pasting up some wallpaper; making myself at home still. But my mind, my soul, whatever the hell else is in there; I’m comfortable with that now.

A herd of zebra

& One fly drinking from the

Seven lines of blood on my thigh.

A hippopotamus,

another hippo,

Two cheetah,

a crush on the cute British Girl with a slicked back ponytail and gold hoops

questions about my illegality.

Twenty-four elephant,

Sixteen white birds,

thoughts about eating steak, watching a lion tear apart a bison.

Two manes of blood.

A herd of wild wildebeest,

One of those funny looking birds.

Too many jokes about my sister and warthogs.

One rare leopard,

Nine lions,

questions for a henna about how it feels

to climb inside a buffalo’s rib cage.

Three more elephant,

Two lion cubs,

A herd of antelope,

And myself

hung by my feet from a tree, stripped of meat and waiting for the

Three vultures to pick me, finally, clean.

You’re made of very complex elements. So am I, so is this laptop, so is my watch, my hair, my rings, everything and anything I can see in front of me to name is.

The universe didn’t start complex though, it started with the most basic of elements: hydrogen, helium, maybe some lithium if you squint. You, on the other hand, are heavy elements: carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron – making you you took nuclear fusion.

Everything we are made of was forged in the heart of stars.

Fusion only occurred in stars, the elements were created, then spread into space by interstellar winds. Any heavier than iron come from somewhere even cooler- supernova explosions. These massive clouds of elements then fuse to form actual things, like the sun, the earth, you.

You are made up of star dynamite.

This brings me very easily into my favourite law of physics: the first law of thermodynamics. Put simply:

“No energy in this world is created, and none is destroyed”

The entire universe has energy. And it can only have this much energy. So that means all of the energy inside us came from somewhere and will end up somewhere else. Every atom in our body, every tiny little measure of energy will go onto be something else: a frisbee, an elephant, a waterlily.

We are the world, and we will be the world.

Every part of us was a part of something else once, and everything around us could have been a part of us. We are surrounded by ourselves, because when you zoom in hard enough atoms are atoms and energy is energy and we all share them.

Imagine a piece of string with a rock tied on the end. Now pin the non-rock-end of the string in place and give the rock-end a push. Wow. You’ve got yourself Simple Harmonic Motion.

SHM is best described in the equation: x=-a.

It doesn’t look as horrible as most physics equations, and that’s because it really isn’t. All it’s saying is that displacement (x) is equal to acceleration (a); basically, the more you pull it up to the side before letting it go, the faster it travels away from that. The minus sign just shows it’s accelerating in the opposite direction to where you pulled it.

The point is: it always returns to equilibrium, the middle, where everything is calm and balanced and even and you can breathe.

 No matter how high the extremes are everything balances, and everything is always working to return to the balance. For every moment you’re lying on the floor too tired to cry, but too sad to sleep there’s a moment (even if it’s in the future) where you’re laughing so hard you actually are crying.

Think of sadness to the left and joy to the right, you’re the little rock. No matter how hard you pull towards sadness you will always end up making a passing visit to equilibrium, then to joy, then back to equilibrium. And the higher you are on the sadness, the faster and higher you’ll return to joy- it’s proportional. It all cancels out to balance in the end.

The final one is a quote I saw:

“You can’t feel motion at constant velocity.”

Sit as still as you can, or stand, or lie, I don’t know how you take your substacks. But stay still.

You’re still right?

Wrong.

You’re actually moving at about 1038 miles per hour relative to the centre of the Earth. Can you feel it?

No. Because you’re in your own reference frame, everything moves relative to you.

You’re moving at 1028 mph relative to the centre of the Earth.

You’re also moving at 67,000 mph relative to the sun.

You’re also moving at 54,000 mph relative to the centre of the milky way.

The point is that all of these are constant, you can’t feel motion at constant velocity.

But the universe is massive, so lets imagine this at a small scale. You’re sat on a train, and there’s a train right next to you, that’s me, I’m on that train, suddenly I start to move. Or do I? You know that feeling where you’re not entirely sure whose moving? That’s relativity.

Your train moves at 60mph, my train moves at 60mph. All you see out of your window is into my window, I wave at you. Your reference frame is always still and I’m moving at the same speed as you, 0mph relative to you. We’re both still, even though we’re going 60mph.

Suddenly, my train speeds up, I’m now going 80mph. I start to move away from you, now waving goodbye. I’m moving at 20mph relative to you.

Your reference frame is always still, even when you feel stuck, when you feel left behind or incapable of evolution or change, you’re hurtling through space on a rock that’s travelling thousands of miles an hour. You will never stay still, but you’ll never be alone, because I’m also hurtling through space on that same rock.

Hi, I’m waving through my train window. You’re not stagnant, you’re flying.

Cells regenerate every seven to ten years. I am not her anymore. I am not the girl in the brown polka dot dress.

She has a name, and it is the name I am called, and the name I see scratched in fleshy lipstick on the mirror above my head when my mother leaves me messages when she leaves. It is a name I connect with the blue, pink and green pastel friendship bench in my primary school’s courtyard, with the feeling of tying bows behind my back, with conversations with my sister.

I wonder who I am now, as a Theseus’s ship of a person.

If you have a girl and every part of her changes, is she still the same girl?

If the parts are swept off the floor with a dustpan and brush, hairy and mixed with dust and shards of glass, are they more of a girl than she is?

“Talk about yourself, like, now.”

Uh.

I’m taller than my mum, than my sister and my grandma, but still not tall enough- I got a pair of Dr Martens for my 15th birthday, a size too big, to grow into. They shake around on my feet now, pulling down my socks.

My knees still buckle when I stand in ballet, curving backwards in a bow. I never wear pigtails anymore- I sleep with two long plaits. Since I grew my hair out, at least.

In seven to ten years what new person will I be?

I will have a septum piercing. I will wear gold moon nose rings, and silver hoops. I will run, every morning. I will learn to do a pull up. I’ll cook myself dinner, I’ll cook her dinner, I’ll cook her breakfast. I’ll pick her flowers, and clean our room, and plait her hair. I will love her. I will walk my dog, train it with perfect recall. I’ll take dance classes again, adult ballet, and senior tap. I’ll dye my hair pink and watch it fade so I can do it all over again. I’ll love, I swear I will.

I have loved, I love, I will love.

I promise myself myself. I promise I’ll wash my face every morning and night, I’ll floss. I’ll use cleansing shampoo. I’ll moisturise my legs. I’ll do better, I’ll get better, treat myself better. I’ll go to sleep on time. I’ll stop scrolling until 11, and writing until 1 and reading until 3. I’ll sleep.

The girl -in the brown polka dot dress, in Australia, in her 8th year, in the photograph- is standing on my right.

“Who are you?”

I look to my left.

There is a woman standing there. She has hair that’s cherry when it catches the light, and a star hanging above her top lip. She’s wearing boots with three pairs of socks and there is a mark on the side of her neck when she tilts her head to examine me.

“Who are you?”

I look straight ahead.

They taught me osmosis in school, but not how to hold my breath

When I return,

I am bloated; they heave as they drag me,

Up to the new shore line, beating my chest as they

Violate my lungs

My wet, winged lungs, sodden and calm

Are tormented into submission

When I breathe, I transform

Skin peeling into scales, into teeth, into

A creature torn from sanctity

The fishermen can weep and pray,

But their nets cannot catch my mercy

So I eat their skin.

Spilling their guts back to the ocean.

I try to find a response.

Because I didn’t eat my vegetables.

Because I failed my maths test, this is what happens when you get under 65%.

I spent too long reading books as a child, the ink indented into me.

Because I kissed a girl, God is punishing me.

I stepped on a crack on the way to school.

One day I was writing a piece of coursework in the kitchen and I looked my my left and a fox was carrying my rabbit’s corpse in it’s mouth.

I didn’t call my sister back.

I didn’t call my dad back.

Each star I can name fell down onto my face.

I had a panic attack in my Spanish Oral. So how I have to re-sit.

This is what happens when you grow old, you turn into a monster of yourself.

I sat in front of a mirror and peeled roots out of my face.

Every year since I was 6 I’ve done something wrong and these are the scars.

“I’m old and stressed.”

I smile, and tap the top of her bun.

“Now where’s your tiara? Princesses always have to have pointed toes.”

three days ago i thought about that time i swam one and a half kilometres across a bay in greece until i could put my head underwater and only see blue in every direction and thought that to share a grave with whale falls wouldn’t be the worse thing in the world.

two days ago i made myself a hot chocolate, got my car keys, and decided that i would feel joy.

i turned put on this tiny coat that didn’t really fit over my jumper, walked out to my car (i haven’t passed my test yet, if you must know) and turned on the headlights, illuminating, at a push, 10m of road. i got my nearly played out second hand queen greatest hits cassette out of the glove box and loaded it into the tape deck unit my dad and i wired in 3 months ago, that still hangs half out of the dashboard, hit play and opened all the doors.

i taught myself to ripstick.

i live in a town where there isn’t too much light pollution, so i could see the stars, i could hear bohemian rhapsody, i could taste my hot chocolate, i could rip-stick 10 metres down the road until i went out of the zone-of-sight and feared for death-by-pot-hole. i felt really fucking cool and i feared death.

i wonder, quite frequently, if i was born in the decade. i collect books and plants and records and cassette players and drive a car as old as is safe enough on the motorways but cheap enough to afford and own 3 different coloured leather trenchcoats. and then i think to myself ‘you absolute twit’ because im not cool or different or born in the wrong decade- i have 35% bookshop discount, attachment issues and my dad lives in amsterdam where there are lots of second hand clothes shops.

i scroll on pinterest until i feel too understood. i binge watch tv shows on illegal websites. i write on ao3. i write on substack. i need to live in the 21st century or i may melt into a puddle of media-dependent ink.

i feel the need to tell people that i felt cool two nights ago, for gods sakes.

the constant need to feel individuality is so deeply rooted within me and my universe that i can’t pull away from it. i’m just a girl memes invade my instagram, im not like other girls videos are all over tiktok, pov: some niche thing noone else thinks is cool is fed to me every single day.

but im not just a girl. im female identifying, yes, but im also queer. and im just a gay. im also a student, and im just sleep deprived. im a younger sister, and im just a disappointment. you cannot take a three dimensional human being and vacuum pack them into being ‘just’ anything. this is the problem with the trend of individuality versus the many: versus girlhood.

im pretty sure girlhood (at least to me) is just a buzzword created by capitalism after they realised the microcosm of teenage-girl’s culture was profitable.

I’m even writing in fucking lowercase to be demure, to be mindful, to be digestible as a girl taking up space on the internet. I’m writing in lowercase to be cool.

Coolness and Girlhood is not something I can relate to each other, mostly because the times I have felt cool I have not felt girly, and the time I have felt girly I don’t actually think I felt girly, I just pinned a bow into my hair and tried to listen to Lana del Ray. (I’m sorry, but she’s just not for me)

Girlhood for me is untouchable; I’m 17 years old. I’m not yet a legal adult- I’m not a woman. I’m not a legal minor- I’m not a girl.

I’m on a bridge of physics homework and spots and my mum washing my socks between childhood as a girl, and girlhood as a woman. So I’ve taken this two year gap between 16 and 18 and decided to make myself cool. And I think, to my own opinion, I’ve been successful.

I hope 6-year old me, girl-me would be proud, and I hope 20-year old me, girl-me will be proud, but right now 17-year old me, cool-me has got to go and finish my Physics coursework- until next time.

Mostly because my outside layer does not look like the type of body that should, or would be, attracted to women. Which is what the inside of my head feels.

I lived somewhere, until I was nine, and then I moved and left some big part of myself I was too young to fit in my suitcase at home there. I moved here and was promptly bullied until the pandemic for reasons I cannot remember and in ways I cannot remember except to say that it was when I first felt that maybe I was just really fucking weird, and that wasn’t okay.

Then covid hit, and I don’t remember what happened, except that by the end of it I was really fucking weird, and that was okay. But I was also gay, and that was not okay.

Sidenote: my internalised homophobia is wrong, I know that. I know that queerness is okay, and that I was born this way. But that is all theoretical; things I know but are hard to practice.

The problem is that I don’t think that, not in the little corner of my brain that screams every time I see my best friend.

When I was younger attraction to women (before I noticeably felt it) was boring and burnt out- the kind of love that you see between couples at your parents Christmas party- the kind that gets each other the wrong type of drink, and glares when the other eats too many crisps and has a child that looks half like the other person.

As I got older this attraction become predatory.

I see men being attracted to women and so often this is linked to evil or controlling behaviours. I watched movies where the guy would kiss the girl in the rain and at first she would fight it, but as he grabbed her and carried on kissing her she would melt into it. I read books where the villain would capture the girl and hold her captive, torturing her with smirks and idle threats until she would fall in love. I was taught about abusive relationships in school (an all girl’s school, mind you) about men who control what you wear, how you speak, how you spend money and it’s so much more common than you realise and so much more easy to fall into than you realise.

Slowly, but surely, I learnt that attraction to women was inextricably and unconditionally linked to violence.

Which means that when I felt it, I felt like a villain.

Liking women is something that I’ve tried to avoid since I’ve realised I had it in me to avoid. It’s like the dress that someone gives you for your birthday without a receipt, so it hangs in the back of your wardrobe, and you cover it with something else, so no one realises it’s there and makes you try it on.

The first time I came out was to myself, and in a way, I was forced out: I was sat in the dining hall, talking about a shirt I had brought with my mum at the weekend that I loved and the girl I was talking to looked at me and said:

“There is no way you’re straight.”

And let’s be clear, I fucking knew that. I knew that. But it was kept firmly three jumpers deep in a crumbled ball in the back of my head.

So that was it for me and heterosexuality. I was bi-curious, then bi, much later queer, and now I sit in an odd space that I would call lesbian if a guy asked me out, but I tell people I don’t like bi, and tell myself queer. Maybe I’m lying to myself, maybe I’m lying to them? I don’t know that yet.

I learnt to come out to people in a diluted, forceful way fuelled by the same girl who outed me to myself, when she outed me to half our year group by naming two girls and a guy for marry kiss kill.

After two or so years I’d come out so many times to so many people that I saw it as fun, mostly because I loved it when they looked shocked.

They looked surprised, thinking I was straight, and I liked it. So, I evolved to look more straight, to act more straight, at least in the stereotypical ways that don’t actually exist because there is no such thing as looking gay.

So, there I was, teenage and queer and confused, looking straight for fun but wanting to see other people on the street and for them to know. There I was, out the girl who cut my hair once, but not my mother. There I was, feeling something that made me feel sick because I never wanted to be attracted to a woman the only way I knew men to be attracted to women like.

And then I had the most brilliant brain wave that maybe, just maybe women-liking-women is different than men-liking-women.

There is still violence in it, there is still abuse and control and boredom of Christmas parties. There is everything in every relationship, while simultaneously none are ever the same.

It’s apples and oranges, scissors and rock. I am not a man, I am a woman, not raised with the same allowances as boys-who-will-be-boys who just banter as they grow up who have reputations to protect. I am a woman and anything that I do will be deeply personal and unique.*

This is my mantra: what I cling onto with two hands when I pull the dress out of my wardrobe and try it on. It will always fit me; it’s grown up with me. Maybe I was given it a bit too young, eating cold school turkey in a busy lunch-hall, thinking it was blue, pink and purple. But I’ve got sharp scissors and a knack for sewing so I’ve dropped the hem and cut off the sleeves and bleached it in preparation for when I’m brave enough to dye it the pink, orange and white inks I brought 6 months ago.

I live in a world where the majority of the time I watch men liking women (often with elements of predation) to the extent that when I watch women liking women, I still see it through the eyes of men: a woman-liking women watching men-liking-women watching women-liking-women.

So here I am now, wearing chunky rings and converse and goose pride pins and looking at people on the street thinking I know. Here I am, still not out to my mother, but feeling comfortable sitting with that-it’s a choice now. Here I am, feeling something that makes me smile, makes me think of my future with a wife and maybe-kids, with a hopefully-dog and with a probably-cat.

I still want to peel off my skin with my own fingernails sometimes, but I know that even if I do that the bit inside of me that really really loves Warrior Nun (Netflix, 2022) won’t come away in the flesh and blood.

My love is deeply personal and unique. My love is deeply personal and unique.

*(Let me be clear, I’m not saying I can’t do bad things, I know I can be mean and bitter and stubborn too.)

I am a little jigsaw puzzle of everyone in my life. From nature or nurture my family, friends and other factors have left their print on me and my personality. Speaking through the thin and slightly monotonous voice of calibri light I am aware my personality is that of an anonymous schoolgirl, yet I have been told by others that I am energetic, loyal, calm in stressful situations and stressed in most others. I can list, almost immediately, where I link these traits respectively to: my sister, my friends, my father and my mother.

These are people which have been so formative in my life, and in this essay I will compare them to other factors that have influenced me; my school and work life, and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Are the influences of these my own choice, decided freely in a free society? Or are they the result of a set path that I can only follow?

My family is ultimately the biggest factor in my life thus far, mostly due to my reliance on them for support, education and driving practice. The butterfly effect is a powerful thing; I’ve grown to see my personality shaped by dance after my mother enrolling me in ballet classes aged 3, learning perseverance, strength, and kindness. In the terms of influencing my own outcomes, (in this example) free will is almost irrelevant - at that age I would eat a butterfly - so I doubt baby-me had any say or opinion in the matter.

My family, as a formative factor have greatly influenced my life and who I’ve become today, and I don’t believe this shows free will. I respect and value my parents, and their opinions (except in some fashion choices) and therefore trust them to make me into the best person I can be, even when I haven’t had a choice in the matter.

Free will is an added bonus to this factor; I cannot say “no” when my mother decides that we are going to drive 5 hours to a swim gala for my sister. Maybe this every weekend, gave me my slightly bitter traits, that are technically unavoidable since I spent my free time sweating in a chlorine filled hell hole.

Friends are the family you chose for yourself. It’s a strong book trope, and also something I heartily believe in; I didn’t choose my sister, but I did chose my best friend, who has been a massive influence in my life. I decided that I would play with her at break time, and I asked her have as sleep over at my house, and to this extent I also played a 50% role in creating and protecting a near 10 year friendship. It’s Amalie’s recycled jokes that I’ll use in the common room, and its her tips I use to make cute Instagram stories and her who I played rock paper scissors with to decide whether I did French or geography GCSE. (I won with rock and did French.) To this extent my own decisions to befriend her as influenced my personality now.

I turned 13 in New Zealand, and I remember vaguely asking my mum what the virus thing was, and how likely it was to come to the UK. She told me that 200 or 300 people would get Covid-19 in the UK, and that yes, she was sure, because her doctor-friend had told her (and of course, her doctor-friend was always right). 3 months later we were in lockdown, and for the next 2 years I continued to grow in a frozen world.

I feel genuinely lucky to have been in a position with healthy family members, and parents who didn’t work in the health service, and I will acknowledge that my experience of lockdown was incredibly fortunate.

Yet I cant help but point a very big finger at the Pandemic, and name it as one of the greatest formative factors in my life. I don’t really remember the lockdowns, I remember them being over all of a sudden and looking down at myself realising that I was now a foot taller, gay and reliant on catastrophic amount of media for guiltless happiness.

Although the pandemic itself was not in any way related to my free will, the activities and choices I made within the murky depths of it certainly allowed me to influence the way I emerged from it, and how my life has changed since.

In my introduction I asked two questions, two sides to the same coin: Are the influences of these [factors] my own choice, decided freely in a free society? Or are they the result of a set path that I can only follow?  I fear I have not answered them, and maybe that has always been the set destiny of this essay, decided 2 years ago when I was halfway through a book about nature versus nurture and dropped it in the bath.

Ferius Parfax (Spellslinger, Sebastien de Castell) said something along the YA-fantasy-book-character lines of “We don’t choose our paths, only what meaning we give them.” and I think I might agree (add indecisive to my personality trait list). I did not chose the greatest formative factors in my life: my family, my school environment, the pandemic, but I did chose the ways in which I let them affect me.

I take pride in the fact I’ve copied my sister’s awkward way of sticking her thumbs up in social situations, and enthusiastically join my dad in his off-key show tune singing. I walked up to the girl with the nicest hair and asked if I could plait it, unintentionally starting a pact that I’ll do her hair for her wedding. During the pandemic I decided to dye my hair pink, and start reading poetry and pin Marvel posters on my walls.

In conclusion I believe that free will has definitely allowed me to influence the way I’ve turned out, but I also refuse to take all the credit, areas where I didn’t have free choice have also shaped me, and although at the time I hated it, looking back I try to think that maybe, just maybe, it might have all been worth it.   

“dont look up”

“dont look up script”

because my memory is almost as bad as my spelling and this substack will be nothing if not anatomically correct.

First of all, all kudos to Adam McKay for creating a world so tragic and chaotic that when the TV turned off I kind of looked around and went ‘oh well what’s different?’ and also for having a name very similar to the guy who wrote the book about the NHS that everyone loved and I hated and apparently hes also kinda a mean guy.

(It might be worth noting at this point that i looked up and vaguely shouted who was the guy that wrote the book about the nhs and being a doctor in the nhs, to which my dad replied “I have no clue” and then my mum yelled “This is going to hurt” not a threat but the correct answer)

This is not a recommendation of the book This is going to hurt (2017) by Adam KAY, or of the subsequent tv show This is going to hurt (2022) which my parents have apparently “got to finish”. This is also probably not a recommendation of Don’t look up (2021) because having finished it im left in a rather frail state of despair and acute shock, partly due to how realistic a very ignored extinction level extent is, but mostly due to Timothée Chalamet’s (please note i got the spelling correct first time) part it in.

But that will be covered in due course as I welcome you to:

my thoughts on Don’t look up in a very particular order thanks to the script I’m about to pull up on the other side of my screen.

*

First of all, its absolutely wild that our character of Kate Dibiasky played by Jennifer Lawrence is described as “[riding] a fine line between geeky and alternative” in the first line of the script for the fact she has reddish hair, a mullet that is only really a mullet if you’re a conservative 40 year old woman squinting, and wears eyeliner. Maybe it’s the scandalous nose pierceing that tips her over the edge, who knows?

She discovers a comet her “jaw drops” and we cut to something else-

That something else is them naming the comet after her and surprise surprise its on a collision course with Earth, worked out after leo (the only name i will refer to leonardo di caprio (the grammatically correct caps had a short run) as) does some very fun looking maths very very fast in a montage because maths is not interesting enough to hollywood.

*

the cinematography is fun in the only way that i can describe it as because i have absolutely no professional or otherwise teachings that means i am qualified to give comments such as these out. it was fun and i say it is fun at this point because after discovering that the jen-law-comet is going to smash hells bells into our literal world the comment that fades dramatically onto screen is:

“I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.” - Jack Handey

Which is a choice i would love not to comment on but im going to:

i really really really want a carpool karaoke with jack handey’s grandad.

*

Stuff happens (watch the movie) (or dont) and jen says “i need to go get high” which i think is valid if you’re just a physics phd student trying to get a phd and instead you get a earth destroying comet named after you, while still having to do physics phd stuff.

*

high point of the movie: we have a female president

higher point of the movie: that president is meryl streep (What Is This Cast?)

low point of the movie: she really sucks

*

also a point that jen comes back to again and again in the movie is that with 3 star general guy at the white house (cus they go there to tell bad-female-president meryl about the earth destroying jen-named comet. keep up.) asks them to pay them back for the snacks that he gets them and then later we find out the snacks are free.

*

A probably important bit to the story line is that leo has a wife and kids and we are introduced to them with the line

“Marshall got a 180 on his LSATs and we’re celebrating”

after which, with no knowledge of the american schooling system, i assumed marshall would be a 12 year old child but nope hes a fully grown man. he and his brother (early 20s and mid 20s the script helpfully provides) live with their mother for reasons we are not introduced to.

also im about 80% sure their mother is shauna from Yellowjackets (2021) which i now know is true because i just had to google when yellow jackets was made.

she is called melanie lynskey and i did have to double check if she is leo’s wife and got the answer yes, and its good because i also found the quote

“she hurls prescription bottles at on-screen husband Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) after she catches him cheating”

which is both a spoiler and a good point since i might have forgotten to put that in.

*

side note: watch yellowjackets (2021) at your own risk. and there is a high risk because oh my lord it is a wild ride.

and not wild like a jen-named comet destroying the earth, but wild like the fact i saw leo’s wife and went oh yeah, i know her from yellow jackets cus shes the one that eats the ear off her best friend’s frozen corpse.

yikes.

*

i now must delete all my melanie lynskey tabs to return to my script.

ah yes.

we are introduced to the president, who is an idiot. the president’s son, who is an idiot. this other guy in the oval office whose purpose i cant remember and have scrolled past on the script, who is an idiot.

they all decide that the midterms are very important and therefore the earth destroying jen-comet is going to be vastly ignored.

jen is revealed to have a boyfriend, who is mostly a very script-helpful guy who fills in the holes of how they get connected to a chat show appearance and tells us no, jen is not a lesbian even though she is an astro physics phd candidate “[riding] a fine line between geeky and alternative”. the non-lesbianism is, of course, integral for timothee chalamet’s role in the film.

*

cate balnchet turns up at somepoint after my dad points out “its cate blanchet” because if you give her a side fringe and blow out she is unrecognizable to me.

she is a chat show person alongside this other guy who interview jen (kate) and leo (sciencey professor) and ignore all comments they make about The End Of The World because ariana grande (What Is This Cast?) just got engaged over a zoom link to the person she broke up with.

cate flirts with leo in a way that makes us all uncomfortable and jen (kate) freaks out because of the whole we are all going to die situation.

*

i very deeply relate to jen (kate) because she can time the demise of earth to the second due to the fact she downloaded a diet timer to count down the days to the moment of impact and validates this by saying:

“Only I’m not on a diet, I’m just crying five times a day.”

and then:

Kate begins to cry.

the next line on the script she says is “That prick.” and i just thought that was worth noting.

(reads script further)

ah yes. the jen-is-not-gay-and-fills-plot-holes-boyfriend breaks up with her, to fill the plot whole of how does she get with timothee while having a boyfriend.

hes pubished an article called “YOU KNOW THE CRAZY GIRL WHO THINKS WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE? I ACTUALLY SLEPT WITH HER.”

which is a wild life choice.

*

various online movements denying the comet begin, and while i am about to note how social media and comments and videos are used in collages across the screen in a fun way i remember the other fun cinematography thing that happened i do want to talk about.

firstly, i recommend the bear (2022) much like anyone who has watched the bear and does not have severe anxiety. Anyone who has watched it, anxiety or not, will remember the flickers of other clips of Chicago, and Life around Chicago and various other things interspersed throughout the series which is amazing and works in a delightful way that i can’t describe because again, with no technical knowledge i dont know how they’re meant to work or what they’re meant to do.

anyway, dont look up uses similar techniques, flickering through various videos of various things at various times. And its very fun.

*

i really dont want to get into this major part of the plot where all of a sudden the president does believe them and then agrees to knock the comet off course and suddenly aborts the mission because shock horror the comet is full of fancy pants minerals and materials that are worth trillions of dollars because then we get into capitalism and thats not a topic i want to bring up in my first not-tiny-letter.

a private company plans to break apart the comet and bring it’s fragments down safely because money and money and not much else. its run by a very annoying and slow-speaking man, and every time he appears on screen my mother feels the need to repeat.

“Well that’s basically Elon Musk, isn’t it.”

And yes, it is elon musk.

*

unsurprisingly this mission fails because it was Not Peer Reviewed which is a Very Annoying Fact noticed by leo, who has switched sides to being an Evil Science Man while cheating on Frozen Ear Eater Wife with Side Fringe Cate Blanchet. this of course makes him switch back to the good guys again, so he does what jen (kate) did the first time around and flips out on cate’s talk show.

*

at this points i realise i am two thirds of the way through the script and have absolutely no want to scroll through the rest, partly given to the fact it’s in a weird format with way too many stage directions and partly because i watched it less than an hour ago, and this has no correlation or chronology anyway.

jen hooks up with timothee in a turn of events that is not surprising since her most memorable line is “i need to get high” and he’s reverted back to the persona he played in the YEET YEET SKIRT snl skit (if you dont know it watch it). she is making out with him as one does (i feel the need to google the age gap. jen is 34. timothee is 28) when she spots… shocker… the comet.

leo has a revelation not making out with timothee (that might be an age gap hes into) but driving, at which point they call each other and go: “Theres the comet” (not the exact phrasing since i deleted the script tab). he stops his car and yells at people that he’d told them so and yada yad and people get out of their car and look and that is the most unrealistic part of the whole thing because while i can get behind an astrophysics phd candidate with a weird taste in jewelry and eyeliner being straight, leo and cate being a thing, and a comet destroying the earth, believing that many many humans would willingly stop their cars, climb out and gaze at the sky in silence to a random guy with a beard shouting “i told you!” is a bit far fetched to me.

the movie ends in a way we all saw coming but is very surprising still, especially as someone who watches superhero movies where the point is to Not destroy the earth. the earth Is destroyed and every member of this wild and wonderful cast perishes in a lovely montage that is again accompanied with flicking images of random other things.

*

i would love to further explain my thoughts about jen and leo and cate and cate’s talk show guy who says at the end (ah no wheres the script tab when you need it) (ill find it hang on) (found it)

“Should we fuck… or pray?”

To which cate says

“Honestly I’d rather just drink and talk shit about people.”

but that seems like this is a good point to end it and so thats where we’re going to end it.

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