All those things seem equally important and urgent, and I know I need to have a shower before I do any one of them because my hair is a greasy slick and I’m still in my pyjamas, but somehow bathing has become an insurmountable obstacle; a literally herculean feat of strength and daring that I do not have the raw power for, let alone the skills and ability.

Every shower is like I’ve never had a shower before. A logistical marathon, performed naked at high temperatures — and then afterwards, oh god, I’m going to require socks and a clean shirt and my only good bra has been lost for two days now and the thought of wearing a sports bra again is just too much to bear.

And this barrier of the shower makes me feel like all the things sitting behind it are impossible, are slipping away faster than I can grab them, and if I don’t do all of them right now they’ll alll be lost forever because there is only ever “right now” and “idk but probably never”.

I have a lifetime collection of lost ideas and broken plans, and the dusty remains and shattered shards of all of them are littering the space between me and being clean and reminding me that — based on the numbers of things I’ve wanted to do vs the number of things I’ve actually done, averaged out across 43 years — I’ve never actually done anything. It all rounds down to zero.

And so I do nothing.

Or, more accurately, I look at Instagram and steal crunchy things out of the pantry, and feel increasingly more confused and frustrated and panicky.

Does no one else think this is the worst kind of bullshit? To be stuck down here in the muck walking the dog and making dinner every single day, while the limitless potential of an infinite universe dangles just out of reach and our frail human bodies barrel towards oblivion?

I have this recurring dream that I’m trying to get somewhere, but I can only move in slow motion. I try to run and it’s like my limbs are stuck in treacle, or mired in mud, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t make myself go any faster.

This one lifetime and this stupid linear timeline cannot possibly hold all the things I want to do and be and experience. I want to write books and raise my children and travel and learn to draw and knit cat socks and speak fluent Portuguese, but I also want to ride a horse and sword fight and stay at an inn on a dusty road and run a marathon and hike every trail and breed cats and build furniture with my hands and pierce my nose again and play tennis and do yoga and meditate and learn to cook Persian food and and and and…

And to do any of it, I have to have yet another fucking shower.

And by blogging, I mean the real stuff. Before Substack, I was on Wordpress. Before that, Livejournal. Before that, I built my own sites in Dreamweaver and Photoshop and shared them with people on message boards. I connected my dial-up by hiking four miles uphill in the snow, barefoot, and I thanked my parents for the privilege.

(I actually didn’t — we didn’t have the internet at home until I was at university, so I had to use the computer lab to gain access to Buffy fanfic and instant messaging, and thus had no time to actually go to class. Yes, this is me soft-launching my own neurodivergence. Buckle up.)

I loved blogs. I loved reading about people in other places, with other lives. I loved discovering what strangers thought and felt and did. It was real, and personal, and messy.

But at some point in the last decade or so, long-form content and storytelling could no longer compete with the apps, and those messy, personal, rambling blogs became how-tos. Listicles. 10 Ways To Smash Your Morning Routine. I Walked 20,000 Steps for 30 Days and This Is What Happened. How To Do 75 Hard the Harder Way.

Harder better faster stronger.

Over the same period, social media stopped being the place where we shared what we were up to with the people we cared about, and became an exercise in digital masking — a frantic scramble to look as good as everyone else does, for fear that someone might notice that we’re all damp, carbon-based sacks of feelings and not Pinterest boards.

Everyone is now aspirational, rather than relatable.

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In the late ‘oughts, you could friend someone on Facebook and their profile picture would be a panda-eyed selfie in a dive-bar bathroom, and you’d know that they’d taken that photo while waiting to discover if they were about to touch up their mascara or throw up on the floor, and you’d think, ah, she’s just like me.

Now you meet a cool school mum, but when you check out her Instagram before inviting her (I mean, her kid) over for a playdate, you inevitably discover she has a white couch that none of her children have ever wiped pizza fingers on, wears lipstick on hikes and makes pottery for rescue animals.

How can you compete with that? How can the state of your baseboards and your selection of mediocre supermarket tea ever live up to her grid aesthetic?

They can’t, that’s how.

If you push through, you’ll eventually find out she’s highly medicated, has a husband who only eats steak, and is self conscious about her teeth — but the first instinct is always inferiority. To see the perfectly composed and edited version of someone else’s life and think ah, she’s so much better than me. I could never be like that.

I’ve watched the people whose blogs I used to read spend the last two decades whittling their experiences and stories down into tweets and carousels and captions (and ‘stories’). I’ve done that myself. A funny story became a funny status became a funny sentence became a picture and the melting-face emoji.

No wonder we can’t hold nuance. No wonder we spend our lives restlessly asking the algorithm to feed us: nothing it provides satisfies for more than a second, and all of it feels fake, forced… basic.

Harder better faster stronger.

--

Now I can opt myself out of experiencing the lives of those I love — I can read about their trials and tribulations on-screen, asynchronously and virtually, and leave a little hug emoji to let them know my index finger took the time to care.

I can check in with friends anytime by tapping on their stories, so it seems silly to haul my bones and meat across town to meet in three dimensions. We’d have to find parking and brush our hair.

Instead I tap the little heart and feel a soft glow.

Besides, I can see by your socials that you’re doing great — if we were to actually meet up, I’d need to tell you that I’ve lost my job or my kid’s being bullied or I feel like perimenopause has taken a stick blender to my brain. And then I’d have to hear about how your kid’s not doing great at school and you’re considering a trial separation and there’s a suspicious damp patch on your bathroom ceiling.

And then I’d feel really bad about maintaining our relationship via Facebook reactions for the last three years.

--

We trimmed our lived human experience into a series of tiny yellow faces, and now we can outsource it completely.

LLMs mean we can all say a lot again, one em-dash and tripartite sentence at a time (and as someone who loves em-dashes and tripartite sentences: fuck you, AI). And then we can ask AI to summarise the AI so we don’t have to read the words we didn’t write.

Ouroboros.

Maybe it’s my bottom-up, ravenous brain that consumes information like a whale shark feeding, but all the AI content is also… not actually saying much? If an LLM can say it, it’s been said before. It’s trained on a generic mashup of human industry to spit out a generic mashup of quasi-human summary. It’s the most basic bitch there is, and it does what bored students have done since writing began: use a lot of words to say the same things in different ways, in the hope that you won’t notice that there’s frequently no there there.

We all look the same, and now we all sound the same.

--

So here’s me, putting myself out there and saying… also not much. I still don’t have a morning routine. I tried 75 Medium and gave up within a week. I’m running a business and writing a book but I also haven’t had a shower today and my kids are eating dinner in front of TV and wiping their fingers on the couch.

I don’t have any answers for anyone, and I wouldn’t be qualified to share them with you even if I did. What I do have is a spicy brain and some spicy kids, and the ability to amuse myself by assembling sentences and publishing them on the internet.

I want to share those assembled sentences here to connect. To relate. If I’m lucky, to entertain. I don’t have any particular topic or niche in mind, mostly because my particular brand of neurodivergence means that by the time I know enough about anything to write about it, I’m probably already bored of it.

Maybe that’s my niche.

AI would never.

Before I had children, I didn’t believe in kids’ menus and screen time and being bullied into buying a 9-year-old hot pink Jordans. My imaginary children were organic and free range and securely attached. They weaned themselves and enjoyed reading books I also enjoyed reading and played gently and kindly both independently and together.

My real 8-year-old, halfway into the second Avatar, sighed extravagantly and announced, “finally, some real violence”. He likes backflips and eating paper and making his friends laugh by pulling ever more unhinged stunts (ranging from jumping out the window during class all the way through to licking the urinal for lols) until he gets proper told off, which he does not like at all.

My 10-year-old gives no shits about being told off. He does what he wants, and, perhaps more importantly for those of us who happen to be his parents or teachers, he does not do what he doesn’t want. What he wants is mostly to make Pokemon decks, talk about making Pokemon decks, do terrifying parkour moves on the tramp, and eat vast quantities of dairy products, to which he is mildly intolerant. What he does not want is everything else. He has never played independently in his entire life.

They both resist any food that isn’t wrapped in plastic, have to be paid to read, and, unless anaesthetised by a screen, need to be separated every 15 minutes before one of them bites the other.

All this to say: when my intentions met my actions, they found each other wanting.

Similarly, before I was actually 40, I had very strong opinions about how I would age. In the second half of my thirties, once the baby fog had mostly lifted, I felt pretty fucking smug about myself. I lifted weights and gave up gluten and went to bed early. I even stopped dyeing my hair for a while and made noises about going grey gracefully (mostly because I wasn’t yet). The me who was still in her thirties would never even think about Botox.

But then I turned 43, and the low-level hum of general concern that had flicked on in November 2022 cranked itself up a notch. I started noticing that, for example, when a book about appreciating your life laid out the years of an average lifespan as a series of boxes, my current box was distressingly far down the page.

A rough patch of skin appeared on one elbow and refused to go away. A band of extra padding appeared around the top of my waist and both thighs. My neck skin, never the tautest, seemed to have lost its hold on my chin.

My kids were getting older. My husband’s hair was getting thinner (but somehow, along with the threads of grey in his beard, this was a sexy development? Fuck men).

My jeans weren’t getting tighter, but only because I was too scared to put them on.

My resolutions to get really fit next year started taking on a slightly hysterical air, as I realised that bouncing too hard on the trampoline felt less like a bladder risk, as in years past, and more like I was in danger of shattering into actual pieces like a particularly brittle stick of soft, pale chalk.

My casual approach to school pickup (also known as “working from home oh shit oh shit it’s 2:30 grab a couple of yoghurt pots and put on a bra where are the fucking keys”) was tested by patches of hyperpigmentation appearing on the sides of my cheeks. It was one thing to be no-makeup casual about my freckles and crow’s feet, but my face suddenly looked like the back of a pensioner’s hands.

And, worst of all, I noticed in the mirror that the skin around my lips had started creasing into deep lines when I spoke. I felt like I’d gone straight from my early thirties to a pack-a-day smoker named Verna with her lip liner bleeding out like a scarlet map of an ancient river system.

So, late last year, I spent an undisclosed (because I have not yet disclosed it to my husband) sum of money letting a very lovely lady named Faye (who looked like she was wagging school but who assured me she was 46, which was all the incentive I needed) laser my face off, which felt exactly like having your face lasered off.

And then I spent four or five days swollen up like a pale-pink moon, watching in interest as my freckles and old-lady-hand-spots pushed themselves up and out of my skin, where they flaked off in crispy black drifts.

When this fascinating but also quite gross process was completed, I felt taut and polished and as shiny as a new penny. For at least a couple of weeks.

And then Verna’s riverbed mouth started bothering me again and I went back and spent a smaller amount to have her stab me all over with tiny needles, which was less unpleasant than the laser but still felt very similar to being stabbed all over with tiny needles.

It was at about this point that I began to wonder if maybe the best intentions in the world aren’t adequate protection against a system set up to make women feel bad about themselves, and to convince them that they only have value if they’re young and pretty — or at least as long as they’re not old.

But I still gave Faye money to stab me again.

It’s a slippery slope, attempting to hold back time and gravity. I still don’t want Botox, although sometimes I find myself daydreaming about facelifts, and I’m dyeing my hair again. I convince myself that I’m doing okay because I still often don’t wear makeup to school pick-up, but I know deep down that that’s laziness and bad time management rather than any kind of principle, and I only feel confident about it because of Faye and her expensive torture.

The 43-year-old me in my head is casual and wise, and knows that life experience and being able to spell heaps of hard words is worth far more than an unlined forehead and thighs as sleek as a teenage seal. But the me in my head also has kids who read for fun and never lick urinals, so it can be hard to trust her advice.