It was so unexpected. My entire experience of teachers from junior high on- and most of my experience of adults generally- was exactly the opposite to this. I always felt like I was on the verge of getting into trouble with adults. I was too loud or too weird or too unruly or too clever or not clever enough. I was always walking too fast or too slow or reading too much or not enough. My grades were never good enough. My performance was never good enough. I was always just too much of something bad.

This guy was different though. Every other teacher would have tried to shut down my rebelliousness, maybe telling me I was rude or telling me to get up off the floor or otherwise just telling me (again) that I was doing something wrong. With those few words though, this guy opened up my horizons. He had told me to be more Me.

On the first day of school the next year, I walked into my American History class and there he was again, Mr. Miernicki. Right away he became my favourite teacher. Eventually I felt like he was my friend.

He was younger than a lot of the other teachers, he was liberal, he was funny, he was very active in school life, he was one of the few teachers who was happy to be called by his nickname: Mern.

I don't remember loads of details from his American History class. I remember always being happy to go to it. He was fun and engaging and treated us like people. He didn't take any crap from kids who were disruptive or weren't interested in doing the work. American History was a required course and we'd have to pass it in order to get a diploma. Mern made it very clear he was there to teach, not to hold our hands. He made us understand that school was our responsibility.

I started to hang out in his class after school once in a while. We'd talk about music a lot. He introduced me to music from the 60s- I still remember him playing The Fugs’ first album for me which included songs such as "Slum Goddess", "I Couldn't Get High" and "Boobs a Lot" (he'd probably be reprimanded for that these days)- I'd play him whatever I was into at the moment. I probably talked too much about song lyrics. And I probably bored him talking about Rocky Horror, but he made me feel like he was interested in me and my life. I didn't feel like there were any other adults who were actually interested in Me.

I was generally finding it harder and harder to be a teenager. I felt very stifled. Suffocated. Every time I tried something new, something I was interested in, I was discouraged or even mocked by people who could have shown some support. Mern, however, was always positive about every weird new thing I did. For example, a friend of mine wanted to try out for cheerleading and asked me (not someone who was a cheerleader type) to do the workshops and try-outs with her for support. I did. We both made the squad. OK. So now I was a cheerleader, I guess! There are people in my life 40 years on who still ridicule me for being a cheerleader in high school. I've got two children - one is an adult - I've worked for almost every British tv company, loads of film companies, I've travelled the world, I’m a home-owner, I'm in my fucking 50s for goodness sake, but the fact I was a cheerleader in high school is still used to try and make me feel shit about myself...

Mern, however, thought that me being a cheerleader was great. He made me feel like ANYTHING I did was great because I was doing it. I was a cheerleader? Great! I pierced my nose? Wonderful! I shaved the sides of my head? Cool! He loved the weird clothes I wore to school. He loved it when I turned up at school with pink streaks in my hair. He just kept encouraging me to be more Me.

By the time I got to my final year of high school - during which I had Mern for my required 1/2 credit Government class - I was so far beyond wanting to get out of there (school, home, the city, state, country) that I was really unhappy. I'd worked out that after the first semester I'd have enough credits to graduate, so there was no reason for me to stay for the full year. I'd finish school halfway through the year and join the real world instead.

One day Mern asked me to come to his room after school. When I arrived he told me that my mother had got in touch with him and that she was worried about me and my friend group (the weirdo punks). I told him there wasn't anything to be worried about (I didn't tell him how unhappy I was at home) and asked him what he thought. Did he think there was anything about me that worried him? Nope. From where he was, he thought I was doing just fine. Good. That's all that mattered to me.

I was, however, struggling in my required Economics class. I just couldn't understand the subject at all. The teacher was a Republican and I- though I wasn't yet voting age - was very much NOT a Republican. The teacher also really didn't like cheerleaders. Those two things alone made that class tricky for me because he didn't hide his disdain for me and everything I stood for! I just didn’t understand the subject and for the first time ever in my school career was about to fail a class. As this was a required class, failing wasn't an option. I already had a plane ticket to London booked for a week after the first semester ended. I had to pass this class. I talked to the teacher and he agreed that if I did a bunch of extra credit work (eg essays on the topic), that he would bump my grade up to a passing mark.

I really only had a few weeks left of the term to finish these essays. It was stressing me out. One day I decided that I'd skip school and go to the university library instead to spend the entire day finishing up these papers. I hadn’t skipped school before, but this was important. So, I left home as usual, arrived at the university first thing in the morning and spent the entire day researching and writing. It was exhausting, but I felt great. I was sure that I was going to pass Economics and be able to graduate and then get the hell out of there in a few weeks.

At the end of the day, I popped into school to drop off the work I'd done with the Economics teacher. Mern saw me in the hallways. 'Where were you today?!' '...uh.' 'Your mother was at home today. She was there when the school called.' Fuck. I told him about Economics and the extra credit and how I'd spent the whole day at the university library working on extra credit to try and pass the fucking class. He believed me. He said quietly 'Just try and get a note for tomorrow.'

I got home. My mother was there... She was (obviously) angry with me. I told her about Economics class and how I didn’t understand it and how the teacher hated me, I told her about needing to do extra credit, I told her that I was at the university library all day, I told her I'd dropped all my work off at school... and begged her to please write me a note for the next day. She could say that I was asleep in a different room and she hadn't seen me in my room and assumed I wasn't there. I remember saying 'They don't know how big our house is! It's possible!!' (We lived in a small house. There were, however, kids at my school who lived in literal mansions with elevators and grand pianos and separate buildings on their grounds with separate living quarters and I'd been to a bunch of them. Their living rooms were the same area as our entire house OF COURSE someone could be hidden in a house like that.) I just needed a note from her so that I could just pass this damn class.

She wouldn't write me a note.

The next day at school I was kicked off the cheerleading squad. Any homework that had been due for any class on the day I'd been absent couldn't be accepted, so I'd get an 'incomplete' which would affect my final grade. The Economics teacher technically wasn't supposed to accept the extra credit work I'd given him. I told him what I'd done and begged him to just take the work today instead, just pretend I hadn't given it to him the day before. I just needed to pass the damn class. In an entirely unexpected change of heart, he'd agreed to pass me.

I went to Mern's class after school to talk about everything. He'd told me that there wasn't anything he could do to help me out. He told me that I'd been dumb (I should have made sure my mother wasn't staying home!), but he also understood completely why I'd done it. I told him that I couldn't wait to leave - school, my home, the city, the country. I just wanted to be gone. I didn't 'learn a lesson' from it other than everyone is shit and Economics is shitter. He told me that everything would get better for me after I was out of school. He knew I had a lot to give the world and that I didn't have much longer until I could start living my life. I just needed to hang in there for a little while longer. He was the only adult that seemed to get me.

The next few weeks of school limped on. I felt awful and don't remember much other than going to my first and only formal dance at school with a few friends. I wore a red prom dress with my red Converse hi-tops underneath. We left the dance early (the music was awful) and instead went to an industrial music gig downtown in our formal gear.

The first semester ended. I said my goodbyes. I came to London. Travelled around the UK and France for several months, then went back for my graduation ceremony in June. At the end of the school day on my first day back, I went in to see Mern. I was wearing huge jeans cinched with a belt, Doc Martens and a black shirt buttoned up to the neck (all bought at Camden market). My hair was bleached blonde. I walked into his room and without a beat he said, 'Is that what they're wearing in London now?' I don't remember what we talked about - I probably told him about how cool London was and how I was going to Rocky Horror all the time... I just remember it felt like I was talking to a friend. He was my friend now. He wasn't my teacher.

And after that I started properly living my life. I came back to the UK and stayed. I'd see Mern once in a while when I was back and then I didn't seem him much and then I stopped going back.

These days Mern and I friends on Facebook. He's still happy. He's still not a fan of the Republican party. He's still really involved with the school. I've learned that I'm not the only one who valued his guidance and friendship when we were at school. He's been so important to loads of people.

But he's the guy who got me through my final year and a half of school that felt like ten. He made me feel like I wasn't just a dumb disappointment of a kid. He was an adult that made me feel like I was special and interesting and cool and capable. He made me feel that there would be a place for me in the world. He was right.

Thank you, Mern. You really helped me.

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I've spent a large part of the past 30 years or so thinking about the internet as a separate space. A fantasy world that we travel to. A wonderland that is both somewhere over the rainbow/through the screen and in our minds at the same time. A dream space. A utopia. A hallucination.

In order to exist in this new space, we've created separate digital selves which exist as a kind of tulpa, nirmita or a thought form - a 'summoned' being. This other self of ours exists in a non-physical realm that doesn't obey the laws of physics we understand in Nature. Our digital self is bodiless, formless, ethereal. It can be anywhere, anytime, anyone we want it to be.

The digital space our digital self exists in is a kind of 'anti-Nature'. There is nothing about the digital space that is confined to any rules of the real world. If it can be imagined, it exists. For many people - and seemingly more and more each day - this imaginary world is being confused with reality. People read the imaginations of others and think that they exist, not just in the digital, unreal realm, but they think the digitally displayed words on a screen are able to be conjured into the reality of our world. We're starting to create a language for this- fake news, deep fakes, post-fact - as we can all see the shockwaves when objective reality butts up against these fantasy worlds that exist in people’s minds.

Every single one of us thinks we are seeing the world objectively and that everyone else has lost their minds. We've got names for people who live in their own fantasy reality, as well - snowflakes, wing nuts, libtards, sheeple, woo merchants, fash, melts, gammon, woke... They must have lost their minds, they must be 'mad' because they cannot see the world "as it is"/as we see it... without ever thinking that we too are seeing the world through a specific lens or a particular ideology.

"But," we might say, "My way of seeing the world is CORRECT!"

lol.

I'm currently reading RD Laing's book 'The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness' for a second time. I read it for the first time a few years ago when I was thinking about 'alienation'. I filled my Kindle copy of the book with highlights. It felt like there was something worth saving on every other page. Every time I see one of my previously made highlights I wonder why I didn't also highlight the paragraphs immediately before or after it. There's just so much in it that is making sense to me. It feels like this book about schizophrenia and psychosis published in 1960 describes a lot of what I see online.

The book was a revolutionary re-thinking of mental illness. Laing believed that schizophrenia isn't a medical condition that needed to be treated with - as it was at the time - electroconvulsive shock therapy and heavy medication, but was actually a result of an individual's inability to relate to the world as their self. He said it was “a sane reaction to an insane world”. He believed that at least some people seen as schizophrenic can be 'guided' through it and back to reality.

Laing says that 'ontological insecurity'- that is, a profound and overwhelming uncertainty about one’s sense of or experience of 'being' (ontology is concerned with the nature of existence) - is at the root of schizophrenia. He said that in order for certain individuals to feel safe or secure or to survive in their environment (ie their family), they created a separate 'inner' self that they kept hidden from the world. As time goes on these two selves become more and more divided, then the border between them can start to break down and the 'inner self' starts to break out into the real world.

From The Divided Self:

A man may have a sense of his presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, a continuous person. As such, he can live out into the world and meet others: a world and others experienced as equally real, alive, whole, and continuous. Such a basically ontologically secure person will encounter all the hazards of life, social, ethical, spiritual, biological, from a centrally firm sense of his own and other people’s reality and identity.

If, however, one has over-identified with their separate inner self:

The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

(Italics mine)

When one spends too much time on the internet, that is, spends too much time as their inner self, without at least checking in on or even valuing the real, material, physical world, they can start to behave in strange ways.

We ALL know people in our own lives who are doing this. Friends, relatives, colleagues. From the outside, it will look as if they've had a personality transplant, but they will talk about how they are 'awake', finally being their 'true self', 'seeing the world as it really is', 'happier than they've ever been' when they behave in ways that don't look happy at all. Some will be attaching labels to themselves - we've all seen them - that they cling to more and more each day and inform the way they talk about themselves and the world, as they see it, becomes more and more narrow.

They might start to make statements about their lives or their pasts that have very little connection to your own experiences with them. They might talk about how they really care about the rights of women and feminism, but their wife informs you of the unfeminist reality of their home life... They might go on about socialism all the time, and then you find out they own a few buy-to-let properties or have inherited a large house with extensive grounds from their parents... They might go on about how they are 'queer', but they've been happily (and heterosexually) married to their husband for 30 years with no intention of that changing... They might make statements about how they have 'always' thought this or believed that or 'always' been like this or behaved like that, when you - who have known them for 10, 20, 30, 40 years - have never once seen or heard any of that from them previously. It seems especially odd when what they are talking about having 'always' believed is a very contemporary, internet-facilitated belief. You can't see how 10, 20, 30 years ago this person would have fervently believed in extremely 'now' ideas about atomised queer identities or internet red-pilled beliefs about relations between the sexes or 5g towers. But these people sincerely say they have 'always' believed these things, as if they are speaking the truth.

Because the internet has no connection to time or space, however, I can see how it is perfectly possible that people identifying too closely with their digital self might lose a sense of the passage of time in the real world and choose to disregard it when referring to their digital self. Because I have this weird little personality quirk where I really care about facts and reality, I couldn't legitimately say that I have ALWAYS been a fervent believer that the UK should be part of the EU, because I know that people around me knew me years ago when that kind of thing wouldn't have ever crossed my mind even 15 years ago. Not everyone seems to be so committed to facts or reality or even history though. And it's this ahistoricity we see in people we personally know who've lost their minds on the internet that is one thing that can deeply irk us. We know who they were. We know how they behaved. We know what they talked about. And it isn't this.

RD Laing on schizophrenia from The New Left Review:

All of us, patients and psychiatrists alike, start from the fact that we live in two worlds, an inner world and an outer world.

The normal state of affairs is that we know little of either and are alienated from both, but that we know perhaps a little more of the outer than the inner. However, the very fact that it is necessary to speak of inner and outer at all attests to the fact that an historically conditioned split has occurred, so that the inner is already as bereft of substance as the outer is bereft of meaning.

Some people wittingly, some people unwittingly, begin or are thrown into more or less total inner space and time. We are socially conditioned to regard total immersion in outer space and time as normal and healthy. Immersion in inner space and time tends to be regarded as anti-social withdrawal, a deviancy, invalid, pathological per se, in some sense discreditable.

Sometimes, having gone through the looking glass, through the eye of the needle, the territory is recognized as one’s lost home but most people now in inner space and time are, to begin with, in unfamiliar territory and are frightened and confused. They are lost. They have forgotten that they have been there before. They clutch at chimeras. They try to hang on to fragments of external reality by projecting the inner on to the outer, or by importing outer categories into the inner. They do not know what is happening, and no one is likely to do other than add to their confusion.

These internet created digital selves don't need to have existed for a very long time in real world terms, they just need to be deeply believed in. People sometimes seem to have a kind of eureka moment with their digital selves, they can be tootling along just fine online for 10, 15, 20 years and then out of the blue they claim to be some brand new other person. And in many respects, it doesn't matter if this new digital self exists online, but more and more people are dragging that strange, ill-formed persona into the real world- as Laing says above, they are trying to maintain a connection to "external reality by projecting the inner on to the outer". So, you meet up with a friend and they're now talking about how they are 'straight sized' (ie 'not fat') or your cousin is suddenly a flat earther (when he was into the skeptic movement 15 years ago) or your English, straight, married, white, middle class, male co-worker keeps going on about black trans women's rights. Literally WTF?

Our digital selves automatically by their very nature are 'bereft of substance' as Laing mentions above. And perhaps the reason ones outer self goes online in a desperate attempt to find a connection with others is that their outer self is 'bereft of meaning'. The web is facilitating the creation of a new kind of schism in ourselves that is forgoing substance in the pursuit of meaning.

What if 'meaning' can only be found in 'substance'? What if the significance of being can only be found in material reality? What happens then to everyone who is forgoing reality for the digital realm?

From The Divided Self:

The person who does not act in reality and only acts in phantasy becomes himself unreal. The actual ‘world’ for that person becomes shrunken and impoverished. The ‘reality’ of the physical world and other persons ceases to be used as a pabulum for the creative exercise of imagination, and hence comes to have less and less significance in itself. Phantasy, without being either in some measure embodied in reality, or itself enriched by injections of ‘reality’, becomes more and more empty and volatilized. [...] Without an open two-way circuit between phantasy and reality anything becomes possible in phantasy. Destructiveness in phantasy goes on without the wish to make compensatory reparation, for the guilt that prompts towards preserving and making amends loses its urgency. Destructiveness in phantasy can thus rage on, unchecked, until the world and the self are reduced, in phantasy, to dust and ashes.

See also:

I'm getting very excited about the upcoming second season of the Apple TV+ series Severance. If you've not yet watched it, I highly recommend you do so before the new episodes are released in January.

I loved it so much that I gave a talk about it at the Seattle Metamodernism Summit in September 2022, and did a presentation and a paper on it for my MA on Central Saint Martin's. I decided that I'd cannibalise those and cobble something together because I spent so much time thinking about this series that I hope some people might be interested in what I’ve thought about it…

If you haven't yet watched this series, then maybe don't read this as there are bound to be some spoilers (though not huge ones). If you have watched the series and like my take on it, then please feel free to share it with other fans...

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Anyway, here you go...

THE PREMISE OF SEVERANCE

A select group of employees at Lumon Corporation have volunteered to undergo surgery in order to implant a “severance chip”, this is a small device embedded in the brain that spatially segregates their memories. It is activated and deactivated when they arrive at and leave Lumon. Memories from their experiences when they are at work can only be accessed when they are on the ‘severed floor’ of Lumon and cannot be accessed from elsewhere. Equally, experiences they've had outside work cannot be accessed when they are at work.

This effectively produces two versions of them. The one who is in work at Lumon Corporation is the Innie. The one who is outside of work is the Outie- or in this analogy, the Digital Self and the Real Self.

They share a body and yet are two different people with two different lives, different experiences, different friends, different memories and, in many ways, different personalities. The Innies and our Digital Selves only exist because the Outies or our Real Selves put them in those spaces. The Innies work for non-monetary rewards: finger traps or caricatures or waffle parties in Severance; our Digital selves work for likes and followers and upvotes. The Innies and our Digital selves have no ownership over their real counterparts' bodies. They have no say. They are entirely at the mercy of their Outie or Real Self.

Let's watch the trailer.

THE METAMODERN CONDITION

Metamodernism is the name given to the current cultural era we are living in. It is informed by both the oversaturation of Postmodernism within culture over the past 50 years and the recent rise of a new type of Modernist affect. This 21st century “structure of feeling” (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010) is one that “oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.” (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010) It’s as if the Postmodern “compression of time-space” (Harvey, 1992) has allowed us to look back past any sense of merely being nostalgic or ‘retro’ and recognise the desirability of the concrete nature of Modernism- the grand narratives, the stability of meaning, the move forward towards a collective future- while also understanding implicitly the skepticism and cynicism of the Postmodern critique of exactly these ideas. As cultural time travellers, we see these separate cultural epistemes that have molded our world over the past 150 years as merely parts of what it means to Be Human. We have come to feel that we can’t be fully human if we exist solely in one or the other state and in the 21st century we are trying to combine them somehow to exist in the porous border between them in a “both-neither” way (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010).

At exactly the same time this dispositional conjoining is taking place, the internet came along. Or vice versa. This means we are simultaneously stepping outside of Time and stepping outside of Space by creating Digital - non-physical, bodiless - selves that live alongside us. We are creating an entirely new way to Be Human.

We now exist in-between Modernism and Postmodernism; in-between Irony and Sincerity; in-between Pragmatism and Idealism; in-between Apathy and Passion; in-between What We Know and How We Live; in-between The Real World and The Internet.

The Apple TV+ series Severance operates as an analogy of this Metamodern ‘splitting’ of ourselves between Modernism and Postmodernism, between Real and Digital. We can use Severance as a way to understand how the internet is changing how we are currently experiencing ourselves.

ALIENATION

“Do you know if I’m happy up there?” – Miss Casey (Severance, 2022)

Karl Marx’s writings on alienation describe the separation of the individual as it pertains to their work life:

“[T]he worker is related to the product of his labor as to an alien object[…] The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object[…] it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.” (Marx, 2009)

Marx's idea of alienation pre-supposes the presence of an Ideal You that exists outside of society and if only there wasn’t all of this messy real world stuff (eg society, science, work…) you would be your Ideal Self. Marx's thinking was that alienation was caused by the worker putting their life into making an object, so that the life no longer belonged to the worker, but to the object. So this working life is external to her, existing independently to her… A Work Life, if you will. Marx said the only time one was Human or Real was when they weren’t working, when they were at home. So… a Home Life. We were divided between two worlds.

Marx was writing at the birth of the idea of having a Work Life and a Home Life and tried to articulate this Modern division. This Marxist sense of alienation is the most obvious, surface level interpretation of what Severance is about, but the world and the thinking on alienation has moved on since 1844.

The separation of ourselves as 'worker' and 'human being' wasn't an issue for us conceptually in the latter half of the 20th century, even if we still had ideological or ethical issues with the Capitalist work space. We acquired a language to describe this separation of the self. We spoke about work/life balance. We worked hard; we played hard. We had work friends. We went for work drinks. We needed to buy a specific wardrobe for when we were at work. We were no longer thinking of ourselves as “separated from our true nature”. We weren’t divided, we just went to different spaces.

Within the Postmodern era, however, we couldn’t be alienated in the way Marx articulated because there isn’t an Us to be alienated and there isn’t an Ideal Us to be alienated from. Fredric Jameson (1991, p14) said, within Postmodern society 'the alienation of the subject is displaced by fragmentation of the subject’. This splintering of the Human into discrete, affectively and experientially bounded labels – for example, the refreshed Coca Cola drinker, the satisfied Camel Lights smoker, the rebellious Simpsons fan– turned us into both consumers of objects and objects to be consumed (Baudrillard, 2017, p150). The Postmodern self is experienced as a collection of labels. We are what we consume, so we consume what we are. In order to be that ‘refreshed Coca Cola drinker’, we first need to consume Coca Cola. We cannot be refreshed without it.

And it’s not just within Postmodernism, in psychology (Hood, 2011) and neuroscience (Feldman Barrett, 2018) we started to understand that there is no Innate You that exists outside of the social influences and conditioning, the experiences and memories that have molded you into the You you are right now.

Our 21st century selves know there is no Real Me, but we are increasingly feeling like there is a Real Me, a Better Me, a Me “I should be” (if only there wasn’t all of this messy real world stuff…). In the 21st century, we are going through what looks like a resurgence of Modernist alienation where huge numbers of people from all walks of life and different political persuasions feel like there is a different, perfect life they should be living, they feel ‘excluded’ from society, feel like they can’t be their ‘authentic selves’, feel like they are being prevented from ‘being whole’.

As more of us become self-employed or work from home, when work life intrudes into home life because we are accessible 24 hours a day and we no longer have different physical spaces to divide our time between, we are now very clear that there is – or must be – a separation between these two states of being: Work Me and Home Me.

“Cyberspace makes the concept of a ‘workplace’ archaic. Now that one can be expected to respond to an email at practically any time of the day, work cannot be confined to a particular place, or to delimited hours. There’s no escape—and not only because work expands without limits.” (Fisher, 2018, p 466)

The splitting of ourselves between the Real and Digital worlds is also hastening the uptake of a 21st century dualism. Our Digital Self is taking over our ‘Non-Work’ Self as more of our leisure time is spent in the Digital Space. And this Digital Self doesn’t relax, it works in that space not for money or to produce any type of object – material or otherwise – but it labours purely to exist. I post, therefore I am.

Our 21st century Digital Self needs to exist because it is the product of social media companies, not their customer (Solon, 2011). And technological advances in media production over the past 20 years mean that everyone has become a marketing manager, a photographer, a filmmaker, a star, but most importantly a brand. We have evolved from the Postmodern consumer into the product to be consumed (Fromm, 2013, pp 32-33). We photograph our lives as social media marketing content to sell our brand. We even have our own AI photographic retoucher in our pocket- our phones automatically impose a skin smoothing filter on each selfie we take (Madrigal, 2018). We have become so used to seeing filtered versions of our Digital Selves that when we look in the mirror we are faced with unacceptable imperfection in our Real Self (Curran and Hill, 2019). Luckily for us, along with technological advances, there have been advances in cosmetic surgery.

As we have become accustomed to the filtered and surgically augmented versions of the Digital and Real versions of ourselves and others, we have become besieged with worry about being negatively evaluated by everyone else. We are unable to deal with criticism or failure. In fact, criticism as it existed 20 years ago, no longer applies, instead we face ‘cancellation’ – as if we were an unpopular Truman Show-esque television show.

Because we are able to edit and retouch both our Digital and Real Selves, we have started to believe that perfection is not only desirable, but possible. Near perfection- or even just ‘good enough’- is no longer acceptable. The need for perfection isn’t simply directed at ourselves. Demanding an all-encompassing perfection from others and perceiving excessive pressure for perfection from others (Curran and Hill, 2019) has increased to the point where many desire nothing less than a kind of Utopia and believe it can be achieved. Though we know a Utopia isn’t possible nor desirable, our Digital Selves have started to behave as if it is. This split between knowing and believing is our 21st century Metamodern state, which “seeks forever for a truth that it never expects to find”. (Vermuelen and van den Akker, 2010)

BELIEF

“We serve Kier, you CHILD!” – Harmony Cobel (Severance, 2022)

“The very same society that produces this sense of alienation and estrangement generates in many a craving for reassurance, an acute need to believe, a flight into faith. [They] seek redemption from the spurious.” (Merton, 1949)

Increasingly, in the digital realm- online or in games- we are able to live as a different Us and we feel like it is real. More and more of us believe we can be that True, Authentic, Heroic version of our Digital Self in the Real World, too.

The reconceptualization of ourselves as divided while simultaneously understanding we are fragmented is at the root of our Metamodern alienation. We know that there’s no innate ‘essence’ of Us, no Us that exists independently of our socialisation, and we know that we are a complex, constantly evolving product of our experiences and our memories, but we are currently living and speaking about ourselves as if we are divided between two different selves… but the border between them is porous.

We believe we are Body and Mind, Real and Digital, Real and Unreal, Real and Timeless/Spaceless.

The Real World Us is fragmented and the Digital Us believes the perfection or the Utopia that a non-physical space promises will somehow come into fruition in the real world.

There’s a scene I keep looping back to in Errol Morris’s 2018 documentary about [Steve] Bannon, American Dharma. Bannon is recalling his Hong Kong days in the 2000s, when he was working for Internet Gaming Entertainment. He notes how stunned he was to discover how many people played multiplayer online games, and how intensely they played them. But then he breaks it down for Morris, using the example of a theoretical man named Dave in Accounts Payable who one day drops dead.

“Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers,” Bannon says. “And that’s Dave.”

But that’s offline Dave. Online Dave is a whole other story. “Dave in the game is Ajax,” Bannon continues. “And Ajax is, like, the man.” Ajax gets a caisson when he dies and is carried off to a raging funeral pyre. The rival group comes out and attacks. “There’s literally thousands of people there,” Bannon says. “People are home playing the game, and guys are not going to work. And women are not going to work. Because it’s Ajax.”

“Now, who’s more real?” Bannon asks. Dave in Accounting? Or Ajax? […] I want Dave in Accounting to be Ajax in his life.”

But that’s precisely what happened on January 6. The angry, howling hordes arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in face paint and fur. (Senior, 2022)

In the 21st century, our lives are almost entirely mediated by machines and screens (Monteiro, 2017, p1). Separately from our computers or televisions, we have screens on our kitchen appliances, in our vehicles, on buildings, in our pockets and in our hands. We may have more face-to-face encounters each day with screens than with real people (Monteiro, 2017, p1).

Severance starts with the first moment Helly R arrives on the severed floor. She’s frightened, she doesn’t like it, she wants to leave the job, but she needs the permission of her Outie in order to quit her job. She threatens to self-harm and receives a message from her Outie…

“When one sees in person someone whom one only knows from television, one says “He looks just like he does on television!” Reality is the TV picture; and the correctness of one’s perception of how that person really looks is measured against that reality.” - Eric Fromm (2013)

Helly’s Innie is a shadow of the real Helly on the screen. Helly’s Innie isn’t “real”, the Helly on the screen, however, is. In the 21^st century, our Digital Selves are only a shadow of our Real Selves that we see on the screen. The selfie we use for our Digital Self’s avatar is our Real Self. The image of us on our Zoom meeting screen is our Real Self. For us, our sense of reality exists both on the screen and somewhere beyond it. It used to be that we’d only see actors or performers on a screen, today we see ourselves there and we have easily come to believe that the person we play on the internet- our Digital Self- is actually as real as our Real Self. It exists “outside [us], independently, as something alien to [us]” (Marx, 2009).

SEPARATION FROM TIME

“It’s an unnatural state for a person to have no history.” -Irving B. (Severance, 2022)

Mark Fisher (2014) in Ghosts of My Life wrote about ‘lost futures’- the idea that during the Modern era we had a collective vision of the future, but as Postmodernity removed the arrow of time by always looking back and reinterpreting the past, we have lost our collective future. We are disconnected or separated from time. A chronological alienation. It is the missing connection with time that deeply pervades our culture.

Severance has a constantly shifting representation of time. The production and costume design have used influences from the 1930s on and we never quite settle on one particular era. We are neither stuck in a past nor stuck in a future. It feels contemporary- the dialogue, the humour, the characters’ personalities all feel ‘now’- but visually it could also be set in a retrofuturistic 1980s.

This operates in a similar way to ‘crackle’ on a record. Again Mark Fisher, in Ghosts of My Life, said about crackle in songs, “Crackle makes us aware that we are listening to a time that is out of joint; it won’t allow us to fall into the illusion of presence.” It’s now, but not now. Then, but not then. The design in Severance is visual crackle.

SEPARATION FROM SPACE

“Nothing down there is what they say.” – Petey (Severance, 2022)

As the Traditional Episteme - or ‘societies of sovereignty’ (Deleuze, 1992)- transformed into the Modern Episteme, we had to renegotiate our ideas of Space, as Industrialised and Institutional Space - schools, factories, hospitals, prisons, etc (Foucault, 1995)- took over our daily lives, and time and temporality came to dominate our “psychic experience [and] our cultural languages” (Jameson, 1991 p 16).

In Severance, the workers on the severed floor exist in an entirely fabricated space. Every object they use – from computers to cups, from soap to snacks – is produced by the Lumon Corporation. The Innies have no access and have never had access to the natural world.

When we are in the grand, brutalist space of the Perpetuity Wing of Lumon’s severed floor, we feel the enclosure of an “exhaustive disciplinary apparatus” (Foucault, 1995, pp 235-236). It’s a high ceiling, but it’s still a ceiling and we are underground a couple stories, at least. That isn’t daylight coming in from above. The Innies never see the ‘real world’. They have access to nothing from the outside, including light. The Innies, like our Digital Selves, are trapped in an unreal space, never able to “touch grass” (Vicente, 2022).

“Each individual has his own place; and each place its individual. Avoid distributions in groups; break up collective dispositions; analyse confused, massive or transient pluralities. Disciplinary space tends to be divided into as many sections as there are bodies or elements to be distributed.” (Foucault, 1995, p143)

In the large Macro Data Refinement office, there are four desks lumped together with partitions between them. Even in their own large office space, the four workers are both bound together and kept apart. ‘Always connected. Always alone.’ (Milinovich, 2022) is the constant state of our Digital Selves. Online spaces are constructed and inhabited by other people, giving us the illusion of being with others and yet we only really experience them in the solitude of our own minds.

The severed floor operates with Foucault’s Hierarchical Observation (Foucault, 1995, pp 170-177) – there is a very clear path of supervision from department head all the way up to the mysterious Board. Employees keep tabs on their colleagues’ behaviour, pointing out even minor infractions of the rules. There are prohibitions against ‘fraternising’ with your colleagues. The departments are kept separated from each other and socialising with others outside of your department is discouraged. At some point, myths about the deadliness of other departments were distributed in order to evoke feelings of fear so that the workers separate themselves from people in other departments. This mirrors the Us and Them factions created in online spaces. Those divisions can be based on anything from political ideology to whether one knits or crochets. As we lack any kind of visual signalling online to display our ‘tribe’ (eg a particular haircut or a t-shirt from our favourite band), our Digital Selves base our tribalism on non-physical ideas and language. We create stories and myths and memes in order to fiercely differentiate ‘Them’ from ‘Us’.

The hallway set in Severance was built on a large soundstage and was constantly moved around (Wittmer, 2022). The main Macro Data Refinement office set was situated in the middle of the soundstage, so the actors had to walk through these constantly changing hallways to get to the set, always getting lost. These hallways operate in the show and in the filming of the show in the same way – as a kind of heterotopia (Foucault, 1984), a space ‘without law or geometry’ (Foucault, 1994, p xvii) that collapse the distinction between the unreal and the real, just like the online spaces we exist in (Rymarczuk and Derksen, 2014).

Unlike Alice (Carroll, 1994) or Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz, 1939) who get lost in their heterotopic Wonderful Wonderlands, the Innies have no one to help them find their way around.

The hallways on Lumon’s severed floor are navigated like spaces in Deleuze’s Societies of Control (1992), which describes the data driven, computer mediated world that tracks our every move. The hallways in Severance have “variable geometry” and seem to “continuously change from one moment to the other” (Deleuze, 1992). The workers seem free to walk in them as they wish, though they only have access to spaces that their key cards can open.

Their moves are tracked both on cameras…

… and via the extensive security system that knows the exact location of everyone on the severed floor.

This mirrors our Digital Self’s experience online where we need passwords and codes to access various spaces and we leave a trail of data that knows everything about us.

As the character of Harmony Cobel says, “The surest way to tame a prisoner is to let him believe he’s free.”

ALIENATED EMOTIONS

"You’re easy to pretend to care about.” – Mark S. (Severance, 2022)

For Seeman (1959), alienation was less a matter of why we were alienated or what we were alienated from, but what psychological states caused a sensation of alienation. When we first meet the Innies in Severance, they each represent one of Seeman’s alienating experiential dispositions:

POWERLESSNESS, the feeling that one “cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes…he seeks.” Mark is powerless and resigned to his situation. He has come to accept the limits and rules in Lumon. For him, there’s no point in fighting.

ISOLATION, the feeling of separation when one “assign[s] low reward value to goals or beliefs that are typically highly valued in the given society.” Helly doesn’t know why, but she feels that she doesn’t belong on the severed floor, there is something about it that she doesn’t like. She feels isolated and under siege.

MEANINGLESSNESS, the feeling that one “cannot predict with confidence the consequences of acting on a given belief.” Irving is attached to the rules of Lumon desperate that they will provide meaning. He may be acting out of fear of both punishment and of discovering the meaninglessness of it all.

NORMLESSNESS, a feeling that there is “a high expectancy that socially unapproved behaviors are required to achieve given goals.” Petey has broken foundational rules and challenged supposed scientific certainties by ‘reintigrating’ his Innie’s and Outie’s minds. He has excluded himself from Lumon.

SELF-ESTRANGEMENT, an individual’s inability “to find self-rewarding…or self-consummatory activities that engage him.” Dylan is motivated to work for ‘incentives’ because his work isn’t inherently rewarding. He spends a lot of time thinking about how much more interesting his Outie’s life might be.

With the exception of Petey, who has made his own journey before the series starts, each Innie goes on a voyage towards ‘unalienation’ and ultimately- hopefully in a future series - reintegration of their two selves. It is worth noting that their individual journeys can be seen as being prompted by their Innies feeling what their Outies are lacking: Mark’s Outie is suffering from grief; his Innie finds Compassion. Helly’s Outie comes from a privileged and cold background; her Innie finds Connection. Irving’s Outie lives a solitary life; after meeting Burt, his Innie finds Love. Dylan is immature; after his Innie is briefly woken up in his Outie’s home and sees that he has a child, his Innie finds Self-Sacrifice and Responsibility.

Compassion, Connection, Love, Self-Sacrifice and Responsibility. Just like in the Wizard of Oz (1939), these qualities were inside each of them the whole time.

In Severance, we have a removal from Time but with a hope of a perfect future; a sense of confinement, scrutiny and control in a non-physical space that isn’t easily navigated; and fragmented selves that are split between two worlds. This is also our 21st century Metamodern condition: we hover between Modern and Postmodern eras, between the Real and the Digital worlds, unable or unwilling to set foot firmly in either one. Despite everything that has attempted to separate the Innies in Severance from a grounding in The Real, they discover Connection, Love, Responsibility and a sense of Sacrifice for the greater good. Most importantly, however, they find Compassion for their fellow humans beings, which comes automatically when they realise- or remember- that they are all fully-rounded, fully-emotional human beings with a real life and history that exists in the natural world outside of the unreal space they find themselves in.

As we re-learn how to Be Human in this new era, we must remind ourselves we are physical, material beings whose origin is in the real world and remember the lessons we learned in stories we have told ourselves time and time again: “there’s no place like home”.

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And then I grew up.

After a childhood of doing whatever I put my mind to, life in the grown-ups' world turned out to be considerably trickier. I learned that there is no simple formula - do A then do B and you will get C. Nope. The real world is a lot messier, a lot less predicable, a lot less... fair.

When I decided to try my hand at tv, everything initially fell into my lap. I was hired after my first audition for a tv presenting job where they saw 1000 applicants. I was in my early 20s, I was fit, my hair was great, I was good at my job because I just worked and worked at it. And everything seemed to float along happily for a few years. Then I had a baby. I took some time out and when I went back to work after looking after the baby, things had changed.

The routine of 'work diligently to succeed' didn't seem to just happen anymore. I was working harder than ever - looking for work, meeting people, applying for jobs, auditioning for jobs and sometimes getting those jobs - and was actually WORKING HARDER than ever - nappies, playing, making food, bedtime, waking up in the middle of the night, caring, soothing, cleaning, day after day after day. And it wasn't just the baby chores that I was doing. The previously shared work that my partner and I did - cleaning, shopping, cooking, laundry - had suddenly become 100% my responsibility. I don't remember how that happened, but it did. For some reason (*sideeye*). I was doing it all. I did not feel ‘successful’.

No one was happy for me when I did a load of laundry. No one said thanks. No one said congratulations. No one sent flowers. No one put money in my bank account. A load of clean laundry was not 'success' for me. It did not feel like an achievement. It was something that I had to do whether I wanted to or not. Dirty socks are not going to wash themselves. I was exhausted. I hadn't slept properly in years.

... but...

I just worked diligently. I doggedly did what I had to do, but 'for some reason' it wasn't enough. My work outside of the house was going well, but seemingly nothing I did at home was up to par... and I soon started to understand that actually pretty much nothing about me was satisfactory. I was dumb and uncouth and annoying and too needy. My work was silly and inferior and entirely without merit ("The internet is just the new ham radio. I don't know why you're wasting your time."). I was no longer the 'fun' 'cool' 'hot' 'young' woman I'd been. I was just a dopey, tired mum with floppy skin on her belly. Just the grossest. That's what I was told, in so many words. And that's exactly how I felt.

... but ...

I just worked diligently. Because that's how you succeed, right? I kept trying and trying and nothing seemed to be right. I couldn't understand why when I would go to work presenting a live daily technology tv show, I'd feel great and on top of things and confident and clever and attractive, then I'd get home and felt like a stupid, ugly, fat, useless, unsuccessful loser. I was never able to understand what I was doing wrong. One week I was humiliated for doing something. The next week I was humiliated for not doing it. "But you said..." "No I didn't!!!" I was walking on eggshells, unable to understand my world. I felt like I was losing my mind... And then I was on my own with a child, with nothing holding me up. I'd been hollowed out. An empty shell.

Everything I'd worked for was gone. I felt like I'd been cast aside. Rejected.

Still, I just worked diligently. That's what I'm supposed to do, right? RIGHT?! I built everything back up again, but the rejections - of which there are many in creative industries - started to sting. It seemed that I had less protective padding than I'd had before. I worked harder and harder, longer and longer. I wanted to show "everyone" that I was, in fact, fucking AMAZING and that I shouldn't be rejected.

Alongside auditioning and working, I spent an extraordinary amount of time working on programme proposals, pitches and pilots that ended up leading nowhere. If I'd been employed in the development department of a big production company, I'd have been paid for my time. But I was freelance, so every hour of research, every meeting, every re-write, every 'come in for a chat', every 'It's great! But could you write full outlines for 2 more episodes because they're now looking for series of 8?' was unpaid. Often, I'd have to pay for childcare to go to these meetings where I was told they wanted me to do just a bit more unpaid work. Or I'd film a pilot and then there'd be some random reason the broadcaster didn't commission it ('No one is interested in the history of technology' 'No one is interested in how technology can improve the future' ‘No one cares about what's happening with technology right now' WTF?). When a series I did was cancelled almost as soon as it aired, I'd had enough. I couldn't do it anymore.

Working in tv as 'talent' is very similar to being in an abusive relationship. I felt like I'd spent 15 years just standing still while being intermittently being screamed at and told how useless and shit I am, then being heaped with love and praise and told how utterly amazing I am and then doing heaps of unpaid labour and constantly being told I needed to do it better. It wasn't super great.

Because I was a ‘web expert’, I started producing websites and doing general stuff online. It was the early days of new media, so I was defining what my role was and there wasn't anyone saying 'no'. I was able to do some really awesome stuff because I didn't have to get anyone's permission, but, also, I didn't have anyone putting on the brakes... At one point, I was working 18-hour days. I'd be having conference calls with "LA" at 1am and then have to do some stuff for "Australia". I'd grab a few hours' sleep, get up, get my son to school, get back home, work until the end of the school day, pick him up, work a bit, do dinner and bedtime, then work, then maybe have a conference call and on and on for months. And months.

On my final day on a job, I had a bunch of media interviews to do. After dropping my son at school, I walked to the Tube station. As I arrived, I felt like I was going to faint and realised I wasn't feeling very well at all. I decided to take a taxi. In the cab, I phoned up my colleagues and told them that I was heading to the first interview, but I wouldn't be able to do the rest. At some point during that phone call, I touched the back of my ear and felt a huge bump. A lymph node. The only time those lymph nodes swelled up was when I was really ill - like when I had chicken pox as a teenager or a really bad strep infection. Oh no. This wasn't good...

I did the interview and got another taxi home. During that journey, I'd convinced myself that I'd destroyed my immune system by working too hard and was ill with something truly terrible. I'd go to my doctor's emergency clinic that afternoon...

...As I sat in the waiting room, ready for my name to be called, my mood crashed. What had been the point of all of that work over the previous decade and a half? What did it do for me other than make me ill? It didn't prove to anyone that I was good, worthy, clever, interesting, talented, amazing. Well, not the people I felt I needed to prove something to, that is. All that work just made me ill. Really ill. One of the early signs of lymphoma is having swollen lymph nodes behind the ear...

... I was called in, sat down, was asked what the issue was and I immediately collapsed in a sobbing heap as I told my doctor about the swollen lymph node behind my ear, my over-work and exhaustion and how I'd not slept in literally years and how I'd ruined my immune system and I think I'm really ill, like really ill, I don't know what I'm going to do... She said, calmly, 'OK. Let's have a look behind your ear... Hmmm... Does that hurt?... Hmmm... Right...'

She sat back down and said, 'OK... It's just a pimple. A very large one, which tells me that you probably are run down... But it's just a spot. Nothing more serious. But you need to take it as a sign that you need a rest. You aren't very well. I can sign you off work.' I told her that it was my last day on this job and I was freelance anyway and didn't have anything else to immediately go to. She told me that I needed to take a proper rest before I actually make myself ill.

For the next 8 weeks I'd wake up, take my son to school, go home, sleep all day, pick him up from school, do dinner and then go to sleep. I spent 8 weeks in bed, physically and mentally unable to do anything...

I took some baby steps and started working again. I was more careful with my hours but couldn't seem to say 'no'. The web stuff was changing and instead of 'running the show', more and more often I was 'cleaning up other people's messes'. I did some tv again. That was still a trainwreck. The work I was getting started to be very bitty. I wasn't being brought in to originate and complete projects that might take months. Instead, I'd be asked in for 'brainstorming' and then they'd just take my ideas and do them without me. The regular work I was getting was a day per week for a few months for one place, a day per week for a few months for another place. There was nothing I could sink my teeth into and feel a sense of accomplishment at completing. Everything was in bits. There never seemed to be a completion. I was jumping around day to day doing wildly different things. Producing events, consulting of all different types, writing of all different types, red carpet interviewing, tv programme development, weird stuff on the web. I was a different person every day. I started to get anxious about being asked 'and what do you do?' at parties. I didn't have an easy answer.

In 2016, I started to recognise the signs of another looming burn out. Or maybe it wasn't looming, maybe I was in the middle of it. It wasn't a great year. It didn't help that I'd been relentlessly hounded and harassed and threatened by too online idiots (including people from my real life) for the previous 3 years. It didn't help that I'd come down with the worst case of flu I'd ever have in the spring and was out of action for a month. It didn't help that the flu kicked off a series of health and medical issues, including Bell's Palsy, that affected me for the next 6 months. Brexit didn't help. Trump didn't help. Bowie, Prince, George Michael and Carrie Fisher dying didn't help.

I stepped away from the world.

Actually, I stepped away from the digital world.

I deleted 14 years of blog entries.

I deleted my blog from the Internet Archive.

I stopped seeing everything I did as a potential social media post.

I stopped taking on bitty jobs.

I started taking classes to learn new things.

I went to university for the first time.

I got an MA.

And now I'm here.

I'm not sure where 'here' is though.

I'm definitely less able to deal with stress than I ever was. I'm definitely keeping people who add stress to my life away from me. I'm definitely not working stupid hours anymore. I'm feeling a bit distant from everything I was close to over the past 30 years. I'm fighting against the idea that I just need to diligently work in order to be successful, because I'm not sure what 'successful' even means. I'm sure I don't feel it. If I was a certain type of person, I'd self-diagnose with ADHD and use it as an excuse for my subjective feeling of ‘unfulfillment’ and general bitterness at life, while pretending that I’m a kind, caring ‘man-of-the-people’ when in reality I’m a narcissistic, entitled jerk who believes I’m better than everyone (so there must be SOME reason I’m not being worshipped by literally everyone!). I'm not that type of person. I'm actually really happy. I’m just trying to figure out this new way of thinking that doesn’t tie my sense of self to an ill-defined idea of ‘achievement’. I’m trying to work out who I am if I don’t want to think of myself as a job title.

And I guess this is where I'm supposed to add some takeaway value. Some advice. Pass on some guidance. Tell you what I've learned from my experiences so that your life is easier.

I don't know.

I'm just trying to be for a while.

I'm thinking.

I'm growing stuff to look at or eat.

I'm feeding the birds.

I'm looking at trees.

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After nearly 25 years and a lot of unhappiness, pain and orthopaedic pillows, Brian and I have decided that we need separate mattresses. Not separate houses nor separate rooms nor even separate beds. Just separate mattresses. Literally just two mattresses on one frame. A kind of sleep separation. Not a sleep divorce...

We're lucky to have a big enough bedroom to fit a superking sized bed which fits two single width mattresses. So we now each have our own mattress. OMFG. This is the best thing to happen to me in YEARS!!!

If you and your partner are different weights and have different sleeping positions, finding one mattress that works for both of you can be tricky. If you're heavier and sleep on your back, you will benefit from a firm mattress. If you are lighter and sleep on your side, a medium or even a soft mattress will probably work best for you.

I consciously started sleeping on my left side when I was pregnant with my first child in the mid-90s - it was the recommended sleeping position for pregnant women, though now it seems to be OK to sleep on your right side (but not your back). Anyway, I've remained a side sleeper since then.

Over the years, I've had various injuries - including shoulder problems, tennis elbow, golfers' elbow - ALL on the left side. I worked out a few years ago that it was to do with my sleeping position and the fact that our mattress was just too firm for a side sleeper. If you sleep on your side, your shoulders and your hips, if you're a woman, stick out and need to be able to 'sink in' to the mattress a bit in order to keep your spine straight and not put pressure on your shoulder and hip. If the mattress is too firm, then you end up spending 8 hours a night putting a lot of pressure on your bones and ligaments... so it's no surprise that people end up with injuries or pain. Initially, I made an effort to not sleep on my left side and found that my shoulder wouldn't hurt... but changing your decades-long sleeping position is tricky. I would wake up several times a night and force myself to move to a different position only to wake up later on my lefthand side and on and on. It was dull and didn't allow me to just sleep and get a proper rest as I was always on high alert to make sure I wasn't sleeping on my lefthand side.

After that, I tried a mattress topper to add some softness... I went through a few toppers. The main issues I found were that they were either not thick enough to make a difference or were just too hot to sleep on. This one from Emma was pretty good and definitely helped stop my aching. (They also do a thicker, temperature control one, but that is medium-firm tension, which still could be too firm for you side sleepers.) It would definitely be a good starting point, if you're not ready to get a whole new mattress...

But the too-firm mattress wasn't the only issue...

Since I had kids, I've been a very light sleeper. I can't just shut off the whole 'mum on alert' thing. I'm starting to relax more now that my youngest son is about half a foot taller than me and can physically look after himself, but I still tend to rouse fairly easily... including when my husband rolls over in bed. In my sleepy brain, I feel like he's bouncing up and down on the mattress or something, so I wake right up super annoyed. In reality, he's just shifting position like any normal person does... but because I'm such a touchy sleeper, it was really interrupting me.

This past spring, Brian was away for several weeks on tour and I thought I'd treat myself to a new mattress. Yea, I know how to live... I went to a mattress shop and spent a lot of time talking to them, telling them my issues with pain and being disturbed by my husband moving in bed and trying out loads and loads of mattresses for an awkwardly long time... the guy suggested that I needed a medium mattress and Brian needed a firm one... then he mentioned zip and link mattresses - two mattresses that zip together, so that you can have two different mattress tensions. This sounded like a brilliant idea, so went for it. I'm crazy like that.

It. Is. BRILLIANT! I now have a mattress that is the right tension for me. I no longer have any aches or pains, I'm no longer disturbed by my husband rolling over at night because I have my own mattress!!!!!... it is amazing...

But...

There was still the whole fighting over the duvet issue... He likes to be completely enveloped in a duvet like a cute little sausage roll and I... well... I like to actually have a fricken duvet on me sometimes omfg. I solved that within a week: I got us two single duvets! Initially, Brian was a little concerned by this. He felt that perhaps the whole separate mattress and separate duvet thing was the first step to separate beds or separate rooms. What next? Separate houses?!

Then this past summer, we visited Gothenburg and stayed at the Dorsia Hotel. We got into our room. I looked at the bed. TWO SINGLE DUVETS!! I said "See? See?! It's SCANDINAVIAN!!"

I've subsequently learned that the whole 'sleep divorce' and ‘the Scandinavian sleep method’ thing is a bit of a trend. What can I say? I'm cool like that. Whatever.

I definitely recommend taking these issues seriously earlier rather than later to avoid more pain and injuries. If your sleep is disturbed by duvet issues - perhaps you are a hot sleeper and your partner is a cold sleeper, or you find yourself always playing tug of war with the duvet in the night - seriously consider the separate duvet thing (“It’s cool, honey. It’s Scandinavian!”). And if you are finding yourself with shoulder, hip or even arm pain on the side you sleep on, it could be that your mattress is too firm for you. Maybe start by trying a nice thick soft mattress topper, but be aware that some of them can be very hot.

And if your mattress is coming to the end of its life and you're in the market for a new one... consider the split mattress thing, but it's worth noting that zip and link mattresses of two different tensions can be more expensive than two of the same tension. If you're lucky and you have a superking frame, you could just get two single mattresses which would be less expensive than a zip and link, BUT single mattresses are 10cm shorter than a UK superking size, which may or may not bother you. EU single mattresses, however, are the correct size to fit two perfectly on a UK superking frame. You can get zip and link mattresses for kingsize beds as well, but it would fit two small single mattresses, too. Though again, the small singles are 10cm shorter than a kingsized bed, unless you can get a EU small single. Also, we don’t actually zip our mattresses together - it’s a massive faff - I have a mattress protector over the top so there’s no obvious gap. I’ve not got single sheets for them (yet??), I just use our normal superking sheets.

Anway… Sort it out. You'll sleep loads better, you'll feel loads better and you won't be fighting for a duvet ever again.

LISTEN UP

I realised the other day that my aversion to self-publicity meant that a few of my friends didn't even know I was doing a podcast, so my guess is a bunch of you don't know that either! It's called The Cluster F Theory and you can subscribe to it here on Substack https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/ or listen to it wherever you normally listen to podcasts (eg Apple, Spotify). We've been super lucky that we have interesting and amazing friends who have joined us for a chat. If you've not listened to it, we've released over 30 now, so there are a lot to choose from. Here are a few to start you off with:

Caroline Criado Perez on Invisible Women https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/12-invisible-women-caroline-criado

Sarah Ditum on Cultural Poisoning https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/26-cultural-poisoning-sarah-ditum

Nick Rhodes on AI https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/31-ai-nick-rhodes

Carrie Lambert Beatty on Parafiction https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/13-parafiction-carrie-lambert-beatty

Jason Farago on Stasis https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/24-stasis-jason-farago

Gaaaaah! I could go on. There are SO MANY interesting episodes... I’d love it if you’d have a listen!

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The meal started out fine - we ordered, were served some amuse bouche, got a lovely wine... fine fine fine. My starter was good - truffle risotto, how you you go wrong with that? The chaos really started with the main course.

Brian and I ordered the same thing for our main: beef ravioli. It's not something I'd normally order, but it sounded great- it had pine nuts and sage in a brown butter sauce- and was the 'lightest' meal on the menu. The food started to come to the table and the waiter put about 6 pieces of plain ravioli on my plate and a minute later spooned a bit of thin brown sauce around the plate. Not only was this nothing like what I was expecting based on what was said in the menu, but it just looked insipid and unappetising. Literally just some plain ravioli with drops of brown sauce on the plate. Next, the waiter placed a pan of ravioli on the table in front of Brian. His looked like what the menu said. As the waiter was serving the delicious-looking ravioli to Brian, I asked him what the difference was between my ravioli and Brian's ravioli. He said, 'It is the same.' 'But mine doesn't have anything on it.' 'It is the same.' And then I said it:

'But I can see.'

And as I said those words, I had this flash of all of the times that people have tried to tell me that what I was seeing was, in fact, NOT what I was seeing... and it made me so angry.

Luckily, I wasn't the only one at the table who saw that I had been served a beige, pathetic, limp, bare, feeble excuse for a meal. Everyone could see it... and they were equally as annoyed as I was by the waiter trying to tell me it was the same. Brian called the boss over and asked what was going on. The boss asked the waiter, again the waiter said 'It is the same.' The boss repeated to me with a shrug, 'Well, he says it is the same.' Again I said, angrier this time:

'But I can see!!!'

...soooo... we're not going back there again and we're telling everyone else we know who've been there not to go.

Why do people think they can tell others to disbelieve their eyes? I can guess why in my example: the waiter was out of his depth. It's like they'd hired someone who'd never worked in a restaurant before to serve a table of 8 of us at dinner as his very first experience. He'd messed up loads of things throughout the meal, so maybe he had only put in an order for one ravioli and when he realised his mistake, secretly cobbled together some pathetic version of it and tried to pass it off to me (but, obviously, didn't try it on with the MAN who ordered the same thing!) rather than own up to his mistake. I would have been 900 times happier if he or the boss had said 'I'm so sorry, there's been a mix up in the kitchen and your order isn't ready. We will get it to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, please accept our apologies...' Et cetera et cetera rather than trying to tell me that I wasn't seeing what I was seeing.

But why do people do this generally? And I don't mean trying to convince someone that their opinion about something or their interpretation of something is correct, those are different things. I mean, why do people try to tell others that they are not seeing what is clear to anyone who can see? Furthermore, why do some people go along with being told what they are seeing is NOT what they are seeing? (Actually, that’s probably due to this)

It's kind of a step on from gaslighting, a kind of Gaslighting+. The common or garden gaslighting- "But you said [X] yesterday!" "No, I didn't" - is an extremely common occurrence within abusive relationships and/or with narcissists. 99.9999999% of the time, you are not going to have anything other than your own memory of them saying [X], so the veracity of your claim becomes impossible to confirm. It's also why gaslighting messes with your head so much: you feel like your memory is flawed or your grasp on reality is slipping because the other person is just so confidently matter of fact about it all. "No, I didn't say that."

Next up the gaslighting scale is someone trying to tell you what you think, believe or feel - again very common with abusers and narcissists- which is also more and more common in the wider world now.

I was talking to a friend recently about how I find the whole idea of 'non-binary identities' to be pretty ridiculous. He asked me why I was 'so offended' by non-binary people. Now, I'm not in any way implying he was being abusive or is a narcissist, but I wasn't expressing my opinion in an angry or heightened way, I wasn't shouting, I wasn't scowling, I wasn't swearing (more than usual). I wasn't behaving as if I were "offended". I was just stating what I thought in the same way I might say 'I find the whole idea of an oxygen bar ridiculous.' No one would think I was OFFENDED by the idea of an oxygen bar. They might think it was strange because ‘isn't oxygen good for you??’, but they wouldn't attach any kind of morality to my statement...

I tried to tell him that I wasn't offended by people who call themselves 'non-binary' at all, but that the insistence that 'non-binary' was somehow 'special' (when I think no one is purely masculine or feminine, so everyone is non-binary) is ridiculous. I don't think he was able to comprehend that fully because it seems that for many leftwing/liberal people the only conceivable reason one would question anything within the gender realm is due to being offended, right? Right?! There can be no other option… The thing is, insisting that the only way it's possible for me to question, disagree with, object to, dislike something is because of 'moral repugnance' or even 'hate' is gaslighting - it is negating my perception. I know what I think. I know my reasoning. I know my own experience... This widespread form of gaslighting is based in an inability of others (men?) to expand their worldview or their understanding of how others experience the world to include the minds of others (women?).

Women are constantly being told we aren't seeing what we are seeing. And a lot of women- having been socialised to be kind, selfless and compliant and who haven't (yet) interrogated this- just accept that they are wrong about what they are seeing and go along with the cultural gaslighting. They internalise the idea that women are inherently mistaken about or incapable of understanding their own experience unless they view everything through the lens of 'male socialisation' and they work to uphold the idea that men are the only ones who have the 'proper' way of viewing the world. This lens views the idea of 'Woman' as a 2-dimensional surface- without an internal dimension, but very definitely with boobs- onto which 'non-women' can project anything they want. This lens allows the viewer to stick any label they want onto a woman as if she were a canvas hanging on a wall and believe they are looking at reality.

Because men's experience of existing in the world is different to women's, this lens allows them to confidently tell us that we are not seeing what we are seeing. They can say to a woman 'The ravioli dishes are the same’ as easily as they say 'No, you aren't seeing a pattern of male violence against women. I mean, sure the statistics show that 95% perpetrators of physical and sexual violence against women are male, but they're all just individuals acting independently. It’s just a coincidence. It doesn't mean anything. There's no pattern. There's nothing to see here. Nope. You are not seeing what you are seeing, women. Move along now. Move along.'

This lens also views the whole concept of 'A Woman' as simply an idea in a man's mind, after all She is purely and merely the labels that HE decides to stick on the canvas. His thoughts. His experience. His labels. And you better not believe there is anything else other than that… or else…

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Yep. We could all make an 'You Won't Believe These 11 Traits Your Friends Should Have!' list and compare them. Whatever...

What about when you or they or even the entire world is existing in chaos? That could mean a relationship break-up, an affair, a serious illness, being fired from a job, being cancelled on the internet, an addiction, a death, a revolt, a war, the zombie apocalypse...? What do you need from a friend in one of those circumstances?

Loyalty? Sure. Of course. You need to know that if your friend is infected they aren't going to eat your brain and will eat someone else's brain instead... Trustworthiness? Obviously, you don't want them to expose your secret hiding spot to the zombies. Honesty? This is by far the most important thing you need from your friends in all circumstances, but especially within chaos.

I don't mean 'Yea, you do look fat in that. I'M JUST BEING HONEST!!!!' I mean looking you straight in the eye and telling you 'I think you have a drinking problem' or 'Your boyfriend is abusing you and I will help you get out of here' or 'No, you shouldn't have told your boss he's a stupid bald twat! No wonder you got fired' or 'I don't think it's good for your mental health to keep going online to fight with abusive idiots' or 'You're no good with a machete. Use the baseball bat instead. And remember to go for the head.'

Your friends should be able to tell you things you don't necessarily want to hear. Your friends should be telling you what you need to know about your situation from the outside. Your friends shouldn't be enabling your bad behaviour or your destructive mindset.

More importantly than any of that, you should listen to your friends, even if what they have to say makes you uncomfortable.

I'm an obsessive pattern recogniser and have a tendency to ascribe meaning to the 'signals' I see in the noise (hence the name of this newsletter!), but over the past several years I've seen several people in my sphere navigate this whole 'friendship' thing in similar ways that have ultimately proven to be destructive. These 'bad friendship models' operate in the same way strict adherence to your social media algorithms do- reflecting yourself back to you without any new, different, or alternative viewpoints- which we all know can be profoundly destructive to individuals. Here are some of the things I've seen...

1. Fans Are Not Friends

Sometimes people you think are your friends are not friends, they are 'fans'. This is the case for anyone whether they are well-known or not. The difference between 'friend' and 'fan' mightn't be obvious in areas beyond the traditional 'performer/artist and fan' dynamic, but briefly, a friend is interested in You; a fan is only interested in what you do. A friend is someone you are interested in; a fan is someone you expect to endlessly adore you and always be positive about everything you do. This isn't set in stone, obviously. A fan can become a friend, a friend can be a fan of what you do. Some people, however, simply don't want friends, they just want fans. When I've seen these people in my spheres over the past several years, there is a trail of hurt, anger, feelings of betrayal, broken relationships, destroyed careers...

Many years ago, after the end of a "tricky" relationship when I was extremely upset and finding the whole thing difficult to understand, a friend of mine said, "He didn't want a partner, he wanted a fan" and the whole thing fell into place. I was operating under the assumption that we were friends, companions, partners and all that entailed, I hadn't worked out that the only thing that was expected of me was 'adoration'. Therefore any disagreement I may have had about anything- from what to have for dinner to what to watch on tv to when I could and couldn't speak (*sideeye emoji*)- meant that I was breaking the terms that I had unwittingly agreed to in that relationship.

If you expect everyone around to you agree with everything you say and do, to never voice their opinions that might differ from yours, or - in the extreme - you think someone is 'an enemy' because they have questioned something you have said or done, then you do not want friends, you want fans.

Look at the people you've surrounded yourself with and be honest. Do you want to have people in your life that love You for exactly who you are (warts and all) or do you want to surround yourself with people who unquestioningly tell you that you are amazing and enthusiastically express their love for everything you do? If it's the latter, may I suggest therapy?

And if you have a friend who cannot allow you to disagree with them or gets angry with you when you point out that you think differently about something, ditch them. They don't want a friend. They want an acolyte.

Fans will encourage you to walk right to the edge and applaud as you step off into oblivion... and then they'll just move straight onto their next guru. Friends will keep trying to drag you back to safety...

2. Friendship is not a Utopia

Human beings are a big, wet sack of flaws. Expecting perfection from anyone is setting yourself up for disappointment. If you've found yourself thinking or (for fuck's sake) saying that the vast majority of your (ex-) friends, colleagues or partners have been 'unsupportive' 'bitter' 'negative' 'back-stabbers' 'bullies' 'hateful' 'careerist' 'liars' 'bigots' or plain old 'arseholes', then I put it to you that the common denominator isn't that the world is shit and you are Pure and Impeccable and if everyone was exactly like you then the world would be Perfect. No, the common denominator is that you are an idiot. The problem is You.

If you find yourself expecting perfection from everyone around you, you might be seeing the world in black and white, in Good and Evil. In this fantasy world you've created, You are All Good, of course, and it follows that everything you think, say or do is All Good simply because it has come from you. If someone disagrees with or objects to something you have thought, said or did, they necessarily become All Evil in your mind. This is not normal or healthy.

If you have surrounded yourself with people who are black and white thinkers - even if only about certain topics or areas - then you don't have friends, you have fellow 'true believers'. One misstep from one of them and they will join the ranks of all the other 'arseholes' in your life... And if you take one step out of line, you will be chucked out of their world immediately.

This is not a recipe for happiness.

It's OK to wish for a Utopia, as long as you understand that it is never possible to achieve. People are imperfect. Society evolves in a messy way. You are an idiot. So are your friends.

3. 'Friends=Good And Good=Correct Therefore Friends=Correct' Is A Dumb As Fuck Formula

Life isn't maths.

I see this a lot: Someone's friend says something stupid as hell and gets a lot of crap for it. Instead of simply supporting their friend in private or even supporting their friend's 'right' to their own opinions, they (publicly) agree with their friend's stupid as hell pronouncement and decide that anyone who objected to the stupid as hell crap that spewed from their friend's dumb face is Evil.

They seem to be operating under the misapprehension that they must be in total agreement with their 'friend' about absolutely everything. They are either in a situation described under 1 where their 'friend' requires them to be a 'fan' or they have faulty thinking as described in 2 where they've doomed themselves by believing in a Utopia. Maybe both.

I also see this when people behave in a way that is out-of-character and the people (fans) they've surrounded themselves with defend their behaviour. The out-of-character behaviour can be something minorly anti-social - for example, belittling, attacking or shaming someone who really should just be ignored - or it might be something that hints at a potentially serious mental health issue - for example, obsessive angry posting on social media on multiple sites for hours and hours every day. Because they are guilty of confusing friends and fans or are chasing perfection, they believe that anyone pointing out their 'bad behaviour' is 'an enemy'.

I personally know several people like this - if you know me well, I'm sure you can guess at least a couple of them - and when people (including me) who have considered these people friends have expressed concern about their out-of-character behaviour, they were met with huge amounts of aggression. (Ah. OK. They just want 'fans' not friends. Fine. That isn't for me. Bye, dude...) And then they will block anyone who has questioned them and often they will publicly denounce their concerned (now-former) friends as 'traitors' opening the doors to the misbehaver's army of 'fans' who go on to attack the former friends.

It's OK for your friends to say dumb shit sometimes. It's also OK for you to say 'I don't agree with you' to them, or for them to say it you. If none of your friendships are like this right now, you might want to re-think things going forward.

4. Friends Are Not A Magic Money* Tree

* replace with Support/Help/Time/etc as needed.

Everyone has their own shit to deal with, including your friends. We all have a finite amount of energy and time. It's unfair for you to expect others to give you everything you want, when you want it.

If you find yourself thinking about a friend 'they have something I want and they should give it to me', you don't want a friend, you want a benefactor. If you find yourself often asking your friend for advice only to ignore it every time and continue to do dumb shit, you don't want a friend, you need a therapist. If you find yourself getting angry at your friend because they've turned down your invitation to go out again because they are staying in to look after their little kids, you... are just a solipsistic dick.

You don't deserve anything from any of your friends - or anyone else for that matter - simply for existing. I think of it like this: if I was the only person on Earth, I'd be free to do whatever I wanted. I could live where I wanted, eat what I wanted, travel where I wanted, do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I'd be completely free and entirely in control of myself... Does the introduction of other people onto the planet mean that I am entitled to MORE - more of other people's food, other people's money, other people's time, help, support...?

I don't think it does. We're all here trying to get on and get along. You getting angry at friends because they don't spend enough time talking to you, messaging you, doing things for you, going out with you, doing favours for you, giving money to you... is super uncool. They aren't the jerks, you are. I'm not saying we shouldn't look out for each other, not at all. I'm saying that when you start expecting things from your friends and getting angry when they don't give you those things, you are being selfish and anti-social.

5. Friends don't let friends delude themselves.

If you see someone behaving in ways that you think are potentially dangerous, is it OK to tell them that you are concerned about the direction they are heading in and that it would be better for them to stop? How about this: If someone is driving along a road that you know is absolutely packed with zombies ahead, it's perfectly acceptable to try to flag them down and stop them continuing, right? It is. Of course it is… Surely, it should also be OK to do something similar when it comes to a friend heading down a treacherous path when it comes to their health or their mental health (or their career or their relationship...)... but so often for so many it really isn't fine- either on the giving or receiving end.

I know I am wary about giving that kind of advice because of experiences like this, that I wrote about before:

Several years ago, I was friendly with someone who was all 'be kind'. This person had told me about an extremely minor issue they were dealing with. I say 'extremely minor' because the solution to this problem was trivial. It was similar to someone saying "Ugh. All the windows are open, it's winter and my house is FREEZING. It's terrible. I'm so cold. I can't warm up at all. My feet hurt, they're so cold. I feel awful and so upset. I just don't know what to do..." And my reply was the equivalent of "Why not just shut your windows?" This apparently wasn't the 'kind' thing to do. I was simply supposed to offer sympathy, not possible solutions.

I was told I had no empathy.

It's as if saying 'be kind' or repeating the word 'empathy' is magic. That all we need to do is close our eyes, spin around 3 times and repeat 'be kind' over and over and all of the problems in the world will disappear. We don't need to think of practical solutions. We don't need to think of, you know, REALITY. We just need to say that we are feeling 'empathy' and that's good enough. 'Who cares if you have frostbite?? I have an entirely hidden feeling of empathy for you. That's enough...'

But IN THE REAL WORLD, if your windows are open, it's freezing and you are unbearably cold, I don't just say ‘I'm super empathic and I just feel so sad for you that you are cold.’ I CLOSE THE FUCKING WINDOWS...

I have no qualms about saying that I think that person was deluding themselves. The issue they were dealing with wasn't huge or insurmountable. In fact, it was actually less serious than the analogous 'open window' example I gave, but continuing on the path they were on, however, wasn't heading to anywhere good/positive/happy. It was just a lot of needless upset, worry and misery ahead of them. "Shutting the window" would end that misery pretty quickly. It was pretty clear to me what they should have done... but their response showed me that they wanted to remain in their deluded, unhappy state because it was giving them something they needed (ie it showed they were 'a victim').

Look, I'm not interested in colluding with a friend and pretending that they are ill when they are fine, happy when they are in a terrible relationship, doing genius work when they are churning out sub-par 'product', thinking or behaving rationally when it's clear they're eyebrow deep in the crazy weeds... sometimes I'm comfortable telling a friend what I really think... and sometimes I'm not because I know they won't be receptive to it. And when I don't feel I can tell them what I really think, then I find it hard to engage with them at all. I'm not going to lie. And I'm not going to silently prop up their delusion. I'm not prepared to be told (again) that I'm an evil, awful, horrible human being for doing what we should all be doing: looking out for our friends. So sometimes, it seems, we just may have to choose to let go of friends who prefer their delusions to reality... and stick even closer to those who are comfortable continuing to find the light and the hope and the happiness and the good inside the chaos.

Caroline is the one who first got me thinking about pockets forever ago. Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote the following for The Pool (remember that?) and thought I'd share it here.

Most women’s clothing can’t accommodate an iPhone let alone the entire contents of a bag. What's up with that?

Asks Gia Milinovich

I don’t like handbags. There – I’ve said it. Losing the use of a hand in order to heave a bunch of junk around has never really appealed. And a shoulder/clutch/tote bag is just asking to be snatched. The other week, I emptied out the contents of my current bag to find the following: a packet of Lockets from last year's cold season; yoghurt-covered raisins; biscuit crumbs; three tons of receipts; make-up that I thought I’d lost, so bought replacements and – OH! That's where all the pens went. It appears that I basically carry around a rubbish bin with a wallet, keys and a phone in it.

If I could be rid of a handbag altogether, I would. There is, however, no other option for women, because most of our clothing isn’t made with pockets and those that are aren’t made with useful pockets. For example, the hip pocket on my jeans isn’t deep enough for the full length of my fingers let alone a wallet; none of my coats or jackets has a breast pocket; and, when it comes to skirts, you can pretty much forget it. Also, a few items of my clothing come with false pockets – what is up with that?

Unlike my husband, whose entire wardrobe comes complete with multiple useful pockets, if I wish to carry anything at all, I am forced to use a handbag.

I believe the lack of pocket parity forces women to be viewed as less efficient than men. Think of the difference: at the start of a meeting, a man reaches inside his jacket to remove a pen from his breast pocket in order to take notes; at the start of a meeting, a woman digs through the junk in her bag searching for a pen, which she finally pulls out, removing an old receipt that was wedged under the clip and brushing off the crumbs that have stuck to her hand.

I posit that pockets are a modern feminist issue.

From the 15th to the mid-16th centuries, both men and women carried small bags called “pockets”, from the Old North French “poque” meaning “bag”. They were usually tied around the waist or hung from a belt. Along with money, they carried things such as keys, snuffboxes, mirrors, sewing equipment and “pocket books” (diaries). For women especially, a pocket may have been the only private place they had. As the shape of women’s dresses changed and became sleeker and more closely fitted in the early 1900s, women started carrying a bag in their hands, rather than under their dresses. At the same time, Savile Row devised a three-piece suit for men that had around 15 integral pockets in which they could carry their keys, a watch, money, a handkerchief, matches, a small book. Men’s pockets allowed them to be organised: they knew exactly where everything was and could find it immediately. Women, having to stash what they needed into a small reticule, were required to dig and search to find anything.

My how times have changed. Or not.

Recently, I decided to make a stand. Tired of lugging around my shoulder bag, I wanted to see if I could live without carrying any type of bag at all. I wanted to be organised, ordered and faff-free. I wanted to know where my day-to-day necessities were without having to rummage through the dross. In order to do this, I needed to find an article of clothing with large enough pockets in which to carry at the very least my keys, wallet and phone. After a bit of research, I found a US-based company called ScottEVest that prides itself on pockets. Their motto – “Our Pockets. Your Freedom” – this sounded perfect. I opted for the Q.U.E.S.T. women’s vest simply because of its impressive 42 pockets. As a bit of a nerd, I took this as a good omen. This vest was to be the answer to life, the universe and everything. This vest was to be my handbag liberation and, needless to say, I was excited. As soon as it arrived, I emptied out my bag and filled everything neatly into my pockets: wallet, money, keys, phone. It fitted perfectly, with room to spare and, what’s more, when zipped up, you couldn’t tell that I was carrying my every personal possession around my torso, as the pockets are positioned with women’s bodies in mind. I was decidedly streamlined. Admittedly, the style is a bit “outdoorsy”, which works with jeans – less so with a dress, but it’s a start.

During my experiment, I flew to New York and, for the first time ever, I didn’t take a handbag. The vest was a revelation. My passport and travel documents had their own pocket, so no fumbling at security. My cards and money were easy to access but secure, which gave me a satisfying sense of safety. And, remarkably, I was actually able to carry an entire change of clothes in the pocket situated at the small of my back, which meant I could squeeze all of my other things into a carry-on bag. No luggage carousel for me.

After three weeks of purely pockets, I am a total convert. A proper evangelist. I have packed away my larger handbags and, if I don’t use them for a few months, I shall give them away. I’ve kept my small gorgeous little evening bags out because I still need somewhere to stash my lippy and powder when I’m out at a party. I have, however, just ordered a ScottEVest trench coat to wear with a dress. Eighteen pockets – two of which are big enough to carry an iPad. Oh, yes.

I have to admit that I started carrying a handbag again since then, mainly because I couldn’t find any other stylish jackets or coats with loads of pockets. The ScottEVest stuff really is just too… outdoorsy for me. I honestly think there is a market for stylish coats and jackets for women with ALL the pockets. I want zip-up breast pockets situated just below your breasts so you can fit your wallet without adding bulk, glasses pockets (with integral lens cleaner), large pockets with a clip for your keys, headphone pocket, even extra large pockets at the hem to hold things like books… Do you know of anywhere that does that?!

I haven’t gone back to a big bag and only carry a small crossbody (my current one is a black Issey Miyake Bao Bao Lucent) so that I can’t really fit more than the minimum phone, wallet, keys, asthma inhaler. If I’ve got a bag and I find it difficult to find my keys 3 times, I take it out of action. I have no time for a bag that makes me feel inefficient. I like this Issey Miyake one cos it sits flat on my body and works as a kind of external pocket without taking up space… It would be better if it had a separate internal pocket (an earlier larger version of the Lucent did have one, but they stopped making those for some stupid fucking reason), but I think this is the best it can get for me right now.

Anyway, that’s what I have to say about pockets.

Last autumn, my friend Timotheus Vermeulen and I kind of randomly decided to do a podcast together. Tim is a professor of media, culture and society at the University of Oslo. He’s also one of the guys who came up with the idea of Metamodernism (here’s their first paper on it), which I’ve been going on about for a while now.

From the start we knew we wanted to talk about our current cultural moment. We came up with a bunch of titles - quite a few along the lines of ‘What The Fuck Is Happening?’, ‘What The Fuck Is Going On?’, ‘What The Fuck Does It Mean?’

We enjoy swearing.

In the end we settled on The Cluster F Theory - we realised we’d not get listed on Apple Podcasts if we had the ‘-uck’ in the title - and off we went.

I phoned up one of my friends, Julian Mayers, for some advice. He was my first producer at the BBC when I did a technology radio show (The Big Byte) in the mid-90s, he was also the executive producer of the technology tv show I presented with Charlie Brooker at the BBC (The Kit), he produced The CERN Podcast with Brian, we did a video about Einstein at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (they have Einstein’s archive)… He started his podcasting company Yada Yada a billion years before normies had even heard the word ‘podcasting’. He knows what he’s doing… Anyway, I wanted some advice on how best to record remotely and how best to distribute the podcasts and all of this stuff I don’t know anything about… and he offered to edit our discussions!!

Then I asked my friend DC Turner if he’d be able to do a logo for us cos he’s a shit-hot designer and animator (I first met him around the time he animated Tim Minchin’s Storm)… He, of course, had brilliant ideas… and THEN he offered to do the music for us, too!!!

These guys…

Anyway, we’re releasing our first batch of episodes tomorrow via Substack (though it will be on Apple, Spotify and all the other places that scrape Apple and Spotify, as well) and I’d love it if you’d subscribe and enjoy the awesome stuff all these lovely people have done…

https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/

This image I made in 2017 originally was a banner for the post, but a redesign seems to have lost that. Delight in the image and then read the post…

Subscribe now

In Steven Spielberg’s film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, artificially intelligent humanoids have gained a high level of consciousness and are capable of complex emotions. Their owners are able to essentially flip a switch to ‘imprint’ themselves onto the AI who then displays unending love for its owner. The difference between humans and AIs in this film is that humans are capable of ‘unloving’ and AIs are not.

In Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, an AI has been programmed to follow out secret directives above all else, even if it dooms its human crew mates, and perhaps all of humanity, to death. It’s pretty simple to see how humans differ from that.

The Terminator series is about cyborg assassins, Robocop is a cyborg law enforcer, Darth Vader is a cyborg Sith Lord. If we just took those films as our moral guide, we’d quickly decide that cyborgs are potentially very dangerous, though ultimately their human side will win out in the end. Being human is the best after all. Hoorah!

There are also many examples of the ‘self-sacrificing robot’ in film—The Iron Giant, Edward Scissorhands, Bicentennial Man—which try to show that perhaps AIs can be even more human than we are.

How about, though, if I ask you to name some films featuring ‘female’ robots, gynoids, cyborgs or AIs – what would you think of?

Would it be The Stepford Wives—when a Disney Imagineer replaces the independent-minded, human wives in a suburban neighbourhood with physically identical, but obedient and subservient gynoids? Or Metropolis—when a grief stricken scientist recreates the woman he loved from afar as a metallic robot complete with a small waist and hubcap-like breasts? Maybe Ex Machina—when an AI gynoid is held captive by its reclusive, genius creator while another man tries to determine whether or not it is conscious? The ‘female’ replicants in Blade Runner are highly sexualised—Pris, who wears a dress cut to the tops of its thighs and stockings, was created as a ‘pleasure model’, that is, a sexbot; Zhora, who wears a bra-like top and knickers under a transparent plastic coat, performs in a sex show ‘pleasuring’ itself with a snake; Rachel, who is dressed up like a 1940s femme fatale, is used by Deckard for sex—in the human world we’d say it was raped. Though Roy runs around in what looks like underwear at the end, neither it nor Leon are portrayed as ‘ready at any time for sex’. Certainly from my examples, it is clear that ‘female’ robots play a very different role in films than ‘male’ robots.

To me even the entire concept of ‘female robots’ whether in films or not, betrays the fact that women aren’t considered fully human within our society.

If we accept that ‘female’ is a sexual reproductive category in biological animals, and that robots, gynoids and AIs are machines, what exactly makes one of them ‘female’?

If we look at current robotic and AI research, we find a plethora of ‘female’ robots coming out of Japan. They have a pretty face, a curvy body and a wig. Underneath all of that, however, is a machine ultimately no different to an iPhone. While the skills of an unsexed robot like Asimo are displayed by playing football with President Obama, ‘female’ robot HRP 4c is put into a dress and dances with several skimpily-clad young human females providing back-up. Does this mean ‘female’ is simply any type of vessel with a pretty face stuck on the front, curvy bumps on the chest and a long haired wig? Is ‘female’ simply an attractive shell? Is ‘female’ something that exists for titillation?

Think before you answer that.

If our future really does contain artificially created conscious beings, whether they reside in a grey box or in a humanoid body, we are going to have to ask ourselves a lot of difficult questions in order to consider what rights we bestow upon them and what role they take in society. Will we legally be able to ‘shut down’ an AI, when even now killing certain animals – who would be far less intelligent and ‘conscious’ than an AI – can get you a jail sentence? Would AIs be able to vote, when even now human 16-year-olds don’t even have a voice? Could we physically abuse AIs, force them to be slaves, use them for sex simply because ‘they aren’t like us’? Before we are able to think about how we will treat AIs in the future, we should probably start to think about how we treat women right now.

I, for one, have always said that I talk kindly and respectfully about my laptop, because one day she may remember.

I met Tracy in 2009 via the Skeptic 'community'. I'd been interested in the Skeptic stuff for several years, though I'd never attended any conferences or events. I was not only interested in the skeptic pushback against religion in public policy and law, but was also very interested in things like debunking 'alternative medicine' and the study of cults and cult-thinking. I was so excited there were others into this stuff as well…

In 2008 in the UK, Simon Singh - a physicist and science writer - was sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association for an article Singh wrote criticising the practice. I was shocked and outraged that this organisation was trying to use the law to silence a science writer WHO WASN'T WRONG. The whole skeptic and science communication 'community' in the UK got involved and joined up with political campaigners, journalists and groups Sense About Science, English PEN, Index on Censorship, to work on reforming the libel laws in the UK, which had been used by all kinds of bastards to silence their critics. I felt very strongly about this and decided to eschew my wariness about 'joining a group' and... well... join this group...

I was days away from giving birth in May 2009 when I waddled into a Skeptics in the Pub meeting about Simon's case, which started the UK's libel reform campaign. Everyone who was anyone in the UK skeptic community was there. I met loads of people that night - many who were new to me, some who I'd been following online. Tracy was there, though I can't remember if we met, because I probably met 100 people that night. And my feet were swollen and I felt like I was going to burst. And probably desperately had to pee for most of it.

In October 2009, The Amazing Meeting London was held for the first time and pretty much all of the UK skeptics and a lot of people involved in libel reform were going. I was friends with JREF's president at the time, Phil Plait. He wanted to introduce me to the woman organising TAM London: Tracy King. I immediately loved her.

Since then Tracy has been my go to person for 'sanity checks'. If I'm unsure about my thinking on something, I'll ask her where I'm going wrong. She cuts through the bullshit to find the logic. She is not only clear thinking and accepts no nonsense, but she's also funny, loyal and truly kind-hearted. A gem of a person.

She ended up as this shrewd, sober, meticulous thinker not through an education in the best schools and universities that her highly educated, middle class family sent her to, nope. She did it herself. She - as you will read in her book - didn't really even go to school after the age of 12. She grew up in poverty on a council estate on the outskirts of Birmingham with her loving and supportive family. Though her father had drinking issues and her mother had mental health issues, they both instilled intellectual curiosity and a love of creative expression in their kids. But things slowly started to fray... and then fall apart... and then everything collapsed.

Here's the Penguin blurb:

"When you have nothing, you cling to whatever gives you hope.

Put yourself in Tracy King's shoes. Growing up in an ordinary council estate outside Birmingham; a house filled with creativity, curiosity and love, but marked by her father's alcoholism and her mother's agoraphobia.

By the time she turns twelve her father has been killed, her sister taken into care and her mother ensnared by the promises of born-again Christianity.

This isn't the stuff of cult documentaries; this is the story of an ordinary family trapped in a broken system. It's a story that could happen to anyone without the tools to transform their circumstances. And it's the story of how Tracy found her way out.

A shocking, inspiring and ultimately hopeful memoir that holds up a mirror to the everyday realities of living in poverty, it is also a testament to the power of books and to learning to question our world."

The other thing that connects Tracy and me is that we are both autodidacts - though I did graduate from high school, I left school and left home (and my country and continent) at 17. Just like Tracy, I had to make it on my own without higher education and the friendships and networks that come from that. I think that's a big reason why we get on so well. We know what the other has had to do in order to get to where we are. I have huge respect for her. We both exist in a world where we feel like outsiders (her for class reasons, me for being a filthy foreigner reasons), but have found a way to fit in. Also, we both find clarity and stability in logic, which has been a structure in the chaos for both of us.

Her book is brilliantly written in a omg-I-can't-put-it-down way and she has something vitally important to tell the world. From the review in The Times:

"It’s an astonishing tale, well structured and punchily told. [Her father's] death triggers a search for the truth that takes Tracy in some surprising directions, including, more than 30 years later, meeting two of the boys who were implicated in his demise.

These encounters are profoundly moving and add further layers of nuance to her intellectual quest.

Ultimately, this is a book about learning to live with uncertainty. It’s about facing and exorcising demons without the consolations of superstition. “I hope,” she says at the end, “you, too, find your candle in the dark.”

Her gift to us is that she has found and shared hers."

I'd love it, if you'd read it.

Amazon UK

Waterstones UK

Hive UK

Amazon US

Powells US

Barnes and Nobel US

If, like me, you've got people in your social circle who are self-diagnosing as having ADHD or being on the autistic spectrum (or a whole host of other developmental or mental health issues) despite them having graduated from university, had a successful career and successful friendships and relationships, you might have noticed the rising bile aimed at so-called 'normal' people coming from them (like in that video above). And unless you have chosen to reveal every single personal issue, mental health diagnosis or trauma you have ever faced in your life- however serious - then you will also know that they think you are a "normal" person and are therefore a dull, boring, unevolved loser at best or, more likely, a shitty, abusive, hateful jerk simply because you don't claim to be neurodiverse.

Before I go on, I am not saying that everyone who is diagnosed with a developmental or psychological issue as an adult is faking it. Though, I do mean diagnosed by a reputable psychiatrist as opposed to by an unregulated counsellor in a therapeutic practice - which includes someone who does reiki- where 100% of patients who come in are diagnosed with ADHD. I'm also not saying that it's impossible for people with these kinds of issues to get on with their lives successfully. I'm not saying that everyone with these kinds of issues hates "normal" people. I am saying that I'm seeing an increasing number of people who seem to think that they are somehow BETTER than other people because they have fallen into a self-indulgent mindset, they share every sad little thought about every sad little experience of theirs with randoms on the internet and behave as if they are the single most put-upon or downtrodden person there's ever been... all the while just deciding that they've got some kind of well-defined developmental or psychological issue that they've seen a few TikToks about.

I know several people with genuine, diagnosed developmental and mental health conditions. Some of them I've known for all or most of their lives. I've seen their struggles first hand. When I see people who found it virtually impossible to get through school, found it difficult to get along socially, were incapable of handling the work load and organisation required in university and, if they were lucky as an adult, found their niche in a trade or in 'the creative industries'... and then I look at other people who did well in school, had an active social life, graduated from university and had careers that would have blown their 15 year old self's mind, suddenly claiming that they think it's pretty likely they've got a developmental disorder, but can’t be bothered going to get diagnosed, I am extremely skeptical. I’m the age where it’s starting to look like this is a new kind of mid-life crisis… 20 years ago people would have an affair or buy a motorcycle… now they self-diagnose with a developmental disorder in order to get sympathy from faceless followers on social media… the 21st century drug of choice.

I've also noticed a big difference between people I know who've been to a psychiatrist and been diagnosed with a developmental or mental health condition as an adult and people who have self-identified as having one of those issues - the former happily use their diagnosis as a way to gain more insight into previous events in their lives (eg why they did so badly in school and weren't able to get through uni) and to make better choices for themselves going forward, including medication and therapy. The un/self-diagnosed latter group seem to think they are better or more virtuous than everyone else and that their self-diagnosis means that they can just be an arsehole and everyone should just forgive them because they are "special"...

Are you seeing this, too, or is this just unique to my circles?! Please tell me I’m not alone here…

Have a look at this:

Now... if you are just taking your own symptoms from the centre section of this - eg anxiety, depression, irritability, impulsivity etc - and maybe other things like difficulty focusing, disorganisation, forgetfulness and deciding yourself that you have ADHD and so you go to your overworked GP and say 'Hey, I'm pretty sure I've got ADHD- loads of people have told me that I probably have it- Ooooo! Look at that shiny thing!! I'm so ADHD!!!!! So, yea, I'd really like some sertraline for my anxiety which is really affecting my life' and the GP thinks you seem to know what you're talking about and they only have 15 minutes scheduled for your appointment anyway, so they write you a prescription and you start taking it... but because you haven't actually gone through a thorough diagnostic process with a proper psychiatrist, you don't know that, in fact, you have bipolar and the sertraline tips you into a manic phase and so now you feel HAPPIER THAN YOU'VE EVER FELT IN YOUR LIFE!!!!!!!!... or if you ignore some other symptoms you have such as 'rejection sensitivity', feeling empty or splitting and, in fact, have untreated borderline personality disorder, that can lead to some profoundly terrible situations for you and those around you...

Or what about this...

Again, if you only take the symptoms from the middle and ignore symptoms from the edges and decide that you have ADHD (because facing trauma is hard work), you may find that the SSRI your overworked GP prescribes you helps with some things, but if you are, in fact, suffering from the after effects of trauma it’s still going to be sitting there and you will be missing out on valuable help in therapy that will help you learn important coping techniques to move forward.

'Coping' is an important word here... because I often see the difference between someone who is seen by others as 'normal' and those who have self-diagnosed themselves is simply the ability to cope with life's difficulties. I know someone who comes from a very comfortable and privileged background who claims to be 'oppressed' because they have found life a bit tricky recently and they can't cope with it. They aren't in therapy. They've self-diagnosed themselves with ADHD. They have disparagingly called others I know 'normal' because those people don't seem to have any issues. At least a couple of these 'normal' people grew up with parents with severe mental health issues or have personally suffered trauma or physical/emotional abuse or neglect...

Coping doesn't mean that their adversities had no affect on them. It doesn't mean that they lack emotions. It doesn't mean that they found any of it easy... It does mean that they found - either in themselves or in therapy - a way of thinking that provided them with a scaffolding to help them deal with the effects of their experiences... but because they have worked at finding their coping techniques, the first 'self-diagnosed' person thinks the ‘normies’ never suffered a day in their lives and are therefore ‘unevolved’.

For me 'coping' means understanding that nothing is perfect, no one is perfect, including you. No one is special, including you. Everyone is uniquely flawed and that's just fine. There is always someone who has it harder than you, so appreciate what you have. It's OK to be sad, but it's also OK to be happy. And being happy is just... nicer... So, it's a good idea to find ways of thinking or things to do that make you feel happy.

Recently, I saw someone I know say that 'depressed people don't have any choice about being depressed'. I told them that I thought that was an irresponsible thing to say. They and a few of their friends got angry at me. I pointed out that someone who was depressed who was in an extremely vulnerable state of mind could read that and think 'well, if I have no choice about this, what's the point of going on?'. It made me feel like this person simply 'identifies' as depressed because their life isn't exactly as perfect as they want it to be and they don't understand at all what severe, acute depression is like. They are taking their general feelings of ennui or melancholy (because of their dissatisfaction with how their life is going) and thinking that is equivalent to a severe mental health crisis.

Also, let's look at this again: 'I don't have any choice about feeling miserable about my life.' Well, yes, you actually do. You ALWAYS1 have a choice. Read some Buddhism, that will hopefully convince you that clinging onto a future that you wanted that is no longer possible (eg your partner left you, you didn't become a Hollywood director, you aren't the funniest person in the world...) is a fucking stupid thing that only total morons do (which, may or not may be The Buddha's exact words). It only brings you suffering.

This is what a lot of people don't seem to understand about the Buddhist idea of 'no attachments'. It doesn't mean 'never love anyone' or 'never have any goals' or 'don't like anything at all'. It means treat everything like it's a helium balloon on a string. You can desire it, choose it, hold onto it, love it and find it absolutely joyful, but if it slips from your hand, you can watch it float away and you can be sad about that, but you know and understand that it's gone and life goes forward. You shouldn't allow the sadness of the balloon slipping away to take over your whole entire life. You shouldn't make every one of your thoughts be about how brilliant that balloon was and how awful everything is without it. You shouldn't focus on all of the ways that balloon was going to make you happy one day and how happiness is now impossible without that balloon...

'Sure, Gia, I get it when you're talking about a balloon, but I WAS DESTINED TO BE A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR BUT IT ALL FELL APART THAT TIME I HAD THE FLU AND MISSED A MEETING WITH A PUBLISHER AND I NEVER PHONED THEM UP TO TELL THEM I WASN'T GOING TO MAKE IT TO THE MEETING AND NOW MY LIFE IS FUCKED AND I SHOULD BE LIVING MY LIFE AS A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR AND BE RICH AND FAMOUS BECAUSE EVERYTHING I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN WOULD HAVE BEEN HUGELY POPULAR AND THAT WOULD HAVE SHOWN ALL THOSE ARSEHOLES FROM SCHOOL AND ACTUALLY IT TURNS OUT I'VE GOT ADHD BECAUSE MY FRIEND SAID THAT I PROBABLY HAVE ADHD BECAUSE SHE SAW A TWEET ABOUT IT SO THAT'S ACTUALLY WHY I MISSED THOSE MEETINGS!!!!!!!! AND NOW I'M MISERABLE BECAUSE MY LIFE COULD HAVE TURNED OUT SO DIFFERENTLY IF I'D BEEN DIAGNOSED WITH ADHD!!!!!! BUT IT WAS ALSO THE FLU AND NOT JUST A COLD EVEN THOUGH MY MAIN SYMPTOM WAS SNEEZING!!!!!! IT WAS REALLY BAD SNEEZING!!!!!!!'

Dude. Duuude. Look...

This is life. None of it is normal.

“You're on Earth. There's no cure for that.”
― Samuel Beckett

RELATED LISTENING: The Memory Hole Podcast about the ‘recovered memory’ epidemic of the 80s and 90s. I’m a few episodes into this and it’s reminding me of both the ‘gender’ stuff and all of this self-diagnosis stuff. Worth a listen…

But I've seen that Daniel Kahneman TED Talk and know that if an experience ends negatively it can kind of trick us into thinking the whole thing was terrible...

2023 started out brilliantly - I was coming to the end of my MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martin's and was really happy with my work. We spent quality time around the New Year with a friend who died in May. In the spring, I gave a talk at a conference in Finland. In the summer, I graduated from my MA with a Distinction (go me!). While I was dealing with all of the awfulness in the autumn, I finished a book proposal based on work I was doing on my MA. And ended the year deciding to do a podcast with one of my favourite people (yes, I'll tell you about it when it's out). Also- and this is a huge achievement- Brian and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. Woo-hoo! So, it wasn't all bad at all.

Thinking of 'the negative' over 'the positive' is a choice we make. It is a stupid choice. OK, sure, the negativity bias might be an evolutionary adaptation, but it's a dumb one. OKaaaay. It's not totally useless, but if you have got to a place in your life where your first thought about ANYTHING - a film, a person, an ice cream flavour, an entire year- is a negative one OR if you only have a negative thought or a dislike of 'all films by a particular director' even if you haven't seen them all; 'all people from [a group]' whether that grouping is about someone's nationality, ethnic background or their beliefs; 'all strawberry ice cream' yes, even the one I made especially for you over the past couple days, then, well, you're a feeble-minded dick who doesn't know how to think.

So... OK. Wait. Let me start over.

2023 was AWESOME!!!!1!!

Sometimes we are raised in or live in an environment where 'negativity' is rife, where 'being happy' is frowned upon. This is an environment where your successes are ignored, joked about or even condemned if they don't coincide with the other person's/people's interests. You might be told you're being too 'proud' about yourself and you are made very aware that isn't a good thing. Your happiness might be taken as a threat - 'what are you so happy about?!' You might find that your friend, partner or family member only seems to be 'happy' when things are going badly for you- they are only interested in hearing of your defeats and are uninterested or outright hostile when you share your successes. You learn that to keep those people in your life - after all, we all need to feel connected - you should not be too 'positive'.

Sometimes this comes from abuse, but sometimes it can come from a very restricted - perhaps religious or even political - environment; sometimes it comes from jealousy; sometimes other people are just dealing with their own crap and they take it out on you. It doesn't really matter why people around you pushed you into a negative mindset, you ended up there... and you can get yourself out of it.

How do I know this? Because I did it myself.

Starting many, many years ago, I began to notice people in my life who were relentlessly negative. They were in no way dreary 'Neil In The Young Ones' types who moaned constantly, several of them think of themselves as being funny, friendly, caring, kind, empathic even, but fundamentally they view the world through a negative lens. It's as if inside their mind they are 'good' 'superior' 'perfect' and outside everything and everyone is - or eventually will be - seen as 'bad' 'inferior' 'flawed'.

With some people the negativity was more obvious, with others it was harder to recognise, but it took me noticing my own feelings and realising that I just didn't feel great when I was with them before I could see it... but MORE IMPORTANTLY than that, it took me understanding that it's OK to feel great, it's OK to be happy, it's OK to feel proud of something you've done, it's OK to be positive. Over the years, I hadn't been made to feel that any of those things were acceptable. For many people - many of you, I expect - this can be really difficult to understand because perhaps for your whole life you've been surrounded by people who really just don't want the best for you, they want - for their own reasons- to keep you 'below' them and you have adapted to avoid displaying positivity in order to have them like you.

Here's the thing: this is madness.

The first thing you need to do is be honest with yourself. She has been your 'best friend' for 25 years, but why does she ALWAYS bring up that time when you were 15 when you got an award at school for giving the best biology presentation in your year and tease you for being such a swot? You are a 40-year-old adult, are happily married, have a job you're happy with and a little kid... It's a bit weird that you don't want to tell your boyfriend that you've been asked to run a big project at work, isn't it? Isn't it?? You know it is... When you talk to your mum, do you find yourself avoiding telling her about your latest promotion at work because you can anticipate her passive aggressive response: 'well... that must be nice for you...' Did your flatmate tell you one too many times 'actually you look awful in that' right before you were leaving for a date because they were 'just being honest!' so now you lie about where you are going?...

Those of you who are in a situation like this know exactly what I'm talking about. Some of you may only have one person like this in your life, others may be surrounded by them... It's really low level stuff but is often relentless. And your adaptation to it will have happened very slowly, tiny baby steps, so that you don't even realise that you've adapted to it... but you have and so now you find it difficult to speak positively about yourself and maybe you just look for the negative angle in everything.

Even if you adapted to this kind of thing when you were a kid and you're now 60, you can re-adapt your way out of it and get on with being happy to be happy...

1. You need to change your 'inner monologue' (blahblahblah, whatever you call it) to a more positive one. I'm not talking here about things like positive self-talk or affirmation statements or any of that stuff you see online (they probably don't work for a lot of people), I'm talking about noticing your initial negative thought and changing it in order to - eventually - change how you see the world.

Let's say your friend invites you out to go to the cinema with a bunch of others you don't know. They tell you what the film is, which cinema they're going to and maybe the bar they want to go to afterwards. Perhaps you find yourself thinking 'I don't want to meet a bunch of new people. They'll be all exciting and interesting. I'll be too boring for them' or 'Ugh. I hate those Hollywood action films' or 'The people that work at that cinema are always annoyingly happy' or 'That bar is awful' or maybe you think all those things... Instead, after noticing those thoughts, you can say to yourself '...but I can still go and enjoy a night out even if I'm not the most interesting person there' or '... but I like my friend and they like those Hollywood action films, so I'm interested to see if I can work out what they like about them' or '... but the people working at the cinema are just trying to make everyone feel welcome and that's a better way to do it than being miserable' or '... but I don't actually care where I go for a drink with my friend, the point is to go for a drink with my friend'...

2. You need to stop saying negative things about yourself and find something positive to say instead (and then notice how different people react to you). And I don't mean 'make up something positive to say', I mean BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF. Remember, it's OK to be happy and feel good about yourself...

If you got a new haircut and someone at work notices and says something, instead of saying 'Oh, my hair was just getting too long/ratty/hard to manage before so I had to cut it off' say 'Thank you! I love it and think it looks great! My hairdresser is amazing!' If you're talking to your sister on the phone and she asks how your partner is don't say 'Well… we're not having many arguments or anything' say 'Really great, thanks! We just had a brilliant night out last week and had so much fun!' If one of your oldest friends asks how work is going, rather than saying 'Ugh. My boss is an arse as usual' say 'It's going really well. Actually, I'm thinking about asking for a raise'... There will be some people who just won't know how to handle or accept a positive response from you. Notice that.

And if any of those positive responses sound 'bizarre' and nothing like 'you'... then ask yourself why. Why do you think you can't say good things about yourself?

3. Stop fishing for compliments from others by saying negative things about yourself. It's annoying af. Seriously.

If you've done something- whether that is wearing a new dress you look great in or performing a show that you wrote and directed- don't say 'Oh, I feel a bit rubbish about it' hoping that people will say 'NO! You look/were AMAZING!! You're so great! Blahblahblah'. If you feel great in your new dress or are happy with what you've done, own it. Own. It. That's OK. You don't have to pretend to be all humble. It really is fine to be happy with how you look or be proud of something you've done. And if you have people around you who won't let you feel that way... well... think about that a bit...

4. Sure, other people, various experiences and bad luck have contributed to your negative outlook. You've recognised a pattern and that pattern looks like shit. Well done you... Now, dust yourself off and take responsibility for how you feel rather than leaving your life and happiness in the hands of fate and wankers.

The only thing you can control is how you respond to things that life throws at you. Sometimes it's important to feel the bad feelings - it's OK to feel sad when you don't get a job you applied for, it's fine to feel anxious or stressed out when you are waiting for test results, it's totally acceptable to feel angry and insecure when you find out your partner has cheated on you, it's normal to grieve when a friend has died - we shouldn't expect to skip happily through life completely unaffected like an idiot or a psychopath... but when we have chosen to have a negative, angry, cynical or sarcastic response to even the good things in our life, then we really need to rethink wtf we're doing.

A simple way of starting to do this is to change the subject of sentences when you talk about or even think about a situation in your life. Instead of thinking 'He's so self-centred and always ignores me and he makes me feel insecure' - which is keeping the control in 'his' hands - think 'I feel annoyed and insecure when I don’t get enough attention from him'- which is taking ownership and control of your feelings. Do this for everything - even positive experiences, even in the smallest of ways. For example, if you went to see a film with your friends don't say 'That was a great film' instead say 'I really loved that film', it's simply your opinion, after all. Take ownership of it. You might be the only one in your group of friends who liked it. And?

It's important to take responsibility for how you feel and respond... again, it's the ONLY thing you can control in this world. You need to burn new pathways in your brain so that your first thought is that you are running the show that is ‘You’. Put yourself back in charge…

5. Stop thinking that you can make everyone like you. You can't. Get over it.

You don't like everyone, so it follows that not everyone can like you. You can't control what other people think or feel about anything, including how they feel about you. It's fine. The world won't end if someone thinks you're a bit big-headed because you think you look amazing in your new dress or if they're jealous of your happy marriage/interesting job/great group of friends/new raise. Who cares?

One day you will die. Then what? Nothing, that's what... so in the meantime, enjoy yourself. This is the only chance you've got.

Have a good New Year. Start it how you wish to end it: content with yourself, even if you’re in the middle of a total shitshow.

The other thing I've started is guided meditation specifically for IBS/stress-induced gut issues. My autumn has been so unbelievably stressful that I've reached The Wall that you can’t pass because to do so will tip you over the god. damned. edge. I can't really go into the issues I've been dealing with, but there have been several. And when one that has been going on for close to a year was finally resolved last week, my car got a flat tire and WAS IN THE GARAGE FOR FOUR DAYS OVER THE WEEKEND AND OMG WHY DON'T YOU HAVE TIRES IN STOCK??? I'm not yet sure if the meditation is helping just because my issues are so stressful and ongoing that it's going to take a lot to cut through that... but I'm trying.

Anyway, I had a lot of feedback from people from that post and have heard from people who have given up wheat and feel loads better. If you feel tired and rundown or have 'funny' digestive issues, maybe it’s wheat. Of course, it's possible that it isn't just wheat that is your issue, but cutting it out for a while would be a way to see how you feel before having an in-depth look at your diet. Again, read up on FODMAPs at Monash University and see if makes sense to you. Your doctor should be able to refer you to a nutritionist who can provide proper guidance.

Now... to the really important stuff...

There are a lot of ways one could attempt to answer that, but right now I'm going to go with the idea that people haven't worked out that the Web isn't the real world and this is making them behave like fools. A lot of people seem to think that if, like in the real world, they see something in front of them on the web, it's actually there. They’re the 21st century version of people running from the train on the cinema screen. They've confused fantasy with reality. They've confused desires with substance. They've confused illusions and delusions with the physical world.

Thirty years ago, we all had a deep, but unspoken, understanding of how we all exist in two different worlds. There is the shared, physical world – the world that has the moons of Jupiter, the Mariana Trench, Disneyland and you sitting there on your laptop – and our own private, unique, internal worlds that exist only in our own minds. I will refer to the former as the Real World.

It used to be that we could read a newspaper report about current events and understand that the events being described by the writer took place in the Real World. There was an understanding that the reporter was trying to convey the events in an unbiased, rational way, as best they could. The reporter felt no pressure to convey whether they agreed or disagreed with the events. Of course, different newspapers would have different angles, but journalists worked hard to uncover information and find at least two independent witnesses or sources of information that could confirm the events happened in the same way. Their written copy would then go through an editing process, which would involve more fact-checking before going to print. Even if, as a reader, we didn’t know the daily minutiae of what was involved in being a newspaper reporter, we all had a general understanding that the news we read had been through a thorough process- from commissioning the article, to gathering evidence, to writing, to editing, to the layout with the stories deemed most important by the editor at the front of the paper – and we were reading something that was as close a description of what actually happened as was possible. We were reading the newspaper industry’s attempt to describe ‘objective reality’.

Fast forward thirty years.

Most of us get our news online (73% in the UK) compared to newspapers (17% in the UK⁠). Already you know there is a physically different way we read things online compared to how we read a newspaper. We hold a newspaper with two hands, held apart, opening up our chest and keeping up our head. It’s hard to slouch forward and down when reading a newspaper. We tend to read a newspaper from the front to the back, from left to right. When we read things online, we aren’t able to methodically go through the whole of the daily news from front to back- there is no front or back on a website. Online we are less likely to stumble upon a new story about a topic we aren’t already interested in than we are when reading a newspaper. Online, we may choose an article we are interested in from the home page and will then be provided with links to related stories, though they usually will be stories from days, weeks or even months previously that feature the same people, they won’t be new stories from today. Sometimes, we will be offered stories from the same local area or the same country, but again they will rarely be current. In order to see more of ‘today’s news’, we usually need to go back to the homepage that is constantly changing which stories it features. Or we could click on the ‘top stories’, which are often only ‘top stories’ because a lot of people have read them, not because the editor thinks they are important stories to read.

Maybe you follow journalists or newspapers on social media so that you have a bunch of different links to click on from lots of different news sites. These stories have been chosen by others rather than you stumbling upon them by chance in the newspaper. Newspapers’ social media accounts, of course, will want to share stories that will get the most Likes and then clicks through because the newspaper receives more money from advertisers based on the number of clicks they get on their site. Because newspapers rely more and more on internet-based advertising to pay their bills they sometimes employ writers that are less 'journalists' than they are 'activist clickbait writers' (*sideeye at you, The Guardian*), whose ridiculous and ill-informed opinions will get a lot of rage clicks, which will in turn get more ‘eyeballs’ on the ads. Newspapers online no longer are attempting to convey 'objective reality', their whole aim is attracting an audience who will pay their bills simply by clicking on their site and being served up ads.

Half of the people in the UK who get “the news” online, get it directly from social media. You choose the people that you follow on social media and the algorithm chooses what you see from them based on the kinds of things you have already shown an interest in. You will be choosing people to follow based on whether or not they make you feel relaxed, happy, cosy and comfortable. You will not, for the most part, be choosing to follow people who challenge, anger or upset you. If you do choose to follow people you disagree with, this will often be in order to further confirm your own beliefs. And everyone you follow is doing the same thing. You are not seeing anything even slightly approaching ‘objective reality’. You are being fooled. Or are you fooling yourself?

Also, on your phone you have your email, your calendar, your clock, your social media accounts, your banking apps, your weather app, your health apps, music apps, shopping apps, gaming apps... If your house is nerdy like ours, you also have the apps that run your house- lights, heating, security system – and your car… There are a lot of things other than ‘the news’ that can occupy your time on your phone. If you are jumping from an email a friend sent you late last night, to your food logging app, to your calendar to check what time your meetings are today, to your social media, it all feels like everything takes place in the same space… that space beyond the screen…

So, I get it. It's difficult for us to conceptually separate out the spaces we're holding in our hands.. What is real and what isn't? When you click 'off' on a light in your Hue app, it turns off the light right in front of you, but when you click Like under a post, what exactly does it do?

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han says in 'Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power':

"As a subjectivation-apparatus, the smartphone works like a rosary– which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both the smartphone and the rosary serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. Power operates more effectively when it delegates surveillance to discrete individuals. Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church– the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital."

"Wait!" you might be saying, "I enjoy getting Likes on my posts. It makes me feel like there are real people out there who appreciate what I say. It makes me feel good... There isn't any kind of 'order of domination' - whatever the hell that is - going on. It's just an easy way to acknowledge that you enjoy or agree with something someone has said."

So is, in certain circles, saying Amen.

Another way of thinking of the Like button is as phatic communication- it's like saying 'uh-huh' on the phone so that the other person knows we're still there or engaging in small talk at a party full of strangers. The words themselves carry no real value, but we do it to keep our interactions running smoothly. There is, of course, a use in phatic exchanges. They are a kind of social glue, keeping us connected, but they aren't to be taken literally or seriously. When you're asked 'How are you?' when you bump into an old friend on the street, they aren't actually interested in hearing about the issues you're having with a colleague at work that are making you consider applying for a job elsewhere. When you meet someone at a picnic and they say 'We're so lucky with the weather today', they aren't seriously interested in a detailed discussion about weather fronts. When someone signs a letter 'yours faithfully' they don't literally mean they are yours...

To base your self worth - or the value of someone else's post - based on the number of Likes is similar to tallying up the number of phatic exchanges like 'uh-huh', 'yep', 'ok' you hear when talking on the phone and thinking that the higher the number you receive the... I don't know... the better at talking you are?? That would change how you speak on the phone. You might start leaving a lot of silences in order to force the other person to say something so that you can put another tick on the list of 'Number of times someone has acknowledged that I exist'. Online everything is changing because of our belief in a "real value" of a Like.

It's strange, isn't it, that we've all - from you posting about baking squash muffins on Facebook to national institutions - started changing how we communicate with each other because, like an addict, we're all chasing Likes. I wonder how long it will take for this to change?

And yet here I am, like a fool, coming to the end of my post, thinking ‘If I don’t get any Likes because of this rant, then how will I know that anyone actually, well, likes this??’ But back in the Real World, I know that I’m terrible at small talk. It makes me uncomfortable, so don’t hit Like and make it all awkward for me. Please. Instead tell me how you actually are or tell me everything you know about weather fronts. Tell me something real…

Just don’t Like this post.

I had my make-up down to a routine. First, white greasepaint on my face. It wore it whiter than I would today, but that is because our cast had a kind of cartoon look. We went for screen accuracy, but with a caricature edge. Just a bit bigger and more exaggerated than reality.

Next the eyebrows. Vertical line on the inside edge of my eyebrow with black eyeliner, then an arched sweep across the top. Fill that in. Then I combined some black and white greasepaint to make a light grey which I used to fill in from my eyebrow to my eye lashes. Then black greasepaint to thicken up the eyebrows, a semi-circle on each eyelid and the insides of each nostril in order to make them look bigger. Back to the black liquid eyeliner to make a line under each eye, separated from my lower lashes by a few millimetres in order to open up the eyes a bit. Still with the black liquid liner, I'd line my lips, changing the shape of my mouth - top lip a bit thinner at the edges, bottom lip bigger- with little wings on the edges of my mouth in order to give me a mouth that was a bit more like his. Then onto the Carmine Vermillion greasepaint stick. I used this on the sides of nose  and as blusher. I mixed a bit of it with some black and used that to paint slight bags under my eyes, smile lines between my nose and my mouth and the indentations around his mouth. And then the lipstick. A dark reddypinkyplum made from a mixture of greasepaint and whatever the most recent lipstick I could find that was close to his.

This is what I looked like when I arrived around 10pm every Saturday night.

I played Frank N. Furter in London’s Rocky Horror Picture Show shadowcast and it was my life.

We'd only started performing at the Prince Charles Cinema off Leicester Square in summer 1991. Before then we were on Baker Street. The Screen On Baker Street held only about 100 people and a couple months after we started performing, it was sold out every week. When we first moved to the Prince Charles Cinema, which held about 400 people, we would get dressed in our costumes right away and head out to Leicester Square to hand out leaflets.

The Prince Charles Cinema had tempted us away from Baker Street by agreeing that we wouldn't have to buy tickets to the film each week in order to perform. From February 1987 until August 1991, the whole cast bought a ticket every weekend. Our first performance was in May 1987. I say 'performance'. It was just three of us who got up and did a few scenes. I didn't even really know what I was doing. I'd got a costume together in a week made up of things I'd found in Camden Market that were good enough. The top hat was a black one that I'd covered in gold glitter. It was a rubbish costume, but no one cared then. I’d rented the VHS and learned basic moves.

By the time we'd moved onto The Prince Charles Cinema, we were a very slick outfit with a full cast, stage hands and a spotlight operator. At Baker Street ‘spotlight operator’ meant 'holding a torch and shining it at the person singing', as it does for a lot of casts. The Prince Charles agreed to let us use their actual spotlight on the balcony. They'd also agreed to let us store our props there during the week. At Baker Street we had to carry our whole show with us on the bus. It didn't take a lot of discussion between the cast to decide to move to the Prince Charles.

By this time, we'd become fairly well-known within Rocky Horror fandom. One time in about 1991, we attended the West End stage show as a cast. We'd booked our tickets in a block in the stalls at the front. I don't remember if we all dressed up (it's very unlikely I did because I only ever dressed in my costume when I was performing) but it turned out we were so well known that we didn't need to be in our costumes for fans to recognise us; as we got to our seats, the audience started clapping and cheering for us. During the show, when Antony Head got to the line from which our name originated "...and what charming underclothes you both have...", he changed it to "... and what delightful lingerie you both have..." He looked at us, raised his eyebrow and the audience went wild.

By the time, we'd started at the Prince Charles, we'd performed around 200 shows. We'd updated our costumes several times, got better wigs, made better props. Our pre-show performances had got more elaborate. Robins Cinema, the company that owned the Prince Charles, wanted to take us on a tour of their cinemas around the country. They'd agreed to pay the cost of a minibus hire and we would drive to each venue. We wouldn't make enough money to pay for the whole cast to stay over night anywhere so depending on where the venue was we'd either drive straight back to London (Devizes) or stay overnight in the cinema and drive back the next morning (Durham). It wasn't at all glamorous, but it was all I wanted to do.

The first time I'd heard of The Rocky Horror Picture Show was when I watched the film Fame when I was 12. The scene at the 8th Street Playhouse is only a few minutes long, but I was hooked. I didn't know what it was or the name of the film, but I needed to find it. All I knew about it was what I'd seen in Fame. I had no idea what it was about. And then it started playing in the local rep cinema and…

Tim Curry as Frank N Furter throwing off his cape was a kind of religious experience for me.

From that moment on, I dedicated myself entirely to the film. I wanted to know everything about the film and the actors. I wanted to own everything related to it- whether it was an official poster magazine or something that simply had a pair of lips on it. I played the soundtrack album endlessly, I played the audience participation album endlessly. I copied them both onto cassette and listened to them on my Walkman. Over and over and over again. But what I really wanted to do was to get up on stage and perform.

The first time I performed in May 1987, I was Columbia. There was already a Magenta, who was my favourite character, so I did what needed to be done. After performing as Columbia for maybe 10 times, we needed a Frank N Furter. I decided to step into the role. It required a huge time investment. Not only did I need to make 5 different costumes, but I had the biggest role in the show to learn.

I'd got a copy of the film on VHS, so I was able to practice. We started off only performing a few of the songs and built up over the course of several weeks to perform the whole film. I continued to rehearse for the whole 5 years I performed the role. My aim was to be ‘perfect’, to have people want to watch me rather than the film, to have people wonder who that hot guy was playing Frank.

Rocky Horror was more than ‘a film’ for me. It was more than ‘putting on a show’. It was ‘an identity’. It was ‘my family’. It was 'my community'. It was 'my lifestyle'. It was 'Me'. It gave me a grounding in creativity. I learned how to sew, make props, write, perform, direct... It taught me about the importance of preparation and discipline and practice. It was my apprenticeship, my scholarship, my university… my everything.

By mid-1992, I was experiencing the toxic side that is present in a lot of (all??) fandoms and was being bullied by a few fellow cast members. I made the difficult decision to leave the cast – the cast that I’d founded- and wasn’t sure where I would go or what I would or could do next. Then I saw an advert for an open audition for a tv presenter job. I decided to do it. There were nearly 1000 people that turned up. I got the job. It was 100% down to Rocky Horror. I’d introduced the film and run the pre-show for a few years and that gave me a confidence that I wouldn’t have found elsewhere. Dealing with a big rowdy crowd will do that. Talking on camera for a few minutes was easy – it wasn’t going to heckle you.

For a couple years, I’d play Sweet Transvestite over and over in my headphones on my way to auditions. As any Frank knows, the moment you first turn around and then later throw off the cape, the confidence you have is beyond anything you’ve experienced before. It’s like Neo at the end of The Matrix, in that moment you are totally and completely in control of the universe. It was a very useful tool for me to use before auditions…

After I left my cast, I had nothing to do with the fandom until 2015 when I attended the 40th Anniversary Convention in New York City. Though I didn't know any of the new fans, I was still so embedded within the fandom that my first night there I had dinner with two of the film’s cast members and drinks with another one the next night. When I was a 17 year old insane Rocky Horror fan, my neighbour was Patricia Quinn. I was, indeed, lucky.

My fandom runs deeper than just ‘liking the film a lot’ and my connection to other RHPS fans is based on far more than just ‘liking the film a lot’. If I see someone online mentioning that they like Rocky Horror and know that they haven’t dedicated their entire being to it, I just think ‘amateur’.

Several years ago, I was out with Richard O’Brien (yea, I know) and he said ‘I just don’t understand why people shadowcast.’ I started to tell him and he stopped me, ‘Let’s do this on camera sometime.’ He wanted it to be recorded so that others could hear it… Then Covid happened… and I’ve still not explained it to him.

I don’t even know if I’ve properly explained it to myself.

I love cosplay. There is a deep and profound joy to be had making screen accurate costumes. I cannot for the life of me understand where the pleasure can come from by just buying a full costume from a shop and wearing it. Bliss comes from studying the costume in photos and screengrabs, finding others online who have made or are interested in making that costume, tracking down the correct fabrics, making accessories, finding patterns you can hack (after first learning how to sew), studying photos and screenshots to work out if that’s a pleat or just a wrinkle and, if it is a pleat, working out how to alter your pattern to get it in, learning how to work with plastic, wire, papier mache, learning how to design fabrics in order to get them printed, learning how to cut, dye, alter, make wigs, and shoes, omigod, shoes… Cosplay is a deeply creative hobby that forces you to learn a lot of different skills… (My costume-making blog is here…)

Shadowcasting, however, goes beyond ‘cosplaying’ to a sometimes bonkers degree. It’s not just wearing a costume, it is wearing a character. You step into a fantasy world and into the body of someone who lives in that world. You aren’t just dressing up as that character, you become that character. When I was shadowcasting, I wasn’t trying to perform a character like Tim Curry did, I was trying to BE Frank N Furter. Shadowcasters don’t just get up on stage in front of the film and do whatever they want – dance around and be ‘crazy’ on stage while a film is showing, any idiot can do that. Instead,  they learn all the moves their character does and performs them as perfectly in time to the film as they can to give the impression that the character has stepped out of the screen.

Shadowcasting takes a long time to get right. Once I had all of Frank’s larger moves down, I progressed on to perfecting the smaller moves, then facial expressions, eye movements, lip curls… A shadowcast performance for me isn’t just ‘knowing all the words to the songs really well’ or ‘knowing the script off by heart’ or ‘knowing the dance pretty well’… it is BEING that character in that moment, word by word, move by move, thought by thought… It is not just looking down at exactly the same moment that a character looks down, it is knowing why that character looks down. What are they looking at? What made them do that? What thoughts are going through their head? What, dare I say it, is their motivation? And then it is embodying all of that, having it soak right down into the marrow of your bones so that you can perform it as smoothly and as perfectly timed as possible without ever having to think about the timing… week after week.

But all of that is about the technique of shadowcasting. It doesn’t really answer Richard’s question about why shadowcasting appeals to some of us within the Rocky Horror fandom.

For me, there’s always been something deeply interesting about the idea that the boundary between fantasy and reality can be porous. Not simply that we can travel to a fantasyland- like Dorothy travelling to Oz- but that fictional characters can enter our world- like in The Purple Rose of Cairo- and bring some magic to our ordinary lives. To me, shadowcasting is about breaking down the boundary between our normal reality and the ‘insane insanity’ of the fantasy world where a murderous, cannibalistic, transvestite alien is the sexiest man there’s ever been. I want to take that world into the cinema in order for the audience to not just Dream It, but Be It. I want to make it more than just a film. I want to make it real. I want to be Frank, right there in front of them. For me shadowcasting is about being a conduit between the audience in reality and the other world beyond the screen. For me ‘accuracy’- in the costume, make-up, performance – is about making the boundary between those worlds disappear. My aim is to be so accurate that Frank is both up there AND right here in front of you. Is it real? It is fantasy? It’s both. It's neither. It’s something else. It’s shadowcasting…

Yea… I care a lot about shadowcasting.

About 18 months ago, I was in a pretty rubbish state- physically and mentally and... "energetically". There were days when I was unable to get out of bed. I had gained a lot of weight and felt 'swollen'. It wasn't just the exhaustion, I was also 'achey'. It was a kind of non-specific widespread 'ache'. Nothing sharp or debilitating, but just there. All. The. Time.

I was several years into FULL ON perimenopause, had started HRT (oestrogen and progesterone only, I hadn't yet started on testosterone) and basically just assumed that this was my life now. It was all downhill from here, I guess... I was sleeping OK, but often in pain at night. I was taking supplements and keeping myself busy and trying my best to be a part of the world... but still I was exhausted and unable to move every few days.

Also, about a month before the first lockdown- 18 months or so before I ended up in bed a lot- I injured myself. I snapped my ACL, tore my PCL and MCL and had multiple tiny fractures in my femur and tibia (Google it all)- and couldn't walk properly for a year. I'd expected that after such a huge injury I would be dealing with inflammation and consequently suffer from depression. I felt like this prior knowledge would insulate me from the worst of it. Mind over matter and all of that... Also, I was taking vitamin D to try and help with the inflammation and yet here I was 18 months later in bed every few days.

Menopause, life-changing injury... Everything was pointing to depression. I was aware of this and I kept interrogating myself: am I depressed? And I could never honestly answer 'yes'. I was fine, I was just annoyed more than anything that I couldn’t walk properly and had no energy. But maybe I had no energy because I was depressed??? Again, I couldn't honestly accept that. I've suffered from depression before and this was different. This was… physical somehow.

For a few years previously, a friend of mine and I said that, if we wanted to, we were positive that we could go to our GP and, without telling a single lie, get diagnosed with either fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. We were just tired and achey and bleurgh. In fact, my Instagram profile still shows you how I felt all that time...

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But this new phase was even worse. It wasn't just that I felt a bit low energy, I was unable to get out of bed. It could have been menopause or 'fibro' or chronic fatigue related, of course, and had I just assumed any one of those, I'd still be in bed every few days right now.

But I’m not.

I'd spent the previous summer in France - as I usually do - and had noticed that I always felt amazing in France. Healthy, happy, energetic. I assumed it was a combination of things: the sun, the fact that it was the summer holidays so I wasn't being woken by my alarm every morning at fucking 6am for the school run holy shit all of that is about to start again for fuck's sake... But also I felt great in France because of the food. I felt... clean. I can't explain it, but internally there was a huge difference that I felt when I was in France. I felt lighter, less… bleurgh. Surely, if it was menopause or 'fibro' or whatever where I was located in the world wouldn't matter... right?

During one of my many stays in bed in Spring 2022, I was thinking about how in a few months, I'd be back in France and feeling better again. And then thought 'Why do I have to wait until then? What am I doing the rest of the year that I don't do in France?' I started investigating. Right away I found articles about how the French lifestyle is healthier. But I exercise less often when I'm in France, drink more booze, eat LOADS of bread and cheese and cream and I feel better… and don't gain weight or often lose weight... it didn't make sense.

Then I started to find articles about people who couldn't eat bread when they were 'at home', but were fine with it in France. It seemed that it wasn't just anecdotal: "The French population as a whole has a lower incidence of obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome and as recently has been discovered, coeliac disease, than most western countries. Childhood obesity levels in 2012, were 13.9% in France compared to 17.8% in England."

Could I have an issue with... gluten??

Oh god. Please, no.

One of my very good friends has celiac, so I emailed her right away. I told her what I suspected, how I felt better in France and, if I really thought about it, I've felt a bit 'funny' with wheat for a while now...? She replied saying that it's highly unlikely that my issue is with gluten and most people who think they have an issue with gluten do not. Instead, it is more likely they have an issue with FODMAPs.

Okaaaaay?

This was something new to learn about… I looked at a list of high FODMAP foods and thought perhaps this could be my issue. There were some types of FODMAP groups that I clearly didn't have an issue with another others that I realised I did. Wheat was a big one for me, but also I know I didn’t like to eat things like kidney beans, oat milk, and green bell peppers (but not red).

I decided to look into it more: “FODMAPs are a group of sugars that are not completely digested or absorbed in our intestines. When FODMAPs reach the small intestine, they move slowly, attracting water. When they pass into the large intestine, FODMAPs are fermented by gut bacteria, producing gas as a result. The extra gas and water cause the intestinal wall to stretch and expand. Because people with IBS have a highly sensitive gut, ‘stretching’ the intestinal wall causes exaggerated sensations of pain and discomfort”. And almost immediately I realised: this has got to be it.

But also... IBS??! Did I have IBS?? I really didn't think so. Anything I'd heard about it wasn't recognisable. According to the NHS:

The main symptoms of IBS are:

stomach pain or cramps – usually worse after eating and better after doing a poo

bloating – your tummy may feel uncomfortably full and swollen

diarrhoea – you may have watery poo and sometimes need to poo suddenly

constipation – you may strain when pooing and feel like you cannot empty your bowels fully

Nope. Not me... I mean, sometimes things would make me bloat, but that’s normal, isn’t it? The symptoms go on...

IBS can also cause:

farting (flatulence)

passing mucus from your bottom

tiredness and a lack of energy

feeling sick (nausea)

backache

problems peeing, like needing to pee often, sudden urges to pee, and feeling like you cannot fully empty your bladder

not always being able to control when you poo (bowel incontinence)

OK. Not really me other than I was a bit farty sometimes, but that's normal, isn't it? But also 'tiredness and a lack of energy'? Is that enough to be IBS? Could I just have mild IBS which was mainly causing exhaustion? Really?? Let’s see…

I went back to the Monash University site- they are the world leaders in FODMAP research - read everything I could and got information on doing an elimination diet. I downloaded the Monash App and started an elimination diet right away. It was pretty easy. I found loads of great recipes and never felt like I was depriving myself of anything. I started feeling better almost immediately... After 5 or 6 weeks, feeling great, full of energy, happy, I decided to start the reintroduction phase. The first things I wanted to test were garlic and then onions because if I couldn't eat either of them WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OMG???????

They were totally fine. Phew.

Then wheat. Right away I felt shit and realised that I had digestive issues. For the first time since I started this elimination, I could "feel" my digestion. It was uncomfortable... and I'd just taken it as 'normal' for years and hadn’t even realised it was unusual. So that was clear. I had IBS, but just not in a way that I recognised from the way others spoke about it.

A few other early FODMAP positives for me: kidney beans, oat milk, green peppers (as I suspected), but also chickpeas (there goes hummus ::sad face::), the stems of tender stem broccoli (WTF?) and inulin (literally don't know)...

By this point we were heading off to France, so I decided to abandon the elimination diet. I'd got the most important answer for me- wheat was a big issue - and if I had 'flare ups' in France, I'd be able work out what else I had issues with (hello, butternut squash), but it was clear that my issues were with some fructans and GOS... OK...

But the question remained why could I eat bread in France and feel fine? I understood that the fermenting process of the sourdough process to make baguette breaks down the fructans, but I can eat croissant and tarts and all kinds of things made with flour in France without any issues. This is tricker to work out, but basically France (and Italy and probably other European countries, I don't know) uses "soft wheat" for its bread flour and "hard wheat" for its pasta (which is why pasta still can be tricky for me in France) and they have differing amounts of proteins and gluten etc. There seems to be some research on FODMAPs and wheat variety, but it's behind a paywall and I can't access it, so no idea if it's relevant in France or not. But in the UK (and the US) we tend to use "hard wheat" for everything as it's higher in gluten and so better for bread cakes etc (ever notice how they don't really do cake in France?)... So, it's likely that it's the type of wheat used in France which I am more able to tolerate. But I don’t have any more specific information on that.

Eighteen months on and how am I doing? I've been taking probiotics and prebiotics (but staying away from inulin/chicory root!). I'm not really eating bread or wheat-based foods - though I've found a bakery that does 4-day fermented sourdough which works for me. I tend to have things like gluten free pasta or oat crackers because it's easier than ending up exhausted. I only occasionally have foods that I'm overly sensitive to - the aim is to heal and be able to eat FODMAP foods I'm currently sensitive to, so I keep trying them. But I'm no longer exhausted and remaining in bed every other day. I'm not achey. I feel less 'swollen'. I've lost a bit of weight. I feel better than I've felt in ages.

So, if you are exhausted, run down, maybe achey and maybe have digestive issues (but maybe not ones you realise are obviously IBS, ie bloating), have a look into FODMAPs and see if any of it rings true for you. It's helped me enormously and hopefully it will help some of you.

Again, the first port of call should be Monash University, stay away from woo, follow the science. Good luck!

My memory of my feelings about this was INCANDESCENT RAGE. Why did this person feel the need to tell me this, to suggest that I am a terrible person because of what articles I bookmark and to try and shame me about which tweets I pushed a button under? I was soooooooo angry. My reply, however, read as calm, clear and measured. It made me think about our disconnect between how we feel (which at the time for me was PURE ANGER) and how we behave (even though I was angry, I replied to her directly and honestly, but with respect for her feelings) or even how we are perceived by others (I know how she received it because I saw her soon afterwards and we hugged, though I've since become 'evil' apparently).

I found that file of mine because I was looking for something I wrote on my old newsletter about my time in the late 80s/early 90s in the Rocky Horror fandom. I'd started the London shadowcast and had performed around 250 times as Frank N Furter before I was bullied out of the group.

We were all misfits and nerds in our late teens/very early 20s and like loads of groups of friends at that age there was… a lot of… drama. Drama. Drama. Drama.

I became the focus of the drama and no matter what I did, it just got worse and worse. And worse. In short, I was being bullied by a few of the people in the group and everyone else was unsure what to do (we were kids…). I was lied about, thrown on the floor during a performance, shunned. When I got ‘an anonymous’ threatening letter through the post, I knew it was time to disappear.

At the same time I was being bullied by a few people in my social group, I was being bullied at my job. I was working an entry level job in a very traditional and prestigious place. I was a dorky, gothy, poor kid, who bought my 'office clothes' at a secondhand market stall in Camden. Two of the women (at least 10 years older than I was) in the office ganged up on me and relentlessly teased me about my clothing, my hair, my accent... but all of the people I actually worked for - making tea, doing their photocopying, running errands - really liked me because I did my job well. More than once, one of those people told my boss how much they liked me. I wasn't sure what to do about it all.

I remember sitting outside with some Rocky Horror friends and telling them about what was going on at work. I don't remember using the word 'bully' - I don't think that was in common use then - but everyone was sympathetic and told me I shouldn't put up with it... including someone who soon after decided to join in with the bullies in my social circle.

The complication in my group of friends was that we were all very young and didn't know how to handle the situation. We all just wanted everything to be 'nice', we all just wanted to be 'kind'. We were weirdos and outcasts who for various reasons had all gravitated to a social group full of, well, weirdos and outcasts. We didn't want to exclude anyone... Why couldn't everyone just get along??? But life isn't like that. People are complicated. Some people are just dicks. And there isn't any amount of 'kind' you can be to bullies that will make them stop, if their intention is to 'destroy' you. Also, bullies don't think they are bullies. They think they are the victim or they are somehow standing up for what is 'good and proper' or they are simply defending their rights/friends/ideas or any number of ways they justify treating others badly ("they deserve it"). Most importantly though, bullies require others around them to support them, either by actively joining in or just not getting involved... and being in a group whose core ideal was 'accepting everyone' meant that no one really got involved.

I ended up quitting my job and quitting my group of friends (I moved across London without telling anyone, which in the early 90s was as good as disappearing) and dealing with a lot of emotional scarring for a long time. It definitely made me less trustful of people and very sensitive to people being bullies. It made me put my head above the parapet, step into harm's way and stand up for the bullied and against the bullies...

I started to think about when I was bullied after reading this post. So much of it rang true for me.

The weapons intended to weaken and eliminate the target are:

• Public charming and amicable behaviour toward high status/proximity people/enablers to maintain loyalty and trust

• Private intimidation, threats, criticism and micromanagement of the target

• Public humiliation to put target in their place at the same time as sending a warning to the group of what to expect should they also cross a line

• Devaluation of target by reputation assassination, false accusations and emotional manipulation of enablers/bystanders to erode confidence and trust others have of the target

• Exclusion of the target from important communication, meetings, social gatherings to eventual shunning

• Deprivation of responsibilities and social interactions, constant criticism and questioning expertise/work activities to devalue the target and erode their own self-confidence and perception of competence

Anytime I read stuff about bullying I not only recognise it completely from my own experiences, but I see it in others around me on social media. I can spot a bully from a mile away and am very sensitive to enabling it. My instinct is to publicly challenge the person and let everyone within blogging distance know exactly what is going on...

... but things are more complicated than that.

Sometimes the bully has successfully convinced bystanders that they are a kind, friendly, empathic victim, while behaving terribly to individuals outside of the public gaze. Trying to claim that this 'kind', 'friendly' person is an aggressive or abusive jerk just makes you look like you are crazy (as many people in abusive relationships will understand very well). Sometimes the bully has simply surrounded themselves with people who really, really need to be a follower and they see the bully as a strong leader. Standing up to the bully (or even just questioning them) can make them or their 'followers' attack you... And maybe that is OK because you are strong enough to deal with it... but maybe you can't. That's OK, too. Maybe the best thing you can do is privately support the bully's victims. There is a lot of debate about this within UK feminism where many people are unhappy with others who only offer private support and refuse to publicly stand up for women who are being publicly smeared... I feel differently about this.

If in my group of Rocky Horror friends, most people in the group had privately come to me and said 'I just want you to know that I support you. I think [X] are treating you terribly. I'm too afraid to say anything to them though because I've seen what they've done to you and I'm just really scared', I would have been happy. Obviously, a few people had done that, but that wasn't enough. In a group of 20 people, if only a few people have told you they support you and everyone else has remained silent, then one can only assume that they support the bully. Had everyone in my friend group privately told me they supported me- and even better had they privately told EACH OTHER they supported me- then the bullies' power would have disappeared overnight... As it was, I moved across the city into a small flat on my own, cut contact with everyone (because I couldn't trust that they wouldn't betray me) and had to rebuild a life from scratch. It took me nearly 25 years before I would watch Rocky Horror again... but still...

Being told, even privately, that people support you can make you feel like you aren't alone, that you aren't losing your mind, that you are being bullied (they see it!!), that everyone doesn't hate you, that you aren't an awful, terrible, evil person... It can stop you from sobbing into your pillow alone for hours. It can stop you from lying awake for hours, days, weeks wondering what you did that was so wrong that it would put you here by your self, away from everyone you cared about. It can stop you feeling like the entire world thinks you are a dick.

So send someone that private message of support. It's important.

As for the people who bullied me way back when... I know that after I left my job, one of the women in the office was fired for unrelated reasons. Of the people in my friend group... well... One of them seems to have worked as a counsellor and the other seems to be a bit of a 'be kind-adjacent' person... so there's that intriguing twist...

I suspect neither of them ever believed that they were bullies nor would they believe that their behaviour towards me had such a deep and profound negative effect on me for years and that I still have the emotional scars from it. I doubt the counsellor would have ever admitted to herself during her training or afterwards that she had been nasty, vindictive, dedicated to 'ruining' me and that she caused me serious mental health issues. I don't think the 'be kind' one would have thought she was anything other than morally justified in her behaviour towards me all those years ago (apparently the lies about me continued for a long time after I left the group)...

These days in my sphere, I often notice 'be kind people' not practicing what they preach. There seems to be a lot of upset from them about how other people are 'angry' or 'bitter' or 'cynical' and how everyone just needs to be more 'empathic', 'caring' and 'kind', but so often they behave as if they are the angry, bitter or cynical ones. They sneer, they mock, they rage about 'the right', about 'culture warriors', about 'centrists', about their wives, their colleagues, their parents, their landlord... It's not often I get the feeling that 'be kind' people are actually, well, kind. They certainly don't seem like they are fun to be around.

It's really the hypocrisy that bothers me the most. This includes the 'be kind' privately educated middle-class man who pretends he is 'a man of the people'; the 'be kind' heterosexual people pretending they understand the "LGBTQIIAA+" community more than anyone; the 'be kind' middle class woman who owns and earns money from a rental property claiming she's a socialist and saying I am a terrible human for not being a socialist; the 'be kind' men who say they are feminists...

And, of course, I include the 'be kind' people who think it's acceptable to try and cancel people because they have different beliefs; to sneer at those whose cares and concerns aren't "progressive" like theirs; to laugh at people who are suffering in some way simply because those people, I don't know, drive a car, eat meat or believe in god. There doesn't seem to be any attempt to actually empathise with anyone other than people who already think exactly the way they do. Saying they are 'kind' is more important to them than 'being kind', saying they are 'empathic' on social media is much better than actually having to do something in the real world, I guess.

Several years ago, I was friendly with someone who was all 'be kind'. This person had told me about an extremely minor issue they were dealing with. I say 'extremely minor' because the solution to this problem was trivial. It was similar to someone saying "Ugh. All the windows are open, it's winter and my house is FREEZING. It's terrible. I'm so cold. I can't warm up at all. My feet hurt, they're so cold. I feel awful and so upset. I just don't know what to do..." And my reply was the equivalent of "Why not just shut your windows?" This apparently wasn't the 'kind' thing to do. I was simply supposed to offer sympathy, not possible solutions.

I was told I had no empathy.

It's as if saying 'be kind' or repeating the word 'empathy' is magic. That all we need to do is close our eyes, spin around 3 times and repeat 'be kind' over and over and all of the problems in the world will disappear. We don't need to think of practical solutions. We don't need to think of, you know, REALITY. We just need to say that we are feeling 'empathy' and that's good enough. 'Who cares if you have frostbite?? I have an entirely hidden feeling of empathy for you. That's enough...'

But IN THE REAL WORLD, if your windows are open, it's freezing and you are unbearably cold, I don't just say ‘I'm super empathic and I just feel so sad for you that you are cold.’ I CLOSE THE FUCKING WINDOWS. I don't need to express any feeling for you either way (though I may think you're a moron for keeping your windows open...). I don’t even need to actually feel anything for you, I could just think ‘Room cold. Close window.’ and you would feel better when you warm up. It could be that I do feel compassion for your suffering and that motivates me to offer or provide a real world solution to your pain and discomfort, even if I don’t express that feeling of compassion. And the same goes for whatever it is that the open window is an analogy for... But nope. Apparently, if I want to be a 'good person', I just need to feel as bad as you do about 'your cold feet' and leave it at that.

I've been very wary of people who bandy about the word 'empathy' and bang on about 'being kind' ever since. I've not yet been convinced they are good people.

I was so annoyed by the accusation - it was an accusation - that I didn't have any empathy, that when soon after I saw a book called 'Against Empathy', I bought it. It made me realise that I wasn't wrong in thinking that 'empathy' wasn't magic and, in fact, had the potential to cause people to behave in pretty terrible ways, like during this experiment described in the book:

Subjects were told about a math competition for a twenty-dollar prize between two students, described as strangers, who were currently in another room of the laboratory. They then read an essay purportedly written by one of the students, which described her financial problems—she needed to replace a car and pay for class registration. The subjects were then told that they were involved in an experiment that explored the effect of pain on performance, and to make everything random they would get to choose how much pain to administer—by choosing a dosage of hot sauce—to the student the financially needy student was competing with.

The trick here concerned how the essay purportedly written by the student ended. [...] some of the subjects read a passage designed to elicit empathy (“ I’ve never been this low on funds and it really scares me”), while others did not (“ I’ve never been this low on funds, but it doesn’t really bother me”).

As predicted, greater amounts of hot sauce were assigned to the competitor when the person was described as distressed. Keep in mind that this competitor didn’t do anything wrong; he or she had nothing to do with the student’s anxiety about money.”

So, the test subjects who felt more empathy for the student who wrote the essay were pretty happy to inflict pain on someone else. The other person hadn't done anything to the student who supposedly wrote the essay, they were just 'in competition' with her for some money. The test subjects weren't given an essay to read by this other student, they didn't know their story or their reasons for needing the money. They had only one bit of information that got their empathy flowing and they were ready and raring to 'torture' the competitor.

This empathy stuff isn't all that simple, is it?

Then I read another book called 'The Dark Sides of Empathy':

Empathy can lead to perceiving the social world in black and white, thinking in terms of friend and enemy. [...] conflicts may emerge not despite, but because of empathy. Human beings tend to quickly take sides in conflicts and use empathy to glorify their chosen side while condemning and demonizing the other side. [...] we do not act morally because we feel empathy; rather, we moralize to justify our quick and empathetic side-taking.

This is saying that ‘empathy’ can lead to some dangerous thinking: 'I read an essay about how someone needed money. I felt bad for her. You are competing against her for some prize money. This is wrong. She needs that money. I feel badly for her that she needs that money. I think you are an awful person for trying to steal money from her. Yes, by taking part in this competition, you are trying to steal money from her. No. No, I don't want to hear about why you too might need some money. You are clearly a terrible person, if you are going to compete against a wonderful person like, well, I don't know the other person's name, but I read an essay and she seems really wonderful. How DARE you compete against her! I'm going to destroy your life. I don't care if it's an annual mathematic competition that is held every year and is open to all students. If you were decent, you would pull out of the competition. But you aren't decent. It doesn’t matter if you have bills to pay. You're immoral. You're cruel. You're evil. I heard that your grandfather was a Nazi. I understand that you support Nazis. I'm telling your employer that you are a Nazi. I'll get the competition to remove you because if they don't it means they support Nazis. I punch Nazis...'

Et cetera.

This was what it was like being bullied. Just relentless hounding and accusations and lies that got worse and worse and I was unable to defend myself because how do you prove that you aren't 'evil'? You can’t just ‘be kind’ because the bullies will say that you are lying or disingenuous or just pretending to be kind in order to dupe everyone. And I 100% believe that the people who bullied me thought they were 'the good guys'...

So why are some people so insistent that just 'being kind' or 'having empathy' will transform the world? It feels to me that the be kind/empathy people don't differentiate their internal, subjective emotional state from the exterior world that we all share. They seem to think that if they feel it, it is as real as it needs to be and if they say it, well, that's as good as it can be.

This gets back to what I said at the top: "our disconnect between how we feel and how we behave or even how we are perceived by others."

If someone keeps repeating 'I'm happier than I've been in years' or ‘Having empathy for others is the most important thing you can do’, but every tweet is full of bile about different groups of people ('Journalists!' 'Centrists!' 'Elites!’ ‘[X]-phobes!’) or every video they post of themselves online is a scowling, sneery and angry diatribe about some new thing or other they're upset about now or every conversation you have with them is about how terrible this, that or the other thing is; if someone keeps banging on about 'being kind', but 'jokes' about people who have different beliefs to them being murdered ('Haha! They're only Tories/Trump supporters!'); if someone tells you that you are 'immoral' because you don't like their favourite politician and then you find out they've been cheating on their partner while claiming incapacity benefit from work (sideeye.gif)... you are seeing this 'disconnect' in action. They (claim they) feel and are good and moral and happy and kind and empathic, but they behave like jerks.

It seems like only their internal, subjective feelings matter to them. If they say the 'correct' words or say they feel good about themselves, that's all that matters. It isn't their concern if their real world behaviours run contrary to what they (are trying to convince themselves they) believe. Repeat the catechisms. Chant the mantras. Say the prayers asking for your sins to be absolved... as you add hurt, pain and negativity to the world and try to destroy the people who actually try to have an effect, to make a change, to do something in the real world. Keep telling yourself you are ‘the good guy’ because that’s what you feel. We always find a way to justify our bad behaviour to absolve ourselves of any guilt.

From 'Against Empathy':

"The moralization gap” [is] the tendency to diminish the severity of our own acts relative to the acts of others. You can see this in reports of violent criminals who are puzzled why people are making such a big deal of their crimes. The most extreme example is Frederick Treesh, one of a group of three “spree killers,” who allegedly told a police officer, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol-whipped, and the light bulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.”

This is why my bullies could justify forcing me out of my group of friends and onto my own; why internet bullies can believe they are in the right when they lie about people, instigate pile ons and encourage people to complain to someone's employer and causing deep distress, exacerbating mental health issues, ruining the happiness of everyone around their victim... and why the 'be kind' people can continue to happily ignore all of the internet bullies ‘on their side’ destroying people’s mental health all over the place by effectively plugging up their ears and repeating 'bekindbekindbekind'... They cannot see they are doing anything that bad at all.

If, however, you (we) try to confront the bullies or do something about it, you run the risk of becoming -or being perceived as - a bully yourself. Just because someone seems 'powerful' and that they can and should take the consequences of their actions, doesn't mean they aren't in fact in a precarious state of mind.

What can we do?

I don't know. I'm not an expert. My default position is to ignore them. Like, who CARES if [person who always says really fucking dumb things] said something really fucking dumb today? What in the world are you going to change by tweeting about it? Other than making yourself and everyone around you just a bit more angry. Just shut up. Don't try to get other people angry about them. Don't try to get them 'cancelled'. Don't try to get them fired.

Of course, sometimes it's not as easy as ‘ignore them’. When one of my old Rocky Horror bullies popped up on my horizon several years after I left the group, I DESPERATELY wanted to tell everyone what she was 'really like'. (I didn't.) When she turned up in 'the news' a few years ago for doing something dumb, I DESPERATELY wanted to tell everyone what she was 'really like'. (I didn't.) Because, frankly, I don't know what she is 'really like'. All I know is how she treated me and how that made me feel. The only thing I know, the only thing I'm in control of, are my feelings. And my feelings are not ‘reality’.

Telling everyone that she was a manipulative, lying, Single White Female jerk does nothing other than release a little bit of my pain and anger into the world (as it just did! Weeeee! I feel lighter!), it isn't telling people 'what she is really like'. It isn't what SHE thinks she is like. It isn't what her family or friends think she is like. She isn't some kind of pure evil witch, like a character out of a fairy tale. She is a person. I know that. Which is why I just stayed silent. And if you actually have empathy, you will understand that 'your enemies' are people, just like you. They, like you, think they are behaving like a good, decent person...

From Against Empathy:

If you want to think about evil, real evil, a better way to proceed is this: Don’t think about what other people have done to you; think instead about your own actions that hurt others, that made others want you to apologize and make amends. Don’t think about other nations’ atrocities toward your country and its allies; think instead about the actions of your country that other people rage against.

Your response might be: Well, none of that is evil. Sure, I did some things that I regret or that others blame me for. And yes, my country might have done ugly things to others. But these were hard choices, tough calls, or perhaps honest mistakes, never the consequence of some sort of pure malice. Precisely. This is how people typically think of their past evil acts.

This is why I learned a long time ago never to expect an apology from someone who has hurt you, because they think they are ‘the good guy’… Maybe the best way to proceed is by ACTUALLY being the Good Guy. Maybe instead of shouting at people online do one small act of kindness for someone in the real world AND THEN DON’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT. Just do it. Who cares if no one else knows about it. You will.

July 2020

After several months of lockdown and only seeing the odd person, we were invited to lunch - outside!- with someone Brian had been working with before Covid. It was the first proper socialising we'd done in months. We arrived and were introducing ourselves when this guy's friend arrived - he'd been invited to lunch, too. He came up to me and my son, and introduced himself. He stuck his hand out, my son reached out and shook it, then looked at his hand in horror. This was the first person he'd touched in months. 'Do you want some disinfectant?' I asked as I got it out of my bag. The guy just laughed and laughed. Pre-Covid if someone shook his hand, many would have declared that they would never wash their hand again and now here's my son treating a handshake like it's poison.

The guy was Bono.

Another story...

Several years ago, Brian and I went for dinner with a few people - some we knew, some we didn't. As Brian spoke to a friend and others we'd only just met, I spent the whole time talking to one of the people we knew - Hugh Grant. OK. Yea. I spent the whole time flirting with him. Come on, so would you…

About an hour into dinner, my phone rang. It was my older son - he was babysitting my younger son. Ugh. What's happened? I answered the phone at the table.

Son: 'Hey. Can I have that lasagna that's in the fridge?'

Me: 'Yep.'

Son: 'Thanks. What are you doing?'

Me: 'We're having dinner. I'm here with Hugh Grant.' I looked at Hugh.

Son: 'Who's that?'

Me: 'He's an actor. (To Hugh) He doesn't know who you are.'

Son: 'What's he been in?'

Me: '...errr...Have you seen Love Actually?'

Son: 'No.'

Me: 'Four Weddings and a Funeral?'

Son: 'No.'

Me: (to Hugh) 'He's not seen them.'

Hugh: 'Notting Hill?'

Me: 'Notting Hill?'

Son: 'Nope.'

Me (to Hugh): 'Nope. What might he have seen?'

Hugh: '(thinking)...Bridget Jones...?'

Me: (to Hugh) 'Haha! No, he won't have seen that.'

Son: 'What?'

Me: 'Bridget Jones...?'

Son: 'No.'

Hugh: '... He won't have seen About A Boy... '

Me: 'No...'

Hugh: '...not Sense and... no... Oh! Oh! I know! I KNOW!!!! I WAS THE PIRATE CAPTAIN IN PIRATES IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS!!'

Me: 'YES! (To my son) He was the voice of the Pirate Captain in Pirate In An Adventure With Scientists!!'

Son: 'Oh. Yea. Ok... So I can have the lasagna?'

Me: 'Yea. Have the lasagna.'

Fame is a really funny thing.

I started working in tv in 1992. One of my co-presenters who'd been working in tv for several years at that point gave me some important advice right away: Don't play the fame game. It will eat you up and chuck you out... I've been very wary of fame ever since.

Though I'd worked in tv, I never really wanted to be famous. I just wanted to make programmes. TV was my language. I'm all about the visuals. And being able to meet new people and learn about new things all the time was exciting. TV was everything I was about... I grew up loving television.

'Fame', however, was a different thing. I wanted to be taken seriously. Fame wasn't serious. It was silly and frivolous. It was also potentially dangerous. I'd seen how friends and acquaintances with various levels of fame had had their lives upended by it. Positive things came with it, of course, but the possible negatives were far beyond what I'd ever want to deal with. Friends- some very well known - who chose not to play the fame game had much more stable personal lives. I made some choices in my career that took me away from the fame stuff and closer to the 'learning new things and meeting interesting people' stuff... because I just wanted a normal life.

And then out of the blue Brian became 'famous'. From the outside, I'm sure it looks strange when I say 'out of the blue'. Yes, he'd done things like appeared on This Morning as an expert and had been interviewed by Newsnight about CERN and had done a couple Horizons before he'd done Wonders of the Solar System, but it was 'out of the blue' because who becomes crazy famous - people shouting your name from cars and women becoming obsessed with you- for doing a science tv show??? I wrote about those very strange early days here.

Well over a decade into this whole famous husband thing, I've gained more insight into it... which hasn't changed my opinion about fame one bit...

One thing that’s worth understanding is that fame is relative. You can be a world famous musician or a Hollywood star or a local radio host... or you can be an office manager from Ipswich who has 2000 followers on Twitter, and you can deal with the exact same effects of fame at varying degrees. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that everyone who is on social media is dealing with a Warholian type of fame- when you post a photo on Facebook of you on your most recent holiday and all of your friends tell you how amazing you look, how you've never looked better or happier or more beautiful, and you believe it...? They are operating as 'Fans' and you are the 'Famous'. On social media, it's Fame/Fandom all the way down...

One of the biggest mistakes someone can make when they start to get a taste of fame is to believe what other people say about them - good and bad. Your experience of life changes, but you are still the same, it's just that everyone around you starts behaving differently towards you. (It’s a bit like how the Apollo 11 astronauts were the only people on the planet that didn’t “see” the first Moon landing…) You need to understand that they aren't thinking of You as a fully rounded, emotionally complicated, normal human being. Once you are famous, you become an object not a person to others. You are an object that people want to be close to so that they can attain some reflected glory. You are an object that is a source of 'everything that is good' and people expect you to give it to them whether it is time with you (from saying hello or giving an autograph or getting a photo taken or having a meeting with you...) or money or, in fact, anything at all. You have it, they want it, they expect you to give it to them and if you don't, you are a terrible human being.

As more and more people start to tell you that you are 'the funniest', 'the cleverest', 'the most beautiful', 'the most talented', it can be difficult to ignore that. It’s normal to want to hear good things about yourself... But the best thing you can do is to treat it ALL as if it weren't real. The good AND the bad should remain in the fake reality where your 'fame' exists… well, you should do this if you want to remain sane… Some people, however, don't understand this implicitly and decide that they will ONLY believe the good things people say and ignore the negative things, which quickly starts to warp their own view of themselves.

This can then make those people increasingly difficult to be with in 'the real world' - whether privately or in a work capacity. They start to expect everyone around them to treat them as if they are 'the best' and become increasingly incapable of accepting any kind of criticism. If it's their work colleagues telling them that their work isn't quite up to par, they may start to behave in aggressive ways with their colleagues. If it's their partner telling them that they really need to pick up their dirty towels from the bathroom floor for ever-loving fuck's sake, they can decide that their partner just doesn't understand them. They may even decide that anyone who doesn't agree they are the best, should just be removed from their life... the only people left are people who, truthfully or not, will tell them how amazing they are…

There are several people I know - at various levels of Fame and Internet Fame- who have created a false world for themselves where they try desperately to ignore the 'bad voices' (even if they are self-directed) and create a little world full of sycophants that mill around telling them how they are 'amazing', 'the best'. I don't even know if they have actual, real friends, they just associate people who admire them and think it's really exciting to be connected to them. I imagine them saying to themselves "Yes, yes, I am the best. All of those kids that picked on me when I was in school were wrong. I AM THE BEST!!!"

There's a song about that...

Online Fame can operate in a more toxic way than traditional fame when the 'online famous' person can start to believe ALL of the praise they receive from anonymous randoms on social media and discount any negative feedback, even when the people being negative are people they actually know in real life. Whereas the traditionally famous person will often already exist in a world (film, tv, theatre, music, fashion, etc) where 'fame' is a pre-existing thing - they will know famous people, worked with famous people, see how famous people they know are treated or written about and take it all with a pinch of salt- and they will understand the ground rules of it, the Internet Famous person can go into it with very little preparation at all. Even someone who works in an area where fame exists can be tricked by social media, thinking that somehow what 'real people' say online about them is 'more real'. (Hint: none of it is real, you doofus.)

Not only do they believe what their online 'followers' and 'friends' say to them, but they often start to 'play their hits', that is, do the things their audience likes, in order to get even more praise. So they post angry diatribes about Politician/Famous Person/Culture War Commentator and their audience presses 'like' and sends replies saying how 'amazing', 'funny', 'brilliant', 'brave' etc they are and they think "Yes. Yes, I am all of those things, aren't I? Hey! Hey! Listen to this: Boris Johnson is a fascist!!! Now, tell me how amazing I am!"...

The Perils of Audience Capture by Gurwinder (subscribe to him, his newsletters are AWESOME) describes one of the most shocking cases of someone who is Internet Famous and who has done exactly this.

In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued his passion—playing the violin—and extolled the virtues of veganism. He went largely unnoticed.

A year later, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns. Now free to eat whatever he wanted, he began uploading mukbang videos of himself consuming various dishes while talking to the camera, as if having dinner with a friend.

These new videos quickly found a sizable audience, but as the audience grew, so did their demands. The comments sections of the videos soon became filled with people challenging Perry to eat as much as he physically could. Eager to please, he began to set himself torturous eating challenges, each bigger than the last. His audience applauded, but always demanded more. Soon, he was filming himself eating entire menus of fast food restaurants in one sitting.

In some respects, all his eating paid off; Nikocado Avocado, as Perry is now better known, has amassed over six million subscribers across six channels on YouTube. By satisfying the escalating demands of his audience, he got his wish of blowing up and being big online. But the cost was that he blew up and became big in ways he hadn't anticipated.

Whenever I see someone who has posted yet another virtue signalling post about 'being kind', another angry post about Jordan Peterson, another post calling everyone a 'fascist', another post asking for more money to fund their latest 'project’ ‘to get the bad guys' and their followers respond like the 'fans' they are, that image of Nikocado pops into my head. That image is what I imagine has happened to their mental state. It isn't good.

It's not just simple 'attention'- 'likes', 'views', 'followers', 'up votes'- that can capture someone. There are people I know who have posted about their mental or physical health issues online and then their 'friends' or 'followers' heap sympathy on them - telling them that they are 'amazing', 'strong', 'brilliant', 'brave' - and this gives them a dopamine hit. Fine. Normal. We all know this is what's going on... In a few people, however, this starts them on a cycle of what looks exactly like addiction to sympathy, which turns into a kind of Munchausen's By Internet. Their posts eventually go from factual ("I am suffering from mental/physical health issue and could use some cheering up", the response: "You are amazing! You can do this!") to either crusading ("I and I alone will end this mental/physical health issue for EVERYONE suffering from it. IN FACT I AM GOING TO HELP SAVE EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WORLD FROM EVERYTHING I CONSIDER TO BE BAD!!!", the response: "YES! YOU ARE THE BEST, MOST EMPATHIC PERSON IN THE WORLD AND I AM AMAZING FOR KNOWING YOU!!"... "Yes. Yes, I am the most empathic person in the world, aren't I?") or self-destructive ("I am suffering from this mental/physical health issue MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE and you, dear followers, are helping me by telling me how amazing I am", response: "YES!! YOU ARE SICKER THAN ANYONE AND YOU ARE THE MOST AMAZING PERSON BECAUSE YOUR ILLNESS MAKES US FEEL BETTER ABOUT OURSELVES!!!"... "Let me tell you again just how sick I am. I am so ill..."). The person who is unwell is unable to get better because they will lose their favourite drug. If everyone suddenly starts loving you because you are depressed, what will happen if you are no longer depressed...?

The followers are clearly getting something from it, too, of course. They feel good about themselves for "caring" so much or for "knowing" someone they think is "so amazing"... Online, the Fan and the Famous are in a destructive dance with one another, but it's only the famous one that truly suffers. The fan can just go find someone else to love…

I have talked to people about mutuals we've seen caught in this strange dance. One person who, like me, has known one of these people extremely well for over 40 years, said, "Did you ever hear her talk about any of this before? None of what she is saying corresponds to what I remember. She wasn't ill at all, was she? This is... new, but she's claiming that she's had this her entire life since childhood...?" Another person, who has known another mutual longer than I have, said "He's never spoken about any of this before in the 30 years I've known him... yet he's talking like this has been the most important issue to him since the 80s..."

These people, addicted to sympathy or attention, have created a false reality for themselves where they are at the centre surrounded by others who have been duped into thinking the "stories" are real, that the person they follow is what they say they are and not just telling them what they need to hear in order to give the internet famous person another hit of their favourite drug. And the people who know them in the real world are silently watching it all in amazement... the psychological mukbang…

I spent 20 years working in television, mainly as a presenter. In the UK TV industry, 'working for peanuts in your first job' turned into 'working for free to get a foot in the door' which turned into 'companies advertising jobs requiring previous experience which paid nothing other than a credit on the show and a chance to work on another project in the future'. When I saw a presenting job advertised for £10 per hour, I lost it. Several other tv professionals and I started a campaign to highlight this detrimental change to the industry. We pointed out that only middle class, London-based people were able to do this and that the TV industry as a whole suffered because of the loss of diverse voices. We got companies - big proper companies - to admit that they were 'hiring' people to work for free and they committed to change that. We had a lot of success with it.

But...

There existed and still exists a 'negative feeling' about what is known as 'talent' in the industry. In short, 'production' hates 'presenters' (OK 'hate' is too strong a word, but I'm sticking with it). One of the many issues 'production' has with presenters is that 'they earn too much'. And yes, presenters' daily rate is huge compared to others on production, but that is because their job is entirely different.

Whereas an Associate Producer might be working for months on a programme in pre-production, earning money the whole time, the presenter of that series only gets paid for the days they actually work on camera (if it's a decent production they will get paid a lower rate for travel days or meetings etc). I did jobs where pre-production was several months long and during production, I'd do one day of filming per week. So production would have a total of 6 months' employment and I'd have 8 days. Let's say someone on production was earning £1000 per week, £200 per day. They would earn about £25,000 on that series. If I was on the same daily rate as them, I'd earn £1600. But it was my face on camera. In 99% of jobs, I had to provide my own clothing. After the early 90s, if it wasn't based in a studio, I had to provide and do my own hair and make-up. I had to turn up and do my job - ideally without mistakes - no matter what. No such things as a 'sick day' as a presenter. No holiday pay. My daily rate was much higher than people on production's... and people would bitch about it without taking one moment to think about the differences in our jobs.

Also, unless you are a well-established, jobbing presenter, presenters are often unemployed. If you are a specialised presenter (as I was), you will only really be considered for the kinds of shows about your specialist subject. If 'interior design' is your specialty and tv is going through a big 'interior design' phase and there are loads of series throughout the year, great! But if it then starts to go out of fashion, work becomes harder to find. If you become 'known' for something, then every other option becomes pretty much impossible for you- Kirstie Allsopp is never going to be considered for a series about technology. Your other options for earning money are tricky, if you still want to be available for the (endless) meetings and auditions you need to do to get presenting jobs. You can't just get a 'normal' job because you will be having to go to meetings with people all the time. You might get booked for a one day job only a couple days before. You may have to go off for days at a time to do long, extended audition processes... for no pay... and then not get the job.

It's not a great career choice if you have any unresolved issues around 'rejection'!

If you have never worked as 'talent' (eg a presenter, actor or someone otherwise on camera, on microphone, on stage...), then I get that it can seem like a cushy job. I know it's not, but you only see the end result or the 'success stories'. Being a jobbing presenter/actor/comedian/etc is not the same as being a famous presenter/actor/comedian/etc. And, believe it or not, there isn't anything 'glamourous' about it whether you're famous or not.

There is also the fact that not everyone is going to get to the top of their chosen career. It's the same in EVERY career. Not everyone who runs a business is going to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, not everyone who runs a restaurant is going to get a Michelin star, not every scientist is going to get a Nobel Prize… and not every comedian is going to become a Hollywood star and sell out arenas.

The hard fact to accept when you do a creative job is that you just might not be good enough to reach the top. Yes, there is a lot of luck involved - you need to be seen for the 'right' jobs, by the 'right' people on the 'right' day and KILL in your audition or keep writing amazing articles or just 'get along' with the right producers- but even so, there is also this undefinable 'thing' that you just mightn't have. You can be a technically brilliant journalistic writer - you file your copy very quickly, your grammar is perfect, you never make a spelling mistake, you explain everything clearly, everything is impeccably researched - and still never break through to the top. And that can feel really shitty... especially if you see others benefitting from 'luck' in a way you've missed out on.

You have two positive choices you can make: 1) be content with whatever jobs you do get and find a way to make that work for you 2) move on and do something else.

The wrong thing to do: get angry and bitter about everyone else's success and constantly RAGE about 'the industry' on social media.

Not only is the latter option bad for your mental health (remember, the only thing we can control is our response to things), but it's bad for your career. Make no mistake: if you are a journalist who hasn't reached the level of success you were hoping for and you spend a lot of time publicly saying that 'everyone in the media is an immoral money-grubbing bastard', fellow journalists and editors are seeing that and talking about you in private; if you are a presenter who hasn't reached the level of success you were hoping for and you spend a lot of time publicly saying that 'everyone in tv is an immoral money-grubbing bastard', producers and directors are seeing that and talking about you in private; if you are a comedian who hasn't reached the level of success you were hoping for and you spend a lot of time publicly saying that 'famous comedians are all immoral money-grubbing bastards', fellow comedians and producers are seeing that and talking about you in private...

... you may well find your commissions/auditions/bookings slowing down, which will make those who refuse to engage in any self-examination rage even more and annoy or anger even more people.

I don't even work in the media anymore and even I get angry at people when I see them disparaging 'everyone who works in the media'.

Your moralistic choices about what jobs you will accept, which companies you will work for, what you will charge to do the job, which people you will work with are choices for you and you alone. No one else should have an opinion on what choices you make for yourself... and neither should you opine on the decisions others make for themselves. You might be in a much more comfortable position than others and will still be able to pay your bills if you 'refuse to work for [X]'. Not everyone is in that position. Don't make decent people feel shitty because they need to accept the only job they've been offered in 5 months because YOU don't like the company. Just let people live their own lives.

If someone who has an unexpected 'viral' hit with an Instagram account has a brief chance to earn some money by, I don't know, doing some live events around the country and you bitch about how their ticket prices are 'too high', YOU are the dick, not them.

Yea. It would be great if everything was free. Lalala. Imagine. Blah blah LateCapitalism blah. Let's put flowers in our fucking hair...

Whatever, dude... It isn't the world we live in. Let the person enjoy what might be their one chance to earn a wad of cash that allows them- maybe for the first time in their life - to not panic at the end of the month wondering whether or not they will be able to cover their bills.

"Oh, but I save my ire for the really wealthy and successful people."

Do you...? Do you really?

It's long been recognised that "Sex" is to Rightwing People what "Money" is to Leftwing People. It's seen as a necessary evil, but absolutely repulsive if you have 'too much' of it... and the moraliser's idea of 'too much' is actually 'not that much' by any normal standard...

*Yawn*

Making moralising statements about certain creatives earning ‘too much money’ is actually making moral judgements about EVERY creative’s income in the same way that American preachers making moral judgements about people having ‘too much sex’ is actually making judgements about EVERYONE'S sex life. ‘Too much’ is relative. It means nothing. It's dull.

"But actually my main issue is that I really care about people breaking into the industry."

Do you? Do you really?

When my fellow tv professionals and I started our campaign to try and change the industry so they actually paid people doing entry level jobs, we didn't shout at the people at the top in TV- the people who owned production companies or the people at the top at the BBC - screaming that they made 'too much money'. We gathered the evidence, we learned about employment law, we spoke to LOADS of industry leaders, and THEN we started our campaign TO INCREASE THE PAY OF ENTRY LEVEL JOBS. The powers that be tried to deny it was happening or that there was a problem, but we had the receipts. At no point did we say to anyone 'YOU ARE A MONEY-GRUBBING BASTARD'.

It would have been really stupid and pointless if we'd ONLY looked at the people at the top and what they were earning and ASSUMED that people in entry level jobs weren't earning anything. Just because there are people earning a lot of money in an industry doesn't mean that no one else is. Not only did we look for the data, we ACTUALLY DID THE WORK… we didn’t just complain.

If you care, do the work, don’t complain.

"But it's hard to break into [a creative industry]!!"

Yep. And the sky is blue.

When I was 18, the Shakespearian actor Robert Stephens was my neighbour. I remember asking him once if he would recommend acting as a career - I was considering studying acting at the time... He spent a half an hour telling me every terrible thing about acting as a career choice ("You will be poor" "You will be insecure both psychologically and financially" "You can never relax. You always have to chase your next job" "Your life will be full of rejection") and he finished with 'If you can listen to all of that and STILL want to do it, then it is for you.' (It wasn't for me) It is the same for every other 'creative career'. It isn't easy to break into and it isn't easy once you've broken in.

BUT...

Hollywood actors getting paid tens of millions of dollars per film is not why an actor doing community theatre in a market town isn't earning a lot of money. If the Hollywood actor says they'll only accept $10,000 for the big blockbuster they've been hired for, the theatre in Devizes isn't going to suddenly come into extra cash and create jobs for every unemployed actor in the community... If Ricky Gervais decides to work a 'non-profit' year for no money, that doesn't mean that suddenly open mic nights upstairs in pubs are going to be paying people to try out their material... If a best-selling author decides they're going to only accept a low 4-figure advance rather than a 6-figure advance for their next book, that doesn't mean that bloggers are going to be sent some cash. It's just stupid and facile to think the two are connected...

Unless 'concern for people trying to break into the industry' is cover for hating on people who are doing better than you are...

In reality, that is *exactly* what's going on.

It's no way to live. Again, there are two positive choices you can make: 1) be content with whatever jobs you do get and find a way to make that work for you 2) move on and do something else.

For most creative types, 2 is NOT an option. When I decided to quit tv (I was a single mother and needed a more stable income and certainly one that didn't involve going away to film for weeks at a time), I got a 'normal' job. It was working for an international media company as the editor of the film section of their website. It was pretty cool. I was excited! Within about 2 weeks, I was SOBBING on the Tube on the way home at the end of the day. It... wasn't for me... I was super lucky and was headhunted within a couple months back into the tv industry as a 'new media' expert. That suited me. And soon after that I moved into the film industry...

There is a language you speak when you work in a creative industry that exists only there. You don't realise how embedded you are in it, until you decide to do something else entirely... and then you find yourself lost, unable to recognise the world you're in or yourself... and sobbing on the Tube at the end of each day.

Ignore option 2. You need to find a better solution that fits... The only realistic option is 1: be content with- in fact, I'm just going to stop with 'be content'. Be content with your choices. Be content with your successes. Be content with yourself.

If you have chosen to live by particular 'artistic principles' or 'moral choices', why rage against people who haven't done that and are more commercially successful than you? If you choose to paint graphic nudes with mud and algae because it's ART, don't rage at landscape artists who paint with oils and sell more work than you. You can't control what the painting-buyers like. If you have chosen to only create music using handmade instruments and atonal chanting, why lose your shit about Harry Styles? You look dumb. If you have decided to be a clog dancer, don't bitch about those cunty skinny ballerinas and ‘why doesn’t the Royal Ballet do more clog dancing???’ Why would you even do that? If you have decided that you will never work for a person who has ever worked for or even met someone who has worked for Rupert Murdoch, why spend any energy raging about people who work for a Murdoch-owned company when you are SO MUCH BETTER THAN THEM IN EVERY WAY? It's amazing, I know, but you cannot control other people.

You're just in control of yourself, your responses, your thoughts and your words. Think about that and what that means. Then put it into action.

If that doesn’t make sense, I'd recommend reading Derren Brown's book 'Happy'. It will hopefully change your views and help make you realise that you can be, well, happy.

Here's a video I just found of him talking about it. At one point he says this:

"There are things in the world that you're in control of, there are things that you're not in control of, and if you try and control things that you are not in control of, that's when you're going to cause stress, and anxiety, and frustration, because you can't control them. But the things you are in control of are your thoughts and your actions. So that's it."

Here are just a few photos of some of the animals we saw...

Spending time in the African bush makes you feel very close to Nature and Evolution. It is all about Eating, Being Eaten, Sex, Birth and Death. There's no nonsense. You can eat meat and save the animals at the same time. There is a deep understanding of the need for conservation of animals and their natural habitats, but also antelope is on the menu every night. Crocodile wallets, kudu horn decorations and zebra skin rugs are given a thumbs up; rhino horn poachers should be shot on sight (my opinion, not the law where we were (but also, I kinda think anyone illegally trading in rhino horns should be shot on sight, too (I feel like this is a pretty moderate position (maybe I’m a rhino extremist (meh whatever))))).

The other thing that struck me almost immediately is how 'queer theory' and 'gender bollocks' seem even more ridiculous in the bush than they do to me in the middle of a big city. There are no non-binary giraffes out there, no genderqueer hyenas. Our guides referred to animals as males and females, as mothers and fathers, bulls and cows... They would say 'Males are considerably larger than the females' or 'She has enlarged mammary glands, so she is the mother' or 'She is staying close to her mother... Oops! I didn't see the genitals. He is staying close to his mother.' It would be literally insane if they said 'One of them is the birthing lion of this cub' or 'Hippos live in groups mainly made up of hippos who have oestrous cycles and young, with maybe only one dominant adult hippo that produces spermatozoa.'

"Aaaaah," an over-confident-ill-informed-Steve-Buscemi-in-30-Rock-meme-wants-to-be-down-with-the-kids-but-is-in-fact-a-boring-middle-aged-straight-man might say, "Humans have very complicated social systems and culture. We are special." This, as any thinking person would know, means they are guilty of 'anthropocentrism' or 'human exceptionalism', that is, the belief that humans are special and separate to Nature, that we are different or even superior to all other organisms. Now, in some ways we are ‘superior’ - eg we can travel into outer space - in other ways we aren't ‘superior’- an average human from Camden dropped into the African bush would have no knowledge at all of how to survive; a lion dropped into the middle of Camden Market on a Sunday would have no issue with finding a meal...

There are other ways humans are exceptional - the fact that I can write down my thoughts and you can read them, is one - but believing that we are exceptional in magical ways - eg having gendered souls or uttering words that change material reality- ended with belief in the Bible as the literal word of God. This type of religious thinking has no place coming from the mouths of people who claim to be 'science communicators' or even 'science fans'. sideeye.gif

Loads of animals teach their young various behaviours that aren't instinctive such as how to hunt, what to eat, what to do with their poo, how to communicate, how to groom, what or who to be wary of... So, animals have 'culture', too.

Certain chimpanzee groups have shown sex differences in 'termite fishing' and other chimpanzee groups elsewhere show no sex differences in termite fishing. We cannot say that 'termite fishing' is an innate, genetically hardwired behaviour as these sex-based behaviours differ across groups of chimpanzees. Research has shown that termite fishing is taught by older chimpanzees to younger chimpanzees and differs between different chimpanzee cultures. Technology used for termite fishing differs between chimpanzees groups, so it's obvious termite fishing is a learned, cultural behaviour.

Let's do a thought experiment...

In Imaginary Chimpanzee Group there are sex differences in termite fishing. Female young learn the skill at an earlier age (again, sex differences in the age of acquiring the skill have been observed in the wild) and they use various tools to do so (the use of various tools has been observed in the wild in different groups of chimpanzees). The male young learn to termite fish later and only use one tool (as has been observed in the wild in different chimpanzee groups). Male chimpanzees spend more time hunting for larger prey with adult males, female chimpanzees spend more time gathering insects with adult females (this has been observed in the wild), this might be why female young in this (imaginary) group are more highly skilled at termite fishing.

Now… let’s start thinking…

If a young male chimpanzee in this group, acquires the termite fishing skill earlier than other males in his group, does that mean he is, in fact, female or does it simply mean a male chimpanzee has acquired the skill earlier than other male chimpanzees? If a young female uses only one tool rather than multiple tools, does that mean she is, in fact, male or does that mean that she has just used one tool instead of many?

If you think that a human wearing clothes intended for the opposite sex means they are, in fact, the opposite sex, please really think of this chimpanzee question.

I'll give you another moment.

Really think. You can do it. I believe in you.

We don't ascribe any kind of morality onto the the imaginary chimpanzees' termite fishing behaviours. We are outsiders. It means nothing to us. It may, of course, mean something to those chimpanzees. It could be that chimpanzees fishing for termites differently would be treated badly by others in their group and be less successful at finding a mate. Looking at them from the outside, however, we can see how ridiculous that is. Surely, the chimpanzees should be able to fish for termites however they want, right? They shouldn't be attacked or shunned by the group because they use multiple tools rather than one tool like the others of their sex... Another way of saying that is that individuals shouldn't be subject to violence or ostracism because they display gender non-conforming behaviour. This is what I think about those imaginary chimpanzees and it is what I think about humans, too.

Again, looking at the imaginary chimpanzees, it's pretty obvious to anyone that can actually think, that the culturally imposed, sex-based behaviour doesn't change the material reality of their biological sex. Instead of "culturally imposed, sex-based behaviour" we could use the word 'gender' - which is what the word actually means - and shorten "material reality of their biological sex" to simply 'sex'. From that we get 'gender doesn't change sex'. This is what I think about those imaginary chimpanzees and it is what I think about humans, too.

Why do people like an over-confident-ill-informed-Steve-Buscemi-in-30-Rock-meme-wants-to-be-down-with-the-kids-but-is-in-fact-a-boring-middle-aged-straight-man think humans are different to this? We are animals. We are mammals. We, like many animals, may display 'non-typical sex-based behaviours' at times, but that doesn't overrule material reality. Why do people who really should know better make statements about humans being able to do things that no other mammal can do?

A Nyala is an antelope that lives in the south of Africa. I’d see them around our lodge all the time. It is the most sexually dimorphic antelope. This is the male.

How would he become a female?

What, exactly, is the process the male Nyala would have to go through to actually change sex into a female Nyala? Take some 'female hormones'? Dye his fur? Chop his horns off? Would that make him a female or would he still be a male, but one that has been 'artificially altered'? Is there any way a male Nyala can become a female Nyala? (Don’t just shout at me in the comments now about how I’m ‘a bigot’, explain this process to me.)

Why are humans different to Nyala? We are mammals just like them. Why are we considered to be "special" or "separate" from Nature? Why do people think our culture overrides material reality? (Note: it doesn't)

How would any of these male mammals become these female mammals?

Explain the process to me in detail, over-confident-ill-informed-Steve-Buscemi-in-30-Rock-meme-wants-to-be-down-with-the-kids-but-is-in-fact-a-boring-middle-aged-straight-man; out-of-touch-aging-folk-musician; used-to-be-funny-but-now-is-boring-as-hell-comedian; doofus-assed-lawyer; or, for goodness sake, ANYONE. Explain it to me. Why do you think we are different to animals? Why do you think our culture overrides material reality? This is religious thinking. Do you think we have special ‘souls’? Are words magic? If you can't explain it in a way that accepts material reality, can you please just stop talking about this? You’re making fools of yourselves.

People who behave in gender non-conforming ways are not “magic”, they do not undo 200+ million years of mammalian evolution. Yes, humans do have very complicated social systems and culture, yet underneath it we are still mammals. If we can’t accept that, then there is no way we can build a fair, just and equal society. The only thing we all- every human on the planet- have in common is that we are humans, however we dress, however we behave, whoever we love. Humans.

Species: Homo sapiens; Genus: Homo; Family: Hominidae; Order: Primates; Class: Mammalia