If I try to write I'll fuck it / I'm just here to gush

Millenial woman ponders her failures, faces inscrutable future with optimism

I’m in the garden before heading off to work at a pizzeria in a couple hours, just like I was doing at 18 when I first started my blog. How cyclical life is.

The internet was always the place I came when I felt like this.

This. This burning overwhelm of lostness and worry that still manages to feel new and uniquely weird, despite being the most familiar recurring motif of my life. This thing that builds and builds the longer it goes unexpressed, pushing me further into the red with a threatening hiss.

It nags in a way that no amount of chatting with good friends, family or even a therapist seem to fix, because the only real antidote is something that doesn’t feel possible any more.

Growing up a Millenial girlie, secretly oversharing online shaped so much of my experience of life. And it wasn’t just the connectivity of it all, but the anonymity. A place only I knew of that nobody could find me for trying. Where I could just be completely, unflinchingly honest and give myself a third place, outside of my daily reality, to just feel it out.

But gradually the internet changed, our parents got facebook, schoolfriends found our tumblrs and we were suddenly trackable and mockable across everything. Overnight our private spaces could be profitable if we pimped them out to consumerism and dumbasses like me fell into the trap of promoting our private spaces to the public, believing every click was a future career opportunity.

Fast forward and our feeds are now a capitalist wasteland, a dust-filled highway through an abandoned town. It’s hard not to sound ancient when talking to young Gen Z-er’s and realising this is the only internet they’ve ever known.

We had it so fucking good guys.

When I talk about my youth online it sounds like I’m describing something as mythical and improbable as the Garden of Eden. And in some ways pre-algorithm internet does feel like that - the last great innocence of the 21st Century.

One of those first sacred places for me was Deviantart, where as oblivious kids we’d upload our own little scanned-in sketches of anime characters, or write rambling blogs and poetry on how hard it was to be a teenager like we were the first ones to do it. I had no fear of revealing my secrets on there because a) the foolishness of youth b) ignorance of a digital footprint and c) it felt like a safe and secret place, with zero risk of anyone from my real life being able to find me there.

It was there that I first discovered the euphoria of ‘posting’ over just scribbling in a notebook that I buried in my bottom drawer. The power was in the release, the possibility of getting to feel seen without the mortifying ordeal of being known beyond what you’ve chosen to reveal.

On there one time I came across a blog post of a teenage girl much like myself, struggling through the same difficult transitional time, but on the other side of the world from a culture I knew nothing about. I commented, amazed at our similarity, and from that moment onward we followed each other as we grew up, across every new social media platform that popped up, like distant cousins. She was there to tell me off the first time I was tagged in a photo on facebook where I was smoking a cigarette. I was there when she fell in love with an internet friend who lived near me and begged me to drop a love letter to his house. She was there when I went off to Uni, started my blog and ended up dropping out, and I was there to see her graduate college in NYC and go off to Flamenco school in Spain. We weren’t close - going many years at a time without directly interacting - but always present.

A few months ago I received a message from her saying she was coming to London for a work trip. It was the first time we had ever considered meeting up, and I knew that if this had happened at any other time in our parallel lives I probably would’ve messed it up, or found a way to wriggle out with excuses, for a reason I wouldn’t even be really able to explain.

But half a lifetime on from first our first interaction, we met for the first time over dinner on a chilly night in Soho. And despite some momentary disbelief at our considerable height difference, there was so little between us that was unexpected. Because no matter what had happened in our lives since, even at 30+ years old we were still just the same teenage girls, tapping on our bulky keyboards, seeking something from the world.

We avidly discussed our lives, asking questions we knew to ask from what we’d seen on the internet. She still posts regularly, but my over-immersion had burnt me out years ago. We discussed Deviantart and how amazing it had been to have an outlet like that when we needed it most. And naturally, we wondered if we’d ever find places like that again.

I think today the closest we’ve come is Substack. But even here the aunthentiticy wavers. Or maybe it’s just that I’m intimidated. Because sure, the internet has changed massively over time, but we’ve all changed irreversibly around it too.

When I looked at Marina over that dinner, I saw someone successful. I saw someone who had matured, refined her skills, educated herself and established a dignified life by fulfilling her potential. And when I thought about who she might see looking back, I’m sure she felt similar, but to myself I felt like a fraud. Because despite also being proud of my life and my achievements, I’m equally bound by a deep and sad knowledge that I always had the potential to end up better than I am.

It makes me wonder who I could’ve been if I hadn’t been so online. If I’d been born in another era, could I have ended up a successful journalist? Or become a cult novelist? May I have written screenplays or musicals that would change people’s lives? Where would this die-hard urge to write have taken me if I hadn’t poured it into 1’s and 0’s and HTML code?

Or would I always have found a way to fuck up?

I can’t just blame the internet for leading me astray, as many of my generation transitioned from that Garden of Eden into resounding success: Multi-book deals. Podcasts. Tv Shows. At the very least, I too should feel educated, refined and established, writing important articles and generating informed critique because that’s what girls who were good at writing do in their 30s.

But I’m not. And the more I’ve tried, the more I’ve fucked it.

A year ago I followed the zeitgeist to Substack in an attempt to recapture some of the magic that once came easy to me. But the moment I opened myself up to creation again, I found the same old faulty wiring that had caused my demise in the first place.

From that first dip of the toe I was almost instantly sideswiped by my own insecurities. My desperation to write something the way a writer would. A burning pressure to generate something informed, well-written and relatable. And it knocked me off my feet again.

Because I’m not a journalist. I’m not a novelist or a screenwriter - I’m just the same as I was all the way back on deviantart. I’m just a fuckin girlie who loves to write and always has something to gush about.

And whenever that delicate, divine things visits me, I’ve been assaulting it, like a flailing fool jabbing up with a butterfly net. My own urgency to capture it has been the very thing preventing it from ever being possible.

I’ve been trying to hard to seem smart that I forgot how easy it is to just be honest.

I’ve been telling myself: All you can ever do is write about yourself. Why should anyone else ever care?

Without remembering that I care !!!

I cared so deeply when I first came across Marina writing about her life in New York, that it was I who reached out to her. I am so charmed when I stumble across a tiktok of someone I’d never meet in my daily life, or get a glimpse into somebody’s inner world that’s entirely unknown to me. I read whole fictional books where people talk about themselves and their worlds that I know nothing about and are unfamiliar to me. Because none of us are at all that different. Writing about me is writing about you, just as reading about you is reading something about myself.

All this time I’ve been trying to find a way to not write about myself and it’s left me creating garbage or creating nothing.

So fuck it, and for real this time.

I am at an unbelivably transitional time right now where I have a million things on my mind, and actually the clarity and headspace to put them down.

I’m in a rock band about to release our debut album and go on a month-long national tour and we are at war with each other. I’m on the brink of having my 4 year relationship with the person I love most in the world fall apart and still having to take to the stage with him every night. I’m watching my once iron-clad future of marriage and motherhood fade into obscurity and I don’t even know if I’m sad about it. I’m undergoing an intensely spiritual awakening and all the women in my life are experiencing the same thing simultaneously. I’m feeling something core within me finally break, and I think it might be my last remaining obliviousness about the true extent to which I’ve been operating beneath the patriarchy. Even the positive moments feel surreal, like living in a parallell universe/timeline and I have no idea where I’m going or what happens next, except that there’s no way back.

So I’m not wasting any more of my precious time in this world refusing to write this shit down because it might not be a ‘good take’.

We’re in real gush hours, Ladies. Let’s fuckin go.