paullicino

[paullicino]

On Fascism

(Image credit: V for Vendetta, Lloyd/Moore. Larger version available here.)

Taken from my Patreon and originally posted on January 20th.

Even before I was born, so much of the arc of my life had already been defined, already been set out, as a result of actions taken by fascists. The dates of birth of most of the siblings on my mother’s side of the family were measured out, with a nine and a half month delay, exactly according to the dates of my grandfather’s shore leave from the Royal Navy. Their births correlated with the times he was not at sea, fighting fascists who had spent several years trying to take over Europe. The war was of such scale that, even at home, everyone was still on the front lines. My grandparents’ relocation to a port on the south coast meant nobody was home when a representative of the Luftwaffe’s Urban Redevelopment Committee hurled a bomb down into the neighbourhood that damaged the family house (including, to my grandfather’s consternation, blowing the door clean off). The necessity of the fight against the fascists had, ironically, moved my family out of harm’s way.

The Luftwaffe would continue making sweeping changes to the urban geography of London, as well as several other British towns and cities, for quite some time. Enough so that, by the time I came to live in the city, decades later, a significant amount of its infrastructure existed as a direct result of efforts to rebuild and redesign. The consequences of fascist aggression were not abstract and historical, they were physically present in the world around me, much as they were directly responsible for guiding the growth and the branching of my family tree. Without twentieth century fascism, I might have been born at a different time. I would certainly have explored a differently designed country and even flown out of different airports that would have existed in different places, rather than have developed from the legacy of my nation’s air defence demands.

The Europe that those airports took me to would have looked different. Cities like Paris or Prague wouldn’t have had to advertise themselves as unspoiled, a word that we all knew meant you’d been spared remarkable new forms of warfare such as blitzkrieg or carpet bombing, where fascists found ways to wage war even faster and even fiercer, our continent their canvas. The people I met in many interesting journeys over many years would have told me different stories, none of which would have involved how their country was occupied or attacked. A man in Norway wouldn’t have told me how his family had to hide a gun under a tea cosy during a surprise visit by members of the fascist garrison. Veterans in Denmark wouldn’t have told me how they can’t forget what a burned body looks and smells like. Malta would not wear a medal on its flag after the small island spent years suffering some of the most intense air attacks of any place on the planet.

Fascists love to project power, and by far the most significant part of that projection effort involved the widespread use of force across Europe, manifested in generous bombing, shelling and demolition efforts. This was served alongside that new cocktail known as blitzkrieg, which combined lavish helpings of air and land forces mixed in with new military technologies to quickly seize land and objectives. Like London, a wealth of towns and cities were dramatically redesigned by this historic effort, resulting in the patchwork present we all grew up with. And, of course, countless hundreds of millions of lives were changed as a result of everything from deployment to displacement, not to mention the tens of millions who died in combat, as a result of collateral damage, or as a result of state sanctioned genocide.

Fascists have to project power, have to manifest aggression, because otherwise they can’t get things done. They can’t achieve what they want. They are bad at exercising logic, reason or empathy. They are bad at co-operation or compromise. Other people don’t want the things that the fascists want, so they have to use force, manipulation and coercion. Sometimes a lot, an awful lot. Maybe even a whole continent’s worth of people don’t want what the fascists want, so the fascists respond with continent-wide, even world-wide force, manipulation and coercion. It doesn’t matter how many people oppose the fascists. They’re fascists, so they think they’re better.

Fascists aren’t very good at self-reflection.

Fascists reshaped the twentieth century the only way they knew how, which was through this pugilistic persistence, through trying to punch their world into the shape that they wanted it to be, like a boxer trying to attack clay with the belief it will become a statue. Their legacy is craters and body counts and death camps and occasionally the shapes of sunken ships that are laid bare by low tide. Most of the things that they focused their efforts on, the technologies or ideologies they bent their brains toward, were things designed to punish, subjugate or kill anyone they decided was an opponent. Those opponents were other kinds of people, not only in other nations, but also in their own, should those people be deemed too different, or even simply dissenters. Conformity was really important to the fascists. Everyone should get along like one big, happy family. One, big, wholly identical, eternally harmonious family.

Fascists love to project conformity. And obedience. Neither of which tend to encourage criticism, compassion, analysis or new ideas. In fact, projecting power and conformity and obedience creates a culture of punishment. I guess punishing people makes you feel strong. And like you’re getting somewhere.

Their opponents, by their own definitions, turned out to be an awful lot of people. I’m going to step out on a limb here as I suggest that attempting to subjugate or to kill people, especially increasing numbers of them, might just alienate a lot of folks.

The fascists, projecting all that force, manipulation and coercion in all kinds of directions, all that power and conformity and obedience, were not very clever and, as their legacy shows, not very successful. It was a bad idea for them to try the things they tried and it caused a lot of problems for a lot of people, though ultimately the fascists found themselves among those suffering the most. They didn’t have the foresight to anticipate this. They didn’t possess the self-reflection to stop. They didn’t tolerate the kind of dissent and disagreement that would have allowed the development of any other ideas beyond their own very narrow, very tiny philosophy.

The fascists weren’t very clever and, unfortunately, they kept hating all the people who were clever. The people able to use empathy and intelligence and deduction and reasoning and data and research and patience and analysis and debate and discussion to point out when and where the fascists were wrong, over and over and over. It seems pretty obvious to me that repeatedly getting rid of anyone or anything that disagrees with you, whether a person or a piece of information, is a terrible idea. You will end up with people who are unable or unwilling to object. You will lose all perspective.

In spite of their carpet bombing and their blitzkrieg and their blowing the door off my grandparents’ house, the fascists were defeated by a combination of co-operation, innovation and their own colossal stupidity. The co-operation came from a remarkably diverse alliance of nations and peoples working together to use everything that they had, including widespread resistance in the countries the fascists occupied and even in their homelands. The innovation came from all these many different people offering new ideas and new technologies, some of which were even developed by people that the fascists had hated and alienated and tried to silence, discredit, expel or kill. The stupidity, as you can probably guess, also came from the fascists trying to silence, discredit, expel or kill just so, so many people who disagreed with them. Over and over. Like they were engaged in some sick, extremist form of absurdist performance art. Their inability to self-reflect, disagree or handle dissent lead to the fascists making a series of monumentally batshit fucknut book-of-records-level-idiot decisions across the years. Over and over. Their greatest hits included such things as invading new territories in which they didn’t have the strength to fight, ignoring such obvious strategic elements as predictable but horrific weather or the challenge presented by bodies of water, changing their minds constantly, hurling time and money after stupid projects or inventions, disregarding battle projections or reports they didn’t like, failing to follow through on plans, failing to correctly provision themselves for conflicts, inventing planes that frequently blew up and, at one point, building a tank that was so melodramatically heavy that not only would it sink into the ground, but it was also unable to cross almost any bridge.

The fascists invested time devising, funding and then constructing to completion a fighting machine that was too heavy to go anywhere and actually fight, not to mention too slow to get itself either into or out of trouble.

Think about that for a moment. They continued to consider themselves superior. These fascists thought they were a type of extra special, extra clever human being. They really weren’t very good at self-reflection. They had begun to lose imagination, creativity and, increasingly, even common sense. It turned out that people excited by power and force weren’t able to sustain much together, to foster much beyond infighting, bullying and corruption.

I talk about absurdist performance art but it’s perhaps important to remember the fascists' own relationship to art. Like dissenting people and dissenting ideas, the fascists would throw out or reject or destroy great swathes of art that they decided was inferior, irrelevant or insulting. Before the war in Europe started, some of the fascists actually staged two concurrent art exhibitions, one of which showcased only their own, superior art, the other of which contained a variety of other art they had decided was “degenerate” and unworthy. They were attempting to make a statement, but it seems that the irony was lost on them when the attendance figures made their own statement, showing that far, far more people, their own people, had visited the degenerate art exhibition.

The fascists sometimes made buildings. Fascist architecture was, like fascists, not very subtle or inventive or original. It was all about conformity and repetition and re-using old ideas, but in simpler and less expressive formats.

Part of the problem of hating everything that is different is that you are also doomed to hate things that are new.

Isn’t that sad?

Being born in nineteen eighty, I grew up under the still receding silhouette of twentieth century fascism. Not only had it shaped my family tree, remapped my country and reshaped my continent, it also remained fresh in the minds of so many millions of people. Its consequences were marked in stone in every town and village around the country. It was depicted in every type of media I consumed, whether that was films or music or books or the simple comics I’d read as a child. Again and again, they all showed how the fascists had done such terrible things, often simply by telling us relatively unvarnished, even uncritical facts. The fascists would be near caricatures, almost unbelievable but for all the evidence and all the personal accounts and even the ongoing discoveries, decades later, of some new transgression or travesty.

It was pretty obvious how bad the fascists were and how much worse they made everything. For everyone. Still, evidence and personal accounts and education, to remind people about the fascists and help them learn for themselves what had happened and how, was sure to help everyone remain disgusted and dismayed by it all. You wouldn’t want it to happen again and, even more so, you wouldn’t want to find yourself somehow ignorant of or even involved in something fascist. That would be unthinkable. That receding silhouette of fascism may shrink, but the harsh lessons of it all were too valuable to lose, in much the same way it would be foolish to throw away any other progress gained from such collective human effort.

Yet now I wonder if that receding silhouette was only the shadow cast by a sundial, ready to return again and fall over anyone ignorant or hateful enough to entertain the same ideas, to build the same habits, to express the same love for projections of power and conformity and obedience, the same desire to force, manipulate and coerce. I wonder about those who express such disdain for, and turn away from, examples of empathy and intelligence and deduction and reasoning and data and research and patience and analysis and debate and discussion. I wonder about the superiority they feel. I wonder about their capacity for self-reflection.

Even before I was born, so much of the arc of my life had already been defined, already been set out, as a result of actions taken by fascists. I have a feeling my future will be, too. And like those of the world who stood against it so that people like me might live a better, safer life, I will find my place in the collective struggle.

[paullicino]

Six Years - On PTSD and Choosing Life

Content warning: This essay very frankly discusses mental health, trauma, gaslighting and suicide. It also links to discussions of abuse and sexual assault.

If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide, know that you are not alone and help is available to you or anyone who might need it, such as the Samaritans, the Suicide Prevention Hotline, or this list of other crisis hotlines and this list of international support resources.

This was reposted from my Patreon.

There are blue skies today. The sun bounces off the mirrored windows of a skyscraper downtown. It cuts straight across my balcony and shines onto my wall. A few blocks away, the staff of my favourite café will share their latest gossip with me, as they always like to do, and maybe later tonight I will make good food and play games with friends until unwise times in the morning. Isn’t life full of wonderful things?

You can find them everywhere. And I certainly do. Sometimes I’ve found them in the intimate, up-close details of a famous oil painting, between the notes of a new song heard by chance, even in the rustling at the bottom of a dumpster, which becomes chittering and then fur and a tail and then direct eye contact with a tiny criminal whose only felony was hunger. I’ve found them amongst perfectly crafted sentences that capture thoughts and feelings and hold them forever on the page, in the silence of the impossibly wild mountain wilderness a thousand miles from home, in the first moments that I’ve taken someone’s hand and watched the gaudy lights of some forgettable venue play across the lines and the shapes of their face.

That’s so many wonderful things to live for. And I can get overdramatically passionate about the tiniest, silliest little details.

I’ve been trying to write this for a long time. I had three significant dreams during that period. In the most recent, I had moved into a dark and barren basement, with most of my possessions still in boxes. Some old friends from long ago came knocking. They pressed their faces against the small windows and tried to force the ageing door. “Where did you go?” they kept asking, their voices entering through every crack. “What happened?”

Six years ago this month I destroyed my suicide note. I burned it on a rainy August night and watched it curl into a tiny, helpless twisting of ashes and charred plastic that no longer had any power or purpose. The note was inside of a ziploc bag, a choice I’d made to ensure its integrity and survival against any of the several different plans I’d made to end my life, and this had melted into black strands of hair-like debris that reached up to nothing. One or two of my handwritten words remained half legible in this mess and tried to reach beyond the flames, to share their intent with the world, but they would never again mean anything to anyone.

I made videos of the burning and took a few pictures, a sort of ritual of recording, then I told a close friend what I’d just done, and then, for a very long time, I set the image as the wallpaper on my phone. It would be an ever-present reminder to me of my choice to stay alive. It was supposed to help me feel strong, though the truth is that I rarely did. It was the worst, most harrowing and most damaging period of my life and with help, honesty, insight, therapy, time and invaluable connection with others who have either seen the same things that I have or had comparable experiences, I managed to fumble and fight my way through it all. But I will never be the same. Six years is a long time and I am still profoundly affected by so much. I am still trying to understand things. I am still trying to figure myself out, to make sense of my identity, my situation, my experiences. To work out where I went and what happened. And I am still trying to move on.

These words are something about that ongoing experience, that work in progress, and about the dual significance of a span of six years. It is not so much about causes or causers, but instead about consequences and changes, and that’s for three reasons.

The first is because what happens after and as a result of trauma is so enduring and significant, perhaps even the most significant consideration of all, and it’s how we find ourselves discussing things like spans of six years or, for some people, far longer. I want to try to explain some of that sort of intensity and that sort of timescale.

The second is because it’s my hope that this is the most helpful way for me to talk about all this, the most illustrative to other people, the most constructive. I could have chosen many approaches, some which I believe might have been more harmful and destructive, and I don’t generally want to be a punitive or destructive person. Ultimately I think this is the most positive and productive approach.

The third is because I’m still not ready to unpack many things, as so much is still ongoing. I am not at the end of this, not out of the woods, and I think I need to know that I’ve reached the end of whatever journey I’m on before I can return to the start.

There is, allegedly, a power in choosing how your own story is told. So I’m choosing to tell it this way and, I hope, with the awareness that any exercise of power requires consideration and responsibility.

Six years is a long time, and while I’ve been trying to write and rewrite this thing for months, those months still pale in comparison to more than half a decade. A lot has changed in six years, and yet I also wish some things weren’t still the same, that I would have been able to make more progress, that I would have been able to create more distance.

Because, while I am six years from that burning note, from that summer rain, in my memory and my mind it doesn’t work like that. I still find myself beside that moment in time, like I could open the door to the next room and once again be right there.

---

Writing this has been very difficult. Writing is supposed to be one of the things that I am best at, and in the past words used to spill out of me so regularly that I wrote a tri-weekly diary, but I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that my relationship to writing has changed. It’s not just that this is a difficult topic. It’s that words don’t come as easily or as fluidly as they once did, making it much easier, all too appealing, to simply not push myself. To avoid things entirely.

But I wanted to write this, in part, because it would be another act of not giving up. I wanted to show myself what I could do, what I still can do, and that, even if I’m changed, I’m still stubborn enough to fumble and fight my way through.

---

I want you to imagine a house. It can be any kind of house, that part isn’t important. What is important is that the house is your home and you have lived there for a very, very long time. It is comfortable. It is safe. It is so intimately familiar that it is a part of your identity. Perhaps you grew up there, or you raised a family there, or you retired there. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s your home and that everyone knows you live there.

Next, imagine that you have a terrible day. The worst day. And at the end of this terrible, terrible day, on a bleak and dusky evening, you expect at least to be able to come back to your house, your home. You take the same route back to the same address, where you see the same building stood before you and open the same front door, ready for the comfort of a place you’ve made your own.

You enter this space that you’ve known for so long and you notice something is wrong. The first clue is something small, perhaps a lamp missing from its usual spot, or you collide with furniture moved somewhere unexpected. You feel for a light switch that is now on a different wall. You stumble on the stairs as you make your way to a bed that is hard and unwelcoming. In the morning, the light from the window is not only a different shape, but cast in the opposite direction.

The changes stop being so subtle. After you notice that a carpet is suddenly faded and pale, you open a closet to find it is twice as deep. Some of your possessions are missing. The spare room no longer has a skylight. The kitchen is a different colour, with different appliances, with no back door, half the size it once was because the walls have been moved. There are new rooms whose arrival and contents are both equally inexplicable. Your most cozy corner is now cold and uncomfortable. You must relearn the entire layout, from bathroom to basement, because moving around the way you once would only causes you to stub your toes, to trip, even to fall.

Your friends don’t understand why you no longer enjoy going back to your house, your home. They don’t understand why you screamed at the different closet, why the sunlight on the wall makes you nervous. Being in your own home now hurts and scares you. How can you possibly relax here? But this is still your same house, at your same address, the one that everybody knows. You can’t argue that it isn’t. And if you invite a friend inside, after ranting about everything that is different, they ask “Why did you change all this? It’s so much worse.”

What can you even say in return? “I didn’t”? That shit’s insane.

But that is how it feels, like I live in a house that isn’t my home. Sometimes I don’t recognise myself. Sometimes, on the worst days, I don’t know who I am any more.

“Where did you go?” ask the voices, entering through every crack. “What happened?”

---

Last summer, a man came roaring down my street in his flawless luxury emerald convertible. I remember him well. He had dark sunglasses and a tan suit jacket and a hairstyle slick with oil, like he was being a parody of a rich man from an eighties film. He surged through the stop sign right in front of me and I let him know what I thought of his public display of privilege and indifference.

“Go a little faster, you cunt,” I yelled. “Maybe you can hit a kid.”

He swivelled his head, looked back over his shoulder and stared straight at me.

He also slowed down.

It was then that I realised the volume I must have used to project myself, over the noise of his engine and toward a driver already continuing down the street, meant a few of my neighbours had likely heard me too.

I’m not sure I cared.

I used to be a more modest and deferential person, and often that is still the case. But often it is not. I have less patience. I have less fear. And I have less trust.

The fear thing is great. Last autumn I walked across a narrow, quivering suspension bridge with no care for the drop below. Later, I found another far narrower, far smaller one and, all by myself, alone in the woods sixteen kilometres up a trail, I jumped up and down on the thing until it shook and swung.

I used to be terrified of heights.

My sense of fear isn’t gone. But it’s both so much more manageable and also, quite often, a thrill. It’s taken me a while to realise that I increasingly seek out things that are exciting, risky or extremely stimulating. I am frank with strangers. I am quick to make decisions. I am keen to try new things.

It doesn’t sound so bad, does it? That’s because it isn’t. Not all change is bad and not every consequence of my experience has been negative. Slowly, gradually, I am learning to appreciate a few of the changes, to lean into them. While one part of me feels sad that I’m less trusting than I used to be, another part of me sees this as more practical. I’m far quicker to drop something or someone like a rock the moment I sense things that I don’t like, and my sense for such things is certainly sharper than it used to be. Am I always right? I don’t know about that. Perhaps some people have been casualties of an overabundance of caution. Or paranoia.

That might just be the new cost of doing business.

---

It was some time in early 2020, while talking with my GP and taking some evaluations, that we began to look at my behaviour more closely. A year before, I’d talked extensively with a therapist about anxiety and about a growing sense of discomfort and distrust. I had far less patience, particularly for those who pushed boundaries, violated or were exploitative, often regardless of whether these things even involved or affected me. Anything that felt uncomfortably familiar, whether it was something I saw in a film, caught on the news or heard about on social media, could ruin my day. I would become jumpy, irritable, scared, or simply unable to do much beyond lie down and try everything I could to banish the feeling that my chest was being crushed. This might take hours. One evening, an ex found me curled up on the floor, ashamed of my own sadness. On another evening, a routine trip to see an exciting film turned into a sleepless night of panic and distress.

I began taking tests and found myself either dismissing the results or retaking them over and over in an attempt to get different answers. The outcomes kept telling me I had the symptoms of PTSD. This was far too dramatic a result and there had already been enough drama in my life already. I myself was too much drama.

Anyway, I thought, having the symptoms isn’t the same as having.

Sometimes I think about how, during some of my most difficult moments, the toughest weeks and months that I didn’t really know how I was going to get through, I made a lot of haphazard decisions motivated by panic and fear and ignorance, by doing my best to improvise and cope and adapt. Some things worked out. Some things did not. Probably the deciding factor there was luck and I’m not really sure I can look back with any wisdom or insight.

I didn’t always know what to do, what to say, who to trust, or how much to trust, how to respond to new information and changing situations, or what in holy hell might ever work out. My response to all of this was to keep secrets or to be cagey, to avoid places and people, to suddenly and liberally cut others off through a mix of ghosting, avoidance and outright blocking, or to occasionally have three-day long anxiety spikes in which I remained highly activated, oversensitive and endlessly insecure. During one of these, someone teasingly pushed me to take part in something that I didn’t want to, something that wasn’t even a big deal, and I was so close to breaking down that I had to almost run from my friends and find a quiet place to catch my breath, all the emotions in my body somehow pinched into a single point somewhere in my gut. During another, a laptop accidentally nudged half an inch sent me into panic mode, manifesting a feeling like a blade of ice slicing straight through my pulmonary artery.

These sorts of responses and behaviours would happen even in spite of all the various combinations of therapy and medication and support I was cycling my way through. I don’t feel proud of how I handled many of these things. I would love to be able to say that I handle them so much better now, with the aid of wisdom and insight. Perhaps sometimes I do.

Sometimes I have simply made terrible decisions and, looking back, I am still not sure how I might have ever done any different. I am lucky that the vast, vast majority of those decisions didn’t fuck things up further.

---

It’s a magnificent day as I write this. The world is jade and azure and gold. The sky is exquisitely, flawlessly blue. Every leaf is rich with the gloss of summer. The sun is setting into the sparkling sea beside a succession of fading distant mountain ridges, each hazier than the last, the furthest so indistinct it looks almost like mist, a ghost of an idea two thousand metres tall. Container ships the size of city blocks sleep in the bay, their hulls traced and wrinkled with rust from a lifetime of global migration. As the growing shadows of slowly swaying trees reach their way toward me, the last light of the day glides over the ground, over the grass and even over my body itself, like spilled wine gushing from a glass. It colours everything the sweet shade of nostalgia. The air is gently warm and the grass is soft beneath me.

I love days like this. They are one of the reasons why I moved here, why I put so much time and effort and energy into relocating halfway around the world. Into building the life that I wanted, piece by piece.

And I love so many of those pieces. I love my little apartment, with the balcony that I always wanted, with its ragtag assortment of secondhand furniture collected one item at a time, with its shelves tucked in here or squeezed in there, never quite tidy enough to look presentable. I love my walkable neighbourhood, with its shops and cafés and cats that follow me from block to block, or critters that peer out from between bushes in the rustling dusk. I love how low cloud creeps in to cover the tips of the skyscrapers downtown, or how the jagged outline of mountains shape the horizon in almost every direction. I love trying to make things, especially with other people, and the reward of being creative, of being silly or being funny. I love all the things I’ve learned to cook, or the ways I can warm myself up on a cold day, or the late nights I can so often indulge, with no care for what might come tomorrow.

I have so much to be grateful for and so much to be proud of. So much here. So much now.

Pretty soon, the sunset will transform the whole sky into a gradient of colour. Someone somewhere will be playing guitar on the beach, and maybe they’ll be good. Stars will appear in the sky, above the familiar urban zodiac traced out by the city lights of apartment buildings. If I stay up late again, the dawn sky will turn the royal blue of an emperor’s cloak. And then all of this will happen again.

I have so much to be grateful for. So much to appreciate.

---

A few weeks ago I had my first nightmare in some time. They still happen. The specifics matter less than the broad themes. Deception. Gaslighting. Manipulation. Boundary violation. All of it in plain sight, yet still unseen, making me feel like I’m helpless, like I’m crazy, like I have no hope of ever being believed.

I thought about it all day. The situations, the faces and the fears. This is the way it’s always been and once one of these nightmares visits you, it stays for a while. It’s like a small stain, an odour that gets into your clothes, the stink of cigarettes after a party the evening before.

Can you wash out a stain? Sometimes. With the right substances, with the correct regimen. And with some aggressive, persistent scrubbing.

One summer night years ago an ex woke me up because I had been thrashing about in my sleep. I had worried her by rolling around and muttering like a madman. Was I having a nightmare, she asked, and it wasn’t just that I was, but that I had them all the time. Every week, at least, each leaving that same gross feeling of violation and abuse. The anxiety medication that I had been prescribed was helping me sleep more, but it also seemed to make my dreams more vivid and profound. It was either that or barely being able to sleep at all, woken by the slightest of noises, up before the crack of dawn because some unresolved tension in my body overpowered all tiredness and fatigue. Even with medication, the smallest of things could still turn me into a nervous wreck, and one night I cried cross-legged on my bed as I explained to my ex not just that I had interpreted a few of her utterly inconsequential actions as a sign she wanted to leave me, but also that I might always be like this. Forever.

The nightmares began a few months after I burned my note. It was right after I opened up to another friend about what was going on in my life, and their response was to tell me about something else that had happened, the full story of an event from another six years before, from distant 2012.

It’s not my tale to tell, but six years is a long time to not know the full story of something. A long time to be deceived, to find out you’ve been lied to by someone you trust and that your ignorance has affected many decisions that you’ve made. Again, I am lucky that the vast, vast majority of those decisions didn’t fuck things up further. But some did.

Six years. It hit me then how long it can take for people to feel able to talk about something, as well as continue to be affected by it. How far the ripples travel and who they touch. And now, here I am, with my own six years.

That discovery was one of several experiences that transformed me into that person having three-day long anxiety spikes, remaining highly activated, oversensitive and endlessly insecure. That person thrashing about in his sleep. That person yelling “You cunt,” down his street.

---

I’ve written before about my physical health and my relationship to my body. I was anxious about things being wrong with it long before I had thorough examinations and validating diagnoses, but as part of those treatments I wrote about, a trio of doctors warned me about how stress was worsening every condition and symptom I experienced. Stress was ruining my health. I was having so many migraines that my GP sent me for an MRI that revealed how those migraines were changing the white matter in my brain.

I would have to do something about this.

Those doctors would help me do something about this, as would other professionals, and their help was invaluable. This would be impossible to tackle alone.

Sometimes I think about people I’ve heard say such things as “It’s not your responsibility to fix someone else,” and, while I don’t disagree, doesn’t such a phrase also imply it’s surely somebody’s responsibility, in this society that we all share, built from things that help us support one another?

Otherwise we’d be suggesting that people fix themselves.

Sometimes I think about people I’ve heard tell others, or themselves, or sometimes the world via the spontaneous and sneeze-like broadcasts of social media “It’s on you to fix your shit,” and I wonder if that’s where that sentence should terminate, if that’s exactly how it should be phrased, if those are really the words that everyone, or anyone, needs to hear.

Because sometimes I also think of another clumsy analogy I once put together. It’s a scenario in which I describe a pedestrian struck by a car, perhaps one driven by a rich cunt with dark sunglasses and a tan suit jacket, perhaps even one that has mounted the curb or surged into a crossing. The pedestrian is knocked down, maybe immobile from the pain and injury that comes from a broken pelvis or fractured leg. An ambulance is summoned, a customised vehicle equipped to transport them to a hospital. In that hospital, that specialised medical facility, a team of trained experts will use skills and equipment to triage and manage, to analyse the pedestrian’s injuries, to provide relief and to chart a course toward recovery. There will be x-rays, there will be drugs, there may well be physiotherapy. I doubt at any point that the person lying in the street would be told, by someone coming upon the scene, “It’s on you to fix your shit.”

No. Not any more than they’d be expected to walk to the hospital, to interpret their x-rays or to prescribe their own medication. Indeed, if they attempted any of these things themselves I wouldn’t be surprised if someone along the way communicated to them some more polite version of “What the holy fucking fuck do you think you’re doing?” and “You’re in no state to do this yourself, let alone know what you need,” and “Fucking hell. You’re at your most vulnerable right now. Fuuuck.”

Hopefully.

Once, many years ago, I knew someone who broke their pelvis. It takes months to recover, maybe a year or more for a limp to fully disappear. And it requires all kinds of help and oversight. It worked out. Doctors and medical professionals can be remarkable.

I have read a lot of books and papers over the last six years. I have listened to a lot of podcasts and interviews. I have been recommended a lot of material by therapists, by friends, by fellow PTSD sufferers. One well-known trauma expert I was pointed toward is Canadian psychologist Dr. Gabor Maté. And he says this:

”Everybody is born needing help.”

He means that it’s a fundamental element of the human experience.

---

Sometimes I go running and sometimes I go to the gym. The reasons I do this are complex, ranging from wanting to be healthier, to wanting to feel better about my body and how it behaves, to feeling like I am making progress with something. That last one is particularly important, because I’m doing something where I’m objectively able to recognise change.

When I run, an app tells me how far I ran and how long it took. I can’t disagree with the app, because it’s entirely objective, and so when I have a bad day, feel terrible and wonder what the point of anything is, the app still shows me that I achieved a reasonable or even an improved time.

It wasn’t always like this. I was bad at these things. I run better than I used to. I perform better at the gym than I used to. I have the metrics to prove it, and while I’m not a particularly dedicated or regular person with my exercise, I still keep at it and I still see improvements.

Whatever it is I’m doing, these apps and their statistics all offer me the same, very simple analysis:

“You’re doing better.”

I motivate myself to run, to go to the gym, to go on twenty-five kilometre hikes over difficult terrain, but I don’t do these things without some kind of help that comes from either expert resources, advice or training.

I don’t exist in a vacuum. None of us do.

---

Help is important because it offers things like perspective and expertise and informed advice. And don’t all of those things sound so extremely important?

How about we imagine that our immobilised pedestrian wasn’t collected by an ambulance. Let’s imagine instead that the driver of the car that hit them stepped out of their vehicle, shook their head, put their hands on their hips and said “Look what you’ve done.”

And then “It’s okay, I know what’s best for you,” before carrying the inert person into their car and driving away. Perhaps even unseen. No witnesses.

If such a thing happened, in this society that we all share, with that person at their most vulnerable, who is responsible then? Who is responsible for what happens next? Who is responsible when that pedestrian, forever limping, says things like “It was my fault, I shouldn’t have been walking there,” or “I should have been looking out,” or “I should have been more visible,” and so on?

A lot of accidents and injuries and collisions and whatnot can be traumatic, scary, confusing. “How do I make sense of this?” asks that person, whether carried away alone in a car, or surrounded by doctors in the emergency room, or anywhere else they may happen to find themselves. “How do I deal with this?” And who might be around them at that moment to help answer such things?

And what will they say?

Perhaps you know someone who was, metaphorically, struck by such a car, before being then carried away by a driver with all sorts of ideas about what’s best, and who later blamed themselves for everything that happened. I don’t know.

I do know how important it was to receive the right help from the right people.

---

It’s hard to know exactly what to do. You may respond to your trauma with a desire for revenge, retribution or restoration. You may not have the insight or the time or the means to do anything much at all. There is the ideal of what could or should happen when harm has been caused, but there is also the uncomfortable reality of how such things actually play out, of how long justice can take, of who is granted credibility, of how complex social dynamics can quickly become, of how awkwardly and uncomfortably people can react when they discover something they would rather not have, or that they have been misled, or so much more. We’ve all seen such things play out secondhand and firsthand.

I have had six years to consider the most helpful way to respond, the most constructive, the most positive and productive. I am still considering. I don’t have much in the way of answers or advice there.

Sometimes I think about the anonymous Broken Teapot essay, with all it has to say about the complexity of dealing with abuse dynamics, of harm happening within a group or community, about social consequences. It was written over a decade ago now, but it remains a very relevant piece of writing that brings up all sorts of considerations around responsibility, about trying to come to terms with trauma and abuse, and about how people might try to use systems or processes to try to solve things in unhelpful ways or even for their own ends.

People can have a lot of opinions about how to handle trauma, how to respond to abuse and how to leap into some sort of process of justice or accountability or reparation or even plain old revenge. So many opinions.

It’s exhausting.

Back in 2020 I tried to write something about all these complications and considerations that I was going to title The Calculus of Abuse. Like much else, it rots in my drafts folder.

Sometimes I think about how many of the ways that we push people to address both their trauma and the things or people that have caused their trauma only makes things worse. I am sceptical about the practicality, value and effectiveness of processes of justice, reparation and accountability. I think a lot of people believe that they will fix things, that they will be fair, that they will spotlight situations and systems and people that cause harm. That, in this cold and unflinching exposure, justice will be done and books will be closed on long and difficult stories.

And I think that’s because we see this happen now and then. Sometimes it happens very publicly. It seems to at least occasionally all work out.

Sometimes I think about friends who were excluded from social circles because they spoke up about something creepy or problematic, because it mattered less what actions or behaviour someone had demonstrated, even what could be proven, and much more who was more popular, or that the status quo be maintained, or that applecarts not be upset. I think about how different people share or don’t share their traumas and their experiences, what they include and what they leave out. I think about people who weren’t believed, people who were misrepresented, people who were shut down. I think about people who spent so long trying to get a handle on their trauma that any thing or person they might want to stand up to already had so much time to prepare, to seed the ground, to dig in, to get a head start. And I even think about the capacity people have to improve, to feel regret, to move forward as better humans. It’s a potential that I hope exists in us all and the writer Kai Cheng Thom seems to agree, saying that even those who cause harm themselves need help to “exit harmful behaviour patterns.”

Sometimes I think about what a friend of mine said about abusive people just being "regular people with very limited tools." And that’s not so different from a child. Doesn’t that make you feel sad?

I think about all of these things because how could you not? How could you not worry about how taking action to address a terrible thing would, in fact, only make that terrible thing even worse?

There is a paper by the American psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman called Justice From the Victim’s Perspective that touches on how many processes and pushes toward addressing abuse and trauma can be retraumatising, without any guarantee they will lead to a meaningful outcome or significant change. It touches on how legal processes and systems can be manipulated to further harm and harass those seeking redress, or how disparities of power and status and money can immediately put the damaged and disadvantaged people who try this on the back foot. It touches on difficulties presented by such things as burden of proof, especially combined with the challenge of a memory minced by traumatic events. How does someone demonstrate and prove trauma, or gaslighting, or manipulation, or anything else?

It also talks about how not everybody seeks such things as justice, restitution, revenge, or not always in the ways that we think, and for a multitude of reasons. These can vary from worrying they won’t be believed or that the process will serve them, to wanting to move on, to the idea that it may be pointless, as some “offenders are empathetically disabled… not capable of a meaningful apology, so they can never provide anything to victims that would be useful.”

Both this and the Broken Teapot essay also feature people examining how they themselves have handled abuse and trauma. I think this is probably the most difficult part of many years of therapy, reading and reflection. Sure, it sucks to have been harmed by an event, a situation, a person or a system, but at some point you also start asking yourself difficult questions like “How do I avoid something like this again?” and “Did I do anything that made this worse?” and “Was I codependent, did I enable someone or did I perpetuate something with my reactions or my responses?”

“Abuse dynamics aren’t so simple,” says the Broken Teapot essay, at one small but very important moment, not long after “I was not solely ‘a victim’. Is anyone?” And, after all those years of therapy, reading and reflection, I’ve come to believe that abusive people and systems gain at least some of their power from how you interact with and respond to them. If we were, all of us, perhaps better informed, we might understand, avoid or escape so many difficult things so much sooner.

And while both the Broken Teapot essay and Justice From the Victim’s Perspective talk a lot about sexual assault, their considerations and their examinations of consequence are more broadly applicable. This reflects how I find myself relating to so many stories of trauma and abuse, regardless of what the specifics of any incidents might be. It’s because I recognise the same things in the subsequent developments, reactions and outcomes, much like I might recognise the same chord pattern in different songs. I see people trying to understand their own changing behaviours, trying to articulate why they won’t do a particular thing or go to a particular place any more, trying to both explain and understand how their body or their health has been affected. The specifics don’t need to be the same for so many of the consequences to be. And I recognise and am much more attuned to recognising those consequences.

Both these pieces of writing are also very good at illustrating one of the most important things that you can learn about trauma, and that is, whatever happens or whatever choices you make, things can never be put back in the box.

Trauma is never erased.

---

Here’s what I think is another of the most important things we can learn about trauma, which is that people are generally very bad at dealing with it and are even worse at dealing with it if they are unsupported. And even if they have all the support in the world, they are probably still going to make bad choices, self-sabotage, lose perspective and do things they regret.

They will probably be foolish, be confused and be likely to make choices that could hurt other people. They may not have great insight or work against their own best interests. That doesn’t mean that they get a free pass. It doesn’t mean we are obliged to simply accept these behaviours. But I think these are realistic expectations that we should have.

In his pioneering book The Body Keeps the Score, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes that many trauma responses are “irrational and largely outside people's control,” coming from people who are “rarely in touch with the origins of their alienation.” An awful lot of the book is about helping such people to find ways past this, rather than disregarding them or pushing them away, even though this will be difficult. I don’t remember anything in the book that comes close to “It’s on you to fix your shit.”

---

While one part of me wishes many things had not happened, feeling both weaker and sadder, another part of me acknowledges that I have gained new skills and strengths. And one of the best things about what I’ve gained is that all this doesn’t just help me, but can also be applied to help others.

That’s a good thing.

I’m a tiny bit wiser than I used to be. A lot of reading and talking to experts and digesting all sorts of media leaves its mark. It’s not just that I know a little more about myself and my experiences, it’s that I can now better recognise parallels to those experiences in other people’s situations, behaviours and pasts. I anticipate slightly better, seeing problems further ahead, and I have a stronger sense of what I need to drop or to avoid.

I’m doing better.

---

I don’t have much that I can write here in terms of the specifics of therapy. I would describe a lot of the process of unpacking and analysing the causes of my PTSD as being extremely painful, like trying to both tidy up and then reassemble broken glass with your bare hands. The things that brought about your PTSD are shameful and harrowing. Their analysis can also be, through a process that can variously be sad, scary, frustrating, educational, validating and empowering. It takes a long time and requires expert assistance, which means the help you need can be a somewhat scarce resource and very, very expensive.

You pay for your trauma for a very long time.

---

I discovered one of the most beautiful sounds in the world some time after 2016, some unknown amount of time after I moved into this apartment of mine, with its balcony and its skyscraper views. I don’t remember now when I first heard it, but it’s been years now and I still adore it whenever it happens. It’s small and subtle and can happen at almost any time of night or day. It’s a sound that makes me think of safety and independence, of making my own space and then occupying it. Of security and stability.

I really, really appreciate security and stability. Much as I increasingly seek out change and crave new experiences or opportunities, these things feel so much better if I can enjoy them with the understanding that I have some sort of foundation under me. Something solid. No matter how small or how far away. Some place of safety.

The sound happens when it’s raining. Whatever metal it is that rings my balcony is hollow, so that when rainfall strikes it, it responds with a kind of subtle but sonorous singing. This ringing isn’t the specific sound I’m talking about, though. That sound is slightly different, something that rises above this other background arrangement.

When a particularly large drop of water hits my balcony railing, it gives a flat, gentle ping of appreciation. The background patter of the other raindrops will continue and then, again, after some irregular interval, presumably as water has collected from the balcony above into a particularly large drop, the ping will sound again.

I heard it one morning this spring, months ago now, right after I woke up and not long after I had started writing all this. I lay there in bed on a day the colour of slate and cigarette smoke and I thought about how the world is made up of so many beautiful, tiny things. Ping, goes one of them, and maybe nobody else on the planet notices or cares. But I try to remind myself of this and how my life is full of so many other probably stupid little things that I like, that I love. Don’t lose these things, I try to tell myself. Don’t forget about them and don’t forget to notice them when they happen. You gave yourself so many more of them when you chose to stay alive.

You get a lot of time to think on days the colour of slate and cigarette smoke.

---

You’ll notice I say “sometimes I think about” a lot here, when reflecting on less positive things, and you might consider this a writing device or a cheap hook or some other writer’s cheat. It partly is, but it’s also a truth. I do think about these things, and so many other things, very often. I think about one or another of them almost all of the time. I find it very hard not to think, to turn my brain off, and the unfortunate truth is that it reminds me about things to do with my trauma almost every day. It has done so for six years now and, as we’ve already established, six years is a long time.

Evenings can be the most difficult time. While I’ve always had a flippant attitude toward sleep schedules, I never used to have trouble going to bed. Some nights my brain will never switch off. My memory is overflowing. It doesn’t matter if I’m tired, it makes no difference if I’m exhausted. The rules around sleep are different now and I think I’m still trying to relearn them.

One therapist described the traumatised mind as like an overflowing wastepaper basket full of difficult memories that are constantly falling out. Any new addition can cause one or many of them to spill and scatter. Time and therapy can help to more properly sort them and make space for other, new things.

What a good analogy.

Occasionally, there might be a suggestion of ADHD sent my way. I can understand why things would look that way and a lot has been said by people more experienced than I about how ADHD and PTSD can seem similar. I think if ADHD had ever been the case some mental health professional or other member of the medical community that I’ve dealt with would have spotted this by now. But no. I’m distracted by some memory or flashback. I’m avoidant, or I’m in need of some thrill or stimulation. I might be full of nervous energy or unusually, intensely focused on something because it feels so good to be thinking about something I enjoy.

And sometimes things are bounding out of that wastepaper basket like clowns out of a clown car. I can feel like I've lost a lot of control over my mind and it's all I can do to rein it in. Some days I have coping strategies and some days I'm sick of it and wish I didn't need to have to cope.

And so I keep myself busy with the stimulation and the novelty that I crave. With people. With events. With runs, with the gym and with twenty-five kilometre hikes. Whatever it takes, whenever I can. It’s not ideal. I’m still figuring out what I need. I don’t always get the balance right. Sometimes unexpected things make me very emotional, either very sad or very frustrated, and I rarely know in advance what might do that. Sometimes I sleep less than four hours a night. Sometimes I want to be alone. Sometimes I desperately need company. I probably seem very strange.

But, let’s not forget, in the past I would lose whole days. For hours, my chest would feel like it was being crushed. I might be found curled up on the floor, ashamed of my own sadness. The nightmares would come every week. So things have clearly, obviously, demonstrably improved.

I’m doing better.

---

I still suck at writing. I don’t know how to fix that yet. I still very regularly feel like there is a gulf between me and so many other people, even my friends. I still have outsize reactions to irrelevant, immaterial things. I still lack confidence in my own personal calibration. "Many traumatised people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them,” writes Bessel van der Kolk. Yeah.

Toward the end of its six season existence there is an episode of BoJack Horseman where an actor reacts angrily to some improvisation and unexpected physical contact that happens during filming. Her colleagues are confused as to why she does this, and perhaps she doesn’t understand herself, but we the audience know that this a response to a physical assault by the titular character some time before. She never finds out, but this leads to her missing out on perhaps the biggest opportunity of her life, after a director discreetly describes her as erratic.

There is no further development with this plotline, no resolution to be had. Nobody finds out why she is like this, nor wants to, nor sets things on a new, better course. I try to remind myself that this sort of thing can be happening all the time, to try and grant people some grace and compassion, but also I try to remind myself that this is me. I have my versions of this behaviour. Maybe fewer than I used to, but still. I can be erratic and I have to face the consequences of that, as well as minimise it as much as I can.

I recently stopped buying fresh fruit from my local store because they would repeatedly put mouldy, furry produce on display. The last time I discovered this, I was holding up a box of ostensibly shiny, blood-red strawberries to once again discover the mass of fuzz hidden underneath. Food is expensive enough as it is, I thought, and it doesn’t also need to be garbage. Too late, the look on the face of the customer standing next to me clued me in to how vocal I’d been with my three-word expression of disgust and displeasure.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

---

You’ve read a little about my first dream, about old friends. You’ve read a little about my second dream, the nightmare. Here comes my third, from earlier this summer.

I dreamt that I was trying to get home again. I was confused about where I was, trying to remember a route through unfamiliar Vancouver alleys. It was evening, not yet dark, but the time between when you lose the long shadows cast by the last of the sunlight and begin to wear the rich, jewelled canvas of the stars. None of  the people I stopped and spoke to knew the streets I named. None of the alleyways I walked down took me in familiar directions.

I never found my way home, but I never stopped trying. Perhaps this does indeed mean I haven’t reached the end of whatever journey I’m on, that I can’t yet return to the start. I think it’s both practical and pragmatic for me to accept that the next six years might still present me with many challenges. That I will have bad, directionless days. That sometimes I’m going to fuck up and fall short.

I woke up to another bright, warm summer’s day, far later than I meant to, and I made myself a fine cup of coffee and a rich breakfast that I would be foolish not to enjoy.

Sometimes I think about suicide. Those thoughts haven’t left me yet and I’m not sure they ever will. Sometimes they arrive strong and loud and insistent, from out of nowhere and with all the power of a thunderbolt in a storm. Sometimes I want to be a shining example of how to conquer PTSD and sometimes I'm so sad I can’t get out of bed and sometimes I am just pissed off and angry. Each day is still different. But tomorrow I will wake up and perhaps I will think to myself “There are blue skies today,” or perhaps I will hear ping, or perhaps I won’t need anything at all to feel great. And perhaps there will be some undeniable sign in the day’s events, in my behaviour, even in the world around me, that demonstrates to me how much I’ve improved.

Each day is still different and today the glib part of my personality says “I sure hope you’ve improved, it’s been six years! That’s six years of painful PTSD examination, therapy, medication, reading, research, specialist appointments, many thousands of dollars spent and a god damn MRI of your weird and messed up brain.” And am I being disrespectfully flippant of my own experiences when I add that having an MRI of my brain was, at least, kind of cool?

Because another part of my personality wants to remind me I’m wiser, braver and maybe even a little more able to help others, people who I will remind myself can’t be expected to fix their own shit alone. People who shouldn’t be pushed aside, in this society that we all share.

And I don’t regret calling that cunt a cunt.

It’s been six years and each day is still different and this morning, when I pause to ask myself how I’m doing, I find I have the most simple of answers.

It’s three words.

“I’m doing better.”

[paullicino]

The Ascent, Part 1

The first of two parts. Written May 2024, from an idea initially sketched out around 2021.

The ground was the colour of slate and smoke, a gradient of greys marbled like the surface of some faux kitchen counter, but it wasn’t snow that veined all those cracks and crevices, spreading like capillaries under skin. It was ice. There was no snow anywhere here on the ground, not at base camp, not on the lower slope, not even on the winding, meandering roads that brought visitors here, almost five thousand metres above sea level and so very far from the last of the tenacious mountain villages that marked the route. There was snow everywhere across the horizon, snow decorating every peak, but right here the nearest bank was seven hundred metres further up the mountain, gradually shrouding the great stone god that rose up to the west, piercing the sky like the poorly-hewn tip of an iron-age spear.

Taken from my Patreon, where you can read all this for free.

[paullicino]

On Relaxing

Taken from my Patreon.

Sometimes I’m getting fitter. To help me in this ongoing endeavour I have a hugely supportive personal trainer who I usually see about once a week, and who very patiently guides me through various fumbling attempts to pick up progressively heavier objects while I wobble like a weathervane atop an old church. At the same time, we talk about lots of things, because she’s a great conversationalist and because there’s almost always something interesting that we want to exchange ideas about (I also think she might secretly enjoy making people try to form words while they struggle with all their hoisting and hauling, but who knows). During one of our recent sessions she asked me both what I would like to be doing next and how my current rest period was going. That’s when I shamelessly stole the idea of The Bingo Card.

First, a little context: I’m not really working right now. I don’t want to be and I don’t need to be and I’m lucky enough that I can afford to take a lot of time off. It’s been fantastic, but also a little alien. This is a position I have never, ever been in before. I’ve certainly spent stretches of time not working, but these have been more likely to involve me worrying how I’ll pay the bills, combing through employment listings or making another futile trip to what in Britain was hilariously known as the Job Centre (and has since been rebranded, for utterly unknowable reasons, as Jobcentre Plus, perhaps reflecting how it is now even more potent in its ability to be both punitive and pointless). That means I don’t associate not working with concepts like relaxation or security. Instead, a better way of describing things would be to tell you what I associate the concept of working with. Chiefly, success and survival. And, in particular, survival.

Staying afloat.

By the beginning of December I’d wound up all the game writing that I needed to do and had already set off on the first part of a long, relatively complex rail trip down the west coast of the United States. I busied myself by booking multiple things across a four leg journey in three states. I arranged to meet lots of people. I went to a work-related event. I had museums to visit and sights to see. I was endlessly stimulated, delighted and inspired.

It was all extremely good. It also probably wasn’t what you’d call relaxing. Or a rest.

As the year wound up and January chilled its way across the calendar I booked every appointment I might have neglected or delayed during the previous year. I saw my dentist and my doctor and my therapist and made sure to go to the gym more often. I snatched up furniture that I’d procrastinated buying for so long. I resolved to create all kinds of new routines for myself based around fitness and completing personal projects. I was Getting Organised and I certainly had all the free time to devote to this. I did indeed get a lot of things done.

It probably doesn’t sound like what you’d call relaxing. Or a rest.

And as my personal trainer and I talked about the year gone and the year to come, she told me about an idea shared amongst some friends of creating a sort of bingo card of goals, tasks and ambitions. Not so much a to-do list, but a grid of things to tackle, perhaps with a reward waiting when some are ticked off. Perfect, I thought. Great. Another way to organise myself, to motivate myself. The card could be categorised, I said. Rows are types of task, while columns are a ranking of how challenging they are. The rightmost task in the writing row is the most difficult. The leftmost apartment-related task is something I could do in a day.

I built The Bingo Card a couple of days later, collating a few different to-do lists that I had lying around (because I always do). I sorted and ranked it. It was a very effective act of organisation, satisfying, but it probably doesn’t sound like what you’d call relaxing. Or a rest.

A little while ago I talked to one of my closest friends and they told me how, now that they’re finally enjoying a period of downtime after a couple of stressful years, their body is tense and confused. They feel both strangely anxious and sometimes depressed, like there is some sense of urgency coming from somewhere, even manifesting from thin air, and at times this is exhausting.

I hadn’t yet said anything about what was going on with me.

Some of my old anxiety symptoms have returned. It’s not a big deal and it’s nothing I can’t deal with, but it’s confusing in light of there being nothing I need to be anxious about. Still, there’s that shortness of breath or that pressure on my chest, or those occasional strong reactions to the silliest or most mild of things. At times this is exhausting and some days I don’t seem to have the energy that carried me through all the work I managed last year.

Another friend sent me information about a potential job while I was drafting all this, which came about two weeks after yet another friend sent me information about another potential job. I have six listings open in my browser. I feel like I should apply to something, perhaps to all of them, even though that doesn’t sound like what you’d call relaxing. Or a rest.

My mind writes at night. As I climb into bed and pull up the covers and turn out the light, it offers me all sorts of ideas about what I can do next. It creates characters and concepts and forms complete sentences that quickly grow into entire paragraphs, somehow already fully formed. It remembers things I haven’t finished and suggests new projects I could begin. It can be exciting, inspiring, but it probably doesn’t sound like what you’d call relaxing.

Or a rest.

I know all of this is ridiculous, because at the same time I’m so happy. I have freedom, I have the ability to indulge in so much more and I’m enjoying things I haven’t had time for in months. I feel very good about myself and the choices I’ve made, as well as acutely aware of how fortunate I am. But things happen when you have time and money to burn, and one of those things is the rise of a nagging guilt about how you could just not burn those things and instead apply yourself to something much more practical or productive. You could even sit down and write something to help you dissect and deconstruct all the experiences and the feelings you find you’ve been having.

All of this is far from the worst problem a person can face. I’ve certainly had to wrestle with things infinitely more difficult, but it’s a reminder that a change in circumstances doesn’t mean an immediate change in outlook, in attitude. I am trying to alter the way that my mind operates and, at some point, my body will also decide to make some alterations too. I have no timeframe for exactly when that may happen. In the meantime, I will try to get on with as little as possible and, armed with the knowledge that I'm not about to sink if take a break from paddling, I may almost be on the verge of relaxing.

[paullicino]

https://www.patreon.com/paullicino Whoops! I've been sharing things on Patreon for over five years now and I missed this huge anniversary. Here are some reflections on that, thoughts about the future and an encouragement for you to, first of all, support minority and underrepresented creators before you continue to give money to someone like me! A huge thank you to everyone who has supported me over the years. You've made such a difference!

[paullicino]

Questions from a Worker Who Reads

by Bertolt Brecht

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live? Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?   Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone?

Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. Was he the only one to weep?  

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War. Who else won it?

Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors?  

Every 10 years a great man. Who paid the bill?

So many reports. So many questions.

[paullicino]

On Poverty and Comfort

Taken from, and funded by, my Patreon. Please check it out.

It’s happening again.

I just got forced back a place in line, mere seconds from being served. Another patron, presumptive and impatient, slid between me and the server working the till in a move that I would describe as all too practised, as smooth, to ask what soup flavours were available. This patron, surfacing from nowhere like a submarine, came up on my starboard side. She cut in, pitched her question across the counter, then cast a glance my way and, to use a phrase my mother would, “looked at me like I was shit on her shoe.”

While I’m not exactly shuffling about in my tracksuit bottoms today, there’s nothing special about what I’ve chosen to wear. I should perhaps have picked The Other Coat, which has magically caused several strangers here to strike up conversations with me. In particular, I feel it’s no small deal for a young woman to decide to start talking to a man she doesn’t know, but one day I was suddenly being told that I am classy and refined, being English and so smartly dressed. Perhaps on a different day I might have felt flattered, but I felt more like some sort of fraud was being committed. I was wearing class camouflage.

It’s something I try to do here, in my local fancy café, because otherwise I feel uncomfortable. But I realise that it’s also something I’ve unconsciously done for so much of my life.

I’ve got a few things that I want to write about here today, everything from sandwiches to suits to submarines, but before I go on I have to ask: Do you know that phrase “like I was shit on her shoe”? Do people say that where you’re from? Some of my lexicon is loaned from Chiswick and Southall, passed down from people who worked as labourers and long-suffering housewives, from bricklayers or from the lower decks of the Royal Navy, from homes that had no hot water and outside toilets. It’s the sort of language muttered past cigarettes on brick stairwells, or yelled across loading docks embellished with incoherent graffiti.

Sometimes these things slip out of me and no-one has any idea what I’m talking about. I make a right pig’s ear of it. And in those moments I’m suddenly somewhere else. I’m in a different time, a different place. And a different income bracket.

Or perhaps the different income bracket is where I am now. So in which do I really belong? Tell me, which would you associate me with? Graffiti and slang? Or poise and politeness?

It’s a question we can return to, if you want, because this piece of writing is in part about returning to things. When I began drafting it, months ago now, I didn’t realise just how much it echoed something I had written nine years before. I was already trying to articulate trends and patterns, without realising I had fallen into one myself.

For now, I have a different question. Did you know that one of Vancouver’s most infamous shortcuts has just closed? The three story, two hundred and twenty thousand square foot Nordstrom store that sits right between the city’s central plaza and two of its busiest stations is no more. Vancouverites will no longer be able to use it to pass diagonally through a whole block, as the crow flies, weaving dreamily amongst racks of designer handbags and thousand dollar flip-flops, before finally returning from this fantasy realm like Dante stumbling out from the underworld.

It’s a shortcut I’ve taken hundreds of times. Sometimes I would stop to inspect a shoe, or to check the price on a tie. The shoe would be upward of seven hundred dollars. The last tie I looked at was one hundred and eighty.

This Nordstrom had its own coffee shop, restaurant and even a cocktail bar. Curiously, its drinks were no more expensive than any other café nearby and, as I began drafting this in the early spring, I stopped for a drink on my way through. I asked the person serving me about her Totoro tattoo and she beamed. “Nobody who shops here recognises Totoro,” she said, and began talking about her clientele. They don’t have that kind of thing on their minds, she said.

She told me that the stations serving drinks were closing within a week and that she didn’t know if she’d have a job after that. “They’ll probably put us on the shop floor with everyone else at minimum wage.” Her colleague, selling suits that ranged from fifteen hundred dollars to eight thousand, told me he didn’t know when his last day of work would be, nor what kind of severance package anyone would have. Apparently, more than six hundred staff didn’t know when their jobs would end, but if Nordstrom did know one thing it was that it certainly wasn’t making enough money in Canada, with its thousand dollar flip-flops sold by minimum wage staff. It was time for the retailer to skedaddle.

I like talking to working people. Often, the conversations are more grounded than the kind of armchair politics you can abruptly find yourself enmeshed in at a house party, trapped suddenly in a kitchen surrounded by revellers armed with dangerously articulated glasses of wine.

The suit-seller had to go. He was run off his feet. Nearby, a rack of torn, pre-ripped jeans was on sale for three hundred dollars, more than seven times what I paid for my pristine pair. They were hung within grasping distance of some thousand dollar dresses.

I’m not an expert on dresses, but the thing about many of those seven hundred dollar shoes, those thousand dollar flip-flops, is that they were shit. They looked absolutely terrible.

Nordstrom allowed an aimless Dante, momentarily directionless in this realm, to sip their coffee and watch people buying their branded shoes and bags and clothes, and to try and perform some mental mathematics. It was a strange experience, because the conclusions you would reach would be that some of the school-age people buying things here were far too young to be able to earn the sums of money they were spending, whilst others were obviously spending many thousands as they bought items for themselves and others, nevertheless gliding through this experience with the casual indifference of a sleepwalker fumbling through a fridge.

Back in my local fancy café they are advertising for staff and perhaps they can take on one or two of the Nordstrom exodus. I look up the posting and wages start at fifteen dollars sixty-five an hour, which I confirm is the minimum wage in British Columbia. Once again, the coffee here costs about the same as anywhere else nearby, but everything else is expensive. The sandwiches are at least double.

And many of those sandwiches don’t look very good.

The staff here often talk to me. They say they talk to me not because of The Other Coat, but because I’m The Englishman Who Tips. It turns out, they tell me, that a majority of their customers do not tip. Most of these staff are smiling young women with accents from France and Romania and Peru. They are always smiling and they are always on their feet and they are always outnumbered by customers who want things and who will not hesitate to slide into a line with practised skill. They are dressed head to toe in white uniforms, but sometimes their footwear gives them away. They are not wearing thousand dollar flip-flops, or any of the sort of things that their customers are. They are much less affluent or, as we bluntly say where I am from, they are poorer.

I worked about five years of retail when I was a smiling young man and much of it was at or around the minimum wage. There were a lot of customers who wanted things and more than a few slid into lines at the till in manoeuvres that seemed all too practised. I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it here again, because it bears repeating: One of the places I worked was a flagship store that made over twenty million pounds a year, a figure that the Bank of England Inflation Calculator tells me is equivalent to thirty-six point seven five million today, more than three million a month. We’d have these weekly briefings where the managers would urge us to work as hard as possible to help make those numbers as big as possible.

Later, when the Labour party came into power, the minimum wage bumped up to three pounds twenty an hour for young adults. But I wasn’t yet an adult and so that rate did not apply to me.

The great thing about young people is that you can make them do exactly the same things as older people, but pay them much worse. Because young people aren’t as important, are they? They’re not as worthy.

Sometimes these retail roles were very cold. Sometimes they were very hot. Whatever the weather, those customers would surface out of nowhere like submarines. They would glide, as if lubricated by their money, but I suppose money always has been something that helps you grease your way through life. I’m certainly slipperier these days. Occasionally I will glide over problems that might have punctured the Paul of the past. I throw money at stuff like a wizard casting a spell and it just goes away.

When I caught sight of the shoes worn by one staff member in The Fancy Café I was suddenly hurled back through time to my years in retail, and a hundred and one experiences came back to me in the blink of an eye. I still have many, many memories of how customers treat retail and service staff, because when a stranger treats you in an extraordinary and unexpected way, it tends to stay with you. I remember one furious man saying “I pay your wages,” which was not true, because Kingfisher plc paid my wages, but he really believed his money and his transactions gave him entitlements and that this was how you spoke to a sixteen-year-old service worker.

It’s been a hot minute since I was sixteen, but I still react to a nearby “Excuse me” with the assumption that someone must want something.

Nordstrom is all gone now. While I was drafting and redrafting all this, it gradually emptied the last of its inventory, first discounting its shoes and its suits and its ludicrously expensive tableware, before then going on to sell even its fittings and its fixtures. Nordstrom offered you the chance to buy a greasy, scratched glass table for a thousand dollars, for some shelves for four times that. Realising that this may sound unbelievable, I took a picture.

Around the same time, I talked to a friend about Nordstrom and, by coincidence, discovered that they used to work in one in the US. “Nordstrom deserves to close,” they said. “If you don’t make enough via commission, they pay you minimum wage. But you get a warning. You can only do that three times before they fire you. What’s worse, they have a lifetime return policy, no questions asked. If a customer returns an item within a year of purchase, it comes back out of your commission, because ‘if you did your job as a salesperson right, they’ll love it so much they won’t ever return it.’”

“I sold this guy nine hundred dollars of stuff for his daughter for Christmas and I didn’t want to because he had no idea what she wanted. Months later my paycheck was docked because she returned everything.”

Well, it has closed now, but I still wonder about those six hundred staff, much as I wonder if it will be replaced by anything kinder. I think about working a job like that, and how only a handful of circumstances or coincidences separate me from being in that position.

But why should I wonder, and why should I worry? These days, I have the class camouflage. I have the fancy coat, or the ability to speak properly and, provided I don’t accidentally let loose a school story of how one of our teachers was stabbed or talk about bored classmates crashing cars for fun, I can avoid too many strange stares from the people around me. I could pick up one of those thousand dollar flip-flops in Nordstrom and nobody acts like I shouldn’t be there, contemplating two shitty, stuck-together pieces of plastic that I could take to the checkout and buy from someone who would have to work at least sixty-four hours to be able to afford them, a length of time I doubt those flip-flops would even last.

Yeah. Why should I worry?

But these days I can’t avoid the slow swell of something I’m increasingly feeling, a kind of growing gravity that has been tugging at me from my past. These last few months it’s given me a kind of emotional whiplash, as I’m pulled in every direction by currents and collisions, by connections in my personal life, by events in the news, by conversations I share with my therapist on lamplit evenings in those generic and inoffensive spaces made from featureless pictures and neutral colours. Even by my own writing pulling the stitching out of the past as it heals, closes up and knits itself together behind me. Because when I press on the place that it was, I can still feel the contours.

All this pulling and tugging has made for an uncomfortable ride. I haven’t had enough high-g training. Usually when you’re in situations where you’ll be experiencing sharp and sudden manoeuvres there are ways to prepare you, to toughen you up. Pilots and astronauts are put in specialist equipment or precisely-engineered simulators that spin them around and shake them about until they no longer flinch or vomit or pass out. The rest of us have to hold on and hope for the best.

Here’s the thing: much of the last year has been very comfortable for me. Work has been terrific. I travelled to the United States for the first time since 2019, and then again, and then again. I was able to put money into a pension for the first time in more than a decade. I bought myself new things. I made plans for a future that could be more open than ever.

And two of the strongest feelings that I have in reaction to this are guilt and confusion. I am fidgeting awkwardly in that wrong income bracket, in the wrong tax bracket. I redraft this now in the local fancy café, surrounded by people wearing capital B Brands and carrying designer bags, designer scarves, designer hats, even wearing elaborate designer watches, because they have decided they need to spend thousands of dollars to have a second way to tell the time.

I don’t come here to write so much because I choose to be in the fancy café, but simply because it is near and it is open late and it has the most space and the least clamour. There are other places I would prefer to be, but some of those don’t exist any more, others have been pushed too far away. I don’t have much choice.

You see, the wealth that leaks from the fashionable, expensive shops downtown, right where that Nordstrom used to be, has been slowly rolling downhill toward my historically more modest neighbourhood. Like molten gold, it bubbles toward us, gentrifying everything it touches. I see it in the shops and stores that have opened after the peak of the pandemic, replacing the businesses that couldn’t survive. That which regrows is better, because it is more expensive, more exclusive. And I see the same change bubbling through the people on the pavement, the cars parked in the streets, even the photoshoot faces on dating apps.

Bubble, bubble. It’s like the rising tides of climate change.

There used to be a burrito place on the corner that would sell you your dinner for seven dollars. Now it’s a store selling designer clothes for babies. One toddler’s jacket is nine hundred and seventy dollars. Before tax.

Your child will grow out of that in six months.

Back in the spring, some time between my many Nordstrom shortcuts, I went to a party in my apartment building for its longest-serving resident. After forty-five years, this woman in her mid eighties was moving to an assisted living residence. Many people from my building’s ninety apartments turned up, including some who have lived here for decades. Without prompting, several talked about how they could never afford to move out, since the province’s rent caps mean existing residents only have to weather a very gradual increase in rates. This doesn’t apply to signing a new lease somewhere else, and so new people moving into our own building are paying at least a thousand dollars more a month than when I first arrived, and even more than other, longer-term residents. We are all sat tight on islands of safety amongst ever-rising tides. We have become surrounded in our stubbornness.

Around the corner from me, a four hundred and thirty square foot one-bedroom apartment is being rented out for a fairly typical two thousand, six hundred and ninety dollars a month. That’s over thirty two thousand dollars a year. Various contemporary census reports list the median income in my neighbourhood as being between fifty and fifty-five thousand dollars a year, before tax. Someone earning that much would be spending sixty percent of their income just to rent such an home.

I would say that this feels uncomfortably familiar, but a decade ago I was spending maybe three quarters or more of my earnings to cover my rent. And a decade ago I was starting to write something just like this, once again surrounded by notes and drafts that I hoped to shape into something not just coherent, but that people would understand.

And once again I remember what it’s like not to have money.

Those rent caps aren’t protecting us from the ever rising price of everything else. I go shopping, see a pack of bagels apparently price frozen at three dollars and remember when it cost almost half this. It wasn’t long ago, it wasn’t some childhood memory, it was less than two years past. The other week, two dollars were suddenly added to the price of yoghurt. Cereal costs a third more. The cheapest bar of budget chocolate suddenly became fifty percent more expensive. This isn’t happening to luxury brands or inessential items, but staples and budget foods. You can watch it happen almost in real time, like accelerated footage of shoots sprouting or plants budding in the spring.

Wait a second, was I saying this a decade ago, in another country, in another time?

It’s happening again.

I just got forced back a place in line, mere seconds from being served. Another patron, presumptive and impatient, slid between me and the coffee I ordered, snatching it away in a move that I would describe as all too practised, as smooth. They had ordered the same drink as me, after me, and presumably it had never crossed their mind that someone else, stepping up to the counter, could possibly come before them. They make no eye contact. Indeed, they don’t even acknowledge my existence. I’m just some slightly scruffy guy in a New England gallery, probably someone who shouldn’t really be here enjoying art, and I’m not nearly as well-dressed, as well-decked, as they are.

I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not, but sometimes I wonder if, in my scruffier manifestations, I become invisible, inconsequential.

I remember a lot of strange stuff these days. Some people say that the Coronavirus pandemic played havoc with our memories, our restriction and isolation turning our minds inward and having them engage in an odd kind of archaeology. I’ve remembered old friendships, old journeys, old habits. And lately I’ve remembered folded broadsheets on kitchen tables in richer friend’s houses, with the features they carried and the writers who wrote them. I’ve remembered the economic downturn of 2008 and how one broadsheet ran a feature where “We Asked 100 People how they’re Coping with the Credit Crunch” and how what this really seemed to have done was ask one hundred people who were antique shopping in Islington how they had cut back on au pairs and skiing holidays. I’ve remembered how this was when I first noticed the peculiar distance from which such newspapers would observe and report on people who lived on lower incomes, who were poorer, occasionally letting one of them grace their pages with authentic stories of jobsearching and social housing.

Poverty was talked about as if it was some curious other country. It existed somewhere else.

I think I remember this in part because news reporting in the pandemic followed the same patterns the same way a little music box quickly repeats the same cutesy tune. Poorer people, it turned out, were feeling the effects of the pandemic much more, said the reports, officially marking such as observation as news, as if poorer people hadn’t felt the effects of everything else much more, since the god damn start of recorded fucking history.

Or maybe I remember it because, as spring began, a CBC News report on a (the?) housing crisis described the state of some poorer people’s living states as shocking, as if it was new, novel, never before seen. And yet such things can only truly shock someone who has gone through life unaware that some of the human beings around them have much less. I was not shocked by any of the things depicted in that report, much as I am never shocked to learn that someone has mould on their walls, broken windows, dangerous appliances, leaking plumbing, freezing bedrooms, failing electrics, collapsing walls or some sort of exploitative landlord or manager (nor that these things make you sick). I am only shocked that there are people in the world who still fail to comprehend the scope and scale of the poverty around them, who have become so swaddled and spoiled that they may as well be sleepwalkers.

You know what else I remember? I remember  how the pandemic turned my neighbourhood into richer people’s racetracks, how they would roar down my street at night. They rode oversized rollerskates costing a quarter of a million dollars along tight roads full of parked cars and blasted through the stop signs at every intersection. They growled in the night, grumbling down my road at three, four, five in the morning, probably achieving top speeds of thirty miles an hour but making a lot of noise as they did so. Their owners thought a good use of their money was to buy fast cars and drive them somewhere they’d be slower than a galloping horse. Most of these were not even good-looking cars. Most of these looked like shit.

When I first wrote that paragraph, a quarter of a million dollars had not quite achieved the significance that it currently has. But more on that in a moment.

I didn’t grow up poor. I grew up well taken care of and fairly safe. But I did grow up more modestly, poorer, than many of the people I came to know, the kind of people you might meet at a university, or in a New England art gallery, or a convention overseas, or who might make analogies about Dante. I also grew up knowing other kids with families who had much less, families couldn’t always surface their floors or fix their windows or fill their fridges. Wedged between two classes, I grew up knowing people who had multiple bathrooms and multiple garages, as well as those who tried to hide the rot on the walls or who didn’t know how to clean up when their disaffected, distressed dog had shit in the semi-carpeted living room once again.

I never forget that dog, though I never told anyone that before.

You know what else I remember sometimes, at random, when my brain decides to reminisce? I remember taking a bus home from work after a terrible Hampshire day, feeling awful about my life, when an old schoolfriend’s younger sister greeted me with excitement and enthusiasm. She came from the same household as the shit-stained floor. She sat on the back seat of this bouncing bus and delightedly told me how, by the age of seventeen, she was finally going to become a mother.

And then I remember how we were encouraged, pushed, expected to move beyond and away from something such as that. Don’t be like those people. Create distance. Escape.

I stopped writing this thing for a while, because each time that I opened it I became sad or I became overwhelmed, and I wondered both what right I had to write about things like this, being the guy with a pension and a safe apartment, and also who would care to read it. There are likely many reasons that people don’t want to read about some of these experiences and situations and one is that they aren’t very much fun. Why read about people with shit-stained floors when you can do anything else, such as watch a television show about starship battles or elves going on an adventure. These shows have CGI now and it’s all very exciting. It’s hard to compete in a world of CGI shows, funny dog videos and services that deliver dinner to your door.

But then it happened again.

I am trying a different fancy café (we have so many now). I just got forced back a place in line, mere seconds from being served. Another patron, presumptive and impatient, slid between me and the coffee I ordered, snatching it away in a move that I would describe as all too practised, as smooth. Again, they had ordered the same drink as me, and it either never crossed their mind to see if another person might claim this order, or I was somewhere between invisible and insignificant compared to how well-dressed, well-presented they were.

Is that just in my head?

I stepped out onto the street, past a row of sports cars and luxury vehicles. They are all over the place now, and I rarely walk a minute before seeing something that costs more than my neighbourhood’s median annual income. And then there was that whiplash, that high-g experience as I was also reminded of this half-written draft and everything else it contained.

And then I was angry.

I stopped writing this because, in part, I don’t know what it says about me that I didn’t so much leave so many of my low income experiences behind as find ways to run from them. Growing up, I was subconsciously sold a story of aspiration that was all about making yourself better than people who were struggling like this, about doing everything you can to create distance between yourself and them, about finding ways to identify with and relate to a different class. Become richer, sure, but become separate too. I think there is something in some poorer, lower-income, working class mindsets where such people are encouraged to resent themselves, to feel embarrassed, to aspire to be or to pretend to be something else, and to lose that past as soon as you can. I went and re-watched old material by the stand-up comedian Billy Connolly wherein he talked about things like his family throwing coats on the bed to keep warm, then pretending that a kids’ argument over those coats was a fight over the eiderdown (“The coats are in the cloakroom, near the mezzanine.”). I watched another where he tells a story of a person falling from a plane’s undercarriage and of a worried local calling the authorities and asking them to come and remove the body not out of concern for the tragedy or the person’s welfare, but because “I think he’s working class.” I have also never forgotten Connolly venting his frustration at someone who said to him “I was going to buy a copy of the Big Issue [a magazine that supports the homeless and unhoused], but the man was smoking.”

Connolly’s take on this was “HE DOESNAE HAVE A FUCKIN’ HOOSE. ALLOW HIM A WEE FAG WHILE HE WORKS OUT WHERE HE’S GONNA SLEEP TONIGHT.”

That’s an anger I understand, but it’s also an anger I am baffled to not see more often, perhaps even all the time, expressed as it should be in proportion to the amount of poverty and hardship I see every day. When I first moved to Vancouver, I encountered dozens of people sleeping on the streets. When I returned as a Permanent Resident in 2019 there were hundreds. There must now be thousands occupying doorways or amongst the growing tent cities that are constantly moved from place to place, an ever-growing population that is pushed away whenever they get too close to those expensive apartments or luxury cars.

When I see these people, I think how only a handful of circumstances or coincidences separate me from being in that position. Bubble bubble, go those rising waters, those rising rents and prices, and I have only climbed a little higher.

A few years ago, I sat next to a person on a train who volunteered their dismay: “It’s such a shame these people don’t want to work,” they said, as if people willingly chose to live in freezing tents without running water or safety or income. And there is valid anger to be thrown at a person like that, but also perhaps the consideration that they have never been exposed to the mathematics or practicalities of poverty, never had to worry quite enough about the cost of living, and have only ever talked about poverty as if it was some curious other country. A remote place of foreigners.

But I still don’t get how anyone can talk of the shock of poverty when it is so ever-present. I don’t understand. Do they look away? Are these the same kinds of people who, surveys have increasingly shown, see their above-average incomes as being unremarkably normal? After all, it now seems that wealth (and poverty) substantially alter psychology.

Nine years ago, in the spring, I shared an essay similar to this one called On Poverty. I talked about the rising cost of food and housing in England, as well as my frustrations around how something that for me was ever-present precariousness seemed somehow surprising, shocking, to many other people. It took me nearly a year to articulate and I only published it because I ran out of patience. To my surprise, it was shared in all kinds of places. Writers I admired got in touch, activists reached out, someone from the UK housing charity Shelter contacted me.

It was already six years after “We Asked 100 People how they’re Coping with the Credit Crunch” and nothing had changed. There was a growing trend toward not buying property in London, but investing in property, to the point that properties that didn’t yet exist were already being pre-bought with the understanding that they would become more valuable and could then be sold to others. Homes were no longer most useful as somewhere to live, but as investments that would appreciate. While I can’t say that this first started in London, I have certainly seen this practice and its consequences everywhere from Vancouver to New England to cities across Europe and Australia and… perhaps you can tell me somewhere where this hasn’t yet begun to happen.

And it is now fifteen years after “We Asked 100 People how they’re Coping with the Credit Crunch” and nine years after On Poverty and all the things that haven’t stopped have only gained momentum. Bubble bubble, the waters keep rising, because whyever would they not? We are, at least, talking more about the trends that we see as the waters reach more of our ankles. In Canada now we talk about how real estate prices that have increased up to three hundred and thirty seven percent mean that Toronto’s housing price to income ratio is now six, while Vancouver’s is ten, how twenty percent of properties are owned by investors (including half of all new condominiums in Vancouver), how the nation’s households now owe more money than the entire GDP, how insolvent an entire generation is. We now do our own versions of stories about, say, how a furnitureless room just big enough for a bed is now nine hundred dollars a month (this kind of story is so familiar… it’s happening again…). In Britain, the food bank usage I was furious about a decade ago is increasingly acknowledged, with a dialogue around how having more food banks thank McDonald’s restaurants might not be a good thing, how an ongoing cost of living crisis pushes more people toward sex work, how raising a healthy family and maintaining a basic standard of living has become increasingly difficult or downright impossible, how ill health is on the rise while life expectancy has stopped increasing and young adult mortality has risen, how almost four and one quarter million of Britain’s children now live in poverty while their parents struggle to feed them (and themselves), all against a background of increasing stagnation. In the United States there is also greater awareness of how wages have stagnated while the cost of living has increased and of how property prices have again wildly outpaced earnings, and continue to do so in no small part because more new properties are bought for the exclusive purpose of being profit-making stock, not to mention how more and more people are not taking lower paying jobs simply because they know those jobs won’t allow them to cover even their most basic needs (there is also an examination of the attempts to fill these voids by relaxing child labour laws in some states and how it might not be a good thing for ten-year-olds to be working the McDonald’s night shift). I see cost of living and inflation discussion across Europe. In South America. Even at the bottom of the world.

But it should never have got this bad, should never have spread this far, and it has done so in part because we ignored the poorer people around us who were the canaries in the coal mine, whose experiences (separated from ours only by chance and coincidence) could very well have been our own, but were instead treated as something happening at a peculiar distance. Those first people caught up in the rising tides were not like us, not our concern. It is only now, as these stories increase and as these graphs grow and as these numbers multiply, that more of us are beginning to understand that the surging waters might well engulf us all. We cannot outpace economics much as we cannot outjump gravity.

And so maybe, just maybe, a few more of you are angry too. You should be.

Two of the challenges I had over the many months that I tried to write this work were trying to start it and trying to finish it. These may sound very fundamental, perhaps even existential, and I suppose they are. Longform writing has been difficult for me the last few years. Trying to find a fresh way to articulate my anger and frustration over something that I have already written about, in one form or another, so many times was hard. There are only so many times I can say that it’s happening again before I wonder if people care. If people care about the increasingly obvious truth that, for a growing number of us, it has essentially become too expensive to be alive, and that if you can’t afford to live, the only thing you can do, either slowly or quickly, is die. And often I wonder why people are not mad about this every day, all of the time, and why much of this increasing poverty and inequality and struggle to survive is still reported and remarked upon with that peculiar distance, rather than being one of the chief concerns of our time. It certainly is a chief concern if it is your day to day life.

And then the submarine happened.

By now just about everyone knows at least something about how the OceanGate Titan submersible was lost at sea, suffering a catastrophic failure as a result of what seems to have been reckless policies and a contempt for safety standards. Tickets for a spot on this tiny, dangerous submarine cost a quarter of a million US dollars, while two nations and multiple air and sea forces invested tremendous resources in trying to locate the missing vessel. I have since witnessed what I think can generously be described as a lack of sympathy for this mixture of carelessness and privilege, as well as the enormous response that had to be deployed in an attempt to rescue rich tourists considered to have made poor choices. In particular, many people noted the contrast between the widespread coverage and intense efforts on behalf of five missing rich people versus the relative dismissal of the recent death of hundreds of refugees, including around a hundred children, in a Mediterranean shipwreck. It was an extremely transparent case of starkly different treatment based upon status.

And I had already woven my submarine analogies throughout half of these paragraphs.

This response is as important as the events themselves. It reflects a growing discontent around the wealth divide and a contempt for the rich, particularly the powerful rich, those who can make decisions that have enormous consequences that they themselves will not have to face. The past week I’ve been presented with thousands of tweets and short video essays by people explaining why they feel so little sympathy and how they’ve had enough. These are presented alongside more and more stories covering things such as the Clearlink CEO celebrating a worker selling their family dog in order to keep their job, or the increasing belief that ongoing inflation is in part caused by a transparent and unregulated desire for profit (including perhaps thousand dollar flip-flops sold by minimum wage staff). In the last few years it’s been revealed that even economic reporting itself is biased toward talking about richer, more comfortable people.

It’s almost July as I prepare to publish this work. The bagels that were, it turns out for only a brief moment, price frozen at three dollars are now thirty cents more expensive, a further ten percent price rise. I look at them and I remember what it was like to count every penny I spent when I was food shopping and I decide that I will include the following paragraph, which I was going to cut from this draft:

You know what the fresh pastries in the supermarket look like when you have only a handful of coins in your pocket? Those cherry-red centres, that glistening applesauce oozing out between crisp layers of puff pastry? They look like lights hung for a festival, they look as bright as Christmas decorations. They lose some of their sense of reality.

I’m not going to celebrate rich tourists lost at sea, but I’m glad it has lead to more people expressing their frustration, their discontent, their helplessness against economic forces that strike them, strand them, like a tidal wave, the surging waters that they cannot begin to climb clear of. I don’t think this means things will change this month, or this year, and I believe that change against forces and trends that have already developed so much momentum will require much more energy, much more pushback. I hope they continue to be angry, that they become angrier still, that they keep articulating and focusing their rage about the growing inequality and unaffordability around them as it begins to affect more and more people. That they express how disgusting it is that it is happening again.

Nine years ago I wrote that I felt we were regressing to the Victorian era, but now I wonder if we’re falling back even further than that. In my world of CGI shows, funny dog videos and services that deliver dinner to my door, almost all of the people who deliver that dinner or who will make me a coffee or who will drive me to the airport, or who perform all those tasks I can request when I throw money at stuff like a wizard casting a spell, are paid garbage and treated like they are disposable. This is usually because they are, and they have few other options. They are not lazy or stupid and we are only separated from one another by circumstances or coincidence, things we had about as much control over as weather, as rising tides, as economic forces with all the power of a tidal wave and which could still strike again and sink yet more of us. It could be happening again. Bubble bubble.

A significant factor in the success of someone like me, of the safer position I now find myself in, is luck, and we don’t talk about that enough.

People are trying so hard to survive. Last week someone broke through the latticework on the door of our building’s dumpster enclosure so that they could slide a hand through a tiny, sharp filigree of twisted metal and operate the handle. They did this in order to reach the trash inside, because their life had become so difficult that they needed to risk harming themselves in order to get trash.

Two blocks away, I finished writing in my local fancy café and stood briefly to return my cup to the counter, which is a common habit in the Pacific Northwest and takes but a moment. The patron next to me looked up from behind gold-rimmed, heart-shaped sunglasses.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that here,” she said. “They have people who will do that for you.”

[paullicino]

The Coronation isn't Funny

Taken from my Patreon, last week.

The Coronation isn't funny.

I can’t deal with it. I can’t deal with the swords and the orb and the special custom screen they’ll anoint the important man behind. I don’t know why this is happening and why anybody likes it. I am at least half a world away, but still I can’t escape this institution because I will have to pledge allegiance to the new King of England as the final part of my Canadian naturalisation. No other person is mentioned in this pledge I will take, not Canada’s people as a whole, or its elected officials, not even the Prime Minister or their office. No, only the monarch.

I have to. It’s not even optional, like the proffered pledge being suggested by broadcasters and organisers back in my country of origin (who are giving the British public the chance to recite their allegiance to King Charles III, his heirs and successors). I can, at least, remove some amount of dignity from this and speak this pledge to the King of England in French. It is, after all, one of the official languages of Canada.

If that seems ridiculous to you, consider then that I first debated writing this entire thing as a farce, filling it with parody and invention. I could invent rituals and objects and people and titles, mix them in with some of their very real equivalents, and it might all be passably funny or passably believable. However, I learned a lesson several years ago: I invented some quotes (as well as some politicians) that referred to Donald Trump for a piece that attempted to satirise double standards and the vacillation that happens when those in office take a hypothetical position they are well aware they may have to change, only to then have people repeatedly and sincerely ask me if what I had written was real.

Pre-election, it had already become difficult to satirise or exaggerate Trump, a man who boasted about assaulting women and mocked a reporter with a disability, among so many other things. His behaviour was so monstrous and melodramatic that it was hard to find much that was funny by building upon that.

Similarly, it has also become too difficult to satirise the coming Coronation, which will involve lords with swords, pieces of what are alleged to be Christ’s cross, a magic stone, the King riding around in a genuine golden carriage and an archbishop who will simply present the orb. It turns out there are a few objects that are given and then taken back. Presented and then put down again. There is a special oil with a special formula. There will be salvoes and salutes fired by guns in London and Edinburgh and Belfast and Cardiff and at sea. There will be multiple flypasts. And did you know there is a special glove? But just one. Just one glove, which is put on for a little bit, before then being taken off again. That part sounds like something from a Michael Jackson performance. Someone will play something called the Weiner Fanfare and I swear to God I am not joking.

Some objects will be borne and some will be presented, each by a different person. Some will have both a separate person assigned to carry them and to present them. The sceptre with a dove (of course there’s more than one sceptre), for example, is carried by one person but presented by another. I don’t know why. I don’t know why members of the clergy will have to turn in each compass direction and hear the assembled audiences there shout back at them.

All this will happen tomorrow, eight hours away from me, and I’m very glad I will sleep through it. Maybe I will wake up to England, Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or the Commonwealth finally getting past some of the extraordinary bullshit it’s been on for a while now, with so many people and services and institutions and organisations that will bend and bow in deference to one person. Seven months ago, the death of the previous monarch brought out a host of bizarre and undignified reactions that included a black and white Funko Pop image of the late Queen, a weird £349 limited edition royal bear and a sombre tweet from London’s Shrek Experience.

And then at least a quarter of a million people decided to spend up to twenty-four hours waiting in a line that reached sixteen kilometres in length in order to get a short glimpse of the Queen’s coffin. If (and this is a big if), on average, those people had spent just eight hours each queuing, that is already two million hours of people’s time, or two hundred and twenty eight years.

And I wonder if less of that time could’ve been spent in deference to a single monarch and more of it on things that would have benefited the wider society that the late monarch wasn’t really part of, but is instead elevated far above. Much as there will be millions of pounds spent on the coronation of this new monarch, who is already themselves spectacularly rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, that could perhaps be spent on resources or infrastructure or even just dinner for people in a country that now has over six thousand food banks and “independent food aid providers” serving two and a half million visitors from households who can’t afford to eat, part of the fifth of the nation that lives in poverty. That fifth includes about four million children.

I might be a party pooper if I suggest that at least two hundred and twenty eight years of useful time was lost lining up to pass by a dead person who never knew or thought about most of those visitors. Or that the estimated hundred million spent on the coronation could fund so many more useful things, especially after so much time and money and energy was also spent on lavish Golden, Diamond and then Platinum Jubilees events in succession, each busted out like clockwork to confer even more status. But police in England have been threatening or even arresting people for things as simple as statements of objection or holding up blank pieces of paper, so perhaps I shouldn’t do that. The monarchy is an institution and a tradition and an icon and living history and it brings people together.

In worship.

Tomorrow’s coronation is not funny because it is an act of worship and deference toward those with inherited money and status. It is a celebration of privilege. It further endorses a centuries old system of rulership that has been minimised or discontinued in so many other places. It will again place one family above the rest of a nation, simply because of birth and succession, and consume an enormous amount of time, energy, money and resources as it does so. And I don’t dislike it just because it is a display of pomp and ceremony that descends into the borderline comic, or because it is boring, or because it takes attention away from so many systemic inequalities or overlooks so much royal advantage and special treatment. I dislike it because it is a state sanctioned act of validation and sycophancy in a country that cannot move forward, and it serves only to help England disappear even further up its own arse like a scatological Ouroboros.

In Tom Clancy’s 1987 novel Patriot Games, a team of terrorists attempt to kidnap Charles and his then wife, Diana. At the climax of the story, Charles joins the fight against them and Clancy has the man who was famously flummoxed by the act of signing documents talk about flying fighter jets and dryly utter the line “I am adept with light weapons.” In reality, Charles crash-landed his plane seven years after this book was written, as part of a flight crew found negligent in their duties.

I ignored a lot of things around the Queen’s funeral and I have ignored a lot of things around this coronation. But I don’t want to be silent. I want to be angry about the unfairness in the world and I feel like I keep having to write about the scale of poverty and inequality, particularly in England, because it is being constantly erased, especially by bullshit like this. And I think what will happen tomorrow will be gross.

[paullicino]

It’s rare that I get to reblog something on Tumblr. This is worth a read.

On why women’s rage is a superpower

My mother hates my new book. I gave her a proof just a few days ago, and although she’s still only halfway through, she can’t wait to tell me all the ways in which she hates my novel.

“Is this science fiction?” she says. (She detests science fiction.) “Were you ill when you wrote this?” (I was.) And repeatedly, she says: “Why are the women so angry?”

I get it. She’s out of her comfort zone. At 83, with no internet, no interest in pop culture and a deep-rooted hatred of anything close to horror or the supernatural, she wasn’t my target audience. And yet it’s never easy to hear such criticism from a loved one. But in some ways, she isn’t wrong. Broken Light is an angry book. It came from a time of lockdown, when social media was my only window onto the world. It came from a place of trauma, when I was fighting cancer. It came from a place of corrupt hierarchies, self-serving politicians, anti-vaxxers, Covid deniers, victim-blamers, and those eager to blame all their woes on minorities. And of course, it arose against the background of the #MeToo campaign and the Sarah Everard murder – a murder that shocked the nation, not least because the murderer turned out to be a serving police officer with a reputation for sexual misconduct - which unleashed a collective howl of protest, as well as an ugly, misogynistic backlash. Even so, my story came as something of a surprise to me: the story of a woman’s rage, and, on reaching the age at which women often feel least valued, her coming into her power.

It surprised me, most of all because I wasn’t an angry person. At least, I didn’t think I was. Those who know me describe me as someone who tends to flee conflict, who generally tries to find common ground, who gets upset when people fight. And yet, writing this story, I found myself saying and feeling certain things on behalf of my heroine, Bernie Moon; things I might not have said for myself, but which felt right and urgent, and true, and strangely liberating.

Anger has a bad press. A woman’s anger, especially. While men are encouraged to express feelings of justified anger, women are often criticized when they try to do the same. Angry women are often portrayed as “harpies,” “banshees,” “Furies.” It suggests that a man’s rage is righteous, but that a woman’s is unnatural, making her into a monster. Male anger is powerful. The God of the Bible is one of wrath. Seldom is he ever portrayed as expressing any other emotion. In the same way, men and boys are often led to believe that expressing emotion is weak - except for anger, which is seen as acceptably masculine.

In comparison, women are often criticized when they show aggression. Angry women are hysterical, shrill, out of control, unreliable, unattractive, unfeminine. A perceived lack of “femininity” makes a woman less valuable, less worthy of respect and of protection. The Press coverage of women victims of violence is a case in point. A victim of violence needs to be attractive, white, gender conforming and virtuous in every way if she is not to be overlooked, or worse, portrayed as somehow having contributed to her misfortune. When trans teenager Brianna Ghey was stabbed, the Press were very quick to state that her murder was not thought to be a hate crime, whilst at the same time obsessing over – and questioning - her gender. When Nicola Bulley disappeared, police felt obliged to divulge details of her struggle with the menopause, as well as her alcohol issues, even though this was privileged information and of no public relevance. When Emma Pattison, the Head of Epsom College, was murdered alongside her daughter, the Press immediately assumed that her husband George must have felt “overshadowed” and “driven to distraction” by his wife’s prestigious job. In all three cases, the victim falls under the hostile scrutiny of the Press, while the perpetrator is given an excuse. In all three cases, the victim – one trans, one hormonal, one better-paid than her husband - is effectively portrayed as “unnatural”. Subtext: Unnatural women do not deserve the protection of the patriarchy. Unnatural women come to bad ends.    

Once you start to acknowledge it, rage grows at a surprising rate. Over the past three years, I have found myself growing increasingly angry. Angry at the injustices committed by our Government; t the greed of corporations; angry at the prejudice extended to those who are different.

Connecting with others on social media has made me more aware of the lives and experiences of those from different backgrounds to mine, and with different levels of privilege. For a long time I’d been resistant to calling myself a feminist. Feminists are angry, I thought. What right have you to be angry?

Growing older, I realize that this was my mother speaking. A woman of a certain generation, who although she was aware of the challenges of living in a patriarchy, still had a level of privilege that many women do not share. White, professional, cishet women can sometimes have the luxury of choosing not to be angry. White, professional, cishet women can sometimes have the illusion of equality. But feminism isn’t only for just one kind of woman. A feminist must look beyond the limits of their own experience. And that’s where the anger really starts: anger at injustice; anger at corruption and lies. Most of all, anger at the prejudice against certain people for just being themselves; for being transgender, or Black, or old, or simply not conforming to what a white, patriarchal society expects and values. And once you start seeing injustice, you start to see it everywhere. It’s like an eye, which, once opened, cannot unsee inequality.

My anger flourished in lockdown. A time of growing divisions. Masks are invaluable in a pandemic, and yet they inhibit connection. They serve as a kind of reminder of who can speak, and who is to be silenced. While Boris Johnson was urging the public to trust the police, a vigil for Sarah Everard was broken up, with violence, by officers citing lockdown laws. While elderly people were dying alone; while I drove for four hours just to go for a half-hour walk in the park with my son; while I sat alone in my chemo chair, politicians were partying. Billionaires were enriching themselves. Behind the mask, the eye opened wide. I caught myself making faces behind my disguise at strangers. There was something weirdly liberating about this; as if, behind the piece of cloth, I could express myself at last. Not unlike writing a book, in fact. On screen, the eye opened wider. Bernie Moon, my heroine, was unlike like me in many ways, and yet anger connected us. The anger that comes from helplessness; from seeing others mistreated. Anger at a society that propagates inequality. And the anger that comes from hormones – those mood-altering chemicals that everyone produces, and yet which allegedly make women erratic; unreliable; hormonal.

In his novel, Carrie, Stephen King tells the story of a girl, whose telekinetic powers are unleashed by her teenage hormones. Carrie is unpopular, bullied, isolated. Her rage finds an outlet in her power. Driven to breaking-point by the bullies, she becomes a monster. Of course she does: after all, the author of this tale is a man, writing from the perspective of a couple of thousand years’ worth of patriarchal inheritance. In literature, a woman’s anger is unnatural; monstrous. It leads to terrible, unnatural things: makes murderers and infanticides of Clytemnestra and Medea; monsters of Medusa and Scylla. Unnatural, monstrous women are always punished in literature, even while acknowledging that they are often the victims of men. And unnatural women are often seen as physically repulsive – a reminder that, to be valued and loved, women must be young, and pure, and conform to the standards of beauty set out by their society. In literature, just as in life, those women who do not conform tend to be less valued, less seen, and when they do appear, do so as wicked witches, evil stepmothers, ugly crones and hideous travesties of womanhood.

But what would happen if a woman took control of the narrative? In recent years, we have observed a number of retellings of Greek myths from the point of view of the monster. Stone Blind, by Nathalie Haynes; Medusa, by Jessie Burton; Circe, by Madeline Miller. In both cases, the monstrous woman is seen from a different perspective; her rage absorbed and justified; her narrative reclaimed from a patriarchy that seeks to tame and subdue a woman’s rage, even at the cost of her life.

My new novel, Broken Light, comes from the same process of reclamation. It owes a debt to Carrie, but I have avoided the explicitly paranormal theme of the original, as well as the girl-on-girl bullying and the psychopathic mother. In my version, Carrie lives; marries her childhood sweetheart; internalizes all her rage and suffocates her power. Until the menopause – a topic which until recently has been largely misunderstood and taboo – at which point her power returns, and with it, a new kind of freedom. Freedom from the male gaze; from the responsibilities of motherhood; from the largely impossible expectations of society. Unlike puberty, menopause is triggered by a lack of certain hormones; and yet the symptoms can be just as dramatic and isolating. Loss of libido, exhaustion, depression, emotional outbursts as well as unpredictable and alarming hot flashes – my version of Carrie’s pyrokinesis. Whether my heroine’s powers stem from any kind of paranormal source is very much up to the reader to decide – after all, paranormal is only a step away from unnatural. And what counts as unnatural is in the eye of the reader – an eye that has been opened, I hope, to a series of new possibilities.

One is that rage is natural. Living in a patriarchy, women have a right to their rage. In fact, it seems more unnatural to me when women are not angry, given how much misogyny remains in our society. And growing old is natural. Being hormonal is natural. Differences are natural; so are disabilities. All women matter; whatever their age, or colour, or sexual orientation, or marital or reproductive status. The value of a woman’s life should not be defined by her popularity, or her age, or her looks, or her kids, or her value to the patriarchy. And no-one else gets to decide what a woman ought to be. A woman is not what, but who - a person, not an object; an active participant in her world. Women have lived too long behind the mask. They deserve their own stories. Stories in which they are allowed the full range of human possibility. So, to answer my mother’s question: Why are the women so angry?

Because it’s a superpower.

[paullicino]

Here’s a new trailer for Pacific Drive, from Ironwood Studios, the team I’ve been working with since last year. This is a much more in-depth look at what we’re making and it’s been released alongside a whole bunch of press previews, everywhere from Eurogamer to Kotaku to RPS to IGN, and many more.

I lost access to Tumblr for a wee while, because technology, but it feels great to be back and to able to post this hugely exciting, hugely satisfying update.

[paullicino]

What's your take on all this OGL stuff?

Dumb and short-sighted, but par for the course when money people get involved. The attempts at spinning it are particularly ridiculous and no one is buying it.

I only have a little bit of experience working within the tabletop RPG sphere, but I have to say that as bad as videogame publishers can be, the most soulless people I've encountered in the broader industry are on the tabletop publishing side. Unless someone working as a tabletop publisher is reading this - you're great, of course.

Obviously someone has to worry about the bottom line, especially in an industry notorious for losing money, but when that becomes the only thing they care about - oof, what a rough way to suffocate everyone else's love for something.

No matter how great and passionate and forthright the individual devs and designers are, the people in charge can always ruin a good thing. Of course, that's true for every industry; it's just really on display right now.

[paullicino]

I love being here so much.

[paullicino]

I recorded a video the other day. After a while, I decided to upload it.

Think before you say anything. Or, alternatively, just don't say anything.

[paullicino]

Iceland, January 2013. The latest Diary tier post on my Patreon is all about this trip, which has very much been on my mind this last week or two. (at Iceland)

[paullicino]

I recently attended my first PTSD support group session

Hello everyone.

I recently attended my first PTSD support group session.

I've been trying to work out some way to talk about this or share this for a little while, but I think being plain about it is about the best that I can do. In 2019 I came back to Vancouver as a somewhat different person to when I left and I brought a few things back with me. I'm still trying to wrestle with that, and what it means for me now and in the future, which feels even weirder in a pandemic that has narrowed the world somewhat. I also think I'm still learning about my mental health and related experiences. It’s been a long, slow process and it can be an isolating experience that is not easy to articulate and to explain to others.

I've had wonderful support from friends who have been patient and helpful and emboldening in so many ways, as well as some smart therapists and a really good GP. Navigating mental health resources is very difficult, especially if you don't have a lot of cash to hand, and it's a particular challenge because the people who need to make use of it are more likely to also be people who are not in a place where they can easily take on a complex and prolonged task. I've definitely had less ability to handle things and sometimes each day is a roll of the dice.

I don't know what's coming next yet, but I hope we can find ways to include more mental health resources in our healthcare systems, wherever we live, and if you're in a position to push for that by who you vote for, who you petition, who you work with or what you do, I hope that you will. If you had a serious physical injury, you wouldn't leave it untreated for years, let it worsen or aggravate it by repeated exposure. Think of mental health care the same way, and deserving of the same sort of infrastructure, facilities, expertise and availability.

Sometimes things are very tough, but I'm really glad that I'm here. Thank you for reading this.

[paullicino]

It's the two year anniversary of my gaining Permanent Resident status in Canada, of this becoming my *legal* home. It would never have been possible without the success of Paranoia in 2014 and the internet's help funding my appeal in 2019.

Even if the last couple of years have been tough, there's nowhere I'd rather be during a life-changing pandemic.

Roleplaying games and the internet have been pretty good to me.

Thank you!

[paullicino]

On the Internet

Taken from, and thus generously funded by, my Patreon. The above image via ExtraFabulousComics.

Do you have a flashlight nearby? A lamp, or other light source? Keep it to hand, it might become relevant for something, something I’d like to demonstrate later. The demonstration is simple and entirely voluntary, the flashlight is not essential. It works just as well as a thought experiment in your head.

Meanwhile, I’m going to write about the internet on the internet. Because that’s what we all do these days, isn’t it?

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. It was a kind of hidden, secret space of unknown dimensions when we found it as young adults. A weird sort of Narnia. A modem meant you could open this door to an entirely different place full of entirely different people obeying entirely different rules. You had to find ways of telling one another about what you’d found this week, either the next time you were together in person, via an email or, God forbid, by printing out a webpage. Twenty-five years ago, the internet was a collection of imperfect search engines (crawlers) taking you to out-of-the-way websites that were as likely to have been made by someone just like you as they were to belong to some major company or organisation. Its mess was egalitarian. It was a decentralised place full of curious corners and sudden surprises. It wasn’t somewhere we logged on to with an expectation of finding the familiar. It was a place of discovery.

It wasn’t simply that the tech wasn’t as good as it is nowadays. That much is obvious. It was the fumbling newness of the place. It was a primordial soup, we were all blobs and we blobbed around together, testing out the water.

It was a tremendously international space. It was easy to stumble across websites in other languages, to find places that weren’t for you, that were never created with you in mind, and at the very edges of these places their owners and their users might just blend together. Spill over, even. Everyone was from everywhere and they were all mingling, uncontrolled. It was liberating. It was mind-expanding.

The internet was exciting, it was new, it was unfamiliar. It was a place to learn. It was a place without an agenda.

It was also a place to be different. Niche interests found their audiences and young people could be united by what they enjoyed, not marginalised. There was no need to fit in when the place didn’t even fit together properly. For those of us bullied, bored, or worse in tiny homogenous hometowns, isolated or upset by the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school can create, it offered little judgement about what you should want or who you should be. It was a place to be genuine. 

I still remember the end of the 1990s, too. It was a decade of growth and change not just for a young generation, but for the wider world we were learning about. There was a peace deal in Northern Ireland, there was optimism in the media and there was a coming millennium that was supposed to be defined by technology and communication, the internet at its forefront. I was not a young man who could identify with very much of this optimism, but I was at least a young man looking forward to change, who could be accepted as who I was on the internet and who could be excited about what it represented. I’d never tried to be anyone else, even though being different rarely works out when you’re young, but now I knew for sure that I didn’t need to.

As my friends and I grew, so did the internet, and it became a place where we could share more about ourselves, where we could play together and where we found a bunch of ways of keeping in touch whenever we were apart. It became a tool to help me work, that kickstarted my career as a writer, as well as an ever-widening window on the world. It wasn’t yet too corporate, its websites and its tools not yet too monolithic.

I remember some of that early sharing. I remember talking to total strangers, a world away, about some part of my life or theirs. I remember talking to one internet friend of many years, who I never met, about British and American spelling. And about spelling in general. I remember they told me they weren’t sure how to spell a particular word and I said they could look it up in but a moment, since they were online there and then. “I can’t be bothered,” they replied, and that frustrated me so much.

The 90s passed and on September 11th 2001 whatever vision there was for the coming century was erased. The course of world events shifted immediately and dramatically. Never before had mass murder been so visible and so immediate. I remember talking not about how different the world was going to be, but that we had no idea how big a difference this would even make. In a very short space of time, it felt as if the world became not only so much more cruel and so much more cynical, but also so much more divided. I remember the weeks and months after those terror attacks as being my first experience of seeing people sharply divided in their politics, divided enough to be extremely angry, extremely offended, by the many suggestions of what should be done next. It set the scene.

As the decade continued, technology and communication certainly did change us. More of us were using the internet not only to talk, but for more and more of our everyday tasks. We were also sharing ourselves, too, in ways more personal and profound, and there was so much to know. I read a blog post by a Black woman from the American South describing the ways she had to bring up her son to interact with the wider world, how angry he was about it, how unfair it all was. I read updates from those caught in the civil war in Myanmar, talking about what they claimed the news didn’t show. I read about the realities of the rapid growth in Dubai, the working conditions and pollution. I read diary entries by people surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, weeks without power and wondering when help would come. I read about the world in a way I’d never been able to before.

More than ever, the internet was a library of lives.

The first trip overseas I took by myself was all planned, booked and executed with the help of the internet. I flew to Chicago, in the United States, and I stayed in the most average hotel in the most average neighbourhood and it was wonderful. I heard real cicadas for the first time and walked through concrete valleys between towering skyscrapers that my tiny mind couldn’t process. In the evenings, I watched a plethora of American news, which was only ever about America, and that frustrated me so much.

The first interview I ever conducted with someone who wasn’t making a video game was with the writer Mil Millington. The interviews I really wanted to do were about people, their experiences, what they liked and why they do the things they do. Mil Millington was the perfect subject because we had both written about games, we both understood the reach of the internet and we were both interested in what the future of this medium would be. He had recently scored a book deal and written his first novel, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, based on his semi-autobiographical, tongue-in-cheek blog of the same name, listing comic domestic disagreements. I asked him what it was like to share all of his personal life online and he told me that, actually, he didn’t:

“I'm, honestly, almost obsessively private. It's just the way I write that, for some reason, if I say, 'Margret won't let me watch a film in peace,' causes people to think, 'My God! Mil's laying his whole life bare!'”

And then I realised that he had, of course, chosen to share all the things that he had. And carefully. It didn’t mean that those things were less honest, less real or less interesting, but he had been doing what all of us writers do: picking his words and his moments. We should all get to share on our own terms.

I liked his honesty. He wasn’t trying to prop up any persona.

---

A little after this time, I was asked on a date by a conservative American woman who I met in my first year at university in London. We saw each other a few times and stayed in touch when she returned to California. A couple of years later, the American Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin spoke about “death panels” run by Britain’s National Health Service. Online, I expressed my annoyance and anger both at Palin just making things up, as well as at the volume of people who seemed to simply accept her words. My former date said that Palin was allowed to “express her opinion” and I didn’t know how to begin to explain, to an adult in her mid 20s, the difference between fact and opinion, or that she could check such things in a moment, since she was online. That frustrated me so much.

This discussion played out over a relatively new website called Facebook, which had become an invaluable way to connect with my fellow students. I had feared being alone at university, lost in a big city, but the opposite had happened. As soon as we all finished our first year of studies and were hurried out of our student residences, we scattered across the capital and the closeness I had taken for granted was suddenly lost. But Facebook became a directory of friendship, another library of lives. In its early days, I made jokes about people oversharing, or using the site to attract attention, but this wasn’t any different to how some of us might behave anywhere else. It wasn’t such a big deal. That’s just humans.

And anyway, I like to share. My whole life, I’ve enjoyed sharing things I think are important because I feel like it helps me make genuine connections, express myself and feel useful. I saw the internet becoming another way of doing this, another way to be genuine. The younger me had played in bands and held dreams of reaching other people through music, in awe of those moments when an audience sings an artist’s lyrics back to them. I still wanted that, that connection, or some version of it.

On the ever-growing internet, we could all share ourselves more. It could become a new medium for acceptance and understanding. What a glorious future it promised.

---

In time, I adopted all of the social media platforms that I use because I enjoy human connection and I think one of the fundamental traits of people is that they can be so interesting. They do stuff, they make things, they go places, they inspire and they pull humour out of the most difficult of situations like a conjurer tugging an elephant from a beanie. I’d like to be able to do those things. Some days I can barely make a pancake.

Social media allowed me to make and share even more, and now I was sharing things with two people at dinner, ten people at a party or a hundred people online. The number mattered less than the creation’s ability to connect, because it all helped me figure people out and it helped me figure myself out. It helped me figure everything out so that, perhaps one day, I might also learn the trick that lets you tug an elephant out of a beanie. I would be able to say to people “Ah yes, you start with the trunk,” or “Surprisingly, you pull from the tail.” Then they could pass that on. Social media seemed particularly good for this, a way for us to all enrich one another.

In 2008, a series of devastating terrorist attacks erupted across Mumbai. Many of the events were documented in real-time by both journalists and locals using Twitter, which made the site seem to me to be an invaluable new perspective on current events. By the start of the next decade, the Arab Spring saw a broad uprising across North Africa, with thousands of people united in protest by the unifying power of social media. It felt like these tools could change our world forever.

Some other things happened as that decade wound down.

A woman on Twitter made a poor joke about AIDS and Africa before boarding a flight, only to find that, by the time she had landed, her words had been shared around the world many millions of times. A woman in England was caught on camera putting a cat in a bin, the footage of which went viral and received such an overwhelmingly furious reaction that one national newspaper asked, only half-joking, if she was the most evil woman in Britain. These events were shared, discussed and dissected with a comparable passion and level of investment as the terrorist attacks and the Arab Spring. On the internet, a cat in a bin was becoming as important as terrorists in a hotel.

I flexed some cynical opinions. We all had opinions by then (though still not the same as facts), because it was increasingly difficult not to get swept up in things like these as and when they happened. They were everywhere, echoed and repeated, with a kind of mentality of momentum. Countless people changed their profile pictures to something green in support of protesters in Iran, or added a flag to support victims of terror in France. They signed internet petitions demanding Something Be Done, though it wasn’t always clear where these petitions would be delivered or how they would compel someone to act. None of these protesters or victims were in any way saved, protected or enabled by a person on the other side of the planet clicking their mouse like this, but if a million other people did it, those metrics created a validity of their own.

I think I remember the late 2000s as the time that I really began to feel different about these things. But by then, I was too bought in. It had already gone from a habit to a dependency.

Year by year, the internet had become less egalitarian. Monolithic sites and spaces were increasingly the center of the experience, whether hubs like MSN and Yahoo, social media sites like Facebook or Twitter, or popular news outlets. We found ourselves in the same places, over and over, and we relied on these for our new discoveries. While social media in particular pitched itself as something that put us all on the same level, behind the scenes levers were already being pulled to shape and to manipulate what was shown and shared.

(That’s okay, people told me. Turn on this feature, or adjust these options, and you get to pull your own levers. That’ll undo everything. You still get to share on your own terms.)

These sites had swelled to envelop us, going from making themselves exciting to making themselves essential. We no longer went online, we were online, always, and we left more and more of ourselves there even when we were away from our screens. Social media allowed you to collect everything together, becoming a place where you could simultaneously read updates from your friends, your parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, your favourite newspaper and your favourite sports team. All in a moment and all competing for your attention. Sites like Google and YouTube started to track and understand the preferences of their users, delivering to them more of what they wanted, working hard to grab and to keep their attention. You liked that dog, that topic, that politician? Here’s another.

Here’s another, again.

I was pulling levers all the time, frantically now, like someone operating locks and gates to try and dam an ever more overwhelming flow. My social media sites had changed from something that I used to something I had to manage. Not only were we all carefully curating who we broadcast to and when, lest we offend an employer or shock a relative, we also found ourselves trying to coordinate and customise them, because if we didn’t they would do this for us. They began to choose what to show us, based on what they believed we cared about, they began to offer us things, based on who they believed we were. They even began to mess with time, giving us information and updates out of chronological order. All of these were changes we often had to undo or at least be mindful of, if we even knew about them. If we wanted to. And if we knew how.

If we didn’t, our reality might shift.

---

I still remember the excitement of our first explorations online. My first favourite website was Snopes, which was then a collection of myths and urban legends, most of them debunked. In the late 90s, bullshit chainletter emails would bounce around the internet with stories about how some Russian scientists had drilled their way to hell, or how a new computer virus had come out, or how Coca Cola dissolved human teeth. Sometimes, the strangest of stories really were true, or at least partially so, but most of them were trash. Thanks to Snopes, you could check such things in a moment. I loved that about the internet.

On September 11th 2001, almost twenty years ago now, it was difficult to disagree about what we saw happening right in front of our eyes. Nevertheless, there were a few people afterward who insisted that a plane had not hit the Pentagon, that the towers had been deliberately demolished, that some more mysterious sequence of events had transpired. They lurked in the darkest corners of the internet, much as they had always existed on any other margins in any other mediums. The rest of us could get on with our lives.

I grew up playing games and then, later, I became someone who analysed, critiqued and even designed them. One of the most powerful and important things I learned through games is that so much in life is based around systems and the longer a system is around for, the better we become at manipulating it. When a game has been around for a long time, we find many different ways to play it and sometimes we have to adjust the rules of the game to account for this. The rules for chess that we have today have seen many adjustments and revisions. The same is true for football. It is also true for our laws and for our systems of government. We have to modify these things in part because times change, but also in part because they are being abused and exploited, subverted in ways their designers never imagined.

Or simply used as optimally as possible.

It’s 2021 and the internet monoliths that we have begun to take for granted, that have surged like the rising oceans to engulf our lives and to carry us along their currents, are constantly being used in ways their designers never imagined. Two years ago, we thought the biggest problem we had with social media and internet monoliths was their subversion to manipulate elections, with great armies of bots and fake profiles being created and directed faster than the people who owned social media sites being able to prevent this. This presence could bring amplification and validity to anyone or to anything. “Learn the algorithm,” was the key to success online. Use a site or social media platform in a particular way and it will elevate you further. Elevate your work. Or your truth. Or just you.

Now, more than a year and a half into a pandemic that defines our generation, the areas of the internet with which we’ve become most familiar and most comfortable, those which we began to pour our lives and identity into, are not only places where elections were subverted, they’re places where the difference between life and death are considered a matter of opinion, where science and fact can be openly ridiculed, where conspiracies about September 11th are tiny in comparison. For some time now they’ve already been well-worn battlefields, public arenas within which opinion and force of will often carry more weight than evidence and reason, but now the consequences of doubling down on a belief are undeniably the difference between living and dying.

More important, for some people, is the difference between right and wrong. Not so much being right, but being seen being right, can give you validity, clout, value. I think we’ve reached the point where dying while being seen as right can matter more than living and admitting a mistake.

The flow of the internet, all those locks and gates opened by algorithms or AI or other people’s decisions that may simply have been motivated by a desire to give us what we like, have made it more difficult than ever to find things that go against the current, or to grasp something we can be sure is objective or straightforward.

One part of me believes that we can no longer look things up in a moment any more, because we have to second-guess every other thing we find. As a journalist and researcher, I never feel secure with what I find on the internet now and I dig, I verify and I compare, still coming away unsure, often worried I will publish something glaringly incorrect. A different part of me, a more dramatic part, sometimes wonders which things are even real.

I suppose anything is real if you can get away with it. If nobody ever notices.

---

There’s another aspect to all this, the aspect that makes me the most uncomfortable. The aspect I least enjoy discussing, but which I have to if I can fully explain myself.

Living alongside the internet, I’ve watched as some of us pull all those levers simply to control the flow as best we can, to keep ourselves afloat, but others have viewed this experience differently. They’ve seen it as a challenge, as another system they can manipulate. It’s an opportunity for them to choose how they present themselves. The more levers they pull, the greater their ability to do so. The more time they invest, the greater the result.

If you take your flashlight, lamp or light source and point it toward an object, you can easily affect the size and the shape of the shadows it will cast. Under your control, those shadows can lengthen or deepen, they can sweep and distort. A light up close can cast a gigantic shadow across a far wall, perhaps a sharp one or perhaps one fuzzy and undefined. Try it. See what you can make. The more you do it, the more tricks you can learn.

All of us try to present our best selves and all of us have our different selves, too. Forty years before I ever went online, the sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, a book about how we behave differently in different contexts. It’s natural for us to speak to our family in a different way to how we speak to our best friend, or to our colleagues, or to a crowd we might be addressing in a speech. It’s not necessarily disingenuous, it’s merely a part of the human experience. But impression management, as Goffman called it, is also a matter of degrees. Some people are more invested than others. If given the tools to perform more effective impression management, more levers they can pull, they will engage even further.

I have flexed a few cynical opinions in my life (at least as many as three, the stats suggest) but, at the same time, I think I have to admit that I have also been very naïve about people. I tend to take many of them on face value and assume they are genuine. Many of us are, perhaps even most of us. But I’ve come to know both that this isn’t always the case and that, given the opportunity, some people will use every tool at their disposal to shape a false version of themselves. We’ve found ourselves in an era where this is more possible than ever. It’s no longer simply within the purview of politicians and PR firms, it’s within reach of every one of us and all we need to do is put in the time and energy. The reward can be ever greater popularity, ever more validation

And I’m so tired of seeing this.

Over the past half decade or so, I have seen the internet and its many systems gamed more than ever. Gamed for political gain, gamed for personal gain and gamed to create images, personalities and that god-awful golem of hollow and lifeless artifice that is brand. Now a person can be a product, a new kind of commodity in this ever more opaque ecosystem.

The nausea and unhappiness I feel from all this is more than the simple declaration that I’m not a brand, I’m a person. It’s the discovery that other people, sometimes people I’ve known, really are a brand now. Their time, their energy, their life is now invested in shaping and maintaining that image, that brand, perhaps even at the expense of other pursuits. And with the right manipulations, the right tugging of the correct levers, they can perpetuate that, build that and further gain the affirmations and validations they need to prove to themselves that what they have created is as solid and as true and as real as anything else. And how would we know any different?

The ocean is not so far from my home. It’s not unusual to walk the beach or the seawall and see people engaged in impromptu photoshoots, dressed in their very best, expertly presented and shot with long lenses. A friend told me that most of these shoots are for the purpose of enriching dating profiles, that there’s an increasing feeling of expectation, a sense that everyone must present their very best selves, simply because everyone else now does so. To be on a dating site is to feel engaged in an ever-escalating competition for time and attention, to need to package oneself as the best possible product.

I don’t at all object to the idea of dating sites, but I could never get comfortable with them and I used to feel like I was browsing a human meat market, that it was all too easy for me to make judgements about people I didn’t know and then cast them aside. I felt, again, like people had become products and this was a system and a process I did not want to be part of. You can game it, people tried to tell me. There are ways to make it work better for you, it just takes a little time. I didn’t want to know.

The more time you spend trying to engage with things that aren’t genuine, the less you have for what is real.

When I use the internet these days it’s with an increasing sense of discomfort and disquiet. I find myself already on the lookout for the artificial. I second-guess people as much as I do information. I’m all too aware of the constructed persona and the deliberate framing, of that angling of a light to cast a particular shadow. In a few cases, this isn’t an abstract concern and social media in particular can be a place where I watch people I know are starkly different to the image they project be celebrated for the false façade they maintain, a façade that can be further reinforced by popularity and prominence. I see harmful and unhealthy people championed even in spite of their actions, because they have managed to engineer support and validation, or using the popularity and affirmation they have gained to push opinion over fact. The disingenuous and the distorted tie together like a greasy braid, each one reinforcing the other, and it’s no wonder falsehoods can spread so far, whether false representations or false information. I would say that sometimes I almost feel like I’m back at school, amongst the same gossip and garbage, but this is far worse than any of the toxic social dynamics and popularity contests that school ever created, and now it comes with measurable metrics in the form of likes, follows, retweets or subscriptions.

I’m sure, at this point, this is a common experience and common concern for most of us, and we are each finding our own ways to handle it.

Or not. For me, the experience is deeply unpleasant.

While drafting this I idly wondered if we could somehow develop a new version of Snopes for human beings. A demystifier of people, something that reveals each person’s private Picture of Dorian Gray, which grows ever more warped as they reinforce their persona ever more. But I’m sure even that would be gamed and subverted before too long.

I'm so, so tired of trying to work out who is real.

---

The internet monoliths I move between in my daily life all have one thing in common. Google, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Facebook, Patreon and so many others are all based in the same place: the United States. They are towering. They overwhelm the rest of the internet. The levers that many of these pull, controlling currents and flow, are being operated in the United States. The politics, existential crises and cultural interests of that country are disproportionately represented and, while I care very much about the United States, I also want to hear about the rest of the world. I want to hear about where I live, and yet even that feels like it comes second. Yes, I am pulling all the levers that are supposed to make this happen. No, it isn’t entirely successful. I am using a paddle against a tsunami.

Once the bias is there, the snowball effect perpetuates. So often, whether I choose to or not, I am in that motel room watching a plethora of American news again, or its modern equivalent. It frustrates me so much. Most of us Westerners essentially live in America some of the time now, if we spend any period online. That’s where our presence and our attention are pointed.

Before publishing this essay, I changed every mention of “torch” to “flashlight” because I felt I had to cater to an internet that sees the first word only as a burning chunk of wood, not as a British battery-powered light source.

The internet doesn’t feel like the world any more. It hasn’t for a long time.

---

I can’t abandon the internet of today. I need it for work. I need it to promote the things I create. I need it to keep in touch with people. I’m not different or special, only someone too bought in as well, my use also going from a habit to a dependency. But it has almost entirely stopped being a place of delight and discovery. It has lost any sense of being egalitarian. So much less is new, so much less is unfamiliar. So much more has an agenda.

Algorithms, metrics and social media have quantified and gamified everything, encouraging competitiveness and narcissism. Public spaces have become arenas and arenas encourage performance. In an attention economy, the outrageous and the overblown mean a cat in a bin can have the same profile and presence as terrorists in a hotel. In spaces that now mix our friends, our parents, Leonardo Di Caprio, the Prime Minister, our favourite newspapers and our favourite sports teams, people we know and love are elevated or relegated according to how interesting an algorithm has decided they are, pushing them to the fore or pulling them from your view. “People on Twitter are the first to know,” says the social network that prides itself on immediacy more than integrity or fact-checking. Misinformation abounds. As the line between person and brand has smudged between all recognition, corporations insert themselves into and between everything else we try to examine. Surrounded by banner ads, the conflicts of polarised culture generate enormous revenue for monolithic American tech companies. As we fight, push our narratives, construct our personas or compete in the race to prove we are the most woke, we all make @Jack richer, or provide Zuck with more of our personal data.

I also find myself reminded of what Octavia Butler called “simple peck-order bullying,” the hierarchical behaviour where people want to, and now can, elevate themselves above others, according to identities they've built for themselves, to push their ideas, push their image, push their sense of superiority or push their opinions so hard that they can reshape them into facts. Anything is possible with enough pulling of enough levers. And now more people have more of those levers. And some of them love to pull and then push, pull and then push.

I don’t like what the internet has turned into, nor what it has turned people into.

So what now?

---

This was an essay inspired by an essay, inspired by an essay, which is always how it goes. Creativity is theft and anyone who says otherwise is only trying to distract you as they secretly shake you down. The eternal question that writers (or anyone creative) is supposed to dread is “Where do you get your ideas?” Because we aren’t supposed to know. But we do know. We get them from everyone else. We thieve them.

Ideas are pickpocketed from the people we pass in twisting evening alleyways, during the briefest moments of darkness and distraction. They’re caught with nets as they flutter with all the freedom of sweet springtime naivete. They’re spied upon from tremendous distances through the jealous lenses of sparkling telescopes. Nothing is truly ours and anyone wringing their words into a desperate defence of some unique capacity for originality ex nihilo is either deceptive or deluded.

(Avoid them. You’re likely their next target.)

This essay was heavily inspired by Lucy Bellwood reflecting on Nicole Brinkley. Both have written nuanced examinations of social media (focusing on Twitter) that I think you should make the time to read, but I’ll try and sum up the main thing I have taken from their writing in one line:

Social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it.

This is in so small part my interpretation, coloured by a particular belief I hold, that being that social media is extremely bad, in a multitude of ways and for many complex reasons, and it is okay to leave it. You can probably see why I approve.

There’s more to it than that. Brinkley talks about Twitter essentially breaking the way the Young Adult literature scene works, which to me is one facet of a dangerously seductive diamond that repeats many different stories of damage done by how we’ve used and gamed the internet. Her wonderful conclusion is that “These days it’s okay to not be sure what Twitter is for. We can stop going there until we figure it out.” And I so desperately wish I could stop going on the internet until I could figure out what it is for now, too. I wish it wasn’t essential. But it is, broken as it may be, breaking things as it may be.

While I don’t think leaving it is an option for me, I am using so much of it less. I have to. Social media, a place where I am shown arguments and controversy over the lives of people I care about, has become somewhere for me to hurriedly hurl out a quick update or two before I flee, escaping before I come across something, or even someone, that will make me sad. Any search box is a cause for scepticism, prompting me to analyse the results it gives and try a dozen different ways to find the same thing, just in case. Even Snopes is now a running commentary on the (American) news cycle. The best I can do whenever I think something fundamental to our society is unhealthy is to participate in that thing as little as possible. I know this limits my reach, limits my relevance and limits my success, but I also know that this makes me less unhappy and allows me to continue to feel genuine. Like I am still myself. Like I am still real. It may be apparent that my mental health has taken a few hits over the last couple of years. It doesn’t need to take any more.

I am not only unsure what Twitter is for, I am unsure what the whole internet is for.

---

There is no conclusion to this essay. It is supposed to be six thousand words of open-ended reflection. The past year or so has sometimes been a huge struggle for me and it really is true that some days I can barely make a pancake. Work has been difficult, writing has been difficult and maintaining regular Patreon updates has been difficult, with this piece being a huge challenge to finish. I think I’ve tried to make the best of things, as well as present an honest but still positive face to the world. I have piles of tasks to get through and I tackle what I can, with what feels like so much competing for my attention. At the same time, I can’t opt out of the systems I live and work inside of, much as I can’t stop paying rent or putting food in my mouth, because individuals can't kick a habit society has become dependent upon. I think the best thing I can do right now is be truthful about all that, try to remain as genuine as I can and continue to step away from what makes me uncomfortable, giving myself some distance from the things that make me unhappy.

That doesn’t mean I’m disappearing (I’m still checking in on social media, streaming on Twitch and so on), nor does it mean this change or this philosophy is forever, nor does it mean that things can’t improve. But it does mean I’m changing a few things about myself, my habits and my preferences. And it does mean I have a working, temporary, if unsatisfactory answer to the question “So what now?”

It is: “We’ll see.”

---

A big thanks to my Patreon community for the links I’m adding here, post-publication.

The first is How sex censorship killed the internet we love, on Endgadget, about controlling the internet in all sorts of ways and about what might be considered explicit (apparently a condom might be explicit).

Then there’s The internet Is Rotting, from the Atlantic, about bits of the internet that are disappearing and the loss of information that comes with it, as well as information that is overwritten and altered. We are keeping less than you might think.

Finally, The web began dying in 2014, here’s how, by André Staltz, talks about the growing prominence of big corporations (all American), what their priorities are, and what online things (services) they may bring to you.