Hello friends,

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Sometimes when I call a friend I haven’t seen for ages, even though we have heaps to talk about, I have no idea what to say. Like, do I start with what I had for lunch or should we talk about that break up you had six months ago? I feel a bit like that now. I haven’t written here since last June, and I gotta say, things around here are looking pretty different.

So, what’s new? The m key on my laptop has stopped working, so whenever I have to use it I have to ctrl+v that baby. Writing a novel without an m key has proven to be annoying, especially when you have capital m’s names like morrie and mum coming up a lot, because then I have to literally google search ‘capital m’ and copy from the wikipedia page so that I can be grammatically correct. Grr. I finished the writing programme in November last year, and am working on having a workable draft for agents and all that publishing stuff in April. I’m looking at slowly shifting into more sustainable work and house situations, not because what I’m currently in is especially bad, but more just that I’ve changed. I have a clearer vision of how I want to be living my life, as well as the energy to pursue it.

I’m so glad that I stepped away from public posting when I did, because 2025 ended up being a year of massive internal work. I’ve been calling it a fallow year, to borrow a land-work term. A fallow year is when you let the land rest and regenerate, to keep the land fertile for future crop yields. 2025 really felt like a year of the soil, the underbelly, the subterranean, the subconscious.

What do I mean by internal work? Well, for starters, I went back into therapy in August last year. Thank you, ELOP. If you’re a queer in London needing affordable therapy, go check them out, they’re amazing. Writing a novel is also massively internal. I’ve really been struggling to care about external world things if I’m being entirely honest, a lot of things have fallen away in the practice of writing. By that I mean I think I’ve stopped caring about things that I can’t be arsed to care about, not that I don’t care about anything at all. Does that make sense? I’m done pretending. I’m unsure if that will shift again when I finish the novel. I’ve been having this quite weird thing where I write something in the novel, not sure where it’s coming from, then a few weeks/months later I realise I was working something out on the page that is now present in my real life.

I also started this hypnotherapy app thing for IBS in October, which has honestly changed my life. I know that sounds like the most Gen Z / woo woo shit ever, but I don’t care. Nothing else helped my gut stuff more than this woman telling me about clearing a garden. I don’t know what to tell you. Then in December I started the Artist’s Way, which I’ll be finishing this week! That has also changed my life quite intensely.

I really struggle to explain what exactly happened last year, so much so that I’m going to be writing a whole thing on it (it’s a whole thing). By capitalist standards, I was sick for most of last year - I struggled to work, to contribute to society, and to take care of my basic living standards. And I was in pain, physical as well as all the other kinds that come with that. But that’s a pretty narrow description of it, and also I think makes it sound worse than it was. It’s more like I was becoming aware of the pain that I had been ignoring for a long time, as I’ve been slowly outgrowing a mode of functioning that really is no longer working for me. So that’s why for me a lot of last year was actually a kind of healing recovery, perhaps for the first real time in my life. It was a transition of states, from surviving into being, which ironically meant I had to feel the most physically shit I’ve felt in a long time. My body continues to surprise me. It was the most confusing thing I think I’ve maybe ever (?) experienced, and that’s all I’m going to say on it for now because I genuinely just need to write this other fucking piece and that’ll explain it better than all this.

All this internal stuff has made me a pretty antisocial and introverted person again. Part of that is a spoons thing, part of that is noticing the friendships that stayed during crises, but I think a lot of it honestly was that I just happened to have two extremely extroverted years (by my standards) in order to establish myself in London. I’m kind of a loner as my baseline, in that I need a lot of alone time in order to be able to do the things that make me happy, and also to be more present for the social and community things that I really care about. That extroversion was largely adrenaline-filled and fear-based; as much as I experienced very loving interactions and slowness as well, it was based on a genuine need for social connections in a place that felt dauntingly isolating. That just isn’t the case anymore.

It’s my birthday on Tuesday, and for the first time I’ve taken the week off of work just to enjoy London and my life here. I had leftover leave accrued, so I thought what the hell. Admittedly, I am spending my actual birthday in Brighton, but that’s mainly because I really wanted to have my birthday by the sea (my beloved). It feels nice to treat myself with a lot of small things, in this city that I really truly love.

My birthday feels oddly auspicious this year. It’s the same day as the Lunar New Year, meaning that it’s also on a new moon. It’s also Shrove Tuesday, or Pancake day. That, combined with the fact that my frontal lobe will now be fully developed (!!!!), idk it feels like a big day. Maybe 25 is the year of my incoming narcissist era.

I’ve been seeing this poem around the tube lately, which has been a comfort. One of the things of the Artist’s Way is synchronicity, little sparks from the universe illuminating your creative path. This poem has popped up in a few synchronous moments, and I thought I’d share it with you.

This winter has been pretty good to me. I was craving it for the second half of last year, because I desperately needed rest and could not properly do so until December. I also didn’t experience a full winter the previous year, because I went back to Australia/NZ. This winter is also the first time in a while that I really set aside proper time for creating, rather than just lopping it next to all of my other responsibilities. I’m fiercely protecting that time now because it feels very precious to me. I’m hoping now to take the lessons I’ve learned from the season into the rest of the year and live more slowly and weirdly, how I want, and - say it with me - NOT OVERWORK mYSELF TO THE BONE.

While I can’t share the novel stuff yet, I do have a couple poems from some recent poetry workshops that I thought I’d put here. It’s been fun to dip back into poetry after a long time, like catching up with an old friend.

This first one is from a poetry workshop last week that I did as part of Page of Wands. We collaborated with LaLa Books, Rough Trade Books, and the poet Ella Frears to host a Valentine’s poetry workshop. It was loads of fun! Also pretty wild for me, you can read here about me reading Frears’ work for the first time. For this exercise we had a list of words that we had to include in the poem and use in unusual ways.

In my room1

My own private world. Confidential goblin,
bearer of my secrets. I whisper into its seeing
ears. Electric light scaffolding my room,
jumping funny on the ledge. The wolf
sleeps in the corner. I’m a dunce, and I know it,
and the wolf knows it, but we together know it.
It sounds like dying but dying’s dead. The
reborn stretches out over the horizon, pink
and blushing, birds freckling the slapped cheeks.
I’m smiling. You’re smiling. I’m -

This second one was from a workshop I did at the ICA the next day, which Field Notes Collective hosted. We had to write a stream of consciousness thing about a body of water of our choice, and then swap it with the person next to us, then write a poem based on the body of water given. I got a beach in New York City, which was fun because I’ve never been there before.

Here I come2

flash of sand smack bang in the dang big apple. slash
of metal in the eye’s corner, skyscraper dreammaker
poking the sky to go higher. history’s here too,
hiding out on the top of the hill, funny thing.
the water sees it all and keeps doing
its thing. true New Yorker. water coming in
from all over, who knows where that can
came carried from? start fresh. start fresh on the sea-
bed of history. what are we in amongst this insanity?
two pebbles crackling under feet. looked over
until we’re not, plucked out and thrown
sky high - you ever seen a rock fly?
skip along memory, until it sinks you back
into the womb. the old and the new.
New York City’s waiting for you.

That’s all from me. I still don’t know what I’m doing with this Substack, but there’s too many other changes going on in my life at the mo to really be thinking about it, soz guys. You may see me again, you may not. But for now, I hope you’ll celebrate with me - that we are nearing the end of winter, the widening days are yawning open again, the daffodils are pushing through the frozen ground stubbornly like the rest of us damn lil fools. I’m happy. I hope you are too.

Lots of love,

Vee

Books (Nonfiction)

1. Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer

2. No is Not Enough, Naomi Klein

3. Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman

Films

1. Everything, Everywhere All at Once

2. Paterson

3. God’s Own Country

Flowers

1. Daffodils

2. Cornflowers

3. Tulips

Social Media People

1. @alokvmenon

2. @seth.hughes

3. @michael__mezz

Books (Fiction)

1. The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions, Larry Mitchell

2. Stoner, John Williams

3. The Overstory, Richard Powers

T.V. Shows

1. Ted Lasso

2. Feel Good

3. Heartstopper

Coastlines

1. North Shore (specifically, the beaches facing Rangitoto Island)

2. Bondi to Coogee Coastal Walk

3. Sussex Coast

Poets.

1. Mary Oliver

2. Ocean Vuong

3. Ada Limon

Songs

1. Going to California, Led Zeppelin

2. Reflecting Light, Sam Phillips

3. The Bug Collector, Haley Henderickx

Parks

1. Hampstead Heath

2. Merri Creek

3. Kell Park

I’ll leave you with a picture of me as a wee baby in Sydney with mama. Two years later, we’d make the move (me, my sister, my mum and dad) from the UK to Aotearoa, ready to begin again.

Take care my loves!

Dear friend,

I love the fact that we are made of dead stars. Something that was once so powerful that it tethered entire planets into its orbit now rests in a fingernail, in the lattice of a ribcage, in the lining of our eyes. We are simultaneously young and ancient. It reminds me of why death is important and necessary: so that new things can be born, and so that the universe has the opportunity to reinvent itself once again.

Someone asked me once, I can’t remember why, what my theory was on the afterlife. I responded with a physics law. Sidebar: I actually loved physics at school, I found it fascinating how it gave a scientific explanation for all the forces that guide our lives unseen. The law I gave was on the conservation of energy: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one kind to another. I’d said that I found this comforting, to know that the energy that once moved my muscles, turned air into my voice, and jumped from synapse to synapse in my brain would still continue on in some way or another, regardless of what happened to the vessel of my body.

I wonder how we would consider the use of energy differently if we considered energy as our ancestors. What would we continue to (em)power if we considered that the energy that made our grandma’s laugh, the blooming of daffodils in the winter, an old cat’s flicking tail or our backyard tree growing up could now be the energy that powers empty corporate buildings overnight, freight ships full of rubbish to be sent overseas for burning, if it’s the energy that goes into making a single plastic cup. What would happen if we imbued sacredness into everything we touch?

Death feels particularly present at the moment on a global scale. I fear that many of us (myself included) have not learned how to approach death candidly; it’s one of the reasons why the pandemic was so mentally tough, and why people don’t like to talk about it today.1 I fear that we are so caught up in how to find our way back to safe waters that we are forgetting that those waters weren’t particularly safe for everyone to begin with. Most importantly, I fear that we are missing the fact that there is potential, if we can grasp it, for rebirth amongst all of this. Somehow, the far-right are envisioning a future (a terrible, fascist one) much better than we are. We may very well be witnessing the fall of the American empire, a genocidal project at its peak in Palestine, and the slow, sputtering death of the reigning mode of economy for the past few centuries. These are not aberrations, but rather decades of politics reaching their tipping point, their final evolution.2 It is not enough to decry all of these things then go back to life as normal, because life as normal is what led us here.

One of the most critically important things we can do right now is to engage with our imagination seriously, and consider alternative ways of living to the destruction around us. If that sounds unrealistic to you, I would urge you to engage with Indigenous and Black Feminist literature (I can happily provide a list if you’d like!) - there is a way to live in harmony with nature and with each other, and it has been done before.3 I don’t think that all of this violent, selfish energy can last forever, because nothing does. It will change, like all things, but the small & beautiful role we get to play as members of the human species is that we get to influence what that energy will turn into.

I went to the Tate Modern exhibition of the AIDS memorial quilt last weekend, and it was one of the most moving pieces of art that I have seen in years. I knew generally that AIDS was a tragedy, and have learned about the many people, artists, family members and friends that were lost; but when faced with dozens of quilts lovingly handcrafted for individuals who’d died, I felt overwhelmed by the grief in the room. Nearly everyone around me was sniffling as they shuffled past the lives taken decades too soon. Partway through, some members of Aids Quilt UK read out the names of those who’d died. As I stood amongst the crowd, hearing mundane first names read with reverence, I felt as though the spirits of those named people came into the room, lounging amongst the quilts, laughing and dancing in their youth once again. Giving them the space to be seen gave them a new life, a way of coming into the 21st century, on the backs of those who remember.

Dear friend, in what ways do you respect and honour death? Are there any parts of your life that need to die so that something new can be born? Do you trust your sense of creativity? And if you could consider rebirth as a gift from death, what would you like to receive?

Thank you all for coming along with me on this journey over the past year. I’m hoping that this small death will provide fertile ground for the next project to bloom. I’ll be back soon, but until then - catch ya.

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

Talking about love in a personal blog seems to be a right of passage. Something about the end of this project is making me think about all the big, central things in my life and it felt silly not to talk about love, what so many of us centre our lives around. In this postcard I’ll be focusing on four kinds of love that govern my life: self, platonic, romantic, & spiritual.

Self

Leaving Aotearoa for Australia at seventeen and now living very far from home on my own has meant that I know how to get myself through challenging situations. I have been thrown into a lot of crazy experiences - like spending lockdown in Melbourne during uni, navigating a degree I found very tough, and starting from zero in London again. What I find much more difficult is knowing when the challenging situation is one that I should be going through (as in, it’s either good for my growth or it’s out of my control), or if I’ve made my life unnecessarily difficult for no good reason. I sometimes worry that I don’t let myself just enjoy life enough, and I have a slightly dangerous combo of being a bit of a workaholic and a (recovering) people pleaser. I’ve also noticed that when I’m running from something in my personal/emotional life I really bury myself in work, which is a pretty consistent recipe for burnout. With that being said, the little kindnesses I show myself now are a far cry from the me from five years ago, and I’m keen to practice other ways of being gentler to myself as I get older.

Platonic

Friendship is something that I simultaneously hold very close to me and feel very distant from. Maybe it’s the Aquarius in me. I’ve never been the sort of person that hangs out with their mates every day after school (mostly because I was running around doing a million extra-curriculars instead), and yet out of all the people in my adult life, it is my friendships that have shaped me into the person I am today. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without them, especially my mates from uni. I am so grateful to my friends for seeing things in me that I can’t, for being a shoulder to cry on or a person to laugh with, and most of all I’m grateful that my friends have made me feel like being my real self is not just tolerable - it’s better than any kind of persona I attempt to be. For someone who used to think that trusting anyone was a mistake and that being alone was the ideal, the value I find in my friendships feels like one of the most marked changes about my adulthood.

But those old walls still exist. I’m continually reminding myself that trying to pretend that everything is okay when it isn’t & attempting to be Superman by exceeding expectations only distances me from the people who love me. I don’t think I am always a very good friend; I reflexively pull distance when I’m stressed and can disappear on people for a bit. I can also find parts of social things very overwhelming and stressful, and it can be hard to articulate to my friends that my inability/struggle to do some of these things isn’t because of them, but rather just because of the way my brain works. But I guess it’s all a process, isn’t it? If you’re a friend of mine and you’re reading this, thank you for being in my life! I appreciate you.

Romantic

Romantic love is honestly the love I neglect the most. Part of it is that I don’t really like dating, it’s a recipe for overthinking & general social chaos for me, but I also just don’t think I could handle a relationship right now. When I fall for someone I tend to really commit in a way that freaks me out as someone with the aforementioned distance and walls, which I fear makes me quite a confusing person to date. Honestly, it feels like I’ve got a million things to work out on my own before I enter a relationship, and I can’t tell if this is a good thing (learn to love yourself before you love others) or a bad thing (you are only loveable if you’re perfect; works in progress are not loveable).

When I experienced romantic love for the first time a couple years ago, it rattled me to my core and shook me on the shoulders, as though to say wake up! Everything that I had thought to be romantic love up until that point were mere shadows of the real thing. I had this feeling as though everything in the world had been moved just one inch to the right, and I was seeing everything clearly for the first time in my life. Even though it didn’t work out, something has irrevocably changed in me since then, and interestingly it’s probably most clearly affected my sense of creativity for the better.

Spiritual

I find spiritual love the hardest to articulate, especially as I find it outside of religion. I think for me, my sense of spirituality comes from both creativity and nature. When I think of spirit, I think of a collective unity that goes beyond physicality, a kind of love that exists on the edges of our consciousness and outside our traditional axes of time and space. Sometimes I’ll go to the trees or the sea looking for answers and they’ll tell me what I need to hear, like a listening aunt or old friend. Someone who is a skeptic may say that I’m just talking to myself and sure, maybe that is all it is. But the answers are often not what I was expecting, or conclusions that I would come to ‘by myself’. It’s kind of like when you’re talking with your dog or something and you know they can hear you and are responding to you, even if you have completely different ways of communicating. Similarly, when I write something, there are many times where I don’t fully understand what or why something is coming out of me, and yet there it is - and these often end up being my and others’ favourite pieces. Creativity, at its best, often feels to me like engaging in a kind of translation of the spiritual, a conversation with but also beyond myself.

Dear friend, what kinds of love do you find most present in your life? How do they make you feel, and how have your loves changed over the years?

Lots of love (you know it),

Vee

Dear friend,

My time studying classical music at uni feels like an entirely different life to what I do now as a writer. There are times where I’ve wished I’d gone and studied something like English Lit instead to better set myself up, but I’ve realised recently that my experiences in the music world have proven unexpectedly useful in my writing. In an odd way, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today without the bedrock of my music teachings. So what did I learn?

The first is the importance of practice. One of the many things that was hammered into my skull throughout high school and uni was that talent only took you so far; the best cellists were those that yes, had talent, but more importantly were dedicated to their practice, working at their craft consistently to fully realise that natural talent. Now, classical music has a tendency to go overboard and guilt-trip you if you can’t (or don’t want to) practice 3-5 hours a day, and I think what many musicians conveniently forgot was that you generally needed money as well as hard work and talent to be a successful classical musician (y’all, that shit is expensive as hell). I am, however, very grateful to have learned this lesson early on. Writing is hard work, and like any creative art it is a craft that takes time to develop. When I was getting back into writing a couple years ago and I’d feel frustrated that I couldn’t quite articulate my feelings into words or would feel stuck on things like structure and rhythm, I knew that the solution was to write more, rather than less. I think there’s a common trope amongst writers that if you’re naturally talented, your words will just flow out of you fully formed, and that those who struggle to write should take it as a sign that they shouldn’t be writers. The reality, most often, is just that the writing skill itself needs more craft, which is almost laughably simply to fix, if it weren’t also the things most writers dread: write more shit stuff, until the shit stuff eventually becomes not-so-shit.

I knew I had a lot to learn as a writer when I properly started it again in ~2022, which is why in early 2023 I did this challenge of writing a piece every day for a month about the sea and posting it on my Instagram1. It’s also why I did a weekly challenge at the end of 2023 that ended up morphing into a weekly poetry-writing practice (that later formed the substance of my poetry book last year), and it’s also why I started this weekly Substack last year. To quote my first postcard (forgive me for the indulgence), “I am learning to be bad at things. I think you have to be pretty comfortable with looking like an idiot at times if you want to eventually be good at what you do.”

The second lesson I learned was to embrace failure. I have failed so many times as a musician that it’s almost funny. I had pretty debilitating performance anxiety - I often felt like I played at around 50% of my capacity on stage versus at home - and I also had a lot of problems with my instrument and general lack of experience compared to some of my fellow students. One failure I still remember wryly was when I was sixteen. I’d gotten into this fairly prestigious music academy in NZ, the kind that prepared you for a life in music. There were kids of all ages in there, and every Saturday we’d have classes and performance masterclasses at the University of Auckland’s yellow piano-shaped conservatory. In one of my first masterclasses there, I did a terrible performance of a piece, to the point where I honestly just wanted to stop midway and end the misery there. When it came time for feedback, the teacher asked for any positive notes first. Crickets. Then this one kid - a 9-year-old violin prodigy - piped up earnestly: “I think it’s good that even though you made mistakes, you kept going.” Ooft. I honestly don’t think any career failure is going to ever make me feel as small as a child prodigy telling me to keep it up pal, you’ll get there, though partly because I’m no longer in the melodramas of teenagehood. She meant well. I’ve had people clap in the middle of my performance, almost dropped my bow because my palms were so sweaty, and forgotten the music even as it lay right in front of my eyes. But I also had good performances, and I did eventually get my degree.

Writing failures feel like a walk in the park in comparison. Got a rejection from a magazine? There’s others! Messed up your poem on stage? Laugh it off! Realised you overshared on an open-mic stage? You don’t need to see any of those people again. I’ve also realised that writing generally comes much more naturally to me than cello ever did, and a lot of that performance anxiety is lessened now that I don’t have to be completely stiff & silent on stages. I am grateful for the resilience those early failures have built into me because it means that now I just go for things and am okay with failing publicly; I actually know now that it’s important to fail and for people to see my failures, because it liberates me from the desire to only be perfect. This comfort with failure is why I could post things that I wrote in a day on social media (even though I knew most of them were not very good), it’s why I felt like I could self-publish my poetry book last year, and it’s why I went for things like the 4th Estate competition, the LWA programme I’m on this year, and it’s definitely why I’m writing a novel now rather than 10 years later. I know that if I fall flat on my face I can assess the damage, have a laugh, and pick myself up again.

Dear friend, I’m sad to be ending these postcards soon. These weekly posts have become something of a ritual, and I enjoy the practice of putting something up each week, some more well-edited than others because of course they will be, life happens. It’s been interesting to read some of my first postcards and see how much my writing has changed; it makes me excited about what’s next. To be honest, I hope to come back here at some point, ideally at the start of next year after my writing programme has ended and I (fingers-crossed) have finished a good draft of my novel. But really, who knows - I may decide to never post online again, or come back in a couple months. I keep changing my mind! In any case, you’re not quite rid of me yet - three more to go.

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

At the start of the year, I coined 2025 as ‘the year of the body’ for myself. No more dissociating, I told myself. No more escaping to the mind.

I don’t think I could have anticipated just how forcefully this idea would make itself known in the coming months. I’ve been quite sick over the course of March and April, to the point where it was affecting my ability to work and, for a brief moment, I was questioning whether I should be preparing to come back home. It wasn’t so much the severity of it as much as the complete randomness with which it seemed to occur, where anything could end up being a trigger that would debilitate me for at least a day. Thankfully, the worst of it now seems to be over, and I’m working with a doctor to learn how to better take care of my body’s needs.

One thing that has massively helped my symptoms has been stretching and exercise. I used to exercise pretty regularly, all throughout school and uni, up until about 2021. Something changed in 2022, and though I knew I should be prioritising my physical health, somehow the act of actually doing something felt like trying to grasp at a ship moving into fog. But now it came to a point of either acknowledging my body or potentially sitting in bed for days because I ate beans. So I stretched.

I surprised myself by how good it felt. I felt as though I’d had something returned to me; a heightened awareness and appreciation for my body. I’ve started running again, and I went climbing for the first time last week. I can feel when I need to stretch, when my muscles are searching for some kind of release. I knew that a lot of my time was spent in my mind - it’s kind of what happens when you’re a writer - but I thought I was still doing enough in my day-to-day life working in hospitality & walking around town to consider myself active. Yet something has fundamentally changed since adding these little moments to my week. Why wasn’t I doing all this before, when I can feel how my body becomes more joyous when it moves?

When someone uses the wrong pronouns, I leave my body. I watch the flutter of confusion on my face - who is this she that’s entered the conversation? - settle into composure as I depart from my body, imagining how I look to the other person, what markers made them see something that isn’t me (are they markers I can change?), before slamming back into my body, reduced to my individual parts. Most of the time it’s an innocent mistake - a side effect of working in a customer-facing role and talking regularly to strangers - but then innocent intentions behind the act don’t hide the act itself.

Most of the time, me and my body are friends. Sometimes we’re cordial, sometimes we get along like a house on fire and sometimes we bicker with each other, fighting over who gets the right of way. I have always felt a certain degree of separation from my body; there are many times where people have referred to my body where I feel that they are talking about something that is not me. For a long time, I thought this was an objectified-female body thing; when I was younger, I could give you a complete list of every single part of my body and how it didn’t live up to the expectations of female beauty. I don’t do that anymore, partly because I now know I’m not a woman but also because I like the little quirks of my body these days.

The days when my body and I are enemies are the days when I feel massively dysphoric. These are the days when I get frustrated that the people around me cannot see the me that is trapped within my body, when I nitpick over the things I wear and how my voice sounds in an attempt to bridge the gap. Then the days will pass and the wind will change, and I will negotiate myself back into loving this body whilst also acknowledging that there are ways to make this body more my body, all the while not quite sure when the next onslaught of dysphoria will hit.

In some ways, I am grateful to have a very sensitive body. I am a sensitive person emotionally, so it makes sense that my body also reacts to things intensely. There are many things that have happened in my life where my body knew what was happening before my mind did, where my body led the decision-making whilst my brain tried to catch up. My body cannot really handle dishonesty, most often when I’m lying to myself. It will call me out when I have unrealistic expectations and I’m pushing people away, letting my work enclose all around me. It will protest until I am forced to listen. Some of my most profound understandings of what I need to change comes about when I’m sick, like when I realised I needed to leave music, or to leave my manager job last year, or when I needed to leave my relationship. I’m not trying to give a higher purpose or meaning to illness, because being sick just blatantly sucks. But I have found that some of my moments of illness have helped me to better understand my times of good health.

I am determined to find a way back to my body, to embodiment, to the bodily joys of life. I see my physical and spiritual self like a venn diagram of two bodies, and I want to see what happens when they come together, overlap each other entirely. I know we always joke about the body being a temple, but I think it’s taken this year for me to truly realise that this body is a blessed vessel that carries me through life, something that I want to feel strong within and deeply connected to. I don’t think anyone benefits when I keep my distance from bodily joy. It certainly isn’t me, as self-protective as these measures seem to be.

Dear friend, how do you worship your body? Honour or respect it? How can you shake the shame, if you have any, hidden in the nooks and crannies of your beautiful bones?

Take care, my loves. Go and be a moving body in nature, and take a moment to be in awe of the moving things all around you. It really all is kind of marvelous, isn’t it?

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

Who gets to be safe?

This is a bleak question to ask, I know. But I’ve been thinking about this a lot. I grew up in the very sheltered outer suburbs of Auckland, in a country so tucked away from the world that we used to joke that if World War 3 happened, no one here would even know. Now I live in a city that is almost laughably unsafe, where people’s reaction to seeing crime, poverty and violence is often one of shrugging it off and moving on before it fully sinks in. When I came to work one day last year to find police tape cordoning off part of the entryway, our customers throughout the day simply remarked “that’s London for you,” before ordering an oat flat white. I think there was only one other customer who was as concerned as I was, who hadn’t yet been deadened by a stabbing happening in such close quarters.

Moving to London has forced me to reckon with an assumption I had that everyone knows what safety feels like. I’ve had an immense privilege growing up knowing that I’d always have food on the dinner table and a roof over my head. Yet I have also begun to question the kind of safety I had growing up; while I knew I had it pretty lucky all things considered, I felt a strong sense of loneliness and isolation. It was only when I moved to Melbourne that I really let myself trust others and myself a bit more, and I still feel a continual surprise here and there that people actually like me for me. I’ve always assumed this was just a me thing, and that my inability to just enjoy the simple contentment of suburban life was a personal fault that was my burden to bear. But it’s only more recently that I properly recognised how suburbia promises safety on the basis that you conform; your safety is dependent on how much you are willing to (or have to) hide, as well as what your personal threshold for deception is before something inside you breaks that’s beyond your bones.

Physical and emotional safety are both essential human needs, but the former feels much more easy to identify than the latter. I have felt conscious throughout all my life of being an outsider, a black sheep, aberrant - because to be myself was to be subject to emotional harm - yet not once did I ever consider this to be a matter of safety growing up. I’m hardly unique in saying this. There are countless books, TV shows, and movies that talk about the underlying threat of violence in these otherwise picture-perfect ‘safe’ spaces, particularly if you’re a minority. There’s a reason why communities are stronger amongst those who face discrimination - when you don’t belong in safe spaces, you make them for yourself, and you need people to share that space together.

It is becoming clearer and clearer to me that the majority of the population in the UK, if not most of the world, is unsafe. Even if we ignore the fact that the UK has a staggering 21% of the population living below the poverty line and that this country is seeing vicious attacks on immigrants, women, people living with disabilities and queer folk - even if we ignore all of these things, there is the broad safety concern which is, quite simply, our ecological future on our planet. There are actually not very many people that live across all the different axes of privilege - and even those who do are not fully protected from life’s difficulties - which means that the majority of British people are struggling with some aspect of their life that makes them subject to harm or violence.

If we were to accept this fact, that on some level we are fundamentally always a bit unsafe,1 how would that change our behaviour? Many of us have been taught that we will achieve safety if we put our head down and do what we’re told - to speak softly so we won’t be seen as bossy women, to be a model minority, to work through the corporate ranks, and so on. This tends to rely on an individualistic mindset; if we ignore the needs of those around us and focus on ourselves, we can achieve security. Yet that doesn’t reflect what actually promotes safety and comfort; we have ancestrally been social beings primarily as a means for protection. If we can reshape our thinking to recognise that our connections to one another are what provide us a sense of safety - including those who are very different from ourselves - how would our priorities shift in our everyday lives? Would we be willing to take more personal risks for the sake of a wider, communal sense of safety? Would we be more willing to show our solidarity for those in danger, because we know there may be a time where we need that support too? Can we have a language around safety that recognises our basic human need for it, whilst also recognising that safety is a negotiation, hardly stable, subject to an unpredictable world?

Dear friend, do you consider yourself safe? If you do, I’d recommend taking a moment to express your gratitude for this gift however you can. Are there ways that you can support the people around you who do not feel safe in their everyday lives? And if you don’t consider yourself safe, well first of all a virtual hug from me. Secondly, don’t feel like you’re alone. There are so many community spaces that are pockets of comfort and protection in amongst these turbulent times, and while talking to people doesn’t necessarily make things physically safer, they do make things emotionally much more easy to bear.

I really hope this wasn’t too bleak of a read - I wrote this with the genuine desire for it to be hopeful, rather than depressing. Sometimes I feel like we’re all aware of these things anyways, and saying the unsaid can help us to break harmful patterns. Writing these postcards in a time of global turmoil is an interesting task; I am not sure if the way I approach it is the right way, but I hope it resonates with some of you.

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

Why do we make art? This is a conversation I fell into recently with someone. He’d confessed to a feeling of creative block, having no desire to make neither art or music like he normally does. Amongst other things,1 I suggested the importance of making art with no intention of sharing it; making art just for your own sake, something that simply in pleasing you (or making you feel awe, wonder, whatever emotion it may be) is enough.2

But for this person, to make art and not show it is to make it meaningless; sharing art is difficult, yes, but a necessary bravery in order to create something meaningful. I couldn’t disagree more, and I said as much. I view the world as generally meaningless and random (nothing really matters! how exciting!), so I get my meaning from what I personally believe my reality to be. I’ve decided the things that I will and will not value, knowing that if I don’t decide then those things are decided for me and often end up as obstacles to my desires. With this perspective, art only for one’s internal world becomes incredibly important in understanding what your internal reality is, compared to the external one presented to you. While my friend also sought to define an objective good or bad art, I am generally wary of searching for such an objectivity, and I think a large amount of that comes from the fact that people like me generally don’t belong in these ‘objective’ canons of Great Art, and that such an objectivity tends to historicise the present rather than simply enjoying the fleeting thing in front of you. We have no idea what art will survive the century, no matter what the critics try to say. Art is protean, always shifting.

My interior world is something I craft carefully. Ever since I realised last year that social media had stolen my sense of a private world (you can read more on that here) I have been on a mission to enjoy the effervescence of the private world, where moments bubble, pop and disappear, waiting for no one to capture them. There are many things I do in a day that the majority of the people in my life are broadly unaware of, whether that’s the album I chose to listen to in the morning, the baby chicks that made me smile by the canal on my lunch break, or the line in a book that made me gasp. Private moments like these imbue the everyday with a sense of sacredness.3 When I choose to share these things in conversation, the feeling is that of opening a bridge between my world and someone else’s. They may cross the bridge and find something that they enjoy, or maybe they’d rather somewhere different. Either way, my decision to invite them in is conscious. Social media, by comparison, feels like having a robo-pigeon infiltrate my little garden, with no idea what is broadcast, or when, or to whom. Only I’m also somehow the robo-pigeon. Crossing the bridge requires a mutual kind of bravery, or vulnerability - not unlike the bravery my friend says is needed to share art. Surveillance requires no such bravery - or rather, the bravery is no longer reciprocal or an exchange, just one person shouting into the void, hearing nothing except the occasional buzz of another like.

Dear friend, I write this to you at a diner table, where I’ve just eaten dinner alone (it was delicious, by the way). I don’t really know what I’m trying to say anymore - I should know by now that no answer to the question on the purpose of art ever does it the full justice, like asking why we love. If there is anything I can say, I think it is this: the more that I have cultivated a sense of an interior life, one where I make a priority to be with myself, the more able I feel to truly listen to the people and the world around me. The self has a way of making itself known, and if you don’t give yourself to it then it will steal time away from your loved ones until they become mere props for the ego.

Dear friend, do you have a manifesto on the purpose of art? How about a quiet idea that works for you? If you’re willing to share, please do - but if you want to keep it for you, I very much understand.

Lots of love,

Vee

P,S, I’m so sorry if you’ve been getting emails from me promoting a paid subscription - that was Substack, not me, and actually please don’t get a paid subscription because I will be ending the weekly posts in just over a month!

Dear friend,

I think I’m entering a hermit phase. I do this every now and then, often after a period of significant change. My life has been quite extremely chaotic since last August (I could also make the case that it’s been chaotic since last January, or since April 2023 when I first moved here …) and it is only now that I feel properly settled into my job, my writing programme, and my life here in London that I feel able to actually let go of the reins and recharge.

I’m by nature an introvert. I like my own company, and while I love to see my friends and talk with people, I need alone time if I want to have a clear sense of how I’m doing. Often when I’m overdoing it socially and/or workwise I won’t fully realise how exhausted I am until it hits me like a truck and I’m completely out for several days. I am also quite a socially anxious person, although this has gotten easier to handle over the years. But the past couple years have required a different energy - one of extroversion, of putting myself out there time and time again, taking risks - in order to make London home. And I welcomed it; I surprised myself by how easy it felt to be around people for most of the day while working in a bustling cafe, coming home to fourteen flatmates, and talking for most of the day. I actually have more capacity for extroversion than I’d realised, and have learned that I don’t need to retreat into myself when I don’t feel good.

When I first came here, I was very invested in making the most of London by visiting all the different must-go places and immersing myself in the cultural scene here as much as possible. I also travelled quite a lot, going to Barcelona, Edinburgh, Berlin, Paris, Zadar, and Tossa de Mar in the space of just over a year, as well as travelling around the UK to Brighton (as we all know), Margate, Hertfordshire, Oxford, Cambridge, and in and around all the different London boroughs. I’ve tried a lot of things once to satisfy my curiosity. Underlying all of this was a restlessness, a sense of unmooring; it’s hard to describe the sheer weirdness of not being able to geographically place where you are, and the usual signposts of friends, a job, a house, schooling, even just cultural familiarity, were absent. So it feels exciting to me now that this restlessness has been replaced by a sense of belonging, and with that a desire to establish a more connected relationship to the places around me than the roving, fragmented attention of the past couple years.

It is really hard to tell where a general introversion ends and where a kind of social anxiety begins. I’m very excited to cultivate more alone-time for myself and to feel strong again after a stressful and occasionally debilitating few months. I’m also asking myself if this hermitting is a retreat from the world. I would be lying if I said the recent attacks on trans rights in the UK have not impacted the way I view public spaces and my comfort within them. I have already had people say things to me on the street, in bathrooms, and I’m not sure how much things will escalate. But it also isn’t just this, it’s all the politics of the now; 2025 so far has felt as though every week comes with a new update on a steadily unravelling global situation, each requiring time to sit with and feel fully. But before I get the time to digest, the next thing has already slammed into me and knocked me off-kilter.

While a lot of all this is out of my control, what I can control is my reaction to things. In spending more time alone, am I operating from a place of love, or a place of fear? I like to think it’s mostly love, and the bits of fear I’ll get to in my own time. In my focus on settling into London I’ve neglected other parts of my life that are now calling for my attention, and I’m looking forward to tending to these quietly and slowly. I have this inexplicable feeling of being in the calm before the storm right now (not necessarily in a negative sense), and I’ve learned to trust my gut on these things. I want to spend a good chunk (if not the rest) of this year building myself up again, doing simple basic things that make me feel good. Start cycling in London. Write my novel. Sort my health out. Spend time with nature. I don’t actually want much else.

Dear friend, in which situations do you operate out of love, and are there situations where you operate out of fear? What changes are you thinking of making this year, if any? How does being alone feel for you?

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

I have always lived in a city. Born in London, raised in Tāmaki/Auckland, university in Naarm/Melbourne, and now London again. Yet throughout my life, I’ve always dreamed of eventually moving somewhere closer to nature; when I was in primary school, my dream was to live on a farm, surrounded by chickens and dogs and writing books from a little garden shed.

This tension between the desire for both an urban and rural life regularly confuses me. Why do I keep choosing cities, when what I want is to be in nature? I felt this contradiction very strongly last year, as homesickness crept up on me and I felt overwhelmed by the demands of London. But this year, something has changed. Going back home and being in nature in Aotearoa and still choosing London has settled this itch to move. I realised that I want the stimulation and creative inspiration of London, and now I’m content with my decision that this is where I will be living for this part of my life.

I remember reading somewhere a while ago that technically, cities are still a part of nature, because humans are nature and so the things we build - much like bees and their hives, beavers and their dams - are still part of the natural world. Essentially, this assumption of cities as ‘other’ or antithetical to nature only reifies the division of humans as ‘other’ to nature as well, when in reality we are part of the ecosystems in which we live.

I am trying to reframe my life to better reckon with this unintentional bias that most of us have: that humans can be separated from the rest of the world (the same logic that suggests we can cheat death, live on Mars, ruin the planet for profit, etc.). Some things are proving easier than others, and this idea of natural cities is a difficult pill to swallow. There is such a difference in experience I find in being in urban versus rural spaces, and a lot of that difference for me is that feeling of connectedness to the other species around me. Cities are very human-centric, which is part of their beauty (the density of people providing interesting arts, culture, food, & conversations), whilst in rural areas what I find beautiful are the encounters with plants, creatures and landscapes. The relationship between humans and their environment feels far more transactional in cities, and at least in London it can feel very difficult to establish a strong connection to the land beneath your feet when landlords can evict you with a month’s notice, accessibility of third spaces is constantly fluctuating, and most people’s relationship to plants and animals are restricted to the indoors and the domesticated.

But perhaps the problem with cities isn’t the concept of a city itself, but rather precisely this notion that a city should be antithetical to wilderness and to nature, another way for man to show his dominion over all other forms of life. What would cities look like if we perceived them as part of the natural landscape, in communion with nature rather than displaced from it?

I asked myself this question as I walked home one day. The more I thought about it, the more excited I felt. Some ideas:

• Solar panels and urban farms on rooftops, or plants for CO2 absorption

• Transport options as primarily underground or raised above ground to allow for free (slower) movement for humans, animals, and bikes. Heavily reduced car usage.

• Coffee shops without single use products; you either bring in a keep cup or you buy a keep cup there (or just have in).

• Increased urban farms (from above) allowing for more opportunities for urban kids to learn about the complex ecosystems that their city provides

• A move towards zero waste and single-use items in general (personal opinion, public bins often mean people do not consider the amount of waste they produce and also contribute to pest infestations)

• Local recycling and waste programs rather than offloading to other areas/countries, also allowing for community involvement & sense of responsibility

• Housing to move away from private ownership and more towards housing associations / government housing, allowing people to feel able to settle into a suburb longer-term and build community

• Allowing parks to be spaces of both recreation and agriculture, utilising local grasses and trees that can help feed the local population (less perfect lawns!)

• Houses fitted with insulation like this one, that is healthier for both us and the planet (often times these are the same thing) whilst reducing electricity needs

• Repair workshops that allow us to relearn the skills of mending our clothes, fixing bikes, repairing household items

• Supermarkets with reduced plastic packaging, local produce prioritised/cheaper to promote both local farmers and carbon offset

A lot of these ideas are heavily inspired by books and articles that I’ve read on transitioning to a degrowth or circular economy, and a lot of these ideas are already in motion in the UK and worldwide as well!

The modern city is a convenient city, but the price of convenience is ecological devastation as well as an epidemic of isolation. Really the two follow the same logic. We first isolate ourselves from our natural environment, then each other, because if the logic is that humans can be superior or separate to the animals and plants around us, then that logic can easily extend to within the diversities of humans themselves, until it’s just one lone human against the rest. I like to think that a system that values and is kind to our environment will also encourage us also to be kinder towards one another, and kinder towards ourselves.

Dear friend, one of my favourite ever books, Invisible Cities, explores this idea that cities are an essential part of humanity and that they reflect the human condition; the worst of cities is the worst of humans, as is the best of it. If you live in a city, what does your environment say about the psyche and values of its inhabitants? Cities will still be a necessity even in a more ecological future, as they reduce our impact on larger wilderness areas and have the potential to be environmentally efficient for dense human populations. But how can we develop them so that they reflect the kind of people we want to be? Perhaps there will be a future in which me writing in a little garden shed with some chickens is not entirely the opposite to living in a city after all.

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

Last Friday marked my two year anniversary with London. It feels pretty special to me; partly because of all the ways that I’ve learned and grown since that day I arrived at Heathrow with a suitcase, duffel bag, and a backpack, already half-hallucinating from the jetlag, but also because London has been a dream of mine for a really long time, and this anniversary serves as a reminder that I’m actually getting to live the life that I’ve wanted since I was a kid.

I was born in London back in ‘01, at Guy’s Hospital right by London Bridge. We lived here for a couple years before moving to Aotearoa New Zealand in ‘03; my dad at thirty-four moving back to a country he’d barely lived in since uni, my mum at thirty moving to a country she’d never really known, me at two and my little sister at one, all on a thirty-hour journey to a new home. We didn’t return again until 2014 for a family trip. I was thirteen and wearing these neon blue and yellow Nike sneakers that were my favourite at the time, along with some questionable skinny jeans. I’m pretty sure I’d also just gotten braces.

I ended up writing a short story about the trip during high school (lost to a self-wiping Google Drive …); about us landing in Heathrow when we thought we were still in the clouds (that damn fog), about the electric hum of a city with more people than our entire country, about this vague sense of familiarity as we walked around where our old flat was, all these narrow winding streets that were a far cry from the open roads and steep hills of Auckland. My parents used to talk a lot about London and how it was some of the best years of their lives, and then we were there seeing it, these other people we all could have been if we’d stayed. It felt like we could bump into another version of ourselves if we just turned the right corner. Going back to a place you’ve left always feels a bit like that, I’ve found.

When we got back home, I remember googling how much it cost to rent a flat in London, and trying to make calculations of the kind of money I’d need to have to move there. Could I start saving up my pocket money? Start working? I could try go to uni there, I told myself, looking at music conservatories in London and dreaming of studying at the Royal Academy or something. But uni would be forever away, at least five whole years. So London became the golden Big Ben keychain I’d put on my schoolbag; a memory to admire every so often, something shiny to get me through the years whilst my life went elsewhere. Of course, uni in London did not happen - can you imagine if it did? I don’t think I would have liked London as a student, even if it had been a legitimate option. But Naarm was a beautiful gift in itself, and I really am so grateful for the four years I got to have there - even the two covid years. In fact, because I was feeling so surprisingly settled there I was tempted to do away with the London dream altogether - or at least, for the next little bit - and just enjoy what I had in front of me.

There was that itch, though. I couldn’t deny it. 2022 was a really weird year of trying to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, and by the end of it I was back home, saving up to move here. It was kind of a crazy decision, and I think not one that I would have done with quite the same recklessness now. I was very very lucky to have found a good job with coworkers who took care of me, and a very lovely house that welcomed me in. I saw enough in those first few months to know that things could have gone much worse. I can’t really explain why I made the jump then, only that it felt like I had to. I still thought when I left that I might be back in Naarm in a year’s time.

When people from home talk to me about moving to London, I feel like I can be quite hesitant to recommend it. The first bit was hard. It was one of the loneliest times of my life, and London when you don’t know anyone is so fucking scary. This whole city moves by so quickly that if you don’t have any anchors it feels like you can disappear and no one will notice. This place is expensive, grey, and very overwhelming. But for all the shit I say about this place, I do really love it here. I just do. I love the life that I get to live here - like I’ve only recently just started to relax on the book-buying thing because all this time there’s been this fifteen-year-old book nerd living inside me who could only get books online from Book Depository (which could sometimes take months to arrive) or in the ten shelves of not-entirely-shit fiction at the Whitcoulls in the local mall. There was still a part of me that was hoarding as though it was all going to be taken away from me soon enough, like the London Review Bookshop was some fever dream (actually one of the first places I went to here, I genuinely cried). I actually had to tell myself that this is life now, I can find some obscure poetry book at an independent bookstore for cheaper than John Green in 2016 Auckland because this is my life now. No one is coming to take it away.

Dear friend, sorry if this is a bit cheesy or if it sounds like a humble brag or whatever. Just let me have my two seconds, because I am so damn grateful that this gets to be my life. I have spent many, many years wishing for the things that I have now, and that goes beyond just living in London. I’ve got friends who take care of me and I them, I’ve got a beautiful home and a job I like, I’m in a writing programme and I actually have writer friends (ten-year-old me would scream, y’all). There’s been a lot of shit with the good - as I write this to you I’m in bed over some health issues that’s been going on the past few months - but I just wanted to spend this postcard on the good. Because life is so fucking good sometimes, and that’s it. I am very often quite hard on myself for not doing enough with my life, so this is also me taking stock for a second and just noticing the things I have worked for, the things that I have tended to and have flourished, as well as the things that are pure and simple gifts, strokes of luck for which all I can do is thank for being here.

Dear friend, thanks for being here. These postcards are actually going to end soon - my last one will be #50, then this little internet experiment will be coming to an end while I explore some other things. Take care, and maybe show the things and the people around you a little extra love this week.

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

This has been a heavy few days. The UK Supreme Court has decided that gender is a biological binary, based on the sex you were assigned at birth. It is going to have an immense ripple effect on how trans people (specifically trans women) will be able to access public spaces, ranging from the NHS, sports centres, public toilets, all the way to prisons and more. It is hard not to see this as a slip backwards in time, because it is: we have had these protections under the Equality Act for the past twenty or so years, and now we don’t. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve had top and/or bottom surgery, been on medication for years, transitioned when you were sixteen, it doesn’t matter if you’re nonbinary or intersex and physically do not belong in either space, it doesn’t matter how many people this will kill - because it will - the gender critical ‘feminists’ and the right are celebrating over their ability to decide what a woman should look like, dress like, and behave. It is fucking horrible.

One thing I have found surprising in myself these past few months has been my changed approach to time, and to hope. I mentioned on here a couple postcards ago that I have been spending less time reading my nonfiction online (as in, Substack articles, Instagram, the news) and increasingly through books. Since writing that postcard, I have read No is Not Enough by Naomi Klein, Country by Bill Gamage and Bruce Pascoe, Love in Exile by Shon Faye, and Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing, for nonfiction. Even though all of these books have been published within the past 5-10 years, and frequently discuss contemporary politics, their approach to time is almost entirely opposite to the online world. Social media and the news are rather aggressively set in The Now. They tend to react to recent events, relying on either the unusual or the hyperbolic. But the medium of print requires books to situate themselves within a much vaster context of time; while the book can respond to the contemporary, it must still be readable weeks, months, or even years from publication. All of the nonfiction books I have read recently engage with a different mode of time; whether that is Country’s analysis of Indigenous Australian landcare dating back at least 60,000 years, Funny Weather’s exploration of artists throughout the late 20th and early 21st century, Love in Exile’s jumping back and forth within Shon Faye’s life incorporated with feminist and class politics, or No is Not Enough’s analysis of the past forty years of neoliberalism that led to Trump’s election in 2016.

In situating themselves as part of the fabric of history, these books reminded me that our contemporary struggles are set within a much longer lineage of struggle than merely now, merely us. Reading these books has not made these struggles any less devastating, but it does instill a sense of hope: our ancestors and our elders have been through this before. We can listen to them to teach us how we may navigate the uncertain waters of the present.

What governments across the world are doing right now, turning back the clock to a time of less freedom and more precarity, is absolutely terrifying. It also isn’t something new. The Supreme Court’s decision is frankly in line with a country that had Section 28 from 1988-2003, that let thousands of queer people die from AIDs with indignity in the 80s and 90s, that only partially legalised homosexuality in 1967. This is also the country with citizens that have fought these restrictions every step of the way, from the Lesbian & Gays Support the Miners movement, the Gay Liberatino Front, through to the annual pride marches and protests that we see now - like the ones happening this weekend, protesting against the Supreme Courts’ decision. The same country that has seen queer writers, artists, and activists speak despite it all, the same country with citizens that have fought for future generations to access more rights than they had. Time is not linear but circular, and we can now rid ourselves of the philosophy that social progress will automatically come as time marches on. We are living proof that this does not happen; things often get worse before they get better. But we can look to our elders, our ancestors, both inherited and not, we can see how they’ve maintained hope and continue to live lives full of beauty and joy, and within their lives we can see glimmers of our own potential future, in all of its damaged glory.

Dear friend, take care of your trans friends at the moment. We’re all scared. But this is also something that affects all of us; the erosion of human rights does not stop with one category of people. Whilst our governments are proving to be increasingly unreliable in giving a shit about the broad public, what we can do is realise that the responsibility is on ourselves to look after one another.

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

I have lived a somewhat unconventional adult life. I have made a few pretty intense changes over these past years - from wanting to live alone at seventeen to living in a house of fifteen now, moving from Auckland to Melbourne to London, from being a quite highly strung classical musician and teacher to (hopefully) more mellow barista and aspiring writer. I wanted to talk today about how exactly I navigate decision-making.

I didn’t really consciously realise what I was doing until I came across two Substack writers. One I found through a Note on their Substack (unfortunately lost to the ethers of the internet!). He was a designer, and talked about this one phrase that defined his life: what does this situation require? Apparently he had come across this style of thinking from his design background, and later applied it to all aspects of his life to get him through different work and personal life changes.

I love this line. It simply yet effectively illustrates the essential components of making a good decision. First, it removes the ego. The question is not focused on fault, but rather responsibility, asking where the gaps in expectations are rather than who is to blame. Second, it is practical. The question shows you what you will practically need to sacrifice in order to meet the requirements of your situation, which brings me to my last point: this question helps you to realise when a situation is simply no longer tenable for what you’re able to give, and a bigger change needs to happen.

When I was debating leaving my job as cafe manager last year, I was essentially asking myself what does this situation require? Less stress, because it was taking over my personal life and health. I could either 1) reduce the other stresses in my life so that I have overall less stress (like eating well, resting well, reducing my responsibilities outside of work), or 2) reduce the stress within the job (have a discussion with my boss about reducing responsibilities, ask for extra support, set clearer boundaries for my own work/life balance). I actually tried both of these, and still felt completely overwhelmed. I was still getting sick and unable to enjoy my days off, and crucially I was writing less - which was the whole point of me moving to London. I realised then that my decision was: have more job security and higher earnings by staying, or feel more healthy and able to write by leaving. I decided to go with the latter.

More often than the logical choice of a decision, it is one’s emotions that will hold a person back from making a change. Leaving a job can provoke insecurities of worth, work-ethic and just plain old financial stress. Leaving a relationship can provoke insecurities around being lovable, being lonely, starting over, and feeling like a failure or disappointment. This is why what does this situation require works so well for me - it politely pushes those emotions aside for the moment, and asks what would happen outside of these fears.

The second poster on Substack mentioned that a similar tactic of ‘unfolding’ has made him much more adaptable in his life, basing his important decisions around a method of following context rather than vision (link here). The idea is that you base your decision-making around a present-day ‘context’ - say, when seeking a partner, you base your decisions on how you feel around them - rather than a future-oriented ‘vision’ - say, a pre-decided set of characteristics you decide your soulmate must have. Visions are more likely to be rooted in societal pressures/values, whereas contexts are pretty clear clues as to what you personally actually desire.

Both of these styles of thinking highlight a key factor in decision-making: guilt. People can be very worried about making the wrong decision, of failing, and of inciting guilt in ourselves as a result. It makes sense. Ironically, though, being too scared of making the wrong decision only makes us more likely to be conservative, which rather than eliminating failure only makes us feel less culpable for it. Being scared of leaving a relationship that you feel you no longer want to be in, for example, may cause you to spend years more with this person than you actually feel you want. But if you decide to leave, that decision is fully on you, the potential failure of which you will have to bear.

For me, guilt often looks like me worrying about not working hard enough. I feel guilty for not contributing more to the various things in my life, and as a result burn out quickly and easily. When I ask myself what does this situation require, I often realise that there isn’t actually a need to work more in most of these settings. The question also helps me realise where I do need to be putting in more energy, without layering on all this guilt for not having done it before. In addition, listening to context over vision helps me to realise when my body is exhausted and no longer feeling good, and to prioritise that over the vision I have in my head of being some overachieving maniac that can do it all with calm and grace. I also still have many flaws in my decision-making process; I’m stubborn and idealistic, which means that I often need a reality check. I am aware that I am espousing decision-making wisdom when I have made many, many questionable decisions, so do take all of this with a pinch of salt.

Dear friend, how do you navigate your decisions in life? Are you quite hands on with the way your life travels, or do you prefer to go with the flow and see what happens? How do you handle the difficult conversations? If you have any suggestions or ways that you like to go about them yourself, I’d love to know!

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

I happened to watch the season finale of Severance the same weekend as I watched the entirety of the TV miniseries Adolescence. The first thing I thought was damn, TV is so good these days and the second thing I thought was why are the most talked about TV shows right now so fucking bleak? There will be spoilers in the rest of this postcard, you have been warned! This is less of a postcard to be honest and more of an analytical essay where I will be exploring both of these shows and how their themes of lovelessness and violence exhibit systemic harm in our current society, as well as how we may respond to their messaging.

Both Severance and Adolescence paint a depressing picture of a sickened contemporary reality, albeit through different genres and with different symptoms in mind. For Severance, this symptom is our work culture; the show is set in a dystopian world created from a fragment of current work culture where people adopt work personas that do not correlate with their authentic, private selves (think work wife, pizza socials, carefully worded emails). In the first season, we meet a cast of office workers who are ‘severed’, meaning that they have elected to have an operation in which their minds are medically severed into an ‘innie’ (the invented self who experiences and only remembers working within the office of Lumon) and an ‘outie’ (the original self that, from the point of severance, does not experience or remember their work at Lumon). Neither the innies or the outies know what work they do at Lumon. Innies participate in absurd rituals such as celebratory waffle parties and watermelon funerals that mimic performative social rituals in contemporary workplaces, meanwhile the outies live in a desolate winter American wasteland, in which each person is struggling to get by for a range of different reasons. Language plays an essential role in the show, where the true meanings of conversations, relationships, and the work itself is distorted by the manipulation of language under Lumon’s guidance. The innies only start to realise their plight when they happen upon a non-Lumon book and encounter, for the first time, language that empowers them. The creators of Severance have essentially taken a simple fragment of contemporary work culture and, through this innie/outie dynamic, blossomed an entire world through which they ask us: what makes both work and life so terrible that someone could be enticed by the idea of severance? And perhaps more importantly, how does severance become the only solution to this reality?

Then we have Adolescence. This TV show is comprised of four single-take episodes of roughly an hour each, chronicling the murder of a young girl and her murderer - a young boy at her school. Adolescence is focused primarily on the psychology of children in the modern day, and why so many seem to be struggling in the environment we’ve created for them. The use of single-take episodes makes this clear; we follow the characters’ journeys in real-time, forcing an emotional immediacy that is starkly different from some of its highly edited, flashier crime contemporaries. Where Severance is highly stylised, Adolescence is almost aggressively mundane, with the four main settings being a police station, the family home, a school, and a prison-like facility. Adolescence’s psychological crime genre versus Severance’s dystopian sci-fi compliment the aspirations of each show: Adolescence grounds itself in reality to illustrate how such horrifically violent actions are born from the social environments we’ve created and continue to live in, whereas Severance entices our imagination, encouraging us to reconsider the narratives we write around our work culture and understand how companies can violate us. As the creators themselves point out, Adolescence is more about asking questions than providing answers, prompted by the real-life multiple murders of young girls by young boys. What would drive a child to kill? What would drive a young boy to kill a young girl? What would drive a young boy from the Internet age to kill? From the British schooling environment? From a seemingly normal family? What question is so deeply vulnerable and complex that violence could ever look like a plausible answer, to a mere child no less?

Both Severance and Adolescence are highly intentional with their use of on-screen violence to create a sense of suffocation, which depart from the expectations of both dystopian sci-fi and of crime dramas. In Adolescence, violence hums along like an undercurrent throughout the series, such that what we see on screen feels more like a door opening to what is already there; flashing like lightning, the violence disappears from sight, waiting for the next opportunity to strike. The actual murder itself is talked about much more than it is seen; we have maybe thirty seconds of footage distorted by CCTV, and four hours of watching characters talk about it, think about it, refuse to acknowledge it, and then these brief flashes of terrifying violence that tilts the reality of the imagined world - or rather, sets reality straight, reminding us of the severity of what we’re dealing with. The incredible third episode is perhaps the best example of this thrumming energy of violence. The conversation between Jamie and his psychologist is highly energetic, with power constantly changing hands, openness and banter sliding quickly into antagonising insults, and tenderness brutalised into violence. There are two key pivots into violence from Jamie, with the second culminating in a final scene that terrifies both the audience and the therapist. Leading up to these moments, Jamie is evasive, dodging questions about his family and friends, his relationship to women, and his desire to be loved. It is through this dialogue that we witness the extent at which Jamie has repressed certain basic human desires - the desire to be seen, to be loved, as well as the desire to, well, be desirable. It’s as if the air slowly leaks out of the room throughout the session, and the moments in which Jamie suddenly realises his own powerlessness or vulnerability is when he lashes out with the ‘manly’ skills he’s been taught to value - aggression and violence. What we see is a child just on the brink of adulthood where his screams are as much a cry for help and for safety as they are a powerful threat.

In Severance, this sense of suffocation is conjured, to begin with, by sheer mystery and with the aesthetics of both the Lumon office and the town. The audience constantly flips between having more knowledge than the characters of their situation with having extremely limited knowledge on the quotidian facts of their lives themselves, as well as the overarching rules of the sci-fi world we’re finding ourselves in. We don’t know why Lumon exists and why severance is essential to their work, we only gradually find out why the characters chose to be severed, and the motivations of the non-severed Lumon employees like Mr. Milchick and Ms. Cobel are incredibly evasive. Yet it is only the audience that gets to fully see both the innies’ and outies’ lives unfold, rendering us privy to information none of the characters receive. Both the set and the shots themselves are designed with boxes in mind, penning both the characters and audience inside whilst destabilising the viewer from chronological time with a bewildering mix of retro technology and futuristic, minimalist architecture. The effect of all this is a strong sense of urgency in the audience to understand what is going on, and when coupled with the slow pacing of action, creates a palpable sense of suffocation, of a growing desperation for something to change, right now.

Season two of Severance fleshes out the world of Lumon, revealing the irredeemable bind for the severed workers: for either one of the outies or innies to get to live a full life, one of them has to die. Who is more deserving of life: the ‘original’ self that was made unaware of the damage they were causing their alternate self and no longer wants to be exploited, or the ‘invented’ self that has never had the chance to live a life outside of a 9-5? Yet death itself here is sanitised of violence; no one has to ‘kill’ anyone, but if you leave Lumon and never come back, your innie is as good as dead. Likewise, if your innie decides never to leave, your outie simply disappears from their life. The only moment of true violence that we see is in the season finale, with a scene that is honestly one of the most thrilling fight sequences I have seen in my life. After highly limited use of red as a colour in favour of green, blue, white and black, Mark is now awash in it, soaked in blood from a murder that was between the selves; the death itself an accident during the process of changing from innie to outie. In the context of both Severance and Adolescence, the absence of on-screen violence does the almost opposite, chilling effect; rather than perceiving these worlds as peaceful and content, we question a society in which violence is so mundane and systemic that it slips from the forefront of our attention. Both TV shows remove gratuitous violence in order to reintroduce ourselves to the shock of it; to truly feel the weight of what is happening when these violent acts occur.

Both of these shows are also shows about love, and how we respond to a lack of it. One of the key sources of momentum in Severance is Mark’s romantic life, both as an innie and an outie; indeed, Mark only severed to escape the grief of losing his wife. Love is the point from which the innies start to realise the injustice of their situation - Mark and Helly, Irving and Burt, Dylan and Denise - and love is the reason why innie Mark chooses Helly over his wife, Gemma, completely overriding the aim of the second season. From this, the audience is forced to ask themselves; what would it be like to be a human who has never experienced love? What would it make you do? Is someone more deserving of love than someone else? In Adolescence, Jamie’s relationship (or lack thereof) to girls is a recurring theme. This is a world in which children have access to the likes of Andrew Tate and other misogynists from their bedroom, with their parents next door, and where their socialisation is mediated through online spaces that can be extremely harmful to children. This is a world where young boys are taught to practice lovelessness, to practice emotional negligence towards themselves and to those around them, and are taught that they do not need love, because love will not find them - as per the 80/20 rule featured in the show that suggests that 80% of women are only attracted to 20% of men. They are not shown care and protection in many of the spaces they should be (highlighted here in the school environment), and are simultaneously taught that they should not need care or protection by these online role models. If they are struggling to be independent then it is someone else’s fault, and that someone else is often the women and girls in their lives. The audience is forced to ask: what would it be like to be a child and not believe to be deserving of love? What kind of society allows for a young boy to feel that love is not possible for him? What would it make you do?

Let me come back to my original question: why are the most talked about TV shows right now so fucking bleak? As humans, we rely on stories to help navigate social changes and to connect with each other. TV has become an interesting site for storytelling recently, diversifying from the golden age of the sitcom towards compelling dramas such as Severance and Adolescence. It honestly surprised me that Severance is as popular as it is; I do not have any doubt about its quality, but the slow pace and highly stylised filmmaking felt suited to the indie filmgoer rather than Apple TV’s most popular show, surpassing even Ted Lasso. Adolescence makes more sense to me given the general interest around crime dramas and documentaries, yet the focus on psychology and refusing a singular blame for Jamie’s actions - there is no sob family story or tragic upbringing - simultaneously resists the genre’s expectations whilst being a catalyst for its international success.

What both TV shows do so successfully through their explorations of violence, suffocation, and lovelessness is to address the elephant in the room: systemic harm. By this I mean that there is no singular villain in either of these shows, yet there is somehow a great deal of harm being dealt out to our cast of characters. In Severance, Lumon stands in for this villainous evil. Yet the executors of Lumon’s wishes are complex; Ms. Cobel seems to have been raised in a cult and has her own vendetta against Lumon, Mr. Milchick is both executor of harm and sufferer within Lumon, and even the girl Ms. Huang can hardly be seen as a villain. The Eagans themselves are complicated, with Helly vs Helena’s attitudes towards Lumon diverging wildly, and Jame Eagan being more of a cultish follower than evil mastermind. Yet Lumon, as a company, is distributing an immense amount of harm to its employees and to the town. In Adolescence, whilst Jamie is clearly the wrongdoer in the story, the fact that he is a child brings into question the systems and society that have not been able to take care of his upbringing. There is no singular thing that we can point at and say this is what caused Jamie, and alarmingly, what we can see does cause Jamie harm - the online manosphere, the school environment, the deterioration of in-person interactions - is all around us. If we want to understand how to prevent more Jamies from resorting to murder, we need to look at ourselves and the way we interact with each other in society.

This is no small feat. In a world where television is frequently viewed for escapism, what makes these shows so urgent that people override this desire to switch off and numb out and instead deal with some incredibly heavy and overwhelming issues? One of the things that we also use stories for is to feel seen and to express ourselves. I look at the world we currently live in, where most of us have experienced some level of systemic harm - whether that is toxic work environments, financial insecurity, climate displacement, harmful gender and racial relations - when we watch shows such as these, we recognise a glimmer of ourselves in them. This might be a difficult pill to swallow when one TV show concerns a brutal murder and the other has a murderous company at the helm, yet these shows take us to these extremes in order to help us reconsider the more mundane yet destabilising harms that occur to us on a regular basis, and further to question our own morality in being complicit within these systems. Both Adolescence and Severance show that it is no singular action that changes these characters; it is quite literally death by a thousand cuts. Societally, are we able to take in this message and rework ourselves - our relationships, our workplaces, our education and our welfare - such that collectively, we reduce the harm we release onto one another and to end this cycle of violated to violation? Creativity is an essential tool in such thinking, and I cannot applaud enough the creators of Severance and Adolescence in using their skills to do what storytelling does best: to establish and critique social values, to imagine potential futures, and to remind us how we are more similar than we are different - even the worst of us.

What will we watch next?

Love, Vee

Dear friend,

I’m not really on the AI train; I haven’t had a strong reason to use things like ChatGPT and I’m aware enough of its risks, both in terms of skill degradation and environmental waste, to not just try it out for the lols. What does interest me about AI, however, is how it is commonly being discussed as the defining moment for our generation (the ‘AI revolution’), and how many people my age are talking about how AI will impact or ruin their future careers. Why I find this interesting is because there seems to be a prevailing assumption that jobs were going to otherwise remain the same, despite the fact that we’re projected to run out of water by 2040, projected to hit 2 degrees warming by 2040/2050, and that we will be facing increasingly extreme weather events in the following decades. This is not a far off future; 2040 is 15 years away. For someone my age, that’s hitting at the peak of my career, at roughly age 40.

Why is everyone I know talking about AI, and not the glaring issue of climate change? There are probably many factors, but I’ll highlight two. One is that people can more easily remember a time before the invention of AI, whereas climate change has been creeping upon us since at least the 1980s, if not earlier. The second is that I think young people have better tech literacy than environmental literacy. I honestly think (though this isn’t tested) that the average 20-something will be able to list three companies that use AI quicker than three species that are endangered in their country. I know that this is true for me at least, and that’s coming from someone who actively thinks about nature quite a lot.

AI, to me, is perhaps one of the most effective examples of just how diverging the values of late-capitalism is with the values of humanity. Jobs have evolved from generations of people learning a skill and trading that skill to receive other goods and services they may need in order for a healthy and happy life. But if AI ends up doing all the jobs that we used to be skilled in, how are we going to trade our skills for the goods and services we need? The most common response to this is that new jobs will come from AI (like they have done for previous tech developments and the Industrial Revolution), but do we really want a world where everyone’s job is to monitor AI, rather than making or doing things that we feel connected to and passionate about? If my future job becomes to watch AI write a novel and edit it for accuracy rather than write my own, can I still call myself a writer? Perhaps there could be a discussion on the future of labour in order to live, and whether individuals can subsist on a universal basic income that allows them to live their lives and follow their passions without concern about basic survival, but even then, even if that was somehow the dominant conversation around AI at the moment - how do we negotiate this kind of freedom against the intense environmental harm that will come from AI?

I mentioned this before, that we’re projected to run out of water by 2040. AI uses incredibly high amounts of water as part of the cooling process, such that it is projected in 2027 to use 4-6 times more water than the entire country of Denmark (a country with a population of nearly 6 million people). For every 10-50 prompts, it is estimated that around 500 millilitres of water is used by ChatGPT. This is without even considering the carbon emissions, mining of rare minerals, and air pollution in AI’s overall impact on the earth.

I don’t see the dangers of AI and the climate crisis as two distinct issues. Both stem from the world in which we currently live, where economic growth is prioritised over the health and wellbeing of our public and our natural world. There will be a revolution in our lifetime, because it is literally impossible for us to keep doing the same thing as we are now. This will include varying degrees of job insecurity, housing insecurity, food insecurity, and water insecurity; these all already exist now, and are growing. This could include an increase in pandemic-level diseases, as well as mass migrations as people flee inhospitable areas. AI will probably play some kind of role in all of this. By the time I retire, we will either have turned the ship around enough that we will be living in a drastically different living system, or we will be trying to live through the severe aftermath of our ignorance. Likely it will be some mixture of both.

I really don’t mean any of this to be alarmist or pessimistic (I am, by nature, an optimist), but it does shock me that many people I talk to are still envisioning regular careers in our lifetime. For me, this is one of the reasons why I’m trying to gain better skills at community engagement and organising, because realistically the economy is going to be fucked for a long time and the only way through is with each other’s help. This is also partly why I’m trying to better connect myself to the land, and understand how to listen to nature; what it says could literally mean life or death in the future. If you’re worried about AI taking over your job, I completely understand that and it is very frightening, but don’t think that job security will come with better AI legislation. Job security is only really possible if the systems in which these jobs operate are carbon-neutral, and reciprocal to the environment around us. It is only possible when businesses are required to consider the environmental and societal impacts of their products and services, and more importantly are held accountable for their actions. It is only possible when our economy reflects the circularity of the natural world, prioritising closed-loop systems that support not only a robust economy, but a healthy world. This is only possible with dramatic changes to the way all of us - not just businesses - approach work.

The reason why I am writing all of this is not to sound doomsday. The reason I am writing this is because I want to make it clear that it is not companies that will change the course of our future for the better, it is the public. Let me explain what I mean. Companies have shown time and time again where their priorities lie: profit growth. If ultimate success for companies is the continuous expansion of their profits, we can rely on the fact that companies will never be the first to cut their own successes short in the name of the environment. So it is up to the public to speak out for our own collective health and wellbeing. We have the power to pressure our governments into legislative change, and culturally to evolve our understanding on what we consider a successful business. At the moment, there is limited incentive to change the way we do things, because the alternative is difficult for companies and they’re still being (relatively) allowed to do the easy way out. If we can ramp up the pressure on companies to change through things like protests, divestments and boycotts, support local community endeavours, and prioritise local suppliers over international (frequently monopolised) markets, we can make it so that continuing the current mode of work, the one that is killing all of us and our planet (I mean this as seriously as I can possibly mean it), becomes the more difficult option than acquiescing to the necessary changes.

There are a million different ways of going about this, and each individual’s choice will be different based on their skills and what they can give, but I do think it’s essential that we remember the power of the people. This is how democracy works. This is how women received the right to vote, this is how the civil rights movement ended segregation, this is how queer people campaigned for HIV/AIDS prevention and healthcare. These things are not given away easily, and they most certainly do not start from the top of the power hierarchy. Using your voice as a public citizen is not counter to tradition, it is tradition. Generations before us have fought for the rights we now have, and it is likewise our duty to fight for those coming after us.

Dear friend, this ended up being a bit of a long rant, didn’t it? This was written to be a conversation-starter, something to open up discourse rather than force my opinion on those who disagree. If you do disagree, I’d honestly be really interested to hear what you have to say, so feel free to comment or message me.

If you take anything away from this, please let it be this: we all have a collective duty to take care of one another and of our planet. I know that I’m far from perfect at any of this, and that I am work-in-progressing this thing in a public way, but I hope that through writing all this I can better connect to some of you and continue learning.

Lots of love,

Vee

P.S. I think a lot of people have different definitions of what capitalism is in their heads, so I can say that when I talk about capitalism here, I am referring to the general (neoliberal) idea in our modern day that an increase in profit or an increase in wealth is synonymous with an increase in the standard of the general public’s life (as in their ability to live stable lives with access to food, housing, leisure and healthcare), also known as trickle-down economics. I contest this because an increase in wealth frequently comes at the cost of the environment and the wealth itself is distributed unevenly, and both of these results harm the general public. I am fundamentally against capitalism because I am fundamentally against private property (who gets to own the Earth, when it is home to so much more than humans?), but I am curious to explore the possibilities we have in navigating the trading of goods and services in a way that upholds, not denigrates, the laws of the earth we live upon.

Dear friend,

I am trying to be a better custodian of things. Up until now, I’ve always thought of myself as an owner of things, but I think there is an important difference between the words owner and custodian. When I own something, it feels as though I have the jurisdiction to do whatever I want to the thing I own. For example, let’s say I own a jacket. If I own a jacket, I theoretically have the right to do whatever I want with it - wear it many times, wear it just occasionally, or use it once then bin it. I bought it, so I get the final say. When I am the custodian of something, I instead think about the best way to take care of the object. As a custodian of a jacket, recognising that it could very well outlast me and be passed on to someone else, how can I best take care of this jacket? Would that look like me wearing it every day, patching up holes, saving it for special occasions, washing it regularly or only once in a while? How do I give it a good quality of life, as well as me?

This might feel like a fairly obvious thing to say, take care of what is in your possession, but I’m writing about it because it feels like a revelation to me at least. To think about my things in this way encourages me to have a deeper connection to the daily objects in my life, which I think consequently encourages me to have less things. I have always been a bit of a stress-buyer, treating myself to random things (food, books, clothes, etc.) when I’m feeling overwhelmed and/or stressed. Owning something supposedly makes you feel better and more in control. Is that true? In the current day, this makes some sense - we do not trust that our economy will remain stable enough for us to continue renting the same place so we seek to buy, we do not trust that libraries will remain open so we purchase books, and when there is a genuine barrier for food access and so many of us do not know how to eat from the land, being able to buy food is incredibly important. But for me personally, many times where I have turned to stress-spending money in response to a desire for security or support, it has not worked out very well long-term. And do we want to live in a world where scarcity is artificially created by our economic structure? What would alternatives to this look like?

I also think that this mindset shift works so much beyond basic ownership. What would it be like to be a custodian of money? Of time? Of housing, animals, plants, and so on? I honestly don’t believe that humans acting entitled to everything in their grasp is making anyone happy. Being a custodian of something is, in many ways, an act of faith in the future of things - something I think many of us are struggling to envision right now. To be a custodian is to recognise that there is a life in this object beyond your own. It is also an act of gratitude; a thank you to the things that bring you joy and sustenance in your life and a reciprocal act of care to continue the symbiotic relationship. Finally, it is an act of humility. We are not who we are without the things in our lives; we need the bikes and the shoes and the little lamps and doors to do the things we enjoy, see the people we love, and take care of ourselves.

Dear friend, if you feel pretty comfortable with the idea of being a custodian rather than an owner already, a potential next step could be to consider being a collaborator with your environment. I’m reading Country by Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage at the moment (one book from the series Indigenous Knowledges in Australia), and they raise an interesting point that even this word of using ‘custodian’ can still imply a level of hierarchy; we are a part of nature like everything else, so how can we collaborate with our environment for our collective health in the same way that plants, water, fire, and animals do - in the same way that Indigenous Australians have done successfully for thousands of years?

Take care of yourself (and your things!)

Lots of love,

Vee

Dear friend,

This is your regular reminder to read. I give you full permission to just stop here and pick up a book instead.

I have always been a big reader, but I go through different phases. I realised recently that I had been struggling to finish a nonfiction book for the past year, and couldn’t quite place why. When I speak of nonfiction here I’m generally referring to books that require extensive research to publish; closer to science / critical social analysis than memoir / personal essay. I’m sure there were several factors, but the one that ultimately motivated me to start reading nonfic again was when I realised I was getting all of my nonfiction through social media - Instagram and Substack. This was largely in the form of articles, essays, and news, much of which likely hadn’t been seen (much less edited) by another person before posting. These platforms also tend to highlight personal writing, so I found myself reading a lot of ‘articles’ that were really just personal rants on certain topics with questionable evidence to show for it.

Because I was reading so much online, I was struggling to read things that were more in depth, researched, and honestly? More boring. I found myself reaching a certain apathy with what I was reading online, only the problem wasn’t that I was reading the wrong articles (though there was a bit of that as well), but rather that I was looking in the wrong place. What I was looking for could be found quite easily in a section of my reading that I’d been sorely neglecting: nonfiction. Reading a book is more boring. But it is also significantly more rewarding.

Some of my favourite books are nonfiction. Braiding Sweetgrass, How to Change Your Mind, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Four Thousand Weeks - all of these books have had a profound impact on the way I live my life. Yet somehow I had convinced myself that all of the critical reading I needed to do could be found online, in shorter content.

I’m not trying to say that online content cannot be rewarding, or that those who write online are doing lesser work. What I’m saying is do not stop reading books. Especially if you loved to read growing up but have been struggling to find the time/attention span as an adult. There are things in books that no online article or longform TikTok video will ever be able to teach you, and the key reason for that is time. Reading a book forces you to interrogate a certain area for several weeks or months, depending on your reading speed. You might learn all the same key facts in a YouTube video, but that video will likely go out of your head as soon as you’ve heard it. The fact that you’re picking up a book and reading consistently will serve as a regular affirmation to yourself that you are actively following your curiosity and your desire to learn and grow, and I imagine that having to recall the different things you’ve learned over the course of the book helps to store your reading into further long-term memory.

I’m currently reading No is Not Enough by Naomi Klein. It talks about Trump’s shock politics back in 2016, and outlines the likely disastrous impact of his policies whilst also highlighting several key ways we can resist his tactics. I’ve been reading a lot of articles online following Trumps’ re-election, but it is this book that has really given me the depth to understand Trump as a figure, and the precarity of the times we are living in. Would highly recommend. Next on my nonfiction list are Love in Exile by Shon Faye, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing, and Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake.

Dear friend, if none of this has motivated you so far, I will leave you with something I said to a friend earlier this week who was struggling to read: it is in the interest of the powerful that the public do not read critically. A critically aware public, one that is aware of its rights and can strip away the government/legal/scientific jargon to understand a situation, can equip themselves with the necessary tools to rebalance society that empowers the majority. In times where we feel helpless and powerless, books are the very thing we should be turning to as one of the key resources we have in finding solutions and the hope to continue resisting.

Our attention is a resource, and it is a resource that can be mined by others for data & profit; a resource that diminishes into ignorance. Or it can be a resource that we nourish, that we take care of, and that feeds us with the learnings we need to continue to grow.

I’d love to hear about any books you’re reading at the moment, or would like to recommend!

Lots of love,

Vee

P.S. I have to acknowledge the irony of writing against online writing, online. This is exactly the kind of unedited, unresearched stuff I was talking about … welp!

Dear friend,

I’m getting pretty fed up with the internet. In a previous iteration of this postcard, I ranted a lot about everything wrong with being online, but to be honest I think there’s enough of that. We all know the hazards of the online world; that isn’t what keeps us here. The reason why many of us are still here (or, at least why I am) is because it is difficult to imagine any alternative. I am so used to the comforts and conveniences of internet existence that it feels quite daunting to consider that there may be more fulfilling ways to live that I do not know about.

So with that in mind, here are some things I am reintroducing this year, in an effort to move offline and encourage a sense of mindfulness.

• Making better use of my library! It gives me the freedom to choose a wider range of books, because I’m not weighing up whether I should spend 10-15 quid on it or not. I’m also trying to get over my desire for ownership in general and to think of myself rather as a custodian of things, and that means getting more comfy with borrowing books rather than having an extensive personal library. Plus, supporting libraries is a way to remind councils the importance of libraries to our communities!

• Actively aiming to read more nonfiction. I’m currently reading No is Not Enough by Naomi Klein which is absolutely brilliant, but I have to consciously add non-fic reading to my to-do list to actually set aside time for it (I do 30 mins), because it’s not necessarily relaxing. I put it on my to-do earlier this week for example, and it ended up with me sitting by the canal in the lovely spring sun while I read. I am aiming to do this as an alternative to Substack/online info-dumps.

• Actively thinking about how I can contribute to the different communities I am in. Whether this is the warehouse I live in, the writing group I’m in, or the Palestine collective I help to organise, I am trying to ask myself as much as possible what does this situation require? and spend time during the week dedicated towards community-building. These things do not run by themselves!

• Writing things down physically, rather than online/in my Notes app. I’ve got a new notebook setup that accommodates for a bit more depth, as well as a plant care & recipe book duo that I received as a birthday gift, as well as a gifted mini notebook for my daily bag.

• Making a physical archive of my digicam photos! I’m currently designing a book for my photos from my Croatia trip last year as a little experimentation.

• Listening to quiet more. I’ll put my headphones on if I’m going somewhere noisy like the tube, but if I’m just walking down a street I can listen to the quiet. This has had a noticeable difference in my life; I feel more engaged in my environment and connected to the people around me.

And here are some things I am curious to try in the future:

• Pre-saving map routes or drawing them out so that I can get better acquainted with London.

• Moving away from Spotify and towards buying albums again (how I do this I’m not entirely sure yet).

  • In a subset to this, going to record stores more to listen to music, and going to gigs around London

• A class for improving my Japanese (probably not anytime soon!)

• Consulting community groups and/or books for help rather than solely online. There’s a mending club in Walthamstow that I really want to try out, the gardening group in my local park, and I want to try a weekend Parkrun at some point. There’s even a cycle-buddy scheme in London that I might try, where cycling newbies get paired with veteran cyclists to learn their work route, get comfortable on the roads etc!

• Finding a good place where I can do martial arts classes again

I also want to say two things that highlighted to me why we need to think about our online selves in relation to our personal and collective health. The first is this quote from Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, saying that competitors such as HBO and Amazon are “two drops of water in the ocean of both time and spending for people,” and that “we actually complete with sleep … and we’re winning!” The second is Spotify founder Daniel Ek saying that the company’s “only competitor is silence.” When I discovered these I realised just how consciously I needed to question how my online behaviour is affecting my health, and to creatively imagine some alternatives that feel healthier to me.

Dear friend, the key to all of this really is encouraging a sense of mindful attention to various things in my life, rather than passive consumption. Most of the time when I am online, I could instead be

1. letting myself be bored or quiet, like when I’m on the toilet or the bus

2. engaging more deeply in something, like picking up a book or watching a film

3. engaging in conversation with someone, like a phone call or catching up with a flatmate.

4. doing something I find actually fun, like playing cello or doing something arts‘n’craftsy.

I will also say what perhaps many of you are thinking: isn’t it hypocritical, to talk about all these things in a post online? I know. It’s something I am also thinking about and will have some updates in the future. I think the internet can be a beautiful place for people, it’s more just that I’m not sure if it’s a more beautiful place to me than the real world.

Bit of a mess of a post, but I’d be interested to hear any of your own thoughts on this wild place we call the internet!

Lots of love,

Vee

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Dear friend,

This year is a year of knuckling down and doing the quiet, necessary work. I’m mainly focused on producing a coherent enough first draft of my novel to send to agents/publishing houses by the end of the year, as part of my writing programme. Between that and all the other community projects I’m already involved in, plus work and any personal goals I have for myself, the rest of my life needs to be mundane and stable in order to maintain equilibrium.

I have this fear that I am a boring person. I don’t go out often and I’m not much of a drinker, I love a lil cosy morning with a book and a long walk in the park, and my brain genuinely does not work if I don’t sleep properly, which means I prefer an early night. I’m essentially a grandpa at heart. I worry that I’m not doing the thing that you’re meant to do at my age, especially in London - go out, be reckless and stupid because it’s fun, and live life a bit more chaotically. I worry that I should want to do those things more than I actually do, and the fact that I don’t is some sign that I’m not living it up enough or that I’m afraid to take risks.

The reason that I’m writing all my worries out (publicly, on the internet) is that I think a lot of people fear being boring. One of the great cons of growing up in the social media age is how we’ve been taught to measure our social standing based on how exciting our lives are, as opposed to whether we’re feeling fulfilled. The reality is that you have to be boring in some aspects in order to be adventurous & risk-taking in others. Someone might have a thrilling nightlife, but avoids the risks in deep & intimate relationships. Someone else might keep a job they don’t particularly like because it means that they get to be adventurous through travel. You can also get lives that are surface-level ‘boring’ but highly fulfilling, but very rarely does someone live a life that is exciting on all fronts and is fulfilled.

For me, I like to be creatively quite adventurous, so I give myself as much creative freedom as I can. This means searching for inspiration in books and in nature, getting up early in the mornings to write, and forgoing a more stable income for work that does not consume my life. I’m allowed to be boring if it makes me happy, and as long as I have time for my friends and for myself, I can’t be doing so bad. One of the things I am most grateful for about my time overseas is that it’s reminded me just how many people live quietly, doing the things they enjoy steadily and bearing the things they don’t with patience. London is such an exciting place that I need to actively think about ways to preserve the mundane; of all the problems to have, it could be a lot worse.

Dear friend, I’d be curious to hear what you think about all this. Maybe you don’t worry about being boring at all! Or maybe you have a different way of thinking about it than me. Maybe you have an agenda with the way I’ve used the word boring. I’d love to hear it! Feel free to comment or send me a message 🙂

Hoping many mundanely fulfilling days for us both this year x

Lots of love,

Vee

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