Expecting to find an answer we find only a duplicate of our own problem.

Do what you are capable of to become who you are.

a part of me. I wonder - when did I become so atomised?

We contain multitudes and I am spurting mists of platitude.

When I think about the best moments in life - the ones that made my skin sing and heart glow and drove my eyes to summon a residue, coating retina like a leaf at daybreak, little droplets forming at inner corners and the lower lid rims getting all sparkly - none involve my phone.

Whether that is because the device dims the world around it or because it dulls my inner awareness of the present such that it cannot be encoded sufficiently into memory, I can’t say.

What I can say is that I want out. The problem in my palm gotten well and truly out of hand. I want to collect more memories that I can feel, not post and glance at. I want to read more than two pages of a book without seeking a number wearing a plush red cloak of notifying pixels.

I don’t want to be like every other body on this tram, whose necks look ugly at that bent angle. I want to sit with discomfort instead of always slipping so easily out of it, cashing in the complexity of my humanity to be churned, like milk to golden butter, from livelihood to profit in the stomach of big tech.

Someone I once liked to sleep with, rest close to, is about to start working for said big tech. I want to be able to get fully over him, so I want out of the little windows that keep showing me his name.

Ironic though that I’m the one who messaged after waking, in those initial dark moment before sunrise that evade my inhibitions, with the residue of his dream lips on mine. Unsurprising that the following night he reappeared. Ironic that I’m writing this on the tram, my head bent though hopefully a little less unattractively on account of the 5 reformer Pilates classes I’ve attended this week.

What if you believed you always look your best and you don’t need to wait until you get your hair blow-waved to go on a date? What if you are always your most beautiful - not the most beautiful but as beautiful as somebody else’s most beautiful. If every day we were all existing in the air as our brightest and messiest, and our thoughts were free from fussing over whether we look enough or too much of something and could instead connect wholly, fully?

“Poetry is so interesting right now because it is an uncommodified space”

so are dreams.

“My first thought is to not think the thought I’m thinking is the thought to share and yet that’s always the thought that connects the room because people need to talk about what they’re actually thinking about.”

In the pocket of my jacket I find twine. I’ve no idea where it came from, just that it says: hold it together.

You don’t find your voice sitting in silence. You find it yelling and singing, and saying no thank you sir I do not want to eat that or go there tomorrow, and whispering, until the words and sounds start feeling less like everyone else’s and more like you’re own. It takes practice.

I didn’t quit my corporate job because I want life to be easy - I quit it because I want it to be a different kind of hard.

• today I intend to show Maddie gently how I love her and believe, with a good glug of delusion, that I’ve got this

• grateful for K (the person, not the substance), for paradox and oxymoron, fitzroy, substack, for my brilliant future

• today I intend to just let the doubts fizzle, to embody my aliveness just in exactly the sweet way I am

• Help! I’ve become the friend who gives crystals as gifts. And five other ways my spirituality is getting out of hand.

If you read this, thank you. What a pleasure to have you in this cosy little digital sphere. If you don’t know me already, I’m Ruby. I’m in a bit of a life transition phase, experimenting with doing things differently.

You see, for about 26 years I tried with all my might to be someone else, or some perfect amalgam of those around me. Now, at 27 - young to most, old to many but especially certain forms of media - I’m experimenting with what it might look and feel like to become the most me possible.

I’ve no idea what this will look like, just that it will probably get messy; that it requires a lot of peeling back, weeding the roots planted by stories not my own, untying the knots of external pressure. I do know that so far the pursuit has been indescribably sweet.

If you’d like to follow along as I share my journey to create a beautiful life (or failure thereof) as some kind of artist you can subscribe below. It would truly be the deepest privilege - a dream come true - to inspire you to do the same.