Why subscribe?
This isn’t really a newsletter.
This is my own, personal, probably self-indulgent social media platform. It’s a chance for me to share all the stories, half-baked ideas and meandering thoughts that I usually post on twitter, facebook, instagram or reddit.
My usual pattern is this:
A thought pops into my head and gets stuck, rattling around my brain like a metaphor in a simile factory.
In an attempt to deal with the idea, I share it on social media. I’m a one man Ringu videotape: I can only lift the curse by sharing it.
But now I’m on social media, stimulating new thoughts and questions and emotions. And then the comments come in doing exactly the same. I starting arguing and pondering and navel gazing.
It’s an itch: the more I scratch it, the more histamine my body produces and the itchier I get.
So now, I’ve redirected all my social media accounts to substack. I’ll write my thoughts down here and send them out into the ether where it might be read. The important thing is, the thoughts won’t be in my head anymore.
I’m King Midas’s barber. King Midas was cursed with donkey ears that he kept hidden under a large turban. The only person who knew about them was the man who cut his hair, who promised to keep the secret. But the heavy weight grew too great for the barber until he couldn’t handle it anymore. In desperation, he dug a hole and bellowed the secret into it, burying it forever. Eventually, reeds grew in the spot and from then on, whenever the wind blew, they whispered the terrible secret.
This is me trying to same technique. In this newsletter you’ll get interesting trivia about words, stories about the weird shit my kids do, book and film recommendations and the flotsam and jetsam from my “neurologically diverse”* mind.
This isn’t a professional operation, although I might mention my current projects. Instead, this a personal account of the inside of my brain; like my missing back tooth, this newsletter shines a light on the parts of me you can’t see.
Maybe the reeds will grow, maybe they’ll whisper back, or maybe I’ll just be some self-indulgent guy shouting into a hole.
*Did you know that neurodiversity isn’t a medical or scientific term? I didn’t. The term neurodiversity was coined by Australian sociologist Judy Singer as way of challenging the idea that neurodevelopmental disorders are inherently a disability. It’s a term that is used to explore how society treats people with ADHD, autism etc rather than a strict biomedical definition. It’s the kind of word that is more useful than it is accurate.
