I used to count my steps, measure my heartrate, suspect I was getting sick not because I felt it but because my HR variability dropped. I spent my mornings, over a pre-commute breakfast, looking at metrics of my night: how much deep sleep, how much light sleep, how much REM. I used to count my calories, look at plots of my nutritional needs. I’d crave protein but if my charts said I was eating enough then I’d push that feeling down down down. I used to spend days writing code, six hours on one for loop, optimising it, making it maximally efficient. Some little voice in the pit of me was scratching at my insides to make something else, something messy, without purpose, a little bit animal a little bit feral a poem a story a song a doodle. I bound that little voice up, buried it somewhere dark. But it’s not that I never did those things—I used to doodle all the time. When I was seven or eight, Mr Y told me off for it. In red ink, next to the strange little doodles at the side of my completed classwork, he wrote: DO NOT DO THIS! Once, at nine or ten, my name was written on the board (the precursor to detention) because I took a step after the playground bell rang. We were meant to stay perfectly still. I cried, looking at my name up there—thought it said something about my worth. And my handwriting was too messy, my teacher said. My s’s and y’s and g’s kept breaking free of the guidelines in my handwriting book and this really does need to be fixed, she is so good otherwise, but her writing needs work. I stopped doodling, I forgot how to doodle (for a time, at least). My handwriting became very small and very neat (for a time, at least). I became smaller, neater (for a time, at least). When I was very little, I believed in magic—or maybe it’s better to say mystery. Anyway, the world was an open sky, it had no edges, no walls hemming it in. Sometimes this scared me. Mostly it gave me wings. I never knew what to say when people asked me what do you want to be when you’re older because all I wanted was to be. Explorer, I settled on at eight-years-old; I just want to explore (I soon changed my answer to something with a pay-check). My earliest memory (I think) is this: in the first house we lived in, my brother, older than me, had a desk in his bedroom, beneath a window. The sun was shining across the desk one morning and my brother was not there, but his notebook was. In it was his handwriting. I did not yet know how to write but I could sense a magic in it and so I crept into his room and I sat at his desk and I hovered the nib above the paper and made the motions he made when writing, so that the end of the pen circled and swayed in the air. Oh my god was I excited. To hold a pen. To know that one day, and soon, I would be able to make meaning with one, just like he could. The magic in that! I don’t know how old I was, maybe three or four? Children have an excellent grasp of magic. They speak its language. It is their first language, it is their mother tongue. I think I held onto this tongue for just a little bit longer than my peers—I fought the notion that I should bury it, that it was not a sensible sort of tongue to speak. But by my mid-twenties I’d pushed that language somewhere deep, somewhere lightless. The future had become a tunnel, smooth and metallic, optimised for the most efficient progress: march on towards this job, then this, then this. I had lost the mystery, the magic. So many of us do. Too busy, too stressed, too focused on climbing to the highest rung. My god, what a world we live in, filled to the brim with magic and mystery and we are taught to huddle in one dimension of it, to see only a tunnel, a ladder, a straight line where an infinite array of paths thread through the world like a web. Perhaps I am overdoing the analogies. Forget the rest: we’re standing in the corner of a park with our eyes to the wall, checking the time, checking our emails, checking our heartrate is low and our nutrition is optimal and pacing on the spot until we reach 10000 steps. A kid might say if you’re not going to turn around why don’t you take this and they offer us a crayon so we can doodle on our flat grey wall, but no, no, we don’t think we’re allowed and so we put the crayon in our pocket. Maybe one day, we say. Maybe when I’m old, maybe when someone in charge tells me it’s okay. If we only turned around we’d see the trees, the streams, the swings, the slides, the colour and chaos and laughter of all the kids playing and what would we think when we saw those sparking eyes and muddy knees and smiles? We would want to join them, surely; we would not want them to join us. We would want to run into the mud, the water, the long grass, swing up to the sky, slide so fast we leave our bodies behind. We would want them to teach us how to play without guilt, how to get hungry and eat, how to get tired and nap, how time is the only thing that is ever really ours and it is owed to nobody else, it is owned by nobody else. We would ask them: please, please, teach us this language we’ve forgotten, and they would shrug and say just come and play. Come, come. Remember your mother tongue.
Friends, I am taking a break from Substack for the next few weeks, and will be back in September. Wishing you all a wonderful month.
One of my favourite artists, Glen Hansard, died this week. I wanted to share one of my favourite songs of his, Star Star. I hope you love it as much as I do.
If you enjoy my work, you might like to pre-order my debut novel, These Glass Bodies.
‘Set against the heat of climate change, this stunning debut novel demonstrates the power of compassion and the grace of acceptance. Moving, elegant, important, Rebecca Hooper is a voice that must be heard’ ― Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry
These Glass Bodies is as fascinating and thought-provoking a response to the climate crisis as I’ve read anywhere. Hooper’s writing manages to be both mesmerising and urgent, beautiful and alarming. Gloriously good ― Anna Caig, author of The Wise Witch of Orkney
Please note if ordering from outside the UK, pre-order options may be limited but will expand closer to publication.
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