i spent a year writing personal essays instead of scrolling

about 12 months ago, i accidentally stopped scrolling, although you’d never know from my screen time. i was still very much online or on my phone, writing half-formed thoughts in my notes app or spending hours at the kitchen table with my laptop open and a cup of coffee, maybe two, beside me, trying to turn them into something. and over the next year, i would go on to publish more than 100 essays and letters across two newsletters and send my little thoughts into more than 40,000 inboxes each week. i haven’t logged off. if anything, i’ve become more publicly online than ever before. but somewhere in there, that time started to feel different.

send me crumbs pls

the stranger part is that i never actually decided to quit scrolling. i didn’t wake up last summer and declare i was deleting instagram. i didn’t buy an old nokia, lock my phone in a drawer or undertake a 30-day digital detox. i didn’t even consciously decide to replace scrolling with writing. i just found myself in a strange patch of life where writing my thoughts down became somewhere to put a difficult chapter, and then, unexpectedly, something i loved. i became fascinated with trying to get better at it too. writing became this nerdy little interest i could disappear into for hours: following a thought, moving sentences around, trying to work out why one paragraph worked and another didn’t. and now a year later, what i want my attention craves feels almost unrecognisable.

so, here are my crumbs from 12 months of publishing personal essays instead of scrolling, and the very odd and unexpected things that happened next.