On silence, shame spirals, and what next for this substack.

I’ve been dead quiet.

A brief-heavy peak turned into an accidental writing slump turned into a secret shame spiral turned into a black hole of career despair. I was too exhausted to write. Then I didn’t want to write. Then I couldn’t write.

Even though I desperately wanted to scream through my keyboard. About injustice. About a career happening extraordinarily mundane. One that happens to so many other creative freelancers, particularly women, who fall foul of Men with Egos. Tale as old as time. Nothing special.

Like so many others, a legal agreement has left me tongue-clamped. I can’t tell you that story. Blankety Blank it. You’d be right.

Instead, I’ve been hibernating in a digital winter. Burrowing deep into my shame. Nuzzling its blackness. Trying to see ahead, while my pipeline freezes, the market value of my skillset tanks in real time and AI encroaches from every direction.

The dream of my own strategy micro studio gasping its last before it ever lived. Right problems. Wrong business model. Doing it all solo in the toughest market in 20 years? Not to be recommended matey.

Silence suffocates over time. You feel it physically in the chest. You move to speak but your words lie like lead. You choke on your own voice. One day, you forget what it even sounds like. The thing is, these days silence is a career killer.

We must perform our competencies for the algorithm. Dance monkey, dance. Hot takes scheduled into your calendar. A hook for every day of the week. An infinite scroll of packaged content to verify our professional existence.

And so, I’m dusting off my keyboard, and trying to remember my own voice. Rolling it around my mouth. Feeling it in my fingertips. What do I want to say now? How do I package myself? Do I focus on my professional selfhood? Dare expand my humanity beyond the realms of my portfolio?

To craft your personal brand, you’re supposed to neatly fold yourself into an appealing box for your target audience. Your voice follows. Find your niche, determine content pillars, be consistent in your tone and churn out the guff. So dictates the framework.

This is I fall flat on my arse. In work and life, I am the Other box. Undefined. Bit of this, bit of that.

A bit creative. Bit strategic. Bit entrepreneurial. Bit arty. Bit introverted. Bit loud. Bit foodie. Bit nerdy. Bit straight. Bit gay. Bit British. Bit ‘foreign’. Bit Jewish. Bit goy. Bit middle class. Bit working class. Bit ill. Bit fine.

I have never enough of anything to position myself with it. And I am tired of trying to make myself palatable. Folding myself teeny tiny, crippled into a convenient shape that gives my soul the ick. I learned over the last year that you literally cannot win even when you try.

So that’s not what you’ll find here, or anywhere else, from now on.

Now, I write as I am. A woman dragging herself out of a shame spiral with ripped fingernails, trying to reclaim her voice and make space for herself.

• Musing on creativity, how to reclaim it, how to express it, in a world where the algorithm devours performance.

• Exploring interesting strategic ideas, and their implications for how we might work and live.

• Trying to build a career in an industry that’s sinking in quicksand.

• Occasionally talking about brand, and making it real beyond a hypothesis that dies in a deck. But not boring on about it. There’s enough of that elsewhere.

A place where life is complex. Nuance is good. Considered, lukewarm takes are valid. Where I don’t have to pretend to have the answers, but I’m interested in the questions.

Where all *this* is held up with grit, masking tape and my fundamental belief that your one obligation, your mitzvah, is to offer the world your imperfect thoughts, quickened by your heart and blood, not an LLM.

A virtual wine libation poured on a techno-feudalist altar to an uncaring universe. Given in the old way. Without care for dopamine hearts or thumbs. And see how the universe opens to you, given time.

In other words, an experiment in not giving a fuck about the outcome, the audience or the stats. To honour the declaration I made at 6 years old at parent’s evening: “I just want to make stuff, even if nobody cares.” Especially if nobody cares. A delectable subversion of the ruleset of every media distribution platform.

Simply writing, not for the joy of it, but for the need to keep my synapses firing and my heart beating. In other words, to be a writer. Unattached from ego. Because that is ultimately what I am. And it is high time I bloody get on with it.

Reading: Butter by Asako Yuzuki. Murder and French butter are two of my favourite subjects. This novel combines them deliciously.

Watching: Wuthering Heights in all its pornographic, flawed glory. With a side of Poirot when I want to escape.

Playing: BG3 Durge redemption run - I tried expedition 33 but got fed up with ALL THE DEATH.

Thinking about: Societal collapse and how it will change the world. My brain is a FUN TIME at the moment.

Eating: Potato vareniki with garlic butter and dill sour cream. When you’re pondering societal collapse, you need good stodge okay.

Listening to: The Rest is Politics US eviscerating Trump. It’s kind of cathartic and kind of terrifying.