Yes, I’m alive. I burnt out like a shooting star in the sky after the launch of the book. It was a potent Molotov cocktail of launching the book I self-published (it was almost impossible to cover the long list of logistics in this series), moving house at the same time, a lot of life admin, and then the kids taking ten weeks of holiday. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t.
I don’t know whether you’re finding a certain fatigue with content, or whether that’s just me. I’m tired of a type of content I create to feed the machine. It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned this. I mean, I’m no spring chicken. I was out tapping away at my keyboard with the first wave of bloggers in the noughties, sending subliminal messages through my music choices on my MySpace playlist to future suitors. I just can’t keep up with the kids and their glossy content, giving off vibes of a mini production studio behind them. I admire their creativity, their tenacity, despite working with a machine that will chew you up and spit you out the moment you stop producing.
Social media has made us addicted to constant validation, and I include myself in that.
So I decided to do nothing, or basically the bare minimum: the Australian edition of The Smallest Restaurant in Paris, the new season of Bake Off launching, and applications for the Kettle Khoo Academy opening (apply, it’s a life-changing opportunity!). And when I say bare minimum, I don’t mean idle. I told you I’d be off, and I meant it, aside from the guest recipes on Substack and some rehashed content for the gram to keep things ticking over. But a hustler doesn’t fully switch off. Even on ‘holiday’, I was reading for an upcoming project: books on Korean culture.
There are financial implications to stepping off, and boy was I made aware of it. Numbers slid 50% on the old gram, my paid subscribers dropped (thank you to everyone who stuck with me). It turns out the algorithm doesn’t particularly reward disappearing.
I’ve been questioning my creative practice a lot. If you know my back story, you’ll know I studied at Central Saint Martins for four years. Creativity is baked into me, and food was always my medium, my message, or, as Marshall McLuhan put it, ‘the medium is the message’. He was on my reading list at Central, and I’ve found myself coming back to that idea. Because what I’ve realised through the self-publishing project is that I’ve recently been craving discomfort in my creativity. I haven’t written a printed cookbook in almost a decade, although my memoir, The Smallest Restaurant in Paris, includes a recipe at the end of each chapter. So what actually gets my creative juices flowing? What makes me curious enough to want to follow an idea down a rabbit hole, rather than simply make the thing I know will perform?
I know I’m in a fortunate position, doing a creative job and being able to live off it. It’s a strange situation out there with the rise of sloppiness (whether human or AI generated) just to satisfy the beast. But perhaps that creates an opportunity to make something with intention. Maybe intentional content doesn’t have the virality one craves nowadays, and maybe it won’t travel as far, but it can stay with your small community. And perhaps that’s enough.
I’ve been digging deep into journalling, tarot cards (maybe you’ll be getting recipes for spells instead of the best chocolate cake in the near future), and asking what is that soothing balm I need to satisfy my creative itch. Of course it’s utterly selfish, and most people would pander to their audience, asking: what do you want more of? What do you need? But I feel like you’re here for the ride. You’re creatively curious, a mindful consumer, craving delicious delights of all kinds and forms. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.
I almost want to create without an audience in mind, without the performative aspect. It feels so legacy media, so old-school TV presenting, where you know you’re performing for an audience but you can’t actually see them. I want to be looser and freer. I want to follow my curiosity and see where it takes me, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into the algorithm’s idea of what I should be doing.
Anyway, all this just to say: I’ll be kicking off a three-part summer series from next week, sharing a little of what happened when I stepped away from the machine. Part one is an alpine adventure, part two is culture with the kids in the Cotswolds, and part three is me, solo, in the south of France. Nothing particularly revolutionary, just some things I saw, ate, loved and thought about while I was offline.
Keep your inbox tuned in, and check your spam. I haven’t ended up there.
A few things I fell in love with again this summer:
My old Lomo Instax camera
My ink thirsty Pilot fountain pen
Vinyl (this album is pure joy)
Bisous,
Rach x
What have you fallen back in love with this summer?
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