Far from the shallow now

From the beginning to the end, this year has been dreamy. Soft dreams, fever dreams, stress dreams. A couple from the very end of the July to the very beginning of October were nightmares. A couple of them were dreams come true, but the realisation was lost on me because I spent so much time in the clouds. As a result I wasn't very present for the last half of the year.

But 2019 is the year I get grounded and finally acknowledge the wonderful things I've worked for, gained, earned, manifested this year. Because there are so many and my life has changed more than it's ever changed before - even I still don't feel it in myself yet. I haven't cried for myself in a long time, maybe it's time I started. In the best way possible.

Happy New Year.

I know you know

New life nerves

from october i'm going to be commuting from my home town to london twice a week to train for three days. i'm going to be coming straight back to work weekends, then the next two days i'll be helping create and rehearse a project for january. my life feels like it's about to be set alight, but with some beautiful beautiful happy fuckin flames because it's my dream life. although it's giving me diazapam level anxiety

i want to write about Mizz and Bliss magazine and the article about the summer perfumes that i can still remember bottle for bottle. i want to write about manifestation and intention. i want to write about my summer perfumes and lists of my top favourites. i want to write about perfumes for every season. about the handmaids tale, the virgin suicides. about my summer playlist. about walking round the park at dusk. about how my skin smells after three applications of hawaiian tropic and elizabeth arden's green tea summer.  about writing.  about hoop earrings. about nose bleed Graceland seats.  i want to write about moving to london and uplifting my life after such a long time of being so low. i want to write about something funny and something sad. i want to write about running, and blogging and articles and promotional pictures from perfume ads and debut albums and that animal crossing advert from 2006 and about every single experience i have ever had that makes me, me.

Summer games

i found an entry in my journal dated the 14th of may, two months ago. a month and a bit ago i was at a wedding that changed my perception on how i tackled an opportunity i was scared of. a month and a little bit less ago, i was at my first audition for the opportunity. two weeks and a bit ago i left my job, two weeks ago today i did my second audition for the opportunity, a week and three days ago i found out that i was successful in that opportunity and will be going to LDN later in the year. it's been a mad month.

it's been a month and a half (especially this fuckin Cancer season) of being faced with the past and the future immediately. both really vying for my attention and both of them overwhelming. things got really dark, worse than dark, things simultaneously got very clear-headed.i was very rational in what i decided i would have to do if i didn't get in. my whole life experience has taught me not to want, because i don't get it. i never have. but i wanted this, more than i could say. and i'm so proud that i showed up for myself, again and again, even when i was frightened.

here's what i've been listening to:

• summer games - drake
• watch me fall apart - sarah jaffe
• my baby needs a shepherd/ red dirt girls - emmylou harris
• piledriver waltz - alex turner
• hot knife - fiona apple

reading 

• the water cure - sophie mackintosh 
• the handmaid's tale - margret atwood (and watching)
• i am i am i am - maggie o'farrell 

writers

i was the girl writing out across the paper, out across the internet. bleeding on her blog (hahah). all over her pages. i was the teenage dreamer, baby blogger, journal cuddling, diary writing all night, the saccharine syrupy sentences, ugly impromptu paragraphs. and other things. i still am, at heart. somehow it's harder to write in my own voice now i'm older and attach my name to my thoughts. other people call themselves so easily - it took me twenty one years to call myself an artist.

on bulimia

i order a twenty piece chicken nuggets at the mcdonalds drive thru. i order a big mac. a chicken sandwhich. i get fries. a large coke (diet, obviously). i hold the brown paper bag close and feel the warmth and the smell of fried food in my lap and then i place it in the passenger seat. i am already starting to escape. we ride off ten minutes out of the city, until the roads become dirt and the streetlights stop shining on me. eating is one of my favourite things to do. 

it's easier to throw up on the side of the road because you can dispose of the evidence like you never committed the crime against yourself in the first place. i have enough tiny deaths looking at the rising water level in the toilet bowl and wondering how you're going to explain that one. i have enough experience in which containers hold vomit best. to double bag. to never purge down a sink because you'll end up sifting through it with your bare hands. i know the feeling of the reluctance to purge and the inevitability of it all. of crippling embarrassment when you cough too loudly in the public stall you're bent over in. does everyone know? does anyone think about bulimia like i do?

Vitamin D

someday i'll write to you and i'll have a few more scars. i'll have different roads and routes and roundabouts mapped out in my brain. i'll sing songs i've written about things i can only imagine. i'll have had a whole lot of happiness, and hopefully, only a little more sadness. that's always been the plan, that's always been why i write. to paint a path away from pain.

summer is coming. it leaves freckles on my arms and invites vitamin d into my blood stream. it always makes me want to wear amber and smell like jasmine and lighten my curls, play 'santa monica dream', drinking beer and getting high in the garden. makes me wanna lay down in abandoned drained pools from the old houses up in the countryside.

i've been reading and thinking about orange groves and olive trees. i'm going to leave my job soon.

Gold in my veins

i've been trying to write here for months but the words haven't really come. i got myself a job that gives me good hours and a different kind of art project to keep my hands busy in the winter. last week i took a train and sat in a room in a future that i imagined when i was fourteen. the roles were switched and some of the details were off, but i'm growing into the woman i always imaged would be sat in the isle in a yellow sundress.

i have a tendancy to get drunk and search for a party a little while longer than everyone else. but watching all these young women move on with their beautiful, messy lives made me realise that i needed to do that too. and i hadn't moved on for a long while, not since i combed all of that fucking glass out of my hair from two thousand and sixteen.

so i took another train down to holloway road and i auditioned for a big deal. and whatever the outcome, the process was vivid and bright and i'm starting to see my future carved out in little stars ahead of me again. i missed them.

i'll write more soon xo