What Gives You Energy?

A Mediation Of Sorts While On A Deadline..

While on a book deadline this month, everything held within this newsletter will be scheduled in advance - simply to avoid procrastination on my part, as well as being a burnout prevention measure. Please reply to this email with any thoughts, queries, etc if needed meanwhile.

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‘Community’ is something of a buzzword to the internet - something that has lost all its meaning, purpose. “Find your tribe” we are told - never mind the inherent cliche of such semantics - while also typecasting ‘loners’ for… not conforming to arbitrary standards.

Match this with the terrible concept of assuming to speak for everyone. Politicians use it for speeches of rhetoric ‘flare’ - the nation feels that… the nation is ashamed, we are told. Arguments online claim to speak for “all women” - while being overly specific about what sort of woman that means. Where is the evidence? Privately, I detest the use of ‘community’; it forces you to become a spokesperson for that demographic by proxy. Failure to conform to arbitrary standards oftentimes means… *insert various painful social consequences here*.

Caitlin Moran previously made the point in an interview with Elizabeth Day that those consequences are mostly worse for women, in their disproportionate responses.

Katherine May

of

The Clearing by Katherine May

wrote such a great piece about community and its nuances a little while ago - something to kept bookmarked:

The trouble with getting together

I remember

Polly Vernon

(Times columnist, Grazia writer, and also on Substack at

Broad with Polly Vernon

) writing about the impact of Hot Feminist - and the scale of what she deemed ‘casual contempt’. I am not by any means as big a name as her, but the same piece still sticks in my memory. I’d enjoyed the book - and got to meet her the same year. (She told me not to fall into the limiting concept of ‘news or shoes’ journalism - because women should be able to do both. One of the nicest pieces of advice anyone has given me.)

For the longest time, I have not felt like I have a community. There is a presumption you will automatically just ‘get along with’ others who have the same shared, protected characteristics as you - because you’ll have something to talk about! Innit nice, you made a fwriend! Aww shucks!

Despite my specialism as a journalist being disability and social inequality issues, that is still reduced to one diagnosis - never mind that my work rarely is condition specific. The bulk is… disability as a *whole*. And trying to write a book with nuance but without having to caveat every single sentence is why writing the proposal has taken so long.

I’ve largely checked out of the internet now. I am tired of this nonsense and how it corrupts the most innocent, the best of intentions; Instagram and Substack are what I use, and LinkedIn for work. And even that is limited.

I raise you a question in response, as something of a counter measure: what gives you energy?

(And it has something to do with these photos you see above.)