How do you start a newsletter that very much wants to be a personal email?

“Dear Reader”?

“Hi”?

“How’s it going?”?

Today, on Tell Me You”re Awkward Without Telling Me You’re Awkward, I’m going to go with:

Oh, there you are. How’s things? (Seriously. Tell me.)

Last time I wrote, I was about to head off to Wales for a solo, birthday, overnighter. It was blissful, as ever, and I was also glad to come home to my family a little more relaxed, a lot sandier, and with hair that had me happily looking - at least one of my grandparents would have told me - “like the wreck of the Hespurus”.

Side note: it was decades after I first heard and fell in love with this phrase that I discovered the Hespurus was a schooner, in a Longfellow poem, and nothing to do with the wild, Catweazley person it conjured in my mind. My aunt has stated that she has no need of costly DNA tests because she knows herself to be “100% Baldrick”. I claim at least 25% Catweazle. On my father’s side, obvs. My maternal grandfather referred to us collectively - then in our early 20s - as Hinge & Bracket.

That was a month ago and A Whole Load Of Things have since occurred, caused some mental and physical disturbance, and eventually disappeared in a celebratory puff of smoke. So, fresh from a few weeks of doomlooping, I’m back in the land of the cognitively functional.

No really.

Despite this typically rambling, tangent-ridden introduction, I’m feeling very calm and contemplative. The recent heatwave here has meant our little house benefitting from open windows and doors (shoutout to Cat-G8), and my little arthritic joints benefitting from not hurting. Look, I’m putting a positive spin on the alarming weather; humour me.

Outdoors, the plants that haven’t turned crispy are flourishing, and our garden, front and back, looks wonderfully unkempt. Normally I’d be trying to rein in Mother Nature a little more but this heat means grass is not cut, “weeds'“ are not pulled, and everything just gets to do its best.

This morning, in the back garden with the cat while Charlie was off checking his moth trap down the lane, I felt like I’d stumbled across some abandoned old cottage with a garden overgrown into a teeny meadow. Rather than beating myself up about not getting my arse into gear to spend days working on flower beds and lawns, I just allowed myself to sit in the deep beauty of it. Full of life, including mine.

This, I acknowledged, is what it is to relinquish attempted control. Life and beauty flourish. I’ve always found that a garden goes heavy on parables if you’re ready to listen, and I am. I am ready to listen and let go.

Letting it go

I’ve recently had bit of a Threads problem that was all about T***p-watching and getting my daily hourly fix of outrage. I was determined to keep up the effort so I didn’t fall for the flooding of the zone. I wasn’t in any way prepared for quite how much flooding there would be. The corruption, the bullying, the deaths, the lies, the abuse, the psychopathy, the sheer grift… I surrendered. I quit. All I’d achieved was setting my nervous system on fire multiple times a day. It’s been a very long time since I could hear that voice or look at that face without feeling actual nausea, and if my real responsibilities lie with my soft animal body, my soul, my life, my loved ones and the planet we live on, then it was way past time for me to opt out of watching a person who will literally kill for attention.

Meanwhile, I’d been despairing about how frustrating it is to have an ADHD operating system. Honestly, I’ve spent quite a while in deep ennui recently because if there’s one thing I know about me after 63 years of experience, it’s that once I’m past the Big Idea stage it’s unlikely I’ll actually get started on the doing, and inevitable that I’ll fail on the completion. So what’s the point? Why bother trying? Another kind of surrender, another kind of quitting, I guess. I’d seriously just thrown in the towel because fuck this. I couldn’t take anymore mental and emotional self-flagellation.

In a last ditch attempt to “fix” myself, I spent time trying to work out what factors needed to be in place for me to stick with something. Like I said in my last post, I’ve never really had a “thing” that I fixated upon or was always able to prioritise, so this was all about “if I could do anything, what would make me keep going?”.

The answer was: nothing. Nothing will. My brain doesn’t do that in this context. In the mug/ spoon/ bed linen/ comfort watching/ coffee bean/ parking space/ shitty selftalk context it’s reliably obsessive, but in the keep-going-and-find-fulfilment-and-maybe-pay-some-bills context it’s a clown show.

The reframe who loved me

What if it’s not about “what keeps me going”, but more about “what keeps me coming back?”. What if long pauses between bouts of attention don’t really matter, as long as I keep coming back? What do I always come back to?

• Firstly, my family, my home (the house, the garden, the land, the More Than Human inhabitants), and making a safe space where we can find peace, acceptance, respect, comfort and love.

  My freedom to simply turn away to choose myself and my life is a privilege and I’m going to use it to create a small sanctuary where beauty, truth, love and the tending of those things are what matters. I believe that’s what I was made for. I believe that many of us were.

  That’s my thing.

• Secondly, damn good stories. Words, pictures, sounds. I’ll always be the first to sit cross-legged on the mat curl up under a blanket ready to disappear into a story world, whether it’s fact or fiction.

  My imagination is my superpower and portal to other worlds.

• Thirdly - and this was a joke until it quickly wasn’t - the internet. I’ve been online since 1998 (chapeau to Alistair, my first editor, who enabled me with a loan to buy an iMac so we could be WFH pioneers by day and, in my case, founding members of online communities by night). I’m horrified by how it’s been weaponised and used as a method of destruction by some, but still in awe of what it can be in the right hands. There is no doubt an argument that in my dopamine-challenged world, I’m just addicted to the quick fix, but I know it’s not that. Yes I get sucked in sometimes, but not for long. And sure enough I always come back. The internet reunited me with Charlie 25 years ago. It told me I could adopt my daughter from China, and long years later, sent us her name and face in a jpg that took FOREVER to download (hands up if you can hear the modem). It linked us to her twin sister on the other side of the planet. It found me all the animals that have been part of my family since 2000. It enabled me to gain learning and qualifications. It told me thousands and thousands of brilliant stories.

  I am not giving it up. The tech bros cannot have my internet.

All this to say, as May closes, I am returning, I return, I will return, to sanctuary for loved ones. To stories. To sharing them here and maybe here. I let the rest go.

And breathe…

Before I sign off, how about some things that are bringing me peace? Hmmm…

• A low histamine diet is saving my life

• Meet Me at the Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoka Machida

• Lo-fi YouTube in the background as the best bodydoubler. One of my favourites.

• This morning in our garden

• Colombian coffee. Black, ceramic, Pour Over pot.

• Our Unwritten Seoul - my entire Netflix algo is Korean now and I don’t care

• muslin bed linen, especially the set I got from The Middle of Lidl for like fifteen quid in a sale

• being home with my person and my daughter and my cat and a summer breeze.

Let me know what’s working for you. Or not working, if that helps.

I hope June is good to you and yours. I will be back at some point in the month, possibly the very last minute as I am with this one because yeah…that.

x

I spent most of last year trying to re-ignite my love for the onlines. I had huge visions and big plans, spreadsheets and goals. What I didn’t have was enthusiasm or focus. Or - most importantly - energy. I’ve told the story of 2024/25 already elsewhere. Autumn-winter 2025/26 brought increasing, chronic pain, and me running on Minimum Viable Effort every day. Being present on the internet was just not even close to being a priority.

When I did go online, I saw how people who were already working extremely hard, were increasingly required to be content creators and social media professionals in order to catch a small amount of attention. With a huge potential audience, posting can look like an audition with millions of others trying out for the role. Similarly, those trying to find IRL professional support for their creative endeavours seemed always to be asked,”What’s your following like? We’ll need big numbers.” All that did for me, working alongside my ADHD proclivity for being all ideas and no action, was paralyse me. I did nothing. Created nothing. Wrote almost nothing. With no services, no products, no nothing to sell, what would even be the point? The damn world’s on fire, genocide is a hashtag, people are dying in the most horrific circumstances, and I’m sitting here telling you what I had for lunch and which K-Drama I’m currently watching? Please. Not only is that not entertaining, I shouldn’t be trying to make it be. Didn’t want to try. My actual life, with my people and my place, deserved what energy I had much more than <gestures vaguely at the internet>.

That’s the bad part. Here’s the good part:

So much fell away. My soul just kept telling me, “Less…less…no, even less. You don’t need this, or this, or that. You can’t do that, or that, or that anymore. Lose more. Can you see it yet? Can you feel it? No? Then you need less...” And on it went, until I gained genuine clarity.

What did it reveal?

• My people and place are my forever priority. They matter to me, nourish me, give my life meaning, make my heart happy.

• I need something that is just mine. Something I treasure and enjoy and nerd out over. A hobby, an interest, a thing.

• I love stories. Listening to them, reading them, watching them and telling them. Words are spells and the weaving of their magic makes me happy.

• I’m fulfilled on a bone-deep level by making something tangible and beautiful. Something I did with my hands. A task with a start and a finish and a moment of “It’s done and I love it.”

• I enjoy being alone or with very, very few people. It’s in those circumstances that my energy moves smoothly and regenerates. Most of my life takes place inside my head and my awareness only really moves outwards in the presence of love, nature or beauty.

• I am brought to tears by the mastery of a craftsperson. The time, patience, repetition, experience and knowledge that combine to - sometimes over many years - turn a skill into a blend of art and utility that just thrills me.

It didn’t take me long to find what I wanted to learn and make my thing. It’s been circling for a long time but perfectionism and impatience meant I wasn’t prepared to be rubbish at it. Those feelings have gone. I’m excited by the story potential of beginning and learning.

I’m learning how to hand carve wood. There’s more, but that will do as a simple introduction. Me, some tools, a piece of wood and a vision. Failures, mistakes, lessons and successes. Little stories of craft, beauty and slow work.

Because I love to write and feel a connection with like-minded people, I decided that I’d keep a place where, maybe once a month (pain issues allowing), I wrote about what I was learning - both through and about the process - and shared other beautiful things and makers that I’ve found. This is what this newsletter will be. Because you kindly signed up to follow my writing at some point in the past, you’re on my mailing list. I appreciate this is a change of direction and topic, so please unsubscribe if you’d like to opt out - I totally understand, and have been very grateful for your company. Thank you.

Finally, the image up at the top of this is not of my work! At this point I can barely hold a sharp knife, but what I really love is a handmade, wooden bowl. It occurred to me that I could learn a lot about wood from the work of others. So I went digging around in second hand shops (another of my favourite past-times) and found these beauties. I want to refurbish them, refinish them and restore them to something even more special, as part of my self-designed apprenticeship. I think it will really help me begin to feel my way around working with wood.

So that’s where I am as we move into spring. In other news, my birthday is soon, and as a gift from my husband who knows me very well after 25 years together, I’m off down to the Gower Peninsula and my favourite beaches for a solo break next week. Maybe I’ll bring home some driftwood.

Sending you all good wishes, peace and inspiration,

Jo