Right Now.

LIVING IN THE MOMENT. Alternatively: DELETE THE APPS. Or, New Year’s resolutions.

I am trying to face the new year with a new perspective: it is really nice that so many people are, at this very moment, resolving to become better in some way. To enrich their lives. To try more foods, to travel father or to new places, to learn alternative languages in which to say the same things, to become people who cherish, or treasure, who appreciate how unpromised time is and want to spend it wisely.

I find The New Year emotionally difficult for a variety of reasons, some of them reasonable and others inexplicable. I am prone to reflection to the point of neurosis, a constant crick in my neck from looking back and behind, but never facing forward and scoping out the future - which inevitably has me spending even more time looking backward, chastising past me for not doing more, not considering future me and the scrutiny she’d subject past me to.

I would like to find some sort of middle ground, which I think in boring, Pinterest infused therapy speak would describe a being present.

I have started by, a few months ago, deleting my Instagram account. It cannot be understated how much better this has made me feel and I cannot recommend doing it enough. This is not a particularly new or creative talking or writing point but this doesn’t make it less true. I do not need to know what all those people are doing, what they look like, be subjected to the worst opinions of all time, a blizzard of Canva infographic urgency and subliminal chastising every minute of the day. I don’t need to know any of it, ever. I never have. I think my brain was filled with all this useless knowing to such an extend that it prevented me from knowing other things, from seeking out more useful knowing, like a new language or a hobby or the faces on the tube seats opposite me. It made my brain full and stupid. It also fuelled my pathological neurosis - had me analysing every story, every interaction or lack thereof, by people I believed were my friends either correctly or due to the false proximity of the internet, concocting insane proof that actually they hated me. I was inundated with photos of women who all looked like each other and looked nothing like me or themselves which made me feel like some kind of alien. I was sick of seeing people become less like whole, actual individuals - constantly moving and performing and behaving in ways that made it clear they simply couldn’t switch off from being watched, looked at, perceived. Anyway. Delete the bastard app, if you’re in need of a resolution.

I also deleted the Twitter app, for far simpler reasons: it is overrun with fascism, pornography, and AI, and I don’t think anyone on the planet could spend a minute on it without suffering immense psychic damage. Truly a special layer of hell exists and is occupied on and via that app.

All this to say - I am present in the world in these ways, free of any one-stop-shop escapism that erodes my brain and sense of self. But this hasn’t been all singing all dancing - in the cold light of day I am increasingly horrified by the chokehold that phones have on almost everybody. From babies in prams all the way up to pensioners. A prison we have all walked into and settled down in, convinced we cannot leave even though the doors are wide open.

ANYWAY!

With all my newfound presence and that to which I have committed to in the New Year, I have a new kind of time on my hands. And so I am taking the moment to announce to you all my intentions for this time, this presence, because I believe it will shackle me to commitment in ways that keeping them to myself will not.

1. 365 days of French practice! I think learning languages exercises parts of your brain that other activities simply can’t reach. I have on and off made this promise to myself and never come good, so this year is the year.

2. Submit to at least six literary journals.

3. FINISH MY MANUSCRIPT. I wrote previously on how I have opened and played with the same couple of poems all year and betrayed myself into thinking this counts as editing, or even writing. No! It does not! I’d like to write for an hour each day, and commit one day each week to editing. This is not an easy task with a full time job but I am stubbornly determined.

4. Read fifty books. On this note I am interested to hear from Kindle users. I love having physical copies of the books I read, but am open to having my mind changed by avid readers who made the change.

5. Write to you all at least once a fortnight, with a decided direction for CherryFemme, and perhaps even a little rebrand.

6. Get back into photography, with patience for myself and for the act itself.

Please tell me your resolutions, email me with anything you’d like to read from me in the New Year, and stick with me as you have done. Thanks for being here.