‘I honestly don’t know if you can help me,’ I wrote recently to a very lovely and well-meaning business coach, who had contacted me about joining her programme. I then proceeded to type out a cascade of worries about the state of my business in this climate.

Her answer was that a lot of what I was saying sounded like a mindset problem. And in many ways, she is right. The way we look at things, the way we choose to interpret how external information affects our lives is always through the filter of our own mindset. Our thoughts control our emotions, and we can think different thoughts if we want to feel certain things etc. etc.  

We don’t have to buy into the world they are creating out of the world they are destroying in the process. It’s time to untangle ourselves from their webs, to return to the things that make us truly content. Not 'happy', because happy is an emotion that comes in bursts, the light that balances the inevitiable grief and and sadness that we all must feel. Happy was never supposed to be how we went about our lives 24-7. It is another marketing construct, a way to sell you shit. At its most basic level marketing works on pain points: pointing out to you what might be wrong with you or making you unhappy and then selling you something to solve it.

WITCH is an all-women Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic, terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells ... It’s an awareness that witches and gypsies were the original guerillas and resistance fighters against oppression… There is no ‘joining’ WITCH. If you are a woman and dare to look within yourself, you are a Witch…Whatever is repressive, solely male-oriented, greedy, puritanical, authoritarian – those are your targets. (Witch Leaflets)

I have wanted to try to organise my thoughts into words for a long time now, and each time I sit down to do it, it all feels too huge and just too f*cking dark. But I am going to persevere, as it’s starting to feel like an actual blockage in my mental system: all these thoughts that flood my head every time I go to write a post or send an email and then stop because it just feels too weird to be going on like normal when all these things are happening around us.

The Suffragettes were not posh tea drinking women, who kept themselves busy sewing sashes. They were radicals who caused far more harm to property. The windows they smashed were on Bond Street, Regent Street and Downing Street. And that was why it worked, because: ‘There is something that governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property.’

I got to vote in two countries this year, and the stakes couldn't have felt higher each time. Someone on Twitter said that today feels like Christmas Eve - in hell. And I couldn't agree more. The time difference has never felt so cruel. I don't want to stay up all night, but I still have PTSD from waking up in 2016 at 3am to see the news. I wish I could somehow switch off from it all, I know it would help my mental health, but I too much is resting on this election. And though I feel exhausted I still have fucks to give.

Here are just a few: (Rant incoming and if you don't like swearing stop reading.)

It’s hard to keep telling yourself that you are ‘aging beautifully’ or rightfully, or that there is any value at all in aging, when as a culture, we really don’t put much value on wisdom or lived experience.

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