The packing diaries

Why is moving one of the most stressful things you can do? That's ridiculous! Or... is it?

Warning! The below isn’t edited, or curated. It’s just a stream of thoughts that I needed to get down, and out of my brain, in order to get on with filling up boxes. I thought about putting them behind a paywall but then I am giving my paid subscribers my worst writing, so that doesn’t add up! But please do consider becoming a paid subscriber, if only to rescue me from the Demons of Vinted.

For something a little more curated, my latest for Cosmopolitan is online now. When VAWG stories hit the press, there’s always a resounding call-out for men’s outrage, for them to help with the fight… But with that comes bad actors, those behaving one way in public, and another behind closed doors. Who can actually fight the manosphere? I interviewed world-renowned experts, domestic abuse specialists, MPs, psychologists and the influencers and celebrities trying to push out a different message to young boys, to find out. Read it here.

I stack the toilet papers; they fit so perfectly into that spot in the bathroom. I scoop my underwear off the tiles, but when I carry them through to place somewhere, all I am faced with is things to do.

I have not managed any of the things I was supposed to manage. There’s a fake tan shadow of me, in my crumpled sheets. Tea-leaf brown that has been layered, layered, layered across my skin, across my bed. I didn’t do it correctly, there’s a tiger-stripe across my left thigh. The reality of my peely-wally skin, exposed and bare.

I think of the phrase, ‘wherever you go, there you’ll be’ and fear I am packing my sadness into these boxes. I need to sleep fifteen, sixteen hours and still sluggishly I traipse to the shop, Vinted buyers nipping at me, like they are my only priority. I drink two cans of Red Bull. The new watermelon flavour makes me feel like it’s not-so-bad.

I am not taking care of myself but I seem to have forgotten how to. Remember when I could dead-lift? When the men in the gym knew my face?

My computer keeps telling me to update it. This faceless, Octopus of a pop-up will not relent, no matter how much I defer, defer, defer.

I want that drop-down option for my life:

Boxes, defer for two-hours

Sell furniture, defer for four-hours

Figure out if all my ambition, all my work, is really worth anything, as, after decades of graft, every journalist I know searches for their plan B, defer for 24 hours

I’m afraid of my old self, the one who lies deep within me. I can feel her being resurrected, clawing at the gate, the place where I had to lock her in. She wants basements, she wants tequila, she wants to choke in liquid smoke.

Instead, I indulge in a new habit. I fire up Gemini, let it know how I am feeling, ask it why I am finding this so hard. They say that moving is one of the most stressful things you can go through, in your life. It’s up there with death, divorce, the loss of a job (oh, wait.)

I think this is pathetic. It’s just a few boxes, some phone calls to make, things that can be tick, tick, ticked off a list.

Gemini tells me this isn’t true. That, after 18 years in a place, I am tearing up my neural pathways, the comforting, well-worn knowledge it has become accustomed to each day. Something to do with my brain still thinking I am being chased by a bear.

I don’t fact check this. I know I should.

I tell it I am also leaving my job and it’s very nice to me about that. I can’t tell you exactly what it says because I don’t want to open my phone right now, get lost in another conversation, feel guilty about the water I am sooking up, the chips of damage I am taking off the planet, all so a robot can tell me what I am feeling is valid.

I work in magazines. I have friends. I know my feelings are valid.

God, I hate cliches.

The only thing I can eat is Pot Noodles. (Gemini is very nice to me about that, says it’s understandable.) The Pot Noodle, we notice, is trying to be Steven Bartlett.

Optimisation culture has reached my chicken and sweetcorn, and I think of all those Girl Boss years, those life-in-a-days, the 5am club pressure and how, I never believed in it but bought it anyway, and now we seem to be flipping from clean girl, to chaos. But it’s still all brand, brand, brand. It’s still all take your life and make content out of it, and that’s how you maintain a career, these days.

Get ready with me for the hospital, get ready with me to break-down on my landlord’s doorstep, get ready with me in curated chaos, where I still look pretty enough so that someone, somewhere wants to fuck me and therefore the algorithm decides to favour my face.

I don’t think I can do it. So, what is next?

There’s a better newsletter, trapped within my pen. One that doesn’t go off on tangents, one that doesn’t expect the reader to understand my unravelling mind. But I am 50 tabs open, a TikTok of a brain, swipe to the next task, swipe to the next thought, I can’t focus, I can only slap fake tan on my legs, sleep for the best.

But this is what is helping. Words that clatter haphazardly across my brain, being released onto paper.

All those Girl Boss years, when I was told to be someone that I wasn’t. When I am a bag of vibrators under the bed, tiger-stripe thighs and missed dentist appointments. My inbox is at 18,627 (unread) and I chopped my hair off with kitchen scissors.

But I am also friendship, late-nights, a phone full of people willing to help me, because I have always been willing, wanting, needing to help them.

A wasp buzzes by, reminds me that it’s almost August.

I’m packing up my identity in these boxes. Figuring out who I’ll offload, when I get there.

Right now, I’m thinking, it’s the person I’ve been all along. Maybe next time, I’ll accept her for who she is.