Entry number one. 14th of the 5th, 2024.
In the months before my 35th birthday, I found it increasingly difficult to think about anything but death. I'd been writing a lot of songs about my teenage years and I was spending time digging through memory boxes, reliving treasured moments captured in old photographs and faded keepsakes, clinging to the past when I suddenly thought, you really can't go back. It was like the reality of human existence finally felt real.
As if, until that moment, I'd never truly believed that one day I will no longer exist. In the lead-up to my 35th birthday, I started to become acutely aware of the inevitable. Of death.
The idea that death is not only inevitable, but unpredictable. Worst of all, natural. I couldn't process it. I felt out of control, trapped, dare I say even deceived by my own inability to embrace this fact of life earlier. How could I have got this far without acknowledging what was coming? Preparing for it? How much time did I even have left to figure it out? To figure anything out? I was lost.
As spring came around, my seasonal effectiveness disorder switched up a gear, so I took myself on a walk to the Botanic Gardens. I spent many summers there with my family, dates with my partner, but I hadn't wandered around alone for years. I was disappointed to learn the glasshouses were closed for renovations due to a storm which had shattered panes and caused so much damage to these iconic buildings that they had to be completely renovated. Instead, I sat on a bench.
It was a weekday, so it was wonderfully quiet and peaceful. I sat there, felt the sun on my face, listened to the wildlife around me, and became completely overwhelmed by my emotions, supercharged by the effect spring always has on my brain. In that moment, I felt so desperately that I needed to express myself, to talk about what spring was doing to me. I got out my phone, placed it on the arm of the bench, and hit record. And I just spoke. Softly. Urgently. With tears choked back, I spoke. Everything I felt, everything that being there in that moment reminded me of, the smells, the nostalgia, the loneliness.
With the sounds of the garden around me, a beautiful backdrop to my moment of complete, raw, and honest emotion. I spoke my truth.
Not long after I finished the recording, a man, I'd seen him wandering around earlier with a camera, approached me and asked if he could take my picture. Usually, I don't enjoy getting my picture taken, but this felt like a moment, so I said yes. As he did some test shots, he must have noticed something in my expression, something that prompted him to say, oh, I hope I'm not disturbing anything. I smiled, but didn't answer. I didn't know how. He got the picture he was after and showed it to me. I recognized my expression from those old photos I'd just been looking at. Death wasn't new to me, only a forgotten name made clear once again by the question of my own finality. I wish I had a copy of that photo he took, so I could look at it again ten years from now when I'm having the same crisis, and remember that I've always been aware. Listening back to the voice note I made that day, I feel so grateful that I decided to capture that moment.
So often, for fear of getting lost in it all, I don't allow myself to let go and follow my creative impulses. When an idea occurs to me, I will always write it down somewhere, but I find it so hard to allow myself to fully run with it in the moment. Like so many artists, I have hundreds of ideas, half-conceived, hiding away in notebooks, memory cards, voice notes, apps, that will never see the light of day because I haven't taken the time to develop them. Really, this means I miss out on a chance to develop myself, as an artist, as a person. The idea becomes an artefact, half-excavated. This recording was one of those artefacts.
I thought about it for so long. What could I do with it? Do an EP based on the seasons, with a song for each one, using field recordings and voice notes. Tidy up the audio and release it as a beautiful piece of prose. Make poetry out of what I said and put a beat behind it. Limitless possibilities. Instead, I did nothing. And the time passed, and here we are. A lot of the time, especially for those of us who are neurodivergent, if we don't work on an idea in the initial throes of excitement, it loses its importance to us. We might feel that, well, I don't feel that way anymore, so I won't put it out. I hate it now, so I won't finish it. But these ideas, these artefacts, serve as reminders of our past. And it's important to put them out into the world, so we can let go. The feelings we had at the time, the situation we were in, we have to let it all go, so we can move on and make something new. The recording I made that day marks a time in my life where I had started to think and feel differently about myself, about the future. It was an important moment for me, and I want to remember it.
As a songwriter, I use my work primarily to process things, to understand myself and my world better. Although right now I feel like I will always be scared to share my work, I finally understand the importance of doing it anyway. None of us know how much time we've got left, and I refuse to waste mine waiting, and wondering, and worrying. So, for this episode, my first episode, I have written a new song based on my voice recording that I made that day at the Botanic Gardens when I was super depressed in the spring of 2023. It turned out to be a very sad song. It turned out to be a very good song that I really like, actually.
It's very demo, it's not finished, and I thought it was just going to be me making something a bit fun but silly out of that voice recording. Absolutely fucking not. It's turned into an absolute heart-wrenching piece of fucking poetry for me, and it's so weird because I write so many words when I write songs. I write loads of words, and they're complicated, and they're very indirect, and they're very poetic and deep and all that crap. Like, they're really... I'm a wordy, wordy, wordy person. The song has, like, hardly any words in it, and I just... I found it so hard to record parts of the vocals when I started to really realise what the song was about, when I really kind of started to figure it out, and it made me really emotional, and I think that's... For me, that's really exciting.
It's really exciting to be making something that I'm just like, oh, I'm just going to see what happens, and actually it turns out to be something that is so deeply moving for me, even if nobody else likes it. I really like it, and it means a lot to me, and I think I will actually go ahead and finish this song.
*******
Smells like camping with the guides. When I was little.
And it smells like the Tyne, and going on walks, with my gran and my sister.
And it smells like drinking down the same river, when I was a teenager.
And it smells like camping as a teenager.
You
waste no time.
I
I fall behind.
We
don’t know it yet.
Just how good
just how good it gets.
Just how good
just how good it gets.
I remember
2021
Ever since then
spring makes me…
I remember
2021
Ever since then
spring makes me…
I thought
we’d make our escape
together now it’s over
You’re grown up and I’m here
waiting for you.
Waiting for you
Waiting for you
Waiting for you
I remember
2021
Ever since then
spring makes me…
I remember
2021
Ever since then
spring makes me…
Everything just feels, different.
*******
