So we are at the end. Not just the end of this year, even though that’s true too, but the end of what was this rather meaningless project of mine, this daily Substack.
I set out to write unrelated daily posts for no reason other than to honour my word of the year for 2024 which was FOCUS. Of course, I did not reinvent my own personal wheel here; I’ve been writing blogs since before blogs got their name. I still have two others from years back kicking about on the wide interwebs. But I call this Substack meaningless by today’s standards. Everyone wants to monetise everything these days and there needs to be some deeper, grand, specific professional reason for keeping a Substack. In the deep, needy recesses of my mind and my memory, all I wanted was to re-grasp that unadulterated sense of writing an online diary for its own sake, not for likes, not for links, not to build a community [please spare me], and certainly not to showcase some form of stellar, and fake, lifestyle. You could even say the founding principle of this Substack was self-indulgence.
And indulge I did. I’ve just now unearthed my first post on 1 Jan 2024 where I wrote about hot chocolate. The day after I wrote about wanting to live in the present and pressing pause on the holidays. The one after that I wrote about resolutions, then about Christmas, about planning, good intentions, focusing, working and doing, and so on and on and on, over 366 days. When the wifi hit a major snag in late August, I eventually ended up posting a number of updates on the same day. Autumn was dire and profoundly marred by my spinal injury, with my updates becoming a litany of fear and pain and medication and set-backs. Just thinking about those days makes my stomach churn.
I wrote quite a bit about food, a bit about books, a lot about creativity and far too much about work. My most heartfelt posts about work are the ones that look to the past; I know that we should never do that, God forbid, don’t look behind you, that’s how you trip, don’t look behind you, you are not going there. But the truth of the matter is that our past shapes us very often irrevocably and that whilst we may eventually move forward from certain life events, their memories remain.
Wasn’t it just the day before yesterday that I managed to weave my redundancies into a post about the Harrods sale? If you read that one, congratulations you! It must be weird to get such a window into a stranger’s inner world and one which, in that respect at least, is as far from unicorns and fairies as anything could be.
But I am a Virgo, you see, and I gleefully go where others do not dare to tread; I eschew small talk and pretty stuff [because there are loads of truly great online spaces where we can look at nice pics, nice houses, nice stuff; I don’t need to do the same whilst pretending that’s the sort of legacy I want to put out there]. I love to get down and dirty with the mundane and the boring, the irritating and the difficult stuff that surrounds us. Writing about it does not make it darker or harder, but is, in fact, a way to process a predominantly unkind and superficial world.
Despite having been an editor for a time, I decided not to self-edit at all, if not just to re-read quickly and catch spelling mistakes or correct paragraphs I had written as if I had been talking, thus writing them as obscure, breathless tirades nobody should be subjected to. But other than that, I’ve left this place as I would a paper diary, for that was its naturalistic intent.
What now then? Do I have a word of the year yet? No, but I will tackle that tomorrow with that download from Susannah Conway I mentioned a few days back, something that I do every year. A few ideas have been percolating to the surface but I am, so far, trying to keep an open mind as to what I may find once seated at the kitchen table with the booklet and my trusty fountain pen.
In practice, I doubt I will let this place die. Although I very rarely re-read myself [honestly, the world is full of other writers and there isn’t much time], there’s something oddly comforting about knowing that just about everything that passed through my days this year has been recorded in black-and-white across what must be thousands of words.
As for 2024, get in the bin, I haven’t got a good thing to say about you. Here’s to 2025 and to us, dear reader; may it be a better year for both and one distinctively devoid of suffering for many.
Cut To The Chase I hereby declare you done and dusted!