I started writing this project when I realised that I wasn’t looking forward to returning to a pre-covid life. In early March 2020, just before the UK went into lockdown, I was feeling suicidal and started taking antidepressants. At the same time, I got covid. It was confusing, nauseating. I rode the wave of apathetic peace. It was nice not having to feel much.

As I emerged from the novelty of the medicine, I looked at the life I was living and decided that I’d had enough. I reassessed friendship expectations, ambitions, my communication norms, wants, needs. I started to make changes to reflect what I wanted: less of everything the world told me was important.

I didn’t want to write about any of this. Not until December 2020, when the X-mas lockdown was established. Everything forced its way out between then and March 2021. The words, the wild noises. I didn’t care anymore. The last 18 months have made me not care anymore. I was weary of my own behaviours and thoughts. If the words and sounds of the project are all I depart with, that will be fine.

I hate that I’ve allowed the conventions and rules such a wide plot of soil in my brain. Everyday feels like a fight against conditioning, a fight against the self. The battle against the want for validation from strangers is tiresome. Living for the sake of knowing nothing else is tiresome.

I want to obliterate the idea that charm and charisma are anything other than tools of manipulation. Framing is horrifying. Narratives are filthy. Stories do not have to be conflict-centric. We are too afraid to do different -- properly different, not mildly different within the established confines, merely presented as different.

The world and people bore me with our presentational slant. To Sell is Human, they say, without thinking about the purposelessness and simultaneous purposeful nothingness of all life.

The weight of the old world is heavy, what we’ve learned light. The usual is returning and I cannot stop it. But I won’t participate. I cannot tell, I do not know.