Being the leading lady of my own life
Because if you can’t be self-reflective around your birthday, when can you be?
Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.
🥣 Homemade houmous. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve really got into a rhythm of making a batch of houmous every few days, whizzing up a can of chickpeas with about half a cup of their cooking water, a big spoonful of tahini, loads of garlic purée, and some olive oil. Once I’ve spooned the resulting dip into a tub for the fridge, I’ve drizzled some more olive oil on top, and then shaken a generous amount of Condimaniac’s The Good Bagel ‘everything bagel’ seasoning on top. Delicious.
📱 One Sec app. One thing on my ‘out’ list for 2023 was morning scrolling, a wish borne out of my truly heinous screen time statistics and a feeling that all that mindless social media use probably wasn’t good for me. I saw Ella Risbridger’s recommendation (ironically, on Instagram), for the One Sec app, and in the 2ish weeks I’ve had it downloaded, my screen time is down by a third! How the app works is that it intercepts you when you open a social media app, asks you why you’re opening it, and gives you the opportunity to do something else instead. It’s great!
🎶 Was I The Drama? Playlist. A truly iconic playlist title (and image) from the Spotify team here. If you’re wondering why Florence Pugh in purple would be ‘The Drama’, check out this comprehensive Vanity Fair article which digs right down into the drama. It was all playing out while I was stuck at home with Covid, without the energy or attention span even to watch TV, so it’s safe to say I lapped it up.
It’s my birthday this week! (It feels weird telling you all exactly what day, but - this week). What this means - as well as an excuse for a Colin caterpillar cake (and watching this Reel over and over again) - is that it’s the end of the annual season of self-reflection I indulge in between mid-December and my birthday. Wiser people than I have written before about how the start of January is a terrible time to set intentions for the year: it’s dark all the time and freezing cold, plus we’ve just spent a week or so out of our normal routine and environment.
But the start of February? That feels a little more manageable somehow. So my intention for this year: to be gentle with myself. I’ve got a couple of big scary goals for the year (selling my book, selling my flat - no news on either yet!), which are both part of taking my future into my own hands. What do I want to do with my one wild and precious life? I want to live it.
I want to write my books. I want to spend time with my family and friends. I want to travel to LA and meet a kind film music composer with a fantastic sense of humour (Oh, wait…). I want to dance! I want to kick ass in my day job! But I have a tendency to be awfully hard on myself, to make things more difficult than they have to be. So this is the year when I question that, and allow myself just to do what I need to.
On my next birthday, I’ll be 30. I don’t really know how to feel about that - or if I should feel any sort of way about it. I guess it’s time to read The Defining Decade one last time and then move onto But You’re Still So Young (all book links in this paragraph are affiliate links to Bookshop.org; if you click through and buy anything I’ll earn a small commission). I’ve recently realised how one thing most of my favourite books have in common is that they’re coming-of-age stories - and that this story arc can be told about characters of any age. In the same way as I’m still waiting for my love story, the feeling that I have another coming-of-age arc on its way is an exciting one. I’ve seen people on TikTok talk about being ready for a ‘new season’ of life (as in, a TV season/series), which is definitely something I can relate to. In my A-Level English class, we talked about ‘being on the cusp’ as a theme of Atonement and The Go-Between. When I took a study unit on Victorian Women’s Fiction at university, the theme showed up again in North & South (one of my favourite books of all time). I’d love to read more stories of characters choosing to make a big change in their lives (It feels weird that all the metaphors I can think of for this involve cliffs, abysses, or ravines - they all feel scary and dangerous). Please do let me know if you have any to recommend!
A postscript: I wrote this week’s newsletter yesterday, and then while on the bus home from Bonnie & Wild, where I celebrated my birthday, I went into my Substack app (it really is the new BlogLovin’ as far as I’m concerned). In this week’s edition of READ. LOOK. THINK. from Jessica Stanley was a link to this fantastic advice piece by Ayesha A Siddiqi, which set off a whole train of thoughts I want to share with you:
While I’ve been lucky enough to do some amazing things in my 20s, there are definitely experiences (some trivial, some less so) I haven’t had, that I now wonder if I missed out on. I told you all about going to Swiftogeddon in October (I can’t wait to go to another one); I could count the number of times I’ve ever been to a nightclub on one hand. Above all, there’s a vague sense that things could have been different.
On one of the writing podcasts I listen to, The Shit No-One Tells You About Writing, the hosts often warn about vague senses of regret for what might have been. Characters have to dream in specifics, they say. But human beings aren’t fictional characters. I think this is something we all worry about, as we grow up and, by taking one path, inevitably see others close to us.
I did a careers presentation to the Year 12s (age 16-17) at my old high school last year, and even they asked me what my biggest regret was. I told them that while the obvious answer would be ‘not getting into Oxford uni’, every choice I’ve made and every thing that’s happened to me has led me to a place I’m happy with. If I had studied elsewhere, I might not have taken German along with my course. If I hadn’t been too busy having a nervous breakdown to apply for placement jobs, I wouldn’t have spent my third year studying abroad instead of working. Then I wouldn’t have moved to Scotland, or met so many lovely people, or taken the Write Like A Grrrl Ignite course with Claire and Alice, or been in the room to hear a presentation about climate-aware investments (that led to my day job, which I adore)… You see where I’m going with this?
It sounds trite, I know, but it makes me think of a saying I’ve heard a lot: ‘if things were different, things would be different’. It’s a close cousin of a phrase I invoke a lot at work: ‘if this was easy, it would be easy’ (and two other phrases I’ve become well-acquainted with in the last year, ‘if they wanted to, they would’, and ‘no answer is itself an answer!’).
And, of course, ‘if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bike’!
All this to say: I don’t know what I imagined 29 would look like. I don’t know what I imagined 30 would look like. In another newsletter I read this week, Sara Petersen’s In Pursuit of Clean Countertops, Jenni Quilter talked about motherhood as an ‘automatic-meaning machine’.
I’ve always known that motherhood isn’t a future I want for myself; I don’t think I’d ever considered that that would mean I’d have to find something else instead. More news on this as it comes, I guess?!
Speak soon (and I really do promise to write about something lighter next week!),
Speak soon,
Lily
Happy Birthday! Wishing you a wonderful year. I am off social media - except Twitter but only til this conference I’m organising has sufficient numbers - but my discord moms group is definitely my “I am bored” weakness so I’ve installed it for that.