As I was walking home after work yesterday, I realised that I had been writing about my life — and sharing the most innocuous things about it — since 2002. My first blog is still somewhere online; it tickles me a little bit that the hosting for that website is still being paid by someone (as in, Blogger.com). I would never want anyone to see it, but it’s still kind of funny that some little part of the Internet is carved out for my Quizilla results and two-liner blog posts about how bored I am of school.

I’m 35 years old now, and a lot of time has passed since then. A lot of things have happened since my last post, too. (I’ve gone to Ireland three times since then, can you believe it?) In the interest of sharing — which is what I’ve always done, but have maybe forgotten how to do in this format — I will briefly share the things that have happened to me since I last wrote here.

I got engaged.

It was really sort of a non-story. We had been talking about getting married (well, I was strong-arming him, really, as a joke…) and I was at my job, listening to a lot of Bon Iver, who he detests — for personal reasons — and I joked about walking down the aisle to a Bon Iver song. Then, I realised I didn’t want a wedding at all. And so, we floated the idea of elopement, and then the ring I wanted was on sale, and so I told him my size and he ordered it for me, and that was that.

I moved out of my Hackney flat and in with Mark… back to Bow.

We somehow ended up with a gorgeous two-bedroom flat (thanks Alli and Adam!) in Bow, and have been living here since May, when we got back from visiting the Philippines. Here we are having dinner with my old flatmates, S and J (now living in Geneva), who I adored.

You know how people say you really get to know a person when you move in with them, and how they say it as a sort of caveat? Living with Mark has mostly been easy, like it’s natural, and how things should have been from the beginning. It’s strange, but I think I just lucked out.

I moved studios, too.

This is my old studio, which I stayed at between late 2018 and early 2023. It’s crazy how much I’ve grown while in there, and how relatively quickly I outgrew the space. Physical manifestation of an art practice’s expansion… or something less obnoxious than that. I have photos of the new space, which is beautiful and unreal, but also about a little over three times what I paid for my small, first studio in London.

Bittersweet. I love you studio, but you were about to fast track my lung damage.

I quit my candle job — which was a toxic environment, even though the work was fun and the people were lovely — and got a jewellery shop job.

Nothing really to say about this except I love looking up the place that must not be named on Glassdoor and Google Reviews, as sort of validation of my sore feelings about working in that place. I was there for a little under a year, and really, I quit because one of the founders’ aggression — which everyone knew about, distantly — became directed at my team. I don’t think we’re on good terms. The other founder has blocked me on socials, both their personal one and the candle studio one’s. Oh well.

The jewellery place was just a little bit hectic. It was well-meaning and lovely and independent, but I think I really was just tired of small business systems.

I quit that jewellery shop job and worked in a deli.

I tried to keep the deli job — because I loved it — whilst working a new full-time, desk-bound graphic designer job in Soho…

… but had to quit it because working over 40 hours a week and then opening a shop on Columbia Road on Sundays was not as easy as I thought it would be.

Long story short: I love my job. I want to keep doing better at it. I am proud of where I am. That I’m working an actual job — not casual or 0 hours or physically laborious — in central London is wild to me. Never in my dreams.

So, like, not the most exciting update, but I’ve got to start somewhere. Get the feel of things again. I will probably dip into old memories, just to keep them somewhere. I think a lot of life events I’ve kept in here are kept alive in my mind because I’ve put them into writing. So, it is to the ether, really, but it’s somewhere.

I read a meme earlier today that the Internet used to be a place you visited, before we all had access to it 24/7 through our phones and devices. I think I’m ready to make it a place again. Maybe in a different way, but somewhere I can visit and revisit when my brain gets foggy.