(Side note: I’ve been thinking about my own little lack of updates on the one sort of social channel/medium I’ve stuck by since I was 14 (!) and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a mix between Instagram releasing carousels — now featuring twenty photos — and the resurgence of Caroline Calloway-esque long-form navel-gazing in the captions. But I digress.)

ANYWAY. I quit my job.

If you recall, in one of the only posts I wrote in the last year and a half, I got a full-time, on-site job in Soho, which probably sounds like a pretty bog standard thing for an adult to be doing. However, it’s still wild to me that I was able to do that job — and do it well — in a city where I basically didn’t really know anyone in that industry. And, really, despite me feeling quite lucky and fortunate to have had the chance to work that job and meet all the fabulous people that worked there, it just didn’t work out for me in the end.

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I found myself increasingly dreading going in to work every day, even though when I got there, things were more or less fine. Every job has its stressors and down times, right? Frankly, it was when I found myself making many, many jokes about having to take a Xanax that I had to take a step back and reevaluate whether that was the right place for me. Because, on the surface, it felt perfect. And, really, when I had disclosed my plans of handing in my notice to people close to me, a lot of them who hadn’t been privy to my near-daily breakdowns were surprised. I did make it seem like the perfect environment, with the perfect people, doing the perfect job. In many ways, it was all ideal, until I had to confront the possibility that maybe it wasn’t.

Not to dooce.com (RIP x) myself here, but I will say that there were a lot of aspects of the role that just didn’t align with my personal wellbeing. Like, if I had to take a Xanax in the middle of the workday just to make it through it, that’s probably not a great place to spend majority of my waking hours at. I was proud of myself for not having needed to take anti-anxiety medication for years, too, so this “regression” or whatever you want to call it was really alarming once I took a step back to really see it and acknowledge it.

So, yes, I quit my job. My last day was on the 8th of April, and they held leaving drinks for me on the 10th of April. Because, like I said, most of the people I worked with were amazing and have become friends forever. Do I have a plan? Not really.

Alongside this full-time job, I was doing some freelance projects (though not actively pursuing them) and going to my studio after my day shift (lol), if I could muster up the energy. Two days after I handed in my notice in February, I got an invitation for a solo exhibition back home. One could view that as a sign that I did the right thing, but also, I’ve been frantically applying for jobs for the last two weeks, and haven’t gotten a callback, so that could be seen as a sign that I majorly fucked up, too.

Do I even believe in signs? I think I only ever really do when it’s working in favour of what I want, so then that probably doesn’t count. I guess we can only really know if we’ve made the right decision or not, once we make it to the other side and it turns out better or worse. Maybe I’m measuring it all wrong, too. Because of course I’m anxious about making enough money to keep living in London, but also I’m no longer anxious about doing work I don’t love and doing a good job at that. Nor am I looking for validation or instruction or progression. I’ve got to dip into my savings in the meantime (thank you past Carina for squirrelling money away into an ISA), but also, I’ve got more time to paint, and think, and write on this website. A thing I’ve been meaning to do anyway but never got around to.

So, perhaps it is the right decision, even if it doesn’t make sense right now. Maybe I just need to find a hack to exclude myself from capitalism (but also, as if). For now, I’ve been doing things I’ve been meaning to, such as spending days in the studio and cooking good meals again. That’s maybe all I need right now.

And even if it didn’t quite work out at my last place of employment, I do have reminders of all the lovely people and times I spent there. Maybe that’s enough for now, too.

My last post was written in the beginning of the year that we are on our way out of, and curiously, about how much (and how long!) I’ve been sharing about my life online. It’s not that I ever stopped, but the medium reflects the attention span, I suppose. I’ve gotten the sought after 20-slide carousel on Instagram and have also been somewhat active on TikTok, but have left my first love — and first receptacle of oversharing — in the dust.

I never meant to; it’s just that I’ve gotten used to less processing times for my thoughts and feelings, and it’s easier to post in-app rather than downloading pictures (because what good is a slice of life blog without pictures) and resizing and uploading, etc., etc. I ran my blogs like a magazine, and now that I have to work a full-time job as well as keep up with my art practice, as best I can, it kind of feels a bit like more extraneous effort, sharing my life on this thing. Who even reads blogs anymore?

Still, it does not fulfil the same need. Like, 100-photo Facebook albums of a night out, I can do without. Cheesy, navel-gazing into the void that I pay an annual fee to keep for posterity: I can never leave it.

So, yes. I got married. On 2 August 2024. To Mark, who I met in 2020, a few months after lockdown restrictions lifted. I don’t think I’ve written about him at length — just posted cute pics on Instagram even though he’s wanted to have a smaller digital footprint — and that’s a shame because he’s really been my favourite person outside my family.

I couldn’t really tell you what compelled us (or me, really) to have the wedding when we had it. I think I just wanted to be married and didn’t want the faff of all the planning and logisitcs that came with a wedding as we know it. Really, I could only think of that poem, by Stephen Dunn, The Kiss:

She pressed her lips to mind.
—a typo

How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.
Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us. There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.
Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.
How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense. It’s the Good,

defining itself. I was out of my mind.
She was in. We married as soon as we could.

“The Kiss” from Everything Else in the World by Stephen Dunn, poets.org

I was just in love and I was happy and I wanted to be married.

We had the second to the most basic ceremony at St. George’s Town Hall in Tower Hamlets, which is the borough in which we both live. We had two official witnesses, Honor and Ian, and had 8 guests total between the two of us. Nimi took a video of the whole ceremony (about 7 minutes) and at various points, the officiant dropped a pen, Mark repeated the wrong words, and I couldn’t help but feel so many emotions well up inside of me.

I’m not usually impulsive, though I can be, and it was at the moment where I was repeating “some of the most important words in [my] life” (allegedly) that I really grasped the magnitude of what I was doing. Luckily, I did want to take this step. I just didn’t quite realise until then the enormity of it all.

We walked to Lahore, a Pakistani restaurant about 10 minutes away from the court house, and loads of drivers and pedestrians we passed wished us a congratulations. It was a lovely, warm day, which I never thought I would have wanted as a wedding day. (I’ve always been an autumn girl.)

Ten minutes away, we booked a table at a pub in Aldgate, and a bunch of people came by to celebrate with us. I’ve not kept a lot of friends in the city close. Everyone’s always busy, and it’s such a transient city that the handful of connections I do manage to make get challenged by distance. A lot of the people that showed up were friends I made at work — good friends — and some friends Mark knew from film school. I had a few uni friends there; even my uni bestie, Daniella, who had moved away to Seville but was fortuitously visiting London that week with her boyfriend.

Although I would have loved both our families to be there, it was perfect for what it was. I didn’t want them to travel so long a distance for a ceremony this simple, and to be honest, I wanted to share something more intimate with both our families for the first time they meet one another.

I know that’s probably contentious, and I’m a bit surprised by the reactions I’ve gotten about “not inviting” my family to my wedding, but I think Mark and I really view the wedding and celebration itself so casually, it didn’t make sense to have them travel from Ireland, the Philippines, and in the case of his youngest sister, all the way from Perth. Anyway, I don’t feel much like explaining. It felt like the right decision for us.

SO YES. I AM MARRIED. I have been for almost two months, and I’ve only sat down to write about it now. That’s crazy. I used to write about every little detail about my life, without a care as to who would be reading. I’ve made precious friendships that way, and learned about how the rest of the world turned, on the computer my family shared in the living room, and then later, in the little bedroom that I shared with my sister.

What’s wild is that I also turned 36 about a month ago. 36! It feels like a big number, but I still feel quite small. Not in a diminutive, self-effacing way. Just that everything else is still so big. 36 is big, but everything else is so much bigger, still. I was going to go in about something Rancière and Derrida wrote, but maybe not today. Maybe I’ll just finish this story here and keep it about my wedding and my husband (!) and how happy I have been before, and since, and how happy I still am.

More photos below, just because.

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.