Over the summer, my quite-old-but-not-that-old phone ate all my text messages and became almost thrillingly unreliable. Ever since then, I pick it up not with the usual subconscious rat-excitement, but with something like dread — it’s so clearly an addiction to something which, beyond podcasts and the camera, offers me far more hassle than pleasure or use, as is the way with anything one becomes addicted to. (Oh, and maps, occasionally.)

I absolutely loathe it, and once I’ve submitted this current big project, my next fairly dull task will be to try and wean myself off it almost entirely. Keep it in the office, plug the landline in somewhere more accessible and use that more, not have to check before I leave one room and walk into another than my phone is in my hand. God, it’s horrible. (Yes, also, music on the phone, also good. Christ.)

I realised the other night that my own anxiety and weariness comes from a sense that absolutely every choice I make these days feels like a battle for my soul. (Ugh, and the period-tracking app is useful. UGH.) It doesn’t feel like merely existing, it feels like living, heavy with some kind of extra-gravitational moral weight: did I turn off the lights/should I turn on the heating/is this food environmentally damaging/can I recycle this/are the children growing up to be vocal about the right things/but not so vocal that they increase division in society/it feels right to keep them off the internet/but will they be prepared when they are free-range on there/it’s great they’re all keen readers/but modern popular children’s books are almost universally awful. This isn’t parenting, or being an adult. This is living in an era where we are facing mass extinction either through climate change or mass conflict, fuelled and fired by those agencies which benefit from conflict and fear: arms manufacturers, politicians, media companies, product-makers, internet figures fashioning themselves into products.

If you are the product, what does that do to your soul? If your daily life, your family, children, friends and colleagues are the backdrop and the context for your self, sold and packaged to consumers or employers, do you gain more than you lose? If your most passionate conversations and throwaway jokes are all equally public, equally up for scrutiny, how does that ensure a fair life for you? If everything you ever say can come back and bite you — my primary reason to wish all children and teens weren’t ever allowed to say or write or do anything on a screen — how does that shape your life?

If you are a female MP, trying hard to improve lives around you, do you deserve to get hundreds upon hundreds of messages describing brutal sexual assault and violence against you and your family? You’re a public figure! That’s the price! If you’re a beauty journalist, having months of harassment and bullying by vicious internet trolls, how do you find the strength to speak up in a moving instagram video?

But. What if the source of that latter bullying seems to be — unless the source mentioned was not correct, unless something else is going on, which is of course more than possible, because nothing can be trusted on the internet — fairly calm critiques of your working practices both on- and offline? What if the trolls who have attacked your children in fact only mentioned them once, in the context of you promising never to use them in your social media? What if those board users were asking questions about your transparency and correct use of Ad and Gifted tags, and only when you set the internet against them does that board start screen-grabbing your own systematic and extremely public bullying (sometimes over long, long months) of other women in the media, attacking their looks, abilities, work and parenting? What if all your friends suddenly start deleting their old tweets (as you have already done) because your accusations have shone a bright light on a forum that at worst, matches tonally exactly the conversations you and media friends have on twitter, and at best are supportive spaces discussing dementia, cancer, cleansing routines, and their own experiences of bullying and unpleasantness at the hands of blue-tickers?

How does that make those female MPs feel? How does that make the women and men, boys and girls who have been harassed, doxxed, bullied and intimidated feel? I wonder what that does to your soul, when every mistake is so public? 

Running to the river now is in the dark; even when we climb out we do so by torch light. I hope you can all find something like this for yourselves, something calm and quiet and personal and fulfilling.

I come home and peel off my cold wet clothes, and look forward to more moments without my phone. 

1. I really, really loved this essay on introducing hope back into a nihilist world. It captures my own struggles with the messiness of everything – if this, then that, so which is worse? – and how everyone seems to be struggling with genuine, literal existential crises. But hope! And weight-lifting! I’ve been doing weights since the start of the summer and every time I lift it’s like a fucking joy injection. If you can start lifting heavy stuff, I massively recommend it. 

2. I want to post a link to the Pop Culture Happy Hour review of Todd Phillips’ Joker film, but I also want to be a better person than that, so I won’t. But Ready or Not is great fun, so maybe watch that instead! 

3. Here are some excellent children’s books series, if you want them: The Dark is Rising series, His Dark Materials, The Murder Most Unladylike books, The Sinclair’s Mysteries, the Tiffany Aching books… is that it? Always looking for more suggestions if you have them, please. 

4. Next time I get an invoice paid I am 400% getting this for the pup. The cold is mean to these feeble, speedy hounds. She is extreme excite. 

I’ve spent the last few months entirely off social media, months that I’ve been instead using for reading, writing a screenplay, grieving a pal, listening to podcasts, going outside, walking, hanging out with my friends and family, picking apples, going for runs, writing cards, writing lists.

It’s been bliss.

Here are some thoughts that have begun to coalesce in my mind during that time:

1. Instagram seems like the least hostile social media app, going by who I follow, but when I’ve opened it recently I’ve felt like my disgruntled old white dad™ complaining about The Youth. “But why are you taking a photograph of your food? Your blanket? Your train journey? Who cares about it? Why can’t you just enjoy your holiday? Who are you writing this to?” 

2. I think one of the reason it bothers me is that so many of the people I follow who talk about anxiety and mental health issues are also the most prolific posters, particularly of selfies. I wonder if we’ll look back on this era of internet-use and marvel that it wasn’t obvious, a direct correlation between filming/photographing yourself and waiting for comments and likes, and anxiety and mental health issues. 

3. In the first episode of Morality in the 21st Century, the much-discussed and critiqued author Jordan Peterson talks to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about how we now put far too much emphasis on Happiness, way beyond Responsibility. How fulfilment and the pleasure of life comes from accepting and handling responsibility, not chasing constant ‘happiness and rights’. Peterson also says kids shouldn’t be told they are perfect and that they should love themselves unconditionally because self-esteem is so important, but instead that they are full of potential, and have a responsibility to tap into that infinite potential to grow into the best possible version of themselves within and against the problems and issues they’ll come up against. I dig this. 

4. I try to raise our kids to be like Paddington. Open-hearted, hopeful, adventurous, curious, moral, questioning, kind. I don’t know if it’ll work. But it helps to have a plan. 

5. I want to side with my generation and younger. My optimism says that young people have fresh ideas, open minds, new ways of understanding old bigotries are no longer acceptable. Young people shouldn’t be dictated to about what is and isn’t acceptable by older generations who don’t understand and haven’t grown up with technology in the same way. But for all that optimism, I realise I’ve thrown out the idea of Wisdom. If anyone older than us says anything we don’t agree with, it’s way easier to say, “OMG the 1800s called and want their ideology back.” But maybe they know something. Maybe it is super rude and disconnected for a family to sit together on a sofa all on separate tablets and phones. Maybe it’s not acceptable for everyone to have their phones out on the table when they’re out for dinner. Maybe we should be able to unplug and walk outside in the fresh air without having to take seventeen pictures of it, select our favourite, caption it, publish it, then check and respond to comments. Maybe living a life through images and captions isn’t how our human brains work best. 

6. (Maybe it also makes you a little bit boring.) 

7. I still grieve for Twitter — even though even glimpsing four tweets on my feed now makes my heart pound and race at the sheer teeth-bared ferocity of it — but I miss the memes and the humour, the people I met there and the opinions I discovered. I love that it gives previously silenced people a vital platform. That’s so important. I can’t say that enough. That’s SO important. 

8. But! Of course, but! Having a platform for everyone means that everyone has a platform. And actually, I feel that’s less good. But I don’t know how to fix that, or run it better. Gatekeepers aren’t the answer. Moral responsibility? “Do I need to post this?” Does it make the world better? Is calling someone trash when they’ve done something ‘wrong’ the right way to live? Do you ever worry that one day it’ll be you? 

9. I do, loads. The more that people are deleted for their errors — a word, a tweet, a joke, a routine, a casting decision, a drunken error — jesus christ, when I think of all my drunken errors and jokes and god, all my mistakes, my god — the more I wonder how anyone dares use social media. (I will shortly be crowd-funding my family’s move to a signal-less home on a hill in beautiful Wales.)

10. This makes me feel like all the people we used to loathe and make fun of, in my Twitter days. Just don’t be human garbage! The rules aren’t hard! But they really, really are. 

11. Do you remember when we disagreed with things and said to people or companies, “Do you think you might -” or “Please could you consider -”? It feels — and I haven’t crunched the numbers! I don’t know if this is nonsense! I hope it is! — that we go full-throttle straight to SIGN THIS PETITION TO GET THIS SHUT DOWN. I like it more when we talk about things. We all need to be challenged.  

12. This is an excellent programme on the vital importance of Dialogue. While I’ve been offline I’m been meeting so many people to just chat and hang out and it turns out it’s great. We should do that more. (*extremely high pitched suggestion voice* And maybe not put that we did it on social media??)

13. These apps are engineered by the top engineers to be addictive. It doesn’t mean they fulfil you. 

14. I, like most late-twentieth-century babies, went through an anti-religion phase. Now, most of the religious people I know are the ones I feel best after seeing. Their quiet charity. Their humility. Their morals. It’s not a sword they use to strike people, it’s an umbrella they offer to hold over those who want it. It’s pretty nice. (And I’d love to discuss with people who have greater expertise than me about whether the fact that almost all religions across the last few thousand years have said vanity/self-indulgence are Not Good Things is suggestive that maybe we should avoid those for our greater benefit, or whether those taboos have been tools of oppression. Both? Probably. I would like to learn more, though.) 

15. Getting paid and credited for your work is important — god knows, I try to make my living in a field where anyone who speaks English is convinced they can do it NO YOU CANNOT — but entering an Instagram space where everyone, always, bangs their own drum is so tiresome. I know I can unfollow them. But how much can that behaviour be repeated and normalised before we forget it’s not the way to shape a pleasant society? And yes, I am also a bitter writer who is not yet rolling in my own Scrooge McDuck coin vault so that’s probably part of it. I don’t even remember the original question asked here, but I think about paragraphs 11 & 12 of the answer all the time. When did ‘building your brand’ replace being an actual person? And I know I’m on thin ice here, I can already hear the retorts, and yes, I am 187 years old, thank you for asking. 

16. I am so, so, so worried about the planet. Everything else kind of feels like small fry, in a way. Please stop encouraging people to buy so much shit. It might be your living but we are literally, literally destroying the only place we have to live. I just don’t get why this isn’t the only thing we are all working on, all the time. (I mean, I get why, but also, WHY?) That Morality podcast I mentioned earlier has an interesting discussion on the value of capitalism that utterly fails to reference the fairly pressing point of “it’s basically ending humanity with its poisoning of water, air and land”. 

17. If I’m not writing, I want to spend my time making things with my hands. This podcast posits that the thing that makes humans happiest to hold is a wooden object. Fuck you, Apple designers! Lol. Anyway, I could believe it. I want to carve wood for a useful purpose and make things from clay and repair things with beautiful stitches and fix objects so they are useful and gorgeous. 

18. Picking and forming teams seems dangerous. It means the other teams are your enemy. That they can’t understand you, that you don’t get them, and that ultimately you aren’t on the same side. 

19. Someone disagreeing with you is not your enemy. It is not a weakness nor an act of aggression to say, “I’m not sure about this. I feel this way at the moment, but I’d like to know more.”  

20. I think if we talk a lot about Fear and Hate and Catastrophe it’s hard to see around those words to what we can do as individual people, rather than being stuck on one side or another of them. It doesn’t mean we ignore those issues: maybe we just try to listen to people we disagree with more. 

21. When I was young, books and films and culture told me that you know less as you get older, not more. Ha! Boy, did they have that wrong! I learned more every day! 

22. Up to a point. Now I know almost nothing, except that at the moment I believe Paddington to be a suitable role-model for my kids, and that there is almost never a clear right answer to anything. 

23. I don’t know how much of this is right. 

Here are the podcasts I’ve mentioned: 

Hidden Brain, Our Better Nature 

Morality in the 21st Century, episode 1

Hidden Brain, The Cassandra Curse 

The Persistence of Analogue 

Double-Talk - I’m really sorry, this isn’t available to download. Darn it. But if you meet me in a caff you can listen to it on my headphones. It’s worth it for the price of a £1.80 latte. 

“You have to do what’s best for your kids, don’t you?”

Even J has said I’ve been almost continually grumpy since the referendum. Take action, people say. Be the change, they say. Optimism is a weapon, they say. 

I think: I haven’t felt this boiling-lava bad since my father was diagnosed with several forms of cancer and an aggressive degenerative neurological condition at the same time as I had moved away from all our friends, seen my sister move to the other side of the planet, birthed a third baby and realised I was over a year late to my publisher with my next book.

Even with my barrels and bowls and mounds of privilege, I am miserable in this world at the moment. In the UK and US, the tone of political discourse leads to racist abuse in the street, leads to the murder of citizens by their own police. Far-right groups grow in popularity across Europe. Homelessness, child poverty and foodbank use is sky-high here. Our planet is slowly shutting down around us. Everything seems like shit. 

A machiavellian bumblefuck who has used many and varied racist and misogynistic terms in print and person has been appointed Foreign Secretary. A greasy silken handpuppet who dedicates his life to fucking over the NHS has been allowed to continue his demolition job. A woman whose breathy emphasis of children in an interview with the Sunday Times that she denied ever happened reminded us that the entire Tory ideology is utterly at odds with the concept of helping someone who didn’t come out of your own/your wife’s womb; a dead cat dropper; a disgraced former defence secretary. These are the people in charge of the country.

I can’t separate out my anger any more. I can’t distinguish between the fury I feel at a child hitting my child so much in a school assembly that mine ends up sobbing, and the fury I feel at the news that David Cameron is currently shacked up in a £17m London townhouse. I can’t pull apart the red-rage threads joining soaring rates of anxiety and depression among my friends, and having to haggle with my phone company for over an hour for an upgrade I don’t even really care about. I can’t unloop my wrath of the truth of this heartbreaking, uplifting speech, from my burning, shaking fury at a friend’s manager not only failing to support her in the face of bullying, but repeatedly taking credit for her work; or my anger against climate change deniers, or men’s rights activists, or all lives matter-ers, or anyone who didn’t vote Remain, or adults who don’t say thank you to service staff, or people who organise events on Facebook, or the continuing career of Woody Allen, or school fetes that charge too much for a coconut shy, or people that stop in busy doorways to fold up massive golf umbrellas, or adverts that serve ice cream in brushed-metal bowls. 

I feel crushed by hopelessness. We are so hungry for a leader to lift us up from this mess that we’re terrifyingly vulnerable to any half-friendly face and some rousing words. While Labour slowly disintegrates amongst rape threats and bricks through windows, the only legitimate government opposition seems to be Nicola Sturgeon, peeling her country away from England, waving goodbye in joyful slow-motion. But what leader in Westminster would ever stand a chance under the arc-light glare of social media? That terrible thing she said when she was 17. That t-shirt he wore in his twenties. That vote she made early in her career. That questionable friendship he maintains. Who could ever be pure enough to offer us anything but another meme opportunity? Everyone’s garbage now. What fucking hope is there. 

In a time when it feels horribly like we’re teetering into civil war, I don’t know how to be kind to my enemy anymore. I barely know how to bite down on the scream I feel all the time, all the time. If I briefly escape this feeling through fun, through a drink with friends, through laughter with colleagues, I feel guilty. There is too much burning chaos at the moment to dare use the luxury of turning away. 

But I want to be positive. I want to make things better. I want to make other people, vulnerable people, feel less frightened or worried or ignored. I think of the inspiring people I know, and of Osborne and Gove and Letwin and Morgan and Whittingdale losing their cabinet positions. I think of the Snickers ice cream in my freezer. 

But I am still continually grumpy. 

I go for a run at the tail-end of the day, trying to run off my anger from this post-referendum collapsing tower of shit and self-interest. I make it through one song before I hear a wolf-whistle, from a someone too dim to wait until I’m further than arm’s reach. I take out one earbud, turn back to him. He is young, probably no more than twenty, with a slight, embarrassed-looking friend. They are only slightly more than my height, barely more than my build. 

What did you say? I ask, turning back towards him. He smirks, and tries to walk around me. I put my hand flat on his chest. 

What did you say to me? I ask again. Normally in these situations, my voice gets higher, my hands shake; I am utterly lacking in authority. But I have been deadened since the referendum result, bashed again and again by worsening news. The latest, that reports of racist incidents have gone up 57% since the result, makes my voice calm, low, firm. 

Get your hands off me! he shrieks, smirking. 

I’m sorry, I say, Don’t you like it? Do you feel like an object that I can just treat how I want? My hand is still planted on his chest, the tip of my fingers resting on his collarbone. 

Get your hands off me! he says again. I’m going to call the police. 

Call them. Do you want me to call them? I can call them for you, if you like. (It is full sunlight. There are at least ten people within ten metres of us. I do not feel afraid, for once.) 

I’m going to call the fucking police on you. Leave me the fuck alone! he says. He comes closer to me, almost resting his forehead against mine, almost touching the tip of his nose to mine, suddenly serious. My finger-ends dig into his collarbone as I hold my arm steady. His face hardens. I don’t care if he hits me. His friend, over my shoulder, sniggers – it feels like at him, rather than at me. The man in my face looks at his friend, and his face softens, almost embarrassed, but not at how he behaved, more that he’s found himself in this absurd situation with this ridiculous woman. 

I’m going to keep walking, he says, and you can follow me if you like, but you’re being mental. 

Am I? I say. Am I? Is it creepy? Does it make you uncomfortable? I keep pace with him for a metre or two, but my legs need to run and the children will be home soon and I’ve got bigger fish to fry than this dipshit. Fine, I say, I’m going to keep running. But I’d like you to consider just taking five seconds – five seconds, that’s all – to think about what you did, and how much women hate that, and how it’s horrid, and it’s scary. 

I can respect that, his friend says gently, and smiles at me. 

Thanks dude, I say. 

I run a better time that I’ve ever run that route before, making it home still buzzing, powered by adrenaline and the angry thought that they could have been meeting friends, and I wouldn’t have had the courage to do what I’d done if there had been eight of them, or six, or four, or if they’d looked thirty or forty or fifty, or six foot something, or mean, or drunk. I would have just run on, because I like being alive, and felt shit for the rest of my day. 

I hope his friend recounts the story to their other friends. I don’t care how badly I come across. And I hope even one of them thinks about it, even if it’s only for five seconds. 

The more concerned everyone is for me, the worse I feel, like I’m just about keeping my own sloshing supply of panic under control but every time someone offers me a top-up it threatens to spill out and flood us all away. This morning, J and I take the kids to school together, and I find myself humming the alternate version of the alphabet that I was taught at 9 years old by the teacher who did our school plays, that we were encouraged to sing when we felt anxious and mouth-dry in the moments before we stepped onstage. Stuff learnt early beds in deep. 

At the hospital, there is a similar delay to my last visit, but this time I have someone with me, and we both are laughing, and when we’re finally called in, I feel almost like a normal person might feel in this situation. 

The neurologist seems different this time, although maybe it’s just the bright blue sky behind him; the golden-blue light of the promise of better days, I think afterwards, in hyperbolic giddiness. I work through my list of questions, each answer surprising us: not that serious, low risk, long term danger minimal, until we’re just pummelling him But are sure and But what about and But how can you tell, on and on until we have to admit a beautiful defeat, and I want to cry even though I don’t seem to be able to do that anymore, goddammit. 

Afterwards, I go for a run in the cold bright day and a flock of birds turns above my head, a whole lace curtain of tattered, feathered underbelly sweeping over me, welcoming in a New Era with such cartoonish positivity that as I run, along the river, along with the sun, my upbeat new playlist in my ears, I would cry again now, if I did cry, which I still don’t, for the sheer joy of good health and good family and good hope. 

And my brain says: That’s all well and good, until we see the neurosurgeon and hear whether you’ve got to have your skull opened up. 

And I say: Who do you think you’re kidding? You had me fooled for a minute, but the verdict’s in: you’re on my team now, buddy. 

My urge is always to sleep when I feel stressed, and the urge is even stronger now I worry that any anxiety will trigger another seizure. Consciously accepting that Christmas will be ruined by having my overdue book hanging over me means that I want to take to my bed immediately. When I receive a shitty work email, cancelling a job I’d been really looking forward to, I don’t even make it off the sofa, but just wrap myself in a blanket and lie down with heavy eyes.

The babies turn it into a bedtime game, tucking me in and giving me extra cushions, fat-bash kisses smudged on my cheeks and forehead. The smallest one slaps me on top of the head and babbles a song in my ear. I think: Maybe I should commit to this. Give up writing altogether and just hang out with these guys, my mind fully on them for once. 

Then I realise I’ve been ignoring the last few minutes of their plans as I try to think of the exact words to capture their cream-cheese-and-sweet-soil scent, and think: I couldn’t give it up, even if I wanted to. 

The Alexander McQueen exhibition is just as stunning as I expected, but it’s also the worst possible place for me to be at the moment, all death and wings and departures and terrible beauty. I have just been taken to lunch and told, “This is a lovely day, isn’t it? FYI, just need to drop this in: in a couple of months I’m going to be sawing your arm off, ok? But don’t let this ruin your day! I just didn’t want it to be hanging over us, and for you to look back and be upset that I hadn’t told you about the arm surgery thing!” 

Arm, hand, leg, whatever, family, whatever, it’s white noise once I realise what her face is about to say. 

I think, We haven’t even got our cocktails yet. 

Then I think, Seriously? You had to tell me, right now? You might have had to tell me, but I certainly didn’t need to hear it right now. I’ve had boys in our teens do this dick move, the I-thought-you’d-want-me-to-be-honest tap dance up on the moral podium, but never my own sister. 

My skin is vibrating with distress. I can’t name the myriad ways my misery blooms. My fingers are tap tap tapping to match my pulse, because I have to stay calm; if my seizure last month was caused in any way by stress, my only priority is staying low-stress, for the rest of my life, and my fizzing cortex is cooperating by shutting down my systems, one by one. The waiter keeps coming to watch us. Neither of us are eating, or saying anything. I’ve spent the last thirty-three years trying to learn that no one ever regretted not saying something in anger, no matter how true that thing might be. 

They box up my lunch, and we walk to the tube in silence, then ride to South Kensington in silence, then walk the underpass in silence, then walk around the exhibition apart. 

All I can think about is how soon I’ll be home.