Welcome!

I'm writing about building a good life in a mad world.

Welcome to Choose Your Own Adventure. I’ve started this as a place to think out loud about how to craft the life you want, beyond the constructs and constricts of the status quo, drawing on wisdom from all over - from drag queens to neopagan rituals to fandom communities. 

I’ve always been pulled between wanting to do things my own way (thanks, Spice Girls) and to build a fairer world (thanks again, Spice Girls), and on the other hand, the comfort of a life rubber-stamped by structures like elite universities and sensible jobs and marriage and mortgages. So I’m inspired by people who break the mould, and also determined not to sleepwalk into life choices and to examine things from all angles to make sure they fit. 

I’m writing Choose Your Own Adventure to figure out if it’s possible to design a scaleable or transferable process for that - to design the life that suits you, and how to borrow where worth it from structures you might otherwise reject, via some kind of decontamination process - like taking ‘the concept of a sabbath’ from patriarchal organised religion and hosing all the Pope off it.

Yes, I’m fun at parties.

I’m starting this not where I expected, which was either thinking about new year’s resolutions (missed the boat on that one) or about the ritual year (let’s circle back at spring equinox), but with something I think might help us cope with an increasingly scary world. 

What if someone handed you a practical list of things to do that you knew would make the world a bit less broken? That would be great, wouldn’t it? So many articles I read about the climate crisis, or America’s creaking democracy, or any of the other multitude of ways our world seems to be foundering, seem to conclude on the same practical note, which seems simple, but I never actually do it. 

To do something practical, and local - which makes a tangible difference, and connects you to your community. As the author Naomi Alderman put it in a very wise Twitter thread during the pandemic, “pick a spot and start weeding”. To pick something not too ambitious, and within your existing skillset, and just get on with it. So why don’t I do it? Why do I read it every time and think “oh I MUST do that” and then… not do it? Is it nerves, to try something new or meet new people I might not otherwise befriend? Is it a nihilistic feeling that it’s just not ENOUGH, that it can’t turn the tide, that the world is irredeemably fucked? (To be clear: it is reasonable to feel that the world is ending.)

I know that there are people who naturally roll up their sleeves and do this stuff - I’m friends with them. They volunteer, they run charities, in the case of my neighbour they feed and clothe a local homeless person for a decade. (I’m also aware that for some of these people it feels heavy, that they can’t stop thinking about how much more there is to do, or that others could do it better.) 

But for others - most of us? - it doesn’t come so naturally. We forget. We feel awkward about the people who might be there. We maybe don’t even like people that much! We suspect we’d have a better time at the pub, or the cinema, or staying at home with our feet up. We think we’re already doing something, by posting petitions and GoFundMes and infographics on Instagram Stories. Or we spin up grandiose plans to start initiatives, plans which rapidly skip years into the future and then overwhelm us. We feel bad about all of these reactions. (I also personally feel ambivalent about charity, coming from a left-wing frustration that more services should be funded by government and accessed without the emotional weirdness that comes with being the recipient of charity. Victorian do-gooding vibes make me suspicious.)

What can small local actions even do though, the little voice in my head says. It’s just going to make YOU feel better. A pathetic balm, which fails to halt the world spinning out of control. Well. Even if that’s 90% of the outcome, is that so bad? That you felt less scared, or depressed? That maybe you got to know your neighbours a bit better, or got some fresh air? 

But. All of those articles are SO SURE! that community is the only way we’ll avoid going insane in the face of such a scary world. So how can I get off my arse? I think we need something like creativity course The Artist’s Way (which itself was inspired by the addiction recovery program the Twelve Steps) for fighting despair. 

The Artist’s Way is a 1990s book by multi-hyphenate creative and teacher Julia Cameron, outlining a 12-week self-led course to (re)discover your creativity and actually make stuff, which I have been banging on about near daily since I started it at the new year. It is - to my British, atheist ear - very “woo woo”, very California. It mentions god a lot. But it WORKS. Each week has an intro chapter - this is the bit that might make you roll your eyes or feel uncomfortable - and then, crucially, ten practical tasks to do that week. You also have daily ‘morning pages’ (a clever psychological trick to make you write a diary) and a weekly ‘artist date’ (taking in some culture). The tasks are small, they are practical, they cunningly trick you into getting past your own bullshit and making things happen. You might send an old teacher a postcard, or clear out some clothes you don’t like, or simply reflect on something like alternate lives you’d like. Each task will make you feel something, give you something to chew on, nudge you to do something positive. It has reminded me - at a time when I needed the confidence boost - of what I’m capable of, what I’ve done already, that I have a network of cheerleaders, and that the world holds lots of possibility to try new things which I might be good at and make me happy. It’s made me much more comfortable taking that kind of creative risk. I am also sure that the Artist’s Way is working for me because it pushes my psychological buttons - I crave tasks, forms, sticker charts, medals - and am also given to spending ages planning and then losing interest or bottle before the execution phase, or sabotaging opportunities that were handed to me, out of nerves. It is such a good mechanism for getting people out of their own way and nudged into practical action - in incremental, non-intimidating ways, which builds a virtuous spiral of progress. I know it’s worked for many other people, since it’s been a bestseller for decades. One article about it quoted the author of Booker Prize-winning Ducks, Newburyport sneering at it as “a total con”, saying “The time spent reading these books should be spent reading Dickens. Or at least writing.” Well, if we could just write, we would. Good for her that she can; if she doesn’t need it - don’t use it. I don’t need crutches right now but that doesn’t mean crutches don’t work or aren’t useful. 

So what would an Artist’s Way for a better world look like? What would the equivalent be of an artist’s date (an hour or so of volunteering?), or the quick tasks? How would you make it fun? I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t have the prompt to get us all litter-picking (sorry), but I am keen to noodle on the theme and start a conversation. What small, practical prompts might nudge people into doing things which - if all those articles are right - could make people happier and the world a bit less fucked? I would love to know your ideas, or the things you already do that make you feel less hopeless. You can reply to this, or WhatsApp me if you know me, or @ me on Instagram or Bluesky and I might try to process it into something. It feels worth making time for.