Hey Meta

My nails are a shade of red called Bloodline.

Hi everyone, sending love from the sobstack <3! Here are varying degrees of what has been up with me.

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Recently I have been trying to use mantras as a way to (re)unite my brain and body. I worry that my brain and body have potentially never been less united. Mantras are meant to help you speak something into existence by repeatedly announcing it to be true, allowing no space for any other thoughts at all. I’m willing to give it a try.

It’s a shame that it’s taken me so long to unite my fingers to keyboard, mainly because I of course wanted to write about the Meta AI Rayban glasses. I feel I was born to write about the Meta AI Rayban glasses. They are the creative class’s equivalent of Blue Lives Matter, immediate grounds for permanent dismissal. The age-old symbol of the cop. In particular, I have been bewitched by the “partner content” you can find on the hashtag #raybanmetapartner. I grit my teeth gleefully at the mispronounced translations and inane, irrelevant information – “Sure! It’s a milky coffee drink containing spices” – pulsing through these peoples’ temples, directly into their brains. I am in love with the fact that the POV footage from the glasses is so bad and so boring that in 95% of the ads you’re just seeing people holding up their phones to film themselves wearing their Meta AI Rayban glasses. We have evolved so far beyond 6 Hour Rainy Walk Through Central London POV and work a busy shift at subway with me. We just want face, body, cash. The Meta AI Rayban glasses are an incredible moment in an incredible culture. They have turned the prison guard in the central watchtower of the panopticon into an influencer, and they have started filming her too.

I wanted to write about the Meta AI Rayban glasses, and I wanted to write about my new technique for falling asleep.

My new technique for falling asleep involved imagining myself unboxing an Hermes Birkin bag. Hard to know why. The word imagining is not correct, because I was not imagining it, I was replaying footage that I’d seen on instagram as if it was from my own memory. It wasn’t fantasy either, because no part of me has shown any indication of wanting an Hermes Birkin bag. Whenever I tried to write about my new technique for falling asleep I couldn’t find the right word to describe what I was doing. It was like a false memory, a fantasy, but not a fantasy. The lack of definition started to interrupt me as I was using my new technique to fall asleep. I’d be lying there in the dark, thinking about the crisp rustle of unfolding tissue paper, and suddenly I’d get stuck in this loop: what am I doing. What am I doing? Not as a judgement, as a genuine question. What am I doing? ‘What am I doing’ is not a good mantra.

It struck me as I walked up stone steps to the Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples last month, that what I was doing was visualising. I was falling asleep every night visualising myself unboxing a Hermes Birkin. It was interesting that was the word which finally seemed to fit, felt neutral enough. I was focussing my thoughts on a repeated behaviour that I believed meant absolutely nothing to me, allowing no space for any other thoughts at all, in order to lull myself to sleep. Like scrolling, but in your own head.

As I continued the climb, now abandoned by my sweating companions, I thought about visualisation and what it’s used for. Visualise the meeting going how you want it to go. Visualise a sexual encounter that doesn’t end in tears. Actually, these visualisations didn’t seem very neutral at all. They felt like pointed ways to bring something into existence, not dissimilar to my mantras. So why then was I visualising unboxing an Hermes Birkin bag? It’s so random. They’re for spiritual estate agents, they’re a symbol of grotesque wealth. But they’re there aren’t they. They’re just there. Just there. And yet, completely out of reach. Maybe by repeating this supposedly neutral, meaningless behaviour in my head, I was cultivating a desire. Subliminally convincing myself that it had escaped out of my own heart, quietly. Almost too quietly to notice. Oh no.

Now we were getting to something interesting, the manufacturing of desires. The way that influencer culture limits the scope of our imagination by repeatedly showing us a vision of success that has absolutely nothing to do with us or our desires. Instead of our own success not being a bag– not even a bag, but the sound and feel of the tissue paper that wraps up the bag that we do not want– but something else, something else. I had fallen for it. I was falling asleep every night obliviously manufacturing desire for it. I wanted to write about that, but my brain had started to disconnect from my body. I am alive I am present I am safe I am free. My body belongs to me my body belongs to me my body belongs to me. The mantras. The mantras would have to pull me out.

I’ve been away a lot. France, Italy, Germany. Naples was fascinating, it felt like falling into an algorithm. There are images everywhere, all over the buildings. Black and white family photos printed on crumbling plaster walls, paintings and murals, entire tower blocks the canvas for reverent portraits of one impossibly huge and beautiful face which is inevitably Maradona’s. Being in Naples made me want to write about the internet even more because I realised it’s possible to live stimulated and within montage, offline, in one of the most ancient cities on earth. I was excited to write. And then the woman I was watching unboxing Hermes Birkins before bed started posting paid content promoting Meta AI Rayban glasses. And then, I dunno. It all became ridiculous didn’t it.

Which is to say, I have been consumed with resentment over the last month. A lot of unpleasant work I did at the start of the year which I would dryly refer to as “money jobs” ended up not really being money jobs at all, and not really making a significant difference to my life. I have somehow still wound up with one month’s rent in my bank account instead of what I had visualised, which was a few months, maybe even six months. Then I would watch influencers posting grid posts of brand trips and feel myself hot and humiliated. Beautiful ageless people in gifted clothing making sad faces, who were apparently in some way related to me, in some way tangentially within my world. Call yourself serious people I would seethe to myself, which they never have. The pain came from a familiar receptor, an impossible thing that was just there, just there and entirely not there. It was the same feeling. Do I want it? Is that what I want? It was like my life but it wasn’t, but could it be? Should it be? Then, when I was slipping off backwards somewhere, I went to Germany.

I won’t write much about Berlin. Some things are better as poems, and anyway I feel like some people might misunderstand my tone. But I will say that the purpose of the trip was to visit two Stolperstein in Kreuzberg which commemorate two distant Brandes’s who were not safe not free not alive. It was a 40 degree heatwave, a full moon and there was a lightening storm which lit up my father in his suit like a strobe. I spent the entire five days waiting to feel something, realising afterwards that was a clever way of convincing myself I felt nothing, which was not the truth. I’m sure you can imagine the psychic fallout from a trip like that. I barely slept. I would wake up and dance like I was possessed in the hotel room every morning, pulling my arms around, falling to the floor, wearing my creased cotton dress out afterwards as though I had been ritually cleansed. That kind of thing.

The stumble stones were polished gold with pink cream and scrubbing brushes, by our hands allegedly. None of us had seen them before until we saw them, just there, just there, close enough to steal the breath out of your chest, far enough away to go out for dinner afterwards and try to catch eyes with the waiter my body belongs to me my body belongs to me my body belongs to me. I came back to London last week and since then I have been extracting numbness from my phone for hours and hours at a time. I have been inviting the scroll into my head, confusing visualisations with mantras with desires. Listening to football podcasts to stamp out even a second of possible consciousness. On Wednesday I painted my nails a shade of red called Bloodline. I started having recurring nightmares about being herded onto a train by a group of it-girls, I understand how this sounds, it’s not supposed to be insensitive, it’s just what has been happening. And I’ve been wondering, what should my mantra be? What do I want? What am I doing?

I won’t pretend there’s any real kind of resolution here, I’m honestly amazed I managed to write anything at all. My body has been flooded with responses this week; weird, disproportionate, adolescent, obsessive. Probably a little lost, I think with good reason.

But I am sticking with the mantras. I think the mantras are working. And if you can speak something into existence then surely you can speak something out of it too. So just to clarify to the universe, and to me and to you: I don’t want an Hermes Birkin.

I don’t want an Hermes Birkin.

I don’t want an Hermes Birkin.

I am alive I am present

I am safe I am free

I don’t want an Hermes Birkin

and

My body belongs to me

my body belongs to me

my body belongs to me.