you can be a different person

on the freedom to change

One of the things I like most about being an adult, and growing older as one, is that you get to meet yourself over and over again. Things go by so fast, and the days are so full of everything, that by the time you stop and take a breath you’ve shifted, a little. You realise things aren’t exactly as they were before—and you get to discover what this slightly new version of you is like, and what she wants.

Last year I realised that it had become important for me to be home on New Year’s Day. To have a calm, simple breakfast (last year it was plain rice and pickles) with a really good coffee; to begin the year in an uncomplicated way that set a good path for the months head. I wanted to be able to put my little office in order, to tidy the house, to maybe read a new book; later, to fill in my calendar, look ahead and set some goals for the rest of the year. In this way, I get to feel like I’ve got my feet on the ground again. That I’m ready to go at things full pelt.

A little retro/introspection goes beautifully along with all of that, so I hope you’ll forgive me for being a little more personal than I usually am. While looking back on the year’s worth of Substacks, I realised that I’d published this post almost exactly twelve months ago today:

When I wrote the above, I had started to recognise that I couldn’t keep on going on the way I had been going; that I’d been suffering really badly with my digestion and overall health for a couple of years and that it wasn’t going to get better on its own. Nine weeks of writing residency over several months had given me space to start thinking about changing things, and had jolted me out of my usual patterns, thinking and diet in such a way to make me reflect on all of them. I’d had a pretty brief but intense bout of food poisoning in October and was feeling better afterwards, but couldn’t work out why. I was thinking a lot about my situation but didn’t have a ton of answers; I knew stress was part of it, and had paused some things (including my beloved Extra Teeth, the tiny literary magazine I am part of, which had become a site of great stress, for a number of reasons) and started to let go of others. Change was on the horizon but not yet in place.

A conversation with a doctor in late January, off the back of a joke I’d made about having ‘shat out all my IBS’ thanks to the food poisoning, made me realise that the ‘stress-related digestive disorder’ that had been making me completely miserable for three years might actually have been SIBO, or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. The doctor suggested that my joke might not be that far from the truth; that maybe the illness had ‘cleared me out’ (apologies), and allowed me to start building my gut biome back up again with more varied foods. Further research led me to understand it might have been triggered or exacerbated by twelve years of veganism—and stress, of course, which is why it showed itself properly during that first year of the pandemic.

By the time I spoke to that doctor I had already started to roll back the veganism, not least because I had tried to do the low FODMAP diet to manage what I thought was IBS, and had found it next to impossible to get through a day restricting so aggressively in two ways. After a lot of quiet handwringing in my head (headwringing?), I’d gone back to a little fish, a little scrambled egg—temporarily, I thought. But I abandoned the low FODMAP (the most miserable way to live, surely) and still found reasons to sporadically eat fish, first without real excuse (and a lot of self-criticism), and then because I was at a five-week residency abroad, where even vegetarianism was a stretch. By the time I had the conversation with the doctor, I had been eating non-vegan foods fairly regularly; after the conversation, I began to understand that instead of a moral failing on my part, it may actually have been part of what was making me better, changing whatever was going on in my guts.

It’s wild now to think how much better I am, only twelve months on. The whole digestion situation is pretty resolved—not perfect, but are anyone’s guts perfect? (lentils I may never eat you again)—and I feel healthier than I have done in years. Having gone back to fish and dairy, with a view to fixing things, I’ve been having not only a wellbeing renaissance but a pleasure trip, rediscovering things I hadn’t eaten in almost a decade and a half—or had never eaten, as my childhood diet wasn’t all that worldly. I have been known to look up from a plate and say things like, ‘has everyone else been eating caesar salad this whole time?’ as I scarfed down homemade anchovy mayo on crisp, cold Romaine leaves, a thin slide of Parmesan melting on my tongue. And I’ve got back into an exercise regime for the first time in ages—I’ve maintained a gym schedule for an entire year. I’ve got muscles I’ve never had before. Not to get too smug about it, but I feel fucking great.

I am, in many ways, really different to how I was just a year ago. I won’t be this person, doing these things, forever, but they are working for me now, and I’m pleased about that—and glad I could try them, to see if they fit. This isn’t a story about whether or not people should be vegan; I was one for long enough to know that people have incredibly strong feelings on the topic and neither side will believe what the other says happened, until it happens to them. I, too, thought—when I was 23 and newly off dairy, feeling incredible—that I would be doing it for the rest of my life. Instead, it’s a story about having your ideals challenged by your own experiences, and getting to a point where you have to say to yourself: here I have evidence that this might not be working for me any more. Do I try changing, and see if that fixes things, even though if it does work it will confront who I thought myself to be?

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Of course nothing is as simple as this. When everything is going wrong, it requires more than one change to fix things. My guts were just one symptom of the overall problem, which is that I had gotten totally away from myself. As I wrote in last year’s post:

Yes, there were a ton of things that I was having to hold. But I had also, on some level, chosen to be this hectic, and was choosing it over and over again. I needed to earn, but we had enough money to get us through. I had too many things on my plate, but it was me that kept them there. As I said, wide eyed with revelation, to my partner: I think I am addicted to being stressed. The thing that had to change was me.

I was addicted to being stressed, and while part of it was a result of being having been the breadwinner for seven years—holding our small family of two together through breakdowns, unemployment, the ups and downs of a freelance career—part of it was that I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t like that, and was terrified that I would stop being productive if I let myself calm down for a second. Yes, I am a Scorpio, thanks for asking.

I thought I was working tirelessly to build a writing career. But the truth of it was that I was barely writing. So much of my week went to other projects; I got a part-time job in order to put my partner through a Masters, and worked really hard at it. I edited, and mentored, and wrote things like the (free-access) Illustrated Freelancer’s Guide, and campaigned, and spoke to the Scottish parliament on creative rights and funding, and chaired events, and wrote funding applications, and ran a magazine even though I didn’t have the first clue about running a business, and endless things that were not writing. I looked productive, but wasn’t doing the one thing I really wanted to do. And I was ill, and I was increasingly pissy and miserable and negative, and I never felt like I had time to myself, and would even resent social occasions, and I was an arsehole to my partner too often.

So things changed. Some of them took years (my partner getting a Masters and changing jobs). Some involved taking big financial risks, like letting go of a part-time job. Some required the ending of projects with friends that I really enjoyed, but that were taking up too much time. And some involved saying no, and holding my ground, and deciding that enough was enough. That it was time to really try—and I finally had the support to do so.

Some things required heavy self-critique as well. Having been a heavy Twitter user for years, I now can’t stand it. You can’t really control whether or not a maniac fascist buys your most-used social media platform and ruins it completely, but you can recognise when it capitalises completely off the worst impulses of humanity and decide to get out of there (maintaining an account for promotion of your work only). You can decide to delete apps off your phone, to delete accounts, to not bother starting with the Twitter replacements because you find yourself reading more, and thinking more gently, and reacting more slowly, and you decide that all of that is positive. You can recognise your worst habits and decide to stop doing them.

Currently I spend most of my week writing or editing, or doing the researching and thinking for writing, or editing other people’s writing, or talking about my writing or other people’s writing with interesting people. This is an intensely lucky position to be in, and I am old enough and know enough writers to know that this won’t always be the case. Publishing is not an industry in which you necessarily earn more as you improve; in fact, the majority don’t. Sales can be fickle, but largely drive the income; you might be ‘orphaned’ by your editor leaving or your agent shutting up shop, and then your foundations have fallen. Many of us need to work part-time or full-time throughout the entirety of our careers, especially if we live in a high-cost area; some of your favourite best-selling novelists have full-time jobs doing completely different things. A lot of them have family money or partners in well-paid work who cover most of the bills. Sometimes you might give up jobs for a few years and then go back into full- or part-time work. Funding diminishes steadily, AI promises a lot but mostly takes jobs, people’s capacity to buy books is affected by neoliberal politicians who only protect the lifestyles of the mega rich. All of this makes for an uneven landscape and an uncertain career. So for now, while it lasts, I am going all in. And if it doesn’t work out? Then I can shift things again. There’s always a new opportunity to change.

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Existentialism—the French, beret-wearing kind—has always had a weird reputation, in the public consciousness. Even when Sartre and de Beauvoir were kicking around Paris and publishing their most influential books, some people thought of them as dour prudes telling everyone everything was awful. Part of Sartre’s famous speech Existentialism is a Humanism was dedicated to refuting the idea that existentialists were all about sitting around and being miserable. In reality, they were smoking tons and having loads of sex; enjoying themselves, if you will.

The minute you open an existentialist book, the idea of it as a philosophy of inaction is quickly disabused. At the very heart of Sartrean existentialism is freedom—an absolute, inescapable, humanity-defining kind of freedom, almost overwhelming us, being rejected because of it. As he writes in Being and Nothingness:

I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to any freedom can be found except freedom itself or, if you prefer, that we are not free to cease being free.

Put in layman’s terms, Sartre means here that we are totally responsible for ourselves (and for all of humanity, but that’s a conversation for another day). Our permanent condition is one of freedom, in that we can choose our next action in every moment; in each second there are a number of possibilities of action, and we can—we must, we are condemned to—choose one every time. This freedom is a burden, for sure. But it is also a gift.

But Sartrean existentialism doesn’t say that you are totally in control of your own destiny, that you can do anything you want to, that if you don’t get to where you want to be you’re a huge failure—none of that. Sartre was well aware that we are not totally in control—not of our bodies, not of our circumstances, not of world events or the choices of others. There’s a key concept that addresses all of this: facticity.

First introduced by Fichte, the idea of facticity was co-opted by Heidegger to mean ‘thrown-ness’, or the state of being thrown into the world; what we encounter there is facticity, and will effect how we engage. For Sartre and de Beauvoir, facticity was yet more specific: it meant the concrete facts of the world that limit an individual’s freedom. Facticity might refer to your physical attributes, or the details of your history and your past (where you were born, and who to, and how you were raised), or the economic situation into which you graduate or enter the world of work. Your human freedom remains, in all of these instances; what you do in these circumstances is always up to you. But freedom has constraints, and facticity describes those constraints. What you are able to do, then, is an equation which has to take in the absolute freedom you have over yourself and the concrete facts of the world that put barriers in front of you.

Things are as they are, and you can’t change them when they’re not yours to change. But what you always do have freedom around is yourself and your actions. You remake yourself over and over again, through the choices you make and the actions you perform. If you are a coward, it is because you have chosen to be cowardly. But tomorrow, you can choose not to be a coward; you can choose bravery, in the face of whatever comes. By making this choice, you become a person who chooses bravery; you stop being a coward, and start being brave. This option is always, always open to you. This is your freedom.

What the last year has taught me—more so than any of the twenty previous years since I read Sartre for the first time—is that there is a profound sense of peace from accepting this kind of freedom, from really knowing that you can change tomorrow—especially in a time when so much is going badly in the world, and our ability to affect it feels ever more diminished. Circumstances become more and more difficult, but still we have choices in how we approach or react to them. I find myself so much less self-flagellating, so much more self-compassionate, knowing that tomorrow I have another opportunity to change who I am. If I am not activist enough, not kind enough, not smart enough—I can be, starting now. It’s okay that I am a flawed individual. It’s okay that I might have disappointed myself today: tomorrow I can be different, and better. It’s okay that I have made poor choices; I have recognised it, and tomorrow I can make different choices, can work to undo what I have done wrong. If it’s not possible to undo them, I can start to build something different.

A lot of my friends are currently parenting toddlers and they talk a lot about ‘repair’, the idea that you are not going to be a perfect parent, that you’re going to shout and lose your shit and be too adult for them and that what really matters is not holding yourself to unmeetable standards but to ‘repair’ what you’ve fucked up; to go back to your child and make it better in the moment. This is the energy behind my plain rice, pink pickles, office-clearing new year ritual: the repair of schisms within myself. The clearing away of who I don’t want to be and the ushering in of who I do. Making space for the freedom of consistent self-creation, self-restructuring, self-actualisation. Being better, and happier, and recognising that we have the freedom to do so.

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My next novel Carrion Crow—a dark, physical book that ‘deduces an unutterable Gothic horror of class and gender from the pages of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management’—is forthcoming in Feb 27th 2024. You can support me, and this substack, by pre-ordering it here: