1: welcome

i love texture. i am a fundamentally sensory creature – there are certain things, like sliding the pad of my thumb over smooth velvet, or the smell of garlic on my fingertips after a meal, or the opening of “this is me trying” by taylor swift, that make my brain go brrrr in a good way.

as i try and sort out what’s going on with my life, with myself – as i recover from a period of chronic trauma, as i learn to live in a disabled body with a disabled brain – i am learning to pay more attention to these things. in 2018, my then-therapist asked me what i enjoyed, what i liked doing, and i burst into tears because i literally didn’t know. i didn’t feel like a person, i didn’t feel like i had a personality, i felt empty and out of touch with my own body, like my mind was always two steps behind where it was supposed to be. this is a long-winded and over-sharing way of saying that now, in 2021, i am trying to let myself be guided by the pursuit of pleasure, to attune myself to the things that bring me joy or fulfilment or whatever other words there are for that feeling i get when i watch the everybody lives, rose scene from doctor who.

so, as part of this project of self-attunement and, for want of a term that hasn’t been co-opted by girlboss capitalist feminism, self-care, i started this newsletter as a kind of texture diary – like a food diary, but more expansive, inclusive of other sensory inputs, a space to write about not only the food i make and consume but also crafts – the weight of a sewing machine, the tight pressure of the yarn under my finger as i push the knitting needle through, the coarse weave of linen – the textures and tactile experiences that i am working to prioritise this coming year.

as a writer, so much of my time is spent in my head – excavating the aforementioned trauma for bits of coal i can try to turn to diamond, or dressing up my imaginary dolls and moving them around imaginary London. i have always most enjoyed customer-service jobs with a heavy side dose of manual labour, perhaps as a counterweight to this – the simple pleasures of the repetitive rip, fold, seal of ticket dispatch in my current job (which i have not done since march 2020; the perils of wfh); the way, when i worked at McDonald’s, i used to grab a flatpacked Happy Meal box from the shelf with one hand and pop it open against my left thigh, unfolding it with one hand and filling it with the other, before throwing it down onto the drive-thru counter to close the lid and present it. the way we used to hurtle around behind the counter, hands on each other’s waists and hips and backs to avoid collisions, slipping on bits of food and spilled grease.

i don’t miss the gruel of that job, nor the shitty customers, but i do miss that – the smells, the heat, the kinetic energy of it, the speed with which i used to run through the kitchen looking for a specific wrap i was waiting on, the lexicon of it which is useless in any other context, the machine beeps that made their way into my dreams. the self-assuredness, the muscle memory – i am convinced that even 6 years on, if you handed me a Happy Meal box i could assemble it perfectly in seconds.

so, i like to use my hands, and my senses. i like to ground myself, to remind myself that i have a body that moves through space and time, that i am not just a floating brain, no matter how much i sometimes feel like one. and lockdown, with its weird atemporality and its geographical restrictions, has made this a challenge. so i am going to try and make more time for these sensory, time-bound, tactile experiences, and i am going to write it down, and that’s what this is. thank you for reading.

---

thank you, sincerely, for reading this far (or indeed at all) – this is an odd project and i don’t quite understand it myself yet and i truly appreciate those of you who have taken a chance and come along for the ride. while you’re here, please check out these things i love:

nina mingya powles’ food diary, comfort food. i love nina’s writing, prose and poetry, and this food diary is what inspired me to embark on this weird little project of my own.

my partner’s patreon, krish does food. their writing is so sensory and luxurious and makes me love cooking and feeding myself in a way that i struggled to access before this relationship. sign up for a monthly recipe newsletter, and tips & tricks including lists of seasonal produce, which i’m trying to use as the building blocks of my meal planning this year.

shannon downey’s make don’t break challenge. i haven’t been able to do this challenge b/c i have been homeless since the 20th december, lol, but i’m planning to do it in feb after i move and am reunited with all my lovely fabrics and ribbons and things. i am trying really hard to Make Things, but i find it so hard to know where to start or where to go with things like knitting and sewing that i’m still learning – so i’m really excited to use these daily prompts to inspire some creative play.

Photo by Maite Oñate on Unsplash