I wanna live like Common People

I wanna do whatever common people do

Hello lovers!

Firstly, please accept my sincerest apologies for my recent absence. I moved house for the second time in four months recently, and it triggered some kind of vague nervous breakdown in me. I know that sounds dramatic, but I don’t know how else to explain it.

You know that thing that happens when you’re trying to yawn but you can’t quite stick the landing? A yawn feels like approaching the peak of a rollercoaster, and the release feels like sailing over the crest and dropping into oblivion. Well, as the second round of packing began, I suddenly found myself yawning constantly but without the ability to get over that crest. I think my nervous system has been clenching for months, and it finally decided to pack up on me.

I’ll stress that I’m fine, mostly. Like everybody else, I’m just holding on to a serious amount of dread and anxiety right now, some of it in regards to tangible things and some of it existential.

BUT!

Writing has always been a salve for life’s challenges, and so it’s time for me to stare down my emotional paralysis demon and get back to work. So here I am!

Hi.

Hello.

How are you?

I’ve been thinking a lot about people lately, and our need for each other. One of the most criminal things capitalism has done has been to convince people that success necessarily means separation from the pack. With its incessant greed for more of the things we don’t need at the expense of all of the things we do, capitalism has waged a centuries long war against community and the power it offers to those of us who value it.

A few months ago, I listened to the most extraordinary podcast on BBC Sounds. Simply titled Witch, it was a 13 part series about the history of witches, including the persecution of people throughout the burning years. I cannot stress to you how amazing this podcast was! I cried multiple times while listening, especially thinking of the harrowing number of people (most of whom were women, but not all) who were tortured and then murdered in a brutal fashion simply to satisfy a craze of control and fearmongering whose legacy we can still feel deeply entrenched today. Please, whatever you do, commit to listening to Witch - I promise you won’t regret it. I’ve linked to it below (and just to clarify, I’m not being paid to promote it either.)

Listen to Witch here.

One of the earlier episodes discusses the deliberate theft of land away from common folk and into the privatised sphere of the aristocracy. Silvia Federici writes about this in depth in her book Caliban and the Witch (which I relied on for part of my research for I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage).

You can purchase I Don’t here (or borrow from your local library). Excitingly, the audiobook (read by me) has also been selected to feature as part of the Editor’s Picks for Women’s History Month on Spotify. Listen to me narrate it here!

Once upon a time, England’s peasantry held rights over access to common living areas. The aristocracy may have owned a lot of “private” farmland, but they needed labourers to work that land - and part of the deal was that they would always have somewhere to live, a commitment offered by William the Conqueror after his success at Hastings.

You can see where this is going, right?