Hi, I’m Sophie. You might know me as someone who has tweeted too much, who posts political rants on Facebook, as that girl with the dirty legs and the one really bad take, as an intersectional socialist who isn’t big on neoliberal identity politics, as a journalist, as a foster carer for cats and kittens, as zine creator, or as someone who lived in Brooklyn, NY from 2010 to 2018. Right now, I’m just a girl living near the bottom of the world, working at a not-for-profit focused on sustainability and trying to make sense of our increasingly fucked up world.
The internet is where I’ve spent most of the last 15 years of my life, and it’s a place that alternatively makes me feel terrible and great. I want to resist the dopamine hits of likes and retweets, of seeking approval from people who I admire through their digital presence. But I don’t want to lose my creative voice. After quitting Twitter a few months ago, I’ve found myself trying to squeeze my thoughts into the cracks of platforms I hate, posting long Facebook rants or Insta stories and later deleting them. It all feels wrong. But I think we all feel a bit wrong these days. Putting my thoughts and feelings out into the internet is something I’m probably always going to want to do in some form, and I’d rather do it on a platform that pays writers than one mining us for data. (To be clear, this newsletter is extremely free for the time being, but there are others on here who are great and you should pay them.)
What am I going to do here? I’m not sure. But I have some ideas. I watch too much TV, and I’m always looking for somewhere to critique the shows that I have mixed feelings about, like the irresistible neoliberal hellscape of Queer Eye, or to heap adoration on great projects like Michaela Cole’s masterful I May Destroy You or the targeted nostalgia missile of PEN15.
I’m really interested in the less-explored areas of mental health. What does it mean to pathologize negative responses to a world that is trying to crush us? Is mental illness anything more than our current cultural understanding of traits that are inconvenient to us? What would treatment and medication look like in a less rigid world? I’m fascinated by the barely-charted zone between our bodies and our minds where so much of our suffering sits. I hope to dig into some of those topics here.
I started my “writing career” as a music journalist after a few years participating in Music Tumblr, and music still is important to me. This newsletter is named after a line from a highly self-referential newish song by my favorite band, the Mountain Goats. I’ll probably talk about music here from time to time as well.
And of course, I’m obsessed with politics, as anyone who cares about the well being of humanity should be. As we witness the crumbing of the American empire and the messy birth of the political and social forces that emerge through its broken pieces, I’m interested in writing about what another world might look like and how we can get there, or survive until we do.
I don’t know what this will look like, and it’s highly possible whatever I create here will mostly have value to me. As is already quite clear, I am a person who, like all of us, makes mistakes. I don’t have the answers. I just want to share this human experience while we have it, and try to understand what it means. Maybe you’re interested in that too.