The first post on this blog was on the 20^th November 2012. 14-year-old me, clearly wild with excitement, decide it was important for the internet to know exactly how she felt about the new Perks Of Being A Wallflower film. Back then I wrote informally but regularly, somehow managing to churn out 2/3 blogs every week on everything from fashion to books I was reading, capping off each piece with what I was wearing and my favourite song. Oh, to be a 14-year-old with all the time in the world and a wardrobe full of floral shirts.

I just wanted to take a pause and write like her for a little while.

And the history books forgot about us

And the Bible didn't mention us

And the Bible didn't mention us, not even once

I changed my domain name last week, kissing goodbye to Thing The Books Forgot. I was in love with that song, Regina Spektor’s Samson, finding it at the real cusp of my 14/15/16 year old indie days that would become populated with battle of the bands and torn crop tops. I’m still in love with that song, it’s just beautiful and heart-breaking and everything I’ve always loved in music. So, I clung to that domain name for 7 year, meaning nothing to anyone but me as the lyrics were forced out of context by the task of finding a blogger ID that wasn’t taken. It seemed to make sense, my faux-philosophical younger self related, thinking no one will ever write about me in history books, my contribution will be null and forgotten. But hey I’m going to start this anyway and fling my opinions and small glimpses into my life out on the internet, I’m going to scream these things into the void and see what happens.

I’m a big-time quitter when it comes to everything but this. I can give you a list of all the classes and hobbies I’ve taken up and abandoned within half a year, but I’d quit half way through trying to remember it. One thing I never shrugged off was writing. I have no way around the clichés here; I’ve written forever, it’s what I’ve always wanted to do and what I’ve always done, it comes so naturally blah blah. But it’s true, from scribbled short stories in school notepads to by-lines on HuffPost, I’ve only ever done or wanted to do this. The past 7 years with this blog is easily the longest relationship I’ve ever been in, the most commitment I’ve ever awarded anything, I’m pretty impressed with myself to be honest. 380 posts, 7 years, averaging out at one a week.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this apart from to scream into the void once again to say thank you. I made a vow a to stop caring about it anyone was reading and just write what I want in the style I want, but I know there’s still people here, a lot of who have always been here. I wonder a lot about what got me what, what the foundation of all my jobs and internships was, and I think I can solidly say it’s this. I’ve seen this through my GCSEs, A-Levels, 3 years of uni and now a full-time job, it wasn’t really that I went to change the domain that I clicked how much time I’d dedicated to it all. I felt weirdly emotional, like it was the end of something when I know it’s not. So, I’m trying to flip it on its head and just say thank you to you. Thank you for still reading and for the nice messages I get, it makes the void so much prettier when someone screams back.

And thank you to me for persevering. Someone go back in time and tell 14 year old Lucy that I’m a full time writer now, she did it.

My favourite room in my favourite gallery is full of female nude paintings and images depicting the power and sexuality of women, all painted by men. Chalkboards prompt conversation about censorship and feminism: are these images okay in our modern age? Are we allowed to admire them and ignore the issue behind it, of female anatomy being acceptable only in art and only for male use while the women in these paintings were oppressed or blamed or brutalised? Can we enjoy the beauty without considering the hand that held a brush in one and tightened around wrists of control with the other?

The female form is everywhere. Shops selling prints and vases, TV promos with a flash of a lower back, music videos with dancing silhouettes, runways with carefully covered nipples, I doubt we go a day without seeing skin. It’s a cornerstone of art, in some ways a shape that’s become a device moving from sex sells to soft, gentle feminist doodles sell as I browse the wallets dotted with boob doodles in Monki. Men wander round in t-shirts with a topless Kate Moss on it, bedrooms around the world are decorated with framed forms, even our perfume bottles flow in and out as hips. The beauty of our bodies is intoxicating and unavoidable, we are admired and marketed world-wide and cross-genre. So why is it so shocking for me to press post on the artwork of my own?

In the final weeks in my flat, I did a photoshoot with my friend for her Depop. We wanted to do it as a collab between my burlesque work and her glorious vintage finds. We talked concepts, shared inspo pics with images of Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol’s factory girls flying between us as I perfected my makeup. For an afternoon we played dress up, listening to music and laughing as I attempted to walk in the insane platform boots she’d found in a charity shop one day. I felt powerful. It was one of those days where I wanted to stare at myself for hours, stood in front of the mirror in a bodysuit and incredible glossy red-apple knee-high boots. The voice in my head that has made me turn away so many times before didn’t speak up that day. I put the Velvet Underground on and laid down on my bay window feeling worthy of a photoshoot and unafraid of the images, a feeling I never experience.

When she sent me the pictures I laughed, amazed. The light hit perfectly, my body was wrapped in contrast of shadow and light in an image that looks so powerful yet so tender to me as the red leather brushed against white mesh that ripples. It’s art to me, on a weekday afternoon we’d added to the history of artwork around the female form with our own piece, curated, shot and made by only women.

Had the picture have been on an art page, sat somewhere in the depths of Tumblr or printed in a zine, I imagine no controversy would’ve come. We see pictures like this all the time, skin is nothing new to us. But under my name, published by my own finger and my own will, that was cause for concern. My sister text me, my mum’s colleagues made comments, and suddenly I was under fire with warnings that I wouldn’t get jobs because I shared my own skin.

I forget that people care. Since joining burlesque in my 2^nd year of uni, I’ve been blessed to live in a bubble of self-empowerment, swimming within the female gaze where we can see our own bodies as art without a male hand necessary. We celebrate ourselves, find pride in our power and sensuality without any need for affirmations sitting on the line between praise and pick up. Attention is not on the radar; we see only art and reference and effort. In that photo, I see beautiful light, I see Barbarella, I see Edie Sedgwick and shiny factory walls and girls topless in studio 54, I see the training put into getting my legs that straight, I see the influence of my favourite photography accounts and frames up in the national portrait gallery, I see that I look amazing, I see the calm that comes from seeing all this in an image of my thighs, a feature I used to curse and claw at. They see a bum, they see the shock that I laid myself down, they see sex.

Would it be better painted? Had I have laid down in a life drawing class and posted the pictures made by others, would that have been fine with them? Is the issue that I did this for myself? Still in 2020, unable to understand that women can enjoy their own sensuality as much as others. Is the problem that I’ve taken that back? Complaint coming from the confusion that it might be less satisfying to sexualise someone that doesn’t need your lacklustre compliment when I praise myself higher each day. Does it all become less fun when I like it? Part of the joy in sexualising women coming from the crawling skin of discomfort, the shy ‘thank you’ to shoo the man away, does an ‘I know’ ruin that? Or is it my label? Images like this blocked off as bad because I’m a daughter, a sister, a future wife, an employee. If I was a model it would be fine, but simply a woman is ungraspable, forcing you to sit in uncertainty. Would it have been okay with a different caption? One less sure of myself and more self-conscious? Or one screaming a statement in plain words, chanting my claim to my own skin, raising an undeniable finger to the patriarchy to melt the male gaze in a pool of politics?

With my own name attached and my own free will, a picture of my own skin wasn’t appropriate. An image of my own skin is turned on my like a knife, apparently threatening to slash up my skills, ruining my ability to do a job. I wonder if they know that, shock horror, I wear it every day, always wearing that same skin under my jeans, my hips, bum, boobs not accessories I can leave at home for a more appropriate occasion. I am always that woman, whether I post the picture or not. Look at me how you will, change your opinion, but I wake up each day that same confident, sensual, intelligent, creative, skilled, talented, empathetic, emotional, loving woman, in the same skin with the same curves underneath it. I lie down on my bay window in a bodysuit, then I get up and write, work, see friends, read, learn. I do both, I can be both, and I am all of it. Your impressions of me are correct and yet limited, women always stretch beyond the canvas. The topless Sappho poured out poetry, naked Eve birthed the earth, the nymphs’ power shaped and tested the protagonist.

In the photo, I see more than them. My mum begs me to consider the way people might view me, but why would I squint? From here I see it all, sitting with myself forever and learning each nuance. From there, the strangers see a couple of images a month, they see skin nestled in between a collage of achievements and thoughts, and if they focus in on one and not the other, their tunnel vision shouldn’t say anything about my public persona but their attention span.

The day I deleted the picture I wanted to cry. Tired of the force-fed shame, shaking with anger from the Chinese whispered opinions of strangers in towns I no longer live in, my finger unwillingly archived my favourite image that’s ever been taken of me, hiding an image that represented the best of my confidence, the sun-shining peak of the uphill battle against body image issues, the skill of my friend, the end product of our collective vision, the finale of my reclamation to claw my sensuality back from the hands of grown men driving past honking horns. So here, if my skin is so unacceptable, have my skill. If that’s still not okay, pretend a man painted it.

When 2019 started I lived on the ground floor of a Victorian townhouse in Sheffield. Now I live on the 4^th floor of an industrial building in Manchester. When it started, I had brown hair down to my collar bone with lighter tips, now it’s cropped and bleached to oblivion. At the start, I was living life between lectures, libraries and my dining room table, now I work 8-5 and live somewhere between my desk, bath and a bar. My best friends remained the same with new additions, my family became one person less, my bookshelf bowed, my wardrobe overflowed, 365 days ran by.

I usually hate New Year's Eve, wishing to hide from the fireworks in a bubble; sat alone in a bath nursing some wine and listening to a podcast. I usually spend the weeks before grappling with ways to quantify a year, battling between the ups and downs as if the conclusion can only be one or the other. I usually feel a weird sense of pressure to come to sound incredible, insightful final comment as you scroll past the thousands of round-ups on Instagram, feeling like I’d be entered into some competition of who had the most transformative year. But this year, I don’t.

Maybe I’m too busy to care. Or maybe ending the year in a different city with different hair and different friends and a wildly different lifestyle makes you realise how redundant the whole practice is, maybe it’s enough to just say its been a year, a wildly weird and wonderful year.

This year, when I’ve found myself sinking into the end of year sadness, cursing past me for not doing this or for losing that, I’ve been trying my best to point it forward. If I didn’t do it then, I’ll do it now. I’ve been writing lists as long as my arms with things to try and do and go and make happen next year or even this next decade. I’ve got time.

I think the biggest reason is that 2020 looks so different. I’m out of education and the confines of an academic calendar, I’m fully financially independent, I live in an amazing city and work a great job, meaning that my year is nothing but open. Every decision is mine to make, unaffected by any external factors. I can literally do what I want, give my time to what and who I want, buy what I want, go where I want. I can do what I want and I feel like I want to do everything.

The idea of the 20s feels delicious. I can’t help but see images of Gatsby’s parties, of decadence and hedonism in an age of untamed excitement. I think of people living passionately, of the wild love of a Fitzgerald novel, champagne spilling, Jordan Baker playing golf, Daisy laughing in a room of floating white silk. The 20s drip of riches, luxury, artistry, living deeply and fully. And I’m very ready to adopt that, more than ready for a bit of hedonism, I think I’ve earnt it.

This year I got a degree. I wrote a 10,000-word dissertation as well as several other essays. I had 6 pieces of writing published. I got a job. I moved city. This decade I did GCSEs, AS-Levels, A-Levels, and a degree. I launched this blog and a magazine. I started my writing careers, getting by-lines all over the place. I sang for a little while. I released a book. I wrote a monologue for a film. I started doing burlesque. I made friends, I lost friends, I made more friends. I made films.  I won a medal. I had relationships and lost them. I moved to Sheffield. I moved to Manchester. I went from a child to a teenager to an adult. I went from 11 to 21. I set myself up a life. All my education, the basis of my career, my whole world view, my politics, my hobbies and side hustles, everything was built in this decade and now all this work has got me here, on the cusp of a decade where my only job is to do whatever I want. Make what I want, go where I want, anything.

So, the word is hedonism. It’s riches, luxury, spontaneity, fun, freedom, holidays, drinks, parties, love, friends, fucking up and fucking off, it’s everything and anything and all of it. That’s going to be 2020 and I think it's enough for me to simply be excited.

I shouldn’t want to work in social media. 

Though I denied it at the time, social media played a huge role in the start of my depression. When I was 13, I’d spend all night, every night scrolling its dark underbelly. Before we all wised up, before the days of safety filters or general awareness of mental health triggers, the internet was a dark place for a teenage girl. In the early 2010s, I would spend hours on Tumblr, scrolling through images glorifying self-harm, posts describing suicide step-by-step as a heroic and compassionate act, pro-ana pictures with long captions bragging about the diminishing number of calories girls I didn’t know were eating each day. On Instagram, all our lives were perfect and pastel pink, the closest we came to vulnerability was sharing Perks Of Being A Wallflower quotes underlined in pink highlighter and full stopped with a heart. My friends were in it too and as I slipped into it, it all became some weird twisted competition of who’s depression could pull in the most followers. 

I wonder if I would have ever self-harmed if it wasn’t for Tumblr. I didn’t even know it was a thing before friends started reblogging images of cuts nested in mounds of bracelets like they were just another accessory. Early 2010s social media made mental illness seem so glamorous, it was hard to separate that from the images of fashion and celebs when they all came with the same filter and same number of likes. My mum forced me to shut down my Tumblr account and I didn’t get a new account until like 2016. I struggled with self-harm intensely and then sporadically until around that time. 

It almost feels like an embarrassing thing to talk about, that the internet made me hurt myself because it seemed like a cool thing to do. But it’s really no different to anything else, the internet made me want that coat, that hair, listen to that album, watch that film. We’re fickle creatures, see something enough and you’ll want it. If enough people seem to find solace and a sense of identity or even popularity through self-destruction, you’re going to want to try it. It’s peer pressure on a global scale, made all the more sinister behind a veil of fakery and catfishing and sparkly visuals. 

So the fact that my job, to a degree, is to make these sparkly visuals to sell bags and shoes, seems nonsensical. Why would I want to work in social media after my early relationship with these platforms was so fucked up? Well, because I launched a blog, I started a magazine, I made best friends, I found new interests, I learnt new things, I engaged with politics, I kept up with the news, all because of it. Because I found all the best parts of it the second safety filters stopped me going looking for the worse. 

Social media has endless potential. It’s made a whole generation of young people engage with politics and movements that started years ago or worlds away, it’s allowed us to hear the voices of underrepresented groups and activists, it’s introduced us to artists and bands and filmmakers that would never have managed to get that level of exposure without Facebook. It’s got power, good and bad, but I think overwhelmingly good. From the darkness of 2010 to now, I’ve seen a tilting. My daily scroll has been slowly changing from images of stick-thin illness shaming me, to images of joy as women like Florence Given and BodyPosiPanda dance round rolls and all, telling me to do the same. Just as platforms have wised up, cottoned onto destructive topics and their associated tags, so have we. It’s great that Instagram asks if you need support when you find yourself looking at tags related to eating disorders or self-harm, but 13-year-old me would have simple clicked proceed and scrolled through anyways despite the warning. The big change now is that I would be distracted.

Back then, my feed was undisrupted. No one really talked about things, so with no one shouting about recover how was I to know to go and seek it? 

I’ve hardly changed who I follow, never having the patience to do a deep purge of my 3000+ following list, but my feed has changed. Old pro-ana accounts now talk about recovery, girls that used to post black and white quote images of Effy Stonem like she was royalty, now talk about the empowerment of showing their scars in public and teaching their babies the importance of self-care from a young age, my likes of support have put boring, flawless influencers to the bottom of my feed and community guidelines have hidden the worse images from the site all together. There’s been a shifting from glamour to realism, vanity to vulnerability, cool self-destruction to cool self-care. I’d been thinking it for a while, holding the thought close as motivation to keep moving in their industry with my passion to help keep this happy change happening, and then Twitter backed it up.

A couple of weeks ago twitter released some research on the change in cultural conversation that they’ve seen over the past 3 years, analysing billllllions of tweets to see what we talked about then versus now. Here are some of the top stats:

• Discussion of self-care and well-being is up 225% while talk of dieting and detoxing is down 52%.

• We focus more on the topics of mental health as a community topic, talking about support and unity far more. Conversation around mental health is up 122% and goodwill hashtags covering topics like charitable giving and issue awareness are up 582%.

• Sustainability is now one of the biggest topics on the site with conversation up 179% and talk of holding corporations accountable for their effect on the environment is up 825%.

• Conversation around the ethics of technology and safety online is up 179%.

• Discussion of representation and equality is at an all-time high, up 468%.

Overall, we seem to be getting nicer. Our online behaviours seem to be becoming more positive, more socially aware, kinder. Obviously, there’s issues. Instagram guidelines regularly discriminates against female bodies, shadow-banning affects performers, data security is generally terrifying, but our feeds feel nicer. 

My experience isn’t uncommon, maybe that’s why. We all want the good of social media without the fear of finding the dark side of it again, all cautious of our profiles becoming the sickly-sweet dangerous aspirational bullshit that made us hate our lives before, all still remaining a little careful and cautious of triggers that would have slammed us down 8 years ago. As we’ve changed our mentality, we changed the landscape; the kind of positive influence these sites needed, not brand-sponsored beach photos. Now activists win influencer of the year awards, we’re looking to real people more and more for inspiration and in effect, forcing brands to keep up with us, making the billboards round town more reflective of the people walking past them. 

I shouldn’t want to work in social media, but I do for that exact reason. I want it to be better, I want to be able to enjoy all the benefits it brought to my life without having my day ruined by someone telling me I need to drink laxatives to love myself. I want real people dancing around, cute dogs being funny, activists making change, casual images of self-care, real talk about real news leading to real action. I want it to stay good and stay getting better, I want to be able to say I helped.