i don't want to be good at the old things anymore

i want to let them rot.

I’m not sure I’d call “making everything look okay” a skill anymore. It’s a trick, a sleight of hand, a performance. Yeah, it gets you places, but only those where you can’t rest. It’s a skill like lying is a skill, and who wants to own up to that?

I’ve grown wary of the impulse to vacuum the breadcrumbs behind me. I’m not interested in presenting a final draft with no workings shown. I want to reveal the parts that don’t add up. The equations I keep miscalculating. The attempts, the do-overs, the spirals. I have no appetite for performing wholeness, I’m-totally-together-ness, or wellness. Life doesn’t move in straight lines, and I won’t act like it does. I’m on the path like you’re on the path. Snake and laddering. Learning. Spiralling.

In my twenties, I remember I was practiced. I could walk into any room, composed and magnetic even after an all-nighter, even with all my inner chaos swirling around (though I'm sure some people who encountered me then saw through it and can attest to me being a total mess). Still, being a functioning shell becomes muscle memory. You keep saying yes. You keep being what you think you should. You keep going. And it works, for a time.

This necessary deception became second nature, but there’s a cost. Behind the high performance is often the abandonment of voice, body, and curiosity. I’ve lived it. I still feel the residue. I’ve learned how easy it is to disappear inside a version of yourself that meets the brief but hollows you out.

Maybe I’m getting too old to pull it off. I try to push back against the structures that quietly suffocate, the “we’ve always done it this way” of the business, especially as a Black artist whose work resists certain categorisations. I’m trying to find systems that let the art breathe. I’m trying to keep it fun, to remember the self-published copies of ‘Bone’ I sold from my bag and on Etsy. That DIY spark has never left me, though sometimes, I forget to protect it.

Lately, I’ve felt the weight of recalibrating everything, especially as I move deeper into work around inner worlds, creativity, brain health, and the nervous system. The more obsessed I get with this type of work, the clearer it becomes; I no longer want to be good at the things that drain me. I don’t want to keep saying yes out of fear. I don’t want to keep working past my limits because I fear what will happen if I stop. I don’t want to keep calling it discipline when it’s depletion.

Sometimes I catch myself scrolling, convinced I’ve missed something. That there’s a better way to do life, more efficient, sexier, more noble or daring, depending on the day and whose social media I’m looking at. But I know what this dissociation dressed up as research leads to: hours gone. Energy completely zapped.

These days are it. There’s no other life. Just the one I’m standing in. I don’t want to miss it because I’m too deep in the machine to notice the sky.

That’s what The Catch is about. Not just the story, but also the undercurrent. Someone who seems polished, successful, and clever, but has much unravelling to do behind the scenes. It’s about the danger of performance, about the true cost of the image. Here’s the truth I’ve been circling for years: