I love winter. It’s the time for cosiness, my time to shine in multiple layers, and the weather becomes a legit excuse to stay inside and watch movies all day, but it’s also the time of year when it’s easy to feel a bit lost. If the plans made in the glow of a new year’s resolution haven’t exactly come to pass, it can feel like a crisis point and that we have to rectify all our mistakes before our next lot of resolutions. Or maybe it’s just the lack of sunlight in the mornings, or reading the news without instantly looking up pictures of fluffy kittens right after that makes the world seem too bleak for us to get out of bed. So if you’re reading this in bed, and resistance to the dark thoughts feels impossible, these are all small sparks in the darkness which you can embrace without ditching the duvet.
Tracee Ellis Ross
I spend a lot of my time admiring Tracee Ellis Ross. She’s so great in the hilarious and politically aware series black-ish (I seriously recommend the season 3 episode ‘Being Bow-racial’ which is top Tracee and has Daveed Diggs doing yoga in a tank top. You’re welcome.); her Instagram is all bold colours, Ross family history – her mum is Diana Ross of The Supremes – and supporting black talent. But best of all is her 73 Questions for Vogue. This series is very addictive – like all American Vogue videos actually; Carey Mulligan as a New Yorker and Mindy Kaling in the Vogue closet are constant go tos when I’m procrastinating – and if you haven’t seen them before, beware, it’s a YouTube spiral waiting to happen. What I love most about video Tracee, speaking, laughing, dancing Tracee, apart from her beautiful home, is that she absolutely radiates good feelings and good intentions. She is exactly the kind of person I want to be. Joy seems to be her main mode for a life well-lived, and that feels powerful.
Solange Knowles
Another Insta favourite, Solange seems dreamier than her supa famous big sister, and her introspection and kindness are in full force for this great essay she wrote in Teen Vogue, detailing the advice she would give to her younger self. I often find these kinds of pieces quite emotional, but also very calming, like one day we’ll be in a position to look back at our own scatty/sad/confused self and treat them with the compassion we maybe can’t give ourselves in the moment.
Magic books that aren’t Harry Potter
I enjoy the HP series, like many people I find them comforting and I like J.K. Rowling on Twitter, but I can’t honestly say that the prose lights me on fire. Emily Dickinson’s writing definitely does, but I don’t know that she would really be such a good choice if life feels grim. So, I would recommend turning to the world’s most life-affirming poet, Frank O’Hara. Art critic, poet, curator, a gay man on the New York scene in the 50s, he finds joy in everything, though he can break your heart with a line, too. Meditations in an Emergency has heartbreak, or the potential for it, along with a passionate love for life in the city, and a voice that is confused, but kind of joyful in its confusion.
If it’s a slightly longer form queer writer you’re after – I am sure you always are – I adore Ali Smith. She is another being keenly alive to the power of words. I know you could pretty much say that about all writers but Smith pays almost poetic attention to sentence structures – sometimes I have to stop reading because I feel a bit drunk on her beautiful prose. She’s funny and playful, and she likes to keep ghosts close by, in a nice way. She wrote this fabulous piece in the Guardian about her inspiration for How To Be Both, a novel about life and after-life, the Italian renaissance, art, friendship – gah, it has it all. When I was in Ravenna this summer, my dad pointed out a disembodied hand, curling round a temple column, and he told me it was probably a Goth that the Romans had tried to erase. It made me feel immensely comforted that historians, archaeologists or simply some eagle-eyed person had realised this, because part of the purpose of the humanities and the arts, I think, is to stop us from forgetting. Forgetting people and their ordinary lives, as well as past horrors we can learn from (ie those same mosaics I saw were probably designed by an artist but constructed by nameless slave labour). Ali Smith, with her fascination for myths, mediaeval texts, and adolescents – a group who can feel that no one is paying attention to them – keeps people living or dead alive to us, joyously and imperfectly alive.
Pen pals
Ok, you might have to get out of bed for this one…When I was at university, my mum’s extensive postcard selection was put to good use, as she was kind enough to send me one a week. Getting post is the best, and sometimes having that tangible proof in your hand, that you are loved and thought of, can feel like miraculous kindness, and it means you don’t have to spend time going through old texts – which we all do, right – for evidence of how funny and special your friendship/familyship is. I love getting postcards and I love sending them; sometimes it’s just to tell people what I’m up to, or where I’ve been, and other times, I have got messages that have encouraged me to keep going in times of stress and sadness. I read somewhere that you should never deny a generous impulse, so start sending, and see what happens.
When you are lost, the most dangerous thing is to think that you are alone. You are not alone. There are so many of us stumbling around in the dark with you, but luckily, some of those people have a light, and they’ve been down this path before, and they know how to find the way again. Sometimes that takes longer than we want it to, finding our people and finding the path, but please know that is there, and that, as Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘We grow accustomed to the dark’, so ‘Life steps almost straight’.
Image credit: Vogue via YouTube
not just a funny face 