Today is the 16th of April 2025. The UK Government has just ruled that a woman is definted by biological sex, whatever the fuck that means. If the rise of fascism all over the globe hasn’t been worrying you more and more with each growing day, I think you need to get your head out of your ass and/or maybe understand how incredibly privileged you are. 

I am blindsided by just how much hatred there is for trans people, in this country, around the globe, in general. Trans people make up less than 1% of the global population. Pretty sure those figures are correct, maybe higher but either way it’s a ridiculously small amount no matter how you look at it and it puts into perspective how truly insane everything is. This isn’t about protecting women, it’s about pushing down a very very small percentage of the population because cowardice and hatred have the loudest voices. Because what happens here is that masculine women, or women with higher levels of testosterone, or women who don’t meet the standards of what these clowns think a woman should be, are going to be affected to. If they truly cared about women, this wouldn’t have happened. 

I think putting into account my own relationship with gender is important, and why I feel so strongly about this. Not that I wouldn’t otherwise (and not that you shouldn’t feel strongly about this if you’re cis) but I’ve always had a strange relationship with gender. Never feeling ‘man’ enough to hang with the boys and never feminine enough to go to the girls. Learning about gender and how people conform to it really opened my eyes as a teenager. Learning there were options outside of being a man or a woman and that I could just simply be myself. I still don’t see myself as either, I exist simply as me, without the need to put myself anywhere on the binary scale. I understand the enormity of the privilege I posses from appearing more masculine in my day to day life, but I understand even more that many don’t have that privilege. This decision, this horrible choice, is going to put so many women at risk. So many trans women, so many cis women, so many people exisiting outside the gender binary who just want to fucking exist. Whilst I myself don’t place myself anywhere, I still enjoy presenting more feminine from time to time and I’ve been so lucky to exist in spaces and places where I have the luxury of gender neutral restrooms or simply just living in more progressive areas. I can wear a skirt outside and still feel scared to shit but know for the most part, I’ll be ok. It makes me so angry that there are so many people who don’t have that, and are going to lose so much more because of today. What a fucking joke.

I’m losing so much coherency here but I don’t care. I want to talk about that sorry joke of a person JK Rowling and how her hatred has helped enable this. I personally don’t care what your relationship to Harry Potter is but I personally can’t stand it on the basis that she created it alone. Save for the horrible racism and stereotyping, I just didn’t grow up with it and I’m actually thankful I didn’t now. Your fantasy series can not be so worth it that this woman keeps getting funded. Fuck your Hogwarts Legacy or that wretched HBO remake series. To all the people in the film and TV industry who I work with- please please please avoid working on that show like the plague. I know most of you have morals. Please. I know it’s a good job from a length and money and scale point of view but is it worth the lives of your trans friends and family? Put your money where your mouth is and turn down dailies. Turn down the possibility of hopping on board it. If you care about us, you’ll avoid it like the plauge. I work on set with so many wonderful people, but I notice how little so many of you care about your trans co-workers. Constant misgendering, the inability to correct others who misgender right in front of you. You don’t hire people who aren’t cis, white and male and I notice this. We all notice this. You talk so much about diversity, but honestly, hiring just one woman on the team isn’t enough. You need to do better. Whatever.

I don’t know. I’m angry. I’m sad. I’m feeling defeated. I know how important it is to stick together, and I’ll continue to be in the corner of all those I love but right now, I’m feeling like shit. I know we have to keep fighting but goddamn it, does a blow like this hurt.

If, like me, you’re both a melancholy brunette (currently) AND a sad woman (always) - today’s been quite the day.

Of course, I’m referring to both the Severance season 2 finale but also the release of Michelle Zauner’s fourth studio album under the moniker Japanese Breakfast ‘For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women).

I’ve always been a big fan of Michelle Zauner’s work and this album
transported me somewhere new today. If her first two albums were the intro, and third a reset, this fourth one is a plunge
into the unknown, breaking away from the grief, accepting that the joy
isn’t always there and acknowledging the melancholia that hangs us over
daily and trying to make sense of it whilst also not really because
after all what can you do about it? It’s such a superb piece of art,
musically, lyrically, thematically- all of it. Like Orlando, I’m in
love.
Between severance (which I can’t speak too much on because of
spoilers) and this album, today’s been great for just revelling in the
art I love. Which is why I want to talk about it.

I’m a very self aware
person and I’m always thinking about the things I do and how people
perceive me. The world gets worse with each day and I see so many posts and so many links, petitions and crowdfunders. I’m a very online person, part of it an online persona curated to make me seem cooler and more alive than I really am. When I don’t share these things publicly I think- do people
think I’m performing? That I don’t truly care? That it’s all an act when I do? Of course I know this isn’t true and I shouldn’t care but I do
because it’s a human thing to do. But still- it’s all very overwhelming and you
can’t help but feel powerless. So you try and live and do what you can
and hope one day it won’t feel so.

I think I’ve been so laser focused
on art and what it means to me and how it makes me feel instead as a
shield. If I post non-stop about Severance, maybe I’ll be ok. But what does it mean to be ok? Who knows…

I feel like I’m getting off track but it all ties together I promise. Lately I’ve been thinking about what kind of stories I want to write and the
kinds of stories that I have written. About the films and music and books and
poems that speak the most to me. To the things that comfort me, to how I interact with people and what keeps me going.

Do you see where this is going? At the end of it all, there’s only ONE thing that’ll get us through…

On most online platforms, I use the handle ‘thejojoplace’ - it was a name born out of love for the TV show The Good Place. I adore that show with all my heart, because it’s all about how human we all are. How fallible, how silly, how capable of affection we are. How we can all be so much better. How we go about that. It’s not cynical. It doesn’t present a jaded view of life and the world. It’s so sincere in the best way and it captured me from the moment I started it.

There’s this one scene, this one moment, that I think about often. The fate of humanity rests upon one man’s shoulders. He writes himself a note for later, because he won’t be the same when he awakens. It contains the solution to their problems, the golden key to this problem.

When we see the note, it simply says:

To him, the only answer is the person that he loves. Why should it be anything else? There’s only one thing that’ll get us through- it’s love. Love is the answer. God, it’s so simple isn’t it? It all comes back to love. I love to love, and I mean all kinds of love. Platonic love for my friends. The way I love the sun shining on my face. Loving getting into bed at the end of a long day. Loving how a cold glass of water feels. Loving the smiles exchanged with strangers on the bus. Isn’t it so cool to love?

Love is the answer to it all. 

I think it makes a lot of sense. I think I’ve written a lot of words to very simply express my enjoyment of things but hey, I’m a lover. Even if it is sorta more than that. I write because I feel a lot. I always have and always will. Because I think people will understand me better if I spill my heart out. Life is weird and people are weird. I don’t know!

Thinking out loud is shit scary. I’m always scared. I’m a very anxious person. But I would rather be vulnerable and sincere and do it scared than being cynical and jaded. I never want to lose all this love. I want to be as true to myself as I can possibly be, even if I’m worried how people will percieve me, what boxes they’ll put me in. I want to keep loving, and keep making art and keep enjoying art until I take my final breath. There’s gotta be something in that right? Right?

Anyways, go tell the people in your life you love them. Seriously. Love is infinite, you’re not gonna use it all up. Go be shit scared vulnerable! Go love.

i’ve been thinking a lot about photography - film photography, to be specific - and how it makes me feel and what i want out of a camera and my experiences with it. i think as the years have gone on, i’ve become increasingly obsessed with gear and finding the perfect camera for every scenario, losing track of what made shooting film so magical for me in the first place. simply put, there is no perfect camera, there is no magic formula that will make everything seem right, how i feel it should be. and despite this, i continue to search, but in reality, the answer has been in front of me the whole time. kinda.

the olympus om10 was my first, my first film camera, my first love. the way i felt when i first started to shoot film was unlike anything else, it was pure wonder and excitement and joy. nothing else mattered, i didn’t care about other cameras or how big it was or anything like that. i just carried it around, took photos and had a good time. something has been lost, in the mix of growing older (and becoming more and more jaded) and discovering other cameras and subscribing to this lifestyle that having one extra thing on me when i go out is too much, that i need to be flexible and free, at the cost of my own enjoyment (because at the end of the day, i worry more about this now, which sucks). whatever i lost, is still there though, somewhere within me, i think. i think i’ve just overcomplicated things, made everything too difficult. i don’t know why, i wish i knew why. i’m trying to change that. i’m hoping i can change that. i think i need to change that.

i’m getting off topic. this is about the om10. a fantastically simple camera to use, it just works. it makes sense, it’s fun to use, i love how it looks and most importantly, it’s just always been there for me. i have two of them now, and whilst my original needs some work done, i fully plan on getting it back up to scratch and keeping it with me until the end of my days. i’m currently using the second one as it’s in mint condition and working fine, but i feel the soul is the same. when i look through that viewfinder, focus my shot and feel that warm sound of the shutter, i know everything is going to be ok. i know somewhere inside me, that simplicity of it all is inside. i want to make more, enjoy photography for the hobby it is to me. maybe i’ll make a zine. maybe i’ll finally make those photo albums. and maybe i’ll just share some photos here and now. a few that i love, new and old, from my om10(s). god i love this camera. god i love photography, and film photography and the feeling i get when i see the grain, the slightly out of focus shots. how i smile when i look at photos of my friends, the shot wide open because i love how a blurry background draws attention to the faces of the people i love. god i love my friends. god i love to love. i’m going to try and blog more. none of this is coherent and nor does it need to be. this is mostly for me, but if you’re reading this too, i hope you enjoy it. this is all spilling out of my brain here and now in the moment and i don’t think i’m going to change a thing. being human is messy at times, quite like film photography. other times, it’s really quite simple, don’t you think?