Windows and wormholes

On climbing in and falling in to people's lives.

Among the many ways I entertained myself as a child, the one phase I look back at with a mix of awe, horror and maybe some guilt is this:
in the lone hours of the afternoon when my mother was at work, when there was nothing to watch on television and other people took naps, I climbed in through the windows of neighbours’ homes.

Why did I do it?

Allow me some grace before the analysis: these missions never had a sinister purpose. I was approximately eleven, and no mission lasted more than the few seconds it took me to stick my head in, catch a glimpse of something random inside a home — a living room sofa, a dining table or a random piece of art stuck on someone else’s walls before I scrammed all the way home, heart pounding in my ears. I didn’t nick things or touch anyone else’s stuff. The point was simply to do it and run.

Now for the analysis: I stopped climbing in through people’s windows once I understood the value and importance of privacy (i.e. once I became a secretive adolescent and had things worth hiding of my own: diaries, crushes, feuds and frustrations).

In another sense, I grew up and learned to channel my voyeurism into a socially acceptable and professionally rewarded form: as a journalist and an artist. I don’t climb in through people’s windows anymore (I promise) but I still draw inspiration from observing human beings — those tiny glimpses of light from other people’s lives are how I remember: I too am part of the flotsam in this cosmic soup, a spark of light in some weary traveler’s commute home.

Note: As of the 14th of February, 2025 this newsletter will have been around for a WHOLE YEAR. Now and Zen was born of my burning desire to make art, and tell you stories. While this newsletter is 100% made with love, it still requires labour, time, art supplies and subscriptions. Starting next month, I will give readers the option to pay for a subscription in order to keep receiving Now and Zen in their inboxes. It is (still) excruciating for me to a) believe that I am a working artist/creator and b) ask for money for my work — but I must do it because I too need to eat. If you cannot afford the subscription and would still like to receive the newsletter, please write to me — I am a gentle human being and we can work things out.

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WINDOWS

I’m convinced that the endless scroll, particularly when we find ourselves in a moment that can only be described as empty — looking at the feeds of strangers or friends-who-seem-like-strangers online — is born of the same yearning: to catch a glimpse of yourself in a strangers’ life, and as a result, to feel part of a collective.

And yet screens, reams and reams of content, feed discontent and loneliness. A moment that struck me last week, amid the heinousness of the news and the Swearing In Ceremony of the Broligarchs, was the way people talked about the TikTok ban online: it felt huge, which is weird because it really was not as big a deal as say, the threat of fascism, a climate crisis, a genocide, or shrinking reproductive rights. Sure, TikTok is a place where people talk about these things, but like any other social media app, it’s also the place people go to in order to escape thinking about these things.

Somehow TikTok is the after-school hang out, a place where people can be loose-tied, unbuttoned and unfiltered versions of themselves without any adults around. In comparison, Instagram Reels is lunch at your teacher’s home — sometimes fun, never entirely relaxed.

Regardless, we are being watched everywhere — whose gaze is welcome and what feels like surveillance? Who decides?

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WORMHOLES

• I loved this window into kink by dominatrix, podcast host and writer Tina Horn. It is a compassionate, thoughtful and frequently hilarious account of people’s varied sexual kinks and how to live with the fact that someone else’s yuck could be your yum and vice versa. If you’d like a trailer, read an interview with Horn here.

• You may or may not have noticed Instagram delicately promoting the account of US Vice President JD Vance. I wrote about Vance in Coda Story’s newsletter a few months ago when Trump first picked him as his running mate, and you can go down that wormhole here:
  
  "Vance’s real value for the Republican Party lies not in his earnest representation of white, working class Americans (as his book Hillbilly Elegy suggests) but in his deep ties to Silicon Valley and Peter Thiel.”
  
  

• There’s one thing I still love my phone for, and that’s music. Here’s a playlist to climb into for your week.