the centre always holds

a little note on beginning, again.

When I was five years old, my primary school teacher told my parents I was a good writer. I’d written a short story, something sufficiently innocent and mindless about a kid going to school and it raining outside. While it drew from the banal details of my limited experience as a tiny human on the earth (and early fascination with bad weather), it caught her attention.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a poem I called “Autumn Leaves”. It went:

Leaves are blowing in the breeze

Falling out of the trees

The leaves are landing on the sow

But the cow is mooing anyhow

From what I can remember, I wrote this for my parents for no other reason than I wanted to give them something and I thought this was a nice thing to do. They stuck it on the fridge and sent it to my grandparents. To this day, everyone in my immediate family can still recall the poem.

When I was 11, I wrote a letter to myself outlining what I wanted to be in 20 years, which – in a fleeting brush with inspiration – I dubbed “In 20 Years”. In that distinct and now mercifully dead prophecy, I predicted I would be a footballer (!), with a wife (!!) and two children (!!!) called Dave and Misaki (a combination of names surely not found anywhere in siblings across the world). I’d spelled out the specifics so intently, the words still linger now.

In a surprise to no one, none of it ever happened, but I still have this letter; another relic of my childhood where words provided the greatest inspiration.

A harrowing read for me as an adult now

When I was 14, I sat alone in my English class at my new school. I hadn’t met anyone yet and I was so shy and nervous that I sat at the front of the class in lunch break until my English teacher walked in 20 minutes early to set up for class. She asked me questions and took an interest in me early on. When the other kids arrived, everyone settled down with their preliminary friends – the ones you make on the first day before you realise you share nothing more than a fear of being the kid on their own at the front of their English class.

We were all given a writing test, to gauge our level for the two years ahead. I read a short text about somewhere in Spain and wrote descriptively about what I found. The next class we got our results. My teacher pulled me aside and said I’d done well and that she could tell I loved to write. She explained I could do the exam this year, instead of waiting another for it. I felt embarrassed and shy. I liked the idea of doing an exam earlier but I didn’t like the idea of skipping a year ahead. I wondered what my class would think of me if I did. I wondered if I would miss out on friends if I chose to leave.

So I stayed. And my teacher’s belief kept coming, even if the friends never did.

When I was 16, I started a blog. By this point I’d moved to another school and I’d met a girl who wrote about life and music on her blog. I wanted to do the same, so I did.

I called it ‘I Can Talk’. The title was less that I felt like I had much to say and more that I liked a Two Door Cinema Club song with the same name. The blog dealt with music but also daily life and the conversations I had with friends. It became, much to my own surprise and amusement, something a lot of the school read – students and parents alike. It wasn’t quite Gossip Girl but it never shied away from the things people wanted to know, from nights out to too many nights in. I kept it going throughout school and university until I graduated. It’s still the most unfiltered and unhinged body of work I’ve ever written.

My old blog and also the most accurate sub-header I’ve ever written

When I was 31, in the summer of 2024, one of my best friends – her name is Maira but she’ll go by many names on here in the future – found out I used to have a blog. “Tom you need to bring this back,” she screeched down the phone in one of her daily outbursts while on her lunch break. “It’s soooo camp.” In all honesty, I’d not necessarily forgotten about the blog but I’d put it away in a corner of my mind as something of a happy period that was well and truly over. After all, that was an era – sort of 2007 onwards – where you could write whatever you wanted, with no real purpose, goal or narrative thread, and you had something good. Did it belong here now? Could it belong here now?

Simultaneously, I was talking to Daniel – my long-suffering, patient boyfriend – and my sister Zoë later that week about how I was feeling disconnected from myself and my creativity. “You need to write,” she said over the phone, from a remote cabin in Northern California. “You need to write about something you love, like before. Remember I Can Talk? You did that because you wanted to, not because anyone told you to. And look how happy that made you.” She was right of course, but it was strange that in a matter of a week, my old blog had been mentioned multiple times. A decade later and it was still rearing its head.

It got me thinking about the things we do that nourish us outside our work. I’m a writer and a journalist by profession, but writing is also the thing I take most joy from in my personal life, alongside music. My career so far, while lucky enough to have let me write for a living, has also taken some of the life out of writing. After all, I didn’t blog anymore, I wrote less creative fiction and even my poetry, which I’d kept up for sometime, had faltered.

So when these mentions of my old blog came up, I saw it as a sign. Part of writing for a living is accepting that you will never always write about the things you want to, nor the way you do. But that’s the beauty of things like a blog and mediums like this – it’s a small way to wrench back some of that control and spirit that brought us all to words in the first place. And as the little chapters of my life prove, writing has always been my centre. It’s the thing I come back to time and time again. It’s also something I feel like I’ve become more disconnected from – at least the kind of joy it can bring me.

Which leads me to this; a newsletter or really more like an stream of consciousness of the things I love wrapped up into something like a newsletter. I would try to explain to you what you’d find here but anyone who has ever met me will know that I’ve always favoured chaos over coherence.

You’ll find music, daily life, topics I’m interested in and, quickly, ones I’m not. This is not a place I can promise value, though I hope you (the reader, wherever you are out there) find it. It’s not a self-help guide (though you will find I need help) and it’s not a lesson in anything other than the things that happen to me and what I try to take from them.

It is, however, a place for escape. Somewhere to drift off to when you want a little lightness, through song or conversation, or maybe somewhere to indulge in sentimentality, another thing you will find I love to do. Above all, this is a place about rediscovering the things you love, while I do the same. About listening to that little voice in your head saying just write it down, share it, do it – and then actually doing it.

It’s always tricky trying to explain yourself when you yourself don’t know what you’re doing. But, like any writer desperate to articulate themselves, I thought of Joan Didion and when she wrote “the center was not holding” (The Year of Magical Thinking) about life in a broken United States. I thought about the idea of the center – as a notion of space at the very heart of things – and how we rely on it to remain constant and there, in order for it to propel us forward. I thought about the center in Didion’s example; the people of North America struggling to survive as society caved in around them, and how there are things we rely on to continue, to push forward.

I thought about what my center is, what kept me going and I figured it was writing. Once upon a time, I felt I could talk. And by talk I mean write. Now I only think how I used to. I thought if I could find a way back to that center, that feeling of putting words down on a page no matter the topic or reason, I wouldn’t feel so lost anymore. And if I kept writing in whatever form, then the center will always hold.

And so i used to talk was and is born. A new beginning in some way, but a medium that looks back to where I began.

What can you expect when you subscribe? It’s hard to say. But for now, I will leave that to another writer, or a poet in this case, to articulate.

‘But let me see if - using these words as a little plot of land and my life as a cornerstone - I can build you a center.’ - Qiu Miaojin

I’ll see you next week, I hope.