Notes On: Spicing up this week

Because it's the autumn equinox aka the perfect time to start romanticising your life <3

• Let’s start with a vibe check. This week is giving: unpacking your favourite oversized knits, lighting scented candles in the early evenings, buying hot chocolate powder from supermarkets, alongside cinnamon and muscovado sugar for cinnamon-spiced banana bread. Making autumnal plans for which you’ll wear velvet and sip cold drinks and perhaps sit by an open bonfire and share secrets over marshmallows, or whisky, or both. This week is for the song  ‘September’ by Earth Wind and Fire – specifically, Taylor Swift’s 2018 cover of it, which is beautiful and simple and hopeful. Which also means that this week is for taking photos that you’ll remember for years: blurry selfies with best friends, curling leaves on pavements, home-made heart-shaped pizzas. Here’s how to spice it up.

• First, set your alarm to get up half an hour earlier than you normally would. With this extra time, before work, do something you really love to do, but which you often think you don’t have time for. This might be planting seeds in a flower box, or savouring a latte whilst watching the sunrise, or doing a YouTube yoga session, or simply reading a book that’s been on your bedside table for weeks. It’ll remind you of all the reasons you love your life, outside your 9-5 (and trust me: there are lots).

• Make something, this week. It could be as simple as a postcard, or as complex as an oil painting. You could write a verse of a song you’d love to perform at an open mic night, or a poem for your mum’s birthday, or an apple crumple because it’s almost October and we all know that October is made for apple crumbles. We are – all of us – creative beings. This has been stomped out of us by the unrelenting demand for productivity that adulthood brings. Find your spark of creativity, this week, if you can. And remember: it doesn’t have to be perfect.

• Make plans for Halloween. Okay, unpopular opinion, but I actually really don’t like Halloween. It falls just after my birthday and just before bonfire night, meaning it’s flanked by two really quite beautiful events: full of love and laughter and sparkling light. As a child, I found it scary. As an adult, I find it intimidating. But I love autumn, and I love celebrating just to celebrate. So: if you love Halloween, plan the perfect party/outfit/night now. And if you don’t? Do the same. Plan your perfect anti-halloween: all cosy, comfort films and foods and friends. This life is what we make of it. (Read that last sentence again).

• And finally, do something for someone else, this week. You could make that cinnamon-spiced banana bread for your neighbour; make a card for your best friend (just because); sign up to volunteer at a local charity. We often get so caught up in what’s going on for us, sometimes it’s easy to forget what’s going on for everyone else. Try, if you can, to reconnect with what you can do for other people. It’ll make you feel full, and purposeful, and – quite possibly – content.

• I hope your week is filled with specks of joy, pin-pricks of mundane moments that make you smile (your cat covering its face with its paws; how the early morning light slants like a slice of butter over your bed; the ending to the best novel you’ve read all year).

• But if you’re having a tough time, at the moment, know that that’s okay, too. That moments of joy do not exist without the moments that surround it: blanketing mists over grey days, burnt toast, feelings of rejection crashing over you when you least expect them. Because news flash: we’re not actually supposed to be happy all the time. It’s a myth. A dangerous, terrible, impossible myth which leads overthinking thought daughters to moments of despair on bathroom floors: how are we meant to exist in a world that expects unrelenting productivity, and beauty, and happiness from us, all the time?

• The answer: we’re not. This life is full of heartbreak and heartache and slow, dark mornings that feel like Februarys (in the worst way).

• The antidote, I’ve found, isn’t to ‘be happy’: it’s to feel the emotions, to take a walk and listen to a playlist like this one, and then come home with a cinnamon swirl and have a long shower followed by a long phone call with someone you love, curled under a blanket that feels like home. If all you can do this week is eat and work and sleep and repeat, that’s okay.

• This life is long; joy will find you. I promise.

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A tiny note:

For a long time, this series has just been for TikTok. But as so many of you are deleting TikTok in favour of a quieter, simpler life (I salute you), I’m testing out migrating this to Substack. Let’s see how it goes. (And don’t worry, it’ll still go up on TikTok as well!). Thank you so much for your support. It means the world to me, it really does.