Introduction

I am Anna, a millennial, white, hetero-passing, queer-leaning and questioning (always questioning everything, ask anyone who knows me at all), middle class, able-bodied, straight-passing, cis-female with reasonable mental health, married to a marvellous human and living primarily in Northern California. I moved to the outskirts of Sacramento in the summer of 2018 so I could be with the stellar man with whom I had fallen in love, thanks to a certain alchemy bringing us together in one of the more niche corners of the internet.

Originally, I am from Southern England where I had an unconventional first 28 years of life. I experienced Waldorf education, unschooling, varied work from childcare to marketing, including a three month stint at an NGO in Kenya, wrapping up with a bachelor’s degree in Social/Cultural Anthropology at 27.

Studying and witnessing, observing and relating with the people around me has been my favourite activity since babyhood. Whether I am people-watching in public spaces or consciously engaging with my fellow humans in my close up interactions. Like many of us, I spend a considerable amount of time on social media, notably Instagram, where I have in recent years curated an extraordinary selection of individuals: intersectional activists, academics, sex and relationship-educators, comedians, poets, authors, musicians, artists, photographers, film/taste-makers, regenerative farmers, visionaries and these are just the ones to which I’ve been exposed.

I have met many of my closest friends and my husband through the weird, flawed gloriousness of cyber-space, so that is why I came up with the idea for this blog — as a space to deep-dive into the pool of hugely diverse creators and individuals. Individuals whose offerings whether it be a book, song, piece of art when synthesised with the continuity of their online presence become more than the sum of their parts.

The wider world from my vantage point is so heavily fucked up. My capacity to engage with the egregious suffering happening in so many corners of the world is increasingly limited, which yes comes from an enormous amount of white, cis-gendered, heteronormative passing privilege. And so, in the interest of not getting totally demoralised and feeling like I am unable to do much of anything related to some of the huge issues facing our world, I want to focus on the things I can do and offer.

I am fascinated by how we write about people, people and their creative, academic, activist and influential offerings, their foibles and their humanity. In a world that is finally starting to reckon with the toxicity of the print and news media that we consume, while also being in the thick of social media debates around ‘cancel and call out culture’, I want to create more humanising, subjective and reverent narratives about people and their impact on my world.

I am not seeking to offer free or sycophantic PR for undeserving individuals, but set a different example about how we might engage with the creators who help shape our perspectives, teach us something about ourselves or the wider world, lighten our mood, make us cry with the resonance of their art.

I want a space where we can mindfully reflect on our mostly one-sided relationships with the people we follow through strange and often distorted world of social media and how we can navigate the line between fan-girl* and art critic, worshipping someone versus healthily appreciating them, objectifying them versus humanising someone and so on.

To these more hopeful ends, I want to use this space to consciously direct my attention to the work of the people who educate, inform, inspire, encourage and reassure me. How often it feels, especially through the quieter, more liminal spaces in life that these people reach out a hand through their music, writing, art, acting performances and activism. So I will share the nuanced thoughts that these people and their life-works inspire within me, to reach my hand back to the ones that grasped mine through crises and revelations, empty moments, grief and joy, rage and peace, panic attacks and epiphanies.

*fan-girl used as a gender neutral term