I took these photos over 10 years ago, in inefficient pumps my feet could no longer tolerate – trying, in a repeated fashion, to see how far I could walk it to the horizon on ‘the tops’. 

Today I’m up there, on the top, walking the very boggy old Yorkshire/Cheshire border, up to ‘Dead End Edge’ …

Today I became like I have become in many parts of my adult life: paralysed by my own presence – the horror of being living-mass; a face, a mask, a persona that must act and become in this world.

Feeling the draping of a well worn claustrophobia around my chest, I did what I attempted so many times in my adult life. I put on the albums that I once had to carry as cassettes, and attempted the ascent.

The songs that are now so embedded in the ascent are not worth disclosing. It would feel so odd to sing along to them in big crowds; they are moments that even close friends need not know. 

All except the landscape… 

There must be a universality of music in its relationship with landscape, in how we imprint the former into the latter through our need to nestle meaning into something that folds out before us. We all do this, yet we will all have different landscapes and different songs.

Every road-bend up here, every monolithic object, every distant land-block meeting the sky, all are imprinted with lyrics, songs that mark every step on this ascent.

…trying to get somewhere. A point of clarity that always felt like it lay just above, on higher ground.

When the overlap of fantasy and reality inevitably receded, I would accept that it wasn’t worth trying to push myself beyond the threshold on the horizon.

If, through my adult life, I have been saying anything without actually saying it directly it is “Help: I want to escape. How do I get out?”

I normally did my ascent to ‘the tops’ in the aftermath of day when I’d felt like I’d done something horrible or some event was too intense.

Maybe I’d had a messy and destructive night out, maybe I’d binged on food to the point that I had nowhere that I wanted my bloated body to be present in. Whatever the cause, I would walk and walk as if I could escape my own flesh, and out-run my societal skin upon these hills. 

“take me to ‘the tops'”.

By and large this life-long pilgrimage was only in my head; the prospect of ‘escaping’ being a secondary reflex to all ‘down there’ stuff.

…and ‘the tops’ are always in the subconscious. They’re always there;

…their thick black line on the horizon, looking back down on us. They are always there to meditate on, wondering if one could ever choose to commit themselves into the portal they promise.

It’s only this year that I’ve truly understood what ‘the tops’ mean to me and especially my attempts to ascend to their horizon point. 

It’s as if these boggy hills are thick with the stories, trials and tribulations that cannot speak themselves below, in the cities, with their dizzying mist of unending upgrades, and continual sticking plasters over yesterday’s doings.

It is as if these hills both bequeathed these cities, and now stand somber, with too many memories that have nowhere else to be heard. 

It sometimes seems that it is only in a familiar vastness that we can speak to ourselves and tell ourselves our true stories, devoid of judgement.

I love these hills because they let me do.

I can access them here, and better understand the fundamentals of motives – better understand myself, in a way that enables me to think about what I should do next.

On the first day of trying to make the ascent I didn’t even get out of the car. But there was enough time to stare out the window at the towering blackened slopes of Longdendale. to somehow see my life reflected.

A story lyrically chaptered by this ascent – through the leafy foothills, the barren flats and the finally the dark tops.

Something within me has become accustomed to seeing kinship in its somber beauty.

Through these vast monochrome blocks of landscape I have the freedom to feel the appropriate emotions to deal with the colourless smudging of low-level anxiety that has blotted by adult life.

It’s the ability to grieve for personal lost futures. To love for what hasn’t been, yet still feels attainable, even if it is factually ‘no more’.

My attempt at the ascent the next day gets further than ever before. In fact I finally reach the summit of the grey/blue line on that horizon that hangs over us.

This isn’t solely a grieving space, but also a space I can escape the ridiculousness of my romanticism for the world. For, up here it is no longer ridiculous , it is no longer getting triggered into bitterness by all the many things that cancel it out. Up here, I look down, and I wish I and it could open up.

Perhaps this is why the ascent always brought anticipation, on catatonic downers that were emotions craving to be released.

Despite their relatively small scale, their expanse suggests I am climbing up to a portal, through which I will find a way that has thus far been blotted out of the remits of what is possible ‘down there’.

This may originate from their lunar-like quality. It often feels like an extraterrestrial landscape; the Woodhead Pass (cars reflecting the sunlight back from the distance) assuming the form of some astral runway, a symbolic passage out of this place.

In order to understand a landscape, feel it and not just see it, you need to be kind of swallowed into it – maybe even lost. The same applies for urban space, albeit in a different way. The place needs to have left a mark, maybe indelible, or at least to the extent that it will bleed into your subconcious.

I have spent so much of the last 15 years in aimless days, roaming street after street of nearby cities. I assumed that somewhere hidden in these urban clots was the gateway to the body-presence I so desperately wanted.

Being ‘in the city’ began to get very heavy. And any observant passer fuelled by an ego agenda could expose my vulnerable misery to a space which shows no empathy to the homeless, never-mind more fortunate lost souls.

My need to be air-lifted out of a life path stuck in ‘no man’s land’ had become so increasingly desperate, that the inevitable unfulfilment became deeply unpleasant.

I’m no longer 24 and it is no longer 2008. The atmosphere has changed so much it’s hard not to feel washed up on a strange planet. Strange, because it looks like home, yet isn’t. I am so far from being home.

I have masked how stranded, how lost in an unrecognisable time I have become.

I have lost the ability to adapt to our ever-morphing reality frame.

I don’t know what else I can do or say, without falling into the habit of pretending impotent cliches meant something and I could find meaning from using them.

Maybe I have run out of time…

Or maybe I just need a different kind of time?

The present experience of time flow is at best disorientating, and at worst, emotionally exhausting to the point of being traumatic.

It’s our duty as children of a machine age, to keep up-to-date, as if our lives depended on it – and it often does.

‘The Machine’ must always up its tempo, that is how it survives; by overseeing a climate of competition, from land colonisation, competition for market dominance, to mental colonisation (which perhaps defines what we’re currently in).

I believe I caught the tail end of a very 20th century experience of time, of things getting better and faster in a linear direction. It’s hard to pinpoint when that experience vanished, but since the collective temporal uprooting caused by the pandemic, so many of us simply cannot reapply ourselves to the chaotic rhythms dominating contemporary life.

This feels more like a ‘Whirlpool acceleration’ where things are are still getting faster and faster, and we all still look forward, but as if outwards from a vortex. The tempo of contemporary life is no longer to successive (and recognisable) markers in a rhythm, but instead sucks us into a pulped procession of moments.

So many of us can no longer recover from one burn out to the next.

But I don’t want this to be an expression of hopelessness. Largely because I’m now at a point where I can no longer afford to be hopeless. Although I may be out of time ‘down there’, I need to now rehabilitate into a totally different frame.

My 30s have been an unpleasant space. If I have the choice not to remain here, then it would be foolish not to take that choice.

I know there is a lot of people who don’t have that choice.

My most honest assessment of my situation brings deep discomfort to even articulate. Never having a relationship, or children, or my own place for long enough for it to genuinely feel like my own place. I’ve tried things in the past, struggled to cope when things got tricky, but I’ve always had a family home to fall back on.

…and one day I will see this with gratitude, not the heavy shame that has dominated my 30s.

Shame is nothing but debilitating, and it erodes aspects of your self worth, even the sense that you have human rights.

“For ‘who am I to speak up for anything?” the inner story would go, “when I have experienced so little of what makes adult life tricky? I’m not even a real person”.

I could beat myself up about turning away from the world, but right now, I just want a short space dwell in the exterior, the ‘up there’ where, despite the fact it’s not really a natural environment, it still holds its own time(s) – carboniferous, ice age, all meeting and eroding into one, but over millions of years.

There may be fear, in any remote space, but it doesn’t make for anxiety – only the time we humans make between us does that. 

I feel like this is where I must do the work I need to do on myself…

…and, despite last chance climate warnings, and a seismic transferal of wealth to the richest, it is something I cannot feel guilt for. For there is now a least one shoot of budding optimism, which is something I haven’t been able to hold onto for some years.

My experience of Mental illness has been of being stuck in a space with your own thoughts about yourself, self-consumed thoughts, swirling around and around with fluctuating ferocity. 

The words ‘self-consumed’ will likely produce little sympathy, yet all of my writings, all of my doings have been saying one thing, ‘help, I want to escape this’, over and over and over…

I have been in this self-consumed vortex with my own thoughts and actions, whilst watching other people live out their lives for all my adult life.

Then comes the Friday evening…

…horrid gut feelings that feel specific to this time of the week…

Alcohol…

I, like many others, use alcohol to exercise what you could call emotional blockages, that build and are difficult to process and manage. 

But my relationship with weekends, especially over my 30s has been a personal horror story. 

I am never sure how the British weekend experience translates in other countries…

We all live under capitalism, unless we’re rich enough not to, and even as the old work/leisure divisions have melted away in recent decades, I’m sure we all have a relatively similar experience of having a lack of time to do the emotional recovery needed after a weeks’ work. 

I think weekends in the UK have kind of become a horror story of their own making. It’s there in the abrasiveness caused by the sheer volume of people clambering for their right to have fun and leisure before they return to work on Monday. It’s nobody’s fault, but it does often feel like everybody’s unworked-through demons are raging up and down the streets of our towns.

…as are my own.

Down there it has felt inescapable…

… and it’s painful and humbling to look back through years of writing, to see similar, self-absorbed pleas. 

As life started to feel like it was passing me by, I felt like I had no time to actively pursue ‘leisure’, and I ended up in towns on weekend, telling myself that I had to put in the hours on my ‘projects’ – trying harder and harder to get somewhere; mentally always on the cusp of acceptable adulthood, but never quite reaching it.

As I found ways to avoid ‘banter’ from drunken revellers, who can clearly see that I’m not in weekend dress code, I’d simply join in, only to end up in bars at 1am, one of the last people out, with a rucksack on my back. 

Looking down on myself almost from the vantage of this hill, it seems so obvious that this life pattern is blatantly not working. And it’s a truth that has in some way always been staring me in the face; on some level I’ve always known that it wouldn’t finally 

…horrid gut feelings that feel specific to this time of the week…

Today, despite yesterday, I escaped it, and I went up onto the tops again.

…and I found myself at a place called Snailsden.

The names of places on ‘the tops’ still pertain to their origin, if only in that your imagination can still make name-places connections here in a way that is much harder down below, especially since the ‘blandalism’ of the late 20th early 21st century smoothed out every rough edge. 

Bleaklow is still thus.

Holme Moss is still thus.

Marsden is still thus.

And so is Snailsden. Because, despite the presence of sheep, it feels pre-mammalian; a den pertaining to much more ancient life forms.

It’s hard to believe that this area is still classed as within the boundaries of my home town. 

As I walked, sometimes through open moor, I stumbled into a valley that seemed too dramatic a ravine to be where it is. This just does not feel like it should be here, it feels out of joint with what is 10 miles down the hill 

Apparently it’s called Ramsden Clough. I’ve never heard of it before.

The moors haunt our imaginations, they have a spectral presence in so much culture that has been created down below. They are in us, we are from them.

But they only uphold their poetry when there isn’t another single person in sight. You can only think of others here in their absence.

I wish to walk and walk, without fear. Reaching exhaustion, to point where you lose your sense of self to the land.

I can’t have been to this specific spot for over 20 years. Possibly not since my doings were still determined by my parents, and before walking up to ‘the Tops’ became more of a wish for transcendence.

In my 20s I’d always stick to the roads which cut through this landscape, because I wanted to reach the other side, with a catatonically-charged wish to find a better world at the other side.

What is weirdest is that I remember this landscape more from the dreamscapes, where exaggerated manifestations of it and recurred ever since.

This may be because these vast moors appear out of nowhere next to a busy commuter link road as if you were still dreaming..

The moors are a realm with their own law, their own foreboding threats and their own illusive promises. They possess that which some people find in the sea, or in the desert. These moors are an ‘out there’ specific to the imagination of Northern industrial towns.

It is so tempting to keep climbing up into them, as if you could meet that other world you feel so desperate for.

I play tricks on myself, to conjure something that transcends a reality I feel so stuck in, trying to see ghosts because everything is present up here only in its absence.

It’s the first time in 29 years I’ve seen a pile of rocks the ruins of buildings demolished to make way for the nearby reservoir. Aged 10 I tried to jump from one to the next, slipping and ending up in hospital with concussion.

I have felt threatened by life, fearful of being myself in a state of happiness from such an early age that my deepest idea of ‘true self’ now pictures itself through sadness and solitude. This is the only place I can feel at peace and safe from the perceived threats imposed, demanding I be more than I felt I could be.

It’s hurt being called negative. As the colours faded, as pop songs, that would once punctuate the passing of time, and confirm all purpose to it began to disappear, slowly covered up by a grey mass that promised nothing.

I have been living in a state of unaccepted mourning for most of adulthood, as I have watched life pass me by with increasing desperation. Constantly denying it to myself, watching those my age make lives for themselves get younger and younger; denying it fervently in spaces where other middle aged lost souls would gather for the same reason, of being bereft of ideas of where to be and how to be anywhere else. I showed zero empathy to those I share such a shameful kinship with, constantly trying to tell myself I was somehow only a temporarily embarrassed lost soul.

As I reach 40, my instincts are to panic, to put up the old forms of self-defence, as the atmosphere of our post-covid world becomes ever darker and foreboding, with no sign of letting up yet – and we all must still live in that world.

Perhaps with the act of properly mourning, it’s so seductive to think that one can remain frozen in time here, in the poetry afforded to sadness, but not to the twitching humiliating anxiety that defines life ‘down there’. There is a danger of staring for too long into submerged utopias of impossible escape that I am admittedly free to indulge in up there.

There’s so many me’s I want to love and leave behind, but maybe I daren’t.

The child who banged his head in 1994 on these rocks, or the 19 year old, who 20 years ago, returned home from a very similar North Yorks moorland as an anorexic skeleton from University trip on a course I would abandon shortly after, like many things after. A memory that I identify with so much shame, I daren’t say the name of the place to myself.

Dwelling in memories is so easy at the cost of the present, and I’ve done it so much…..

But I won’t beat myself up – I have never known how to be a body in this world.

I wish I could stay here. Walk and walk and find myself in company, company of this world or not. And I wish I could take this, and implement it down there, and find such peace where I usually finding sweat-stained anxiety.

I’m back in the same spot, the hills that separate the urban spaces of Yorkshire and the North West.

I made a bold admission the night previous: I told social media that I had lived with a mental illness for 20 years.

This kind of thing makes my many social masks turn inwards and scowl, but I had to do this: I had to make it real to myself, and I could only do this by making as many people as possible know that I meant it

It had to be an admission in one of the spheres that encourages my unpleasant gut theories about myself. My theories that I’m edging closer and closer to an irredeemable failure, and of constantly ‘doing life wrong’ .

…of being ‘wrong’ .

These feelings keep me in the cycle; praying that the next exhibition or next validation, will grant me an ‘ok-ness’ that finally finds its way into my flesh, and I’ll finally feel free of….well, myself – the self that feels trapped in a metaphorical glass cage with these theories about himself.

My most painful, potentially humbling, admission, is that I’ve been trapped here for a quarter of a century, still trying to become an adult. To shout this feels like it’s made real – to give myself some slack how shit it has been watching my young and early middle age adult life go past me whilst I bang on the inside of a cage that nobody else can see.

Over the last 2 years my body and mind have finally hit burn out, chasing “just over the next hill” con tricks that had previously been so useful. All my projects have been competing with a rotting sensation, deep in the chest, from decades of feeling trapped on the other side of an actual life.

I’ve finally recognised my fixation with a zone. The hills that roughly follow the A628 road, in an area between Barnsley and Greater Manchester.

They possess a poetry that has so much resonance.They harbour so many stories that can’t breath down below, include my truth about myself.

I rarely actually got to the duringattempts to get ‘here’ in moments of desperation. Somehow it always felt that I would be in another world once I got there – ‘a portal’ as I’d describe. Which is why I could sometimes mistake Greater Manchester for being Urban Yorkshire in a parallel reality.

The lorries and cars that negotiate this dangerous trek fit into this poetry, but, by and large, anything from ‘down there’ disturbs it. You have to be selfish here; for only you can exist up here, staying out of view of the few dog walkers and cyclists, as up here figures can only be present in absence. As a haunting poetry of what has been and gone, and why these hills are in many ways a ghost land that haunts the places below.

I make a connection between these hills and of an extreme experience of not knowing how to be: anorexia. They reciprocate that which anorexia aims to achieve: a state between life and death.

Trying to reach here in my earlier years wasn’t only about being in a space to meditate on the self in the ‘down there’, but to be in a space where I could be between life and death; just like the state of anorexia. Where NOTHING could get to me.

I see a vague shimmer of Manchester’s increasingly super-skyline over the hills, and think about the problems we face in the ‘down there’.

Manchester is once again a monster on the horizon. No longer an image of satanic mills, but of a faceless, ruthless, world-city, of extreme wealth and extreme suffering side by side as if they weren’t part of the same picture.

A sharp and cold stab of horror catches up with me: “

“...we on this island thought we’d got through to the other side of hell. We became complacent. Looking for peace on a post-political plateau. But who could blame us?“

If I try hard enough I can hear the shooting and screaming from both sides of the hills, from under the glazed over scars of the Miners Strike and Peterloo. They demand that I to show up; be a useful body. But I used to go to protests only to wage war on myself. Not knowing how to contain my self-disgust in this midst of other people who play their parts so well, I’d go hide in pubs and soothe my wounds.

As I almost slip on the path up here, I keep thinking ‘tread lightly’ not with the weight of it all.

Beyond my chesty feelings of disgust and shame, and the bitterness and resent it breeds, I know I can do so much better than this. There is more, but just now.

One day…

I did not know how to be a body down there in the towns. I didn’t know how to be flesh.

In my younger adult years my guts were saying “take me to the moors, take me to the moors”. It was compulsive thought. Perhaps it was put in my head by words of the ‘The Smiths’. Although I find it more likely that the Smiths were also not the owners of these words, and were but carriers.

It’s a gut instinct impulse for all of those for whom these moors have formed a life-long backdrop.

I think of the moors very much in relation to my raw inability to be a body.

A friend recently spoke of the sheer slicing power of the word ‘Anorexia’, and how he believed it is really, in some way, the same word as ‘suicide’.

I think he is right, I believe they operate in the same realm; when a body feels like it is being edged out of life, as if the sky was solid walls encroaching.

I have always had a fantastical picture of the moorland horizon to the west of my town. I see it as a portal to somewhere beyond the lived experience.

It’s barrenness allows one to reach a space that isn’t dead but remains removed from that of the living.

It is a space where the unbearable feelings produced from having to be a body down there no longer applied.

“They cannot reach me here…”

Cynthia Cruz in her beautiful and personal book ‘The Melancholy of Class’ speaks about Anorexia in terms of existing a ‘living death’.

If suicide is the act of removing yourself completely, obliterating your body presence, to perform the act of living death is to remove your body from life whilst still being technically alive – removing it from its physical and erotic social role in a world where the sufferer just cannot emotionally comprehend existing.

Anorexia isn’t really about food, no more than food is fuel for the body in a body that still doesn’t know how to occupy physical and social space without feeling disgust and dread.

This is, of course, no kind of direct oppression, from any specific agent: yet the reaction is physical.

We are the lumps of clay forced to make ourselves free.

I came of age in a culture of different expectations and horizons than those of previous generations around these parts.

I have long called this world a world cast under a ‘cult of self-belief’, or a ‘cult of constant self-improvement’.

The Factories were ruins, the mines were being blown up, and new shiny retail parks with the promise of an American-style paradise were filling the gaps they left.

The old world, where society made lumps of clay of us, to be factory workers, cannon fodder, and to upkeep domestic drudgery, was melting away.

This was the future, where we, the clay, had to mould ourselves.

…to be whatever we wanted to be.

The only choice we lacked was the freedom not to choose. We had to become ourselves.

I didn’t know how to become, and didn’t know how to go forth and become my own self-made self, who could be a body in this kind of world

I can tack explanations and excuses to this – that I’d lost all my self-worth due to assuming a social-role of class whipping boy -but all I know is that I saw no future in which I could thrive, no future where I wouldn’t feel humiliated and useless.

The biggest thing I feared was the continuation of school life into adulthood as a lowly endgame.

So I fell into my head. With a body that I had no place for, but felt weirdly ashamed of. Exercise and food limitation was a way of keeping it in check, and keeping it inoffensive.

I tried to remain forever young until I found a body which was granted access through the gates.

Pathetic, perhaps, but I’ve been here since.

Early adulthood is accompanied by a greater pressure to act, as the future is no longer coming, it is the present.

It is around this time, that I literally looked sideways, westwards, to see these hills as an escape.

I’ve been coming here again recently. Because I’ve kind of hit a dead end, admittedly perhaps the same dead end as 20 years before. But with the knowledge that I need to get past it.

I’ve spent a lifetime not knowing how to be a body. I’ve watched everyone around me make a life for themselves, and I have felt like I’m stuck behind glass looking at it, banging at it, louder and louder.

I’ve spent a lifetime making increasingly louder and louder artistic statements, screaming at the capitalist constellation all of us have exist within, kind of as a last resort to feeling bereft on any tools to move forward in my own life.

People try to help. “Just do something different”, they say. But there’s something in the way, which they cannot see no matter how loudly I try to point it out.

During previous attempts to overcome this, I have depended on generating some optimism about the goal in question through an idea of myself in a new body…

That next big event, next exhibition, that move to a new place where I finally fit into that work/life in an urban community. All imaginings conjure footage in my head, where I see my body in those spaces, finally embodied by self-acceptance.

But I’m so tired of trying to upkeep ridiculous tricks. I’m still here, still this rigid teenager. It’s humiliating to write, and I’m too old for any of this anymore.

I can think differently up here. It kills the increasingly painful commands to manifest.

Because this is a land that is neither dead nor that of the living, I shed that pressure to shield myself in harmless but mandatory conversations about the passions and joys possessed by our living flesh..

But there’s a life out there for me, somewhere, that does exist, and isn’t through a portal to another world.

“Without examples, without models
I began to believe voices in my head, 
That I am a freak, that I am broken, 
That there is something wrong with me, 
That I will never lovable. Years later, 
I find the courage to admit that I am transgender, 
And that does not mean that I am unlovable. 
This world that we imagine in this room 
Might be used to gain access to other rooms, 
Other worlds, previously unimaginable.”

I’m slightly catatonic, beaten by a really low time, yet equally I can see something crystal clear, something never clear in the low-level panic state of the cold hard realism, down there, below.

I don’t want to come down, down from ‘the tops’, which, however inhospitable and dangerous, always seem to offer a portal to somewhere else.

Nor the night roads which eventually lose their intolerability to walkers, and become astral runways- removed from the flat destinations at every turn off, by every step into the trance.

I’ve kept looking at the photo above, one I took as I scaled the steep inclines of a river source. I wanted to fall in love with the photo, because the photo is of an idea, and idea of place, a place I wish I could remain, a portal to another realm where my physical presence seems to belong, not tangled in the icy chest stabs of ‘wrongness’.

How did I get here?

The photo is of knarled oak trees that cover a river source near the Woodhead Pass area of Dark Peak, a river that eventually goes on to help form the infamous river Mersey.

Living with the physical presence of the Dark Peak hills shapeshifting with the distant clouds, over the pennine foothills, I would walk mile upon mile up to them in a desperate period in early adulthood, with this superstitious need to believe that they would take me away to another place.

This feeling would often carry itself over to the area at the other side of the hills, momentarily second-guessing Greater Manchester and Liverpool as a Post-industrial Yorkshire in an alternative reality: similar, but weirdly Other – “maybe I can find happiness here?”

I used to scoff at the idea of a core self, thinking that we were just an accumulation of external voices and ideas that constructed us (which increased my feelings of hopelessness in trying to change), but when I don’t think through the mind/body separation, so habitually and so religiously defended by the Western Mind, I can see my core self through my body.

It’s in the pain I feel when I get laughed at still; it’s the self that comes to life when there’s brief moments of wondering if I can be in love, and it’s the self that has felt like a dying body within me over my 30s, as I have increasingly watched people live their lives, whilst I have been ever-more destructively trying to chase it from within a cage nobody else can see.

It’s no more a thinking self that a flesh-based feeling self. This is the first time in my life I have been able to see this.

To try to sit with myself, my body; my entire adult life has been an escape from this sensation.

I turned 39 last month, I can’t do another decade like this. Yet, I’ve said this before, in my 20s.

The only problem is that the void, or the space where this ‘core self’ rests, is so horrible to sit with. It’s like a thunderstorm of self-disgust. When the overthinking mind has no actions to overcome this, rather than go back to the same habits, it feels a lot easier than sitting with disgust.

This is why I chose to begin this blog with this Burial sample. It’s by somebody who is transgendered. I couldn’t quite believe how closely I related the the sample on the Burial track,

Although problematic to say, as an outsider who still does not know what to do with his own flesh, I believe ‘trans desire’ is a desire not to only exit and transcend the gender one is born in and thus defined by, but also the type of world in which we all must become, and be a body – a world where there is two types of existential threats ever-closing in, one internal to capitalism, and one external; climate breakdown.

We share desire to escape what we must be.

In this light, it is so brave, to step into the unknown, with only a faint hope of materialising within it.

Suicidal thoughts, as I have experienced them throughout my adult life, have been similar: the desire to take the body beyond the realms of the place in which something seems to prevent it existing.

I wish it was up here, on these walks, that the portal to the world I’ve always wanted to live in can be found. But the other worlds need to be found where I am, if anywhere.