What The Fuck is f*ck i love you?

New to my writing? Start here. I'll tell you what love's got to do with it.

More from f*ck i love you

the fily (audio)files audio essays | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

f*ck i loved that the pod | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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Welcome to My Corner of the Internet

I spent most of Sunday this week writing and re-writing my Substack About page. My brain — bless it — sees the moss, the rocks, the ferns, the trees, the forest and the whole damn vista at the same time. Creating clarity out of that kind of layered complexity can be tricky. Especially when what I’m trying to distill into pithy marketing copy is me.

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My body of work, much like my thoughts, does not often go in straight lines. The revision process to get them straight enough to follow gets pretty wild. Some of these sentences have been rewritten more than 30 times. Not to mention the darlings sacrificed along the way.

This could also just be hyperfixation, a factory setting I do not know how to turn off for trying. I am neurocomplex¹, after all. And thank god for AI on this front. For actual. Gemini and ChatGPT give exactly zero fucks about how many revisions you ask them to critique, or what time of the day it is when you do. You have them largely to thank for the improved clarity and concision relative to my past work. I do the writing. They are the cleanup crew. #DreamTeam

That all said, I’ll do my best not edit myself into banality. If you wanted me to sound like a LinkedIn headline, you’d be there and not here.

On Neurocomplexity

“Why do you need a label? Because there is comfort in knowing you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse. You can’t find community with other zebras if you don’t know where you belong. It is impossible for a zebra to be happy or healthy spending its life feeling like a failed horse."

-Unknown, from “Too Pretty to Be Autistic” by Kelly Stonelake

What to Expect Here: Connecting the Dots

Notwithstanding the process reflections, what can you expect from me in this space?

While my first few pieces give the impression I’m strictly a mental health advocate, that's not my niche. I started with psychological fracture and hormonal revelations because it’s where I find myself and because it’s a departure point for broader social critique.

Where most creators attempt to niche themselves deeper than the Mariana Trench, I prefer widthwise, down, across and back over, weaving my stories into broad collective stories wherever I think there will be value for me and you. I connect dots and profess speculative futures and try to make theories like enshittification² — one of my favourites, obviously — accessible, compelling, and relevant to your life.

In short? I try to show you how everything is indeed connected to everything and I try to make sense of what it means to live in interesting times.

That said, there is in fact one grand uniting theme to all of the seeming side quests and switchbacks, and that’s what the fuck f*ck i love you is all about — and what I’ll tell you about next.

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Why “f*ck i love you”?

Even though I feel very allergic to brands, we apparently all need one. I prefer to think of it as shorthand for what I stand for and what you can count on me for.

And no, I did not take the Tony Robbins module on the science of taboo language. I am not trying to break your state and hijack your attention (because fuck that noise and fuck that guy).

I speak like this in real life, for better or for worse. And fuck I love you — and its first cousin, I fucking love you — is something I actually say, specifically when you light up my brain and my heart at the same time. It is joy, respect, reverence, affection, appreciation, and amazement all smashed together and spontaneously exclaimed. I have an embarrassing riches of humans in my life who inspire its utterance on a fairly regular basis.

I also chose it because authenticity isn’t my strategy, it's my necessity. It is a requisite antidote to stress. When you’re recovering from a menty b while living with an autoimmune disease during perimenopause, mitigating stress is not elective. I cannot spend spoons trying to pretend to be something, or speak like someone, I am not. I tried that for nearly 40 years and the results have not been great.

Plus, it’s more than an expression. It’s my thesis in four words. Though, that interpretation is borrowed from bell hooks. Love, she taught me, can be a verb, arguably, should be a verb. It is actions. Choices. Investments in growth and betterment. Mutuality. A practice. A politic that whole societies can run on.

Or, they would if I was in charge (says every despot-in-waiting, ever).

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Transformation Through the Cracks

But on with the show. You didn’t come here for excessive pontificating or pitying retrospectives. You came here to hear me say words like enshittification — and explain what they mean and why they matter in your life.

And you came here because you too can feel in your bones that we need new ideas about how societies run right about now. You know that this version has run its course. This shit is obviously not working. Not for anyone, not anywhere. You don’t need to be able to describe it to feel that the cracks are turning into chasms real quick. Meanwhile, the robots nip at our heels.

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Cracks might not be all bad, though. They’re how the light gets in. And cracks are what interest me most — the kind that form in humans and societies alike. Because nothing’s ever changed without it cracking wide open first. This is the way of transformation, after all.

And transformation — mine, yours, and ours — is what this publication is all about.

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Am I For You?

Whether or not my work will land with you is a question for you to answer. But I can help you try to narrow it down.

If you are someone who loves personal revealings tangled up in wry, irreverent social commentary coloured by colourful language...

and if you too think a whole hell of a lot needs to change around here...

and if you are insatiably curious about what it means to be human in the Now/Future, this liminal, upside-down fuck-around we’re trying to survive…

then maybe, probably, the answer is yes: my stuff is for you.

And if I’m right and if I’m lucky, fuck I love you is what my writing’ll make you wanna say, too.

1. neurocomplex is a term coined by fellow substacker Lindsey Mackereth to use in place of neurodivergent or any of the pathologized acronyms I’ve collected after my name: Autism, ADHD, BD (maybe), MD, PMDD, or CPTSD — all terms used to describe the broad collection of neurological differences, sensitivities — and in DSM terms, disorders — I navigate in my daily life. And often incorporate commentary on in my writing.

I prefer neurocomplexity because it acknowledges I am a whole human and my cognition — entire nervous system actually — is, by default, complex and highly sensitive. Not something to be pathologized, but instead important to understand so that I can understand I’m not a total fuck up. Because life gets pretty ruthless when you’re a zebra who spent ~40 years trying to be a horse.

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2. Podcasts are another thing you can count on me for. Here’s a great 4-episode series called, Who Broke The Internet, by

Cory Doctorow

, the guy who coined enshittification. Thank you for sending it to me,

Devon Carr

, I fucking love you, infinity and beyond.

If this piece lit up your brain and heart at the same time, sharing, liking, commenting or subscribing is Creator Speak for “fuck i love you, too”.

And let’s be honest this is still capitalism and this economy is shit (again) so I don’t use paywalls. If you’re in a good position and excited to make a one-time or monthly contribution, I’d be super grateful.

I’ll still fucking love you either way.