Proof I Exist, Collected in Spite

A list of everything that made me feel real when I thought I’d evaporated.

I don’t have a personal brand. I have symptoms.

And for the past two years, they’ve been leaking into the Notes app on my phone like confessions I’m not brave enough to say out loud. Not hobbies. Not star signs. Not some curated little identity smoothie. Just...fragments. Raw data. Glitches in life that felt like me when everything else didn’t. A spoon that made me cry. A sentence that ruined my week. A smell that unlocked a decade. I wasn’t trying to find myself — I was trying to prove I hadn’t disappeared.

There was no aesthetic. No goal. Just a growing hoard of emotional debris that hummed louder than most people’s voices. I added to it mid-argument, on trains, in loos, during sex. Like I was trying to sketch myself in the dark with no mirror and only vibes. No outline, just heat. Just echoes. Like piecing together a ghost with duct tape and delusion. I wasn’t documenting a life. I was collecting proof that I hadn’t fully disappeared; just shapeshifted.

Here’s everything I’ve quietly hoarded, that maybe adds up to a person:

• Walking into rooms and knowing instantly who hates who (before they do)

• Public park signs with aggressive fonts (“Keep Off The Grass”)

• Steam rising off tarmac after a dramatic downpour

• Cutlery that makes me feel safe. Especially small spoons. Especially the ones I won’t let guests use

• Half a lemon in the fridge that looks like it saw things

• Headphones on in public so no one speaks to me but I still feel witnessed

• Beans on toast

• That dusky, impossible-to-name blue-pink-grey sky just before a thunderstorm

• Rain on terracotta (!!!)

• People who say “I don’t really get fashion” while wearing beige for safety

• Library books with receipts from someone else’s life

• Candle wax hardened mid-drip like it got embarrassed halfway through

• The pause after someone says “I didn’t mean it like that” as if tone doesn’t leave fingerprints

• Coats that hold me better than most people ever have

• That thing where you watch someone’s lips while they talk and start narrating their inner monologue in your head

• The word “anyway” after a long message that clearly meant everything

• People who don’t know I’m writing about them

• That weird rush when a stranger says something profound by accident

• The phrase “I need to write that down”

• Avocados that go bad 3 minutes before I’m emotionally ready to eat them

• Tupperware that holds scent memories of other meals

• Satin in winter

• The phrase “I think you’re just reading into it too much” (as if that isn’t the entire point of me)

• The existential joy of rewriting someone’s WhatsApp reply in my head because their actual tone was offensive

• Flat Diet Coke

• The emotional violence of unexpected kindness from a stranger

• Seeing a couple kiss on the tube and wondering which one will grieve harder

• Eye contact with a pigeon that feels like mutual disrespect

• Feeling nostalgic for things that haven’t happened yet

• People who read your Substack and think it’s just jokes

Maybe this isn’t a list. Maybe it’s a leak. A slow, private seeping of everything I wasn’t supposed to feel out loud. I don’t know if it’s healing or just documenting the damage in prettier language, but it’s something. A pulse. A proof. A breadcrumb trail back to the girl who felt things too hard and got tired of apologising. I don’t need it to make sense. I just need it to stay.