Not knowing might just be the thing that might set us free
A calming prospect for any in-between times
Hello from East London, before I begin that trapse back to the airport, dizzy on a pint of cider at the pub and a quick hoon on a PMS Milky Bar en route. The light is all syrupy here, filled with that feeling that everything’s about to turn, once again. It’s that impending sense of uncontrollable change, which, even when it comes so regularly with the seasons, also always feels like a surprise? I love how regularly we get so dumb, and life continues to surprise us. It’s a great reminder that so much is both in and out of our control.
(Is this giving shut up, you’ve just smashed one drink, you’re not a philosopher? Who cares, I’m going with it <3).
Also, welcome to all the new subscribers who gravitated here after my recent piece about being single. I got a lot of messages over the weekend it was published about feeling seen, which I’m not telling you as a flex, but more so a meditation on these secret feelings (about anything) we all harbour and often don’t talk about. My suspicion is that the not talking about it — the not being able to name it — is the thing that makes the emotional experience lonely, more than the feeling itself.
This is what I want to be for you: something that sporadically arrives in your inbox that makes you feel less alone in the world. Special.
Vibe shift: Some nice things to look at that you don’t have to buy
I just got my final roll of film back from Japan, which I took with my friend, and I thought I’d share it with you here because I feel like I personally always enjoy a visual newsletter. Stop making me read so much all the time! My brain! My eyes!
I talk about low-stakes creativity a lot, and this is my personal, slowburn hack. I’ve been carrying a film camera with me on my travels for over 10 years, and it means so much to me to have this personal archive of images from my life, even if some of them are shitty or blurry or weird. Especially if you do a lot of moving around on your own, they become these vivid reminders that yes, your life is real, you were really there, those things really happened. It’s romantic.
Onto the topic at hand: On not knowing (and that being a good thing)
It’s visa renewal time again, which happens to coincide with that of a lot of my friends who live overseas. It’s really anxious and expensive and existential and a total reckoning with your life choices. You are living in a state of unknown until either you or some government immigration department decides where you can live, and the worst part is that (speaking from my privileged position right now), you’ve brought it on yourself.
It’s made me think a lot lately about worry.
Earlier this year, I was experimenting with a radical concept of ‘not worrying for a month and seeing what happens’. I think it was around May or June, and I’d gone to see a witch with red hair who gave me this advice, and honestly, once I started, it was a relief. I wrote Mary Oliver’s ‘I Worried’ poem out in Portuguese and stuck it on my fridge as a reminder of what I had promised myself: a month of refusing to let that troublesome emotion in through the front door, in order to see what it could bring.
The results were (lol) extraordinary. I just, felt, like, so much lighter. And anything that felt heavy and not imminent would just have to wait til the first of the next month. By the time that rolled around, it had diminished in its anxiety. Thrilling.
Where I’m going with this
I think it’s worth experimenting with knowing less. Or, as my friend and I yelled at each other running through the rain the other night, ‘Living like it’s 1997!’. Aka the halcyon days before the internet made us feel so constantly dumb for not knowing everything or lazy for not searching for the answers.Aka being ok with not having all the answers, and trusting they will come.
A little effort, a little reprieve.
After that month, I found the more I know, the more I worry. The more I see into other people’s lives (they have a cool house, why don’t I have a cooler house, they are in love, it’s so weird that I’m not in love, she has cool hair, I’m 33, why haven’t I figured out how to have cool hair yet), the more I ruminate. These are not new revelations, but I think our brains are so addled now that we have to keep reminding ourselves: how much of what we’re reading and looking at is truly important? And how much can we just accept life’s… mystery?
So much of our anxiety is linked with the incessant desire for knowing. I know when my Uber will arrive, I can check immediately whether Aquarius and Scorpio are a good love-match, so why can’t I find a solution to these greater life questions just as quickly? Cos it’s life, bitch, that’s why. If all these deeper existentialisms could be flattened and figured out that quickly, there’d be nothing remotely human left. A calming thought to return to amidst the current AI hellscape.
Very early 2000s Tumblr girl of me, but it reminds me of this excerpt from a Rilke poem from Letters to a Young Poet, which I made my dad buy me for Christmas when I was 13, to his bewilderment:
So simple, so easy to forget.
Reclaiming your mystery
It’s 2025, and I think mystery is very in and will continue to be.
It’s people having mostly vague knowledge of where you are and what you’re doing. It’s WhatsApp splinter groups where you share holiday photos, without posting it on main. It’s not replying for between 3-13 days. It’s trusting that the right information (or answers) will find you when they need to.
I’m suspecting the most sane of us in the coming years will be the ones who can genuinely convince their nervous systems that they don’t have to know everything all the time everywhere at once.
There’s a joke amongst my freelance friends that the chicer, more established you are as a creative, the more enigmatic your portfolio is. I think this applies to life as well. It’s that tension between putting enough information out into the world that you’re searchable if needed (for jobs, lovers, for magic), but mysterious enough that your life feels like it’s truly your own. In the middle of that Venn diagram, which is a different shape for everyone, lies a form of contemporary nirvana. That’s what I think we should be trying to assemble for ourselves.
Wishes,
Bel
x
PS. Another super random, little bit emo, but nothing major playlist for you this week feat a nice little Dad Rock moment at the end:
“So much of our anxiety is linked with the incessant desire for knowing… If all these deeper existentialisms could be flattened and figured out that quickly, there’d be nothing remotely human left.” Love this SO much!!! 💛