writing i'm proud of
to celebrate the 200th post. we've been here for almost four years!
I love this place so much and, like anything, it’s taken years of experimentation to become somewhere that feels entirely enjoyable to run, rather than where I post what I think I “should” or what I’ve assumed you would want from me.
A few days back I posted my 200th piece. TWO HUNDRED! This newsletter has been running for 3.8 years. I started it in 2021 after feeling completely disillusioned about the dynamics and use of social media in social justice spaces. I’d just been run off the platform, lost my BBC radio slot and received 5,000 messages of hate a day for not speaking on situation between two creators. Other people had it much worse than me, but I wanted a space that felt safer and less volatile.
I often criticise myself for not writing “enough” here, because I have many jobs (you can see my thoughts on that here). On a subscriber platform you must invest time before you make much money, but you also need make money to justify your time so it’s a hard balance. When I did the maths, 202 posts over 190 weeks works out as more than one post a week on average for 3.8 years, so look, I’ve not been the most consistent but I’ve been hitting my marks!!!!
To celebrate that fact, I’ve pulled together 3 posts I’m proud of from the 1,330 days I’ve been running this newsletter. I hope you enjoy re-reading them, or discovering them for the first time if you didn’t read them already.
1. A 3-part series about becoming pregnant, having an abortion, and the mess that came with it. part 2 and 3 are here and here.
2. The netflix series I helped make happen and why I didn’t want to be part of it.
can I tell you a secret?
I guess I wanted people to feel moved enough to do something about stalking, and to recognise that cyberstalking is stalking not some fake digi-version of it. That just because social media or the internet is the tool a perpetrator uses to stalk you doesn’t mean it isn’t happening offline, or that it doesn’t have real world impact. I wanted people to ge…
3. written after the murder of Sarah Everard in response to the influx of men messaging me
An Open Letter To All Men
Disclaimer for women and marginalised genders: This letter is a call to cis men, and in the interest of engaging men who may never have picked up a book on social issues, I’ve aimed to keep it simple and to the point. For me it has to be, ultimately, accessible. Due to this, it feels very heteronormative, because unfortunatley it is, and in places it la…
Here’s to more reading, writing and experimenting. Thank you for being here. You don’t actually know how much it means for you to support my work in this particular way.
love ya.
G x
Congrats Gina! A monumental achievement. You bring light to darkness, hope to despair, and integrity in a world that sometimes feels devoid of it just by being you. It’s an honour to have that in my inbox 😘