the utter

You write a thing that came from a hole in your chest.

You know it isn’t anything close to perfect.

You press publish, against your inner critic’s judgment.

You sigh a relieved sigh and go to make tea, or something like it. Twenty-four hours later, Substack emails you your numbers,

a grade, if you like.

I don’t. That’s the trouble. The metrics are sometimes true, but never the truth. As my readers have kindly expressed, metrics do not measure how long someone sat still after reading your words, or who remembered a quote and shared it with their sister, partner, or friend. They are binary, numerical, and can rarely capture impact, emotion or hints of recognition. Still, we religiously check them.

Can I turn this feature off? A little bit? Although I consider myself a performer in many fun and necessary ways, writing as performance is not my ministry. I don't want to be at the mercy of some dashboard, and these days, must work hard to circumvent this.

Oh, I could just not care, I suppose. It’s not that metrics are evil; indeed, there’s something to be gained from knowing how specific ideas and essay-things land, if they do at all. I know metrics can be helpful. Some people thrive with the right data. But for some of us, those numbers don't inspire refinement; they inspire hesitation, self-doubt and the death of important risk. Though I feel the fear and do it anyway, I reckon I am no more immune or impervious than anyone else. Metrics are too easily mistaken for meaning. Am I only as good as my last email? If that’s the case, I’m (regularly) screwed.

Some of us are out here trying to keep it raw and from the heart, a little unkempt, and wild,

and to let it be,

ungraded and unstarred.

The real metrics, I guess, live in the quiet; in those who don't comment but read, and the ones who show up at your little event in a bookshop in a town you’ve never been to before and say, “I’ve been following you since the beginning.” (You melt my heart each time you come out of the house to see me. Thank you. It isn’t a given, and each time I’m overwhelmed with gratitude.) I keep saying I’m going to do more meet-and-greets / readings / speakery things this year and next, and if you’d like me to come and do my thing where you are, please do reach out. I’m just an email away.

Back to the platform. I want to build a rebellion here, a library of feeling, a warmhouse of language, and, as I have said, must take care not to internalise spikes or slumps. I am not my open rate, or the subscribe or unsubscribe list, but could be the reason someone decides to start a newsletter, or a book, or a piece of art. This is why I show up each week. (Well, that and it buys my groceries). Some people ask me how I manage to show up twice a week, like what new is there to say?

Well, look.

As long as the sky is frost, then lilac-peach, and the roses grow, bloom and scent-happy, and the moon is a thumbnail

to a globe, to a sliver of silvergold,

and there are new, surprising, off-kilter people to see

and be thrilled or repulsed by, and dreamybad places to go,

and as long as the devilsystems tell on themselves and show their asses and awful teeth, and the devilsystems break something in me and bring forth new terrible truth and the seasons rise, and the trees green-green, tall and insistent

and we change and trip over and change some more,

each lesson is old as the world and always, always new. There are new thoughts, desperate challenges, and drumbeat affirmations that we need to know and unknow, ten times a year.

If you’re reading this, thank you. Whether you’ve been rocking with me from the beginning or here as of yesterday, it means more than any graph.

Love, Yrsa.

oh just me talking about talking

I can’t tell you how often I’ve felt like I’m too late. I felt late at eighteen, I felt late at twenty-three, and I’ve felt late deep in my thirties. It’s a mindset; there's no truth to it. The feeling was that I had missed some secret deadline, one no one ever announces but one we are expected to meet to be deemed successful. I looked at other people, those younger than me, moving faster than me and I thought they got themselves together in time. They snuck in before the doors closed.

The doors, of course, are not real, but I didn’t know that. The deadlines were an idea of my own making. I didn’t understand that, either. “Late” was just a story, dreamed up by my inner critic, designed to self-sabotage and halt me before I even started. That, and too much time spent watching other people.

Success has no clock, only gatekeepers. It’s up to us to decide how much power the gatekeepers have. Gatekeepers count on you feeling as though you missed the moment. They want you to believe you need them. If you feel behind, that’s the system working as designed. If you are convinced you’re too late, you’ve taken yourself out of the running. If you are convinced you need some guy in a room to say yes to you, you’ll wait a long time.

If you can be convinced that real artists, writers, thought-leaders, and business owners were anointed at birth or even discovered on time, you’ll never realise that you can name yourself.

Thankfully, the brain and your life path don’t work on everyone else’s schedule. Opportunities, ideas and new outlooks don’t peak at 25, 30, 35, 40, or any other made-up number. The brain evolves. It rewires and builds new pathways. The brain is continually rewiring. Which means healing is possible. Which means it’s never too late. Which means that who you were is not who you have to be.

👆🏿👆🏿 I wrote this in the early hours of Tuesday morning, and now I’m making it free because I want more of you to see it. I know what it’s like not to be stuck but to feel it. It’s easy to believe you’ve missed your moment. Shame doesn’t just quiet you. It keeps you waiting. Sometimes, we feel frozen, not because we lack discipline or drive, but because of something deeper. Something in the body is holding us there. The brain isn’t just this disembodied thought factory. It’s an entire ecosystem - a body-mind machine shaped by the nervous system, our survival instincts and messages we absorbed long before we even had words for them. Sometimes, it’s not only our minds keeping us stuck, but the body remembering a time when movement wasn’t safe.

You can’t be late to your own life. Not really. And your brain can’t evolve on a self-imposed, strict timeline. Not really. Neuroplasticity proves that nothing is wasted or too late. Every moment of stillness or every year spent circling the same thoughts…every single bloody version of yourself was still a part of what it takes to make you you. Even the moments that seemed useless. Even the years you thought you lost.

I cannot stop giving thanks for all that I thought might kill me.

The information we are fed wants us to believe that if you haven’t been chosen by now, you never will be. Mate, you were meant to make your own timeline! I would not have any books if I waited for the people in the glass-fronted buildings!!! Creativity is an act of movement. Every time you make something, you prove that you are still in motion, that your story is still unfolding, and that waiting is not the answer. If success has no clock, you’re not late. If the doors weren’t real, you don’t have to wait for them to open. When you stop waiting, you become dangerous.

(If you need proof that you don’t need a gatekeeper, read Pay Your Rent With Poems, a practical guide to building something tangible, and yours.)

I don’t usually write about love in the way I’m about to. I write about love in prose and well-timed wistful poems infused with distance and hindsight. I write about the problem with love and the throes of early love, less so of the moments when it fails me or I fail it. I consider this work to be too close to the problem.

This morning, I am thinking specifically about being the problem, which is why this piece is difficult to write.

Somewhere in South West London,

I know that I love you. You go walking

And so,

The Josh Craig and I performed in Manchester. We’ll be performing everywhere. Invite us to your town.city.place of higher learning.gallery.

I ❤️ poetry + electronics. Also, shout out to my gorgeous friend Eloghosa Osunde, whose book “Necessary Fiction” is in the works. Sometimes when I perform this poem live, I shout it out xx

A special thank you to the Arts Council and Leone Rose xx

UK!!!! I’m having a party/meetup/fireside chat with electronics/ poetry reading/confessional in the UK with my incredible partner in fun, THE JOSH CRAIG!!! Come and say hi and listen or dance or sway to poems!!! SUN JULY 14TH doors at 7.30 PM band on the wall, Manchester, UK, FREE EVENT.

TICKETS NEEDED FOR ENTRY!!!!

Fall in love with a new poem. Break this damn English in forty places. Bend these silly rules of Engagement since they are not working for people like us, have never rarely worked for people like us, and people like us are tired, perhaps. Understand time as a divine faculty, not simply a resource to be bartered. Delete those apps from the phone. Send E a long, winding voicenote. Shape the growing story; all this hot, stained glass. Understand it is malleable, impressionable. Press lips hard against the windowpane. Marvel at the O shape. Be outside, even when the day is bold, and I am not. Find more things to love than to complain about. Find more people to love than people to complain about. Be a hell of a romantic—court joy as a new religion. Hold my own beautiful hands. Say the resounding no’s that are needed right now. Tell the girls what I learned in the wild. Start the alt club of my dreams. Become the CEO of the thrilling unknown. Talk about the confusion. Take these twisting wishes and almost wants & make love & strange art. Believe her. Believe him. Do Karaoke with J in Ktown again. Honour my beliefs but not so much that I cannot shift. Go to Nigeria and find my family. Go home to Jamaica. Bring something home to the land, and let it tell me ______ Nourish the earth and let the earth soothe. Let the life that I have set out work for me. Care even more about it all. Find inspiring methods of care. Hone a nurturing practice. Be in a new kind of communion. Work out what to do about the walls that have grown out of necessity. Sing about it. Fry plantains. Spend hours on good red rice. Invite folk around to eat. Tell her the truth about me, not her. Tell him the truth about me, not him. Tell them the truth about me, not them. Archive. Film. Draw. Paint. Put it out whether I think it’s ready or not. Learn everything from this.