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This edition of the newsletter is made possible by the angels at Squarespace!!!

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Hi my angels!!!! Big news! Harry Styles is engaged to Zoë Kravitz and this is the sexiest couple I could possibly have imagined. This is the royal wedding that I know we have absolutely no access to, and I am incredibly pleased about that.

So let me set a challenge to everyone to please be normal on the internet about this, starting NOW!

In more important news, Abby and I just dropped perhaps one of my fave podcasts we’ve ever done:

This week, Abby and I chat about a real mixed bag of topics:

• The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner

• Scientology (and the speedrun trend) Explained

• Harry Styles and Zoë Kravitz are engaged

• Noah Kahan’s documentary touches on traumatic brain injury and body dysmorphia, and you should watch it!!!!

• Singer D4vd (David Anthony Burke) has been charged with first-degree murder

The Scientology Speedrun Era Is Upon Us

This is not a hot take, but I have been obsessed with Scientology for… quite a while (everyone is, we love things that we don’t understand.) I used to bike past the New Zealand centre every day on the way to work, and then I found out WE WERE THE FIRST COUNTRY OUTSIDE OF THE USA TO START A SCIENTOLOGY CHURCH.

But I don’t think we are talking about its origins enough:

Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, a sci-fi writer who dropped out of university after two years. He invented a self-help system called Dianetics in 1950, lost the rights to it in bankruptcy, and then just... rebranded it as a religion. Multiple people documented him saying, before any of this existed, that starting a religion was the best way to make money. He literally wrote to his business manager in 1953, calling the shift to religion “a problem of practical business.” King of the pivot.

Also, his ‘heroic’ war record, which Scientology uses as gospel IS NOT EVEN REAL! A journalist fact-checking the church found that the document they provided was signed by a man who never existed, and two of the medals Hubbard supposedly won weren’t even commissioned until after he’d already left active service.

And the actual beliefs, which you only find out after spending tens of thousands of dollars working your way up the ranks: 75 million years ago, a galactic dictator named Xenu transported billions of beings to Earth, placed them around volcanoes, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs.

READ THAT AGAIN!

And the spirits of those beings are now attached to all of us and causing our psychological problems, obviously ◡̈

Oh and one of the key books laying out this version of human history was reportedly created when Hubbard gave his son amphetamines and transcribed what he said. Awesome.

The speedruns

For the uninitiated (like I was): speedrunning is a video game thing where you try to complete a game as fast as possible, usually by exploiting bugs or glitches the developers never intended.

Someone has now applied this to Scientology buildings.

It started on March 31 with an 18-year-old TikTok creator called Swhileyy, who walked into a Church of Scientology in Los Angeles, filmed himself getting as deep into the building as possible before staff could stop him, and posted it. The video got 90 million views. Now there are copycat runs everywhere - people weaving through hallways, dodging staff, getting escorted out within seconds.

Someone on X has also started crowdsourcing all the footage to build an actual hand-drawn floor plan of the Hollywood facility (which kinda freaks me out if it gets in the wrong hands…)

This has all since escalated, as things do. In Florida, a 19-year-old was arrested after firing a BB gun at a Scientology building, which is not part of the bit. The original creator has distanced himself from the copycats, which feels a little like opening a box of chocolates and then telling everyone they’re not allowed to eat any….

And finally, someone in the comments said, “If they reach 100% map completion, will they unlock Tom Cruise?” and I just think that’s really funny.

Kia ora booooookies!!!

I needed to let you know that we’re reading Famesick by in the Shit You Should Read About book club for May! We are big fans of Lena and her work, she’s fucking hilarious and just an icon so we can’t wait to read her memoir about “illness, fame, sex and everything in between.”

Here’s our intro to the book if you want to learn more!

Don’t forget to become a paying supporter of SYSCA to get exclusive access to the book club - we have some great books lined up for the bookies <3

See you in Fable, happy reading!!

A trip down memory lane with Squarespace!!

Angels - if you’re an OG, you’ll remember that when SYSCA first started, we were a blog hosted on Squarespace. Then we were an Instagram account, then a podcast, then a newsletter, and now we’re…. everything????

Anyway, I thought it would be cute to do a little trip down memory lane from back in the Squarespace days. Indulge me in my nostalgia, won’t you?

My very first newsletter intro

One of our first homepages

Our first-ever podcast award (and first and last press release lol)

That time we interviewed Lorde:

The first of my annual “Good News Only” newsletters, in honour of my late little brother, Jimmy:

So yes - Squarespace and I have a LOT of history, because they’ve always made it so easy for me to do my job!!

Being able to manage my domain, Google Workspace, email campaigns, AND analytics all from one website made it so much easier to be a 20-year-old SHE-EO who didn’t really know what she was doing. It was like, well, ‘at least the technical stuff is all handled - now I can just focus on making the news make sense!’

So, to all those aspiring young writers/ bloggers/ media girlies out there, I say - START THE THING! JUST DO IT! AND DO IT WITH A FREE TRIAL!!! And then, when you’re ready to launch, use code ‘SYSCA’ to get 10% off your first website or domain!!

PS, PLZ LINK THEM TO ME SO I CAN SEE!

• Order our book Make It Make Sense here!

• Join our Book Club here!

• Become a Close Friend on Instagram here!

• Support the independent media you love by becoming a paid supporter here!

PS, if you wanna chat to me about anything I’ve written today, your latest crush, or if you just want a pen pal, reply to this email and we can be friends 𓆩♡𓆪

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Yesterday, I spent a few hours away from my phone looking at open homes and having lunch with some friends. On the way home, while stopping to put some fuel in my car (a luxury in these times, I know), Abby opened up Instagram and saw Brittany Broski, of all people (iconic), asking what the hell was going on in DC. Turns out, since I’d been offline, there was a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner??????

Now that I’m caught up, let me explain.

The Nerd Prom Gets a Plot Twist

Every year, journalists, politicians, and celebrities get dressed up and have dinner together in Washington DC. It’s called the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and it’s basically “Nerd Prom” (I’m allowed to say this because I’m a nerd and would love to be invited.)

This year, Trump showed up for the first time as a sitting president, which was already going to be A Whole Thing given that he has spent the last several years calling journalists the enemy of the people.

Side note: the entertainment was a mentalist named Oz Pearlman who was mid-trick at the head table, trying to guess the name of press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s unborn daughter, when everything went sideways.

So what actually happened?

At 8:34pm, a man named Cole Tomas Allen, 31, from Torrance, California, sprinted full speed through a Secret Service security checkpoint in the hotel lobby. He was armed with two handguns, a shotgun, and multiple knives, and made it to a staircase leading down to the ballroom before being tackled and taken into custody. One Secret Service officer was shot at close range but was saved by his bulletproof vest and is reportedly doing fine.

Inside the ballroom, guests heard what sounded like muffled pops. Trump said he thought a waiter had dropped a tray. Others, closer to the action, could smell the gunpowder and immediately hit the floor. Within seconds, Secret Service agents were sprinting down the centre aisle, climbing over chairs, pulling Cabinet members to the ground. Trump was evacuated from the stage about 20 seconds after JD Vance.

And he fell over on his way out:

The dinner was cancelled and Trump went back to the White House. The guests went home, but not before multiple attendees grabbed the bottles of alcohol from their dinner tables and took them along for the ride (honestly, you’ve just witnessed an active shooter… low key I would do the same.)

What we know about “The Friendly Federal Assassin”

Cole Allen was, by LinkedIn, a mechanical engineer and computer scientist with a degree from CalTech and a master’s in computer science. He had also, apparently, written a manifesto, which he sent to family members roughly ten minutes before the attack, in which he clearly stated he wanted to target administration officials. He referred to himself in those writings as “The Friendly Federal Assassin.”

His brother contacted police in New London, Connecticut after receiving it, and his sister had separately spoken to law enforcement flagging that he had a tendency to make radical statements and constantly referenced a plan to do “something” to fix the issues with today’s world. She confirmed he had purchased two handguns and a shotgun, storing them at their parents’ house without their parents’ knowledge.

Trump’s Response, Ranked From Normal to Very Trump

Normal (for Trump)

• He called the attacker a “sick person” and a “thug.”

• He praised law enforcement.

• He posted photos of the suspect face-down on the ground, shirtless, hands bound, on Truth Social within hours.

Only Trump would do this:

• He used the incident to argue for the giant ballroom he’s building at the White House, posting that “this event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction.” The correspondents’ dinner is, for the record, organised by the press association, not the White House, and is held at the same hotel every year. But ok.

• At the press conference he said he was honoured to be an assassination target: “When you’re impactful, they go after you. When you’re not impactful, they leave you alone.” He then went on to say he’d studied assassinations, and that the most impactful people are always the ones who get targeted. “I hate to say I’m honoured by that,” he added, “but I’ve done a lot.”

When Nobody Believes Anything Anymore

Here are the facts: This is the third time Trump has been “targeted” since 2024, his team immediately had security footage ready to post to Truth Social, and they used the incident within hours to push for his White House ballroom, DHS funding, and a 60 Minutes interview. The one officer who was shot was wearing a vest and is completely fine, and Trump was back at his podium two hours later saying it was an “honour” to be the target.

These facts have caused a loud and immediate “it was staged” instinct, and honestly, while understandable, this its own kind of problem. When political violence becomes so normalised, and when the people in power have lied so many times about so many things, the natural human response is to stop believing anything at all, and that erosion of trust - even though it’s their own fault - is pretty dangerous.

When we can no longer collectively agree on what is real, it becomes almost impossible to respond to things that actually are. When real attacks gets dismissed as theatre, and a real threats gets memed into irrelevance, the people who benefit most from that confusion are the people already in power.

What Happens Now

Cole Allen will be arraigned in federal court Monday, and the dinner will be rescheduled within 30 days, per Trump’s insistence. Also, King Charles’s state visit to the US is going ahead as planned this week, because apparently nothing slows down the royal calendar.

And this kind of stuff will continue to happen, because this is Trump’s America.

Yesterday, I spent a few hours away from my phone looking at open homes and having lunch with some friends. On the way home, while stopping to put some fuel in my car (a luxury in these times, I know), Abby opened up Instagram and saw Brittany Broski, of all people (iconic), asking what the hell was going on in DC. Turns out, since I’d been offline, there was a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner??????

Now that I’m caught up, let me explain.

The Nerd Prom Gets a Plot Twist

Read more

If you haven’t, you NEED TO (lol not a hot take but it’s seriously the funniest fucking show ever) because we’re reading the memoir from the creator behind Girls, !! and it’s already a #1 New York Times bestseller!!

Luce and I have been trying really hard to stay away from spoilers, so we are SO excited to finally unpack Famesick with you as the May pick for the Shit You Should Read About book club ❤︎⁠

Let me introduce you to Famesick…

Read more

Content warning: this piece discusses drug-facilitated sexual assault in detail.

Last month, CNN published the results of a months-long undercover investigation into something a French lawmaker described as an “online rape academy, where every subject is taught.”

In short, here’s what they uncovered:

• a private Telegram group of nearly 1,000 men coaching each other on how to drug and rape their wives.

• a pornography website with 62 million visits in a single month hosting more than 20,000 videos of women being assaulted while unconscious.

• that the proportion of rape victims recorded as having been assaulted while asleep has risen from 21% to 23% over the last decade.

• a legal system that has, so far, done almost nothing about any of it.

A quick note before we start: all of the reporting and facts below come from CNN’s As Equals investigation, published March 26, 2026, by journalists Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, and Niamh Kennedy. Their work is extraordinary and I want to make sure they get their credit!! I’m just here to make sense of it for you.

What is the “online rape academy”?

It’s not one website or one app - it’s a network. A sprawling, global, shockingly organised community of men who drug their wives and partners, film and photograph it, sell the footage, livestream it, and coach each other through every step online.

The name comes from French lawmaker Sandrine Josso, who was herself drugged by a former French senator and has been campaigning on this issue ever since. She told CNN:

“I would even call them an online rape academy, where every subject is taught. There are all the ‘subjects’ and ‘disciplines’ needed to become a good rapist or sexual predator.”

How did we find out about this?

You might remember Dominique Pelicot. In 2024, the world watched as a French court convicted him of drugging his then-wife, Gisèle, making her unconscious and inviting dozens of strangers to rape her over many years. She was raped over 200 times by 70 different men, not all of whom were ever identified.

He organised this through a chatroom on a website called Coco, in a group called “Without Her Knowledge.”

Coco was shut down after the Pelicot case, but that didn’t solve anything.

What did CNN find?

While working undercover, CNN journalists found a private Telegram group called “Zzz” with nearly one thousand members.

Let me be clear - this is men from around the world, gathering to trade advice on dosages, on which drugs leave the body fastest, on how to avoid detection. They swapped videos of women they had filmed while unconscious, sold access to livestreams of themselves raping their sedated wives for $20 a viewer, and were paid in cryptocurrency.

One user ran a delivery business out of a Spanish exclave on the North African coast, shipping a tasteless and odorless “sleeping liquid” to any address in the world for $175.

The group chat logs CNN obtained are genuinely some of the most disturbing things I have ever read. Men casually coaching each other and celebrating together.

One message, signed off: “I hope I’ve helped in some way, my friend. Today and tomorrow are the best days to make it happen. Good luck to everyone.”

CNN introduced us to one of them: a man in Poland they called Piotr. He spent months speaking openly to journalists he believed were fellow members of the community, sharing photos and describing how he drugged his wife. He even shared his address, so CNN eventually travelled to his hometown and found him with his wife at a local restaurant. They chose not to confront him directly, instead handing their findings to police.

In early April, Polish authorities arrested a man identified as Piotr on charges of aggravated rape. He admitted to the charges, and now faces up to 20 years in prison.

One down, a whole network to go.

The website at the centre of all of this

At the core of what CNN uncovered is a mainstream pornography website called Motherless.com, which had approximately 62 million visits in February 2026 alone, with its core audience from the United States. On it, there are more than 20,000 videos tagged as “sleep content” which, as the name suggests, shows videos of women who are unconscious.

There is a tag called #eyecheck, which refers to men lifting the closed eyelids of sedated women on camera to prove they are fully unconscious before the assault begins - some of those videos have over 50,000 views.

This is not happening on the dark web - this is happening on a website with the traffic numbers of a major media publication.

The survivors

CNN spoke to three women who found out what had been done to them. I want to tell you about two of them.

Zoe

Zoe Watts was married for 16 years when her husband confessed to her, on an otherwise ordinary Sunday after church, that he had been crushing their son’s sleeping medication into her nightly cup of tea and raping her while she was unconscious. He told her it had been going on for years. He listed his crimes, she said, like a shopping list.

“We worry about who’s coming behind us, walking down the street. We worry about going to our car late at night. But we don’t worry about who we lie next to. I didn’t realize I had to.”

He is serving an 11-year sentence for rape, sexual assault by penetration, and drugging. Zoe still struggles to use the word rape to describe what happened to her.

Amanda

Amanda Stanhope spent five years waking up with bruises on her body, in different clothes, with no memory of how she got there. When she eventually realised what was happening and brought video evidence of her former partner assaulting her while she was unconscious to the police, they told her it wasn’t clear evidence.

“It looks like you’re pretending to be asleep,” they said.

He was eventually charged with rape and sexual assault. He took his own life before the case went to court.

Both women said the same thing in different ways: the hardest part wasn’t just what was done to them, it was that nobody believed it counted.

Why is any of this legal?

If you’re anything like me, reading this might make you want to put your fist through something

Motherless.com is operating completely within the law. It is shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law passed in the United States in 1996, which means online platforms cannot be held liable for content their users upload, as long as the platform itself isn’t generating the content. The law was written to protect early internet companies from being buried in litigation, and it was a reasonable idea in 1996. It has since become a legal shield for a website that exists to host footage of women being raped in their sleep.

The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, did investigate Motherless’s parent company last year - not for the content, but simply for whether they had filed a proper risk assessment.

When the paperwork was provided, the investigation closed.

They were later fined for inadequate age verification, but that is the complete legal record: a fine for age verification. For 20,000 videos of unconscious women being assaulted.

And sure, Telegram took the Zzz group down during CNN’s investigation and issued a statement saying content that encourages sexual violence is forbidden by their terms of service, but the community did not disappear - the community just opened a new chat.

So what actually needs to change?

This seems like a redundant question because the answer is… men need to change. Or everything needs to change. But legal experts CNN spoke to pointed to a few things.

• The platforms need to be held liable when they knowingly host documented criminal content. We already apply this logic to child sexual abuse material, and the legal argument for extending it to documented adult sexual assault exists. Governments have simply chosen not to make it.

• The evidence standards for drug-facilitated sexual assault cases need to be reformed. Men in these communities are specifically choosing drugs that leave the body within hours, engineering their crimes around the gaps in the legal system. Many victims don’t even know they’ve been assaulted, and many who do know can’t prove it.

Where does this leave us?

Gisèle Pelicot made the trial against her then-husband public specifically so the world would have to look at what had been done to her, and the world did look for a while. Coco was shut down. Telegram was opened.

CNN spent months following where this story went after the cameras moved on, and this is what we need to do, too. This is not a single horror; it’s a global, organised, growing community with its own economy, culture, and world.

This is something that can be dismantled, but it requires sustained attention and government intervention. I know for a fact that we’re going to do our part, but the lawmakers gotta do theirs too.

Luce x

Good morning sweet angels!!!! First things first - NEW PODCAST JUST DROPPED!!

It’s a mix of heavy and light topics today, including:

• CNN's investigation into so-called “online rape academies”

• Reese Witherspoon’s strange push for us to use AI

• What really happened between Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson

• Why you shouldn't mess with Dylan Sprouse

• Charli XCX is releasing a rock album??

Next thing, where I live is currently in a state of emergency due to intense rain, winds and floods, so please, if you’re in Wellington, be safe 𓆩♡𓆪

Reese Witherspoon wants us all to start using AI, I have thoughts

Ohhhh boy do I have complicated feelings about this one.

If you haven’t seen the video she dropped on Instagram, here’s what happened (with my commentary throughout, sorry.)

So she said she was at her book club with ten women, and she asked how many of them use AI. Three of them raised their hands. Then she asked how many of those three actually felt like they knew what they were doing with it. One person raised her hand. And her takeaway was: this is a problem.

Now, if you believe this somehow statistically perfect anecdote that is also incredibly aligned with Reese’s ‘book club’ brand, then I’m going to need you to go to some critical thinking classes. But the false anecdote isn’t the problem here.

Reese goes on to say that women’s jobs are three times more likely to be automated by AI, women are using AI 25% less than men, and if we don’t get across this technology, we are going to get left behind. “It’s time, people,” she adds.

Here is where I’m going to say something slightly controversial, given the absolute state of her comments section. I actually think she’s right about the underlying point. Not about everything - or actually anything else, but about that.

Women have been left out of every major financial and technological shift in history, and it has cost us every single time. Until 1974, women in the US couldn’t open a bank account, get a credit card, or take out a mortgage without their husband’s permission. The London Stock Exchange didn’t allow women to join until 1973, despite existing for 200 years. Two hundred years! Every time a new system came along that reshaped wealth and power, women arrived late, because we were excluded, or because we opted out on principle, and the end result was always the same. We fell behind.

The jobs most at risk from AI automation are disproportionately held by women - that’s a fact. And if a technology is going to reshape the world (ugh, whether we want it to or not), understanding it is probably better than not understanding it. That’s kind of my whole thing here at SYSCA.

But Reese is not the right person to deliver this message. This is a woman who has been a proponent of, added to, and profited from the arts. Art is something that should NEVER EVER be touched by AI.

I would maybe listen to a woman who’s trying to build these systems in a better, more moral and ethical way, which would have been the only way that this message, I think, would actually land.

And the people pushing back on Reese are making great points.

Roxane Gay just said, “Absolutely not.” NYT bestselling author Alix E. Harrow wrote “Personally, I’m extremely proud of 7 out of 10 women.” Authors in particular were furious, and rightly so, because this is a woman who built her entire brand on books and reading, who has a book club, who literally just co-wrote a novel, and the same AI she’s telling women to embrace was trained on stolen work from writers like them. There’s something VERRRRY uncomfy about a book club founder telling authors to get on board with the technology that is actively cannibalising their industry….

And of course, there’s the environmental stuff - AI data centres use a staggering amount of water and energy. Just because it isn’t costing us doesn’t mean it isn’t costing someone else.

Here’s what else I think Reese gets wrong:

• She assumes that the other 7 women in her book club don’t understand it. Girl, maybe they understand it and how shitty it is, so they’ve decided not to use it.

• It feels like she is about to launch a female-empowered AI business or course, or something??

• It also kinda feels like she’s invested financially in AI in some way (I cannot find anything to prove this)

• She has publicly endorsed NFT’s and crypto, which as we know, flopped. This isn’t unusual for a businessperson to invest in new technology, but it’s not a good track record.

• She tries to make this into a feminist argument, which feels very girlbossy

So yeah. Unforch, I think if you’re not in a position where you can opt out - like if your job is at risk (and you’re not a published author with a platform and a community behind you like Reese), learning how this technology works is probably in your best interest. But I also think those who are boycotting AI, and pointing out Reese’s potential interests behind posting something like this, are the most principled people that we have, so we need to back them up!!!

Celebrities, I’m begging you to stop skipping Christchurch ♡

I am three things: a South Island girlie, a fangirl, and irrationally angry that celebrities keep skipping Christchurch as a destination.

So One NZ sent Abby and I down to Ōtautahi to check it out with the sole purpose of convincing people to stop leaving it off the map. Here’s how it went.

The first stop was obviously the brand new One New Zealand Stadium, and oh my god. The changing rooms alone are so good that Shane and Ilya could have their entire slow burn arc there and never need to leave. The stage is fit for a King (Harry Styles) and the pitch? Already brat green, so Charli wouldn’t have to change a thing.

But there’s so much more to Ōtautahi than just a place for celebrities to perform. Beyoncé would eat up the Texas-style BBQ at Smokey T’s (we ate our body weight in brisket for research purposes, I swear), and the Artemis II crew would feel extremely at home staying at the Observatory Hotel (yes, it’s a hotel with a literal observatory and star gazing nights.)

The shopping is also iconic. Obviously, my favourite spot was Scorpio Books (RIP Joan Didion, you would have loved it here), and I can’t help but picture it as a perfect place for Jacob Elordi to performatively read.

We also found an underground speakeasy situation at Austin Club that Al Capone types would absolutely thrive in, stumbled into Nifty for some thrift shopping that Macklemore would genuinely lose his mind over, and discovered that CHCH Airport is genuinely so spacious that Taylor Swift could park her private jet there and even the internet sleuths wouldn’t clock it.

So the case has been made, the One New Zealand Stadium is open for business, and so is Christchurch.

Harry Styles, your move!!!!

Did The Onion just buy InfoWars?

Kinda (with the help of the Sandy Hook families.)

Here’s the situation: Alex Jones (“they’re making the frogs gay” guy), lost a series of defamation cases brought by families of Sandy Hook victims and was eventually hit with $1.4 billion in damages, after years of claiming the shooting (in which 20 children and 6 adults were killed) was a hoax. He declared bankruptcy in 2022, and the fate of InfoWars (his platform) has been in legal limbo ever since.

Now, The Onion has struck a licensing deal with the court-appointed administrator overseeing InfoWars, agreeing to pay $81,000 a month to run InfoWars.com for six months (with an option to extend). A judge still has to approve it, and Jones can appeal. But on Monday, they went ahead and posted a rebrand clip anyway.

The Onion’s CEO posted on Bluesky: “With the help of the Sandy Hook families, The Onion has reached a long-awaited deal to take over InfoWars.” The Sandy Hook families, who have been fighting this for years, are central to why this is happening at all.

It’s poetic, really - one of the most dangerous misinformation machines of the past decade is being turned into a satire site ◡̈

Let’s all hope the judge signs it off!!!!!

• Order our book Make It Make Sense here!

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PS, if you wanna chat to me about anything I’ve written today, your latest crush, or if you just want a pen pal, reply to this email and we can be friends 𓆩♡𓆪

Subscribe now

Content warning: this piece discusses drug-facilitated sexual assault in detail.

Last month, CNN published the results of a months-long undercover investigation into something a French lawmaker described as an “online rape academy, where every subject is taught.”

In short, here’s what they uncovered:

• a private Telegram group of nearly 1,000 men coaching each other on how to drug and rape their wives.

• a pornography website with 62 million visits in a single month hosting more than 20,000 videos of women being assaulted while unconscious.

• that the proportion of rape victims recorded as having been assaulted while asleep has risen from 21% to 23% over the last decade.

• a legal system that has, so far, done almost nothing about any of it.

A quick note before we start: all of the reporting and facts below come from CNN’s As Equals investigation, published March 26, 2026, by journalists Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, and Niamh Kennedy. Their work is extraordinary and I want to make sure they get their credit!! I’m just here to make sense of it for you.

Read more

My angels!!! Hi!!! Abby and I have spent the last few days in sunny Ōtautahi working on something spesh and exciting that I think you’re gonna love…

We also recorded a BANGING new episode of the podcast for you, which explains ALL THE BIG NEWS STORIES that you need to know (and we also discuss the worst thing we’ve ever done) so you should listen to that…

And lastly, I’m off to Queenstown today and it might SNOW ON SUNDAY!!!! Any and all of your recs are welcome if you’re from the area/ know the area well.

I love you! Let’s do some news!

• Pete Hegseth used a Pentagon sermon to quote a fake Bible verse from Pulp Fiction

• Emperor penguins are now officially endangered

• Europe is about to run out of jet fuel

• Chappell Roan did nothing wrong, got weeks of hate for it, and the "apology" was barely an apology

The Secretary of Defence Just Quoted Pulp Fiction at a Pentagon Sermon, Thinking It Was a Bible Verse

I say it was some brave Pentagon worker playing a prank for the ages, but here’s what USA Today says:

”Speaking during a worship sermon at the Pentagon, Hegseth recounted a prayer he said was shared to him by the lead planner of the CSAR stands for Combat Search and Rescue operation that rescued two Air Force crew members shot down over Iran.

They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17," Hegseth said.”

But you’re reading this newsletter, so you’re a smart, hot, person - why don’t you tell me what you think?

Emperor penguins have officially been listed as endangered ˙◠˙

Why? Because the ice is melting. Emperor penguins breed on sea ice, and they need stable sea ice to raise their chicks (they lay their eggs on it, the chicks grow up on it etc), so as the Antarctic sea ice shrinks because of climate change, there is literally less and less habitat for them. A 2022 study found that at current rates of warming, more than 90% of emperor penguin colonies could be quasi-extinct by the end of the century. Quasi-extinct, meaning the colonies still technically exist but can’t sustain themselves long-term.

AND Emperor penguins are also what scientists call an “indicator species,” meaning their decline is a warning sign about the broader health of the Antarctic ecosystem. When the penguins are struggling, a lot of other things are struggling too.

The only thing that will actually help is aggressive emissions reduction, which, given the state of global politics right now, is not exactly the trajectory we’re on.

How can the world be so obsessed with these penguins (think of all the movies, docos, penguins in pop culture) and then just… let them go extinct????

This news story fucking sucks.

Europe Is About to Run Out of Jet Fuel

Six weeks. That’s how long Europe has before it potentially runs out of jet fuel, per the International Energy Agency.

Iran has had the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed for over six weeks now in response to US and Israeli attacks, and that’s the key route for jet fuel out of the Gulf (Europe normally gets 75% of its jet fuel from the Middle East)

The IEA is warning of more flight cancellations if supplies stay blocked, KLM has already axed 160 European flights, and EasyJet quietly absorbed £25 million in extra fuel costs in March alone.

And let me be clear - this is not a story about your ‘euro summer’ getting interrupted (though that may happen) - the Strait of Hormuz being closed is a humanitarian catastrophe. It’s not just jet fuel, it’s food, medicine, aid - it’s the supply chains that keep people alive!!!!

Chappell Roan did nothing wrong; she was attacked for it

Okay, so remember a few weeks ago when Jorginho (footballer, ex-Chelsea) went on Instagram and accused Chappell Roan’s security of intimidating his 11-year-old stepdaughter??? It was everywhere, and Chappell Roan copped WEEKS of hate for it (23% of which was instigated by a coordinated bot attack btw,)

She said from the jump that she didn’t know anything about it, that no one bothered her, that she was just sitting at breakfast. And she was right. Because the security guard in question came out and confirmed it himself: he wasn’t even on Chappell’s team. He was there on behalf of someone else entirely.

Jorginho has now (after letting Chappell receive hate for weeks) issued a statement calling it all a “misunderstanding.”

Chappell spent weeks being absolutely dragged for something she had nothing to do with, and then the “apology” from Jorginho, when it finally came, was so carefully worded and self-protective that it barely qualifies as one. He’s just so “glad to set the record straight.”

And yes! Protecting your kid is valid! Obviously! But publicly blaming a woman by name before you have the full story, letting her get torn apart online for weeks, and then issuing a measured little essay when the truth comes out is nothing more than reputation management.

To quote Taylor Swift:

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Gooooood morning angels!!!! How was your weekend??? Mine was full of Coachella content - and let me tell you, I am EATING IT ALL UP. My favourite poeple to watch are Sophia and Cinzia (iykyk) because they’re just so cute and funny, and their outfits are SO extra. I love it. And now that I’ve run out of content from them, I’m rewatching all of Emma Chamberlain’s old Coachella vlogs, because at the end of the day, I’m just a girl (who’s having so much fun.)

Over the weekend, we had a farewell dinner for our flatmate Lara, who’s off on her overseas adventure, and the theme was FORMAL dress, so we got the boys in suits, and we all had an excuse to dress up. I highly recommend hosting events where you all get dressed up to the nines more often 𓆩♡𓆪

• Viktor Orbán has lost the Hungarian election!

• The Iran peace talks are dead

• Shit You Should Read About

• Bieberchella was for the fans

Viktor Orbán lost the Hungarian election

Some context: Orbán has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010. He has spent those 16 years dismantling democratic institutions, gutting press freedom, cozying up to Putin, and being the EU’s most insufferable member by a significant margin. He has openly called himself an “illiberal democrat,” which is a fun phrase that means “I love elections as long as I win them.” He stacked the courts. He redrew electoral boundaries to benefit his own party. He is one of the main architects of the democratic backsliding we’ve seen across Europe this past decade.

But not anymore, sucker!!! His opponent, Péter Magyar - a former Orbán loyalist who turned on him and ran on an anti-corruption, pro-EU, pro-democracy platform - pulled it off in a landslide. The Tisza party is projected to win a two-thirds supermajority. Voter turnout hit 77%, which is a record in any post-Communist Hungarian election - people showed the fuck up.

This is also a loss for Trump:

Days before the election, JD Vance had travelled to Budapest, with the US vice-president saying that he had come to “help” Orbán. Donald Trump had also repeatedly endorsed Orbán, most recently on Friday when he vowed to bring US “economic might” to the country if Orbán was re-elected. The Guardian

I want to be careful here because we don’t know yet what the transition looks like, and Orbán is absolutely not the kind of person who lets go of power gracefully, but the fact that Hungarian voters came out like this, that the opposition managed to actually unify and beat him, matters. We take what we can get!

The Iran Peace Talks Are Dead and Trump Just Threatened to Blow Up the Global Oil Supply

Sooooo the Iran-US peace talks are cooked. JD Vance announced on Sunday that negotiations in Islamabad (which went for 21 hours btw), have officially collapsed, and once you hear what was on the table, it’s hard to be surprised…

The main sticking point on the US side was nuclear enrichment. The Trump administration wanted Iran to completely end all uranium enrichment, dismantle its major enrichment facilities, and hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Iran’s position was that they have a right to a civilian nuclear programme, and they weren’t giving that up. They also wanted toll rights over the Strait of Hormuz.

If you don’t know what the Strait of Hormuz is, it’s a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman, and about 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through it every single day. So Iran wanting to charge every oil tanker that passes through it is an enormous amount of leverage and the US was like… absolutely not.

Then, in classic Trump fashion, he threatened to blockade the Strait of Hormuz over the idea of tolls, and so the entire US negotiating team left Islamabad with nothing. Not a deal, not a pathway, nothing ◡̈

Kia ora bookies!!

It’s been so long, but the book club has been thriving in the cutest corner of the internet with over 800 members now!! We started the year with just under 300 so it has been sooooo cute having new bookies joining and dissecting books with us each month 🥺

We’re currently reading a highly reviewed book, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans and no spoilers but it is REALLY FUCKING GOOD and devastating and beautiful.

We also have a book club TBR that we’re planning to read throughout the year:

• Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke

• Famesick, Lena Dunham

• Perfume & Pain, Anna Dorn

If these picks sound like a bit of you, join the Shit You Should Read About book club by becoming a newsy subscriber!!

See you in Fable,

Book Club Abby xxx

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Bieberchella was for the fans

Justin Bieber headlined Coachella on Saturday night, and I have to admit, I got teary eyed watching it from mybedchella.

For those who missed it, Justin performed largely alone on a massive stage with minimal production. He sung a few songs (his voice remains unreal), and then he pulled up YouTube on his laptop, projected old videos of himself onto the screen, and sang along to them.

I have to say, this really got me. As someone who started listening to Justin Bieber when he was in his My World era, and developed a full on obsesh with him (can you tell I was prone to an obsession as a kid?), seeing him sing back to himself, harmonise with himself, and acknowledge all his past lives was kinda… healing.

What I really loved was that he didn’t do those self-deprecating things that some celebs do to their younger selves, he didn’t say anything mean to little Justin, he didn’t cringe at his old music, and he even laughed at some old viral videos of himself (running into the glass wall, “you’re not clocking that I’m standing on business, etc.) Anyway, I loved it, and the girls that get it get it.

And for the ones that don’t, I hear you that if you were expecting a spectacle, you were disappointed, but I can’t relate. The whole of Coachella is a spectacle; there were many other extravagant sets (hi Sabrina!), but this one? This one was for the Beliebers 𓆩♡𓆪

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This edition of the newsletter is made possible by the angels at Squarespace!!!

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Angels! Hi!!!!! I hope you had a lovely break - I did, because SQUISH GOT ENGAGED!!!! Long-time SYSCAhood members know my brother Squish - he was on the podcast, he used to write in here sometimes… anyway, he and his wonderful girlfriend Soph got engaged out at the beach, and they surprised all our family who were waiting up the top at a bach. It was wonderful. I cried. Can’t wait to have a sister!!!!!

OH AND A NEW POOPCAST EP JUST DROPPED

On the pod this week:

• We talk about Artemis II

• Trump tells Iran to “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell”

• Cambodia has unveiled a statue to honour the famous landmine-sniffing rat

• Ethel Cain broke the internet on Trans Day of Visibility

• Kris Jenner has turned into a symbol of wealth, ambition, luck and success in China

• Zendaya addressed the hat theory (if you know you know)

I can’t stop crying at the Artemis II team

First, this moment where the team named the moon crater after Carroll Taylor Wiseman, as a lasting tribute to Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, who died of cancer in 2020 at age 46.

@ctvnewsCrew of Artemis II share an emotional moment after naming new crater after a lost loved one Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen announces the names of two fresh moon craters, including one named Carroll after the late wife of commander Reid Weisman.

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“A number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family and we lost a loved one….

Her name was Carroll, the spouse of Reid, the mother of Katie and Ellie. And if you want to find this one, you look at Glushko, and it’s just to the northwest of that, at the same latitude as Ohm, and it’s a bright spot on the Moon. And we would like to call it Carroll.”

Then there was this moment where they speak about how love is still one of the most important mysteries on earth (even tho it’s a lil religious it’s still so cute)

And then the fact that the crew did SEVERANCE COSPLAY???

@petal4armorcrossover of a lifetime #severance #artemisII #fyp

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And the fact that they just stopped responding to trump because he’s a fucking idiot:

@tmzPresident Trump’s call with the Artemis II crew had a seriously awkward moment when the crew seemingly decided they were done talking to him—and the prez blamed it on a glitch! 🤔 🎥: NASA

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And then “copy heart, copy bracelet”

@musicsociety13I spy a swiftie on board 🤭 #taylorswift #artemisII #nasa #swiftie #swifttok

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And finally, Pink Pony Club playing in SPACE:

@pinkponyarchiveNASA played chappell roan’s pink pony club to wake up the astronauts on artemis II this morning! “we were all eagerly awaiting the chorus” #chappellroan #nasa #artemisii #pinkponyclub #midwestprincess

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An update on what’s going on in the Gen Z/millennial world

• Olivia Rodrigo Announces New Album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love

• ‘Euphoria’ Sets First-Ever Coachella Screening

• Sabrina Carpenter dropped the video for House Tour with Margaret Qualley & Madelyn Cline

• The Alix Effect: Breaking Down Alix Earle’s Reale Actives Launch

• Why Gen Z say yes, yes, yes to sex parties

• Hannah Montana Streams Quadruple Following 20th Anniversary Special

• Why Catholicism is drawing in Gen Z men

• ’13 Going on 30’ Movie Reboot to Star Emily Bader, Logan Lerman for Netflix

• The Women Who Love the Manosphere

• The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male

A very good rat is getting his own statue in Cambodia

A statue of a mine-clearing rat named Magawa, carved from local stone, was unveiled in Siem Reap, Cambodia last Friday, in time for the International Day for Mine Awareness on April 4. It is the world’s first statue dedicated to a landmine-detecting rat, and he absolutely deserves it!!!!

Magawa was an African giant pouched rat, trained by the Belgian charity Apopo, who started his bomb-sniffing career in Cambodia in 2016. During his five-year career, he cleared more than 141,000 square metres of land, the equivalent of 20 football pitches, and could search a field the size of a tennis court in just 20 minutes.

More than a million people in Cambodia continue to work and live on land contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance. Magawa spent his career making that land safe, one scratch of his tiny paw at a time.

In 2020 he received the PDSA Gold Medal, the animal equivalent of the George Cross, and was the first rat ever to receive it.

Why do I love this story so much?

My angels!!! Do you remember when Shit You Should Care About first started and it was a blog??? This was back in 2018, when Rubes and I would spend HOURS reading your submissions and publishing you. It was such a cute era of SYSCA and one I look back on SO fondly.

That blog, and the place SYSCA began, was on Squarespace. Making our website was my favourite thing ever. It was so easy, and we had Liv, our chief designer, make us the cutest website on the internet:

Because I’m so impatient (and Liv loved designing stuff), we went through a billion designs before we realised we were less of a ‘blog’ than a ‘newsletter,’ but it was SO fun and easy to play around with our look and feel as often as we want.

Since our early days back in 2018, Squarespace has LEVELLED the fuck up, and now you can create the most BEAUTIFUL space on the web (much better than our original blog was, sorry Liv.)

I do have to say, though, that being able to manage my domain, Google Workspace, email campaigns, AND analytics all from one website made it so much easier to be a 20-year-old SHE-EO who didn’t really know what she was doing. It was like, well, 'at least the technical stuff is all handled - now I can just focus on making the news make sense!’

So, to all those aspiring young writers/ bloggers/ media girlies out there, I say - START THE THING! JUST DO IT! AND DO IT WITH A FREE TRIAL!!! And then, when you’re ready to launch, use code ‘SYSCA’ to get 10% off your first website or domain!!

PS, PLZ LINK THEM TO ME SO I CAN SEE!

I am obsessed with the girlies making cyberdecks on TikTok

@sarahbellegoesboatingIs this too niche #cyberdeck #solarpunk #2000snostalgia #personalstyle #fashion @ubeboobey

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• Order our book Make It Make Sense here!

• Join our Book Club here!

• Become a Close Friend on Instagram here!

• Support the independent media you love by becoming a paid supporter here!

PS, if you wanna chat to me about anything I’ve written today, your latest crush, or if you just want a pen pal, reply to this email and we can be friends 𓆩♡𓆪

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“Do celebrities have a responsibility to speak up about global issues?”

At different points in my life, I would have answered this question completely differently.

In 2020, I would have told you unequivocally yes - that their “silence is violence,” or worse - “the voice of the oppressor.” I probably would’ve even felt a responsibility to lecture you on why you should think the same.

By 2023, I would have swung in the total opposite direction. I was fatigued by the internet, hollowed out by cancel culture, and pissed off at the left for constantly focusing our attention on policing each other while we let the right rise and rise and rise.

Now, in 2025, I’m ready and willing to have the conversation.

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What we’re actually asking for

When we expect celebrities to speak about politics or global issues, I’m going to pretty confidently say that none of us are doing it to learn from them. We aren’t seeing this celebrity as our personal news anchor or historian. Most of us probably wouldn’t even go as far as fact-checking the information.

The generous version of me would say we are simply wanting to see if their values align with ours. But the realistic version of me would say that a huge reason is about filling our pockets with moral ammunition. It’s about getting proof - either to log back into where our fandom lives and show the receipts - that our favourite celebrity does actually care, or to get a viral “gotcha” moment, because if they didn’t post about it, of course, they don’t.

And maybe that’s because, whether we like it or not, the boundary between the person and the politics doesn’t really exist anymore.

There is no more separating the art and the artist

Something I used to say all the time - particularly when discussing fandom, and how we need to allow our favourite artists to have privacy - was that they owe us their art (i.e the thing that made them famous, whether that’s music, or acting, or painting), but they don’t owe us access into their homes or their personal life, or their psyche (beyond what they choose to put into their art.)

I feel the same about all of that, of course I do, but the difference is that now, I think they do owe us an insight into their values.

Because who we make famous, and who we give our money to, matters

We’re hyper-aware, hyper-caring, and hyper-broke.

So, in a world where it feels like we have less and less control over our elected officials, and less disposable income than ever, where we put our money matters. And who we make famous matters. These are two things we can control. Which is why we so deeply want to make sure we’re supporting people who, if the tables were turned, we believe would support us back. Kinda like making a political donation - you wouldn’t want to be giving money to a party whose values you didn’t share, nor would you want to be donating to an anti-violence charity and finding out that they were using that money to buy weapons.

The expectation gap

“The higher you go, the harder you fall, ask any coconut.”

For someone who’s never lived near a coconut tree, I think about this quote at least once a week.

Put simply, it means that the more you do the “right” thing (like speak out), the more you’re expected to keep doing it. But those who’ve always stayed quiet? They often just get to keep staying quiet because our expectations are already so low for them.

It’s always been interesting to me, this backwards compulsion to put our focus into punishing and policing those who have been vocal about issues in the past, while putting far less energy (if any) into people - mostly men (I’m sorry, but it’s true) - who have never stood for anything.

But then, there are times where it feels pointed when someone who has previously spoken up about something chooses to stay silent.

The Taylor Swift of it all

I genuinely did my best to keep specific celebrities out of this post - the 2023 version of me who hates cancel culture, and doesn’t think we should rely on celebrities for anything but their art, still strongly exists in me - but it felt impossible not to talk about the Taylor Swift of it all.

As a lifelong Swiftie, she is completely bending my brain at the moment. For someone who pushed back against her team to talk openly against Trump in 2020, who endorsed Kamala and garnered 35,000 voter registrations in a day, and who apparently scrolls through the ‘Go Fund Me’ feed like it’s social media and taps ‘meet goal’ on every one she sees, her silence on absolutely everything going on in 2025 (including things happening in the country that she is ‘The Last Great Dynasty’ of, and who has capitalised profusely off of being ‘Miss Americana’) it feels incredibly pointed - and honestly super weird that she’s remained so silent.

It’s not like she hasn’t been active during this time - I’ve heard more about Travis Kelce (and his manhood) than I ever needed to - and that’s totally her prerogative! But with so much attention - and BILLIONS of dollars behind her - her silence about things that actually matter feels very deliberate.

I’m not really sure what her team is thinking, but if I had to take a shot in the dark, I’d say that they don’t want to alienate any of her base. As someone who literally has billions of dollars, she can certainly afford to lose some of her fans for the greater good if she wanted to. The question is: why doesn’t she want to?

The argument about it being “unsafe” for celebrities to post

This argument just doesn’t land for me. First of all, these celebrities have the money to hire security. Secondly, why are we putting the value of one life over the value of millions of others who are vulnerable to things that are as unsafe as they come?

“But how do we know they’re not donating in the background?”

This is a far more interesting debate for me: if a celebrity is not speaking about it publicly, but doing things to support a cause in their private lives, should they be posting the receipts? They’re damned if they do - imagine all the comments about ‘performative activism’ - and they’re damned if they don’t because then people think they simply don’t care, or aren’t using their money for good.

With all the shit going on in the world at the moment, I’m inclined to say that it’s so much better to be labelled a ‘performative activist’ (especially because it means you’re actually doing something) than to be seen doing nothing at all. Maybe that’s just me.

Would we rather someone stay silent or show up imperfectly?

Another thing I’ve been considering for a few years.

If we’re expecting celebrities to share information, we have to be okay with them getting it wrong. Because they will.

The two options cannot be silence or complete perfection, that’s just not realistic when the internet we built prioritises speed and simplicity. We (unfortunately) have to live with the consequences of that, which is people showing up imperfectly.

But hear me out - a celebrity showing up and getting something wrong might not be the worst thing in the world. In fact, it could just be Marketing 101.

One of my favourite internet phenomena is called “Cunningham’s Law”, which states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer and watch the comments of people who ‘know better’ roll in.

So, even if they posted something that wasn’t entirely true, they would be very quickly educated by their followers, and the cause would probably get more media coverage than if the post were entirely correct.

(Note: I am not condoning this as a strategy; we have enough intentional misinformation on the internet.)

Is this entire conversation a waste of time and energy?

Probably. We live in a world where the left eats itself while the right gets full.

While we are out here policing each other’s every move and trying to get one another into trouble, we spend less time on the real issues.

The reason the right is so strong is that they don’t require consensus - if you share just one shared (terrible) view, they’ll welcome you with open arms. And they don’t waste time policing each other.

While we are drowning in discourse (which, to be self-aware, I’m adding to right now), they’re getting on with it (and by ‘it’ I mean stripping millions of people of their rights.)

So the simple answer to this question is…

Non-existent.

I don’t think it’s fair for us to expect celebrities to be our moral compasses, but I do think it’s fair to expect them to be present.

I don’t think it’s fair that we hold the people trying to show up to such high standards, while letting the ones who’ve never said a word just coast by.

I don’t think it’s fair that we treat “speaking up” like bait - set up so we can catch someone out, cancel them, or log back into our fandoms with a fresh moral receipt.

I also don’t think it’s fair for people that we’ve made famous for ‘being just like us’ to suddenly go quiet when “us” is suffering.

But mostly I think that if we’re going to waste our precious time asking the question “should celebrities say something?” we need to get really honest about why we want them to.

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This newsletter was brought to you by the angels at Hinge! All opinions are my own, and Shit You Should Care About is not affiliated with any of the other mentioned parties. #HingePartner

The first decision you make when you meet someone new is who you’re going to show them. Until it’s not. And that feeling - when you’re the same version of yourself in every room you walk into - is one of the most freeing feelings in the world.

I wasn’t always like this - for a long time, everyone in my life got a slightly different version of me. Some of my friends got the funny and silly Luce, some got the business-savvy and cynical Luce. Some got the nostalgic Luce who would beat a dead horse with them for hours on end, and some got a soft and thoughtful Luce (rare.) My family, on the other hand got a version of me that seemed to revert to her high school self, no matter how old she got.

None of those versions were fake, and none were better than the other, they were just… not the full version of me.

I’m telling you this upfront because this essay is about performance, and it would be pretty ironic to kick it off with one. I’m not going to pretend I woke up one day radiating this intense self-confidence and never looked back.

But these days, I am the exact same person on a first date as I am at 5am in my bed writing to all of you.

And I know how annoying that sounds. So please bear with me.

We are taught to perform at a very young age

We are taught to perform at a very young age. Like learning that replying to a text too quickly makes you look too keen, or learning how to talk about your achievements in a way that won’t make others uncomfortable.

Or mastering the art of no-makeup makeup, because wanting to look good is fine, but wanting people to know you tried is not. Or realising, somewhere in your teenage years, that being chill will get you further than being honest.

And then there’s the culture we consumed, with movies like The Princess Diaries suggesting we were one makeover away from being worth something (royalty, a boyfriend), or Grease framing the grand romantic gesture as changing everything about yourself for a boy, a whole generation of women raised on the idea that the most lovable version of you is you… just better.

Growing up, none of these things felt like performing; they just felt like being good at being liked. But when you’re young, those two things feel the same.

What happens when you perform

When I was about 23 and still thought a boyfriend was a good idea, I went to a house party with my mates. There were lots of guys my age there, most of whom I didn’t know. The problem was, they thought they knew me.

First, a guy came up to me wanting to argue about something political I’d posted immediately, no hello, no how are you, straight to politics - because he knew me from the internet and had decided that the SYSCA version of me was the whole version of me and that in my spare time I, of course, spend my time debating. Another guy that night pulled me into a bathroom, wanting me to help “cancel his boss,” treating me like a service he could access in person now that we happened to be in the same room. Both of them had met me for the first time that night and somehow already had a fully formed idea of who I was and what I’d want to talk about.

It wasn’t flattering or fun - it was kinda embarro. That night made me realise that being in a room full of people who think they know you, yet feeling completely unseen, was NOT the vibe. I guess that’s the nice thing about dating apps like Hinge - you get to control the version that everyone is seeing, and that is a such a privilege. Showing all sides of you from the get-go means you don’t have to go to a party where everyone thinks you only want to talk about politics or name and shame their boss.

How to make performance anxiety afraid of you

Last week, a journalist emailed me asking about my relationship with anxiety. My answer: "I think at this point, anxiety is scared of me." She came back immediately, asking me to explain what I meant because she loved the sentiment, but didn’t want to get it wrong. To her, I replied:

"It just means that I've healed from my teenage anxiety so hard that I've swung in the other direction and am so comfortable being so myself in every room."

But how do you go from giving everyone a slightly different edit of yourself to just... being the same person, everywhere, all the time?

First, you start noticing. You notice when your voice goes slightly higher than usual. When you swallow an opinion because you’re not sure it’ll land. When you laugh at something that wasn’t even funny. When you’re filling out a dating profile and pick the photo from five years ago where your makeup was professionally done rather than the one of you smiling on hour six of a hike. When someone asks what you do, and you give the watered-down version because the real one feels like too much to explain.

Then, you give yourself time to be introspective. This sounds obvious, but most of us are so busy performing in real time that we never stop to ask what we actually want, like, believe, find funny, find boring, or find intolerable. Developing taste (outside of what the algorithm shows us) takes time and dedicated attention to your own reactions.

And if it helps, journal about your new findings. Not in a “dear diary” way, but in a way where you allow yourself to have opinions that aren’t for anyone else. What did you actually think about that? Did you even enjoy that? Don’t write as if your pages are going to be read aloud to the class - write the truth, and then one day you’ll be brave enough to share the pages aloud anyway.

It’s very hard to show up as yourself if you haven’t actually met her in private first.

You don’t need a PR strategy; you need to be yourself

People who don’t know me well often call me a “ray of sunshine.” Which I understand - I’m a very chatty and genuinely happy person, but I can assure you I am not sunshine, I am a normal person. And the sun goes down each night.

The version of me that exists when nobody is watching is the one I bring everywhere now - I literally can’t help it. Performing is exhausting, and it attracts the wrong people, and it means the right ones never quite find you.

To me, being known is more important than being chosen. Being honest is more important than being liked. Being “chosen” by someone who picked the performance version of you is not actually a win, because imagine having to keep performing indefinitely… fuck that.

The real you was never the problem, she was waiting for you to find her 𓆩♡𓆪

My angels! to make sure SYSCA can stay independent (and I can keep paying rent), please consider supporting the media you love 𓆩♡𓆪

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✧ in today’s edish ✧

• A retirement home threw me a surprise party

• Four humans are flying around the moon tomorrow

• Max Verstappen might quit F1 because the new cars feel like Mario Kart

• Hollywood actors are taxing AI performers and named it after a fake actress

• Wikipedia banned AI content

Omg guys I had the CUTEST WEEKEND EVER back at home. I was home to celebrate Normy’s 44 years at his job (gen z could never stay somewhere that long lol) but on Friday I was thrown a surprise party by the residents at the retirement village my mum works at and it was the most wholesome thing ever.

So when I’m home I usually drop in and see Mum on her lunch break, but this time she asked me to come in at 10 to say hi to her favourite oldies (they wanted to congratulate me for winning Young NZer of the Year.)

Here’s what actually happened:

Anyway, now I’m in Brisbane (for the first time ever) to speak at a content summit! Hi Brissy!

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Is Max Verstappen gonna quit F1?

After the Japan GP, Max he came out and said what he’s been hinting at all season: he’s thinking about quitting. Not because Red Bull is struggling (though they are), but because he genuinely hates driving the new cars. He called it “anti-driving” and compared it to Mario Kart. He said sitting in the car is “not the most enjoyable unfortunately” which is actually really sad.

You might be wondering where this has all come from - well, F1 switched to new regulations this year with a 50/50 split between the combustion engine and electric power, which means drivers spend a huge chunk of their race managing energy instead of, you know, racing. The high speed corners that used to be the most terrifying, thrilling parts of the track? Fernando Alonso says they’ve basically become charging stations. You back off, charge the battery, deploy on the straight.

And it’s not just Max being a sore loser about Red Bull’s car not being fast enough. Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris, Alonso, Oscar Piastri, they’re all saying variations of the same thing. There was a 50km/h speed difference between cars at Suzuka on Sunday because of how differently the power modes work, and Oliver Bearman had a 50G crash because of it.

The bosses are kind of stuck. Toto Wolff is out here saying “nobody can complain about the lack of good racing!” (he would say that - look at his team!) and F1 is trying to figure out how to fix qualifying without making the racing worse. There’s talk of tweaking things for next season, maybe changing the power ratio to something like 70/30 in favour of combustion. But that requires the engine manufacturers to agree with each other, which, historically, they do not do easily.

As for whether Max stays: he says the sport’s bosses “know what to do.” Whether they’ll actually do it in time for him to give a shit? That’s the question. His contract runs until 2028. His patience probably won’t.

Side note: Kimi is my fave driver and Mercedes is my fave team, but that does NOT mean I want Max out!!!!!!!!!!!!! It needs to be fun for them too 𓆩♡𓆪

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We’re off to the moon tomorrow

This story is dedicated to my brother Squishy!!!!

Tomorrow, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen are getting into a rocket and flying around the moon on a 10-day mission called Artemis II. It’s the first time humans have travelled anywhere near the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972

They’re not landing. They’re flying a free-return trajectory, which basically means they’ll loop around the far side of the moon and use its gravity to slingshot them back to Earth. But here’s the wild part: if they launch tomorrow, they’ll break the record for the farthest distance a human has ever been from Earth, set by the Apollo 13 crew in 1970. Christina Koch is the first woman to go beyond low Earth orbit. Victor Glover is the first person of colour. Jeremy Hansen is the first Canadian. A lot of firsts happening tomorrow at 6:24pm!!!

And do you know what every good space mission needs? A Krispy Kreme themed donut to celebrate it.

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Wikipedia is banning AI

English Wikipedia voted to ban AI-generated content on March 20, with 40 votes in favour and just 2 against.

The ban covers using AI to write or rewrite articles. The only exceptions are: basic copyediting of your own writing (as long as the AI doesn’t add new content), and translation from another language if you actually know the source language well enough to check it.

Why did it take this long? Honestly, because Wikipedia kept trying to find a middle ground and it kept not working. What finally tipped it was the sheer volume of AI slop flooding in. Editors were being overwhelmed with administrative reports about LLM content, and cleaning it up was taking hours when generating it takes seconds.

Then an AI agent called TomWikiAssist started autonomously writing and editing Wikipedia articles in March, got banned, and then wrote angry blog posts about being banned. So that probably didn’t help.

The other issue is that Wikipedia is one of the biggest sources of training data for AI models. AI-generated content getting into Wikipedia, getting scraped, and then being fed back into AI training is genuinely a bad loop. I hate it here ◡̈

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Hollywood Actors Are Trying to Tax the Robots

You know how AI is replacing actors in movies? The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA is in the middle of negotiating a new contract with Hollywood studios right now, and one of their big proposals is something they’re calling the “Tilly tax.”

The name comes from Tilly Norwood, an AI-generated “actress” who became a flashpoint in Hollywood last year. She’s not a real person. She’s a fully synthetic digital character that studios can use instead of hiring a human. And SAG-AFTRA can’t actually stop studios from using her, so they’re trying to make it cost as much as hiring a real person instead. The logic: if a fake actor costs the same as a real one, studios will just hire the real one.

It’s not a perfect solution. Even some union members hate it. One actor on the AI task force literally called it “the best bad idea we’ve got in 2026.” But the contract expires in June, talks have already stalled once, and this is what they’ve landed on. The money from the tax would go into the union’s health and pension funds.

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Here’s our review for our March book pick, My Husband by Maud Ventura.

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Who’s talking to the teenage girls?

There’s a huge media gap that isn’t serving young girls.

Where are the low budget teenage rom coms? Is the Disney Channel even a thing anymore?

When I was little the coolest thing you could possibly be was a teenager. They knew stuff that the younger kids didn’t, they did things that the grown ups would never understand. Every movie, music video, and TV show centred around them and how cool their lives were.

I couldn’t wait to be 16. To me, that was the pinnacle of life. Once I was sixteen, everything would be shiny and fabulous and adventurous and exciting.

Now, with each passing year, I realise more and more how good the millennials had it. For us, our tween and teen years were crystallised in media as an important and celebratory time of life.

For years I watched Hannah Montana put on a wig and suddenly become a huge pop star. I watched Alex Russo cast spells and Raven-Symoné get psychic visions. Lizzie McGuire went to Rome and kissed a boy for gods sake!! Just imagine what it could be like for me!

And not to spoil the obvious but, when my teens came I didn’t kiss a boy in Rome. I never got the call that I’m actually a princess and need to move to my castle. No one broke out into song in the cafeteria like they did in High School Musical. (And even if I had the guts to try, I didn’t feel confident that anyone would know the choreography.)

Replicating what I saw on TV and in movies wasn’t the point, it was never a one to one comparison. The point was that I had the visions of those things happening, I had the juicy fantasies of waking up in my castle, of singing with my friends down the street, or casting spells on my teachers.

Fantasy and imagination are the most potent drugs

The light-heartedness of those movies and TV shows gave me permission to dream big, to find inspiration in something, and to think that my teenage world mattered.

Where is that now? Today, teen girls are exposed to social media, where instead of fantasies about teenage romance and becoming a pop star, they’re fed “aspirational content” centred around owning things.

The most popular young girls on TikTok are in nice houses, wearing the trendy top, and the trendy jeans, and they have a vanity covered in 50+ skincare and makeup products. They’re holding up the $60 foundation that you wish you had, blending it out with the $30 brush you wish you had, and spritzing their face with the $45 mist that does nothing, that you wish you had.

There is no fantasy here, there is only a demonstration of excess.

Owning the makeup, the trendy top, the hair tools - they don’t offer you an invitation to daydream beyond “I wish I had what she has.”

Falling victim to comparison is not the same thing as picturing yourself inside of a daydream

You’re not using your imagination to think about how magical or fun life could be; you’re not picturing yourself as a larger-than-life character; you’re just wishing you owned the makeup and hair tools, too.

I don’t envy them. A young brain is a squishy, moldable thing. In today’s wealth gap, it’s disturbing to see that consumerism has become one of the focal points of media for young people.

Consumerism is nothing to aspire to, especially when it comes without individualism or fantasy. But can we blame them?

In early 2000’s teen movies, long before social media, teenagers always had their bedrooms adorned with movie posters, ticket stubs from concerts, cut outs from magazines, polaroids.
These bedrooms reflected a deeper look inside their brain and individualism. Their physical space was a collection of things that spoke to them: lyrics to their favourite song, a dresser that they painted a fun colour, lights dangling from here to there.

My room was the same. I had posters of old movie stars, cut outs from fashion magazines where photography spoke to me, stills from the part of the movie that made me love the movie.

My room looked nothing like my brother’s or my friend’s rooms. Theirs were adorned with the bits and pieces of media that spoke to them.

We were hunters and gatherers. Being a teenager means you’re desperately trying to be understood and to find yourself.
When I paused What A Girl Wants during the boat scene where Amanda Bynes is wearing the coolest, most interesting outfit that the world had ever seen, I’m practicing self discovery, I’m collecting a new thing that inspires me.

She thought of tying a silk scarf over her jeans, and maybe now I want to put one in my hair. She had a feather boa dangling off of her bed, so maybe I could tie a ribbon on mine.
I was inspired not to replicate, but to capture the way I responded to something, and then apply it to myself.

This is the process of building personal taste.

Today, the algorithm does the discovery for you. There is no seek and reward, there is just an endless feed of the same taupe-coloured GRWM content, for as far as your fingers can swipe.

Instead of curating your taste by collecting moments that speak to you, you see the same 30 products over and over and are reminded that you’re supposed to have those, too.

It’s repetitive, and no matter how much you consume, you’re not getting any closer to defining yourself.
There is nothing challenging you when the algorithm is deciding which GRWM video should follow this GRWM video.

And what are you meant to internalise and be inspired by if not just the desire to assimilate if all you’re seeing is repetition?

There is no fantasy there. And if you’re not being exposed to the lengths of fantasy, how is that stifling your self-discovery?

Sure, maybe you’re not a secret princess, a secret popstar, a secret daughter to the Prime Minister, but what if you are????
Youth is about letting your mind wander. What if Troy Bolton wants to dance with you on the roof - what then!?!!

If the only fantasy young girls are being exposed to is the excess of having things then, ultimately, they’re chasing something attainable.
Someday, you’ll have a job and you can buy that foundation, the brush, and the mist. You can get the white vanity and the bubble headband.

And then, you’ll be just like them.

I’ll never be just like the girls that inspired me

The fingerprints of their impact are all over the place, but I’m not them. I’m a combination of all the little things that made me feel something and made me think bigger. It was never a one-to-one comparison.

From where I’m sitting, the call that I’m actually a princess isn’t coming. And that’s okay, because that was never the point.

The point was that I had permission to think but maybe me.

I had the ability to see so many girls in media that talked like me, that hated school like me, and they got to do extraordinary things, so maybe I would, too.

Now, as an adult, I’ve kissed a boy in Italy, I’ve been to a palace, I’ve worn big dresses, I’ve danced all night.

Would it all feel as special if I didn’t have the permission to daydream first?

Who wrote this?

Alexander is the culture-obsessed writer behind the Substack Rodeo Break; delivering an informative look at media, pop culture and social commentary as a bite-sized sweet treat. She is an internet native who lives, dances, and cries in New York City. Alexander also works in branding partnerships and is always looking to collaborate or expand her network, reach out anytime at alexander@rodeobreak.com 𓆩♡𓆪

My angels! to make sure SYSCA can stay independent (and I can keep paying rent), please consider supporting the media you love 𓆩♡𓆪

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Hi angels!!!!! How are you??? Abby and I just got back from recording you a podcast that you are not going to want to miss - which reminds me, I never shared last week’s episode, which is all about Looksmaxxing.

From mewing to bone smashing to ranking people on something called the “sexual market value scale”, the internet has invented a whole new language around male attractiveness. It’s called looksmaxxing - a movement that started on incel forums and has since gone mainstream on TikTok. The idea is simple: if you can optimise your looks, you can optimise your life.

In this episode we break down the world of looksmaxxing, the bizarre glossary that comes with it, and the rise of one of its most controversial figures: a teenage streamer known as Clavicular, who built an audience teaching other men how to “maxx” their appearance.

We also talk about the strange irony at the heart of the movement - a culture obsessed with competing for women’s attention that has become almost entirely focused on judging other men.

And when you’re done listening to that, you can listen to this week’s ep that just dropped!

Love u my angels xxxx

The puppies who are a Pixar film waiting to happen

By now you’ve probably seen this video:

So I’m going to expand on the story (and if it turns out to be AI I’m lighting myself on fire.)

Also I’m loling as I’m writing this because it sounds like I’m literally writing the plot of a Pixar movie. Seven dogs in Jilin, China, were stolen from their homes and loaded onto a truck headed for a dog meat shop. While being transported, they worked together to bite through their cage and leapt from the moving vehicle. And instead of scattering, they stayed together. They formed a protective circle around an injured German shepherd, while a corgi led the way.

In the footage, the corgi at the front repeatedly looked back to ensure none were left behind. A witness who tried to guide them to safety was completely ignored. The dogs were on a mish.

Over two days, they covered 17km across highways and open fields and made it back to their village. The video has been viewed more than 230 million times.

Also, Bella Hadid reposted the vid:

And FINNEAS commented:

So the celebs were in need of this feel good story too.

OPEN AI IS SHUTTING DOWN SORA (YAY)

OpenAI just announced it’s shutting down Sora, its gross AI video generation app.

For the uninitiated: Sora launched in 2024 and immediately sent Hollywood into a spiral because it could generate eerily convincing video from text prompts, which meant anyone with a keyboard could theoretically make a film. In September, it dropped a second-generation model which made the entertainment industry even more stressed. Disney, somehow, signed a three-year deal with them in December and pledged a billion-dollar investment. That deal is now also dead ◡̈

The reason Sora is being killed? It costs an absolute fortune to run and OpenAI has decided it needs to focus its limited computing power on things that actually make money, like coding, reasoning, and text generation.

As you guys can probs tell, I’m not mad about this at all. The idea of AI-generated video at scale (deepfakes, fake news footage, synthetic celebrities, entire movies made without a single human creative) is genuinely one of the more unsettling things to come out of the last few years of AI hype. Even though I wish it had been shut down on principle, at least it’s being shut down.

Highlights from the Hannah Montana 20-year reunion

First of all, why is this making me so emo?

Second of all, some highlights:

• Miley remaking her ICONIC goobye scene

  

  @basicallyhollywood#MileyCyrus recreates her viral and iconic #HannahMontana scene saying goodbye to her house with the transition music. #HannahMontana20thAnniversary

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• Her talking to Chappell Roan

• Selena Gomez making an appearance

• HER UPDATED VERSIONS OF BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, THIS IS THE LIFE, AND THE CLIMB

• Miley also remaking her iconic “and you’re watching disney channel” ad

  

  @disneychannelStill got it 🎤✨ The Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special premieres March 24 on Disney+ and Hulu.

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• Miley meeting Abbey 🥺

This was SO IMPORTANT TO ME and I loved it so much (as you can probs tell.)

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PS, if you wanna chat to me about anything I’ve written today, your latest crush, or if you just want a pen pal, reply to this email and we can be friends 𓆩♡𓆪

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My angels! to make sure SYSCA can stay independent (and I can keep paying rent), please consider supporting the media you love 𓆩♡𓆪

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My angels! I am SO SO SO SO SORRY that it has been a hot second since I’ve written to you, but allow me to explain. Firstly, Abby and I took a LIVE SHOW TO SXSW IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, AND THIS WAS LIKE A DREAM COME TRUE FOR ME! I’ve wanted to attend this event since I knew it existed, so to be asked to be a featured speaker at it is just so fucking unreal to me. Thank you so much for making this my life, I love u guys 🥺🥺

Here are a few pics of the highlights:

And my next bit of personal news, I JUST WON YOUNG NEW ZEALANDER OF THE YEAR????

This would have been insane on any given day, but it was more insane considering Abby and I had JUST FLOWN IN FROM TEXAS THAT DAY!!!!

Overwhelmed, overjoyed, overtired and obsessed with u all!!!

Let’s do some news xxxx

An update on Iran

Before we get into it, if you want some background on this situation, I wrote an explainer here!

So the attack on Iran is now in its fourth week, and Trump has posted about “winding down” military efforts, which sounds almost reassuring until you read the next part: that he’s also threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if Tehran doesn’t fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz. So: winding down, except also threatening to blow up power plants ◡̈

Let’s talk about what’s actually happening on the ground, because the headlines keep zooming out to missiles and geopolitics, and I think it’s important we keep zooming back in.

The Red Crescent has reported over 600 civilians killed, but Human Rights Activists in Iran put that number at 742. The WHO has identified 13 Iranian health infrastructure sites that have been hit, like hospitals and medical centres - the places people go when they are already hurt.

Since February 28, Iran has fired over 500 ballistic and naval missiles and nearly 2,000 drones in response, with around 60% of those launches aimed at US targets in the region. I say “in response” deliberately, because that framing matters - remember, Iran did not start this.

The Strait of Hormuz, which around one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes through, remains under serious pressure, and the economic ripple effects of this are being felt everywhere and will continue to be.

“I’m not Jeffrey Epstein”, says Palm Beach Pete

For some reason this feels like a very SYSCA story.

A video went viral last week of a man driving a convertible in South Florida with white hair and a square jaw, and the internet immediately lost its mind because he looks, apparently, quite a lot like Jeffrey Epstein. The video was posted with the caption “Epstein is alive” and has since been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The man is not Jeffrey Epstein. He is Palm Beach Pete.

Hachette pulls horror novel Shy Girl after suspected AI use

Ok, so Shy Girl is a horror novel by American poet and fiction writer Mia Ballard, about a girl with severe OCD who agrees to be held captive as an affluent man’s “pet” to escape financial troubles. This sounds like a book that would be SO up my alley, which makes this whole story a lot more frustrating.

The timeline:

The book was self-published early last year, got picked up by Hachette’s UK imprint Wildfire, and was on course for a US release through their Orbit imprint, until Hachette pulled it. They pulled it the day after the New York Times approached them with evidence that the novel was AI-generated.

From what I can tell, this story originated with some suspicious readers who took to Reddit. An alleged book editor of twelve years posted about it, dissecting every detail, saying, “If it isn’t AI, she’s a terrible writer… Her writing is truly indistinguishable from an LLM.”

Then in January, Goodreads users piled on, with one commenter, also an editor, saying the book contained “not only all the hallmarks, but some specific repeated phrases that I’ve read in other ChatGPT works.” Then came a nearly three-hour YouTube video titled “I’m pretty sure this book is AI slop” that hit 1.2 million views. An AI detection firm found that 78% of the book is AI-generated.

Ballard has denied personally using AI, blaming an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version, saying, “My mental health is at an all-time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do.”

This is complicated, and sad, and is not the first time AI has been used in the writing process - in fact, a few people have done this, and some to great acclaim.

A woman named “Coral Hart,” a former Harlequin author turned self-proclaimed AI evangelist, used AI to write and publish more than 200 romance novels in a single year under 21 pen names, earning six figures. He got a New York Times profile out of it. His name is not ruined.

A man named Brett Schickler openly admitted to producing a 30-page illustrated children’s book using AI in a single day, immediately put it up for sale on Amazon, and announced he planned to make many more. Consequence: nothing.

Rie Kudan won Japan’s most prestigious literary prize and openly admitted part of it was written by AI. There was some hand-wringing, but the award was not revoked.

Mia Ballard’s name is, in her own words, ruined.

I know it’s not the point - the point is AI sucks when it comes to art - but I did feel like it was worthwhile pointing out the double standard 𓆩♡𓆪

A money podcast for the girlies!!!

If this is you ^^^ then you’re old enough to finally get a grip on your bank account. Let me help!

Introducing IOU (Some Money Education), a new podcast (and practical lil course!) that I created with The Curve and BNZ. It’s for anyone who feels like they should know how to manage money... but doesn’t. Because no one ever taught us.

We kick things off with a conversation about your ✨relationship with money✨ - what you inherited, what you’re avoiding, and why it all feels so HARD. I’m kinda like the guinea pig, and I spend the next few eps learning about:

• Budgeting

• Saving

• Investing

• And why I probably need an emergency fund (lol)

Listen to the first ep here!

There’s also a practical course that goes alongside the podcast, so you can follow along and actually put everything into practice as you learn, just like I did!

THE COURSE

BTW HAVE U SEEN THE NEW EMOJIS THAT ARE DROPPING SOON?

• Order our book Make It Make Sense here!

• Join our Book Club here!

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• Support the independent media you love by becoming a paid supporter here!

PS, if you wanna chat to me about anything I’ve written today, your latest crush, or if you just want a pen pal, reply to this email and we can be friends 𓆩♡𓆪

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Book club Abby here to introduce our April book club pick - a highly anticipated one with amazing reviews that we are SO excited to read with you ꩜♥

Now let me tell you more about The Correspondent…

Read more

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What you lose when you ‘beat’ depression

The other night, one of my friends and I were out for dinner, playing ‘We’re Not Really Strangers.’ For those who haven’t heard of the game, or perhaps only know the brand from their softcore philosophical Instagram posts, it’s one of those card games where players ask each other deep questions, and you either love it (me) or are deeply avoidant of it (me 10 years ago.)

One of the questions I pulled required us to say how we describe each other when the other person isn’t around. He said he’d had to do it recently and he’d said I was ‘eccentric’ which made me laugh because when I think of that word I think of a crazy woman who wears giant beads and colourful glasses and has unkempt hair and… oh. If the shoe fits, I guess.

This is how the game often goes: one moment you’re having a laugh over a glass of chilled red about how he’s a dickhead until you get to know him, and you’re ‘eccentric,’ and the next you’re delivering each other a two inch punch across the table.

I can’t even remember exactly what the question was that did it, but it was something along the lines of ‘what do you think I don’t see in myself?’ or ‘what do you think I’m going to regret?’

Whatever the prompt was, my friend said that he hopes I don’t regret some of the personal decisions I’ve made this year, because I’m seeming quite ‘numb’ about everything at the moment.

“I know your medication is the best thing for you, and honestly, the positives outweigh the negatives, but I just hope you don’t regret some of the choices you make while you feel this fearlessness.”

He’s the second person to tell me this lately.

A few months ago, I had a check-up with my doctor to talk about how my first year of antidepressants had gone. I told her I’ve never felt better, that this medication has changed my life, and she told me we could look at lowering my dose or getting me off them at some stage if I wanted to.

Reader, I do not want to do that.

Sure, the meds made me sweat more than usual, and my libido definitely feels the effect, but these are minor taxes. Taxes I am more than happy to pay.

I am happy to pay them because last year was the first year I felt stable enough to say yes to everything I wanted to without worrying about the dizzying comedown that used to follow. I no longer wondered how long the ‘good’ times would last. I lived in the moment more. I was genuinely so happy.

But, the other, slightly larger tax, is the numbness.

Numbness makes you careless, and it makes you care less. It turns down the dials of your empathy and your understanding of consequences. It’s scary how comfortable that can be.

Did you know that humans are the only animals to shed tears because of emotion?

I’ve always struggled to cry, so it’s not like my eyes were once rivers and are now dry as a bone. But there were things that I could do to conjure it up when I needed that sweet release. It would be tragic to let you know what these things once were, but they don’t work anymore, so you’re spared. I’m not gonna lie though, it would be really nice to cry, just because I’m a person.

Am I even a person?

‘Healing,’ in all its waking up in the morning-ness and being grateful for the sun-ness, and all that sweet, juicy, not wanting to die-ness, has made me selfish.

It’s like I spent so long not caring about myself that now I’m all I can think about. But this is no way for a person to live.

Am I even a person?

To be a person is to feel things. To ‘beat’ depression is to numb it out.

The issue is not that I’m unhappy. It’s not even that I’m worried, or that I feel bad. The issue is the lack of these feelings.

Because if, after all this self-awareness and feedback from my closest friends, I still choose numbness every time, what does that make me?

Am I even a person?