Weekly Wrapped #10: Write, Bleed, Yearn, Repeat
musings on straight-girl nails, jazz-induced horniness, and one very bad film
In case you missed it, check out my most recent post about stealing my brother’s clothes:
This week’s wrapped includes:
A failed bisexual awakening
A half-baked film review
A spliff, a ten-mile run, and a bit of existential yearning
🌎 Where I Am
Still in London, mostly holed up at home — bleeding, writing, cooking, yearning over a completely unavailable man, and laying belly-up in the garden like some kind of overripe fruit. My friend came over and we smoked a spliff out back, talked about sex and dating and pregnancy and motherhood and money and embodiment. I felt like a teenager again, minus the angst and with much better skincare.
The next morning, we ran ten miles together — Green Park to Hyde Park to St. James, around Westminster and along the south side of the Thames until we hit Battersea Power Station.
Afterward, she interviewed me for her Substack Her Pace, and I tried to put words to how movement and endurance and marathon training has made me feel more alive and in tune with my body.
📖 What I’m Reading
Women by Chloe Caldwell, a novella I picked up thinking it might unlock some dormant bisexual longing in me. Alas, I remain helplessly straight — not by choice, but by the sheer weight of my long straight-girl nails and complete lack of interest in doing anything but “receiving” from another woman.
Some would refer to this as being heteroflexible. I would rather not be called anything at all.
🎧 What I’m Listening To
“Begin The Beguine” by Artie Shaw has me in a chokehold this week. It’s 1938 big band jazz, and somehow it’s fueling my writing, my feelings, and my hips. No, big band horns wouldn’t usually have me gyrating across the room, but this week has been weird, so here we are.
One minute I’m weeping into a Google Doc, the next I’m grinding alone in the kitchen like a lost time traveler. I don’t make the rules.
📺 What I’m Watching
I’m bringing this section back only to say I just finished Celine Song’s new film The Materialists and I am utterly bereft. Song’s first film, Past Lives, was a cinematic gut punch — luminous, devastating, and quiet. The Materialists felt like its disinterested cousin who showed up to the function, said nothing, and left with a guy who works in finance. I’m bitter. So, naturally, I’m writing a Substack essay about it. Stay tuned.
✍️ What I’m Writing
I am heads-down on my feature story for Ori Magazine about female creatives and entrepreneurs in Tunis. I leave for Tunisia on August 11, and my deadline for this story is August 15. Needless to say, I have to get a lot of the writing done before I get there.
How does one write a travel story about a place before they go there? Well, in this case, I’ve already been to Tunis. Now, I’m focused on conducting interviews across time zones to capture how these women are reclaiming space — through art, fashion, food and community.
I’m writing what I’m calling the skeleton of the story, and will get the meat once I arrive.
One highlight from interviews this week, was my delightful conversation with Baraa Ben Boubaker, a Tunis-based designer whose work is rooted in slow fashion and ancestral techniques. She blends handwoven fabrics, natural dyes, and traditional Tunisian silhouettes with a pared-down aesthetic that resists spectacle.
💭 What I’m Thinking About
How much we hold in our hips.
The other day, I was riding the intoxicating high of some spicy text messages. Fifteen minutes later, I was weeping on my bedroom floor. I’d gotten my period. I was avoidant. Confused. I had what my friends and I call “scrambled egg brain.”
In these moments, movement is usually the best medicine.
So, I laid down, feet planted, and started doing glute bridges. Hips to the sky. And then, it happened. Was it an orgasm or an exorcism? Hard to say. Possibly both. Possibly always both.
My hips stayed pulsing in the air. My whole body trembled. I started crying and laughing and grunting. I felt like a wild animal.
The hips are one of the primary places the body stores unprocessed emotion and trauma. This isn’t just spiritual woo — it’s physiological. The psoas, a deep hip flexor muscle, is directly connected to the fight-or-flight response. When we’re under stress or in survival mode, the psoas contracts to protect us. And if we don’t release the tension later, it builds. Over time, stored tension in the hips can show up as anxiety, numbness, or unexplained grief.
And, y’all wonder why I am constantly dancing around borrowed kitchen shaking my ass and hips?
😌 What Small Pleasures Am I Enjoying
The ever-present chatter of my women. Though to call it a small pleasure feels dishonest — it is, quite literally, the pleasure of my life. We are always talking. I have a woman in every time zone.
Karen, in Tunisia, wakes up with me — same time zone, different world entirely. We start our mornings in tandem: What deranged sext did you receive overnight? Is your ADHD ruining your life or just your morning? Did he take you on the date? Why do we always want what we can’t have?
Then there’s Madi, early riser in Boston, who always beats the rest of the East Coast to my inbox. Any word from The Cut? How’s the running? This triathlon thing is kind of great, right? Why are men the way they are?
And like clockwork, when it strikes 9 a.m. in New York, Joanna appears: boooooooobie, how’s your heart? Thus begins another day of being in constant connection with my sister — a part of my heart outside my body.
When I start spiraling about why some man won’t text me back, I redirect my attention. To my women. And my god, do they deliver. A woman need only find her women to remember: we never needed a man for a dopamine rush. We’ve had group chats all along.
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