I Miss Caring Less

I haven’t published a proper piece of writing since the 2nd of May.

Part of me is annoyed at myself for neglecting Substack for two months, but I’ll cut myself some slack. It isn’t that I haven’t been thinking about writing. Writing is, and probably always will be, a necessity for me. The problem is that I haven’t been giving myself the space to create. Instead, I became obsessed with finding the idea. The niche. The essay nobody else has written.

Every time I begin typing, it somehow feels as though someone has already said it.

I’ve spent evenings at my kitchen table with a notebook, filling pages with the things I genuinely care about. Fashion. Music. Individuality. But as soon as I land on something, my head fills with a thousand competing voices. Every argument immediately arrives with its counterargument. Every observation feels pre-empted by someone else’s hot take. Before I’ve even finished a paragraph, I’m already imagining the comments section.

I change my mind almost daily about the endless stream of fashion gurus behind screens declaring what’s chic, what’s over, what’s “in” and what’s “out”. Sometimes I think it’s playful and genuinely insightful. Other days it feels painfully performative. I know because I’m guilty of it too.

We live in a strange moment where every opinion, reference and archive is available within seconds. You’d think that would produce more original ideas, more curiosity, more experimentation. Instead, it often feels as though we’re endlessly recycling the same conversations, just with different fonts and different faces.

The internet has become brilliant at helping us recognise patterns. It’s becoming much worse at helping us think.

Maybe that’s because we’ve become spectators of ourselves. Before we say something, we imagine how it will be received. Before we get dressed, we imagine how it will be interpreted. Before we write, we wonder whether somebody cleverer has already beaten us to it. Somewhere along the way, creating became secondary to anticipating the audience.

The kind of writing I love isn’t writing that tries to be right. It’s writing that tries to understand something. Messy, contradictory, personal writing. Writing that changes its mind halfway through because the writer actually discovered something while they were writing it.

Somewhere along the way, I think I forgot that’s what I’m actually good at. Not pretending to have all the answers, but writing my way towards one. The pieces people have connected with most were never the ones where I tried to sound clever. They were the ones where I dropped the act and wrote from my own perspective.

So here I am again, doing just that.

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In usual fashion, I have gone through some pretty big life changes recently.

At the end of last year I decided to quit my corporate fashion job and leap into a world of chaos I know much better: agency life.

Yep. I swapped a secure pay cheque, brain-numbing meetings and the slow loss of my soul for the excitement and unpredictability of a modelling agency. Two months in, I have zero regrets.

It’s reminded me why I fell in love with fashion in the first place. Not the spreadsheets, not the endless optimisation meetings or quarterly targets, but the people. The unpredictability. The stories. One minute you’re chasing a photographer for test images, the next you’re sending a model to a casting that could completely change their career.

It’s chaotic, occasionally exhausting, and there are moments where I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. But I’ve realised I’d much rather feel overwhelmed because something matters than comfortably numb because it doesn’t.

I also moved back to London.

Fabio and I now live together in Camden, which has been one of the best decisions I’ve made. Even if he still works until God knows what time every evening, there’s something strangely comforting about knowing he’ll eventually walk through the front door. Living with someone isn’t always about spending every minute together. Sometimes it’s just about knowing someone else has a key.

Camden, though, is the real love story.

We’re right in the middle of it. Loud, messy, occasionally ridiculous, and exactly how I hoped it would be. Every time I walk down the High Street I feel as though I’m wandering through layers of London’s past. Punk kids, tourists, market traders, musicians hauling amps, office workers trying to get home. It’s a strange mix that somehow still works.

I’m not entirely convinced Fabio would write quite such a romantic review, which, in fairness, he has every right not to.

Camden isn’t a place that refused to grow up.

It’s a place that refused to become self-conscious.

Not in an immature way. More like Peter Pan refusing to leave Neverland because he’d already seen enough of the adult world to know it wasn’t quite all it promised to be.

There are ghosts everywhere. Old gig posters fading into brickwork. Record shops that somehow survived streaming. Artists still making work long after the world stopped paying attention. Homelessness is part of that landscape too. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t poetic. It’s brutal. But it’s impossible to separate from the streets themselves.

To people passing through, Camden probably looks like a caricature of its former self. A tourist attraction selling rebellion on tea towels.

Live here, though, and something else reveals itself.

Beneath all the clichés there’s still a quiet refusal to move on. Not because people don’t know the world has changed. Almost the opposite.

It reminds me of that line from Gnarls Barkley: “It wasn’t because I didn’t know enough, I just knew too much.”

That’s Camden.

A place that has seen enough versions of itself to be sceptical of the next one. A place that still believes, perhaps foolishly, perhaps beautifully, that music, art and a little bit of madness are worth holding onto, even while the rest of the city rushes somewhere else.

Camden feels like the morning after the greatest party London ever threw.

I wonder if that’s why Camden feels so familiar.

There are parts of me that still resist the tidy version of adulthood. I don’t always want to be agreeable or predictable.

I sometimes wonder whether adulthood is less about becoming yourself and more about becoming increasingly aware of yourself. Somewhere along the way we stop asking, What do I feel? and start asking, How will this come across?

Children don’t have that editor. They dance badly. They make terrible drawings and proudly stick them on the fridge. They tell you exactly what they’re thinking because expression is their default setting.

Adults become brilliant editors.

We soften opinions before we’ve spoken them. We laugh a little quieter. We wear the safer outfit. We rewrite the text three times before sending it. We become so fluent in anticipating other people’s reactions that we slowly lose touch with our own.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t write for two months.

It wasn’t that I’d run out of ideas. I’d simply become too aware of how they might be received.

We say we value authenticity, but I’m not convinced we do.

We love authenticity once it’s become art.

We applaud musicians for writing painfully honest songs. We frame Sylvia Plath quotes on Pinterest. We tell young creatives to “be vulnerable.”

But vulnerability in ordinary life is much harder to tolerate.

Tell someone you’ve written a novel about heartbreak and they’ll call you brave.

Admit over dinner that your heart is broken and suddenly everyone starts changing the subject.

Art gives honesty a frame.

Real life doesn’t.

Maybe that’s why Camden still feels alive.

Not because it’s trapped in the past. Not because every busker on the High Street is destined to become the next Amy Winehouse.

But because it’s one of the few places I’ve lived where expression still seems to arrive before presentation. People still make things because they have to. They still dress for themselves. They still care, loudly and unapologetically, about things the rest of the world has decided are impractical.

Perhaps that’s why it feels like home.

Not because I want to escape adulthood.

Because I’m still trying to work out whether growing up really has to mean becoming a smaller, quieter version of yourself.

Holly xx