Cambridge Girl Talk

Support the LGBT+ community with your clicks, your views, your listens, your shares! Here’s a list of some of my favourite queer women and non-binary singers to diversify your listening. Hopefully there’s something for everyone here.

Christine and the Queens

Chris is a French singer-songwriter and releases songs in English and French who identifies as gender queer and pansexual. Her music has a pop feel with Janet Jackson as a big inspiration for her latest album. Her music is fun, sexy, and powerful.

Fun fact: I bought a blazer from Zara because she was modelling it. Moral of the story? I am a sucker for advertising and hot people in suits. But do I look fantastic in a blazer? Absolutely.

Song to start with: 5 dol

Iconic lyric: what if the obvious is suddenly so insane?

 

Clairo

Clairo is perfect for fans of soft indie rock. Her latest album Immunity is relaxed with plenty of songs about unrequited love and learning to be comfortable with the unknown. Have a watch of her genius video explaining the song Bags for more of an insight into what her music is about.

Song to start with: Softly

Iconic lyric: Sofia I know that you and I shouldn’t feel like a crime

 

King Princess

Anyone who knows me knows I literally cannot shut up about King Princess. I am pretty much convinced she is a goddess sent from gay heaven to taunt me. A New York native, she just released her first full album in October after releasing an EP in 2018. Her sound is fairly chilled with gorgeous vocals and lyrics that appeal to anyone who was an angsty teen and is now an angsty twenty-something. When does this angsty phase end by the way? Asking for a friend.

Song to start with: 1950

Iconic lyric: I rule with the velvet tongue, with my dress undone

 

Princess Nokia

Princess Nokia is hip-hop singer and rapper. She’s an intersectional feminist who is keen for women of colour to take up space. Her lyrics are always clever and range from rapping about her upbringing, to her sexuality, to the state of New York City. Her album 1992 Deluxe has a great mix of low-fi hip-hop tracks and others with a nostalgic 90s and early 2000s RnB feel. Whatever the track, her sound is powerful and sexy.

Song to start with: Tomboy

Iconic lyric: A nerdy girl with nymphomanic tendencies

 

St Vincent

Since starting her career touring with Sufjan Stevens in his band, St Vincent has released a wide range of experimental tracks. She takes inspiration from Kate Bush, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix. She’s said before that her music is so changeable as it reflects her life living with anxiety. Everything can change in a moment and she channels this in her songs. 

Song to start with: Masseducation

Iconic lyric: I can’t turn off what turns me on

 

Girl in Red

Girl in Red is another queen for those with angsty souls. Her indie-rock tracks are written, recorded and produced in her bedroom in Norway. Her song “we fell in love in October” is particularly lovely. She’s said in an interview that it’s about the joy of experiencing being in love with her first girlfriend after a long time of struggling to accept herself. Just shouting “my girl!” over and over again.

Song to start with: I’ll die anyway

Iconic lyric: you will be my world, my girl

 

Janelle Monáe

Once again, anyone who knows me knows I won’t stop forcing them to listen to Janelle Monáe. Her music is an eclectic mix of hip-hop, RnB, rock, and pop. Her most recent album is especially incredible lyrically, with plenty of comment on the state of the US at the moment. Older albums take a lot of influence from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” with the idea of the robotic woman as a recurrent theme.

Song to start with: Take a Byte

Iconic lyric: Hundred men telling me cover up my areolas, while they blocking equal pay, sipping on they coca-colas

 

Emily King

Somewhere between RnB, soul, and pop, everything Emily King has released absolutely bangs. Another New Yorker, she’s toured with John Legend, Floetry, Alicia Keys, and Erykah Badu. When I saw this queen live last year (pun unintended, flex absolutely intended) it was one of the best gigs I have ever been to. Her voice is so soulful and controlled.

Song to start with: Look at me now

Iconic lyric: always know when the last smile has been drawn, so you won’t have to give too much of yourself

 

Tracy Chapman

This list would not be complete without Tracey Chapman. Her androgynous voice is deeply soothing and her lyrics are powerfully emotional. Her song “Fast Car” is one of the greatest songs of the 20th century in my opinion. Her album titled “Tracy Chapman” from 1988 is great listening for a long car ride while you stare out of the window.

 

This article could have been a lot longer so if you made it this far and are still looking for more, here are some honourable mentions that I didn’t have time to write about: Frankie Cosmos (indie-rock), dodie (sad girl bangers), Tove Lo (pop/electronic), Hayley Kiyoko (pop), Shura (pop).

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant-” wrote Emily Dickinson, in one of the almost 2,000 poems, scribbled on scraps of paper, that were found in her bedroom upon her death. Born in the 1830s in Amherst, Massachusetts, it is said that in the last years of her life, she would rarely leave her room, and always dressed in white. She’s one of my favourite poets ever, if not the favourite, and so I greeted the news of Apple TV’s retelling of her life with some apprehension.

In those 4 walls of her bedroom, held in silence like a fly in amber and secluded from the hustle of revivalist 19th century New England, Emily Dickinson managed to crystallise the deepest range of human emotions – where it always seemed that she’d reached enlightenment and been cut off at the last minute by a dash. Apple TV, if their recent offering The Morning Show (streaming to mostly bad reviews) is anything to go by, are not characterised by subtlety.

Single words, earmarked by dashes, exclamation points – Emily Dickinson’s poetry channeled the telegraph decades before it was invented. “Some of the strangest, most fascinating poems ever written”, opens Apple TV’s Dickinson. This respect for its subject and her output reassured me at once, and it really does provide the emotional core to this dreamy and feverish retelling of what Dickinson’s life could have been.

To keep this spoiler free, I’ll just focus on the first episode. Hailee Steinfeld (of “Most Girls” fame) plays the titular poet,  while her complicated and strict father, Edward Dickinson, is played by an excellent if sometimes wooden Toby Huss. The opening scene sees Emily wake up, lights a candle and write, visibly shaken and twitching with inspiration, breathing heavily. It reminded me of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria remake, when the young girls are possessed by a witch’s spirit as they dance. Dancing is erotic and euphoric in Suspiria and so is writing in Dickinson – her sublimated emotions and anxieties poured forth into poets like “Wild nights – Wild nights!”, allegedly about her sister-in-law, Susan, here played by the sweet-faced Ella Hunt.

Dickinson (which has met with largely positive reviews) is a sprawling, ambitious take on a complicated figure. It’s certainly not what people expected – modern, funky, made for social media.  Emily says “bullshit” within the first five minures. Vaguely old-timey and quite beautiful graphics and drawings adorn the title sequences of each episode, while bass-heavy backing tracks punctuate scene changes, including A$AP Rocky and Skepta’s Praise The Lord . The dialogue is halfway between general period drama formality and a 2000s teen movie. “What up sis,” says Emily’s brother Austin (Adrian Enscoe) as he rides up to tell her he’s marrying her best friend and (in the show and probably in real life) secret lover. “Nothing bro, just chilling,” she replies, lackadaisical – it really is a show carried by its visuals and storyline, rather than dialogue.

But striking imagery was crucial to Dickinson’s poems too – just look at one of her most famous lines, “Because I could not stop for Death –/He kindly stopped for me –/The Carriage held but just Ourselves –/And Immortality.” Each episode is named after a poem, and it is this poem that the show opens with. Lines of Emily’s poems appear as she composes them, embossed in gold on tree trunks and water buckets.

It’s really a show about the power of escapism. Every night, Emily retreats inside her mind to drive around with Death (an excellently relaxed Wiz Khalifa) in a red velvet dress. In life, Dickinson wrote with feverish imagination, probing deep at death, repression and trauma, all the while ensconced in staid respectability. In Dickinson, Emily is powerful, supremely confident in her status as a misfit. Her poems here are not published anonymously – whereas real-life Dickinson was said to be afraid of being published, obsessed over mysterious men (writing a series of letters addressed to a mysterious “master”) but never finding real love. We’re so used to this idea of a life experienced through the mind, through letters, being “less than”. But in Dickison, Emily is young, and has not yet become a recluse.  As the show takes pains to stress, whatever life Emily built for herself, it was the one she wanted.

Many criticised the show online and on Instagram comment sections for the liberties it seemed to be taking with the truth. Emily didn’t run wild in orchards, or kiss women, or smoke opium, or even want her poems published! Films like Terrence Davies’ 2016 biopic, A Quiet Passion, portray Dickinson in a more expected light, a quiet, terrified woman, unprepared for the real world. But as Rachel Handler explored in a wonderful article for Vulture, it is really not so clear that Emily actually was such a homebody. Madeleine Olnek’s 2018 film Wild Nights With Emily turns that assumption on its head and showed Dickinson as a fun, queer (perhaps a lesbian), exciting and ramshackle woman. Apple Tv’s Dickinson does similar things; it teases out what’s already in the source material – a loud passion for life, for nature, a life deeply felt and experienced.

Her relationship with Susan is explored beautifully and is truly one of the shows’ greatest strengths. Meet me in the orchard, Emily asks in a letter dropped down in a basket. It’s  a beautifully shot scene, and a visual pleasure to watch them watching each other, framed by red apples, one dressed in white and the other in black. You’re not sure if they’re just friends – until Emily asks “Sue” to promise her she’ll always love her more than her brother, and they kiss.

This relationship has been theorised on extensively by literary scholars, but largely discarded by the academy, especially during the years of the “Lavender Scare” of the mid 20th century.  Martha Nell Smith and Ellen Louise Hart published a book in 1998 called Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, a compilation of Emily’s letters to Susan, undeniable expressions of romantic love. “I love you as dearly, Susie, as when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”

Dickinson really marries well the nods to the poet’s extensive literary output, with excellent TV. A particular success is Emily in a blood-red dress, leaving behind the virginal white for her nightly carriage ride with death. Later on, as Billie Eilish plays, discussions of the afterlife – “publicity is not the same thing as immortality” – reference one of her most famous poems: “The Carriage held but just Ourselves – /And Immortality.” The scene is charged as Emily – literally – flirts with Death, and the whole show drips with vivacity and sex. There’s competition, romantic and physical, for Sue’s affections by Emily and her brother, against the backdrop of Susan’s sister’s funeral – their youth is inevitably tinged with loss and death. Even as we see the preparation of a bountiful feast, the audience is treated to a close up of a chicken being killed.

Again, anyone reading Dickinson’s poetry would notice her fascination with death (“I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –”) but there’s the sexy, flirtatious side to her isn’t fictional. She  once mailed Kate Scott Turner a poem alongside a pair of garters. Kate Scott Turner is believed by many to have had a brief fling with Dickinson. She ended up living an openly gay life in Europe and is in the only existing daguerrotype of Dickinson

It’s by no means a perfect show, of course. The dialogue is often awkward, and there’s a weird interplay between archaic and modern language: lots of “I shall” followed by “I’m pretty psyched about it”. It seems to be a point about age – the younger characters use slang, while the parents are stilted and formal. But it doesn’t quite work. There’s slightly too many slick gimmicks, it’s a bit too instagram-generation in its aesthetics – it needs more soul, something Dickinson’s poems never lacked.

The greatest value in Dickinson is the way it reminds us of the power of our own imagination to soothe and to fulfill us – something we should all keep in mind in the midst of Week 5. Don’t limit yourself to writing what you know, write what you feel. Emily Dickinson may have lived out the end of her life in one room, but she travelled in her mind. Vivid emotions, despair and trauma run deep in Dickinson’s poems; “‘It was not Death, for I stood up” is a delicate meditation of what we are capable of surviving. But there is also a deep lust for life –  “I taste a liquor never brewed/From tankards scooped in pearl”.

The show as a result seems to be more about what Emily Dickinson’s life could have been, if it had been more fair. It’s an  assumption that in society as it is today, there is more to offer, to “fearless” women like Emily. She “dwells in Possibility”, as she wrote herself, and so does Apple TV’s Dickinson.

I love podcasts. I spend more time listening to them than I do my lecturers. Everyone has heard of ‘The Guilty Feminist’ but have you listened to these? Here are some top picks of podcasts run by women and non-binary people to spice up your walk to and from lectures this week.

1. The Receipts Podcast

A podcast providing a space for women of colour speaking openly and honestly about relationships, friendships, and the issues they encounter in daily life. Have a listen to episode 71 for an interview with Cambridge graduates Ore and Chelsea (authors of Taking up Space). This is “unadulterated girl talk with no filter” and it’s a lot of fun.

2. Secret Dinosaur Cult

Secret Dinosaur Cult is a podcast run by non binary comedians Sofie Hagen and Jodie Mitchell. This is a cult where you will be offered forgiveness for the worst things you have done, and Jodie and Sofie will tell you about when they’ve been terrible people. They explore their childhood trauma and abandonment issues through the medium of dinosaurs. This podcast will make you laugh, cry and you might learn a thing or two about dinosaurs too.

3. No Country for Young Women

A podcast from the BBC about the experiences of young women of colour in the UK. Hosts Sadia Azmat and Monty Onanuga are joined by special guests to discuss topics such as culture, motherhood, racism, and sexuality.

4. Just Between Us

Just Between Us is a comedy podcast hosted by Alison Raskine and Gaby Dunn. They take listener questions, bring on guests, and play hypothetical games such as “would you stay with this cheater?” and “Are you a terrible parent?” As well as the comedy, they also have some frank conversations about mental health and sexuality (Gaby is bisexual and non-monogamous and suffers from bipolar disorder and Alison has OCD).

5. Made of Human

Another one by Sofie Hagen. In this podcast, Sofie interviews guests and their gentle questioning tends to bring out intense and emotional conversation. Topics often include fat activism, feminism, and trauma. A particular favourite episode of mine is with Susan Calman, where the two of them talk about their struggles with depression, and Susan talks about her gender expression and going on Strictly Come Dancing as a lesbian.

6. Bad with Money

Another podcast by Just Between Us host Gaby Dunn. In Bad with Money, Gaby talks about the struggles of dealing with money as a millennial and talks to activists and financial experts. Her description of the show sums it up best:

“Feelings, finance, and the f*cking system. Comedian and New York Times best-selling author Gaby Dunn (aka America’s Deadbeat Sweetheart) unapologetically examines the intersection of finances and social justice. Every week, Gaby brings a queer, feminist, unabashedly radical point of view to conversations with journalists, politicians, activists, and fellow deadbeats.”

7.  Call Your Girlfriend

A show by long distance best friends Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow. Topics include body hair, pronouns, activism, race, and disability. They believe in women connecting and speaking out against structural inequality.

“We are unapologetic feminists who support everyone’s right to autonomy over their own body. We believe that friendship—particularly among women and femme-identified people—is a defining, important, and powerful relationship, and that conversations among friends can be the source of incredible social and political power. Women sharing their experiences with each other is a potentially life-changing act. It’s also really fucking fun.”

8. Sex Power Money

To go with her new book Sex Power Money, Sara Pascoe has released eight podcast episodes where she talks to people related to the sex industry to demystify it for the average listener. Topics include stripping, sex work and being a sugar baby. This podcast allows those that are so often talked about, to talk for themselves.

Is muting people rude, or is it the only way to healthily manage our social media personas?

In Cambridge’s fast-paced world, it can feel like people’s social media does nothing but sparkle. There’s been a lot written in Cambridge about imposter syndrome, to the extent that I’m almost tired of discussing it now – but it is true. Every day it feels like there’s another post about a play, or a society, or an academic achievement.

Sometimes, you just may not want to see those posts. You could unfollow them, but that would likely lead to highly fraught social situations – everyone takes offence at being unfollowed.

And that, my friends, is where muting comes in.

So what is it? I’m going to focus on Instagram here, not least because it’s interesting to consider what muting means in the context of other recent-ish innovations, like the Close Friends stories. You can choose to unfollow people on Facebook, but, honestly, who uses Facebook anymore? Instagram has taken the blue behemoth’s place as the internet’s diary, and it’s where I personally mute people, and where most people do. You press a button on their profile that makes their feed (their posts, their stories, or both) essentially disappear. No one knows they’ve been muted so, no hard feelings.

Why do we do it? Muting doesn’t happen for negative reasons alone. I’ve muted people because they post too much, or I flaked on a commitment and feel guilty when I see their posts. This is precisely why muting is interesting, psychologically. You can still love a person, but feel distanced from them, and not really want to see their content daily, or their 15 identical shots of dappled light hitting a river (guilty).

Muting people can be temporary, too, and temporary mutes can be motivated by jealousy. While I was still trying to sort out an internship mid-summer, I had to take some time out of seeing grad-scheme stories on people’s instagrams. It takes a while for me to mute someone, but not for everyone. One friend I asked for this column, joked, “I have a one strike rule…one dud post and they’re out”. Muting can be, then, a Mari Kondo-ing of your feed, if you feel your feed doesn’t spark the joy that Mark Zuckerberg intended it to.

It’s the same idea as Close Friends story – a way of exposing your truest and, sometimes, worst self. There you post a private side  to yourself, often of a confessional nature, featuring discussions about your sex life, ugly pictures, updates on mental health. It’s a side to you that you’re not necessarily comfortable exposing. Muting, however, is more often about keeping FOMO at bay, and controlling the amount and the quality of posts that stream our way. I think it’s born out of social media exhaustion – you know that feeling when you’ve scrolled a bit too long and you’re looking for something but you don’t know what? For me, it feels like eating something sweet for too long. It’s too many nice pictures – I get toothache from the saccharine smiles.

Do the different gradations of muting make a difference? What kind of relationship do you have with someone you only mute stories from, and not posts, or vice versa, or both?

Another friend, when asked, said it did make a difference. “Often I just mute stories. The main benefit for me is being able to keep the semblance of being on good terms with people at home (that I’ve drifted from), because actually unfollowing them would be too fractious”. Politeness often dictate that you can’t unfollow someone you have a fraught but civil relationship with, even if you’d rather not see their posts. To unfollow is tantamount to an official friendship end, and not everyone is ready for that.

What’s striking, then, is that these updates clearly go against what social media is allegedly about – keeping up with people. It’s a tacit understanding that we do want more private lives than our follower count may suggest. It’s funny – the internet can be characterised as some entity devoid of humanity, changing social norms, but I find it’s deeply run by unspoken codes of human interaction.

We’re moving towards a social media world where you can increasingly narrow your social circle, in apps built ostensibly for widening it to the entire world. There is a similar rationale behind private instagrams (‘finstas’ or ‘spams’). We’ve gone from anonymous chat rooms in the early 200s, to an emphasis everywhere on “curating” your online experience.

This all may seem microscopic in importance, but these apps do play a significant part in how we interact with each other in daily life, especially “millennials” and the generations below. Their effect on the etiquettes of managing human relationships are important to consider.

To conclude this ode to muting, it really does seem to allow us to manage relationships and our social media personas better in this digital age. Before Instagram and Facebook you could just drift apart and, I don’t know, not follow their MySpace anymore. But today’s internet is a far more constant onslaught of content. With friends from home, we may feel alienated from them, having changed so much at uni. Feeling cut off from people is painful, but we live in complex networks of friendships as the social animals we are. Unfollowing is a far more definite statement, when a silent, pacifying mute does the trick.

I read an article on i-D about close friends stories, that had a similar conclusion. One of the people spoken to said, “It gives me control over my digital self in a space where so much of me is exposed.” Letting go is great, but control (when it comes to social media) might be better.

By Atlanta Tsiaoukkas 

‘MOODS and NOODS’, an exhibition by PIN_COLLECTIVE, is at the new Motion Sickness gallery space, in the unlikely location of Lion Yard. The uninspiring streets of cafes and shops, in fact, makes the gallery space appear inviting to those who love anything millennial, with flashes of pink and a gaudy, cereal-topped waffle (EJ Montgomery) as the window display. The space is part of an ongoing project by Cambridge School of Art graduates, Arabella Hilfiker, Denise Kehoe and Eleanor Breeze to stimulate the currently quite dull art scene in Cambridge, allowing experimental, young artists to be celebrated in dedicated spaces. So far, this venture can be considered successful, as the ‘MOODS and NOODS’ exhibition has meant that, whilst many in Cambridge feel the need to get on a train to see new art, for a couple of weeks, it is only a short walk away. 

The exhibition clearly explored ‘millennialhood’, and if this concept can be defined by one feature it is nostalgia. News outlets regularly decry the younger generations for an ‘obsession’ with nostalgia, often with a further comment shaming us for missing the past when we have it so good now. With ‘MOODS and NOODS’, PIN_COLLECTIVE have fully embraced the millennial stereotype, with all artists touching on themes of nostalgia, whether it be paintings inspired by childhood cereals (EJ Montgomery), child-like collages (Lily Rankine), or a princess themed play tent (Holly Rose Jackson). However, unlike many artists who today work with nostalgia, the pieces fortunately did not feel trite, rather, there was a sense of pushing boundaries, exploring, perhaps, what is hidden behind young people’s love of nostalgia. In particular, this can be said of the larger-than-life paintings of cereal packaging, which, though taking such direct inspiration from advertising is relatively common in the art world at the moment, felt like an appropriate acknowledgement of a collective millennial childhood, tainted by excessively bright colours and capitalistic endeavours. 

There was also an underlying sense of anxiety, evoked by the pieces themselves and the experience in the gallery space. Much of the work, such as the the various sculptures, were scattered throughout the floorspace of the gallery, risking being knocked by passersby, immediately creating a nervousness amongst viewers, especially as, usually, artwork is kept at a reverential distance. Considering the familiar content of many of these pieces, it feels only right that we almost slip on plastic bags from the corner shop and trip over abandoned cardboard boxes, just as we did as children. Even more anxiety-provoking was a specific sculpture by Gwen Senhui Chen, in which the piece dripped a cement-like substance directly on the floor – as the sculpture dripped, the floorspace reduced (it was much harder getting out of the gallery than getting in). These physical choices complemented the work brilliantly, such as Holly Rose Jackson’s film (found within the princess tent), which was described by one viewer as ‘American Headspace’, referencing the manic yet calmingly repetitive and meditative voice over. The exhibition was full of contrasts between millennial colourful childhood and the stress-inducing world we live in now. 

The nostalgia of this exhibition is seemingly both joyful and distressed. The ethos of PIN is ‘our interests include…pretty colours…mocking you…mocking ourselves.’, and this very much comes through in their self-referential and nervous composition. This is definitely not just an exhibition exploring nostalgia, but one which explores corrupted nostalgia. The work reminds you of when your innocence was questioned – when you accidentally saw a porn ad whilst trying to watch a cartoon; when you realised that cereal boxes were colourful and exciting purely to make you ask your mum to buy it. 

If just to support two young collectives, one with the aim to make Cambridge a great city for art, you should go to this exhibition. You should also attend regardless of your loyalty to the art world – it is a thought-provoking, stimulating exhibition which will keep you thinking long after you’ve visited. 

17th October – 3rd November 2019 

15 Petty Cury, Lion Yard, Cambridge CB2 3NE 

11am – 4pm, Friday to Sunday. 5pm – 8pm Wednesday 

Header artwork by Corinne Seymour

I’d thought for a while on what to start off my Girl Talk column with – a deep dive into the Caroline Calloway scandal is always tempting, of course. But, seeing my newsfeeds covered in posts about Mental Health Awareness Day, I felt compelled to write about something which everyone in this university talks about constantly, it seems: work.

It’s a funny word to use, for our constant succession of deadlines, readings and worksheets, and can lead to confusion. If I use it at home, with friends not at university at the moment, they’re puzzled, and say they thought we weren’t allowed at part-time job at Cambridge. Oh no, I reassure them, this isn’t something you can clock out of, at the end of the day- there’s always something else you could be doing, another book to read or more essays to do. Term has just started and I already feel like I’m behind, fielding emails, ramming a summer’s worth of dissertation reading into a few days, all the while nurturing the friendships that keep me going.

Anxiety has been a part of my life at least since the age of 16, and it has always been connected to my academic performance. Receiving an email from a supervisor can leave me terrified to open Hermes, and the way my heart beats right before my history supervisions could probably power the Industrial Revolution. Work and mental health in Cambridge are inextricable, and it’s an even more pernicious issue when counselling and mental health adjustments are underfunded and inaccessible.

Now, a few caveats. I don’t mean for one second to imply it’s a harder life to be in my cushy (but expensive! #cuttherent) Medwards accommodation reading about the early Japanese state than working a full time job for minimum wage. Also, plenty of people here may have a perfectly healthy relationship with their work. In which case: keep on reading and shake your head in despair.

I realise I am by no means the first person to say Cambridge’s approach to academic work is unhealthy. It feels like fairly common knowledge – we’ve all seen people pull constant all nighters, work after a night out, and the atmosphere in college during exam term is, well, very particular.

The supervision system, I think, actually makes this worse – we find ourselves in fairly intense academic relationships with adults who frequently have no tact or sense of emotional intelligence. Stories about supervisors making people cry are a dime a dozen. I also feel that issues of cultural capital come into play here: if you’re used to the supervision system because your school had a similar level of one-to-one attention, you may not be as intimidated by the prospect of asking for an extension, for help, or just saying ‘no’ for one week. This will then be compounded for people of colour and otherwise marginalised students who don’t see themselves in the academics they’re supervised by. As women, we’re socialised also to please others, to be ‘polite’ and ‘nice’ and ask for, rather than state, our needs.

Here’s what I want to say: if you struggle completing all your work and you feel like an imposter – you’re not alone! The feeling of being crept up on by work is felt by everyone around you, I can assure you. I scalded myself quite badly with boiling tea three weeks ago so the start of my time in Cambridge was marked by A&E visits and some reduced mobility – especially frustrating when the things you have to do are far away.

Second, you really, genuinely, do not have to do as much work as they say. A tip for humanities students: not every essay has to be done, so be smart and figure out what topics you can avoid revising. Without meaning to sound like an HSPS student, deadlines are social constructs. I handed in my first essay here 6 hours late, which very much set the tone for my academic career in general. I think I’ve handed in two essays on time in my time here, and it literally does not matter. Prioritise yourself, your way of working and your mental health.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what has really helped me is to think about self-care and leisure as deliberate acts. As Audre Lorde wrote in A Burst of Light and Other Essays “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”. It’s a beautiful phrase, as is all of Lorde’s writing. Of course, Lorde was writing as a black lesbian feminist in America, and her work is very much directed at the experience of black women. She expressed in her succinct prose something that’s at the heart of what I want to write about today. Caring for yourself in a world where mental health care has been slashed by cuts, where people wait for weeks for appointments at the University Counselling Service or the Disability Resource Centre, or never receive funding for private counselling their college offered them, and   creating spaces of care and community amongst your friends, in this space, does feel radical.

Basically, a message for everyone: you can take time for yourself. You’re not a productivity machine. Have little rebellions, and hold on to them when Week Five hits.

This summer felt different from pretty much every summer I’ve had, mostly because I made the effort to spend time alone, and give myself space. Space to think, breathe and act. Not to paraphrase Virginia Woolf too much, but when you have that space for yourself, it turns out, the life epiphanies come thick and fast.

Summers are a tricky thing. At least for me, they’ve always been fraught with peaks and troughs of hope and disappointment – I’d start the summer willing this to be the year I return in September fitter, prettier, somehow cooler only to face the disappointment come late August that that’s not, in fact, how life works.

In comparison, summers as a child were almost violently joyful things. I lived in Spain until I was about 13, and the thing I most remember about my summers there are the colours. Blue, mainly, obviously. There’s something about that never-ending turquoise sky of mid-July when clouds seem an impossibility. But also the bleached white of long sleepy Augusts in Madrid, when everyone else who could had left the city. When we moved to a little village nestled in the Spanish sierra, my memories are coloured with the golden green and dark woods of the mountains. You’d wake up to the sound of a donkey braying, and there’d be nothing to do but swim and sunbathe.

That’s all fantastic when you’re 8 and anxiety hasn’t hit you like a ton of bricks yet, but once it does, I’ve always found too much solitude to be counterproductive. We still go back every summer since we moved to the UK, and I’ve spent a lot of my teenage summers simmering with stress over a vague sense of not doing things right. Not sure what things those were, but they were there and they were not being done right. Summers away from my Cambridge friends can be especially apprehensive, considering I’m surrounded by the loud presence of my 3 siblings, my parents, my maternal grandparents and whatever extended family wants to drop in that day.

So, I began to seek out quiet corners of my garden, or solitary walks under the shadow that the mountain range cast on the village once the sun began to set behind it. It sounds very basic, but for someone not used to consciously taking care of myself, those 20 minutes of yoga every morning began to be a little treasure. This also meant taking care of my body as a physical thing – sport! Exercise! A revelation! I stretched, I swam 20 laps a day, I downloaded a workout app. I’d always hated sports, but there’s an undeniable magic in scratching out time to Not Think. You feel the burn, the sweat, but your mind goes quiet. Maybe the #LiveLaughLove peddlers have a point.

Doing more activity meant I slept easier, and crucially, had more focus to sit down and read. I’d gone from reading voraciously, countless books every month, when I was 10, and then as academics hit hard during my teenage years, my reading had dwindled to a point where during my first year at Cambridge I read maybe one book all year. I read three just this summer, which was a big deal for me. These were a collection of Joan Didion essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the Stephen King-esque Summer of Night by Dan Simmons, and Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee. Didion’s lush, verbose descriptions of her native, nostalgia infused Southern California are exactly what you need when you’re feeling morose on a summer evening, in case you were wondering.

At the end of the summer, I took my first trip to the USA, where my father is from, to do dissertation research in Richmond, Virginia. I was still reeling from the end of year-long relationship the week before, and felt cast away, tense and afraid, knowing where my anxiety could take me in stressful situations alone. It felt like a revelation to realise that I could bring the healthy, solitary habits I’d developed over the summer with me anywhere. After one stressful day at the freezing air-conditioned archives, I took myself to see a free exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. I wandered around the 21^st century art rooms – large rocks stuccoed to the wall, technicolour ribbons creeping from one wall the other, all meaning and form broken down- and planned the dinner I was going to have at a nearby Cuban restaurant. That was my first meal at a restaurant alone. It’s somehow taken me 21 years to realise there’s a real joy to be had in solitude, but I’m glad I got there.