Coming soon

...challenging to share myself in a way I have never done before.

I’ve had an online presence since about 2011, starting with blogging and writing posts. In 2015, I added creating video content alongside my writing. So, sharing my thoughts and ideas isn’t new to me, yet, setting up Jay Likes Red on this platform made me pause when I was asked to choose a primary and secondary category. I didn’t know how to categorise or define what I’m doing here. It’s not really about the topics or themes I’ll explore - those will shift as my interests do. I’m here for the process itself, for how I express and share the thoughts and ideas that move through me.

I’m not just talking about the medium - whether it’s writing, talking, podcasting, or videos. I want to share in a way that reflects more of the chaos and process inside me. There's this societal expectation for everything to be logical, rational, linear, mechanistic, material, reductionist. Yet, when I look within, that's not how I think or feel. How much of me gets lost in translation when I try to fit that mould? How many of us are left out of society’s narratives by those same standards?

In trying to introduce this Substack, I’ve struggled to do it in a simple, straightforward way. I’m starting to realise that maybe it’s ridiculous to expect myself to be able to. What I’m really saying here is: I’m a human being, just like you.

I’ve done some astoundingly stupid things in my life, and I’ve done some amazingly great things too. For some people, I embody everything that’s wrong with the world. For others, I provide hope and inspiration. I’ve given myself too much credit for doing so little, and at other times, I haven’t given myself enough credit for what it took to do the things I did. That’s true for all of us.

I’m at a point where I believe we can’t resolve our differences unless we first acknowledge what we have in common - our shared humanity. What does it mean to be human? I, like many others, have changed so much over the last four to five years. The voices and people who once gave me hope and grounded me in those early COVID years - many of them concern me now. I’m not saying I disagree with their points or arguments. Maybe it’s their approach that’s part of the problem, because it reminds me of how my own approach became a problem for me.

I feel as though we’ve stopped seeing each other as fellow human beings. Oh, stories are still there, but now we base them more on what we perceive as right or wrong, good or bad. We fill in the gaps in simplistic ways based on our own preferences - who we agree or disagree with. Our interactions with each other have become so shallow, they’re almost meaningless. We live in a world ruled by algorithms, preferences, and convenience. Sadly, this dynamic has also impacted the way we relate to one another.

One of the greatest losses is that the louder some of us shout and proclaim, the quieter others get. Many people like me - ones who overcome their own reticence and dare to share online or in person - claim to speak for the silent majority. I know I’ve felt as much. But only the silent can speak for themselves. Only we can tell our own stories. I don’t mean we all need to start a Substack or a podcast. We can engage with each other - be it on social media or in day-to-day life - in a way that leaves room for a greater awareness of who we are. We can make room for each other’s stories. I think we begin by acknowledging that there is so much more to each of us than we will ever realise.

We have these extremes where even the most well-meaning of us are just lost in our own worlds, isolated from everyone else, while equally well-meaning people impose ideas and changes with little to no self-awareness. I don’t know what the answers to our challenges are, but I know we must figure them out together.

I’m not against individualism, nor am I for full-blown collectivism. Pluralism? No, not that either. It’s hard to define. I’ve been exploring what it means to be me, and I want to connect with others doing the same. I want to see people - really see them - not just judge what they think or do, or agree or disagree with their justifications, adding my own in a clever way.

I have a lot of dreams, a lot of visions of the future. But I’m not here to make a case for them. I’m having an experience; you’re having an experience. What do those experiences mean, and how do they intersect? Before we can act cohesively and constructively, don’t we need to understand why we’re doing it? Don’t we need to understand the context that drives change?

In a world of sound bites and clickbait titles, where you have to make an impact in the first few seconds - I don’t work that way. We need time, dialogue, and connection to truly know each other. So, I’ll be here, experimenting, unlearning all the ways I’ve translated and made myself more palatable for the world - as if the real me was too much or not enough. I don’t care about avoiding offence or conflict - I’ve always been good at debating and defending my ideas. But I don’t want to fight anymore. I want to be open and vulnerable, even if it means getting hurt. Winning those old battles in the way we have feels more and more as though it makes losers of us all.

It’s not that I want to be offensive or cause conflict - I don’t. But I’m not afraid of it either. More importantly, I don’t see why being honest and vulnerable about ourselves would naturally lead to those outcomes. I won’t hide behind words to avoid what’s inevitable in life.

There’s a quote from Kazuo Ishiguro that’s almost cliché to use in an intro like this, but there’s a reason it’s so frequently quoted. This is what we’re doing here:

“But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?”

[Song: Hanumankind – ‘Big Dawgs’]