How to be a potato

Fixion lessons from February

Mar 01, 2025

Well, February can fuck off now, can’t it?

We’re 59 days into 2025 and I have been ill for nearly all of them. Not quite ill enough to stop, but enough to keep me feeling like low-level shite most days.

Luckily, my work only requires my brain, my typin’ hands, and a more-or-less vertical position. So this has been my office for much of the last month:

A photo of the view from a bed: a rumpled dark blue duvet and a colourful knitted blanket. An open laptop on top of the covers at a wonky angle. On the wall opposite are two large square canvases painted in dark colours with swirls of gold. — *paintings by Mr Joe that become ever more Rorschach the more I lie here*

And while I usually try to collate something positive or hopeful into these Fixion Lessons I gotta say this month has been a tough one. Personally, societally, globally. Y’know. It’s rough out there.

Normally, my antidote to this feeling would be fiction, escapism, reading, writing, making stuff — but I haven’t even had any spare energy for that.

The WOES. The morbs. My god.

Because all this time spent lying in bed feeling sorry for myself inevitably leads to a lot of internal thought-spiralling and existential idiocy.

I certainly didn’t intend to post about this. (I’m not even sure about it now, as I draft it.) What a godawful depressing post, huh? Who’s gonna want to read that? But then again, if we don’t write the messy truth sometimes, are we just perpetuating imaginary online personas and imaginary online expectations that might as well have been farmed out by AI?

And yet: how to be authentic on the cursed internet?! Definitely not a 3am thought one needs when one’s most immediate pressing concern is how to breathe through one’s blocked-up nose. But more on that (the authenticity, not snot) shortly.

My son, who is also having a fairly shitty February, summed it up pretty succinctly after admitting he was feeling bad about “not doing enough” and “just wanting to rot in bed” and I reassured him with all the reassurances I also probably needed — that it’s ok to rest, that he needs to rest, that time is bullshit and he’s not wasting anything by taking a pause.

He thought about it. Nodded, then said:

“I think I need to be a potato for a while.”

Baby. Yes.

I also very much need to be a potato. Faceless. Voiceless. Motionless. Perhaps somewhere deep underground, waiting for the ground to thaw. Perhaps just a big pile of buttery mash. Perhaps sitting forgotten in a dark cupboard, sprouting a multitude of eyes.

Potatoes don’t have existential 3am thoughts.

And you can’t willpower your way out of being unwell, after all — however frustrating it is.

Which reminds me of another wise quote I saw somewhere on one of my many algorithmically curated feeds that offer advice I frequently ignore:

“You can only move at the speed of the slowest part of your nervous system.”

And if it’s zero miles per hour, little potato, so be it.

So my fixion lesson to myself this month has been to do very little. To let the crisis cycle come and go. To make plans and rework plans that didn’t work and think honestly about what it is I actually want to do. And how to make that ‘authentic’ (ugh) if I possibly can.

(I fully realise the irony of needing to take my own creative hibernation advice here. The irony is throwing literal potatoes at me.)

Also — perhaps most importantly — my dog Frank decided the solution to all of this was to tuck herself up like a little spoon at every available opportunity, which might actually be the best medicine for anything, and I should just shut up and do more of this:

And now: saying the quiet part out loud

Oh, it would be nice to end it there, wouldn’t it? But in the interest of honesty, here are some things I probably shouldn’t include in this post:

So, how did I do at turning a woe-is-me grumble into something vaguely positive (or at least potato-shaped)?
Is it internet-palatable?
Look, I even included a cute picture of a dog!
The first draft of this was very different. It was much longer. It was an angry rant, actually. And it wasn’t about being ill or struggling to be creative. It was the unfiltered 3am existential quandary over authenticity. Questioning who the hell I am to be writing anything worth a ‘lesson’. Laughing at how humans have been having the same repetitive ‘epiphanies’ on art and creation for millennia and how we’re all still just babies, really. How the loudest voices are rarely the wisest. How I don’t really want to be on the internet at all, most days, but herein lies the source of all my income. How specifically irritated I get watching someone’s seemingly ‘honest’ and ‘vulnerable’ post go viral when I personally know them to be an absolute piece of shit con artist in real life. How hard it is to tell the difference, a lot of the time. If that makes me a con artist because sometimes I write things that don’t reflect how I really feel. How dangerous it is to have an opinion online. How ridiculous to think an opinion even matters, when we’re all just baby potatoes.
That one’s still in my drafts.
This one made it through the 3am crisis.
This one has a picture of a dog.
This one gets posted on a day where the sun is shining and I can breathe through my nose and the jasmine plant in my kitchen is flowering and whatever comes next, at least February is finally fucking over.

Be a potato with me:

Because marketing is the perfect way to end a post on authenticity.

But a potato’s gotta eat.

And a lot of what I do is about being honest — in your writing, with yourself, about your creativity. It’s not always pretty and internet-perfect (someone recently felt the need to email me and inform me they were unsubscribing because my language was too fucking ‘vulgar’) but, well. It’s this.

So if that’s something you’re looking for, too, here are a few ways you can join me in seeking the potato-deep truth in your work:

Online writing workshops:

Through spring and summer I’m emerging from my (vegetable) bed and running a bunch of Zoom and Substack-based workshops on Shakespeare, ‘Write What You Know’ (appropriate, right?) and finding The Story in a Song.

more info

Creative development one-to-ones:

Don’t be a lone potato. Get an objective eye on your work, explore your creative process, troubleshoot, problem solve, vent your literary angst, and find the support and solutions you need to sprout your ideas.

Creative development sessions include a 1-hour Zoom consultation along with a feedback review of up to 3,000 words.

Frank the dog may or may not grace us with her presence.

find out more

And for monthly posts going deeper into the actual craft of writing, editing and ‘fixing’ your fiction, a paid subscription gets you everything I have to give — and helps me make, share, create, learn and persist (and maybe have fewer 3am crises).

manage your subscription

Thanks for reading.

: )