My Writing Journey 2024 Wrapped | Lyric Essay
Riding the Undertow: A Year-Long Journey Through Chaos, Creativity, and the Stormy Soundtrack of Life.
January – Thunderous Black Moodcore
Top Genre: I played 14 hours of rumbling clouds and screeching guitars. A storm on loop.
Mood: Apologies for the delay, I have been drowning in chaos.
2024 opened with heavy skies in my inbox, my home, my studies. I couldn’t find the space in my mind to write a single word. The laptop keys fell silent like a radio, searching for a signal in the middle of the ocean. It’s impossible to be creative when the pressure mounts. I spiral into a thunderous black mood when the words refuse to dance. Too many of my emails during this period opened with, “Apologies for the delay; I have been drowning in chaos and struggling to come up to breathe”.
Still, I hurled two writing submissions into a restless sea. They felt half-formed, limply cast out in green bottles. That’s all I had: the faint possibility they might wash ashore somewhere.
February – Drowning in The Undertow Blues
Top Genre: Low-toned heartbreak, heavy on bass.
Mood: The inside of a churning wave, no surface in sight.
No writing surfaced in February. The chaos that started the year was now overflowing into this month, and the undertow was pulling me further under. My adopted mum’s partner faced complications with his heart surgery – “touch and go”, the doctors said. The strongest woman I knew began to crack under the weight, her strength fraying at the edges. Family crises reveal your place in the narrative, and mine was edited out without the anchor of biological ties. Every wave of news swelled higher, and I felt myself slipping beneath it, fighting the current.
March – Chaos Breaksbeat
Top Genre: Pulsing in chaos, breakbeats fracturing the silence.
Mood: Everything got too much. Something had to give.
I could no longer bear the weight of the waves as chaos kept coming. The pressure was too high. Everything got too much for me. Something had to give before I did. My only logical gasp for air was to take a study break from my master's. Ducking out meant leaving that group. I felt like I was letting them down. I had no idea what I would’ve done had they not agreed. At home, there was a slow turning of the tide: my mum’s partner recovering, a sense of normalcy edging back in. Work was still a riptide, but I found some footing. I wrote a column for the student newspaper. Typed words, pressed send, and felt relief.
April – Shallow Validation Indiepop
Top Genre: Upbeat, shimmering, with small triumphs.
Mood: The sweet ping of the notification bell.
The two limply cast-off bottles from January came back with opportunities. A piece I submitted to the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Competition was longlisted. I was selected to be part of New Writing North’s development programme for working-class writers, A Writing Chance. Which is how this Substack started. The validating dopamine hits helped me find my footing again.
I felt like I shouldn’t need that validation. I felt superficial, chasing the high from seeing my name on a list or the ping of new subscribers. But in those moments, the damper lifted, and the words flooded back.
My adopted mum revealed she would marry her partner. I was the last to know.
May – Milestone Dreamwave
Top Genre: Airy synths and reverent echoes of possibility.
Mood: From a children’s home to Abbey Road Studios. Impossible becomes real.
May marked a milestone: my first recording session at Abbey Road Studios. From children’s homes on the Isle of Man to the most famous recording studio in the world. What one felt so far away became real. My adopted mum and I had dreamed, planned, and schemed this over late-night talks when I was younger, with her expelling any reason why I couldn’t. It always amazes me what this scrawny little chav gets up to now. The A Writing Chance programme hit the ground running. I went on the iconic Arvon Retreat, spending a week with fellow writers in the middle of nowhere. Writing, connecting, decompressing. The exhaustion of the previous five months crashed over me in that stillness. Being ‘on’ all the time is its own kind of fatigue. I launched my Substack with its first post and met my mentor. I felt in sync with the current this month.
June – Algorithmic Tides
Top Genre: A restless ambient drone, numbers creeping upward.
Mood: Self-doubt behind every status update.
June arrived with a wave of hope: permission to write again. But I drowned myself in my imaginary expectations. The keys fell silent again. My footing was slipping against the current again, and it was my fault this time. I berated myself: “How can I be a writer if I can’t even do one post a week?” I cheated by recycling old work to maintain standing with the algorithm. But no new writing emerged. Rolls of thunder echoed in the back of my mind again. Substack isn’t just about publishing. It’s about building an audience. Writers need readers. Otherwise, what is the point? I obsessed over metrics and retreated to the comfort of the recording studio. Music was easier than words.
July – Lost in Static
Top Genre: White noise.
Mood: Faded transmissions, a station left in silence.
No posts. No pulse. No reverb. I drifted in static.
August – Festival Revival
Top Genre: Electric chord progressions, crowd roars.
Mood: High voltage, carried on cheers.
Everything swelled in August, and I could now ride the current instead of being slapped by it. I played at a major UK festival (YNOT), something I had dreamt about ever since I first plucked the strings of a guitar when I was fifteen. The stage lights glowed. The adrenaline soared. The audience roared. I could write again. I typed up a piece recapping the festival and hit the post on Substack. The notifications pinged. Jonn, my Substack mentor, shared my page with his network, and new readers trickled in. My words made ripples, and I found myself riding a new exhilarating current.
September – Uncharted Frequencies
Top Genre: Experimental rhythms of hope and fear.
Mood: A hush before the biggest drop.
Momentum slowed when I started drafting a piece about the paradox of overprotection of the care system. How the best intentions can lock young people in a cage. The writing demanded a deeper vulnerability, like diving without knowing if your lungs could handle the depth.
My study break ended. I returned to the master’s program but in a new group. I feared the old pattern: expectations pressing down like a heavy tide, snuffing out the spark I’d just revived in my writing. I told myself I knew what to expect this time. But nothing prepares you for the presence of a planet-sized star in the same orbit. A famous face that distorts the gravity in every workshop, every critique, every conversation.
October – Weathered Reflection Shoegaze
Top Genre: Soft, introspective strumming with waves of reverb.
Mood: The ache of old memories, the hush of new truths.
My adopted mum married her partner this month. His close shave with death revealed her silliness for her unwillingness to marry him when they were already tied by life’s everyday threads. This year, I’ve learned that I’m a fair-weather family member. They say DNA doesn’t make a family, love does. But this is only when the sun shines and the seas calm. I can handle that if only the lines were clear. It’s not ok to be told you’re equal only to find you’re optional when it really matters. It felt good to see her happy again.
October is the anniversary of my father’s death when I was a child. I’ve never really spoken about it, but I wanted to explore how I felt, so wrote a piece about how the gap of a father is one that never closes. Similar to my September piece, I found myself descending into new depths of vulnerability with my writing, feeling the water close over my head but refusing to panic. Substack may demand quantity, but its readers demand resonance and truth. Meaningful writing requires time. Some waves crest faster than others, and I’m finally accepting that.
November – Echoing Confessional Lo-fi
Top Genre: Slow-burning reveals beneath layers of fuzz.
Mood: The subtle tremor of vulnerability that doesn’t quite reach the same dark corners as before.
The post about my father touched more people than any other. There’s a particular appetite for trauma, a strange thirst for the raw and painful. I’m not sure how I feel about offering it so freely. But for now, the words are out there, reverberating in the digital air.
I finally finished a post about returning to the University of Oxford, where I folded like a melted Mars Bar under the weight of expectations. It felt different from my October piece, as though I was splashing in a puddle rather than diving into the depths. Maybe I was simply being shallow? Or maybe, after stripping my soul bare in that father-focused essay, I needed time to wade back into safer waters.
So there it is: the echo of confession, tinny and distant, reverberating in the digital landscape. Not every wave dips as low as the last. Not every post can scrape the ocean floor of my psyche. Sometimes, I can only handle skimming the surface, letting the undercurrents swirl beneath. But I was more confident in my writing.
December – Steady Undertow Post-Rock
Top Genre: Building crescendos with patient, looping progressions.
Mood: A quiet confidence in the face of comparisons and algorithms.
I noticed the other writers in my A Writing Chance cohort had more followers than me. Their audiences differ from mine, and the numbers shouldn’t matter. But my confidence was already wobbly, so reason arrived too late to save me from sinking. If you want your “subs to stack” on Substack, you must play the game: network, find your niche, and hope for virality. My posts never go viral, but that’s okay. This knock felt different. A kind of muscle memory kicked in, the one I’ve developed over the year for surfing self-doubt.
The undertow never overwhelmed me. This time, the keys never fell silent. December was one of my most consistent months, with four posts. Yes, I did cheat once by recycling an old piece, but I also finished a post that had been simmering for six months about hunting down old photographs from my childhood. `And other post of how I went to the BRITs and this post of weaving a final reflection on how far my writing has come over the last twelve months.
It’s okay to repurpose old work. It’s okay to take time and write something deeply meaningful. It’s okay to drop out sometimes and let life intervene. It’s okay not to chase subscribers because they will eventually chase you. As I wrap this year, I see my writing like the tide: ever-shifting, constant, sometimes receding, sometimes surging forth.
The playlist of 2024 may be wrapped and put back in its sleeve but the 2025 one is about to spin. Each new track will carry me further into seas I never saw on any map. Will I find the words or let the current wash them away again?
Play, pause, replay. We carry on, chasing the next note.
Thanks for getting to the end of this piece, and I hope you enjoyed it. I’m developing this Substack channel as part of New Writing North’s A Writing Chance Programme for working-class writers.
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