2025 JOURNAL ENTRIES:

I write a lot. I feel we hide parts of ourselves from one another, which leads to further isolation and separation in an increasingly individualistic and disconnected world. Here, I share my daily journal entries—even if I feel fear or embarrassment about what I share—in the hope of being honest and less pretentious with those who take the time to read my words.

-Ruby

Disclaimer: I write from my own experiences and thoughts, as well as stories and reflections on the people I have met or known—blending real lived experiences with fiction. Please keep this in mind as you read.

Thursday the 13th of February 2025

Making chutney. The simple reason to be.
To be is to make chutney.
To exist is to reap the land and squish its gifts into a jar, a stored piece of why one lives.

Oh, my heart is soft and open, and it sings at the thought of one making chutney.

As a child, squeezed between the concepts of life that your loving parents place at the pinnacle, you are the star on the tree, the northernmost point. An opportunity to humanise their worth, their love, their beliefs, their morals, their lessons. You are the human embodiment of their lessons learned, or at least the ones they tried to learn. What a gift.

To replace something with something else.
To replace mistakes with chutney.
Regret with chutney.
To stop doing drugs and start making chutney.

A story that seemed too good to be true.

Some children dream of Disneyland, and others dream of their parents making chutney.
Some dreams do indeed come true.

The whole world is obsessed with women. Every aspect of life eats up women like they are the best dessert at the best restaurant in the best part of town. Although it depends where you are and how you see it if this devouring is good or not. Painful or not. Kind or not.

Some women are subject to a kinder slaughtering than others, but it’s taken me some time to understand that the only way to take it is if you’ve got your hand in the palm of another woman. There isn’t much sense in getting ravaged alone.

The obsession with women is not merely a cultural phenomenon but a structural force—an undercurrent shaping the way society organises itself, how economies expand, and how power is both given and withheld. It manifests in reverence, in desire, in commodification, in suppression. Entire industries orbit around the female form, from beauty and fashion to entertainment and advertising, each one extracting value from the way women are perceived, adorned, or withheld from view.

Women are symbols, muses, objects of devotion and derision. They are mythologised in art and punished in politics. The economy bends itself around their existence—whether by selling beauty as necessity, domesticity as virtue, or empowerment as product. Social hierarchies tighten and loosen in response to their movements. Even resistance to these forces is absorbed and repackaged, another aesthetic to be consumed.

From the digital landscape to the physical, from the sacred to the commercial, the presence of women is never neutral. Their absence is loud. Their visibility is currency. Their bodies, their voices, their choices—admired, restricted, worshipped, owned. Society does not simply include women; it orbits them, reshapes itself around them, builds and destroys entire systems in their wake.

It is not a fixation. It is a foundation.

Sunday the 2nd of February 2025

I am very aware that the way in which I write can seem like a tricky, finely woven fatalism. But I am here to tell you that it actually isn’t as nihilistic as it may seem. Hopefully, you’ll see what I mean by the end of this page. Or maybe the next.

When we talk about society and capitalism and different demographics and gender and classes and the West and consumerism and inflation, we feel big that we have something to say and that our opinions matter and that we are being ripped off by the government and that there is always someone to blame. When I look over to my bookshelf and see The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, I think that there is no one to blame and that we are all one and that all there is is this breath. Then I go for a walk through Byron to Woolies, and someone drives past me in a 2024 BMW with a $9 oat milk turmeric latte with three drops of lion’s mane mushroom extract. No more than eight steps later, a homeless guy is lying under a Coles bag with a can of Coke ripped in half, containing 25 cents at his feet. He has one shoe on. I am walking through the rich man’s playground, and I am torn between trying to embody Eckhart Tolle’s beliefs and having a searing anger that fuels my hatred and rebellion to whatever the fuck is going on in the world right now. But who to point the finger at?

I believe that each day we are faced with a million tiny choices, and ultimately we create our own reality. I believe we all have the power inside of us to live the lives that we dream of, and I believe in all kinds of magical things. However you look at it, the world is filled with wonder. But when do we choose to look at the hard things? When do we decide to stop turning a blind eye to the injustices? When does the homeless man stop getting swept under the rug?

We can look at the homeless man and the person in the BMW in a few different ways. We can think that one of them worked hard and perhaps stayed away from drugs or alcohol and the other didn’t. Perhaps that is true. But when do we think that maybe their life choices had a little less to do with their willpower and a little more to do with what cards they were dealt by Sir Capitalism the Great.

My mother. An amalgamation of beautiful thoughts and kind-hearted doings. The woman who had helped a hundred people know that there was a point to life greater than the anaesthetic of drugs and alcohol. A woman who could find the ultimate contentment in a piece of bark and could put a finger on the pulse of the most obscure thought I have ever had.

My mum is a star. The guiding light of courage that is as important to me and my existence as the blood that pumps through my flesh body that comes from her. To open your eyes and your heart and your mind is to realise that we have betrayed the women of our world.

The system has made a lot of money off women.

Women are capitalism’s faulty ATM that spits out around 90 trillion annually for the big boys up top. This doesn’t make sense, so I’ll share a part two another day, joining the dots and hopefully leaving you with an understanding of what I mean.

Love and nurture the women around you. Adorn them in every wonderful thing you think about them and fill their hearts up with a million reasons to be alive.

I love my mum and am so grateful to be the daughter of my mother.

Saturday the 1st of February 2025

Nick Cave. I’m sure you’ve heard of him. He’s famous. Especially famous amongst the living in Warracknabeal, a small browning town in inland Victoria Australia, their claim to their only little piece of fame. To claim some fame of someone famous and have it as your own, oh how the cards of life fall. If only to be in the middle of it and not taking credit from the guy that sings Red Right Hand and was born where you have lived nearly every day of your life. If the dead could remember him they would. Lined up like troops in the local cemetery. Five more each week find their place amongst the rest at the moment. The town wonders why. The numbers are higher than usual. Much higher. I, personally, have been doing my research on this. I have some theories. I’ll share them later to urge you to read on and understand that I do have some sense and my learnt beliefs don’t actually come from Instagram reels and extroverted fact meddlers. I try to stay away from anything too loud or in your face because I think there is probably a reason that said thing needs to be loud or get in your face.

Friday the 31st of January 2025

I wince.

This has happened to me before. Twice. I know it without knowing it before I even know it. It’s what some would call intuition. It’s what Sam Pickles would call the shifty shadow. It’s one great gift and a sometimes perceivable curse that lifts as soon as you know that everything is going to be okay.

The issue is that you don’t think it’s going to be okay when you are in the midst of it. Well, you do, but being dramatic is a part of the whole human experience, so you get into it. No one thinks it's going to be okay when they are packing up boxes and doing a bond clean.

This isn’t about packing boxes or bond cleans. This is about knowing when your time somewhere is up. The clock strikes twelve, and you’ve gotta get out of there. There is never a right time for the striking of this metaphorical clock, but whenever it chimes, you always feel like the great universe has gone and done you dirty and is doing all this at the worst time possible.

Anyway, I’m thinking about packing up and leaving this place. I love it, and as the days pass, I am coming to like it less than when I was really in love with it, and I want to remember things fondly. Kind of like when people who were once in love stay together for way longer than they should because they keep holding onto the glory days.

Well, the glory days have been had here for me, and there are more awaiting me somewhere else.

What a gift!!!

Another way of seeing it is that I’ve got photos waiting to be shot, and they sure as hell ain’t getting shot here.

Adios. Au revoir. Catch ya later.

I am EXCITED for the future.

Thursday the 30th of January 2025

She feels 300,000 tiny butterflies begin to churn up the oxygen inside her body, building into a storm that can only be soothed by lying in the grass, uninterrupted, for a lengthy period of time—being held tightly by someone she wants to be held tightly by, or crying.

Sometimes, she feels like there is a dictator measuring her success or worth as a person with a dagger of loathing—one she herself has never felt. She wonders: why is it directed at her?

They fill the space in the room next to her with words about her as if she is not there, and if she dares to say anything, the anger and analysis of who she is and what she is become far worse than saying nothing at all. Using words like "parasitic," they blow her heart apart with sharp, loaded, hateful words that rain down on human flesh. She waits to bleed and bruise, but the marks never show. Not to the eye, anyway.

Torture comes in many different forms, and she wonders what takes the most mental strength to overcome. Unlike a captured prisoner from the opposition, she is not meant to be captured—is she?

She runs away, and from afar, she misses them. She comes back and wishes to miss them from afar. What is this curse? No wonder people go insane. Looking at the patterns that came before her, she questions: do the crazy turn the sane insane, or was there only ever insanity?

Silently, she laments to something greater:

How do you determine if you are being selfish?
How do you determine if you are right?
How do you know if someone is wrong?

She guesses it depends on who you ask. Seek the answers you want, and you’ll find them. She thinks reading philosophy books or spiritual guides can be weaponised by some people—the things people will use as artillery.

Wednesday the 29th of January 2025

Monday, a public holiday. What to do with a whole day of no work, and $60 an hour lies stale in an old part of her mind. Strong, tired, young, old, thin, fat, smart, and dumb lie inside her as she rubs her eyes in circular motions in a hope to drain last night’s tears that got stuck in her head, down the neck and into the heart. Where they will stay until there isn’t any room for them anymore and they come bubbling out her eyes. She wonders how many old tears have been stuck in her heart over the years. What’s the oldest tear? Has it been there since she was fifteen? Ten? Perhaps even from when she was a baby.

Sometimes, when life gets really thick with emotion and anger and blame and resentment, a tear will push through her eyes, and as she lays in the emptiness of shedding them, she knows she let some go that were heavy and old. A tear she may have been carrying for a long time.

When these tears come out—ones that leave her feeling lighter than before—they exit her body in an earth-shaking, painstaking labour of grief. It’s not often she is open to their exit. Not because she doesn’t want to let go, but because the act of doing so is so painful.

When he looks at her crying like a child, he knows. He feels. He understands. He understands that he doesn’t understand. He mourns. He voices soft echoes and words of love and devotion.

In his arms, he feels her shift and churn through things he can only wonder about. When she shares her words on the deepest, wordless thoughts of her heart, he feels he has never heard it before. Not from anyone.

He feels powerful in knowing that his presence allows her to open, although it scares him that he is the ground on which she falls apart. He feels it is his opportunity to prove himself to her. To be the calm amongst the storm, as she births past pain.

This must be the labour and honour of love.

I write this now, very tired and very empty. I have no idea what I am talking about, and I am wondering if anything I know is anything at all, and I am ready to lay down and surrender to sleep. The world's secret (hopefully) daily miracle. The night. The closing of the eyes and the losing of the self. Each person whisked away by the dusk of night to lay amongst the clouds of nothing real and wake at least 1% softer than the evening before.

That’s one perspective.

Some would disagree.

The world’s secret curse. The night. The closing of the eyes and the waiting room of the mind that I never leave. Hard to escape something you cannot enter or exit. Begging for a breakthrough. It never comes.

I get up at 4 am and tap my toes and think about running so far that I collapse into a puddle of sleep that measures up to that of a four-year-old in the arms of their father on the train home from the city at 8:30 pm on a Thursday.