What I've Stopped Explaining About Myself

Some things no longer need a defence. It just took a while to realise that.

There was a time when I explained myself quite a lot.

Not in the dramatic sense — I wasn’t constantly defending major decisions or justifying my existence to anyone in particular. It was quieter than that. A small preface here, a clarifying sentence there. The slight adjustment of tone when certain subjects came up, to signal that I was aware of how this might sound, and that I had considered the reasonable objections already.

It’s exhausting, looking back. Not because any individual explanation cost much, but because of the accumulation. The ongoing low-level performance of being understandable.

I write. I have always written, in one form or another — long before it became something with a platform or a name or a posting schedule. For a long time, I felt the need to contextualise this. To make it legible to people who didn’t quite see the point. To frame it as something practical, or useful, or heading somewhere that would eventually make sense to everyone watching.

Writing is not a project with a destination I need to justify. It is simply what I do, the way some people garden or cook or run — not for outcomes, but because it is the shape their attention naturally takes. People have suggested, kindly and otherwise, that I might redirect the effort into something with better returns. I understand the logic. I just don’t share it. I no longer explain this. I no longer feel the gap where the explanation used to go.

The quiet life I choose — the slower pace, the deliberate ordinariness, the resistance to urgency for its own sake — still attracts the occasional question. Aren’t I bored? Am I not wasting something? Don’t I want more? The questions haven’t entirely gone away. What has changed is that I no longer feel obliged to answer them. I choose this. Fully and without apology. That tends to be enough.

There are smaller things too. The platforms I’m not on. The invitations I decline without extensive reasoning. The pace at which I move through the world, which is not everyone’s pace and doesn’t need to be. The grief I still carry for a dog I only had for eleven months, which some people find disproportionate and which I find entirely proportional to the love involved.

None of these require a footnote.

What I’ve noticed, in stopping the explanations, is that nothing collapsed. The people who matter didn’t need them anyway. They already understood, or they trusted me enough not to require a justification for every choice. The people who needed the explanations — who required me to make my life legible on their terms — those relationships quietly recalibrated. Some fell away. I found I could bear that.

There’s a particular freedom in no longer auditioning your own life for an audience that wasn’t asked for and didn’t earn the role. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes slowly, in small decisions not to elaborate, not to preface, not to soften the edges of something true.

At some point, you realise the explanation was never really for them.

It was for you — the part of you that wasn’t quite sure yet.

When you become sure, the need falls away on its own.