Don't panic!
Why haven't I done more? Why haven't YOU done more? Calm down, we're only a week in...
Happy newish year! And if you’re new here, hello! This is the first time I’ve opened my laptop for three weeks but I’ve had a mega-surge of subscribers in that time, who largely fall into three categories:
People who saw my article for Grazia’s The Juggle about fitting exercise around kids. If this is you, you’re probably a mum (other types of parents are available) who is a bit knackered and frazzled but desperate to feel better. Sending solidarity: my children only went back to school today. IT’S PRACTICALLY 2025!
People who saw my article for Stylist’s Strong Women on how Couch to 5K needs a rebrand. If this is you, you’re probably a wonderfully mediocre runner or aspiring runner. Welcome, you’ve come to the right place, and you might like to read my origin story about why I launched Keep It Up Fatty! in the first place or perhaps this one on how you’re not as crap as you think you are.
People who follow the lovely bestselling poet Donna Ashworth, who just launched her own Substack
and has been kindly recommending Keep It Up Fatty! to her zillions of fans. If this is you, you’re probably used to far more warm, sensitive, thoughtful writing than I’ll be dishing up here, so sorry about that. I did go quite deep on what it was like being the fattest person who worked at heat magazine, but I’m afraid I haven’t written a poem since approx Year 6.
While I am obviously absolutely delighted to kick off 2024 (and 24 is my lucky number *mystical face*) with all these new subscribers - see snazzy bragging graphic that Substack provided above - it’s also got me feeling very twitchy about not having time to actually write anything for three weeks, which leads me to what I want to talk about today: social media pressure and comparison-itis.
This has been on my mind since going out for dinner last week with some friends. One of them, who happens to be one of the most attractive, successful and downright adorable people I know, mentioned that she’d just got rid of Instagram because it was making her feel rubbish. The others shared these feelings and agreed that a lot of this feeling rubbish was about other people’s amazing houses and other people’s amazing style.
I - Isabel Mary quite contrary - pompously declared that Instagram doesn’t make me feel rubbish at all, but actually that’s not entirely true. It just doesn’t make me feel rubbish about interiors and style, since I’m fairly secure in my downmarket, garish choices in those departments. But right now the things that make me feel inadequate on social media - although not so much Instagram as Substack, LinkedIn and Strava - concern two other things: productivity and running.
Because in that three week period when I’ve been constructing elaborate Lego kits and eating and driving up and down the M11 and eating and wrangling a five year old around an ice rink and eating, it felt like everyone else was churning out sparkling content. On the one hand, I cannot bear to read yet another “Here’s why New Year’s resolutions are totally whack!” hot take, but on the other, I probably should have written one myself.
(Seriously though, being a bit down on New Year’s resolutions feels like the new “Halloween is so over-commercialised!” when it comes to stating the eye-rollingly obvious. Right now it would actually be more subversive to say “A fresh new year has begun and so I want to eat more kale, do more Pilates and read meaningful books daily, and I’m fine with that.”)
And so the nagging voices in my head have been going “Come on Isabel, it’s the beginning of January and you write a newsletter about fitness and body image, YOUR AUDIENCE NEEDS YOU, pull your bloody finger out!” and then I remember that nobody really gives a shit, nobody has been frantically refreshing their Gmail for an email from me, and you’re not even paying for this, you filthy gannets.
Plus over the past couple of weeks there has been more than enough fitness and body image content out there to be getting on with. It’s definitely fine. Isn’t it? OH GOD WHILE WRITING THIS I’VE JUST RECEIVED THE FOURTH NEWSLETTER IN TWO WEEKS FROM SOME OTHER WRITER WITH KIDS AND I’M ONLY JUST MANAGING ONE, WHY AM I SO SHIT? Yeah, you see how the cycle of shame and reassurance and panic goes, whether it’s about writing or eating or exercise or drinking or some other thing you feel like you should be doing more or less of.
So then there’s all the running stuff. I’ve done plenty of running over the Christmas break, including several extremely muddy parkruns, but the other people in my orbit who are training for London Marathon seem to be going above and beyond, making me feel like I’m not putting the miles in enough, even though it’s still 16 weeks away. Or possibly 15. Either way, ages. Ish.
I’m following an 18 week training plan which started on December 18th, an absolutely terrible time to start a training plan obviously. But one of the reasons these training plans need to be long is because you’re quite likely to get thrown off at some point. Life doesn’t just stop because you’re running a marathon, no matter how much you bang on about it. Illness, injury, work commitments, celebrations of the birth of Christ and just life are all likely to mess up the routine at some point. My daughter made this crystal clear at 5.21am on New Year’s Day when she woke me up by vomiting all over the bed we were sharing (IN SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE! Soz Lucy and Duncan). What a way to see in 2024 - happy spew year indeed.
But but but but but I have plenty of miles under my belt, right? I’m not starting from scratch, I ran a half marathon (badly) four months ago, I know what I’m doing to a point, I’m not trying to win, I can do this. When I told my best mate, who’s run loads of marathons (sub-4, baby!), that people posting their 25KM Boxing Day training runs were making me panic, she rolled her eyes and said “They’re the same ones who claimed they revised for their A-levels every day of the Easter holidays”.
And anyway, without veering into “New Year’s resolutions are whack!” territory, I will say that post-Christmas is actually a terrible time to start a new routine - or at least, not technically better than any other. It’s cold. You’re tired and possibly a bit bloated. And if you’ve got kids, they’re ever-present.
Because we all know that when it comes to things we feel like we should be doing but somehow can’t, it’s not really about time, is it? There were plenty of little blocks of time during the Christmas holidays when my kids were deep in Mario Wonder and I could probably have fired up my laptop and knocked out a Substack post if I really wanted to, but my brain wasn’t there. It’s not that we were smugly making wonderful memories for three straight weeks (may I refer you to the aforementioned 5.21am vomit), I was just having a nice time not typing.
Eight years ago, when my son was tiny and I was freelance and not entitled to any meaningful maternity pay, I used to work from home around him - I perfected the art of writing an X Factor review for The Telegraph in 22 minutes: the exact amount of time he was happy bobbing around in his Jumperoo - but I just can’t do that sort of thing anymore. It could be age, it could be the fact that as children get older, in some ways they actually get more mentally (but less physically) consuming. Or it could be the fact that lockdown did a real number on us all, and if I have to work when my kids are around I spiral into panic.
But it’s also because I like having a routine, and Christmas time, when the days have no meaning, doesn’t lend itself to this. I like writing my Substack posts on a Monday or Tuesday morning, home alone, after a run. It’s when I’m at my most productive and creative. But I have no idea when it was Tuesday over Christmas. And with any routine there needs to be acceptance that it won’t always go to plan. There’s a reason I assembled the marathon training schedule on my kitchen wall with Blu-Tac, rather than glue.
The trouble is, social media makes us think that everybody is doing all the stuff, all the time, because the ones who aren’t doing the stuff aren’t visible - plus of course there are also plenty of very well-adjusted, non-narcissistic people doing stuff and NOT posting.
In case I seem even smugger than usual with all my running and my Blu-Tac and my “Instagram only makes me feel GREAT!” nonsense, here are just a few of the things currently making me feel inadequate because of how much they’re in my face on both social and old-school media…
The failure: I haven’t carved out time to pitch a fun and quirky marathon training column to some publications who might be interested in me writing such a thing, and the marathon is only three months away. There are so many articles out about running at the moment, why didn’t I write ALL of them?
The reality: I’ve got a decent enough trickle of other work that people have approached me for without me having to pitch (which I hate anyway). Hopefully this will keep happening and if it doesn’t, that means I’ll have time to pitch, even if I miss the boat on marathon stuff.
The failure: I haven’t found time to sell a load of stuff on Vinted and it looks like everyone is suddenly going wild for Vinted, what if by the time I get round to Vinted nobody wants to buy anything anymore? And yet weirdly I have found time to buy stuff on Vinted…
The reality: Vinted isn’t going anywhere (and nor is the pile of unwanted clothes in my bedroom). This one can definitely wait until I can actually be bothered.
The failure: I haven’t finished printing out and adapting my marathon training routine, let alone doing really long runs like all those people on Strava.
The reality: I’ve planned it out until mid-March. Deciding which day I’m going to do strength training during the first week of April is not particularly pressing, and really I’m probably just craving some time getting busy with my nice stationery.
The failure: I haven’t figured out how to start making money from Substack; I said I would do this when I hit 1000 subscribers, and some people seem to be making loads of money from Substack and why didn’t I start my Substack a year ago when I first thought of it anyway, IDIOT.
The reality: I only hit 1000 on Saturday, and this is my first day back at it. It’s OK if I just take a minute.
The failure: I haven’t posted on Linkedin for ages and it’s gone wild over there since last week, what if I am missing out on some valuable networking opportunities?
The reality: Who gives a flying fuck.
The failure: I haven’t started fundraising for London Marathon yet and I can see from the charity team page on Facebook that some people have already raised thousands.
The reality: Well, when it was still 2023, it felt a bit too far off to start spamming people with the JustGiving link, because when I sponsor people, I tend to do it close to the event. But if you do fancy sponsoring me to run 26.2 miles for Asthma & Lung UK, go ahead! And everyone who sponsors me gets to pick a song for my running playlist, so please comment or email me with yours (which IS actually nice to do early on, because then I can train with the playlist as well as run with it on the day, yeah?).
See? What a mess! But it’s so hard to remember a time when we couldn’t compare absolutely every part of our lives to friends, acquaintances, frienemies and strangers on social media.
We would only know what amazing floor tiles they had if we knew them well enough to be invited over. And our knowledge of their exercise routines, or lack of, would be minimal. 20 years ago, if I was training for London Marathon (a laughable idea to lazy drunk 22 year old me), would I be worrying I wasn’t training enough? Possibly, but unless I had a real-life friend or was part of a running group, I’d have no idea what everyone else was doing. Would this motivate me more or less?
And would we all be happier? We’d certainly be less distracted, but there are probably also things we would never have done. In fact, without the availability of apps like Couch to 5K to get us going and then the opportunity to not only share our own experiences but take inspiration and borrow knowledge from others, whether it’s on Instagram or Strava, would I run at all? I’m not sure. I’m not a TikTok user (yet?!) but they’re making a big song and dance - as they like to - about all this in their new “search and discover” campaign, with a nice focus on running when you don’t look like a runner, whatever that means.
It’s easy to say that social media is evil, and it definitely has a strong stench of toxicity at times, but it’s also full of people being active and enthusiastic, and that can be infectious. So, since it was always going to come back to those bloody new year’s resolutions everyone is so down on, perhaps mine isn’t to scale back my use of Instagram or any of the multiple other platforms I’m addicted to, but to use them more constructively. Less scrolling and scowling, or indeed reading and running, and more learning and engaging and feeling part of something positive.
I can reassure you about at least one thing, which is that people are always going wild for Vinted, they’re just talking about it more right now because of New Year’s resolutions. I sold a load of stuff in it in the early summer ahead of my house move and very little stuck around for longer than 48 hours before selling.
You always make me laugh. Thank you ☺️