INSIGHT: DANIELLE GAY, EDITOR IN CHIEF AT GRITTY PRETTY MAGAZINE

My newsletter, Reservations, was something I started in the months following a really big breakup. After my engagement ended, I started to share a little bit about what was going on with me and I found that over time, more and more strangers started to converse with me in my DMs. Eventually, I thought, I should put all of these thoughts somewhere. I now call it a living memoir: I write about dating, sex, love, relationships, friendships, the self.. It evolves. It has become a collection of personal essays which I send out each Thursday night. And it wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t experienced love, and yes, heartbreak.

There is a quote in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, when one character says to another: “I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day. After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” That is to say, there are times when I wonder why any of it matters at all. At other times, I think the entire purpose of life is about connections—about love—and how we shape one another through them. I’ll let you know if I ever figure it out…

This probably won’t surprise anybody who has read Reservations but it’s definitely my connection to self. I am now attentive to the ways in which I made myself smaller in relationships; not prioritising myself and not living authentically. Through my life-shattering breakup, through my writing, through it all, I have made contact with my true self. I love myself and I think that’s where love truly begins.