I’m someone who lives in my body.  Hours of my CPU are spent on whether I want courgettes or peas with my fish cakes tonight, what I need to buy and cook and eat before tomorrow’s meeting so I have a proper dinner, if those nuts really agreed with me and what precise level of satisfaction I’m experiencing with my digestion today. I’m preoccupied by how hungry I am, or not, seemingly all the time. How my knee is feeling today and when I last had sex.  Am I over or under caffeinated right now. That muscle I pulled in top right quadrant of my back eight months ago, I can still feel it, huh, but I didn’t yesterday, why, what did I do different?  The euphoria of that run, the shock my calves felt and the slow day-by-day step down to recovery. How straight my back is, how my sit bones feel on this chair, and the angle of my back arch. The feeling of this texture on my skin, or that. And my period. When I’ll come on, how long I’ll bleed for and how much, on which days, and how the skin around my cheeks will fill with fluid. When and how my pelvis will loosen, and how the pain will permeate from the middle to the outer of my lower back in waves, and cripple me for about 20minutes before I’ll feel at 80% again.

Well Labour fucked with all of that.

Or rather, the greatest social movement of our era despite Labour did. I’ve just come back from The World Transformed, where I forgot to have dinner, smoked loads and felt great. My period was here and gone and now back and now pain on day three WTF??? I was so present in space and interaction, the New Kind of Politics and the people we were all being, that I had no idea what was going on with me and didn’t care. What luxurious queue conversations were had. What laughter in my workshops. What atmosphere in the streets and in the Wetherspoons. Seems like The Left is back. In a big way. And The Suits looked out of place, rigid and dated.

I’m not sure if this was excitement, it was more like a release. It’s like being on a long seemingly endless train journey when you’re in a tunnel and are sure you’re going to come out, but you don’t know when. Every once in a while you look out for it and you still can’t see it, and some people glance at you funny for looking out of the window in to the dark, and from others, a friendly nod. And then suddenly you can see it, and it looks like a pin hole, and you know it’s coming and you want to hold everyone’s hand. And you start crying.

John McDonnell made me cry, Shareefa Grassroots made me cry. The McStrikers made me cry, Gary Younge made me cry and Diane Abbot made me cry. China Mieville’s To a Red October signature on the first page of his book – which I opened on the tube this morning  – made me burst into tears. I cant even cry. I haven’t cried for five years, and now what, I can? Really? Is it all going to change, inside and around me?

I think I’m predisposed to being so in my body, but it’s also a chapter in my How to Live Well Under Neoliberal Capitalism guide to myself. It’s the way I retain self-respect and refuse to rush or be rushed or pander to the instant and instantaneous. It’s my fuck you to neoliberalism to look up at the sky and walk a bit too slow for London. To have unproductive conversations at inconvenient times. To explore, as Jeremy Gilbert quoted in the Acid Corbynism session, the full potential of my being. To live authentically and spend time pondering ingredients, relationships and textures.

My period is all over the place, it’s here, it’s not, it’s gone it’s back, I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve had a good break from There is No Alternative pumped out and recycled in this city everyday. But most of all I had a break from being inside me, and embodying me. I like being one of many and feeling insignificant in a sea of conversation. It’s how we’re going to get out.

It is in fact, from within the collective, that we will find ourselves free.

You Are Not Alone.