Gossip Drop #2: The best show I've seen in years.

And a controversial opinion.

Sometimes Weekend Gossip Drop will arrive in the last moments of Sunday evening because I spent the whole weekend busy complaining about the heat. Today I was walking around my suburb trying to find somewhere Matilda and I could sit with air conditioning (we have no air con at home) and it was 36 degrees!!! What in the middle of March! It’s almost like it’s getting hotter, like the globe is warming, like the whole planet is going to overheat.

Anywho, I gave Matilda her evening bottle in the park and it was very this.

But legit how, as a species, are we meant to survive in heatwaves with no air conditioning? I was such a bitch today? Because I get cranky when I’m sweating?

Now I’m sitting in the dark (I feel as though lights make it hotter) while my husband intermittently gets up from bed to grab ice cubes for a purpose that is as-yet unclear. Cool cool.

So let’s get started on Weekend Gossip Drop.

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Recommendations

Last night I watched all four episodes of Adolescence on Netflix in one go and my lord. What a masterpiece. The British crime drama begins with the arrest of 13-year-old Jamie Miller, who stands accused of murdering his classmate. Opening with Jamie’s life being turned upside down immediately humanises him, and you’re forced to look at him as a terrified, vulnerable teenage boy, which is remarkably powerful given how the limited series unfolds.

Each episode is filmed in a single continuous shot, unfolding in real time. The format creates a moment-by-moment intensity, and allows the tiny details of the world to emerge - like, how do police speak to a boy accused of murder? How do his parents speak to him? What do two police officers see when they walk through a high school campus?

The format is particularly compelling in episode three, during a session between a clinical psychologist and Jamie. I won’t say anything else so I don’t spoil it for those who haven’t watched, but Adolescence is one of the best shows I’ve seen in years, and is one of the boldest in terms of engaging with the complexities of modern masculinity.

On a completely different note, the leading UK publication The Times and The Sunday Times were free to read this weekend, and I discovered so many brilliant stories. They’re usually locked behind a paywall and I’m too cheap to subscribe, but what a brilliant initiative for subscriber-only publications to unlock their content once in a while, because I may well subscribe now after all the wonderful pieces I read.

One of my favourites covered an issue I’ve been interested in for a while, and I gobble up anything about it: Our new health crisis — we’re diagnosing too much, too early. Every health professional I ask tells me we’re in a phase of over diagnosis, and that it’s doing more harm than good. And I’m all like… but how?! I swear every time I open my news app there’s a story about how if someone’s bowel cancer had been diagnosed a few months earlier, it might not have been terminal. I live in permanent fear of missing something. My Google history is full of questions about all sorts of symptoms that I’m convinced will one day turn out to be a diagnosis that explains everything. Right now, I have ‘get a colonoscopy’ on my to-do list simply because I’m fixated on bowel cancer. Next month I’ll probably want an MRI.

But this article (written by neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan) presents an argument against my desire for every possible test under the sun. It asks about the utility of diagnosing conditions that are untreatable. Or conditions that will emerge later in life - so people spend years waiting to get sick. Apparently, even though wealthier countries are getting better at detecting cancer, mortality rates are similar to lower-income countries. A lot of clinical work has no impact on outcome. In Australia, O’Sullivan says, overmedicalisation has been identified as a bigger health cost than population growth or ageing.

Fascinating.

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Thoughts

I can’t stop thinking about a fact I saw on Reddit recently. I’m not sure if it’s true, so I’m literally Googling it right now. Hold on one sec…

Omg it’s true.

Maybe I’m the only person who finds this interesting, but hey.

Apparently, no one who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The idea is that congenital blindness protects people from developing schizophrenia. And now I’m reading the theories as to why…

One is that some of the characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia are actually cognitive dysfunctions, in areas like memory, language, attention and perception. And people who are born blind have better cognitive functioning in these areas, because their brains have learned to overcompensate.

Another is that there is some evidence that people with schizophrenia have problems with their vision - problems that come before the onset of psychosis - and these problems might be part of what causes hallucinations and delusions. If you have already learnt to live in the world without sight, you’re not vulnerable to the false predictions a person might make when their vision falters.

Well. There’s a fact for your next dinner party.

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Gossip

This is (allegedly) where I start shit/stir the pot.

And I’m going to a ‘lil bit. With the story of Ruby Franke and The Devil In The Family docu-series getting a lot of attention, there’s a black-and-white sentiment bubbling up that says: you should never, ever put your children on social media. For context, Franke was a family vlogger who ran the popular YouTube account 8 Passengers. She is now a convicted child abuser, and some of her cruel disciplinary methods were documented on her YouTube channel. There’s viral footage of her coercing her children into being filmed. It’s chilling.

But most women are not Ruby Franke. And while I do sometimes feel uncomfortable watching people’s children in content - particularly when it’s clear that they don’t want to be there - I think there’s room for nuance in the conversation around mothers featuring their kids on social media.

For a lot of women, their lives are inextricably intertwined with their kids. They spend a huge proportion of their time parenting - cooking and cleaning and reading and teaching and talking and playing. For most of human history, this was erased. Invisible. It wasn’t valued. It doesn’t exist on the historical record. Now, regardless of what you think of social media (it’s a cesspit, mostly), it is a part of how we connect with each other. How we share. How we validate what our lives look like. If we remove children from that landscape, we remove a huge number of women. We relegate them to a place where, again, their existence isn’t visible.

Almost all women who share their kids online are doing it because their kids are the light of their lives. Because they’re simply with their kids all the time. And because kids - babies and toddlers and primary schoolers and teenagers - are part of the fabric of the society we live in. It would be weird to ignore that. To not acknowledge them on the platforms we use to document our days.

There’s a huge conversation to be had around consent, and about money. If your child is featuring in branded content, are they being paid for it? Does this constitute a child ‘working’ at an absurdly young age? Or are you both just having fun, and the intensive criticism is another way of us policing what mothers do?

What do you think?

Chat next week!

Clare xxx