What is up with the English?

A genuine investigation

Friends,

Hello from the shitshow of the world: England. What a mess it’s been here, these past few weeks. Months. years.

It’s a trip, navigating a return to a country that’s in collapse. How did we get so screwed up? Why are we renowned for being so repressed, so severed from the full experience of humanity? How did this lead to our horrific history, of colonizing a quarter of the world and forcing huge swathes of it into our own screwed-up model?

I’ve got an essay about exactly those questions up in LitHub today. This essay was with me, growing and morphing, over the first year I spent back in England. It’s the reason I called this Substack project “how to go home”. Whether you’re navigating a literal return to your country of birth, or simply trying to break free of a culture that has, for millennia, been telling stories that make its people homesick in the soul—this is a moment of mythic return.

I hope you’ll read it, and share it if you enjoy it.

Love,

x Ellie