Hello! This is Loose Leash, a newsletter you probably forgot you subscribed to, from writer/director Alicia Lutes. Things are changing (more details coming soon!), so please stick around! Or not, it’s your life.
I’m not afraid of getting older, nor am I mad at my body for aging. Every single day I’m thankful for this amalgamation of skin, sinew, and bones taking my synaptic impulses through the world that’s getting stronger the more I care for it. The more I stand up for its wants and needs. I am less than six months out from turning 40 and I have never felt better despite the positively Dickensian circumstances that surround me and all of us, really — but we (as a species) have been here before.
Welcome to the Digital Middle Ages, baby. The Social Media-eval Times. Oh and also, Millennials are turning 40—get ready for our midlife crisis, which is gonna look a lot different than our predecessors given the *gestures wildly* of it all. To say nothing of the fact that we are such a digital generation whose very existence is tied to the myriad crises we’ve already experienced (9/11, the recession, the pandemic, Idiocracy becoming real and also fascism). It just takes some time, little girl, you’re in the middle, as Jimmy Eat World might say.
Anyway, 2025 has found me frequently at a loss for what to say, and it’s had me thinking a lot about 2018, and the last time I thought about disappearing from the internet completely.
Just over seven years ago, I was vacationing in Europe, deeply depressed and alone, having ostensibly lost everything in my personal and professional life the literal day before I took off on this highly anticipated, long-overdue break for myself. For two weeks, I wandered the streets of Bath, London, and Berlin, crying on friends’ shoulders in pubs or at tube stops; over Aperol Spritzes along unexpected canals, devastated on a trip I could no longer afford to neither go on nor cancel. I didn’t know it then, but that situation had triggered some of the deepest, most essential core wounding from my childhood. It sent me on a tailspin, but one that ultimately has brought me into the light.
Being away from social media and the internet is the only thing that saved me from staying in that loop. Rufus Wainwright’s Release The Stars and Janelle Monaé’s Dirty Computer playing on repeat in my headphones as I wandered new grounds, or traveled to new places. And for most of that time, I was almost always alone. It all felt like a convergence of my old life and current one, trying to help me discover who I was now that everything had changed. In the lyrics and beats of two decidedly different (but also in many ways, not) musicians, I wanted to return to a more authentic, and also leveled up version of who I was when I was a ferociously joyful and creatively unafraid child.
I am constantly re-learning this lesson. I am re-learning it right now. And on a cultural scale, I think it’s one we’re desperate for a little self-reflection on.
Why am I so afraid of this child, who is also me, and has always been? And why does this deeply personal question also feel like a societal one? This is the true Other Alicia I should be preoccupied with, not my father’s other daughter with the same name as me. This woman-child I am afraid of, who—when I see flickers of her in the other people I know, or see her on screen, or read about her on the page—I adore and scream her praises. This is who I’m afraid of becoming? Why, exactly? I encourage her when I see her in others, gleeful whenever I spot her, glad that she is taking up space and feeling every iota of her existence. And yet I am afraid to do the same for myself, afraid to encourage and prop her up within me, afraid that doing so would turn me into some deeply unwieldy, narcissistic monster, or render me unlovable, or both (which is how I felt when I was little and desperate for my family to accept me for the creative little weirdo that I was and am and will always be).
I mean, if social media in 2025 has taught us anything, it’s that, yeah, being an unfettered version of yourself with access to everything can turn you into a deeply unwieldy, narcissistic monster who may either feel, or actually be, unloved. But I think we can all agree that it’s all probably a lot more complicated than all that.
So, if ever there were a time to test the validity of those hypocritical theories, wouldn’t it be now, on the cusp of 40? When the world is on fire (both literally and proverbially) and so much is meaningless? When there’s so many expectations, exaggerations, and utter demonizations of what it means to be a single woman with few routines or stereotypical responsibilities? When social media and the world are already in crises, will anyone be really looking? And if they do, will they even get it right?
As Angelica Bastian semi-recently said:
Pop culture treats this time in adulthood — from your mid-thirties into middle age — as a boring space defined by loss, routine, humiliation, and responsibility. But if you take a step away from what we’ve been sold, there is evidence all around to confer that middle age actually takes on a multitude of shapes and postures especially when you don’t have kids or you have approached life with a more radical bent toward cultivating community.
In so many ways, I feel like I am in the most magical and possibility-fueled time of my life being on the cusp of middle age and 40. I have chosen to circumvent the traditional path and am simply “yes and”-ing whatever comes next from that. I need the ferocious young woman-child energy I’m so afraid of in order to survive or thrive in this. For too long I would shrink whenever I felt the posture of this woman in me, scared of her, afraid of what she might produce, or who she might become—never for the better, always for the worse, mind you. Afraid she might stand out just a bit too much, be a bit too proud, too tall. Too big for her britches. The cynical cycle continues.
But maybe that’s exactly what I (all of us, really) was born to be. For better or for worse: too much for this time, too much for this era, this life, this way of existing. My largess will help to blow it all up. Yours can, too.
Besides, something tells me that all of us being a bit bolder couldn’t possibly create something worse than *gestures at the internet, society, culture, and the state of work in late-stage capitalism* all of this. If anything, I’ve learned that the realest thing to follow is your own instincts and inner voice—so long as you don’t make an echo chamber out of it. Because our instincts are ultimately born out of love, baby. And that’s the only thing that could possibly save us all.
My instincts keep telling me that I want to feel the warmth of summer, but that it also misses the deep chill of winter. That I want to be in love and I want to be alone; I want a life in the middle of the city and a secluded existence in a garden sanctuary in the woods. I want to watch the fall of capitalism and patriarchy and colonial impulses after I spend the morning smelling the flowers that I’ve grown. I want to make a comfortable life for myself and my dog making art that really matters to me,and hopefully enough other people that the inherent, inspirational nature of art continues to grow and blossom and thrive. I want us all to make it out of this middle part alive. It’s always darkest before the dawn, as they say.
I want to tend to things, to be tended to, but for too long I tended to tend to things with a goal of not offending, because in the end, I want for tender loving—for me and everyone, really. And I think in many ways I have long worried that to offend was to be ultimately unproductive. Because offending doesn’t breed community, does it? And isn’t that what we’re all realizing we really need in the middle years here, be they a part of midlife or the Digital Middle Ages? We’re in crisis here because we realize we’ve lost the plot and now everybody’s scrambling to figure out what’s really real—to them and in reality—and how to cultivate a community that enhances that. What makes it really hard is that our society is built on profiting from you experiencing the world isolated and alone.
The point is: we’re currently living and experiencing a world that thrives on us all feeling and physically being separated from one another. Literally, metaphorically, culturally, humans are easier to manipulate and control when the affects of all of this get stacked together. Enter: social media, brain-rot, and the culture created therein. I’m being a bit simplistic, but hopefully you get it (and also because this piece is, frankly, already too long).
I am so thankful for the reminders of my age and the simply act of aging. It has shown me so much, helped me to appreciate that much more, and given me strength for the moment we as a society—and as millennials entering midlife—are currently enduring. And I think the most radical thing I could be right now is earnestly cringe. To do the things I’ve been too afraid to do, and to do so publicly, for all the world to ridicule and see. Because I think the thing I forget is that I’ve already survived my worst fears and toughest days. I have so often had my tenderest parts out there to be used and abused. And I’ve survived it all, even with all that I (and we) have lost in the process.
It’s taken years to get myself back to this place of feeling like I am worthy and self-assured, making me all too aware that this feeling could evaporate in minutes under the right circumstances. I could lose my way again, maybe even worse than before. But I also know that I have the capacity to find it again. To get back to what’s real—even if it’s hard to see the forest from the AI-generated trees these days. We just can’t be afraid to be out loud about it all: to call the spade a spade. To counter what so many people assume to be “inevitable” or “too hard” with “says who?” and “why?” And I think that’s why I see Millennial Middle Age and these current social media Middle Ages as so analogous: it’s gonna take us all traveling on the same road together to survive it, and hopefully grow from its ashes something better and more fruitful thanks to all that we have learned.
In community. In communion—with one another, with nature, with reality itself. And it’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it. The alternative is certain death. That’s the only way any of us make it out of this. What did JFK say? The only thing we have to fear is fear itself? Yeah, sounds like it’s about time we re-learn that lesson.