Uncensored
The Uncensored Market + life update
Hello hello fellow people and poets!
It’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything here, but I’ve finally worked up some motivation to write. The second half of todays letter will be an explanation of where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing in my absence with TGG, but to start off I’d like to write about the June 7th Uncensored Market!
The Uncensored market is a sex positive/kink friendly 18+ market that features traders, stage performers, and interactive workshop opportunities, and it is run by the amazing @Mothtoflameevents and @Emilysin290 ! It’s like comic con with way more sex toys.
I heard about this market last year through an Instagram advertisement where I applied to be a volunteer photographer for the day. It sounded like a great opportunity and I was looking to put my love of photography to good use. It was a great day and I got to speak to a lot of veterans of the Kink scene and it was as educational as it was fun! When applications opened this year for the Summer 2025 market I decided on a whim to apply to be a workshop host.
Around that time was when I had a phase of giving more time to my physical hobbies because my social media addiction was at a high and mental health very much at a low and I knew I had to do something physically creative. I’ve made zines and scrapbooks but wanted to try out collaging and found it to be quite therapeutic.
I applied to run a KINK COLLAGES workshop, it was a total shot in the dark but I, as an ambitious person, wanted to push myself to try something new…and it paid off!
📸 @Lonewolf_mc_quade
The KINK COLLAGES workshop was the first workshop of the event, followed by the DRIP & TIE workshop, and the SELF-TIE SHIBARI workshop. Being the first right as the doors opened was nerve-wracking, and as someone who is not great at public speaking or commanding a room I was feeling the nerves for days before, but once everyone had filtered in and got started I felt a little more comfortable and confident in my ability to do it. The collages that I saw looked incredible, even if most were unfinished due to the 1 hour time restraint.
I am so grateful to the hosts of the Uncensored Market, Moth and Rebecca, for giving me the opportunity to push myself and achieve something outside of my comfort zone, something I never thought I would have the confidence to do. This market is needed during a time where queer lives are being attacked and rights are being removed. With the rise of conservative ideas and fascist governments, markets like these that embrace sexuality, kink, and bodily freedom are demonised and could even be criminalised and that is why we need them. They are doing a great thing and I’m thankful to have been apart of it.
Offering a safe space to be unapologetically creative without shame or judgement is so important, and I hope everyone who came along had a great time! Applications are open for the December 2025 market and I’m currently brainstorming ideas for possible workshops so stay tuned! To check out the other amazing workshops and vendors who attended on Saturday, have a look at the Uncensored Market Instagram.
Thank you to my wonderful friends who also came to support and help me out, it meant the world to have you all there (especially everyone who saw me nervous as all hell pacing and counting down the minutes until the workshop started.)
+Life update
Every time I have sat down to write within the last month, I’m overcome with a complete inability and lack of motivation to put words onto the screen. I have ideas rattling around this cluttered head of mine, and I spend all day at work uneasy that I can’t write. Then when I’m home and my time is my own I’m too tired and too unenthused to try.
This newsletter is my sanctuary, and every moment I let a day go by without working on it fills me with a lot of anxiety, yet it’s been over a month since I’ve posted. In my unplanned absence there’s been a lot going on that I’d like to share with you in hopes that sitting down to write here, even if it isn’t profound or poetic, that it gets the excitement back.
+Motivation, quiet, and pressure
I have a steady job for the first time in a long time, and while the money keeps me going, it’s drained me of any and all motivation to write. I work 40 hours a week in a wee warehouse where I spend my days maintaining plants and flowers, sounds like the easiest job in the world I’m sure, but the long hot days and regular injuries make for an exhausted writer. (I have to phone the doctor to check out what I think is nerve damage on my ankle after getting the same work injury twice in a short time span) For a few weeks I was writing short stories and poems on my lunch breaks but eventually trying to cram it in was too demanding of my creativity, and whenever I couldn’t write I was getting frustrated and upset.
So I did what I usually do when I have writers block- Stay as far away from my laptop as possible. Every time I picked it up and thought maybe I can just write something small made it worse. What I didn’t want to happen was not writing for a month, but here we are.
When it comes to my writing career on social media, I’m terrible at promotion and staying active. The Ghoulish Gazette Instagram is used purely to promote this newsletter, but even at that I’m not very good at continually promoting posts of the past, even if I worked so hard on them and don’t want them to be forgotten just because I’ve put out something new. Very rarely do I post on Substack, to do so just seems performative, or a chore to tick off my list.
Most of the Substack articles on my feed right now are all about how to build your platform and how to maximise your subscriber count, and I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t got to me. I’d love to say that I write purely for the love of the craft, but sometimes it does feel like I’m shouting into the abyss where every shadow has its back turned to me. It takes a lot of hard work to get somewhere big, and my writing is no exception, but looking at the statistics and constantly checking the performance honestly started to discourage me from continuing.
But there’s some positivity here. In this last month I’ve realised that even if I should post more, be more active and do whatever else helps my writings visibility, it’s not second nature to me. I’m more than happy to pop up whenever, be active when I feel like it instead of trying to cater to an algorithm and promote myself constantly because that feels more authentic to me. The more authentic I am to myself, the more authentic I am to my writing.
That being said I am going to make a conscious effort to have more of an online presence, but I’m not going to break my back trying in the process.
+What I’ve been doing now you know where I’ve been
Since writing my 7,000 word essay, I’ve been exploring the inner parts of myself and making the effort to be a better person for myself and for others. If therapy has taught me one thing recently, it’s that I put far too much pressure on myself. Pressure to write, to be successful, to be the prettiest and the best at everything because if I’m not I’m nothing. That is going to take more time to unlearn than I’d like it to.
Since that essay, I’ve felt free to embrace my sexuality as a woman without the same pressure as before. In realising I’m demisexual, I’ve put less pressure on myself to find a guy to have sex with every time I go on a night out, I can dress sexy to feel good instead of dressing sexy so I’m attractive enough to fuck. Because even if I am and that attracts a man, I know the night won’t end in sex so the pressure is off. There’s still a lot of feelings related to shame that I’m working through with the help of my therapist and friends, but I’m getting there.
I’ve tried to get serious about my physical health, which I’ve been trying to do since 2020, but this whole time I struggled so much to stick to eating healthy and going to the gym, and the reason for that is because I was trying to fit the universal standard instead of finding what works for me. The idea of sitting in a gym or going on a diet are entirely unappealing and boring, and that might work for a lot of people but in 5 years it hasn’t worked for me.
Now that I’m aware of what doesn’t work for me I’ve found what does. I’m not eating food I don’t like because it’s healthy, I’m modifying food that I do like by adding ingredients that make the protein higher and volume more filling. Every day is a challenge not to fall back into bad habits, but I’m taking it step by step and not putting too much pressure on losing weight and getting fit anymore and I have noticed a small difference and I’m so proud of myself for finally getting to a place where I can listen to my body and know what it needs.
Fitness is still a big struggle, but to put a little more fun into it I’ve started taking Pole fitness classes at my local studio. Pole sports is a beautiful art and it engages the whole body, but most importantly I find it more fun than anything else I’ve tried to do for exercise. I have however begged my best friend to force me through her workouts and start running, not because I don’t want to, but because I need the motivation
It’s all these factors that have contributed to my silence and lack of motivation to write. I love my job, but it is killing the creative inside of me and I do worry that I’ll never be able to write again and by having this as my only option I’ve shot myself in the foot- but that’s the fear and anxiety talking.
When it comes to this newsletter, I have put far too much pressure on delivering promises I’ve made to myself by announcing all the things I have planned to publish. When I do that and then can’t/don’t publish them I feel like I’m letting everyone down, but the only person I’m disappointing is me.
I can’t sustain myself or my love of writing while being hard on myself, so I’ll make no promises about this newsletter. I’m going to work on my drafts and I’ll publish them when I feel ready.
Thank you kindly for reading and sticking by me.
Until the next, stay weird
Kaci xc