Sibling Suvivalry + Lockdown in Brighton

In the lockdown, we were all stuck in our respective areas and, for me, that meant Brighton. I have a love-hate relationship with my home town because in the last ten years, particularly, I’ve felt the unique elements of what made up Brighton and Hove have eroded. There’s a very unique culture and a twang from people who grew up here which is totally different to what people perceive as typically Brighton, particularly if you lived in the little country parts. People sometimes ask if I’ve been to Australia because there honestly is like a yangy sound that my grandparents would speak which I’ve inherited. I also have heard so many people who live in the North of England describe the South as very disparate and, for the most part, it is, but it’s not because of a lack of desire for community, but a forced relocation because of the cost of things. Where I grew up it’s a tiny little village area where everyone built houses, so they have all been here for 60 years and I was asked to respectfully refer to their neighbours as aunties and uncles. The more pricy things have become in Brighton, the less connected the community has been, and the Brighton I loved, which I assume would have been more like a liberal pocket of community, is not there anymore. 

The other thing about Brighton which I really feel made it what it was, the corners of subculture that made up the town like some alternative patchwork quilt… they’ve totally gone. I used to walk from Borders, which is now Urban Outfitters, past Rag Freak, an independently owned rock and roll, gothic, spikey, market stall in a genius place to become some generic cafe, through the lanes which would be full of shops selling God knows what, from sparkly unicorn postcards to bongs, to the big penis books, to Paul Frank bags, to Red Veg the vegan fast food place that was here 20 years ago... Nowadays, there are so many weird little shops that have been styled by someone in Ikea furniture to look quirky, but they’re plastic tat in strange colours and little more. It’s just not as fun as it used to be. There are no lesbian-only spaces, which I think has caused a massive divide in the LGBT community. Even the gay bars are now student orientated and the people who work here have no connection to Brighton. It feels to me like those horrendous photographs of pristine, unusual beaches that suddenly get promoted to tourists and become a dump. It’s a watering hole and not a clean one. 

But I found myself in Brighton during the beginning of the pandemic after France shut down a week before England. I didn’t know what I was going to do as I had just moved from working in a freelance capacity with years of income, to a new business which would have been a better set up for me. But not if I was going to apply for Furlough, which I didn’t qualify for whatsoever. So I just decided to focus on Agitprop, and bring the new version of the website for everyone to enjoy.

The first four months, I was absolutely living for the lockdown. It was like a reset and I was working on my health, doing my personal training over zoom. It was awesome. I felt super happy and enjoyed the process of being able to be around my family. My niece who was in our bubble was here all the time, which was a joy because we got to hang out when we were allowed to. I just had a great time. Then, a few weeks before my birthday, we sadly lost my last grandparent, my grandad Ray. It definitely was a shocking experience, which soon followed with the entire family contracting COVID. So I took a real hit in the middle of the pandemic and I felt my mental health was really affected because, annoyingly, in my case, it gave me a huge irritation to my eye injury. This has been an ongoing event for me and really a debilitating experience because practically everything I do in my life that I earn an income from, requires me to be able to see clearly and I was back to square one.family. My

This birthday, I have been working professionally for over fifteen years, which sounds absurd because I’m a 90s baby. But I have been the energiser bunny and I had a mission that I was destined to work towards and I was trekking to London, booking my little gigs at 14 years of age. In those 15 years, I have deliberately transformed myself, pivoting each time something blockaded my journey and I used identity to really explore my emotions. I wanted to share with my audience on Facebook, which is my longest social media account, all the different inspirations and ideas I had with each incarnation. It was a really fun mini project and for two weeks I went through the stories and the incidents, including the injury to my eye.

The significance of talking about this injury was the effect it had on my ability to control my gender expression, and being a trans person who has never disclosed my medical history online, I think that people have misunderstood a lot about what I’ve gone through. I wanted to share that I created a male alter ego to really use as a shield whilst I was in recovery and regaining my ability to see again. It was a direct response and something that was totally misunderstood. But speaking about this for the first time publicly was amazing, because so many people who had objectively been watching my work for years began to peel back the layers of who I am and understand the ins and outs of what makes me, me. And it was important for people to learn for the first time that my name is Jo or JoJo, and not Joseph Harwood. That’s my business name, and that’s who I operate under, in the same way Elton John or a drag queen works through a transit identity. I thought it was obvious but the illusion of JH is apparently more believable than I realised haha!

So, just after the death of my grandad was a rebirth for me, because I could put behind me my past work and look into the next stage of my career without the fear that I’d brought with me along that journey. I decided to connect with a counselling service to discuss everything I’ve been through and I think taking those active steps was a really helpful tool, because I think we all have a fear of discussing the feeling of being weak at times, and we all go through both positives and negatives. What I found was that a lot of what happened to me as a child, which I won’t disclose publicly yet, still affected my decisions as an adult. Despite how successful I’ve become and all the things I get to do today, I definitely feel like my childhood was something that had a profound, traumatic effect on me and many of the situations that I saw as an adult were almost like a recreation of things I’d been through already. To really look through that with an objective lens is super tough, and you’ve got to prepare for the after effects of doing so because the weeks leading, from my therapy sessions were awful. 

My sister got married during July and it was really an incredibly releasing thing for the entire family. I got the opportunity to film the wedding and create a montage about the day for my family and do the makeup. I was crying and it was just like a full stop on a lot of the things we had been through. I don’t have any grandparents with us today, but watching my niece call my mum Nana, and realising we had moved into our next life as adults was really profound for me. We definitely have been through a lot, and the pandemic was an unusual staging, but we survived it. 

A highlight for me was visiting my opticians to finally assess the damage that had been done to my eyes, and I had every possible test going to look at the pressure in my eyes, the scar that I had under my left eye and my eyesight, because every time I would try and focus on a TV screen or a computer since having COVID was a blur. And to my surprise, my eyesight has changed drastically for the better. My glasses were now 1.0 too strong for my eyesight, which has changed since getting the virus, and I don’t know how that has happened. I no longer have an open scar in my left eye and it looks like a massive improvement, which is totally a joy. So, even through the pickaxe to the head feeling I went through when I was positive for Corona Virus, my eyes, which have been impacting me for over four years, have somehow healed. So I write this more so to say that we never know what’s around the corner, this was such an expected year and a half, but in that time, things had miraculously come together. Whatever hand we’re dealt, you never know what positives will come from it.