It’s been quiet here since December when we carried out a performance with TALOS Festival in London. Attendance was poor and delivering the show cost around 10 times more than we made in ticket sales. However, we had the honour of seeing a TERF storm off in a huff as soon as trans rights were mentioned, which is a priceless memory.

Past

It’s hard to look back at Season One without loaded emotions, but the thing that hits me is how incredibly resourceful and resilient creatives need to be when they’re bringing a vision to life. Intrapology was the biggest, most personal project I’ve ever done. It lived inside me; its pain was my pain, its joys were my delight. There’s no way to hold any of that at arm’s length.

I won’t pretend that it all turned out as I’d hoped, but I’m proud that I pulled together an incredibly diverse and talented team of more than 40 freelancers - much bigger than many small businesses - with some individuals performing more than one role and everyone adapting their skills to this project. It took a lot to manage the project day to day with a bunch of actors, directors, technicians, software developers and testers, consultants and specialists.

I’m proud that we pulled out all the stops to create an online, interactive world for and with people who find it hard to access physical theatre spaces and don’t see themselves at the centre of traditional storylines. Our core team learned something new with each episode and by Episode 4 we began to see the plan coming together. The writing was stronger, the actors had settled into their roles, the director was making magic, the technicians were stellar. Then we ran out of money.

There should be a few more ‘Rs’ alongside resourcefulness and resilience. Rest, recover, and re-evaluate. Reach out and in for care and support because it’s hard out there and, for those of us with disabilities, it is hard to ask our bodies to carry even more pain. Creatives take risks which means they accelerate towards setbacks, celebrate tiny triumphs, and do lots of invisible work that audience members never see. It’s important to resist simplistic notions of success and failure and remember all of that work, because it takes a hell of a lot of courage to put yourself and your new-born baby on the line.

Present

None of my many funding applications in 2025 were successful, except for the Children’s Capital of Culture traineeship which came to an end in March. Even during the period when we had funding, I had to spend around half of my time writing unsuccessful applications, another large portion trying in vain to reach audiences, plus admin for our existing grants, leaving only a small sliver of time for actual creative output. Basically, it doesn’t make sense for a disabled person with only 25 working hours a week to be responsible for creative direction, producing, fundraising, PR, and community management all at the same time!

On top of that, burnout and long COVID have been aggravating my MS, leaving me very unwell since December. For several weeks I was almost bedbound. The devastating psychological impact of near-constant rejection from both funders and audiences, especially for a project as ambitious and as personal as this one, hasn’t helped. I therefore had to stop for the sake of my mental and physical health.

That means not making and publishing new work until at least next year. When I do start making new work, it’s likely to be much smaller in scale. Whatever productive capacity I recover will be spent making things, not begging strangers to care about the things I’ve made. More than ever, I want to tell stories about how it feels when you sit alone facing the void where society was supposed to be, and what we could build together if only we could reach one another.

Future

Thankfully, my energy is starting to return, and I’m starting to think about how I might move forward with Intrapology. My first priority has been to cut our digital platforms back to reduce costs and focus on the things that make me happy to be on the internet. I’ve closed our ghost.io members site and ported the content to a micro.blog; I intend to close our Patreon as well, after republishing the more interesting content onto our micro.blog. If you were a supporter on either of these platforms, you will receive an invitation to subscribe to our micro.blog mailing list.

I’m unlikely to go back to posting on the Intrapology Instagram and Tiktok accounts because surveillance capitalism doesn’t make me happy and it has never helped us reach audiences. I’m keeping our Neocities site, our Peertube instance, and our Fedwiki, because those things are joyous expressions of the collective creative potential of the internet, without content recommendation algorithms that gatekeep our access to audiences. I’d return to corporate social media if I got the budget to pay someone to do it efficiently and strategically, but this is unlikely to happen.

In the meantime, work we created when we had funding still needs to be published. This includes the recording of Episode 4 which was edited by our Children’s Capital of Culture trainee, Lucia Pires-Reeves, and the interactive playscripts of Episode 4 and Episode 5. I also hope to publish some blog posts discussing the strengths of the work we did in Season One to make a public record of the possibilities we explored for online interactive work that centres queer and disabled folks. I hope other people can try to realise these possibilities in their own projects, and I hope they receive more support than we have.

Thanks

I’d like to thank our funders - Arts Council England, Creative Catalyst, and Innovate UK – and everyone who took part as collaborators and audience members. We lost very few team members on our journey, and many gave so much at difficult times in their lives. As creatives we learn to hold pain as lovingly as we hold joy. It doesn’t destroy our truths, it is produced in service of our truths and resides with them inside our bodies. It hurts and with self-flagellation it hurts even more. By practising compassion it can become one of those cracks that lets the light in so that we can see our way to our next creative adventure. The point is to stay with those truths because that’s the only way to do the work that matters and collectively build worlds we can all live in.

Updates on all of this will be on post.intrapology.com so please do follow that via RSS or email.

All the best,

Zoyander