I share thoughts on my trip to Lisbon, including how I gained some perspective on my PhD woes by travelling outside of my usual surroundings. I also write about why it feels particularly difficult to disconnect from my worries at the moment, and how I’m trying to deal with that heaviness. As usual, I hope that sharing my lower moments with honesty will make sure that this essay series gives a realistic portrayal of how 2026 is unfolding for me.

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Every week, I share a handful of journal prompts alongside my own reflections from the week, inviting us both to pause and notice where our attention has gone before the next week begins.

This week felt heavy, and I’m left feeling a little fragile. Before I dive into the usual structure of my weekly Field Notes reflections, I thought I’d give a little bit of context on why.

Honestly, this was the hardest week I’ve had for a while. That doesn’t negate how lucky I feel to have the opportunities and support system I do; sometimes a difficult week is simply a difficult week. I want to be open about those moments because social media can so easily become an onslaught of picture-perfect lives with all of the grind and slog cut out in the editing room. Seeing others share honestly about the heavier parts of their lives has made me feel less alone in my own low moments, so I’d like to offer some of that honesty here too. It wouldn’t feel like much of a practice of paying attention if I only documented the weeks when I liked what I found.

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Every week, I share a handful of journal prompts alongside my own reflections from the week, inviting us both to pause and notice where our attention has gone before the next week begins.

This week, I’m reflecting on the exhausting uncertainty of job applications, what my brain is reaching for when it needs an escape, and trying to balance self-doubt and excitement about the future.

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That’s how they get you.

I am an autumn-winter person through and through. I have a late September birthday; I love a dark evening and become disproportionately excited at the first hint of crispness in the air. After the relentless heat of this summer, I am already yearning for cold mornings, jumpers, long walks, and evenings spent inside with something comforting to watch.

Unfortunately, the autumn content has also begun its annual infiltration of my algorithm. With it, I can feel the wishlist forming. I need boots! I need a brown leather bag! I need mugs! I need candles! I need a fluffy blanket, and a berry-coloured lip stain, and a phone case with pumpkins on it, and wool socks, and an insulated coffee cup for my morning walks. I need, apparently, an entirely new set of possessions to experience the season properly.

Somehow, in an online world already saturated with stuff-related content, autumn seems particularly vulnerable to commodification. Something about the season lends itself spookily well to consumerism: warm colours, nostalgic traditions, cosy textures, ‘effortlessly chic’ jumper/boot combinations for walks through amber leaves.

This is nothing new. I remember scrolling through justgirlythings autumn content on Tumblr when I was a young teenager, and watching American women on YouTube talk viewers through enormous Bath & Body Works candle hauls. The aesthetic has changed since then; the memes and aspirational products are different, but the underlying promise hits very similarly. And, spookiest of all, we have all become vastly more susceptible to online marketing.

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And, at heart, I am still that thirteen-year-old girl poring over her dad’s iPad when she is meant to be asleep, enchanted by the thought of the autumn she is about to have. (I really remember ordering mini Bath and Body Works autumn-themed candles from the UK on eBay at a ridiculous markup with my birthday money, fumigating my poor family members with pumpkin-vanilla-maple-cookie-spiced-leaves chemical warfare.)

I still find something genuinely lovely in the collective excitement. I enjoy looking at other people’s autumn moodboards and making my own; I enjoy the ridiculous anticipation that starts building months in advance. I won’t pretend I’m above it all. But buying those mugs did make me stop and think about what exactly I was trying to purchase. At least partly, I was trying to buy the cosy autumn evening I imagined drinking tea from them during, microdosing nostalgia for autumns-gone-by. I found myself grasping at a season that feels slower, calmer and more comforting than my stifling, hectic summer has been.

While working on this piece, I decided to make a hypothetical autumn wishlist based on the sort of things I’ve been seeing online (which came frighteningly easy to me). I wanted to see what would happen if I actually curated my fantasy into one place, so I could turn it into one of those autumn graphics myself. I added up the prices.

£1162.

That number is frankly obscene.

I already own perfectly functional versions of each thing on the list. I have leather shoes, knitwear, mugs, a bag, a coffee cup. It is not cold enough where I live to require alpaca wool socks in the autumn. I just don’t need a new berry-toned lipstick to survive September.

And this is where it is useful to remind myself that the nicest things about autumn are, for the most part, completely free. The crisp air on a morning walk, realising for the first time this year that I need to wear a scarf. Taking myself somewhere beautiful to appreciate the trees changing colour. Making soup and eating two bowls of it for dinner while I watch an old film with my fiancé. Coming home cold and putting on the biggest jumper I own to read our books under a blanket. The beautiful outfits and expensive candles are truly not the point of any of those things.

Of course, I’m not arguing that the occasional thoughtful purchase doesn’t bring a little joy. I’m not going to pretend I regret my mugs, because they’re beautiful, I’m very excited to use them, and I hope I’ll have them for years. There is absolutely something lovely about choosing a few objects that make your everyday life feel a little more special.

I just want to catch myself a little earlier this year, before autumn becomes a wishlist. None of us needs to start purchasing autumn in order to enjoy it.

Since I started this article with a purchase, I will end it with a list of alternatives to just buying more autumn stuff. Here are some suggestions for how to get excited for the season ahead which lean into experiences, rather than acquiring new things:

Every week, I share a handful of journal prompts alongside my own reflections from the week, inviting us both to pause and notice where our attention has gone before the next week begins.1

This week, I’m reflecting on returning to family, letting myself linger in the just-engaged bubble, the PhD stress creeping back in around the edges, and why I’m craving familiarity as everything else in my life changes.

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It’s July and I have hope in who I am becoming.

-- Charlotte Eriksson

I went into July feeling a little overwhelmed by things. I had three months to finish my PhD, I hadn’t secured a job, and various goings-on in my personal life were gnawing away at me. All of those things are still true. But July was, against all of the odds, a lovely, gentle, happy month.

Before I dive into the rest of it, I will share some very happy news: I got engaged! I want to give some more details later in this post, but I’ll say for now that I’m still basking in sheer joy after my partner proposed to me last week on a rainy Scottish beach.

I have felt a bit like I’m floating since then. Of course, I still need to finish my thesis and apply for jobs and pay my bills and deal with normal life. But I am, at heart, a true romantic, and I am full of a joy that makes all of those things feel lighter.

Anyway—more on that later. For the first 28 days of July, I was not thinking about weddings, so here is a little reflection on the rest of the month.

prompt 1: where have I spent my attention this month?

Aside from spending the last few days of the month solely thinking about how happy I am to be engaged (!!!), a few things really shaped my thinking in July.

Film: The Odyssey (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Like everyone and their mother, I went to see Nolan’s The Odyssey. And I really, really loved it. I count myself quite lucky that I managed to see this before I really saw much of the online discourse (of which there has been… a lot), and also managed to see it in Oslo’s Colosseum cinema, which is spectacular. The thousand-seat cinema screen was full, and I felt completely swept up in it all. I truly love seeing films as part of a huge audience. I feel such a sense of togetherness in the shared act of watching an epic story unfold in the darkness of a cinema, no phones in sight.

I find it quite surprising that a lot of the critique of this film centres around its purported lack of emotional depth, because I was weeping by the end. I had a similar reaction to rewatching Interstellar earlier this year: Nolan’s films have me leaving the cinema thinking about how badly humans are messing up the world, but hopeful that there is a chance to strive for goodness. They make me want to be a part of that effort; to not leave the fate of our planet to the absolute worst of us. Odysseus realising what he had done in Troy and beyond made me think about the climate crisis, about war, about the AI arms race that seems to be at serious risk of spiralling out of control. I thought it was so powerful that I went to see it for a second time the following weekend, and would see it again.

Book: Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

On a lighter note, I have been slow reading Taiwan Travelogue and very much enjoying it. (I say slow reading as though this is a contrast with my other reads, when really I’ve been slow reading everything lately. My head feels very full, and I’m worried that if I read too fast, I won’t take anything in.) This book feels exquisitely layered: it plays with ideas of the nature of translation, colonialism and class dynamics, and appetite. A lot of this exploration happens through descriptions of food, which I’m finding equally clever and hunger-inducing. I have about a third of it still to go, and am really enjoying working my way steadily through it to allow myself to unpack the hidden layers.

Item: Louise Carmen Roadbook (leather journal)

One material item from the month has brought me a lot of joy: my Louise Carmen leather journal. This was my first leather journal in what has become quite a sizeable collection, and it remains one of my absolute favourites. I bought it in January 2025, and I love that it has aged so beautifully (it looks substantially more patina-d and a little scratched up compared to the photo above, which is from last summer). On meh days, when I feel like my thoughts are a mess, and I am not holding it all together very well, I can rely on my journals for some moments of calm and clarity. While one obviously doesn’t need an exceptionally fancy journal to find this, I think the beauty of this lovely object can genuinely help me to get out of my own head. Returning to it feels like a ritual; a reminder that it is still worth taking time for beautiful frivolities on good and bad days alike.

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Now, firstly, I have to admit that ‘nothing salads’ is a very funny phrase. It rings a little existential. I like that it was commented by cucumbers22230, and wonder if all of their insults are salad-themed.

I also enjoyed following the logic of the comment through to its conclusion: if adults have no “creative writing” projects, and, by extension, no creative projects in general, then every creative masterpiece in existence was brought into being by some maverick genius child. I’m tickled by the idea that Crime and Punishment was written by a very earnest, theologically minded 11-year-old; Raphael’s cherubs were actually self-portraits of the chubby prodigy toddlers who painted the Sistine Madonna.

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But this comment mainly made me genuinely sad. Whoever is behind cucumbers22230 seemed to be completely baffled that some adults choose to spend their free time being creative. Of course, there’s a good chance this specific commenter was just trying to wind me up (there’s always a good chance of that on tiktok). But I think the sentiment is depressingly common. Many people do think that creative pursuits are a waste of time. That it’s cringe to try to write, or paint badly, or be involved in your local theatre company beyond the age of twelve.

It’s a bit easy to mock such people. My initial reaction was to laugh, and then to feel a certain sense of superiority: you honestly can’t extend your imagination far enough to imagine an adult enjoying creative writing? Dear lord, what a sad little life, Jane.

But honestly, so many of us are never encouraged even to try to enjoy creating. Art, music, theatre, and creative writing are often things we have to do in school for a bit, but so many people will never touch them again after graduating. Rather than providing an opportunity to develop curiosity, community, and playfulness, learning such subjects becomes associated with assessment and whether or not someone is ‘naturally talented’. And even then, a majority of education systems seem to make it clear that these things are far less valued than other parts of their curriculum; sort of ‘add-ons’ to take part in once a week alongside your real schoolwork. You know, the proper subjects, like maths and science. The ones that lead to a real career.

So many of us stop believing that creativity is something adults are allowed to do simply because they enjoy it. Hobbies become things that should be monetised, mastered, turned into side hustles. If you're not trying to become exceptional at something, what's the point? We become remarkably good at justifying why we don't have time to make things anymore.

While cucumbers22230 did rile me up, maybe they were once a kid who loved to write stories. Or maybe they were never particularly interested in these things, but they were also never encouraged to give them a try anyway.

And you’re missing out on so much of life if you never try to create. Even if you have no hope or interest in trying to become a professional (or even very proficient) in any of these pursuits, there’s still so much to gain from just doing them. I don’t have any plans to try to publish any of my creative writing, and I didn’t write it with the hope of anyone reading it.

I write because I enjoy it; it lets me engage with the world around me in a different way. I notice people and places that spark ideas for a character or setting in a story, scribbling down ideas in my pocket notebook as I go about my daily life. I collect turns of phrase or overheard snippets of conversation that might make it into some writing. I don’t particularly care if the final product is polished or perfected. Maybe one day I will, but for now, it serves as an escape from the difficult parts of my life. Nobody else ever has to read it, and it’s wonderfully freeing to give myself permission to create for the sake of creating.

In fact, I think if you’re not any good at something like writing or painting or making music, there’s a bonus benefit: you get to learn that you don’t constantly have to produce great stuff to be a valuable human being. Spending some time just being human is a beautiful part of life.

If life is all full of nothing salads, art is the dressing that makes it worth eating.

Every Sunday, I share a handful of journal prompts alongside my own reflections from the week, inviting us both to pause and notice where our attention has gone before the next week begins.

This week, I'm reflecting on disconnecting in the Norwegian wilderness, the discomfort of sitting with difficult thoughts rather than distracting myself from them, and what small children might teach us about where our value really lies.

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Lately, my social media feeds have been serving me a lukewarm stream of content all promising the same precious secret: how to become a “top 1% woman”. The formula is consistent. Wake up at 5am. Drink something unsettlingly green. Read self-help books before breakfast. Journal. Meditate. Exercise. Eat “clean”. Never waste time. Never scroll. Never be lazy. Never be average.

I’m acutely aware that under its surface, this content is nothing new. But every few years, the labels change. We’ve had “that girl”, “clean girl”, “it girl”, “hot girl”. (When I list them like that, I can’t help but imagine them as a row of smirking apparitions who manifest one after the other like the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, except, rather than making Scrooge realise the error of his ways, they’re here to make me realise what a lazy, inferior loser I am.) The aesthetic evolves, but the message stays remarkably similar: become somebody worthy of admiration. Become somebody who’s a winner.

Now we’re apparently trying to become “top 1% women”. I mean, at least the that/clean/it/hot girl has finally become that/clean/it/hot woman, I suppose. But this framing feels particularly icky to me because it makes the goal explicit. It’s not just to be cool, or happy, or fulfilled; it’s to be better than everyone else.

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When I see this type of content, my first thought is always the same: top 1% at what, exactly? The generic advice put forward in these videos never quite makes that clear. It's a sort of mishmash of relentless discipline and a particular aesthetic, designed to signal superiority. But the framing implies that committing to this routine for long enough would bump you steadily up a sort of general leaderboard that ranks… What exactly? Ounces of swamp green powder consumed? Soulless hours spent reading self-help books you don't even enjoy?

I don’t have anything against waking up early or exercising or eating well. These habits are obviously good for us (although sleeping well is more important than waking up early just for the sake of it). But these videos are never really about becoming kinder, wiser, more creative, or more thoughtful. They’re never about honing a niche interest or skill, or helping your community to thrive. They just feel sort of empty. The goal isn’t building a meaningful life, but maintaining the feeling that you're doing life better than almost everyone else.

I think that’s an incredibly bleak way of looking at human beings. We’ve shifted from asking, What kind of life do I want to build? to How can I become the sort of person other people envy? How can I make sure I feel superior to the people around me?

And these routines leave out so much. They never recommend staying out later than you planned because the conversation is too good to leave. None of them suggest getting slightly too drunk with your closest friends, eating an alarming quantity of salty pub snacks, and crying with laughter at terrible jokes until your stomach hurts. None of them tell you to spend an afternoon wandering around a museum with no particular plan, or lose yourself in a novel simply because you’re enjoying it.

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And yet some of the happiest days of my year have looked exactly like that. Sometimes the thing that most improves my wellbeing isn’t another self-improvement habit, but staying in the pub until one in the morning over a packet of crisps and one too many ciders. Life isn’t supposed to be perfectly sanitised. It’s certainly not supposed to look identical for everyone.

These videos also tend to imagine self-improvement as an intensely individual pursuit. Every spare moment is directed towards optimising yourself, your body, your morning routine, your mindset, your productivity, your discipline. The people around you become less like companions and more like competitors in an invisible ranking system.

But that just isn’t how we grow as people. We grow because somebody encourages us when we’ve lost confidence. Because a friend introduces us to a book we’ll think about for years. Because a mentor believes in us. Because somebody makes us laugh when we’re taking ourselves too seriously. We exist in relationship with other people, not in isolation.

It's striking how few of these routines ask what you might contribute to the people around you. There are endless checklists for becoming a better version of yourself, but almost none for becoming a better friend, neighbour, colleague, or citizen. It's a vision of fulfilment that begins and ends with the self.

Throughout my PhD, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some genuinely exceptional people. Many of them will go on to do remarkable things, or have already done so. Interestingly, very few of them resemble the people in these videos. Some are incredibly organised; others are gloriously chaotic. Some exercise every day; others become so absorbed in an idea that they forget to eat lunch. Some wake up before sunrise; others produce their best work at midnight. In my experience, really brilliant people are often beautifully strange.

What they have in common isn’t that they’ve perfected a universal formula for success. It’s that they’re deeply interested in something beyond themselves. Their energy isn’t spent trying to become “top 1% people”; it’s spent asking interesting questions, making meaningful contributions, and building lives that reflect what they actually care about.

That’s what’s missing from so much productivity content. The question shouldn’t be, How can I become better than everyone else? It should be, What kind of person do I want to be, and what kind of life do I want to live? Those are very much not the same thing.

I don't want my greatest ambition to be maintaining the perfect morning routine. I’d much rather become somebody who is curious, generous, thoughtful, and surrounded by people they love. If that occasionally means sleeping in, abandoning my planner, or staying out far later than a productivity influencer would recommend, I think I’m willing to live with that.

Here’s where I’ve found myself this week. I reflect on everything from late-night worries about the future to The Odyssey, morning walks, and hoping to be more present in the week that's right in front of me.

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We’ve just passed the midpoint of the year, and I feel equal parts terrified and hopeful for the months ahead. 2026 is shaping up to be a transformative year for me. Don’t get me wrong: I haven’t reached any huge milestones or made any dramatic moves so far. I haven’t gotten engaged or married, become a homeowner, published a book, or announced any ‘exciting and humbling’ career news to my 259 avid supporters on LinkedIn. Nevertheless, I can feel something shifting beneath the surface; an excitement for what the next six months might hold for me.

The past six months have been full of endings. I’m finishing my PhD, saying goodbye to one chapter of my life, and trying to work out what I want the next one to look like. Somewhere along the way, I realised that I was spending a lot of my time either thinking about the past few years, or imagining where I’d be in a year’s time. This is, I think, a normal way to feel at a point of transition. But I also don’t want the rest of the year to whirl by in a hazy blend of nostalgia and anticipatory worry, at the expense of feeling grounded in where I am.

At this point in the year, I always find myself drawn towards some kind of reset. The internet tends to offer two versions of this. One is the beautifully curated vision board: autumn wardrobes, beautiful writing desk setups, flatlays of dinner party hosting tables, and beautiful nature shots. I genuinely love making Pinterest boards, and there is something very joyful about collecting little glimpses of the life you hope to build. But I also find that this practice can encourage me to focus almost entirely on outcomes, rather than actually embodying the life I’m living now.

The other option is equally unsatisfying: an endless stream of optimisation advice. Habit trackers, productivity systems, and routines promising to transform your life by September, and to make you a better and more worthwhile human being. I’ve written before about why that sort of content doesn’t resonate with me. We aren’t machines waiting to discover the perfect operating system; we’re people trying to build meaningful lives while juggling work, relationships, health, uncertainty, and the wonderful inconveniences of being human.

Neither of those approaches encouraged me to actually notice my life as it was unfolding.

I don’t need a vision board; I don’t need another productivity system. Instead, I want to pause long enough to ask myself a simple question:

How am I actually living, and what actually matters to me?

So I decided to put together a mid-year review for myself. I really don’t want to give myself a performance review. I want to have an honest, reflective conversation with myself. Below, I’m sharing the first set of prompts I’ll be working through myself over the coming weeks.

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The city felt foreign then. I could feel the presence of the many thousands of impressive souls who had passed through on their path to do great things. I sensed their eyes looking down at me from portraits hanging on hardwood panelled walls while I ate beans on toast and formed awkward friendships during freshers’ week. It was hard to imagine that I could ever feel at home in a place which already held so many stories.

Almost ten years later, I am finally trying to say goodbye to it. Oxford is a small city: it holds around 165,000 inhabitants, barely a city by some people’s standards. And it is as beautiful as the pictures make it look. It’s very easy to fall in love with such a place, and I’ve seen people visit for a few days and feel like they’re leaving a little piece of themself behind when they go. When you spend a decade in Oxford, you get to know it very well. Its streets and winding passageways are the lines on the wrinkled hand of an old friend, deep and worn and familiar.

And those streets hold so many memories. This week I felt a little overwhelmed by them. The stone steps outside University College, where I sat at the end of a chaotic undergrad night out, half a bottle of wine in and trying to recover with friends over greasy chips from a food van. The bend in the river where I jumped in after my first set of (slightly catastrophic) university exams, going into cold shock and coming out smelling of goose. The cafes that became my go-to spots for most of my PhD, where I’d have comforting small talk with baristas before locking into writing for the day. The pub where my partner and I had our first date almost five years ago. These places were the building blocks of my young adult life.

Some of my worst memories are held by Oxford’s streets too. It would be nice if I had a neat, romantic story about how I fell in love with the place; about how 18-year-old me felt the fear slip away to easy confidence, how she made the best memories of her life and found her path. In such a story, the moderate adversity of an intense undergraduate degree and some health challenges could provide some conflict and rising action for the narrative arc, culminating neatly in the PhD as an inspiring and heart-warming resolution.

But, of course, life does not feel that way. It feels much messier. I won’t delve into the worst bits (I have complicated feelings about farming such experiences for online engagement, and think the way algorithms incentivise us to do so is… not good), but they certainly don’t feel like plot points that have been wrapped up neatly. Many of them are things I’m still working through, and probably will be for a long time. Beyond that, it would feel a little patronising to my younger self to write about her like some naive character about to set out on a quest and frame my current self as the infinitely wiser one at the end of the journey.

Oxford’s streets no longer feel full of the people who walked them before me. Instead, I’m crowded by the versions of myself I grew into and out of while living there.

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There’s a temptation to reminisce on these past versions; to laugh, albeit affectionately, at how much they still had to learn, or the choices they made which now seem completely baffling.

But really, those ten years aren’t bookmarked by sudden shifts from young to not-young, from naive to wise, from immature to mature. Rather, I see a thousand versions of myself, in constant flux. And I’m still in that constant flux.

In looking back, I also find myself looking forward. I try to think of myself in ten, twenty, fifty years. What will that version of me think of her 28-year-old self? Which places will have come to feel like home, full of complicated memories and versions of future me? It feels like a mistake to think that I’ll ever feel like a finished version of myself. I certainly don’t now.

Last week in Oxford I found myself hungry, and couldn’t for the life of me think of anywhere to buy some lunch. I stood on Cornmarket Street as hordes of tourists moved around me, my mind blank as I tried to decide. It hit me hard in the chest in that moment: Oxford is no longer home. It’s beautiful, and familiar, and largely unchanged, but it’s no longer the place where such small decisions feel automatic. Since moving away 9 months ago, I’ve already begun to evolve into new versions of myself.

The first versions of my adult self not held by the safety of Oxford’s streets. I feel excited to continue to meet them.

I feel that way about my PhD finishing. I am so ready to be done, acutely aware of the toll it’s taken on my wellbeing, and excited about what’s going to come next. But still, I feel myself caught in a heaviness, trying to process that this is actually going to come to an end. I’ve been thinking about this moment for a long time (four years!), but it suddenly feels very real. I’m at the point of filling in the paperwork, planning the practicalities of wrapping up these years of my life. I’m back in my childhood bedroom on the last day of the school year, trying not to cry at the thought of it actually being over.

This time around, the process of change has been prolonged. I moved away from Oxford about nine months ago to finish up my doctorate remotely, and the move marked an ending of its own. I’ve watched friends and colleagues move on too: the people I started my PhD alongside making their own moves, submitting their theses, setting off on various impressive postdoctoral paths. The process of finishing up a PhD is not a neat one, but rather a series of small moments together marking the end of something bigger.

I don't think there is a formula for navigating such endings well. For a long time, I was quite harsh on myself for feeling these transitions so deeply. I assumed I was somehow doing endings wrong; too soft, too nostalgic. It seemed that everyone else was simply better at moving on than I was. This felt especially irrational when I was genuinely excited about whatever was coming next.

I have learned to be much gentler with myself. It is entirely reasonable to feel untethered when something important comes to a close. In fact, I suspect that there are many people around me feeling the same, even if we don’t talk about it very much.

Rather than beating myself up for feeling this way, I've gradually gathered a handful of rituals and reflections that make periods of transition feel a little less untethered.

They aren't intended to make endings hurt less, but to help me move through them a little more gently. I wanted to share some of them below, in case they help you too.

The rest of this piece is for paid subscribers. ★ I share eight rituals and reflections that have helped me navigate endings a little more gently over the years.

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I was sitting in one of my favourite local cafés with a cohort of remote-working strangers, all tapping away at our laptops. At this stage of thesis writing, I have a dense list of tasks to get through each day. Today, I made the mistake of going off path: I opened a chapter which both of my supervisors had given feedback on that I’d yet to read through. This was not one of today’s tasks; I was supposed to be drafting a completely different chapter, knowing that I’d rather have a full thesis draft ready before I start revising anything. But alas, I found myself too tempted to look. Encouraged by positive emails letting me know that the feedback was there, I thought to myself, don’t get bogged down, just have a quick scroll through.

Reader: this was a mistake.

Below, I reflect on criticism, exhaustion, and the surprisingly emotional experience of reaching the end of a four-year project.

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The dinner was at Ask For Luigi, a Michelin Guide-recommended spot I’d carefully landed on as my splurge meal for the trip. There is something equal parts exciting and nerve-wracking about walking into an upmarket restaurant and declaring that you've booked a table for one. I’ve dined out alone quite a bit over the years, but always out of convenience or necessity. This felt different: I was taking myself out for a deliberate, indulgent solo dinner.

It was wonderful.

I ordered an Aperol spritz, which arrived a rich orange (not all Aperol spritzes are created equal; it’s all about the ratio, baby), and fresh tagliatelle with a white wine beef ragu. As a coeliac, fresh pasta itself was enough of a treat, but fifteen months later I am still thinking about that ragu. Please, god, let me experience that ragu again before I die. I asked the waiter for help choosing a red wine, and enjoyed watching the restaurant around me through a gentle, warm fuzz, full of wine and pasta and perfectly content. I had an espresso to finish, and the waiter brought me a tiny violet meringue with the bill.

There is so much joy to be found in being in your own company. In being able to order sparkling water for the table, because you are the table, and choosing a glass of wine without having to consider what everyone else is eating and drinking, and whether you should compromise on what you really want to share a bottle. It feels like an exercise in learning your own taste, and trusting it. I paid $70 for that dinner; I’d pay double to have that experience again.

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On that trip as a whole, I revelled in being able to choose exactly what I wanted to do, and to make every small decision during my time there. I wandered the Vancouver Art Gallery and paused at the paintings that caught my eye, walking on when I had taken the time I needed. I watched the entire Twilight Saga in my hotel room after the conference sessions each evening, given my location in the Pacific Northwest and my penchant for high-culture cinema. I bought a box of 16 macarons from a stall in Granville Island Public Market, and may have consumed them all by the time I flew home.

I also had so much time to listen to my own thoughts. In the Billie Holiday song from which I borrowed this piece’s title, she sings about how she’s haunted by her love’s presence when alone. She sits and revisits the memories of their time together, praying for God to send him back to her. It’s melancholy and beautiful, and beyond being a love song, it speaks to how being alone opens up an opportunity to feel our feelings. To know what’s important to us when the noise of daily life and other people’s input is quieted. Loneliness is not the only emotion that can bloom in solitude.

Before I moved in with my partner, I remember having a conversation about how much we both need alone time. We decided to move in together about 4 months after meeting, which, yes, was insane. 4 and a bit years on, I’m very grateful to my younger self for being insane. However, this would not have gone well had we not spoken about our need for alone time. About how, regardless of how much we love being in each other’s company, this was not about how we felt about the other person; it was about how we felt about ourselves. A basic need. I know that some people do not feel this way, and I’m immensely grateful to have a partner who completely understands me on this level.

I’m at a transitional phase of life right now: about to submit my PhD thesis (pending actually finishing writing the thing), and making decisions about my career path ahead. Letting myself be alone has given me two things which I think would have otherwise felt very difficult.

I’ve had space to feel the complicated emotions involved in coming to the end of these four years. I oscillate between anticipation, fear and worry, excitement, regret, and pride in what I’ve done. This is tiring, but I also think it would be strange if I didn’t feel at least most of these as I come to the end of something so huge. These mood swings are underpinned by a simultaneous readiness to be finished, and a sadness to be leaving the place that has shaped my adult life so far. It feels so personal, and letting myself be in my own head for a little while, fairly often, lets me feel all of these things rather than trying to press them down.

Secondly, spending more time alone has given me a kind of clarity that I haven’t experienced before. Not certainty, exactly; I’m not sure I’ll ever stop feeling a little apprehensive about the future. But I have found myself feeling much more confident in my ability to work out what is actually right for me. I won’t go into the specifics of my next career steps just yet. I think that reaching the end of my PhD has made me want to think carefully about which parts of my life I choose to share publicly going forwards. But having enough quiet has allowed me to arrive at decisions privately, before inviting other people’s opinions into the room. I’ve had the space to think through what I want, without immediately worrying about how my family, partner, colleagues, or friends might react.

There is something deeply reassuring about discovering that your own voice is sometimes the one you most need to listen to. Not because the people we love don’t matter, but because there are some decisions that become much clearer once everyone else has stopped talking. That, more than anything, has felt like a weight lifting from my shoulders.

In going to Vancouver, I didn’t need isolation, but enough quiet to hear myself think. There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from spending time in your own company, making small decisions for yourself, and learning to trust your own taste. I think that's why I still think about that dinner in Vancouver so often. It was about the pasta, yes, and the gorgeous red wine, but it was also about remembering how much I enjoy my own company. About sitting in my own thoughts for a little while, which, at this particular moment in my life, is exactly where I need to be.

It’s a universal truth of adult life that you sometimes need to Get Stuff Done when you really, really don’t want to. I’m in the final months of my PhD, and I’m having more and more of those days. I very strongly believe that we all need rest, and that a life constantly focused on productivity and optimisation is not one that I want to live. But I also believe that doing challenging work is part of what gives my life meaning, and that being willing to try difficult things opens up a lot of experiences. Whatever meaningful work looks like in your own life, it's likely that you'll sometimes hit roadblocks in motivation. I think it's worth spending some time working out how to keep going when that happens.

For me, the answer hasn't been to force myself to work all the time, but to learn how to work well enough that I can genuinely switch off afterwards. I think that being committed to focused work goes hand in hand with being committed to rest: being able to work deeply can let us step away afterwards without constantly thinking about the tasks still sitting on our to-do lists, and being able to rest fully gives the energy needed for deep, sustained work. I love feeling fully present during my tea-making rituals, or going for a post-work drink with my partner. I love lying in bed until 11am on Sundays, and watching TV with my mum and dad without my mind being elsewhere.

It’s not that we have to earn rest—in fact, when my productivity levels feel lowest, that’s often a sign that I need to step back to recharge. But I also find work so much more energising when I can fully engage with it. I feel most exhausted by my PhD when I’m eking progress out in tortoise-slow steps, rather than entering a stretch of focused work where I can actually become excited by what I’m doing.

Of course, it is not realistic to expect all of our work to happen in that state. But I do think, with time spent learning how we work best, it’s possible to cultivate the conditions that make this kind of flow state more likely. I used to feel frustrated that I got a lot of my work done in intense bursts, followed by less productive stretches. I found myself thinking, why can’t I just even it out and get the same, sensible amount done every day? Over time, though, I’ve realised that I get much more done by working with my brain rather than battling against it.

I think that learning how to work with your own brain is a deeply personal journey. That might sound obvious, but so much of the content we see online positions productivity as a one-size-fits-all set of life hacks; a single formula for success. Excuse my language, but I think most of that is a load of shit. Too much of that industry keeps us engaged by making us feel as though we should always be working differently. In reality, many of the most interesting, ‘productive’ people I know have weird and wonderful ways of working, and wouldn’t dream of suggesting that everyone else needs to be doing the same.

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It took me years of experimenting to figure out what works best for me. What follows isn't a productivity system or a blueprint for success. (That would rather go against what I’m trying to explore with this whole series). Instead, I lay out the questions and experiments that have helped me understand how I work. Even (and perhaps especially) on days when I'm feeling overwhelmed or anxious, these are the things that help me find my way back into focused work. They don't always work, and on those days, I give myself grace.

None of these involve buying anything new or forcing yourself into a rigid routine; they are simply practical but flexible ideas you can adapt, discard, or reshape until they fit your own brain.

The rest of this piece is a practical companion to my previous essay on productivity culture. These are some of the frameworks, experiments, and habits that have helped me build a working style that feels both effective and sustainable.

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For a long time, I have felt a little bit embarrassed by the way I get things done. Since I was a teenager, I’ve been someone who can shift into goblin mode and get a lot of good work done, fast. I promise this is not a flex. The flip side is that I have never sustained an early morning routine, never sat down serenely at a perfectly organised desk to start working at 6am, never stuck to an elaborately time-blocked calendar. It’s taken me until now, almost at the end of my PhD, to realise that this is simply how my brain works, and that it has actually served me just fine so far. And yet, every so often, I still find myself wondering whether I’m really being “productive” enough.

If you have spent any time in the same corners of the internet as me, a very particular image of productivity begins to emerge. Productive people wake up early. They drink lemon water and an ominous-looking green powder mix before coffee. They have immaculate desks, immaculate calendars, and a colour-coded system for everything. They work in focused Pomodoro sessions on such a strict timer that I think their body clocks must operate in 25-minute blocks, ensuring brain waves radiate solidly until that little timer goes off, when they conveniently pause for a break before getting back to the colour-coded workflow before them.

The details of this image change over time. When I was a teenager, productivity content revolved around Mildliners and Muji pens, used to craft painstakingly beautiful handwritten notes. These days, the ideal productive person seems to own an entire Apple ecosystem, an immensely complicated, aesthetically pleasing Notion dashboard, and a desk setup that costs roughly the same as a small car. But the core underlying message remains: productivity is about being tidily disciplined and in control.

For many years, I internalised that message. Because my own work habits looked nothing like that, I assumed there must be something wrong with me, or at least that I should always be striving to do a bit better.

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The longer I spend in academia, the more convinced I become that my best work is often the least photogenic. And I must say that I do have some exceptionally photogenic work days: I’m a student at a beautiful old university, and I love romanticising my days by visiting its libraries. But some of my most productive days—and by productive I mean genuinely fruitful, when I actually make intellectual progress and move towards my goals—are spent, as I said, in goblin mode. Curled up on my sofa with a hot water bottle and an old hoodie, or in my hometown coffee chain, wearing clothes scrounged from my teenage wardrobe because I packed too lightly to visit my parents. These sessions often feel chaotic; I become a hamster that has chugged a Red Bull and can’t quite keep up with its own thoughts. But I quite often come away feeling like I’ve finally gotten somewhere with a task that’s been at the back of my mind for a while.

Of course, I am not suggesting that to be productive you must go back to your hometown, put on a mismatched outfit purchased in the 2014 January sales, and chug mediocre iced coffee until you reach a flow state. But that’s kind of my point: a lot of productivity content tries to convince us that there’s a single correct way to work, and that replicating someone else’s steps is how to crack the code. When I actually talk to other researchers, writers, and people who do intense, tricky work, that is obviously not the case. Some of those people thrive on routine and structure: they genuinely take a lot from working the exact same hours every day, and time blocking every task a week in advance. Others only work in super intense bursts, with very specific setups to support that. Most people fall somewhere between these, or, like me, vary depending on the task of the day.

Yet productivity content presents one highly specific version of success as if it were universal. It flattens these individual differences in the way we work, while also ignoring the fact that most of us end up experimenting with various strategies to fit our evolving needs. It’s not so much that I disagree with the version of productivity being presented. Some of my own weaknesses are beautiful stationery and complicated organisational spreadsheets. I just resent the idea that there’s only one formula to achieve our goals: my beloved notebook ecosystem and spreadsheets exist alongside my goblin mode sprints, and that seems to work just fine for me.

One reason this version of productivity dominates online is that it is highly visual. Colour-coded planners and perfectly organised Notion dashboards look impressive in an Instagram post. An enviably beautiful desk setup makes for a satisfying ten-second clip, which, in turn, makes for a lucrative sponsorship opportunity.

The problem is that the most important parts of intellectual work are almost completely invisible. You cannot easily film yourself grasping a difficult concept for the first time. You cannot capture the moment when two seemingly unrelated ideas suddenly connect in your mind. You cannot create an aesthetically pleasing montage of staring into the middle distance for twenty minutes or taking a break to clear your head and eat some grated cheese out of the bag before finally working out how to solve a problem.

Some of the most productive moments of my PhD would have made terrible content. They have happened while pacing around my messy kitchen, ranting out loud to myself about something, or sitting in a noisy coffee shop looking haggard with an empty Word Doc open and a vaguely panicked expression on my face. They looked nothing like productivity, yet they often produced my best work.

Here lies the problem. When we spend enough time consuming productivity content, it becomes easy to mistake visible productivity for actual productivity. We start to believe that the planner, the routine, and the aesthetic are the work itself, rather than simply tools that may or may not help us do it. When that happens, we begin to distrust our own ways of working, however effective they might actually be, leaving us feeling dissatisfied at best, and completely useless at worst.

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For me, this wasn't just a theoretical concern. When I was eighteen, I genuinely believed that productivity was something I could optimise my way into. While I don’t think I consciously sat down and decided to become the sort of person I saw online, I had certainly absorbed the message all the same. Successful students seemed to be disciplined, organised, and relentlessly hardworking in a highly regimented way. The recipe involved waking up early, timetabling the hell out of every day, and an intense degree of self-control.

I decided to become that person.

I worked incredibly long hours. I decided I would largely put hobbies, socialising, and rest on pause: I would have ample time to enjoy my life later. I distinctly remember telling my mum in the autumn term that I was looking forward to the summer break already, despite it being 8 months away, because I wouldn’t have exams to prepare for, so I could fully relax. I became very good at pushing myself through exhaustion and ignoring the signals my body was sending me. I’d often work from my bedroom during the day and close my curtains so I wouldn’t feel distracted by what was going on on the busy street below.

For a while, it worked. Or rather, it looked like it worked from the outside. I was productive in the narrowest sense of the word: I got things done, achieved great marks on my work, and appeared highly motivated from the outside.

But it was, quite frankly, pretty miserable.

I quickly found myself to be a woman on the edge. Despite achieving highly, I felt a huge amount of pressure to maintain that, and had physical knots in my back to constantly remind me of that. I once went to hand in some work to one of my eccentric but kind tutors 10 minutes past the deadline, and he popped out from behind the submission tray to jokingly say, “caught you!”. To his horror, I began to cry. I had so little mental reserve that a harmless joke could dissolve me. I walked away from that encounter with a Snickers bar gifted to me out of guilt and pity, and the advice that I “just needed to chill out a bit”. In hindsight, this was completely true. At the time, it did not feel helpful.

I have a long list of stories along those lines, but they’re probably for a separate essay. Suffice to say: I spent a long time dealing with the mental and physical consequences of trying to operate as if I were a machine rather than a person.

To be clear, I don’t think productivity content caused that burnout. The reasons were much bigger and more complicated than that, and I was ultimately a young adult blundering through her first year of university, trying to adapt to an intense academic environment in the only way I knew how. But I do think that ‘productivity culture’ reinforced an idea that I was already vulnerable to believing: that there was a single correct way to work, and that if I wasn’t naturally inclined towards it, I simply needed to try harder.

In the years since, I have been incredibly lucky to meet many successful, intelligent people who work in ways that look nothing like that ideal. The more successful, happy people I meet, the more convinced I become that sustainable productivity is deeply personal. People are not perfectly optimised machines, nor should we try to be.

Those who are most intellectually secure and thriving are those who have gradually learned how their own brains work.

I still enjoy beautiful stationery; I still love a good spreadsheet, my satisfying planner setup, and the rush of a completed to-do list. None of those things are inherently bad. But the older I get, the less interested I become in finding the perfect productivity system, and the more interested I become in understanding how I actually work. I have befriended my inner goblin, and I shall continue to feed her grated cheese and iced coffee through the end of this PhD and beyond. It is fine if my most productive days look messy, chaotic, and unphotogenic. Alas, they seem to work rather well for me.

Thank you for reading! This is the first in a series of essays exploring the world of productivity culture and the ideas that sit beneath it. In companion pieces for paid subscribers, I’ll be digging further into my own experiences: ways I’ve built up systems that have genuinely helped me, ones that absolutely haven’t, and how I’ve gradually learned to build a way of working that fits my brain rather than somebody else’s. If that sounds interesting, I’d love for you to join the conversation. ★

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I have just come out of a self-imposed social media break, and it has left me feeling rather strange about that side of my life. A couple of weeks ago, I realised that the way I was using social media was not working. I was scrolling upon waking up, scrolling right before I fell asleep, scrolling during the gaps in my day to stave off the gnawing stress that’s been eating away at me during the final stretch of my PhD. A lot of the positive habits I’d built up were slipping, replaced by trying to constantly distract myself. Alongside consuming content, I was constantly thinking about what I would create next: what I’d film, what I’d post on my stories, whether I had enough content in the drafts to stretch across the next week. As a few other stressful parts of my life started to intensify, I could feel that my body was stuck in a state of fight-or-flight. And then I found myself thinking: hang on a minute. I could just stop.

To be clear, this was a temporary break. I have no intention of exiting social media forever, because I genuinely feel like social media brings many wonderful things into my life: opportunities to connect with and learn from intelligent, interesting people; a chance to express myself creatively; a way to share my academic work and ‘lift the curtain’ on grad school life. I’ve built genuinely wonderful friendships through this side of what I do, and I also feel proud of the community I’ve built through my content.

But lately I’ve felt that some of that good stuff has been overshadowed by an anxiety that’s been building up in me for a while.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. I write about the pressure I’d started to feel around creating content, some conflicted feelings around monetisation, and why giving myself permission to take a break helped me evaluate how I think about social media. ★

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I don’t think I’m the only person who finds this hard to talk about. One review of the research estimated that at least a quarter of people will experience a dissociative episode at some point in their lives2. Despite this, I seldom hear people speak about their experiences of dissociation. I’ve spoken to many friends, colleagues, and acquaintances over the years who have opened up about other mental health problems, but we’ve never touched on this. Statistically, at least some of these people have probably experienced dissociative episodes. I suspect it’s common to find this hard to verbalise, despite openness to discussions around mental health in general.

So why do we feel this way?

Like with most questions in psychology, I don’t think there’s a single definitive answer. I have spent quite a while mulling over my own feelings about it, and had some very thoughtful and interesting comments on my previous post and the related video I had shared on TikTok3.

Below, I try to explain some of the interconnected reasons behind my hesitation to open up.

1. There is something inherently difficult about putting my dream-like state into words.

I experience dissociation as a floating, foggy state that I can’t step out of. I can function within it, but it just feels so weird that it sort of evades description. Or rather, any description that I can come up with sounds abstract and poetic, overladen with metaphors, and is not the sort of thing I can casually drop into conversation. “How are you today, Amy?” “Ah, well, I feel like I am floating through the day, propelled by the current of a river, surrounded by fog with noise-cancelling headphones on. Thanks for asking. How are you?”

Whereas I do feel like I could say, “I’m feeling really anxious lately, and that feels quite hard to deal with today”. There’s something more concrete in that, or at least more baked into our day-to-day language. I can feel fairly certain that the other person will know what I’m talking about, and can probably relate to some degree.

I’m not the only one who feels this way: A 2020 qualitative study4 interviewed twelve people who had experienced dissociation in the context of psychosis, and found that participants struggled to put their experiences into words, contributing to a difficulty in opening up with others. It makes a lot of sense that an experience defined by a sense of strangeness and otherness is tricky to verbalise.

2. There’s a fear of stigma or judgement attached to dissociative experiences.

I think a part of that difficulty comes from a fear of judgement. There is definitely a part of me thinking, “I can’t say that, because I will sound batsh*t crazy if I do”. Of the people in my immediate circle, I’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t have a basic understanding of what ‘anxiety’ means, but I can’t say the same about dissociation.5 That lack of awareness certainly sits at the back of my mind when I consider talking about my experiences and how that might be received. It can be really exhausting talking about one’s mental health, and that is particularly true when you also have to explain the basics of the thing you’re experiencing.

Of course, this creates a vicious cycle:

This is part of the reason that I decided to open up a little about my own experiences online—to open up an avenue of conversation, and to hopefully connect with others who had experienced similar things.

3. There is huge diversity in our lived experiences of dissociation, which might make it harder to connect with others.

‘Dissociation’ is not one experience, but a family of related ones. Various words exist to describe different ‘types’ or ‘categories’ of dissociation: depersonalisation, derealisation, detachment, compartmentalisation, felt sense of anomaly, etc. I won’t go into the details here, but in short: it’s quite confusing, there’s some degree of overlap between different terms, and definitions can be fuzzy in daily conversation, mental healthcare settings, and research settings alike.

Even within one ‘type’ of dissociation, two people’s experiences could differ dramatically. Take derealisation, for example, which is what I experience. This describes a disconnect from one’s surroundings, which might incorporate other people and/or the environment around oneself. One person might describe feeling like they’re viewing the world through a glass screen or thick fog. Another might describe a sense of unfamiliarity with people they know (even close friends and family) while in this state.

Sometimes when reading other people's descriptions of derealisation, I find myself thinking: yes, but that isn't quite what it feels like for me.

I think this contributes to some of our difficulty in talking about our experiences: perhaps we fear that we won’t be understood even by others who identify with the term ‘dissociation’, or fear that our own experiences are somehow either ‘weirder’ or less ‘severe’ and worthy of support compared to those of others.

4. There is something very vulnerable about being in a dissociative state, so silence can be self-preservation.

The final reason I could pinpoint was the sheer vulnerability of these experiences. It’s hard to emphasise how unnerving I have found my own dissociative episodes in the past, and I have felt a strong sense of protectiveness over myself during, and following, these. It feels like during the episodes, my brain is withdrawing me from my surroundings as self-preservation; after the episodes, maybe my hesitation to talk about what’s just happened is an extension of that self-preservation.

When I posted my last piece and shared a short companion video on TikTok, several people shared their own experiences in the comments. A theme that came up was dissociation happening during particularly vulnerable periods: pregnancy, postpartum, grief, and emigrating to a foreign country were all mentioned. It makes sense to me that we try to self-preserve during such times by going inwards rather than vocalising how we’re feeling to others.

While I’ve been writing this piece, I feel very aware that there are probably important reasons that I have missed. I also know that there are people with vastly different experiences of dissociation than mine (see point 3). I can’t speak for them, and I don’t want to.

But this highlights the importance of opening up this conversation. If dissociation is genuinely as common as the research suggests, then many of us are having these experiences in silence, perhaps feeling much more alone than we need to be.

I felt really moved and validated by many of the comments on my previous essay and videos. If you have thoughts that you would be willing to share, I would love to hear them in the comments.

Thank you for reading this piece. Amy Catriona is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts on mental health and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber ★

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If you’re looking for support resources related to dissociation / depersonalisation, I have found this site very helpful for trustworthy, practical advice: https://www.midlands-ddc.com/for-you

I’m in a crucial period of my PhD: I’m juggling thesis writing alongside some long-term health issues, family stuff, and all of the other things that, frustratingly, seem to be an inevitable part of adult life. I’ve started to notice a creeping sense of stress associated with social media, and TikTok in particular, which has gradually ramped up over the last couple of months. Since looking after myself feels particularly important right now, I can’t afford to ignore what my mind and body are telling me.

The pressure comes from two directions.

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