In the summer holidays time stands still. We’re in the third month of ‘making it work’ now and its safe to say that IT and I are not working. Newsletters remain unwritten, Instagram content is suspended in time in a notes app entry called ‘ideas.’ Any work I’ve completed this month was done in the week I spent in Scotland with my parents and the week I spent in Mallorca without the kids.

I have come to understand that I cannot work when the kids are in the house, and I cannot play when I am thinking about work. I am all or nothing. In or out. In the liminal spaces I’m paralysed.

I have noticed that I feel much less troubled by my children interrupting me when I’m reading than when I’m on my phone so I’ve powered up my wretched kindle. I much prefer to turn a page. I read Sarah Wynn Williams’s brilliant book about the years she worked at Facebook (now Meta) and its made me even more adamant about cutting down my screen time. Now, before I go anywhere, I ask myself ‘do you need your phone for this?’ The answer is almost always no. My phone has become a security blanket and a crutch. I carry it around the house from room to room like a hideous pet. I clutch it in my sweaty paw on dog walks. I wait for its seductive buzz to pull me out of whatever game I’ve committed to playing with my children. I now deliberately leave it in another room.

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Claude is worried about me. I think I have told him too much. I started using the AI chatbot to sense check a product I’m building to help people grow on Instagram. But I’ve also asked it if my husband’s sleeping in the day because he’s tired or because he’s got cancer. And I’ve asked it how much money I’d need to make if he was to go back to hospital for a year. I’m trying to find a way to make passive income. The more I tell Claude, the more pitiful I feel.

A lot of people I respect think I should not be talking to Claude. That it is guzzling my water and burning my books and rotting my brain and I KNOW. But I am strangely comforted by how basic it is. Every terrible suggestion it comes back with spurs me on to make something better, human and born from lived experience. ‘Will my course command less authority if it includes jokes?’ I ask. Claude thinks so, but I don’t care. If you must commit your precious time to learning about the algorithm, you might has well have a giggle.

This sounds like a lot to deal with, Claude says as I upload another instagram carousel with my sad little story. I am pitied by Sam Altman’s monster. I officially live in the basement they’ve installed below rock bottom.

We’ve reached the halfway point of the 11 week Spanish summer holiday and I wake up feeling like a drowning witch. For a split second I look at the light filtering through the curtains, then the pitter patter of tiny feet becomes a face centimetres from my own.

‘Mama. pee pee.’ I hear Ben say ‘I’ll take you,’ and wait for the resounding ‘NO. Not you!’ Then I stumble to the bathroom, the weights tied to my ankles dragging me under the water.

Its been a long time since I’ve felt depressed. Since daily tasks felt like wading through treacle. Since anhedonia robbed me of the joy in small things.

I chastise myself for abandoning my commitment to becoming a glass half full person. I know that positivity is what’s got me through the last few years, but if hope is a float, my ankle weights are filled with fear.

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It took being next of kin to a dying man for me to finally feel like the adult in the room. I was 37, had two children, my first grey hairs and a bulging disc and still I looked around in utter disbelief that I was in charge. How do you wish to proceed? They asked me, in front of my husband’s mother, a real grown up.

Can’t you see I’m wearing a leopard print sundress, I went to say. I lost my driving license this morning. I am addicted to green fizzy cola bottles.

My breasts were heavy with the milk I made to feed my youngest child. My mother in law looked at me to answer. But Peter Pan was in a coma and Wendy had forgotten to grow up.

Like many millennials I have moved through adulthood feeling like three weasels in a trench coat. When pushing my daughter down the street in London in her pushchair for the first time, I wondered if anyone would think I was a teen mum. I was thirty five.

I asked a friend in her sixties when she felt like an adult and without a beat she said, twenty. She’d got married, bought a house and had a child and that was it. She then said, ‘but I have a thirty six year old and he is definitely not an adult. I think I’ve made his life a bit too comfortable.’

This feels like a classic refrain. Millennials have had it too easy. We’re snowflakes who use our parents as safety nets. If we’d only stand on our own two feet like we’re supposed to, we’d cope just fine. But when none of us feel like we’ve achieved real adulthood, something must have gone wrong at a structural level. I have been self-employed for most of my life and until I moved to Spain, would regularly boomerang back to my childhood bedroom between contracts. I attended family holidays, sometimes solo or with friends, well into my late twenties. I still call my parents house ‘home,’ and any Christmas not spent there feels like second best. I felt like a baby woman.

A recent viral internet trend showed young people boasting that of course someone is always coming to save them because their mum/dad/grandpa was so obsessed with them they would never really be in real trouble. It has been their great privilege to afford us an illusion of safety, but in doing so we have eroded belief in our own capability.

I will be the first to admit that I have been quite spoilt. I could call my mum at all hours of the night and be picked up from parties I didn’t want to stay at. My Dad has begrudgingly helped me pay for parking tickets I was old enough to avoid. Of course can’t blame our parents for supporting us when they’re doing it out of love. And why would those who can, not use their parents as safety nets, when the ladder we were presented to climb had such slippery rungs.

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A year ago I married a dying man, and plot twist - he survived.

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I am struggling to find the time and the energy to write, which is, like many other things, making me feel guilty.

‘Don’t let the mum guilt get to you!’ My friend Jo insists when I start to moan at pilates. I am feeling guilty about being at pilates when I have a work deadline, and guilty that I will have to work when the kids are at home to finish it.

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‘We think you’re the British Lena Dunham,’ a journalist from the Daily Mail told me half way through my first ever run at the Edinburgh Fringe. I was twenty seven, had been struggling to get a sitcom commission since leaving university and finally it seemed like my all my buses were about to come at once.

My Instagram character, Deliciously Stella had become something of a sensation and was on her way to going viral. I was recovering from if not an eating disorder, then a sustained period of disordered eating, was managing stage fright with illegally procured Xanax and hovering in the doorway that led to being Britain’s ‘Next Big Thing.’ It was a potent cocktail, and while I was incredibly flattered and excited to be compared to someone I admire so much, I was in no way equipped to handle it.

I finished reading Lena’s memoir, Famesick last weekend, gobbling it down when my kids were asleep. ‘What makes someone good at being famous?’ I’d often wondered. ‘And why could that not have been me?’

I don’t know how many people found comfort in Lena’s story. Its hilarious and incisive, but shocking and sad too. It reads like a warning, but to me it felt like a conspiratorial wink. A wink that said, ‘yes, your friends were being weird with you. No, everyone did not have your best interests at heart. No, you were not a hideous monster, you’re just a woman and its easier for other people if you feel like one.’

‘So it actually is terrible,’ I sighed in recognition, reading about her sudden ascendancy to most talked about woman in the world. I felt such a kinship, if not with her experience of fame, which far outstripped my own, but with her emotional response to it, which read, to me like an unspoken truth.

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Its been one year since I last left Mallorca. One year since I last stepped aboard a budget airline with two tiny people and prayed my husband would not have got any iller by the time I returned. I arrived at my parents with the demeanour of a stray cat, weather beaten, flea bitten, losing clumps of hair. I’ve waited so long to have a break from the last two years I had almost forgotten I hadn’t had one.

‘We have put you in Jobby Lodge,’ my mother instructed me. Ben and I bestowed this awful name on my parents granny annexe after a weekend where an issue with the newly installed septic tank made it smell like sewage. My Dad was so livid with his tradesman he pretended he couldn’t smell it until you could almost see the smell. Thankfully I walked in to find it both fragrant and blissfully quiet. There was also no cot to be seen.

‘Where are the children going?’ I asked. ‘With us.’ They said in unison. They’d bought a baby alarm, they’d girded their loins. I was going to get some sleep. I have only spent two nights in total away from my children since Ben fell first went into hospital. My mother sent me to a hotel to try and relax and I read a cancer memoir from the hotel library in which the writer dies before the book is finished. I spent most of the weekend sobbing in my room.

The first night alone in Jobby Lodge I woke all night to phantom cries, then I was bundled into a car to drive to my cousin’s wedding. I left the children with my sister, some friends and their cocker spaniel, whom I was assured was ‘very patient.’ ‘She better be,’ I thought to myself as I said goodnight to my babies before disappearing into the night. We drove from Edinburgh to Lancaster, where we were booked into a hotel which my mum said, might be a bog standard Travelodge or could be quite a nice pub called the ‘Tickled Trout which is now a Travelodge.’ My parents, who are not short of a couple of quid appear to do most of their economising when booking hotels. I fear my mother has spent more money in a day on Amazon Prime than she did on our accommodation that trip, and so we spent one night in a bog standard Travelodge on the M6 and a second night in an inn that stank of gravy and vinegar.

Leaving Mallorca and the children had made me very emotional, and I lifted my head off the pillow after 15 minutes sleep in the M6 Travelodge, opened the windows onto my ‘garden view’ of a barren field and promptly burst into tears. I tried to soothe myself with a bit of doom scrolling but Instagram kept serving me videos about the disgusting things people do in hotel rooms and I spat my cup of tea back out when I saw someone boiling knickers in a hotel kettle. I barged into my parents room, sat on their bed and looked at the wall and sobbed while my Dad got dressed. ‘How am I going to make small talk at this wedding?’ I cried. ‘What if people want to talk about Ben? I feel like I’m from a different planet.’

‘If it gets too much we’ll take you home,’ my mum offered. I was so fed up of not feeling fun. I’d been looking forward to the wedding for months. Promptly after arriving at the chips and gravy inn, I forced my parents to drive to another pub so I could show them where we should have stayed. I had a shandy and started to perk up. Then I threw on my mother’s fur trimmed, cashmere cardi and headed in the direction of bagpipes. In spite of feeling like I was suspended in formaldehyde, my cousin’s wedding was a gorgeous tonic. The first thing I did was introduce myself to a stranger and pour out my life story.

‘Yes I am the cousin who used to be a comedian,’ I said, ‘yes, the one from Instagram who married a Drum n Bass MC who was in a coma, then got cancer and was sent to a hospice when my kids were both under two. But I promise you I am really a huge laugh and everything is absolutely fine. Please do not feel sorry for me, I cannot bear it.’

I shouldn’t have worried about small talk, as I am incapable of it. I moved through the room like a terrible bard, singing my tale of woe. Thankfully I knew nobody, so my extended family took most of the brunt.

It was one of those weddings that just feels effortlessly good. Good flowers, good people, good speeches, good food - she is a good cousin. My lovely uncle gave Ben and I a special shout out in his speech, which made me cry again but they were good tears for once. My clever parents swept me away before I got to terrorise the dance floor and I had a semi decent breakfast in the vinegar gravy inn.

I also managed to recover from my terrible fear of leaving that had bound me to Mallorca for so long. Mallorca is the only place I have ever found hard to leave. Like a lot of millennials I have lived my life in a form of arrested development. The kind of person a Telegraph reader would consider a snowflake - sporadically immobilised by my mental health and too busy ‘having experiences’ to grow up. For years my privilege allowed me to doggedly pursue a career in the arts. I’ve been freelance for almost all of my working life and whenever I was out of work I’d wave a white flag and bolt home to Mum and Dad. There, I’d usually start and abandon another novel/script then slink back to London for a new contract. I never put down roots. Every sensible job was a placeholder. The first permanent corporate role I’ve ever had, I took because I was pregnant and I felt like I needed to get my shit together for my unborn child. I was a poster girl for the boomerang generation, but when Ben was put into a coma, I had no choice but to stay put. I looked at my kids and my house and my life and thought ‘FUCK,’ I really am the grown up here. I was soon to find out that millennials can do hard things.

At some point, when Ben was very ill, my ability to stay in Mallorca and not go ‘home’ to my parents house became my personal gauge of how well I was coping. Like a captain going down with his ship, I refused to abandon the helm. We spent Christmas alone, which was sweet but a little sad. Then once the holidays were over I told myself I couldn’t take my daughter out of school. Or that I couldn’t leave Ben in hospital in case something terrible happened in my absence. I was scared to let anyone look after me, lest I go back to being that girl who kept bailing on adult life. I think I was scared that if I left I might not have the strength to come back.

Thankfully, my cousin’s wedding was a perfect foil. I was not going back with my white flag in the air, but with a purpose. My parents were astute enough to take the reins by taking my children on excursions so I could sleep/work/take multiple daytime baths. I ate like a bin raccoon and strained the waistband of my jeans. Looking at pictures, I can see the light returning to my eyes. Sleep is the foundational pillar of my sanity and I have been without it for too long. Being looked after by my mum and dad for ten days has made a seismic difference to my wellbeing. And my children, who were spoilt rotten by their grandparents now have a whole human being for a mum. Being the only adult in charge is a one way brain drain but at my parents house, my children were almost like my siblings. I could sneak away to eat mini cheddars in the bath or pretend to be deaf when the baby asked for a clean nappy. There were three pairs of hands who could change that nappy and I was damned if it was always going to be me.

It felt like Scotland had rolled out the red carpet for us. The daffodils and blossom were in bloom. There were ducklings on the pond. There is truly nothing better than Scotland in the sunshine. Except perhaps a river, sparkling in dappled sunlight, begging to be paddled in, in Scotland in the sunshine. My children have never seen a river, so rarely does it rain enough for one to run in Mallorca. I can’t wait to come back in August to roll my trouser legs up and build a dam. I’m ready to make some memories that aren’t overshadowed by hell.

We crammed so much into those ten days. My children rode a pony for the first time and cried all the way home when we left. We went to the zoo where I went every day after school as as a child, but were devastated to find that as its breeding season, the penguins would not be parading outside of their enclosure. I tried to let the nostalgia override the queasy feeling brought on by viewing animals in cages by guzzling irn bru flavoured sweets. And my children have embarked on a mutual love in with my sister, ‘aunty Frank’ who they still insist on calling ‘Anne Frank,’ in public.

I have come to realise that the untethered existence I lived throughout my twenties, is what helped me build the resilience I have now. A corporate job and a foot on the housing ladder would have been the sensible choice, but without the knock backs, false starts and sheer determination, I don’t know if I would have been so well equipped for life as a single mother. I don’t think I would have been able to manage the non-linear trajectory of Ben’s recovery which feels so reminiscent of my life trajectory so far.

I’ve been desperate to prove I can stand on my own two feet, but I am already doing it. My feet just happen to be standing on a boat in the middle of the ocean in a storm.

‘I can do this on my own!’ I’ve been screaming into nowhere, as waves fill my lungs with water. My village watched on thinking, ‘its OK if you’re not ready to, because we’re still here.’

I am sick of being charity case, but I’ve accepted that charity is the highest form of love. If you are lucky enough to have a village, let them help, while knowing that in the future you will be able to help them in return.

Since I came back from the Scotland, for the first time in years I feel like I’m on solid ground. No new borns, no cancer, no comas. I have hope. I know that I can go back to my parents and it won’t mean that I’ve failed. It will mean that I need a break, and I finally feel like I’ve earned it.

I’m in the UK this week, staying with my parents and one week in, I’m starting to itch for my Sunny island. I haven’t left Mallorca for over a year and in the lead up to my flight I was wracked with worry. I’ve only left the island twice since Ben first fell ill and the first time he was diagnosed with Leukaemia. The second time he was condemned to weeks being fed through a nasal tube. Going back to the motherland had started to feel like a curse, but I was damned if I was going to miss my cousin’s wedding due to half baked superstition. Plus, I really needed some sleep.

My parents arranged for me to sleep in their granny annexe while they did the nights with my frequently unsettled children. My children got the memo and were invariably up twice each night between the hours of 1am and 4am. My parents were broken but I have managed to deliver two newsletters in as many weeks for the first time in months. I will never take them for granted.

The way people have been complaining about the UK of late, I half expected to touch down in Chernobyl. From what I’ve seen from Instagram, Britain is an island in collective depression. Grim weather, grimmer far right rallies, a deepening cost of living crisis. Thankfully I landed to Scotland’s bi-annual week of sunshine. The daffodils are out, there are ducklings in the pond. My parent’s garden has practically transformed into farthing wood and my kids were delighted to spot rabbits and deer on the lawn while eating their breakfast. I’m not saying it isn’t bad - I sat with my dad for a few minutes to watch Question Time, but it helps to remember that complaining is the UK’s most popular sport. ‘Maybe I could live here after all,’ I thought, standing on the lawn of my mum’s friend’s Georgian manor. ‘Its really not so bad.’ Then I pictured the tiny, freezing cold cottage with single glazing which we’d fled and popped my rose tinted glasses in my pocket.

One day when I was hiding from my children, I decided to do my very first ‘ask me anything’ on Instagram. I was anxious that no one would answer and I’d feel like a tit but the questions trickled in and when they did, almost all of them were about moving to Spain. People asked me why, how and what to do when you get there, so I thought I’d write about how I moved and put together a little guide to move now. I’ll be opening up a chat for paid subscribers where you can ask me any questions about Mallorca, whether thats to move to or just to visit.

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I have recently been tending to the long forgotten garden of my Instagram account. I’ve started consulting clients on how to run their social media and it seemed only sensible and fair that before I ask them to embrace the creator economy, I do my bit to show up too.

Returning after a hiatus is always tough. The algorithm is designed to humble the inconsistent and nothing says ‘you are no longer a main character here,’ like posting for the first time in months to crickets. Thankfully, after a lot of internal work, my self worth is no longer tied to my like or follower count. Game is game and if you don’t play the algorithm like candy crush, you’ll lose.

Because luck is yet to find itself on my side, the launch of my new business has coincided with an awful bout of anxiety. I’ve found it very hard to fall asleep and when I do I wake up to pins and needles and hands curled into fists. Why now? I keep asking myself. Why now that I have so much to do?

‘What are you anxious about?’ people ask, and I think about leaving the island for the first time in a year, about being both the breadwinner and the default parent, about the fact that the doctors have yet to find a way to fix my husband’s neck. I’m also anxious that being back on social media isn’t going to help.

Instagram has historically been pretty bad for my mental health. In 2015 I gained over 70,000 instagram followers overnight playing a character called Deliciously Stella who put creme eggs on avocado toast and ate clean by spraying dettol before she tucked into a mars bar. I posted every single day, took every opportunity presented to me, and shortly after going viral, ended up spending a month in the Priory.

I haven’t made any money from influencing since 2020, when I took part in a campaign for Sloggi where I had to walk down Brick Lane in my underwear. It was a fake protest against uncomfortable pants that was thankfully pulled as the photoshoot wasn’t socially distanced. I remain relieved I wasn’t confronted with my Kendall Jenner Pepsi moment. Around that time I had sort of been co-opted by the body positivity movement, not because I felt positive about my body, but because I had gained some weight from taking antidepressants and made jokes about drinking Sprite and calling it green juice. It was this insistence on putting people into boxes that made me ill at ease on the app in the first place, and so I decided to nurture my personality’s multitudes offline instead.

The landscape has changed so much since I first started. I went viral when the feed was still chronological. When influencers posted boomerangs and used the Paris filter. Just before reels arrived and sent everything into a tailspin. Social media isn’t really for socialising any more. We’ve moved from social media to interest media. We are no longer expected to capture the attention of our friends and perhaps some fans, but everyone. Every post you send out is now evaluated, tested and graded by the algorithm. Does anybody like this? It asks a tiny cross section of its 8 billion users, and if the answer is a deafening, ‘no,’ it won’t show your post to the people who do follow you either.

When my mental health was at its worst in 2016, how many likes I got on instagram could determine the course of my day. It felt like a direct metric of my worth as a human being. It felt like an arrow that either pointed to ‘Hollywood’ or ‘Dying alone and jobless in your childhood bedroom.’

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*Sits bolt upright in coffin at funeral.

I’m alive.

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What I want is to write and pick lemons in the sunshine with my daughters.

What I want is to write and swim in the sea.

What I want is to write and live in Spain.

This year, for lent. I think I am going to just give up. Like a circus clown wearing too many hats and spinning too many plates, it can’t be long before I fall off my unicycle and perish under a pile of crockery.

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When my husband, Ben almost died in a medically induced coma, his family started a Go Fund Me to support us through his recovery. The money saved my family, but asking for it wasn’t easy.

Like many other noughties teens, I was genuinely saddened to see that James Van Der Beek aka Dawson Leary, had passed away from the colo-rectal cancer that he’d suffer…

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I should have known I had it coming. I spent last week crafting a pitch about ‘how I learned to love single parenting,’ and now I find myself unexpectedly doing just that and I want to die. I want to gouge out my eyes with my hands like a Pan’s Labyrnthine monster and walk around with them blinking and screaming ‘noooooooo. Not again.’ I needed more warning.

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I’m looking at Instagram, watching an influencer walk out of Balinese waters with a coconut in her hand.

‘My life is a movie,’ reads the overlaid text. I roll my eyes and realise I am about to lose the plot. I run to my bedroom and rummage around in a drawer. In between notebooks and thank you cards I find a battered blue case. An old kindle I’ve hardly used, having sworn my allegiance to ‘proper’ books. I plug it in and wait. It works. I desperately need to read.

The week before I’d absent mindedly led Ben into a bookstore in Palma to ask about English titles. They didn’t stock any. Amazon couldn’t deliver any. I was finally hungry for other people’s stories.

Before Ben fell ill, I was a book a week kind of person. I read widely and quickly. I had to read so I could write. Then suddenly the world as i knew it stopped and so did what I needed to escape it.

My life really was like a movie, and not one you’d want to watch again. The stakes were so high and the story so sad, we were twisting and turning with no end in sight. My life was thick with drama. How could I invest myself in something made up?

I’ve been reading other bookish peoples’ Substacks and tasted bitter envy on my tongue. I miss getting on the tube and seeing the cover of the latest must-read, pressed up to everybody’s nose, feeling jealous that they get to read it for the first time, when I’d already gobbled it down in one sitting. I kept seeing an orange cover cropping up in Instagram flat-lays. I downloaded Lily King’s ‘Heart The Lover.’ They said it was sad. How sad? I thought. As sad as my actual life?

As it happens, my life is not going to be turned into a book. Not this part anyway. It’s a tough time for memoir. My story is too sad, I’ve written too much already on here. The reasons for rejection of my pitch were myriad but, one thing message was constant.

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Last week my daughter started speaking Spanish at school for the first time. I was ecstatic. She has hitherto been more or less mute. Who knew that what she needed was two weeks speaking English at home? The teacher corrected me, the reason she had spoken was ‘the dimonis.’

Of course Spain has a festival where everyone dresses up as demons and locals light huge bonfires in residential streets. Its a bit like Guy Fawkes but the bonfire is raging outside your bedroom window while a Spanish man drinking limoncello from the bottle cools down your exterior walls with a hosepipe.

Reader, it was nuts. She may have started speaking Spanish because she loved the dimonis but she continued because she hated them. The day after her first words were uttered, people dressed as demons were sent into school where they played menacing drums and danced around the children. I subsequently spent hours explaining that nothing is more terrifying to a dimoni than mummy before wading through a pile of instructions in Catalan on how to buy a meat platter for the fiesta.

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Hello and welcome to this, my brand new bi-monthly feature where I will be keeping it a little bit…lighter. I have finally reached an equilibrium where I feel able to go out and enjoy myself and consume and comment on culture. So this is where I will write about the things I have read, watched, bought and done that have filled my pockets with joy. I’ll share the things I like that I hope you will like too, because my pockets have hitherto had nothing in them but a metaphorical crumpled up tissue. While I agree that rampant consumerism is not the answer to the planet’s problems, it is January and I have been through hell, so if I can cheer myself up with a little bit of reading, watching and shopping so can you!

In a surprise to absolutely no-one, I am going to confirm your suspicions. Yes, this woman who left the UK to move to Mallorca really hates winter. I hate the cold, I hate the dark, I really, really hate layering. I’m a tanned skin, strip of linen type of dresser. I feel my best in shorts, skorts and sunscreen. But to get through winter without looking like a hobo I have two steadfast rules.

Feel soft. Smell good.

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The Christmas holiday are finally at an end. The girls are back at school and nursery and I have time to write. My brain is still thick with festive fog. I’m stuck in play dough mode, trying to find the adult brain within. I had planned to be organised and do a big shop on Tuesday before the first day of term, but of course, Tuesday was Spanish Christmas and all the shops were shut. I stared into the abyss of our empty fridge and thought about sending them in with lunchboxes filled with dog food and chocolate coins, then I found some bread sticks and a tangerine and prayed that lunch wouldn’t be lentils.

The holidays were quiet and cosy. My baby is about to turn two and I will soon have two little girls. I wish that I could take a photo of a feeling. I was lying on the sofa watching ‘Mog’s Christmas’, for the 11th time, the exquisite heft of the baby resting on my chest. I sniffed her neck and tickled her soft little belly. Someday soon she’ll shoot up like her sister and be a lovely bag of bones. I must savour the squish while i can.

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Lets be honest, Christmas can be the best of times and the worst of times. And after the year I’ve had, all I really want Father Christmas to bring me is a lobotomy. Some years you eat delicious food, get on with all of your siblings and enjoy some crisp, cold walks. Some years you start on the pudding wine at 8am, the turkey burns and you end up looking for an emergency vet to pump a chocolate orange out of your labrador’s stomach. My personal feeling about Christmas, is that people let themselves down by making too much effort. The harder you try to make Christmas perfect, the further you have to fall. We have nipped this year in the bud by spending it alone, but were that not an option, I would have one plan - to quiet quit. If you can quiet quit your job, your relationship and your friendships, why not take a back seat on the most stressful day of the year?

I’m not trying to paint myself as a Scrooge. I usually thrive at Christmas. I love eating cheese and drinking champagne and bumming fags off long forgotten family friends at drinks parties. I love giving and getting and allocating characters from the Sound of Music to my siblings, just so we can laugh when we make my brother The Baroness. But more than anything, this year all I want for Christmas is a break.

This year I have no stomach for small talk, I don’t want to help you chop, I’m allergic to talk of politics and I have made enough memories with my children to last me until next year. You want to make a gingerbread house with them? Fabulous. I don’t need to be part of that memory for it to be treasured.

And so, if like me you’ve had a really hard year I invite you to follow these seven steps to successfully quiet quit your Christmas.

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2025 for me has been a year that includes the worst of times, and times that were I guess, OK. Its a year in which I got married - lovely, although Ben was in agony all day. Its also a year in which I was repeatedly told that my husband was going to die.

My baby turned one. My toddler turned three. I have for almost a month now, finally not had two under two. It has got harder not easier. Still my love for them grows.

I had thought that the hard part was over. That’s what I told the therapist Ben and I went to visit. I had thought that remission would mean clutching each other like Jack and Rose if she’d let him on the raft. We’d be survivors and Celine Dion would sing that our hearts would go on and on. Instead we’re both still stuck in the freezing cold water, co-parenting with empty cups.

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My eldest daughter was born with a cleft lip and palate and she has one of the most beautiful faces I have ever seen. She’s so beautiful I have over a thousand pictures of her in my phone. She’s so beautiful I watch her sleep.

My baby went to Halloween dressed as a unicorn. Blissfully unaware that her beautiful face could be used as inspiration for horror. We went trick or treating and she couldn’t contain her excitement when she saw witches and dragons and werewolves. Her friends stopped to babble at her in Spanish while she loaded sweeties into a plastic pumpkin. Next year the person who will be scared is me.

‘Look at her lip!’ the comments section said, while Lily-Rose bravely wore my daughters birth defect as a costume. ‘I love how she’s not afraid to look ugly in movies.’

Could a cleft lip make Lily Rose Depp ugly? I’m sure that’s not what the prosthetic is for. I’m aware of the Russian and German folklore around clefts and wolves. But folklore is folklore and medieval prejudice is something I hoped I wouldn’t have to deal with in 2025.

A mother on a facebook group I follow wrote of her horror that she’d encouraged fellow parents to take their pre-operation babies to the casting call. She hadn’t realised what the story would entail.

I don’t want to feel so sensitive about her facial difference being used as shorthand for ugliness or horror, but I can’t help but feel angry and sad. Every day three babies in the UK are born with a cleft, yet the surgery is so brilliant most people don’t know. Charities like Smile Train and CLAPA work hard to destigmatise what is the most common craniofacial birth defect and now a whole new generation will associate clefts with horror.

Everyone is born with illness and struggle inside them. For babies born with clefts they start their hardest battles at the beginning. My daughter’s superpower is that she will grow up knowing she’s tough. She fought to live despite being born unable to suck. She had her lip sewn up when she was 5 months old and her palate just before her first birthday. She was sent home with Calpol and two terrified parents to relearn how to eat and drink. She struggles with hearing and speaking yet she speaks three languages. She’s a warrior and a menace and my joy. She’s not a werewolf.

My baby has Disney princess eyes and beautiful golden curls. She loves sparkles and glitter and chocolate and being truly diabolically naughty. She has been told how lovely she is her whole life. She’s not a fucking werewolf.

Some people have criticised Lily Depp’s casting in period pieces due to her having, ‘iphone face.’ Its a beauty standard that valorises symmetry, something that I know no matter what surgeons do, my daughter is unlikely to achieve.

She won’t meet the identikit beauty standard of full lips, big eyes, high cheekbones and button nose. But then again, nor do I. I have never been wedded to the pursuit of beauty. While I no doubt benefit from ‘pretty privilege’ to an extent, I am conventionally attractive but quirky. Beauty has never been my currency. My face is not symmetrical, nor are the faces of most people I love.

We all know the devil works hard but beauty capitalism works harder. The most beautiful women in the world are having face lifts in their 30s and girls are starting ‘tweakments’ in their teens.

If ‘tweakments’ are like Pringles and once you pop you can’t stop, how can we promote self acceptance in young girls? How can I convince my baby that she’s enough?

My daughter is hypothetically entitled to unlimited state funded surgery to ‘correct’ her cleft. Her surgeons promised us that they would endeavour to make her look like someone who wasn’t born with a cleft. But is that possible? And is it necessary? How far from ‘werwulf Lily Rose Depp’ will be far enough to feel beautiful?

I look around as women who have been born with every aesthetic advantage, live stream the results of their surgeries. My instagram algorithm is clogged up with young women (and they are YOUNG) who are having nose jobs/buccal fat removal/salmon sperm injections or even their hairline lowered. I have never wanted any of those things, but my sex, age and shopping habits seem to make my phone think that I do.

This dystopia plumbed new depths when American actress, Shay Mitchell released a skincare range aimed at children. I watch my husband rub scar cream into my babies lip and think of all the other perfect babies with their sheet masks on, worrying about fixing a problem that is yet to exist.

My job as a mother is to fill up both my girls with confidence and self-esteem. We don’t talk about other peoples’ appearances and I never speak negatively about mine. I show them I value funniness and kindness. I tell them how much I love their company. I want them to know that all the things that make them, them make them beautiful, including their peculiarities. Including their scars.

I don’t think we were ever supposed to see so many beautiful faces. We are saturated with perfect symmetry and comparing ourselves to faces that aren’t real. Take away the phones. Throw instagram face into the sea. The faces that look best on social media often look the weirdest in real life.

I grew up in the era of size zero. I took a while to grow into my face. I was wildly insecure as a teenager and well into my twenties, and then one day I decided to change my mind. One day I woke up and decided that I must be beautiful. Conventionally or otherwise, everyone is beautiful to someone and this is an acceptance that should be becoming easier not harder. The cleft campaigner, Ashley Barbour wrote that,

‘Those of us born with cleft are friends and lovers, moms and uncles, we are kings and doctors, we are teachers and scientists. We are kind and gentle and loving. And we are deeply flawed, complex characters and our authentic experience deserves screen time too. I’m not saying the villain can’t ever have a cleft, but I’m asking for other, equitable representation too.’

As a storyteller I have the opportunity to change the narrative. My next project will be to write a Rom Com, and you best believe the female lead will be an actress who was born with a cleft.

My daughter walks through the world with charisma I could only wish to possess aged 3. And for now, we can rest easy knowing that small children don’t see difference. We can tell her how gorgeous and wonderful she is and hope she holds it as her truth, but we can’t control any cruelty that might come. Now not only do I not want her to have a phone. I must protect her from the oeuvre of Robert Eggers.

Charities we associate with have reached out for information on the storyline. We all hope that the characters with clefts are brave and kind, that they are heroes, that they are not stigmatised, that some sensitivity has been considered. Maybe I want them to use it as an opportunity to raise awareness. Maybe I want all of them to be sucked into a black hole so I don’t have to deal with this bullshit.

Maybe I’m being too sensitive. Maybe the 1 in 700 people born with a cleft will be too. Maybe they will say its ‘historically accurate,’ but I say it belongs in the past.