“All the sleeping women are now awake and moving” Yosano Akiko

It is not even that early but on this stretch of coastline where sunrise punctures the partying, there are only three of us at this gym that opens out onto the sea.

Myself. An older woman and her trainer.

I too am an older woman now I think to myself as I run my hand over the sun-dappled rack of free weights, looking for the heaviest harbinger of eternal youth that I can lift.

She is maybe in her late 50s or early 60s.

Her trainer young, and buff, full of health and himself.

He pays her no attention as she struggles and sweats through the sets, her thighs straining against the band in a series of unsightly donkey kicks.

She stops for too long between each kick but he doesn’t even lift his eyes up from the phone, straddling the bench by her side, his thick muscly calves inches from her straining face as she too prays for forever on her hands and knees.

It’s all I can do to stop myself from going to sit on the floor beside her in lieu of this man who is being paid to empower her but can barely be bothered because with those lines etched into her face, that thin crepey skin, the sky-blue veins spidering their way up her legs towards the breasts beaten down by life, she has entered the realm of the unseen and unworthy of his undivided attention.

I want to crouch right in front of her, look into her eyes, and tell her that I can see her, I want to shout into her ear, come on just one more kick, you can do this, you can do hard things. We can do hard things. Me and you all alone here this morning because we still believe in better.

Maybe her heart hears me or her soul senses mine rooting for hers because she gathers some unknown reserve of strength and heaves her way through

8,

9

and

…

10

Or maybe she long ago learned not to wait for any man to pull her up especially when he’s the reason she’s on her knees.

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As the sun settles in the sky, the compound princesses with their perky boobs and pert bottoms, long legs with a squeeze of Lululemon and long days of leisure begin to arrive.

I reprimand myself for thinking ugly thoughts about beautiful women.

We each make our choices.

These women may lie in beds of roses, but I’m the fool who wants to make my own bed of thorns and thunder every goddamn day just so I can stuff my own money beneath the mattress and my own dreams between the sheets.

“The problem is you keep pretending you had a choice, but this was just the way you were made,” K tells me over dinner later in the week in an ivory tower in the suburbs. That’s two times in ten days he’s put in an appearance, which makes it twice as many times as in the entirety of the last year, and I have come to the insane conclusion that the universe, in its esoteric wisdom, has decided he’s my guardian angel, even if I can’t quite tell which shoulder he’s perched on. At some point this year I started to outsource my self-worth, and there’s something in the meandering wildness of K’s words that is waking me the fuck up and reminding me who the fuck I am.

They descend en masse, this gorgeous giggling gaggle of girls, stepping off buggies and stepping onto the treadmills to get their steps in, seemingly oblivious to the irony of forgoing a walk down the beach to get here. I watch them and long for my far-flung besties who, like me, make a habit of walking barefoot on burning coals just to prove we can.

There is a beautiful man chiseled out of marble and museum fantasies. Shirtless and with his cap on backwards, he runs up and down the long length of the beach, back and forth, for half an hour, an hour, a whoop, a playlist and, I presume, the promise of sex helping him keep a remarkably steady pace. I think about how I have never been with a man like that and I feel sorry for myself.

“There doesn’t have to be a villain to warrant a divorce,” says a woman I know after letting slip, in the middle of a hilarious story about meeting George Clooney in Cannes 20 years ago, that she had just left her husband. “He wasn’t even with Amal back then,” she jokes. “But I was still married.” I pretend not to hear the implication as the waves on this windy day lash against the tip of her words.

She was married for 20 years.

“And how do you feel?” I ask.

“I have faith in the possibilities,” she says.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“Same age as you, but I’ve stopped saying it out loud.”

I wonder if the crux of my problem is that I’m always saying everything out loud enough for everyone to watch me trial and error in real time.

The older woman has moved to a seat at the gym cafe. There is a thick, heavy book in her lap and she is furiously making notes in the margins.

I recognize the cover. It’s a story I once began but never quite finished and it’s all I can do to stop myself from going to sit beside her just to ask what happens next.

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“That was years ago. What made you think of it now?” he says putting out his arm to help me walk on the sand in my six inch golden wedges.

“I need to know why you told me.”

“Why are you asking me now?”

“Because my body is full of secrets,” I say knowing K will be entirely unmoved by the poetry I am about to slip into the conversation. “And my head is full of storms and I’m looking for a life raft in other people’s stories.”

The glittering lights of the event we’ve just snuck out of are fading behind us as we head down the beach towards the outdoor bar of the hotel I’m staying at.

You may remember K from a previous Substack, he whose origin story we can’t quite be sure of, and whose destination is permanently unknown, but who remains an infinite fount of wisdom if you like your counsel cryptic and a little cruel.

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I haven’t seen or heard from him in months, but as always he has suddenly appeared out of nowhere and is waiting for me in a dark corner of the event just as I get off stage. I cannot make this shit up.

We get to the bar.

K, as is his habit, orders without bothering to ask what I want and then continues a conversation I wasn’t even aware we had started.

“They’ll descend on you like vultures if you’re single,” he says. “And you’ll fall off your pedestal in no time.”

“Wow. Number one, that’s a wild thing to say. Number two, where did you get the idea I was on any sort of pedestal? Number three, when you show up out of nowhere, the least you can do is play nice.”

“This is me being nice,” he says. “I’m doing you a favour. Right now, you and I can walk away from that party, cross the beach to this bar with your arm hooked into mine, and no one thinks anything of it. No one would dare speak ill of you because you’ve never given them cause to. Other than calling you magnoona.”

“Magnoona (crazy) but not sharmoota (a whore).”

“What?”

“I wrote that in my Substack. I thought that’s what you were referring to.”

“I don’t even know what that is,” he says laughing at the absurdity of my assumption.

“Of course you don’t.”

He ignores me.

“You’re flying higher than you ever have, Amy. Everything I’ve always told you about rising above and beyond, you’re finally doing. Anyone who speaks to me about you these days, I tell them, don’t fuck with her. She’s in no mood for bullshit. This is your moment.”

“How ironic,” I say. “There I was thinking I’m free-falling into oblivion, not flying.”

“No one in the real world cares about your emotional bullshit.”

“Maybe that’s half the problem,” I say, reaching for his drink having downed mine.

He laughs.

“You need to hear it straight for someone. Stop with this nonsense, and this fucking moping. Look the fuck around you, at what you’ve done, what you have, the impact you’re having. Look at how people are looking to you. Pay attention to what is only now becoming possible or you’re going to fuck it all up. ”

I sigh.

“Also what you did tonight wasn’t free-falling. You had the whole room eating out of your hand.”

“It’s an act.”

“It’s a gift,” he says. “And you’ve finally figured out how and when to use it. So don’t start searching for pointless ways to screw it up. No one can touch you right now. This is it. This is what you worked for. ”

“What did I work for? TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK I WORKED FOR? Because I don’t know anymore.”

“Stick to the plan, Amy.”

“So let me get this straight,” I start. “Basically the plan is: keep my head down, keep on grinding, don’t feel anything, and dampen any remotely dangerous desires because God forbid someone thinks I’m not pure enough to also be powerful. What kind of unfair bullshit is that?”

He stays silent.

I plough on,

“You got to fuck shit up and live to tell the tale. But I have to suffocate myself so I don’t jeopardise my success?”

He shrugs. “I don’t make the rules.”

“What madness are you speaking right now?!”

“You’re so very close, Amy,” he says. “You’re on the precipice of things beyond your imagination. You think you dream big, but where you’re about to go is even bigger than that. So you have more to gain and conversely more to lose than any other woman I know.”

And just like that, somewhere inside the lopsided madness of his argument, the madness that’s been hounding me for months suddenly lost its hold on me.

I mean, for this week at least.

See you next Tuesday ;)

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But I know she seeks me out even in my sleep forever battling the darkness that threatens to devour me.

And for this I am blessed and I am grateful.

So even when I wake soaked in sin wondering if I’ll be able to make it out of bed alive she warms my wings enough for them to unfurl, gifting me the thrill of getting too close. At least until nightfall.

He jokes that having a wing tattoo only on one shoulder must make me fly lopsided, wisely stopping himself from reaching out to touch it. I reply with something about already flying too close to the sun. I’m seeing how many times I can recycle a reference that belongs to a different story in an attempt to scramble the source code. It’s an exercise in futility because the bloodline of some storylines will forever throb through my veins.

My downfall is that the faces never fade. My father would soothe me by saying the word إنسان (ensan - human) comes from نسيان (nesyan - forgetting). Even as a child I knew that would never apply to me. But still I fell in love with the poetry of it.

My father is now the one forgetting, slowly disappearing into his own mind. He alone understood who I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to do, because I was always his invention.

Maybe I started losing my way when he started losing himself.

The lore goes that when I was five famed director and friend of the family Mohamed Khan foretold my future when I insisted on making up a bedtime story for him.

I don’t remember telling my kids enough bedtime stories. I was too busy building temples to the tales of others.

What do you do for a living? I commit our people’s stories to the world’s collective digital consciousness. Folded neatly inside the computer for eternity. Let them put that on my gravestone please.

No one ever needs to ask about my ‘Storyteller’ tattoo. It’s trite enough to be self-explanatory but it’s still my favorite. One time someone did unwisely reach out to touch it and it was the undoing of me.

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I’m asked almost daily about the color of my skin. “You’re so tanned, where have you been?”

I’ve been inside myself for too long but I was born this way somewhere between sunkissed and sunburned desperate to be kissed a certain way and always burning for something more.

Or less.

Less of me fucking feeling this way.

شمسها في سماري

Shamsaha fee samary. [Egypt’s] sun is in the darkness of skin.

It’s the sunset that scalds the most. By that time of day all my wrong answers have revealed themselves. At dawn there’s still a chance I could get it right.

“I was about to go to war for you,” I say jokingly on a work call about some ultimately innocuous issue, pithily playing on my reputation for being quick to get my claws out when it comes to the credibility of my publications.

But something about the context in which the words slipped so readily from my lips that afternoon, the who and when and why of it, the phone balanced between my ear and my shoulder as I rummaged through my beach bag for the hand cream I use as a security blanket, struck me down for the rest of the day.

My whole life I’ve gone to war for those to whom I mean little and let the ones who love me languish.

And when they realize how wide I can open myself up to let them pour their pain into me, they do so with relish. Till they are spent or satiated and forever after forget to ask how I am.

Did I make that sound like it was about fucking? I can already feel the frisson in your imagination, but that would be too easy my friend. For you and me both.

We’ve been through this before. That’s not my way, or wasn’t my way, which is probably why I’m now writhing with longing by the wayside.

I will sit on the edge of a bedside in sickness and hurrah in health. I will weave words that make them feel like masters of the universe. Or at least their trade. Cast spells with my stories to spread their gospel far and wide.

The danger only started when I recently discovered I could use those words to turn my own fantasies into reality. Or maybe it’s the other way round. I was born with a North Star but can’t always figure out which way is up.

Be careful what you wish for.

On Thursday morning I woke up alone in a hotel room high above the Mediterranean screaming. I thought it was only in my head till housekeeping came knocking at the guttural sound of my sobs. I called my mother seeking relief or maybe repentance. One from the other. “Give me a minute,” she says, and many minutes later sends me a long message made up of soothing syllables. She knows I need to read the words to believe them but these days most things are easier said than done and dusted. So I put them in my pocket, along with the screams, and spend the afternoon on camera in a car made for men who run the world. And everyone thinks the video wonderful and witty, and at lunch they sit me opposite the man with the big title knowing I’ll keep him engaged and entertained, not knowing just that morning I had to crawl and claw my way into existence.

There’s a name for this this behaviour, but I’m loathe to give it a label lest I believe it.

On Friday I message Salma right before a midnight flight to somewhere far far away so I can feel closer to my family. I’m not doing well at all I tell her wringing out reams of words from my wounds onto WhatsApp.

I end my existential essay with a little witticism as is my wont lest I ever take myself too seriously. “And that concludes this edition of Goodnight Stories for Stupid Girls,” I write.

“Firstly that’s a great name for a podcast,” she replies and I am grateful to all the goddesses that even in the depths of despair my girls understand one ought always keep their eye on the ball because come morning it will still be our burden to birth the sun.

And then she continues, “You did not work this hard, to become the woman you are today, to come as far as you have, to achieve everything you have, to smash it all on the rocks of anyone’s indifference.”

She knows how stubbornly I hold on to those who hold out.

Every night this week I have repeated her words to myself like a mantra. “Do not smash it all on the rocks of anyone’s indifference.” Do not. Do not.

I know how to be good but I don’t know how to be cold even when I promise myself otherwise. I cannot meet your silence or stoicism with sanctions of my own.

I will answer every call and every message, take every meeting with light and lightness, a quirky quip and a laugh loud enough that you don’t hear my mind shattering. And then I’ll feel like a stupid fucking girl afterwards because it will have taken every ounce of effort and energy to pretend I didn’t drag myself out of the darkness just to do my job. Because that’s all that’s left of me now apparently. The job.

No one worries as long as I show up for work.

But don’t you dare pull away from me. Please.

And thank you.

A million times thank you till I spiral so far out of my own orbit to get to “fuck you.” And some goddamn peace of mind.

My fucks-yous are either too soon or too late. Never just right.

Once in a house right on the edge of the Indian Ocean, Salma watched me do my song and dance routine for a man who’d arrived on our stretch of beach by helicopter. I had connected a constellation of dots between him and others in ivory towers and understood there was a game to be played in which I could reign victorious.

It’s not always about my ambition. Sometimes it’s survival. Figuring out which story they need to hear to keep me alive for another night. I once sat in a room that was designed to make me disappear but a story about kitesurfing saved my life. None of it makes any sense until it does.

“Stories are the excrement of time,” wrote Adélia Prado

That night Salma pulled me away and in soft whispers beneath a sky full of stars and the possibilities that are bred in my extremes said, “Do you have any idea how extraordinary it feels when you cast the full force of your attention on anyone let alone those to whom you claim allegiance?” She begs me to just once save it for someone who will rise to the occasion by plying me with poetry.

But the man who wrote songs for me also wrote the soundtrack to most of my nightmares which is strange because the morning I left I forgave him his sins and will forever forgive those who trespass against me. Because it’s supposed to be better that way.

Besides it’s never been a matter of choice. Say the right words in the right order and I will go to war for you but I’m always doing battle with myself.

I remembered the other day how once, when I was around 18, I sat in the bathtub for nine hours straight. My parents had to break the door down. Nothing was wrong. Except for everything.

It was not the last time a door would be broken down to get to me. Wounded and feral. The worst was when the wrong person was on the other side.

Meanwhile in the present tense on the right side of history the man who has always loved me cooks me the perfect eggs and makes sure I eat my protein and kisses me goodbye on the cheek I offer him in lieu of the lips he’s asked for and watches silently as I don my glittering armor ready to go to war for everyone but him.

“Look at me,” he demands.

But I can’t.

The irony about wanting to throw everything away is that you must have everything to begin with and what kind of sadist does that?

Even as I write these words curled on the carpet of the bedroom floor selfishly wretchedly typing for dear life, he’s in the kitchen with our daughter making banana bread and making sure life goes on.

“Why don’t you join us?” he asks gently.

But I can’t.

I won’t. I don’t want to. My heart doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to for the people it’s meant to.

Yet in the middle of the night when I cry out that I want to go home, he’ll quietly remind me I am home, as I tuck my face into the curve of his neck, tear myself to sleep, my night sweat sinking into his skin, the whole weight of me and my terrible thoughts making his right arm go numb, but he’ll keep it there till morning no matter how much it hurts.

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Or so it would seem following the arrival of my test results earlier this week.

After months of mulling (mostly on Substack) whether it is or isn’t my hormones, Dr G sat me down in his clinic last Wednesday afternoon and said, I quote, “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. In fact these numbers would be impressive even for a woman in her thirties.”

Then he added, “You could have a baby tomorrow if you wanted.”

Lol.

Except not lol at all.

Rather than be delighted, I was devastated. I needed my hormones to be haywire so my spiraling could make sense. Now I’m obligated to take full responsibility for my own outrageous behaviour, for the fires I’ve started beneath my own feet, for the way I’m hopping around manically because I’ve made the floor lava, even as my family, my friends and Mr Y watch from the sidelines yelling, “But you’re safe.”

Safety, it would seem, is a state of mind. And I so desperately miss my peace of mind.

“Are you absolutely sure?” I asked, though it sounded more like pleading.

“Yes,” he laughed. “But don’t go writing about this too.”

Pause.

He can see my bottom lip quivering.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“I needed something to blame,” I say. “For feeling so crazed.”

“Amy, I’ve known you long enough to know that’s not a new thing.”

“Feeling crazy and acting crazy are two very different things,” I reply. “The problem is I’ve started acting on it.”

“Again, not strictly true,” he says.

Which is when I start bargaining.

“Let’s do that DUTCH test.”

“You don’t need the DUTCH test.”

“Fine. What’s the DUTCH test?”

He shakes his head.

“If you don’t know what it is, why do you want it?”

“Because I can’t fucking face myself.”

Apparently he cannot help with this.

On the way back to the office I message the group chat I have with Deana and Salma.

“It’s not perimenopause. But I can have a baby if I like. Lol.”

Salma replies immediately.

“You’re not having one, are you?”

I get sidetracked by a work call.

By the time I get back to the chat, there’s a barrage of increasingly urgent messages from Salma.

AMY ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE A BABY?!

“No. That would be mental,” I reply.

“Amy, given your recent track record of unhinged behaviour, I am in no position to put anything past you.”

And so it was, armed with knowledge of my confirmed insanity, I headed back to the North Coast for the weekend where I would unwittingly slip into one of the most surreal afternoons of my life…

Women tell me their stories.

Because they know me.

Because they think they know me.

Because they want to know me.

And ultimately because they want me to know them.

Perhaps there’s something in my stories that feels like a permission slip to let slip. To snip at the gossamer threads stopping the secrets between their legs from escaping into the world and wreaking havoc.

I think they think I’m not scared and so with me they can be brave. I never have the heart to tell them that I’m the most terrified of all.

But still I wonder what it means that, on a single Saturday afternoon, suspended somewhere ethereal between the sea and the sun, reading a book while half immersed in a pool full of people so beautiful I could barely breathe, having eaten too little and drunk a little too much, three sets of women, each from a different decade of womanhood, would seek me out one after the other.

Over the course of an afternoon that slipped almost imperceptibly into an evening with the peculiar elasticity of dreams, each pulled me into a story. About the things they knew of themselves, and the things they believed about me.

I felt like I’d been coaxed into an alternate reality, a Dickensian tale in which the only way to get out alive was to work out the moral of the story. There’s no place like home.

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The night before I found myself at a party surrounded by nearly everyone I have ever known. All of us dressed in white like demons in disguise. Better the devil you know. Yet I’d felt so completely unknown to myself I had to run out of there before I lost my mind. Even more.

I messaged Deana from the car. I’d left her behind without warning moments after pulling her onto the dance floor.

“Sorry. Had to go. Mr Y was struggling with his eyes.”

She replied, “I love you.”

Because she knew I was lying.

My brother Adam has to message me almost once a week with the same reminder. “You’re fine. You’re good. Nothing bad is happening. You’re OK.”

“HOW DO YOU FUCKING KNOW?”

“You are fine,” he’ll repeat, calmly, over and over until I believe him.

But back to these women…

I looked up from the book in which I’d been engrossed for hours to find that a party had started on the outer edge of the pool and, amongst the guests, a woman I have known for years. We’d talked a lot about work, but also about the possibility of one day not talking about work. I avoid us doing anything of the sort because loving people has always undone me, so I try to keep the body count at a minimum.

And I think I could love her.

A lot.

She is preternaturally beautiful and so very smart. She tells stories and studies people and, as such, knows where to find the corner piece of the puzzle.

She recently turned forty.

“I read all your Substacks, and I can read between the lines,” she says as I put my book down and slip into the pool beside her.

She’s caught me in a state of softness, so I acquiesce to a conversation I know will crack me open.

“I’m coming undone,” I tell her after she shares her own stories of breaking and becoming.

“I know,” she answers. “A fire has been ignited inside of you and you’re trying to put it out. But that’s the problem. Doing that will eventually destroy you. You can’t unsee things. Listen you don’t need to tell me anything, but I want you to know that I see you, and I understand.”

“But I have so much to lose,” I tell her. “I think my soul is breaking.”

“It’s not breaking. It’s liberating itself.”

There we are with that word again.

Liberating.

“Amy, you will suppress and suppress in the ways you have always done. You’ll keep trying to be the good girl, doing the right thing by everyone, hiding behind the work, and eventually it will blow up in your face.”

“Maybe it already has,” I say.

“It hasn’t. But it will. So Amy, any day, any time, anywhere, we can sit and we can talk. You and me are the same, even if you don’t see it yet. We are the same.”

She leaves then because I think she thinks I want her to leave, and I don’t know how to tell her that I need her to stay. That I don’t want to talk later. I want to talk now.

I get out of the pool, my head fuzzy and fraught, and head to the beach.

I walk the entire length of that beach, all the way to the edge of the compound, and touch the big concrete bollards with the palms of both my hands.

Someone from security asks if I need anything. I don’t tell him that I just needed to feel the borders of something because I’m losing my own.

As I walk back, getting closer and closer to the fray where the party had spilled from the pool onto the beach, a young woman runs up to me.

I have never met her before, but she’d once messaged me on Substack, and I remember her immediately because her writing had blown me away.

“Yes! Yes!” I say, grabbing her by the arm and asking her to walk with me. I’d wanted to offer her a writing position at one of my magazines but the days had passed and I must have forgotten.

“You are a wonderful writer,” I tell her. “And I’d love for you to work with us.”

Before she answers, she tells me her story, and I listen, grateful for the distraction.

She has just turned twenty-two. She has just graduated from an Ivy League university in the States and now finds herself back in Egypt.

Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

She is smart and beautiful, and she is lost, but full of longing.

She wants to do everything. All of it. And so instead is paralysed by her own potential.

I’ve been there before. I have been her. The good girl who studies hard enough to solve the maths problem but whose skin is covered in poetry, and who is forever told the world is at her feet but is scared the shoes might not fit.

She tells me she’s writing a book about her grandfather, who is her inspiration, but she’s worried she might be putting the words down on paper too soon.

“It is never too soon,” I reply.

“But what if I don’t know what the real story is?”

“You’re not supposed to know until you’re done,” I say.

And then she leaves and heads back to her friends because I think she thinks I’d probably like her to leave me alone now.

But I wanted her to stay.

Because for those fleeting moments, it felt like I was the one with the answers.

I make my way back up to the hotel, past the pool, to my room, and I lie on the floor and let hot tears stream down my cheeks until it gets dark.

Then I put on a leopard-print bikini top with a pair of beige harem pants and fuss with my hair and put on some lip gloss so I can be with the beautiful people who make me catch my breath.

As I leave, I see two women I know entering the room next door to mine. One is a daring, dazzling dynamo who works at the intersection of business and media and is on the precipice of great power and for whom I have so much admiration. The other is an outrageously beautiful artist who dances and dreams beyond convention.

They are each thirty-one years old.

There are nearly 15 years of life and marriage and kids and chaos separating me from them.

They drag me into the room with them in the way of young women getting ready together before a big party. They have caught me in a state of softness, so I acquiesce.

They dress while I lie on the bed with a tube of Pringles between my thighs and a coffee mug of tequila by my side, and they tell me how I am their inspiration. How when they grow up they want to be me.

“That’s funny,” I say. “Because I wish I was you when I was younger.”

I wish I’d had their steeliness and their strength, the way they will never let a man bring them to their knees because they only needed to learn that lesson once. The way one of them stands tall when she says, “And then I bought myself my own diamond necklace because I fucking could.”

They sit on the edge of the bed and, in softer voices, each tells me some version of, “Whatever is going on with you, please understand this. We want what you have. Don’t throw it away. You might be looking for an adventure you’ve never had, but we’ve gone on that trip and it’s not what you think. You have safety, and that’s what we all want. The safety you have.”

Time seems to fold in on itself and I’m not sure how, but suddenly it’s after midnight and there’s some sort of after-party at which I don’t belong, in a sprawling suite with an absurd name, and I’m having a conversation with the man to whom this room belongs. A man who has built an entertainment empire, and like so many my age, is divorced, with kids, but is now living his best bachelor life.

I ask him if he’s happy.

He says yes.

I ask him why.

“Because I’m at peace.”

And I look around the room in which everyone is lacing themselves with forgetting and in between the music and the mayhem and the cranked up laughter I pay attention to the women.

The woman from the pool.

The girls from the room.

The other women in that suite whose stories I know or know of. And it occurs to me that all of us has the same scars on our knees and not one of us is at peace.

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A long list of unintelligible things scrawled across the clinic’s headed paper that I made absolutely no effort to understand. I much prefer to be in denial than to actually take medical matters into my own hands, much as I admire those women - including but not limited to Eva Longoria and Halle Berry - who do copious research and then post reels entitled 4 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Perimenopause for the general benefit of womankind.

I will however work out militantly every morning, start the day with 30 grams of protein and carefully control my cortisol, even though I’m fairly certain nobody had cortisol when I was growing up. My bestie Salma says we’re supposed to do all of this for our 90-year-old selves. My answer is always the same. “No, bitch. I do this to look hot.”

I am terrified of disappearing into that particular kind of invisibility that afflicts women in middle age, where they're seen, but not looked at. I want to be desired god damn it. I want to know that some cosmic combination of my body and mind is still weaving spells on unknown someones.

This I suspect is some sort of post-traumatic response to the decades during which I had my hair thrown up into a messy bun, shackled by my own ambition to a series of progressively more expensive desks, grinding my teeth every night on the grit dredged up from the depths of my belly.

So I’ll do the hot-girl shit, but absolutely nothing that requires dealing with the medical establishment. I will take on the machinations of an entire media company, take on the powers that be in order to realise impossible dreams, puppet-master people, places and entire movements. But the moment abbreviations like CRP and CBC and DUTCH start getting bandied about, I begin feeling desperately, devastatingly overwhelmed. Much like I feel when my teenage daughter barges into my bedroom at 11pm and says, “I’m hungry.”

Besides, I simply do not abide by abbreviations. When I first started MO4 and would find myself drowning in the drivel of corporate client meetings, I had no qualms saying, “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trained in bullshit,” whenever people started stringing letters together that didn’t result in proper words before reminding them that humanity mostly consumed digital content while on the toilet in some crappy cubicle at work so no one actually cares about their fucking SWOT or RTB or ROI and moreover I will never entertain an RFP.

I can’t even bring myself to have a perfunctory GPT convo like, “Hey, Mr AI, before you eat me, could you tell me what these tests mean and whether I’ll need to be institutionalised?”

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I’d far rather just bury my head in the sand and trust in the power of prayer, Pilates and a daily 30-minute walk at an incline of 15. (Fifteen what, exactly? I don’t really know. Just... fifteen. Because that’s the highest the treadmill in my home gym will go because again, it doesn’t count if it’s not literally the hardest.)

And so it was I watched, passive and detached, as a single vial of blood (a surprisingly small amount for such a long list of tests) was taken from my right arm because the left arm refused to avail itself of anything. Which is weird because I’ve always considered my ability to give good blood (and to bleed from the depths of my soul) a kind of superpower, one amongst the long list of superpowers I’ve made up that nobody cares about and I cannot monetise.

Like, for example, how at a wellness event led by an outrageously hot Egyptian who lives in Bali and teaches people how to breathe - because apparently we’ve all been doing it wrong our entire lives - I discovered I have an extraordinary aptitude for ice baths. On my debut I sat submerged right up to my ears for a good 14 minutes, positively reveling in watching the wellness bros with heavily funded tech startups give up, climb out and concede defeat long before me.

Yeah, motherfuckers. This is what a decade of bootstrapping without a penny of outside investment will teach you. A little goddamn resilience.

Naturally, had I been alone in that ice tub I would never have lasted that long. But there’s nothing like an audience and a pointless thing to prove to get me performing at my peak.

As Hemingway once supposedly (and famously) said when asked what drove him to write, “To show the bastards.”

Indeed if I was ever to write one of those obnoxiously trite business-cum-self-help books that segue into a collection of shareable Instagram snippets parsed from a personal-branding global podcast tour, Show the Bastards would absolutely be my central thesis. Because dumbing things down is apparently the single biggest key to success in the world of ideas.

Last year at a party on the tail end of El Gouna Film Festival, a man we’ll call K, finds me standing alone on the quieter end of an ostentatious gold-gilded oblong bar. I had positioned myself there intentionally because after nearly 10 days of festival shenanigans, humanity itself had started to grate. I was nursing both a Spicy Margarita and a scathing commentary in my head about everyone.

Now K is what you might call “interesting”. Exactly what he does and from whence precisely he sources his copious funds I couldn’t tell you. He’ll disappear for months at a time and then reappear and continue the conversation midway through as though no time has passed. But he says some crazy shit and nurtures some wild theories about the aforementioned people, places and movements, which I find endlessly entertaining. And I’ve long ago learned that in certain echelons it best behoves one to operate on a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. As long as we’re not talking sex crimes, murder or funding a genocide, you do you, boo.

“You’re still here?” he asked, referencing the festival itself, not the event.

“Yeah, well it’s work, as you know,” I said before instinctively breaking into She Works Hard for the Money because if there’s an opportunity to communicate exclusively through ‘80s lyrics I’m psychologically obliged to take it and banter is a kind of religion for me.

I nod at the barman in that way that means I’d like another of the same, but K interrupts to take control of the order in that way men love to do with me when they need to imply that “yes, you might be ‘strong independent etc.’ but not on my watch.”

I acquiesce because choose your battles, and go through the entirely unnecessary motions of telling K my very specific order just so he can repeat it to the barman, who already knows exactly what it is.

“Amy,” he starts in the tone that implies he’s about to impart the sort of wisdom only businessmen of a certain ilk ever think to impart on me. The ones who don’t see me as a pain in the ass or a thorn in their side but view me as a kind of lovable oddity, as if my hard edges are simply an amusing little test they alone have managed to pass. Nobody ever considers that maybe I’m actually just a really fucking nice person and that rumours of my bitchiness have been greatly exaggerated by the incompetent and unimaginative.

“What is driving you? Why are you still running at the exact same pace?”

“The same thing that has always driven me,” I reply. “To show the bastards.”

He laughs at that. But for the wrong reasons. And I feel tears of self-pity prick behind my eyeballs knowing my ravishing reference has been wasted on this man, at this party, in this world that I’ve built which on most days I adore but on most nights leaves me parched and clawing desperately for something or someone witty and wise to quench my thirst. I know that’s the reason I’m always trying to build people up into something more than they are, so I don’t have to feel so god damn unrequited all the time.

I can’t bear the idea of being drawn to anyone who just ‘is’, they have to be the mostest of something or other, because if they’re special it must mean that I am too.

Come sit next to me and let me write a story about you that we can both believe in.

“I’m serious,” I say, while giving the overbearing up-and-coming actor at the opposite end of the bar the kind of polite, tight-lipped wave that says, yes I see you but please stay exactly where you are.

“Well that’s a problem,” K says, ignoring the interaction, and the countless other inevitable interruptions that take place when I’m surrounded by people whose literal livelihoods depend on their media visibility. “You won’t get your yacht if that’s your motive.”

“I mean, the stories, of course,” I sigh. “They’ll always be the reason. I believe in them and their power and their impact. But when shit hits the fan, it’s really just the visceral desire to make sure everyone can go fuck themselves that gets me out of bed each morning.”

“But what have you got left to prove?” he asks.

Everything.

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He’s being facetious.

I’m not sure what I’m being.

I’m being serious. I’m being a coward. I’m saying what I feel but maybe don’t mean, or maybe it’s the other way around. I don’t know anymore. It’s been months and months of this. I just know I’m making a mess, and it breaks my heart that he doesn’t just yell, “Enough!” and banish me to the depths of hell before I exile him back to bachelorhood.

We’ve had an amazing long weekend on the North Coast. I hadn’t intended to ruin it, but he started spiralling about why I never post him on my Instagram Stories anymore.

For context, Mr Y is barely even on the socials. His dormant Instagram account was created years ago at my behest, and the few posts languishing on it were uploaded at my insistence. Unlike me, he does not crave attention and/or external validation from strangers on the internet.

And yet here he is questioning why I hadn’t posted him that night, even though we’d taken a bunch of pictures on the balcony beforehand. Me in my lime-green skirt, him in a pink linen suit.

We’d spent that night in the gardens of an outrageously beautiful beach house high above the Mediterranean.

“It’s on the market for EGP 500 million,” I’m told, because every party on Egypt’s North Coast is ultimately just a thinly veiled attempt to sell you an impossible dream. “And every piece of furniture is Ralph Lauren.”

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My WhatsApp is bursting at the seams with invitations to Sahel events, brunches and blowouts, global DJs lending their cachet to real estate companies along one endless, schizophrenic stretch of coastline that can’t quite figure out whether it’s the new Ibiza, the new Tulum or the new nostalgic version of the old thing that no longer exists. Anything, as long as it’s not just itself.

Compounds cordoned off from reality and from one another. Every experience curated, every interaction orchestrated, every sunset sponsored. ‘Belonging’ plotted onto a masterplan and monetized by the square metre.

But here I am, as always, doing the mostest for a piece of the pie, helping the man behind the curtain amplify his messaging as long as it helps me expand my empire. Pretending for the night, for the weekend, for the month, for the last fucking decade that I’m not made of poetry. That words, in the right order, even if they’re in the wrong place or spoken by the wrong person, don’t make and break me every day. That the stories won’t find me on the bathroom floor at two a.m., desperate and delirious. That it doesn’t take all my willpower to put it in my Notes instead of a DM. That I don’t reach for the books on my bedside in the middle of the night in a bid to escape myself. Just so I don’t run away to that place on the edge of my imagination - maybe wondrous maybe wretched - where my wildness lies in wait.

Instead, I take the house tour and ooh and aah as I run my palm across the Ralph Lauren throw in a bedroom made of money and someone’s sex dream, and say, yes, on Sunday I’ll have someone call you to close a media deal for Sahel season. Yes, yes, I totally understand now why you wanted me to see it for myself.

I have done well to make them believe that we’re in this together.

There’s a spectacular sunset, a light breeze, a DJ bringing ’90s back, and I keep being served some sort of lavender-laced tequila concoction, so I’m willing to play make-believe and do that very easy thing of making a house full of outrageously wealthy strangers believe that Mr Y and I are the coolest couple there till death do us part. Both of us fluorescent and fabulous, the fun flamboyant double act play-flirting with the cute Lebanese bar staff.

Such fun!

So honestly I’m shocked that Mr Y has started this argument about my Instagram Stories. I have no choice but to gaslight him, even though his gut is quietly grasping at the truth, even if he doesn’t quite understand the extent of it yet.

If neither of us does.

In the past few months he has only appeared on my Insta sporadically, and usually with the kids. Not that that ought to be a measure of anything remotely sensible in real life, but as always, the Stories, or lack thereof, tell a much bigger story.

I go on the offensive, bringing up twenty years of resentment. Anything to avoid admitting that I’m posting him less because I’m experimenting with an alternate life within the curated confines of my social media. Even though I’m fully aware that liking the view of yourself through other people’s eyes is a dangerous addiction and trying to understand yourself through social media is a recipe for madness.

“Enty mekasra el donia 3al Instagram el ayam di,” the CEO of another real estate company tells me at a beach brunch earlier that same weekend. It’s an Egyptian expression everyone understands to mean something along the lines of, “You’re killing it (on Instagram these days).” But the literal translation is infinitely better: “You’re breaking the world.”

Breaking my world, I think. But don’t say.

“It’s as if you’ve suddenly been liberated,” he adds.

Liberated.

It’s a good word for whatever the fuck is going on. But is it a good thing?

Liberation has a notoriously patchy track record for us Arabs, never quite going the way we planned.

Liberated from what? From myself? From the girl who seemed fearless but was mostly just terrified of unleashing the tantalising tempests within. Terrified of what I might be capable of if I freed myself from these self-imposed shackles and became fully liberated. How much more liberated can I get before there are civilian casualties?

I read All Fours by Miranda July last summer, a novel about a woman whose carefully ordered life begins to unravel somewhere in the liminal space of perimenopause, desire and middle age. She sets off on a cross-country road trip, only to pull over less than an hour from home, abandon the journey, and secretly hole up in a drab roadside motel. She spends $20,000 transforming the room into a sumptuous replica of the Bristol Hotel in Paris and uses it as the backdrop for an obsessive affair with a younger married man she meets at a Hertz rental lot.

I hated it.

It made me feel hollow.

It made me feel seen.

Maybe this marriage is stopping me from finding out exactly who I become when nobody needs me to be good. Maybe that is the best thing about it. Maybe it’s the only thing keeping me safe. Which is probably why every time we come to the crux of the divorce conversation it curdles into impossibility.

“Separation first because that’s what you’re supposed to do, I guess,” I say. “It’s what everyone does.”

“Since when do you do what everyone does?” Mr Y says, rolling his eyes as he puts away the pizza boxes the kids had left strewn across the floor while we were out.

“You know, just to test out the tenability of the arrangement, how it’s supposed to work practically,” I add as he scrapes our leftover room-service Bolognese into the bin, even though someone would have eventually come and taken it away.

He’s anchoring the conversation in the mundane. No one gets divorced while taking the trash out. Or maybe that’s exactly when it happens.

He pulls my phone charger out from the depths of the overstuffed beach bag, a soft drift of sand escaping after it, and he heads to bed.

We have reached no resolution.

But my phone will be charged in the morning.

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It is an obnoxiously oversized boardroom table. One better suited to a gathering of the G7 than the needs of a startup, albeit a heavily funded darling of the ecosystem.

This coming, mind you, from the woman who had a 30-person, boat-shaped, black lacquered boardroom table custom-made the moment she obnoxiously took over the entirety of the former library of the American University in Cairo as her office, less than three years after founding her business, even though she definitely could not afford either of them (not the office nor the boardroom table), mainly because she can out-ego any man while simultaneously berating all the men in the room for their outsized egos.

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“It’s because all the founders are men,” I say as we stroll over to the sofa.

“What?” says the man I am having a meeting with.

“You’re all men, are you not?”

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“Well, it just explains why the table is unnecessarily large. You know what they say about big boardroom tables…”

No one has ever said anything about big boardroom tables. But even when I actively tell myself not to say things purely for the sake of making the men in a room uncomfortable, these gratuitously provocative statements slip out of my mouth unbidden.

He doesn’t know how to reply to that, so he laughs nervously, which has been more or less his modus operandi since the start of the meeting. A meeting our respective teams had been trying to set up for a month, but neither of our schedules aligned. Mine on account of the fact that I was in a ‘blow my life up and let everything burn’ kind of mood. Him because his company is in that exhilarating phase of: ‘Let’s spend all the money we raised scaling in ways that are not the least bit sustainable, but no one will hold us accountable because such is the investment landscape, and even if it all goes to shit, we’ll just tell people we were optimising for failure while embarking on a podcast redemption tour before some hot new VC comes along to fund our next experiment.’

Accordingly, he’d been jet-setting between various buzzwords — Riyadh, Doha, Dubai — and I assume only showing up to HQ for long enough to order oversized furnishings.

Nonetheless, here I am trying to close a big advertising deal for a year’s worth of high-value placements across my media portfolio, and there he is, reluctantly acquiescing to the need to promote his product in order to satisfy a board that equates marketing with momentum. Just long enough for the rocket ship he’s on to burn through the atmosphere, or for the exponential growth graph in his pitch deck to finally catch up with reality, at which point he can exit or IPO or whatever it is that’s actually the objective here. So, in this fleeting moment, at this particular intersection in the matrix, we are entirely beholden to each other’s bullshit.

We sit on the sofa. He sends for another round of Americanos now that we have bonded over the startling fact that we both like our coffee black with no sugar.

“So I like to ask the tough questions,” he starts…

When people say things like that in meetings, I silently ask God to please protect the poetry in my soul and to please forgive me the sin of being an entrepreneur.

Turns out that when he said “tough questions”, what he actually meant was that he wanted to conduct a full autopsy of my leadership style, given various things he’d apparently read about me on the internet and/or overheard in otherwise polite company.

I swallow my rage despite knowing no man has ever been asked to account for the consequences of his demeanour, decisions, discipline, determination or demands. Only his results.

No man has ever been asked to account for the whirring of a fucking rumour mill or the inanity of the internet. Indeed, we live in a world where men in the literal fucking Epstein files have yet to be held responsible for their actions, yet I get called out for my use of the F-word, for holding people to a higher standard than even they believe they are capable of, for asking that we rise to the occasion and deal in reality rather than fumble around in our basest feelings, for empowering only the most exceptional people in the room, and for having little patience for entitlement, complacency or a lack of ambition.

It was not that I had never been challenged on this before. Potential employees had skirted around the subject in interviews. Potential investors had dredged it up as part of their due diligence.

Have I fucked up? Absolutely. Have there been seasons when I have been a one-woman Charybdis, sucking unwitting bystanders into the vortex of my obsession, believing that everyone ought to be as incentivised as me to do battle? Yes. Have I paid my dues, suffered the consequences, learned to soften the edges without surrendering the steel, and temper the heat without extinguishing the flame? Yes, yes and yes.

But I would sooner hold myself to account than have any man who has never walked in my shoes, any man who would never ask those same questions of another man, have the audacity to position himself as judge and jury.

You try building a regional media company from nothing. Knowing no one and without a penny of outside investment. You steer it through a revolution, two devaluations and being shut down by the powers that be and, somehow, still surviving. You navigate a pandemic, a war, the goddamn apocalypse. You build a blueprint for an industry that barely existed, then watch as the very same people who call for your head treat your company as fertile ground for their headhunting. You somehow stay standing through the mud-slinging while those who are lauded and applauded, who have their logos projected onto phallic buildings that touch the sky and their faces plastered on magazine covers, collapse and take everyone down with them with no reckoning and no remorse. And then, by all means, come ask me your tough fucking questions.

And yet, and yet, and yet. Call it grace or call it growth, somehow, for the first time in my life, I found it in me to answer the question rather than the accusation. To sheath the sword and extend him a generosity he hadn’t yet earned.

I took a breath. I took a sip of my Americano. I looked over at my business partner (and brother), who was bracing for impact, and gave him a wink.

Then I unleashed.

Coolly, calmly.

Methodically yet mercilessly.

I wasn’t a sledgehammer, much as I would have relished the momentary high of it. I was a scalpel, cutting through the very premise of his line of questioning with surgical precision.

The room fell silent.

“Good answer,” he says.

“A practiced answer,” I reply with a wry smile, throwing a knowing glance at the women in the room, giving everyone permission to exhale and sink back into the sofas now that the danger had passed.

In the past I would have hurled myself at his question, leaving the room burning in my wake, marching to my demise beneath the banner of “he can go fuck himself.”

I would have been of the firm belief that any response less than fire and brimstone would have been a form of compromise. The road to hell is paved with my reckless reactions, serving no one and nothing but my own self-satisfaction. But my God, this felt just as good. Using my words wisely rather than wildly. Catharsis without the collateral damage.

“Wow, what was that?” said my brother Waleed when we got back in the car.

“Did you not read my last Substack? The one where I talk about making fuck-you money?” I joke. “I think that was me figuring out that the only person standing in my way was me.”

Maybe my return to writing has helped regulate a nervous system that for too long was on high alert. A relearning that the ferocity within me is far more powerful when it escapes my fingertips, not my lips. That I need to save myself for the page and not give so much of myself in these rooms that are undeserving of the incandescence of my imagination.

Maybe the only reason anyone has ever had the last word was because I gifted it to them.

Maybe as a writer I have no business even being in rooms where meaning is found in bottom lines, not between the lines, or in the conjuring of lines that make your heart ache with reverence or regret, with the sacredness of being seen.

Yet here I am.

I have always been able to wield my pen in such a way that lets you think I’ve told you the whole story when it’s just the partial truth. Reveal my secrets without you ever being able to prove me guilty. Innocent until you find the line that unlocks the floodgates, except you’re probably searching on the wrong page. Yet for some reason it has only just occurred to me that I can speak in much the same way. That I can still set the world on fire, but have it burn slowly enough to give us all an escape clause.

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“I will support you in any rash, stupid or dangerous decision you want to make, but only if you go get your hormones and your head sorted, and then you can go fuck up your life as badly as you wish,” she had told me as we lay on the floor of her bedroom, bums smooshed up against the wall, legs raised at a ninety-degree angle because I’m having heart palpitations that threaten to turn into a full-blown panic attack.

It has only ever happened once before: the night before I hosted Steven Bartlett on stage at an event I had dreamed up for reasons that one hundred percent had something to do with my ego. And clearly it wasn’t Steven or the stage that was the problem, because there is nothing I relish more than obliging people to make me the centre of attention. But, as multiple therapists and medical professionals later told me (in a friendly capacity because I refuse to actually get help), it was in fact the accumulation of two decades of foot-to-the-floor pedal-to-the-metal pressure, compulsive productivity, and high-functioning self-destruction mediated by pathological overachievement. My body finally chose that inopportune moment to rebel.

But it was fine because the dodgy doctor my family has on retainer came to my bedside at four in the morning and injected me with something that made me pass out and wake up three hours later with crazy eyes and the strong suspicion that I was now invincible and immortal.

Nothing a pair of vintage Cartier sunglasses, and the thorough prep work I’d already done (I am nothing if not always, always prepared) couldn’t fix.

In fact whatever was in that magical mix helped me put on the performance of a lifetime. (Which you can still see pinned to the top of my Instagram feed, even though Steven has since proven to be rather problematic. But I loved whatever version of me appeared that day so much that I can’t bear to let it slip down the feed.)

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But back to my gyno’s office, talking about my libido. Dr G - whom I adore - is the same man who birthed my babies and mediated my miscarriages, and let me tell you, there is something deeply disconcerting about finding yourself in the very same room that saw you at the peak of your reproductive powers, ripe and juicy with either pregnancy or the possibility of it, but is now setting the stage for you to shrivel up and die.

I joke. I joke.

This will quite clearly be my most spectacular season yet, but let us go through the motions nonetheless.

Herewith follows an almost verbatim transcript of my conversation with Dr G who, it must be noted, has officially grown tired of birthing babies and has made it his mission to become a world-leading expert in perimenopause and menopause, ushering all the women he once saw through childbirth into this new formidable phase of their lives.

Dr G: OK Amy, so what’s up?

Me: So I thought we could discuss me having another baby. Hahahaha.

The last time I was in this room, just after my fortieth birthday, I said the same thing to him, except I was serious and he was apprehensive. But I wouldn’t be deterred. Anyway, that ended in tears and blood on the pavement (literally) and me “healing” from my second miscarriage by attending my best mate Omar’s buddy-moon in Nuweiba less than ten days later and getting the most outrageously high and drunk I have ever been.

I spent that entire long weekend only tenuously tethered to reality and everything was either sparkly and hilarious or curiously calm. I danced and danced and danced. I also ranted about colonialism because there is no circumstance in which I apparently can’t do that. Although I was told afterwards that I did concede colonialism also gave us some rather lovely hotels and that very specific feeling of nostalgia and longing one gets when watching ‘The English Patient.’

The buddy-moon ended with me throwing up all over the bed at four in the morning while Mr Y was in it. He cleaned me up, carried me to the sofa and went to sleep on the beach while pretending not to be furious with me, which is basically our whole fucking marriage.

The next morning I stared up at the ceiling and came to terms with the fact of “no more babies.”

The irony is I didn’t even want the baby all that much.

I just wanted more. To be ahead. To be the best.

Two kids sounded like such an average number. I wanted to say, “Yes, I founded a media company, I’m a CEO and I have four children.” Like Emma Grede (now) or Sara Blakely (then), who I loved until she decided to vocally support a fucking genocide.

Rather aptly, Omar was the only one who pegged that my reasons for having another baby were performative at best. We were both in Saqqara just after that mammoth mummy discovery was made - the one that got turned into a Netflix documentary. We’d been invited to see the excavation site which involved being lowered deep into the earth by a rope while standing in a kind of human-sized basket. The minute I refused, he knew something was up because why would I ever refuse something so gloriously ridiculous?

“Well, I wasn’t planning on telling anyone yet,” I whispered in his ear. “But I’m pregnant.”

“Jesus,” he said, rolling his eyes. “That’s literally the opposite of what you’ve been saying you want! Was it planned?”

We had just returned to reality after hiding out in Marsa Alam during Covid with nothing to do but have endless very deep and meaningful and often very unhinged conversations.

“Fuck you,” I said. “It’s exactly what I want.”

It wasn’t what I wanted. Or maybe it was. I don’t know. I really don’t even know.

Dr G: Sure. Let’s do it. Let’s get you another baby.

(He’s joking).

Dr G has seen me and various members of my family at our most unhinged…

For example, when I pulled out my laptop less than an hour after my emergency C-section because my baby company felt just as urgent as the real baby he’d just pulled out of my stomach. (Masterpiece surgery and stitching, may I add. My scar is barely a couple of centimetres and sits well below the line of even the skimpiest bikini. DM me and I will happily give you his details.)

He watched me scream at my mother in the lobby of his hospital when I had my first miscarriage because I needed to be angry at someone and God wasn’t answering.

He’d seen Mr Y show up after Maya’s birth, straight from a flight, dressed for some inexplicable reason in a three-piece white linen suit, sporting a fedora, and clutching a bottle of Scotch as if I had just had a baby in colonial times and he would have to rush off for sundowners and cigars on the terrace of the Shepherd Hotel immediately afterwards.

Me: OK, fine, fine. I’m here because... perimenopause.

Dr G: OK then, symptoms?

I shrug and, for some reason, start to feel my eyes prickling with hot tears. Why the fuck am I about to cry?

Dr G: Fine, let’s take it one by one. How’s your sex drive? Low?

Me: Well actually, quite the opposite.

I don’t tell him that’s part of the problem. That I don’t know what to do with it. Well, I do, but they’re all things that will just land me in hell, not the literal one of religious texts but the one where you can’t live with yourself because you’ve fucked (up). So if he could just help me settle the fuck down, that would be great.

Dr G: Ah, OK. How’s your skin? Does it feel drier?

Me: Actually, no. Not at all.

I don’t know how to tell him that it feels like my skin is cracking open and poison is seeping out. Maybe he has something for that? I’d like to fill the crevices with better judgement. And maybe a little fucking perspective. And then seal the cracks with gold, because I earned them, and I want them to show, but I also want them to be beautiful. Like kintsugi.

Dr G: Hot flashes? Foggy brain? Weight gain?

And the list goes on.

Me: Nope. No. Not at all. No to all of the above.

I want to say, listen Dr G, I’m the strongest and healthiest and, weirdly enough, potentially the hottest I’ve ever been. I long ago learned that I must never get my hair highlighted blonde and that I really need not tie a sweater around my waist because my ass looks great in the right pair of jeans. My tattoos make me look cooler than I am, my words make me sound smarter than I feel, and on the days when I feel good I can make the whole fucking world bend to my will. This could potentially be my sexy superhero era if only I didn’t feel like a stranger in my own life. Most mornings I’m gripped by something murky and maddening and manic. A melancholy that threatens to consume me if I don’t begrudgingly go through the motions of my routine because I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t just keep going.

Instead I say,

“Night sweats and heart palpitations. I think I may have had a hot flash in the airport on the way back from Cannes Lions and, I don’t know Dr G, I just feel... not right.”

I feel like I’m loosing my fucking mind.

There’s no point telling him my body knows something my head is refusing to accept. That my desires are only deemed dangerous because they’re dragging me down a road that benefits no one but me and therefore bodes badly for everyone but me. And when you’re a wife, and a mother, and a CEO leading a charge of 160 people, when you’re at the head of a family business where everyone’s business is your business and everyone’s wellbeing dependent on them finding you well, all roads must lead to the greater good…

even if it’s not for your own good.

************

*I’m booked in for all the required hormonal bloodwork on the 28th so we can find out if it is indeed biology, or just a girl with agency intentionally wanting to blow up her whole life.

I have promised my mother that I will not end the world in the meantime.

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I have made all these things before.

Been broken and bruised and made beautiful by them before.

Too much of all of it and too little of some of it.

But on the morning of my 46th birthday this week, as I lay in bed, staring up through the skylight of my cabin on my friend M’s yacht, the roughly hewn rocky edges of an Ibizan outcrop coming in and out of view as the boat swayed gently, I was overcome with need, a voraciousness the likes of which I have never known. I’m famished for these things, wild with wanting, as if the whole world is ticking and I’m the bomb, liable to explode if I don’t gorge on it all. Let the consequences drip messily down my chin. Wipe it all away with the back of my hand and then reach out for even more.

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This is not ambition. I know the taste of that all too well. It is something else I can sense and smell but haven’t yet quite grasped. I just know it’s of a different shape, and belongs to a different plane from the accomplishments I have already collected and manifested. And I know that the only way to grasp them between my thrumming fingers would be to upend, uproot, turn everything upside down. An upheaval I’ve been writing about and around for months without ever having the courage to name. Or do anything about it.

A mantra repeated endlessly without action becomes meaningless.

“You’ve changed,” M tells me later that afternoon as we sit on the deck, cold glasses of Whispering Angel condensing between our fingertips. “You’re calmer and less aggressive. More confident in yourself. Less chaotic.”

I’m not sure that bodes well for our friendship, which was created in chaos and cemented in clashes. Everyone had assumed that if we ever met we would repel each other, given that our worldviews are so diametrically opposed. Instead, I think we immediately recognised in each other the same kind of potentially problematic darkness, albeit manifested in different ways. Demons invisible to the naked eye. But it takes one to know one. And so we immediately careened towards each other with a kind of gleeful abandon, knowing that ultimately no harm could be done. Equal forces cancelling each other out and maybe, in the process, even fortifying our respective glass houses.

We should have ended up somewhere in hell. Instead, he became an emergency contact, defending me in rooms where I was misunderstood, flying across the world to sit with me in doctors’ waiting rooms, softening the blow of devastating news with scathing humour and bottomless tequilas. One does not have to be sensible to be empathetic. He has also regularly dragged me on a myriad of last-minute adventures that have admittedly left me worse for wear, but oh, the stories we’ve had to tell.

And while there is nothing so fortifying as the female friendships I have written about copiously, sometimes I crave a little testosterone-laced sparring to distract me from myself. As my best girlfriends have consistently pointed out, I have a soft spot for problematic men (Mr Y notwithstanding, who is the least problematic man in the entire universe, which, given my proclivity for self-sabotage, may ultimately prove to be the problem). And while I know my girlies don’t always approve of my male friendships for a myriad of reasons, I will protect and defend them with my life because, however uncomfortable it is to admit, they satisfy something primal (and yes potentially problematic) in me.

But back to the boat.

The light bouncing off the Mediterranean is making our faces glow with possibility, and it makes me want to let my secrets slip from my lips into the sea. Let the salty water cleanse the scars left behind by my self-flagellation. Or maybe I want to see how M would react if I told him just how much I’ve changed, the things that have triggered the tightness in my throat, locking in all the sounds he’s so used to me making.

But I suspect he knows already, so I do us both the service of just shutting the fuck up about it. Some things can’t be taken back once they’re spoken out loud.

“Everyone would be so shocked to discover what a good girl you are,” he told me once, when he was still getting to know me, unwittingly tripping over my traumas. “Well, don’t go telling anyone,” I had replied. “It will ruin my reputation.”

I might appear to be calmer, less chaotic, but the reality is I have never felt so much inner turmoil as I do now, and I tell him as much. “All those years when I was vibrating at that frenzied frequency, shouting into the wind, on the inside I was actually at peace,” I say.

Rumi says, “Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.” And I wonder if maybe it’s because I’ve found my way back to the words, that I no longer feel the need to shout.

“You weren’t at peace,” M says, keeling over with laughter. “You were absolutely not at peace. You were just so busy surviving that you numbed everything else. And now you’ve made it out the other side, arrived wherever it was you wanted to get to, everything you were pushing down is coming up to the surface. Amy, you landed in Cairo knowing nothing and no one, you had to make so much noise just to get to where you are, there was no way you could have heard the voices in your own head.”

He knows about the voices. He has seen first-hand what happens when I don’t keep them at bay. One night many years ago, we were having dinner in a hotel that was once the grandest of homes on the edge of the woods in the middle of the English countryside. There was an orange tree in the centre of the room. It was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed and I lost track of time, started drowning in the darkness, trapped between terrifying whispers, jolted back to reality only by the shock of his recrimination.

“Did you just fall asleep while I was talking?” he said, incredulous.

I wasn’t asleep. I was possessed.

It was a dramatic thing to say, I know, but I didn’t know how else to explain it. He didn’t flinch. He got the cheque and dragged me to the bar to share all his scary stories, and I knew I’d made a friend for life.

“Maybe it’s not turmoil,” he says. “Maybe it’s just the truth fighting to escape.”

Maybe it’s just my fucking hormones, I want to joke, but the day is too beautiful for banter. Besides, I’m tired of blaming biology for a revolution I’ve been postponing.

“Whatever,” I say, not wanting to fall into my feelings. These days on this boat, around this island, with my family and these friends who long ago became family, are filing down the sharp edges of the shards that have been lodged in my chest for weeks, or maybe months now. I’m losing track.

“You know what I want M?” I say instead. “I want to make serious fucking money. Fuck-you money. Yacht money and generational wealth money. Keys to the kingdom money. That’s what I want.”

I want to make meaning. I want to make money. I want to make love. But we don’t need to talk about the the latter right now. All my Substacks are ultimately, in one way or another, devoted to the latter. As as for the meaning, I’ve made plenty of it already. The meaning was the easy part. Even when I didn’t mean it, I could always make people believe it. It’s the storyteller’s conceit to deceive you to make a dreamer out of you. The sword is honest; it is truthful in its desire to kill the man who stands in its way. It has no other agenda and claims no higher ground. But the pen can destroy worlds with its lies.

Yet, for the most part, I really fucking meant it. The things I preached, and continue to preach, about how much these stories matter. The revolutionary impact of creating a company rooted in the reclamation of one’s narratives. The way those stories live in the world. The way they’ve impacted entire industries. In my hardest hours, I lean so very heavily on that. If nothing else, I built a thing that makes meaning. That matters. I hope that’s my legacy. I hope they remember that whenever I could, I made as much noise as possible on behalf of those with talent and ambition and desire to make their corner of the world a little better.

And in making meaning, I made money. I just never really thought about the money part with any clear intention. It was the by-product, not the blueprint.

As women, we’re never supposed to say the part about the money out loud. We’ve been trained not to speak it. It stings our eyes when we sit in a room and ask for a raise. Hearts racing, we will rewrite the proposal a thousand times over to justify the price, which is probably half what we should be asking. Please, sir, may I have some more? We undervalue and underplay and underestimate our own fucking worth. And when we don’t, we are punished or patronised for it in countless insidious ways.

“Oh no, but you’re so very expensive, hahahaha,” powerful men who lead entire industries will say of my media company. They do it jokingly and jovially, in rooms where I know billions are quite literally being thrown around with the breezy lightness of a fucking inflatable beach ball. But who the fuck am I to set my own terms for the business I built in an industry that hadn’t even been invented yet!? To monopolise not through brawn in the ways they’re accustomed to, but by caring so much about all that fucking meaning, by making so sure that we’re the god damn best that eventually these men must come knocking on my door to pay a price they claim is high but, contextually, in their world, I know is peanuts. And then I must grit my teeth and smile through the banter about it?! Well, maybe it’s the hormones (LOL), but let me tell you, I’m now fucking done.

Show me the fucking money.

And this is a topic M can one hundred per cent get behind. So, as we crack open another bottle of rosé, he crunches numbers with me, plays out different scenarios, and we talk fundraising and power plays and the steeliness it’s going to require to go out there and claim my stake not in a world of meaning but of money. Real money. And I am buoyed by it.

In this strange and slippery season, the women in my life have saved me and held me, and reminded me I’m beautiful and worthy and wondrous. I would not have gotten out of bed if it weren’t for the sheer force of their love, and the fact that they’re willing to have the same conversation with me over and over again on the group chat, knowing I will do exactly what’s in my head anyway and just come crying back to them.

But I also needed this. This brutish, hard-edged response to my state of mind. Someone who refuses to let me hide behind the meaning, or even the idea that I’ve actually made it, because he knows that, in a world of men, his world of wealthy men who never have to suffer the consequences of their actions, meaning alone won’t get me where I now need to go. No one’s actually going to show me the money. I have to be ruthless enough to take it.

“Next year we summer on your yacht,” he says.

“Deal,” I say.

I down the last droplets of wine, powered by the possibilities, and go sit on the stern, dangle my feet in the water, watch as the kids splash around in the sea, sparkling and energetic and so completely oblivious to the absolute magic of the memories they are creating. I think about making money, making meaning, making love. I close my eyes and listen to them talk.

Summer sounds like children trying out different conversations for size.

“What’s the difference between immerse and submerge?” one of the kids asks.

One of my kids, of course, because if I’ve given them little else of me, I’ve given them a generational wealth of words.

Swaying in the sun, I’m slipping into a kind of serenity for the first time in weeks, so I keep my eyes closed, stay silent. But I think to myself that the difference is you can be immersed in a task and there is nothing more glorious. If you are submerged, however, then you are likely drowning.

Can you put those words in a sentence? I ask myself wryly, just as I would ask the kids.

Yes, I most definitely can:

I feel like I spent the last two decades of my life immersed. But now I think I am submerged.

PS: I’ve booked an appointment with my gyno for Thursday to see about these hormones.

*************

I thought maybe talking about it would make me feel better, but sometimes there’s nothing left to be said. Even if I will always find plenty to say. And in searching at the source for reason or meaning, especially if I’m desperate for aesthetic answers, not true ones, beautiful lies like the ones I’m so adept at telling, not brutal realities that others build on my behalf, it just ends up feeling like I’m picking at a scab that had started to heal. I do that a lot, convince myself I can stop before I bleed everywhere. But knowing where to draw the line has never been my forte. And so I stayed awake the whole night afterwards just trying to stem the haemorrhaging. I know it’s going to leave a scar.

I woke up Friday with a desperate urge to close the blinds, lie in the dark and drown in the darkness of my thoughts. It has happened before, my demons clawing at me from inside the mattress. Many years ago, before I’d learned to work out as soon as I woke up, take comfort from the feel of abs beneath a tank top, I spent every weekend for three months in bed watching How to Get Away with Murder. I was working seventeen-hour days back then and didn’t know I was probably severely depressed. High-functioning something or other. But the functioning has always been the easy part. Even when the feelings are flooring me.

Once upon a time a boy I loved wrote a song for me. The opening lines were, “You say it’s not a problem but you take it all so far. So when is it a problem if you take it all so hard?”

I’ve always found weekends and summers the hardest. They stretch too long and thin without the pinch of productivity to rein them in. I hate feeling like the world around me is trying to do nothing or is refusing to respond to my somethings.

When the pandemic happened, my friend Omar convinced me to run away to Marsa Alam. We spent our days in the sea and our nights beneath the glowing sweep of the Milky Way. Our kids who were still small and supple played somewhere just beyond the periphery, safe in a bubble created by the end of the world. It occurred to me that maybe there was another way to do life. He moved permanently to the beach right after that. Did the thing that people always talk about. Made his one day today.

Sometimes when I go visit him he will remind me how, during those halcyon days, when even grief seemed to be suspended till further notice, there would be times when, without warning, I would get up off the sand and just start running down the beach or through the water or south down the coast. Maybe that’s what I need to do now.

I have a video of both of us from two Januarys ago, him and I running down a dune in Lamu and into the Indian Ocean. Laughing wildly and whooping freely. Not long after that lots of things came undone.

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Mr Y is alarmed that it’s 12 p.m. and I’m still in bed. He gets under the duvet with me, massages the very specific spot on my back that is always causing me trouble. His affection makes me feel wretched and wracked with guilt. I don’t know how to reciprocate, because it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

He says, “How about we move to Bali this September? Take a year out. You’ve kept it together for long enough. You’re allowed to let go.”

This man went blind just over a fucking year ago and he’s talking about how I’ve kept it together?! He’s the one who’s lost his sight yet I’m the one losing sight of my priorities.

“We can’t,” I say, “because it’s Maya’s first year of GCSEs.”

“I will homeschool her,” he says.

Of course he would.

I move out of bed and onto the sofa in my library where, for some reason, the AC refuses to switch on and it maddens and frustrates me to the point of hot tears in the sweltering heat. None of this makes sense. My body is not making sense.

My mum harangues me incessantly to make an appointment to see about HRT from the same doctor who birthed my babies. The last time I saw him he said, “I’m done with pregnant women. I’m dedicating myself to the menopausal ones before I murder the next woman who tells me she wants a fucking water birth in Egypt. What water, from which hose, do these women want their baby falling into fresh out of the womb?”

I love my gyno. I don’t want him or anyone else giving me HRT.

My mother also brought me a packet of primrose oil capsules and is of the firm belief that I would fuck myself less these days if I just took the goddamn primrose.

The housekeeper, Doaa, rushes into the library in response to the dramatic sounds I’m now making. Calmly gets the AC to work. Makes me a coffee.

I decline the coffee. I haven’t yet had breakfast and, according to the ever-expanding handbook of Things Perimenopausal Women Must Never Do, coffee on an empty stomach is very forbidden. “Your cortisol spikes. Your body gets inflamed. You retain fat around the belly.” There’s at least an 87% chance you turn into a witch.

Meanwhile men in midlife get to have affairs with their assistants. Which begs the question, what will men do when AI replaces them? The assistants, not the men. The AI is coded never to replace the men in power, obviously.

And then, quite without warning, and for the first time in the decade she has worked with us, Doaa decides to have a heart-to-heart. She reminds me we are the same age and tells me how she has spent a lifetime working and giving to everyone else, and only recently has she decided to live for herself. To sit at a café with a girlfriend, to buy herself a nice dress.

“I wouldn’t even dare buy myself a sandwich,” she says, “because I wanted every single penny I scraped together to go towards my kids. But in the end I understood I had to take care of myself and not care who thinks what or says what. You taught me that. To not care what anyone thinks as long as I’m doing my best.”

I couldn’t remember telling her that at all. And I can’t imagine I had ever even shown her that in the fleeting moments we interacted as I obnoxiously rushed out of the house very early every morning.

The conversation is making me feel pathetic. Selfish, spoilt, self-entitled and unbelievably ungrateful. I’ve never subscribed to the notion that everyone’s problems are created equal. We might feel as wretched as each other when we hit our respective rock bottoms but, contextually and objectively, in a world of excruciating inequality, unimaginable grief and, you know, fucking genocide, my entire life is a lottery win. And I think it behoves one to hold on, however tenuously, to that awareness, even in the midst of madness or the throes of pain.

Besides, I don’t know how to explain to Doaa that my problem is the opposite. I had been too fixated on my own dreams and my own desires, barely paying attention to all the people around me suffering or sacrificing in the process. Not least of all my own kids. And I’m not sure I can change. Worse, I’m not sure I even want to. So instead I took her hand and said, “You’re right, thank you, Doaa.”

And then I fought through the fogginess in my mind to follow up on the timing of a panel I was supposed to speak at the next day, something big and ministerial I had agreed to many moons ago when I was still in my right mind. I was abruptly informed that my panel was beginning in exactly thirty minutes.

Lol.

There was God again, forcing me out of my feelings and into the real world before I let all the dominoes fall.

According to my mother, God has long been saving me from myself. It is, in fact, remarkable He has the time for me considering the trouble I’m always getting myself into. Always there making sure something or someone stops me from going too far despite my best efforts to the contrary. Even if I really do actually want to go all the fucking way.

An hour later, my hair a little wonky and my lips a little loose, I am on stage at the Grand Egyptian Museum alongside a line-up of renowned CEOs, all men, of course, who I assume were perfectly content to have their coffee on an empty stomach. I’m facing a sea of a thousand or more students eagerly awaiting my sage words of wisdom on how to get “From the Classroom to the C-suite”. There are a remarkable number of young women in the audience. More than I’m used to seeing at these summits.

I grit my teeth and smile blankly through thirty minutes of trite platitudes about passion. I try to fix my face as a fellow panelist - the owner of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the region - preaches incessantly and unfathomably from various religious and philosophical texts. The photos posted afterwards show that my face was not in fact fixed.

Eventually I tire of the façade and say, “There are hundreds of girls out there in the audience and only one of me up here. You know why that is? Because it’s not about passion, or experience, or fate, or even education. It takes relentless hard work and an unimaginable level of sacrifice. Are you actually willing to do what it takes?”

It’s definitely not the inspirational anything-is-possible panel they were hoping for. But I’m not in the headspace for it. If not HRT, I definitely need to be taking something before the next time I step out in front of an audience. At least a fucking coffee.

I step off the stage and into the glare of the afternoon sun, shade my eyes with my hands as the girls swarm around me despite my diatribe. I don’t ever wear sunglasses. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to diminish the light.

They want selfies and internships and answers about their future that I can’t give them. But I do give them attention, pull them in from their too-polite waiting, and wonder which of them will survive the things they will lose if they want to win.

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But that’s only because of my marriage. There is a man beside me in the arena so everyone is safe even if I’m the one wielding the weapons.

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I’d never verbalised, or maybe even crystallised that thought, but as soon as it left my lips I understood it to be true. It’s Wednesday night in Downtown Cairo and I’m nursing a bottle of Sakkara. Not my usual drink, but something about the setting and the company called for it, and there’s always part of me that’s scripting the moment for some future story even as it plays out. This story needed a beer.

I’m at a small surprise gathering for a colleague. I stopped being invited to these things many years ago, a separation of church and CEO that was inevitable the moment we went from starting to scaling, from a company small enough that I knew every name and every story - most of them friends or former colleagues that I’d somehow fooled into working with me - to an operation that lives and breathes, beats and thrives outside of me. One where I’m in the lift up to the office and someone asks if I also work there.

I will sometimes see stories of team members past and present hanging out together across the country or in far-off lands and, while I’m profoundly proud of having cultivated a culture in which colleagues become forever friends or chosen family, I can’t help but be a little envious of the camaraderie from which I’m de facto excluded. But this time I was invited, and the moment I sat down I was inundated with a barrage of questions about the before times, especially from some of the newer girls who rarely get face time with me.

This is a strange season during which nearly every situation I stumble into seems to be inviting me to take inventory of my life, to figure out what the fuck happened while I was busy making plans. That’s not true. Nary a plan was ever made. There was always just a vision, or more accurately, a ferocious feeling about the future, which I fixated on and then stampeded towards recklessly, ruthlessly and relentlessly. But it would appear that after nearly twenty-five years of this, the universe seems insistent that I now take a moment and take stock before I make my next move.

My ambition saved me from my fixations on the people who touched my life and then let go, rendering my imagination incapable of letting them go, or at least the fragments of them that I remain forever obsessed with, no matter how much time passes. The way someone’s lips curved with the line of their teeth and the specific number of times they dipped their teabag in and out of a mug. The way they’d light a cigarette on my balcony then look out over the Nile and sigh like the whole city would one day be ours, and the way I believed them. That one time at 4 a.m. someone said let’s go horse-riding in the desert, then found the horse and the desert. The flip of a hand above a gear stick inviting your fingers to interlock with their desires as you drive around the city in search of redemption.

Those things slip into my thoughts unbidden and I am rendered almost paralysed by a poisonous ache throbbing through my veins. That is the danger of this season, this liminal in-between moment. If I can’t geo-locate my future then I will get thoroughly lost in myself. Or from myself. I will latch onto things that seem scintillating but are dangerously slippery to the touch, and I will keep slipping up until I just can’t get back up again.

The girls asked me about my marriage, how I met my husband, how the dynamic affected the moves I made or didn’t make. They’d read my Substack from the day before and, along with countless other people blowing up my DMs, were now burning with all the questions I had intentionally left unanswered.

In trying to answer them as honestly as possible, I understood, or verbalised for the first time, that outside all the ways Mr Y freed me up to devour the world without having to reckon with the practical realities of motherhood and domesticity, his very presence, loathe as I am to admit it, acted as a kind of protection in a society that had already played judge and jury and, for a good few excruciating years (till they finally realised I wouldn’t be cowed and that maybe there was a method to my supposed madness), tried endlessly to hang and quarter me.

There were mean tweets and scathing social media posts, eviscerating essays on websites made for the insipid masses who lack the imagination to dream impossible things. Rumours that swirled because who the fuck was she, where did she come from, and who the fuck did she think she was, and all the ways I had fucked up in the building of my business, and the things I had yelled, and the way I had sworn, and the people whose feelings I had hurt, and my apparently insane insistence that everything be done not only different and better, but best, that it can’t be that hard for everyone to just get their shit together and be the most hard-working version of themselves, my fucking toxicity and all the things that would never have been noticed, let alone condemned, if I’d not been a woman.

But it’s also important to note that I can never tell who the villain of the piece is. I have too much admiration and empathy for the power-grab. I’m halfway through ‘Yesteryear’ and, so far at least, take absolutely no issue with the narrator that everyone seems so insistent on vilifying. While we’re at it, I suspect Elizabeth Holmes was hedging her bets in a way a million Silicon men have done since the invention of the chip, and I couldn’t help but find Anna Delvey’s audacity compelling. So there is a good chance that, to all intents and purposes, I really was the bad guy all along. Or more aptly the bad girl, but you know, that comes with a whole load of connotations.

Then there was that one awful week when one of the biggest newspapers in the country decided to tell all sorts of tales about me on the home page of their website until some other power put a stop to all the nonsense because they had a different agenda and ultimately I was just a pawn, though I never quite figured out if we were supposed to be playing chess or checkers or the long game, but I did learn that sometimes you really do have to just smile and wave, boys. I’d started too many forest fires and committed the (second) biggest sin of all: monopolising a market in a land where only certain powers are allowed that sort of power.

The point is, all those things could be mediated and ultimately managed. As long as they didn’t think me a whore, which would have caused irrevocable damage and could have been all too easy to do given the way I was starting to move through the world...

Because my world may be of my own making, but it was built inside a world of men, and that world was made long before me. And so when I walk into an event, a dinner, a gathering with an agenda, it’s mostly ever the men in the room that I know, the founders and CEOs, the puppet masters and wannabe masters of the universe. And when you move amongst men in this country in that way, with ease and familiarity, with inside jokes from recent meetings and intense asides about future plans, with let’s have a shot and let’s shoot the shit, when you have always operated on the periphery of what they deem to be normality, refusing to suit up or shut up or put up with the bullshit, when you don’t understand the rules of engagement but have made the rules up as you go along, when your words are wiser and your wit is quicker, when your tongue is forked but your talk is smooth, when you don’t care if they’re watching or talking because you’ve long ago cemented over your sensitivities, you run the risk of the bogey monster that is a certain kind of reputational damage coming for you in the middle of the night. But Mr Y was always in the room, so I could be anything they wanted, but never a whore.

And what does it matter? Who cares? Why is to be or not to be a “whore” - whatever the fuck that has ever actually meant - even the point? Because in this specific world of men, you can be forgiven anything but that. Because you’ll lose your footing before you’ve found your place. You can’t rule the roost if you’re not a rooster. They will allow you to remain unhindered as long as you remain unattainable. Impenetrable. As long as you behave yourself, in the only way that really truly matters to them, which they will automatically assume you’re doing if you’re married, unless of course you prove otherwise. And you must never ever prove otherwise.

So go ahead and give them the finger baby girl, as long as there’s a fucking ring on your finger.

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She laughs. Her friends laugh.

“Perhaps you ought to have the affair then write the book about it,” she replies.

I laugh. Her friends laugh.

“Great idea,” I say. “It will make for a brilliant book cover testimonial: ‘Recommended by the Former Prime Minister of Australia... the book and the affair.’”

We all laugh.

But inside I start panicking because I’m doing that thing where I turn my truths into flippant fodder for public consumption, cutting it too close to the bone even when I already have the bitter taste of marrow in my mouth.

I have a horrifying habit of turning myself inside out and letting all the crazy parts make a mess on the floor if it will help me work the floor. Gather round, people. I will keep you in my thrall even if I pay the price with a sleepless night of, “Why the fuck did I say that?” Admittedly, doing it to a literal head of state was audacious even by my own standards.

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Earlier that evening I sit in a bar alone with an hour to kill. I order an espresso martini and make up stories in my head about the couple in the corner holding hands over the table. The place is packed but I’m alone at the glowing marble counter.

A beautiful man in a crisp white shirt comes and sits right next to me, ignoring a whole row of empty leather stools. I immediately tense up, swivel my seat slightly so I mostly have my back to him. But at the same time I think to myself how easy it would be to slip off my wedding ring, slip it into my purse, turn around and smile. Where might the night lead?

I message Mr Y instead and tell him I miss him. I say it because I want it to be true, or at least I want to work at making it true before I lose my mind. I say it even though I suspect he’ll probably find it suspicious, this random early evening declaration of longing.

Before I left for London, he sat me down in the kitchen and said we needed to talk and I needed to take what he was about to say seriously. He pointed out how, in 16 years of marriage, he’d never asked this of me, but he was asking it now:

He wanted me to call him daily when I was away. He wanted me to check in of my own volition and not wait for him to reach out, as has always been my habit. He points out that in all my copious stretches of solo travel, I’ve never once called home. That the moment I take off, it’s like my life back home ceases to exist.

I had never thought about it, but when I think about it, I realise he is right and I add it to the list of things that might be faulty with me but I’m not entirely sure I know how to fix.

Wives and mothers check in. They do it instinctively. They call their kids before bedtime. They FaceTime and ask about homework and playdates and how everyone’s day was. They tell their family they miss them and love them. It has never occurred to me to do so and it has taken Mr Y 16 years to mention it. I want to ask him why now but I’m scared of the answer and seeing as it’s a remarkably reasonable and clearly wildly overdue ask, I say, “You’re right. I will.”

And I do.

Every morning when I wake up, I call and make myself recount the minute details of the day before like this is a thing I have always done and I don’t know why it tightens my throat and makes me want to cry.

The beautiful man at the bar shifts in his seat in an attempt to get my attention.

I think about what Salma said to me earlier that morning, parked in her car in the rain outside her flat.

“Amy, you do know you’re objectively beautiful, right?”

I laugh through the tears that come too often these days and squeeze her hand and say, “It’s literally your job as my best friend to think that and to say that and I love you for it. But that is not true, Salma. And I’m not sad about it. Not at all. I know I am attractive. But that’s not the same as beauty. I am attractive because of the way the things I have achieved reflect and refract off my skin. But when you take me out of context or get too close, I think I lose that shimmer. It’s not beauty, Salma, it’s biography. Just another story I’ve written and made people believe. It’s just that these days I don’t quite believe it myself. Because, you know...”

She knows.

I’m in London for the awards ceremony of the Women’s Prize because Salma is a judge for this most prestigious of global literary awards and has made my entire year by inviting me to be her guest for the event.

And if ever there was a year in which I needed to be reminded of the burning passions that got buried beneath the gruelling grind of the last two decades, this was it. Other than my mother, no woman has hounded and harangued me more to make a literary comeback than Salma. She is the reason I started this Substack, which is very possibly the only reason I have not yet given up on myself despite the multiple shocks (many self-inflicted) to my system.

And while she graciously made it seem I would be doing her a favour by showing up at her side for one of the hottest events on the international literary calendar, she was ultimately giving me the gift of reclamation and remembrance. This was her night, yet there she was touching the stars with one hand while holding mine with the other.

That seemed to be the theme of the night. Women thinking other women are wow. And putting their money and their talk and their tears where their mouths are. I will never forget the moment when the recipient of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Virginia Evans for The Correspondent, was announced and I caught Salma and her fellow judges, arms interlocked, fingers interlaced, tears flowing. They were so genuinely moved by the moment and I thought to myself, only women. Only women would feel such wonder for another woman’s wildest dreams.

I posted a story of the moment and wrote:

Nearly every woman in that room was an author in her own right, stars in the same sky, and yet so effusively celebrating the ones shining brightest. I will never forget the abundance in that room.

I flew back to Cairo cradling that abundance in my arms, suspended in mid-air, my imagination full of new words and worlds and the glimmer of new possibilities. I am in an in-between place. I know this. My body transitioning, my desires, corporeal and career, careening off track, except that getting back on track, the same track, won’t fix this. It’s time to forge some sort of new path, build something new that is for now, something that burns my fingers when I touch it just so it balances out the fire raging inside me. I know I ought to give myself a grace period, a moment to figure it out, but patience has never been my forte and the ferocity of my feelings always gets in the way. Sometimes stillness is the progress, but I feel like I’m going crazy. There is no other way to say it. Like I’m losing my mind. I know I am not the only one, that there are millions of women, generations reaching back into eternity, who have become possessed in this way, who burned at the stake for the way their insides were burning up.

I have a tattoo of the crown of Seshat on my left arm. She was the ancient Egyptian goddess of writing, wisdom, and knowledge. It is said that she invented writing. She would stand at the edge of the battlefield, wielding her reed pen, and when the war was won or done, she alone would document the grim reality of warfare.

I crash-land in Cairo. Night sweats and nightmares, grasping guiltily onto Mr Y in ways that he doesn’t understand and for reasons he can’t make sense of. But he doesn’t try to break my silence because he knows that when it matters most I can’t speak and I no doubt used all my words up in London pretending to be shinier than I feel.

By morning I am more mangled than ever.

I go to wish my mother a happy birthday. We barely speak, her and I. Decades of calcified conflicts. Her trying too hard, me trying too little. Both of us very, very tired by it all. She is lying on the floor in her room stretching out her back. I kneel down and give her a hug.

“Happy Birthday, Mama.”

But I don’t let go. I stay there, holding on tightly. And then, without wanting to or meaning to, I start weeping. And then I start sobbing, the heaviness in my heart escaping onto her chest.

And then I am talking.

And then we are talking. For the first time in so long that I no longer have a measure of it.

I tell her how I don’t want to lose my husband but these desires, or at least my desire to be desired before it’s too late, are threatening my whole world. I tell her how, after years on the periphery of my kids’ lives, I no longer know how to reach them. I tell her how the thing that has always anchored me, the company that has consumed me, that took up my days and nights, barely giving me room to breathe, let alone think, no longer needs me in the same way. And ironically, it feels like I’ve been abandoned. It has set sail without me, and I understand that I did that. I made that happen. I imagined something, and I sacrificed everything and everyone for it, and it now exists outside of me. And it’s a beautiful thing to behold but I don’t know what to do with my hands when they’re not caked in the dirt of the trenches.

And then, even though I did not intend to, I tell her my deepest, darkest secret.

Actually, I started with that.

The rest came by way of explanation. Or justification.

Let me tell you, Mama, how I maybe got myself into this mess.

She told me she knew already.

She told me she’d seen it happening, she even pinpointed the exact moment I broke, when I came back to the dinner table from a work weekend away a couple of months ago and she saw my face had changed. She knew there’s only one thing that can do that to me.

This is the woman who has seen me take on the wrath of some of the most powerful men in the country without flinching. Who knows that when the enemy is at the door, I will gladly open it and face them down. Who has seen me lose babies without blinking and give birth while doing battle. Who has seen me hoist everyone I have ever loved onto my back and work to build a dream for them. Who has watched me hammer tables together out of driftwood and bent nails and then host feasts that transform misfits into mavericks.

There is only one thing that will break me. And that’s if I give you access, if I show you softness, if I let you touch my face with your hands and call me beautiful and then, without warning, you snatch those hands away. As if maybe my reality was too hot to the touch. If I show you my hand and then you hide your hands behind your back and leave me empty-handed, it will shatter me in ways I have no recourse for. My teeth are sharp but I will never bite the hand that fed my feelings. That has been on me. Or in me.

She already knew.

A mother always knows.

“What do I do now?” I ask her. “I mean about all of it. I don’t know what to do anymore, Mama.”

“You write,” she says. “You write.”

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*****

I will always write you better or worse than you really are.

More magical or monstrous. I will take the words right out of your mouth and lace them with poetry or poison, but you’ll still swear that was exactly the way you said them.

You’re wrong.

It’s just the way I felt them.

I will write you to process the shock of your epiphanies and understand my own extremities.

I will write you into my world, crack open my conscience and make you hang off the empty hooks in my imagination. And then we’ll both be hooked.

I will use my words to put you on a pedestal, write you onto the stage, but it’s all just a set piece that will come apart when I come to my senses.

Or when you hurt me.

Whichever comes first.

I will write you if I like you, love you or loathe you, or if you said something interesting to me once over mezza on a Cairo rooftop.

I will write you if you like me, love me or loathe me, or if I said something dangerous to you once over tequila shots at a hotel bar on the edge of a revolution.

I will write you if you give me too much or give me too little, or if you just won’t give it to me the way you promised at 2am in a DM I should never have replied to but can’t bring myself to regret.

You made the most mess after midnight, but still I’ll forgive and forget.

I will write you because you revealed your desire at a nightclub in a city that bores me with its riches, and then seemed shocked when I cried. It’s because I knew we could never really be friends after that. At least not in the same way. And I only ever wanted to be friends.

I will write you because we never went to the city of our late night fantasies. You got scared or got sensible, and then seem shocked when I pleaded. It’s because I knew I would never be the same after that and didn’t want to meet myself in the dark.

I will write you because you promised me forever in the city that I love and stuck to the plan. Because nothing I do shocks you. Even when I break your heart. So I will take you for granted and drown in my guilt.

I will write you better or worse than you are, or ever were, so I can pretend there’s something profound about my own choices. If you were a god then I can be a queen with the body of a goddess. If you’re just a human then I was just a girl who should have known better.

I will write you to stop you haunting me, ghosts with ten fingers and ten toes, totem poles and pivot points.

It makes everyone nervous when I write about them. But it breaks their heart when I stop. Stop thinking about them.

I will write you better or worse than you are. Than you ever were. Because the you I write is just a figment of my imagination and I’m a sucker for a story.

Still, whatever you did and however I hurt, I’ll never forget to say thank you. Thank you for noticing. You might have seen me flail but they’ll never see me flinch, because you’re not the only one that can pretend it’s all black and white. Except I’ll go home and gag on the grey.

The you I write might exist in the real world.

But that’s never been my reality.

So I know you think I’m writing you.

But...

It’s not you.

It’s me.

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******

On the morning of my wedding to Mr Y, I curled up in an empty bathtub on the top floor of the family house on the edge of the desert in Sakkara and refused to move. Through the window above the sink I could see the dunes that rolled right up to the edge of the property shimmering in the summer sun. I wanted the shifting sands to devour the chaotic cacophony of preparations that had reached a fever pitch in the gardens below.

Through the bathroom door, I yelled, “I don’t want to do this. I can’t do this, I’m not getting married.”

My mind had attached itself to the idea that this relationship had been too easy. We met and immediately fell into step. No wondering or waiting. No angst or anger. He flew to see me in Marrakech (I was there for an event) within days of us meeting. Kissed me in the market. He felt like a safe place and I was in desperate need of a soft landing. My heart didn’t beat faster or skip a beat. It kept beating. Regularly. Regulated. Neither time nor the world ever stopped. In fact in a strange turn of events the world kept spinning without me spiraling. Long distance without longing or languishing. Cairo. London. Dubai. Flights and fun and friendship. We talked every night over Skype. About what? I couldn’t say. I couldn’t remember what, if anything, we had in common. I rarely consulted him about work or my worries, but when I heard voices in the middle of the night and my words made a mess all over the floor and my ambitions threatened to suck all the air out of the world, he didn’t once flinch. There was never really a proper proposal just a kind of comfortable and comforting inevitability to things. And suddenly it was the morning of our wedding and I didn’t know if I could or should go through with it.

My father stood silent, steady, steely and stoic on the other side of the locked door. Listening and waiting.

My 30th birthday was a month away, and this was my second attempt at marriage, albeit theoretically my first proper go, given that the first one had been an elopement and an exercise in self-sabotage. This new marriage, I would come to understand with the burdensome benefit of hindsight, was ultimately an exercise in self-preservation.

Besides, it was too late either way. The katb ketab had taken place two days earlier, even if all I could remember of it was the ridiculous black-and-silver arm cuff I wore that kept getting caught on my dress, so that by the end of the day the delicate fabric running down one side was completely frayed.

I never remember the right things. Some fleeting incident will make me feel a certain way, and my mind will forever fixate on that one fragment. Whenever I think of my katb ketab, I think of that goddamn arm cuff.

And also my father crying as the ma’zoun sealed my fate.

I had never seen my father cry.

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Everyone thought it was beautiful and moving. But I understood those tears were not born of joy, but an almost harrowing belief that he was saving me from myself.

That this was necessary. Urgent, even.

That I needed a safe harbour from which to pursue the thing that had always mattered most to him: fulfilling my potential.

It wasn’t about settling, but about settling down so that I could level up. His convoluted conviction that I needed to get the marriage and the kids done and dusted, “out of the way” as smoothly and serenely and easily and breezily as possible so that I could direct all the feelings and ferocity, the deafening buzz vibrating off my skin always threatening to ravage everything and everyone in my wake, towards the important task of success. And he consciously understood (like I must have unconsciously felt the night we met) that Mr Y would absorb the storms and absolve the chaos.

The fact that I was already the managing editor of one of the biggest lifestyle magazines in the Middle East and a published author, was not enough for my father. Partly because I was still “working for someone else” and, more importantly, because the drama of that night six years earlier (and everything that followed) was still vivid and visceral, lodged like shrapnel in his mind. In all our minds. An oozing scar running down the centre of our family…

That night six years earlier when I barricaded myself into a room in the Nile Hilton, a flight back to London the only thing standing between me and blowing up my whole life.

My mother, who had flown into Cairo on a maternal hunch, crying and screaming in the hotel corridor, begging me to just open the door.

My boyfriend in London screaming down the phone at me not to open the door, that if I could just hang in there until the flight, we could finally be together forever and fuck the whole world.

My then best friend, years before a reality show would drive a forever wedge between us, messaging me frantically from reception, torn between my boyfriend and my mother and her own father, who had used his considerable power and leverage to track me down to that hotel in the first place.

The messages from the magazine asking where I was because I was supposed to be interviewing a Lebanese superstar that evening and had gone MIA.

My thoughts collapsing in on themselves. My lungs fighting for air from the wrong place. The ugly swirls in the worn carpet taking up too much space in my mind. My best friend messaging to say her face was bleeding because she’d had a nose job that morning and was supposed to be recovering.

My conviction that I had no choice, when really I had every choice.

A knocked-down door.

The scene in reception in the middle of the night.

Being carried out by men in scrubs as I lost consciousness. A hazy gap in reality after being injected with some concoction intended to calm me down in order to save me from myself.

All the fucking time, all my life, people trying to tell me that my way is the wrong way. That if I could only just calm the fuck down, there might be a better way.

The only way for me to calm the fuck down would be to die. And I don’t want to die. I have so much more I need to know. So much I still haven’t told you.

Except this time the calm was imposed on me.

And then hours, maybe days, I don’t know, because all these years later I have never spoken about that night. To anyone. Not even my mother.

I wake up in a room that is not a hospital but not a house either. I cannot tell you what it was or where. It was cold and clinical and I have never been able to bring myself to name it. Days pass in and out of consciousness at someone else’s will until eventually I am carried home to come to my senses.

I sit on the balcony of my apartment high above the Nile for weeks. Silent. Refusing to speak. My mother somewhere in the background refusing to go home to England. All my devices taken from me, for my own good.

The rage building.

A plan hatching.

My arms burning and breaking out in hives and no one being able to say why.

Trying to latch onto the words flickering across my eyes but I can’t keep hold of them for long enough to turn them into sentences. I’m desperate for words to anchor me back in my body, if not my own words, then anyone else’s. But when I try to read, the letters swim out of reach and I feel like I’m again sinking into the swirls on that horrible hotel carpet.

I don’t know how much time passes, but eventually everyone decides that I’ve settled back into my skin enough to settle back into work.

On my first morning back at the office, I leave my laptop. My bag. I take only the passport I had packed all those weeks earlier because that one detail had seemingly slipped everyone’s mind.

I hail a black-and-white cab off the side of 26th of July Street and head to the airport.

I stare at the flickering departures board.

I tell myself that if I stay, I could be a superstar in my industry. I know it sounds wild, perhaps even worrying, that such a thought could enter my mind, but that was the exact thought. Because I had worked extraordinarily hard and I was really fucking good at what I did and I could sense I was right on the precipice of something spectacular even if I couldn’t yet fully grasp what that could be.

But if I went, if I left, I would be choosing love at the expense of all else.

Love, lol.

I would be choosing the boy I had obsessed over since that first week of university when I walked past his dorm room and heard him singing Mr Jones through the open window and was instantly undone.

“When I look at the television, I want to see me staring right back at me.”

The boy who had knowingly pulled me apart and whom I had already spent years recovering from. Who had turned my university years into a haze of fear and loathing and longing. Who had brought me to my knees more times than I could count. Who had me dance for him with tears streaming down my face like a sad scene out of a crappy made for TV movie and then told me it made him sick to his stomach when I danced in public. Because good girls don’t move like that. Who didn’t really want me but still made me leave a beautiful gentle boy from Texas who did. Who called me a whore even though I’d barely been touched. Who punished me relentlessly and ruthlessly for all the things the world would one day reward me for. Who made me give up the best parts of me, the best people in my life, and everything that was good about me and for me.

I had put a continent, a career and years between us. And yet there I was at the airport, 24 years old, ready to spectacularly relapse, regress and relinquish my sanity.

I stare at the flickering departures board.

You know what I did?

I chose him.

Not me.

I fucking chose him.

And in doing so, I chose violence in the most literal sense of the term.

My body made the decision and it would take the worst year and a half of my life before my mind caught up.

A year in which I disappeared from my family. Reappeared only to take them to court, somehow convinced I could force them to stop loving me. To leave me languishing.

A year in which he took me to hajj and as we walked between Safa and Marwa screamed at me to cry so he could be sure that I really meant to be cleansed of all my sins, the primary sin of which was apparently being me. Being myself. A year in which I was trapped, literally and metaphorically. A year in which I was married and marred. Mottled with bruises, inside and out.

The night we married, I “gave” him my virginity and remember thinking how ironic it was that my mum was convinced I was pregnant. It was the only thing she could imagine powerful enough to explain what was happening. All I remember is the searing pain and the crisp white hotel sheets covered in blood. Like a massacre. He made a joke and went to pray. I went to the bathroom and dressed for dinner.

The deranged details between that night and my finally extracting myself from that life are a story for another time because this is perhaps already a little too much, and I certainly did not plan to scrawl it out on Substack tonight, or indeed any night.

Not yet, anyway.

But here we are.

As usual I have arrived at a place I never intended, so bear with me.

In the end two things save me.

Words.

The words I wove and the words I read.

And my father.

And during the katb ketab, I know that is the real reason he is crying.

He is relieved.

Relieved that this gentle giant of a man I am now about to marry will love me selflessly. That he will never stand in my way. That he will give me the runway to run as fast and as far as I need to. That if I insist on hurling myself at the world, someone will finally be there to make sure I survive the landing.

My father coaxes me out of the bathroom and says, “Amy, you will go through with the wedding because this man will never hurt you and he will look after you in the way that you need to be looked after, not with money or power or shiny things. Men like that might love you but they will never lift you up because they can’t have a woman like you competing with them. You are too young to understand how sturdy this man you are about to marry is. He won’t try and make you smaller to make himself bigger. He will never ask you to lower your voice. He will love you with acceptance and adoration. And when you have those things, you really will become unstoppable.”

I give him a hug and dry my tears and marry Mr Y.

Last Thursday, after twenty-five years, I took my kids to see my university town. A place I had avoided given that it seeded the story I have told you today, setting the scene for some of the worst days of my life. But entire rivers have flowed under that bridge and I could now appreciate the beauty of the city objectively. Show the kids my old haunts.

The places I danced.

Reminisce about the parts of the story that hadn’t shattered me.

As we sat in the park opposite the apartment where I used to live, the kids climbing trees with their cousins, it suddenly occurred to me that it was May 28th.

Our wedding anniversary.

Sixteen years.

My father was right. Infuriatingly, gloriously right. Mr Y never got in my way. He loved me unconditionally. Let me be even when my becoming was at his expense. Which is perhaps why it feels so perverse that on our sixteenth wedding anniversary I found myself back in the city where I once blew up my life, in the middle of my midlife reckoning, that dangerous ferocity back again, simmering too close to the surface, scalding my skin, pushing me towards the precipice of fucking it all up. Getting back in that bathtub, staring up at that flickering flight board and asking myself a version of the same question: which life do I choose now?

******

“Personal narrative is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” Mary Karr on memoir writing

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“There you go,” she said, handing it over calmly, as if the moment had been scripted and not wildly serendipitous. “Also, spewing your words out is the only thing you should be doing.”

My mother screamed me into this world. And hasn’t stopped since. Screaming at the world, screaming at me, around me, against me and for me. Mostly the latter. I can’t speak to her because of it, but I love her for it.

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This month my kids turned 14 and 12, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the irony of that sticker as it pertains to me. I did not scream them into this world. They both arrived in exactly the same way.

Early.

My waters broke.

No contractions.

No pain.

No screaming.

My body coolly unwilling to push the baby out, while simultaneously putting the baby’s life in danger. Not that I was aware of how bad it was, or could be. A measured middle-of-the-night conversation with my doctor. “It’s going to have to be a C-section.” The strange dissociative calm that befalls me in big life-and-death moments, so contrary to the excruciating emotion that devours me when it comes to the superficial shit.

Everything happened very quickly and very quietly, strangely at odds with the high-frequency ferociousness of my life. Mr Y didn’t even have time to make it back from London. He missed the birth by an hour.

I was not particularly attached to giving birth naturally. To be honest, I had not thought about it much either way. There was no birth plan. I read no books about pregnancy or motherhood. As someone who worships at the altar of words, lactation manuals were not a form of literature I was prepared to subscribe to, and whenever anyone would thrust some sort of baby book into my hands I would glibly respond, “But whatever did they do in caveman times?”

I have always subscribed to the notion that instinct will kick in and then everything will figure itself out.

Besides, I was far too distracted by the burgeoning beginnings of my business, so that first pregnancy took shape quietly in the background of my life.

Oh, and there was also the fact that I was starring in the first reality show in the Middle East — the most expensive, and arguably most unhinged, production of its kind MBC had ever embarked on. I had been installed into a suite at the Sofitel El Gezirah, with a camera crew attached to my soul round the clock, overseen by a squad of ruthless global producers whose sole mission seemed to be finding ways to ensure my co-stars and I would self-sabotage and ideally implode spectacularly on camera.

I could barely feel my face during those manic months, let alone the human taking form inside of me.

By the time — exactly two years later almost to the day — my son made his own early entrance into the world, I was already deep in the trenches of my business.

When I felt the warm water trickle down my thighs without warning — no contractions, no pain, no screaming — I knew the drill. I messaged the doctor myself this time. “I think it’s going to have to be another C-section. And I think it needs to be now.”

I had landed back in Cairo from Dubai just a few hours earlier — a flight I absolutely should not have taken that late in the pregnancy, but one that felt crucial to our regional expansion plans.

Earlier that same day, I had also found myself in the gilded reception of my hotel being yelled at by an imposing ginger not-so-gentleman, gesticulating wildly and infuriated by the fact that I would not be fucked with when it came to my business. That I had miraculously managed to pull off a deal designed to exorcise him from my ecosystem despite his belief that I “didn’t have the balls, let alone the know-how.”

He was right. I didn’t have the balls. What I had was a womb that was literally inventing a human and, as far as I was concerned, that made me invincible.

It only occurred to me many years later to question why, even in that state — so heavily pregnant — I remained entirely unable to incite any sort of protective instinct from a man. Or at least enough empathy for him to calm the fuck down. This continues to be something of a theme and, whereas I was once proud of the fact that I seemed to elicit this kind of head-to-head aggression, of late I find it mostly just exhausting.

Anyway, the point is, I often look back at the circumstances in which my kids were born and wonder if, by not screaming them into the world, some vital, visceral and necessary connection was somehow muted. And whether it affected everything that came after.

My instincts did indeed kick in, but with a kind of focused efficiency, as if overcompensating for the fact that I wasn’t immediately consumed by the kind of earth-mother devotion we’re told we should feel. I didn’t become softer, or maniacal with maternal nurturing. I wasn’t floating around in a haze of divine fucking feminine transcendence. I was frazzled and feral, but relentless in my insistence that I could make it all work. On breastfeeding and pumping and staying up all night and sterilising and using that weird little contraption to suck the snot out of their noses while taking meetings and sending emails and running relentlessly between my apartment and my office, mainly because I had no other choice. Because the business had to survive for my kids, and I had to survive it all for everyone.

So I dealt with it like one more — or one million more — things on my checklist, moving methodically through my days ticking it all off.

And now they’ve just turned 12 and 14, and I can’t figure out how any of it happened. Or when any of it happened. How the person looking back at me in the mirror has teenage kids when I can barely account for the last decade in my memory. Only a kind of melancholy lodged deep inside my bones.

Somewhere along the way I became a stranger in their lives, navigating on the outskirts, watching it unfold without me and not knowing how to nudge my way back in.

Add this to the mangled machinations of my marriage, the tangled web of my dangerous desires, the fact that my own company — the thing I devoted every ounce of passion and precipitousness to — barely needs me anymore, and the nebulous nature of a new set of ambitions seeping stealthily into my imagination, and I feel as if I’m floating away into the ether with no one but Mr Y - who is either grasping at an old idea of me or maybe the only right idea of me - trying to grab hold of my feet and pull me back into my body and into my life. I’m not even sure if I fit properly into either anymore.

Which is how, on Wednesday night, I ended up saying, “Fuck it, let’s go to London on Friday,” ditching long-held plans to go to Soma Bay for Eid. There was no time to start faffing about with proper holiday plans, so this seemed like a straightforward enough option to escape myself in lieu of sitting with myself.

It’s also how, on Saturday morning, I ended up in a church behind the Royal Albert Hall with my friend AD and Sia’s Unstoppable blasting through lighty-up headphones as I engaged in a mix of ecstatic dance, Jane Fonda-style aerobics, breathwork and generally just jumping manically around with twenty strangers.

“Just meet me at 11:30 am,” AD had said, refusing to divulge any further information.

Meanwhile, Abdallah — an outrageously fabulous, flamboyant specimen of a human who had recently given up a career in medicine to practise full-time whatever it was we were practising — pranced around the room reminding us that we are all our own superheroes while vigorously shaking his ass.

Abdallah was, in fact, the superhero I didn’t know I needed.

I have never loved AD more than I did that morning for dragging me into this weird yet somehow perfectly-timed little adventure.

Afterwards, AD and I sat on the edge of the Serpentine with alarmingly large plastic cups of Aperol in hand — but also a high-protein salad because bone density etc — and discussed the thing we always seem to discuss these days: the terrifying and exhilarating possibilities that present themselves when you admit that you may have constructed an entire life around a version of yourself you no longer fully recognise.

AD, recently divorced, has herself been crawling over burning coals in a bid to “become,” and it is achingly beautiful to watch. She has done it in the face of unimaginable pressure and in the midst of unimaginable grief. I tell her I’m blown away by her bravery. I tell her she’s blooming into being.

But then, as we walk back towards our currently existing lives, sipping on problematically oversized Aperol number three, she says something devastating…

“I think Mr Y is one of the strongest and steeliest men I know.”

God damn you AD, that is not what I want to hear right now.

But she keeps going…

“I think in a world full of men who talk a big talk, he embodies a real kind of masculinity that comes from a deep sense of security. I think he knows everything, Amy. Even the darkest and most dangerous things you think you’re keeping from him. He understands you better than you understand yourself, and he’s just waiting for you to get whatever it is you need out of your system. And when all is said and done, he’ll be there waiting to catch you. That is not something you ever give up.”

I liked it better when flamboyant Abdallah from fitness-dance-therapy was my superhero.

AD delivers me to the train station where Mr Y is, as always, waiting for me and trying to control his irritation that we are now an hour late for his friend’s barbecue somewhere in the countryside.

Standing on the platform, him quietly seething and me not-so-quietly, too-early-in-the-day tipsy, I move towards him — in what I am absolutely convinced is a very sexy manner — and coax him into the sort of unnecessary public display of affection we probably last engaged in before the kids existed and definitely before that Christmas when Maya was two years old and I sat in the car outside his mum’s house, watching my breath curl into the cold, and said, “I think we should get a divorce.”

There’s a Turkish saying that when you love a rose you learn to endure its thorns. Mr Y has his whole body covered in cuts from a lifetime with me. I’ve just never known how to kiss it better.

Later that afternoon at the barbecue I lay back in the grass next to my friend Heba, at whose 21st birthday party Mr Y and I met nearly 19 years ago, and who recently went through a high-profile divorce of her own.

“What is it you want exactly?” she asks me. “Because if you think the grass is greener, it’s not.”

I want to be swept away, Heba. I want to feel desired by someone who has fallen for the persona and need never know the truth. I want to fuck up in all the ways I was too scared to when I was younger. I want to raise hell and let it all go to hell. I want something that will make me feel soft and stupid with longing. I want to write my book. I want to stop being so fucking scared of the fact that I now have the time to write my book and see my kids and do all the goddamn things I kept telling myself would happen “one day,” and understand that day has arrived. That “one day” is actually today. I want to suffer the consequences of my actions and come out the other side glowing from whatever comes after the fall. I want to feel something other than rage, regret and resentment. I want to be a queen, and a pawn and plaything. I want to understand why hard things come so easily to me but easy things feel so fucking hard. I don’t think the grass is greener. I just want to know how it feels beneath my feet.

Heba sighs. “I understand,” she says.

Of course she does. Because nearly every woman I speak to, nearly every woman who DMs after reading my Substack, also understands. We just stay quiet, swallow it whole, call it survival or adulthood or motherhood or all of the above. We mourn in the middle of the night and, when the sun rises, pretend we aren’t grieving all the versions of ourselves we buried beneath our breath.

You’re supposed to stay quiet. I’ve just never known how.

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Below me the music is thumping. I can feel it in my feet as I stand in front of the sink staring at myself in the sweaty mirror, doing a lousy job of talking myself into saving myself, or at least out of screwing myself. I take a deep breath and instead of letting go of this idiotic idea, I let it swell and swirl, and before I know it I’m deftly moving through the crowd, possessed by the notion that somehow a big dramatic statement will soothe me or satiate me or maybe just fucking sedate me.

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I find the person I need to speak my mind to — a person who has already made it clear in a multitude of ways how alarming they sometimes find the mercurial machinations of my mind — and proceed to state my case.

I know no good will come of it and immediately realise I have once again done myself a disservice. A repeated recurrence of late, but I suspect symptomatic of this midlife mess I’m in, greedily grappling for one good goddamn answer from anyone about WTF is going on and what I should do about it. Mostly just to avoid sitting with these questions myself because deep down I know the answers. I just don’t like them.

Which is how I ended up in Deana’s car crying (again), which, given she had already dedicated an entire week in Luxor to my delirium, is frankly unacceptable behaviour on my part. I have spent my entire life trying not to be a burden to anyone, and suddenly I’m unburdening myself all over the front seat of my best friend’s car in a mall parking lot at 1am while she tells me the same things for the fifty billionth time, except without Salma there — back in London — to lighten her load.

Of course Salma was filled in on the group chat in great detail early the next morning and made absolutely no attempt to pretend that what I did was anything but actually mental.

But she loved me anyway and reminded me that my compulsion for candour is also my superpower, even if it so often ends in catastrophe.

So that was my Monday night.

It was a spectacular event otherwise, with one of the most phenomenally and outrageously creative humans I know celebrating the launch of his own hotel, and me in an ethereal white wisp of a top that had popped up on my feed a couple of days earlier and which I ordered immediately, mostly because I would have never dared wear it in my twenties but am now determined to start rummaging through Pandora’s Box.

Now allow me to take you through every single other day of this week because while I’m vibrating at this frequency, I have for the first time in my life decided to attend all the events I’m invited to, just to see what happens if I actually live the life I built.

Let us begin by going back in time to exactly one night earlier.

Sunday at the EU Residence in Cairo celebrating Europe Day.

I do not know what Europe Day is and thus have never had the slightest inclination to celebrate it. Neither, I suspect, did most of the people milling around the gardens that night.

Except for Giuseppe from the Italian embassy, who I struck up a conversation with at the bar when they were refusing to serve either of us on account of it being on lockdown until after the ambassador finished her speech.

I thought I was being funny when I leant over and whispered, “So what the fuck is Europe Day?”

Now, I can’t tell if it was me casually dropping the F-word at a diplomatic event, the fact that no one was serving him the whisky he wanted, or if I was simply oozing obnoxiousness, but Giuseppe did not find me cute or funny.

He did, however, believe I needed to be taught a lesson — literally — and proceeded to give me a twelve-and-a-half-minute breakdown on the historic origins of Europe Day while the ambassador simultaneously did the same on the mic.

I kept trying to make eye contact with Mr. Y so that he could come save me (from myself again), but on account of him barely being able to see anything anymore, our once impeccable social-situation silent-signal language is now thoroughly diminished. Instead, he was happily chatting away to a very large old man with a cigar as part of his ongoing and inexplicable global mission to make friends with all old men with cigars.

Like that one time I accidentally consumed three chocolate mushrooms at a wedding in Ibiza and had to basically be basically carried home while he complained the entire way about having to leave behind his three new best friends, who all happened to be old men with cigars and were apparently structuring some multinational — and, from what I could gather, deeply dodgy — deal that Mr. Y could totally exclusively get in on as long as we were able to come up with several million dollars by morning.

Having finally extracted myself from my lecture, and having nearly caused a minor diplomatic incident by suggesting to the deputy ambassador of Brazil that a surefire way to ensure an accurate census of all Brazilians living in Cairo would be to announce an open invite for his fellow countrymen to a party at the embassy featuring lots of gorgeous women dressed in Carnaval-inspired outfits (nope, also not cute and not funny apparently), I bumped into one of my favourite women ever.

A corporate powerhouse who is, I’m guessing, just over a decade older than me and who has raised two incredibly successful daughters and who has, for the last fifteen years or so, periodically checked in on me, encouraged me, redirected me and reminded me that whatever other empire-building I’m under the impression I’m doing, to always, always, keep writing.

The moment she spots me she grabs me by the arm, pulls me in and says, “OK, I can see what’s happening with you and we need to take a deep breath and regain some control.”

Given the state I’m already in, it took everything in my power not to tumble into tears right there and then.

“I know how you are feeling. I know it feels like you’re on fire, but it is your hormones. This will pass, I promise you, and in the meantime don’t make any rash decisions.”

Of course my first thought was, LOL TOO LATE, but I kept that bit to myself.

And then I immediately asked her, “It will pass when? WHEN WILL IT PASS?!”

“About five to six years,” she said.

This is not what I wanted — or needed — to hear.

Five to six years?! Five to six years of this and I will one hundred percent have summoned all the demons currently trapped in the gap between my gel nail polish and my cuticles and they will be running riot, burning down everything I have ever built and everyone I have ever loved. Or I will have gotten a tattoo on my face.

“And absolutely no HRT,” she added. “Do not touch the hormones.” Thus far, when it comes to HRT, I have received a litany of diametrically opposing advice from every menopausal woman I have spoken to, so I know everything is definitely going to turn out great.

Instead she proposed a list of supplements and before I’d even left the event, had WhatsApped pictures of them with a reminder of just how fucking great I am.

GOD BLESS WOMEN.

I went to bed that night thinking about how I used to get offered coke at parties and now I’m being given gluten-free, non-GMO and hypoallergenic magnesium glycinate capsules. I also spent a disproportionate amount of time frustrated by the fact there isn’t a single Egyptian actress who could play me in the movie of my life (based off the book), since they all have to present so properly and politely in public and what I really need is someone with Angelina Jolie energy back when she was in her keep her husband’s blood in a vial era.

Which brings us to the Tuesday after the Monday in which I said crazy things to the person I should not have said anything to.

Well let me tell you. Tuesday I got my shit together.

I had three events to check off all in a row. So before entering the fray I messaged Deana and Salma in the chat that’s now called ‘Beit Al Fananeen’ after the villa we stayed at in Luxor, where I was supposed to leave all my crazy behind but clearly did not, and said:

“OK girls, last night I was a mess but tonight I will be glorious. Tonight I will find the strength to be my old self. I will give no fucks and feel no fucks. I will glide and glow and glitter in a metallic silver skirt. And under no circumstances will I unleash the storms brewing inside me. Tonight there will be no destruction left in my wake.”

They agreed in no uncertain terms that this was most definitely not only a solid plan but also a perfectly plausible one.

I’m pretty sure they then messaged each other privately to confirm I was in fact doomed.

But because I had made a promise to my girls I was morally, ethically and physiologically obliged to keep it.

And for the first two events I was on fire. Not in the way where I burn everything in my life down, but in the way where I’m the flame and everyone else is the moth. Which I relish. Anyone who tells you they don’t love that too is a liar or just really secure in themselves.

Of course by the time I got to event three and the cocktails from event one had started to take effect, I could feel myself beginning to waver and all manner of crazed ideas were beginning to course through me.

But here, once again, is how the women in your life — even the ones who are not actually in your life — will save you.

As I did the compulsory rounds of this third and final party, nearly every single woman of a certain age and a certain ilk that I bumped into — women I knew and women I did not — took my hand or squeezed my arm or gave me a hug and said, “ME TOO.” Thank you for the Substack because ME TOO. Thank you for the Instagram Stories because ME TOO. Thank you for writing again. Thank you for Tuesday mornings at 8:02am. ME TOO.

They told me about the little rituals they’d developed around reading my Substack and they told me their own stories because somehow this Substack had created a shared safe space for all of us.

There were a few men who also slipped the Substack into conversation, but they mostly asked besides the point questions about the structure and scale of the platform and how exactly I plan to monetise it, which, let me be clear, I was not mad at because I also love me a monetisation scale-up convo.

The point is, those interactions with those women that night did something indelible to my brain chemistry. I was reminded that sometimes the best things come from the worst times. I’d been searching so manically for one good answer and yet all the answers were exactly where they’ve always been: in my own words.

And then I got pulled into a gorgeous gaggle of female friends in their 40s and 50s, all of whom are running wild with wolves and throwing thunderbolts at the world, and we danced to annoying remixes of Whitney Houston and Gloria Gaynor like no one was watching although I was keenly aware that a lot of people were watching. There were absolutely no tears and no crazy confessions and it was edifying.

When I got home I posted a story in bed, still in my silver skirt, and wrote, “Not sure if I’m feeling more myself or just feeling myself,” and immediately tumbled into the best night’s sleep I’d had in weeks.

Of course by the time Friday came around — and I was at approximately the 193rd event of the week — my “I got this” Tuesday-night energy was most definitely beginning to wane.

I spent the entire afternoon smushed around inside a soft scoop of nostalgia with one of my oldest friends in Cairo. We had spent endless nights together in our twenties at Sequoia — if you know you know — smoking shisha by the Nile while talking about the big, crazy things we were going to do with our lives. And now here we were years later, sitting inside a sprawling development he had built from the ground up, in a café-bakery owned by the same friend who had launched a hotel brand earlier in the week, passing time before the opening of a new Lemon Tree space — itself part of a lifestyle empire co-founded by yet another girl we used to hang out with back in the day. Of course my feels were going haywire at the montage-worthy coming together and coming of age arc of the plotline.

Add to that the fact my period was only a few days away — which I am now weirdly appreciative of given all this talk of perimenopause — and things were beginning to feel… sensitive.

So when the clock struck midnight and my friend — let’s call her A — sidled up to the bar next to me at the Lemon Tree party, I was already emotionally listing.

A is a famed psychologist, which is precisely why I had intentionally avoided speaking to her for the last couple of months despite her multiple attempts to the contrary. She can see directly into and through my soul and also she is going through her own shit, so my own scab-picking feels indescribably self-indulgent in comparison.

She is also a badass disguised as an exceptionally sweet and sensible person and after becoming increasingly frustrated waiting for cocktails to arrive, she simply took four shots from a tray heading to another table, ensured we downed them, then looked me dead in the eye and said:

“Now tell me everything.”

And even though the music was loud and the context circumspect, I did.

I told her everything.

And I did a really bad job of fighting back the tears, especially when I said, “And I was brought to my knees as if the last twenty years of my life never happened.”

She looked around the room and said, “You could bring this whole place to its knees if you wanted to. Have you forgotten that? The power you have?”

GOD BLESS WOMEN.

“I’m finding it very hard these days to access that belief,” I replied.

And instead of giving me advice she knows I won’t follow, she told me a story about an experience she’d just had in the manner of a wise sage sharing a parable.

I hugged her and told her I loved her and we agreed that we would go get fucked up together in London next week, which sounds wildly problematic and therefore most definitely the only sensible solution in this particular season of madness and, I’m starting to realise, also magic.

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A reminder that sometimes the wrong thing can be the right lesson.

I am an abject believer in the sanctity of a sorry. It should always be said swiftly and sincerely. One ought never sit on a sorry or let it simmer.

I, for one, am really good at sorries.

Not the problematic sort that slip ceaselessly from the tongues of women as precursor and postscript to their opinions and desires, their arrivals and exits, their very existence. Forgive me father, for I have sinned.

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I’ve never suffered the sickness of those sorries, which I suspect has ultimately made things harder for me. Especially in a world of men who need the slippery, smooth softness of a preemptive sorry in order to succumb to an alternate point of view, to a decision that is not of their doing, to an idea not born of their imagination. I’m acutely aware that often a simple sorry is all it takes to kiss better the bruising on an ego, but I have little patience for that pretense. In those settings, a fuck you will sooner escape my lips than any sort of apology for my opinions, my ideas, my decisiveness, or the swiftness with which I will take action while they blather and blunder.

No, I’m talking about the sorries that must follow a fuck up, if only for the sake of your humanity.

And so if I fuck up — which is often and openly — I will apologize with great fanfare. I will slide into your DMs at two am with an overwrought essay because I will be unable to sleep if I don’t. And then I will still stay up all night anyway, frantic for your forgiveness. I will stand in front of a room of 150 employees — and my God, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to do that — and with a straight spine and steady voice lay claim to my contrition. I will grasp your arm and look you in the eye and say, oh my God, I’m so very sorry. I will WhatsApp you minutes after a mistake with, “I’m sorry. I love you.”

Conversely, I am a sucker for a sorry served to me on a silver, if burnished, platter. It doesn’t matter how much you have hurt me or harangued me. It doesn’t matter how many minutes, weeks, days, or even years have passed. If you apologize, all will be forgiven immediately, effusively, and without question.

“I thought you’d bite my head off,” said the person whose apology was tentatively proffered. “I’d understand if you told me to go fuck myself.”

There is an ancient Greek word, “Kairos” — the critical, fleeting moment where action has to be taken before the opportunity disappears. The kind of suspended second before you kiss someone, confess something, walk away, say “stay,” or change the course of things forever. In that critical fleeting moment - the apology suspended awkwardly between us - I desperately wanted to be the type of badass bitch who makes you work excruciatingly hard for an exoneration that may or may not even be on the horizon. I suspect that is what is expected of me. And yet it could not be further from the truth.

“I’ve explained this before,” I sighed, sipping on a coffee gone cold but still using it as a crutch, feeling powerless despite — ironically, or perhaps aptly — overlooking a building that would soon become a testament to the power I have worked so hard to amass. “My fuck yous are silenced in the face of the few who I’ve let feel the flesh beneath the fanfare, who’ve seen how precariously it’s all put together and how catastrophically it can collapse. So no, I’m not going to bite your head off, and yes, apology accepted.”

And then we sat in silence.

And then I inevitably filled that silence.

Because the words inside me are willful and, in certain circumstances, will canvas and convene against my will, for better or worse. Or in this case, to make everything better. To make it so that we moved on swiftly, so that within minutes it was as if nothing had happened. Not now, not before. I even took it upon myself to script the justification that should have been written for me.

“I get it,” I said. “The circumstances, the context, the craziness. It was not ideal but perhaps it was inevitable.”

They nodded their head in agreement. Yes yes, that sounded about right. Of course.

And so all was forgiven and, perhaps more dangerously, all was forgotten.

Because when I forgive I always forget.

What, I have always wondered, would be the point otherwise? Surely the feeling of forgiveness, if truthful and honest and whole, is predicated on the act of letting go.

Otherwise it’s just a temporary balm — like the lip balms in floridly coloured tubes beauty brands keep pushing into our purses — and we slather them onto our mouths thinking we’re softer and smoother and better but they’re not actually healing anything.

I used to think the ease with which I can forgive and forget was a kind of superpower, the most evolved and elevated part of me. A pristine part that had somehow survived serene and steadfast beyond the otherwise mangled messiness of my mind. But lately I’ve begun to wonder if it comes from some deep-seated insecurity because why else would one so easily diminish and perhaps even disrespect one’s own hurt.

Surely those girls you’d be scared to cross for fear of being forever ex-communicated, or your heart being excised and your sanity being exorcised, know something I don’t. Surely there’s something cathartic in coldness, something self-salvaging in remaining stoic when faced with a sorry. Surely some hurts require that you say over and over, no fuck this and fuck you, and none of this is OK and I won’t let you be OK by making you think I’m OK with it just because of a word. “Sorry.” It’s just a fucking word.

But therein lies the crux of the problem. Words hold too much sway with me. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words, my God, the words will devastate me. They can also save and salve me. They can render me powerless or powerful in equal measure. And, for better or worse, I’m yet to come across a sorry that didn’t seep into my skin and sink into the better parts of me. That didn’t make me want to wipe the slate clean, and let bygones be bygones, to agree that it’s all water under the bridge even if I’d been drowning. Even if I’m still drowning. To settle back into my belief that surely no one actually means it when they mess with you.

Naivety? Delusion? Denial? An abject belief in good, especially when I need to repent for my own sins? Perhaps all of the above. But in this season of terrifying change, when on some nights it feels like my insides are imploding and I’m wild with breaking and becoming all at once, I’d like to keep intact this instinct to protect my peace by being at peace with those who have offered to make peace with me.

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And let me tell you, there is nothing like the imminent threat of being eaten alive to immediately stop you being in your feels. We are in this mess because of my feels—always feeling too much of the wrong thing and too little of the right thing, and fucking up in ways that, in the moment, don’t feel like fucking up at all (which is, in fact, the worst kind of fucking up). Wrangling with myself over the countless ways in which I act or react, but knowing I don’t know how to be any other way than to just be, all the goddamn time. I never regret anything I did or said—because one ought never beat oneself up over honesty or vulnerability or an innate desire to speak one’s mind—but I often rue it.

Lately, however, I may have gone a little (read: a lot) overboard—as you may have sensed from my compounded spiralling on both Instagram and Substack—and so it was that my actions and inaction, my defaults, distractions, demons and deviations led to a six a.m. SOS to my girls, on the chat formerly known as one obscure thing and now known by another weird name. One of them hopped immediately on a flight from London, the other delayed a flight to China, and all of us ended up in a private villa dubbed ‘Beit Al Fananeen’ (Home of the Artists) in the magical Al Moudira Hotel in Luxor, where Project Save Me From Myself—and all my selves, past, present and future—ensued.

In my soon-to-be 46 years of life, in all the gnarled and gangly years of girlhood, in the toughest throes of my womanhood, I have never once broken glass in case of emergency and called upon anyone outside of my immediate family. I have always strictly subscribed to the notion that no one is coming to save you—that you can pull yourself apart in private, but you must pull yourself together in public. This time was different, because this time I knew there were women I could trust with my life—and more importantly, women I could trust with the darkest, most dangerous parts of my imagination. With the seething in my soul and the secrets threatening to break me and those that matter most to me. I knew they would not judge me for my behaviour, but more importantly, not judge me for somehow justifying that behaviour to myself. That I could tell them about the ways I had been brought to my knees, and they would remind me that uneasy is the head that wears the crown.

And so they came, and we convened in a way that I marvelled at, because even when I was crumpled on the cool tiles, crying hysterically, I was objectively aware that contextually my breakdown was fucking fabulous. There I was, my sun-kissed skin glistening in a beautiful bikini, by a private pool, with a butler named Robert bringing us mango ice cream while acting like he could see and hear no evil. (Robert did, in fact, see and hear all manner of things that we can only hope he is contractually obliged to never repeat to another living soul.)

And I remember thinking that I really need to do some sort of talk where I explain to the girlies that perhaps the most important reason to work obnoxiously hard and become a success in the most traditionally capitalistic sense of the word, is so that if you ever find yourself unravelling in midlife, you can drop everything midweek, without permission from anyone, and freak the fuck out with your girls in the lap of carefully curated rustic luxury.

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But I marvelled even more that I was being propped up—literally, not just proverbially—by women who, like me, were hellbent on winning. Who were not ashamed to admit that they wanted it all and then a little bit more. Who had spent a lifetime throwing two fingers up at social mores and made-up scripts. Who had been there and done that and gotten the T-shirt that says “fuck this” or, indeed, “I AM INFINITE,” as per the high-end performance wear brand that Deana is about to launch—the samples of which we spent the week running around in, admiring the way they made our bums look. As a side, but nonetheless very important note, these words are emblazoned on the inside of her leggings so that they’re basically hugging your uterus, which gives me an infinite amount of joy. Allow me to also add that we put my breakdown on hold on several occasions to discuss her imminent brand launch in great detail, because, as a rule, another woman’s plans for world domination must always supersede everything else. Letting her business plans wash over me offered much needed respite from my insides feeling like they were imploding.

And so each and every day - in between the bites of ice-cold watermelon and the sips of freshly squeezed lemonade that Robert kept teleporting into the villa with - Salma and Deana gave it to me straight and scathing. They were brutal in their honesty (which I needed) but also endlessly patient as I repeated the same scenarios and the same stories in a million different ways, hoping that one of those times I’d say it in a way that settled my mind. They allowed me to tumble down rabbit holes of preposterous proportions and picked me up when I got to the bottom and realised it was just another dead end. They filmed every single unhinged moment of mine - especially the ones where I was lying face down on the floor and saying wild things like, “but this is the hottest I’ve ever been” and then watched the videos back immediately while laughing hysterically.

And even though Salma knows I’m weird about physical affection in casual settings, she found every opportunity to hold me as tightly as possible to regulate my shot-to-shit nervous system while whispering, “You are Amy Mowafi and you bow your head for nothing and no one.” Which, admittedly, is exactly the kind of dramatic and emotionally overwrought statement that I need Salma in my life for. And when I pointed out that I had, in fact, just done exactly that—hence how fucking wretched I felt—we both forgot the immense well of words and wit we usually have at our disposal and regressed to just calling people really bad words.

And every time my bottom lip started to quiver or I did that thing where I pace and spin in an effort to self-soothe, Deana would look me dead in the eye, in the way she does with people on her inspirational podcast, and give me the kind of motivational speech that comes from having spent a lifetime seriously working on herself.

And when I noticed the aggressive looking bikes propped up by the entrance of the hotel and suggested that, at the height of the midday desert sun, we ride—without the strongly recommended guide—to the nearest temple, no one argued. Because they understood that when my mind feels soft, I need to take my body through its paces just to remind myself that I can do hard things. That I am infinite.

Admittedly, someone should have pointed out that cycling alone in the desert with no guide, no protective gear, no water, no money, not even a fucking cap, is not a hard thing but just an actually stupid thing.

Which is how we did not reach the temple in less than 20 minutes, as Thomas the hotel GM said we should—while still trying desperately to stop us from going on our clearly doomed adventure—but instead found ourselves, two and a half hours later, at the gates of hell.

But buoyed by each other’s presence, we took a deep breath and overcame our mangled heat-drenched minds, ignored the screaming exhaustion in our legs, defied the dehydration scouring our bodies…

stopped to take content (madness, I know, but when you see the pictures you will understand it was worth it),

and somehow made it to the temple with these girls who had proven, once again, that they are my literal ride or die.

We parked our bikes by a small kiosk selling Coke in glass bottles—which we did not have money to buy—sat on a ledge, and WhatsApped Robert to come save us.

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But no. If the multitude of whispered conversations I’ve been having with some of the spectacularly successful women I know are anything to go by, it turns out that women in midlife who have spent a lifetime doing it all, and having it all, and wanting it all, are, in fact, a menace… in the best fucking way possible.

Women of a certain ilk and era who bought into the belief that they could be masters of the universe, stubbornly ignoring all the signs that what was being asked of them was a kind of madness, because how can you be both mother and mogul without losing your mind a little? How can you be both wife and warlord, someone who can garner the respect reserved only for ‘good girls’ but with ‘balls’ big enough to cut a c*nt down to size? Ferocity laced in flirtation, ambition masked with contrition, claws covered in lace, desire drowned out by decorum, duty, denial. Precociously puppet-mastering rooms in which you were never wanted while making them need you nonetheless.

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And because we are not the type of women to bandy about ideas of burnout, and because we believe so fully in the sanctity of our sacrifices, eventually the fight gives us fangs instead of fatigue. We reach our peak looking our best, operating at optimal output, living our supposed best lives, but feeling feral and feverish and finding ourselves on the brink of biting into it all just to tear it apart, just for the chance to be seen as we are now, without the blurriness of the baggage we carried to get here.

There is so much discourse around the woman who devotes everything to home and hearth, to husband and children, to school runs, homework, and fever-fuelled night shifts. The one who smiles sweetly on her man’s arm, letting him live out his dreams while she lives vicariously through him. And that is not, for one second, to say that full-time motherhood isn’t the hardest fucking full-time job—one that ought to be wildly financially compensated. It’s simply to say that it is a kind of martyrdom the world knows how to empathise with, even if that empathy does fuck all for a woman in midlife, sitting alone in an empty nest, in bed beside a philandering husband, surrounded by the detritus of discarded dreams.

However, a woman who appears to have done it all—or indeed, to have had it all—is one whose sacrifices aren’t so easily swallowed. She’s viewed as selfish. Because she didn’t spend enough time with the kids. Because she had no qualms building an army to do her bidding at home. Because she locked in and refused to switch off until she got what she wanted.

She will never be afforded the grace of saying, “Wait a second, is there something more? Is there something—or someone—that can now make me feel all the things I suffocated and suppressed, reignite the parts of me I put off and pushed down and put on hold in order to get here?”

As if she has not, to all intents and purposes, acted like every fucking man in midlife who “makes it” and then swaps stability for scintillation. And the ultimate irony is that what these women want, is simply to feel like a woman.

So let me tell you a secret about ‘us’ type of women. We are rarely who you think we are. And yes, we come across as ‘too much’, and the common refrain these days is to respond, “well, if we are too much, then go find less.” But we are not—and I am not—too much of what you think. At all.

There is too much soft beneath the strong and too much meek beneath the mighty. But not even enough to inherit the earth. Instead, I’m merciless in my desire for a good answer in lieu of the right one. I’ll roar like a lion but roll over for you like a kitten, if you just play nice enough. I’ll hold my head up like a fucking queen, command a room and lead an army of acolytes, and if that’s all you’ve ever seen or known of me—that facade I forge for work and world—then fuck with me at your peril. I will destroy you in the only way I know how: by driving myself harder so that I leave you dead in the dust.

But if I’ve invited you in, shown you any part of myself that exists beyond the persona, if I’ve given you the full force of my attention and dialed you into my vulnerabilities, and you try to fuck with me, then the likelihood is that I will simply be fucked by you—and I will destroy and devastate myself even more in the process.

I have done it before.

Stood in the rain and begged for more. Perched on the edge of a blush-pink armchair in a cottage on the edge of a forest, days away from donning a cap and gown for my (mis)education, and said, “I’ll dance for you if you let me stay.” Pleaded for a little more time in a hotel room at 6 a.m. Refused to leave when I should have walked away.

I recently asked a formidable friend of mine—a woman who is married but who, given the jet-set circles she moves in, is constantly being pursued by a legion of powerful men, the type who ignite industries across the world—how she resists their outrageously over-the-top advances, even though she too is feeling as dangerous and desirous as I am at this potentially pivotal impasse in our lives.

“Because I know the moment I give them my power, they will no longer want me,” she said, pouring me a shot of mastiha. “Because it’s not real. Because even though the world thinks we act like men, we are not men—and if I give myself away and then they give me away, it will destroy me.”

And I thought about my husband, who loved me when I couldn’t command a room, when I had no power to “give away”, who has never uttered the words “I’m mesmerised by you” after watching me set a space alight in a backless dress, but who fell in love with me soft and silly and freshly scarred, wearing black opaque tights and an awful yellow dress that made me look like a bumblebee. Because I hadn’t yet figured out what my body could be if I looked after it, and what my mind could do if I unleashed it. And I thought about how, ultimately, I’m just punishing him for knowing me then and not now. For seeing me as I am and not as I act.

And still staying.

For knowing how I flail and fumble and get desperate and delirious in the middle of the night.

And still loving me.

For knowing how I can’t even figure out how to work the fucking Netflix remote, and how I long ago dissociated from the hardest parts of motherhood. For knowing how, when my 14 year-old daughter Maya is ruthless with her words, clawing at my conscience for attention, all I can do is stare at her silently, blinking slowly, thinking, “I know what you need, I just don’t know how to give it.” Thinking I wasn’t built for this. That I know how to build ideas. Build a media company. Build a network. Build a reputation. But I don’t know how to build a child.

He watches me sitting there. He sees it. Waits for it to pass. Says, “She’s just a teenager. Don’t let her hurt you.” As though I’m not the one doing the hurting.

And still he stays.

He sees that when the doors close, I’m not sexy or funny or fun. I don’t play with words in ways that entertain or enrapture. I barely speak unless spoken to, and even then the words feel submerged in some kind of sludge that has built up over the years, so everything comes out slow and gurgled, and I have to ask him to repeat himself over and over until I understand what’s being asked of me.

“Yes, yes, I’ll come down for breakfast.”

Last night he said, “Why don’t we get the you that everyone else gets?” And I didn’t really know how to answer him. Other than to say it’s a performance that pays the bills, which is the kind of crude reply that so readily slips from between my fangs but can only end badly for both of us. So instead, I rein in my inexplicable rage, diminish my desires and stay silent, because the bitter truth is that the truth won’t ever set you free, and secrets are sweeter on everybody’s tongue.

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*It should be noted that I totally stole (with permission) the ‘a menace in the best way possible’ line from Farida ElShafie the gloriously talented Managing Editor of SceneStyled.

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Exactly one year ago today, the first line of this Substack arrived fully formed as I sat on a bench in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I was there because I needed a space to soothe and save me, and museums have always held me up when my bones felt too soft to keep me standing straight.

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I had been meaning to start a Substack for months, had been meaning to return to my writing for years. To burrow my way up from the layers of life under which the words had become submerged. In the 12 years since I had quit my full-time job as a writer, editor, author, I had built a world that defied words. Brick by brick, one outlandish sacrifice at a time, something glorious and gorgeous, and for which I am wildly grateful.

Most of the time.

As my brother reminded me late last night (while I sobbed on the phone to him—which is a rare occurrence, but I needed both the brutal honesty and the take-it-to-the-grave secrecy of a sibling), in a single week I’m afforded more experiences and adventures and ideas—a verifiable tsunami of life—than most have access to in a lifetime. Even though I had let the wrong things feel right, he gave me the grace of saying the right things. This year has taught me that in my moments of need, my brothers will show me a non-judgemental magnanimity that I have rarely reciprocated, mired as I often am in the responsibility of steering the ship.

But building that wonderful world also winded me. And the louder my outside voice got, and the more adept I became at using it, and the clearer it resonated in spaces that affect change, the more my inside voice—the one I needed to write—was silenced.

Sitting alone in the V&A that afternoon, exactly one year ago, Mr Y just around the corner undergoing the first of many complicated medical tests that would settle the matter of his loss of sight, a little hungover from the tequilas that my friend M had poured down my throat the night before to distract me from the impending devastation, already feeling unmoored by a marriage that had struggled to evolve with me and knowing that now, and for the foreseeable future, nothing could really be done about it, I sensed the once-familiar prickling on my skin of a story needing to be told.

Later that afternoon I fumbled about with the Substack UI until I figured out how to launch this newsletter, and I made a promise to myself…

One year.

Whatever happened, I had to publish a piece, on the same day, at the same time, every single week for one whole year.

What would happen after that was a problem for a year from then.

And so once a week, for the last 52 weeks without fail, I have sat in front of a proverbial blank page, a flickering cursor on an empty screen, and have been afforded the privilege of that first line, fully formed from the gods.

The rest of the words, like everything in my life, I had to work hard for, claw for, scour and scrape from the soft parts of my psyche, scrawl them out from beneath my fingernails. I have hunted and gathered witty words and wise words. Wondrous words and words that have wrecked me. I never know what I will find until I have found it. I never know what I am thinking until the words are staring back at me, wilful in their independence, their existence outside of me. And when I read them through, I wonder, what the fuck was I thinking.

I never know the ending at the beginning, but I always know when I’ve come to the end. At least in my writing.

In the real world, I often can’t bear for a thing to come to an end.

Indeed, a few nights ago, straddling my own undoing, I was told, “You’re just not used to people telling you no.” They had missed the point. My whole life has been people telling me no. Nos screamed in my face, nos “for my own good,” nos wrapped up in polite phrases and sent by email, nos by text, by turn, by trial and error; nos by proxy and by force, nos by bulbous businessmen and by men who insisted on telling me when I was wrong and when I was sorry, nos at tables I was not allowed a seat at and in rooms I was kicked out of for speaking my truth. Nos for God and country. I know how to navigate a no. What I don’t like are abrupt endings. I like them poetic and purposeful, I like things to come full circle, I like to feel ready for them, I like them to reference a line from earlier in the story. But real life rarely works out that way, and my imagination, which is too clear and colourful for my own good, often needs a moment to catch up to reality.

Over this past year on Substack, I have been more honest than I had planned for and more careful than I would have liked. There have been deep wells of words that I have control-alt-deleted because they gave more away of me than I was ready to give, or gave more away of other people than is my right. My stories so often intersect with the plot lines of others, and it behoves me to tread carefully.

The stories I share, even those I blurted out in my earlier career as a writer, have been lauded for their rawness and a “realness” readers have found fascinating, if not shocking. I have always been bewildered by this because I know the hardest, harshest, most terrifying and tantalising parts of these tales are playing out in silence. I am the most open secretive person you may ever meet. I am not yet brave enough to tell you the whole truth, mainly because I can’t handle my own truth.

One day. Maybe.

This past year on Substack has also reminded me of the cardinal rule—you don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to write. You write anyway. You write when you have nothing to say and too much to do. And yes, it’s easier to write when your mind is reeling and your heart is hounded by some fresh pain, but that sort of self-indulgence belies the discipline required to call yourself a writer. So you write even on the days when you feel nothing but the drudgery of being in the trenches of life. Although there have been countless times this year when I have found myself knee-deep in some sort of craziness and seriously wondered if this Substack has unconsciously made me seek out wilder things just for the plot.

There have been pieces I’ve loved, in which every word had been crafted with care, and I’ve thought to myself—ooof, that’s such good writing—but then it hasn’t quite landed, a lukewarm reception at best. Then there have been weeks when, running out of time, I’ve begrudgingly published what I hastily wrote, only to find it resonates in ways that have floored and humbled me. It’s taught me to not be so precious about it all. There’s a Persian proverb that says, “What comes from the heart, lands on the heart.”

There have been days when the effort was excruciating, and others when the writing wrote itself and I was nothing but a vessel, and it made me believe in miracles. It made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, my mum,

and the girls who DM at all hours of the night,

and the ones who stop me on the street,

and the woman with two kids who recognised me in a restaurant by the Red Sea as I was wrenching out last week’s Substack, who apologised for interrupting my dinner, but could never have known in that moment how much I needed to hear what she had to say,

and my bestselling author best friend who begged me to start this Substack and always comments with a love letter to my words,

and the women who send links to my Substack on WhatsApp groups full of other women,

and the ones who repost or restack everything I write,

and the ones who send me essays reflecting back my thoughts and feelings, claiming I’ve said what they couldn’t,

and the ones who simply tell me I make them want to fucking read,

and the ones who told me they started writing because of this Substack,

who started a Substack because of this one,

and the woman who thanked me for showing the reality behind ‘CEO’ life, “You make it seem messy, which makes it seem possible,”

and the mums who said, “EXACTLY WTF,”

and my friend May—who also owns a media company—who messaged me this week saying, “All you should do is write, Amy,” not knowing that message would land in my lap at my lowest, when I was fighting demons born of my own delusions and trying to manage the mangled consequences of my own actions,

and the inspirational woman who runs an incredible initiative empowering Egyptians with disabilities, who posted a Story late last night with the kindest words about my words and my world, not knowing it helped me get off the bathroom floor,

and the 1,360 people who subscribed to this Substack,

and the 88,500 who have read it over the last year,

that maybe, just maybe, they can’t all be crazy (except for my mother, she is most definitely crazy, but I have inherited the most maddening parts of her, and they are my superpower).

All those people are the reason I sit down each week and write. They are the reason I survived this year. You are the reason.

That first line in the museum, arrived when I needed it most, when life lost its balance, and my body started craving things it shouldn’t and my skin burned with ferocious feelings and my mind raged with ideas that threatened to ravage me alive. Today’s Substack is perhaps aptly born of a week in which I have been wrangled and wrenched in ways I cannot yet speak of. Not a happy ending but a full circle one nonetheless.

Except this is not the end.

I promised myself a year. I kept my promise.

But I think I may yet have another year in me…

I hope you’ll still stick around. Your presence here is my greatest privilege.

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