For something a little more curated, my latest for Cosmopolitan is online now. When VAWG stories hit the press, there’s always a resounding call-out for men’s outrage, for them to help with the fight… But with that comes bad actors, those behaving one way in public, and another behind closed doors. Who can actually fight the manosphere? I interviewed world-renowned experts, domestic abuse specialists, MPs, psychologists and the influencers and celebrities trying to push out a different message to young boys, to find out. Read it here.

I stack the toilet papers; they fit so perfectly into that spot in the bathroom. I scoop my underwear off the tiles, but when I carry them through to place somewhere, all I am faced with is things to do.

I have not managed any of the things I was supposed to manage. There’s a fake tan shadow of me, in my crumpled sheets. Tea-leaf brown that has been layered, layered, layered across my skin, across my bed. I didn’t do it correctly, there’s a tiger-stripe across my left thigh. The reality of my peely-wally skin, exposed and bare.

I think of the phrase, ‘wherever you go, there you’ll be’ and fear I am packing my sadness into these boxes. I need to sleep fifteen, sixteen hours and still sluggishly I traipse to the shop, Vinted buyers nipping at me, like they are my only priority. I drink two cans of Red Bull. The new watermelon flavour makes me feel like it’s not-so-bad.

I am not taking care of myself but I seem to have forgotten how to. Remember when I could dead-lift? When the men in the gym knew my face?

My computer keeps telling me to update it. This faceless, Octopus of a pop-up will not relent, no matter how much I defer, defer, defer.

I want that drop-down option for my life:

Boxes, defer for two-hours

Sell furniture, defer for four-hours

Figure out if all my ambition, all my work, is really worth anything, as, after decades of graft, every journalist I know searches for their plan B, defer for 24 hours

I’m afraid of my old self, the one who lies deep within me. I can feel her being resurrected, clawing at the gate, the place where I had to lock her in. She wants basements, she wants tequila, she wants to choke in liquid smoke.

Instead, I indulge in a new habit. I fire up Gemini, let it know how I am feeling, ask it why I am finding this so hard. They say that moving is one of the most stressful things you can go through, in your life. It’s up there with death, divorce, the loss of a job (oh, wait.)

I think this is pathetic. It’s just a few boxes, some phone calls to make, things that can be tick, tick, ticked off a list.

Gemini tells me this isn’t true. That, after 18 years in a place, I am tearing up my neural pathways, the comforting, well-worn knowledge it has become accustomed to each day. Something to do with my brain still thinking I am being chased by a bear.

I don’t fact check this. I know I should.

I tell it I am also leaving my job and it’s very nice to me about that. I can’t tell you exactly what it says because I don’t want to open my phone right now, get lost in another conversation, feel guilty about the water I am sooking up, the chips of damage I am taking off the planet, all so a robot can tell me what I am feeling is valid.

I work in magazines. I have friends. I know my feelings are valid.

God, I hate cliches.

The only thing I can eat is Pot Noodles. (Gemini is very nice to me about that, says it’s understandable.) The Pot Noodle, we notice, is trying to be Steven Bartlett.

Optimisation culture has reached my chicken and sweetcorn, and I think of all those Girl Boss years, those life-in-a-days, the 5am club pressure and how, I never believed in it but bought it anyway, and now we seem to be flipping from clean girl, to chaos. But it’s still all brand, brand, brand. It’s still all take your life and make content out of it, and that’s how you maintain a career, these days.

Get ready with me for the hospital, get ready with me to break-down on my landlord’s doorstep, get ready with me in curated chaos, where I still look pretty enough so that someone, somewhere wants to fuck me and therefore the algorithm decides to favour my face.

I don’t think I can do it. So, what is next?

There’s a better newsletter, trapped within my pen. One that doesn’t go off on tangents, one that doesn’t expect the reader to understand my unravelling mind. But I am 50 tabs open, a TikTok of a brain, swipe to the next task, swipe to the next thought, I can’t focus, I can only slap fake tan on my legs, sleep for the best.

But this is what is helping. Words that clatter haphazardly across my brain, being released onto paper.

All those Girl Boss years, when I was told to be someone that I wasn’t. When I am a bag of vibrators under the bed, tiger-stripe thighs and missed dentist appointments. My inbox is at 18,627 (unread) and I chopped my hair off with kitchen scissors.

But I am also friendship, late-nights, a phone full of people willing to help me, because I have always been willing, wanting, needing to help them.

A wasp buzzes by, reminds me that it’s almost August.

I’m packing up my identity in these boxes. Figuring out who I’ll offload, when I get there.

Right now, I’m thinking, it’s the person I’ve been all along. Maybe next time, I’ll accept her for who she is.

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I just burst into tears in the middle of the street. I was recording a voice note to my friend, “I think you’ll be proud of me,” I began all cheerily. “I just advocated for myself really well in the doctors.” And then I began to list what had happened and suddenly, unexpectedly, my voice broke and I began to cry.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know why I’m crying. I’m fine.”

I say unexpected but really, I thought, a few minutes later, letting out tiny yelps in my garden, so the mechanics over the wall don’t hear, is it really unexpected? It should be expected. This is hard. I am allowed to cry. So, why did I sternly tell myself, “you can have two more minutes of feeling sorry for yourself and then you need to get on with your day.” Why didn’t I allow myself any longer?

It’s been years, actually. Years.

Years of having one nipple that bleeds. One nipple that will, suddenly, in the middle of a meeting feel so intensely sore, I’ll let out a small gasp, then swallow that gasp, look back at my laptop, smile. Years of taking off my bra at night and seeing blood, stained and settled in the cup.

It’s been one year, now, since I sat in a Vegas hotel room, the line crackling, and they told me it wasn’t cancer. This short, overwhelming call, day breaking over the city, that golden, strawberry light and I said something I have, very much, since regretted. “No, no it’s fine, if it’s not cancer there’s no need to see me again. I’m fine.”

But I’m not fine.

This isn’t fine.

Today, in the doctors, the nurse told me that because I’d already been to the breast clinic, she wasn’t sure if she could refer me again. “But..” I said. “It’s not going away. None of the creams work.” Because that’s the thing, they keep saying it’s topical, related to the eczema flare-ups I had as a child, but… I am the one feeling it, every day. That pain, it’s like someone is stabbing me, with a thin needle, from the inside.

She went to get the doctor. He rushed in, sweaty, panicky, probably not because of me, but as he spoke so hurried, and I had to answer his questions so quickly, his panic made its way into me. “And it’s not getting better? And it’s been years? And it bleeds every single day?”

He referred me, once again, to the breast clinic. They’ll see me in two to three weeks. I move from England, to Scotland, in one month.

And so I cried because… why has it been years? Why have I been putting up with this for so long? Do I value myself, so little, that I am just willing to shut-up, and smile… while I bleed? Why have I left it, so long, that now I am having to cram in a visit to the Royal Marsden, as my life is packed up all around me?

I am so angry at myself.

The thing is, it’s not that I haven’t tried. I just can’t shake this feeling that I haven’t tried hard enough.

But it’s so hard to get a GP appointment these days, you have to remember to call at 8am, on the dot, to be seen any time soon. Call in the afternoon, as I have, and ask to speak to the one specific doctor you want, the one who looked at your nipple so kindly, who acknowledged that you shouldn’t have had to be living with that pain, who took your pain seriously and… she doesn’t have any slots for two months. So you hang up, say you’ll try again at 8am, tomorrow, forget, get distracted by all the boxes, and the pitching for work, and your draining bank account and…

That’s how it becomes years.

As I type this, there’s something crying out within me to stop. That I am throwing myself a pity party, only one invited, and no one wants to hear all of this.

But… that is also how it becomes years.

All my life, I have been taught to smile through the pain. Not by my upbringing (my dad, actually, cried frequently, my mum was vocal with her anger) but by something else. Something I can’t pinpoint. The need to be the smiling, happy, no-bother woman that is, in general, widely liked. Someone who moans, someone who kicks up a fuss, they are not liked. But… they probably get a doctor’s appointments sooner.

There have been points with this where I have simply shrugged, and said to myself, “well, if it is cancer, that’s your fate, it’s fine.”

My health anxiety, once a constant buzz of death in the back of my head, has flipped into a melancholy malaise.

Yet, I don’t think this is, necessarily, all to do with me and my specific set of circumstances, my upbringing, my mum’s cancer, my mum’s death. I think it’s a tightly-wound, toxic part of being a woman.

Women accept pain. They accept that they must get on with things.

I have known a woman who…

Cooked the Christmas dinner, while sneaking off to the toilet to vomit, during the first stage of chemotherapy. Telling no one what was really going on, smiling and serving drinks.

Yelled out in pain, clutching her infected tooth, sobbing behind her hair, but staying home, instead of the dentists, because her kids needed her.

Couldn’t walk, her ovary twisting inside of her, biting the inside of her arm and still, insisted, to the nurse her pain was “oh just seven out of ten.” (that would be me.)

So I cry because…

I have accepted my pain for far too long.

It shouldn’t have been years.

I should have valued myself more, trusted myself more, advocated for myself more.

But, I also need to see that I didn’t do that, all on my own, because I am stupid, and silly, and disorganised, and pathetically desperate to be liked.

I shouldn’t have had to fight this hard.

I am existing in a system that’s flawed, with a deep societal message, ingrained within me that tells me I am not worthy enough to fight it.

One that meant I needed to choose being liked over being seen.

It’s fucked.

It needs to change. I need to change.

I can’t people please my way out of pain.

Wow, I wrote that so fast and I don’t normally write in the rawness. Please consider sharing, liking, commenting, subscribing, I value you all a lot! Even when I don’t reply to comments straight away, that’s because I am feeling too exposed to do so but I always read them all and they mean so much to me.

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I’ve wanted to write for so long about my upcoming move, it feels ripe for exploration but when I try I can’t, I forget how to communicate and stop typing. I’ve forced myself to write this, mostly because I have a dwindling list of paid subscribers (love you! Appreciate you!) and I don’t want to lose them, or any of you, really with my silence. So here’s everything I’ve been thinking, lately, dumped down, as I try my best to figure myself out…

Me, on the rooftop of my first flat in London, in 2011

Sometimes I feel as if London is pushing me out. Its thick, stifling air forming huge hands that wrestle with me, grabbing at my shoulders and shoving at me, saying “see, you thought you could handle me, but you can’t, go on, scamper, scamper back home.”

I’ve been reading books all weekend, lost in Glasgow and New York, and I really was in those pages, dancing within the paragraphs and then I’d pull myself out, for things I can’t remember now because all I can really feel is the fear: I’m so scared, I’m so scared, I’m so scared. Then I’d run back, settle into the window seat, and retreat into other people’s words once more.

One time, after taking acid, I was trying to sleep. I was coated, head-to-toe in crusty mud, in the pristine white sheets of my friend’s fold-out sofa. I’d made the not-so-smart decision to place half-a-tab on my tongue, at 7pm, the day we were leaving the festival. The drive home (my friend was sober, I should add) felt like Mario Kart, whizzing through the streets. But then, I wanted to sleep. So… I counted. One, two, three… It usually works. This time, it didn’t. I found, when the numbers got too high, I was gripped by this all-consuming fear, terror that literally ran through my veins. I’d dare myself to count higher, like the dares I did when I was younger, to knock on the doors of scary houses. 24, 25… go, on, you can do it. 26. NO! TOO FAR! Then, I’d scarper back to safe territory. One, two, let’s never go again.

I read the next day that when you take acid your brain’s boundaries blur, parts that don’t normally communicate suddenly do. Your world is flung open and the reality of numbers never ending becomes terrifying. There’s so much unknown. And that’s how I feel right now, the terror that causes me to scamper back to my window seat, back in the safety of the ones, the twos. There’s too much unknown, right now, in my next steps.

This is all quite over-dramatic. I am, after all, just moving from London to Edinburgh. I am moving back home. I said to my friend the other day (a friend who has upped his own life, to another country, for a job that takes him out into violent, unforgiving seas) “I FEEL LIKE I AM TEARING UP MY ENTIRE LIFE.” And, TO THINK, I once thought that I was an adventurous person. Turns out, not-so-much.

But then, what is home? When I moved from Edinburgh, to London, 18 years ago, I’d go back and visit those cobblestone streets, the squawk of the gulls, their red-dotted beaks and think “here, I’m home.” I also knew I could not be there, home was now out of bounds. I felt as though every street held something that I was trying to forget. My mum died under those skies. London, London was brand new.

And now I return, knowing that sometime, probably not soon. I beg you, not soon, my other parent will die. Under those skies. London can’t protect me from that. Edinburgh can’t either but, Edinburgh can give me more time.

I’m so scared, I’m so scared, I’m so scared.

I always thought that when I left London I’d do so in a blaze of parties, celebrations, hitting up my favourite haunts, jumping on pink-fluffy rickshaws and blasting out Britney as I took out yet more cash, for them to drive me across Tower Bridge again, just hit me baby one more time. Now it’s happening and I want to French Exit out of my life. Sneak off, in the hope no one will notice, no one will care. Or, perhaps more accurately, so that I won’t care.

As when things get hard, and I get scared, I am fond of escape. That doesn’t mean hopping on a plane to Ibiza, then Italy (though, I did just do that) but instead trying to swallow down all my feelings in a flurry of “I’m fiiinesss” and “this is the right decision.” And, if I’ve said that to you, do know I wasn’t lying. I am fine. This is the right decision.

I just can’t figure out what I’m going to do when all of this life is packed up, or who I am going to be when I get there.

When I tell people I am leaving they say “but you can’t leave, you are Soho” or “but you can’t leave, you are Cosmo” and they’re right, I have pulled London and my career tight and I have encased my bones with them. For so long, they moved within me, seamlessly but, lately, they’ve started to rub. They’re not who I want to be. I also don’t think I want to be a place, a career.

But then, to return… Where is home? After a while, living here, I’d go to Edinburgh and feel like a tourist. Visitors would ask me where was good to go and I wouldn’t know, everything had been re-named and newer, cooler spots had opened. I’d get lost walking in streets I’d walked in at five-years-old. Then, I’d get back to London, feel that hot rush of tube air, look around at strangers, the mad-cap variety of them that you get here, and know: this is home. This is where I belong.

You shouldn’t attach your self-worth to something that moves. I read that once and it resonated, as that’s something I do. I escape, I bury my problems and I attach my self-worth on things that move: high-status jobs and people-who-I-want-to-like-me. I should say, I do that less now, but I still do it. I don’t want to. But I do.

When I wrote this piece, Am I Addicted To Ambition, I worried that everything I had built here, in London (the career, the friendships, the thirty lifetimes squeezed into one day) was all built on a desire to escape. My mum died and then I avoided that fact through career climbs and party, party, parties. It might be true. But I still built it. Even if our parents haven’t died, don’t we all still want to escape? Build something of ourselves, separate from them? This is why I am a therapy-drop out, I get exhausted by all the over-analysing (she says, in an essay over-analysing.)

But still, this is why I’m scared. I attached my self-worth (“it’s who you are”) to a career and a city that I cannot stay in. I have to move out of these cemented bones, crumble them and build up into something and someone new. In the place I watched my mother die, in the place where every street holds a memory.

I’m so scared, I’m so scared, I’m so scared.

It has to be done. The streets can have new memories, there will always be someone dying underneath a sky.

I am also not a place, or a job, all of this is just moments in time, things that happened to me, lessons and memories that I’ll pack into these boxes, along with the dust of who I used to be.

Thank you for reading! If it resonated, please share with a friend, or consider becoming a paid subscriber (I am trying to post more!) and please let me know, have you ever done a big move? Or felt split between two homes? How did you cope? Sometimes after I write something big I hide from the comments for a while, so I’m sorry if I don’t always reply straight away but I always see them, and they stick with me and I appreciate them.

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There are strangers in my home, manoeuvring through all the clutter that we tried to clear; chaos that the estate agents would prefer to be wiped away, our personalities painted beige.

I sit, in our yard that we’re now calling a garden, and try not to listen as their voices ascend the stairs. I want to follow them, defending the house like it’s a relative… “I can talk shit about it, but you can’t!” Are they looking at the window seat now? The one he built for me? The place I sat, stormy mornings, my fingers powered by ambition, 6am, typing, my first book conceived, right there, as the light leaked its way in.

They’ll be trampling all over the carpet, where I unrolled my yoga mat, those endless pandemic days, back when I thought I could learn the splits. I didn’t. Instead, I had wine delivered by the crate, boxes and boxes of the stuff that I’d drink, yoga mat still rolled out, rage building inside, desperate, just desperate to run out of the house, to throw myself onto a pile of bodies, just to feel the breath of strangers on my skin. “I went mad in this house,” I want to say. “And then I became sane again. All within these walls. Can you believe that?”

When we viewed this house, I saw a poster pinned to a lamp post outside. Duck yellow, soft pink, tiny, illustrated socks hanging on a line. A baby clothes exchange, every first Saturday of the month. There are three play parks, they surround us. A woman on our road does pregnancy yoga, from her shed. Life, back then, was plotted out. Marriage, house, babies.

It is here, that I became an odd puzzle piece. It is here that I realised that I do not fit that life. The one I so envisioned. It was a life that had been drawn for me, for us, an illustration, tiny socks on a washing line.. the expectation of that life pressed into my soul, the assumption that it was everything I could ever want.

And now these people are here, up and down the stairs they go, projecting their own future lives upon our walls. What do they see? Will it work out for them?

I tell them that the parks nearby are beautiful, and they are. I circled those paths, over and over, the question circling too, over and over in my mind. “Do I want this?” as I watched a child pushed on a swing. “Do I want this?” as a woman passed me, pushing a pram. “Do I want this?” as, unbeknownst to me, my body made other plans.

It is here a cyst grew, my ovaries weighed down, dizziness, oh the dizziness, as I gripped the banister, phoned up doctors, made appointments, begged them to believe me. One said, “nothing to worry about,” as he circled his wedding ring. “Just your fertility.”

The cyst twisted, it was this huge thing, the pain unfathomable. They tore me open, whipped it out, stitched me back together again. I couldn’t walk for days but, when I did, I went to the park. The park with the mothers, the bumps, the swings, the slides. It didn’t happen right then, that’s not how these things go, we talked, for months, maybe even years, we talked. I drew up new lives in my mind, good scenarios, awful scenarios, scenarios without him in the picture. In what world’s would I regret this? Will I always wonder? But it was in that park, in this house, my stitches turning to scars, that I realised: I did not want what I thought I had wanted. What I had been told to want. I wanted something different.

I love this house. I wish I could hire a crane, pick it up, move it elsewhere. I love all the things that estate agents say make it “tricky.” The outside toilet, surprisingly handy when you arrive back, wine-tipsy, unsure you’ll make it up the stairs. The train announcements, that robotic voice that’s now become a friend, telling me how it’s looking out there, that maybe I’m best to make other plans. Maybe I love it because I, like the house, am tricky. It is not a house, it is not a flat, “hmm,” one estate agent said, “it’s undefinable.”* I am not a mother, I am not maternal and I am not even one of the many women I thought I would be. I cannot do the splits.

The potential buyers ask why we are moving. It would be easy to say, “perhaps we should never have moved here at all.” But that wouldn’t be true. There’s grief in saying goodbye to homes, there’s grief in saying goodbye to who you thought you would be. I had once wanted to be a ‘good’ grown up, a ‘good’ woman, a mother in the suburbs. “The schools are excellent, you know? There’s great transport links into the city.” It’s so obvious now, looking back, that I could never have been her. But I had to almost become her, to figure it all out.

I have not failed because I moved to an area, into a house, thinking it’s the place we would build a family. Lives are not something that you can just pick out from an estate agent’s brochure. They are a mess of the things we can control and the things we really, really can’t.

“It’s OK if your dreams don’t come true here,” I could say, as I show the potential buyers out the front gate. “Sometimes you need to step into the wrong life, to see how much it doesn’t fit you. You need to feel how you burst out of its seams.”

It is here I figured out that I do not have to be one sort of person, that I can be many personas, the ones that I do become, and the ones that remain an imagination. The ones I try on, and the ones I then discard. Out of anywhere I’ve ever lived, this is the place I most found out who I am.

And now, it’s someone else’s turn to move in, and into the person that they will come to be.

Thank you for reading! I suspect the grief of moving will be a bit of a theme over the next couple of months, so I’d love to hear about houses, places and people you moved on from and what you learned from them. I’ve also included links below on other Substacks I’ve written, over the years, as I tried on my now, incredibly comfortable child-free life. And if any of this resonates, or you want to support my writing please do share with someone you think might like my writing!

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A photo of us, taped in my diary (I’ve edited his face out, for privacy reasons)

I can remember him in fragments. I am not sure if the moments that I step into are my own, or just photographs that captured a second of our existence, images that do not encapsulate who, or what we were.

I met him in a smoke-filled room, in a boys house, the sort that my 16-year-old self had never been in. Before then, the parties I went to were thrown in our parents’ homes; ancient furnishings that weren’t to be ruined, office desk bins that we threw up in. This was a flat that someone young, like us, lived in. A boy (man?) who chose his own decorations, but, barely. All I can remember is the smell of incense, a scarf covered in moons and stars, hung haphazardly on a plain white wall. We all thought we were on the cusp of adulthood but, we weren’t, not really. We didn’t know much about anything at all. I could not tell you what we spoke about.

But there he was. Topless, rail-thin, with what I, excitedly, thought was a six-pack. Looking back, it wasn’t. His body was the result of not having any fat, his muscles visible because of what wasn’t there, what should have been there. Is that cruel to write? Should I write that? I liked his body. It’s not an insult. But… he’s dead now. That boy, clutching an aerosol can, whose ice-blue eyes I fell in love with. Perhaps he’d prefer it if I just left it at that: a six-pack. A rosier, half-truth of who he was, back when I knew him.

He was 19, a small-town boy, who – by the time I had met him – had already lost friends to drunk driving. That was something they did there. Swerved recklessly through winding, dark roads, a gamble that they were all willing to take. Our lives felt endless back then; death a construct, a whisper that would never reach us.

I say I fell in love with him but now, twenty-four years later, I don’t know if that’s true. He didn’t die on a dark road, in fact, I don’t know how he died. I just know that he did, recently. And that he shouldn’t have. As, while he was not as young as he was back then, he was young. In his forties, a wife, two kids, now forced to live without him.

I’ve just started to put words into italics, experimenting with how they might look in bold. I tend to do this when I am not sure whether what I am writing is right (right?) Whether I should be saying anything on this, at all. To be clear: I am not writing this, or publishing this (if I end up doing so) for sympathy, please, do not comment: sorry for your loss. This was not someone that I have lost now, he is someone that I lost over a decade ago, in the average, normal way that a teenager loses her first boyfriend. We wanted different futures; we went different ways.

I’m writing this because, this is going to keep happening, isn’t it? We will continue to learn, in odd, and slightly dystopian ways, that those we once shared time with, those who once meant something to us, have died. And we weren’t there, we weren’t at the funeral, because, really, why should we be at the funeral, but now we’re left with these shimmering, half-memories of a person who may have forgotten us, long ago.

On this newsletter, I write about death, trying to learn how it can shape how we live. And grief like this, that does not belong to us, but that is still a part of us, is something – I feel – worth untangling. But I don’t want it to seem that’s all he is, was, to me: a piece of content for a newsletter that I have not touched for months. He was a person, he had a whole life and he mattered to many. I need to explore my memories of him, share them somehow, even though he has long been a stranger to me.

I was bored at work and I googled his name. That’s when I learned that, months ago, he died. That people wore their Rangers shirts, to his funeral. That they flew the flag, at the club he worked at, half-mast, for him. I could see, through Facebook posts, how loved he was.

People were right to love him. When we were dating, my dad was exploring with being more open about her gender-identity. She would transition a few years later, and I remember telling my boyfriend this big family secret that I felt he should know. He loved me and, therefore, he should know who I came from. I was afraid that he wouldn’t understand, transgender was not something widely spoken about, or understood, back then. Particularly not in small communities, like the one that he was raised in. But he was accepting, he understood. A few months after that conversation, at his birthday, his friends dressed him up in women’s clothing. A laddy ‘joke’ that was, and still is, common. He took me aside later, his face sheet white with his sensitivity, as he was so worried I would think he was mocking dad. “I would never do that,” he said. “I just felt I couldn’t say no to my friends, but I wasn’t, your dad is one of the best people I’ve met.” He was someone who cared and thought deeply, who could open his heart to other ways of being.

There are pages and pages in my diary, devoted to him. I could seek them out, use my past words as a glue, for the torn-up memories, scattered across my current mind. But… I don’t want to because they will reveal something grimy: I wasn’t very nice to him.

My reasons are selfish, this not wanting to confront myself with my own cruelty, because, in many ways, that is who I am: selfish. Someone who puts her own clambering need for new experience, for a life full of the new, above how I might make others feel. Or is that how I’ve been conditioned to think? That choosing to live, for what I wanted, over what a man wanted from me, was wrong. That I was the bad, big city girl, who broke his heart, with all her never ending wants.

If I’m kind to myself, which I need to be, I should remember that I was 16, then I was 17, and the world was calling my name. Or, more specifically, the night-clubs of Edinburgh were calling my name. Mondays were establishment, Tuesdays I went to my grandma’s (as in my actual grandma’s, this isn’t the name of a club), Wednesday, the Cav, Thursdays, establishment again… The weekends could be his. The clubs were fuller, they didn’t need to turn a blind eye to the under agers, in order to fill their tills up. He didn’t like clubbing, was incredibly shy, whereas I was someone who (still am in many ways) needed to do hourly laps of the club, see who was there, get to know the same faces, week in, week out. Gossip, dance, do shots. We weren’t compatible and I should have been able to see that but instead, I tried to have both – the comfort of him and the wildness of the night. I couldn’t. Not without hurting him.

I cheated on him. A dancefloor kiss, nothing really, looking back. I thought I was doing ‘the right thing’ by telling him, and maybe it was, I don’t know. But… what damage did I do, with those actions, that he continued to carry? Maybe none at all. Am I magnifying my small role in his life in a useless, and self-centred way?

When I look at photos of who he was, right before he died, I do not recognise him. I could have passed him on the street and not have known. So, who am I, to be reflecting on a short, sharp period of his life and what impact that had, when I don’t know – and I will never know?

But, in trying to decipher the weird feeling I have, that I can’t shake off, since I learned of his death, it is those moments that I keep returning to. We have the power, when we’re young, when we’re old, right this very second, to alter how someone else interacts with the world, with other humans, other relationships. Did he struggle to trust again, after that? When other girlfriends told him that they were out, dancing, gossiping, doing shots, what did he hear? I know that I made someone’s life worse. Not for long, he most certainly will have got over it, got over me. I am just a spec in his life, and he was just a spec in mine. But there was a point when we mattered so much to each other, when we loved each other enough to hurt each other.

And now? I do wish I could say sorry. But, I also know, had he carried on living, which he should have, I wouldn’t have reached out. Maybe somewhere, in some alternative universe, he’s randomly Googling my name, learning of my death, wondering if I remembered him – and how…

The kindest thing we could have done for each other was to let each other go, let each other live in the ways we wanted, in the ways we could never have lived together. I also know that I can’t type out something saccharine here, like: be kind, think of how your actions could impact others, because we all know that, and yet, we all carry on, causing damage to each other, in all these big and small ways, as we hurtle towards our own deaths.

I guess, what makes a life, isn’t rounded-off, straight-forward happy memories. We can’t Sellotape together torn-up moments and create a neat ending out of them. We can have hurt someone, and we can have loved someone. We can know that whoever they became, we were a part of that even in the teeniest, and tiniest of ways. We can feel strange, and we can feel sad, and we can try to remember them, fondly, hoping the life they went on to live without us was, as much as it could be, a happy one.

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Here are some facts: my dad is a woman. She was born, all those years ago, in this man’s body. This ill-fitting, uncomfortable to wear body, that simply did not match her soul. For a long, long time she functioned within it, moving around the world, clunkily, never quite feeling right, or herself.

When I was 19, my mum died. The year she was dying, 2004, the Gender Recognition Act passed. It was during that time that my dad heard a voice, a voice that commanded attention, a voice you had to listen to. “The woman inside of you is wholly good.” She embraced that voice. She had to. Her mind was breaking down, it could not cope anymore. All of this pretending, it drags a person down, after a while.

But this isn’t her story. It’s mine.

We grew up in a topsy-turvy house. The living room was on the very top floor, a graveled path led out onto the garden, the garden that was high on a hill. We had spiral wooden staircases and when the door buzzed, our dog would clatter down it, barking.

It was a new house, no one had lived there before. Still, one night I saw a ghost. The strange thing about this ghost, though, was that it looked just like my dad. The ghost was wearing a white silk nightie and the ghost was looking in the mirror. Its face was so haunted. The ghost did not believe in its reflection. I had to check, to be sure. “Dad, dad,” I said. The ghost did not respond. That’s how I knew. My dad would have responded.

As my dad, was (is) great. He, for that is what he was, back then, would take me to ballet. He would work so hard at getting my bun just right, only for the teacher to come over, whip it out, and in two seconds, put it back, only better, neater this time. I could hear my dad’s laugh, rooms away. When I got my ears pierced, my dad did too. Both of them, even though I said, “dad, men just get one pierced.”

When I had friends round, unexpectedly, I’d call the house first. 557 6609. I still remember the number. “Mum, can you make sure dad isn’t in his skirt?” I’d say. I didn’t know what I was asking. To pull off his comfort, to hide… for me.

We were on stage together, last Sunday. I told her this, in front of an audience of 80 people. The guilt that I carry. It’s heavy. She didn’t remember. She had become accustomed to hiding. No one understood, back then, what it meant to be transgender. It was sold to us as a dirty thing, a perverted thing. “We had a community, I loved dropping you off at school,” she said, the spotlight on her. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that anymore, if people knew.”

I wish she wasn’t right. That she had been able to be herself, earlier. That she didn’t have to hide, for me, for my sister, for my mum. I can remember taking time off of school, building a fort out of the sofa pillows. We had to take care of dad. She wasn’t well. She needed us.

“You saved my life,” she says now. I don’t know if it was then, that breakdown. What I do know, is: we loved her, and that, in turn, allowed her to love herself.

I do. I love her so, so much. I’d build her a fort of pillows, whenever she needs me.

At the end of our talk, which perhaps, I should explain what it is, was part of Out In The Hills, a queer festival at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. “In conversation with Jo Clifford and Catriona Innes.” We laughed a lot, it was fun. Anyway, at the end of our talk, there was a Q&A. Someone, the parent of a trans child, asked “which is harder, having a trans child, or a trans parent?” I didn’t know the answer. Hardness varies from person to person. Hardness is not a competition. But I was grateful for the question. Because it is hard. It has been hard, to have a trans parent. I don’t like to say that very often. There’s a lot of hate out there, right now, for trans people. I don’t want to give those bigots anything to run with. I don’t want them to say “see, being trans causes harm. Look at the harm it caused this girl, this sunshine of a girl, so tiny, so sad, watching a haunted ghost in the mirror.”

But actually. It’s them who caused me harm. It’s them who caused those breakdowns. It’s them who made me feel so worried, and scared, that I needed to call ahead. It’s them who made her remove the skirt. The skirt she looked so happy in. That wasn’t me.

After mum died, I couldn’t trust the world around me. I couldn’t hear the phone ring, and not think, someone’s died. When I was 21, my dad had major heart surgery. I can remember two things: the bruise that bloomed across her chest, this huge butterfly of a bruise, that, it turns out, wasn’t so beautiful. It was a sign they’d messed her drugs up. She almost died, over those days. The second thing I can remember is crying under a tree, on my 21^st birthday. I was going to be an orphan.

Do you know what saved her? Being wheeled into surgery, being treat, as a woman, as who she is, by the doctors. It made her strong enough to pull through. To be seen, as you are, by strangers, that’s a powerful thing.

That might not happen anymore. The Supreme Court ruling, a man is a man, a woman is a woman, all that crap, could see her banished. Out of the spaces where she survives as herself.

I’ve not been afraid, for a while now. I can trust the ground beneath my feet, I can trust my phone when it rings. But there’s a red-flag warning, fluttering in my stomach. The way that transgender people are being treat, in the UK right now, being forced to limit where they go, what they do. Being attacked, in words, in action, in murders, is heading toward genocide. That’s not me being overdramatic. That’s from the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Protection. Did you know that 62% of transgender people have faced harassment and violence? Did you also know that 88% of transgender people do not report the crimes they have faced? I didn’t want to know that 48% of transgender people have attempted suicide once in their lives?

When you don’t allow people to be themselves, they breakdown, they die. If they survive, they survive haunted.

We have to let people be. Let them live.

I don’t know what comes next. I know I’m afraid again. Not for her, she lived, she lives. But there are other daughters, other fathers, in hiding. How can we make a world that’s safe for them?

Thank you so much, for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, please do share it. And please do follow my dad on her Substack, The Light Inside. Also, during our talk, we heard that relationships like ours are rarely shown, happy, loving ones. We’d love to do more talks like it, and maybe even write a book. If that’s something you’d like do let us know! We can use it to build a case for agents, publishers! Thank you!

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The hideousness of January, after 40-years-of hard training, still comes as a surprise. There’s the flutter of the credit card, through my letter box, ordered and needed now, undoing a year of paying it off. Then there’s the virus I thought I had escaped, plunging up my darkest emotions, being oh-so-convincing, as it tells me the way I feel now, is how I will always feel.

As that’s January’s cruelest trick, it arrogantly presents itself as the cement in the year: it tells us that, somehow, the actions we take now – hurry, quick, quick – are creating our path for the year ahead. I know, rationally, that this is not true but still, I found myself, weepy, drooping and pathetic, in bed, convinced that this was a precedent of what was to come.

I don’t want to sob because I’m in debt again, or because I’ve had to call in sick on my first day back at work IN! THE! NEW! YEAR! I shouldn’t hold very normal, human things against myself as personal failings. But I do. And I do even more so, in this stupid, cursed month.

Writing some of this Substack, sick in bed

I’m also currently reading Workhorse, by Caroline Palmer, which is set in New York’s magazine scene, just after 9/11. It’s a brick of a book, of which I am only about a quarter of the way through, as I keep having to pause and stop reading. Not because it isn’t good. If anything, it’s too good. It’s taking me back to who I once was, and I’m not sure I like that feeling. Because, while it’s a polished, more pronounced version of my world, it is still set in my world. As Clo, its main character, is striving to make it in magazines, constantly comparing herself to those around her who have ‘made it’ and climbing the ladder, ruthlessly, and ruggedly, hoping to reach the happiness that is surely waiting for her at the top.

This was who I was in my twenties, working at Weight Watchers magazine, determined to make it on the masthead of a more glamorous glossy. Sometimes I would wander through Soho, standing outside the revolving doors of the major publishing houses and I’d watch these women, swishing in-and-out-in-and-out and I’d ache. I wanted to be them so badly. They were perfection, they were all I would never be.

And now, I’ve done it. I am not perfection and magazines are not what they were (or could they have ever matched what my imagination made them out to be?!) but I no longer ache, as I have achieved what I set out to do. I am also kinder to myself. I no longer see myself as a lump of plasticine, blobby and in need of moulding. The way I did back then.

But then I read a chapter of Workhorse and I can feel myself sinking back into that old persona, I’ll close the book, look at those around me, or open up my Instagram and wonder: why am I not her? What’s wrong with me? What do I need to change?

Me, in my twenties. I’m at a reader event magazine party trying to pluck up the courage to talk to the editor of Company magazine (RIP) I also bought that dress and kept the label on and returned it and I think about it all the time. It’s Oasis, if anyone sees it on Vinted let me know!

Between this book, and January, I find myself in a place of poor self-esteem and I need to figure out how to rebuild it.

I think we all know the obvious first step. Stop reading Workhorse.

But then, in contrast to all that I just said: god, it was fun to strive that hard. To have this incredibly simple path to follow, life felt like it had come with an instruction manual and if I followed it, precisely, the gold at the end of the rainbow would be mine. Now, in the dawn of 2026, my forties stretching out ahead, I no longer believe in that gold.

Over Christmas, I was faced with the dreaded questions all authors must face seasonally: “how’s the book selling?” Only this time, it wasn’t even my book I was being quizzed about, but one that I had ghost-written within the year. I tried to explain that, really, how it had sold was none of my business. I had written something that matched the brief, that made the celebrity and the publishers happy and, from what I’ve seen, is generally being enjoyed by those who have picked it up and read it. But that, also, even if I did know how many copies it had sold, I did not want to use that as a marker of its quality, of my worth as a writer.

When I wrote The Matchmaker (my book that came out in 2019) I was in peak Workhorse mode. I woke up, each day, at 6am to write it and then I went to work at Cosmopolitan, where I would take on a whole load of extra work, to prove that I was capable of being promoted to Features Director. Everything I aimed for was shiny job titles, awards or to be able to call myself a ‘best-selling’ author. In the end, I got the shiny job title, I won the awards but I was not able to call myself a ‘best-selling’ author. The book did not sell particularly well.

(for more on thoughts on this time, my piece: Am I Addicted To Ambition?)

Despite the first two accolades, I held the book’s (self-perceived) failure against myself for a long time. I decided that it wasn’t good, that I wasn’t good and that I could not write fiction. I had been working on my second novel and enjoying it but, suddenly, opening up the laptop I had written the Matchmaker on, and which housed this new novel, felt impossible. I couldn’t do it. But my brain had to write. I began to write shorter thoughts, little bitesize snapshots popped up and begged to be written down. I began to share them on Instagram and people began to call them poetry. From there, I was featured on a few “poets of Instagram” lists and a few accounts, with larger followings, shared my work.

With that, the hearts, the comments, the shares, the data of it all, worked its way in. I found I couldn’t write poetry without considering how it would perform and, as a result, my work got worse. Then the poems stopped arriving in my brain, altogether. They went on strike: the words knew, even if I didn’t, that they were not sufficiently rewarded by Instagram likes. They would not begin again, until I found a way to compensate them, properly, for their work.

And then I came here: to Substack. I couldn’t focus on fiction, because the best-seller lists and book sale pressure caused blockage, my poems had, in a huff, left me, and this held promise. A place I could just write, with no pressure to achieve in any way. Then the Substack best-seller lists appeared, I heard of people making way over my yearly salary with their offerings. Data was pointing at me, once again, and calling me a failure. And, as those of you who have read this newsletter for a while will have noticed, I stopped writing as much.

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I thought I left behind the Workhorse version of myself behind. That I was now someone who prioritised joy, and love, and having fun, over ambition and achievement. That I now knew not to compare myself to other, glossy magazine girls, that climbing the masthead and reaching its peak was not the correct route to happiness. But now, as I view my writing over the past five years (the writing I’ve done for myself, not for a brand or magazine) I can see I’ve upgraded that discontent. I don’t compare myself to other women, but instead, numbers, data. I’ve just fallen for another trap of success and it’s limited me. I have been less creative because of it.

I’ve been writing this newsletter over the course of a few days, and found, writing this part (where I realised how much I had let data limit my creativity) incredibly tough to work through. I hated myself for being so shallow and numbers orientated. It’s not like I’m numbers orientated in a good way, I told myself, not like I ever actually manage to use them to achieve any fucking thing. Instead, I let them mock me into submission, into silence. How pathetic.

But then, I realised I’ve fallen for January’s cruelest trick of all: that we must hate ourselves. That that’s the only way we can, and should, ever change. We must gorge ourselves in December, in order to squeeze and prod at our fat in January, we must find our flaws and bully ourselves relentlessly until we eradicate them.

What if I tried to approach 2026 differently? As when I try to be softer and kinder to myself, I can see that it’s natural for the data to have wormed in this way. Yes, data and creativity shouldn’t mix and yet, here’s Substack emailing me my stats for the month, here’s poets being given book deals based on the virality of their work, here’s Google Analytics dictating what stories journalists should and should not write. And, perhaps most vitally, here’s my bills, waiting to be paid, and my salary is based on how well I manage to sell words. Of course that’s going to get to me! I can’t fight against it. I just need to acknowledge that the data is there, that it matters but it’s not all that matters. What I have to offer goes way beyond it.

I’ve heard that now, people choose words to define their year and guide them, rather than setting resolutions, in stone. I like this. It feels easier amidst this tug-of-war I’m having with myself, trying not to be as defined by career milestones but still very much wanting (and enjoying) having a career and moments to strive for. I think I’ll go for: soft power - recognising the power I hold to go for all that I want, but also the softness to be kind to myself if it doesn’t work out how I thought it might.

It’s the year of the horse. Maybe, for me, that looks like a Shetland Pony.

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What do you think? Also! What’s your word of the year? PS: I know this one isn’t really about grief at all, sometimes it’s good for me to write about other things. If you enjoyed it and are looking for something in a similar vein, here’s two similar pieces I wrote…

How Can We Accept All Sides Of Ourselves?

How career comparison stole my joy

Also, if you want to order The Matchmaker, I changed my mind, it is really good! I was just being a bitch to myself. It’s here. And, as always, to support my work please do share or consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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My mum once bought this egg-shaped device that she would rest her face on. It was said to massage her chin; pummel the double out of it. I’m sitting here now, robot-face, red-light permeating through my skin, strapped into a ‘scientific’ beauty aid that I don’t know if there’s any truth to, and I’m thinking: is this her? Is this something she would do?

I’ve just turned 40, as have most of my friends, and we’re told that this is the age you begin to see it: you become your parents. All those habits that you found oh-so-annoying as a teenager are now lived out, through your own actions. But without mum there, living ahead of me, I’m feeling, suddenly, like I’m missing something vital. A mirror image of who I might come to be.

The ridiculous thing about this revelation is it’s come from something so much fun. I’ve been listening to Sentimental Garbage where Caroline and Dolly are overanalysing, in a Freudian way, why the F.R.I.E.N.D.S are the way they are. How Monica ultimately, slowly and just-as-neurotically is becoming her mother, how Rachel has done everything she can to escape her mother’s marry-rich-and-lose-yourself-fate. I adore this stuff; unpicking people’s behaviours is one of my favourite hobbies.

But… then I turned in on myself: how can I figure myself out? What parts of her am I living out? What parts of her am I escaping?

I knew my mum for 19 years. Or 14 really, as, of course, I can’t remember her when I was a baby, or a toddler. Maybe, actually, it’s more like 10 years as who she was, up until I was nine or ten, is simply a comforting blur. A cashmere green jumper to be held against. The sound of humming as she worked, and I played.

One of the greatest compliments you could give me, if you knew her, is to tell me I look like her. That I remind you of her. It’s something for me to cling to, a part of her, existing through the freckles on our arms, the roundness of our faces. That used to be enough, but lately, I’ve found I need more.

I don’t think my mum would be very happy at me saying, in public, that she bought that chin-pummelling device. I think that was a private vanity, that she’d have preferred to remain behind closed doors. But I don’t know that. I can only guess that. As, really, there were so many things about her that I didn’t know at all. Ten years really isn’t that long to know someone.

I’d like to be like her. In more than just how I look. I was told recently that I stroke my nose with my forefinger, when I’m thinking. Did she do that? What actions of hers do I now do? I know that she had a lot of friends, the queue for hospital visits and bursting funeral hall, showed that. She threw parties, with different themes.

I have lots of friends, I love to go to parties.

Recently, I was ranting to my dad about journalism and how one-note opinions and articles, lacking nuance, sail successfully across the internet, lauding praise, while the sort of writing I do, considering and presenting different sides, doesn’t attract nearly the same amount of numbers. “That’s exactly the sort of rant your mum used to have,” dad said to me. (she was also a writer and journalist.)

I loved that. But also, I wished that she could tell me about it herself. That we could go for lunch and slag off other journalists, convincing ourselves and each other that our rants were not bitter, pouring wine into each other’s glasses and cackling at how silly we were being.

I’d like to know what she liked about parties, who she enjoyed speaking to and who she didn’t. I’d like to tell her about the acid trip I had, compare notes with her own psychedelic adventures. I’d like to know her not through how other people saw her, but how she saw herself.

I want to be able to understand myself better, by understanding her better.

This is a new longing. It is only something I have recently noticed that I am missing. As, while some of these wants (wine-filled lunches, conversations on all that she knows) have cropped up before, what hasn’t is the realisation that there are parts of myself I will never be able to truly understand, because I do not know much of who she was. And I definitely do not know who she would have become.

I often worry, when writing this newsletter, that I am picking at old wounds, simply for content. It’s not that there’s not things happening, currently, that are evoking grief within me, grief that could be written about. As there is. It’s just that I often don’t want to write about things while they’re ongoing, there’s no clarity to be found in the raw, and harm can be caused in broadcasting pain that involves other people. I want to be mindful of that.

But also, old, long-running grief, does still deserve to be spoken about, as much as the new, fresh stuff. Because it surprises you. I’m surprised by this revelation, this new way of missing her. There’s this person that I want to get to know deeply, more than anything or anyone, and I can’t. It’s impossible to.

Is that why I like parties? Hopping from one person, to the next, gathering snippets of who they are, always hoping and chasing and getting to know strangers, because there is one stranger I will never get to meet?

Or is it because she liked parties? Because it’s in my bones to glitter, in the same way that she did?

Am I trying, in some way, to fill the space that she left, with my stories, my journalism? Get to know everything, about everyone, because I will never know her?

Or is it simply in my DNA, to write?

Or… Do I just enjoy writing? Do I really need to go this deep at all?

I’ll never know. And I’m not sure there’s much good in trying to find out.

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What do you think? Is this something you’ve encountered in your own grief? And thanks again for sticking with me, I know I’ve neglected this Substack this year. It’s been tough trying to navigate spending time on something that doesn’t pay my bills, even though I LOVE it so. But I should, I know, as it really does mean a lot to me how many people read and are invested in my brain dump writing here.

Oh also the podcast I mentioned is and it’s BRILLIANT. It makes me so, so happy! I was even on it once, you can listen to me banging on about Maroon 5 here.

I remember feeling anxious when my phone was handed back to me, after the picture had been taken. I don’t really like having my photo taken, when I am wearing swimwear. I knew how it would go, I would look fat and rosy-cheeked, and I’d have to smile and say to my friend: “it’s great, I love it” before swiftly deleting it, both from my camera roll and my own memory.

But... I liked it. I looked happy. I was happy. I posted it, proud of my long, strong legs, smug about a morning spent in the sauna.

Not long after, I received a notification. An anonymous account, faceless, a name consisting only of random letters and numbers had commented:

“Get on Ozempic.”

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I have just filled in a health form, for a health retreat I am going to, in India, next week. This is very much in my nature, I say yes to things I find challenging, I say yes to trying new experiences.

They asked me my weight. My finger hovered over the drop-down menu. I didn’t want to give them it. There was the option “prefer not to say.” I felt bold choosing it, defiant in a way that I can’t quite explain. Choosing that option, a fill in box appeared. It asked “do you feel comfortable with your present weight or do you feel pain in your knees?” and then “are you satisfied with your weight or do you want to gain/lose weight. And, if so, by how many kilos?”

I paused. How to answer.

I wrote: “I would like to lose weight... But not at the expense of my happiness.”

I’m not sure if this is true. The lose weight thing, I mean, not the happiness thing. The happiness thing is definitely true, as, what I could have written (perhaps should have) is...

I can’t go back to hating myself.

I can’t go back to hating myself.

I can’t go back to hating myself.

I can’t.

I wanted to get ahead of them. Already I felt their question about my knees was pointed, accusatory. Like “you may be happy with your weight but your knees aren’t, you big old fatty.” (see how easily I can slip into cruelty?) I didn’t want to arrive and have them force me to stand on a scale, tell me that the one thing I need to make my priority - above ALL else - is my weight. I didn’t want someone to think that they needed to tell me this, that it wasn’t something that I was aware of.

There was a time when, in every working hour, I thought about my weight. I worked for a weight loss magazine; it was my job to think about it.

Before I go any further, I should add I loved working for this magazine. I learned many of the key skills I use today, there. The women I worked with were fun, wise and kind. I also don’t think that there’s anything wrong with wanting to lose weight, and embarking on a weight-loss programme (or, if it works for their medical needs, GLP-1s)

But... It’s probably (actually definitely), not good for the mind to work, for years, within the weight-loss industry. To become conditioned to robotically write, as you know the copy will sail through to subs if you do, “she ballooned to a size 12.”

I didn’t know then what I know now. How damaging this language can be, what diet culture (and obsession) can do to an entire generation. If I had, would I have written that still? I wouldn’t write it now, but then? Then, that’s what we did.

If you think that I contributed to the damage of the psyche of my readers then, do know, I was punished. Punished in ways I am only now becoming aware of, as I look back on the ways I viewed my body, and myself.

I did not consider myself hot, or sexy, or strong. I considered myself in numbers: how many I had eaten that day, how many I had lost that week. I dressed in drab fit-and-flare dresses, clothes that did not make me feel joyful but that, crucially, made me look thinner. I worked out, I did a half marathon, and the thoughts throughout that race, my own brain taunting me, while I achieved something great were you are not built for this, you are not built to be seen. I was horrified, simply horrified, by the sight of my skin crossing the finishing line. The moment captured in a photo, never to be seen again.

Perhaps if I had posted it (though this was before Instagram) some faceless, nameless account would have commented...

Get on Weight Watchers.

Today, I am fine. I think, for someone that wrote about weight loss for the majority of my twenties, I have escaped lightly. The fit-and-flare dresses are (thank god!) gone, I have not stepped on a scale in years (’prefer not to say’) and the only numbers I track are found on barbells, as I attempt to lift heavier, feel stronger. I’m in my forties and think I look better than I ever have, not because I’m thinner, or because my body has changed much, but because I carry myself in the way of someone whose camera roll does not consist of photos of myself, standing in saggy pants, an endless parade of ‘befores’, waiting patiently for her ‘after.’

But I am also deeply aware that the assumption is, and always was, that my priority, any woman’s priority, should be to get slimmer. We are eternal Bridget Jones’, only now, she wouldn’t pull herself into Spanx but jab herself in the stomach with a pen.

I’m afraid that, in a few weeks, I’ll return from this retreat (the retreat where I placed as my aim: “to get to know my body better”) and all I will want, in that old, all consuming way, is to be thin again. Some medical expert will take one glance at my body and assume that I want to be thinner. That they will scratch out my old aim, and make this my new one. That they’ll think I need to sacrifice my happiness.

I’m aware it was just one comment, one troll. That the form is not actually taunting me, that I am slipping into taunting myself. But then I think of what that faceless, nameless person must have hated about the photo. It wasn’t my body, it was my joy. There are people in this world, many of whom hold a lot more power than an unhappy stranger hiding behind a keyboard, who (for many reasons) want to strip women of their joy. Shrink women so that they can feel tall, so that they can feel power, once more. I think I know now, not to let them. I hope I do.

I have to cling onto my happiness.

Thank you for reading. Let me know what you think, in the comments below.

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Then, one day it was gone. My memory may be warping things here, making me out into more of an angelic child than I actually was. But I don’t think I cried, I don’t think I wailed, “I wanted it, it was miiiine.” I knew it was expensive. I thought my parents couldn’t afford it. I didn’t want to make them feel bad, or guilty (again, perhaps my dad will tell this story very differently.)

I woke up on my eighth birthday and there it was. The doll’s house! I treasured it. I still treasure it. It lived in my childhood home long after I outgrew it, then, when my dad moved the doll’s house did too. It sat by the front door and became the home for gloves, stray earrings, loose change. The tiny tomatoes have fallen out of their crates, the ancient glue no longer holding them in place, the potato sack is now empty.

The dolls house now, stained, and housing an exercise band amidst the broken furniture.

I’m in Edinburgh right now, I’m sitting in a dusty pink chair, its velvet is tattered and faded. The chair clings on. I’m here, because my dad’s body is becoming tattered, faded. Her joy, that’s what she clings onto. But, in order to dampen, limit her pain (how we wish we could clear it out instead), we need to clear out the clutter. Make her life easier to live. The doll’s house can’t stay here any more. Once again, a home, in need of a home. Where can it go? Can I say goodbye?

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When my grandma died, my sister and my dad were my shields. They took on the agony so I would not have to feel it. They were the ones who sifted through her things, decided what to keep and what to discard. When it comes to other people’s belongings, it’s a guessing game as to what’s important - a child’s drawing can be worth as much as a piece of gold. I laid claim to the things I wanted without stepping into her space. I didn’t think I could: to me, she existed within her belongings. To watch them be thrown away would be to throw her away, to fling out how much she meant to me.

I didn’t feel this way, as much, when it came to my mum’s belongings. Perhaps because I lived with her. I visited my grandma, in her home, and her stuff was novelty to me, I visited her but I also visited her button tin, her marble solitaire game, her Scrabble board. To say goodbye to those things was admitting: I’ll never be here again, I’ll never feel this form of safety again.

My mum was my home. She was the house, she was the walls, she was the windows. She was the air that I breathed. The loss was perhaps so big, so unexpected, so unfair, that I could detach myself from it. When you know that nothing will ever be the same again, when your world has altered so dramatically, every item has significance… and therefore, no items can hold significance. If I let them, everything would tumble down.

Yesterday, as part of our clear out, dad brought out two bin bags. Clothes. Grandma’s clothes. Mum’s clothes. My grandma was Plymouth Brethren Christian, she had to wear a hat to church. Women had to cover their heads. In this bag there was a pillar-box red hat, she wore it with a red cardigan, with gold buttons. She was there, cherry red in my memory. There was another black hat, lined with fluff. That hat is less clear, there’s something about it, lingering, hard to reach. There was also a blue cardigan, with orange flowers. My grandma knitted that cardigan, my mum wore it.

I took all of these items and I breathed them in, they smelled of dust, they were musty. I placed the hats on my head. They were too small.

At the bottom of the bag was another hat. Faux fur, leopard print. Definitely not church appropriate. My mum wore hats for rebellion, for fun. I knew who she was, from that hat. I put it on, I looked silly. I took it off.

The space within the hats was empty, the air below them new. This is a new flat, floors neither of them have ever stepped on, doors they have not opened. If I tried, really hard, I could see their faces, what they looked like in those hats, in those clothes. But then I’d open my eyes and they weren’t there.

“The enemy of a clear-out is sadness, nostalgia and regret,” I’d said to my dad that day. “We’re going to have to be brutal.” The harsh, brutal truth is: the people we have lost are not found within their belongings. I will not find my mother within her empty coat, my grandma does not exist in size-three, patent buckled shoes.

Yet, I wore my mum’s clothes for years. Piece by piece I lost each item, items that made me feel close to her. I wrote once*, wondering, was this deliberate? An unconscious but conscious act on my part, an essential part of the grieving process… or, am I just forgetful?

Scattered across my bookshelf, gathering dust, are porcelain birds and angry-looking mice with China stamps on their feet. Collectables from my grandma’s China cabinet. I hold onto a copy of Bob Dylan’s Tarantula, my mum’s writing on the inside of the book. I can’t find all of them in their belongings, this is true, but there is also something of them, found within the pages, within the hand-painted eyes of the birds. These are things I will never throw out, I will never lose. To erase all of their belongings from my life, would (to me) feel like erasing them, entirely. I can’t do that. I need to remember them, I need to hold the things that they once held.

But I also can’t live in a museum of loss, let the past and its purchases pull me back, always reminding me of those long gone. So… when culling our possessions, making way for a new phase of life, how can we choose what to keep, and what to throw away?

When my family cleared out my grandma’s house, they found an old chocolate box, stuffed full of letters. Dad kept it, gave it to me, just yesterday. These were clearly the most important letters of her life; notes celebrating the birth of her daughter, my mum, Susie.

I read them knowing how it turned out, that my grandma sat beside her only child, watched the breath leave her. Suddenly, as I write this, it comes to me: the black fluffy hat, did my grandma wear that to my mum’s funeral? Is that where I saw it last? How did she get home that day? Who was with her? I only remember fragments, the snowdrops clutched in someone’s hand, and later, the fog of weed smoke, a desire for a boy to kiss me.

I feel ashamed that I do not know who accompanied her home.

I kept the letters. I threw the hat away.

As for the doll’s house, its walls hold so much. I held onto it, for so long, because I thought, one day, I would have a daughter - and she would play with it. I am not having children. This was my decision, but still, with that, comes a sense of grief. Choosing what to do with that doll’s house go is a separate feeling of loss. I will be letting go of the memories of the child I once was, but also letting go of the woman I will never be. The woman I still feel, on some level, I should be.

My own children may never play with that house but… I did become someone, thanks to it. Someone I always wanted to be, someone that fits me. My house, my home, it’s above a shop. A shop that was once a green grocer’s, now an art gallery. That birthday, my parents bought me my future.

At lunch today, my friend pulled up in her car. Ready to load the bags we’d cleared out into the car, and take them to the charity shop. I said to dad “I’ll take the doll’s house, it can go now.”

She said: “it’s not time for you to get rid of it just yet.”

She was right. There’s nostalgia, there’s sadness but there’s not regret, within the four-walls of that miniature home. My mum bought me that house, my grandma watched me play with it. There’s a new future, waiting within its walls.

I just need her around to show me what that could look like.

What do you think? What items do you hold onto and why? Are there things that remind you of your past, of people you’ve lost? Have you ever gotten rid of anything you regretted, later?

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*For Elle magazine

I’m waiting for a lump in my breast to shrink. Monitoring a pink and red rash that’s spread, like a water stain, across my skin.

I’m also trying to keep a check on my mind, on my Googling hands, on the parts of me that say: “this was always how it was going to be. Death has always lingered unseen, and waiting.”

When it comes to worry, what’s normal, what’s right?

What’s obsessive?

What’s necessary?

My breast itches now, reminding me of my predicament. It could be my bra, a delicate, red, lacy thing that I put on this morning because it’s been designed to fit. It holds my breasts, or in this case, breast, as there’s only one that matters, right now. It looks pretty but it’s sturdy. Its job today is to prevent pain.

A few months ago, I was in a Vegas hotel room. Watching the LED Sphere, currently a cartoon face, smile and wink at me. My phone sat on the table in front, it was 5pm in the UK, morning where I was. Gamblers pulled at slot machines below; there’s never a time in Vegas when someone, somewhere isn’t gambling. I was waiting for a phone call from a doctor. My stomach gnawed, hungrily, at me. But I couldn’t go in the lift, down to breakfast. The lift didn’t have reception. And if the doctor couldn’t get through to me now I would have to wait longer; I would have to wait longer in a head that insisted on torturing me, that would not turn off, no matter how much I begged it.

My phone rang. I answered. The line was glitchy, broken-up. I heard what I needed to: it wasn’t cancer. In my happy haste, I told them to remove me from their system. I went for breakfast.

“I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to have to write this down as a crusty, scabby nipple,” the doctor had said, about a month or so before. There’s no real medical term for a crusty, scabby nipple it seems, so this is how it was marked down. And that is what I’d been facing; one nipple that changed, crusting over, occasionally bleeding, bright red droplets falling down my stomach. Then there were the shooting pains, the itching. Nothing too major, but irritating, and seemingly endless. It didn’t get worse, but it also didn’t get better.

I have a history of thinking that I am dying. That everyone I love is dying. I have been trying to rationalize this wild way of thinking, look at the evidence, and see that: I’m still here, they’re still here.

This obsession became a problem I had to fix. The hypochondria was a new, ironically, self-diagnosis that was, probably, more accurate than those of the past. But which I have not been particularly kind to myself about.

So, knowing my history, my wayward brain, I bullied myself into thinking everything was fine. The “crusty, scabby” nipple was fine. I was not to Google it. Googling it leads to spiraling, Googling leads to… death. But, as a poster on the back of my gym’s shower door told me, nipple changes are something to get checked out. Nipple changes can be a sign of breast cancer. In telling myself that I was a worrier, that I have health anxiety, that I can’t be trusted, I’d been ignoring my body telling me something was up. That’s the conundrum, really. I’m told all the time (in fact, I’m sure I’ve even written these words): “listen to your body.” But… how can I, when my mind twists what my body has to say? When my mind was trained on a formative experience, that of a mother being fine, and then, a mother being told she was dying?

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So, I went to my doctor. That doctor referred me to a breast clinic. The breast clinic wanted a biopsy. That biopsy involved a needle, right in the nipple, and me leaving, blinking in the August sunlight, wondering – was there any need for this? Or has my anxiety just bullied me, so far, that I, demanded, a needle in my breast? Unnecessary pain. Stupid mind. But this wasn’t my anxiety. This was health professionals, telling me that they were sure everything was fine, it was, most likely, a skin condition but, on the very, very, very rare possibility that it was cancer, they needed to rule that out.

I was right to get the checks. I was wrong to do what I did next, waiting for the results, which was hit up my old friend Google. I found it strangely comforting, like I was shielding myself from future surprise pain by preparing, and reading as much as possible. I convinced myself, through every single real-life story, and every single forum I could find, that it was cancer. For weeks, until that phone call, that was what I told myself. I almost cancelled the trip to Vegas, reasoning that I didn’t want to receive the diagnosis so far from home.

As I made my way down, in the lift, finally, for breakfast, I told myself I wouldn’t do this again. That, as I got older, there were going to be more reasons to worry. More ailments to get checked out. I would get them checked out, in a grown-up adult way and then I would consider the facts, the statistics. I wouldn’t always jump to the worse case scenario.

Now, here I am, prodding my breast, Googling my symptoms, deep in the forums. It’s mastitis, a breast infection, most commonly seen in breastfeeding mothers. I am not a breastfeeding mother, but, due to the “crusty scab” the infection has likely got in. God, aren’t I sexy? Anyway, this is the most likely scenario. Another, incredibly rare form of cancer is simply something that needs to be ruled out. But, to rule it out, takes time, takes monitoring, takes waiting for a lump underneath my breast to get smaller, and smaller, until it disappears.

I know, now, how to monitor my wayward brain, when there’s nothing to worry about. I know, now, that when my phone rings it’s, most likely, most of the time, not bad news. My life has not shattered in a very long time. I can trust the ground beneath my feet. What I don’t have training in is balancing when something does need to be checked out, when there is something worrying, but not necessarily, devastating.

At the weekend, the pain in my breast was so stabbing, I could not walk. Now? It’s just “the normal” – back to the shooting, stabbing, tiny knives, taunting me now and then. I realised that the moment I heard “not cancer” I told myself I had been stupid, over-reacting. I dismissed myself from further checks, when I am still having to deal with something that causes me discomfort.

If I’m in pain, I do owe it to myself to find out why, what’s causing it, even if that cause is not the worse-case-scenario. Even as I write this I have a lingering awareness that there could be people reading this who are living with the worst-case, whose lumps did not shrink. I don’t want to come across like I am asking for sympathy, when others are worse off, but, I want to write about this because I think this way of thinking isn’t just damaging me, it’s damaging a lot of others.

I want, I need, to be able to “trust my body”, to enter into a rational conversation with it. What, when, if, there is something devastating lurking within me, am I going to girl-who-cried-wolf with my own health? Will I chastise myself for being silly, stupid, dramatic, OTT, too much to the extent I ignore whatever it is, whatever lies ahead? As these voices in my head also match the general atmosphere in the medical world. Women are dismissed as dramatic. Their health is not (always) taken seriously. I’ve been OK, with this particular ailment, I’ve been taken seriously. In the past, I have not. But this is what happens, men stay silent, until it’s too late, women are dismissed, until it’s too late.

I hate being told to ‘listen to my body’ like it’s that simple. But… I also do need to learn how, and then advocate for what my body needs. Any advice?

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I’m sorry I’ve been so absent on here! I’ve struggled to know what to write about and lost confidence a little in what I wanted to say. I got frustrated with Substack’s obsession with numbers while also comparing myself to them, I told myself I was never going to be a success on here, so I stopped entirely… Actually, maybe that’s what I’ll write about next. Thank you for sticking around for me.

Her being filled the water bottle, a quarter-full. The bottles cap was a turquoise-unicorn, the bottle more accustomed to holding orange squash or Ribena. But there she was: the colour of sand on a grey day.

I was at a festival, the rain spotted on, and off, and on again. Her daughter had come to speak to me, I was taking part in a friend’s performance, we had cardboard box confession booths and we invited people in, to share their “silly sins.” The sins that were shared were not silly. Nor were they sinful. They felt shameful but only because that shame had been placed there, by somebody else. The actions were not bad, society just told them that they were, because society is always telling us to be people that we cannot be.

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A woman popped her head up, and in, I could see her eyes through the cardboard cut-out ‘window.’ I won’t tell you what she shared. That’s not my grief to tell. What I can tell you is, I felt the same. I (hope) I could comfort her, tell her the best way to remember someone is in their entirety: their good, their bad, their awful. As that’s the best way to love someone: in their good, in their bad, in their awful. We don’t always have to like the people that we love.

She asked me if I would like to meet her mother. She was carrying her, in her backpack. She had once loved festivals. Now, here she was, at one. In another way, in another existence. That’s what I hoped, as I looked at the mother this woman so loved, housed now, in a child’s water bottle. That’s her vessel, ground down to ash, so fine you could sift it through your fingers. But where was she? Where was her soul? I don’t believe our dead are just gone. That that’s it. But here was someone’s dead, a substance that could easily float off into the air.

I’ve been thinking about my future, lately. What changes I want to make, who I want to be. I went for a walk in the woods, began to think. I missed my own mum then, I so wanted to ask her what she felt was best for me, I wanted her to boss me into the right decision. A ladybird came flying down, a red-and-black one, like the tattoo etched onto my wrist. Was that her? Was she telling me that all was going to be OK? Or was I just telling myself that, creating comfort out of insects, looking for magic that was not there?

In an interview recently, a singer told me that a magpie was knocking his beak against her window, for three whole weeks. On the last day of his knocking, her dad died. When I spoke to Lotte Bowser she spoke of how she asked for a sign, from Ben, her fiance and she asked for an owl. An owl appeared. Once you begin searching for signs, you can see them everywhere. The existence of someone, somewhere, elsewhere, calling to you from their newfound dimension. But it’s not real, it’s not solid. The ladybird only talks to me in my head.

We held a funeral that day, at the festival. For shame. We had a disco coffin, covered in mirrored tiles. The artist’s message was that we do not bury our shame, we hold it high, glistening in the sunlight and… we dance.

I did not see that woman again, or her mother. But I thought of her, I hope I had helped relieve her of some of her shame. Because there is so much shame in grief, we want to remember them ‘right.’ We want to live correctly, for them. Which is impossible, because each and every one of those ashes, in that bottle, held a different side of this woman. I didn’t know her, but I know this is true, because it is true for all of us: we are not one solid thing, we are cells, that become ashes, that become the soil, individual atoms that encompass who we are. Nice, truthful, nasty, vile. We are all of those things, at some point. To remember us, just as our good sides, would not be truthful, it wouldn’t be right.

Photo credit: Vicki Watson

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Later, at 7pm, as the sun threatened to turn to dusk, I placed half an acid tab on my tongue. This was not smart. Do not do acid on emotional days, do not do acid when you’re tired. But I did. The sky, as it does, turned to midnight blue. We all went to a light show, lasers darted around our bodies, impenetrated our eyes. Someone behind me, ca-cawed like a bird in the jungle, and I felt, suddenly, I was there, across the globe. Bubbles circulated all around us, and I was so aware of the ground beneath my feet. The soil, the grass and who it held. Who was in the air, in the bubbles. She was there. My mum. I knew that, for certain. My grandma wasn’t, because I really think, even in heaven, she wouldn’t approve of the acid trip, of my being tired. She’d have worried.

But! The bubbles!

They popped, gently on my skin, I absorbed their rainbow. The air was light and fresh and fragrant and I could feel everything flip, we went into the different dimensions, the universe was holding onto my friend and I. They, for the briefest of time, were showing us that all our dead are around us, we just can’t access them, not all the time. Not yet.

The bubbles showed us that nobody ever truly leaves. That we didn’t need to be afraid.

That mother’s body is ash, my mother’s body is ash. But their soul, their guidance, their essence: I found it, I felt them, that evening before they floated off, in the search of a new adventure.

What do you think? Everyone has different spiritual leanings and beliefs, but I find embracing this philosophy, that no one ever truly leaves us, helps me, not just when it comes to thinking about who I’ve lost but also thinking about the future. But, it’s taken me a long time to get here and if your grief is just fresh I would absolutely understand if you’re like FUCK OFF THEY DO LEAVE US, I AM CURRENTLY WITHOUT THEM. I want this to be a place for us to be honest about our grief, so please do let me know what you think in the comments.

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The piece of work I was taking part in was Skailin: A Funeral For Shame, by Creative Electric. You can find more of Heather’s work here. We performed it at Kelburn Garden Party, one of the most magical festivals on earth.

I took acid knowing I was safe and surrounded by people who loved me and who would look after me (they did.) I made sure I was fed, hydrated and I didn’t drink any alcohol or take any other drugs accompanying it. I was, overall, in a good place emotionally. It’s a powerful drug that brings up a lot of strong emotions, and it has brought me a lot of wonderful life lessons but I don’t recommend just taking it, particularly if you’re grieving or healing, without thinking properly and researching about it first.

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I have Thursdays now to write for myself, so I will aim to also publish a new letter on Thursdays, or Friday morning. Grief can be tricky to write about every week, so sometimes it might incorporate other themes.

This week, I guess, is a bit of both and is inspired by this brilliant post by particularly the line “it was her daughters’ destiny to be the children of a writer so she would carry on writing about them.” It was my destiny to be the child of a writer and then, I guess, become one myself. This is what I’ve learned.

Writing about myself, writing about others…

I have watched my ‘mum’ die on stage. I have watched my dad say goodbye to her feminine self, discuss her hatred for her body, her anger etched across the face I consider home.

I have sobbed in an audience of strangers, all of who are crying at a piece of theatre, while I cry because what I am watching is my life, my family's story. I should explain: my dad is a playwright and, while it's not all she does, sometimes her work incorporates parts of her life. Inevitably that results in her work incorporating parts of my life, my sister's life.

This has been such a long standing part of my existence, I find it difficult to explain how I feel about it. It just is. But, it strikes me, that my perspective on how we choose to write about ourselves, what we share and what we don’t, is quite unique. As I have been the subject of someone else’s pen but I have also made others the subject of my own pen.

I am who I am because I am my father's daughter. Theatre, eccentricity, pulling truth from within and displaying it, for others to see, is a part of my fabric. I should also add, my mum was a journalist and a writer. The phrase: "the personal is political" was drummed into us as children. Our life's lessons should, and would be shared.

I sit here, in an aestheticians office, numbing cream on my lips. I will write about this, for the magazine I work for. I will know what to share (the tingling on my lips, how they swelled up, the colour they turned) and what not to share (the fact the numbing cream reminds me of cocaine). This will be easy. When, so much of what I write, isn’t. Though, that’s not strictly true. As writing about myself and what I have been through, I also find easy. It's how I figure myself out. I once read that Taylor Swift has never been to therapy, because her song writing does it for her. I feel that way. When I need to, I'll take to the page, letting the words spill out, letting the words find my answers. What’s difficult is not the writing itself, but the sharing. What I choose to leave out, cut out, and why. For who.

I entered into journalism during the era of the over share. The absolute best way to climb the ranks, get your name known at a time before personal branding, before social media, was to tell everyone, everything about yourself. You'd get a page in a woman's weekly, or one of the websites known for "personal essays" and spill, spill, spill. Even better if your experience matched something a celebrity was going through that week: when I worked at LOOK, if Jennifer Aniston did or said something, it was my job to find someone who had done that very same thing. Looking back, it was quite the coincidence that the same circle of writers all had had the exact experience of whoever and whatever was trending that week...

I didn't share anything. I didn't think my life was interesting enough and I wasn't smart enough to lie. Until I moved to Cosmo and casually mentioned that my dad was transgender to my editor at the time, . ‘That, that's what you write about.' I find this still, I'll be coaching a younger writer and they'll be pitching outwards, when the real story, the most interesting one, is inwards.*

I wrote about our relationship and it helped. I was invited on Woman's Hour and I still get messages today, from the children of transparents, asking me for advice. I want people to see how happy we are. Transphobes are known to say that the process of transitioning will damage the family, hurt children. What hurts children more is to live alongside someone who is trapped within a body that doesn’t fit. My dad’s transition taught me a valuable lesson: that the more I am myself, over who I am told to be, the happier I will be. That’s all true. But, was that article the whole truth? No. Of course not. It was 2,800 words. It also involved other people, their unspoken experiences… and one of them is dead.

There are also elements of our story I didn’t want to run away, beyond us. Anything negative I could see being jumped upon, twisted. Relationships are not simple, we are happy but we are not the happy-ever-after of the trans familial experience. And perhaps I portrayed us as that.

I was on Woman’s Hour with others who had had transitioning loved ones. One of them struggled, she found it very hard to accept the new figure in her life. I was asked afterwards: “did you not judge her? Why couldn’t she be more like you? You’ve found it so easy, why couldn’t she?” I felt I’d betrayed her, others like her, as I didn’t tell the whole truth. I was trying too hard to portray us as perfect.

Yes, I have accepted my dad and her transition wholly. I am so proud of her. But I do look at old photographs and miss the person staring back at me. I don’t know if I miss that person, or who I was back then, who our family was. My dad also fully transitioned after my mum died, had that experience not happened to me, would I have been crueller to dad, been more selfish? There’s a possibility. I was a spoiled teenager. I had, very recently, been shown that time can be cruel, that time snatches people away from us. It was very hard but it was very easy: accept who someone wants to be, as they could go any minute.

When I am coaching other writers, those writing their own story, I warn them that what they say now, stays forever. To consider who will read their words and the reaction to that. This is perhaps not good advice. I am, essentially, asking them to hold parts of themselves back. Their story will not be what it could be, when they think in this way. I am holding parts of myself back, writing this. I am aware I could be a stronger, more successful writer, if I revealed more, pushed myself into a braver place.

Particularly as, right about now, I am seeing a resurgence in the personal essay. Both here, on Substack, the juiciest bits behind paywall and also on TikTok, where I am constantly served girls, tipsy on Tequila Rose, letting me in on their wildest exploits. I know that many of the writers, from back in the day, regret how much they shared. They say this with book deals, incredibly successful careers. They say they’re not sure it was worth it. I don’t doubt that this is true, that there’s lessons to be learned. The girls of today could feel the same in a few years time. I will keep sharing my advice, to consider what you share, and ask yourself why. To choose to censor yourself for your own happiness. I also don’t believe that the personal essay should be the way to success. I hate how our truth is monetised but if it goes too far, too truthful, it’s sanitised. I also do think that the growth of the personal essay has damaged journalism skills and some people’s ability to talk about anything but themselves…

But I’ll stop there before I get too catty, and also because I want people to keep sharing. To not be afraid. As, I do also worry that the regret that comes from so-called oversharing is wrapped up in who we are told to be as women (or those in a minority): that we always look better with our mouths shut.

This is not to say that it is harmless, to share our own stories. That that’s entirely our prerogative. I know I’ve hurt people with my words, thinking it was just ‘my truth.’ It is not easy to watch my dad’s most painful moments play out on stage, feel the sharp sting of the overlap of my own pain. I am also aware that I don’t know what she has chosen to hold back. That’s the mystery of (truthful) memoir writing. Sometimes even the writer is not aware of the whole truth. But, by sharing what she does, I hear from people whose lives have been changed by her writing, by her honesty. I do not see myself as a casualty within that. I see myself as part of something huge. Something that will keep expanding, lessons handed on, long after she’s gone, long after I’ve gone. The personal is political.

Let me know what you think, share with others etc etc, but MORE IMPORTANTLY subscribe to my dad’s Substack The Light Inside.

* saying that, please, please if you pitch me a story about your life please ensure that it’s interesting and unique. Struggling to meet someone good on Tinder isn’t. I’m sorry. I feel harsh. I just receive a lot of emails.

First of all, I’m sorry I’ve been MIA. I’ve been working two jobs while ghost-writing a saucy romp of a book for a reality TV star. All of those things combined have made it hard to write anything about grief. Or really anything for myself. And the longer I don’t write for myself, the more I begin to think I can’t do it. But I turned 40 last week and began writing a list of thoughts I had about it, which I’ll share below.

Thank you for remaining with me, my mind has been on imagined cheating scandals and dominatrix-ing (what would be the right word?) in limos. But I’m back now! More to come soon… Here’s what I’ve been thinking about turning 40…

The more I know, the less I understand

Across my social media feeds I see ’28 things I know at 28’ ’30 things I’ve learned now that I’m 30’ – but they seem to trail off as people get older. I didn’t want to do one. What do I know? What can I share, that I want to cement, in fact?

When you’re in your 20s, or definitely this was the case for me, life can feel black-and-white. You can share those black-and-white moments decisively with others… Cheating is wrong; if you do this, you’re this sort of person etc and then, as more and more people around you make mistakes, as you fumble and fuck up yourself, the grey areas cloud everything and making a judgement becomes all the more complicated.

I’m reluctant to say what I ‘know’ now as, there are experiences lurking around the corner. Lessons to be found in the dust. I used to want to be solid in who I was and signify that. Today I’m happy being mouldable. I want to let the ocean of my life drag me along, see where I end up.

If our 30s were about status, our 40s are about recognising how little that stuff matters

I spent my late 20s and early 30s wanting it all. Chasing for it. Begging for it. Mortgage, marriage, (working) in magazines. I got white wine drunk at weddings and cried, I wanted a ring on my finger. I worked myself ragged, rising at 6am to write most days before working all day. When I wasn’t at my desk, my eye was always at the clock, hurrying through the lunches, the events, the ‘perks’ of the job to get back to my to-do list, to look the very best I could be. For who? For what?

“Never attach your self worth on something that moves,” said Donna Ashworth in newsletter. I did that, for a very, very long time. And, if I’m honest with myself, I still sometimes do. I’m trying to unpick that, stop it. Find the line, and stay on it, between feeling fulfilled by my work and being defined by it, between being in love, but not needing a man’s love to make up my worth. I’ll get there, or maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll always teeter on the edge, maybe I’ll always try. I keep saying I want that ambitious person back, but I don’t, not really. My years can’t be spent colouring in boxes, then jumping to the next.

But, saying that… I want to throw everything away

I woke up on my birthday and wanted to cancel the spa day I had planned. Instead, I wanted to quick-hire a skip and throw all of my belongings into it. The chaos that I have curated did not feel right for a woman of forty-years-old. Owning four different dust-gathering dry shampoos felt childlike, and stupid and God why-am-I-still-like-this? I had to shake away the visions of who I told myself I’d be at this age, how I’d have figured myself out and, at least, have a zip-up purse with multiple loyalty cards inside it. Instead, I have a bucket-of-a-bag coated in melted magic mushroom chocolate, with lollipops, used napkins, five lipsticks that don’t suit me, a broken Christmas tree ornament and somewhere, within all of that, floats my bank card.

I stayed over at a friend’s cousin’s house a few weeks ago and her life was exactly how I once thought mine would look. She had a Medic8 skincare routine in her bathroom cabinet and her pasta and rice decanted into jars. A neat little back garden, with matching wicker furniture and proper wine glasses, that sparkled. So, for just under 24 hours, I stepped into her life. I, even, left her pristine home and went to a Reformer Pilates class before work. Like a saint.

I thought of her (and by ‘her’ I mean the me that became her that morning) on my birthday, and I scolded myself for not having sorted my shit out. It’s been a few days now and the urge to chuck everything in the bin and start over has subsided… a little bit. I am not an organisational expert (which my friend’s cousin is, for a living). I am a professional writer. I am curated chaos. There are parts of myself I can’t change. But then, equally, I have to consider how I want to spend (if I’m lucky) my next forty years. And I don’t just mean in terms of mess, and stuff. I spent a good chunk of my thirties in anguish, see-sawing between wanting and not wanting children. I’m settled now, in the not wanting of them, and that’s torn open my future. A whole new set of paths have emerged, there are so many possibilities to play around with… what’s next?

I don’t have to decide now

I didn’t hire the skip because, truthfully, I don’t think I am in the right mindset to rationally decide what should stay, and what should go. This applies to my life as well as my stuff. I can’t quite trust my emotions right now: they rise, they fall, they end up all in a tangle. I’m told this is normal, that big birthdays, with a zero in them, spin us all around, they make us consider things in both a good, and a bad way. I need to let them settle and then consider what they brought up.

Is being ID’d now an (older) age signifier?

A few days before my fortieth, a bouncer asked for my ID. I looked up at him baffled and said, “I don’t have any but it’s my 40^th on Monday.” He began to exclaim how amazing I looked, how he didn’t believe it and I realised… this was an attempt to charm me. I don’t think I look 40 (but then what does 40 even look like? Our perceptions of ages and looks are warped) but I don’t look under 21.

It went from not wanting to be ID’d as I was underage and didn’t have it, to then wanting to be ID’d as it was a sign I ‘looked good for my age’ to now, being ID’d because a younger man saw me coming and thought ‘I know how to flatter this woman, I’ll imply she looks young.’ I don’t like it. I should say (as this is correct) that I don’t like it because it plays into the unobtainable beauty myth that youth = beauty. But, if I’m being more truthful, I don’t like it because for someone to look at me and think that I need to be flattered by being told I look young, this has the opposite effect: it tells me I’m beginning to look older.

I feel hotter than I ever have before

The thing is, I don’t want to look younger. Most of the women I work with are in their 20s and early 30s and I admire their individual beauty but, in the same way that I admire the beauty of someone my age, or older. I don’t look back at old photographs and wish I looked like that, nor do I even really think or wish that I’d appreciated how I looked more back then. I just like how I look now and I didn’t like how I looked back then. I think that these two things correlate somehow.

I still get upset that things don’t fit in changing rooms but I blame how fucked sizing is, rather than my own body. Even my stomach, which I used to be repulsed by, I’ve found a level of peace with. I think of what my yoga teacher used to say “round is a shape, it’s a beautiful shape” when the nasty thoughts creep in. And, I’ve found, the more I like myself, the better I look.

And, isn’t it funny, how I keep wanting to caveat all of this, by adding in lines like ‘don’t mean to sound arrogant’ and ‘maybe it’s all in my head hehe’ but, I shouldn’t have to do that. I should be allowed to say: “I look good” with no caveats. And, if it is all in my head, then that’s fine. I’m looking good for the person that matters.

But saying that… the male gaze still matters to me

I’m not proud of it. But it’s deep within me, a need to gain approval from men. I thought it would decrease as I got older, but it’s increased. It was a whispered, shameful thing that came once I decided not to have children: “if I’m not a mother, and I’m not hot, then what am I?” I know that I am many things beyond where we’ve been told our value lies. I am trying, now, to forgive myself for when the harsh whispers of the patriarchy snake around me. It’s understandable that I’ve absorbed it, that I can’t just rinse decades of conditioning away with a few mantras. Here’s a poem I wrote about that…

I won't flake off my parts
For your consumption

God look at how I try to convince myself 
Writing these lines like a good, little, empowered...
Girl? Woman?
My sexuality is tied into how you consume me
I can't untangle those knots
We like to look back... This is who I was. This is how I was.
See! I'm grown! Oh-so-fucking-wise to my conditioning
Then... There you go, mr blue eyes callin' me darlin' and...
God I want taxi drivers to like me
Men to love my poems
It was a different time, right? We wouldn't let it pass now? 
But my merit system is moulded on you. That rogue reward.

All those decades of raw power. Can I ever claw it back? 

I’m not going to lie about my age, is this a mistake?

I didn’t want to turn 18. Why? Because, as I can vividly remember talking to my friends about, then “men won’t high-five each other when they hear our age.” I wanted to remain 17 forever, because men wanted me to stay 17 forever.

It’s so fucked up that I thought that, that men did that. That I liked it. That I saw my power as something they could gift me, something that they could take away. Something that time would take away, with each passing year.

I hate that youth is considered so gilded. What I want, for my future, is to wear my age with pride. To lie about it feels, to me, to be succumbing to the damaging narrative. That we should all want to be on an endless, Benjamin Button quest backwards. But, at the same time, I think about the fears that I hold and the reality of this world. Youth is gilded. It is also, a part of my career. I work for a brand that is aimed at Gen Z. My knowledge is valuable to my team, that much I know. But, no matter how hard I try, I am losing grip of who our cover stars are, and with that, comes the fear of not being able to know who our reader is, what she wants to read. I want to stay in this industry, I want to… remain relevant. To do so, would I be better off hovering around the 35-mark until I can no longer get away with it? I won’t. I can’t now, even if I changed my mind. But… doesn’t it suck that I’m even considering this?

There are other ways to live

I’m currently licking the lid off of a yogurt pot, a handful of stolen Babybels stashed under a napkin beside me. I’m wearing an unwashed poncho that has followed me around festival, after festival, witnessing everything, absorbing everything. I plan on stashing the stolen cheese in it, before dashing up to my room, where I will work, before going to another festival tonight. I arrived at this hotel, at midnight, in a fluffy, raspberry of a coat, a black mini skirt and under ten percent battery.* The bus driver took pity on me and dropped me off here, for free. It’s called Woody’s and I feel like I’m in the Midwest, not Largs, Scotland and I’m content, as I choke back my three-sugars coffee and plan the day out in my head.

At night, I thought I could feel my cat climb on top of me, that I could roll over and feel the warmth of a person I love beside me. The bed is big and I woke up alone, but ready.

I’m thinking of latest post, her words: there are other ways to live. How my craving for order on my 40^th was actually a deep-rooted lie placed within me. That to be loveable as I get older, to maintain all that I’ve built I have to contain myself, gain control over the chaos.

But I do all of this, after last weekend, where I boarded my closest friends onto a canal boat in Camden, was surprised over and over by all of their love. When I decided not to have children, the world tore open for me. I’m afraid of what comes next. I’m so ready for it.

There are other ways to live.

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*don’t worry dad, I had a battery pack somewhere (maybe I have learned some things along the way after all)

I don’t really want to write this. I am currently lost in the land of fiction, ghost-writing a novel that’s all seduction on yachts, overflowing jacuzzis and wayward fake tan exposing long-held secrets. It’s silly, frivolous, pure escapism… and it’s set in 2010. Long before today, long before this news. I want to stay there. Please, can I stay there?

Today, The UK supreme court has ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman and biological sex.

My dad is a transgender woman. She is, and always will be, a woman.

I can remember, before she came out, when I was a child, waking up in the middle of the night, and seeing her standing, staring at herself in the mirror. She was in a white silk nightie. She was looking at herself: her short hair, her sharp jawline as if she was not real, as if she was a ghost. I ran back to bed. I convinced myself that I had seen a ghost, not because of the nightie (I was used to the nightie) but because of the haunted look in her eyes. That person couldn’t be my jolly, happy, silly dad who made up rhymes with me, and held onto me while I roller-bladed to the shops. They had to be a ghost.

I now know she was haunted. I saw her in the throes of pain, as she tried, desperately to figure out what she could do. Could she keep living this way? In a body that did not fit? Could she survive?

I have memories of friends of hers, coming to our house, or names that floated in the air. People that did not survive. People who wanted to live, who were loved, but who could not keep breathing, in the body they were forced to exist in. I’m not going to list the suicide rates for transgender people, I can’t look them up right now. But they’re there. They’re terrifying.

My dad once wrote about a friend of hers…

The one the doctor said wasn’t serious and so they refused to help her.

She was someone whose shame was so extreme

She never could come out in her public life

Someone whose true life - whose women’s life -

Mostly happened behind closed doors.

And who finally drank herself to death.

Before she went, she said:

There comes a time when you can’t go on

You have to choose

Between living as a woman

And dying as a man

My mum died in February, 2005. The Gender Recognition Act (allowing people to legally change their gender in the UK) came into place in April, 2005.

For many reasons, I know, that if my dad could not live as a woman, she would have died.

I would have been made an orphan. Maybe not that year, or the year after. But, I believe it would have happened.

This decision, that will ramp up transphobic abuse, push people further into shame, into the closet, into hiding who they are until they can take it no longer… it will kill people.

People are going to die.

They’re going to die… and women, women who call themselves feminists, are celebrating.

I wrote in a poem once: “we believe lies when we are at our most afraid. You’ve taped the mask of a monster onto the innocent, while the villains smirk in plaid shirts.”

And, oh, they’re smirking right now. As those in power have successfully distracted us all, yelled '“look over there” to distract from their own long-list of failures.

These feminists said they wanted to ‘protect’ women, and women’s spaces and…

In 2021, Women’s Aid showed that in 2019-20, 59% of councils in England had cut their domestic abuse services budget: by November 2020, there were 24.5% less refuge spaces than there should be. I’ve reported on this, charities are reluctant to be too vocal about how tight services are, how impacted they are by cuts. They don’t want anyone to feel they can’t reach out and receive help. But it’s a crisis.

Then there’s this…

According to UN women, globally, an estimated 736 million women - almost one in three - have been subjected to physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence. Most violence against women is perpetrated by current or former husbands, or partners. Men they knew, men they once loved.

This is the fight. This should always have been the fight.

I can’t keep writing. I normally like to take my time on pieces, not just write reactively, in rage.

I also always, always want to find a positive and seeing the outpouring of fury on social media right now is one, I guess. But will it be enough? Or will tomorrow we move on and post about something else, direct our fury elsewhere? Will we take that anger and place it elsewhere, somewhere useful that will actually bring about change?

I’ll leave you with my poem. It’s all I’ve got right now.

Here’s also some links to other articles I’ve written, when I wasn’t typing in sadness and rage.

What happened when my dad came out as transgender

The NHS is crumbling, pointing the finger at trans people is not the answer

And please, above all, follow my dad on Substack. She’s a remarkable person who writes beautifully about life, and the human experience. - The Light Inside.

Lots of love.

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Oh hello my love
It's how every message from her begins
She hopes I had a nice day, then she tells me of hers 

It's bitter in Edinburgh
There's a sheet of ice waiting for her
Just beyond her doorstep

It will thaw soon, the crocuses tell us it's nearly Spring
But when it has weakened
To a puddle
Another threat remains

I want to speak of her joy, she has so much of it
These stories shouldn't just capture pain
But the lies, they're multiplying
So I must imprint the facts

There's the one in two
Abused, attacked
Remember the nine in ten
Their young lives very nearly cut short

Numbers are hard to quantify
Examples spell it out
But she shouldn't have to bleed
For you to believe

Cruelty is gift-wrapped as comedy 
Peeing safely seems up for debate
Snatching human rights to win an online war
The happiness true identities bring
Lost to a keyboard

Yes, we carry keys with our trembling fingers
That matters, it will always matter
We believe lies when we are at our most afraid 
You've taped a mask of a monster onto the innocent
While the villains smirk in plaid shirts

Please stop swallowing that red herring 
Over and over again
It's fed to you as a distraction
From what will really help
Won't you join us as we create the day ahead?

When we
Me, you, her, him, them
Can fling our doors open
The enemy neither in, or out
The safety of the sunshine calls
Let's link arms and take those steps together 

I’ve reached the steady waters of grief. I might not stay here for long, who knows? There used to, often, be things that brought turbulence. Mother’s Day was one of them.

It fell a fortnight after her death. So, the adverts were already on the television, the promotions were in the supermarkets. I can remember sitting, in a world where everything was grey and watching pastel pink women loving each other, adoring each other, selling me something.

I was too numb then, for it to impact me. That came later, pain, anger but also a bitter envy, an emotion I did not like in myself, when I opened social media and saw what I did not have. What I would never have. Losing someone isn’t just about missing who they were, but also who they could have been, who you could have been together. Would we have gone for roasts? Would we have got tipsy on white wine? What would we look like, now, standing side-by-side in photos?

Today, I do not feel, well, anything. I’ve been aware of the day coming, promotional emails make it hard to ignore. And, working in journalism, I’ve also had the PR mailers (and the chasers) for months now, reminding me, asking how will my readers celebrate mum?

I even opened Instagram this morning, once a danger zone, and I casually looked through the photos. It was just… an everyday scroll. I did decide, quite quickly, to close it again. I may feel OK, but that doesn’t mean I should throw myself into the rocky waves. Inflict pain on myself simply because it is not there.

It’s crossed my mind that, perhaps, I should feel guilty for this. That I should be very, very sad as I have lost someone very, very special. That I should force that pain upon myself. But I have been very, very sad, many, many times before. How and when and how hard I grieve does not change how much I loved her.

I loved her monumentally; I am also allowed to live, happily, without her.

A few years ago, I felt differently to how I did today and I wrote the below newsletter, where I also spoke to others who find this day hard, for their advice. I wanted to reshare it again, but with this new introduction, to show that, however you’re feeling today, it’s OK. You’re allowed. And if you’re feeling flung around, and trapped, in much choppier waves, with time, you’ll swim out, you’ll reach a place of calm.

When Mother’s Day is hard

(the below was originally published in 2023)

It started in the supermarket. And, God! What is it with me and feeling intense emotions on standard shopping trips? (it’s happened before.) But I was suddenly very, very angry at Morrisons’ suggestion that I buy some fish to “celebrate mum.”

“Don’t forget!” the sign urged me in cursive pink font. I told the sign to fuck itself and… I must admit this could be my hatred of fish coming through. But, of course, there is another (probably more valid) reason…

It’s the thing I joke about, making strangers feel awkward at pub garden tables. It’s the thing I’ve written about so many times I’ve bored myself. It’s the thing that made me launch this newsletter.

There have been eighteen Mother’s Days since I lost her. Including the one that happened two weeks after I stood in an empty room, and touched her bloated, cold, unrecognisable and unbreathing cheek.

It’s not always a miserable day. I’ve felt different emotions throughout the years – usually sad, sometimes can’t-get-out-of-bed-so but often tinted with an excessively positive and loving (in a macabre way) outlook that urges others, please, celebrate her before it’s too late. I’m glass half full! I like traditions! I love love!

This anger is new. Even the tone of this letter feels unlike others before it. But I also found myself rallying against the host of totally well-meaning emails asking me to “opt out of Mother’s Day promotional emails.” “It’s FORCING ME TO TICK A BOX SAYING ‘NO SORRY DEAD MUM’ IT ONLY FUCKING REMINDS ME” I ranted, over voicenote, to a friend. As for the promotions that have made it to my inbox? They’ve received my wrath too. Particularly the waxing salon offering me a discount if I went for a Brazilian with mum. (WHO DOES THAT?)

What’s changed? I think, as I write and consider grief weekly, I am just more aware of the impact of celebration days. As, of course, it’s not just today. Valentine’s Day can be deeply upsetting for many. As can Father’s Day. And I know that Mother’s Day doesn’t just upset those who have lost their mums. It also impacts those who have estranged or difficult relationships with them. And those who want children and can’t; those who have experienced multiple miscarriages; those who have lost their children.

It's not that I want these days to stop. I was once asked to speak on the radio (about this piece for Cosmo) and the host asked me whether I thought they should be banned. In today’s age of outrage I suspect they were rather disappointed when I shrugged and was like “nah of course not.” Not only would it be pointless, it would also be robbing people of the chance to celebrate their loved ones.

As that rush of love pushes through the anger. I stand by that it’s important to take time to celebrate the incredible people in our lives.

I just want to acknowledge that these days are hard. For one email to arrives in your inbox that says “hey, I see you.” To do that I needed the help of others, to try and capture (as much as I can) the different emotions experienced when you, for whatever reason, find the day hard.

The wonderful women below have either a difficult or estranged relationship with their mums or, like me, have lost them. Hearing their stories helped lift my anger. I also felt deeply connected to them, and their words. (if you struggle with mother’s day due to fertility issues then I have a separate letter coming up for you. I see you and I am sending love.)

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Here’s what they had to say…

“I try to remember how lucky I was to have my mum”

My mum and I were so similar. We both loved watching Gilmore Girls together, shopping and getting a new book to sit and read. She was what can only be described as a sparkly person and just had this wonderful generous, creative, kind energy. I lost her to cancer in 2013. She was ill for a couple of years and died two weeks after my 21^st birthday.

I was in my last year of uni and just about to go into real adult life. It was so scary. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed and thinking “oh god I’m going to have to cancel all my magazine subscriptions” which is a totally ridiculous thing to think but I thought, I’m an adult I have to figure out all of this on my own now.

She was my number one cheerleader. She supported me and my sister so much. But she was also honest. I remember when I told her I wanted to get into magazines she said “I know you don’t want to hear this but no one is looking for you, you need to put yourself in front of these people, get in the room any way you can.” And she sat with me sending out hundreds of emails for internships. I now work in the industry I dreamed of.

There are so many things that make living without her hard. One thing that comes to mind is that I have binge eating disorder, triggered by emotional stress. She also had B.E.D when I was growing up and it’s hard not to have her to talk to about it. She understood my disordered eating so much.

Mother’s Day has always been a mix of emotions. I used to hate it and cry, and eat my feelings watching Gilmore Girls. Sometimes I still do, avoiding social media or leaving the house where I might see people and their mums. One year though, a friend of mine invited me to spend it with her and her mum and, after that, I decided to reframe it in my mind. I see the day as an opportunity to be happy for my friends who still have their mums in their lives. I also have enjoyed watching my friends become wonderful mums to their babies. I also make sure to send my Nan flowers and a card because that’s what my mum would have done for her. Mostly I make sure to remember how lucky I was to have mine and feel grateful for the time I got with her.

Nicole

“I donate the money I would have spent on a present to charity, so some good can come out of a bad day.”

We used to openly mock people who said “my mum is my best friend” but, there were times, when it did feel like my mum was my only friend. We didn't always see eye to eye, particularly when I was a teenager and we were experts in pushing each others buttons but I was incredibly proud to be her daughter. I lost her to cancer in 2013.

For the first few years without her I felt completely untethered. I turned to self destruction, drinking too much and self harming for the first time in my 30s. The grief was so acute, sometimes I felt like it would kill me. Whenever anything big happens, good or bad, she's still the first person I want to tell. Everything I have achieved feels less special because she's not here to share it with.

Mum was a big perfume fan and whenever I catch a whiff of Chanel No 5, I immediately think of her. We were big fans of trips to the cinema and I still find it tricky to go and see films where I know there will be mothers and daughters sitting together. It stings. As does going on social media on Mother’s Day, seeing the declaration of love for mums who are still here. On the day I acknowledge any sadness and check in with friends who are also in the same boat. I donate the money I would have spent on a present to charity, so some good can come out of a bad day.

Cath

“I now have such a thirst for life, and I think this is what her love has transitioned into.”

There’s a bit of a cruel date alignment this year – it will be four years on Sunday (Mother’s Day) since we lost her. I was always so heavily connected to Mum, and her absence has been so intense and yet so numbing. She struggled with mental health issues, and consequently addiction, and that meant our relationship was quite complex at times. I find that as I grow older, I understand her more deeply and I struggle to come to terms with the finality of the loss.

I still find myself reaching for the phone to call her when I have any news to share – it’s been four years now but I still have that initial instinct! I really think the Mother-Daughter bond is so precious, and it’s hard not to feel that missing presence as I navigate through life. It breaks my heart when I think of all the things we should have experienced together. The upcoming Spring days always remind me of Mum. She loved being outside and was always so connected with nature. I feel her all around me when the world starts opening up for Spring and Summer. She was so radiant – just like the open water, and the sunshine!

The experiences I had with Mum – good and bad – have really changed who I am and how I deal with different things. She loved so deeply and felt everything. The loss of Mum has given me an acute awareness of life, and I feel everything so much more profoundly. I now have such a thirst for life, and I think this is what her love has transitioned into.

Yet I still dread Mother’s Day! Each year I think I am mentally prepared, but it always triggers some unresolved emotion. I like to spend the day doing something that I knew helped bring Mum peace – usually getting outside in the elements! I’m also so lucky to have such a wonderful support system and my friends and family will go out of their way to make sure I’m okay on the day. I’ve got a couple of friends who are new Mums and that’s really heart-warming for me.

Bethany

“Whether you have somebody to plug the gap or not, it's still a gap.”

I've been estranged from my mum for 20 years now, since I was seven. Ultimately I can't forgive her for some of the things that she has done. Whilst I understand and support (and, in fact, advocate for) the fact that everybody makes mistakes, especially and even as parents, there are some extreme scenarios in which this doesn't apply for me morally.

I think at first, I made it difficult for my mum to have a relationship with me (to be clear though: I do not blame myself) - I lived with my dad full-time and was starting to show symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I made excuses not to see her even from that young age of seven. In the end she gave up, and as I got older I felt I needed to explore this a bit. So I found her and met up with her when I was 16. That was my opportunity to ask her all the questions I had. I learned I'd never get the answers I wanted and that ultimately it would never be alright. For my recovery from PTSD, my relationship with her just couldn't happen.

Estrangement really is a last option. It's not one you take lightly. It's when things are totally irreparable or cause such damage to you that you just can't anymore - I've thought about it a lot in adulthood and wondered back and forth for a few years but ultimately my mind never changed: the relationship did me serious damage. Families are complex and they hurt each other and some things you can forgive, some you can't. The only person who could decide that for me, was me. There is a real vibe of 'but she's your mother', 'you only get one mum' - yes, but I also only get one life, and I've really learned the importance of that. If you wouldn't put up with something from anyone else, you shouldn't put up with it from your family either. The pressure around forgiving family for things you wouldn't forgive other people for is baffling. Controversial, but look at Prince Harry.

I had a lot of healing to do as a teenager (and in my early twenties) and I used to find the estrangement really difficult. I had a lot of anger to shift. My two closest friends are very close with their mothers, and I would see them together or hear about them doing things like getting manicures or going shopping and it bothered me a lot. I also hated hearing about how ‘a hug from mum’ could heal anything. It’s a phrase said a lot and it always upset me. But as I went further and further through PTSD recovery and learned more about who I am and what I'm doing, I honestly just discovered that I'm so much better off without her. I have a brilliant step-mum who has been around for a long time which cushions the blow nowadays somewhat, but I still know in my heart that my birth mother is out there somewhere going about her life. But ultimately, as more and more time has gone on, I don't need or want a 'hug from my mum' anymore - when you learn how to navigate the world as your own biggest advocate and supporter, you know with certainty what is right for you and what isn't. She isn't right for me and my life.

Mother's Day is bittersweet. It's a reminder of what's not there - but it's also a reminder of what is. I celebrate my Stepmother on Mother's Day because she really has played that role as best she can and has done a lot for me. I truly believe in the concept of 'chosen family'. But I do tend to avoid social media (or at least massively reduce my time on it) and remind myself that it's just. one. day. Whether you have somebody to plug the gap or not, it's still a gap. That's tricky. But the two can co-exist: gratitude for who you do have, and mourning for who/what you do not.

Hannah

As for me…

So, what do I have planned for today? It could look like a standard Sunday (gym class, roast with pals) but actually it’s playing a part in the tiny rebellion that I want to see influence my whole life. And that is celebrating all love. All the time.

I know there’s a lot of promotional info around at the moment that you can also celebrate other mother figures in your life… but I don’t have that either, in the sense of an older woman who can offer me guidance. What I do have is a multitude of friends, from all walks of life - those with children and without. A dad who is the opposite of anything I’d ever see when it comes to promotional materials about ‘happy’ families. A sister who is an incredible mum herself, and the first person I want by my side if I ever injure or hurt myself. A household made up of a kind man and a huge cat. Plus, a new one I only realise through writing this letter. I also have the love and connection to others, like those above, who understand my pain.

I plan on focusing on all that love. How lucky I am.

While… let’s face it… probably also feeling a little sad at those I see, on social media or in real life, celebrating with their mums. As Hannah says above “whether you have someone to plug the gap or not… it’s still a gap.”

Oh… and I have booked that wax. With a good friend. God help the poor waxer if she tries to challenge my validity to that discount…

What do you think? How have you spent today? Oh and if you’re into the idea of celebrating all different sorts of love, please consider buying my book - a kinda anti romcom romcom that does just that. It’s here. Or, if you love Cath’s idea of donating to charity (I ADORED THAT) can I point you in the direction of Showerbox? They’re a homeless charity I volunteer for, they provide showers (and other hygiene essentials) for those experiencing homelessness. The money donated will go directly towards those they help, or towards launching showers in other locations.

And… as, always I am sending so much love to you.

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At the end of each day, often the last thing I want to do is look at words. But, I promise you, I’ve been reaching out to interesting people to interview and have lots planned for this Substack. I just always want whatever I write to be properly considered, so hopefully, even though, at the moment it’s few and far between I hope you keep reading (and sharing, if you like it!) Thank you.

This post continues on similar themes to this last one. It also CONTENT WARNING contains descriptions of disordered eating.

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“Are you sure?” It’s a Thursday night, around 7pm and I’ve just ordered a glass of Vinho Verde. When I did, I smiled happily at the waitress, told her it was my favourite wine. She’s a towering woman, slim, high cheekbones, aloof. Already I feel round in her presence; rosy cheeked, flustered, silly.

I assure her, yes, I am sure, I do want the wine. She tells me that, at this restaurant, they like to practice “restraint.”

When she leaves, I feel unsettled. I look around the table, give a small shake of my head to my companions. I don’t know them, so I don’t want to make a fuss.

Her attitude continues. When we are served bread, with this ball of rich, expensive-tasting butter she comments, clearing the dishes, “oooh someone ate a lot of butter.” When we order our courses, I choose the vegetarian option which is basically just two bowls of vegetables, served in different ways, and she congratulates me for “actually, finally, caring about my health.”

When it comes to pudding, I know what to expect. I order chocolate mousse, I’m questioned, asked if I’d prefer the fruit instead. I’m laughing now, but it’s not a real one. I’m an uncomfortable people-pleasing rebel, insisting that “yes, I want the mousse. I am allowed the mousse. Give me the mousse.”

I laugh because I’ve figured the whole thing out. I can play along with her game. I don’t like doing it, but I will, because the other option – to storm out, make a scene, feels too big, too fussy and, besides, maybe they’re right, maybe I don’t care about my health. Maybe I deserve to be told.

The waitress is an actress. This whole restaurant is a sham, a clearly-not-thought-through PR stunt to launch a campaign. I won’t tell you what for, as I am writing this not to complain about what happened* but instead to analyse how I felt afterwards, what this experience did to me. But I appreciate it may be confusing, so what I will say is this: as a journalist I am invited to events, to promote products or companies, and often I don’t know what I am getting myself in for. I say yes to things, and sometimes that works out. In this case, it really, really didn’t.

Having figured out what was going on, early in the evening, I managed to develop a coping strategy. As thoughts of inadequacy, of self-hatred, began to flood me, I would chant, over and over in my head, you are happy, you are healthy, you are loved, you have a good body image… I told myself, you don’t obsess over food, you like yourself, you enjoy your life… These things are more important than being thin. They are, please believe me, they are, please…

I know I’m right. That message is right. I am also happy, healthy and loved. But, do I have a strong body image? Do I view myself - the skin that I inhabit - as good? No. I can’t say that with confidence. Not right now, not after that night. Not after hearing every voice I’ve heard, in my own head, voices I’d dismissed as ridiculous, and paranoid, reflected back at me. Confirming the cruelty I have inflicted on myself, cruelty I have been trying to leave behind.

My body was the biggest at the table. That became something I obsessed over. The waitress made jibes at everyone, but I felt that she was only really making them, intentionally, to me. That she was thinking: oh I’m made to do this, as part of my job but her, that one, her jeans are slightly too tight, is that a belly roll I see? She needs this. She should listen.

The first course was cleared. And, from that moment, I was that ball of butter. I was lardy, coated in grease. I was something that people should not consume; I was not to be witnessed.

I can’t imagine what that evening could have done to someone with an eating disorder, or a history of disordered eating. As, in general, I do consider myself to have a healthy body image. But, in the days that followed, I began to unpick that. I only have a healthy body image, in comparison, to those who do not. I eat three meals a day, I don’t weigh myself, I don’t curse myself, tug or pull on my stomach, pinching myself hard in disgust, each morning, no, I don’t do that. Not like I used to. My camera roll has actual nudes in it now, sexy ones, instead of front, side, back, underwear shots stored in a special folder, to ‘track my progress.’

I view my body as a vessel to exist in, to carry me around, rather than something to be changed, altered. A project that could never be completed.

But… it took two barbed comments for all of this to unravel. For me to leave my rational brain and into an all-consuming space, to get trapped in a loop of stinging thoughts, where everything I was, and everything I ever would be, would be defined by how much flesh I carried on my bones.

That was in the moment. Then, in the days that followed, I began to scold myself, question my intelligence, my supposed ‘strength’ for letting the comments impact me so much. Isn’t this the curse of today? We’re still absolutely told that we should look a certain way, but we are also absolutely told that we’re meant to be ‘smart’ enough, mentally robust enough, to not care about beauty standards, to see through them. If we don’t manage: well then, we are vain, bad feminists who need to get ourselves into therapy. Because it’s that simple. And therapy is, of course, accessible and works for everyone.**

There’s something I need to add here. That I’m too ashamed to admit, but I will, because I need to write this out of me. Only once I’ve done so, perhaps, I can move into a different realm. One where I address the cobweb of my mind, and clear out the false literature that’s been placed there. Recently, I have lost weight. Or, so people tell me. I have lost weight because I, on occasion, not all the time, and definitely not deliberately, keep being sick. I have developed an intolerance to something and the smart thing to do, the actually healthy thing to do, is to keep a food diary, figure it out and stop eating whatever it is that is tearing my stomach lining to shreds.

But I’m not. Why? Because I am being told how good I look, how healthy I look. I hope this speaks for itself, how fucked up as a society we are, that – at all costs – slimness is rewarded. It’s always been this way. All my life the quest has been sold then repackaged, over and over again. We went from Special K to clean eating to Ozempic.*** If you’re not losing weight the right way, or you’re doing it obviously, then god, why do you care so much about your looks? Shouldn’t you be smarter than that?

What I’m trying to say is. I’m tired. I’d love a solution, but a solution for decades of conditioning does not exist. I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want my first thought to be, when I catch an illness that means I cannot eat, to be: oh you’ll lost weight.

But, a week or so after that night, I did find something.

The vicious voices still playing in my mind, one evening, I went to a community spa****. I lay naked in a sauna, surrounded by bodies. All ages, all shapes, all beauty. I listened to the women speak to each other, laugh, support one another. We so rarely see this, ever, bodies just being there, just for ourselves, for sweating, for scrubbing, for laughing, for dunking into cold water and then shaking ourselves off, the freezing tingle enveloping our skin.

I’d entered that spa hungrily. I’d had lunch with a stranger earlier and I’d only eaten two sides, because I did not want her to judge me for eating more. As I sat in the heat, I shakily realised what I needed. This. Women in all of their glory, to remind me that I am more than the flesh on my bones. I am loved, I am healthy, I am happy. Truly…

(oh and a flapjack from the spa’s canteen…)

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*I did write to the PR expressing how concerned I was that this event didn’t come with any form of trigger warning, and how damaging it could be for people with eating disorders.

** Hopefully you can detect my sarcasm, but here’s a piece I wrote on how I feel about the simplistic attitude of “have you tried therapy?”

*** I don’t want to get sued. Ozempic when used to weight-loss is being used off-label. It was prescribed and has always been intended for people with diabetes.

**** It was the Porchester Spa, London. It’s £30, for all day long and it’s very healing.

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I keep thinking of the corridor. I was slumped in it, my head on my friend’s shoulders. Time had disappeared. Earlier, I’d been insisting “it’s a birthday, I can’t miss a birthday,” and now, here I was, early hours of the morning, struggling to figure out how I’d got here, what had happened, why was I here... What decisions had led me to this point? Why had I made them?

I could have missed the birthday party. My mum had died the day before. Yes. I could have missed the birthday party. But I had been practicing this. It was all I knew to survive. Since her diagnosis, my life was like shattered china. I was holding together all the pieces, waiting for the glue to set in and dry. Waiting to become whole again.

I can’t tell you how long I waited because: I don’t know if I’m whole again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes us us. When someone says “you’ve not been yourself lately” what do they mean? Don’t we all have multiple iterations of ourselves, all playing out, all at different times? How much of what happens to us shapes us? Who would we be if certain things hadn’t happened to us at certain times?

Tomorrow it will be 20 years since her death. I have become accustomed to holding myself together. That’s not to say I am cold, steely, that I do not cry. But I know how to sever myself; I know how to cut my mind off from the sadness; I know how to go to the birthday party. I keep going, until I slump.

Usually, on her anniversary, I am consumed by her. This year, I find, I am not. I think of those twenty years and all I can think of is… myself.

I feel a sense of wonder, that all that time has passed. How did I spend those years? Did I spend them wisely? If she hadn't died, then, at that pivotal point in my young life, who would I be? Who would we be? I was 19 when I lost her. I grew without her. Now, as I approach 40, I can’t picture a version of myself with her beside me. I’ve coped without her for so long. Somewhere else, in another lifetime, is there a version of me that doesn’t know how to sever herself? Who actually is as light and breezy as she appears to be?

It's hard to admit that a tragedy has shaped your entire existence, that, for twenty years - whether light or heavy - you have carried grief with you. That being shattered, broken apart, so very early on, has meant that you've had to spend precious time rebuilding yourself. If she hadn't died would I have drank the way I did? If she hadn't died would I have let the pursuit of success swallow me?

But, perhaps more pressingly, what would our time together look like? What would we talk about? What would we argue about? I know she could be critical, a trait inherited from her own mother, would she be critical of me? Would there be moments of rage, of hatred? That's not nice to think of. I don't like to think of that.

I don't know what other people's relationships are like with their mothers. I don't ask and, of course, they don't tell me. But what's it like to have someone who has lived their life before you? Who's there to tell you of the eccentricities of life, the things that are to come?

I don’t know of her inner life. I knew of her, through me. Through who I was. I was a teenager and she was a mother. Her role was to guide me, to teach me. To weather my selfish storms, to hold my crying face to her soft chest, to absorb my tears. If we’d been allowed to age together, would that be different? Would I know more of her, as a person, with secrets, with desires, with ambitions? What did she carry? There are some thoughts that I have that I only want to share with her. I want to show up, at her door, and I want to tell her what has happened to me. I want her to help me to figure out who I am.

I can’t do this. I know I can’t do this. I long for this, I long for her.

It's not that I don’t have love. I have so much love. I have people who I can turn to, people who pick me up, people who help hold me together. I have guidance. But I don’t have her guidance. Is this why I forever feel a little bit lost? Or are we all just a little bit lost? If she was here, would I even listen to her? Our relationship might not have been what I so wanted it to be.

I don’t have the answers. I’ve discovered, while typing this, I’ve grown tired of the questions. Right now, all I can say is she made me who I am, through her life and through her death. I miss her, I wish she was here, but… I also know she can’t be here. I have to be here, without her, that’s just the way it was dealt. There are some mysteries that cannot ever be solved, questions that come without answers.

All of us, living with grief, long-term or short, we hold ourselves together. We pour gold into our cracks. We Kintsugi our existences. We might have looked different before but we’ve made something beautiful out of our shattered selves.

Here’s something I wrote for her, comprised of my memories…

She taught me how to eat with chopsticks, there was a clatter of them, causing chaos in the cutlery drawer. She wore a snow leopard faux fur coat, it dragged the ground as she walked. She rarely wore make-up, spent big on her hair. She said "you wear it every day." She painted flowers, plotting out her garden on paper before the soil. In summer, she had a wide-brim straw hat, the freckles on her arm, they joined up. She had so many friends her hospice sink stored wine, there were queues at visiting time. She was always late, and quite unapologetic about it. She made us take our own sun umbrella on holiday. She pushed me to be brave. She sang Janis Joplin in the kitchen. She bathed in honey. She collected stones and shells, combing the shore for hours. She printed out the words for Auld Lang Syne and handed them out before midnight. She raised her glass and made a toast to life, even on her death bed. She put the breath in me. She's here, somehow, she's here. 

As a toddler and with a doll who, if I’m honest, I can’t remember. That Sindy camping set though! What a toy!

We were sitting - cross-legged, spooning plastic cherries into plastic mouths - discussing how we would all, definitely become mothers one day. There were three of us, primary school best friends, and we were seven-years-old. This is young, to know exactly how our lives were going to pan out, but we did. We’d been told. We were women, we would become mothers.

It can be hard to explain social conditioning. The way that we breathe in ideas daily, often not even noticing what we’re inhaling: an invisible, powerful gas that permeates us, and influences what we do, and how we feel about ourselves.

I didn’t have many dolls at home. There was one, called Paula, who wore a salmon-pink knitted dress, made by my grandma. She had been my mum’s doll, perhaps even my grandma’s… But apart from Paula, this heirloom of tradition, if I wanted to play with dolls, I went to my friend’s houses. I believe this was an attempt by my parents to break the pattern, to block the inbuilt motherhood expectation.

Still, it got in somehow. Already. As there we were, fussing over fake nappies, and telling each other how we would have children. One of us said she was going to carry her baby, be pregnant but, I, alongside my other friend, said we would adopt. That we didn’t want to be pregnant but, obviously, we would be mums! We would adopt.

Did I know, back then, that I didn’t want to be a mother? Was that feeling, that knowledge being pushed, deeper and deeper, inside of me? I knew I didn’t want to be pregnant. But it was inconceivable that I wouldn’t become a mother. It’s what I had to do. So, I would adopt. There’s the solution right there.

The messaging was all around, the gas had already sunk in.

Another tricky thing about social conditioning is that there are plenty of times when what we’re sold is what we actually want. So, perhaps gas, this unconscious breathing in of it, isn’t the right analogy. As, I don’t believe that everyone who is a parent is a parent simply because they were told to be one. That we are all puppets-on-strings who only want the things we want because we have been orchestrated by an invisible force to want them.

There are things we want, then there are things we don’t want and then there are the things we’re not sure we want, but are told we should.

Today, what I want, is to discuss (hopefully without offending anyone about their wants, and choices) is the grief we can feel when our lives don’t match the expectations fed to us by others. How disjointed we can feel.

I’ve felt lost, a lot, lately. Panicky at times. The future feels foggy and when my steps don’t know where to go, they distract themselves by going around old, well-worn circles.

I’m tricking myself into thinking that I’m sad.

I’m not sad.

But, this year, I turn 40. And my life looks nothing like I thought it would, when I sat on that carpet and played dolls with my friends. Or, when I was 30-years-old, about to marry and convinced that children were the next natural step.

We once sent Paula to the toy’s hospital. Her leg had broken clean off, popped right out of its socket, so, off she went, to be mended. I was invested in Paula’s recovery, and I remember thinking, Paula will get better and Paula will be played with by my children.

Paula made it out of the hospital. She sat, on my grandma’s chair, until my grandma died.

I don’t know where Paula is now.

I don’t have Paula, and I don’t have children.

I am not sad.

But when I trick myself into being sad, it’s thinking of all the ways my life does not match up to the happiness ideal.

I feel that way every time I walk past my local Italian restaurant and see a bunch of balloons celebrating a 60^th birthday. Children and grandchildren clustered around, getting ready to blow out candles.

I feel that way when I see people posting about nativity plays, or I see them in movies or on TV. I feel this yearning, this loss. I want to be there, on a too-small plastic chair and watch my child sing under Christmas lights.

Except I don’t. Not really.

I’ve spent a lot of time examining my decision not to have children. Part of that is leaning into these raw, wanting moments and really feeling the chasm open within me. Trying to label whether, in these small, flashes of sadness, there’s a sign that I really do want children. That I’m lying to myself.

I often find that the only reason I feel sad, I feel wanting, is because I’m comparing my life to an ideal. One that is everywhere: on our TV screens, in movies, literally sold to us in adverts (often, I’ve found, selling cars). The loud, bustling household. The pencil-marking heights on walls.

For some it is happiness. But for others, absolutely isn’t.

This year, on a Sunday morning, I flew out to Spain to spend 24 hours on a porn set. I danced on stage at Glastonbury, and I spent three-days at another, smaller festival, laughing non-stop about ice-cream and nothing at all. I blew gigantic bubbles on a beach, and I climbed Camden’s canal locks, in a boat full of haunted teddy bears. I’ve spent my Saturday mornings hearing facts about forgotten film stars, serving up tea for a community of people who are facing homelessness. If Spotify Wrapped also counted the amount of time I’ve spent talking to my friends over voice note, it would add up to days, if not weeks.

I have a full life.

And… here’s the part I’m not really meant to say out loud: I have been slightly bored in children’s company.

I thought I wanted children all throughout my teens, my twenties, and into my thirties. I wanted marriage, I wanted children. I wanted my life to look like how I was told it should look. So, after many white wine fuelled arguments at weddings, when I felt the expectation of others weighing down on me, I got married.

I woke up on my honeymoon and I wondered, why, why am I married?

This question was nothing to do with the man asleep beside me. He still sleeps beside me. He’s the right decision. But I realised my aims for marriage were less to do with him and more to do with proving something. Proving that I was chosen, that I was valuable.

At 14, I sat in a circle to play spin the bottle. Two boys got up and refused to play. Simply because I was there. Because I was so unkissable. Because I was so repellent.

This stayed with me. This, along with all the messages that a woman’s value lies in how appealing she is to men; if she is not chosen, she is “left on the shelf.” At those weddings, when people asked me “so… when will it be you two?” I did not hear small talk, I heard: “you won’t manage to get him to marry you, did you really think that you, you, would ever be chosen?”

Inside, at times, I’m still that rejected 14-year-old, desperate to be kissed.

I got married. I was chosen. And with that, with getting what I thought I wanted, I realised I had been fed a lie.

My value did not lie in that ring on my finger, I did not have to check boxes in order to be worthy. I love a man and he loves me, but that is only a percentage of who I am, what makes me special.

It led me to wonder, what else had I been lied about? The answer was: motherhood.

As that’s the next step, isn’t it? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a golden carriage. We sang that to our dolls, it still rings in so many of our heads.

I began to take an inventory of my past. Think about the things I’d lustily chased, and thrown my all into, all the things I’d achieved. None of them involved a baby. I prioritised so much more.

Today, I know my decision was right. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling wrong sometimes. As Self Esteem says in this Guardian profile: “there’s this person I should be, and I’m not, and I hate myself for that.”

There’s always going to be dolls, there’s always going to be car adverts. There will always be short-sharp bursts of sadness, the grief of a life not lived, an optical illusion of a happiness that isn’t real, or right for me.

I have built a life that suits me. I think this year is going to be complicated, I have to keep reminding myself of this. A life that, had I been aware of it as an option at seven-years-old, I would have played with: the doll of who I am today, almost 40, fully happy.

Thank you for reading, I find this topic quite difficult to write about as everyone’s circumstances are so unique and I’m aware it can cause others pain, particularly if you want to be a mother, but, because of circumstance you’re struggling or can’t. The messaging then, that’s all around, is so much more painful and I’m sending you a lot of love.

If you related to this, or think someone you know might, please do share with others. Below are some other pieces of writing on the subject…

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With a child’s plastic net, we fished for the impossible. Over and over, again and again, we tried, scraping it along the bottom of the grimy canal. With each tiny tug, the feel of something weighty, our stomachs lifted in hope, only for them to dash back to darkness as the net emerged, empty once more.

Curious strangers passed by, asking, “have you lost something expensive? Have you lost something of value?” Our faces were red and puffy, three members of a family crying on a Birmingham canal bank. We couldn’t explain, it was too hard to. This loss was small, it was nothing but… it was also ginormous, it was everything.

They were just sunglasses. Sunglasses that were square and tortoiseshell, one arm always fell off and needed screwing back on, they were worthless. But they were hers. So, yes, they had value. No, they can’t be replaced.

I’d taken them off, wary of losing them. I was about to jump, from boat to land, the rope tied sturdily around my hand and elbow. We were on a canal boat holiday, perhaps our first, without her. I can’t remember the details. I just know a gust of wind snatched those glasses, that had been placed both carefully and carelessly, on the roof of the boat. And splash! They were gone.

We’re not supposed to care about possessions. There are more important things in life than just… stuff. It’s silly and shallow to place so much emphasis on our belongings.

But we do. I do.

Those glasses suited my mum’s face, they framed her face which was round, and pale and freckly. And so, they framed my face, which is round, and pale and freckly. I wore them and felt like I could see the world how she might see it; exist in the way she’d like me to live…

There have been other things. Mostly clothes.

An emerald green, cashmere jumper, last seen in a pub in East London, crumpled on the floor, the memory of its existence temporarily forgotten in a red wine haze.

A torn midnight blue skirt, that I wore as a dress, left behind at a party, I’d swapped its itchy fabric for an oversized man’s tee-shirt over my 100-denier tights. I traipsed home without it, then was too hungover and embarrassed to try and get it back.

A black and white scarf, that smelled of her, dusty Oscar De La Renta sprayed over with Charlie Red by an old housemate, lost… somewhere. I don’t know where. But I guess, even in my possession, that scarf was already lost: its value, the remnants of her, gone with the spritz of an aerosol can.

These items come to me sometimes, in my dreams. I am wearing them again, feeling their fabric against my skin.

They haunt me.

When I was 14 I went to a school ceilidh, and no boys wanted to dance with me. I sat, to the sides, and waited, and waited, and waited… I came home and I crawled into bed with my mum, and my tears made that jumper damp. The pain of the evening passed, in her arms.

I have always struggled to remember my mum, before her diagnosis. I can see her in her hospice bed, her face puffy with steroids, when the tumour had morphed her into someone I did not recognise. It’s always been so unfair, that my brain does this - an injustice to who she was, how wonderful she was - that these are the memories my brain plucks out and serves to me.

But her belongings exist outside of my mind. They are a physical representation of her that I can’t erase, that I could see. The jumper told me stories of that night, of her comfort. But they also told me of the parts of her I could never know, that I can now never ask about. She went to parties in that skirt, I went to parties in that skirt. She went on holidays in those sunglasses, I went on holidays in those sunglasses. They helped me to know her.

Losing them was like losing pieces of her.

There’s another belonging that haunts me. It means so much that I don’t even like describing it as a ‘belonging’ – my umbrellas are belongings, my socks are. This was… Precious. Invaluable. An artefact that held my family’s history, that carried with it how I came to be, who I was, who I am.

It was placed on my finger, at my grandma’s graveside. Her engagement ring, five diamonds, each one represented a word: Will You Be My Wife? My granddad had scrimped and saved for that ring, it was always there, on her finger, sparkling on her soft hands. Hands that held mine. She never took it off.

I took it off.

God, I hate myself for this. I hate myself for this. I hate myself for this.

I took it off.

I was at a boxing class. I didn’t want it damaged, as we sparred, laughing and punching, so I took it off, placed it in my bag at the side of the hall. When the class was over, it was gone. I searched, believe me, I searched but… Gone.

I still search. Passing pawn shop windows I’ll look, miracles happen. They do. One day it might be there, one day it might be on my finger once more.

In the days after I disintegrated. Each time I thought of what happened, what that ring represented I would have to dash – quietly, without alerting my colleagues – to be sick. I kept how I was feeling a secret, my agony only visible to the toilet bowl. I was so ashamed, of both losing the ring in the first place but also for feeling so affected by it. Why had I cried more over this ring than I had at my grandma’s funeral? Than I had at my mum’s funeral? Was it all about the diamonds? Was I that shallow?

It both is and isn’t about the diamonds. As while there are the possessions that hold only sentimental value, often the things that mean the most to us also hold actual, real-world, someone-could-steal-this-and-sell-it-in-a-pawn-shop value. Because my granddad worked for that ring, he grafted to show my grandma, in a physical way, how much she meant to him. A man of his generation, he probably found that a hard thing to express, emotionally, but materialistically, that was possible. That is what he did.

I’m thinking of all of this, as fires rip through LA: belongings, artefacts, now ash. How that must feel. Or, how it must feel to have war push you out of your home, force you to leave behind the life, and its possessions, you worked so hard for. All of that now rubble, coated in bomb dust.

Our lives matter so much more than our stuff, yes. The items I grieve, I grieve because I grieve the person that owned them before me. But, even as I look around my house now, at the things that matter that are just my own, I try to imagine how I would feel if I lost them.

My notebooks, full of my thoughts, evidence of my past, my growth and memories that my brain cannot hold.

The paper cranes my husband, and family, crafted to hang from balloons at our wedding – intricate origami work that took hours. Hours that expressed love.

The multiple copies of Death of A Salesman, I buy one each time I go into a second-hand bookshop and see the play script. They have come from all over, yellow pages, a collection of the same words, a representation of the writing I love, the sort of writing I’d love to achieve some day.

Empty diptyque candles, now used as pen and make-up brush pots. I always wanted to be the sort of woman who owned diptyque candles, these are evidence I worked hard, and, for a brief period I was.

Our belongings are so much more than just stuff. They represent who we are, who we want to be, who we worked hard to be.

After we accepted defeat, and knew the sunglasses were well and truly gone, my sister went into the bowels of the boat and emerged with a cardboard box. My mum’s ashes. And so, onto mucky brown water, just beyond the Spaghetti Junction, cars roaring, we took a handful of her and reunited her with her sunglasses, her memories of sunshine holidays and the 1970s.

One of the hardest things about living is knowing that everything we love, even ourselves, will one day become ash, become dust. Each loss reminds us of this.

We are allowed to grieve for the things that matter.

The only picture of my grandma’s ring. If you ever see it in a pawn shop, let me know (miracles happen)

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