For a long time, I thought the internet rewarded people who shared everything. The more personal the story, the more vulnerable the moment, the more likely it was to become content. Somewhere along the way, social media became a place where everything needed to fit inside a caption, a carousel or a reel. It became faster, louder, more performative. And ultimately, the conversations I wanted to have no longer belonged there.

Over the past decade, my career has taken me from luxury public relations to journalism, creative strategy, branding, weddings and, eventually, content creation. What started as documenting my work slowly became documenting my life. I shared my wardrobe, my work, my travels, my wedding and, in many ways, invited people into a chapter of my life that I genuinely believed would last forever.

Writing has always been how I make sense of the world. It’s where ideas get to breathe. Where opinions become more nuanced. Where the answer isn’t always obvious by the second paragraph. So, I started A Creative Council. Not as another newsletter, but as a place to think.

Sharing your life online is a funny thing. It can bring some of the greatest opportunities you’ll ever have. It can also mean that when your life falls apart, people notice. The past twelve months have been some of the most tumultuous, gut-wrenching, empowering, debilitating, painful and unexpectedly beautiful of my life. The life I was building with the person I thought would be my forever shattered. And, honestly? I shattered alongside it.

Looking back now, I understand why people thought I’d disappeared. Why my content shifted so dramatically from lifestyle into fashion, styling and creative direction. It probably looked intentional. Like a strategic pivot. It wasn’t. It was survival.

I think that’s also why I never made the “life update” everyone seemed to be waiting for. Before going on antidepressants, I couldn’t even talk about what had happened without having a panic attack. Some days I couldn’t get out of bed. Some days I couldn’t make it even one hour without crying. When I did have to leave the house, it took far more than anyone realised. Therapy. Medication. Sitting in my uber trying to slow my breathing. Reapplying my makeup after crying in the bathroom. It wasn’t resilience. It was survival.

Did people really expect me to prop my phone up and film that? I don’t mean that sarcastically. It’s something I’ve genuinely thought about. Because somewhere along the way, we’ve started believing that if someone doesn’t share something online, it somehow didn’t happen. The answer is, of course, no. Both things can be true at once. I was grieving the biggest loss of my life while still showing up to events, creating content and trying to keep the career and business I’d spent years building afloat.

From the outside, you saw someone dressed for Fashion Week. You didn’t see me thirty minutes earlier on the phone to a real estate agent about selling the house I’d thought I’d raise my first child in. You saw a Reel I’d filmed days earlier, on the one afternoon I’d managed to pull myself together long enough to put on makeup and create enough content to disappear again.

Some of you noticed. You’d message me saying my eyes looked bloodshot or “sad”. That I seemed flat. Friends would hug me at events and quietly ask if I was okay. The truth was, I wasn’t. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating properly. I wasn’t excited by things that used to light me up. I was functioning because I had to, not because I wanted to. It takes an extraordinary amount of energy to make it look like your life hasn’t just fallen apart.

As I slowly started telling friends, family and people in my wider world what happened, one question seemed to come up more than any other: “Are you going to delete all your wedding content?” I always find it interesting because I think people assume the answer would be yes. That I’d be embarrassed. Because the relationship didn’t last, I’d want to erase every reminder of it from the internet? But that’s never really been the feeling. Sadness was.

Embarrassment is something you get over pretty quickly when your job involves sharing your life or work online. You build a thick skin, and you stop caring what most strangers think of you. Sadness is different. The fact that I can’t scroll Pinterest without stumbling across my own wedding photos isn’t embarrassing. It’s heartbreaking. Not because I regret that day - I don’t. It was one of the happiest days of my life. It’s sad because those photos represent a future that no longer exists.

I’ve always been a planner. The kind of person who colour-codes spreadsheets, thinks five years ahead and believes that if you care enough, work hard enough and stay committed enough, you’ll eventually find a solution. It’s served me well in business, it served me well in life, and I tried to approach my relationship the same way. Without getting into the ins and outs, this July would’ve marked ten years together. Ten years. A decade spent building a life alongside someone. A decade imagining children who’d inherit my dark hair and his eyes. My nose, his metabolism. A home that would slowly fill with traditions we’d cultivated over that decade.

When you’ve been with someone for that long, you don’t just lose the person. You lose an entire imagined future and ecosystem. That same ending came with very different consequences, and for the first time in my life, time felt loud. It’s one of the crueller realities of being a woman: I had just turned thirty. I have one functioning ovary. And suddenly, conversations I’d always assumed would happen “one day” became immediate. Fertility. Egg freezing. Starting over. I wasn’t just grieving the relationship I’d lost; I was grieving the certainty I’d always felt about the future.

And because so much of my work revolves around weddings, love stories and beautiful beginnings, there were moments where the irony felt almost unbearable. I’d spend my days helping couples celebrate the start of forever, then come home and mourn the ending of what I thought was mine.

The interesting part? I realised I’d spent years living in fear of losing the life I’d built. Then I lost it. It didn’t make me fearless. But it did make me realise how much energy I’d spent trying to control things that were never mine to control.

And the funny thing is, every person I love has spent years telling me the exact same thing. That I “gatekeep my personality”. That the quickest, funniest, most unfiltered version of me rarely makes it onto the internet. And, if I’m honest, they’re probably right. Somewhere along the way, as my relationship unravelled, so did my confidence. I confused becoming smaller with becoming easier to love. The people closest to me spent years reminding me I never had to.

It’s all the same person. You’ve just been meeting one version of her. This past year has taught me there’s a difference between privacy and secrecy, between vulnerability and performance. More importantly, it’s taught me that trying to squeeze conversations that deserve depth into places that reward speed was never going to work.

So maybe that’s what this is. Not a reinvention. A reintroduction.

You’ll still get the fashion. The brands worth discovering before everyone else does. The collections worth investing in. The creative strategy, the business thinking, the weddings and the travel.

But you’ll also get the conversations I usually save for the people closest to me. The thoughts behind the recommendations. The stories behind the stories. The career dilemmas. The dating debriefs. The essays that don’t belong on Instagram. The things I’m still trying to untangle.

Because as awful as this year has been, it’s also connected me to people in a way I never expected. Complete strangers have shared stories of heartbreak, business breakdowns, infertility, grief, career changes and starting over. Not because they wanted answers, but because they wanted someone else to say, “Me too.”

It reminded me that maybe the conversations we’re all craving aren’t more personal. They’re just more honest.

The version of me you’ve met online has always been real. She just hasn’t been the whole story.

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