When I complained about the lack of time to write while watching the sunset at the beach (a flattering portrait of myself I’m sure) it was kindly suggested that I could in fact, write on the plane.

Dear Reader that is not what the plane is for.

I took my first proper long haul flight when I was twenty and was blown away by the little movie screen and the free tiny meals with all those packaged courses. If you hear me complaining about plane food please know the robots have replaced me. How could anyone complain about the pure luxury of being brought a little portioned out meal and free glasses of wine? Even sleeping upright couldn’t ruin that.

Which is to say that I think we need to respect the no man’s land of the plane. Frankly I think anyone who connects to wifi while in the sky is a lunatic. Accept we are above reality and the considerations of the world, recline your seat, it’s time to watch all of the Lord of the Rings movies in one continuous stupor while nibbling on that tiny packet of pretzels they bring round.

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t write on the plane. So enough explaining why I’m late and time to actually get to it. As always do let me know what you think about the whole destiny vs agency shebang in the comments.

Submit your own questions via dm or direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com and please do consider subscribing if you haven’t already.

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Dear Older Sister,

Do you believe in “the universe”? Do each of us have a “destiny”? If your answer is yes, how much agency or power over our own paths do we really have? Or if not, is everything happenstance? Are our actions are all we have?

I ask because I’m in a strange stage of life. I’m almost 32, single and experiencing a period of unemployment and all the financial stress that comes with that. I’m truly happy being single and ultimately love my life right now but when I look to the future, I have no clue what I want to happen next or how I want it to happen. Kids or no kids? Relationship or no relationship? Fulfilling job or unfulfilling job?

When I raise these questions, concerns, thoughts etc with friends I get the same platitudes:

• “You’ll find something amazing!”

• “What will be will be.”

• “What’s meant for you will find you.”

• “You’ve just gotta trust the universe.”

Do these statements fall under the category of “just things people say”? And is it wise or foolish to derive comfort from them? And honestly, what’s the appropriate response to a statement like this when you are at your wits end?

Essentially, should we trust that good things will happen (while still taking active steps to get there) or should we take our desired fate in our hands and run?

Sincerely,

Lost in space

Dear Lost in Space,

Yowzah, now this is a question.

There’s a lot going on here, questions about spirituality, about our faith in good things coming, friends seemingly irritating the hell out of you with platitudes, doubt, hope and everything in between. It also seems like you’ve likely made up your own mind on this one - even in your framing it’s not ‘should I just believe’ you’ve got that all important ‘while working towards it anyway’ in there which can only ever be the answer to this question.

But let’s take some real life examples shall we?

Embarrassing real life anecdote one; I once had a therapist question whether I was a sociopath because I ticked a box that said I never questioned my decisions.

I’ve probably already mentioned that I used to be in therapy on here. I am a firm believer in the power of talking to a silent stranger for years in order to uncover the ways your parents fucked you up and the ways you made it worse all by yourself.

There are many things in therapy that you legally cannot be embarrassed about, like crying and thinking shameful awful things you must never say out loud. Trust me Lost in Space, your therapist is there to listen placidly as you find the bravery to say what you believed to be unsayable. You will feel better for it.

Unfortunately, I’m not in therapy at the moment because I wanted to use the money to go to Primavera last year instead. I’m not saying quitting therapy to pay for a festival is a good idea, but I did get to see Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan in one sun drenched weekend with my closest friends. Take from that what you will.

Anyway, this isn’t about quitting therapy, this is about the early days with the therapist before my last therapist. My ex-ex-therapist if you will and something that happened that I still find vaguely embarrassing for good reason.

In one of early sessions, where her big orange cat would sometimes sit on my lap, I was given a worksheet to fill out and bring back. It included statements like ‘I worry about people not liking me’ and scales of one to five for never to all the time etc.

I am an impulsive and stubborn person at the best of times, which basically means I often have complete conviction and act quickly. My current at-home bob can attest to this. (It looks great, Big Hairdressing is lying to you, but also — if you’re my hairdresser Daniel reading this, a triple scorpio god — I will return to the salon once I’m less skint I swear).

So, given this personality type, I filled out the worksheet in two minutes flat. Circling and ticking absolutes here and there, including an answer to the statement: ‘I make the right decisions.’ For which I circled five, for always.

My therapist at this point was not the kind of therapist who hid her emotions. She was clearly surprised when I handed the worksheet in the following week, in fact she proceeded to tell me; “I have never seen anyone circle always before!”

We conducted the session like normal, I most likely cried while not reaching for the tissues. Then at the end, where she’d generally wish me well and shoo me out, she told me she had some more questions for me.

This is where she asked me about what I’d meant by ‘always’ and also; how did I feel when other people were sad? How did I feel when I was told what to do? What did it mean to be kind?

She never said it out loud, but I’ve always been convinced that this was in fact a sociopath checklist. Therapists do not keep you after the session when they have stopped getting paid because they think you’re fun to talk to.

Whatever I said, I must have proven myself not in fact cold to the world and she didn’t bring it up again.

So now, for you Lost in Space, I will explain what I meant by “I always make the right decision.”

I did not and do not think I am always right (whatever my girlfriend tells you, sometimes, when there is a full moon I am occasionally a little bit incorrect in a small way). Also I am a person who is not a sociopath so of course there are things I have done that live in me as horrible regrets, like a collection of ugly inherited ornaments that I unpack in every new bedroom and file onto a shelf labelled ‘why would you do that you stupid slut!’

But I did and do believe that if I made a decision, it was likely the right one for me at the time. Even choices that were bad for me. What I’m saying is; I have empathy for all those versions of myself.

Do I regret not doing a study abroad year in New York and instead throwing all my plans into the wind because I couldn’t bear the thought of spending that much time away from my weasel University boyfriend? Oh, you betcha.

But I don’t blame her for those choices, I was in love and I was young and I visited New York for the first time at twenty seven instead and slept with an artist in her studio and wasn’t that so much better than anything I would have done at nineteen?

So where is the lesson for you Lost in Space?

Well, believing good things are coming for you — like a trip to New York — goes hand in hand with believing that those past versions of yourself did the best with what they had and that no decision can ever truly be wrong if it’s genuinely what you wanted at the time.

You don’t have to be like me Lost in Space and be so manically certain that people quite literally question your sanity, but you do have to trust and forgive the choices you’ve made. Given the tools you had at your disposal, you did your best and you will do your best again, you will take yourself to sparkling new places called ‘at least I was honest’ and ‘I know what I want now’ which may not look like you’d imagined but will be so much better for it.

So trust in the universe Lost in Space but just remember you’re the universe.

Embarrassing real life anecdote two; I recently made a midnight wish to the, er, gnomes.

Ok, now we have a portrait of a quick acting person with absolute conviction let’s muddy that shall we?

Like you Lost in Space, like all of us, I am a person of contradictions.

Recently on my trip to Australia I visited a much beloved friend in Melbourne. This friend and I once had lunch in a cafe near my old flat where we talked very, very loudly about horoscopes and astrology and I declared to her that I’d decided I was going to write an autobiography and chronicle what it really meant to be a twenty five year old woman. I was planning to name it ‘Becoming.’ This friend had to break it to me that this book title was already in use by the niche performance artist known as Michelle Obama.

Anyway, I didn’t write that memoir to the relief of the publishing industry (although sometimes I wish I did have a record of that version of myself) but this lunch went down in our shared friendship history. How fun it was to loudly talk with certainty about things people might find silly in a small cafe and feel we were both being laughed at and laughing at everyone around us. What it was to be twenty five and loud. How I so dearly love being loud.

When I saw her on this trip, we were both changed and entirely the same. In fact I wrote a little note about it.

One of the things we did was window shopping. We walked around markets and bougie Melbourne streets and discussed buying fancy bowls and then ultimately bought nothing. Both of us on a budget, mine induced by spending the previous week and a half of my holiday acting like this:

In the midst of our self restraint, she took me to a crystal shop.

Inside, we found a little spinner at the back. Spin the dial, receive a symbol and find the corresponding ‘fate’ on a little ticket and the £25 spell to go with it.

Giggling, she asked if I wanted a go?

We both stepped up to the spinner and then, straight faces, repeated the instructed saying “I believe in the elves” as if we were swearing an oath in court.

I received a slip that promised me success and acclaim. She received a free wish.

This is where I tell you that we laughed and moved on, we were both on budgets after all. But what would be the fun in that. So on our very restrained shopping trip, we spent the best part of £50 on spells and crystals.

That night, drunk after dinner, we opened our spell pots and conducted the rituals described. My friend was much luckier than me, she received a nice star pendant. But my spell-in-a-jar-for-a-fee was to the gnomes, my spell jar included a not insignificantly sized figurine of a wizard (to summon the gnomes perhaps? Because he is the gnomes’ king? Because the spell shop didn’t have anything that looked like a gnome to shill to me?) and instructions to always wear it around my neck.

I woke that night gripping the wizard in hand and I vaguely regret to inform you I am still wearing the wizard charm now.

Is it because I believe wearing this Wizard of the Gnomes will grant me my wishes? Or am I wearing it as a physical reminder of what I want so that I’ll work to go after it?

Honestly, it’s probably both of those things.

Of course we have to believe good things are coming, of course we have to work towards them.

I’m not an out and out believer in manifestation, particularly the full-blown grifter end of the spectrum where smiling faces online promise endless riches if you’ll only take their course and focus on attracting abundance. But I fundamentally believe that believing in yourself will make you better at what you try — how could it not? Believing in yourself really is just a decision to put your all into something. Of course you will be more successful in the long run if you can get yourself to the place where you really work at everything you want.

So yes, Lost in Space, if believing in the universe and good things being meant for you can be both comforting and go a way to helping you really apply yourself fully, then light those candles and buy all the crystals you want baby. What I’d guard against is allowing a belief in manifestation, the universe, what is meant for you etc, to actually get in the way of working towards what you want.

You cannot get a job you don’t apply for, you cannot fall in love with a person you don’t meet, you cannot receive success and acclaim from the Wizard of the Gnomes if you do not write your Substack newsletter … ahem.

Lost in Space, work as hard as you can for the things that you want. Work with the firm belief they are waiting for you. Life is long and hard and tiring and we should take comfort where we can find it.

Also; tell your friends to shut up every now and again if it makes you feel better.

I’ve never met a person who wouldn’t benefit from having someone roll their eyes every so often. A little bit of ego death is good for the soul.

Love,

Your Older Sister

Want to Submit?

Come get lectured and submit your own anonymous letter via dm or direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com. Remember, I’m your older sister; you can tell me anything and I won’t tell anyone (except mum, she says tuna bake’s for tea).

*Apologies to my real little sister erased from this picture and to my other little sister not even in frame, I love you both so much.

For this letter I’ve snuck away from my in-laws for an hour or so to think about writing, creativity, blind and foolish hope etc.

So here’s hoping this is at least vaguely coherent, next I’m off to check if there are spiders hiding under the toilet seat or perhaps to throw some shrimp on the barbie. (Can you hear my Australian girlfriend groaning? Spot them in the image for this letter, painted as a bumble bee.)

To have your own question answered when I’m in a slightly less living-in-a-state-of-surreal-half-asleep, write to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com.

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Dear Older Sister,

I’ve always wanted to be a writer but I’m ashamed of everything I write.

So, to set the scene, I have always wanted to write. When I was even just a small kid and they asked at school, I told everyone I wanted to be an author. I guess I had visions of myself sitting at a big desk with a typewriter and making up stories. I used to love reading fantasy books and I remember realising that someone had taken the time to make them and that it had been thought up by someone. That’s when I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

Of course, I have tried to be practical as people always tell you to be. So I studied sensible things and I got a sensible job and I guess I thought, once I had the stability of that, that I would start writing in the evenings and the weekends.

I imagined I would take notebooks to cafes and come up with brilliant wonderful worlds made of words.

But while I was studying I was so busy writing essays and now I have a job I am so busy cooking and cleaning and eventually sleeping when I finish work and I kept putting writing off.

Then I decided I needed to take myself seriously, or I was never going to be a writer. So I booked a holiday alone and went and stayed in the middle of the woods but that’s when disaster struck. Everything I wrote was bad. Just bad bad all the way through. I wanted to write books like the ones I have always loved reading but my stories were clumsy and it was so hard to get ideas.

I felt so ashamed of myself. I’ve been telling people forever that I wanted to be a writer, but when I finally had the opportunity, I was no good at all and the embarrassment of that realisation was worse than anything.

I thought I wasn’t writing because I didn’t have any time, but what if I’m just not meant for it?

Older sister, how do you know when you should give up and find a new dream? And if I don’t give up, how can I become a good writer?

Best

Aspiring Author

Dear Aspiring Author,

Congratulations, you have taken the first step on the road to becoming a writer; discovering how truly awful you are.

I’m not being cruel when I say this, or even really joking, because the reality is that the thing stopping a lot of people from writing is a two-fold combination of fear of trying and lack of self-awareness. You, wonderful AA have crossed both of these thresholds.

Not only have you begun trying, you have also proven that you have a sense of taste. You can tell your writing is bad. This is great news. Only by knowing something is bad can you work towards making something better!

I’m speaking from my ever so slight experience here.

Like a lot of writers on Substack I am also a wannabe, gotta-be, hope-to-be author. At one point I was even an almost-to-be author and got a novel all the way through the first hurdles of self-disbelief, over the hill of endless draft revisions, through the valley of death that is the query trenches and up to the peak of the mountain mere seconds away of planting my flag in the ground. Which is to say that my novel got to an acquisitions meeting (where editors essentially pitch books they’d like to buy to their team) but no dice. I.e. no book deal.

Can you hear the thread of hope over the sound of my wailing? That is unfortunately another thing you are going to have to develop to become an author AA; an ability to be rejected and do it anyway.

Laying it out like this there are three parts to your problem; giving yourself permission to write, giving yourself permission to be bad, and doing it anyway.

Let’s tackle them one at a time shall we?

Giving Yourself Permission to Write

The horrifying thing about writing, or really doing anything that makes your heart sing, is that it is often much easier to live only in the make-believe than it is to actually do it.

In the make-believe everything glitters.

I remember when I imagined myself as an author AA, I also imagined myself at a desk — one of those big Victorian pedestal desks to be specific. You know, the ones with the leather tops and all the drawers. I imagined myself having grand ideas and perhaps sitting in a chair on a stage and answering questions about my brilliant-ness.

For years, this was the only writing I did. All this imaging myself sitting at a big desk. Which, I’m sure you can already see, is not writing at all.

Like you AA I was always so busy and so tired, and I felt that the circumstances needed to be perfect if I was going to make great art. Surely, at some point, everything would fall into place?

Also, if I didn’t try, I didn’t have to fail.

In the make-believe I was a gifted writer who had simply yet to pick up a pen. I was all potential and hope. If I tried actually writing, that might no longer be the case. And, I was so old (which is the kind of thing you think when you are twenty five and very stupid) perhaps I had missed the chance to be a brilliant young savant? If I started writing, what if it took me years to write a book?

I couldn’t possibly start writing, what if it took me a long time? I was already getting too old for it to take a long time!

So, what changed?

Well a number of things. Firstly, that I realised I was going to get old anyway, that putting off starting out of fear of it taking a long time was an entirely stupid endeavour. Secondly, and this is perhaps the most practical part of the advice; I started journalling.

Just like I had always fancied myself a writer, I had always fancied myself a diarist. But I’d been just as incapable of that too.

It was dumb luck really and cosmic timing that I was vaguely prescribed journalling at the end of six NHS CBT therapy phone calls a couple of weeks before I broke up with my last boyfriend and four-ish weeks before the beginning of the pandemic.

So when we were all instructed to stay inside and it felt like everything I believed to be a fundamental fact of life was available to be questioned, I was in possession of a periwinkle Moleskine notebook. With nothing else to do, I kept a diary regularly for the first time in my life.

Why should you keep a diary AA? Because a diary is writing.

People will often talk about developing your ‘voice’ as a writer, the way only you could write and tell your story. When you’re starting out that might feel like an abstract concept, the kind of ephemeral thing people who don’t want you to succeed might demand when you’re more interested in trying to invent magic systems or weaving intricate plots. But I promise you will not regret developing a voice and the way you can develop yours is by keeping a diary.

Right there, in between all the things you wish you’d said during an argument at dinner your voice will grow on the page.

I’m not saying this is always a positive, I’m sure the trainee phone-therapist who prescribed me journalling wasn’t imagining I would be writing in quite such a self-aware form as I now do in my diary, what with my eternal impulse to round out entries as stories and tweak life to fit. But it was the best possible thing I could have done for my writing.

It let me introduce writing into my life with no pressure of any aims of publication and it made me good at approaching a blank page.

So buy a diary AA, and give yourself permission to write.

Giving Yourself Permission to Be Bad

Ok, so you’re writing. Success. Time to suck.

The first short story I ever finished was about a woman with bulimia who really wanted to eat paella and hated her boyfriend. I wrote it in order to enter a food themed writing competition run by a hotel chain. The winning story was printed and available for guests to read.

I wrote the story because I thought perhaps I could win the prize and my biggest motivator has always been good healthy competition. Once I finished I was incredibly pleased with myself. I was so pleased with myself that I wrote nothing else for maybe two or three more years. I’d written such a good short story after all, perhaps I never needed to write again.

AA let me repeat myself. I wrote a short story about a woman compulsively throwing up for a food themed competition run by a luxury hotel chain. In case it needs stating, I did not win.

While I had made time to write (test one; aced!) I had not yet developed any sense of taste or, more accurately, of my own badness.

I thought the story was brilliant. What I needed was to learn how to tell how bad it actually was. AA you need to know when something is bad, it is an important and necessary skill. If you believe all your writing is wonderful straight out of the gate then your writing will always be bad.

I’m sure this is where I will be reminded of some born genius who has only ever published first drafts, but I simply do not believe they exist. By the time I got my agent with my last novel, I was on the seventh draft. It had taken me over three years of bad writing to get there.

That whole time I was working on it I was telling people that I ‘needed to finish my novel.’ What I realised quite late in is that when you say this people assume what you mean is; I need to write enough words.

But that’s not it at all. I had written enough words in the first year. In fact I had written enough words probably five times over. The problem was that every time I read a draft, I could tell I hadn’t yet made a book.

Did I know what specifically was bad and missing and wrong? No, that would have been easy. Instead each draft was a grasp towards a more hopeful thing. A game of tweaks and big swings and reaching into the dark.

Then when I did sign with my agent, we re-drafted the damn thing three more times anyway. One for luck, two for good measure and the third because suffering is my favourite weekend past time.

AA you have to write badly. You have to know when you write badly. It is the only way to eventually write well. So again, congratulations, you can tell your writing is bad. You are so far ahead of everyone who is still stuck thinking their short story about paella is genius.

Doing it Anyway

Excellent, you’re writing badly. Now to keep going.

Remember mere seconds ago when I mentioned the many many drafts of my doomed novel? It might sound relentless, but I don’t know any writers who have written a book after giving up. It quite literally, is not possible. You have to write to write.

Sometimes people talk about writing as a game of attrition, you must have a horse in the race to be in any chance of winning etc

What they might not tell you is that even if you hang on, if you are one of the minuscule percentage of people who actually works at it long enough that they do in fact write a book, that it doesn’t actually guarantee that you’ll get what you want. You could write for a decade, you could write for five, and you may never get a book deal.

You’ve heard of Yesteryear right? If you have eyes and ears and consider yourself to be a person in all likelihood you have. It’s the billboard-shop-window-television-appearance-international-tour book of the year. Oh also, it’s the third one Caro Claire Burke went out on submission with (that’s when agents send out manuscripts to editors in the hopes of landing the author a book deal). The first two that Burke wrote didn’t sell to anyone.

In fact not-selling a book is the more likely outcome of writing one than any of the others. If this puts the fear of God into you may I recommend the incomparable Write Off podcast? Listen, ye children of hope to the many tales of failure and persistence from writers who were rejected and did it anyway.

Now I don’t want to obscure my point here. Because these are stories with happy endings. Burke didn’t sell her first two novels, and now look, Yesteryear is going to be a movie with Anne Hathaway in it. But really what I’m saying is that this might never happen for you AA, or for me.

There may never be a book deal, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a writer.

Unfortunately, if you are the kind of insane that drives a person to write a book, then it will not matter if you are unable to secure an agent or a book deal — the demon that sits in your skull will insist you write another one anyway.

You might even swear it off for years and then one day you will watch how your mother interacts with her mother and think, almost against your will; what an interesting dynamic that is. And then look, you’re thinking about the way they hold their forks the same, how they act against their own self interest. Now you’re imagining it wasn’t your mother, but a woman like her, living with her mother, what if the pair of them lived alone? In the middle of the woods? What if one night your mother went to her mother’s room and her mother wasn’t there and the window was open and there was a howling in the night and your mother had to set off to save her mother from the wolves? And look, you’re writing even against your own will.

That’s what it means to be a writer AA. So sure, go give up if you’re capable of it. But I’d bet money you aren’t. Better to accept your lot now. You’re going to struggle to find the time, you’re going to write terrible things, no one is going to read it, but you’re going to write anyway.

Because if you really want something, if it lives under your skin, it’s that or death. And death is going to happen whether we like it or not so you may as well chase your dreams in the interim.

After all, that story about your mother and her mother the werewolf isn’t going to write itself.

May as well start writing.

Love,

Your Older Sister

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*Apologies to my real little sister erased from this picture and to my other little sister not even in frame, I love you both so much.

In my writing I am always setting stories in the stifling heat, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get away from the opening of ‘The Bell Jar.’

‘It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.’

There is no better opening to a book in my opinion, no better evocation of summer.

There’s something about the demands of summer; to have a good time, to wear next to nothing, to properly make sure you’re appreciating it, that has always chafed. Maybe I just don’t like getting too hot. I have always been a read-in-the-shade kind of holiday goer.

I’m going away this summer, but on a more sight seeing adventure type trip. Although I’m sure I will inevitably pack far too many books. Ever the reading optimist.

There goes summer, forcing you to reckon with the person you hope to be and the person you are, in the form of a pile of unread books schlepped across the globe.

This week in ‘Dear Older Sister’ I’m thinking about friendships; what you can ask of them, what they tell us about the people we are. As we all decamp to picnic blankets and after work drinks, I think summer is a good time to be thinking about the mysteries of friendships. After all, winter is all about going to ground, summer brings things up into the light.

If you’d like to send over your own question you can do so directly via email to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com.

As always, this is a free bi-weekly publication, I’d be giddy as anything if you’d subscribe.

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Dear Older Sister,

I feel like my friends don’t respect me.

I’m sure they do, on some level. Maybe I’m being too sensitive. But I think I need some perspective.

It’s been a pattern throughout my life that people don’t respect my opinions or decisions. Obviously it started with my parents, as everything does: You’re not sick, you’re fine. You’re not stressed, you’re fine. That’s not what happened. That’s not true. That’s not right. You’re being too loud. It’s not that serious. You worry about things too much.

It’s pretty unsurprising, then, that I rarely challenge people close to me when they discredit my feelings or decisions. I noticed that as I’ve grown older, it seems few close friends trust and value what I have to say. My value, it seems, only comes from tokenistic ‘party girl’ things - being available to someone romantically, a funny date story, a chance encounter with someone famous, a chaotic interaction with a stranger at the pub... I admit to playing up a bit to this stereotype at times - I use humour to diffuse tense or difficult situations, so I can see where it all stems from.

But what I genuinely cannot understand, in the year of our lord 2026, is why my friends don’t respect when I have a serious opinion or when I’m making a serious decision. When I share a fact, or relay something from the news, they almost always double-check, or challenge me. I’ve recently made quite a significant life decision, and I’ve been pulled up by several of them asking if I’ve actually thought this through?

I’m in my mid-thirties, of course I’ve thought it through! I’ve overthought it to oblivion! We’re not twenty anymore!

When I do make a ‘mature’ decision, I get a verbal pat on the head. That’s actually really adult of you! Well done! These are cherished friends of 5+ years, at least, across different friend groups. My newer friends don’t act this way with me. I have been as reckless and impulsive as anyone else in their youth, but my friends all seem to have granted themselves clemency and been afforded the wisdom and maturity of growing up, whereas I have apparently been skipped over.

I find it condescending and deeply hurtful. I’m either older than or the same age as these people - why is there an inherent sense of seniority to their opinions and their decisions but not to mine? What happened to containing multitudes?

I’m successful in my career, I’m academic and well-read. I try not to shout too much about these things (we live in England and that would be uncouth), but I’m feeling increasingly defensive as of late. I’m starting to hate myself for it, it feels arrogant.

Why don’t my friends trust my word?

Sincerely,

Fucking Frustrated

Dear Fucking Frustrated,

Firstly, I’m sorry. It’s clear in your letter how upsetting you’re finding this. There’s nothing worse than feeling like we aren’t being listened to. Friendships are those places that we put our most honest selves, where we shape who we want to be, and it’s disorientating to find that even here — in our own curated world — we’re not being seen.

I’ve been thinking about your letter for a couple of days now. There are some obvious practical things you can do. Namely; talk to your friends. I feel like the majority of my advice in these columns whittles down to honesty, vulnerability, trust etc. I’m sure all of these things would serve you here.

But I think what might be more interesting for you to ponder is my own question to you; how do your friends’ reactions make you feel?

Stay with me here, I can hear you shouting ‘Older Sister I have already told you!’

Which yes, you have, you’ve told me how hurt you are. But I wonder what the layer beneath that is? It strikes me that when you talk about your friends you use the phrase: ‘an inherent sense of seniority to their opinions.’

Fucking Frustrated, when you say seniority, do you really mean; they are acting like my parents?

What I’m wondering is, if you can pinpoint exactly how you feel, then maybe you’ll be able to express it in a way that gets you closer to what you want. If you say to your friends ‘you’re being patronising!’ they’ll probably just get defensive (rightly or wrongly) but if you say ‘when you react like this it makes me feel like I did as a child, like a person whose feelings and opinions didn’t matter,’ that could make all the difference.

If you want to be heard, sometimes you need to work out what it actually is that you’re trying to say.

Because, really, none of this is about who is right and who is wrong. It might be that your friends react like this because they’re worried about you, or it could be that they really don’t trust your decisions, maybe it’s a little of both, maybe it’s neither. Maybe they’re being completely normal and you’re taking all of their responses badly because you were cursed by a witch to always doubt your closest loved ones. What matters is finding a way to say what you mean and that they try and listen.

It’s about how you can get what you want. What you want is to not feel like your childhood self.

I’ve been thinking about our childhood selves a lot lately, not only because I am suddenly surrounded by babies and the ever present worry that one harsh word or odd mood might change the course of their lives. (Seriously, is no one else freaked out about how malleable children are? Little blank slates soaking up everything you do, even all the things you don’t like about yourself?)

But also because I’ve been using my childhood photos throughout this series. I’m sort of obsessed with that childhood version of myself and how I can undo some of the things she learnt about herself.

When you were a child, Fucking Frustrated, like almost all of us, you had no control over very basic things like what you wore or when you went to sleep. Children are a shepherded class. But beyond these normal restrictions, the ones that kept us safe and well, you were denied even more. When you tell someone what you think, how you feel, who you are and in return the people you trust most respond with denial, well surely that is going to become a deep wound.

I’m not saying your parents are bad people Fucking Frustrated, maybe they grew up in an environment where asking for things was dangerous in some way. Maybe they too learnt from very small not to voice their own realities.

The problem is that whatever kind of parent you have, they will inevitably mess you up. Philip Larkin inevitably put it best in ‘This Be The Verse’

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old-style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

I had a different childhood to you, Fucking Frustrated, but I leant into the ways I was perceived just as you did when you crafted your lackadaisical party-girl persona — and now I too find myself with the daunting task of untangling the web.

If you can’t tell from the picture I used for this letter, I was a bold child.

I was the eldest granddaughter on both sides of my family. Now I have my own nephew, whose very being we praise and fuss over every second, I can see why I was the kind of child I was. Crowds roared in celebration everywhere I stepped and I felt to my very childhood core that I deserved it.

Not only was I bold, but the ways I was bold have become part of my family lore. Stories about my stubbornness, my single-mindedness are prime for retelling. I’m sure you have your own stories Fucking Frustrated, narratives that became the building blocks of your life.

For me there’s this family video of when I’m seven, maybe eight?

I’m putting on a talent show with my sisters and our family friends. In I strut, proud as punch, and proceed to perform a song and dance I have made up on the spot about shooting stars. This would be fine, except I am accompanied by a friend who has not been briefed on this made up song. In the telling of the story I apparently say ‘just follow me’ and march us out. In the video she valiantly attempts to follow along with my improvised performance, catching only the ends of words. Later, other children come to the centre of my lounge to perform. I dance in front of them. I read books over their shoulders. I guess the words they are about to say. I perform to the camera constantly. Out of shot my mother calls; Molly, Molly, let them do it.

This is the kind of child I was — probably very irritating, but seemingly immune to any form of self-consciousness or doubt.

No one questioned what I wanted. No one told me I wasn’t hurt when I was. That my opinions weren’t important. In this way I was luckier than you Fucking Frustrated, but I haven’t swanned into adulthood unburdened.

For me, the pattern I am stuck in, the way my family thinks of me that I am trying desperately to shake off, is that I am somehow inherently competent. Because what I learnt from that idea was that I didn’t need to ask for help.

That I shouldn’t ask for help.

Oh you’ve always been so capable.

Sure, maybe I was when I was eight and the only thing the world demanded of me was dancing in my parents lounge. But the problem with this idea of myself — because that’s what childhood stories are, they become the ways we think about ourselves — is that it led me to deny anything bad I was experiencing or feeling.

I can handle it, I used to think, swanning into all settings with the confidence of a man who went to private school with a cut glass accent. I can handle it, I used to think, when I found myself in a relationship with a Bad Man (more on that here). I can handle it, I used to think, when I was very very sad and very much could not handle it.

And this way that I felt about myself, this way that my family felt about me, often it followed me into my friendships just like you. I had friends who considered my achievements part in parcel with my inherent personality. Things always work out for you! they’d say, my mother’s voice echoing in theirs.

That’s really what I’m getting at here Fucking Frustrated, we are the things we carry with us.

Earlier this year, I had a great big terrible let-down. A sort of foundational failure that ripped a fissure right through me. I no longer feel like the bold little girl in these photos. My compass is missing north. For the first time in perhaps my entire life, I don’t know what I want.

It’s funny, being sad and having to keep repeating it. It makes you feel like a very boring person to be around.

Like you, Fucking Frustrated, I prided myself on being a good-time. I’m aware that part of the reason people like being around me is my confidence, my absolute conviction in my beliefs.

Who am I without this? Will my friends still love me if I become a different kind of person?

I wonder Fucking Frustrated if you’re asking yourself these same questions? When you stop yourself from being honest with your friends.

You weren’t listened to when you were very small Fucking Frustrated, right when being listened to is the most important thing in the world. You learnt how to make not being listened to into a super power. No one will take me seriously? Well then I will be the most unserious of them all. I will go laughing into the night. Of course you did this, how could you not?

It’s so odd how humans work, you’re a child and someone says something about you and an animal part of your brain goes “I guess that’s who I am forever” and then growing up is suddenly realising “oh wait that’s just something someone said about me, how do I become a real person?”

I’m not blaming you for this, but I think we have to be honest about the ways we have been active participants in our own lives. With childhood patterns, it’s a sort of chicken and egg scenario. Do people think of me as capable because I am? Or am I capable because that is how people think of me? Do your friends think of you as irresponsible because you are? Or are you irresponsible because that is how they think of you? Really it doesn’t matter what came first, they’re equal players.

That’s the thing about patterns, they repeat.

Right now, the party girl persona you crafted feels so far away from how you actually are. That’s why it’s so painful when these friends keep treating you as if you’re still that person. It’s both that it’s patronising, and that it doesn’t feel true. Maybe it never was.

But you were part of creating it, and you might need to give your friends a beat to catch up with the ways you’ve changed.

Who are you if you’re no longer just a good time? What if you were a person who insists on your feelings? How will these friends react to these new demands?

Who knows, Fucking Frustrated, perhaps these friends are people who won’t be able to adapt to the way you want to live. To what you feel is honest. Perhaps some of the friends who were drawn to me for my boldness will find me dull in my aimlessness. Perhaps yours won’t want to change your dynamic, maybe they are most comfortable thinking you are foolish so in turn they can feel wise — because while they can’t be as fun as you, at least they have that.

But I think we have to give the people we love the benefit of the doubt. We have to give them the opportunity to show up for us in the way that we need.

The only way to do that is to be honest with them about how you’re feeling. We can’t change our childhoods, but we can decide how we want to live the rest of our lives.

A good friendship is an ongoing conversation. There are friends who will always see you as the person you were when you met. Perhaps as you change these are friends who will grow further from you. But maybe they’ll surprise you, just as you are infinitely changing so are they.

It’s easier sometimes to not let ourselves ask for what we need because we expect resistance. What is the point of telling your friends they’re being condescending if nothing will change?

But making that judgement before you’ve given them to chance to is just as cruel. If we owe each other anything, we owe each other grace. If what you want is to be seen differently, why not offer them the chance to be different too?

I hope when you speak to your friends, Fucking Frustrated, they can hear you.

And who knows, maybe one day even your parents will learn to listen.

Love,

Your Older Sister

p.s. if you have your own answer for our letter writer, do share your thoughts below. But be nice, ok?

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Want to Submit?

Come get lectured and submit your own anonymous letter via dm or direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com. Remember, I’m your older sister; you can tell me anything and I won’t tell anyone (except mum, she says tuna bake’s for tea).

*Apologies to my real little sister erased from this picture and to my other little sister not even in frame, I love you both so much.

This week I’ve been thinking about sisterhood in fiction. Not only because I’m fiddling away at my own novel-in-progress about sisters, but because I’ve just finished re-reading Ann Patchett’s ‘Tom Lake’ — a novel about three sisters and their mother.

As one of three girls, I cried roughly every fifteen pages on my first read, a record I maintained on my second. It’s also got me thinking about the fact I’ve actually never read the sister book. You know, ‘Little Women.’ Perhaps that is my next read. Do let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments for books about sisters; the good, the bad and the middle child.

Ok, next up, in case you missed it, do check out the last letter below for musings on asking for what you need and all the time I wasted disliking friends’ boyfriends.

And a reminder that this is a free bi-weekly letter. I’d be so grateful if you’d subscribe — heck, open the email and I’ll kiss you on the mouth.

Finally, as always you can submit your own questions direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com.

Now, let’s begin.

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Dear Older Sister,

I’ve met a man that makes me dream.

As most little girls who grew up in the rural Midwest (or, I suppose, probably anywhere), I knew from a young age that I would be a wife—and a mother—one day. My own mother married at nineteen and had five children before she hit thirty. She always told little me to marry a rich farmer one day. Looking back, maybe she was wishing she had married a rich farmer, since she and my father struggled financially for the majority of my childhood. Regardless, I watched the TLC shows like Say Yes to the Dress and Four Weddings (the concept of this show boggles my adult mind) with the simple fact of my own wedding in the back of my mind. After remaining boyfriend-less throughout my teen years and my college years, I had replaced this fact with a new one: that I’d be single forever.

I had a six-month relationship last year that revealed not only the ugly parts of a relationship but also the ugly parts of myself that I’d been blissfully blind to as an un-partnered woman, and I knew all along during that relationship that I wouldn’t marry that man. (A deep feeling in my gut I naively ignored.) I won’t go into the juicy details about that here, partially because I’ve healed and moved on, and partially because this letter isn’t about him. It’s about the man I met at the beginning of this year.

Older sister (or, more accurately, stranger on the internet), I knew within a week of dating this man that I loved him. And I knew within a month that I’d want to marry him, and not just that, but that I’d want to raise kids with him and go on adventures with him and be by his side through his heartaches, and to have his hand in my hand during mine. When I say, “I love him,” there is no “but.” (This was a common theme in my first relationship. “I love him, but he can be mean.” “I love him, but he doesn’t treat me well.” “I love him, but xyz.”)

We’ve been together for a few months now and we’re talking about getting married next year. (Note: we’re in our mid-to-late twenties.) There’s just so much I could say about him, but one of the things that made me realize how deep my love is for this man is that I have two new Pinterest boards: one titled “Wedding,” and the other titled “Baby.” (I know I know, such unique and original names.) Before him, I didn’t allow my adult self to dream of a wedding, of having children, of a partnership. But now my mind is flooded with dreams of a life with him. For the sake of brevity, I won’t continue my gushing, but know that if we were on a phone call, I’d go on for hours about every treasure his heart holds.

My question, older internet sister, is if you think I’m simply living with rose-colored glasses over my eyes, or if you think quick, deep, intimate love is real. And, if it is, how do you know? (I would argue that I now know, but this is the first time I’ve ever been in love. Being sure might be a symptom.)

Thank you,

Dreamer

Dear Dreamer,

Let’s get this out of the way; yes Dreamer love is real and you can trust it.

Not only can you, but you must. There are so many opportunities in life where it might feel easier, more simple, less frightening to stop yourself from wanting things. But holding yourself back because of what might happen means choosing pain now in an attempt to avoid pain in the future. Dreamer we can’t know what the future holds, there might not be the kind of pain you are envisioning — there might be no pain at all. You have met someone who makes your heart light up, you love him, you know this. If you need permission to love him, then take this as permission Dreamer, love him and don’t look back.

The part of your letter that called out to me wasn’t this question, but the weight and history behind it. You say this letter isn’t about your last relationship, yet it’s right there in all the ways you’re doubting yourself now because of your experiences.

It’s right there in “I love him, but.”

Dreamer I have also dated a bad man. One who made me doubt myself and the things I thought were true. Someone whose badness seeped out from the relationship I left into new areas of my life, who came with me at the back of my skull when I met people after him. Somewhere still in my body, there the bad man lives.

This kind of experience marks us. Sometimes I think about other types of pain, how if you are hit by a car no one would expect you to carry on walking as if it never happened. Emotional pain is like walking with an invisible limp, your body callouses around it, you find ways to build a crutch.

When I was with this person Dreamer, I too said “I love him, but.” In fact I often said “I love him and.”

I said I love him and sometimes I wish he was less mean. I love him and sometimes I wish he would listen to me. I love him and sometimes I think he will never understand me. I love him and I just want my own space, that he isn’t always asking where I am. I love him and I imagine he didn’t exist. I love him and I imagine he was never born, I don’t want him to feel pain or die — god I don’t want him to die — but sometimes I imagine he had never come into my life and I can feel the relief fill my body.

I said this last part out loud. I remember the look on the face of a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time when these words came out of my mouth. The gentle way she told me that if that’s how I felt, I didn’t have to be with him.

I remember how I wisely, smugly, shook my head. I was in love, I told her, this is what love looked like. Love is compromise.

It was so long ago now that that version of myself feels like a stranger to me. I can see her there, just behind the glass, smiling as she goes. Trusting she is in love and that love will rectify all.

It wasn’t until I caught myself thinking this, that love is compromise, on the escalator at Waterloo station, that I realised I was wrong. It was like I travelled outside of my body in this moment, saw myself in the way that old friend had seen me. I saw how young I was. Did I want to be sad for the rest of my life? Of course I didn’t. So I left him.

For years after I still looked back on that relationship with kindness. You are worried about rose-tinted glasses Dreamer, I am the owner of a rose-tinted mind. Everything was glowing.

Then, as time passed, that invisible wound grew until eventually it ripped a hole right through me. I couldn’t keep walking around without acknowledging it.

I went to therapy. I journaled (a lot). I spent actual years writing a long sad novel about what it was like to be a person who didn’t know how sad they were. The way this bad man made me a stranger to myself. A person who couldn’t even tell when they were in pain.

And I looked back at it and wondered; was that love?

I can’t speak for you Dreamer, perhaps you did not love this bad man that you dated, but with all the wisdom of hindsight on my own life I can tell you that I did love mine.

That I loved him but, I loved him and.

This is where my real advice comes in; you cannot let it stop you.

Discovering all the ways I let love blind me was frankly alarming. Jesus, I had mastered repression, how could I ever trust myself again? What if I let another bad person in? What if I turned around again in five or ten or fifteen years and realised I’d fallen for something bad?

Dreamer, we can’t know. When you meet someone who gives you goosebumps the first time they touch you, there’s no guarantee that person will always be good to you. That love will see you through.

I remember the first time that bad man put his hand on my back, it felt like electricity.

When we were together I would think about that touch so often it calcified into a diamond. One day, my children would hear about this. Grandchildren of ours would sit at my feet and I would rhapsodise about the feeling, how love had struck me straight through like an arrow.

I knew I would only ever love him. I was wrong.

Instead I’m engaged to someone else, a person who put their hand lightly atop mine on our first date. I can’t say it felt exactly the same, that being touched by this person erased that bad man. I can’t say either that the knowledge I had once been so wrong doesn’t occasionally rear it’s ugly head.

But I know this love is no lesser because I loved the wrong person before.

In life it can feel like there are so many options for how we want to be. But really there is one choice only; to let ourselves grow in the ways that feel natural or to hold ourselves in place. It might feel better to stay still, to announce we are in control. But even a rock will one day be weathered by the wind. Are you a person who wants to change because of your own desires, or because of what the world inflicts on you? Either way, change is coming.

When we lean into what we want, when we let ourselves love someone, even if we let that love guide us into dark places, then at least we know it was because we believed in goodness — that we trusted that somewhere off there glimmering on the horizon, beautiful things were waiting for us.

Sometimes I still find myself wondering if I would have been better off if I never loved the wrong person. But how could I regret all of those mistakes when they have led me here?

I am writing to you right now, Dreamer, from the emerald sofa I share with the person I am planning to spend the rest of my life with if I am that stupidly lucky. Dreamer I told her I loved her after three weeks.

I regret nothing from jumping.

Even if you don’t know where you’ll land Dreamer, I promise you won’t either.

Love,

Your Older Sister

p.s. please enjoy the photo above of me as a smug little girl as a bridesmaid at a wedding, I hope one day I can be just like her.

Want to Submit?

Come get lectured and submit your own anonymous letter via dm or direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com. Remember, I’m your older sister; you can tell me anything and I won’t tell anyone (except mum, she says tuna bake’s for tea).

*Apologies to my real little sister erased from this picture and to my other little sister not even in frame, I love you both so much.

This letter is coming straight to you from the height of the London heat wave. The fans are out, the blinds are down and patience is running thin. No matter, here’s a dose of ice-cold advice to cool you down.

If you’re here for gossip or musings you might also enjoy the first edition of the series linked below.

Ok, enough admin, time for the good stuff: Letter #2, Why you can’t bet on a breakup.

Submit your own questions direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com if you dare.

Dear Older Sister,

I need to preface this by saying I know I sound like the worst. Like a man hating banshee. But I like some men I swear, I just don’t like this one.

So here’s the deal; my friend is dating a terrible man.

He isn’t mean to her or violent, the kind of things that would make stepping in obvious. He’s just a total energy vampire. Like at parties he lurks in the corner like a gargoyle, and when you can get him to engage, he’s completely self-absorbed.

I’ve tried to get my friend to stop bringing him to things if I’m honest, but she doesn’t read the social cues or totally ignores them. I just want to get brunch without having to make small talk with a guy who couldn’t care if I lived or died.

I can’t imagine what they talk about. My friend is this sparkling, clever, funny woman and I guess I’d always imagined us growing older, going on dinner dates or even couples holidays. I’d imagined she’d date someone as interesting as her. I think she’s settling.

Older sister, I hate my friend’s boyfriend - can I tell her?

Best,

Man Hating Banshee

Dear Man Hating Banshee,

Firstly, thank you for writing in to “Dear Older Sister” and trusting me with your heart! I promise to be firm but gentle, as all older sisters should be. I’ll also take your word for it that this man is only boring and not genuinely horrible or abusive, because that is a different issue entirely.

So then, can you tell your friend that you hate her boyfriend?

I think you know the answer or you wouldn’t have written in; no, obviously not. If you tell your friend you hate him the best case scenario is she silently seethes and there is an awkwardness that lingers in the air for the next five years. Our friends are adults, they’re allowed to make different choices than us. We have to let them love who they love, even if we find them boring, self-absorbed gargoyles.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything you can do.

The part of your letter that resonated with me the most was when you mentioned your dreams of what your future with this friend and her partner might look like.

I grew up going on holidays as a child with my parents, their best friends, and their daughters. There were five of us in total; five little girls sleeping in tents in France, running into the waves at the beach, taking turns being mean to each other and making each other laugh. There’s a picture of me as a sweaty child on one such holiday included above.

I, like you, Man Hating Banshee, believed that as an adult this is what my closest friendships would look like. That we would meet people and fall in love and all grow together as little two-person units. I dreamt of couples holidays.

But reality, as if often the case, has been different. Of course there are couples dinners and friend’s partners I would gladly call friends as well. Yet we never quite formed the kind of boy-girl bank holiday friend group I’d envisioned. You know, that default set of people you have a barbecue with when there’s an extra day in the weekend.

I couldn’t say if it’s a symptom of having gone to a girls’ school (really most things probably are) but while we’ve all grown closer together through the grand second adolescence of our late twenties and early thirties, the majority of the time we see each other it is just us. Just the girls.

There isn’t a go to best friend couple to take five little girls to France with.

Sometimes this makes me a little sad, yet another way adulthood hasn’t looked as I envisioned. But it no longer bothers me as it used to. Not because any of these friends have broken up with partners I didn’t like and magically become engaged to my ideal man, but through a process of acceptance.

I had one friend in particular that I struggled with the most, her boyfriend like your friend’s Man Hating Banshee wasn’t particularly ‘bad’ in any way. But it was like we were communicating in two different languages. It baffled me. How could my friend love this man who didn’t seem to like me?

The part of it I found the most difficult, and I suspect is the root of your problem also, was what I felt to be his ever presence.

What I wanted was my friend’s undivided attention. I wanted to be honest with her, to say cruel things without judgement and sad things without pity. When we’d first met we’d been teenagers, I’d had so much access to her. Her time and love felt wide open and endless. I couldn’t bear that now I had to share it.

You say your friend ignores your hints that you’d rather she not bring her boyfriend along, but I wonder whether instead of telling her what you don’t want, you could ask her for what you want.

I think what you want Man Hating Banshee, is time with your friend. Your visions of holidays and dinners are like mine; a desire for greater intimacy.

Right now you’re thinking if she could only break up with this boring man, you’d have her back. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Unless you can be vulnerable with her, tell her that you miss her, that what you need is closeness, there’s every chance she’ll just start dating another man you don’t like. Even if it isn’t another man it could easily be that her work gets stressful and she stops responding to your messages, or she’ll start training for a marathon and cancel all your summer plans. There are many ways life gets in the way of our friendships if we let it.

The issue isn’t the boyfriend Man Hating Banshee, it’s your friend not prioritising your time together.

I’m not saying that being honest about this is a straight forward thing to do. In fact it is much simpler to point all of your disappointment, frustration and anger towards this boyfriend. That is easier than reckoning with the fact these are actually things you’re perhaps feeling towards your friend. The gargoyle, as you call him, is a straw man, a receptacle for emotions you’d rather not have.

In my case, I silently (and sometimes less than silently) disliked my friend’s boyfriend for the best part of a decade. What a waste of time.

For me, the thing that changed was that they got married. It sounds silly really, putting that down on virtual-paper, but it’s true. On the day of the wedding I watched them at the altar and I could see in their faces how much they loved each other. I knew this before of course, but there’s something about seeing it that made it undeniable. As I watched them, as I uncontrollably sobbed from the stalls, I realised I was happy for them both. Her boyfriend wasn’t some stranger taking up space at a table I had hoped was just for us, he loved her.

Later, during the party bit of the wedding, when we were both half gone on table wine, I went over to him and admitted out loud what I had never said before.

I know we’ve never seen eye to eye, I said, but I want you to know how genuinely happy I am for you both.

That was it really, a moment of real emotion and a tiny dash of honesty and it was like the silent wall we had been constructing between ourselves for years came down.

I’m not saying we’ll ever go on holiday together, but now we are two people who love my friend and, I hope he doesn’t mind me speaking for him, we genuinely like each other. He’s funny and kind and we’ve even had couples dinners.

It’s strange really, the way things can sometimes change overnight, how honesty can solve your problems even a decade in. How all things are resolvable.

Stranger still, it was actually this friend who once told me something that actually did make me break up with a boyfriend. But she didn’t tell me she hated him.

For a while I had been unsure if the relationship I was in was right. I was in love, I was happy, but there was something there — lingering beyond the edge of my vision, an itch at the back of my skull.

I’d rationalised it at the time as a natural response to long term monogamy. Love is compromise after all. And I was happy, I told my friend, I felt it was reasonable to accept that your relationship with your friends was different to the one with your boyfriend.

You can’t expect one person to fulfil everything.

We were in the lounge of my old shared flat when I said this. We’d gotten our nails done for her birthday and it was dark out. I remember how she let me talk, how when I finished she took a moment before she responded, that she was gentle and generous.

I want you to know something, she said.

I want you to know that the way you feel with me — what you’ve been saying about how comfortable you are, how you feel met — I want you to know that I feel that way with you too. But I also feel it with my boyfriend.

It’s not like I ran out of the flat that second to end my years long relationship, in fact I’m pretty sure we were together for at least a year or so after that. But this admission, that the closeness I felt with my friend was something she also felt with her boyfriend, well it played on my mind. I hadn’t considered that while I was happy, there are some people you don’t have to compromise to love.

Now I am in love with someone else, a person who makes me feel like I do with my very best friends; they make me feel seen.

So perhaps, Man Hating Banshee, there is something you could say to your friend to make her leave her boyfriend. But it probably isn’t that you hate him.

Even more than that, if you centre your own feelings — what you want from your friend, rather than what you don’t want from her boyfriend, you might find him much more tolerable to be around. You might even grow to like him.

Or maybe one day she’ll dump him.

But either way, at least you’ll have been honest about what you need, which is all we can ever really hope to be.

Love,

Your Older Sister

Want to Submit?

Come get lectured and submit your own anonymous letter direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com. Remember, I’m your older sister; you can tell me anything and I won’t tell anyone (except mum, she says tuna bake’s for tea).

*Apologies to my real little sister erased from this picture and to my other little sister not even in frame, I love you both so much.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of ‘Dear, Older Sister.’

This is an agony aunt column where I will answer your letters with the full heart and know-it-all attitude of older sisters everywhere.

Today, in an effort to prove I wouldn’t make you do anything I wouldn’t do myself, I am answering my own letter. It’s the question I have been asking myself daily for months, one I am no closer to answering. But I hope, in exploring it here, it might reach another person trapped in the same loop.

Without further ado, Letter #1 A letter from myself.

Submit your own questions, problems, musings and gossip via dm or direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com.

Dear Older Sister,

I have been stuck lately, for the past year or so (if that counts as lately), unable to answer a question that feels more pressing with each passing month; do I want to have a baby?

Growing up this was never a question. I knew I would have three children, three girls, just like my mother. That I would marry my third boyfriend at twenty seven and pop out a miniature version of myself at twenty eight.

But by the time I was twenty seven, I was not engaged to my third boyfriend. I was dating my first girlfriend instead.

Since then I have been on what I would describe as a journey of unlearning. Queerness has opened up a world of possibility, of questions.

It turns out I did not want a husband, but do I want a baby?

And if I want a baby, do I want a baby because I have always been told it is what I should want? Or is it my actual desire? Is desire enough?

My life isn’t what I imagined, how do I shape a new vision of the future? How do I know what kind of future I want?

As you can see, it is more than one question, good luck answering it.

Molly

Dear Molly,

Let’s get the obvious part out of the way; if this was a question I could answer I wouldn’t be writing about it in a sort of meta-humiliation-ritual on Substack. But I think there is something about honesty that is always valuable.

Here, I offer up my own flawed self and hope, reader, that you will offer yours in return. That we may regard each other vulnerably, with open hearts.

So, do I want to have a baby?

I guess I began thinking about this in earnest after I turned thirty. Not for biological clock reasons, but because the people around me started telling me, deep in the night, in the smoking areas of East London pubs, that this was their last summer.

Sure, I said, vaguely disbelieving them. We will be doing this forever, nothing will change.

Of course I was wrong.

Over the past year two of my friends have had children and six, including my real life little sister, are currently pregnant. For a few of them I was their last big-night-out companion before they found out it was going to be their last big-night-out. I’ve started telling people a bender with me is a good luck charm for conception, in case you’re in the market.

At the same time, while they were all busy making new life, I was working on a novel. They were growing fingernails as I was crafting 80k words about a big country house and queer awakenings. It felt a little like we were all in conversation with each other. They were making babies as I was making a book.

But the book didn’t sell, and they were all still pregnant and at times it became all consuming; I had not made a book, I had not made a baby.

What did I actually want? Did I want a baby? Do I want a baby?

In an attempt to interrogate my desires head on I bought a book; Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a memoir of early motherhood.

I wanted to feel I had confronted the realities of motherhood. Maybe then I could know if it was something I wanted for my life, or at least if I decided to have a child I could be frank about the fact I had considered the costs.

In A Life’s Work there are many costs.

The part that stays with me the most is where Cusk describes her inability to ever feel completely whole; that time with her friends away from her baby makes her feel like a bad mother, that time with her baby makes her feel like a bad friend. That there is no moment of balance or fulfilment, just a mother at the centre on a Sisyphean quest to satisfy someone else — full in the knowledge that she will never satisfy herself, that she may never be wholly in one place ever again.

Is this a cost I could bear?

While reading the book I recommended it to a couple of my expecting friends. Which felt a little like David Attenborough recommending a book about the arctic to a polar bear.

The most interesting thing about A Life’s Work, other than how beautifully written and honest it is, were the conversations it sparked with strangers in public. Remember what I said about being served by honesty? Well here it is in action.

The first conversation I had was on an overground train. I was reading my book while standing, swaying above a mother and son sat down directly ahead of me. As I read I realised they were both looking at me. Well not at me, at the book.

The boy was doing his best to mouth out the words on the back cover, his mother helping.

Eventually, it felt rude to not acknowledge the interaction. Headphones removed, I told them simply; it’s really good.

The mother asked me what it was about.

Motherhood I told her, it’s a memoir about motherhood, it’s very honest, it’s very good.

Are you a mother? She asked.

No, pink in the cheeks, I’m not (and here comes the vulnerability), but I’m thinking about it, I replied.

Think more, she said with a raised eyebrow. And then they both left the train.

The second interaction happened at Victoria Park.

I was on a bench on a Sunday making my way through the final pages of A Life’s Work when someone sat next to me. Initially I ignored them, committed to Cusk’s final words — curious to find how I would feel at the end. Would how I felt about finishing this book tell me what I needed to know? Would it help me understand if I wanted to, if I could, become a mother?

When I did finally look up, it was a reminder that books sometimes are lesser teachers than we would hope.

I was sat next to a young woman — sat next to her was a cherubic baby. She was taking turns feeding herself and offering little bits of her food to her child.

I smiled, the mother smiled. Eventually I ended up asking what her baby was called, how old she was, in that way a sunny Sunday afternoon on a bench suddenly makes me feel like having conversations with strangers. In return she asked me about my book, what it was about.

I gave her the same answer I had given the mother on the train. It was about motherhood, no I wasn’t a mother, yes it was something I was thinking about.

She considered this as her baby looked intently at people passing us, stared directly at a roller skater. Yes, I wanted to tell the baby, they are going so fast.

The baby’s mother told me then that she had two children, that just as I had implied when I’d said the book was very honest, that it was hard.

But, she said, it taught me so much about myself.

She went on to tell me that her ability to do this very hard thing had shown her what she could achieve, that her children, far from taking away from her sense of herself or purpose, allowed her to have a new perspective on what was possible.

She told me if she had known how it would change her, she wouldn’t have waited so long to do it. That now on Sundays she leaves her older child with her partner and she comes to the park with her baby, to walk a lap and eat the same meal and even these simple moments of life have become imbued with new found meaning.

I gave the baby the book to look at, she put the corner in her mouth and the mother apologised.

Don’t worry, I told her, it sort of feels like a baby should be eating this book.

Then the mother asked to take a photograph of A Life’s Work so she might buy her own copy.

Have mine, I said, I’m finished reading it and it makes sense that you should have it.

As I left the park, I knew I had given the book to the right person.

And it was funny really, these two almost opposite interactions. Both times I felt the desire the contradict the person speaking.

I wanted to tell that first mother that I had thought a lot about this, that if she was allowed to have a child why shouldn’t I? And to the mother in park I wanted to tell her; I have already done hard things, that I didn’t need a baby to show me what I could become.

I guess what I’m saying is, I chafe against being told what to do.

So what is the answer then, do I want a baby?

Not even an older sister can answer that one.

If I have learnt anything from queerness, it is that sometimes you can be the last person to find out what you really want. That there are some things only our bodies know, that come revealed to us slowly, like the turning of the seasons, seedlings working their way up through the cold earth in spring.

That one day you will turn a corner on a road, or enter a room at a party, or meet a person on a bench outside a pub, and you will know you are looking at the answer to a question you forgot to ask.

Perhaps the maybe-baby will be answered just like that.

Time, as it always does, will tell.

Love,

Your Older Sister

Want to Submit?

Come get lectured and submit your own anonymous letter via dm or direct to dearoldersister.submissions@gmail.com. Remember, I’m your older sister; you can tell me anything and I won’t tell anyone (except mum, she says tuna bake’s for tea).

*Apologies to my real little sister erased from this picture and to my other little sister not even in frame, I love you both so much.