When I became chronically ill, this became a particularly important practice. I found it difficult not being able to do the things I wanted to do, and so noticing the small things became more important. When my health was particularly bad, and I was very limited in what I could do, I found myself becoming more appreciative of the things I might previously have overlooked.

Now, my health is somewhat better, although there are still limitations on what I can do. I’ve realised that I want to keep hold of this habit of noticing the things I’m loving, appreciating the small moments, and paying attention to what makes life feel good.

So, here are some of the things I’ve been loving in August.

Camping

I spent a week camping at a beautiful campsite with wild swimming and saunas. I had such a lovely time with my sister and my dad, and it was particularly wholesome to have that time with my sister, because we don’t live near each other anymore.

Camping always makes me appreciate the small things. Staring at the stars. Having a warm cup of tea over a campfire. Being without all the usual material things, and somehow finding that I’m more present because of it.

We were camping in the middle of nowhere, and I loved the slower pace of life. Supporting small businesses, chatting to people who are passionate about what they do, and buying fresh produce from little stalls at the side of the road. I brought home some lavender and tomatoes, which were both delightful.

It also made me appreciate the healing role of nature. We’ve had such a dry and hot summer in the UK, which is unusual for us. It has been lovely, but nature has both benefited and struggled from it. We went to a local vineyard, where they explained that the grapes have had an excellent year, and the blackberries were huge and early. At the same time, the grass had completely yellowed.

Then, over the last few days, it finally rained. It was so refreshing. We were out on a walk and got completely caught in it, but somehow that made it even lovelier to get back to the house, dry off and get all cosy.

The eclipse

I watched the eclipse in my local park, and it was such a wholesome experience.

A usually pretty quiet park was suddenly filled with people of all ages and backgrounds, sharing their eclipse glasses and laughing at each other’s attempts to make homemade ways of watching it.

It was such a rare moment where everyone was talking to each other, sharing something together, and simply enjoying being in each other’s company.

It made me realise how much I value community and how much I want to keep developing that in my life.

A yoga and sauna day retreat

I went on the most wholesome day retreat, where we did yoga and a sound bath before walking down together to a local community sauna. We spent some time in the sauna, then sat around in the forest chatting.

It was such a lovely thing to do, particularly because I went alone. I loved being reminded that you can turn up somewhere by yourself and still meet people who are on a similar wavelength.

Exploring

I did a good bit of exploring this month!

My friend came to visit me, and we spent the day exploring some lovely, chilled bars. We went to places I wouldn’t usually have chosen, and they were such a treat. One was a ‘hidden’ rooftop bar with the most beautiful view of the city, and another was a speakeasy-type bar tucked inside a barbershop, with delicious cocktails and amazing jazz music.

I went outdoor swimming at a new spot, which was such a peaceful and beautiful place, with a huge range of wildlife.

And I visited a new book club, as I’ve been trying out different ones in my area. I’m particularly glad I tried something new because it was during a week when my health had flared up. It would have been very easy to stay home, but I’m glad I went.

New things I’ve been loving

My music taste this month has been a mixture of two ends of the spectrum.

On one end, I’ve been enjoying upbeat, happy music that I can dance around my flat to. I’ve particularly been enjoying ABBA.

On the other, I’ve been slowly getting into more nostalgic, slower music, sparked by the release of Phoebe Bridgers’ album.

Late August feels like such a beautiful time to celebrate summer while also beginning to slip into the slower pace of early autumn. It always makes me feel nostalgic, too. I think it might be something to do with the association with school and the feeling that September is a little bit of a beginning.

I’ve also been enjoying comfort TV shows, and finally watched Sex and the City this month, which I loved.

There is something that is nice about looking back over a month and realising how many small things there were to enjoy. None of them are particularly extraordinary on their own, but together they make up a life that feels full.

And perhaps that is what this little gratitude practice has taught me most: that a beautiful life doesn’t necessarily have to be a big or exciting one. Sometimes it is a cup of tea by a campfire, getting caught in the rain, strangers sharing eclipse glasses, a swim somewhere new, or dancing around your flat to ABBA.

Sometimes, it is just noticing that you are happy.

Before I start, I have to say that the term ‘bitch’ being used for women who are establishing boundaries and putting their needs before others makes me feel uncomfortable, because we should be celebrating women who do that, rather than using what could be seen as derogatory language. However, I appreciate that social media loves a catchy title, and that it could be seen as women reclaiming the word. Nonetheless, I think it is an interesting discussion point.

Now, I don’t think this statement applies to a lot of autoimmune diseases, whereby genetics and biology play a huge part.

However, I think for certain chronic illnesses that have emerged without any apparent genetic or biomedical reasons, and health professionals cannot find anything ‘medically’ wrong, this is where this statement may be interesting to dismantle.

For me, I was in pretty perfect health until one day I woke up with chronic migraines, chronic fatigue, and random aches and pains that have never really gone away. I have had various tests done, and nothing has come up, and now I endure continuous pain.

This has led me to question the role of psychological and social factors in the development of chronic health conditions.

Although the statement is clearly made for social media, and is probably a huge simplification of how health conditions occur, and I don’t love the term ‘bitch’, it does somewhat seem to capture the ideas that women are expected to do so much, and keep so much together, and as a result, the body can become exhausted and stressed, which can give rise to health issues.

I have done a lot of research into how the body holds onto trauma, especially in the context of Van der Kolk’s book ‘The Body Keeps the Score ’.

Whilst I think the statement ‘Be a bitch or get an autoimmune disease’ probably massively underplays the role of biology and genetics in chronic illnesses, it does highlight the social and psychological role of chronic health conditions occurring, especially in the context of no underlying genetic or biomedical reasons for those health conditions.

It also highlights how so many women have spent their lives putting other people’s needs above their own, and it has had physical and psychological consequences, even if it does not feel like it in the moment.

I, like so many women, have spent so much of my life prioritising other people’s needs over my own and have struggled with people-pleasing.

I spent so much time keeping myself incredibly busy and neglecting my own rest until eventually my body forced me to rest.

I hid my sadness and anger, for fear of disrupting the peace.

However, becoming chronically ill has almost forced me to put my own needs above others, because it is pretty hard to ignore my needs when my body is telling me so physically that I need to focus on my own needs.

I broke up with my ex-boyfriend because he was not supportive of my health, and I saw so many reports from other people with health conditions that if a partner is not supportive, they are actively making things worse.

I found this with my ex because it caused me so much stress, and I noticed how much worse it made my health and how constant the flare-ups were. This was a really difficult decision, and it made me think that if I had not been chronically ill, we probably would have stayed together.

That is a hard thing to accept, but also, I noticed that since breaking up and being single, my health has gradually been improving, because I can put all my focus into my own health, instead of focusing on him and how much I felt I was failing as a partner, because I could not do so many things because of my health.

In the last few months, I have been exploring dating, and it has made me notice how much more boundaried I am now.

I understand that I can only date someone who actively supports my health, and that starts by finding someone who is curious about my health.

However, there are a lot of limitations placed on me because of my health, and it makes dating trickier.

I cannot do late nights, drink a lot of alcohol, or may have to cancel plans due to flare-ups.

It has actually been a huge learning curve because I have had a few incidents where people haven’t been on board with the adaptations I say I need.

It’s a strange thing because I actually think my health helps me figure out who would or would not be a good partner for me. I know that if they can’t adapt and be curious, then I know they won’t be good for me and my health in the long run.

One thing I have noticed is how quickly I will tell people if they have crossed boundaries or if I feel something isn’t going to work.

It has reached a point where a few people I have dated have actually said, ‘I appreciate your honesty’, which is funny to me, because my worst nightmare in the past would be putting boundaries in place and sharing that, and people breaking up with me because I have shared my point of view.

Now, I don’t care.

I know that if that were to happen, it would just be a sign they were not right for me.

It is not just with dating that I have become more boundaried, but with everything.

I tell my friends and family if I am tired, I cancel plans or ask to rearrange if I need to, I change plans if I am not up to the original plan, and I share with people if they have done or said something that makes me upset.

I think as a former ‘people pleaser’, I was always worried that people would find me difficult if I shared my needs and told them what I needed.

Generally, those around me have been great and have been very willing to help and adapt.

It’s also been a helpful strategy, almost like a ‘litmus test’, because if people around me are unable to adapt, then maybe that is not great, and it helps me filter out the people who are willing to help and those who aren’t.

It has also made me realise that people-pleasing is not really as caring as I previously felt it was.

Previously, I felt like if I put everyone’s needs above my own, that would show I care about them.

Now I can reflect, and I don’t feel like it does that.

It just creates these relationships that feel shallow.

I remember reading that people-pleasing is a form of manipulation, and whilst I never intended to be manipulative, I now understand that point of view, because I think on some level, I hoped that if I put other people’s needs first, other people would care about my needs.

However, I never shared them, so I was expecting they would read my mind and know how to do that.

Now, I don’t want other people to put my needs above theirs; I want everyone to put their own needs first, but also to be adaptable, and I have learned to be adaptable and caring towards people, but in a way that does not neglect my own needs.

Since doing that, I know I have deepened the relationships with those around me.

I used to be someone who would never share when I was angry or sad, for fear of dismantling the peace.

However, over the last few years, I have come to recognise the importance of expressing all of the emotions, even the negative ones.

I am proud of my ability to communicate and share when I am sad and angry, and I think that has made my relationships more honest.

I am not appreciative of being chronically ill, and I wish I did not have health difficulties.

However, I think it is important to make the most of the situations we find ourselves in.

For me, I think being chronically ill has forced me to focus on my own needs and has taught me to dismantle my previous patterns of people-pleasing.

In doing so, it has helped me have more genuine and honest relationships with people around me, including properly communicating my needs, and in return, people have communicated their needs to me.

So, I don’t necessarily think being chronically ill has made me a bitch, and I think the term ‘bitch’ is probably clickbait.

However, I think it has made me more honest and able to communicate my needs to others, and to communicate if people have done things to upset me.

I have become someone who expresses my anger and sadness.

I have become better at establishing and sticking to my boundaries.

In return, it has been wonderful that people have been so understanding.

I can’t say that if I had learned to establish and share my boundaries, stop people-pleasing, and express my anger and sadness, I would have not got chronically ill, because I can’t know that.

I also don’t think it is fair to think like that, because it gets into the thinking of ‘what ifs’.

I also imagine there are people who have been able to establish boundaries, who have still become chronically ill.

However, I am proud of myself for stopping people-pleasing, even if it took me getting chronically ill to do that.

For anyone reading who may relate, I hope you feel proud of yourself for every time you try to go against social norms of what is expected of people, and especially women, and establish a boundary, or give yourself peace and patience.

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With most people I have dated throughout my adult life, something has felt missing.

Not necessarily chemistry. Not attraction. Not even kindness. Something deeper.

Dating has often felt surface-level, as though the person might know me, but they don’t really know me. Not the inner parts of my heart. Not the things that have shaped the way I move through the world.

When I was younger, I wondered if there was something fundamentally flawed in me. Maybe I was asking too much of people. Maybe there was something about me that made it difficult to feel truly connected to someone.

It was only after dating someone who understood grief that I realised it wasn’t that I was flawed.

Perhaps there are just some things that are difficult to understand until you have lived through them yourself.

I have come to believe that there is something significant about dating someone who has experienced hard things. Not because suffering automatically makes someone kinder, wiser, or a better partner. It doesn’t. And the people I have dated have, for the most part, been perfectly nice people. I’m sure they will make wonderful partners for someone else.

But there is something about having your life fundamentally altered by loss that changes the way you understand pain.

When you have experienced a big loss, you learn that pain doesn’t stay neatly contained in the event that caused it. It permeates everything. It changes the way you understand love, safety, relationships, time, and the future.

As someone who lost my mum when I was young, I have always felt as though people I date are missing a part of me when they don’t know about her.

I think people who haven’t experienced grief can have an innate fear of death. They don’t ask questions because they assume I don’t want to talk about it. They avoid mentioning her because they think bringing her up might make me sad.

But I am already living alongside grief. My mum is already part of my life.

There have been men I’ve dated who have never asked about her. Or I’ve mentioned something, and they haven’t asked a follow-up question. Or they’ve compared it to the death of a grandparent. Or they’ve said, “I don’t know how anyone could possibly go through that.”

Sometimes there is a look of pity that makes me feel as though I then have to manage their reaction to my grief.

And sometimes, when people do ask questions, they ask at exactly the wrong moment, when I’m happy, when I’m having fun, when I don’t particularly want to talk about grief at all.

Mostly, though, they haven’t really asked anything.

“That must have been tough.”

And then, quickly, onto something else. Something more comfortable.

I think that is what has felt so lonely.

Because I don’t need someone to constantly talk about my mum. I don’t need every conversation to become a conversation about grief.

I just want to know that you aren’t afraid of the fact that she exists in my life, even though she is dead.

There was one relationship where this was different.

He had experienced a difficult childhood himself. He didn’t talk about it much, but there was an unspoken understanding between us that I hadn’t experienced with other people.

Not long into our relationship, he asked me about my mum.

“What was she like? What happened?”

And then he asked if he could come to her grave to meet her.

I had never had anyone I dated ask me to do that.

I don’t think he had a religious bone in his body. He just wanted to know her.

And I was genuinely taken back by how beautiful that felt.

We went together.

He stood beside her grave in silence. He asked me questions. He listened.

It was probably a small gesture to him. To me, it felt enormous.

There is something about that moment that has stayed with me. Perhaps because it was so simple. He didn’t try to fix anything. He didn’t tell me how I should feel. He didn’t avoid the awkwardness of standing beside a grave belonging to someone he’d never met.

He just stood there.

And I think that is something people who have experienced hard things sometimes understand instinctively, that being there is often more important than knowing what to say.

So often, people avoid talking about death because they are frightened it will upset someone.

But I will always have moments where I think about my mum.

That’s not going away.

So avoiding her doesn’t protect me from grief. It just means I have to carry that part of myself alone.

That relationship eventually broke down for other reasons, but that moment will always stay with me.

It was tender. It was exposing.

And somehow, it made me feel known in a way that no one I had dated before had managed to make me feel.

He didn’t shy away from a part of me that he might personally have found awkward or uncomfortable.

Instead, he embraced it.

I had a difficult time getting over that relationship, and grief played a huge part in why.

It felt as though he had seen the real version of me.

The part of me that had been shaped by grief. The part that was hurt. The part that was still trying to make sense of things. But also the part that was moving forward despite pain.

I’m not sure I was that same person to him. At the time, I was still so entangled in my own grief that I probably couldn’t see the relationship clearly.

But I think that experience set something in motion. It taught me to stop avoiding grief. And, perhaps more importantly, it taught me to stop caring so much about other people’s discomfort with my grief.

I had spent years making sure other people were comfortable with my sadness. I didn’t realise how exhausting that was until someone finally wasn’t afraid of it.

When we broke up, it also set off something unexpected. I found myself thinking about my mum more.

Every time I thought about the breakup, I thought about loss. It became difficult to separate the two.

What do you mean there is someone I can never speak to again because she is dead, and now there is someone else I can’t speak to because we broke up?

One person is dead. One person is alive.

And yet, in the strange, irrational world of grief, both were suddenly absent.

I know that is how breakups work. But when you have experienced a significant loss, everything seems to find its way back to that original wound.

Grief has a way of recognising itself.

I have dated people since, and I have never quite found that same sense of being understood. I think, inevitably, that has become part of the reason some of those relationships have ended.

Because how am I supposed to imagine spending my life with someone who doesn’t know one of the most vulnerable parts of me?

How can we build a life together if they don’t understand the why behind so much of the way I live my life?

My fears. My attachment to certain moments. The way I understand love. The way I understand loss.

The fact that, somewhere underneath everything, there is still a younger girl who lost her mum and has had to learn how to grow up without her.

I have dated men who have had relatively straightforward lives. Some have openly admitted that they don’t know how to talk about grief.

I’ve tried to explain. I’ve tried to make it easier for them.

And somehow, even when I explain, I can still end up feeling like the villain, and that breaks my heart.

Because I don’t want grief to become a test that someone has to pass before they can love me.

I don’t want to demand that someone has experienced tragedy in order to understand me.

But I do want someone who is willing to sit beside the things they don’t understand.

Someone who doesn’t need me to make my grief smaller so that they can feel comfortable.

Someone who asks about her. Someone who understands that talking about her doesn’t mean I’m stuck in the past.

Someone who can hear me say I miss my mum without immediately trying to make me feel better.

Someone who understands that sometimes I will be sad, and sometimes I will be completely fine, and sometimes I will be both at once.

Maybe that’s what I mean when I say I want someone who has been through hard things.

Not necessarily someone who has experienced the same loss.

Just someone who knows what it is to have their understanding of the world fundamentally changed.

Someone who knows that life can be cruel, unfair, and beautiful all at once. Someone who doesn’t look away.

I think about the line from Fleabag a lot.

“I don’t know what to do with it, with all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it.”

Because perhaps that is what grief has done to my understanding of love.

My mum was the first great love of my life, and then she died, so now I carry all of this love with nowhere obvious to put it.

I think sometimes I have tried to put it into romantic relationships, and maybe that is part of why dating can feel so complicated.

How am I supposed to have this great love story when I’ve already had one of the greatest loves of my life and lost it?

One man once told me he would “give me the love my mum can’t.” I remember thinking, how did you even have the audacity to suggest that? I don’t need someone to replace what I lost. I don’t need someone to give me the love my mum can’t.

I need someone who understands that I will always carry that love with me. Someone who can make space for it. Someone who can sit beside the grief without trying to fill the space it left behind.

Maybe that’s all I’ve ever been looking for. Not someone who can save me from grief. Just someone who isn’t afraid to sit with me while I carry it. Perhaps that is what being understood really is.

Not someone who has the right words. Not someone who can make the pain disappear.

Just someone who sees the tender, complicated, unfinished parts of you and stays.

When I was a teenager, I had thoughts that I was cursed because every four years, someone important to me died. I felt like the Grim Reaper and thought that somehow I was cursed. I knew I wasn’t. Deep down, I knew I was just incredibly unlucky. I know now that those thoughts were my way of trying to make sense of the horrendous amount of grief I had experienced by the age of 19 - the sort of life that, to this day, attracts pitiful looks when I explain that my mum and all my grandparents died before I became an adult.

I put off feeling the absolute intensity of that grief for many years, because I think it was too much for my teenage brain to grasp. Which, I now know, was so understandable. While my friends were entering adulthood and experiencing all the fun that came with it, I was trying to grapple with the tension between being ‘normal’ and feeling the reality of grief.

At the time, I think I dealt with this by playing pretend. I acted like I was just like my friends, like I had no cares in the world. At that age, people have all these preconceived ideas about entering adulthood, including being naive, making mistakes, and figuring things out along the way. In some ways, I had the opposite experience and was ‘mature’. In other ways, I was more naive than those around me.

I had spent many of my teenage years anticipating my mother’s death and looking after her, and so, in many ways, I was probably mature beyond my years. But at the same time, I was incredibly vulnerable because of my experiences of grief. Moving away to university gave me a new environment in which I could stay busy, drink alcohol, and find ways to avoid my feelings.

I know that my ways of coping with grief at 19 probably weren’t what people expected grief to look like. But it was only years later, when I read Losing Young by Rachel Wilson, that my experiences began to make sense.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t grieve, or that I was grieving ‘wrong’. It was that this was the only way I knew how to cope at that time. My brain seemed to cut off so much of the grieving experience because, perhaps, it knew that it was too painful for my teenage brain to handle.

There seems to be so much talk about the prefrontal cortex fully developing at around 25, and sometimes I wonder whether my brain simply wasn’t developed enough to deal with the magnitude of that pain. Maybe avoiding it was exactly what I needed to cope in that moment.

It’s been ten years, and I’m 28 years old.

In the last few years, I have become chronically ill, and the experience of being chronically ill has brought up a lot of those same feelings of grief. Just this time, I am grieving a body that doesn’t do what I want it to do.

It reminds me of something I read in Losing Young, that any new loss can remind us of other losses, and that a new loss can be the biggest trigger for an older grief. The two become intertwined.

That is very much what I’ve experienced. I have found myself grieving my mum again over the last few years.

I know that I have done a lot of work to ‘heal’ the wounds that were created through grief, and a huge part of that has been learning that I can now sit with feelings of sadness and hurt. My health has forced me to face some of my avoidance strategies, because it is pretty hard to ignore your body when it suddenly can’t do everything you want it to do.

It has also made me think more about trauma. There are suspected links between trauma and chronic illness, and discovering those links has been painful. But it has also shown me so much about grief, and about how, even when we try to avoid painful feelings, our bodies can hold onto them. They ‘keep the score’.

I don’t think grief disappears. It can’t. If anything, I think it grows in different ways.

The things I grieve now at 28 are not the same things I grieved when I was 18. Now, my grief focuses on missed experiences, missed achievements, and missed conversations that an 18-year-old me would never have thought to ask about.

The grief is also not as all-consuming. It feels more like a nod every so often, when I see something small, or when big moments happen.

Grief doesn’t consume me in the way it once did. I have, in some ways, made friends with it. I can see it as an expression of love, and it makes me grateful for the small things.

On hard days, it reminds me to live a life that I’m happy with, because life is too short. It has also shown me that it is okay to rest. It has helped me learn self-compassion, which is something I certainly didn’t have at 18.

Now, I look back at that 18-year-old girl with tenderness and sadness. I feel sad that she thought she needed to have everything figured out.

And now, when I look at 28-year-old me, I know that I have nothing figured out.

And I’m okay with that.

I have been dating this guy, and recently we had sex for the first time.

We got very drunk. He asked to come back to my flat, and he did. There was no conversation about contraception. He didn’t offer to use a condom. He didn’t ask me anything about whether I was on birth control. And then, without asking me, he ejaculated inside me.

I had consented to having sex. But afterwards, I found myself feeling incredibly anxious.

I already get anxious about sex, about potential pregnancy scares, STIs, and all of the things that can come afterwards. And yet, I find it incredibly difficult to have those conversations in the moment. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

What makes it particularly difficult is that I want to feel like I can trust the person I am having sex with to think about those things too. I want to trust that the person I am with will care about my health, my safety and the potential consequences of what we are doing. I want to feel that they are thinking beyond the few minutes of pleasure in front of them.

Instead, when someone takes no responsibility for those things, it makes me feel unsafe. It makes me question whether their pleasure has become more important than my wellbeing.

And then I find myself thinking about the majority of sexual encounters I have had.

This isn’t every experience I’ve had. But it is far too many of them.

And I know this isn’t a particularly unusual story. In fact, I suspect that most women could tell you a version of it.

I have had traumatic experiences around sex in the past, and unfortunately, that is a story that is far too common for women. Recently, I learnt about the concept of fawning — an extension of the familiar ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses to stress, where instead of fighting, running away or freezing, we appease. We give in. We prioritise keeping the peace over our own boundaries and needs.

I think that is something I can find myself doing.

Perhaps that is part of why I find it so difficult to have these conversations in the moment. It isn’t that I don’t know what I need. It isn’t that I don’t care about my own safety. It is that, sometimes, the part of me that wants to keep everything comfortable and easy takes over before the part of me that knows what I need gets a chance to speak.

I have healed a lot from my previous experiences. But it is difficult to heal in isolation when the people you are having sex with aren’t necessarily creating an environment that feels safe enough for you to practise those boundaries in.

And it makes me think about the disproportionate focus on male pleasure within heterosexual sex.

Because so often, it feels like the expectation is that women will accommodate sex, rather than that sex will be something both people actively create together.

In this situation, as in others I have experienced, it has felt like his enjoyment was prioritised without much consideration for what would make the experience enjoyable, comfortable or safe for me.

And I don’t just mean sexual pleasure.

I mean the feeling of being cared for. The feeling that someone is paying attention to you. The feeling that they are thinking about what happens to you after the sex is over.

There is something incredibly sexy about that.

I have had ex-boyfriends tell me that they really cared about making sex as enjoyable for me as it was for them. And sometimes that meant asking me, ‘What positions do you like?’ or trying to understand what I found physically pleasurable.

Of course, that matters.

But I think there is a much broader understanding of pleasure that we sometimes miss.

I want someone to care about whether I feel safe enough to enjoy myself. I want someone to think about contraception and protection without making me responsible for bringing it up. I want someone to create a sense of trust and connection. I want someone to notice that being thoughtful about those things can actually make sex feel more intimate, not less.

I don’t want responsibility to be something that gets in the way of sex.

I want responsibility to be part of what makes sex sexy.

I wish more men understood that.

I wish more men understood how many women carry complicated histories around sex. How many of us have experienced coercion, assault, unwanted sexual experiences, pressure, or simply years of learning that our discomfort is something we are expected to manage quietly.

I wish more men understood that they have a role in creating experiences that challenge those histories, rather than inadvertently reinforcing them.

Because I don’t think women should have to be perfectly healed, perfectly assertive versions of ourselves before we are allowed to feel safe during sex.

I think we should be able to expect care from the person we are having sex with.

And perhaps that is what has made this experience feel so sad to me.

Not because my experience is unique.

But because it isn’t.

I wish it were.

I think there is something quite remarkable about being a young woman and doing things that previous generations of women were not permitted to do, or if they were, it was seen as ‘weird’. I think about the things I have chosen to do in my twenties that my ancestors were not afforded the same freedoms: living alone in a beautiful apartment in a lively city, or booking flights across the world simply because I wanted to, even choosing that over travelling with friends.

I think about all of the silly little encounters I have had abroad, and how all of those hazy, blurred and unexpected memories would not have happened if I had not gone. Had I travelled with someone else, I probably would have been absorbed in our conversations instead of noticing the people, places and tiny moments unfolding around me.

I think about the day I met an Italian guy and a Hungarian woman. We spent the next twenty-four hours wandering the city, gradually collecting an eclectic group of strangers from different corners of the world. We talked about politics, love, home and everything in between until six in the morning, before stumbling onto separate trains an hour later.

Or the time I convinced a group of French women that I spoke French, whilst reciting the random words I remembered from my school language lessons, because drunk and international me is full of more confidence than I have ever had in the UK. Three years later, we still like each other's Instagram posts.

Or the time I met a Russian guy in a taxi, and we talked for hours about all the places we had been, and he told me he had emigrated because he strongly disagreed with the Russian government, and how we had been to all the same places in the last few years.

It makes me think of all the chance conversations, and all the beautiful moments of connection I have had whilst travelling. I once read that solo travel allows people to become more authentic because it removes them from the expectations they have quietly absorbed in everyday life. Without anyone expecting you to be a particular version of yourself, you get to experiment. Maybe you become more confident. Maybe you say yes more often. Maybe you simply notice the world more.

I do not know about that, but I have had conversations with people I have met travelling that I have never had with long-term connections from my day-to-day life.

When I travel, I become a much more confident version of myself, and I walk around cities I have never been in my life as if I have lived there for the last few years, and have learned the skill of navigating very confusing public transport systems. It has made me more confident in my day-to-day life as well, and has made me appreciate the small moments more.

I do not feel as pressured about what I am going to do with my life, and instead I realise I live a privileged life compared to so much of the world, and the fact that I am even able to write about solo travel makes me significantly more privileged than so many other people in the world.

I think there is something about meeting people, and having quite intense moments, and then leaving and probably never seeing them again. It is like there is a deadline on connecting. It makes us honest, and it makes us want to make the most out of the time we have. And is that not a beautiful lesson to take forward? Maybe with solo travel, I know there is an end, but the same goes for everything else in life - everything has to end, and so I have realised through solo travel that the importance of appreciating the small moments has to extend to my day-to-day, and it has.

It is a strange thing, because I owe a lot to my spontaneous decision to solo travel, in the pits of heartbreak. At 26 years old, I felt anxious about not being anywhere near buying a house, or with the love of my life, but actually, now, I care so much less about that. I've stopped postponing my life until it looks the way I once imagined it would.

It is a funny thing as well, because I have had several friends who have gone down a more traditional life, who bought houses, and got engaged in their early 20’s, who are now looking to me and saying I have inspired them to do what I am doing, and they appreciate the bravery I had to do something different. I think the lesson in that is that everyone does life on their own terms, and to spend any time comparing what we have to others is not a good use of our time, especially when we do not have the whole story.

For a long time, I thought I was behind because my life did not look like the version I'd imagined at twenty-five. Solo travel quietly taught me that there is no universal timeline, only the one we build for ourselves. And if there is one thing those flights, strangers and chance encounters have given me, it is the confidence to keep choosing my own timeline.

I would describe myself as a fairly casual reader, and yet last year I read eleven books, despite ongoing issues with my vision that made reading more difficult. In previous years, I would often read two books a month. I am currently doing a doctorate, surrounded by people who would generally be considered highly educated, and yet only a small number of my friends regularly read books for pleasure. Working in Psychology, I have also met many people who once saw themselves as readers as children, but who lost their enthusiasm for reading somewhere along the way through education, work, and the pressure to constantly consume information productively.

Growing up in a working-class area, reading was not necessarily seen as something cool. It was slightly nerdy, slightly strange. I took that label and ran with it. I loved novels as a child. I would stay awake long after my bedtime, completely immersed in fictional worlds, imagining characters and places far beyond the environment I grew up in. I read classics for fun and was reading far above my age level from quite young.

But what I remember most now is not necessarily the books themselves, but what they quietly taught me about other people.

I remember reading Jacqueline Wilson novels about children in the care system, books about poverty, instability, loneliness, and family breakdown. Long before I understood concepts like systemic inequality or adverse childhood experiences academically, fiction had already introduced me to them emotionally. Now, working with children who have been adopted, I often think about how much those stories shaped my understanding of adversity and vulnerability. In many ways, I think fiction taught me empathy before research papers ever could.

As a child growing up in an area with limited diversity, books also exposed me to lives and experiences far removed from my own. I read stories about war, immigration, race, disability, sexuality, and gender. Without fully realising it at the time, reading helped bridge the gap between the relatively homogenous world I inhabited and the much larger, more complicated world beyond it.

Looking back, I think my reading was political long before I understood politics.

Not because novels explicitly told me what to believe, but because they encouraged me to imagine other people’s lives in detail. They taught me that people who seemed very different from me still experienced grief, fear, shame, love, insecurity, hope, and joy in recognisable ways. Fiction made the world feel simultaneously bigger and more connected.

And increasingly, I think that matters politically.

Of course, reading novels does not automatically make somebody politically progressive, and self-help books do not inevitably push people towards reactionary politics. But I do think the kinds of stories we consume shape how we imagine both ourselves and other people.

Over the last decade, I have also read my fair share of non-fiction and self-development books. Some of them have been genuinely useful, particularly books grounded in psychology, memoir, or thoughtful reflection. But I often found myself uncomfortable with the underlying message of many popular self-help books: if you optimise yourself enough, success will follow.

Even when these books briefly acknowledge structural barriers like class, discrimination, poverty, disability, or inequality, those issues often feel treated as obstacles to be individually overcome rather than collective problems requiring collective solutions. The focus remains firmly on the self: your habits, your mindset, your productivity, your discipline, your success.

At some point, I realised that consuming endless self-improvement content was not actually making me feel more fulfilled or thoughtful. Like many people, I felt increasingly surrounded by podcasts, videos, and social media posts telling me how to become the “best version” of myself. Every spare moment seemed to become an opportunity for optimisation.

Ironically, the more focused I became on self-improvement, the narrower my thinking started to feel.

Recently, I made a conscious decision to return more fully to fiction. Initially, it was not a political decision at all. I simply wanted hobbies that did not need to be productive. I wanted to stop treating my spare time as something that needed to generate constant personal growth.

But what surprised me was that reading novels again actually made me feel more reflective, more emotionally engaged, and more aware of the world around me.

At the same time, political discourse has become increasingly hostile and polarised, particularly in both the UK and the United States. Across social media and podcast culture, there has been a growing overlap between certain forms of self-development content and increasingly reactionary political ideas. Podcasts regularly platform discussions around hierarchy, masculinity, “success”, biological essentialism, and resentment, often dressed up as empowerment or truth-telling.

Much of contemporary self-development culture encourages people to interpret social problems through the lens of personal failure, competition, and status. Those ideas can sit very comfortably alongside political movements that prioritise dominance, hierarchy, and individual success over solidarity and collective responsibility.

And perhaps that is part of why fiction feels politically important to me again.

Novels ask something very different of us. They ask us to slow down. To sit with ambiguity. To inhabit perspectives outside our own. To recognise complexity instead of reducing people to stereotypes, opponents, or obstacles.

Self-help culture often asks: How can I become more successful?
Fiction more often asks: How do other people live?

That distinction feels increasingly important.

What also strikes me is how rarely mainstream self-development culture talks meaningfully about community. About care. About volunteering. About mutual responsibility. About supporting people through hardship, even when there is no measurable reward for doing so. The emphasis is so often on becoming exceptional rather than becoming connected.

And yet, no society can function entirely through individual optimisation. Somebody always gets left behind.

Perhaps that is why reading fiction now feels strangely rebellious. In a culture dominated by algorithms, outrage, productivity, and personal branding, choosing to spend hours quietly immersed in somebody else’s story can feel almost resistant. Not because reading novels automatically makes somebody morally superior, but because fiction expands our moral imagination in ways that are increasingly rare online.

Sometimes political action is loud. Sometimes it involves protest, organising, or public resistance. But sometimes it is quieter than that. Sometimes it begins with listening carefully to experiences unlike our own. Sometimes it begins with refusing to let our world shrink.

Perhaps reading fiction matters because it reminds us that other people’s inner lives are as psychologically real and complex as our own. In a political culture increasingly shaped by individualism, outrage, and endless self-optimisation, that feels quietly radical.

So I think I will continue reading more novels. I will continue believing that stories matter, that empathy matters, and that reading should remain accessible rather than prestigious. Whatever somebody enjoys reading — literary fiction, romance, fantasy, or even fantasy smut — it all has the potential to open up the world a little further.

And right now, that feels political in itself.

References

YouGov. Reading and Books Survey Results (2025)

https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/documents/2025_Reading_and_Books_poll_results.pdf

As a woman in my late twenties, I am just as perplexed by dating as many of the women around me. Wonderful, well-educated, talented women who have done incredible things still find themselves having the same conversations: stories of bare-minimum behaviour from men, dating without success, and a general exhaustion with dating apps.

Some of the people around me who are in relationships seem to fare better. But that is not always the case. I have friends who quietly admit they are miserable, yet stay because the alternative, being single, feels scarier.

It feels like women are expected to make themselves smaller for men.

I have also found myself in conversations where women have decided to stop dating altogether, saying that they hate men. But I think it is easier to say we hate men because it reduces something complicated into a single, simple emotion: hatred.

The truth, I think, is more heartbreaking.

For me, it isn’t hatred. It’s sadness.

Sadness about the expectations placed on women. Sadness about the feeling that no matter what I do, my value as an individual will always be seen as less than what it might be if I were in a relationship, even if those relationships make me miserable.

I could do wonderful things in my career, with my friends, and in my personal life. Yet the societal expectation will still linger: that eventually I will be expected to get married and have children.

I’m not necessarily against that life.

But I want the choice.

I want my worth to feel bigger than my ability to fulfil that expectation.

At my core, I believe in love. I still want the calm but passionate love that the films, books, and media I consumed as a child promised me. I want to be truly known by a partner, and to know someone on a deeper level than I ever have before.

But the reality of dating has not matched those expectations.

While I’m grateful for the relationships I’ve had throughout my life, I sometimes look back and wonder whether any of them truly loved me or whether they simply liked the idea of being cared for by a woman.

I love my friends deeply. But I’ve also noticed how often our conversations circle back to men: the latest strange behaviour on a date, the confusing messages, the exhausting dynamic.

It isn’t our fault. It’s the result of the way society has conditioned us to centre men in our lives and in our conversations.

Lately, it has felt even heavier with the rise of “traditional roles” discourse on social media. There are constant conversations about whether women should or should not have children, often suggesting that women who choose not to are selfish.

The pressure feels relentless, and most of it falls on women.

Rarely do these conversations ask whether men might also be selfish for the same decisions. In reality, nobody is selfish for making deeply personal choices about their own lives.

At the same time, many dating profiles seem filled with men who appear more concerned about having children than about finding someone they genuinely care about, someone with whom they might explore the possibility of children later.

For me, that question isn’t simple.

I have a complicated relationship with the idea of having children due to genetic conditions in my family and my work with families experiencing fertility difficulties. It’s not a yes-or-no decision.

And yet, I’ve had people ask me directly on dating apps or on first dates whether I want children.

Those moments remind me that for many men, this conversation is often framed as a straightforward yes-or-no. For the women around me, it rarely feels that simple.

All of this has led me to a quiet realisation.

“Decentring men” doesn’t mean hating them.

It might simply mean recognising that dating men is not always worth the emotional cost.

I say that in the kindest way possible. It’s not that men are bad people. It’s that dating them is not worth making myself smaller just to be seen as “enough”.

It is not worth softening my emotions or shrinking my knowledge to make men more comfortable.

It is not worth ignoring my inner world simply because engaging with it feels inconvenient to someone else.

I think I’ve decided that while dating and relationships may be part of my life, they should never be the thing that defines it.

I’m starting this Substack as a space to think honestly about modern womanhood -including navigating expectations, friendships, work, dating, and the strange cultural moment we’re living in, all with a psychological focus.

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