Whenever I fall into a pit of panic or a swell of grief threatens to knock me sideways, my immediate response is to freeze. I wish I could run, but I can’t. At times, I can barely move it’s so paralysing. It’s not an exaggeration to say that in that moment, when my body is frozen, the tears come unbounded and I’m staring into the darkness, it feels like I’m dying. It’s absolutely terrifying.

For a long time, both myself and my husband were entirely unsure how to cope with this response. I've spent the better part of my career writing about health, and I still didn't know that 'freeze' was a thing until it happened to me, and until my psychologist articulated it in a way that held space for the terror that descends. Fight, flight, freeze. We all know the list but nobody tells you which one you’ll be until you’re in it.

But here’s what I’ve worked out since. While I can’t lace up my shoes at 2am and head off into the bush (although at times I wish I could), in the morning, once the worst parts of the fear have subsided, the trapped energy I feel in my muscles needs to go somewhere. And running serves that purpose. This means that when I run, it’s not just some nebulous coping mechanism I picked up along the way, it’s the flight my body was hurtling towards at 2am, finally finding its way out.

If you’ve ever experienced loss – or even just found yourself grappling with a period of immense change – it’s likely you’ve also experienced the urge to move. And what’s fascinating is that this desire we experience to move is not just psychological, it’s biological. While most of us can attest to the mood-boosting benefits of exercise, burning off the adrenaline and cortisol that floods our body during periods of stress, movement is also one of the most effective ways to shift our nervous system out of that freeze response and back into our bodies. And the research supports this. It’s not just that the evidence shows physical activity is a way to distract or escape from grief, it’s that the physicality itself provides the perfect landing place to re-express those emotions, and to feel free of them.

Which might explain why I’ve spent the best part of two decades doing it. I can’t quite remember the exact moment that I fell in love with running. I’m not a ‘natural’ runner or a ‘fast’ runner or even someone who looks particularly ‘apt’ at running. But still, for some reason I love it. Almost obsessively at times. For more than 20 years, running has been the way I process whatever madness or milestone I might be navigating at the time, but I never quite realised the impact it had on my mental wellbeing until Mum was diagnosed with cancer.

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That was 2020. I did my best to run as often as my body would let me, as far as I was able, navigating postpartum and injuries that came in a flurry. And in the last two years in particular, as I’ve finally left babyhood behind and regained both some strength and some physical space from my children, I’ve been able to lean into running with much more ease.

But over the last year, as she was dying, running became the through-line that tethered me to reality. It gave me an escape, but it also gave me purpose. I was fighting for my own life as she was losing hers.

The day after she died, I ran into the hills. My chest was heavier than ever and I choked back tears the whole way up. But my legs never failed me. They carried me, they did their job, they held me up even while I felt as if I might fall.

It’s why I feel less helpless when I’m running. I feel like I am taking back control of the uncontrollable and finding a way to literally shake the grief and fear and anger out of my body.

It’s not that I feel by going for a run I’m able to outpace it. It will always be there and Mum will still always be gone. The fear and panic that rises at 2am will also likely continue to visit – although hopefully as time passes, less often. But what I know now is that after the freeze, the flight will come, and when the sun comes up, I will run.

PS. This one sits close to the book I'm writing. If you have your own version of it, the thing your body made you do while you were grieving, I'd really like to hear it.

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write a book. And over the years, I’ve started several manuscripts that remain unfinished. There are half-baked ideas for novels scribbled in journals and many many iterations of the memoir I’m now writing noted down in all sorts of places. My Google Drive is full of words, my notes app overflowing and every now and then I open a drawer or a handbag only to find some random post-it with an idea for how one concept could link with the next more effectively.

But the truth is, while the book I’m working on now feels like it is shouting at me to get out of my brain and onto the paper—and thankfully I no longer feel like I’m questioning the narrative arc—the actual process of consolidating words that were scribbled down in a rush and many that were written during some of the most difficult days of my life, has been incredibly difficult.

Who knew that writing a book was hard? Well, not me apparently.

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I think popular culture is somewhat to blame here. If we consider the many rom-coms and television shows of the 90s and 00s that became such blockbuster successes, there were many of them that featured a female protagonist who was a writer (or at least connected to publishing in some way). Writing was seen as an aspirational career path and one that felt both satisfying in a creative sense, but also within reach. We could all picture ourselves as Carrie Bradshaw, likely even if we’d never considered writing as a realistic career path.

In my own experience, while I can look back with the benefit of hindsight and recognise that words were always my preferred medium, I’m not sure if ‘writer’ was ever the exact term I would have used to describe my dream career. And I certainly didn’t work towards it as if it were. Case in point: I studied Fine Arts of all things, thinking that photography might be my path forward. But really, I think this decision just sort of came about because that’s the subject that made most sense to me at that time. It’s certainly a decision I wish I could go back and consider again if I had the opportunity.

But maybe, through my consumption of popular culture, I resonated with something else. From Little Women to Bridget Jones’s Diary, Sex and the City, Something’s Gotta Give, Julie & Julia, You’ve Got Mail, The Devil Wears Prada… all of the female lead characters possess some connection to writing, publishing or books. And by osmosis, somewhere along the way I decided that I too was going to be a writer.

While the road to get here has been somewhat winding—and certainly not as lucrative as it appeared to be for Miss Bradshaw—I’ve never questioned my choice to pursue this career and if anything, I’ve just felt disappointed that I let my own imposter syndrome get in the way of pursuing this goal to write a book earlier. To be clear, it hasn’t gone away, but I must admit, I’m much better at telling it to shut the fuck up these days.

Still, while the words are slowly jigsawing their way into place and there are many more to be written, the challenge is now getting someone to read them. That is, someone besides my writing mentor who is helping me to carefully get a few chapters in order. And I think this is the bit that those films and TV shows never quite nailed. They never showed the hard part.

The protagonist always appeared to be filing copy and winning the book deal without much slog in the middle, but the truth is, writing is (often) a slog. And until someone reads your words, you never quite know for sure if they’re any good. It’s also a lot lonelier than popular culture would have you believe, and it requires a far less fancy wardrobe.

Most days you’ll find me hunched over the kitchen table, my navy cardigan draped across my shoulders and a half-finished cup of tea to one side. There’s far less fancy footwear involved, but the only thing left to do now is keep going.

And then beg you all to read it.

As a writer who cut her teeth in health and lifestyle journalism, and someone who still writes regularly in the space, I’m always keen to chat about the latest wellness trend. Part of my brain enjoys hunting for the “hook” that lets me dive deeper into a topic. But on a more personal level, I’m simply someone who’s naturally drawn to this kind of content.

While I’m far less rigorous with myself these days, the culture I grew up in—that of the late 90s and early 00s—can only be described as toxic. Any story that hinted at “wellness” had less to do with health and wellbeing and everything to do with shrinking ourselves. Diet culture was rife, and tabloid headlines were so overt and abrasive it’s a wonder any of us survived with our sense of self-worth intact.

So when the wellness industry blew up, it felt refreshing. It felt like we were finally being given permission to do better… for our bodies, our health, our minds. Ancient practices like Ayurveda, yoga and Vedic meditation became cool again. Ingredients our grandparents probably had in their cupboards, buried for generations, popped up in every health food store on every corner. Sure, they came at a premium, but we collectively agreed that our health should also come at a premium. We wanted to feel the best we possibly could.

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And in the grand scheme of things, wellness culture became a positive influence on our lives. But somewhere along the way, wellness tipped into self-optimisation and now we’re surrounded by maxxing culture. Sleep-maxxing, fibre-maxxing, looks-maxxing, gym-maxxing… everything-maxxing. The conversation has shifted from being, feeling and looking well to complete and total optimisation—with the unspoken caveat that anything less than optimal isn’t worth attempting at all.

While I love writing about these trends as I’m fascinated by our very human instinct to fall into line like sheep, on a more personal level, maxxing culture does something unsteadying to my perfectionist-inclined mind. It makes my imposter syndrome even louder than it already is. It makes it easier to reach for the excuse and say, well, if I don’t have time for a 10km run, I may as well not run at all. Or, if I can’t finish the article today, I may as well not start it.

But it’s not just me. Maxxing culture has made extreme optimisation so aspirational that anything less feels like failure, or worse, like we’re going backwards. The parameters for success are rigid, and once you layer in the easy access to digital metrics—sleep scores, heart rate, tempo zones—it’s no wonder we’re all a little over it.

The solution isn’t to throw up our hands and give up entirely, but there has to be a counterpoint to all this maxxing, a way to keep looking after ourselves without turning our own wellbeing into one more thing to fail at.

Life in all its messiness can’t be measured by a series of binary metrics, that’s what makes it such an adventure. It’s also what makes it full of as much joy as it is grief, frustration, wonder and beauty. And I would venture that simply by living to the best of our abilities, we are already maxxed out.

90s nostalgia is literally everywhere right now and has somehow seeped into every corner of the culture. And I, for one, cannot stop consuming content on the topic. From fashion to television, technology, and now, apparently, parenting. The 90s are back, big time.

The memes poking fun at this trend are outstanding, and what they all seem to capture so beautifully (and what I try in vain to explain to my six-year-old when he complains that he is bored for the 597th time in a single hour) is that when we grew up, we were dressed, fed (usually a slice of dry toast or a half-baked Pop-Tart straight from the packet) and then sent on our merry way, shuffled out the back door only to return if we were a) bleeding or b) if it was dark. That was it. He maintains I must be exaggerating for effect. I PROMISE you I am not. Some of my core childhood memories are of me and the neighbourhood gang of hoodrats running amok in the empty fields near our home. We lived up in the hills in New Zealand, so ‘nature’ was very much on the doorstep, and, honestly, we’d only turn up again once we heard my dad’s wolf whistle belting out across the valleys, the universal signal that dinner was ready.

What’s even more mind-blowing to me now is how young I would have been. As one of the youngest of the neighbourhood kids, it was simply assumed that the older ones would look after the little ones. They did, for the most part. But often my friends and I would disappear off to make our own fun, the only expectation being that we didn’t get up to too much mischief and that we came home when the whistle blew.

Even the parents in my orbit now share similar tales of gloriously hands-off 90s parenting, and while it’s lovely that we’re all so much more present in our kids’ lives these days, I do wish we could reclaim a few of those core 90s philosophies. So, in no particular order, here’s what I think we should bring back, ASAP.

The home phone (and the answering machine)

Every single piece of content I’ve consumed lately is in violent agreement: there was something wonderful about the home phone. That feeling of it ringing and simply picking it up, with absolutely no idea who might be on the other end. To today’s kids this is a nightmarish concept, having to make polite conversation with an unknown adult (likely one of your parents’ weird mates) before passing the receiver over and bellowing down the hallway: it’s for youuuu! No caller ID, no screening, no read receipts. Just you, a curly cord, and the low-grade terror of the unknown.

Boredom itself

Are we ever actually bored anymore? I’ve been so thoroughly therapised by social media that, despite never once putting my hand up for the role, I’ve somehow become the project manager of my children’s lives. There’s an unspoken expectation that every minute of every day be accounted for, optimised, enriched, and heaven forbid there be a gap. But boredom was the whole point. Boredom was the empty field. It was the flat afternoon that forced you to invent a game, build a fort out of couch cushions, or lie on the carpet staring at the ceiling (or speaking into a fan) until an idea arrived. Nobody was coming to rescue you from it, and that was precisely the gift: you learned that you were responsible for your own fun, and that your own imagination was the only equipment required. I’m trying, very hard, to sit on my hands and let my kids be bored. But it is, I’ll admit, far more uncomfortable for me than it is for them as it’s like we’ve simply erased this skill entirely.

Free-range weekends (and a healthy dose of unsupervised risk)

Playgrounds these days are great, sure, but nothing compares to scaling a ten-foot ladder and hurtling down a scorching metal slide with no barriers whatsoever. You were almost certainly going to sail off the end, most often onto concrete, but that was the point: we learned to weigh up risk and gauge our own abilities at speed. We were not wrapped in bubble wrap. We were barely covered in sunscreen (which, yes, is its own problem). But we found our limits by, well, occasionally finding them. My kids are pretty wild, and yet I still catch the flash of fear in their eyes at the top of the big ropes at the park, when they realise nobody is going to lift them down and that the only way out is through.

The shared computer

How good was having zero privacy around our screen time? First you had to wait for the dial-up to decide whether it fancied showing up at all (that shriek and hiss like a fax machine having a breakdown), and then you got to have gloriously semi-private chats on MSN with the boy from the neighbouring school, all while knowing full well a parent could wander into the family ‘computer room’ at any given second. This was the definition of living on the edge. And let’s not forget taking turns with the latest edition of Encarta. To think we simply accepted that a brand-new encyclopaedia was released each year as the complete and definitive record of all human knowledge. WILD.

Watching the same VHS on repeat

Streaming has quietly broken our brains, and the instant gratification our kids get (skip the intro, skip the episode, switch shows mid-sentence, all at the tap of a button) has stripped the joy right out of watching telly. There was nothing better than tearing inside at the end of the day and collapsing onto the couch while the afternoon kids’ shows played out in their fixed, unskippable order. And better still? Waking early on a Sunday morning, wandering out to the TV room and slotting in your favourite VHS, then holding down the rewind button for roughly seven minutes to get the thing back to the start. We waited for everything. And somehow, the waiting made it sweeter.

I know I can’t actually recreate any of this for my kids. The world has moved on, and I’m not about to disconnect the wifi and post them out the back door with a Pop-Tart and a prayer (tempting as it is). But I can loosen my grip a little.

This past weekend, a great big bunch of us went down to our local cafe for a gig where our extremely talented neighbour had been invited to play. And it turned into one of those delightfully spontaneous Sunday afternoons with a few too many wines, a few too many bowls of fries, and lots of laughter and singing.

Given all the neighbourhood kids were there, everyone had a little mate to hang with and as soon as they recognised that all the parents were, effectively, ignoring their demands because we were having our own fun, they began to venture a little further afield, beyond the edges of our table, to the corner of the road, or around the back to play on the soft grass. Sporadically, someone would pop back to the table to check in or a parent would slip away to keep a watchful eye. But it was hands off in the best possible sense, a real community vibe where the little ones were able to be bold, the older ones were trusted to keep a close eye and the only time anyone complained was if they’d scratched a knee and needed a bandaid.

I’d love to tell you that we all planned it, or that we’d project-managed the whole delightful afternoon into being. But we didn’t. We just turned up, poured the wine, and got out of the way.

Turns out that’s the whole trick.

A couple of months ago I shared a piece that was fairly grim in its outlook, reflecting a sentiment that essentially, as millennials, we are living in an economy that has well and truly left us fucked. That despite working our little tooshies off, we are constantly required to pivot and that now, for the first time in a long while, the work ethic that has always stood us in good stead isn’t enough.

And I want to be clear: I stand by every word of it. The conversations still brewing in the spaces I occupy continue to prove its truth. My business partner and bestie have long been cracking up (amidst bouts of crying) that ‘next week will be better’. We have, in essence, been white knuckling it for a while now. And when I say we’ve been white knuckling it, this is no exaggeration. We’ve been drawing on every skill in our arsenal just to keep the lights on, despite having a library of clients. A lot of our work of late has been project focused, which means high input from us, but lots of waiting around for clients who have to juggle our requests with their day-to-day workflow, before projects are wrapped up and invoices can finally be sent. It’s been a creative period, but financially rewarding? Honestly, not so much.

But still, we’ve been hustling, building and creating in the background—and it seems that hustle and word of mouth and, honestly, our dumb blind faith has finally started to pay off.

Over the last two or three weeks, we’ve had more enquiries, more requests for work, and more ongoing projects signed off than we have in over six months. The volume has gone up, sure, but more critically, it’s the steadiness of it. The baseline is now understood, and for a hot minute, it feels like we can breathe out.

And here’s the thing I keep coming back to: blind faith, every so often, actually does pay off. Not in the way you planned, and never on the timeline you’d hoped for, but it does. I’m starting to believe, too, that perhaps the clients who went quiet, the commissions that fell through, the people who just outright ghosted us, were never really ours to hold. They weren’t intended for us, and clinging to those threads was only ever going to keep us from doing the work that was. That’s not to say the fear ever fully leaves. When things are quiet and the slots need filling, there’s still a part of your brain that urges you to say yes to everything, even when your body is screaming NO. But the trick, I’m slowly learning, is working out which yeses are actually yours.

Because the truest yes I’ve said lately isn’t to a client at all. It’s to the book I cannot stop thinking about. I’ve been hustling in quiet (often before dawn) to get its pages written, and on Saturday morning—having sat in the dark writing since 4:30am—I sent off my first two chapters for editing. I have no doubt they’ll require a lot of work and a lot of rewriting. But with work finally settling into some kind of flow, I’ve found that the quiet spaces to write, the breaths between kids and chaos and the domesticity of it all, are getting smaller and smaller. Which means I’m writing in the dark, when I would much rather roll over and go back to sleep. It’s the one yes my body screams no to that I keep choosing anyway.

The slightly morbid saying ‘when it rains it pours’ usually means that we should be bracing for the worst. But perhaps it just needs a reframe, and every so often, the pouring is the good kind. So for now, I’ll take the downpour.

Last night, I decided to cook pork belly for dinner. It’s a dish I’ve made countless times before and, as always, I follow the method passed down from my mum—and from her mum before her. It’s a recipe as intrinsic to my family as it can get, and there’s comfort not only in its simple preparation but in the result: because there are no fancy methods to master, it always delivers a delicious dose of nostalgia with every bite.

As a child, we used to have Friday night dinners together at my grandparents’ house. It was a ritual that I don’t recall ever skipping, and although I’m sure part of our commitment to these dinners was due to familial expectation, my grandmother—fondly known to us all as Vecāmami (pronounced vats-a-mum)—was an incredible cook and would serve up a feast as effortlessly as any Michelin-star chef.

Her pork belly was often requested and, luckily for us, would enter frequent rotation come winter. Cooked slowly over a bed of apples, onions and carrots, the meat would melt in your mouth whilst the crackle was crisped to perfection.

After she passed away, my mum took over pork belly duties and, if possible, hers was even better.

While I don’t claim to have stolen the title, I must admit that every time I prep the dish I feel as though I’m honouring my lineage. A lineage of women who loved to cook and feed their families simply because it brought them joy.

Tonight I’ve decided to make another recipe that was Mum’s: her Latvian lamb soup. I didn’t plan two of her meals in a row—I think it’s more to do with the sudden arrival of winter in Sydney, and my subconscious reaching for ingredients I know to be comforting—but in opening my fridge this morning, I felt that familiar wave of grief swell over me again.

That’s how my grief seems to move now. It’s so much less about the big, obvious moments like birthdays or anniversaries (although I still brace for those, of course), and so much more the unsteadiness of grief coming to land between my hands as I cook. Sometimes I don’t even know that what I’m craving is less about the dish and more a longing to be closer to her.

As I do my best to recreate her dishes for my own family, I know that while she may not be at the table to enjoy them, the lineage of our family goes on. We keep cooking. We keep grieving. We keep loving.

If your winter needs a little comfort too, here's how it's done. Vecāmami's pork belly…may it bring your table the same joy it's brought ours.

Vecāmami’s Pork Belly

• 1 pork belly (approx 1.5kg, but don’t fuss over it—it always works out)

• 4 apples, cored and sliced into eighths

• 1–2 brown onions, sliced into eighths

• 4–5 carrots, unpeeled, halved lengthways then cut into thick batons

Preheat the oven to 160°C. Grab an oven bag and throw the vegetables in the bottom.

Score the pork belly (I often do this earlier in the day and leave it to dry, uncovered, in the fridge for a couple of hours). Drizzle with a little olive oil and rub it into the skin—it should be moist, but not dripping. Using standard table salt, salt the pork liberally, making sure the skin is well covered.

Place the pork in the oven bag on top of the vegetables, set the bag on an oven tray, and cook for 90 minutes.

Slice the oven bag open and move the pork to a clean oven dish (keep the vegetables warm in the bag). Turn the oven to grill and crackle until perfect. Serve with the veggies, creamy mash or braised red cabbage.

Freelance work, agency work, life, admin and grief (as always) have completely swallowed me. While much of the overwhelm is the good kind with work finally appearing to be gaining some forward momentum again, the flipside is that it’s left very little in the tank for the page.

So instead of forcing a few thin words out, I am resharing a piece from earlier in the year….

When I first wrote it, it felt deeply cathartic. But now, it reads differently—at least for me.

With my efforts now turned squarely towards a book, I can see that these snippets and memories were the early threads of something bigger.

Now that it’s winter here, too, the butterflies that visited me so frequently have all but disappeared for the season. Where do they go? I’m not sure. But I can sense that my grief, like the butterflies, has moved into a more quiet, dormant space. It is still there, humming like a butterfly beating its wings in my chest, but it spills over a little less often. And for that, I’m grateful.

So, if you’re new here—and wonderfully, a few of you are—this is a good place to start. And if you read this one back in March, it might read differently for you as well.

Back next week x

Female friendship is a complex beast and a subject that I'm endlessly fascinated by. While each of us will have our own interpretation of what 'good' friendship actually looks like, there is something inarguably painful about experiencing a friendship evolve, dissipate or end entirely—something experts agree can feel as painful as heartbreak.

When the friendship in question is also one of those formative, long-term relationships that has taken up space over the course of several decades, it can be tricky to navigate when it seems as though the two of you are no longer aligned.

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Personally, I place great value on friendships that feel safe and mutually supportive and fundamentally, I don’t believe that friendships can survive long-term if there is a mismatch of effort. But I also believe that sometimes this misalignment can remain unseen for long periods of time, simply due to the fact that we don’t place the same expectations on all of our friends.

I’ve written about this before, but essentially I think we place our friendships into different buckets subconsciously, and while one friend may cancel plans last minute and it doesn’t bother you in the slightest, there may be another friend who does the same thing and you find yourself reeling. This isn’t by accident; it’s simply our brain categorising the connection based on learned behaviours and experience.

But there is another category which seems, for many of us, difficult to articulate and to boundary. That is: those long-term friendships with women who have borne witness to the many different iterations of ourselves and watched from the sidelines as we’ve literally—and figuratively—grown up. For some reason, these long-term friendships often feel sacred in a way that new friendships do not. There is a shared history there and, as a result, I think, a deep respect for the way we navigate these friendships when life’s circumstances force them to evolve.

So many women maintain friendships with people from school or university simply due to some sort of sense of obligation. We feel intimately threaded to these people and unsure how to unknit ourselves when we recognise that the friendship no longer serves us. I know I’ve experienced this.

There is a long-term friendship that takes up a lot of residence in my mind, and recently I’ve felt a shift within myself. For years, I placed very little expectation on the relationship—despite being the person who was called upon whenever her life hit a crisis point. I’m invested, and there’s no questioning that I have always dropped, and would always drop, what I’m doing to be that support. But perhaps what I’ve failed to admit is that from time to time, I’ve felt disappointed (even though I’ve never said it out loud).

The last few years have been a comedy of errors, and as the shit has hit my fan again, and again, and again, I’ve noticed her absence—despite likely being entirely unintentional. What I’ve realised is that reverence and alignment are not the same thing, and despite being in each other’s lives for longer than I can remember, it’s only now that I feel ready to loosen my grip.

Honestly, I'm not sure she'll notice, and I've surprised myself by being okay with that. I probably just sit in a different bucket, and that's not a wound anymore, it's just how things are now. There’s a strange grief in realising a friendship you’d never previously questioned has quietly changed shape, and yet there’s a strange peace, too, in acknowledging that shared history no longer trumps mutual effort.

Despite working as a writer for the best part of 15 years, and having written countless pieces of long-form content for other people—including, funnily enough, books—I’ve never quite managed to get out of my own way for long enough to sit with an idea, flesh it out properly and see it through. And despite the shame of admitting this out loud, I also know I’m not alone in this.

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If you were to mine the contents of any writer’s notes app, you’d be met with a whole collection of half-started sentences and ideas not-quite-fully-formed. While I can only speak to my own experience, the truth is, I’ve always got at least 10 pieces of half-finished articles, blogs or ideas that require my attention and although a few are lucky enough to see the light of day, especially if I can convince my editors to commission a story, most of them do not.

In the process of trying to get my narrative clear for my book, I decided recently that it was time I finally went through my many (many!) notes and arranged them in some sort of sensical fashion. But as is always the case with well-intentioned administrative projects, this took far longer than the hour I had set aside, and instead I had to return to the task again and again over the course of many weeks in order to make sense of all the words I’d written. Many of them were sort of journal-like in their tone, and these were the bits I desperately needed to keep safe for the book. But many were business ideas that never came to life, to-do lists that certainly never got finished, funny things my kids have said that I’d obviously wanted to keep in memory, and many, many lists of books I’ve read.

Finally, however, I managed to shuffle everything away in its rightful place, and now there is a more considered cloud-based system where I know to save anything that might be useful in the future.

With all the sorting, well, sorted, the actual writing had to begin. And honestly, it’s been a very lonely process. When you’re working on something you believe in but have no outward proof yet that it’s going to be useful to anyone else, imposter syndrome sets in quickly. So far only a couple of people have read any of the words that belong in this book, and while I trust them implicitly, they also already know my story as they’ve been witness to it in real time. They’re invested which also means they have a personal interest, really, in seeing it succeed. That’s a kind of comfort, but it isn’t quite proof.

And despite being firmly type A in almost every other area of my life, I’ll admit it: I have really, really struggled to prioritise this project even though it’s the one thing I want to complete more than anything else. So recently, I did something about it. I booked a mentoring session.

Having to explain out loud, to someone who holds no prior context, what my book is about including why it matters, and why I think it needs to exist in the world, was confronting. The words were hard to find but watching someone with no stake in my story recognise that it might just be something real felt validating in a way the reassurance of people who love me never quite could. And now, I have homework to do.

Because here’s the uncomfortable thing… I can’t control whether this book eventually makes it into your hands. I can’t even control whether I’ll get the right people to read it. But I can control whether it gets written. And there is a lot left to write.

So all this is to say: putting it down here makes me feel a little more accountable. To myself, and to you.

As a woman, there’s nothing worse than someone (read: a man) asking: are you on your period?

Firstly, because it’s wildly insulting to assume that any behavioural changes we may be radiating in their direction have anything to do with our ‘flow’. But also, dumb dumbs, by the time our period actually arrives our mood is usually vastly improved. It’s our luteal phase, or PMS, that you need to watch out for.

Thankfully my husband is a quick study and he learned a long time ago not to utter the question: when is your period due? But instead, we’ve created a lovely little dialogue between us that brings a little lightness to the inevitable dark cloud that hovers above our household for at least half the month. PMS week—also formally known as the luteal phase—is now referred to as ‘sharks in the water’. This means that the threat is circling, and should you be so dumb as to dip your toe in the water, I might just take the whole foot.

Period week—formally known as Aunt Flo—is now fondly referred to as ‘shark week’. Without needing to be too illustrative, this obviously means that the sharks have attacked, we’re through the other side but the bloodbath (no pun intended) is here for at least 4-7 days.

While I haven’t officially trademarked these terms yet, feel free to utilise them in your own household—I promise, they help.

But language aside, the luteal phase is a fucking trip. While your rational brain knows that you’re feeling like an alien in your body because it’s hormonal and there is literally nothing you can do about it, your irrational, hormonal brain is frantically trawling itself for data on why on earth you were able to function as a normal human yesterday and yet today, putting your socks on inside out might just be the moment your whole life unravels.

What’s so upsetting about it all is how visceral it is. From the moment I opened my eyes this morning I could feel it brewing in my bones. I was pulsing with rage (and heat) and couldn’t wait for someone to bait me so that I could let it all out. My six year old seems to have cottoned on and likes to give me a wide berth when my eyes begin to turn red, but my three year old (bless her) still happily pokes the bear, nary a care in the world.

Instead of doing school drop off this morning and returning home to my desk—and shit pit of a house—I knew that my rage would be better spent focused on a task that had nothing to do with work. So I took myself to the supermarket for a rage shop. Side note: I am just one of those sickos who enjoys a grocery shop—but at this ‘time of the month’ I also find I’m more likely to tie my self-worth to my productivity and ticking the groceries off my mental load list actually brings a sense of calm. I probably need to talk to my therapist about this, but can recommend as a coping strategy for fellow type A readers.

Anyway, I decided to pop my AirPods in and tune into a podcast—basically so I could avoid eye contact with all other humans and ensure that I couldn’t hear anyone breathing too loudly—and funnily enough, the episode that was next on my listen list was titled ‘Nobody Warned Us About Peri’ from We Don’t Have Time For This. I mean, WHAT PERFECT TIMING.

If you’re not already a listener, I can highly recommend these girls for a good giggle—but even though the episode was so refreshing in its honesty and life-affirming in the sense that I no longer feel like the only dragon wandering the earth alone—it did shine a light on how perimenopause is very much creeping round the corner.

Symptoms of peri can be so mystifying, so discombobulating and until you start to connect the dots, it’s also easy to dismiss them as simply PMS. In my own experience as someone who has battled with bouts of chronic insomnia since having children, sometimes I get wildly confused as to whether I should be blaming this diagnosis, premenstrual insomnia, the moon or whether my restlessness might be due to some deeper hormonal shift.

So when do we stop blaming the luteal phase and admit it’s peri? Maybe I should ask my husband… I’m sure he’d have some thoughts on the subject. Or maybe you could just ask me again in a few days, when I’m safely on the other side of this hell and gloriously myself again. For at least three days.

On Sunday, I decided to paint my daughter’s bedroom wall pink.

It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a while now—and given anything remotely girl-coded brings her an immense level of joy—I knew the project would be a hit. But for months it kept dropping to the bottom of my to-do list because it wasn't a 'job' that, once attended to, would improve our quality of life in any meaningful way. It was simply a task intended as joy for joy’s sake.

But this past weekend we had one of those blissful ‘pottering about the house’ days where the calendar was clear of commitments, weekend soccer games were cancelled and, aside from a few loads of laundry, nothing really needed to be ‘done’. Even more importantly, however, both my husband and I woke up in one of those moods where energy actually meets action and, instead of well-intentioned plans that fall by the wayside as soon as you sit down for a cup of coffee, we were both happy enough to actually get moving. If I was a little more woo-woo I’d go so far as to say this type of mood strikes once in a blue moon and, as many of you may know, over the weekend we did, in fact, enjoy a blue moon. But woo-woo aside, we were up, we were at it, and the first stop was, of course, Bunnings to pick up supplies.

Aussie readers will know that a visit to Bunnings is basically an activity in and of itself on any weekend, and our kids are always keen for a trip to Bunnings if only for the sausage sizzle. But fun outings aside, I genuinely didn’t expect to enjoy the painting itself as much as I did.

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At 38 years old, I’d somehow never painted a wall before, but I found the whole process strangely calming. There was something deeply mindful about focusing on a single task and seeing progress unfold in real time, especially as I was doing something for no other purpose than to make my daughter happy. In fact, this was the part that surprised me most: the uselessness was the whole point—watching a wall go from white to pink simply because a three-year-old wanted it to.

Billie buzzed in and out of the room offering regular updates on just how much she loved her new pink wall while my husband spent a few hours helping a neighbour with a DIY project of his own. By the end of it all, there had been paint rollers and play dates, power tools, shared ideas, a glass of wine or two and countless trips between houses. It was one of those weekends that reminds you how lucky you are to have people around you.

After last week’s newsletter, where I spent a lot of time reflecting on the bin-fire that is the world more broadly, it felt like a timely reminder that the antidote to much of that overwhelm is often much closer to home.

Now, whenever I walk past Billie’s room, I feel a little spark of happiness. She’s already spent more time playing in there than she has in weeks and I’ve lost count of the ‘thank you mummy’s’ that have come my way in the last 24 hours. Now it seems funny that I'd put that job off because it wouldn't make our lives run any smoother, but it turns out that's not really the measure that matters.

I suspect there’s probably a deeper metaphor hiding in here somewhere, but for once I’m happy to leave it alone.

Sometimes it’s enough to paint a wall pink.

For a while now, I’ve personally been feeling the gut-punch of living in this bin-fire economy. And as a creative who works in content creation and marketing, the rapidity at which AI and advancing technologies are coming at us, I find that during the space between me closing my laptop on a Friday afternoon and reopening it on a Monday morning, my skills are already outdated. Claude (or whatever AI tool I’ve spent the previous week mastering and integrating into my workflow) is already redundant or has upgraded and outdone itself. It’s relentless and it’s exhausting.

While writing is really what I want to do full-time, the truth is, I can’t. At least, not without supplementing my income with marketing clients. The agency I run with my friend is in a constant state of flux—we are at the mercy of the economy and this clusterfuck of a tech race and unfortunately, there is simply no option to just tap out anymore. It’s not like choosing not to be on Facebook (which for a while was sort of the signal that you were an evolved human), the truth is, if we choose to stop using these tools or at least understanding them, our work will dry up entirely.

But beyond having to learn these new skills ourselves, we also have to implement and teach these tools to our clients who, for the most part, are scrambling to wrap their heads around the constantly shifting landscape and question how they can improve efficiencies in their own business.

Couple all this with an economy which is arguably about as bleak as it was when we left university amidst the global recession and it all paints a pretty shitty picture.

My husband and I have even found ourselves in this constant conversational loop where we spend much of our ‘free’ time determining how to pivot on business ideas, searching for a path that will finally allow us to make some significant headway. And while we are both in a privileged position in the sense we run our own businesses and are able to combine our skills, it’s a slow burn. It’s also a slog that many of our peers don’t get to witness behind the scenes. Newsflash: running a business is not all coffee dates and rainbows. It’s stressful and without a silver spoon in our mouths and no broader support network to lean on, I often question who is going to catch us if shit really hits the fan?!

So when The Cut published a piece last week titled We’re Midlife Crisis–ing in the End-times. Now What?, I clicked with the wary recognition of someone about to read about their own life. It was, honestly, as bleak as I expected. The general sentiment is that us ‘older’ Millennials are completely and utterly fucked. We have fewer resources and less hope than ever before and despite leaning on our grit, dedicated work ethic and ability to pull from our bag of tricks to constantly pivot, pivot pivot—it seems that now, there is nowhere for us to pivot to.

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Reading Amil Niazi’s piece, I felt somewhat reassured by the sense that I’m not alone. Like the writer, I too often scroll LinkedIn and feel envious of my peers who chose to take a more traditional route, climbing the corporate ladder and who, now sit in the C-suite with a salary that is likely providing some sense of financial stability in this chaotic climate. While of course you cannot see what goes on behind closed doors and it’s true that everyone has their own shit going on—whether that’s being in the thick of early parenthood, feeling the squeeze of being in the sandwich generation caring for ageing parents, experiencing loneliness or relationship issues. Everyone is struggling. But for creatives, it’s a particularly dire time.

To be frank, back when I first started working in publishing, I was a commissioning editor for a weekly magazine. Back then (over 10 years ago), we paid between $200—2000 for a story. We had a team of in-house writers (of which there were at least five of us at any one time) and we also had an extensive list of freelancers who, depending on their level of experience and the story they were able to secure, were paid between $0.30 and $1 a word. To be paid $1 a word these days as a freelancer is about as likely as waking up to find a unicorn smoking a pack of Marlboros on your balcony. That is: complete fantasy.

While there is still a market for freelance work, the pool has drained significantly. The editors I write for I remain fiercely loyal to and stay in almost constant contact so as not to be forgotten. I don’t, after all, want to bite the unicorn’s hand that feeds me… so to speak.

But budgets overall have reduced significantly and the articles that used to pay me upwards of $1000 a piece, now pay less than half of that. Freelance writing has become a supplement to my ‘real job’ rather than the job itself. This means that it involves a serious reframe on my part and instead of thinking of writing as the sole revenue stream, a published article might mean my groceries are taken care of that week or I’ve managed to pay for daycare for a day or two. It’s certainly not ending up in any holiday funds or compounding interest account.

All of this is to say that the article in The Cut made me feel grateful that we’re all in this together, but equally sad that, well, we’re all in this together. There’s no arguing that Millennials have had a rough trot. We interned for free, climbed the corporate ladders like we were told to, coupled up young if we were lucky enough to find our person, ticked off all the things Instagram told us was important including expensive hens parties, European holidays and beige interiors. And now, we’re pivoting again. We’re uniquely over-qualified and yet too ‘old’ to compete with the younger generations who are still, quite frankly, happy to work less hard for less money in the roles that are more relevant to us. It’s a strangely discombobulating place to be, especially when all the tools in our toolkit appear to be redundant (or at least taken over by AI).

And I question what kind of world we’re building—or perhaps breaking—for our children.

Like Niazi, I have young children at home and I’m so conscious now of ensuring they don’t absorb any of the stress beyond the safe walls of our home. They’re still young enough that while they may not be ‘seeing’ the horrors of the world unfold around them on a macro level, I’m very conscious that I don’t want them absorbing any financial or existential stress I might be feeling by osmosis. This means at home, I role play somewhat that I am the adult that has my shit together.

Most days I almost believe it. And maybe that’s the only useful thing I can model for them: that you can be tired and unsure and still show up and that the floor moving doesn’t mean you fall. Pivoting isn’t a failure, it’s just what Tuesdays look like now. While I hope that they don’t find themselves writing this same essay in 2046, I have to brace for the possibility that they will.

It’s also the first time I’ve been home again since my mum passed away six months ago and the truth is, the world looks completely different to me now.

For so many years, New Zealand was always my home—even though I’ve lived more of my adult life overseas. But the way I would describe trips home were just that: going home. With our families forever based there, the tie to our place of origin has always been steadfast.

But as soon as my mum got sick—in the midst of the 2020 Covid lockdowns—home took on a new meaning. At first, it was the one place in the world where I longed to go more than anywhere else and yet, due to the incredibly strict rules put in place by those in power, it was also one of the most difficult places to reach. There was no question that I had to ‘go home’ when I received news of my mum’s diagnosis, but getting there involved an incredible amount of hoop-jumping, bureaucracy and unfortunately, emotional turmoil due to the decision I had to make to leave my husband in Sydney and take our newborn baby with me into quarantine overseas.

For the past six years, the whole concept of ‘going home’ has therefore shifted entirely. While the Covid lockdowns and travel restrictions eventually eased, for six months during 2020–2021, we lived in New Zealand out of fear for what leaving again might do. We’d already been separated once and now, knowing how sick my mum was, it felt like we were tied to this place through no choice of our own.

While I’m so grateful to have had the time and privilege to travel back and forth, I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t also taken a toll. Especially over the last 12 months. The novelty of travel wore off quickly and when the whole focus of my ‘going home’ was to care, I felt very adrift and very alone.

And so this trip feels different. And it’s not because I’m no longer grieving. The truth is, going home now without Mum at the other end feels so difficult to even comprehend. I know it’s going to be immensely difficult being in her space, with her scent still somehow embedded in the house and traces of her everywhere. How could it not be discombobulating?

But for the first time in a long time, the anxiety I feel about going home is no longer about what awaits me there. Instead, it feels tethered to what I’m leaving behind.

So many friends have asked me if I’m ready to go home, if I’m nervous. But I truly feel like I’ve managed to reframe what lies ahead. It’s no longer about bracing for inevitable loss. We’ve already lost her. Now, the sadness comes from having to leave my husband and my children and the small life we’ve built together—and strangely, that’s a nice anxiety to have.

When Mum got sick, I subconsciously and instinctively blocked out my role here as a mother myself. I handed the reins over to my husband with full confidence. Actually, I didn’t hand anything over at all—I didn’t need to. I simply upped and left as often as I had to, and many times, with less than 24 hours notice. I didn’t allow myself to think beyond the next few hours and I certainly didn’t acknowledge what it meant to repeatedly have to leave my own children and miss their little lives while I desperately tried to hold onto my mum. I think if I had, it would have broken me.

So I compartmentalised because I had to.

But now, I’m choosing to be grateful. I know that there is heartbreak ahead of me, a tangible mirror to my grief being home again. But I also know that I will miss my children and my husband and my own life in a way I haven’t done in more than five years.

This time ‘going home’ is not carrying any expectation that I am there to care for anyone. I’m simply going home to be with my dad. To sit next to him and of course acknowledge all that we’ve lost, but also, look towards all we have left to live for.

With my eldest starting ‘big’ school and my youngest ramping up to five days at daycare, it felt a little like freedom—and something resembling silence—was waiting just around the corner.

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But within a few days of this new normal, my gut was screaming at me that I’d made the wrong decision. That Billie, my three-year-old, was simply not ready to be away from me. Her mood had shifted, there was a clinginess and a level of uncertainty about her that had not been there before. She is wilful, strong-minded, and I am constantly in awe of her confidence and self-assuredness. But in just a few days, I’d felt it fade a little. And she was tired.

My instincts told me to pull her out of daycare for a day. But I admit, it took me a while to listen.

On a deep level, I think I felt some shame. Shame that I’d made a decision that, although entirely reversible, would be an admission that I’d got it wrong. That I’d done something I knew was in my own best interests, while perhaps ignoring that it wasn’t in hers.

But even beyond the irrational mum guilt, it was also the first time in a long while that I’d felt my instincts so viscerally. And the more I sat with it, the more I realised this hesitation wasn’t only about motherhood. Other women in my life also seemed to harbour a quiet uncertainty when it came to trusting themselves.

Culturally, I think we’ve become so inundated with information and well-meaning advice that we’re almost paralysed by indecision when we need to be discerning about what we take in, and what we choose to refute. The question is: when did this distrust kick in? When did we all start questioning our own instincts?

While I can only speak to my own experience, I do believe becoming a mum was a turning point. Despite being told over and over to “trust my gut”, being put in charge of a tiny human left me feeling more helpless than I’ve ever felt before. The nurturing was instinctual, sure. But knowing what to do, listening to my gut and then actually following through on it was something I had to practise.

What I remember instead was a lot of noise. From other people, from friends, family members, Instagram… all yelling at me to trust my instincts while also delivering very, very conflicting advice.

But as the fog of early parenthood has lifted, I’m not sure I can blame ‘mum brain’ any longer. I strongly believe we’re living in an age of outsourced knowing and the saturation and constant advancement of technology has completely shifted how we navigate our day-to-day lives. While developments like AI have undoubtedly changed our world on a more macro scale, on a personal one, the immediate access and presence of AI has made me question my own intelligence countless times.

While I remain a bit of a dinosaur in the way I run my domestic life and don’t yet lean on AI in that space, it has permeated my professional life in a way I never saw coming.

The creative levers I need to pull are still very much my own, but I now use AI daily for efficiency and also, often, for sense-checking. But why? If I’m honest, I think there is now a deep-seated belief that ‘it’ might know better. The trouble is, by outsourcing so many of the tiny decisions we used to make instinctually, we are at risk of letting these creative muscles atrophy.

As a writer, this is terrifying. Already I am so aware of how much I fight against the urge to open AI when I’m working on creative projects. A marketing email is one thing, but my voice? I’m terrified to lose it.

But on a broader scale, I still think that as women, the patriarchy has a lot to answer for when it comes to women’s seeming inability to trust our own instincts. We still exist in spaces and systems largely built by men for men—societies that are still not equipped to properly serve women, let alone mothers.

In professional settings, we’re told to advocate for ourselves, to negotiate and ask for more, but the reality is, as women, we are still paid considerably less, promoted less often and taught to question our right to have a seat at the table. Whether we like it or not, this conditioning teaches us that our instincts to speak up are wrong.

But this distrust of ourselves is not something we’ve simply absorbed in adulthood. It has been there since the beginning when, as girls, we were trained to seek external validation and second-guess our own instincts in an effort to make everyone else comfortable. And we’re still doing it now.

The good news is, I have noticed a shift amongst the women in my orbit—especially as we head towards midlife. There seems to be some kind of subtle reckoning that occurs in our 40s and thankfully, we all stop questioning ourselves so much.

There is a cultural rhetoric that sort of says as we get older we give less fucks—and I have certainly found this to be true. But I don’t think we all age into this new sense of self. I think that it’s true we tend to become more honest, but it’s a practice.

If I cast my mind back to pre-kid me, I was fairly terrible at communicating what I actually wanted. Professionally, I wore a very good mask and because I loved what I did and loved leading teams, I felt confident in that arena. But personally, I was awful at it.

My husband would ask me what’s wrong and despite probably knowing in my gut that something was bothering me, I would be completely unable to articulate it. It was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t form words around it. I didn’t trust myself.

Over the past few years, however, I’m pleased to say that this has completely dismantled. I am candid. Always. And sometimes, probably, to my detriment. But I don’t think there is ever a question of how I’m feeling anymore because I’ve just learned to say the thing out loud. What’s the worst that could happen?

Someone might disagree with you, but at least that then sparks conversation. When we stay silent, things fester. The act of doing so is also programming our bodies not to listen, to lean further into distrust and away from our instincts.

It’s like that old saying: practise makes perfect. And I tend to agree. But as women, I think we’ve outsourced our knowing for so long that it can be both uncomfortable and difficult to recognise the sound and shape of our own instincts.

Until the question of Billie and daycare arose, I think I’d forgotten what it felt like to lean into my own instincts.

So what happened? Ultimately, I trusted my gut. I pulled her from daycare and reshaped what our weeks now look like as a family. While I’ve ‘lost’ a day of silence, what I’ve gained is so much more than that. She has softened into me again and instead of feeling guilty for walking away from her on a Tuesday morning, I now get to hold her hand and let her run the day. It’s certainly not relaxing by any definition, but it was the right decision.

It also wasn’t something I needed to outsource or sense-check. I knew it all along.

Monday marked six months since we lost you. Today is also World Ovarian Cancer Day and Sunday, well, Sunday is Mother’s Day.

I’d hoped that perhaps I would be able to make it through this week unscathed, but in hindsight, I think that was simply wishful thinking. The marketing around Mother’s Day has been omnipresent, and I’ve found myself walking around wondering who else is in the ‘dead mums club’. Trouble is, unlike wounds you can see from the outside, this one has a way of staying hidden.

You consume my every thought and yet so often, I wake up and forget that you’re gone. Before the consciousness comes flooding back into my body, there is a moment when I get to be the person I once was. But every time it’s like a sucker-punch and every time it leaves me reeling.

By some strange twist of fate, this week I also had an article commissioned which saw me writing about the tragic reality of ovarian cancer in order to help raise awareness for a cause that’s been so close to our hearts for so long. And while difficult, it felt deeply important to share your story and somewhat serendipitous that I’ve been called to sit with it again.

I know that there are so many wonderful things to be grateful for, and at times I can see how far we’ve all come. But the sky looks different now. The way I move through the world feels different now, every cell in my body shifting to make room for the wound that I know will likely never go away. I don’t say it very often, but I’m angry that you were the one who was taken away.

My heart is hurting and while I hope that our energies will find each other once again, I know it’s not today, and not tomorrow.

Until then, I’ll keep turning my face to the sun. I’ll keep saying hello to the butterflies, and I’ll keep squeezing the hands I have within my reach.

All my love.

Where do I see this most clearly? LinkedIn. My dislike for the platform is already well documented and honestly, I know I’m not alone in feeling as if it’s nothing more than a necessary evil in terms of maintaining some sort of professional presence (whatever the fuck that means these days). I would even go so far as to say that many of us use it simply because we understand that on some level, we are at the mercy of algorithms and know that those who appear consistently engaged in some sort of cultural dialogue are prioritised. But aside from all the LinkedIn fluff, at its core, its intention is to provide a networking space where we are all able to leverage our individual experience, open up networks and find work.

What I see on there, however, is a whole lot of gatekeeping. It feels showy-offy rather than supportive and what I’m definitely not seeing is women tagging their friends or colleagues in relevant work opportunities or acting as any sort of professional conduit.

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But LinkedIn is a huge corporation. Our own social media platforms, book clubs, mums groups and social networks are not. They are intimate spaces owned by us and therefore, in these rooms, we have the power to support those around us. It just seems like we’re not. Still.

My personal policy is that if a friend, colleague or even an acquaintance asks for advice, a connection or a conversation—even if it's an automated 'will you like my business page' request—I don't scroll past. I accept the request. I like the post. I share the work. And when I can, I buy the thing.

This isn’t effort. It takes seconds. And as the person on the other side, hustling to get work, sell a product or find a job, I know that one action can make all the difference.

So why are so many of us still keeping our connections close to our chest? And I don’t mean strangers, I mean the women we know. Women we like, even. Women we’ve worked alongside.

When I wrote about this before, I argued that as women, we’ve been conditioned to be in competition with one another. That by supporting someone else’s pursuit (even if it has no bearing or cross-over with our own endeavours), that we feel like we’re somehow missing out. The conditioning might be unconscious. But the decision not to like the post, not to share the work, not to refer someone on is decidedly conscious.

You may not have noticed that you’ve done this, but there’s no question the person whose post you scrolled past certainly has. I have several friends running their own ecommerce businesses and they can likely name every single friend who has overtly shown their support. But sadly, they can just as easily name the friends who’ve chosen to turn away.

In my own experience as a writer, I feel intimately attuned to the support I receive. I know which friends read my words or the past colleagues who are likely to drop me a recommendation. I never hold the expectation that everyone in my life should read every article I put out into the world, or hire my agency to build their brand—but when someone likes a post I share, sends it to a friend or even opens an email, I see it. I feel supported and I know who is genuinely in my corner.

All of this is to say: support isn’t abstract and as women, we’re already battling some fairly deep patriarchal foundations that threaten to keep us small, keep us quiet and keep us hidden. But if we choose to support each other publicly, loudly and without shame or envy, we turn the abstract into the tangible.

So, next time you’re scrolling on Instagram or wading through the fluff on LinkedIn, instead of simply skimming through your friend’s posts, stop and like them. Even if their content isn’t your jam. Even if the product they’re selling isn’t something you need right now. Think of it as re-conditioning your programming and I promise the person on the other end will feel it.

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Still, sometimes I’ll look around my house or stare into my fridge and think: is this it? Not in an ungrateful or I wish I had more stuff kind of way—but more in a I can’t believe I’m here already way. Like many of my generation, I was raised on a healthy diet of Nancy Meyers movies which informed me—in no uncertain terms—that by the time I’d reached 40, I’d be living in a palatial Hampton’s-style beach mansion. It would be styled with expertly arranged eclectic furniture, I’d spend most of my time in my stunning farmhouse kitchen wearing grey marle cashmere cardigans, and every evening my family would gather around our beautiful timber table to enjoy a banquet of Coq au vin and perfectly roasted duck fat potatoes to a soundtrack of French jazz. Oui?

While I’m at it (because isn’t this fun?), my bedroom would also include lots of layered textures, plush bedding and bedside tables large enough to house a beautiful lamp and my abundant collection of books. My wardrobe would be a walk-in, obviously, large enough to house a gorgeous reading chair for when I am simply too tired to get dressed right away, and my clothing would be hung neatly on velvet-lined hangers, arranged by colour, then by fabric, and finally, by season.

Throwing dinner parties on a whim would be as effortless as my ability to toss together a flavour-filled green salad and Spaghetti alla vongole upon request… all whilst wearing unstained linen.

I could go on, but it’s rather depressing to suddenly have the realisation that adulthood isn’t actually anything like the film set we were sold in adolescence. Adulting—for want of a better term—is also often grossly unsatisfying and less about choosing furnishings and more about deciding what the fuck to cook for dinner again. I’m sure that I’m not the only one who absorbed the dream that one day my kitchen windowsill would be overflowing with perfectly potted herbs and my identity would be closely knit to my ability to make all my bath towels match, but now that I’m reaching midlife, I’ve started to question whether this lie we were all told—that ‘adulthood’ is some final destination—was at all helpful. In my opinion, it feels less easeful and more like a series of hurdles you’re constantly leaping over whilst desperately attempting to implement some sort of executive domestic system.

When I look around my house, there is no dissatisfaction with the status quo (despite my attempts at humour above). But I’m not going to lie, it would be lovely to have a couch that didn’t threaten to leave dried Weetbix on my jeans every time I sat down, or if my wardrobe—heaven forbid—actually had doors on it. With young children constantly vying for my attention, too, I must admit that if my fridge was dimly lit and impossibly organised with crisp sliced vegetables or home-baked snacks stacked in clear containers and herbs standing upright in glass jars (rather than wilting sadly and sticking to the side of the plastic bin), I might feel like I have my shit together somewhat.

Sometimes I do that thing where I fool myself into thinking: one day, when the kids are older I’ll hang my copper pans in that corner of the kitchen that is currently collecting random pieces of paper, Lego and half-eaten fruit. And then I think, actually, when my kids are older I hope they’re the ones inviting me over to their messy, well-loved home to cook for me. It might not be Coq au vin on the menu, but I’ll be equally impressed if they nail a good mac and cheese. I won’t even mind if their towels don’t match.

The truth is, while I knew for a long time that I was tumbling towards an inexplicably painful loss, I wasn’t prepared for the envy that would be left in its wake. But every day, I feel envy watching those around me move through the world with their mums still by their side. I know you didn’t do anything wrong. I know it’s not your fault. But I feel it anyway.

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What’s worse is that this feeling bubbles up in the most mundane of moments. I’ll see a grandmother pushing a pram while her daughter strolls mindlessly beside her, or a friend will drop into conversation that they really must call their mum. These moments make up mere seconds, and yet they slice through me, opening the wound once again.

I know that grief has blunted me and at times, I am abrupt. It’s not necessarily that I am lacking tolerance—although I’m sure it comes across that way—but the way the envy presents itself is by wanting desperately to dismiss your problems.

I wish I had a better way to articulate it, but in many ways, I feel like an entirely new person. I know that the seeds of ‘me’ still remain, but my perspective has shifted so much that my capacity to hold space for other people’s issues has reduced significantly. This sounds harsh, I’m aware. But when a problem feels smaller, more insignificant or worse still, easily solvable if only the person in question would take some accountability or action, I can’t help but feel like my grief has been forgotten.

That’s not to say that I—or anyone else wading through this muck—wants to dissect it all the time. It’s more that when it’s an invisible beast clawing at your back, it can be hard to inhabit your world which from my vantage point appears friction-free.

I also feel shame that there is a part of me that hopes this new, more direct version of me sticks around, long after the acute grief has faded. I guess I’m just hoping that the people who choose to love me are also choosing to embrace the evolution of our relationship, whatever shape it takes.

That’s not to say I don’t try to bite my tongue. I do. And over time I’ve become better at interrogating the feeling rather than letting it take over. There are definitely times I still feel like shouting—I get it, you’re having a hard time but at least your mum didn’t die—but I truly believe it’s less about anger or longing, even. Perhaps it’s just about understanding that envy is ugly, but it’s also human.

I don’t want you to stop talking about your mum. I want to celebrate that she is still in your life. But I also want to be honest and be able to tell you that it’s hard. My mum is never coming back. And every time I close my eyes, all I see is her. That's a pain I can't even begin to put words around. But maybe you can help me to.

Her viral memoir has absolutely swept the world in recent months, but unlike other memoirs of the same ilk penned by seemingly ‘ordinary’ women in midlife, Burden’s book, Strangers, has penetrated the culture in such an all-consuming way that it’s not just literary types who have taken notice.

For those of you who require a quick précis—assuming you have been offline for months and are yet to read anything about the text itself—Burden’s memoir examines in close detail what it feels like when your spouse of over two decades suddenly becomes a stranger, leaving her without explanation amidst the early, chaotic days of the pandemic. At the beginning, there is another woman, but what I took from Burden’s account was that it remains somewhat unclear as to whether this was the fundamental reason for his departure. He is unhappy, so he leaves. And she, at home with their children, is left feeling adrift, confused, and understandably deeply betrayed.

While the trope of the ‘other woman’ is as old as time, it’s not this narrative that has the world gripped but rather Burden’s status as some kind of trust fund heiress. She is a woman of immense privilege, and this seems to be what has commentators clawing for dirt. Most of the articles I’ve read have, on some level, glossed over the facts of her experience and instead have focused solely on her privileged status, as if simply because she is part of the one percent, she somehow deserved her fate.

Sure, it’s fascinating to witness what life is like beyond the velvet rope, and this glimpse into New York high society is certainly part of the reason I loved the book so much. I’m sure it’s also a contributing factor as to why it has drawn such a wide-reaching audience, because we are being given a window into a world that, for most of us, will forever remain out of reach. But curiosity is one thing. Envy, on the other hand, is an unflattering emotion in any light, and the articles I’ve read berating her writing simply due to her status in life are, I feel, missing the point entirely. It’s also lazy discourse. If all we have at our disposal is judgment on her life and character—as if it has anything at all to do with why her husband left her—then perhaps we should all leave Belle Burden alone.

But beyond the ‘must be nice’ of it all, perhaps the most blood-boiling rhetoric that has risen to the surface is the commentary that derides her as a mother. The argument presented is that she should have swept it all under the rug, or worse still, silenced her story for the sake of her children. What horrendously patriarchal and patronising thinking—that as a mother, we should silence ourselves simply to ensure the comfort of everyone else. Given that she gave up her career, stayed home to raise their children, and continued to push for some sort of joint custody arrangement for his benefit (which it’s important to note, he refused), I would argue that using her voice and sharing her story so openly will actually only serve to benefit her children. Hopefully, they will see a woman who chose to tear down the institutions that kept her silent and break the cycle of infidelity that plagued her own family history.

On the flip side, however, I’ve also read some beautifully nuanced pieces that touch on how it’s her writing that has been able to effectively enamour so many—and I tend to agree. Her prose is simple and unflinchingly honest, and there is a notable absence of superfluous fluff. That’s not to say there’s no detail—quite the opposite actually—but these illustrations serve a purpose, setting the stage and painting a colourful picture of what her life was like before, during, and after her husband left. And yes, that includes all the Martha’s Vineyard, Bill Paley references and Truman Capote name-drops. But these are not as flashy as some would claim, they are necessary. Her pain is real despite her privilege, and while she may be afforded more material comforts than most, as anyone who has walked through grief knows, it’s a very base human emotion that cannot be tended to with money or champagne or cashmere jumpers. Grief cannot be cured by ‘things’ or other people. It is simply a season that must be weathered with grace and compassion, not only by those experiencing it but also by those bearing witness.

What I do think is important to point out is that the book is meandering, but this style of writing is incredibly palatable—and that’s what makes it such a wonderful read. So many of the comments and accounts I’ve stumbled across have attested to this, with women around the world and from all walks of life claiming to have devoured it in a single sitting. No matter what you think or feel about Belle Burden, she’s doing something right if she is able to grip such a broad audience so effortlessly.

So whether you decide to pick up this book or not, I guess I just want to encourage you to think critically about it. Try not to absorb the envy or narrow views of others who claim she only got published because of her status, or that her story is nothing more than a privileged piece of art. Instead, try to see the human behind each word: the woman who sat in the dark during the global pandemic and decided to pick up her pen. I would argue that the act of her doing so was less about finding acclaim and more about simply processing the pain, anger, absence, and utter confusion she was feeling at that very moment.

Yesterday, my husband and I got up at 3am to get ready for the mother of all road trips. And by ‘get ready’ I mean, shower and start caffeinating.

As tends to happen the night before I have anything significant planned, sleep was elusive. I woke fitfully every hour or so and by 2:20am sort of just gave up. What was the point anyway?

The kids, however, managed to sleep through us banging about the kitchen while we brewed fresh coffee and were so excited when we finally woke them to creep into the car in the still pitch black night.

We took this exact road trip 12 months ago and while most people thought we were batshit crazy for attempting such a long drive with, at the time, two kids under five—it was the best holiday we’ve ever had. Of course, there was the usual amount of whingeing, people management and bribery that one would expect, but also, it was absolute magic.

Never have I felt more in my body, present to the little life we’ve managed to cultivate as a family or more aware of that fact this this is it. This. All of it.

I can also remember viscerally the feeling when we returned to our home in Sydney. There is always joy in coming home again but my husband and I both recognised that we’d experienced a moment in time that was so cup filling and we were desperate to recreate that magic.

And so, when talk turned to planning school holiday adventures a few months ago, we knew we wanted to attempt the great road trip north once again.

When you decide to recreate a holiday you always run the risk that you’ll botch it entirely. There is a very real chance that you simply got lucky the first time, and once your rose-tinted glasses have faded, things may look a little different. Still, against all odds, we knew we were happy to risk it.

In many ways, getting this holiday off the ground felt far more arduous than last year. The long run-up to Easter was busier, fuller, noisier. Despite my best efforts to tie up loose ends, my to-do list still trails behind me, forever unfinished. And beyond our little orbit, everything feels a bit unsteady—the economy, the rising cost of fuel, the general state of the world. There’s a low hum of uncertainty that’s hard to ignore.

But if the last twelve months have taught me anything—when the only thing I knew for certain was that I was going to lose my mum—it’s this: the only things that truly matter are the handful of people you choose to love, the walls that hold you together, and the memories you make inside them.

Sometimes, stepping away from the humdrum of daily life isn’t indulgent, it’s essential. And perhaps when life is feeling wobbly, heavy or too full, it’s the perfect time to escape it all.

Because this is it, after all. This. Now.