the conveyor belt in front of her was packed with frozen food and cheap convenient meals; the sort that come in boxes with somewhat appetising (but also kinda nauseating) photographs disguising the colourless slop inside. ready meals. pizzas. chicken nuggets. fish fingers. a few loaves of industrial bread shoved in between. it was a big shop; an accumulation of food that can simply be heated in the microwave for a few minutes then tipped onto a plate.

at the very end, just before the divider, sat a packet of rennie — a heartburn relief product.

he laughed at the irony of it when he told me, though only for a second. then his voice sank in realisation.

it wasn’t because there was anything worthy of ridicule about the woman. quite the opposite. she had done exactly what this society trains people to do.

she had bought the cheapest food that would fill her trolley and keep her family fed, and alongside it, the small chalky tablets that might queten the uproar of bodily symptoms after the fact.

the meal → the sickness → the relief

all paid for in the same transaction.

i have thought about that image every single day since. it haunts me.

people are paid too little in an economy that costs far too much. rent, heating, transport, childcare, electricity, food. by the time dinner enters the picture, many people are already making decisions from a position of depletion.

the body is faltering, the mind is exhausted, the bank account is drained. under those conditions, cheap food does not feel like indulgence. it becomes compliance to reality.

food corporations learnt long ago that hunger is only the beginning. the real money sits in engineered appetite.

a fresh meal cooked at home can disappoint you (trust me, i would know!)

too much salt can ruin an entire dish of pasta.

or if you’re anything like me, accidentally adding too much worcestershire sauce to a stroganoff can make you wince.

but a frozen pizza would never be so volatile.

it has already been engineered to pass pleasantly over the tongue, even long after a year of being purchased, and still, leave behind the craving for another.

this is bliss point. it’s the calibrated level of sugar, salt and fat that produces maximum palatability, along with textures and formulations designed to keep foods highly crave-able and if consumed enough, addictive.

then people call it choice.

they speak as though everyone is standing in the supermarket with equal freedom, pausing thoughtfully between fresh salmon fillets and frozen slabs of battered chicken, deciding what kind of person to be.

people arrogantly call it discipline, priorities and education, as though the working class have somehow failed to receive the memo that vegetables are good for them.

news flash: a person can know what would nourish them and still be unable to buy it in sufficient quantity, cook it often enough, store it properly, or choose it over something cheaper that will feed more mouths for longer.

the meal → the sickness → the relief

ultra-processed food comes with a haul of symptoms: heartburn, indigestion, constipation, headaches, weight gain, high blood pressure, poor sleep, inflammation. keep people inside that pattern for long enough, and the consequences become far more serious.

then another company owned by billionaires steps in with little boxes and bottles of medicines and tablets to take the edge off. but, not to cure. never to cure. to cure would mean losing you as a customer, and that would be far too disruptive to their meticulous business model.

there is money to be made from causing the wound and even more money to be made from dressing it.

ordinary people are being asked to perform nutritional virtue under conditions that make it punishingly difficult, while billionaires profit from every stage of the decline.

it reminds me of a bloodless version of the hunger games: people clawing at one another because the blame has to go somewhere, while the rich sit above it all, insulated from the consequences and enriched by the damage.

we’re all just cash cows.

truthfully, we’re not so different from factory farmed animals, raised for meat then slaughtered in the name of profit.

maybe we should just eat the rich instead.

-o.c.

i had wandered off, looking for the loo, or the smoking area, i can’t quite remember which, and when i came back every girl i had come out with had dissolved into the dark and noise of the nightclub. (later, when i had better phone signal, i unlocked my phone to see a long string of missed calls and texts — it turned out we were playing cat and mouse, trying to find one another). but, unable to find them, i started walking.

york at that hour, with my heels swinging from one hand and my handbag in the other, was the loveliest thing i had ever laid eyes on. the minster sat floodlit above the rooftops, shifting into view at the end of every street. over the river ouse, i stood watching the water, dark beneath the night sky as it dragged the streetlights out into long rippling ribbons. i meandered down cobbled lanes, past dark tearooms and cute bow-fronted shop windows. each street was dressed in a warm glow of fairy lights. and there wasn’t another soul in sight.

i felt safe there. it was a drastic contrast to the city i grew up in (which i would never, at any cost, walk through alone at night).

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i made it across the city, feeling light as anything, and hopped onto the last bus.

the bus was almost empty. every window was furred over with breath and i pressed my forehead against the cold of the glass. i started to drift off into a light sleep, before we’d pulled off the kerb.

i woke up to a hand on my shoulder and two faces leaning in over me from the behind seat. two girls i had never laid eyes on before, presumably the same age as me. one of them had a few streaks of glitter across her cheekbone, and was wearing a dress far too thin for october (which told me she was a northerner, like myself, before i even heard her accent). the other girl was holding a fat paper packet of chips against her chest like a hot water bottle (my kinda girl).

one of them was already unscrewing a fresh bottle of water. she pressed it into my hand and folded my fingers shut around it, prompting me to drink it in the manner you’d speak to a much younger sister in. the other girl grabbed a handful of her chips, still warm and greasy, and placed them in my other hand. without a word, i shovelled them into my mouth and gulped down the water, still feeling a little drowsy.

then one of them said something that snapped me out of the daze.

“a friend of mine, back in manchester, was followed home and attacked a few months ago” she confessed.

my eyes suddenly pinged open.

noticing how concerned i looked now, she added “i know it’s less likely to happen here, but we saw you sitting alone and wanted to make sure you get home safe”.

of course, not wanting to be a burden, i unconvincingly told them i would be absolutely fine. but, they firmly stated that it wasn’t a question, nor up for debate. they were taking me home, whether i liked it or not.

the three of us got off the bus at my stop, which i later found out was two miles past their own. they walked me to my flat, with one of them on either side of me, an arm hooked through each of mine. they weren’t exactly sober themselves, so we swayed in unison down the road, talking utter nonsense.

they waited until the door locked behind me before walking away, back into the dark. i watched them from my window before briefly opening it to yell “thank yoooooou!!!” in the midst of the night. the sheer volume clearly startled them before they broke into laughter, waving goodbye and blowing kisses.

i woke the next morning with a thumping headache and a text from a number i hadn’t saved: “just making sure you got in okay last night x”

we exchanged messages for day or two, but i never did see either of them again. that, i have found, is usually how it goes.

i have turned that night over so many times. it feels so remarkable, yet when i look deeper, it’s actually quite ordinary for womanhood.

the story we are raised on tells it the other way around.

you are the girl in a tower or the hundred-year slumber, and your only hope of survival is if a man you have never met comes in, probably on a horse, wearing armour, and carries you out. but, at least for me, that was never true. it has been, every single time, a woman coming to my rescue.

and it reaches back so much further than either of us could have seen. somewhere right now, as you read this, a woman is typing “home safe x” to another woman.

it happens millions of times a night, this small census we take of one another, this counting of heads in the dark.

“text me when you’re in, doesn’t matter how late”.

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my mother did it to me. i did it to my friends. their mothers did it to them.

it is the oldest love letter there is, passed down the female line, and underneath all its wording it only ever says one thing: please. just get home.

we are told the deepest love is the love that knows you. they say, to be loved is to be known, right?

that love is real, and i would lie down in traffic for mine.

but there is another love that asks even less, and i am no longer sure it isn’t the purer of the two: the love of a woman who does not know you from anyone, who owes you nothing, who wants nothing back and slips away before you can thank her, and who steps out into the cold for you anyway, for no reason on this earth beyond the fact that she is a woman and you are a woman and the night is what it is.

nobody writes songs about her.

she isn’t in the fairy tale.

she got off at the wrong stop and went home and never told a soul.

and she has saved more of us than a knight in shining armour ever could.

i have carried those two girls with me since that night, like a debt i have made my peace with never clearing. they changed me.

now, if i am ever in trouble, and my fiancé and father (who would charge through flames and tear the world apart just to reach me) are simply too far away, i already know my hand will reach out for woman first.

so i spent the following years trying to become one of them.

i have walked women home at 3am.

i have crouched on the sticky tiles of more nightclub bathrooms than i’d care to admit, gathering a near-stranger’s hair into my hand while she was sick into the bowl.

i have stood guard over a drink, one hand flat across the top of it while she had her back turned.

i have become a woman’s girlfriend for ninety seconds. they grab your hand whilst announcing to a creepy guy who won’t leave her alone “look, this is my girlfriend”. you never question it. you just step straight into the role until he finally wanders off.

i have caught a woman’s eye across a bar, held it, and tipped my head a half-inch towards the man who’d been hovering around her for far too long.

once, i lightly shoved a man who would not leave my friend alone, and because he was three pints past standing up properly he went over backwards like a deck chair, and somehow that became my problem, so i spent the rest of my friend’s birthday on the wrong side of a velvet rope, arguing with the incompetent security guard.

there was never going to be a prince from a fairytale coming to rescue us.

there was only ever this.

a long line of frightened women reaching back for the next one.

women are my lifeline.

-o.c.

paris, basking in the early sunlight, still rubbing the sleep from its eyes.

my boyfriend was midway through a tattoo appointment, so i had been handed a pocket of morning to drift through.

up near sacré-cœur, the hill was laced with small cobbled streets interconnected by stone stairways, rinsed in a buttery light that made the pale buildings look almost edible.

a florist was muscling metal buckets onto the pavement. outside a café, a few red tables and woven chairs stood stacked together. the air, rich with the scent of freshly baked baguettes, croissants and pain au chocolat; a familiar smell paris seemed to exhale each morning.

i meandered aimlessly without a plan, turning down whichever lane looked most promising. every passage seemed to lead to some smaller, lovelier one.

a young boy passed me on a bicycle balancing a baguette under one arm as if he had done it all his life.

then, a woman in a navy cardigan stepped out of her building with her lil’ puppy and a packet of cigarettes, blinking into the brightness as if the morning had surprised even her.

i remember thinking that the city looked best before it had been freckled with one too many tourists, each of them lingering, viewing the city through their iPhone camera lens instead of their own pair of perfectly functioning eyes.

i found myself in a boulangerie, buying a croissant i did not particularly need, but how could i resist? before stepping back into the street, i briefly turned my head to pronounce “merci, au revoir!” butchered by my thick yorkshire accent.

i carried it in a brown paper bag that warmed my hands through the greaseproof lining. i did not sit down to eat it. i continued wandering, tearing pieces from it, flakes of it falling onto my dress.

i had wanted mornings like that for years without quite saying so. to be alone in a foreign city with nowhere urgent to be, following the smell of bread through the side streets while the day gathered itself around me. it felt too surreal to touch with my bare hands.

then, i came to a sudden halt. my feet stopped pressing forward. a dense ache settled in my chest as i felt the pain of just how beautiful this moment was.

i think there are only a few things in this world that are so beautiful they hurt. but if you look for them, you’ll find them. i’ve collected a handful of my own over the years:

1. walking past a lit window at night and catching a second of someone else’s life, people at a table, laughing, and feeling the weight of how many worlds there are that you’ll never be inside.

2. the last song at a live gig. that exact moment when everyone in the room knows this is it, before it ends.

3. reading something you wrote in a journal ten years ago and recognising yourself completely, knowing that person had absolutely no idea what was coming.

4. watching the sunrise or sunset along the sea horizon.

5. realising mid-conversation with a someone that this is one of the best conversations you’ve ever had, and that it’s going to end when one of you stand up.

6. watching a stranger in public read a book you love, not knowing what page they’re on but having a general idea based on their facial expressions.

7. asking an elderly person what they were like when they were young and watching their face change while they remember.

8. watching somebody you love talk about something they’re passionate about.

9. a summer thunderstorm breaking after days of heat.

10. standing on the beach at dusk, as it snows.

i think, the only thing i truly strive for in life, is to collect more of these moments until i have enough to piece together an equisite mosaic and be able to call it my life.

-o.c.

it exists on every single list with a title like ‘films guaranteed to make you cry’, so of course it crawled onto my own watchlist. and i can now confirm, it certainly earns its place.

i cried with zero dignity, the way i always do. it’s the kind of weeping that leaves your face sore, your tshirt collar damp, your cheeks flushed and your nose so blocked you end up breathing through your mouth like a small child.

my fiancé doesn’t ever rush to coddle me anymore. nine years in, he has watched me come undone at the john lewis christmas adverts, at novels i claim to read ‘for fun’, videos of old people in love, speeches that are mildly inspiring, and almost every film we watch together.

he never laughs at me or teases me for it. he just lets me feel what i’m feeling without question, and gently strokes my back. he knows i feel everything at a volume most people would find exhausting to live beside, and that i have never once worked out how to turn it down.

when the credits finally rolled, i let out a deep sigh and he wiped my face with the heels of his hands. i looked at him, tears still blurring my vision and asked him the question i have been carrying for as long as i have known how to love anybody.

“how will i cope—”, i asked, almost choking on my own words, “if my mum or my dad or my sister or you go before i do?”

he is a man who always has an answer. he has talked me down from a hundred imagined disasters; he once spent the better part of a summer convincing me, against all my certainty, that i was not dying of a heart attack. don’t tell him i told you this, but more often than not, he’s right.

but this time he said nothing. he tilted his head. he made a small, helpless shape with his mouth. he looked at me the way you look at something you cannot fix and are not willing to lie to.

i think he knows.

i think he knows i won’t cope.

the shape of my fear is abstract enough that it is hard to explain to anyone who does not carry their own version of it.

dying does not frighten me. at least, not anymore.

it’s the others. it has always been the others.

i was eight years old, and we were driving home through a winter’s night from my grandma’s house. the heater was ticking and my sister was asleep against the door beside me. i had my forehead pressed to the cold glass, watching the moon follow us home. it kept pace with us the entire way (or so i thought) slipping behind the bare hedgerows and surfacing again over the open fields, never once falling behind, as though it had taken it upon itself to see us safely home. my parents must have assumed i had drifted off too. and then, with no warning at all, i erupted into a flood of tears.

my dad jumped in his seat. my mum flung herself around to face me.

“looey, are you okay?!” she said — looey being my nickname, only ever used by my family.

“what on earth is the matter, love?!” my dad followed, his eyes already searching for me in the rear-view mirror.

snot and tears were leaking down my face, and between the choked hiccups and the wet, juddering gulps, i forced the words out.

“what am i going to do when liquorice and miley die?” i cried.

liquorice was our cat. miley was my hamster, named during the peak of my miley cyrus fangirling days. across the front seats i watched my parents’ eyes meet for half a second before my mum turned calmly back into her seat, folding their panic back away for a later date, when it was actually needed.

my mum curled her arm backwards through the gap between the front seats, offering me a hand to hold, while my dad spoke his wise words of comfort as i caught my breath and calmed down.

i was only eight, mourning two pets who were, at that very moment, alive and warm, waiting for me at home. and i have been doing some version of that over my parents, sister and fiancé ever since.

i am the youngest of all of them, which means if the world runs in anything like the order it usually keeps, i have been handed, the one part i would never have chosen. the last to leave the room.

and because i cannot stop any of it, i have spent my life trying to practise it. on the darkest days, i have even selfishly pleaded to the universe to give me the grace of being the first to step out.

this is the logic of the frightened: if only i can imagine the worst in enough detail, perhaps i can wear it in before it ever happens.

when my mother doesn’t answer my call at five, my mind has her at the bottom of the stairs long before it will get round to the obvious… that she is simply in the shower. when my fiancé’s headlights haven’t turned onto the drive by six, my mind has him in a wreck on the dual carriageway before it will so much as entertain a traffic jam, which is, every single time, the only thing that has ever made him so much as a minute late.

i rehearse the exact moment my life splits cleanly down the middle into before and after.

but it never works.

you cannot inoculate yourself against losing someone by losing them first in your head; the body keeps no such credit.

all you manage to do is die a little in advance, on a loop, for years, while the people you dread losing are alive, cooking their dinner, wondering in passing what you might be cooking for yours.

he was right not to answer me.

there is no answer.

i have gone looking for one in books, in other people’s losses, in the small hours when the world is asleep. and the nearest thing to consolation i ever dug up was also the least welcome.

every philosophy that offers to take the fear away asks for the same thing in return: that i love a little less and hold them more loosely, so that their leaving would not take quite so much of me along with it.

i understand the logic perfectly. yet, i have refused it every single time.

i would not trade one ounce of how much they mean to me for a calmer night’s sleep.

so i am learning the only thing left to learn.

this, i think, is where i finally begin.

with me, this time.

because for as long as i can remember, i have lived a step ahead of my own life, bracing, watching, always waiting, while the real living of it went on somewhere behind, without me. i have spent years mourning a life that was unfolding beautifully in the palm of my hands.

i have been so afraid of being left behind. all the while, without ever meaning to, i have been the one leaving, slipping out of my own days, year after year, until there was almost nothing of me left inside them.

i had gone missing, lost somewhere in the years far, far ahead.

i have been gone for a long time.

and i would like to come back now.

-o.c.

your next read…

the question people hurl across pub tables and christmas dinners.

“so, what’s next for you?”

for years it was the easiest thing in the world to answer. finish the exams, get the place, get the job, line up the next step; you could reel it off without even thinking about it.

and then one evening someone asks, and you open your mouth, and there’s just... nothing there. you say something breezy about taking things as they come. but you go home, and the question follows you in and makes itself comfortable at the foot of the bed.

the job is fine, the house is fine, nothing is actually on fire, and by every measure, you’re doing okay. but you’d still rather be almost anywhere other than here, except you couldn’t tell me where ‘here’ even is, or where you’d go instead.

you feel completely stuck in that spot.

everyone you went to school, college and university with seems to be striding off into lives that look decided and sure, while you stand about wondering if you missed the memo.

is this it? am i wasting it? was i meant to be someone by now?

welcome to the quarter-life crisis.

you won’t enjoy your stay. so i hope, what follows offers some comfort, relatability or helps get you out of here asap.

work, ambition, and burnout

the reading list

convenience store woman by sayaka murata
keiko has worked in the same tokyo convenience store for eighteen years. she has found peace there instead the expectations of ordinary adult life, e.g. marriage, a ‘proper’ career.

keep the aspidistra flying by george orwell
gordon comstock quits a respectable advertising job because he despises money and status, then finds himself trapped by the poverty he chose on principle.

this life we live nowadays. it’s not life, it’s stagnation death-in-life. look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. sometimes i think we’re all corpses. just rotting upright.

metamorphosis by franz kafka
gregor samsa wakes up transformed into an insect and immediately worries about missing work, letting his family down, and losing the only value they seem to recognise in him.

famesick by lena dunham
dunham looks back on early fame, public scrutiny, illness and addiction, asking what happens when getting the dream does not make you well or free.

the watch list

the nightcrawler
a desperate man in los angeles starts filming violent crime scenes for local news, turning ambition into something predatory and detached from morality.

the graduate
benjamin returns home after college with no idea what he wants to do next, then drifts into an affair with an older woman and a panic about his future.

black swan
a perfectionist ballerina wins the lead role in swan lake and pushes herself through rivalry, pressure and psychological collapse in pursuit of greatness.

the worst person in the world
a timid photo editor at life magazine leaves his work routine to track down a missing photograph, forcing him into a life far bigger than the one he has been watching from his desk.

changing friendships and loneliness

the reading list

swing time by zadie smith
two girls in london bond over their love of dance, but class, talent and ambition send them into very different adult lives.

expectation by anna hope
three old friends reach their thirties and find that the lives they imagined for themselves have split into disappointment, resentment and uneven forms of success.

never let me go by kazuo ishiguro
three childhood friends at an idyllic secluded english boarding school. as they grow, they discover that they are clones created solely to harvest vital organs.

memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. but i don’t go along with that. the memories i value most, i don’t ever see them fading.

the lonely city by olivia laing
after moving to new york and becoming intensely lonely, laing writes about what loneliness does to people and how it can be resisted and redeemed.

the watch list

dead poets society
a student at an elite boys’ boarding school finds confidence through a new english teacher and a close group of friends, until family pressure and discipline become impossible to withstand.

lost in translation
a neglected young wife and an ageing actor meet. both are dealing with existential crises and feeling isolated. they form a platonic bond while exploring tokyo together.

ferris bueller’s day off
ferris fakes being ill and skips school for one last day. he ropes his best friend and girlfriend into an adventure through chicago in a stolen classic ferrari.

amélie
a shy parisian waitress starts interfering in other people’s lives to make them happier, while avoiding the risk of wanting something for herself.

love, relationships and breaking up

(i don’t read much romance, sorry!!)

the reading list

engagement by gun-britt sundström
follows a swedish university student as she navigates the exhausting clash between her desire for romantic love and her fierce need for personal independence.

the watch list

la la land
an aspiring actress and a jazz pianist fall in love in los angeles while chasing careers that gradually pull them in different directions.

before sunrise
an american man and a french woman meet on a train to vienna and spend one night walking the city together before both have to return to their separate lives.

eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
after clementine erases joel from her memory following their breakup, joel books the same procedure and relives their relationship backwards while trying to save the memories he regrets losing.

blue valentine
a couple’s early romance is set against the later collapse of their marriage, showing how love can wear down through money, disappointment and daily resentment.

pride and prejudice
elizabeth bennet clashes with the wealthy and reserved mr darcy while her family tries to secure marriages for five daughters with very little money and very few options.

mentally unwell

the reading list

good morning, midnight by jean rhys
sasha jansen returns to paris after a breakdown in london, trying to survive cheap hotels, old mistakes, alcohol and the loneliness of being a woman with very little money left.

eleanor oliphant is completely fine by gail honeyman
eleanor lives alone in glasgow, works in the same office every day and drinks through her weekends, until a new friendship forces her to face the trauma behind the life she keeps insisting is fine.

a little life by hanya yanagihara
four college friends live in new york and build adult lives around art, law, work and friendship, while one of them struggles to survive the severe abuse he has never been able to leave behind.

things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realise that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

my year of rest and relaxation by ottessa moshfegh
a young woman in new york uses prescription drugs to sleep through a year of her life, in a desperate bid to “reset” her life.

no longer human by osamu dazai
yozo hides his profound feelings of alienation and inability to understand humanity behind a mask of comedy before spiralling into self-destruction.

the watch list

good will hunting
a self-taught maths genius working as a janitor at mit is pushed towards a better future by a therapist, his friends and the professor who discovers his talent.

fight club
an insomniac office worker, numbed by his job and consumer life, starts an underground fight club with a charismatic stranger who gives his anger somewhere to go.

girl, interrupted
after a suspected suicide attempt in the late 1960s, susanna kaysen is sent to a psychiatric hospital where she becomes close to a group of young women, especially the reckless and magnetic lisa.

a beautiful mind
a brilliant mathematician builds an extraordinary academic career while struggling with schizophrenia, paranoia and the strain his illness places on his marriage.

family, homesickness and growing up

the reading list

we could be rats by emily austin
two sisters who were close as children grow into very different adults, with sigrid stuck in depression, unemployment and old fantasies while margit tries to understand what happened to the sister she thought she knew.

the vanishing half by brit bennett
twin sisters leave their small black community in louisiana as teenagers, then build opposite lives when one raises her daughter as a black woman and the other secretly passes as white.

this big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. the saddest thing there is, you ask me.

instructions for traveling west by joy sullivan
a poetry collection about leaving old versions of your life behind, paying attention to desire and loneliness, and trying to rebuild yourself somewhere new.

the watch list

little miss sunshine
a strained family drives across america in a broken yellow van so their youngest daughter can compete in a beauty pageant none of them are emotionally equipped for.

lady bird
a restless teenager in sacramento tries to leave her hometown and separate herself from a mother she loves but cannot stop fighting.

aftersun
sophie looks back at a holiday she took with her thirty-year-old father in turkey, piecing together the depression and financial strain she was too young to understand at the time.

little women
the four march sisters move from girlhood into adulthood with different ideas about love, work, money and the kind of lives women are allowed to want.

and more…

(these are the ones that healed my soul a little)

the reading list

east of eden by john steinbeck
explores the eternal struggle between good and evil, free will, and the human longing for love. set in the california’s salinas valley, it intertwines the lives of two families across generations.

and now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

letters to a young poet by rainer maria rilke
rilke writes to a young aspiring poet about writing, solitude, love, sex, uncertainty and the patience required to build an inner life that is not constantly seeking approval.

the watch list

the shawshank redemption
a banker is wrongly imprisoned for murdering his wife and spends decades inside shawshank prison, where his friendship with another inmate helps him survive a system built to break him.

interstellar
a former nasa pilot leaves his children on a dying earth to search for another habitable planet, while his daughter grows up trying to solve the scientific problem he left behind.

the wild robot
a shipwrecked robot learns to survive on an uninhabited island, builds relationships with the animals around her and becomes the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.

your next read…

growing up, i had a gift for only ever doing the bare minimum, if that.

that was until i turned seventeen when i developed a new logic in which my entire worth would depend on whether i had spent twelve hours studying that day or not (bonus points if i could do it without taking a break!)

my friends were relishing in the remaining warm weekends of their youth, getting drunk at garden parties on alcopops and peach schnapps. meanwhile, i declined every invitation and chained myself to my desk. empty cups of tea stacked up beside me and my bedroom carpet was barely visible beneath a layer of handwritten notes. i would wake in darkness, so i could study before college. on the bus, my earphones would play recordings of my lessons on soil chemistry. every free period was spent in the library and lunch was eaten with a friend as we quizzed each other on clinical psychology between mouthfuls of pasta. when i finally crawled into bed after studying until late, i would open a civil law textbook for a bit of bedtime reading (at least it was dull enough to send me to sleep).

it didn’t start like this. it started with a simple goal: to be accepted into the university of york, i needed two As and one B in my a-level exams.

after the first set of mock exams, i got exactly what i needed. that should have bought me enough relief to slow down. instead, it made me more ambitious (in the most joyless way possible). each time i reached the line, i erased it and redrew it a little further away.

on results day, i opened the envelope and the paper was printed with two A*s and one A. those grades were far beyond what i needed. hell, i could go to any university in the country with those grades. yet, my eyes fixated over the one A before i headed over to my psychology teacher in a huff.

and just like that, the perfectionist was born.

from that moment onward, nothing i did was ever enough and that belief manifested a miserable life. the unattainable standard set by myself resulted in burnout… every. single. time.

that is what perfectionism does. it feeds you a spoonful of what greatness actually tastes like, just long enough for you to savour it before tearing it away, taking something of you with it.

to escape it, i had to first understand some hard truths:

1. the achievement was never the point.
   at some point, you stopped working toward a goal and started working away from a feeling. at some point, it becomes less about the goal and becomes a frantic attempt to outrun something that lives inside you. but, you can’t outrun something internal with an external achievement. the finish line keeps moving precisely because crossing it was never going to fix anything in the first place.

2. every achievement is dead on arrival.
   your brain normalises positive outcomes almost immediately after they occur through a process called hedonic adaptation. so, the moment you meet your target, your perception of what’s actually ‘good’ upgrades simultaneously.

3. perfectionism is not the same as simply having ‘high standards’.
   being unable to tolerate doing something imperfectly is a trauma response; a deeply held belief, often formed long before adulthood, that your value as a person is contingent on your output. what is it, for you? for me, it was buried beneath the eating disorder i had previously battled through. the lingering lack of self-worth leeched onto my intelligence, in hope i would never have to return to the place where i possessed no qualities that made me feel adequate.

4. you’re not actually afraid of failure.
   you’re afraid of producing something that accurately represents your ceiling. failure is easy to dismiss — bad day, wrong circumstances, not enough time, etc. but if you give something everything you have and it still falls short? that’s like salt being rubbed in a wound. perfectionism is a strategy for keeping your true potential untested.

5. you’ve confused the feeling of striving with the feeling of being alive.
   the endless thirst for perfection is exhausting (we can all agree on that). but it’s also invigorating. merely completing something and just being ‘good enough’ are comparatively quiet. you have mistaken that intensity as passion.

at some point, you have to ask yourself: who are you without it?

perfectionism, for all the damage it does, also functions as an identity. it’s the reason you work hard and feel like you have an edge. take it away and what’s left? just you. that ordinariness is often what keeps perfectionism alive; just a deep fear that without it, there isn’t enough underneath to justify your place in this world.

you have to actually feel the feelings you’ve been outrunning

it’s an avoidance strategy. as long as you’re busy enough, you never have to sit in the quiet and feel the thing that started all of this. sadness, shame, insecurity, whatever it is. and that feeling will continue dictating your life for as long as it remains unfelt. you must learn to sit with your feelings long enough to familiarise yourself with them.

rest is not something you earn

this will take a long time to actually believe. you can read that sentence and agree with it immediaely. most people do. and then you’ll return home after work and feel guilty for watching a film instead of doing something productive. the knowing and believing are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where you probably get stuck. closing that gap is not a thinking exercise. you can’t reason your way out of it. you must practice it, until one day you’ve spent an entire day basking in the sun and you notice the guilt is quieter than it was last time.

you are allowed to want things for reasons other than being good at them

along the way, you stopped doing things for joy and started only doing the things you could excel at because doing something badly feels like a public failure. over time, this leads to a life that gets smaller and smaller, narrowed down to only the things you’ve already proven yourself in. you stop trying new things. and a life without ever being a beginner, is an airless place to live.

you must notice the exact moment you cross from improving to defending

there’s a specific threshold in every project where you stop making it better and start protecting yourself from the moment it leaves your hands. learning to feel that shift, and name it in real time, is more useful than any productivity framework. it usually feels like a change in energy. before the threshold, edits feel generative. after it, they feel like circling. once you can identify that moment consistently, you have an actual decision point.

and now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
— john steinbeck

-o.c.

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a high rise apartment in new york, where the windows ran from the floor all the way up to the ceiling and the whole city spread out beneath them like a field of lights.

i collected it in pieces, on pinterest, the way you might collect conkers and seashells. the traditional kitchen with the morning sun pooling across it, the skyline going pink at six, the woman in the slip dress holding her coffee with the whole of manhattan laid out behind her.

i wanted that life so completely it felt like missing someone i’d never met.

and here is what i knew about myself even then, even while i was saving those photos: i am terrified of heights. even standing at the top of my stairs makes my stomach drop. i need a great deal of space around me or something in me pulls tight and restless. i love having a garden more than i’ve loved almost anything tangible, somewhere to kneel, sprawl in the grass and put my hands in the soil. and the very first thing i would ask about any new home, before anything else at all, is how much of the neighbours i’ll be able to hear through the walls.

so the life i pined for, the one i fell asleep imagining, i would have lasted a fortnight in it before that beautiful apartment began to slowly undo me.

it took me a number of years to see the obvious thing.

i had never wanted a life at all.

i had wanted a photograph.

and a photograph and a life, it turns out, are two completely different things.

so let me tell you what i wish someone had told me back then: a pinterest vision board might be the most damaging way there is to reach for the life you want.

the wanting isn’t the trouble.

i adore wanting things.

it’s the board of photographs, and what it does to the dream while you stand there admiring it.

your dreams are not your own anymore

start with the part we never quite say out loud. a vision board is, almost by its nature, a scrapbook of other people’s lives. someone else’s holiday, someone else’s body in someone else’s outfit, photographed by someone whose entire job is to make that one particular life look like the only correct way to be alive.

we don’t really invent our desires. we catch them, the way you catch a cold off a stranger on a train. we want things because we’ve watched other people want them first.

almost all of us carry a false but comforting belief that our deepest longings rise up from somewhere original and untouched inside us. a french philosopher, rené girard, called this: the romantic lie.

a vision board is that lie turned into a seemingly harmless activity you do on a sunday. you sit there with your iced coffee, certain you’re uncovering what your heart truly wants, when really you’re gathering up the leftovers of what other people have already wanted, beautifully, on camera, for money.

and once you’ve seen it, you can’t stop seeing it.

the things we pin are hardly ever strange or surprising or particularly ours. they’re the same handful of images everyone is pinning, which is an entirely different problem, and we’ll get there.

photographs lie by telling the truth

even if the longing were truly your own, there’s a deeper trouble with building a future out of pictures. a photograph can only ever show you the outside of a life. and the outside of a life and the inside of one have almost nothing to say to each other.

the outside of a life is: stuff. things. tangible goods.

the inside of a life is: how it feels.

think about what a photograph is actually good at. it catches the best moment of the day. every life, photographed, hands you its two loveliest seconds and tidies away the other eighty-six thousand.

so when you save an image, you learn a great deal about how a life looks. you learn almost nothing about how it feels to stand inside it at three in the morning, or on a wet tuesday in november with the heating playing up, or on the four-hundredth perfectly ordinary evening, once the novelty has worn off and it’s simply your life now.

my photo of the aparmtnet in the sky couldn’t tell me about the vertigo. it couldn’t tell me about the sirens from the street below, the noisy neighbours making a racket at the crack of dawn or the elevator that was forever out of order.

and here’s the catch we keep falling for: we are remarkably bad at guessing how a future will feel.

we picture the apartment, feel a warm rush rise up through the chest, and we mistake that rush for a forecast.

it isn’t one.

it’s only how the picture makes us feel right now, today, with both feet planted on the carpet of a home you dream to move out of.

we are all dreaming the same dream

we all draw from the same well; the same handful of aesthetics, the same feed pouring the same images into millions of pairs of hands at once. so, we end up longing for the same life.

the pale scandinavian kitchen. the linen sheets and sourdough rising in the morning. the forest cabin, the countryside cottage, the villa by the sea, the very same shade of beige, pink or sage green.

it’s worth sitting a moment with how strange that is.

our wanting is meant to be the most personal thing about us. it should be the part that is unmistakably, only ours.

and instead, a great crowd of us walks around longing for one near-identical life, ordered from the same catalogue. and each of us are naively certain it rose up from somewhere deep and original within.

i don’t think most of us truly want the cottage or the villa. i think we’ve watched them be wanted so many times, by so many lovely looking people, that we’ve mistaken how familiar it is for how much we love it.

the dream got mass-produced, we were each posted an identical copy, and we each unwrapped it and thought, “how strange… it’s exactly my size!”

on dreaming well

i’m not against dreaming. i dream constantly; it’s one of my favourite things in the world to do. the trouble was never wanting a beautiful life. it was the shape i kept reaching for it in. so here’s how i’ve started doing it differently.

dream in feelings, not in pictures

almost every photo we save to our vision board is standing in for a feeling we can’t photograph.

the apartment in the sky was never really about the apartment. underneath it was something more like: i want to feel as though my life is impressive. i want to feel chosen, a little dazzling, like i’ve made it somewhere that matters. those were the true wants, and they deserve to be taken seriously.

the trouble is that a feeling can live in a thousand homes, and a photograph can only ever be one.

“i want to feel calm and unhurried, with room to breathe and birdsong in the morning” can be answered by a cottage, a narrowboat, a small house on a hill in a country i’ve never been to.

“i want that exact apartment” can be answered by one apartment alone, and it’s one i’ll realistically, never have.

reach for the feeling instead.

it’s far more generous than the picture.

it has so many more doors.

write them down instead of pinning them

when you pin a picture, you’re choosing something that already exists, made by another person, of another person’s life. it can never become yours, because it was theirs long before you found it.

when you write a dream down, in your own words, it has to pass through you to exist at all.

it has to travel through your real body, your true preferences, your own odd little mind. a page can’t show you a stranger’s kitchen. it can only show you what you, specifically, are able to imagine wanting.

writing is the one place a dream comes out shaped like you — because you are the one making it, out of nothing, with your own hands.

questions to ask the things you want

even when writing down your own dreams, you can easily be influenced by things already ingrained in your mind, after years of social media consumption. so ask yourself:

1. do i actually want this? like, actually?

2. or do i just want it because somebody else wants it?

3. or even, do i just want it because i want other people to see me with it?

4. if i think i do want it, why do i want this?

5. if the world was void of judgement, what would i truly want?

i deleted that pinterest vision board a while ago. it felt, oddly, like the end of something, which tells you how fond i’d grown of a life that was never meant for me.

what’s there in its place isn’t a board at all. it’s a page in my journal, all words, full of very small and very specific things. not particularly candid but every word of it is mine.

and the strangest, loveliest part is that i’m nearer to it now than i ever was to that new york skyline, because for the first time, i’m walking towards a life i’d want to live inside, rather than one i only ever wanted to be seen having.

your next read…

burnout discourse tends to be built around overwork and exploitation, which is accurate as far as it goes, but misses something. some of the most thoroughly depleted people you will ever encounter are the ones who genuinely cared and gave themselves to their work, and then found, somewhere down the line, that it had consumed them.

they did not run out of effort.

they ran out of self.

the self-help industry that has grown up around burnout has not quite grasped this. it prescribes rest, sleep and digital detoxes, all of which are important, but what it cannot seem to offer is a route back to the person who existed before the work took over, because that is not a problem that can be solved with rest.

the thing that actually works has no industry behind it, because it cannot be sold.

you have to make it yourself.

what burnout actually is (and why the definition matters)

every single definition of burnout i could find felt incredibly condescending. here’s one:

“it is not a medical or mental health condition… burnout is a state of physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion.”

i briefly choked on my drink as i scrolled down the page to see a list of twenty-three symptoms, including: issues breathing, gastrointestinal problems, frequent illness due to lowered immunity, high blood pressure, persistent feelings of dread, worry and anxiety, and reliant on food, drugs, or alcohol to cope.

erm, we’re both thinking the same thing, right? how can burnout be excluded from being a medical or mental health condition?

here’s my guess…

a recent study found 75% of people experience burnout. that’s the majority of us. if burnout was recognised as the illness it is, it would be a valid reason for calling in sick to work. pfft, they’re never going to allow that. plus, billionaires would be forced to acknowledge that the current working standard they impose is making everybody sick. again, that’s not going to happen — what good would that be for capitalism? (i fucking hate it here).

the definition i prefer

David Whyte wrote:

burnout, in a very profound way, is a loss of friendship with time itself, a daily existence that can no longer honour the specific gifts and seasonality of the hours that guide me through the day.

this is what burnout is. this actually describes what it feels like from the inside. the inability to be present, the sense that your life is happening slightly ahead of you and you are always just catching up.

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why rest isn’t the answer (even though everyone says it is)

you cannot rest your way back into a relationship with time.

rest does helps, i’m not disputing that. but it helps the way paracetamol helps a broken bone. it addresses what you’re feeling, not what caused it, essentially soothing the pain but never mending it.

holidays, for instance, are seemingly one of our favourite ways to seek rest during burnout. but, the mental and physical benefits of taking a holiday for your wellbeing are gone within two to four weeks of returning to work, sometimes, even less.

you have been made into a machine

Karl Marx spent a considerable amount of time in the 1840s writing about what he called alienation: the process by which capitalism estranges workers from the products of their labour, from the act of producing, and eventually from themselves.

his argument was that humans are inherently creative beings, and that reducing someone’s work to something repetitive, purposeless, and owned by someone else is to take something essential from them.

whether or not you generally agree with Marx, one cannot deny that his work on alienation precisely explains modern-day burnout.

what he identifies most clearly is that burnout is not what happens when a person is too fragile for their work. it is what happens when a person is thorough enough to do everything asked of them, and nobody thinks to stop asking.

people will tell you: you worked too hard, you’re just a perfectionist, you didn’t have a work-life balance. it’s always YOU. but you were not actually the problem.

you were a carefully engineered product. people in a class far above the one we exist in would have known you were at risk of burning out. but profits come first, so you were pushed anyway. and society has been trained to ensure you never acknowledge that, but instead, blame only yourself for faltering under the pressure everybody else seems to be coping just fine with.

making art is the reversal

the most severe damage is not to energy or drive. those, given time, will return. what burnout systematically destroys is curiosity: the capacity to wonder about something, to care what happens next, to get truly lost in thought, to follow an interest because it is interesting, and for no other reason.

this is why the obvious prescriptions don’t reach it. rest does not reinstate wonderment. it does not restore the desire to know what happens if you mix these two colours, or what you actually think about something when nobody is asking you to have a professional opinion on it.

art specifically counteracts this.

and if you weren’t already convinced that art is a miracle, it engages emotional regulation through non-verbal pathways. it bypasses the part of the brain that tries to make sense of things in words.

this is so important, because one of the most consistent features of burnout is an inability to articulate what is wrong, even to yourself.

making art also:

• reduces cortisol (the primary stress hormone that has likely been elevated for however long you’ve been in this state)

• releases serotonin, dopamine, and endorphins (aka the good stuff)

• supports neuroplasticity (the brain literally rewires itself during the process)

• strengthens self-referential processing (aka you start to feel like yourself again)

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flow: the state burnout specifically destroys

in the 1960s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi stepped into multiple decades of research, into what he called flow: the state of complete absorption in which challenge matches skill, you become less aware of time and the activity becomes its own reward.

compare that to what burnout does to a person:

they are not just opposites. they use the same neural circuitry, and you cannot occupy both simultaneously.

so, art is neurologically the antidote.

side note: among many others, my dad lent me his copy of flow during my recovery from burnout, and it truly had a remarkable impact me, so i should urge you to take the time to read it too.

→ the city university of new york have a free pdf version available.

the purposelessness paradox

the art does not have to be good. in fact, there is an argument that bad art is more restorative than good art.

when you are making something badly, the ego has nowhere to go. there is no standard to perform against. no version of yourself to maintain. you are simply a person making something with no investment in the outcome.

self-monitoring is what makes burnout so exhausting.

am i doing enough? is this right? does any of this matter? is this perfect?

you can switch this off by setting the stakes to zero.

when you are skilled at something, even creative work, the ego finds its way back in. you have a standard now. you know what you are capable of, and every piece of work gets held against that knowledge. the measuring is its own pressure. proficiency is not a clean escape from performance, it just resets the bar.

for bad art, the bar is on the floor. you are a beginner again. nobody asked you for this. there is no right or wrong. no one is keeping score.

and for someone who has spent years being assessed under a microscope, allowing yourself to be terrible at something is actually quite freeing (even if you have to scream at your inner-perfectionist a few times).

what to actually do with this

it’s simple: make something nobody asked for.

don’t post it. don’t photograph it. don’t improve it. don’t sell it.

the format is irrelevant. the quality is irrelevant. the audience is zero.

“but i don’t like drawing” — cool, me neither.

bake a loaf of bread. write a poem. make an abstract collage from old magazines. take your camera on a scenic walk. record a mini film of your day. learn to play one song on an instrument. practice nail art, hair styling or make-up. sew a patchwork blanket. make a birthday card by hand. write a personal essay in a notebook. sculpt something from air-dry clay. arrange a bouquet of flowers. paint on plant pots. learn a dance from a music video.

so, ‘not being artistic’ is not an excuse. nobody is expecting you to produce a masterpiece. that is literally the entire point of this…

twenty minutes. something that belongs only to you. this is more restorative than almost anything else you could do with those twenty minutes.

the maker in you is the oldest part of you.

it was there before anyone told you that your hours had a price. and it will still be there long after that, too. you can climb back into it whenever you need, no matter how long you’ve been away.

because, vienna waits for you.

i stand beneath the piercing strip light, feeling exposed, holding a pair of jeans (which i have already decided i will hate).

somewhere, beyond the curtain, a woman asks for another size, smaller, of course, in the sweet tone of someone untroubled by the number on the label.

with both hands, i pull the denim over my hips. the security tag presses a small dent into my waist. i turn sideways, which is always a terrible decision, then front-facing, which is worse.

the waistband bites into my sides. when i force the button closed, the fat on my stomach spills over the top. i stand there for a few seconds, looking at the red marks already forming on my skin, and feel something curdle in my gut.

i have to peel them back down my legs (ehh, are they spray painted onto my legs or something?!)

the denim catches at my thighs, then at my knees. i yank them harder, one hand against the wall, face flushed. by the time i get them off, i am sitting on the stool with the jeans inside out around my ankles, crying before i can stop myself.

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for years, we were taught that a body was only acceptable once it had been reduced to something petite. then, in recent years, women resisted this narrative and shifted the official instruction to love your body.

the creases.

the folds.

the scars.

the dimples.

the lumps and bumps.

whatever. i am still being told to stand in the mirror, and think about my upper arms.

it was supposed to be liberating. and i suppose, for a while, it was. but, i soon grew tired of being told to look at myself. i had looked enough.

i don’t want to love my body, actually.

but i don’t want to hate it, either.

i just want to exist in my own skin without observing it under a microscope.

i do not want to undergo a humiliation ritual of standing naked in front of a mirror, reeling off affirmations about my body. equally, i refuse to shrink myself down again.

i’m exhausted. i want a ceasefire.

i just want to roll around in the grass, nourish myself, swim in the ocean, and dance in an oversized tshirt in the kitchen, without my mind being occupied by how i feel about my shape.

point blank, my body is the least interesting thing about me. and i’d like to treat it as such.

back in the changing room, i wipe the tears from my eyes, pull the jeans from my ankles and hang them on the plastic hanger.

i step out carrying the jeans over one arm. the shop assistant smiles and asks if they were any good.

“awful” i say, with real conviction.

for once, i mean the jeans.

-o.c.

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truth be told, me and summer don’t always get along. i often feel an unbearable external pressure during these months. people expect you to be going somewhere, to be doing something. not to mention the internal pressure that comes from expecting your summer to look exactly like an aesthetic pinterest board, then feeling disappointed when it doesn’t quite meet your expectations.

i’ve been thinking about the kind of summer i actually want. i don’t want an impossible bucket list that looms over me as a reminder of all the things i didn’t get chance to do. i don’t want to spend the days worrying about how my days look on social media, instead of how they feel to me.

i want to lounge in the garden, plagued by nothing. just me and my book against the world. i want to go on silly little side quests, mini adventures and cook meals that i would only cook on warmer days. i want to do what makes me feel good, without worrying about whether other people will approve.

so, here’s my guide to having a slow summer.

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summer crafts 𖤓˚࿔

collect shells on the beach — you can use them for all kinds of crafts; painted trinkets, jewellery dishes, fridge magnets, keyrings, photo frames or jazz up the back of a hair brush.

paint pebbles and rocks — wash them, let them air dry. paint them with acrylic paint or paint pens. once dry, coat them with a clear gloss varnish.

press wildflowers between the pages of a heavy book — leave them for three weeks or so, then use them to make your own cards and stick them in a journal.

start a summer junk journal — get into the habit of hanging onto every tiny bit of junk beyond receipts and tickets. think: wrappers, leaflets, napkins, etc.

on a hot day, make sun tea — fill a large jar with cold water and four tea bags (try hibiscus, or good ol’ yorkshire with a few fresh mint sprigs or lemon slices). leave it in the sun for five hours until it reaches your desired strength. then serve.

side quests 𖤓˚࿔

• go wild swimming

• visit a farmer’s market or farm shop and buy fresh groceries

• find a park to sit in and people watch

• spend an afternoon in a cute beer garden

• go on a colour walk

• have a picnic by a lake

• go to the station and buy a ticket for whichever train is boarding next

• pick your own strawberries

• go to an outdoor cinema

• have a disposable camera day

• go for a long walk down a coastal trail

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summer snacks 𖤓˚࿔

frozen grapes — both red and white work, but differently. white graps are more crisp and tart while red grapes are much sweeter. they’re also good dropped into a cold glass of your favourite drink.

strawberries dipped in melted chocolate — dip them in melted milk chocolate then drizzle melted white chocolate over the top. chill them in the fridge.

‘crip and dip’ (as my sister calls it) — grab a pot of hummus or make a quick dip with greek yoghurt, lemon, garlic, salt and chopped herbs. eat with salted crisps. mmmmm.

frozen banana bites — slice banana, sandwich with peanut butter, dip in melted chocolate then freeze.

homemade jam (or jelly if you’re american) — simmer chopped strawberries or raspberries with sugar and a squeeze of lemon until thick and glossy. spoon into a clean jar, chill, then eat.

slow summer reading list 𖤓˚࿔

sunburn by chloe michelle howarth — lucy falls into an all-consuming secret romance with susannah over one long summer while grappling with the expectations of her conservative community in nineties rural ireland.

evenings and weekends by oisín mckenna — set in london during a summer heatwave, you follow a group of young, interconnected characters who are navigating complex relationships, financial hardship and personal crises.

june baby by shannon garvey — ruth is shipped off to block island by her father who can’t cope with her grief, and the summer she spends there becomes the one she’ll spend the rest of her life yearning to go back to.

a month in the country by j.l. carr — tom, a traumatised war veteran, spends the summer in rural north yorkshire to restore a medieval mural.

dandelion wine by ray bradbury — during summer, in small-town illinois, twelve year old douglas wakes up to the thrill of being alive while the season teaches him about childhood, change and time passing.

a room with a view by e.m. forster — a young woman who breaks free from the repressive social expectations of english society on a trip to florence, where she falls in love with a free-spirited man.

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summer poetry prompts 𖤓˚࿔

nothing screams ‘slow summer’ like sitting beside a body of water, alone, writing poems in your journal.

• peaches, saltwater, and second chances

• sunkissed memories

• daughter of the ocean

• love letters to long evenings

• postcards from the golden hours

• a girlhood of sea shells and scraped knees

• honey drizzle days

• apricot skies and bare feet

• the year the sun loved me back

• all of my sun-kept secrets

slow summer watchlist 𖤓˚࿔

call me by your name (2017) — during a summer in northern italy, a seventeen year old falls in love with his father’s visiting research assistant.

before sunrise (1995) — two strangers meet on a train and spend one summer night walking through vienna together.

the parent trap (1998) — identical twin sisters, separated as babies, meet at a summer camp and switch places, hoping to bring their divorced parents back together.

aftersun (2022) — sophie looks back on a holiday in turkey with her troubled father, piecing together what she saw as a child and what she only understood years later.

stand by me (1986) — four twelve year old boys embark on a two day hike through the oregon woods to find the dead body of a missing local boy but the trip becomes a final glimpse of childhood.

mamma mia! (2008) — on a greek island before her wedding, sophie invites three men from her mother’s past, hoping to find out which one is her father.

aquamarine (2006) — if you don’t already know, get to know now. during their final summer together, two best friends discover a mermaid in their local pool and help her win over a lifeguard so she can prove love exists to he father.

slow summer playlist 𖤓˚࿔

more ways to slow down this summer 𖤓˚࿔

• eat your dinner outdoors without your phone or music. just listen to the birds and the breeze.

• buy a bunch of flowers from a market stall and arrange them yourself in whatever jars you have.

• write and send postcards to people you love.

• do your grocery shopping at a local farmer’s market.

• go to an art gallery or museum on a quiet weekday.

• bake your own bread at home (and make your own butter too!)

• visit your local library.

• sit on the beach at night.

“and so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, i had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

— f. scott fitzgerald, the great gatsby

love always, olivia xx

Most days, I find myself emerged in a film or lost between the pages of a book. In those spaces, I have discovered lines that stayed with me for years. It’s almost like these pearls of wisdom just fall into my lap at the precise moment I need them most. Maybe they do. Maybe the universe is sending me a gentle nudge. Or, maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m actively searching for them in times of need.

Whatever the reason, sentences written and spoken by people I will never meet have a remarkable ability to recalibrate my understanding of the world. After all, there’s only so far we can get when we’re bound by the walls of our own mind. We must step out of those confines and allow ourselves to be touched by the words and lives of others.

An incisive sentence alters the way one thinks by quenching the thirst of a dehydrated mind. Afterwards, certain thoughts can no longer return to their original scale.

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⋆ You don’t want to die. You just want to start living.

⋆ Either it works out, or it turns into poetry. There isn’t any losing, I think.

⋆ Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. — Anaïs Nin

⋆ Are you climbing a mountain for the world to see you? Or for you to see the world? — David McCullough Jr.

⋆ Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once. — Marcus Aurelius

⋆ The most dangerous form of blindness is believing that your perspective is the only reality.

⋆ It’s not necessary to react to everything you notice.

⋆ A head full of worries leaves no room for dreams. — Zara Street

⋆ We suffer more in imagination than we do in reality. — Seneca

⋆ Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness. — André Gide

⋆ Everything you lose creates space for everything you need.

⋆ Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies. — The Shawshank Redemption

⋆ If you aren’t seeing anything inspiring, you’re walking too fast.

⋆ Everything is a win when the end goal is experience.

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⋆ Forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it. — Maya Angelou

⋆ The amount of good things in your life depends on your ability to notice them.

⋆ The fears we don’t face become our limits. — Robin Sharma

⋆ And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good. — John Steinbeck

⋆ A person’s biggest punishment is who they are.

⋆ The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages. — Virginia Woolf

⋆ If you’re an ocean, be an ocean. Don’t be a pond just because people can’t swim.

⋆ The only way to get somewhere is to leave something behind. — Interstellar

⋆ You’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the part that makes most people give up.

love always, Olivia xx

I imagined it continuing without me, unchanged by my absence, as though the people I had been and the lives I had lived were still there, waiting to be found again.

I thought memory was the road back.

It’s a strange road, sure, certainly unreliable in parts, overgrown in others, freckled with potholes and uneven terrain, but still leading somewhere real.

I am less sure of that now.

Most of what I call the past has already been tampered with by the time it reaches me. This is especially true of my former success, which my memory has preserved as something that was constantly drenched in golden sunlight.

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When I think of my former life, I see myself in my home office. I had a long pink sofa pushed against the wall, like something straight out of a noughties chick flick. I shamelessly thought this was the coolest thing ever. On my desk sat a sleek, wide computer screen, accompanied by a keyboard which made a satisfying clicky noise at the touch of every key. Inside my drawers, everything had been divided up with small containers; pens, paper clips, sticky notes, all separated into their correct compartments.

I adored the work I was doing. And according to my growing bank balance, I was really fucking good at it too.

This is the version my mind offers me when I feel small in my slower life.

Look, it says.

Look how talented you were.

Look how much you had going for you.

It does not care to remember the mornings I sat at that same desk with a tight jaw after two hours of sleep, or the nausea, or the electric fatigue, or the way my mind kept hurling onward, long after my body had begged for it to slow the hell down.

It’s miraculous how it forgets the part where I knocked on death’s door, laying limp in an ICU bed with multiple organ failure, in a coma, kept alive by machines, all because I had gone too far. Maybe it’s too painful for my mind to linger on that, so instead, it reminds me that at twenty-two, I had built a life I was already proud of, and at twenty-six, I am already a premature failure.

That is the problem.

Because a memory can be almost accurate and still lie to you. I know what I remember was not entirely imagined. I did have days when success made me feel fluent, bright, in command of my own direction, and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest. But memory becomes treacherous when it lets me remember what I gained without reminding me what I had to give up for it.

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So when I miss that life, I try to be exact.

I miss the pride, the accolades and the micro-doses of joy with each accomplishment.

I miss the rare, delicious feeling of others finding me impressive.

I miss the woman who believed the world was opening because she had learned how to pry it open.

But I do not miss that life.

I do not miss being trapped in a prison, guarded by my own ambition.

I do not miss having the version of freedom that I could only afford by offering up parts of myself.

The past is gone, and what remains is sometimes more than a warning, or a lovely little life lesson. Sometimes it is a temptation — a perfect former life, dipped in syrup, covered in sprinkles, with a cherry on top.

I know my own version of this is rather specific. Few people spend their early twenties being flung upward by overnight success, discover their body cannot keep pace with the ascent, then find themselves falling from grace. Still, I suspect most of us have some version of the past that seems better the further we get away from it.

The ex-partner you yearn for once the actual labour of loving them is over. The old friend whose selfishness has faded behind the nights they made you laugh until your stomach hurt. The job that now seems like your calling because you no longer actually have to wake up for it and deal with your asshole of a boss. The body you once despised, now remembered with a fondness you never offered it when it was yours to live in.

Before running back to your past, remember this, and remember it well:

Memory is not fixed each time we return to it. The mind brings the past back into the present, where it can be changed by the mood we are in, the things we now know, and the meaning we need it to have.

So, when memories from your past return with hands full of flowers, you must ask what it buried in order to grow them.

-o.c.

your next read…

Of course I know that.

I have heard this from every motivational quote on Pinterest, both of my parents, and every single person with a podcast mic. The problem is that knowing a thing logically does very little when you’re plagued with stubborn feelings.

Too much of my life has been spent under the impression that I am about to start properly. Sometime, soon…

Once I get organised.

Once I finish this other thing.

Once I’m less frightened.

Once I have more money.

Once I lose some weight.

It seems as though, it’s always just about to begin. The real life. The important one.

And, of course, while I am waiting to become the person who can live properly, the world continues spinning around.

somebody’s good news is my personal emergency

I want to be VERY clear: I adore watching others succeed. I want only good things for people. In fact, I want the absolute best for them. I often become no.1 fans and cheerleaders for complete strangers on the internet. I have sobbed at weddings, bought baby gifts, celebrated new jobs, and said “you deserve this so much” with sincerity.

I have also, on occasion, needed to lie down immediately afterwards.

Someone else’s success can make me feel as if I have been caught doing my life wrong. Their announcement becomes a mirror held at an unflattering angle (the kind that exposes my double chin).

I am so, so, so pleased for them, then suddenly, I am aware of my own loose ends.

And, the comparison is rarely even logical. I have envied lives I would not actually enjoy and have felt deflated by milestones I do not want yet, or may never want.

For years, I have vehemently insisted that I do not want children. Then, shortly after waking from a coma, I wrote with shaking hands: my five goals for when I eventually got out of hospital. One was to open a bookshop (because apparently even when I’m teetering death, I’m still thinking about those damn books). Another was to have a baby.

My dad looked at the page, then at me, his face slightly scrunched in confusion.

“I didn’t think you wanted children?”

I wasn’t yet able to speak, so I violently nodded my head as to say: YES, YES I DO. Maybe I was working over-time trying to convince myself.

He was right, though. I didn’t want children. The amount of drugs being pumped through my system can’t have helped. But I also remember at least three of the young ICU nurses announcing they were pregnant during the few weeks I was awake in there. One of them was pregnant with her second child. My God, I felt defeated. Women were making entire families while I was still regaining the strength to lift my head from the pillow. For a brief, chemically assisted period, I assigned myself a new life path — one I didn’t even care for.

In a similar fashion, the internet has made other people’s lives too available. Their success reaches you with a well thought out caption, sometimes it’s airbrushed, maybe it has a filter on it. Most of all, it’s conveniently free of the weeks they spent crying or behaving horrendously towards their loved ones, because ambition had made them unbearable for a while.

We know this, obviously.

We know we are seeing the edited version. Yet the edited version still cuts deep.

My own life, by comparison, is full of drafts. Literal and otherwise.

the woman i could have been…

The real problem is not only other people. If anything, they are often the supporting characters. The true antagonist is the woman I could have been. I don’t like her, at all. She’s a pretentious bitch who hovers around me like she belongs to a higher class of person.

She writes, early each morning, by an open window before she checks her phone, sun rising, birds chirping.

She somehow saves money but all of her groceries are organic and locally grown.

She reads the difficult classics without checking Google every four pages.

She started earlier and she chose better.

Every time I consult this imaginary woman, she contradicts me. She has no actual life, which gives her an enormous advantage. She never gets ill. She never cries in the mirror before taking a shower. She never spends three hours researching something she does not need, then feels too mentally cluttered to do the thing she sat down to do. She has never suffered a day.

She never lets me forget that she is my lost potential.

Lost potential begins as a compliment: You could have been brilliant. You had it in you. You were meant to do more.

Then it turns. Potential stops feeling like possibility and starts feeling like a debt.

If you could have been brilliant, why aren’t you?

If you had it in you, where is it?

If you were meant to do more, what exactly have you been doing?

You begin to treat the person you are as a disappointing substitute for the person you could have been under ideal conditions. But the ideal conditions do a lot of work in that fantasy.

the panic is not always wrong

I would love to dismiss the entire feeling as nonsense and say that nobody is behind, timing is fake, comparison is poison.

Sometimes, the feeling of being behind has a point as it’s telling me I have neglected things I care about, and it knows I have been waiting for confidence when discipline would have been more useful.

I am behind in some ways. It’s true.

I have wasted time.

I have delayed things I cared about.

I have let comparison turn me bitter, at times.

I have measured myself against other people.

But, I have also lived. And that counts for more.

I want to stop speaking about my life as if it is merely the disappointing preface to the life I was supposed to have. The woman I could have been will always look better from over here. She benefits from never having existed. But she has not done what I have done, either.

I have spent enough time mourning a version of myself who never had to live.

I would rather see what this one can do.

-o.c.

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I don’t know the latest particulars involving Trump or Israel; I mention them only because precedent suggests they are, almost certainly, meddling in something.

Despite my best efforts (my best efforts, amounting to deleting Instagram, TikTok and avoiding televised news channels) the news is not always avoidable. When I do my weekly food shop at Sainsbury’s, the newspapers are on display next to the entrance, so against my will, I sometimes catch a glimpse. Sometimes, I hop onto the explore page of Substack, in search for something to read, but find myself suddenly choking on a news story I would have preferred to avoid. Even if you hide from it, it’ll find you.

Maybe it’s true that I am ignorant of current affairs. But, I have had to be. I used to spend hours on Twitter, where the news was rife. Then, I would move to TikTok and Instagram, like they’d be any better. I would come across something that made my heart rate climb, then go looking for more. I would get lost down rabbit holes until I had frightened myself half to death and left myself with information I could neither use nor act upon.

At least now, I can eat my dinner without that gurgling nausea gathering in the pit of my stomach, and I can peacefully fall asleep at night.

Back in July 2024, after the Southport attack, I cried helplessly, at the news, for days on end.

First, I cried for the victims and their families, of course. Then, because my brain is often an unhelpful organ who likes to plot against me, I felt guilty for making even a fraction of it about myself, so I cried about that too. Ah yes, the endless cycle of irony.

Then, misinformation spread like wildfire. Riots broke out across the country, targeting immigrants and people of colour. This still unfolded after it became clear that the attacker was actually born in Cardiff.

My hometown became particularly ugly. Shops looted. Streets trashed. Young white boys (and I am choosing that word carefully — they don’t amount to ‘men’) physically and verbally attacking innocent people of colour.

I remember, so vividly, one specific video from my hometown circling Twitter. A Muslim man trying to get into his parked car while a swarm of savages dressed in Stone Island, went for him and his car. He only just managed to drive away. The entire thing felt dystopian, almost apocalyptic.

I did not manage to shake it off.

I wrote pages and pages and pages in my journal, fuelled with so much rage, my pen actually started to tear through the paper. I had nowhere else to put it. That’s what the news does to us. It feeds us a constant banquet of emotionally taxing information, but refuses to offer any kind of solution. It made me wonder, why do I need to know this, in such intricate detail, if my hands are permanently tied? So, I began loathe the uselessness of knowing. I could watch it, understand it, feel sick over it, make myself ill with it, and still do absolutely nothing useful with any of it.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was burning beneath the skin because three young girls had been murdered, and thousands of insentient racists saw it as an opening.

It was never about the victims. And of course, it should have been! But you do not loot Greggs or vandalise mosques in the name of justice. You do not honour murdered children by attacking people who had nothing to do with their deaths.

All I could think was: these are the same boys who howl “IT’S NOT ALL MEN”, then live quite comfortably under the logic of “it is all immigrants.”

I wondered how they would feel if women rioted, committing violence against ALL white men, every time a white British man committed rape or murder. Quite frankly, we’d never get anything else done…

That was the last time I watched the news.

For the sake of this piece, I allowed myself to wander through a few news publications, and I was genuinely appalled by how much I had absorbed in the space of a few minutes.

Holy shit!

Apparently, my air fryer is spying on me… My fridge is spying on me too. Bombs are being dropped. Robots are going to take my job. Trump is doing crazy shit, as per usual. I need to start worrying about the scorching temperatures expected to hit Britain this summer. Yep, nothing I can do about it. Just worry about it. Oh, my TV is spying on me too. Shootings, murder, earthquakes. I guess I should start preparing for WW3, somehow. Disease is spreading. In fact, my entire house is spying on me.

I had consumed all this information and found myself physically incapable of doing anything with it.

soooo, how do i actually stay in the loop? ⋆˚꩜｡

My fiancé and I have a simple rule: if something happens that I should know, he tells me. It means I am not left being fed the versions of events engineered to keep me in limbo between fight and flight. He just gives me the facts.

Avoiding current affairs, for me, has very little to do with timeliness. It just so happens that the stories breaking the news are still in their first, frantic state, before a journalist has had the time to make sense of them, or a writer has had the distance to shape them into memoir or non-fiction. Once information finally reaches me in those forms, I lap it up!

I feel as though I’ve at least done something more substantial by reading the words, and hearing the voice, of somebody who has actually lived through it and can elucidate it from the inside. It feels completely different than consuming a sensationalised version of events, diluted to eight-hundred words and a fear-inducing headline, typically written by somebody observing the whole thing at a comfortable distance.

non-fiction recommendations ⋆˙⟡

1. Nation of Strangers by Ece Temelkuran

2. The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins

3. One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad

4. Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman

5. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

publication recommendations (they’re not all so bad) .☘︎ ݁˖

1. Delayed Gratification — slow journalism (only covers news from at least three months ago)

2. The Guardian Long Read — long-form journalism

3. The Know — unbiased newsletter focussed on facts and positive updates

A human being was never meant to receive the world like this.

You wake each morning, reach for a glass of water, and just like that, you are handed the anguish of countries you cannot save, and the names of the dead before they have even been mourned by those who loved them. How can we call this ‘being informed’? It’s torture.

For too long, I lived inside that helplessness, and it did not make me wiser.

It made me want to die, actually.

-o.c.

your next read…

This is the first thing you must unlearn when you begin reading classics.

Many moons ago, I began with Wuthering Heights, which in hindsight, was a foolish place to start. I had assumed that being a strong reader in one corner of literature would make me a strong reader in all of it. What I had not yet understood was that fluency does not always carry over. A nineteenth-century novel does not care how many contemporary books you have finished that year.

It took me months to read it. The language was often archaic. The structure, the shifting timespan, the narration, the characters; it was like nothing else I had read before.

I vividly recall one specific character, Joseph; his dialect was written in a thick Yorkshire accent. And even as somebody born and bred in Yorkshire, I could not, for the life of me, translate the riddles on my page into cohesive sentences.

A year later, I returned to it with more patience and slightly less pride. This time, I read alongside a website translating Joseph’s dialogue, which proved necessary. The second reading was an entirely different experience. I could finally see the novel itself, rather than just the effort required to get through it, and I loved it.

I suspect this is where many readers lose confidence: they begin with a book that does not suit their taste or meet them at the right level of difficulty, then mistake that mismatch for a failure on their part. It is a shame, because once you find the right classic, the genre stops feeling dutiful and starts making perfect sense. You understand, very quickly, why some books have survived decades, and even, centuries.

1984 by George Orwell

This was the first classic — or modern classic, if we’re being precise — that I ever gave five stars, though it honestly deserved six… A book so prophetic that it gave the English language at least a dozen new words for things we weren't supposed to need words for.

The Plot: Winston Smith is living under a totalitarian regime that surveils its citizens, rewrites history, and prevents independent thought.

Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Every generation discovers this book and thinks it's about their current government, and every generation is correct… A brilliant political allegory about Stalinist Russia, but its understanding of corruption, propaganda and collective gullibility mirror so much of the current political state of the world.

The Plot: A group of farm animals overthrow their human owner in the hope of building a fairer society, only to watch it become something just as corrupt.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

A book that gets more people to read it every time a politician tries to ban it, which Atwood would absolutely consider a win.

The Plot: Offred, is a woman who is forced into reproductive servitude in the theocratic state of Gilead, where women’s rights and bodies are controlled.

Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Alcott based Jo on herself, didn't want her to end up with anyone, but was forced by her publisher to marry her off. The resentment is palpable on every page.

The Plot: We follow the four March sisters as they grow up, fall in and out of hope, deal with love and disappointment, and try to make a life for themselves during the American Civil War.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

This is the first classic that can made me laugh out loud. Every character in this play is completely insufferable and absolutely correct about everything.

The Plot: Two men adopt false identities to escape social obligations and pursue romance, only for their lies to spiral into increasingly absurd complications.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The entire plot is two people talking on a bridge in St Petersburg for four nights, and it will absolutely destroy you in 60 pages.

The Plot: We follow a lonely young dreamer in St Petersburg who meets Nastenka, a young woman waiting for another man. Over four nights, their conversations grow intimate, forcing him to confront the difference between imagined love and real life.

Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

His family's solution to having a giant insect for a son is essentially to move the furniture around and hope for the best, which tracks.

The Plot: Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes one morning transformed into a giant insect, then watches his role within his family deteriorate as he shifts from breadwinner to a frightening burden.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Meursault is the only character in literary history who could witness his own execution and file it under "fine, whatever."

The Plot: Meursault, a detached young French man, whose emotional indifference, particularly after he commits a seemingly senseless murder, places him in conflict with the values of the society judging him.

Difficulty Level: 3 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

A book about a man who spends his whole life doing the respectable thing and dies realising it was the wrong thing — a fun 90 pages!

The Plot: Ivan Ilyich, a successful judge, has spent his life pursuing status, propriety and social approval, until a sudden illness forces him to confront the emptiness of everything he once considered respectable.

Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Somehow manages to be a scathing moral fable while also making debauchery sound appealing.

The Plot: A beautiful young man remains outwardly youthful while a portrait of him bears the physical consequences of his age and sin instead.

Difficulty Level: 2 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Jackson wrote this in 1948 and readers were so disturbed they cancelled their subscriptions to The New Yorker — which is, frankly, the best review a short story can get.

The Plot: The residents of a small town gather for an annual community ritual, The Lottery, that at first seems harmless, then gradually reveals its true purpose.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

A book that makes you wonder if the people running the asylum are always the most unhinged ones in the building.

The Plot: Randle McMurphy, a convict, is admitted to a psychiatric ward, and his defiance puts him at odds with the controlling Nurse Ratched.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★

Stoner by John Williams

A book about a man who discovers a passion for literature as a young student, and then spends the rest of his life watching everything else disappoint him by comparison. Relatable.

The Plot: William Stoner, a poor farm boy, discovers literature at university and becomes an English professor. The novel follows his ordinary, difficult life through work, marriage, disappointment and devotion.

Difficulty Level: 1 out of 5

My Rating: ★★★★★

And, on that note…

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of the past centuries”.

-o.c.

your next read…

We do love that phrase, don’t we? The most intelligent species.

It is one of those titles humanity has awarded itself. It is always delivered with such assurance too, as though the matter has been settled beyond dispute.

And yes, of course, there is no shortage of evidence for our supposed brilliance. We have measured the age of stars. We have sent telescopes peering into the oldest corners of the universe. We have built vehicles to leave the ground and taught machines to hold entire libraries in the palm of a hand. We have built cities so bright they can be seen from space, little glittering clusters of human self-importance stitched into the dark. We have done all this, and more.

And yet, I have never been able to hear that phrase without a small curl of disgust. Maybe it’s because I have never been entirely convinced that intelligence is the same as wisdom.

Apparently, intelligence can mean building digital systems so advanced they can predict our shopping habits, our ovulation cycles, our voting behaviour, yet still leaving children hungry and whole populations disposable.

By this definition, intelligence begins to feel cheap.

In 1945, the sky above both Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were drenched in a sudden piercing light.

Human minds assembled the atomic bomb, piece by piece, solving each technical problem as it arose, nudging each equation into place until at last they had manufactured a second sun and dropped it onto ordinary people going about their ordinary morning.

Just like that... Skin hanging from the body in strips. Shadows burned permanently into stone.

And somewhere else, far from the heat of it, men in suits gathered, discussing success in rooms untouched by ash. The calculations, I am sure, were immaculate.

That feels like the truest portrait of our species.

Later, during the Cold War, we built enough nuclear weapons to kill the world over and over again, then coined a phrase so slick and bloodless it almost sounded intelligent: mutually assured destruction. That is, deeply grotesque and quite frankly, the kind of thing we’ve been warned about in classic dystopian novels for decades. Still, we tell ourselves, we are the pinnacle of evolution.

That being said, I do not think humans are inherently cruel. Though, that would be a far simpler explanation…

I think we are uniquely capable of distance. We can stand far enough away from a thing, that its suffering no longer registers as real. We can convert the living world into figures, projections, probabilities and strategic interests, and in doing so we spare ourselves the gross inconvenience of feeling too much.

A wolf kills because it is hungry.
A deer tramples something smaller because it does not know it is there.
But human beings can develop an entire web of reasoning around harm.

Sometimes I wonder if intelligence without wisdom or empathy is just a more sophisticated form of self-harm.

So here we are: building smarter machines while the seas warm and the air fills with poison. The planet itself is beginning to look tired of us.

And I cannot say I blame it.

No other creature behaves quite like this. And it’s about time that we admit: there is something deranged about a species ruining the conditions of its own survival whilst continuing to describe itself as advanced.

But that is not our entire story. We are also the species that writes poetry. The species that has sat at hospital bedsides through the night. The species that has dragged strangers from rubble with bleeding hands. We compose symphonies. We donate kidneys. We march for people we will never meet. We send telescopes into the dark simply to look, which I think is one of the better things about us. There is kindness here too. Tremendous kindness, actually…

…Enough to make the brutality feel not inevitable, but chosen.

Wisdom and empathy, I think, are what should have been seated beside intelligence all along.

1. Wisdom would have told us that not everything that can be done ought to be done.

2. Empathy would have forced us to look properly at what our abstractions conceal.

If we ever manage to fuse the two, perhaps, history will look different.

I still hold onto some hope that the story of our species will not be defined by the weapons we built, but by the ones we chose not to.

A bright mind with no empathy or wisdom can become positively rebarbative.

And what is the use of being the most intelligent species if we remain so emotionally stunted that we cannot recognise the obscenity of setting fire to our own home?

That, to me, is not intelligence worth admiring.

-o.c.

But somewhere along the way, people started turning to AI for emotional support, feeding it questions that are not only practical, but also, existentially damp… Though, there seems to be one teeny tiny drawback: it is a machine that has NEVER LIVED A SINGLE DAY AS A HUMAN BEING.

What should I do with my life?
Am I behind in life?
How do I stop wasting my time?

AI does not have the emotional capacity to heal anything or anyone beyond the likes of an iPhone, accidentally dropped down the toilet after one too many shots of tequila (we’ve all been there). But, these human problems are not the sort you can simply fix by leaving them in a bowl of dry rice.

I feel as though this has become so common, so quickly, that using a search engine to self-diagnose a brief spell of chest discomfort now feels nostalgic. Gone are the days of trawling niche forums for advice, falling upon another human being who had the exact same problem six years ago. And, gone are the days of scouring Tumblr for mildly inspiring quotes and of course, resorting to WikiHow for—whatever the hell we used that for…

I can already see where this is heading, and it is not particularly encouraging… Asking another person for help is starting to feel like too much hassle. Our simple ability to handle anything mildly difficult has been squashed like roadkill, in the name of convenience.

You have to catch them at the right time, explain the backstory and hear their actual opinion, not just what you want to hear. It is so much easier to consult the soulless chatbot in your pocket, which never sighs when you repeat the same question for the fifth time.

I can’t deny that it’s efficient on a technical level. You’ll receive a response in seconds. Though, I’m not convinced that immediacy is much of an achievement when the substance is utter nonsense.

Literature remains unmatched, and always will (I resent the fact that this even needs defending). Nowhere, is this more evident than on the page itself.

Oscar Wilde
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Margaret Atwood
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Whenever you feel like criticising any one...just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.

John Steinbeck
I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.

Fyodor Dostoevsky
To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

Franz Kafka
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

Albert Camus
Live to the point of tears.

George Orwell
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Hanya Yanagihara
Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realise that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

Kazuo Ishiguro
There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one.

Khaled Hosseini
Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.

Olga Tokarczuk
The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.

James Baldwin
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

-o.c.

Your Next Read…

Its original title was: novels that feel like *that* part in let down by radiohead.

Which, I fear, may have been the better title. But I had the nagging suspicion it would be lost on too many people.

You do know the part I mean, don’t you?

and one dAAAYYYYYYY, I AM GONNAAAA GROWWWW WIIIINGS

I have a soft spot for miserable books. A deep one. So deep, in fact, that my fiancé is often reduced to third-wheel status in a rather intense arrangement between me and whichever emotionally ruinous novel has most recently entered my life.

And before you get ahead of yourself and start drawing conclusions about my mental state: I’m not depressed, and I do not struggle with any mental illness. I’m not one of those relentlessly upbeat people either; in fact, I find them faintly disorienting when my social battery is running on fumes.

I’m content. I’m satisfied.

I hardly need to point out how dull a life might become if it were lived in a permanent state of satisfaction. Nothing more, nothing less. Just... fine. I realise that may sound almost offensively out of touch to anyone currently trying to claw their way out of Rock Bottom’s basement.

If that sounds like you, I’d gently suggest turning your attention elsewhere, much as I appreciate you being here. Your mental health comes first, and I would never recommend feeding a depression diet of sorrowful books.

That said, I refuse to send you away empty-handed. So, here are a few recommendations I can personally vouch for — works that, when I was drowning myself, not too long ago, healed something in me that had been living in the dark a little too long.

• The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (heavy emphasis on this one)

• Almond by Sohn Won-Pyung

• Alices Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (an admittedly rogue choice, but very little rivals the specific comfort of returning to a favourite childhood story as an adult)

• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

• If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura

• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

And if you’re still here, hello!

I feel as though sad literature suffers from a rather unfortunate reputation. This, however, is my view on it.

How are we ever meant to feel genuine empathy for people unlike ourselves if we refuse to spend any time in lives that do not mirror our own? You cannot develop a moral imagination by remaining obsessed with your own reflection. And it feels especially pressing now, because the world is deep in an empathy drought. I am not sure what other phrase adequately covers the sheer ease with which horrors are being committed, justified, and absorbed into the wallpaper of modern life. At this point, cruelty is not even forced to raise its voice. It barely has to clear its throat.

Whilst memoirs have given me plenty in this regard — Educated, Know My Name, The Glass Castle, to name a few — I still think fiction has opened me up more than anything else.

Which sounds faintly ridiculous, given that fiction is, by definition, made up. Not real. Entirely invented. But invented does not mean false, and fiction has a way of reaching emotional truths with a precision often overlooked by non-fiction.

That is not to say these stories stand in for every real life, nor to flatten the force of non-fiction, but fiction can still offer a startlingly faithful portrait of suffering, especially when so many people in the real world are never given the space, safety, or language to make themselves heard.

If you have read A Thousand Splendid Suns, you will likely know exactly what I mean. I have always felt that novel gave voice, with devastating clarity, to the lives of so many Afghan women who are expected to suffer in silence.

I wonder if you’re scanning this with pursed lips, nodding in aggressive agreement… Blink once for yes, blink twice for no. I’ll get the message.

Beyond that, I think we are far too quick to forget that humans are supposed to feel everything. Not just joy or gratitude. Not just whatever emotion appeases our aesthetic when articulated in a white font over a beige sunset.

I cry often. Horror of horrors.

But it is normal, and actually very healthy.

The internet, meanwhile, seems determined to pathologise any feeling that cannot be repackaged into a lesson, a mantra, or a morning routine.

STAY POSITIVE. BE HAPPY. SMILE.

God forbid anyone simply feel sad for a moment without being handed a quote telling them to reframe it as something positive. And honestly, I think it is fine to see that sort of thing, scream “shut the fuck up” at your phone and get the hell on with your day, as you were, tears and all.

So, now that I have hopefully mounted a convincing enough defence of my affection for the deeply harrowing and spiritually obliterating end of literature, here’s a snippet of my long and fairly committed history with melancholic fiction.

Buckle up, baby!

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

If you didn’t expect this one first, I really don’t know what to tell you. This novella ruins me EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Admittedly, every single time equates to twice, because that is apparently all I can handle. How blind you are, Nastenka!

Summary: A lonely man wanders St Petersburg, meets a woman, and immediately builds an entire emotional future on four nights of conversation. Mood.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★★

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I have read enough dystopian fiction to be fairly difficult to impress on the misery front, and still, this one absolutely wiped the floor with me. I knew next to nothing going in, which I now consider a public service worth extending to others. Do not read the synopsis. Do not go poking around. Just pick it up and let it ruin your life properly.

Summary: Nope.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

No novel has ever asked more of me than this one. This remains the most emotionally challenging novel I have ever read, and I do not say that lightly (coming from an avid reader of sad literature). It made me cry hysterically, several times, not just at the end, which says something about how deeply the characters get under your skin.

Summary: Four friends attempt adulthood in New York, with varying degrees of success and emotional instability. At the centre is Jude, whose traumatic past keeps arriving like an unpaid bill from hell.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹ *

My Rating: ★★★★★

Things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realise that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.

*Please read the trigger warnings before reading.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

For a book this short, it had no business hitting quite this hard. I have never really stopped thinking about it, which is about the highest praise I can offer any book, never mind one you could finish in an afternoon. You could call it a story about a giant bug, I suppose, but that would be a bit like calling Jaws a film about a fish. Published over a hundred years ago, it remains one of the most realistic portraits of modern work culture. Kafka, you genius.

Summary: Gregor wakes up as a giant bug and everyone is understandably upset, though mainly because he can no longer go to work. Very normal family behaviour.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★★

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

This book made me want to grab Stevens by the lapels and tell him to please, for once in his life, FEEL, GOD DAMNIT. Turns out emotional repression, when done with enough commitment, can absolutely ruin a life. Lovely, harrowing stuff. No notes.

Summary: Stevens, an ageing English butler, looks back on a life spent worshipping duty, dignity and a Nazi sympathiser. Which turns out to have been an appalling use of a life.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★★

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

This is one of those recommendations I make with an apologetic expression. Is it a masterpiece? Without question. Did it make me feel borderline ill? Yes. It is an unflinching portrait of drug addiction; so raw and so disturbingly believable that every time you think the characters have surely reached the lowest possible point, you fall through a trapdoor. Approach with caution and perhaps a reasonably stable mental state.

Summary: Four New Yorkers mistake obsession for hope (which is always a promising start). Heroin, diet pills, television, the dream of a better life — all very motivational until the dream starts eating people alive.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹ *

My Rating: ★★★★

*Please read the trigger warnings before reading.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

A façade maintained at the expense of absolutely everything? Say no more. My heart was in pieces. Baldwin’s prose is so gorgeous that underlining did not suffice, so I resorted to jotting down entire passages in my journal like they were sacred text. Emotionally, this book took me everywhere. Tears, oh so many tears! And a level of fury towards the misogynistic characters that was, frankly, not especially civilised.

Summary: A young American man in 1950s Paris, falls for another man, Giovanni, while engaged to a woman, then promptly lets shame and denial do what they do best: ruin absolutely everything.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★

If you cannot love me, I will die. Before you came I wanted to die, I have told you many times. It is cruel to have made me want to live only to make my death more bloody.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Like I said, fictional though it may be, this book has always felt to me like a kind of testimony on behalf of countless Afghan women whose suffering has so often been absorbed into silence. More than anything, it made me sit with lives the world has repeatedly taught us not to look at too closely.

Summary: Mariam and Laila form a close mother-daughter like bond whilst enduring life as women in Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★★

A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed. It won’t stretch to make room for you.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

This book made me insufferable. Every few pages I needed to interrupt the nearest person, flapping my hands, “oh my gosh, listen to this sentence!” Which is, admittedly, a tedious way to behave, but Vuong left me no choice.

Summary: A letter from a son to his illiterate mother, untangling trauma around Vietnam, poverty, addiction, queerness, and the catastrophic ways people love us.

Weepability: ☹ ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★

In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me?

I miss you more than I remember you.

Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel

I’m used to the whole motherhood question being handled with the delicacy of a brick through a window, so finding a book that actually gets it felt mildly miraculous. Straight into my top three books of all time.

Summary: Laura and Alina, two women in their thirties, navigate choices around motherhood and non-motherhood by choice, alike.

Weepability: ☹ ☹

My Rating: ★★★★★

I don’t buy the idea that sad books make us more miserable.

I think they make us harder to anaesthetise, which is annoying, obviously, if your plan was to drift through life like a well-moisturised little sociopath. They remind us that other people are not just extras milling about in the background of our extremely important personal biopic. They make the world harder to ignore.

Inconvenient, sure.

But probably useful, if we’re hoping to remain at least partially human.

I think miserable books are good for the soul. Woah, hot take. I love the books that ruin my evening, interrupt my sleep, and make me resent having to return to errands and other inferior obligations.

A little excessive, maybe.

But at least I know I’m still in there, somewhere.

-o.c.

The news headlines had been mounting for days, each one carrying the same distant sense of alarm, until one suddenly brought it to our doorstep: the first confirmed UK case had been found in York. We looked at each other with the dazed disbelief reserved for things that were meant to happen elsewhere. Three minutes down the street was the first case in the country.

With talk of a two-week lockdown gaining shape by the hour, we stepped into our heels and went out anyway, greedy for one last evening to mark the end of the academic year before the world shut its front door for fourteen days.

We were dressing for daylight drunkenness when B clipped her shoulder with the straighteners and cursed under her breath. S, having lost sight of her credit card, cast her suspicion across the room as though every surface were in on it. I was perched on the floor in my bra, knees folded in, painting clear varnish over the thin ladder in my tights.

At nineteen, I held an absurd confidence in the permanence of certain things. A friendship, once made properly, seemed to me one of them. Especially the female kind forged young, in first flats and borrowed clothes. After enough nights spent in one another’s company, enough mornings endured with swollen faces and the stale fug of last evening still trapped in the curtains, a kind of family likeness appeared.

During my years at University of York, I had two friends I loved in precisely that way.

Before nights out, the three of us would gather in whichever room offered the best mirror and the nearest plug socket. The place itself didn’t matter.

Every student bedroom possessed the same exhausted atmosphere: a chest of drawers that never shut, lecture handouts under a chipped mug of cheap vodka and Coca Cola, dust clinging to the skirting board, a bin lined with an old Topshop shopping bag, overburdened with used cotton pads, squashed cans and receipts.

Yet once we arrived with our makeup bags and armfuls of rejected outfits, the room acquired glamour through use. Hair tongs warming on the carpet. Gold hoops laid out beside a linguistics reading list. The air, tart with perfume and heat.

S always drank too quickly, her pupils already brightening by the time I had managed a first sip. B could hardly get through a story without collapsing into laughter halfway, the sentence splintering under her own delight.

We were so fucking stupid (in the best way). And my God, we were good at it.

Condensation was slowly budding in the corners of the glass as darkness thickened against the pane. The three of us were drinking from whatever was clean enough to hold alcohol: often a plastic jug, sometimes a bowl, one time, a plate. It only held a shallow puddle of liquid, which had to be sucked up through a straw. I still don’t know how the few brain cells between us managed to fuse together and deem that a smart idea.

We could animate any setting simply by appearing in it together. Three girls half-dressed for the needling Northern chill, and wholly certain the night would continue splitting open for us, door after door, because really, who were we to believe otherwise?

We returned back to the flat we called home, smoke clinging to our hair, carrying the city in our bones. We would clatter down the corridor, talking too loudly, one of us suddenly ravenous for something beige and salty, another swearing she would never drink again as though this vow had not already been made and broken thirty times before.

Then morning.

Curtains leaking a pale, unforgiving light. Makeup half-rubbed into the pillowcase and glasses on the bedside table with a thumb’s depth of flat mixer left in them. One of us sitting cross-legged on the bed with tea. Another emerging with her duvet around her shoulders, wincing at the day’s first glare. And then the great unspooling of the previous night.

We could spend entire days like that, doing very little. We would often walk without destination, meandering, aimlessly, letting the streets of York unspool around us in cobbles, crooked lanes and that honey-drizzle light that made even the old brick seem sweet.

At the kitchen table, we painted one another’s nails in glossy strokes. Later, we gathered on the floor where S would crouch behind me and B, wrapping sections of our hair around the hot iron like ribbon.

In the early bloom of spring, we would lie for hours in the grass, half-sunk in sunlight, letting one conversation open into another: the universe, philosophy, human nature, whatever happens after death, why grass is green, how on earth the pyramids were built, and all the other vast questions that seemed both impossible and urgently worth pursuing. We understood very little, but that never seemed to matter. It was simply the rare and lovely extravagance of having enough time to ask and wonder.

Those hours in daylight seem, from here, just as valuable as the nights that occasioned them. At the time, I had no sense of the finitude of it.

Early adulthood is often accused of arrogance, and sometimes rightly so, but I think part of what people call arrogance is simply an undeveloped sense of loss.

I knew, in theory, that university would end and we would, one day, leave behind that snug arrangement of rented rooms and overlapping lives. But I had not reckoned with how suddenly a life could close. The two week lockdown rolled into months, then more months still. Before any of it had settled into comprehension, our little lives were being taken down around us, packed into boxes and bin bags without the grace of a real goodbye, then driven back to the separate towns we had once been so glad to leave.

Soon enough, we would enter the long unfolding of adult life: jobs, rent, tiredness, partners, obligations. But I thought whatever we had made would survive all that untouched. I thought distance might inconvenience us, but never alter the substance of what we were.

We spoke about the future with the entitlement of girls who had not yet been corrected by time: weddings, hen dos, Christmases, birthdays, shared holidays and babies born near enough in age to become friends themselves. Entire decades laid out before us.

I recall genuinely troubling myself over which of them I would ask to be maid of honour one day, as though abundance itself were my only problem. It never occurred to me that one day I would see S on her wedding day, but only through a square image on my Instagram feed.

There should have been fittings, phone calls, group dinners and a chaotic weekend in Greece involving too much Prosecco and something akin to the Super Trouper scene in Mamma Mia.

Somewhere in another version of our lives, the three of us would have made a glorious shambles of the wedding prelude (yes, the York-related pun was shamelessly intended).

Instead, the day presented itself to me in the lacquered scraps of other people’s keeping: S incandescent in white beneath the winter sun, a venue glistening with that effortless opulence some places seem to conjure.

And I, one hundred miles north, B one hundred miles south, stood at home tracing our thumbs across the glass as though that gesture could amount to presence.

Later, I sent her a message and tried to decant into it the better part of those inseparable years; all the unembittered happiness I felt at her joy, reduced to a few lines of glaring light.

There were no screaming matches, no slammed doors, nothing so obvious as a proper ending. Although, I sometimes think that would have been easier.

We simply kept moving, and life, with its dreary efficiency, kept moving still. One job here. Another city there. A new relationship, different routines, messages answered a day late, then three days late, then with a lazy ‘heart reaction’ because a worded reply required more energy than the evening could spare. Plans were discussed and rarely fixed. The few fixed plans would then become undone by trains, money, exhaustion, illness, work, excuses.

Eventually, so little remained between us that we reached for anything at all to fill the silence, until, by some unspoken mutual consent, we simply let go.

What followed was this strange, diluted aftermath.

Each of us have been altered in solitude, beyond one another’s witness.

We are strangers, now.

It is hard to explain this kind of loss because it sounds so harmless in the telling. The friendship did not curdle or turn sour; it was merely outlived by circumstance. And yet few things are sadder than watching something, once as ordinary as daylight, recede into a vague memory…

I used to think some friendships earned permanence simply by having been lived so fully. As though enough years beside one another ought to count for something permanent.

But they do not.

Friendship asks to be kept alive from every side, from all involved. It asks for effort that is mutual and repeated, in all the little ways that barely register while they are still being given. When that stops, something once ardent can begin to drain of its life without anybody quite meaning for it to.

I miss the strange opulence of it. The way a bare little day could swell into something lavish simply because other women were inside it with you, noticing what you noticed, enlarging it by their presence. Nothing needed to happen, not really. And still it felt full.

That is what I miss most: the peculiar abundance of being so thoroughly accompanied, as though life itself became more expansive in the company of other women.

And that, I feel, is why the absence of female friendships in your twenties can feel so much larger than the facts seem to justify. It was not just that they were gone, but that the life I had been living with them in it went with them.

For a while, it was the most fun we ever had.

And I truly thought that would follow us everywhere.

-o.c.

your next read…

As a little girl, I grew fond of one inconceivable idea with the kind of earnest certainty only the young and naïve can sustain. It was, as so many of my earliest longings were, bound up with the sea.

I could stand in front of it for hours, watching the white seam of each wave undo itself upon the shore. It seemed impossible to me that a person could live without ever seeing it.

And so, with a child’s untainted belief in what might yet be made possible, I began to imagine a way forward.

One day, I would buy a minibus, lacquered in riotous colours like the one in the final scene of Nacho Libre; the very movie, in fact, where this dream first gained its roots.

I imagined steering it through vast inland countries where the horizon never once broke into blue. I would gather up children whose eyes had never been met by the wonder of open water. I can still picture the dream exactly as I used to hold it.

The bus rattling along a long a dirt road beneath the long hush of a opal sky. Heat rising off the ground in trembling sheets. Dry grass at the roadside, bleached almost white. The windows flung open. The children inside pressed shoulder to shoulder, all chatter and elbows and expectant faces, not yet knowing what waited for them. Their natural ebullience, as I held it in mind, was radiant and tightly gathered.

After the miles stretched over days, at last, that first fathomless spill of prismatic blue at the edge of the world.

I used to imagine the precise moment the children realised what they were looking at. Conversation falling away. The bus quietening around that first shared astonishment. Every gaze pulled helplessly towards the light outside.

I would pull over somewhere high enough for them to see it properly. The bus doors would wheeze open. One by one, then all at once, they would tumble out into the salt-thick air and stand there, arrested. Before them, the ocean unfurling without end, each shifting plane of light shattering softly across its surface.

Then they would run. Of course they would run. Down whatever path led there, shoes filling with sand, hearts hammering, towards that vast gleaming body, as though it had, all this time been keeping its distance only to welcome them properly.

I was once a young girl with a mind brightened by a thousand shimmering dreams, and a heart so pure, it only yearned for beauty that might be carried into the lives of others.

But, that dream, slipped from my buttery fingertips into the long procession of my unlived lives, each one still carrying its own unreachable light. Still waiting somewhere beyond me, while I remain here on dry land, having never taken anyone to the sea.

-o.c.