Before I begin this piece, I can’t help but highlight the enormous irony in my own situation: someone who earns a living from their online presence, discussing the failure of the push towards an offline lifestyle. I can smell your scepticism through the screen, and you’re right to be wary. If I had my Kris Jenner hat perfectly styled, I would be denouncing an analogue world, or better yet, ignoring the topic altogether, but what I have to say is more nuanced than a sly campaign to get you to stay on social media. So if you can give me a chance, we’re going to explore the failure of analogue 2026 together.

In case you missed it last year, analogue 2026 was a social movement that pledged a return to analogue media (DVDs, CDs, print media) and a move to ditch our phones. I came across the movement as it flooded my Instagram Reels Feed (ironically) in December, way before the hot haze of this summer, when life was cold, and 2026 seemed infinitely possible.

It didn’t come out of nowhere; that month I had been seeking out and engaging with more literature recommendations and content for improving my attention span. Like most of the Western world, I became very aware at the tail end of last year just how much my attention span had shrunk. We all talk about it: watching TikToks on 2x speed, second-screen watching on Netflix, and piles of unfinished or even untouched books collecting dust in our dimly lit apartments. It gives me both comfort and overwhelming anxiety that I am not alone in this realisation. So, amongst the AI slop and fast-paced aesthetic shots soundtracked by Olivia Dean, Analogue 2026 came into my For You Page. A commandment for the new year: to ditch digital and reclaim ownership over our consumption of media; by downgrading our phones, coming off socials, and returning to physical media, to name a few tenets.

The idea was received with open arms by pockets of the internet, earning tens of thousands of likes for creators proposing the idea, setting their comment section alight with further suggestions of “cancelling their subscriptions” and “denouncing ChatGPT” and creating a domino effect of sister trends like 75HardTech, where participants are adapting the original fitness challenge to detox from their devices.

But if it received so much attention, why are we still endlessly stuck to our phones? Quite simply, it didn’t stick. It became another trend. But I think to really understand why, we need to look more deeply into the yearning for it in the first place.

As a society, we rely on technology; we consume more content than ever before, and so many of our connections and relationships depend on our digital access to each other. So surely, you’d expect an increase in tech use? While that might be what the tech bros were hoping for, I believe it is actually the reason for the pushback against it.

In just the last five years, our digital consumption has skyrocketed to heights even I, as a creator, never saw coming. To put it into perspective, when I started in this weird little career, there was no such thing as Instagram Reels or TikTok; while in existence, it had nowhere near the user base it does today, not until the lockdown of 2020. Now we scroll video content like our own personal slot machines, ready for our convenience, whether for 3 am doomscrolling or a 3 pm distraction from an overstimulating family gathering. We are bombarded with so many digital images every day, and answer me honestly: how often can you remember the video you watched 5 scrolls ago?

Ryan Coogler, director of SINNERS, the film that smashed records to become the most Oscar-nominated film of all time, was conscious of this hyper-consumption of digital content when creating the masterpiece. He claimed that his “main non-negotiable” for the project was that it was to be shot on film. Ryan stated that “in today’s age, shooting someone on film is more impactful than it ever was, because there is such a proliferation of digital photography.” He specifically points to the “100s and 1000s of digital images” we all view online and how, when you capture something with “celluloid”, it feels “different”.

This dedication and pure love for the craft of storytelling only becomes more evident now in the wake of an “AI slop” boom on social media. The use of AI has become a particularly controversial topic in the last year; I have strong, mixed feelings about it. I believe some of the tools can be extremely helpful and, if utilised correctly, could significantly enhance our living standards and technological capabilities. For example, an AI tool tested by the NHS successfully identified tiny signs of breast cancer in 11 women which human doctors had missed. This is an extraordinary achievement. However, we also have the catastrophic damage that excessive AI use is causing to the planet and the worrying fact that people are becoming dependent on AI bots, namely ChatGPT, to perform cognitive and social tasks they used to complete independently. A fact that is especially frightening when you take into account the increase in the diagnosis of early-onset dementia in those in their 20s and 30s. It’s easy to see why it’s a controversial topic, and that’s before we even get into the moral argument of “what place does AI have in human storytelling?”, which has been a huge argument across creatives in the last year, with creatives like Guillermo del Toro shouting “Fuck AI” to a crowd on stage at a press event for his adaptation of Frankenstein, who were more than ready to shout it back in camaraderie.

As AI becomes more associated with slop, laziness, and, quite brutally, low-brow media, going analogue is becoming associated with luxury and desirability - at least amongst creatives. You can see this in the reactions to Coca-Cola’s completely AI-generated Christmas ad, compared with Porsche’s, which blended hand-drawn art with 3D animation. The former was heavily ridiculed and mocked, while the latter was praised and rewarded for its dedication to the crafts used. Quite simply, the people are already fatigued from looking at generative AI; they want to see real art again, and more than that, they want to feel.

The seeds for this yearning were sown much further back than the conversation of an analogue 2026. I think the clearest indicator is the vinyl boom of the last decade. Vinyl sales have grown steadily since around 2007, surpassing CDs in the U.S. in 2022 for the first time since 1987, becoming a dominant physical format. My own journey with physical music media parallels this exact timeline, as I have been collecting vinyl records for the last 13 years. When I got my first job at 16, one of my favourite things to spend the leftover money on, after buying my college bus pass and food budget, was vinyl records. In tiny record stores, online on eBay, 12 inches, 7 inches, picture discs; all of it. I just loved, and still love, the quiet intimacy of holding an artist’s project in your hands, laying down the needle and waiting for the warm crackle of feedback, listening to the project and often running from the next room to flip to the b-side with minimal interruption. It’s so ceremoniously human.

Despite all of this, so many people who earnestly took up the challenge of analogue 2026 failed to see it through. From the general discourse and sentiment to physical media and analogue living, it feels like people want the nostalgia of our early lives without sacrificing the convenience of our modern world. I’m guilty of it; if I have to call a restaurant for information rather than just checking their IG or Google Maps, that friction of inconvenience is so jarring to the smoothness I have become accustomed to. As well as the glaringly obvious issue that I think the challenge naively underestimated: just how tough a phone addiction is to crack, and replacing scrolling endless reels with bulk buying 99p DVDs is just swapping one dopamine rush for another.

I’m aware this is where my online-career bias will creep in, but I do sincerely believe that when used correctly, technology can improve our lives. When used intentionally, social media can inform, entertain, and educate us on topics we might not otherwise encounter in more traditional media. Using myself as an example, I’ve been able to reach millions of people in my career, putting them in front of topics like disability and accessibility, without waiting for the gatekeepers of traditional media to decide it's now a worthwhile topic to cover. And I’m not the only one; many creators have used the online space to make important topics like global issues, discrimination, and even just much-needed positivity reach audiences they might not otherwise reach. I'm grappling with the culture I’ve helped create and justifying my own career, but I have to believe there is good here, isn’t there?

So if we can’t go entirely analogue, and we want to really reap the best bits of social media, what do we do? While it may sound obvious, I think the most important first step is not to approach this as a new trend or challenge. The temptation to gamify your habits and indulge in the dopamine rush is strong, but you’re setting yourself up for failure. Instead, here are some of the small changes I made to help encourage my brain plasticity:

1. Banned myself from using my phone on the tube. I moved in January, and it meant that I was now spending more time on the tube, from around 30 mins a day to now an hour and a half a day. The temptation to doomscroll or to lean into hyperproductivity on these journeys is strong in both directions. But I was trying to make reading feel more of an approachable task again, something I did little and often; I decided that when travelling alone, I would devote my tube time to reading. Out of all the habits I’ve changed, this is the one I push most on my friends. Once I got past looking like a performative Pinterest post, being able to jump in and out of a book in small chunks made reading feel manageable, and less like this big thing I had to carve out time for.

2. Not blasting myself with background noise all day. I have previously been guilty of having a show I’m rewatching just playing in the background so it’s not quiet. Noise for the sake of noise. Which, as a woman living alone, I don’t think is inherently a bad thing - it’s comforting. But I now don’t diminish TV shows, audiobooks or films to a split screen, and instead opt for a soft lo-fi or Animal Crossing focus YouTube video to soundtrack my tasks.

3. I don’t allow myself to be reactionary. So much of our online world is engagement farming, and unfortunately, negative content tends to elicit stronger reactions. So when I find myself enraged by something I’ve seen online (which, trust me, happens often), I don’t run to the comment section or jump to make a stitch reaction arguing my opposing point of view. Instead, if I feel I must respond or engage, I share with a friend, I sense-check, and try to formulate my thoughts rather than allow my emotions to burst out into the online world.

4. I allow myself to be bored. As the self-appointed CEO of sidequests, I will admit, yes, my calendar is always full; I rarely find extended periods of boredom. But what I mean is, in those little moments throughout the day, I stop myself from mindlessly picking up my phone. When I’m waiting for the lift, on the toilet, waiting for the kettle to boil, seconds throughout the day when I was scrolling through my phone without even realising I’d picked it up. Now, when I’m picking up my phone, I mentally ask myself - why am I picking up my phone?

5. Another side effect of excessive social media use is the normalisation of consumerism, woven into every aspect of our lives. To try and reprogram my brain to not see life like a shopping channel, I have two hobbies I do every week: one is physical activity and the other offline creative work, and neither requires me to shop to indulge. The physical one might be as simple as a run in the park; the creative one differs more week to week. I have done pottery painting, scrapbooking, and writing, to name a few.

6. Did a mini audit of what I actually enjoy about social media. Rather than just mindlessly doomscrolling, I checked in with myself to audit my habits on the apps, who I actually liked seeing on there, who evoked negative responses from me, and to cap my time on each app. Even just being aware of your habits can help you make changes towards them.

7. Screenless nights with friends. Answer me honestly: how often do you find yourself spending time with your friends, and at least one of you has become distracted in a doomscrolling hole? As well as tackling my own habits, my friendship group has made more of an effort to have board game nights, phoneless meals, and just nights where we yap for hours.

8. Pushing back against AI. “AI is here”, “AI is inevitable”, “Use it or get left behind” I feel like I’ve faced more pressure to use AI in the last 2 years than I ever have to do drugs. But remember that you can push back on your use of AI, whether that’s purposefully not using ChatGPT or not engaging with creators/outlets that post AI-generated slop.

Analogue 2026 was always going to fail, because it was designed to. It was another trend curated for engagement, without real, tangible behavioural changes for sustainable change. Whether it was conscious or subconscious, it’s hard to ignore the way it was played out as another assertion of social and cultural hierarchy, an attempt to assert once again what’s ‘high-brow’ in an online world where AI slop is being defined as the ‘low-brow’. Trying to go analogue off the back of a social media trend is like fighting fire with fire. To make long-lasting change to your life, you can’t treat it like a trend. But as we’ve discussed today, the heart of it is something worth investing your time in; because beyond the flip phones and stacks of 99p DVDs, it was about having ownership and control over the media you consume. I believe you can still do this if you are willing to be a bit stricter with the device you hold in your hand, using it as a tool to improve your life rather than to rule it. Because at the end of the day, what good is a limitless device that imprisons you behind its glowing screen?

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1. Watch The Oresteia at The Bridge Theatre.

Jumping in at the deep end a little here, but as we seem to be in an Ancient Greece revival, so I’m hoping you’ll bite. Although not as obvious as Nolan’s The Odyssey, The Oresteia is a modern retelling of the Greek Tragedy that explores generational trauma and the consequences of war. While we may not be in the aftermath of the Trojan War like the original text, the retelling rings closer to home by swapping King Agamemnon for a PR spokesperson of a family-owned tech company that finds itself complicit in selling its products to aid in warfare, and his ‘sacrificed’ daughter is a Gen Z social justice activist who is leading a protest against her family’s business. While you need no knowledge of the original text to enjoy the play, the interpretation of this story mirrors the original text in an eerie way and shows that while warfare may have changed in tactics, the impact of war on families remains horrifying.

The Bridge Theatre is famous for its bold set pieces, and this play is no exception, as the whole story takes place in a set piece house that revolves to allow us to see directly into the whole family home as their drama unfolds. As well as the incredible performances, particularly from Tom Glynn-Carney (Aegon from House of the Dragon), the use of this set piece dials up the tension of the story and makes the 3-hour & 30-minute run time soar by. Yes, it is a very long play, but worth it!

2. The Southwark Cathedral History Book Festival.

The 1000-year-old cathedral is opening its doors for a day of talks from an array of historical writers. If, like me, you’ve found yourself becoming a bit of a history dad in your late 20’s (or even better - your early 20s!), there is plenty under this historic building to sink your teeth into. The beautiful 1000-year-old cathedral is separated into 3 areas: the nave, the library and the JTW room, each hosting their own talks from 10 am till 7 pm. A full agenda is on the Southwark Cathedral website, but to give an idea of what to expect, some of the talks I plan to attend are:

• Alison Weir: Six Tudor Queens: The Wives of Henry VIII

• Jo Durrant with guest Dr Elizabeth Norton: ‘Women Who Ruled the World: 5000 Years of Female Monarchy’

• Andrew Kenrick: ‘Rex Juba: 15 glimpses of an African King’

• Dr Erica Canela: 'Zealous: A darker side of the Early Quakers'

You can buy tickets to each talk if only 1 or 2 pique your interest, or, if you find yourself wanting to attend all or multiple, you can buy passes to attend every talk in each area.

Check out the full agenda here

3. V&A East: The Music Is Black, a British Story exhibit.

The newly opened V&A East hosts one of its first exhibits, and it did not disappoint. This exhibit explores the history and impact of Black British artists across all genres of music, from jazz, hip-hop and modern grime. The immersive exhibit starts at the slave trade and the impacts of colonialism on instruments and music, and doesn’t shy away from how intertwined our complicated and gruelling past is with the music we produce and enjoy. The exhibit manages to condense 100s of years of history and culture into a succinct and enjoyable way that feels like walking through each era. Hosting iconic outfits and items from some of our favourite and most influential artists, you’re going to want to take your time around this incredible exhibit and soak it all in.

4. Settle in for an arts & crafts afternoon at a Pottery Painting Cafe.

Maybe the last few recommendations have been a bit history-heavy; how about some arts and crafts? Whimsy arts and crafts activities have taken over the internet lately, and in response I’ve noticed more pottery cafes opening up across London. I took my step-mum to Pottery Studio London for her birthday, and I was a bit nervous as I’d never done a public arts and crafts session before. Was I expected to be good? Luckily the answer was no. It was not an art exam; it ended up being a lovely couple of hours painting my own design with a latte and a little sweet treat. If you want more of a relaxed afternoon, I would recommend doing a simple pottery painting session, where you select your pre-made piece and paint whatever you want onto it. But if you want to flex your artistic muscles a bit more, you can take a pottery class where you actually create your own piece, Ghost style, well, maybe not exactly.

Some locations in London:

• Pottery Studio LDN (North Greenwich), the one I have been to.

• Bonbon Pottery (Battersea, Kingston Upon Thames, Notting Hill, Royal Wharf)

• London Social Pottery (White City)

5. Battersea Park in Concert

Speaking of Battersea, its offerings don’t end at pottery. Battersea Park is opening its gates for the Battersea Park in Concert event over the August Bank holiday (28th - 31st) for a long weekend of culture in the park. The event consists of open-air concerts filled with indulgent picnics, fantastic live music, and joyous dancing! Each day hosts its own event:

• Friday 28th Aug - Jeremy Loops.

• Saturday 29th Aug - Pop Symphonic with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.

• Sunday 30th Aug - Movies & Musicals with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra.

• Monday 31st Aug - Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra with support from The Amy Winehouse Band.

Each event is wheelchair accessible with specific wheelchair and companion tickets for the accessible platform sold on their website.

Book Tickets

6. Celebrate 200 years of London Zoo.

London Zoo is turning 200! As well as visiting the zoo itself, you can celebrate with them by attending one of their events over the summer. Including:

• Disney’s The Lion King Exhibit, where you can see a showcase of the West End musical’s costumes and puppets. You can also join in one of their workshops led by Disney teaching artists to learn how the iconic opening number ‘The Circle of Life’ is performed.

• Drawing After Hours - a free-of-charge event that is operating on a ballot system.

• Run Wild at London Zoo, a family fun run consisting of 1 mile and 5km distances.

7. Watch a film at The Arzner’s outdoor cinema.

London’s arthouse cinema and cafe is gearing up for another summer of queer cinema. With a packed agenda of queer and queer-adjacent films in their outdoor cinema till the end of the season. With fan favourites like Bottoms, Bend It Like Beckham, and Mulan, a community-free screening of The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, and a Gala Screening and Q&A of Blowie.

I myself am clocking in for the outdoor screening of Madonna’s Confessions On A Dancefloor Tour; we are knee-deep in a Madonna Summer and outside, in a London summer, surrounded by other gays, feels like the perfect place to watch one of her best tours!

The full season agenda

8. Inspect The London Archives of Medieval London.

Back to a more geeky suggestion, so I’m aware this may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those of you out there who are trying to learn as much as possible this summer, you can get up close and personal with some of The London Archives collection. They have curated a medieval collection of archives to allow you to explore records that tell us about the lives of medieval Londoners, such as their wills, property transactions, and their relationships with their neighbours. The

There are only a few spots left, but the event is free and wheelchair accessible!

Book your free spot

9. Party at the Natural History Museum.

My favourite place since I was a child, the Natural History Museum is more than just a fancy storehouse for our prehistoric friends. Throughout the year, they host several unique events you won’t find anywhere else. Although some of them are on the more expensive end, there are some which are more affordable:

• Monster of the Deep exhibit (£15)

• Behind the Scenes Tour: Spirit Collection (£35)

• Silent Disco (£42)

• Dino Snores Sleepover at the Museum, separate events for grown-ups and children (£87-£235)

Full event agenda

10. Step back in time and watch a play in Shakespeare’s Globe.

Ending how we started, with a theatre recommendation, and this time it’s right back to our roots. You can watch a play in Shakespeare’s Globe, with several different productions, including some of Shakespeare’s own works, in the very place they were meant to be enjoyed.

Tickets to shows start at as little as £5, and you can also book a tour of the theatre to really complete your Shakespearean experience. I am seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream this month and finally ticking off one of my big history-lover dreams: seeing a Shakespearean play at the Globe itself.

Full Theatre Agenda

I hope the rest of your summer is full of whimsy and adventure however you find it, but if you do find yourself taking one of my recommendations or have already enjoyed one, do let me know how you find it!

Long live whimsy girl sidequests!

Being completely honest, I didn’t know that Disability Pride Month was a thing until roughly 4 years after becoming Disabled myself. I became aware of it through the fantastic work of fellow Disabled online creators and advocates, and as much as The Daily Mail and other right-wing conglomerates might want you to believe it’s one of these new “woke” agendas that has surfaced from Twitter, the month actually has its roots in the Disability Rights Movement from the 1990s.

Across the pond, Disabled activists were fighting for Disability equality nationwide. When on the 12th March, a protest would take place that would largely be credited with progressing the movement to the rights Disabled Americans have today. Over 1,000 people marched from the White House to the U.S Capitol to demand that Congress pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. This Act had been lobbied for since the 1960s and would go on to be the first comprehensive civil rights law for disabled people. It is similar to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but what made this Act so integral to the protection of Disabled people was that it also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations. It feels unbelievable now that this is something that even needed to be fought for, but unfortunately it did, and not too long ago.

On that day in March, roughly 60 activists, including eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, illustrated the cruelty of inaccessibility by getting out of their wheelchairs or setting aside their mobility aids and crawling up the Capitol steps in an act of civil disobedience. 104 activists, many in wheelchairs, were arrested, and the event became known as “the Capitol Crawl”. After decades of lobbying and strategising, the ADA was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush, just 4 months after the Capitol Crawl, on 26th July 1990.

It was less than 3 months after the signing of this Act that the very first Disability Pride Parade was held in Boston, Massachusetts. A demonstration, starting at City Hall and ending at Boston Common, was marched, wheeled and driven by the people to affirm the statement that Disability is ‘far from tragic; Disability is a natural part of the human experience’. It would take another 25 years, till 2015, when the Mayor of New York City declared July as Disability Pride Month. As I said, hardly something that has come out of nowhere, Disability Pride Month has been hard-fought for by the community.

I wish this is the part of the story where I could tell you that the laws brought in did their job, and everyone realised that Disabled people deserve basic human rights so they never committed ableism ever again…wouldn’t that be nice. Unfortunately, we still need Disability Pride Month 11 years after it was declared, because inaccessibility and ableism are still rife in our society. You only have to look at the statistics to see how Disabled people's lives are far from equal to that of our non-disabled counterparts.

In the UK:

• 10,000 disability hate offences were reported in 2025, and only 300 cases were taken forward to prosecution.

• Around 21% of the public report witnessing individuals being mocked for learning disabilities, and 17% admit they would feel uneasy interacting with a disabled person. 3 out of 4 disabled people (72%) have experienced negative attitudes or behaviour in the last 5 years

• Disabled people and their families are disproportionately affected by poverty, with 27% of working-age disabled people living in poverty.

• Disabled women are more than twice as likely to experience sexual assault and domestic violence.

• More than half (51.8%) of disabled people are actively prevented from watching sports due to a lack of venue accessibility, and 22.6% report that inadequate accessible transport is a major barrier to their daily lives.

The statistics alone are horrifying, but the nuances of ableism and inaccessibility go beyond the numbers. As well as a battle with the world around you, being Disabled can be an internal war with yourself. The identity of being Disabled has a long history of shame, pain, negligence and rejection; and this is a heavy burden to bear. One that can very easily seep into all areas of your life: your relationships, your work, your education, your family, your passions.

This, to me, is what makes Disability Pride Month so important. Yes, it is an opportunity to address structural issues that still cause ableism today, and that is incredibly important. We need to make huge changes to our society to make it more physically accessible for those with disabilities. But it is also a cultural and societal act of defiance that can be life-changing on an individual level.

When I say I am proud to be Disabled, that is a layered and loaded statement. One that has taken many years for me to be able to verbalise, and even now that I can, it is still weighted. I say it even though I still sometimes struggle to look at my body in the mirror, despite the fact that I still cry when the lift to the tube is down, and I'm stuck underground, even when I rage at the fact that I know my life was astronomically easier before I was enrolled into this new identity against my will.

Because to say I am proud to be Disabled does not mean that I love to be Disabled in the same way that I love to be a Lesbian, and it does not mean that I welcome all of the struggle that comes along with it. To me, Disability Pride Month, and the statement that I am proud to be Disabled, is about reminding myself that my life is worthy and just as valuable as it was before I became Disabled. It is a political act of defiance against a world that is constantly trying to make me believe that my life is not worthy. As confident as I may be in some areas of my life, my relationship with my disability is something that needs consistent nurturing, reinforcement, and celebration of what it takes to be the Disabled woman that I am.

Beyond my own personal relationship to Disability, the month reminds me of the power in community. While a lot of the Disability Rights history I’ve shared with you today took place in the USA, our Disabled community was fighting a similar fight over here in the UK too. Something that I find so powerful about this era of protests was its move from a charity model to help Disabled people, to a demanding of comprehensive civil rights. The only reason I was able to get the bus to dinner tonight is because of the Disabled Rights Activists who chained themselves to buses, stopped traffic in the street, and were lifted out of their wheelchairs because they refused to accept inaccessibility any longer. It is because of them, and all of the other Disabled activists that came before me that protested and campaigned on numerous different issues, that I can reap the benefits of progress made so far. So as I watch the ramp come out of the bus, I take my place in the wheelchair bay, and watch the city go by from the window, I think of how proud I am of those with Disabilities who fought for my life to be easier, even when they didn’t know me, so that I may do the same for the next generation of Disabled people. I won’t know them, but I hope their lives are easier than mine is right now.

So while Disability Pride Month may not have the press, brand support, and general visibility that LGBTQIA+ Pride Month historically has, it is still equally important and rich in history. In the year 2026, when ableism feels like it’s getting more prevalent again and when governments are scapegoating Disabled people, we need to share our history widely and shout loud and proud that our lives do have worth, because somewhere in the world right now someone has just become Disabled and thinks they might be better off dead. When in reality they have a whole world out there that is just waiting for them to put their stamp on.

While the patriarchy may try to paint womanhood as this soft, dainty, doll-like experience, I’m sure I won’t be alone in saying that my experience of womanhood is much more akin to Nosferatu, Frankenstein, or The Substance. I think horror is baked into us, into all women, regardless of the way we present and navigate the world.

Maybe it’s the state of the world or the rise in young filmmakers with a desire to show these stories more explicitly, but it feels like women’s stories are being told in horror now more than ever.

Horror is undoubtedly having somewhat of a golden era right now. Back in early 2024, I predicted that gothic horror and the gothic aesthetic would experience a boom, and with the release of Nosferatu at the end of that year, it appears I was right. But why? Well, to put it lightly, the world feels like a real-life horror film. So it’s only natural for our media to reflect that feeling of fear, panic and destruction. Not to mention that as a society becomes more conservative in the mainstream, you often see the gothic boom as a counter-culture. A protest and a tool of rebellion that confronts society’s worst fears and anxieties head-on. In the context of women, it has been a crucial platform and political outlet for female writers; we can see this in literary devices such as the trapped heroine. Look at Nosferatu, for example: Ellen’s disgusting desire and violent lust are brought to life in the embodiment of the Count, and it has devastating effects on the entire population. Decimating the city and ushers in death like a soft wind. Wow, who knew women’s lust was so powerful?

Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe it was made from a premonition, but Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu was released just as Trump won the 2024 election campaign and would launch the already bubbling conservative and trad-wife sentiment across the country.

As well as its ability to reflect our times, horror is also having a boom right now because it is one of the few genres in film that seems to be taking big risks, telling original stories and wanting to evolve the art of storytelling. Cinema is undoubtedly in big trouble, economically speaking, so unfortunately for us, that’s why we’ve seen an absolute train of live-action remakes, biopics, and pre-owned IPs. While I hate it, I can’t deny that it makes sense why a studio would see the appeal of making a film with an already built-in fan base, like Moana.

Yet the horror genre seems to largely subvert this play. Horror is one of the few genres that consistently releases films with original stories, and it is seeing its risks rewarded in a big way. Ryan Coogler’s Sinner’s is a phenomenal example of this; a film that was pitched to fail by Vanity Fair became the most Oscar-nominated movie in history. It succeeded because, beyond being an entertaining film with an incredibly talented cast, it gave audiences what they’ve been crying out for: an original story that connects us and the experiences we share.

But Sophie, what has this got to do with Obsession, Backrooms and most importantly, women? Okay, I’m getting there! Both horror films have dominated cinema over the last month; both were created by young filmmakers who started on YouTube, and both involve a man turning a woman’s life into a horror movie without subtlety. The part that was, for too long - the quiet part- is being said out loud: men can make women’s lives a horror film.

Now all of the “not all men” crowd have stopped reading; something that I found interesting about Obsession in particular was the audience’s reaction to it. I would go as far as to say, if you are a woman dating a man, you need to take him to see this movie, as a litmus test for how deeply he understands your consent. Because the thing that made this movie’s misogyny so sinister is that Bear, our protagonist and torturer, was a so-called “nice guy”, and while I don’t think the movie was subtle with its stance on Bear’s actions, lets breakdown the flaming red warning signs that Bear is, in fact, the villain of the story.

Bear might be a sweet, bumbling, awkward soft boy as the movie opens with him practising how he is going to declare his love to Nikki, but to anyone paying attention, we start to get a real glimpse into Bear's selfishness when he leaves medication out for his cat to get into. An accident that would kill her.

Maybe you think I’m being harsh, maybe that was a genuine accident, and maybe we can’t judge him on that mistake; but it’s what comes next that allows us to see this as our first warning sign that Bear’s selfishness will kill and ruin the lives of those around him.

Our “nice guy” is given an explicit chance by Nikki to confess his feelings for her, and instead of taking this chance, he says no and makes the wish instead. “I wish Nikki loved me more than anyone in the whole f***ing world." That is what he wishes for, not: “I wish I could be the man Nikki would love” or “I wish I had the confidence to tell her how I feel”, but a wish that thrusts him at the centre of her world, with no window to view anything else.

Despite Nikki’s affections for Bear blossoming immediately after the wish was made, our "“nice guy” does not put two and two together, and almost immediately takes Nikki home to his bed. Again, maybe I’m harsh: “he probably didn’t actually expect the wish to come true!!” and you know what, I can’t say my belief in magic would be so strong that I would either. But let’s jump a tiny bit to the scene where Ian calls Bear in the restaurant, and it becomes explicitly clear to Bear that his blissful romance has been completely orchestrated by his wish. Does he immediately call the number on the box? Does he return to the shop? Does he try to talk to Nikki? No, he takes her home, and he has sex with her. Too busy satisfying his own needs to even notice that while Wish Nikki may be moaning the sounds of pleasure she knows he desperately wants to hear, the Real Nikki is crying underneath him. The creators of this film are leaving absolutely no room for ambiguity; the Real Nikki is not, and cannot, consent. This was a scene that really haunted me as I left the cinema, and it wasn’t until I was sat with a friend later on, discussing how angry the film made us, that I could realise that what we had just watched was a rape scene. It wasn’t explicitly violent; we didn’t watch her struggle; in fact, we saw her submit, but it was made clear by the filmmakers that this does not negate her lack of consent. While The Wish Willow may be fictional, this core of the story is all too grounded in reality for too many women.

Ignoring the Polaroid titled “not me”, leaving her to stand in her own mess all day like an untrained puppy, and trying to keep her from the party through fear of embarrassing himself, Bear consistently fails to do not just the right thing, but anything! Even on a phone call to the One-Wish-Willow, Bear still refuses to cancel the wish. Although I was already pretty seething with Bear at this point in the film, I love the way the filmmakers chose to play this scene out, with Bear not knowing that cancelling the wish isn’t actually an option, as it allowed us to see just how selfish he really is. To the extent that even after experiencing weeks of the Real Nikki trying to break through the cracks in Wish Nikki’s exterior, cowering in terror as her midnight antics get more and more horrifying, and now being explicitly told that she is being held somewhere, he still prioritises his wish. Before hanging up the phone on the screams of the girl he wants us to believe that he loves.

With every scene, I think I can’t be more furious, and then the filmmakers show us the Real Nikki break through to beg Bear to kill her while Wish Nikki sleeps. And what does our Nice Boy say? “What is so bad about being with me?” From the very start of this film, Bear centres himself while the whims of his wishes torture everyone else around him. Even in death, he releases the real Nikki only to leave her with the consequences and destruction her torturer caused. While Nikki may be the only survivor of our main cast at the end of the film, I can’t help but wonder what state she has been left in. Surrounded by the dead bodies of her friends, her own flesh mutilated, and her memories a prison of her abuse.

As the credits began to roll and we were left with the looping audio of Nikki screaming, I couldn’t help but think of all the women around the world who might have escaped, somehow survived, those who are thought of as “the lucky ones”, and were somehow still left with the consequences their abusers should’ve been facing.

I was left haunted by this film; I couldn’t stop talking about it to people who hadn’t even seen it, and I spent hours watching every grainy edit of Nikki on TikTok. Just when I thought I wasn’t ready to plunge myself into another horror movie anytime soon, I was told I must see Backrooms. As someone who single-handedly has made it their mission to see that cinema survives, I booked myself an early morning ticket and was sat in the reclined leather chairs at the Vue before you can say “fuck AI”.

While our main woman of this story was undoubtedly put through hell by Clark (the image of her being chased around those never-ending corridors gave me such an unsettling feeling in my stomach, and I’m not sure exactly why I found it so scary, but I did), I was relieved to see Dr Mary’s escape be more hopeful than that our Nikki was subjected to. As Dr Mary, after trying to therapise and coach Clark out of his own self-destructive habits, finally gives in and tells him that he can choose to stay trapped if that’s the path he chose for himself. It’s upon this relief of giving up on Clark that Pirate Clark enters. Sending Clark’s wife, Barbara, fleeing into the wall like a bug scattering under a lifted rock, shocking Mary into action as she cuts herself free from the chair, and Clark, torn apart in the arms of his giant pirate self. While I’m aware that describing this film to anyone who hasn’t seen it makes me sound like I’ve taken LSD and gone around a cheap fairgrounds haunted house ride, I was taken aback by the beautiful imagery in this scene. Depicting Clark’s refusal to heal and willingness to be stuck where he is, as Satan Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya, gave such a visceral image of how destructive this mindset is, and how it quite literally eats you alive. The story, tone and characters may be completely different to that of Obsession, but the thread that when a man refuses to heal and consider others, a woman often pays the price, was strung so tightly my hands felt bound to my cinema chair.

Horror is on an absolutely generational run these last few years, and I can hope it continues, not just because it makes for gripping viewing; but because the genre is essential to telling the story of womanhood. I’m aware womanhood is more layered and nuanced than our pain and our worst days, but for too long it has been reduced to rom-coms and “chick-flicks”, and surely there must be a place in the world of cinema for women’s stories to exist within both? If the young filmmakers coming through now are anything to go off, I think we can be excited at that being a real possibility.

In a sea of young people holding up their phones to the sky, the 67-year-old was throwing her whole body to the beat, arms up in the air, no death grip to a phone, just a woman who had been told she needs to age gracefully for half of her life, showing more liveliness than hundreds of thousands of younger people surrounding her.

Nearly 3 months on from this, she has just dropped her long-anticipated album, Confession II. An album full of huge dancefloor fillers, trance hooks, and a Sabrina Carpenter collaboration; where she has a clear message for us: she wants us to get up and dance.

A command that rings deeper in 2026, as we are now living in a world where nightlife is dying, if not already dead. Even in my home city, the capital, London, the city does not come alive in a way that I was promised it would when I was growing up. Yes, you’ll see finance bros and girls spilling out of a pub every Thursday throughout the summer, but that culture seems bound to the pavement of their nearest office pub, before abruptly ending by 11 pm when they have to stumble their way home before the last train leaves them behind in this ghost town. Ever since COVID-19, it seems nightlife has been on life support, with London alone losing 20% of its venues operating past midnight.

Socially, nightlife is not a part of the cultural language in the way it was in the 00s, when going clubbing on a Friday or (sometimes and) a Saturday would be a regular occurrence in your calendar. Bars, clubs and pubs would be cleared out by people from all backgrounds across the whole island before they clocked into work at 9 am on Monday, leaving all their weekend activities at the door.

People are just not going out the way they used to; clubs are closing left, right and centre, and silence is becoming such a new norm across our city that the Mayor is having to handle noise complaints in the once beating heart that was Soho.

But why is that? It would be ignorant to ignore the economic factors at play here. To put it simply, people don’t have money to, quite literally, piss up the wall anymore. We’re not spending money on clubbing; clubs aren’t making money, so clubs have to close down, so there are fewer clubs to go to, and when you also account for the fact that young people are not buying houses, there are no house parties as an alternative. The cycle seems almost too obvious even someone with as little grasp on economics as I have can make sense of it.

Without ignoring all of that, I think there’s another layer to explore here, beyond the economics; we can also find a link between the death of nightlife and the rise in the Far Right. You would have to be living under a rock to have not been aware, conscious, and somewhat terrified, of the way politics in the West has taken a sharp turn to the right since COVID-19. In fact, it has become so rapidly normalised that we have our reigning Labour government U-turning on previously held “progressive” beliefs in an attempt to scavenge some Reform votes. As a part of this shift in the cultural landscape, we’ve been plundered back into a heavy-handed push for “traditional family values” with trad-wives becoming the new glamorous aesthetic to aspire to, and puritiy culture sweeping Gen Z. The shocking study that found that 31% of Gen Z men believe a wife should always obey her husband, illuminating us to the horrible truth that Gen-Z may not be quite be the generation who would liberate us from hatred, discrimination and inequality, that we hoped they would be.

As crucial as economic turmoil is to the issue of dying nightlife, the cultural backdrop we are living in cannot be ignored because it is this landscape that determines what is and isn’t acceptable, relevant or popular in our society. And a society that is poor and focused on pushing traditional family values is not going to be one that will support its people, especially the women, in an environment like a nightclub, typically perceived as sordid and loose. You only have to look at the way Madonna has been treated for refusing to grow old graciously, to get an idea of how the patriarchy would benefit from keeping women from getting together and moving their bodies freely. To dance means to control your body, to use your body autonomy for your personal joy.

But if we’re not at the club? Where are we? Well, if you look around you’ll see we are at the club; the run clubs, the book clubs, the pottery clubs; it seems productivity culture has filled the gap that nightclubs left. Now, I don’t think this is inherently a bad thing, because at its core it’s an attempt to foster community and creativity, and it does offer an alternative to those who have never been interested in nightlife. Which is an important thing. I guess my worries arise when we see nightlife dying, and our alternatives are only ones that prioritise productivity. It feels like the anxiety of the unforgiving economy has bled into young people’s hobbies and is pushing them to be constantly in a state of wanting to maximise in every way possible. Even something as simple as reading, a wonderful hobby and skill I would encourage everyone to engage with, has been rebranded into “personal curriculum”. It’s not that these events and hobbies are becoming more popular; that is the issue; it is that it is not happening in a vacuum; it is happening in the context of our cultural climate.

There will always be people who don’t want to go clubbing, who have no desire for a dancefloor, and it is not those people who I worry for. My concerns lie with young people who really need the community of a dancefloor, the release of cringe and discovery of self that isn’t measured or prioritised for maximum shareholder interest. Particularly for the LGBTQIA+ community, which has historically found so much relief, safety and expression in the nightlife scene; for us, clubbing wasn’t just a weekend pastime, it was integral to our being.

And while alcohol and drugs may be a common part of that environment, I don’t believe that is the heart of what makes nightlife special. In fact, most of the nights I hope to remember on my deathbed are ones I could actually remember the next day. The night I heard Hung Up played in G.A.Y HEAVEN on the embankment and the DJ mixed it in with Voulez Vous, my first public gay kiss, the week Beyoncé dropped Lemonade, and we were just shaking with excitement the whole night waiting for the DJ to play Formation, and when he did, the room erupted with such energy that I thought the floor was going to collapse beneath me. The dance floor is such a specific flavour of community and relief, and ironically, when it is dying, I think it is when many of us need it most. In a world that feels stiff, our bodies need to move. Where our hearts feel like they need to be kept safely in our chests, they need to be pressed against another’s. When our minds feel small, they need the illumination of a disco ball to light the way. We need the dance floor, just as we need each other, and on those sticky floors we can harmonise with the music and create a vision for the world we want.

Madonna creating a dance album in 2026 is no coincidence. The world needs to dance. And as she showed us at Coachella, Madonna is always ready to be the one to charge us to the dance floor. Let’s hope the rest of the world heeds this call.

I show up 10 minutes late. A habit I haven’t been able to quite break in my 20s, but any real cinema-goer knows: the first 15 minutes are adverts, the next 10 minutes are trailers, then the final 5 are in-house plugs or those strange navy propagandas. So I don’t rush, I take my time and get my coffee. I look around the empty lobby and remember the first time I went to the cinema without parental supervision. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, but it must have been primary school because the girl I went with stops appearing in my memories once I get to secondary school. I remember how busy the cinema lobby was in my hometown, how we stole Pic ' N Mix from the concession stand, and how my dad didn’t actually know we were going unsupervised. That feels another world away now, and I mean, I guess it technically is, but as I head into the showing of Toy Story 5, I think of all the birthdays that lead to this one.

I think particularly about the decade I’m leaving behind. The years I was told would be the best of my life. My 20s. My prime. My glory days. That’s the way they sell it, isn’t it? Well, to women at least. That all life begins and ends in the youth of your 20s, that everything that comes after simply cannot compare. This beautiful, vibrant, raunchy 10-year-long party slowly dances closer to a cliff edge every year. You feel it in constant questionings of “no plans to settle down yet?”, or when you watch female celebrities your age face a different kind of scrutiny, and given the current social climate, you can be on Twitter for less than a minute before finding someone ranting about how women decline from 25 years old, losing all their value. The messaging is everywhere, whether directly or indirectly, your 30s are the beginning of the end.

My end, however, nearly came much more prematurely. When I was 21, I nearly died in an accident that left me paralysed. It was only a week after my 21st birthday, the day I got my uni results, and seemingly, the beginning of my “prime”, and I found myself clawing in and out of consciousness on a stretcher in a corridor of an underfunded NHS hospital. Sick in my hair, broken shards of my T12 vertebrae piercing my spinal cord, and my legs no longer able to carry the weight of me, just when I was about to run straight into the best days of my life.

I often think of that day as one of the worst days of my life, but truthfully, most days that followed it took that crown again and again. Long, painful, gruelling days in rehab that started with a flurry of staff performing the basic tasks I used to do for myself without thinking. Before rolling from Occupational Therapy to Physiotherapy to Therapy Therapy, then finishing with the indignity of overhearing nurses discussing every detail of my body at the staff handover. On those days, I envied the day of my accident because at least on that day, there was still a chance I could have just died. Or the days after rehab, when I was housebound in my parents’ house. Days I slept away, because in those dreams, I was living in the glory days I was promised. Walking, running, dancing in my head while I left my body to waste here in this earthly bed.

I cannot remember exactly when life started to feel alive again. Somewhere between the 18-hour sleeps at my parents’ and now, I started to catch glimmers of it in the everyday. Like when we finally had our house adaptations done, and I took my first shower in 8 months, or when I passed my driving test, or when I went back to the gym. All of these little moments that eventually, over time, compelled me to stop sleeping away my life.

I moved to London in 2022 when I was 25, so by incel standards, I was plummeting in value by the second. But as I lost value to the patriarchy, it was this year that I really started to invest value into my life as one I was excited to live. After spending most of my 20s flirting with death, I had arrived to my mid-20s ready to learn how to live beyond survival. I learned that while I’ve had to become independent and capable, I’m not as solitary as I originally thought. I learned that most of the things I truly love and enjoy doing are interests from when I was a teenager. I learned that self-preservation above vulnerability is a false God. I learned that the reason I have an incredible village is that I am a loyal villager. I learned what I liked to read, what I like to eat and who I love to kiss. I entered this decade nearly dead, crawled through the brunt of it on bleeding hands and knees, not knowing what would be on the other side, or if there even would be one. While the patriarchy shouts that my life is dwindling with every ovary lost, I can only feel my world expanding and growing beyond such narrow constraints of age that treat an ageing woman’s life like a prison. I am finally ready to embrace and explore life with a confidence that only comes from believing you deserve it.

I often wonder if I would feel so alive today if I had not the hot breath of death on my neck, and the truth is, we’ll never truly know. But I think I know the answer, as I think of who I was as a teenager, and how I came to my 20s. A lost, often bratty, and sometimes sweet young woman who had no idea in less than a year she would be paralysed for the rest of her life. Something I used to say around the beginning of my recovery journey was “life comes at you fast”. Not an original saying, in fact, I think it’s a standard “how can I acknowledge the severity of my situation without scratching too far into the weight of it that it makes others uncomfortable” response my generation seems to have mastered. Well, I now believe it to be misguided; life doesn’t come at you, life comes from within you. Struggle, hardship, challenges - they come at you, and I guess you could argue they are a part of life. But as someone who has spent years excavating my soul for a reason to persevere to the next waking day, life in its purest form is the thing that fills your chest like blooming flowers and sets your brain aflame. The books you read, the opinions you ingest, the love you receive, and how you synthesise that back out into the world to make it more alive - that’s life. And it all comes from deep within you.

So, as I start on this fresh new page of a decade, I let go of the fear that society tries to drill into us, women. Because I know life does not end at 30, how can it when I fought so hard for it?

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But one of my aims for 2026 was to attend the theatre more. Perpetually frustrated by AI slop and alarmed by my rapidly shrinking attention span, I found myself drawn to experience art in a space that demanded my full attention without exception. Such a space is so far and few between now, even the cinema, which is one of my favourite places in the world, is not free of phones and distractions. I will defend cinema to anyone who will listen, and yet even I can’t deny that the day I had my Hamnet-induced sobbing interrupted by the person to my right googling “Did Shakespeare have twins in real life?” was a day even I struggled to fight the case of Cinemas over Streaming. So as I watch the “NO PHONES” sign waving politely in the air at the Ambassador’s Theatre, I feel a sense of excitement wash over me, like I am being strapped in for a real experience.

And an experience it was. I would like to classify myself as a seasoned horror fan. I don’t scare particularly easily, and yet I think I left claw marks in the bicep of my friend who was foolish enough to come with me. The play was a masterclass in set design, and without spoiling anything for you (as I do urge you to go see this show), what it was able to achieve narratively through using such a small space haunted me for days. Afterwards, I was harassing the ushers, trying to coax the secrets of the show out of them. The next day, I was detailing a particularly scary scene to my physio, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood to attention.

I had well and truly been bewitched by what I had seen. But it wasn’t just the action on stage that created this experience; something I believe was truly just as important was the feeling of being amongst a crowd that was gasping equally as loud as I was. That was also sharing theories about the second half during the interval, who also needed to take a second before leaving because they were gut-punched by the final 5 seconds. In a city of 9 million individuals, we shared a moment together that was as uniting as that perfect first day of fool’s spring.

That’s not to say this unifying feeling cannot be found elsewhere; to get back to my rightful position, of defending cinema for a second, it can absolutely be found there. In fact, I had a similar experience at the end of The Bone Temple this year. When Cillian Murphy burst back onto our screens at the end of the film, the legendary theme music from the 2002 classic igniting the cinema. These rare moments of shared experience shine when we let them, but it is becoming increasingly harder to.

We have been aware for a while that we do not have a monoculture anymore; watching niche YouTube videos or shows across 4-5 different streaming services while simultaneously scrolling an algorithm curated just For You. It does create a particularly strong case for the argument that we are losing the art of sharing spaces and experiences in the offline world.

The theatre may not exist as a utopia, where the worst parts of social media are erased, and everyone is living in harmony. It can be incredibly inaccessible, both in price point and in disabled access. Leaving many young and working-class people feeling like they are not welcome in the space, while disabled theatre lovers are often left out of both old and new spaces. In October last year, I had to leave The Hunger Games on Stage before the show had even begun, because I couldn’t see any of the stage from the wheelchair bay. Not only was that experience isolating and embarrassing, but what was equally as hurtful was the response from a lot of people (particularly so-called theatre lovers) online who found a way to blame me for daring to be in the space that I paid to be in.

Theatre is not perfect, and it absolutely has a lot of work to do if it is going to survive the rapidly changing modern world, and welcome in new audiences. But I think there is a lot to be learnt from the power those rooms still hold, and especially the magic of seeing a story unfold in front of you, under beaming lights, with no way to edit out a mistake. Sharing that with a group of people before they wander off into the crowded streets of Soho is truly something special indeed.

From page one, I immediately fell into Mary Shelley’s dark, gothic world and in the dramatic way only a pre-teen can, I started to see myself reflected in the story. I read and watched the creature battle with the ego of his creator and felt the rough pages turn into a cold, hard mirror in my hands. For the first time in my life, someone had put pen to paper about the feelings I could not name, and had reflected to me an ugly truth that would haunt me for years to come.

I think my mother hates me.

But parents didn’t hate their children, did they? Mothers loved their children, didn’t they? If that was true, why did I feel this connection to this creature, this repulsive creation born of ego and hubris? What was it about my very being in her presence that felt unnatural? Was there something wrong in the way I was made, or the way I was held in her arms? I couldn’t say, but this epiphany sent me off on a journey of discovery.

Before discovery, however, must come liberation, and I estranged myself from my mother when I was just 15 years old. Years after those seeds were planted in that English class, and yet still so young that the absence of a mother could be felt in every cell of my body. Missing something I never had, I enviously watched friends get bathed in maternal love, forgiven for every sin and allowed to write their stories from a blank slate. My story, however, felt like it was being written from the ink of her stolen pen.

Despite the distance I had put between us physically, I felt this tie between us like a haunting. I tried to outrun her presence looming over my shoulder, I screamed until my lungs burst, hoping to cover up her distant footsteps, I pushed my feelings to the side and intellectualised my suffering like the case notes of a sleeping patient. Nothing I did could prevent the inevitable, and it came to me one day as I found myself manipulating a boyfriend who quietly frankly would’ve given me the world without persuasion; this was not a haunting, but a possession.

I had come to see myself as something unnatural, and so I spent the foundational years of my life carrying such a rot inside of me; I believed those who came too close could smell it permeating through my skin. I would feel the black bile gushing up my oesophagus into the mouths of those more tender than I when they tried to take me into their embrace. I felt too monstrous to be fully embraced and loved, and my experiences with men only tightened the albatross around my neck. Every attempt to let the blood from this hateful heart just proved to me that there was a stench of death on my breath and a life sentence that had been signed before I was even Earthside.

Like all sick, monstrous women, I had sent myself away. I thought that if I could academically understand the war raging inside me, then my suffering would cease. Like naming a demon to disarm its power, I thought if I could study psychology, if I could understand what had caused her behaviour, it might release me from repeating such patterns. Like all good girls from Catholic school, I studied, I read beyond my syllabus, I rejected the distractions and the temptations of the flesh, and I would be in the bed of my uni dorm at 10 pm to be rested for a 9 am lecture while my peers partied around me. I had always been told I was a good student, a clever girl, and yet in this pursuit of the truth of the very centre of my heart, being intelligent and obedient was not getting me very far.

The insight I was searching for would never be found in a textbook, no matter how many important words I highlighted. I could study attachment style and debate nature vs nurture till I was blue in the face, but it would never cure the aching that comes from being built on sinking foundations. The only thing that can begin to do that is people.

Making friends at uni wasn't something that came quite as naturally to me as it did to others, but when I finally allowed myself to be seen fully, I realised others allowed me to see them, too. Around the sticky tables of student bars, or on the cold walks home at 3 am, I started to learn that I wasn’t the only person in the world to be estranged from their mother. I had felt alone for years, believing that this just wasn’t something that happened to people, and yet, here I was. Making friends who could relate, the details of our cases differed, but they taught me an important lesson: families are complicated, and sometimes the ones you share blood with are not the ones most worthy of your love.

I’m 29 today, this weekend was my 13th Mother's Day estranged, and I spent it with a friend I made at uni, with such wholeness that I even forgot what day it was. I’m in a very different place in my life than when I was 15, 18, and even 25, and I look back on the last 14 years of my life with such empathy for every version of myself, even the ones I wouldn’t want to be today. It took such violence to become this soft. I have ripped out the ugliest, deepest parts of myself to plant flowers, and I can only hope that I continue to bloom so boldly that I might be the humanity that helps someone else suture their wounds. So that maybe one day they can spend days that used to haunt them, under the sun, with friends, also forgetting what that strange feeling deep in their gut used to be.

If you were asking me in casual conversation… ”It’s just so much cheaper” is what I’d say. That’s not a lie. My new apartment is much cheaper, and I managed to negotiate 8 weeks free rent, which, if I ever want to save enough for a deposit, is an irrefutable offer.

But if we’re being completely honest, it was more than just the visions of a healthy savings account. In truth, over those two years of independent living, I had found myself growing painfully lonely. A feeling I didn’t anticipate. Firstly, because it had always been a dream of mine to live alone in the city. Growing up in Essex, I would walk to school, daydreaming, with the earphones of my dad’s CD walkman in my ear, imagining a life where I was rushing from tube to tube and coming home after work to nothing but the sound of my records.

Secondly, because it’s not like I am alone. I speak to my parents everyday, I see my friends weekly and having a platform online, I physically can’t keep up with the messages I receive daily. And yet there was a little tear inside me that I could feel rupturing each day.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t home alone crying into a tub of Ben & Jerry’s every night, but I did find that my spark was dulling, things I enjoyed lost their appeal, and I became very addicted to my phone (that’s a story for another time). But this decline was so subtle that I didn’t notice what the problem was until the autumn of 2025, when I found myself engrossed in the silhouettes of the people living in the apartments across from mine. I would watch these strangers’ lives play out from across the street. I observed them as they would make dinner, study, argue, and I’d even notice when they went on holiday. I saw the intimacy of life in their homes, and I realised it was not a reflection.

In fact, it felt more like looking back at what my home used to feel like when I lived with my best friend. You see, before I lived alone in London, I lived with my best friend in our dream apartment for two years. Those were the two best years of my life. But life happens, and things change. So, while still best friends, he moved in with his partner on the other side of the city, while I moved on to live alone.

And I can’t lie, having your friends go on to live with their partners while you’re paying the single tax, it did make me start to think, “is that what I’m missing? Do I just need to find a girlfriend?”

That’s when I started to have the moral conundrum - shouldn’t I be more independent than this? Most women before me never even got the opportunity to live alone, and here I was, wasting that opportunity, thinking back to when I had a man in my home (a gay man, yes, but you get the point). I started to feel like a fraud for every post I ever made encouraging other women to do things alone. Not to mention the guilt I felt for being lucky enough to actually be able to afford to live alone in London in 2025.

In all honesty, it was a complete earthquake to who I thought myself to be, and what I thought I wanted for my life. Those glossy daydreams of being a chic, independent woman felt completely naive. So one morning, after a night of restless sleep, I sat down and reevaluated what I needed for my life, because something had to change.

I pondered the relationship question, but decided that although it might be nice to be in love one day, that wasn’t the intimacy or connection that was so desperately missing from my life. I realised that living alone, working alone, I just needed more passing human connection. While I have my team, I text daily, I’m not seeing colleagues every day, I’m not delving into office gossip, and I’m not getting those water cooler moments that are so integral to our daily relationships. Ironically, working in social media, is not very social at all.

I realised, I think I could be ok living alone in these four walls, if my needs were met in other ways. Because I didn’t completely hate living alone (sorry I clickbaited you on the title), I still had good days in my quiet little flat, but I just had more days that I felt completely ambivalent towards my life there. Like it was merely a hotel, rather than a warm home. And didn’t I deserve more than that?

As for the feminist conundrum, I thought more about that, too. I realised that if my ideas of myself and my needs could change, maybe my ideas of feminism could (& should) change too! Maybe my concept of feminism had become a little too moulded by the GirlBoss culture of the 2010s (it would make sense given that’s when I grew up). Maybe I didn’t have to stand alone to stand proudly, and that, maybe, immersing myself in a community to pour from and into could be even more beneficial to feminism? Maybe other women felt different, needed something else, wanted that more individual life, and maybe that was ok, but it wasn’t for me. I knew that now.

So what did I do? Well, as you know, I did move. I moved West to be closer to a lot of my friends, and more than that, the stars aligned, and I now find myself neighbours with my best friend again. While I may still have the comfort and independence of living alone, just down the hall is the community and connection that I had been missing.

It’s not a forever home, not a permanent solution, but it is a lesson and reminder to me that you are allowed to change your mind on what you want for your life. That needing connection is not a weakness, but a necessary tool in a world that is trying to divide us further and use our loneliness as a weapon.

If you feel the roots inside you start to shift, when you feel them clawing at your insides, follow where they want to take you, plant them where they will grow - even if it’s not the garden you had in mind. The bloom might be even more beautiful than what you had originally planned for.

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