It was one of those beautiful Auckland winter days: clear blue sky and blazing sunshine. I skipped across the shells and surprised myself by breaking into a sprint along the water’s edge, a massive grin on my face. Heart hammering, I stopped at Duck Island to treat myself to an ice cream – salted caramel cacao crumb.

Back home, I couldn’t face an afternoon stuck in the dull winter’s gloom of my living room, so I packed my laptop and went out in search of somewhere more inviting.

The Strand Wine Bar nailed the brief. Warm and cosy, sultry jazz playing, and candles dripping wax down the necks of old wine bottles. I ordered myself a glass of Malbec and a side of warm baguette with smoked butter, studded with chunky gems of rock salt.

It felt like exactly the right place to think about pleasure.

Why I started thinking about pleasure

The Pleasure Project came about because I kept hearing versions of the same story from my female friends. So many of them are exhausted. Burned out, or hovering dangerously close to it. These are intelligent, beautiful, wonderful women and they are struggling. Their days are an endless treadmill of modern life’s demands: work, childcare, life admin and logistics, money.

Having gone through burnout myself, I feel deeply for these women. Because the scales have tipped so far to the ‘must do’ and ‘should do’ side, that joy, play and fun have disappeared. Research bears out what I have been noticing. Typically, women put others’ needs ahead of their own, and prioritise “doing the right thing over being happy, whereas men are better at the pursuit of pleasure and hedonism.” The result? Women are twice as likely as men to experience depression.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve discovered the importance of pleasure for my own wellbeing and enjoyment of life. And I’ve been passionately sharing the news.

But what kind of pleasure?

Then I read Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation and began to wonder if I’d got it all wrong. Because in it, Lembke explains how the quick hits of short-term reward that we are surrounded by in modern life deplete and damage us.

Had I been kidding myself that pleasure was important – scratch that, essential – to a good life? Not quite. An article published earlier this year in the scientific journal Nature took a radical look at the importance of good-quality pleasure for wellbeing, relationships, and overall quality of life.

Pleasure is not a shallow add-on to life. In fact, the research suggests that pleasure helps create meaning. Meaning is the feeling that your life isn’t just happening to you. It’s the difference between feeling energised by life and just getting through your days until the next break.

Positive experiences expand us in so many ways. Building our reserves to regulate stress, widening and strengthening our social connections, and growing our resilience. They also expand our perspective. When we’re overwhelmed, we often retreat to our own personal bubble of worry and anxiety. Pleasure helps pop the bubble.

Unsurprisingly, studies on happiness and life satisfaction suggest that life is simply better with regular boosts of positive emotion, social connection, and time in a flow state. In short: pleasure.

Pleasure is not (just) hedonism

I’m not suggesting we abandon all responsibility and pursue a life of pure hedonism.

“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.”

― Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

But I do believe that many of us could do with redressing the balance, pulling back from self-punishing duty and leaning into intentional joy.

Not all pleasure is equal. Dopamine Nation taught me that the quality and texture of our pleasure matters. The quick dopamine from the likes of scrolling, shopping, or processed food can leave us feeling more depleted, rather than nourished.

Getting curious about pleasure

When I started working on The Pleasure Project, my intention was simple: to focus on a different activity in each article – pottery in one, sea swimming in another – creating a menu of potential new hobbies you might like to try. But that changed as I started speaking to the women you’ll hear from in the series. What got me really curious was the guilt and shame often surrounding enjoyment, and the way each woman’s chosen pleasure seemed to meet a need that was missing elsewhere in her life.

That led me to the research I mentioned earlier, showing that women often prioritise doing the right thing over being happy, while men tend to give themselves greater permission to pursue pleasure. Over time, this imbalance can cause resentment in relationships, a pattern I’ve seen play out in the lives of many women around me.

A nutrient, not a vice

If there’s one thing I hope you take from this series, it’s this: the ‘good kind’ of pleasure, in moderation, is a nutrient, not a vice. Regular experiences of delight, play, rest, eroticism, art, laughter, movement, and social warmth are not an add-on, but an essential part of a healthy, meaningful, well-lived life.

Thank you to all the women who generously shared their stories with me for The Pleasure Project.

Enjoy. x

References and further reading

Akbari, Anna. “Indulgent Balance.” Psychology Today, 20 June 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/nz/blog/startup-your-life/201806/indulgent-balance

Dowthwaite, Lowri. “Men and women experience happiness differently – here’s why.” The Conversation, 20 November 2018, https://theconversation.com/men-and-women-experience-happiness-differently-heres-why-104507

Nielsen, Tessa. “The Science of Happiness.” https://specialisedhealth.com.au/, https://specialisedhealth.com.au/the-science-of-happiness/

Ray, Julie. “Research Demystifies the Gender Gap in Life Satisfaction.” Gallup News, 13 October 2022, https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/402839/research-demystifies-gender-gap-life-satisfaction.aspx

ScienceDirect. “Building a science of human pleasure, meaning making, and flourishing.” Neuron, vol. 112, no. 9, 2024, pp. 1392-1396. ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627324002009

The Invite is a dinner party where no dinner is eaten, and a sex party where no sex is had.

This film had me curled up in my seat in discomfort, half-hiding my eyes, yet unable to look away. The performances, the script, the colour palette, the set, the use of windows and mirrors as a silent fifth character, the humour, the awkwardness, the sexiness: I loved all of it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I went back to the cinema to watch it again – and I can count on one hand how many times I’ve done that in my life.

For this blog, I often have a specific woman in mind when I write. She has a husband, kids, and a career. And somewhere along the way, in slow motion, her relationship lost its spark. More than that, she and her husband now feel like housemates. Or perhaps even strangers, who happen to know each other’s passwords.

The Invite does something incredible. Over the course of a single evening, in a single apartment, it shows us in real time how warmth and connection can disappear from a long-term relationship.

See Me

The film’s director Olivia Wilde and Seth Rogen play Angela and Joe, a married couple who invite their upstairs neighbours, Hawk and Piña, played by Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz, over for dinner in their newly renovated apartment.

Angela is an art school grad turned stay-at-home mum, whose life is consumed by the interior design of their apartment. When the neighbours arrive, they compliment her on the care she has clearly taken on the renovations. Her emotional reaction makes it clear that she hasn’t received any recognition for her creative efforts and taste – key parts of her identity – for a long time.

While Joe and Piña smoke a joint together, Angela gives Hawk a tour of the apartment. In the bedroom, the two draw close and speak passionately, with palpable desire about… paint swatches on the wall. As Angela settles on her decision, Hawk tells her “You knew. You just needed someone to tell you what you knew.” He validates her, recognises her, gives her back some of the confidence she once had.

The erotic charge isn’t really about physical attraction, at least from Angela’s side. It comes from who she gets to be with him. Hawk shows her curiosity and admiration. She comes alive with the attention he gives her.

It’s really a continuation of a scene that is described rather than shown, where Angela enjoys walking past a window naked after she showers, knowing that Hawk could be watching her from his apartment upstairs. Being seen is a powerful aphrodisiac. It’s a stark contrast to her husband, who no longer sees her as a person, let alone a sexual partner.

The cinematography and set do a lot of heavy lifting here – mirrors and windows repeatedly reinforce the importance of being truly seen in a relationship, while apartment walls, split screens, and framing physically divide Angela and Joe, even when they’re in the same room.

The opposite of desire isn’t a lack of sex, the film seems to suggest, but feeling invisible in your own relationship.

Play With Me

The other thing that keeps a long-term relationship alive, The Invite argues, is play. Silliness, laughter, novelty, delight. The first things to disappear when life gets busy.

The Invite is beautifully book-ended with scenes of Joe and Angela playing the piano. In the first – a scene from Joe’s memory – they fumble the notes, laughing together. In the present, Joe slams the lid angrily when Hawk touches the same piano. Play is no longer allowed in this house. By the end of the film, Joe and Angela are reunited at the piano. Only now, there is no laughter. Joe is visibly ashamed and frustrated as he stumbles over the keys, while tears fall silently down Angela’s face.

Hawk and Piña provide the obvious contrast. Confident and at ease, they touch one another constantly, they hold eye contact, they turn towards and show genuine interest in each other. They have fun together.

It’s only when Joe is alone with Piña that we see him come alive again. It’s the first time we hear him laugh. Listening to music, joking around, doing silly dance moves, in pure delight.

The only time we see Angela and Joe light and playful together is when they discover that their upstairs neighbours host sex parties. Because suddenly there is novelty and possibility. It’s a thrill, a shared spark.

Later on, Hawk explains to the group why he adopted that name, in a speech improvised by Norton. He describes his relationship with his late wife, who tried to share her fantasies with him – to reveal a more sensual, playful part of herself. He shut her down and suppressed her. In the end, she stopped trying to connect.

This is the cautionary tale of The Invite. One person reaches out and reaches out, and eventually stops.

Choose Me

The third warning The Invite gives us is the most mundane. It is the danger of getting so lost in family logistics and domesticity that we stop making the effort to connect to our partner with warmth. Intimacy isn’t the result of having a child together or sharing a joint bank account. It is an active, intentional practice.

The very first words of dialogue after the opening credits come from Angela, as Joe arrives home from work. Not “Hello, darling” or “How was your day?” but a sharp “Shoes off, please!” While Angela curls her eyelashes in the bathroom mirror, Joe comes in to use the toilet.

Angela tells Joe the neighbours are coming over for dinner with an annoyed “I told you yesterday, remember?” They bicker constantly, with contempt, moving onto a new argument halfway through the previous one. Their bickering is underscored by the frenetic strings of the soundtrack.

The intimacy and intrigue of early romance are totally gone.

The visuals reinforce the message. We constantly see Joe and Angela placed opposite one another, shown facing the camera in alternating shots, or marooned at either end of the frame, completely apart.

Their apartment and clothes are all cool blues and greens. Whereas the chemistry between Joe and Piña is underscored by the orange glow of the lit joint, the smoke and sultry soul music.

Piña, like Hawk, has learned relationship lessons from her own mistakes. What went wrong in her marriage?

“We stopped having sex. Then we stopped talking. People forget they deserve better.”

As Angela and Joe’s marriage comes to a sombre end, my heart broke for Joe when he asked the room “How much effort do I put into having sex with someone who is supposed to want to have sex with me?” Another reminder that intimacy doesn’t maintain itself. It can’t survive the domestic day-to-day without intentional effort from both partners.

After the Credits

The Invite is a feast for the eyes. It’s one of those films where you could pause on any frame and it would tell a story through space, light and colour alone. Wilde knocked it out of the park with her direction.

Beyond its visual beauty, what completely drew me in was the way it captured the slow erosion of intimacy, desire and connection in a long-term relationship. Not through one dramatic betrayal, but through hundreds of ordinary moments, just as so often happens in real life. The iconic psychotherapist Esther Perel acted as a consultant for the film, and it shows.

What stayed with me most was Piña’s final observation to Angela and Joe:

“We only get a few chances for meaningful relationships in life.”

On my first watch, I heard it as permission to let go. Life is short. Sometimes the bravest, kindest thing two people can do – for each other, and often for their children – is to part ways. As someone who did just that, I felt validated by Piña’s words.

But I think there’s another truth in it too. If you’re lucky enough to find one of those rare, meaningful relationships, it’s worth pouring your heart and soul into protecting it. Truly seeing one another, with admiration and ongoing curiosity. Making space for play, novelty and delight. Choosing warmth and connection, over and over, even as everyday life grinds you down.

The Invite doesn’t suggest these things alone can save a relationship. But it does remind us that holding onto intimacy takes mutual effort, and that a good relationship is a practice.

I’d been a good girl for so long. As a wife, a mum, an employee, a daughter. I didn’t even do the rebellious teenage phase, so I seriously needed to make up for lost time. Now I craved – and did – anything that felt energising, freeing or indulgent.

And it worked. I feel more alive than ever. My mum said I looked younger.

At the same time, something else was happening. My attention span was collapsing. In Teams meetings I’d be checking my phone or opening a new tab to read the news. At home, my screen time crept up and up.

My four-year-old is being trained too

I told myself it was okay, because I always looked up when my four-year-old daughter called for me. But what about all the times she saw me having to look up? What about the times she didn’t ask for my attention at all, because she could see I was on my phone?

For a long time, mornings with her have been a battleground. Unlike when she’s with her dad, with me she’s not allowed TV before daycare. Despite this rule always having been in place (with me), she still asks every morning – and still has a meltdown when I say no.

She’s a smart cookie, and she knows my weak spots. First she tried asking for “educational” TV. Then she figured out that she gets TV if I take a nap. So on Sunday, I listened with equal parts amusement and horror as she “kindly” suggested I looked tired and should have a rest… so she could watch Peppa Pig.

She is growing up in a very different world to the one I did. And now I’m trying not just to rebuild my own cognitive health, but to protect hers too. We’re both being trained by the same system, after all.

In an attempt to rehabilitate my attention span, I picked up Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke and started following Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

To my surprise, I started to see a connection between the kind of pleasure I’d been leaning into and my inability to resist my phone.

A tale of two dopamines

As the two authors argue, not all pleasure is the same. Some of it makes me feel more alive, more like myself. Dancing. Movement. Music. Being in my body, in the moment. These restore me.

But some forms of dopamine make me feel an odd combination of flat and still wanting more. An hour sapped by Instagram isn’t energising, it’s depleting.

Manson argues that we shouldn’t even be aiming for pleasure (”what will make me happy?”) but instead for meaning and purpose (”what am I willing to struggle for?”). At first, that felt a bit depressing. I’ve been struggling for ages. Isn’t it my turn to get some joy?

I’ve become an advocate for pleasure, particularly for women, who are so often consumed by all the must-do’s and should-do’s that we rarely get to the want-to-do’s. I thought I was doing something good, something rebellious, by reclaiming pleasure in Act II of life.

Did I get it all wrong? Not exactly. But both Lembke and Manson argue that the more you rely on quick hits of pleasure, the harder it becomes to feel satisfied by anything slower or steadier.

The issue isn’t pleasure itself. It’s the activities that are highly stimulating, always available, and easy to repeat. Today, that often looks like social media, short-form videos, the phones themselves, online shopping, ultra-processed food, pornography, and easily-accessible drugs and alcohol.

The joys that ask something of me

Lots of the things that bring me joy – dance class (even when I mess up the choreography), writing (even when I delete my last two hours’ work and start again), baking bread (with mixed results) – ask something of me.

Others – slow yoga, listening to music, being in love – feel nourishing and connecting.

I think about my work. It makes sense that I wasn’t satisfied in my previous job, kept burning out, and wasn’t at my pinnacle of creativity or effectiveness. I just couldn’t summon up the care or meaning I needed.

I think about my core values. I used to be deeply involved in campaigning for women’s equality – protests, volunteering, writing, paid work. I stepped away from it when my daughter was born, because having a baby took up all my care and attention. But recently, I’ve been missing it – having something to stand for, so I’ve been dipping a toe into getting involved again.

First-generation parents in the attention economy

Back at home, my daughter’s dolls and puzzles lie untouched while she asks for her 32nd rewatch of Demon Hunters. I don’t want to remove or deny her joy. But I also don’t want her wired for constant stimulation.

As a first-generation parent in this environment – engineered for comfort, convenience and endless entertainment – there isn’t a clear guide for how to navigate this. Especially when I’m addicted to my own little rectangle.

Manson makes the point that this isn’t about laziness or lack of discipline. These systems are expertly designed to keep us hooked. Each quick hit makes us a little more dependent on the next one. Apparently we’re all on the addiction spectrum now.

Saying no to your inner child

I definitely don’t have all the answers. But there are a few things I’m experimenting with.

The first is accepting that willpower isn’t the solution. We’re not meant to resist temptation all day long. So instead, I’m trying to change my environment. When I get home I’m putting my phone “two doors away” – in a drawer, in the bedroom. Deleting the most depleting apps. In short: create friction wherever you can.

The author of Dopamine Nation says that limiting or reducing access isn’t enough, though. We have to actually pause the habit. That means rather than trying to use your phone “a bit less”, stepping away from it entirely for periods of time. And, annoyingly, it won’t even feel good. You won’t get a blissful feeling of calm or clarity. You will feel discomfort. Restless. Itchy. The urge to forget this stupid experiment and reach for the phone.

And that’s not failure, it’s “the nervous system recalibrating”. Great.

It’s hard to hold the line for a four-year-old whose brain is geared for instant gratification. But I can deal with her meltdowns. Honestly, my own inner child is harder to deal with. I tell myself stories. “It’ll just be for ten minutes”. “I just need to check one thing”.

Escaping the quick-fix dopamine spiral

I know the best thing to do would be to eat a meal without distraction, to be in the moment and focus on the taste of the food. For now, I’m taking baby steps, starting with reading a book with breakfast rather than defaulting to Instagram. To be honest, that’s what I did as an analogue nineties kid anyway.

If you’re serious about escaping the quick-fix dopamine spiral, Manson and Lembke recommend slower, more tactile, absorbing activities: reading, walking, cooking. And doing things with your hands: writing, sculpting clay, sewing, gardening.

In time (painful, uncomfortable, itchy time), doing more of these, and less of the intense, frequent and addictive activities, will reset your baseline.

Choose your pleasure with care

I don’t regret a second of my pleasure-chasing adventures over the last two-and-a-bit years. It has genuinely been a blast. For me, pleasure was a way of attending to needs that hadn’t been met for a very long time: vitality, freedom, and the sense of being fully myself.

And that got me wondering about what other women were doing for pleasure - to nourish their minds and bodies – and what unmet needs these pleasures were serving.

So I decided to ask them.

In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, bell hooks offers an explanation. She argues that many of the qualities women most long for in intimate relationships – sensitivity, emotional presence, the ability to share feelings – are the very qualities we train boys out of from an early age.

Because despite the persistent belief that we raise boys and girls the same, we really don’t. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard, “I’ve raised her gender-neutral – she just really loves pink!”...

hooks cites research suggesting that baby boys not only cry longer and louder than girls, but are comforted and responded to less. Long before they can explain how they feel, before they can even walk, talk, or eat solids, baby boys are already being given the message about which feelings are welcome and which are not. Whether we mean to or not.

The cost of standing out

The book reminded me of a discussion I had with a boyfriend, back in my twenties, about whether I would change my name if we got married. I put the question back to him: ‘How about you change your surname to mine instead?’

His reaction was an immediate, visceral recoil. He leapt straight to the open derision he’d get from his dad, then onto the less open but still palpable disrespect he’d feel from his friends. His personal thoughts were all but irrelevant. The social cost to him was unbearable, the cost of deviation too high.

Years ago, men who took paternity leave in Scandinavia were mocked as “latte pappas” – until paid parental leave became mandatory for both parents. It took structural change to shift cultural expectations. Time and time again, we see that it isn’t enough to simply make a different choice as an individual.

Which is why I think even parents who genuinely support gender equality can find themselves reproducing the very norms they disagree with.

If you asked my friends with sons what they want for their boys when they grow up, I suspect most would agree they want them to be emotionally healthy, capable of asking for help, fully involved as parents, and free from restrictive gender roles.

Yet at the same time, they don’t want their sons bullied in the playground.

So even the people who most want to dismantle the system keep perpetuating it.

The shame reflex

Personally, I find it pretty hot when a man is moved to tears by love, beauty, gratitude, or tenderness. Witnessing a man’s capacity to feel deeply, to stay present with those feelings and to share them deepens my sense of connection, which heightens attraction for me.

And yet even when I’ve said this sincerely, and repeatedly, it hasn’t always been believed.

I know not every woman responds the same way. Some women don’t react well to their partner crying. hooks has a theory about why. If a woman’s role is to ensure her partner feels loved and secure – and that’s a big if, but stay with it for a moment – then his pain becomes her failure. She hasn’t loved him well enough.

What does he hear in that moment? That he has done something wrong by feeling. And so the cycle continues. Both of them are caught in the same social conditioning trap, just coming at it from different sides.

The hunger for emotional presence

Growing up without a dad in my early childhood, I was extremely close to my mum. So that hero-worshipping bond with a father has always been a slight mystery to me. When I had my own daughter, I assumed she would be as close to me as I was to my mum. It came as a surprise to discover she was just as close, if not closer, to her dad.

With no frame of reference, I saw this as a personal failure.

hooks offers a different interpretation. She argues that historically, maternal love has often been treated as a given, while paternal affection was less consistently available and therefore placed on a pedestal.

The same thing, she argues, shows up in adult relationships. When a man is emotionally present, we place him on that same pedestal, treating what should be a basic skill as a rare prize.

I can personally testify that after being in relationships with men unable to access, let alone show, feelings, I felt starved for that connection. And when I finally got it, I revered and clung to it.

If you’re feeling that hunger, let me tell you that you are not needy or too much. You are hungry for something entirely reasonable. Even if you have spent years being made to feel that your hunger itself is the problem, rather than the lack of nourishment.

When understanding changes the question

Looking back, I realise that emotion wasn’t being withheld deliberately. There was just a genuine gap between what I was asking for and the ability to provide it.

hooks argues that many boys are never given the emotional tools that adult relationships require of them. Worse, they are taught to reject and disconnect from their own emotions almost entirely.

That doesn’t mean change is impossible. Nor does it remove responsibility. But it does mean that some of the gaps showing up in relationships today are less about bad intentions and more about emotional capabilities that were never developed.

Consider the man who tells his partner that he’ll be playing football or golf or marathon training for a good chunk of Saturday. Not because he’s selfish, but because it never occurred to him that he might want to ask. And compare this to the woman who asks if her partner can watch the children so that she can have a shower. Both have inherited assumptions about time and space and caring defaults, and are passing on the same norms to their own children.

Just as those early “latte pappas” couldn’t change an entire culture by themselves, nor can one relationship undo every lesson both people have absorbed across generations.

Sitting with it

The line from the book that stayed with me is the one I opened with. That many of the qualities women most long for in their partners are the very qualities boys are taught to suppress.

To reiterate: if you feel emotionally alone in your relationship, it’s not because you’re asking for too much.

Rather, this book reminded me that sometimes what we’re asking for may be something that was discouraged, shamed, or buried long before we arrived.

Understanding this doesn’t close the distance overnight. It doesn’t magically give a man emotional skills he was never taught, or access to emotions he learned to push down. It certainly doesn’t mean accepting behaviours that hurt you.

But it could change the questions we ask ourselves, which could perhaps build a bridge across a gulf. Instead of asking “What’s wrong with him?” or “What’s wrong with me?”, perhaps a more useful question might be: “What was he taught about being a man, and what has that cost us?”

Because these boys learned not to cry.

I start explaining to my daughter “when I was young…” and realise I sound exactly like my Grandad. To be fair, we millennials have come through a period of such a crazy amount of change that it feels like we grew up three generations ago rather than three decades ago.

I flick through memories like a photo album in my mind. Remembering that on the special occasions we went to restaurants, my parents were asked “Smoking or non-smoking?” before we were shown to a table. Thinking about how I used to race to the TV after school to catch Cavegirl at the only time I could watch it. How Grandad took photos of me on holiday with a camera that he got developed a week later.

Washing my face in the shower the other day, I had a sensory memory of the bright orange face scrub I used as a teenager, filled with tiny exfoliating beads, so pretty, suspended like floating gems in the bottle. I don’t think I had a clue at the time that they were plastic. And even if I did, so what? I had no concept yet of billions of microbeads slipping through waterways, being ingested by wildlife or humans, and the possible impact of that.

Discovering the problems later

Once you know the pattern, you can’t help but see it everywhere: a new thing arrives, framed as progress. Quickly it becomes normal. And only slowly do the hidden costs emerge.

A more personal example is my own medication. When I was first prescribed antidepressants in my twenties it was presented as a short-term boost to get me through a tough period. Later, it was reframed as a corrective to a simple chemical imbalance – just as a diabetic takes insulin, I needed medication due to my biology.

To be clear, I am not opposed to antidepressants. But I do have a problem with them being prescribed as a default, a cheap and easy option, without nearly enough discussion about their long-term effects or the difficulty of withdrawal.

Most of us make reasonable decisions with the information we have at the time.

But of course, not everyone has the same information. Tobacco companies knew the link between smoking and cancer long before everyone else, just as many powerful industries spend millions shaping the public conversation around the risks of their products today.

The trial we didn’t sign up for

A former colleague of mine used to participate in drug trials as a side hustle. Any time his bank balance got a bit low he’d sign up for a week essentially living in a hotel, all meals provided – and come back to work flush with cash. He knew what he was agreeing to, including the risks.

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m living inside a giant behavioural experiment that I never signed up for. And there’s no danger money or free accommodation for taking part.

For example, as an elder millennial, I joined Facebook in its glory days. We’d plug our digital cameras into our laptops to upload blurry albums of every night out, tag our friends, organise birthday parties, and have fun composing and reading our friends’ status updates (awkwardly written in the third-person).

Little did we know that we had boarded a social media train destined for infinite scrolling feeds fuelled by outrage, an incubator of dangerous misinformation, a cesspit of AI slop and adverts – a wasteland, with little evidence left of the reason we joined in the first place.

AI has its own version of this journey. Soon after I began using it, I felt the impact on my cognitive abilities. As employers pushed me and my colleagues to be more productive, I found myself hooked on the ease of generating plans and content in seconds, without having to think. And the more I used it, the more I found myself unable to think for myself. Muscles atrophy when they aren’t used.

Today my brain feels foggy and slow. So to get my work done, I turn to… AI.

I hate it, but I feel genuinely trapped.

The price we’re paying

Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification opened my eyes to the ubiquity of systems that reward deteriorating products and services.

His model describes a three-stage decay: platforms first offer genuine value to users, then pivot to extracting value from users to benefit business customers, then finally extract value from everyone to benefit shareholders.

Amazon, Facebook, Google, Spotify – remember how good and revolutionary they were at first?

What struck me most was that this pattern isn’t limited to tech platforms. It increasingly feels like the defining story of modern life: we are encouraged to adopt systems before their long-term consequences are understood, and by the time those consequences become clear, opting out is difficult.

The cost feels eye-watering. It’s not just that my cognitive abilities have diminished or that I suffer the mental and physical health impacts of modern life. It’s that I can no longer trust myself to judge what is good or safe or true anymore.

This makes modern parenthood even more challenging. I religiously used an app to track my daughter’s sleep and feeding as a baby, only to realise I had developed no sense of maternal intuition. Her dad would hear her squawk in a particular way and say “she’s tired”, while I stared at my phone, clueless, relying on the app to tell me what to do.

At our most sleep-deprived and vulnerable, we are sold miracle cures and convenient healthy baby purées. We do our best. But total vigilance is impossible – and this isn’t a personal failure. The responsibility shouldn’t be entirely on us.

Holding on to what makes us human

After I finish enlightening books like Enshittification, I tend to come away from them feeling down. Ironically, despair is what these systems want from us.

Because they profit from the wound and the treatment. They manufacture the problem, then sell us the cure. Feeling anxious from modern life? There’s an expensive supplement and an app for that.

Your nervous system is the battleground. What makes them the most money is a brain that is too fragmented to judge clearly, too stimulated to unplug, and too dependent to opt out.

Which is why the best things you can do are also the most boring: slow down, pay attention, and notice what actually satisfies you and helps you grow.

It’s not a miracle cure (and I’d tell you not to trust anyone selling one of those anyway), but I’d argue that holding onto the things that make you human – your capabilities, your judgement, your discernment – is the best defence you have.

The reality was that I was struggling with suicidal thoughts. And having to force a brave face around everyone other than my bestie and my boyfriend was making things even worse. For five days I felt consumed by anxiety and shame – a ‘crazed inner force’ as I called it in my journal. Feeling a deep sadness with no obvious cause, I found myself bursting into tears, or needing to curl up and cry. Physically, I was uncomfortable – clothes suddenly feeling too hot or too restrictive or too itchy, and sounds became viscerally unpleasant and overwhelming.

Sadly, for me, this wasn’t a one-off experience.

Because I experience this, to a varying degree, like clockwork, every single month. This is PMDD, or premenstrual dysphoric disorder, experienced by around 1.6 per cent of women of childbearing age.

The miracle cure

On the hunt for something to help with the debilitating symptoms, a few months ago I discovered cycle syncing, the practice of adjusting your diet, exercise, and lifestyle to align with the hormonal fluctuations of your menstrual cycle. It has taken off in recent years, particularly on social media.

In your follicular phase, with more energy and motivation, you might increase intensity at the gym and get started on new projects. In the luteal phase, you would protect your energy and pull back on socialising.

Losing nearly five days a month to despair and irritability, I was absolutely taken with this idea as a solution to my problems, and began to look into all the ways I could minimise the symptoms of PMDD by tailoring my life to each week of my cycle. To help me plan, I built an app using Claude, featuring everything from the supplements I should take (omega-3 during the ovulatory phase) to the food I should eat (dark chocolate and leafy greens in early luteal) to the exercise I should do (strength and HIIT in follicular, slow yoga in late luteal).

It felt empowering to be in control.

My idea was to follow the plan diligently for a few months, then write this article as a miracle guide for any of you struggling with cyclical symptoms, whether PMS, PMDD, or something else. ‘I’ve cracked it!’ I’d share triumphantly. ‘I’ve got the cure-all answer!’.

Spoiler: this is not that article.

The concept is desperately appealing, of course. I’ve written before how productivity advice expects people to function in a linear way, with stable energy. The way that workplaces – understandably – assume each of us turns up at work equally able to be productive every day. To get acknowledgment that as a woman I experience life differently from one week to the next felt incredibly validating.

And cycle syncing offers hope. I’m not defective, I just haven’t been working with my body. That’s pretty powerful.

When the evidence doesn’t add up

But the more I dug into cycle syncing, the less I liked it.

While I don’t believe science and western medicine have all the answers (they haven’t sorted out my PMDD yet, for one), I do believe in having strong evidence to back up health-related claims. The influencers making money peddling the idea of cycle syncing on social media may genuinely find that it works for them. But some are making claims that simply aren’t supported by the evidence – and those claims don’t just fail to help women; they can actually harm us.

At brunch last weekend a friend said she had seen a statistic that we can expect gains of 40% at the gym when training during the follicular phase. In reality, as yet, there is no strong scientific evidence to support the idea that women should train less in any given phase of our cycle, nor that we can expect massive gains in another. But when enough influencers make these claims, wellness misinformation spreads through repetition.

When empowerment becomes limitation

What’s the problem with this? I see two main issues.

Firstly, the idea of cycle syncing risks reinforcing old-fashioned notions about women’s capacity. Telling us that “during this phase you shouldn’t do X” is staggeringly limiting to me, as a woman living an independent life in 2026.

As digital marketer Dria Chan wrote, “In 1970, Newsweek asked whether a woman could be president, citing hormonal fluctuations as a legitimate concern. If a woman is unfit to make a consequential decision during her luteal phase, how could she possibly be fit to lead a country?”

With this perspective, cycle syncing becomes the opposite of empowering.

The second issue I see is that it risks distancing us from our own intuition and observations about our own bodies. Some women may find they get migraines at a certain point in their cycle, others may find their sleep changes. Others will experience none of this. A prescription to work differently, train differently or avoid major decisions depending on the time of the month can never be accurate for all women.

The reviews and meta-analyses we have so far have found that impacts on exercise performance across the menstrual cycle are, at most, trivial, with too much variation between people to make general rules. There can be no universal template.

Finding hope without a cure

So what does this mean for me, and others with health conditions like PMS and PMDD?

It means taking a personalised approach. Last year I created a Google Form to track my symptoms. It’s a quick daily check-in at 8pm, with all the results instantly synced to a spreadsheet, which I (a data nerd) can analyse to my heart’s content. I prefer this approach to a period tracking app. It’s visually clean, ad-free, and feels less like I’m feeding my intimate information into the data economy. It also acts as evidence to help me access appropriate healthcare - a GP is far less likely to dismiss a woman’s concerns when she shows up with months of consistent data in her back pocket.

I can’t tell you how much I wish I was writing the triumphant version of this article. The one that told you I had solved my symptoms forever. Unfortunately, as I write this, I am in that five day inferno, where it is only possible for my boyfriend to say the wrong thing, and where my daughter’s “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy” is not just wearing, but enough to make me physically seize up, gripped by an overwhelming urge to scream and escape.

The good news is that these days I am more in tune with my own body and its patterns, and quicker to spot the symptoms that quietly announce the onset of my PMDD. I mark it in my calendar not to dictate my limits but to remind myself that if I am experiencing sensory overwhelm, extreme mood swings, severe anxiety or sadness, there is a biological explanation for it. It gives me a guilt-free explanation to take things slower for a bit and remember to reach out to friends for support. It also helps me not to catastrophise, knowing that things will be significantly better within a week.

The hope comes not from a miracle cure, but from knowing that, like every other time before this one, I will come out the other side.

P.S. Hello, and thank you for reading right to the end. If you enjoyed it (and I’m guessing you did, as you’re still here) a like or comment helps more people stumble across The Writing Half. And if it made you think of a friend, I’d be delighted if you forwarded it on. Word of mouth is my favourite algorithm.

Over the years, when it came to choosing furniture, cushions, art, or even plates and bowls, I deferred to his better judgment. As a designer, he had taste. On the occasion I did venture an opinion, it was clearly the wrong one. Which is how I ended up with a house full of things I didn’t want to take into my new life.

That same year, in 2024, I was lucky enough to go on an amazing communication course, through my work. Required reading on that course was Tara Mohr’s Playing Big. And it was in that book that I discovered a radical, powerful new life tool: my inner mentor.

Mohr opens this chapter with a bold statement: “I feel as if I’m about to let you in on a priceless secret”. Sceptic that I am, I followed the instructions, and can confirm Mohr isn’t over-hyping it.

Imagine for a moment how different your life might look without fears or insecurities. Imagine what choices you might make differently, or risks you might take.

This exercise gives you access to that by introducing you to an older, wiser version of yourself. She is a woman who is “unburdened by fear and untouched by insecurity”, who emanates “utter calm” and “love for oneself and others”. She knows exactly who you would be if you were brave enough to show up as your true self.

Through a guided visualisation you uncover details - what her house looks and feels like, what she wears, what she eats - and so she becomes uncannily real. She even has her own name. Mine is Serena.

Years after that course, I still tap into my inner mentor’s wisdom whenever I’m feeling stuck, confused or at a crossroads. Serena often surprises me. Her advice does not always align with what my friends tell me to do, or what I imagine my mum or gran would recommend. My inner psyche built her in the shape of what I most needed permission to become.

I’ve long struggled with not being perfect. All of my life I worked hard, followed the rules, I was responsible, a good girl. I believed that kept me safe and lovable. Serena, though, is fully at ease in her life. She does not need anyone’s approval or to mould herself to be pleasing to someone else, to feel worthy. She does not have my tight jaw issues or panic at the idea of not having complete control or certainty.

If it all feels a bit woo-woo, I guess it is. And yet I’m not a woo-woo girl. For me, her words carry weight because she is the voice of my deepest inner wisdom. So when “she” tells me that I don’t need to take someone else’s advice, or to ask for what I actually want rather than what seems reasonable to want, I listen carefully. It is such a relief to have this truly steady, emotionally mature presence that I can access at any time.

Although it felt like my inner mentor came out of nowhere during my visualisation, she is entirely familiar to me. As though this wise older woman has been watching over me my whole life.

In other ways, she is oddly unlike me. When she first “invited me into her house” (as the visualisation guides you) she was cooking soup. I hate soup. Not everything in the exercise is literal - much of it is symbolic.

As part of interpreting your vision, Mohr recommends that you “explore symbols” and “look up your inner mentor’s name”. No surprise that the simmering home-made pumpkin soup on the stove and even Serena’s name represent the ease and calm that I struggle to access. The inner mentor is a compensating or balancing figure who can help you outgrow an old organising principle.

My inner mentor doesn’t give me “shoulds”. Even when I present a solution that feels like a foregone conclusion, she often presents a third option or sheds light on why the “wrong” answer might in fact be “right for now”. Sometimes she refuses to answer directly and throws the problem back to me. You already know the right path, don’t you? You’re not really struggling to decide, you’re struggling with what other people want you to do or think you should do.

Discovering a deep self-trust in my own thoughts, feelings and capabilities feels like a superpower.

The inner mentor changes what is possible.

For my new home I only bought items I love. I finally got the gold cutlery I hadn’t been allowed, dialled up the femininity with pink bedding and cushions, lit incense, and created soft lighting with home-made candles and dimmable lamps. The mantra was ‘if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.’ It feels like me, like home. Rebuilding my self-trust and rediscovering my own preferences and wants has taken time - after all, I had tamped them down for so long - but I am getting there. And meeting my inner mentor has been an important part of that journey.

If you’re interested in discovering your inner mentor, you can get the audio guided visualisation on Tara Mohr’s website. I also recommend reading Playing Big, particularly Chapter 2, for all the context and advice on making the most of the exercise.

Pausing before sipping his glass of wine, Joe casually commented: "I used to be an overthinker, but I trained myself out of it." My eyes widened.

I BEG YOUR PARDON?

I had absolutely convinced myself that overthinking was simply a part of my identity, something I had been born with and was destined to suffer from for the rest of my days. The revelation that this is a habit rather than an intrinsic part of the way my brain works floored me.

"So how did you do it?" I asked, realising I might be about to receive the enigma code.

His answer was confusingly simple: when he noticed he was overthinking, he just... didn't. He's an under-thinker now, he said. Just like that.

The obvious follow-up question

If it's not an intrinsic part of me, why haven’t I “just stopped” before?

Probably because humans don't respond perfectly to logic and insight. Otherwise all smokers would quit with ease, and I'd have no issues resisting that Tim Tam biscuit. Knowing overthinking is unhelpful doesn't send the compulsion away.

Overthinking gives me the sense of control I crave, a feeling that I'm "doing something," which brings temporary relief. So I get stuck in a self-reinforcing loop – all the while knowing that this "something" is not only not fixing the problem but exacerbating my stress.

Addictions are annoying like that.

So why does the loop start in the first place?

I've been doing a deep dive into burnout recently, trying to figure out why I was still experiencing the symptoms long after my heavy workload disappeared. I came across a phrase that stuck with me: high IQ without agency = anxiety.

When our actions are restricted, our thinking turns inward. Overthinking becomes a substitute for the brain getting to actually be in control of something. The intelligent, questioning woman – the one who cannot simply follow orders without understanding the why, who is cynical of authority, who thinks for herself – finds that her intelligence needs an outlet. When it doesn't have one, it loops.

Making my days better with data

In November last year I created a daily mood check-in for myself using Google Forms – quick enough that it didn't add to the admin load, with two questions: how was my day externally, and how stable did I feel internally? Plus free text for highlights and lowlights.

When I analysed months of data, what actually made my days better surprised me.

There was almost no achievement in there. Instead, the best bits of my life came down to experiences for my nervous system: specific people, specific moments. Physical and sensory pleasure – sun, swimming, food, touch. Flow states. An overall sense of lightness and autonomy.

Which got me thinking about what I could actually influence. Which of the highs and lows are within my control?

The honest answer: less than I'd like. But enough.

Things I can control that make me feel better

• Movement – even slow and simple, like yin yoga or a walk in the rain

• Small sensory pleasures – taking time with skincare, a steaming hot cup of tea, really good food

• Productive activities when I choose them (not when I have to) – cleaning the kitchen, ticking off one thing

• Being in or near water – ocean, pool, shower, or just splashing my face

• Getting outside – sunshine or a bracing walk, both work

• Flow state time – blocking off a chunk of time for something all-consuming

• Reaching out to people I have a warm, easy connection with

When I'm doing the things in this list, my brain is much less likely to be in a state of overthinking. This is part of Joe's training plan, it turns out. Because, for me, it’s a lot easier to switch into one of these activities than to simply “stop overthinking” as he advised.

Body first, brain second

We think of overthinking as a problem with the mind. But more often than not it's also a physical state. Nearly every one of my effective interventions is either physical or sensory. The nervous system stabilises through the body, not through analysis. Which means the advice that used to feel patronising – go for a walk, call a friend, move your body – isn't wrong. It just has to be treated as part of a training plan, not a miracle cure.

Training, not transformation

A-grade overthinkers are used to success. But unfortunately, overthinking does not disappear overnight. Which is quite frustrating for us.

Think of it as a muscle. A single walk, a single dip in the ocean – these will not fix the habit. Instead, the system needs to be retrained through repetition and consistency. You won't notice it after one fifteen-minute walk around the block. You will if you keep doing it every day.

That’s not to say there are no quick fixes for in-the-moment wobbles.

Hacks for instant overthinking relief

Looping thoughts→ write

Stressed → walk

Anxious → breathe or move

Lonely → call someone

Angry → music (+ sing or dance)

Tired → nap

Staying in the body, staying present

At Splore Festival in February I got a new tattoo. A sunshine on my wrist that I catch sight of throughout the day. It’s a talisman of sorts, to transport me out of my analysis and into the present moment. ‘Out of my mind, into my body’, was the intention behind it. I wanted to be reminded of the bliss I felt that weekend, of soaking up the sun and sea water and dancing freely.

It’s helping with my training. Joe said it took him a couple of years, so I’ve got a little while still to go.

I'll let you know how I get on.

It was in that frame of mind that, back home, I switched on the TV to discover the all-new Netflix mega-hit Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. It was catnip for me.

In an act of self-flagellation, I dutifully followed Kondo’s instructions to pile all my clothes on the bed, and then felt slightly sick with shame. I donated binbags full of garments, folded my t-shirts vertically, and committed to twelve months of buying no clothes.

That year I bought a sewing machine and overlocker, and learned to sew my own clothes. I also educated myself on fabrics - which ones bobble quickly, which are essentially plastic, how to get clothes to last longer, and so on.

But my twelve months of abstinence did not cure me, and my wardrobe has slowly refilled over the years.

Over the last month, I finished up at my well-paid full-time corporate gig and began a part-time contract. It was a deliberate decision to prioritise my own wellbeing and quality time with my daughter, and I am absolutely loving the luxury of time. The flipside is that my income halved overnight, and no longer covers the basics of rent, bills and food.

The impact on my wardrobe was two-fold. First, with no disposable income whatsoever, I have launched into another period of self-enforced no-clothes-buying. Second, I had to get a housemate, so that I could pay my rent, which meant moving my daughter from her own room to sharing mine. That meant handing over a good chunk of my wardrobe to pint-sized unicorn patterned leggings and sequinned dresses. And that meant another clear-out was needed.

As I worked through the rail, pulling out dresses I’d barely worn, I catalogued an archive of once-attempted identities. There were the monotone pieces I bought when I started my job at the bank, designed to look serious and professional in black and grey. There were the bright bursts of orange, red and hot pink that I wore in the previous job, when I had the confidence to pop. And there were a swath of beautiful items I’d always struggled to part with because, as lovely as they are, they require an owner who irons her clothes or has a dry cleaning budget. Which I clearly do not.

It was scary to realise how many clothes I had bought in the last couple of years that I didn’t even own anymore. Non-refundable second-hand items bought online that turned out not to fit or not to look or feel as I’d expected. Items that I’d bought to achieve a specific Pinterest look, or nearly-right items that I never reached for. Trousers that had no pockets. I’d been buying for fantasy future versions of myself.

Having gone through the cycle a few times now of accumulating and disposing, I felt such guilt and shame at doing it again. I rented a rack at Re:Circle and sold a few things at a fraction of what I’d bought them for. After giving away a dozen or so of the remaining pieces to friends, I folded the rest up into a suitcase and hid it away in the basement, to return to at a later date.

Of course, the guilt and shame don’t stop the urge to buy that one new top that would complete my wardrobe. They don’t overcome the beauty, the novelty, the possibility, the relief, or the urge to treat myself. After all, consumer culture is set up to make us keep wanting that one new thing.

I still love the feeling of walking into Flo & Frankie, inhaling the sweet fragrance, and brushing my fingers along the rows of delicate dresses and co-ordinated sets. Just for a moment imagining that I am the type of woman who enjoys a leisurely weekday lunch with wine instead of chain-drinking tea in the office.

But one thing that does change, when buying clothes is no longer an option, is the algorithm. Within days of not scrolling Pinterest, hovering on Instagram posts, uploading my outfits to the Whering app, or virtual window shopping, almost everything clothes-related disappeared. No more ads, no more sponsored posts or suggested fashion influencers in my feed.

It also gave me a healthy distance to discern between what I actually want or need and what I’m being influenced to want. On a trip to the UK last year I couldn’t help but notice the trend for burgundy in every shop. I knew that in six months the exact same shade would fill every shop window in New Zealand. And so it did. On the way to dance class one night I stopped in front of Seed in Takapuna, recalling that exact thought, looking at a row of mannequins dressed head-to-toe in burgundy.

I’m not anti-fashion - I’ve always loved clothes. When I was a child, my Grandad sent me heavy envelopes in the post, full of newspaper clippings on fashion that he diligently cut out for me. I love how playful and self-expressive outfits can be - the grown up version of a child’s dressing up box.

I also know that my style has remained pretty consistent over the years. In a WhatsApp chat with four of my girl friends, I laughed when an “on this day” photo from five years ago was shared: I looked down to find myself wearing a version of the exact same outfit all these years later.

And yet I kept buying clothes as if I didn’t already know myself. As though I had to keep reinventing myself or trying to be someone different in order to be right. More colourful in my Diversity and Inclusion role, more sombre at the bank.

I spent so many years shrinking myself, or moulding myself to what others wanted. I feel sad realising that I wasted so much of my life doing that. Act Two of my life is about re-discovering who I really am, rather than performing versions of myself. And that is as true for my clothes as it is for my personality.

There’s a sadness too, in coming to terms with the amount of money I spent on these different iterations of myself. I keep a meticulous record of my spending using PocketSmith, so I could tell you exactly how much I’ve spent on fashion since 2018. I won’t, because I’d like to retain some dignity. I could also tell you exactly how many of those clothes I no longer have.

Honestly, looking at the black and white cost of all this consumption sends me right back to that pile of clothes on the bed in 2019. Feeling disgusted and ashamed. Is this really what I traded my time for? Working in a harshly lit corporate office so that I could use shopping as a selfhood subscription service? I imagine how much I’d have in my Sharesies account today if I’d funnelled even half of my clothes spending into investments instead.

I said earlier on that reducing my work hours meant I had to stop buying clothes. But I prefer to think of it the other way around: by choosing not to buy clothes, I am buying myself a better life. Investing in better things: chiefly, time and wellbeing.

I’m not sharing this from a point of enlightenment; I do not delude myself that I have transcended consumerism forever. But while I love the pretty little dresses in Flo & Frankie, I love this temporary period of feeling freedom and spaciousness even more. And perhaps that’s finally a version of myself that I can live with for a while.

Well-meaning advice made me angry.

You don’t understand what I’m going through.

If I said something like “my daughter refuses to get dressed in the morning” I’d get advice along the lines of “have you thought of turning it into a game?” and I’d think: I’m sorry, do you not understand? I am completely wiped out. I can barely string a sentence together.

I had a month-long trip back to my parents in the UK coming up, which was the only thing getting me through. But I knew that as soon as I got back to New Zealand, the contrast would make everything worse. So before I left, I booked a weekend in a five-star hotel for when I returned to Auckland. Partly to treat myself. Partly to do a self-coached life reset.

As the free cancellation deadline approached, I nearly talked myself out of it. I’d just had a month away. It felt extravagant.

The hotel wasn’t quite what I’d imagined. The spa pool was out of action, sirens and shouting from the street kept me awake half the night, and the room smelled damp. But the real luxury turned out not to be the hotel’s five-stars. It was the absence of domestic load.

Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own that women need time, quiet, space and money away from their daily lives in order to think. That:

“all the conditions of her life [...] were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set free whatever is in the brain.”

Nearly a century later, that hasn’t changed. Sometimes you need to step away from the laundry and the cooking and the dishes to truly reflect. And so I did.

What actually changed on my retreat

For a while, I had been fixated on a long-term retirement number – working towards FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) as my definition of safety. Over the retreat weekend I realised I’d been sacrificing present quality of life for the future. Being present for my daughter’s childhood. My own health.

Future security matters. But I wasn’t going to have a good future if I didn’t get my health sorted and spend quality time with my daughter now.

A month later, the universe gave me a reminder of exactly that. A routine cervical cancer test identified abnormal cells, which I ended up having a procedure to remove. Thinking about what it would mean for my daughter if I weren’t around confirmed my priorities. The present is the only thing we have guaranteed.

Which brings me to today. Six months on from that self-guided retreat, I quit my job. The retreat didn’t cause that directly, but it definitely shifted some of the mindsets that were keeping me stuck. I had felt so powerless, so out of control in my own life.

Leaving a job without another one lined up was not my ideal scenario, but thankfully I landed a part-time job in a friendly organisation (where people smile and say good morning - shock!). It means that I can pick up my daughter at 5pm without guilt, negotiation, or risk of getting in trouble.

How to do your own version

You don’t need a five-star hotel. But you do need a few non-negotiables: uninterrupted time and privacy (at least a day and a half), zero childcare or obligations, and your domestic and mental load fully removed. No cooking, no washing up, no laundry. That’s the actual luxury – not the thread count.

I would also recommend giving yourself a treat that feels genuinely good. Book a massage. Take yourself out for dinner. Pour a glass of wine. I loved the ritual of brewing tea in a fancy teapot, not just boiling the kettle and dunking a tea bag. There’s something nourishing in adding beauty to the ordinary.

If you’ve been putting off sorting out your stress or thinking about what you actually want from life, and have the privilege of being able to create the time for this, here’s how to do it.

For transparency, I used AI as my sparring partner throughout – and I’ve included every prompt I used in my free Retreat Prompt Guide below. But if you don’t want to use AI for any reason, you don’t have to. The framework is the same either way.

Retreat Prompt Guide By The Writing Half

2.58MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Prepare

A couple of weeks before your retreat, get yourself set up. You’ll get so much more out of the weekend this way.

Plan your pleasure first

Imagine your perfect weekend, where you walk away feeling rested and refreshed. What would that look like for you?

For me, it was a mixture of food, culture and self-care. A luxurious massage at East Day Spa. A walk around the Commercial Bay shops. For brunch on Saturday I headed to Chuffed café. In the evening I met up with New Zealand’s only other tiramisu blogger, who was up from Wellington for the weekend, to indulge in our favourite dessert together. On Sunday I headed to an exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery. These weren’t extras. They were very much part of the weekend.

Once you have an idea of what your perfect weekend would look like, book that massage or a ticket to that play - give yourself something to look forward to.

For me, this was a hybrid life reset and luxury weekend break. And aesthetic, sensory, embodied pleasure is important to me. I’d spent most of 2025 feeling depleted, frumpy, and exhausted. So I dressed up and treated myself. I was telling my body: you are worthy. You are enough.

The setup (it’s not complicated)

1. Think about your destination and context.

Whether you’re using AI or flying solo, take some time to reflect on and record what you’re doing and why. Think about your current situation, and whatever context is relevant.

2. Define your goal.

Mine was to finish the weekend able to answer the question: what would it look like to be killing it in various areas of my life?

I used the Wheel of Life as the foundation of my retreat. I picked nine topics that felt important to me. Pick your own, tailored to your own life. Here were mine, to get you thinking:

• Parenting

• Romantic relationship

• Emotional and mental wellbeing

• Health, energy and physical vitality

• Work and purpose

• Creativity and soul

• Friendship

• Home

• Finances

3. Generate your questions.

For each area of the wheel, come up with the key questions you want to work through. I recommend one overarching question, plus one or two that sit underneath it. If you’re using AI to support your self-led coaching, this is also the point to get it set up with custom instructions. Prompts for both of these are in my prompt guide below.

Retreat Prompt Guide By The Writing Half

2.58MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

That’s it. You’re ready.

How the weekend works

1. Give yourself 45 minutes per topic. It sounds like a lot – three quarters of an hour, multiplied by however many topics you have – but it isn’t. Not when you’re getting into something like career, or physical wellbeing, or parenting. These are big, chunky topics you could spend a whole weekend on individually.

2. Sort your environment. Adjust for perfect lighting, tee up your playlist, and set the timer for 45 minutes. The beautiful teapot is optional but highly recommended.

4. Record a stream-of-consciousness voice note. Use the voice recorder app on your phone and answer your prepared questions off the cuff. Speaking rather than writing matters here. It’s faster, for one, and you can go off on tangents, correcting yourself as you go. It doesn’t need to be polished.

5. If you’re using AI, paste the transcript and use the prompts in the guide. Let it push back, challenge you, ask more questions. This is where things get interesting.

6. Make a mind map. After each topic, distill everything down to keywords (or have your AI do this for you - again, prompt in the guide), then make a visual mind map and notes by hand. One page per topic. Bring coloured pens and felt tips – draw, doodle, get creative.

7. Finish with one to three simple, achievable shifts. Not a sprawling to-do list. Quick, actionable wins. See my guide for the prompt. Add them to your one-pager.

8. Take breaks. In between topics, I took breaks. Longer ones - like the massage or brunch - but shorter ones too. A quick blast of Taylor Swift while dancing unselfconsciously around the hotel room helped boost my energy between sessions.

9. Get your final five focus areas. Three shifts across nine topics leaves you with 27 changes to make, which is too many. So once you’re finished, cut it down to five shifts across the whole Wheel of Life that will have the biggest impact. Again, the prompt for this is in the guide.

The takeaway tools

1. Generate a Retreat Report. At the end of the weekend, ask your AI (if you used it) to create a report from everything you’ve covered using the prompt in the guide.

Mine was essentially a blueprint for a total reset, moving me from a survival state to a life defined by calm, agency, and vitality. It identified the key ripple shifts – high-impact, practical habits – and distilled an overall takeaway from the weekend. It was something I needed to hear: that nourishment through beauty and intentionality isn’t a luxury, but a necessary foundation for everything else.

2. Load your transcripts into NotebookLM. Take all your AI transcripts from the weekend and upload them into NotebookLM. Now you have a permanent repository of everything you thought about, said, and worked through, which you can keep using. From there you can ask questions across all your notes, generate instant mind maps and summaries – and if you’re feeling extra, create podcasts reminding you of the key levers to pull in different areas of life when things get hard.

3. Schedule regular reviews. Before you leave, block out weekly time in your calendar to ask yourself: what am I going to do this week to move towards those goals? Enthusiasm alone won’t carry you. Nothing changes when you get back to real life unless you plan for it.

The unexpected discomfort

There were hard moments. I woke up on Sunday with a cesspit of negative thoughts: What if nothing changes? What if I’m always a wage slave? What if this whole weekend is just expensive wallowing?

There were also sessions, like the finance one, where I felt a real physical tightness in my throat. I stopped and named the sensation. I figured out that it came down to a key value of mine: agency. If I don’t have enough money, I don’t have control over my life.

In another session, I realised I simply didn’t have the headspace for that particular topic and consciously abandoned it.

Fair warning: the come-down is real. I got home on Sunday feeling low. All these ideas, this whole vision, and then I was home and nothing had changed. I still had to load the dishwasher, do the washing, make the packed lunch.

Next time I’ll change my sheets before I leave, do an online supermarket order timed to arrive when I get home, and book a yin yoga class for that evening. Small things, but they would have helped me finish the weekend in a better place.

Final thoughts

The weekend won’t change your life by itself. But it might shift something. Six months later, I’d quit my job. And as Virginia Woolf understood so well: having time and space to yourself is as much an essential as it is a luxury. You deserve a room of your own.

Have you ever done something like this? I’d love to know whether you’d consider it yourself. Leave a comment below.

And if you’ve made it this far, you may as well hit Like. It reassures me this isn’t just a very long note to self.

For me, it’s the eye-watering price of filling up the car, and the ever-upward cost of the weekly shop. It’s the insane, unpredictable state of the world. It’s this sensation that things are slipping through my fingers faster than I can get hold of them. Will AI take my job? Will jet fuel prices stay so high that I won’t be able to fly home to see my family anymore? Will I ever be able to afford to buy a house?

Add to that the complexity of work, childcare, and relationships, and we can start to tell ourselves the story that we’re not living up to the life we thought we’d have by now.

But there is another version.

The problem with measuring yourself against a moving target

I’m a big fan of Te Kahukura Boynton, the founder of Māori Millionnaire. In equal parts your hype girl and your scariest teacher, she tells her Instagram followers to stop negative self-talk and instead focus on what they can achieve.

She draws on an idea from Dan Sullivan when she talks about ‘the gap and the gain’. Rather than measuring ourselves against where we think we should be, which is always some moving, fantasy target, we need to measure ourselves against where we started, and how far we’ve actually come.

This is helpful when we think about something like housing. Whereas our parents might have bought a house costing three times their salary in 1986, in Auckland today the average house costs 7.4 times the average income. For me, a separated co-parent, the comparison is pointless.

Happiness is cheaper than you might think

Recently I asked my friends on Instagram what brings them moments of joy. The answers were not expensive or outlandish. They were simple. Being out in nature. Sunshine. Cats.

I’m not one for performative or toxic positivity. The world is pretty messed up in many ways, and I think it’s okay to acknowledge that. But we know that gratitude has a proven impact on our mental wellbeing. So if we can find things we’re grateful for, that bring us joy, and that are inexpensive and simple, I think we’re onto a winning formula for feeling a little bit better in this world.

I’m a sucker for a promising gadget. But I also know instinctively that tracking my sleep with an expensive wearable won’t improve my wellbeing as much as some of the smaller, boring, consistent actions I could take. The evidence backs this up too.

The boring, evidence-backed stuff that actually works

A piece of research I came across this week found that spending 120 minutes a week in green spaces is enough to produce a meaningful reduction in both heart rate and cortisol. That’s a ridiculously easy way to boost your wellbeing. It doesn’t need to be forest bathing or mountain biking or staying in a remote log cabin. It’s just over 17 minutes a day, or a couple of longer walks across a week. And the benefits begin quickly, with measurable changes in heart rate within the first ten minutes of being outside.

This morning I caught up on an episode of the What’s Up Docs? podcast focused on light, and its impact on mood, sleep and overall wellbeing. I was fascinated by the research discussed by their interviewee, Professor Hester Parr, who said that even on a grey day in the UK, the benefit of getting natural light outdoors outweighs any artificial brightness indoors. That includes a brightly lit supermarket and even a light box designed to treat seasonal affective disorder.

I found it hard to believe - familiar as I am with a grey day in the UK - that this could be the case. But it reinforces the idea that these small, sensory interventions have a disproportionate impact.

If I look at what energises me versus what drains me, the pattern continues.

The things that help require something from you

The things that tend to improve my wellbeing require some level of participation. Moving, creating, being deliberate and present. By contrast, many of the things that leave me feeling flat are passive. Endless scrolling, numbing myself, unconsciously consuming.

The active ones regulate our nervous system. The passive ones can leave us feeling more dysregulated.

There are no miracle gadgets, no glamorous transformations or easy fixes to the complexities of modern life. We can still experience pressure and difficulties, which fresh air and grown-up colouring in books won’t fix.

And yet. We do still have agency to shape our experience of life, to a certain extent.

So I keep trying to figure out how to detach myself from my phone (because time-limiting apps, greyscale mode and an alarm clock on my bedside table haven’t worked for me) and schedule in walks on my daily to-do list.

Betting on what you can control

Those closest to me know my least favourite thing in the world is feeling a lack of control. Uncertainty is my nemesis. And while I can’t influence the actions of a certain world leader, or the price of flights half way around the world, I can take small steps to change the way I feel. Spending time with people who I can be myself with, and doing things that require my flow state are helpful go-to’s for me.

We don’t need to pretend everything is fine. But we can expand the frame to include the things that are going well, and the things we can influence for the better, as well as all the messy bits.

This month I quit my well-paid, full-time corporate job to focus on my wellbeing and my daughter. It was a scary step to take.

I am taking a bet on myself and the things I can control within my life. From a 40 hour week, not allowed to leave at the time that would let me pick up my child from daycare, to a part-time role that gives me the space to move and nourish my body, and to pick up and drop off my daughter every single time.

I could focus on the gap between my old salary and my new one, but I’m choosing to focus on the gains I’ve made instead.

On a weekday lunchtime, before I quit my job, I joined one of these friends for a walk along Takapuna beach. It was one of those perfect summer days: blue sky, sunshine, warm without the sensation of skin sizzling. We walked the length of the beach, before detouring by the cafe for ice cream, sampling a few flavours before heading home with wafer cones in hand.

Spending quality, unrushed time with a friend, soaking up the sunshine and relishing my raspberry and chocolate sorbets felt like utter bliss. What a beautiful thing - having the time and autonomy to step away from emails and nourish myself, before finishing my work for the day. I undoubtedly produce higher quality work when my day includes happiness top-ups like this.

The hybrid working roll-back

Businesses seem to forget this when they treat knowledge workers like battery hens. And that’s why these friends have all said no. No more.

No to structure that pretends we don’t have real lives and real constraints outside of employment.

We thought we’d been granted a generational leap forward in flexibility and hybrid working from COVID. It was momentous for working mums (and dads…). But it was naive to think that corporations wouldn’t take back control.

As they roll back, we’re losing the flexibility of when and where we work. We’re losing the autonomy that topped up our goodwill. The same goodwill that resulted in us giving companies our extra discretionary effort. So guess what? No flexibility to pick up our kids? No extra discretionary effort.

Don’t you just love a ‘fast-paced environment”?

There’s a particular phrase we see in job descriptions that makes us all collectively shudder: fast-paced environment. Because we know that’s corporate for leadership constantly ordering last-minute pivots, and a workplace where burnout is considered normal (or worse, a badge of honour).

This group is saying no to a return to being measured on time chained to the desk instead of effectiveness. And no to picking up your child being seen as a favour.

These issues affect mums, but my female friends who have chosen to step out of employment don’t all have children. Two of us do and the other two don’t.

These are intelligent, impressive women, fed up with not being given the autonomy or mandate to get stuff done. Fed up of spending energy battling the system to do the work we’re employed to do.

The good girl contract

Millennial women were taught to be “good girls”, told to work hard, to climb the ladder.

But the higher up we get, the more we see through people at the top. The way “hard decisions” always land on someone without a reserved parking space. The way “we value your honest feedback”, until it lowers the engagement score.

We’ve learned it’s not just long hours and high pressure that cause burnout. We can handle hard work if it fires us up. What fries our nervous system is having no control. It’s the cognitive dissonance of what we’re constantly told is important not matching our lived reality. It’s the unfairness. It’s being treated like a replaceable cog in a machine. It’s the emotional labour - managing up and managing the double bind of being a strong woman without being difficult. And it’s the futility - the knowing that however much the same issues are raised, nothing will be done to improve them.

When staying isn’t neutral

Women in this position are spending their salary on therapy for existential fatigue and Lion’s Mane for corporate brain fog. GPs are signing sick notes. Prescriptions are being written. And while well-meaning friends and family say “don’t let them push you out” or “it’s much easier to find a job when you’ve got a job”, staying is not neutral.

The parents among the group have an extra challenge. The extra logistics, of course. The magic trick of being expected to leave the office no earlier than 5pm while simultaneously arriving at daycare no later than 5pm. A feat not even Sha’Carri Richardson could achieve.

But there’s also the energy challenge. High-achieving women put on their best front Monday to Friday and crash in their personal time. The same time that children demand emotional presence and physical endurance.

Personally, I had a child in order to spend time with her, not to pay for out-of-hours childcare on weekdays and apologise that “Mummy’s too tired to move today, sweetheart” on holidays and weekends.

From quiet quitting to actually quitting

If 2022 was the year of quiet quitting, 2026 is the year we actually quit. Many high-achieving women are no longer willing to sacrifice nervous system stability, dignity, and agency.

We’re still quiet, of course. How could we millennial good girls be anything else? We’re not storming the skyscrapers. But we do seem to be launching a subtle attack on the status quo, simply by adjusting our standards.

Could this be the year we collectively renegotiate success, status, and adulthood in a high-cost, AI-disrupted, burnout-heavy economy?

Who will blink first?

At a recent job interview, my interviewers fumbled their answers to my questions on culture, leadership, workload, and flexibility. The next day I got a call that they’d love to progress my application with a second interview.

“No, thank you,” I answered. It’s the first time I’ve ever declined a company after an interview. As my friend gave me a virtual high-five over WhatsApp, she made a quietly radical point: “More companies need to realise they are being interviewed too.”

It’s a privileged position to be in, to quit your well-paid corporate job. But I believe that companies will only change when they feel an impact. Time will tell who will blink first - we millennials who won’t tolerate what they are offering, or the corporates who lose out on smart, experienced women when they quit or say no to a second interview. The power and money sit with business. But my hope is that if enough brilliant people reach the same conclusion - that we will not put up with this shit - that’s how systems eventually change.

I guess I assumed that because I’d survived a marital separation - with a child - the hardest break-up was over. And then this happened.

He is the person I most need to speak to, and the only one I can’t.

I want to be in this with him, both of us sharing how awful it feels. To hold each other and say, “Did that song hit you too?” To ask how his daughter took the news.

Nobody else in the world shared our experience of our relationship, how could anyone else understand what the end feels like?

And yet, in a different way, someone else is feeling it too. My four year old is still crying at bedtime, a week later. “When will he come back to you? Will he never?” she sobs. “Will he NEVER?”

It breaks my heart that her heart is broken too. I’m trying to stay strong for her, while barely holding myself together.

When the body doesn’t understand what’s happened

I knew I’d cry, of course. But I’d missed how raw, how visceral it would be. Deep, heaving sobs, snot pouring, hyperventilating.

There’s a suddenness to the way each grief wave arrives. I open the bin, see his crushed can of Monster energy drink and instantly burst into tears.

Then there are the unexpected outbursts in public - walking along the beach when a deep inhale comes and - wham - I’m crying uncontrollably again.

And there’s my total inability to eat. Feeling my stomach growl and demand nourishment. To prepare a meal, only to look at it with disgust. “I managed four crackers today,” I tell my friends. The day before it was two mini-size Twirls and a protein bar. This morning I took a bite of scone and it felt like forcing myself to chew dry sawdust.

Friends drive to my house delivering comforting food, and watch me eat to prove I have.

I wonder how long all this will go on for. How long I can actually survive it.

The pain of his absence

I had forgotten the excruciating depth of misery of a bad heartbreak.

I miss him in the rain. I miss him on the beach. Every weather, every location hurts.

He is a phantom limb. I keep expecting him to be there. But I check and he is gone completely.

We used to message each other first thing in the morning until last thing at night. ‘We used to’. As though he has died.

“Good morning, handsome.”
“Sweet dreams, beautiful.”

My friends have been amazing at checking in and supporting me. But it’s not the same as having him - my person. There's no “I am yours, you are mine”.

That absence is the loudest part of the pain.

And it is a physical pain, this heart ache. Ache is too mild. Heart excruciation, perhaps.

And so many moments of: I can’t do this. I can’t. I just can’t. As if there’s another option.

Love looks different after marriage

After separating from the person you had a child with, you fall in love differently. I couldn’t promise forever, because the pages of my fairytale were torn apart while I was still reading the story.

And so we promised each other something different - perhaps something even better, we felt: I actively choose you every day. I’m not here because of a promise, a ring, a certificate. I’m here because I choose to be with you today.

This wasn’t just love. It was my healing

My relationship with him was transformational. I am a better person than when we met. More open-minded to different people and ideas and experiences. Kinder, too.

He wasn’t just someone I loved, after my marriage. He was the one I healed with. We helped heal each other, together.

I felt so safe with him that we could both literally feel my nervous system settle when I lay against his chest. This was someone who reached for me without thinking, who kissed me between the eyebrows, who made me tea in my own kitchen. Someone who drove an hour to feed my daughter lunch when I was too unwell to get out of bed.

He was someone I trusted with things I hadn’t shared with anyone else. Someone I could seamlessly move from parenting to silliness to sexiness with.

He was someone whose voice saying “Hey beautiful” at the start of almost every voice note would make me melt, day after day after day.

Why this one hurts so much

As a separated co-parent, I carry a lot on my own. And that feeling of someone stepping in and taking care of me is… everything.

My marriage ending broke the life I’d built. But this break-up has torn me apart from the person who rebuilt it with me. Who rebuilt me.

And that’s why this one is so painful.

From everything to nothing

I’m finding the jarring suddenness hard to process. On Tuesday night we had a perfect evening. We went to the cinema and I spent half the film turning to look at him, marvelling at him. He had his “rock star” look on that night. It’s a certain posture he’d hold, perhaps a confidence or comfort.

On Wednesday morning we were over, and by that evening I’d received the last WhatsApp message from him.

And then I was blocked.

I could no longer see his profile picture - the one I’d got a buzz of dopamine from thousands of times over as it popped up on my phone screen.

More painfully, I could no longer see when he’s online. That one word that at least let me feel artificially connected through the ether. ‘We’re both online, we’re both in the same virtual space.’

When there’s nowhere for the emotions to go

I follow the process: denial, bargaining, the whole shebang. He just needs some time, then we can talk again. He just needs some time, then I can hold him again. He just needs some time.

Then the final realisation: none of that will ever happen again. I have lost it all, irrevocably, forever. I decide to go back in time and change everything I said last Wednesday morning. It takes me a moment to realise that this isn’t possible, and the grief hits afresh.

So I leave voice notes and send texts to myself. The ones I would have sent to him.

The desperate, pleading ones. “I can’t do this. Please. I can’t not have you in my life.”

The mundane. “The landlord finally came round today, hopefully the shower will be fixed soon.”

The caring. “The cyclone is coming through tonight, are you all okay up there?”

It’s a way of pretending everything is still normal, and of filling the endless silence.

Silence because I can’t open Spotify anymore. Every playlist is filled with him.

Silence because on Netflix our trashy shows are held in suspended animation under Continue Watching. Waiting for something that will never happen.

The fresh hell of the small, ordinary things

In every corner of my eye is a memory that punches my stomach or causes another wave of fat tears to spill. I open the fridge and see his quarter-drunk bottle of Kiwi Blue in the door. His toothbrush and toothpaste - always squeezed from the middle - on the bathroom shelf.

In the confusion and tears of leaving, he left behind a pair of shorts. “Chuck them,” was one of his last messages to me. Only of course I haven’t. They smell like him and I inhale deeply when I need to feel the echo of his presence. I fall asleep holding them near my face, like a toddler’s comfort blanket. I wake up to find myself still gripping them tightly.

The pillowcase that he slept on, which I can’t wash, because I can’t bear that yet.

Small, ordinary objects that promise he’s coming back on Tuesday night, like normal.

The thought of him never being in my house again, never holding me, is indescribably bad. The shorts have less of his scent already; it’s fading every day. Soon it will be gone completely.

I’m not alone, but I sure feel like it

I know I’m not experiencing anything unusual. About eight billion people have written poetry on this stupid human experience since the dawn of time. I know I’m not unique. And yet I am convinced - convinced - that not a single person has ever felt this much pain from heartbreak.

Friends check in and I give them variations of “not too good, honestly” and “still can’t eat yet”, followed by a reassuring “but it’ll get better” or “but I know I’ll get through it”. And obviously I know I will get through it, because I have to. But right now I don’t feel like I ever really will.

We often discussed our soul-deep connection, a sense that we were permanently fused in some other-worldly way. So I can’t get my head around never seeing him again. It doesn’t compute.

After divorce, I thought I’d already been through the toughest experience, when it comes to love.

This one may not have taken away a house, a two-parent family unit, or a joint bank account.

But it has taken the last part of me that trusted in a soul-deep, ‘we’re bonded forever’ connection.

And that feels a whole lot harder to recover from.

The lack of triumphalism is reflective of how I actually feel. This comes with very mixed feelings.

The burnout loop

The usual assumption is that burnout comes from too much work. And to be honest, last year that was true for me. I was in a period where I didn’t have enough time to go to the toilet or get a drink. Managing way too much – parenting, running a household, a new and full-on job – while still being new to single parenting and going through the emotionally taxing months and years that follow a separation.

The pattern looked like this: I’d get burned out. My brain would slow to the point of not really working. At weekends I’d literally collapse, unable to get out of bed. During the week, my patience would hang by a thread and I’m not proud of my parenting at that time.

What got me through was holding out for my trip back home to my parents in the UK. I had visions of burrowing under the duvet at their house and staying there. And, yes, the trip revived me. But as soon as I returned to New Zealand, it got even worse. I no longer had something to look forward to – a month of my Mum taking care of me. I burned out again immediately. It became a loop I couldn’t stop.

On my new manager’s very first day in the job I finally, properly, crashed. The GP signed me off work.

When I got back, my workload had decreased significantly. And while I was no longer at rock bottom, it still wasn’t sustainable.

Why not?

Because burnout is not just about too much work. It’s about the balance between what a job gives you and what it takes from you.

It can be too much work. It can also be values misalignment. Or disillusionment with leadership. It can be, and I say this seriously, insane boredom when you haven’t got enough to do.

The clearest way I can explain it is that when I’m writing for this blog, I can be at my laptop in the evening, totally energised, going to bed late because I’m so fired up and in the flow. Versus being at work at 2pm, utterly exhausted, and unable to believe it’s not 5pm yet.

When work takes more than it gives, it can only go on for so long.

I knew this was coming for a long time.

To be clear, this wasn’t a toddler tantrum. Yes, I needed a break, but it was more than that. If it wasn’t, I’d just hop on a plane to Bali. Sorted.

Instead, I’ve set myself an existential question to solve, which I’ve never had the space to explore before.

Is it possible, in this day and age, to have work that fires me up, feels meaningful, gives me purpose – and also works with the practical reality of doing the daycare or school run, and single-handedly paying for a two-bedroom flat in Auckland?

The moment I committed to finding out was New Year’s Eve. My boyfriend was with his friends, setting himself a goal – making and releasing music by 1 June. I said: if you’re holding yourself to that, I’m holding myself to mine. Same date. Whether or not I have a job to go to, I’m leaving. Quiet, resolute, deliberate.

It didn’t fit with my good girl upbringing. I was terrified of telling my parents. I went back and forth on it endlessly. By myself, with friends, in therapy. But I kept coming back to the same thing: staying was not cost-neutral. Staying was harming me. And that was showing up in my health. I had to keep coming back to that on days I almost freaked myself into changing my mind.

Then the timeline changed.

I was told that the flexibility I’d been using to pick up my daughter at 5pm was no longer available. I asked for a reduction in hours, from 40 to 37.5 – declined. I asked if I could use annual leave to leave half an hour early – approved as a two-month transition, then no longer possible from 1 May.

Perhaps without realising they’d done it, they had forced my hand. Having always been the last to be picked up, as a child, I have always been determined that my daughter wouldn’t experience the same thing. If I couldn’t pick up my daughter by 5pm, I couldn’t work there. So 1st June became 1st May.

So. Here we are.

We’re in a cost of living crisis. Fuel prices have just jumped frighteningly. I co-parent - I don’t live with a partner to fall back on. My savings are finite. There are real stakes here, and I would not advise anyone to do this without serious thought and real security behind them. I know the privileged financial position I am in to be able to risk this.

It’s time to find out if there is a workable option out there for me. Something that provides income stability with the ability to be emotionally present for my daughter and to manage my energy sustainably. Those are my non-negotiables.

I’m after a few other things too: more agency, work that means something and aligns with my personal values. I don’t know yet whether that’s a wish list or whether it can become a set of actual criteria. But I’m finally in a position to find out.

I don’t want to be unemployed and adrift. I don’t want to burn through my savings. I just want some time to recover, and then to think clearly – to figure out whether something else is possible. Something that works for me and for my daughter. There’s no guarantee of a job at the other end.

I have hope. But I genuinely don’t know what the future looks like. I’ll keep you updated – stay tuned.

And sure, they work hard. But what this misses is the system that often makes their effort possible in the first place. Many of these ‘I don’t know how they do it’ leaders have an entire hidden ecosystem.

To borrow a phrase from Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought,

‘Being able to go to your job and concentrate on your work to the absolute exclusion of all else is something that our system assumes [everyone is] able to do equally.’

Men at the top usually have stay-at-home partners. They are not thinking about meal prepping or planning or lunch boxes. They are not navigating children crying at drop-off or the mad dash to leave the office to arrive on time for pick-up. No wonder they can get to the gym regularly.

Meanwhile, women at the top can afford to outsource tasks like childcare, laundry, cleaning and meal prep. And I don’t see them planning their days around bus timetables.

I don’t begrudge anyone their support (even if I am slightly envious of it). But we do need to recognise that “putting in the effort” is not a neutral phrase. It is made possible by invisible support that I rarely hear mentioned in success stories.

“Drop your standards”

When I first burned out as a single mum, people kept telling me to “drop my standards”. The house doesn’t have to look perfect, they’d tell me. I know they meant well, but it felt like a complete misunderstanding of my experience. I wasn’t talking about optional extras.

Before my burnout becomes acute, it looks like this. My child is fed and clothed, taken to daycare and picked up. My fuse is shorter, but her needs are essentially still met.

And because of that, nobody notices or cares that my life is shrinking. I go to bed straight after she does, barely staying awake through bedtime stories. With no time or energy to prepare nutritious food or exercise, see friends or do any hobbies beyond work and parenting, my health declines and my resources deplete fast.

Hitting the wall

Sooner or later, this approach fails.

For me, that happened on a Sunday. I had enough energy to push my daughter on her trike to the playground across the road. Once there, I realised I couldn’t stand up. I sat down on an orange cylinder. Then I realised I couldn’t sit up. I slid down onto the floor, ending up flat on my back in the playground, unable to move.

After a while, I got us the hundred metres home and fell into bed, unable to get up again.

Not to fill my little girl’s drink bottle. Not to make her lunch.

At this point, language of “putting in the effort” or “dropping your standards” is absurd. This is no longer about optimising or trying harder. The body is clearly saying: stop.

Keeping it quiet

On Monday morning I opened my laptop and got on with the week’s work like nothing out of the ordinary happened the day before.

Because I don’t want to be labelled the weak one. The difficult one. The one you can’t trust with high-profile or complex work.

Or worse, the one who can’t take care of her own child.

And so the system continues, just as designed. We absorb the strain privately. The crash is invisible.

The privilege of pushing through

Pushing through isn’t universally available. It’s easier if you’re healthy. Wealthy. Have support.

It’s harder – perhaps impossible – if you’re also dealing with chronic illness, mental health issues, solo parenting, or other factors that make life more difficult.

Endurance does not come down to willpower alone. To frame it as a personal failing, rather than a structural one, is to ignore other people’s lived reality.

The stop

At a certain point, to keep pushing is not a virtue, but a cause of long-term damage.

Maybe after you crash, you use sick leave, get signed off work for a bit, or reduce your hours. Maybe you have to stop work entirely and rely on savings or benefits. All this can feel embarrassing, like a personal failure. I’ve certainly felt that way.

But work will expand to fill whatever space we give it. Organisations replace people who leave. The systems carry on. Bodies and brains do not.

If yours are giving you information that they are no longer coping, this is reality, not weakness.

What next?

If you find yourself here, you don’t need to fix your entire life this minute.

You might start with something smaller. Admitting you can’t push anymore. Accepting that this is not a personal flaw. Not comparing yourself to others when you don’t know what invisible support they have.

Use sick leave if you have it. Reduce hours if you can. Let something visible drop. Ask for very specific help.

Our culture quietly relies on certain people – often women – to absorb impossible strain, and then applauds those who benefit from that system.

You can’t choose not to break. But you can stop pretending that breaking means you failed.

P.S. Thank you for being here. This was a personal post, straight from my heart. If you enjoyed it, please give it a like. And if you know someone who is pushing through and could do with hearing that they are not alone, I’d love you to share it with them.

But when I posted an Instagram story last week, asking what my friends thought of it, something unexpected happened: the only responses came from men. Not a single woman replied.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And I wonder if it’s because it’s just too painful for us women to look directly at content that is, at its core, about how little many people think we’re worth.

It comes at a time when our media coverage is filled with the open misogyny of the US president, the Gisèle Pelicot case, Epstein and friends. Women are shown again and again that degrading people like us – in words and actions – is not rare or fringe. It’s commonplace and accepted. From the most powerful men in the world to the ones who live in our street.

So adding “engage thoughtfully with contempt towards women” to our to-do list is not top priority on a Tuesday evening.

And I think that’s fair. We need to choose where to put our energy carefully. We’ve got enough on our plates.

Why is this content so appealing for men today?

Men’s and women’s roles have shifted enormously over the last century. Women no longer need men for financial security, transforming partnership from a necessity into a free choice.

While this is progress, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Women now face the ‘second shift’ (in the UK, women do around 60% more unpaid labour than men). Meanwhile, men are expected to be emotionally available in ways their fathers never were.

That expansion hasn’t always been framed as ‘add this’, but often as ‘replace what you are’. And an attack on your very identity always hits hard.

But the problem isn’t masculinity itself. Strength, protectiveness, being a steady presence: these are not bad things. (In fact, they are part of what makes my boyfriend so hot.)

But because our clickbait culture lacks nuance, male identity can quickly be framed as an inherent threat. Here, the manosphere offers a seductive alternative: proudly reclaim your masculinity and blame women - and feminism - for your struggle. It’s a powerful offer.

The risk comes when that message hardens into something more extreme. When buy-in to the manosphere devolves into dominance and entitlement and hatred and violence.

I’m reminded of the saying: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” The manosphere didn’t invent this feeling, but it has done a good job of weaponising it.

What do we do now, ladies?

Probably less than you think. To start with, you don’t need to engage with harmful content at all.

You cannot Ctrl+Z Andrew Tate. You cannot out-algorithm the algorithm. You cannot single-handedly reverse a cultural tide that has been building for years across every platform, in bedrooms and group chats you’ll never see. And it’s not your responsibility to.

An Ofcom report published last year (Experiences of Engaging with the Manosphere) reassures us that most men consuming this content are not at the extreme end. But for some – particularly the most isolated – there is a clear pathway to radicalisation.

And it offers a second glimmer of hope, too. The strongest protection against moving to the most dangerous end of the spectrum isn’t media literacy or algorithms. It is real relationships with women they respect.

So perhaps the greatest impact we can have is in ordinary moments at home. It’s what our children absorb about relationships, respect, what’s acceptable, and what quietly gets excused.

It’s in the social moments that feel small but wearing. The slightly off comment in a social situation, the joke that you don’t find funny, the overheard remark from a colleague. You don’t have to make a scene - there’s often a social cost to doing so. But you also don’t have to laugh.

Where there is room for conversation, curiosity is often more effective than confrontation. Asking questions can open up reflection in a way hostility never would.

In defence of looking away

Maybe my female friends who didn’t respond to my Instagram story didn’t watch Inside the Manosphere. Maybe they were creating or watching something that made them feel good about themselves instead.

And honestly? Same. I still haven’t watched it.

I’ve been meaning to. As a feminist. As a mum. This is a genuinely important topic to me.

But when I have a couple of hours to myself in the evening, I keep choosing something else.

Recently that’s been Shrill – a brilliant series centring a woman who refuses to shrink herself to make others more comfortable. Before that, Madam, a hilarious Kiwi show focused on women, desire, and independence. And, yes, I’ve already re-watched the fifth series of Bridgerton.

I’m not a bad feminist, but I am a tired one.

I started The Writing Half to speak directly to women about what matters to us: purpose, identity, pleasure, wellbeing, culture. We have limited time and energy and we should fiercely protect both.

Yes, the manosphere is real, it’s worth knowing a bit about, and it’s not going away any time soon. But it’s also not yours to solve alone.

So, if tonight you choose not to give misogynistic rage-bait your attention, and instead switch on something that nourishes you, that is a completely legitimate form of resistance.

I’d love to know, have you watched Inside the Manosphere – or consciously decided not to?
You’ve made it to the end, so why not hit ‘like’ or leave a comment? It reassures me this isn’t just a very long note to self.

Bins. Cleaning. Food planning, shopping and prepping. “Wear Red Day”, which apparently comes around once a year on the day your child’s only red clothes are in the wash.

For most of my working life, I’ve lived in a two-adult household. And we genuinely shared the load. Admin, money, laundry, meals. A rarity in a hetero couple, I’m aware.

I thought the hard part would be logistics – dragging the bins down the drive every Monday night, it being my turn to clean the house every single time, and losing the quiet luxury of someone else making me a steaming hot cup of tea at just the right moment.

But you get used to the logistics. The real shift is load. The awareness that if you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. If I don’t feel like, don’t have time, or am too exhausted to do something for my daughter, there is no one there to pick up the slack. To cook her dinner. Pack her lunchbox. Make sure her teeth are actually brushed.

When the Phone Becomes a Life Raft

Over the last year, the more depleted I became, the more I turned to one thing for connection and escape: my phone. The screen time counter on my homescreen made me feel ashamed every time I picked it up, but it didn’t make me stop.

I tried the usual go-to advice: app limits, greyscale mode, minimalist screens. All irritating and all easily overcome. So I did whatever I do when I need help, and searched the Auckland Libraries catalogue.

Indistractable promised I could “control my attention and choose my life”. Honestly, I’d settle for feeling in control of my Tuesdays.

Productivity Advice Wasn’t Written for Tidal Lives

Seventy pages in, I felt the unfamiliar sensation of anger in my belly. About the author’s advice: time-box your week to within an inch of its life, then review weekly to see where you failed.

Ah yes. Just what the sleep-fragmented, burned out, hormonally fluctuating, separated co-parent needs. A shame-inducing performance review.

As I sat there, shaking my head, I realised something: this book is not written for people like me.

The unspoken premise of most productivity advice is stable energy and predictable days. If that’s your life, by all means optimise it. Wake at 5am. Cold plunge. Hit the gym. Plan the week, and expect it to behave. It probably will.

But many lives are tidal. Week on, week off. Childcare days and child-free days. Hormones. Fatigue. Rebuilding after the image of life-as-you-know-it dissolves.

You Cannot Replicate a Two-Adult Household Alone

On the days I have my daughter, everything takes more energy. From the commute, to the cooking, to the emotional regulation. She wakes in the night and she wakes early. I’m shattered.

On the days I don’t have her, I try to compensate with outlandish things like adult connection and sleep.

For months, I held myself to the same output as before. As if one exhausted woman with a strong cuppa and the Google Calendar app could perfectly replicate the productivity of a two-adult household. When I couldn’t, I blamed myself, assumed I lacked discipline or was too lazy. I took myself away for the weekend on a self-guided retreat to optimise 12 different areas of my life, returning with 30 micro-actions for improvement.

In Hard Seasons, Lowering the Bar Is Wisdom

It has taken nearly a year of bumping along the bottom, in and out of burnout, to begin to accept something painful: in your toughest times, you have to lower the bar. Not forever, or because you’re not good enough. But because when you hit harder seasons, it’s not the time for peak performance.

You will never get to your peak if you keep collapsing.

This is the time to prioritise taking care of yourself. Optimisation can come later. The quicker you can accept that, guilt-free, the quicker you can create that stable foundation for the long-term.

Margin Is a Strategy, Not a Luxury

How? Not with bubble baths and facials (though they’re absolutely lovely).

I mean white space in the calendar. Evenings and whole weekends with nothing scheduled. Making music, growing vegetables, sculpting clay, for pleasure, not a side hustle. Refusing to extract the maximum from yourself simply because Tony Robbins shouts it at you on Instagram. Schedule intentional buffer time instead.

My phone time wasn’t just a problem, it was a symptom. When I am exhausted or overstimulated, my phone offers quick connection and temporary relief. And being harder with myself was never going to work when what I needed was less load and more real-life replenishment.

In Act One, the goal might have been outwardly achieving the polished, two-parent, middle-class #lifegoals. But in Act Two I’ve got to start rewarding myself for stability instead: building a life for me and my daughter that fits my actual resources as they are now, not the capacity of a household that no longer exists.

If you are holding a major weight in your life – divorce, a baby, burnout, illness, grief, or something else – you are carrying so much.

So stop expecting yourself to optimise, in this season of life, at least.

You don’t need more discipline, you need more margin.

I kept tweaking the amounts in my budget categories, but nothing changed.

The breakthrough came when I stopped relying on discipline and started relying on a system that did most of the thinking for me.

In this essay I’ll explain the simple budgeting structure that finally worked – how separating money into different accounts changed my behaviour, how I customise it for the messy realities of life, and how it’s helped turn money from something I felt guilty about into something I feel in control of.

Let’s start with a few disclaimers.

I’m not a financial advisor, this is simply what works for me. Take whatever is useful and adapt the rest.

This system is for people whose income broadly covers their essentials but who still feel slightly hazy about their spending. If your income doesn’t cover the basics, this piece probably won’t be helpful.

And of course everyone’s circumstances are different. If you share finances with a partner or have irregular income, you’ll need to adjust the framework accordingly.

The problem: I had a budget and still ignored it

I’ve always tracked my money carefully, and I’ve always hated using cash because it feels too easy to lose track of spending.

And yet. For years, I would set myself meticulously crafted budgets and then ignore them.

I was great at tracking spending once it had happened. I’d export the data, categorise every transaction and pivot table the heck out of it. But tracking the past didn’t help me control my outgoings.

I am evangelical about PocketSmith, a money management tool that connects to your bank accounts. I promise I have no affiliation with the company. I just love how it gives me complete visibility of where my money goes.

But even as a dedicated PocketSmith user, with every transaction categorised, I was regularly breaking my budget, especially when it came to clothes. I vaguely knew it, even as I entered my card into the machine at Flo & Frankie, but knowing wasn’t enough to stop me. When I got home, I’d categorise the payment in PocketSmith, which confirmed that yes, I had blown the budget. Again.

Eventually I realised the problem. A budget that only tells you you’ve broken it afterwards is no use. Data was not the issue. I needed a different structure.

The turning point

Then one day I picked up a book that changed everything. Since then, I haven’t overspent once. And I’m not trying any harder than I did before.

The book was Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor, and what follows is my adapted version of the system. I recommend reading the book for the full deep-dive.

At its core, the Barefoot Investor framework is a bank-account version of the old envelope method. Each payday you divide your income into different “buckets”, putting money into separate “envelopes” (bank accounts) for different purposes.

It works because the limit becomes real, not theoretical. Instead of one big balance where everything blurs together, I can see exactly how much is left in each category. And when an account is empty, that’s it. There’s no robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I still track my spending in PocketSmith, and it is now set up to mirror my Barefoot categories. But separating the money into different accounts is what finally changed my behaviour.

How the system works

A note before we start: this system takes a little time to set up, although once it’s in place it largely runs itself. If you want to follow along, you might like to set aside half an hour and make yourself a cuppa. Ready? Let’s begin.

In my simplified version, there are two buckets:

• One for spending in the short to medium term

• One for building long-term security

Let’s start with the first one.

The Blow Bucket

This bucket is called “blow” because the money in it is going to be spent.

We divide it into three smaller pots:

• Daily Expenses

• Splurge

• Smile

Step 1: Daily Expenses

This first account is where your income is paid.

Daily Expenses covers the essentials of living, like:

• rent or mortgage

• groceries

• utilities and internet

• petrol or public transport

• insurance

• essential expenses for children

The Barefoot Investor framework suggests allocating about 60% of your take-home pay to this category, but your percentage will depend on your circumstances.

Living alone with my daughter, paying for a two-bedroom home and covering 100% of the bills myself, my Daily Expenses take up more of my income than that. That’s fine – it just means the other categories adjust accordingly.

The important first step is understanding how much of your income goes towards the essentials.

If you’re paid fortnightly, calculate how much each expense costs on average per fortnight, even if you pay it monthly or annually.

You may also want to include a small buffer for unexpected extras.

Step 2: Splurge and Smile

Once you’ve estimated your Daily Expenses, subtract that amount from your income.

The remainder becomes X. You then divide X into four.

Two portions go into your spending accounts: one into Splurge and one into Smile. The other two portions go into your long-term wealth bucket.

This happens automatically every payday. Set up the transfers once, and you’re done.

You have a card for each account - clearly labelled.

Splurge

Splurge is for fun, everyday spending.

I’m annoyed to admit that about half of mine goes on eating out – sweet treats, lunches when I forget to pack food on work days, the odd takeaway, and meals or drinks with friends.

Splurge also covers:

• subscriptions like Spotify or Netflix

• non-essential purchases for my daughter

• books and hobbies

• day-to-day hair and beauty spending

• clothes and accessories (although I’m currently doing a no-clothes-buying year)

If I have anything leftover in my Daily Expenses or Splurge accounts when payday comes around, I sweep it all into my Grow account.

Smile

Smile is different. It’s for bigger lifestyle purchases that happen less frequently.

Think:

• holidays

• furniture

• larger experiences or treats

Unlike Splurge, this account isn’t touched often. It’s where money accumulates slowly for bigger joys.

The second bucket: Fire Extinguisher, Mojo or Grow

The second bucket is much simpler. Everything left over from your income after the spending bucket goes here.

In the Barefoot framework, this is 20% of your take-home pay. But depending on how much your Daily Expenses are, it could be more or less than that.

What you call this bucket depends on your financial situation.

Fire Extinguisher

If you have debt – including credit cards – the first priority is paying it off.

Mojo

Once debt is cleared, the next step is building a safety net.

I aim for about six months of living expenses in cash savings. Half sits in an accessible savings account and half in a term deposit.

Grow

Once you have a safety net, you can start growing long-term wealth.

That might mean investing in shares, contributing more to KiwiSaver, or paying down a mortgage faster.

And here’s the whole system in a nutshell:

Why it works

Modern life is overwhelming and full of decisions. At the same time, technology companies are constantly designing new ways to capture our time, attention and spending.

This system works because it removes most of the decision-making. Your pay arrives and, through automatic transfers, is parcelled out into its different pots.

At any moment you can see exactly what’s left to spend, without constantly asking yourself: Can I afford this? And never quite feeling confident in the answer.

Designing a calmer life

The Barefoot Investor approach won’t magically make you “good with money”. It simply gives you a structure that makes managing it easier.

And even though it made me realise I can’t afford to buy nearly as many clothes as I once did, I feel empowered rather than restricted. Because the choices and trade-offs are mine.

I could decide to push harder in my career and earn more if I wanted to indulge my love of fashion.

Until recently I paid for the luxury of a fortnightly cleaning service because it gave me back time and energy with my daughter.

The important thing is that you’re in the driving seat. There’s no constant low-level worry, no vague sense that your money is slipping through your fingers. You choose what you spend money on with more intention, and give yourself more space for what matters to you.

And that’s a much calmer way to live.

How I make it work for me

(aka bonus bits for the money nerds)

The Daily Expenses hack

One small tweak I’ve made to protect essential spending is to get money for bills out the door as soon as possible. I’ve requested that most bills leave my account the day after pay day.

I’ve also created separate accounts for bills that happen more frequently than my pay cycle. For example, I’m paid fortnightly but my rent is weekly. So every payday an automatic transfer moves two weeks of rent into a separate rent account. The same goes for daycare fees, which are also weekly – that money goes straight into a daycare account. The payments then come out of those accounts.

These tweaks mean that money for bills is effectively gone the moment I’m paid. It removes any background worry that I might accidentally spend it. I know that what’s left in my Daily Expenses account is mostly money I can actually use for everyday life.

Adapt it for your Daily Expenses

For transparency, at the moment my split looks like this:

• 70% Daily Expenses

• 7.5% Splurge

• 7.5% Smile

• 15% Grow

The exact numbers matter less than the structure.

The grey areas

Not every purchase fits neatly into a category, so there is flexibility in the system.

If my daughter begs for a drink bottle in a shop because she loves the strawberry pattern on it, that’s Splurge. She already has a perfectly functional bottle at home. But if she’s lost her drink bottle somewhere between daycare, the playground and the car, and she genuinely needs another one, that’s Daily Expenses. Same purchase, different intention.

A hot chocolate at a café is usually Splurge. But if I’m meeting a colleague there for a work meeting, it might fall under Daily Expenses.

Beautiful lingerie? Splurge. Basic underwear? Daily Expenses. You get the idea.

The key question I ask myself is: Does this support my basic functioning, or is it part of my lifestyle and enjoyment?

That’s why yoga, coffee or a cleaning service might sit in different categories for different people.

Irregular expenses

Many people find their cash flow works perfectly well until something expensive happens. A big birthday gift. An annual insurance bill.

You probably could have seen it coming. But now the day is here, and you don’t have the cash to cover it. A budget does not work if it breaks down at the same moment as the car does.

The solution is to create special accounts. These are additional pots for significant, but less frequent, expenses.

For me those include:

• car costs (WOF, servicing, insurance, repairs)

• treatment for a jaw issue every few months

• big gifts and major hair or beauty treatments

• annual digital subscriptions (VPN, PocketSmith, Google storage)

• tech hardware like a new phone or laptop

I calculate the approximate yearly cost, divide it across the year, and set up an automatic transfer each pay cycle from the relevant account.

The money just accumulates quietly in the background until it’s needed. The key is to never touch it until it is.

Invisible spending

Being across your spending like this means things rarely slip through unnoticed.

Companies love to make their services easy to sign up for and difficult to cancel. Free trials roll into paid subscriptions. Plans renew automatically.

So we’ve got to fight their systems with our own.

Whenever I sign up for a free trial, I immediately put a reminder in my calendar a few days before renewal. I also set reminders to periodically shop around for major bills like broadband, energy and insurance.

Being in control means that nothing “just happens” to your money.

I should say upfront that I have never read the book, so I approached the film as a discrete piece of art.

Now, I know this adaptation is polarising. As I discovered the next day, for every person like me who found it a visual masterpiece and left in tears, another found it oversimplified or shallow.

I consumed the sets and costumes in awe, and was hooked by the excess, eroticism and spectacle.

A few days on, though, what has stayed with me is the haunting end.

Because as much as I disliked Cathy - she is selfish, manipulative, cruel - I feel that she is ultimately punished for wanting two things at once: Security and passion. Stability and aliveness. A respectable life and a wild moor.

And this is why it hit me so hard. Because this is the exact tension I have been grappling with for years, and it is one that I, too, feel punished for.

Millennial women were raised on the Girl Power promise of integration: that we could be ambitious and fun, independent and devoted, financially secure and emotionally fulfilled. We were told the world had evolved enough that we wouldn’t have to choose.

Gender equality was here, and we would no longer be held back by being a woman.

But adulthood has quietly rewritten the contract.

The problem? Things around us did not change to keep the promise. Men did not step up in housework, child care and elder care to anywhere near the same extent that women stepped up in the workplace (see Annabel Crabb’s research in The Wife Drought). School and workplace hours were not adjusted to reflect the reality of parents working and picking up kids. Corporate cultures still reward presenteeism.

In previous generations, women often stepped out of their careers when they had children. Things were supposed to be different for us.

But are they?

That implicit contract we signed up for - that we could ‘have it all’ - turned out to be a scam, stretching our nervous systems to breaking point.

So once again, women my age are exiting their careers. We’re experiencing a quiet female millennial burn-out revolution.

Because we can’t do it all. Our nervous systems are fried.

The expectation is that we’re assertive (but agreeable), successful (but unthreatening), a mother (but don’t talk about our kids too much), and independent (but have a partner to pick up the slack or fund us while we reduce our hours for childcare).

And when we can’t do it all, we have to make our lives smaller to survive.

Until a couple of years ago, I lived firmly on the stability side of the equation. I held down secure jobs, had no tattoos, drank in moderation, got married. I was respectable. A textbook Good Girl.

It’s only recently that I’ve slid along the scale towards passion. Choosing clothes for how they make me feel, rather than whether my Gran would approve (sorry, Gran). Knowing - and loving - someone in a soul-deep connection. Dancing at festivals in a gold sequin miniskirt. Divorce. Crying in art galleries - and movie theatres.

I have several bold, amazing female millennial friends who have recently quit their corporate careers without another job to go to. And they’re not leaving because they’re not ambitious, but because the culture and structure are not built for our personalities and our lives. We want to feel alive and wild. To run across the moors, so to speak.

It feels like opting out is the only lever we have left to pull.

Let’s come back to Cathy, and the tragedy that she cannot have both passion and security. Like my friends, she tries to occupy both worlds, but is ultimately punished for it. She has to split herself, because the two can’t be integrated.

Wuthering Heights, set in the late 18th century, has no fairytale happy ending. The split between security (with money and status) and soul-deep passion is unresolvable.

What about in 2026? Does it still have to be so binary?

Well, for me, and my friends in the same boat, it certainly feels so. We haven’t yet found the middle way - if there is one. There is no ‘correct side’ to pick. You can burn out or opt out.

We had a naïve fantasy that intensity and stability, fire and ice, could be perfectly reconciled in our one life. That we could be a responsible adult, employed, secure, and still have meaning, alignment, energy, and a calm nervous system.

But the film refuses to wrap things up in a neat bow. It does not provide us with a safe integration fantasy. And that’s why I left the cinema in tears.

Because for a while now, I’ve been feeling stuck. Now that I’ve tasted it, I can’t unknow what it’s like to feel alive. Being caged inside soulless institutions for 40 hours a week feels intolerable, impossible. But opting out is not a long-term option either. I still have to pay rent and bills, put food on the table, and provide for myself and my child.

Is there an alternative life for women, for mothers, for single mothers, that doesn’t require cutting off half of our true self? We are so tired of sacrificing, of feeling small and restricted, and (literally) sick of the trade-offs we are forced to make.

We don’t want to just ask “can I tolerate this?” anymore. The question we want to ask - which should not feel radical, but somehow does - is “does this help me feel more alive?”

This weekend, I realised that social situations exhaust me because I am both performing and assessing my performance.

I was at the last ever Splore with three wonderful women who I don’t know too well.

But I was filtering everything I said. Have I talked about myself too much? Have I been the right balance of curious without overextending into prying? I was realising how much energy it takes to constantly scan, to be so hypervigilant about how I am coming across to others.

No wonder I’m so tired all the time.

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The last few years have been tough for me. And as a result, I haven’t had the bandwidth to do much more than survive. Being self-centered has come about from necessity, not narcissism.

Unlike most of my life, in this period I’ve done no volunteering. I’ve had a lack of interest and curiosity in cool stuff, no energy to produce anything more than the minimum or think about anything other than keeping my kid and myself alive and appearing - superficially at least - acceptable.

The women I went to Splore with show up as so much more than that. The one who saw a gap in the market for women with bigger feet and set up her own shoe company. The one who loves fashion and media, is connected to everyone in New Zealand and can give the best documentary recommendations. The one who is so trusted as an advisor that she can do highly paid contracting work rather than settling for a boring 9-to-5.

When one of them told me that her mum still jogs, at the age of 84, it struck me how I hold myself back. I feel held back by my exhaustion and the story I tell myself that I can’t do things that other people can, because I’m weaker, more fragile, more tired.

What the Body Stores

I’ve had jaw issues, including severe night clenching and grinding, for as long as I can remember. I spend a fortune each year on preventative and remedial treatments, from Botox to bite splints, to crowns on my cracked teeth.

Recently I spotted a new specialist face masseuse had opened for business in Auckland. As she worked on the knots in my neck and pressed my cheeks between her finger and thumb, tears began to stream steadily down the sides of my face to my ears. And as she held the weight of my head in her hands, I thought of a former colleague of mine who died by suicide around 18 months ago.

The two are not unrelated. Let me explain.

Being a first-generation immigrant and single mum, I never truly feel held anymore. I always have to be responsible, even if I’m mentally burned out or physically unwell. I long to be able to switch off, check out. Leave my responsibilities at the door.

In my hardest moments, my mind can drift into scary places. I think about my daughter and what it would mean for her if I weren’t around anymore. There are times – the kind that come with exhaustion and overwhelm – where I question whether she might be better off without me. But mostly I recognise that I do add something meaningful to her upbringing.

I know that growing up without me would have a lifelong impact on her, from my own experience of losing my Dad at the age of three. It’s no coincidence that that’s when I started grinding my teeth at night.

18 months on I’ve not been able to move on from the anger stage of grief around my colleague’s death.

The massage felt like absolute catharsis. I’m not a woo-woo girl, but even I can’t deny the sensation of something deeper than fascia being released as my jaw muscles were squeezed and freed.

Opening the Pressure Valve

At Splore I could feel my internal assessment meter running in real time. And so I stepped away from the group. I felt anti-social, but I also knew that I needed this time for myself.

For the first time in my life, I had the urge to meditate. To find a quiet spot and let all the feelings that had been swirling around find some stillness.

I’ve never been a festival girl. It always felt unpleasant: the pounding music, the disgusting toilets, being stuck in a place with thousands of people and no way to escape.

But Splore was different. It’s set in a stunning regional park right next to the ocean. In the morning, before brewing up a cup of tea on the beach, I floated on the salt water, tuning out.

Music that I wouldn’t normally be drawn to was exactly what my body needed. I moved for hours, racking up 30,000 steps two days in a row.

And with limited shade available, I relished the sun warming me deep into my bones. For the first time in years, I have slightly bronzed legs.

Choosing Stillness

On the last night, in the middle of the crowd and immersed in a pounding beat, I suddenly craved less. Less movement, less sound, less activity around me. I left the crowd and started wandering back up to my tent, when softer sounds called to me.

It was the wellness tent at the top of the hill, with a DJ playing more chilled vibes than down by the ocean. Around ten people were dancing, slow-motion and floaty. Cushions were scattered over the floor and couples were cuddling under blankets. This was my place.

I set myself down on cushions laid out in a wide cross shape – perfect for draping my body, arms and legs. I stayed there for so long, so still, that someone came to check on me. I felt the night air getting chillier on my exposed skin, but I didn’t want to move. The moment was perfect. I didn’t need to perform or assess myself.

The whole weekend of physical pleasure was sublime. Sun on skin. Floating in water. Moving unselfconsciously to the music. Pure physical and mental rest.

Over the weekend I did wellbeing sessions too. A workshop on staying sane in an insane world. One on grief. Breathing. I held eye contact with a woman I’d never met before.

When the Body Leads

The next morning I woke with the sun and began quietly dismantling my tent while everyone around me slept. A woman in the tent next to me popped her head out and we got chatting. She said she’d had an amazing time, but barely spent time with her friends all weekend.

“I think it’s what I needed, though,” she said.

It was like she had voiced my own thoughts. “Me too.”

Splore wasn’t (just) an escape from reality. It was an opening of the pressure valve. No inbox, no productivity, no hurry. I had made a schedule that I instantly abandoned on arrival. Instead I followed my body’s instincts about when to eat, when to dance, when to move away from the beat and into stillness.

I find that when my body can be intuitive, it is much calmer, and my mind follows.

Bringing It Back to Ordinary Life

The question, then, is how to take this back into ordinary life. A life that – for me, and I feel I’m not alone in this – is tightly wound. Clenching, scanning, a permanent holding of responsibility. I am perpetually braced.

On the final day of the festival, I got a small sun tattooed on the inside of my wrist. A fleeting glance at it takes me back to the warmth and ease in my body at Splore. A happy little reminder throughout the day to unclench and to live beautifully in the moment. Effortlessly.

While we can’t all quit our jobs and flee to a field, perhaps a radical first step is to notice the bracing.

And to choose – not all the time, but in moments – to relax our body, and allow our thoughts to follow.