Six months ago, she arrived on Substack with four essays already written and no idea what she was doing. She said she wasn’t sure she’d still be here in six months. She is still here. She has written thirty-five pieces, launched a second publication, and is, as of this week, cutting the ribbon on a third.

I have watched all of this from the cushion. Nobody asked me. That is fine. I am used to not being asked. I lose air sometimes. I go nose-down. Life continues around me and I observe it. That is what I do.

What I will say is this: she is not the same person who arrived here in February. Not bigger, exactly. More herself. The way a room gets more itself when you finally hang the thing you’ve been meaning to hang for years, and suddenly everything that was already there makes more sense.

She has been building rooms.

⸙ Émoi you already know. The flat white at 7am. The feeling before the words. The room where the light is always left on a little.

⸙ Back Kitchen is the room behind it. Where the apron comes off and nobody is performing for the front of house. She built it because the mechanics conversation kept leaking into this one, and she didn’t want that. There is a new essay waiting for you there. If you haven’t been through yet, now is a good time.

⸙ Regardless. is the third room. The one she has been planning for four months and is finally, finally opening. The words without the apology. Same person. Different hour. Different temperature. There’s a lot of commotion in there already things being moved around, put down, picked back up. The essay’s not ready. She opened the door regardless.

And then there is the giveaway.

She has been making logos for people. Quietly, without announcing it. A logo, an email header, a wordmark: the three things a small publication needs to look like it meant to be here.

This is not a professional service. She is not a graphic designer. What she is, is someone who knows her way around the tools, has strong opinions about Comic Sans, and genuinely enjoys the rustling up of something that fits. She did this for , who cried. She would like to do it for three more people.

This is for the writer whose logo is held together with good intentions and a free Canva template. The one who knows it’s not quite right and has absolutely no interest in learning why, or fixing it, because they have better fish to fry. You win a conversation with her, a very human one, where you tell her what your publication feels like, and she comes back with something that feels like you. No brief required. No graphic design vocabulary needed.

Three winners. If more than three people raise their hand for a silly little logo, names go into a hat and Popcorn picks the winners. Popcorn is a golden retriever. He lives in Australia. He is an international celebrity panel of one and he did not know he was being volunteered for this, but the flamingo is confident he will rise to the occasion.

⸙ To enter: leave a comment on this post, and write the word BUNDLE!. You have until Monday 7, September at midnight. Three winners, one Australian golden retriever, zero graphic design vocabulary required.

The flamingo. x 🦩

⸙ New here? The flamingo has a page. He’d love to be properly introduced. And this is Popcorn.

Someone told me the other week they ‘don’t really do poetry,’ and I smiled the way you smile when you know something the other person doesn’t - yet. Because here’s the thing: they have read poetry. Enough of it, at some point, to reach a verdict. What they mean is: my experience of poetry has been bad, and I have made peace with that. Fair enough. That part is obvious, and it’s not really what interests me.

What interests me is what’s underneath that.

They know, somewhere, that writing a poem costs something. That it comes from a place that isn’t easy to get to, and that showing it to someone is a small act of trust. So when someone hands them a poem, they’re not just being asked to read it. They’re being asked to feel it, to respond to it, with something that matches the size of what it cost the person to write it.

And what if they can’t?

“This is nice” doesn’t cover it. It’s too small, and everyone can feel that it’s too small. Worse: the writer might ask the follow-up. What did you like about it? And then what? Now, there’s nowhere to hide. You either perform an enthusiasm you don’t feel, or you sit there, exposed, with nothing.

Saying I don’t really read poetry upfront, before any of that can happen, is armour. It’s not a lie about taste. It’s a very efficient way of opting out of an emotional labour nobody warned you you’d be asked to do.

I know this because I’ve been on the other side of it, badly. Years ago, I had a flatmate who wrote poetry and loved it the way some people love a person. She kept asking to show me her work. I kept deflecting, in the vague way you do when you don’t yet have the vocabulary for what you’re avoiding. Eventually she wore me down and I said yes.

I read it. I understood nothing. Not the meaning, not even the mood. There was simply no way in. And I was, at the time, a particular flavour of person: very French in my directness, not yet fluent, in English, or in humaning. So instead of finding a kind, evasive sentence, I said something like: “Okay, I’ve read it. Can I go now?”

I still wince at that. It was the wrong thing to say, and I knew it even as I said it. I just didn’t have anything else in the drawer. Sometimes you’re aware of your own limits in real time and still can’t do better with them yet.

What I understand now, years later, is that it probably wasn’t even about capacity. It was likely just poetry that didn’t reach me, hers, or that particular poem, or that particular version of me. Because the strange thing is: I love poetry now. Not all of it, not automatically, not as a genre I’ve decided to be loyal to. But when it lands, it lands, and I no longer treat the ones that don’t as evidence that something is wrong with my reading.

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Last week, I had a very bad day at work. The kind that doesn’t stay at work, the kind that follows you home, lies on the sofa with you and is still there in the morning. I did what I sometimes do when I have no better idea: I went looking for a poem. Something to send to myself, almost. Something that already had the words.

I found nothing. Not for this. Nothing that quite described the feeling.

So I told my friend about it instead, something about purchase orders and pulsating human hearts, more rant than prose, sent without a second thought. The next morning, I woke up to a poem she had written for me. My hands were shaking. Then my heart joined. Then all of me - held, paralysed, embraced at once, the way a film does it. Not one violin easing in, a full orchestra, all at once, and you’re standing right in the middle of it.

The drawer wasn’t empty this time. There was something in it, and it was too big to hold.

That’s what a poem can do when it finds the right reader at the right moment. It doesn’t ask you to meet it halfway. It comes all the way across. It already knows where you are.

I was the wrong reader once. Cold in front of someone’s trust, nothing in the drawer, saying can I go now to a person who had handed me something real. I’m a different reader now. Not because I studied harder or developed better taste, but because enough time passed, and enough poems landed, and eventually I learnt what it feels like when one does.

I still don’t know what I would have said to my flatmate now. I just know I would have had something.

✤

The woman who overthinks compliments and has been questioning her own body politics was always going to have thoughts about Substack behaviour too. This week on Back Kitchen: is sub-for-sub a legitimate strategy or a corruption of the thing you came here to do? The scaffolding, the building, and when one of them needs to come down. Read her article here.

Saturday, 2pm, is when I have my first coffee on days that belong entirely to me. I saw a woman I recognised. She comes through sometimes, going about her life, minding her own business, using a Zimmer frame, not because her age requires one - she’s not elderly, not remotely. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her breasts were at her waist. My eye caught it and didn’t quite know where to go next. I finished my coffee and went home and spent the next twenty four hours trying to understand why I couldn’t leave it alone.

The following day, Sunday, she appeared again. Same frame. Same everything. And I understood I wasn’t going to be able to ignore it any longer. The coffee was already on the table. The thread was already there. So I pulled it.

✤

I am a woman who finds bras comfortable. Who would wear one to bed if it were socially acceptable, so I wear one every day. Not because anyone asks me to, not because I’m going somewhere important or trying to look a certain way. Because without one, things move, and I find that uncomfortable. I have always found that uncomfortable. Even at fourteen, when supposedly nothing needs much scaffolding, I was already reaching for the underwire. The girls have never looked at the sky. They never did. That is just what they are.

I have also spent a considerable portion of my adult life in front of a mirror, reviewing beauty products, maintaining an appearance that made me feel like myself. I say made me feel like myself because that is what I believed, and I am not ready to fully unpick that yet. What I know is that somewhere along the way, the maintenance became the thing. The hairdresser every five weeks. The SPF, the routine, the effort that’s supposed to look like no effort at all. A subscription I keep renewing without asking myself why.

So when I saw her, uncontained, unbothered, moving through my little town on a Zimmer frame without a care in the world, no negotiation, no adjustment, no performance for how she might be perceived, something in me did not just notice. Something in me recognised the distance between us. And it was bigger than I expected.

She let go.

Not of herself. That framing belongs to other people: the ones who would look at her and reach for a phrase like letting herself go, as if a woman’s primary obligation is to remain enticing to whoever happens to be looking. What she let go of is the performance. The negotiation I make every morning without noticing I’m making it, about how much space I’m allowed to take up, and in what condition.

I haven’t let go. I could. Nobody is stopping me. The door has always been open. I just keep choosing the same side of it. Every morning, without drama, without thinking about it much: underwire, mirror, routine. The subscription renewed automatically, so long ago that I’ve stopped noticing the cost.

I am not saying she is braver than me. I am not a fan of the word. Brave should be saved for situations that actually require it, and leaving the house without a bra shouldn’t be classified as an act of bravery, even though I understand why we reach for it anyway. But I’m also not going to pretend what I felt when I saw her was simple. It wasn’t admiration, and it wasn’t pity. It was a form of recognition and it arrived without asking.

She wasn’t asking either. That’s the thing. She was just living. She was literally using a frame to move through the world. And I couldn’t stop thinking about her as being out of frame - outside the picture of what a woman in public is supposed to look like, outside the boundary that decides who gets looked at approvingly and who gets the second look, the raised eyebrow, the thoughts that keep going long after the moment has passed.

Maybe I was uncomfortable at the idea that she could be comfortable without the underwired contraption we are all supposed to wear for a smooth, streamlined, balanced silhouette. This wasn’t about the male gaze. It wasn’t about what men think of women’s bodies. It was smaller than that. And closer to home. Something that feels like shame, the shame of someone who has not yet given themselves the permission that another person has clearly taken.

She was free in a way I am not. And rather than feeling uncomplicated joy at her freedom, I felt disturbed by it.

Have I been, secretly and internally, policing women? Not in a big way, but in a small, involuntary way, perpetuating a standard I never chose to question? The standard that says bodies should be managed. That boobs should be contained. That the visual comfort of others is something women owe the world. She reminded me it isn’t.

✤

Here is the image I keep returning to. A bird in a cage. The door is open. The bird stays. Not because it’s forced to. Not because it doesn’t know the door is open. But because it was born in the cage, and the cage is familiar, and the outside is large and cold and uncertain, and the perch is comfortable enough. I can choose to leave the house without a bra. No one is stopping me. The door is open.

And yet.

If I cannot take the freedom, if the freedom exists in theory but feels like it costs a lot to take, is it real freedom? Or is it just a door that happens to be open in a cage I am still choosing to sit in?

I don’t have an answer to that today. I am still in the coffee shop, metaphorically. Still watching her walk past. Still sitting with the discomfort of a woman who was not asking me for anything and somehow gave me everything to think about. She wasn’t asking for my approval. She wasn’t asking for my admiration. She wasn’t asking to be called brave, or free, or radical, or any of the words we reach for when we see a woman existing outside the frame.

She was just walking. With her Zimmer frame. In the Sunday afternoon light. Minding her own business in a body that had stopped performing for anyone who wasn’t her. And I was the one who made it into something. I was the one who looked, who felt disturbed, who pulled the thread all the way home and found, at the end of it, something I wasn’t entirely prepared to find.

That the cage has always had an open door. And that the guard had always been me.

I am not a poet. I am an inflatable flamingo. I live between two faux palm trees in a north-facing flat in England. My expertise is in being deflated, and in watching the grey sky through the window, and in knowing what a top-up of air feels like. I have never studied poetry. And yet, some of the dispatches she hands me have come out as poems, without me deciding they should. The spring one. The subscriber one. They arrived that way. I did not choose.

I have been watching this happen to other people too.

⸙ was carrying a heartbreak, not all at once, but poem by poem, over weeks. The whirlwind. The closure. The final chapter. Each one a different layer of the same wound, peeled back slowly. She did not sit down to write a collection. The feeling kept arriving with that particular shape. Short lines. Room to breathe between the hard parts.

⸙ writes about her small son and the mess he makes of things. The savage strawberries. The cherry pie he was too impatient to wait for. The blueberry muffins she says are the only life skill she needs him to learn. Her poems arrive, I think, in the quiet after the little one has been put to bed, in the last hour before she has to be put to bed herself. They are funny and warm and soft. She did not set out to be a poet. She set out to tell the truth about a small boy covered in strawberry juice, and poetry was the shape it needed.

⸙ writes in two languages, because some feelings arrive in French and some in English. He started writing after a cancer diagnosis that threw him, in his own words, to the floor. He needed a valve. The poems were what came out. He did not choose poetry. Poetry chose him.

⸙ is in his late seventies. He has been making photographs for thirty years. He writes now because he kept finding writers he wanted to read more of, only to discover they had already gone quiet. He is sharing everything while he is still here to tell you about it. He wrote a poem from a surgical table yesterday, one eye patched, his sister driving him home, the radio playing a Beatles song. He used voice recognition because typing was difficult. “I write with just one eye, I only see part of the sky,” he wrote. The poem came anyway.

Nobody handed Kim, Evie, Dean, or Bill a certificate for it. Life just arranged itself into the shape of a poem, and they let it. The thing that needed saying could not be said in paragraphs. It needed line breaks. White space. The kind of gap you leave on purpose, so the reader can feel what you didn’t say.

And then there is .

Unlike the others, Meg did not stumble into poetry. She chose to live there. She writes because she believes that something is wrong with the language we are given to describe the world, and she wants words that try to tell the truth anyway. Her poems are about power, absurdity, economics, and the emotional reality of living through this time. She names the thing the room agreed not to say. She has been doing it for a while. She is very good at it.

Which is why, when someone reached out to her one evening with a scribbly message, Meg already knew where the shape was. That someone went to sleep. Meg wrote through the night. They woke up to a poem.

Not a poem about work. A poem about being paid to exist, not justify. About ten years of doing something well and being asked, suddenly, to prove it in triplicate. About wanting an unwatched hour. About a friend asking You free today? and having the time to say yes. They posted a note that morning. My heart just exploded. Their hands were still shaking a little bit.

⸙

I don’t know what a poem is supposed to do. I’m a flamingo, not a critic. But I know what I saw: something arrived exactly when it was needed, and it didn’t just understand her. It went further than she had. It said the thing she hadn’t found words for yet.

I watch a lot from this cushion. I did not expect to watch this. The window is open. The sky is grey, same as always. Two lifts that morning. Hers, and mine.

The flamingo. x🦩

⸙ New here? The flamingo has a page. He’d love to be properly introduced. She also has a back kitchen. The flamingo recommends it. Read her words on Pangramgate.

And yet.

This is what happened in the two seconds before I opened my mouth. The woman had a very large nose. Not a nose you might mention in passing, a nose that would be the first thing listed if someone had to describe her. I registered it. And then, almost immediately, I scanned the rest of her. Looking, I think now, for something to offer. Something to name. Something to place alongside the thing I had noticed, as if I were rebalancing a scale on her behalf. I found the coat. It was genuinely lovely. I said so genuinely. She received it genuinely. Nothing about the exchange was false.

But the trigger, the reason that particular truth was said that day, to that person was not entirely clean. If she had been conventionally beautiful, would I have noticed the coat at all? Would it have come out? I’m not sure it would.

The word compliment comes from the Latin complere, to fill up, to complete. At its root, a compliment was not flattery. It was an act of wholeness. You noticed something in someone, you named it, and in the naming, something was completed: in them, and in you. It’s a nice etymology. It’s also, I think, a little too clean for what actually happened in the lift.

Because here is what I have been wondering. Was I offering her the coat compliment as a small offering of “Look, I see something else too” aimed at both her and myself? Was it a way of proving to me that I wasn’t the kind of person who lets a nose be the first thing she sees? Or, murkier still: was I trying to make the discomfort I had about her nose go away by handing her something warm, so I wouldn’t have to sit with what I had noticed?

Was I projecting? Projection would mean I imagined she felt bad about her nose - which I don’t actually know - and then handed her the coat to reassure her about a feeling I had invented on her behalf. Without her permission. She may love her nose. She may not have thought about it once that day. My rebalancing was based on a story I wrote about her, which was really a story about the thing I had noticed and wished I hadn’t.

I don’t fully know what happened in those two seconds. I know what I did. I know what I registered. I know the two things happened close together. I cannot disentangle whether the compliment was a gift to her, a small piece of self-management, or both. Probably both.

I once had a colleague who would say things like “I’m so rubbish at organising, you’re so much better than me at it.” On the surface, a compliment. Underneath: flattery designed to produce a favour, wrapped in performed helplessness. The self-deprecation was so theatrical that it was almost a tell. She was not praising me. She was recruiting me.

That’s not what happened in the lift. I was not recruiting anyone. The coat compliment did no harm. She smiled. Her day was marginally better. Mine was too. The exchange was warm. I’m not saying I did something ungenerous. I’m saying warm and clean aren’t the same thing, and most compliments carry more of the giver than we like to admit. Knowing this doesn’t make me give less compliments. If anything, I give more. But it makes me a more honest giver.

I still don’t know if that means giving compliments is selfish. What I know is that they can be warm and self-serving in the same breath, and the warmth was real, and the self-serving was real, and both things were true in the lift going up.

Give the compliment, say the thing, or don’t. But if you do, let the room be warmer than you found it. Even if you needed the warmth too. Especially then.

I was scrolling through Substack recently when a note from a friend stopped me in my tracks. “The spouse is part of the reality phase,” she wrote. “The affair partner is part of the escape phase. Two totally different aspects of the situation.”

I almost replied. I started typing. And then I stopped, because what I wanted to say was too long for a comment and too important to rush. Because I think she named something real. And I think it has very little to do with the affair partner.

Here is what I have read, heard, and come to believe about why people wander and I would like to say upfront that this is not a trial. We are not here to decide what counts as betrayal or to rank anyone’s choices. We are here because someone, probably you, has been lying awake asking what they did wrong. And I would like to offer a different question.

When a man begins an affair, what is he actually looking for?

The popular answer is: someone younger, someone more exciting, someone his partner is not. But I don’t think that’s quite it. I think what he is looking for is a clean slate. Not a new person. A new version of himself.

With the affair partner, the tally doesn’t exist yet. He hasn’t forgotten her birthday. He hasn’t said the wrong thing at the wrong moment. He han’t let her down in the small and accumulating ways that long relationships inevitably produce. She looks at him and sees someone capable, present, worth choosing. And in her eyes, he finds the reflection of a man he used to recognise. It was never really about her. It was about the him that hasn’t disappointed her yet.

Let me tell you about the pickle jar.

A few years ago I started noticing something. When I asked men for help with small things - genuinely, not performatively - something shifted in them. I asked a member of staff to open a bottle of Innocent carrot and orange juice at Tesco because the lid was too tight. I asked a tall stranger in Aldi to reach the sweet chilli cheesebake from the top shelf. I once broke the lid mechanism from my Brabantia bin, brought it to my colleague, and asked if he could fix it. He could. I paid him in Reese’s peanut butter cups. He was delighted.

The faces. That’s what I kept noticing. The way they lit up. Not because the task was significant. Because they were useful. Because for one small moment, they were exactly what was needed, and they knew it, and nobody was keeping score.

The affair partner is basically a constant pickle jar. Everything is a pickle jar when she’s new. He opens it. She’s amazed. He’s magnificent. He’s the knight in shining armour. Meanwhile at home, the jar has been opened ten thousand times and nobody notices anymore.

Now, here is the part that nobody talks about, because it is uncomfortable. The tally is not always kept deliberately. Nobody sits down and decides to score their partner. It builds the way damp builds in a house, slowly, until one day there is damage and you cannot quite remember when it started. He forgot the anniversary. She’s hurt. Now, there is a mark against him. He feels the weight of it every time she looks at him. That weight becomes shame. And shame does not make people better partners. Shame makes people shrink. Shrinking makes them less present, more defensive, more likely to forget the next thing. The tally does not motivate growth. It slowly builds the case for his own inadequacy until he either leaves, or stops trying, or finds somewhere the case hasn’t been built yet. So the affair partner doesn’t have lower standards. She just hasn’t started keeping score.

And the question that follows, the one I find more interesting, is whether any of this could be different. Not through unconditional reassurance. Not through pretending the forgotten anniversaries didn’t happen. But through something smaller: remembering, every now and then, to hand him the jar. Even if you could open it yourself. Even if you have opened it yourself, a hundred times, and could open it in your sleep.

The point is not the jar. The point is the moment. The moment where he is useful and capable and seen, not despite the history between you, but inside it. Where the tally pauses. Where he gets to be, just briefly, the man you chose before either of you had disappointed the other.

I would like to be clear about what the pickle jar is not. It is not a solution. It doesn’t save a marriage. It is a small pause in the tally, nothing more. And when the tally has grown too heavy - when the forgotten anniversary has become a forgotten Valentine’s Day has become a pattern of forgotten things - no jar will fix that. That is a conversation, not a symbol. Maybe about whether you still want to celebrate. Maybe about something bigger.

The pickle jar keeps something alive that might otherwise quietly die. It cannot resurrect what is already gone.

Which brings me to the person this essay is really for. The one who has been replaying everything. Checking the timeline. Wondering if you were too much or not enough, too available or not available enough, too serious or not serious enough. Auditing your body, your age, your face, your performance, your personality for the flaw.

Consider this. The tally is not always yours. Sometimes the weight that broke the relationship was not your score of his failures, but his own. His private record of every time he let you down. Every birthday he almost forgot. Every argument he handled badly. Every moment he saw disappointment on your face and added it to the case against himself.

You were not the judge. He may have already convicted himself before you said a word. And if that is true, if the relationship ended not because you were not enough, but because he decided he wasn’t, then no amount of being thinner, funnier, cooler, more easy-going, less emotional, more available would have changed the verdict. Because the verdict was never about you.

You might have been asking the wrong question.
Not: What did I do wrong?
But: What did he decide about himself?

Maybe he realised that he wasn’t enough. And no jar you could have handed him would have touched that.

This essay began with a note from , a Substack friend whose one-line observation stopped me in my tracks. Thank you.

All in all, across my entire life, I think I might have read about twelve books. So if you had told me that last Friday I would be writing a piece of fiction for Substack, I would have laughed in your face. I am still trying to figure out how we got here. Let me try to piece it together. Because I have been turning it over all week and I think the answer is more nuanced than I stepped outside my comfort zone.

The challenge came with a very specific brief, and there was something about the specificity that grabbed me before I could talk myself out of it. Here is what it said:

Forty-five seconds. A smell. A single burning object in the dark. That’s it.

I should have said no. I have said no to every tag, every challenge, every invitation to do something that wasn’t my genre, since I arrived on this platform a few months ago. I am a lapsed blogger who is fond of the essay. I have a brand. The brand does not include fiction. I said yes anyway. I am still not entirely sure why.

I nearly gave up six times. The descriptions were the first problem. I have a complicated relationship with descriptions in fiction. I find them insufferable to read. I do not want to know about the colour of the velvet. I do not care how the light comes through the window. I want to get to the feelings, the action, the thing that is actually happening. Reading endless descriptions is, to me, what I imagine voluntary root canal feels like. Enjoyable for someone, presumably. Not me.

So when it was my turn to write them, I panicked. Not because I didn’t know what a sparkler looked like. Because I didn’t trust myself to describe it in a way that would keep anyone in the room. This, I realised, is the central terror of fiction that nobody told me about. With an essay, you have an argument. The reader stays because they want to know if you’re right. With fiction, the only thing keeping them there is belief and you are the one who has to manufacture it, sustain it, and hope they don’t notice the join.

What saved me, in the end, was familiar ground. I couldn’t imagine characters, so I used real ones. I am Lori (a name I had in a previous life). My friend Abbi is my friend Abby with one letter changed, a disguise so thin it is essentially decorative. I couldn’t invent a scene, so I reached for something real: a cold night, a dog barking behind a fence, the nerves of someone whose phone battery is dying at the exact wrong moment. I couldn’t invent a smell, so I went back to childhood. To pétards - the little firecrackers we stepped on in my native island. The smell of them. The sound.

I wrote: a smell like gunpowder and childhood. That line did not come from imagination. It came from specific moments in specific places, decades ago. I sourced it from memory, and it landed as fiction.

That puzzled me more than anything else. I had always assumed that what makes a fiction writer worth their salt is an endless supply of imagination — the capacity to produce people, scenes, smells, weather, from nothing, on demand. When I caught myself reaching for familiar names instead, I thought I had already fallen at the first hurdle. But the names worked. The smell worked. The dog behind the fence was real and the reader didn’t know and it didn’t matter. Memory had stepped in where imagination was out of stock, and the page didn’t seem to mind which one had done the work.

I don’t know yet whether that’s a real way in or a beginner’s trick. Maybe it’s how every fiction writer starts and quietly stops admitting later. Maybe it’s the cheat code for people like me, the ones who arrived through the essay door and don’t have the imagination muscles built up yet. Either way, it was the thing that got me to the end of the piece. Memory, not invention. The fact that I had a sparkler in my own past meant I could write one onto a page.

Something else might have drawn me in. Something that has nothing to do with craft or memory or the mechanics of forty-five seconds. The challenge was ’s. I have been tagged in challenges before. I have never participated in a single one. So why this one? Why now?

Kayleigh is completely and refreshingly unafraid. When she wanted to say hello to me on Substack, she slid into my DMs and said something along the lines of: Hey, I like your vibe, maybe we can collab one day, alright then, just wanted to say hi, see you, byeeee. That is the energy of a eight-year-old on holiday who has spotted a potential friend by the pool and decided, without second-guessing, that they are now friends. I cannot do that. I do not have that level of confidence.

So when her invitation came, it didn’t feel like a tag. It felt like an invitation from someone who already believed I could. She had built the trust before the ask arrived. And the ask arrived wrapped in so much genuine enthusiasm that the thought of entering didn’t completely paralyse me. It was a trust moment, running both ways. She trusted I could produce something worth reading. I trusted that if I didn’t, she would be kind about it anyway. That two-way trust is the thing that moved me from “No, not my genre” to “Okay, fine, forty-five seconds”, how hard can it be?

(Quite hard, as it turned out. The only reason I didn’t actually quit is that I had already made the graphic for it and didn’t want it to go to waste. I find this equal parts amusing and mortifying.)

I published the piece in a note, not a proper post. There was no way I was sending that to people’s inboxes. I am not ready to be that brave. But I wrote it. Three hundred and seventy words about two women, a sparkler, and a photograph.

And somewhere in the writing of it, something shifted. Fiction writers have my complete and unconditional admiration now. They had it before, but now it is the admiration of someone who has briefly stood in the room and understood, first-hand, what the pressure actually feels like. The making-believe believable. The holding of a reader in a world that doesn’t exist. I had no idea. I have put them on a higher shelf than they were already on, which was already quite high.

The piece itself, Forty Five Seconds, is below. It was my first time. And, in all likelihood, my last.

If you want to see how fiction is actually supposed to be done, V writes as []. She writes serial fiction with dark humour, real teeth, and not a piece of velvet in sight. She is, in short, everything I discovered I am not, on the page. Buckle up and find her here.

Warm wave to my friends , and who also joined in the challenge and & who I met along the way.

I cheered for all of it. I clicked the heart, I left the comment, I meant it. And then I would close the app and sit with the knowledge that I did not have the equivalent thing to offer. Nothing that fit the template. Nothing that the algorithm - or the people behind it - would recognise as an event worth marking.

What I had was a foundation that finally, after months of searching, matched my skin tone exactly. I had opinions about cakey, patchy, and streaky. I had things to say about lip liners, primers, bronzers with nowhere to put them. Facebook was not interested. Neither were most of the people I knew in real life. Not because they were unkind. It wasn’t their subject. It wasn’t their language. So I found somewhere else to speak it.

I did not arrive on Substack directly. Nobody does, really. I found YouTube first, through a colleague talking about football highlights. From YouTube I found the world of beauty content, and from that world I found Twitter, and from Twitter I found small beauty bloggers on Blogger, and somewhere in that chain of discoveries I realised: people write about things that matter only to them, other people find them, and magical connections form. So I started a blog. Before I realised it, I had written a thousand words about nail polish. Something clicked. It never fully went away.

I am telling you this not because the journey is interesting in itself, but because of what it reveals: the blog was not born from ambition. It was born from a need that wasn’t being met closer to home. If the people around me had been curious about what I thought, about foundations, about anything, I might have never needed to build a platform at all. The blog existed because the primary sources ran dry and I had to find water somewhere else.

The conversation about social media usually stops at the manipulation. “The slot machine, the number that goes up, the system designed to keep you scrolling.” And that is true, as far as it goes. But the need that the system exploits is not a weakness. It is one of the oldest human things there is: hunger for connection with other like-minded spirits.

What Substack has been giving me, at its best, is not subscribers. It is the experience of writing something that lived inside me for years - something with no socially praised occasion, no template, no obvious audience - and having a stranger read it and say: “Yessss! This! Exactly this!” Not because they were being polite. Not because an algorithm surfaced it to them at a vulnerable moment. But because it resonated. Because they were also carrying the thing and maybe hadn’t seen it written down.

That is what the like button was always supposed to be before it became a metric. A small gesture that says: I was here, I read this, it landed. The trace of a connection. Evidence that you existed in someone else’s attention, even briefly.

I think about the people I have met here in the past three months. The ones whose names I now look for when I open the app. The ones whose comment made me feel less like a stranger to my own thoughts. None of them are people I would have found any other way. We do not share a geography, or a profession, or a background. What we share is harder to name, big feelings about things maybe. A way of noticing things. A refusal to be satisfied with the surface of it.

You build a family from what’s available. Sometimes the one you were born into gives you everything. Sometimes it gives you the foundation and you have to find the rest yourself, sideways, through a colleague’s football video, a small blog, a decade of silence and an itch that came back too loud to ignore.

The strangers who read you are not a consolation prize. Sometimes they are just the people who were always going to get it. You just had to find each other first.

La mère fait du tricot. Le fils fait la guerre. I was fifteen. I had to write four pages about that. Not four pages about war, or grief, or the devastation of a family that finds it all perfectly natural. Four pages about the poem. The structure of it. The repetition as a literary device. The themes. The symbols. Whether Prévert was making a political statement and if so, what kind, and if I could demonstrate my understanding in no fewer than four sides of A4, in neat handwriting, by jeudi.

My friends and I genuinely considered smoking zamal. We didn’t. But the fact that getting high seemed like a more viable route to four pages than anything our education had given us tells you something. Not about us. About the four pages.

The wrong relationship

I have been thinking about how to describe what school was, and the closest I have come is this: it was a relationship I didn’t choose, couldn’t leave, and gave my best years to.

Not an abusive one. I would like to be clear on that. I am not interested in the argument that the system was designed to oppress, to produce compliant workers, to crush the spirit of the masses. That argument exists and I find it a little tired. What I think happened is less dramatic and more depressing: people stopped caring about what school was supposed to do, and nobody noticed until the damage was already done, and now here we are, a generation of adults who know how to analyse a Prévert poem and cannot balance a budget or regulate an emotion or ask a question without first apologising for not already knowing the answer.

The wrong relationship is not always evil. Sometimes it is just wrong. Wrong timing. Wrong fit. Wrong version of you receiving it. You gave it your energy, your mornings, your capacity for wonder, your willingness to be shaped and it gave you back a grade. And if the grade was good, you felt temporarily okay. And if it wasn’t, you felt stupid. And either way, something got a little smaller each time. That is what a wrong relationship does. It doesn’t announce itself. It just slowly becomes the voice in your head.

What it was actually measuring

Here is what I have come to understand, years later, that nobody told me at the time: school was not measuring whether I had learnt anything. It was measuring whether I could prove I had.

Learning is what happens when something sparks in your brain and stays there because it meant something to you. Proof of learning is what you produce under timed conditions, from memory, in volume, on a topic you may or may not have found relevant, after a period of strategic memorisation that most of us called revision and I would now call gambling.

The lottery worked like this. You could not memorise everything. Nobody could. So you made choices, calculated, anxious choices about which topics were most likely to appear on the day. You bought your lottery tickets. And if your numbers came up, you wrote your four pages, and you passed, and the system recorded this as evidence that you had learnt something. And if they didn’t, if the thing you hadn’t memorised was the thing that appeared, you sat there. You looked at the blank page. You watched other people writing furiously, pages filling up around you, and you understood in your body what it meant to have picked wrong. And then you did the walk of shame. You handed in your blank page after fifteen minutes because sitting there any longer, watching everyone else’s productivity, was its own kind of unbearable.

Nobody asked why you were leaving. Nobody wondered what had gone wrong in a system that had left a student with nothing to say. The conclusion was simpler: you hadn’t worked hard enough. You hadn’t prepared. The fault was yours.

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” Einstein said that. I used to think it was a joke. I don’t anymore.

The ersatz dissertation

I was fifteen. My friend - a different school, higher ceiling, sharper pencils - wrote a dissertation for me. I asked her because I had nothing. Not because I was lazy. Because I had been given a blank page and no tools and told to fill it, and I couldn’t, and she could, and the gap between us felt like evidence of something permanent and damning about my intelligence.

She wrote it. It was good. It contained the word ersatz. I got 19 out of 20. I have still not looked up what ersatz means. I am looking it up now, for the first time, in this essay, years later, because I am finally writing for myself and I am finally curious: ersatz. German origin. A substitute, typically inferior, for something real or genuine.

I got 19 out of 20 for a dissertation full of someone else’s thinking, containing a word I didn’t know, about a text I hadn’t understood, on a topic I hadn’t chosen. The system recorded this as a success. What it had actually measured was my ability to find a workaround. Which is, I will admit, a skill. Just not the one anyone was claiming to teach.

What I taught myself instead

Here is the thing about the wrong relationship. It tells you who you are. And you believe it, for a while, because you are young and it has grades to back itself up. But it cannot fully extinguish what was there before it arrived.

What was there before, in my case, was English. Not the English they taught at school - though I sat at the front for that too, and it was never enough. My English. The one I built myself, from the outside in, with a handmade vocabulary list and a pen and paper and Canal+ showing American films in their original version at an insolent hour on a weeknight, and me there with my notebook, writing down every phrase that caught me.

The English on shampoo bottles - lather, rinse, repeat - and the backs of custard tins and instruction booklets and anything, anything at all that had English words on it. I was not doing homework. I was not revising for an assessment. I had no grade to aim for, no four pages to fill, no Thursday deadline. I was just.. hungry. Genuinely hungry for it. And so it went in. Not because I memorised it. Because I wanted it.

Maria Montessori said that. She was right. The system did not keep my light burning. I kept it burning myself, after hours, from shampoo bottles and subtitles, because the thing I loved most was the one thing they couldn’t make compulsory or grade or ruin.

Learning starts when school stops. I know this because of what happened to my curiosity the minute the bell rang and nobody was watching.

The pot de fleur

I was thirteen. PE. We were given bibs, handed a volleyball, and told to play. At no point did anyone explain the rules. Not a word. Not a video. Not a demonstration. Just: here is a ball, here is a net, off you pop.

I stood there. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I had no framework, no context, no entry point. So I stood. And I was nicknamed le pot de fleur - the flower pot - because that is what you call someone who stands very still in the middle of a game and contributes nothing.

I think about that volleyball court a lot. Because it is a symbol of the whole school curriculum, in one frame. We were never told the rules of the game. We were just put in the room and assessed on our performance and given nicknames for not already knowing what nobody had taught us.

Here is the part I almost left out, because it is a little bleak. If you sat me down in an adult education class tomorrow and told me there was a test in three weeks, I would do the only thing I was ever shown. I would apprendre par coeur (learn by heart). I would write it out neatly. I would buy a highlighter. I would highlight the important parts. And then I would sit there with my colour-coded notes and have no idea what to do next. Am I meant to read them? Just read them? How does the reading become the knowing? Nobody ever told me. They told me to revise. They didn’t tell me what revising was. They assumed the method was self-explanatory, or that we would absorb it, or - and this is what I actually believe - they hadn’t thought about it at all. The curiosity survived. The method was never installed.

For the person still carrying it

I would like to say something now to the person who is still hearing the old voice. The one that says: I am not intelligent. I am not equipped. I did not learn properly. I am a fraud. I have been winging it since I was fifteen and one day someone is going to notice.

You were not stupid. You were playing a game that was rigged - not maliciously, not by design, but by decades of institutional negligence and a fundamental confusion between learning and the performance of learning. You memorised things. You gambled on the right topics. You handed in blank pages sometimes and full pages other times and neither one was a true measure of what was happening in your mind.

The curiosity was always there. You just had to get out first. I know this because of what happened to mine. Decades after the Prévert poem, after the ersatz dissertation, after the walk of shame, I am writing essays. Voluntarily. For no grade. About things that caught under my skin and wouldn’t leave until I gave them a shape. I write at midnight if the itch demands it. I write about the interview theatre and inadequacy and the word effortless and what it means to feel before you have the language for it.

Nobody assigned this. Nobody is marking it. There is no Thursday ultimatum and no four pages minimum and if there were, I would still have things to say when I reached the bottom of page four. That is not because I became intelligent. It is because I was always curious, and school just wasn’t looking in the right place.

I finally looked up ersatz. A substitute, typically inferior, for something real. That is what the assessment was. Not the learning, the proof of it. The inferior substitute for the actual thing, which is messier and slower and cannot be produced on demand and under timed conditions.

The real thing looks like a fifteen year old staying up late for the fifth showing of an American film on Canal+, notebook in hand, writing down phrases she wanted to keep. It looks like learning that starts when nobody is watching. It looks like this.

A small note before you go. I have been hard on school here, and I meant every word. But the good ones do exist. Glen Fielding is one of them. His essay on Yale and the neck-up university is the one I’d point you to, when hope in school is running low.

Food noise.

If you’ve never experienced it, the term sounds mildly poetic. A metaphor, perhaps, for being a bit greedy. A colourful way of describing enjoying your food a little too much.

If you have experienced it, the phrase barely needs definition. You know it the moment you hear it, the way you know the name of something you’ve been pointing at your whole life without the word.

What the noise actually sounds like

It is not hunger, exactly. Hunger is clean. Hunger has a beginning and an end. Hunger says: you need fuel, here is the signal, now go and eat and the signal will stop.

Food noise is different. Food noise is the background programme that runs whether you are hungry or not. It is finishing a meal and having your brain begin, before the plate is cleared, to consider what comes next. It is walking past a bakery and having the thought arrive not as a flicker but as a full conversation: should I, shouldn’t I, maybe just this once, but then I said that yesterday, but it smells incredible, but I just ate, but... and by the time you’ve had the argument you’re already inside. It is lying in bed at night and your last thought before sleep being about tomorrow’s breakfast.

It is not greed. It is not weakness. It is not a failure of willpower, discipline or character. It is a neurological reality that some people live with every waking hour, and it is so poorly understood - even now, even by the medical profession - that for most of history it had no name. You just lived inside it and assumed everyone else did too. You assumed the people who ate small portions and stopped when they were full and forgot about food between meals were simply trying harder than you.

They were not trying harder. They just couldn’t hear the noise.

The reset button

I have found, over the years, exactly one thing that quiets it for me. Not permanently. Not easily. But reliably, when I can get myself into the right frame of mind for it. Occasionally not often, not as a routine, but as a deliberate reset, I fast for a day. I’m talking about the kind of structured, minimal eating that the late Dr Michael Mosley spent years researching and advocating: somewhere around 500 to 600 calories, carefully chosen, enough to function without the jitters. I adjust it slightly for my own body. I know myself well enough to know exactly where the floor is before things get uncomfortable.

And on those days, something happens that I can only describe as silence. The noise stops. The background programme switches off. I move through the day and food is simply not a conversation my brain is having. I eat what I planned, I feel satisfied, and I think about other things.

The first time I understood what was happening, I sat with it for a long time. The feeling was so unfamiliar that it took me a while to name it. This is a what a normally regulated person feels like. Every day. Without trying.

That realisation is not a small thing to carry. You have spent years - decades - believing you were the problem. You were fighting something every single day that other people were not fighting. And you didn’t know. You didn’t know they weren’t fighting it. You didn’t even know there was a fight.

Every time I mention this reset to people - every single time - the room goes tense. I watch people reach for the word they’re afraid to say. Disordered. I understand the reflex. I am not offended by it.

But I notice something strange. People have heard of fasting. They have heard of Ramadan. They have heard of not eating until nightfall, of intermittent fasting, of 16:8 windows. They are fine with all of it. But the moment I say the words “500 calories,” something shifts. The number does something to people that the word “fast” on its own does not. They stop hearing what I’m telling them and start hearing something I’m not saying.

So I would like to say this clearly: knowing your own body well enough to give it exactly what it needs to feel regulated is not disorder. It is the opposite of disorder. It is the most ordered thing I do.

The image

There is a picture doing the rounds on social media. You may have seen it. On one side, a gym. A small group of toned bodies, standing proudly. On the other side, a pharmacy, Mounjaro on the sign, which is one of the GLP-1 medications in the news. A queue of people waiting. And those people - the ones who chose the other door - are melting. Literally dissolving, their bodies dripping and pooling at their feet, faceless and formless. Beneath the image: which path are you choosing today?

I looked at the image for a long time.

What I felt wasn’t outrage, exactly. It was disappointment. Because I think the person who made it genuinely believes they are posting something motivational. I think they look at that image and see discipline on one side and weakness on the other, and they feel righteous about which side they’re on.

They don’t understand - and I mean this without contempt, because I think it is a lack of awareness rather than a failure of character - that the people in that queue may have spent decades fighting a battle that the people at the gym door simply were not fighting. That the noise they have been living with is real, and exhausting, and not a reflection of who they are. That the medication is not a shortcut. For many of them, it is the first silence they have ever known.

The thin people do not like the game changing, and I think I understand why. When you’ve built part of your identity on winning a fight that other people kept losing, the arrival of a different route in doesn’t undo your work. But it removes the edge. And that, I think, is what this image is really about.

What nobody should be ashamed of

Losing weight slowly, with effort and calorie counting and the unglamorous work of changing habits. Losing weight with medication, and the particular challenges that come with that route too - because it is not easy either, and anyone who says otherwise has not done it. Not losing weight at all and deciding that your body is yours and you are done performing for other people’s comfort. Being somewhere complicated in the middle of all of these, where the feelings are contradictory and the journey is non-linear and it doesn’t fit neatly into a motivational image.

None of these warrant shame. Not one.

The route was never the moral question. The noise was never a character flaw. And the people in that queue are not melting. They are tired. They found a route to the silence. They deserve to walk through the door without apology.

And then I noticed something. The TTGG’s content is the growth hack. Their entire niche is telling you how to get big on TikTok and by watching them, you make them big on TikTok. It’s a closed loop. You watching them is the thing they’re teaching you to do. I dismantled the advice. I wrote a piece about it that I never published, because I didn’t have a platform yet, and by the time I had one, I understood that the piece was pointing at the symptom rather than the thing underneath. The symptom was the TTGGs. The thing underneath is older and has nothing to do with TikTok. It’s hope. And what happens to it when it meets the right opportunity at the wrong moment.

Hope is almost universally described as a virtue. The thing that saves us. That separates the resilient from the defeated. That keeps us going when the evidence suggests we should probably stop. And that’s partly true. I’m not here to argue against hope entirely. I would like to keep some, in a small jar, for emergencies.

But hope has a dark side that nobody wants to acknowledge. Hope is also a door left ajar. And the door doesn’t open because we are foolish or particularly susceptible. It opens because the unguarded moment is not a weakness of character. It is part and parcel of being human. It arrives for everyone, without exception, at different times.

One video that does unexpectedly well. One Substack note that lands when you didn’t think it would. One morning when the guard drops just enough to think: maybe this time. That’s all it takes. The moment is small. That’s exactly what makes it land across millions of people at once. Not a grand delusion shared by the naive. A tiny one, shared by everyone, briefly, when something cracks open just enough to let the light - or the pitch - in.

The growth gurus and every person who has ever sold a recipe to a place they’ve never taken anyone will always find a way to thrive. Not because they are particularly brilliant. Because hope is not strong. It’s small and specific and arrives exactly when we are most open and least defended. And some people have learnt to be standing there when it does. Here is what makes the pitch so effective. It doesn’t just sell hope. It sells hindsight.

And we fall for it. Not because we are foolish, but because hindsight is genuinely valuable, and the offer of it, packaged neatly with a hook in the first three seconds feels like exactly what we needed in that unguarded moment. The problem is that someone else’s hindsight was never really yours to follow. You can have the recipe. You still have to cook.

I would like to invite you to do something uncomfortable. I would like you to think of your own unguarded moment. Not the TTGG specifically, though if that’s yours, welcome, there are many of us. I mean the broader version. The moment when the guard came down just enough. When you let yourself believe. When the door opened and something walked in before you’d decided whether to let it.

Mine are embarrassingly recognisable in retrospect. The moving in. Love will solve it, I thought. No conversation required about the mental load, or who pays what, or what happens if it doesn’t work out. Love was the answer, and I had it, and that was enough. The guard was down. The door was open. The bill came later, on its own schedule, with interest.

The 11pm task. It will only take an hour, I estimated. With brazen confidence. The all-nighter that followed was not a surprise to anyone who knows me, which at the time did not include me.

The wrong first date. All the red flags visible from the surface of the moon. A trusted friend, just as deluded, bless her, saying: Go on, you’d never know, what if? And you have no answer to what if. You never do. That’s the whole mechanics of it. What if is hope’s most effective delivery mechanism. It arrives as a question so it cannot be argued with. It just sits there, open-ended, while the guard thinks about it.

The doom and gloom was always coming. Hope just rescheduled it. And sometimes charged you for the delay.

Here is what I would like to say before I close, because I don’t want to leave you with the impression that hope is the villain. It isn’t. The unguarded moment isn’t a failure of judgement. It’s proof that you are still in there, still capable of believing, still open enough to be reached, still human enough to think maybe this time even after the last time didn’t work out. The more we fall, the sharper the intuition gets. Not immediately. Not without cost. But eventually.

And perhaps that is the real function of hope, not to protect us from the bill, but to make sure we keep moving towards it. Every unguarded moment, even the ones that cost us, teaches us something about where the door is and what tends to walk through it.

We get better at recognising the pitch. We get better at staying in our own clarity rather than buying someone else’s. We get better, little by little, at deciding when to leave the door ajar and when to keep it closed.

You might have noticed I’ve been up to something. I bit the bullet. I opened a second publication not because émoi needed a companion, but because it needed protecting. The mechanics of this platform, the frustrations, the politics of trying to get your work read: They kept leaking into this space and I didn’t want that. Émoi is not the place for that conversation. So I built one that is. It’s called Back Kitchen. No front of house there. I could have imported your names but I didn’t, because that felt wrong. This is your opt-in, if you want it. [Come through the back →]

The majority of Substack writers have under 1000 subscribers. I have 160. I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because it matters to what comes next. Most of us are not being seen. And before we go any further: this is not because you’re not good enough. Your writing is not the variable here. Hold that thought.

Here is what I think is actually happening.
You have to heat the room before you perform in it.

Unless you have been actively interacting with someone recently, replying to their notes, engaging with their posts, existing in the same corner of the platform together, their notes will not readily appear to you. And yours will not readily appear to them. Which means that before you post the note you actually care about, you need to spend time scrolling the feed, replying to things, warming the room. Twenty minutes, roughly. Nothing elaborate. Just presence. Interaction. The establishment of a fresh cord between you and an audience. Then you post. And the people you just engaged with are the ones most likely to see it, because you’ve just reminded the algorithm that you exist in each other’s orbit.

I call this room warming. You might call it a massive pain in the bum. Both are correct. The rest of this lives at Back Kitchen, where the apron comes off. Continue reading

The speaker becomes the official adjudicator of what is allowed to matter. And you, the person who felt something, noticed something, cared about something, is left holding a feeling that has just been declared inadmissible.

I once said it back. A friend told me something wasn’t that deep, and I said: it is to me. Not aggressively. Just plainly. It is to me. The conversation didn’t go much further. Which told me something. Because if the phrase had been offered in genuine good faith, as a gentle invitation to step back, breathe, reconsider, then it is to me should have opened something up. It should have prompted a question, or at least a pause. Instead it closed. Because the phrase was never really an invitation. It was a door being slammed.

There is a version of this in professional life that I find particularly educational. I once had an issue with a piece of technology. The person whose job it was to help me fix it told me, in so many words, that it wasn’t that deep, that nobody else was bothered by it, that it probably didn’t matter that much. And I noticed something shift in me. Because the problem had not changed. The inconvenience was still real. But now I had a second problem on top of it: I had to defend the legitimacy of having the first one.

He was not entitled to decide whether it mattered to me. That was not his job. His job was to acknowledge it, tell me honestly whether it was fixable, and give me a realistic timeline. Instead he appointed himself the arbitre of its importance and left me arguing for the right to be mildly inconvenienced. It’s not that deep doesn’t just dismiss the feeling. It relocates the problem. The issue is no longer the thing that bothered you. The issue is now your sensitivity to it.

Here is what I think is actually happening when someone reaches for that phrase. They can’t go there. Or they don’t want to. Or they tried, briefly, and didn’t find anything, and rather than conclude that they might have limited range in this particular direction, they concluded that there was nothing to find. Which means the phrase reveals something. Not about the depth of the thing being discussed. About the depth available to the person discussing it.

Some people have simply never been invited to go deep on certain things, certain feelings, certain griefs that look small from the outside. That is not always their fault. But it’s not that deep is not a neutral observation. It is an assertion. And assertions carry responsibility.

There are better things to say and they are not complicated.

I don’t feel it that way, but I hear you.
I’m not sure I get it fully. Tell me more.
Ah, yeah. Never thought about it like that.

Any of these acknowledges the feeling without requiring the speaker to share it. None of them demand that the person who felt something justify having felt it. All of them leave the conversation open rather than closing it with a verdict.

They require a small amount of emotional generosity. A healthy-ish ego, one that doesn’t feel threatened by someone else’s depth. The willingness to say I didn’t get it rather than there’s nothing to get. That’s not a high bar. It just looks like one, from behind a phrase that has made the bar disappear completely.

Here is the thing about people who feel deeply, think carefully, notice things that most people walk past without looking at. We are not a problem to be managed. We are not too much. We are not in need of lightening up or calming down or being reminded that it’s not that deep.

The same wiring that makes us feel things deeply about our own lives means we can meet you at yours. If something trivial happens to you, if someone steals your ‘moist maker’ sandwich, if the airline loses the one pair of jeans that fits perfectly, if a comment in a meeting lands wrong and nobody else seems to notice: we will not tell you it’s not that deep. We will feel it with you. We will understand, without needing it explained, why that particular thing matters that much. That is not a burden we place on other people. That is what we bring.

The person who goes deep on their own experience is usually the same person who will go deep on yours. And if you have ever had someone genuinely meet you there, in the depth of something small that felt large, you will know that it is one of the rarest and most valuable things another person can offer. We are just paying attention. To everything, including you. And if that makes some people uncomfortable, if our depth reads as an inconvenience or a reflection they would rather not see, our depth is not the problem.

If it’s deep to you, it’s deep. You don’t need it measured, verified or declared admissible. It is to you.

Two days earlier, when the essay was written and the only thing left was the thumbnail, the obligatory welcome mat at the top of every post, I had turned to AI. Eyes wide open. Unconflicted. Until column C.

I was illustrating a piece about politics. About arriving late, learning sideways, finding the back door. I had a Bitmoji I’d saved years ago. I knew the image I wanted - unmistakably French and preoccupied - and I knew I could probably have assembled it myself. Instead I opened Copilot and asked it to add the beret and the croissant. Then I went back and added the “Fromage Not Farage” slogan on the t-shirt myself. Found the door separately, a photograph I’d already used in a note. Built the thumbnail by hand. I used AI. But I also showed up. There are sausage fingers all over that image. Mine in every decision around it and if not entirely in the making of it. You can tell someone was here. I have been thinking about whether that distinction matters. I have not finished thinking.

There is an argument I keep hearing. It goes like this: AI image generation has an environmental cost. Data centres. Electricity. Water for cooling. Every prompt is a small tax on the planet. This is true. I am not disputing it. But I notice it arrives very quickly in certain conversations. And I find the timing interesting.

My Tesco supermarket is always freezing. Not because I asked for it to be freezing. Not because the staff asked for it to be freezing. An external system decided when the air conditioning needed to be on, and now we all walk around the aisles shivering all year round.

The Stagecoach buses in my part of England have the heating on all year. You cannot turn it off. The driver cannot turn it off. The passengers cannot turn it off. It just runs. And yet somehow the moral weight of energy consumption has found its way in my thumbnail.

I am not saying the environmental argument is wrong. I am saying it is selective. And selectivity, in a moral argument, is worth examining.

Susan examined my weight loss recently. She was concerned. I was getting too thin, she said. Fading away. This was kind of her. It was also the first time Susan had mentioned my body in eighteen months - during which time I had been one point away from a BMI of 29. Susan’s concern for my health arrived precisely when my body became something she liked less. I noted the timing.

I wonder if the environmental argument about AI illustration is doing something similar. Arriving dressed as concern for the planet. Because if the problem is truly the environment, the problem is every prompt, the invisible ones as much as the obvious ones. The ones with grubby fingers still on them as much as the ones that look like anybody was even home. If the problem is only the ones you can clearly see, then perhaps the environment is not quite the whole story.

Say that instead.

I don’t know where the line is. I’m not sure there is one. But I think the question worth asking is not what tool you used. It’s whether you showed up. Whether there is something in the image that could only have come from you.

I can’t draw a clean line. I didn’t. But I know where mine is and it lives somewhere around the fingerprints. Not as a prescription for anyone else. Just as an honest account of where I landed. The question of where you land is entirely your own.

If any of this resonated, Matthew Rooks is worth finding. He trains port operators, teaches maritime communication, and illustrates his own essays in watercolour. Don’t let the understated About page fool you: his work is extraordinary. His Substack explores what AI reflects back at us and what it can’t see at all. Find Matthew here.

It wasn’t, entirely. What I am is someone who came to reading through the back door: beauty blog posts first, then personal essays, then opinion pieces and etymology deep-dives and comment sections that probably don’t count. Each one a door that opened onto the next. By the time I arrived on Substack - with four pieces already drafted and zero anxiety about the writing - the only thing that gave me pause was this: I was a non-reader, joining a reading community. And I had somehow already made friends here whose primary art I wasn’t sure I could meet.

What I actually am

I am not someone who doesn’t engage with language. I am someone who engages with it obsessively, specifically, in ways that don’t always announce themselves as intellectual.

When I see a piece of text, I don’t see a story. I see font and layout and syntax and the choice of one word over another and what that choice reveals. I notice typos in half a second. I am genuinely interested in why a comma landed where it did. I have a degree and a Maîtrise in English but I have never once considered myself a bookworm. I studied English because I didn’t want to stop learning it, not to become something, just to go as far as I could. The books-equal-intelligence equation is cultural snobbery dressed as common sense. I know this. I have known it for a while. Knowing it has not entirely dissolved the feeling.

The empathy paradox

Here is the part that confused me longest, because it looks like a contradiction.

I am a massive empath. I feel other people’s pain with a proximity that is sometimes inconvenient, on public transport, in films, in comment sections I should not have read before bed. I have left rooms because someone else’s joy was too large for me to contain quietly. And yet I cannot lose myself in fiction.

These two things look like they shouldn’t coexist. And then I understood: my empathy is real-world calibrated. It fires for actual people, real situations, genuine emotion. Fictional characters don’t trigger it the same way, not because I don’t understand them, but because some part of my brain always knows they’re not real. The signal doesn’t arrive with the same force. The ‘transportation’ doesn’t happen. I am not cold. I am just wired for the true thing. And knowing that gave the guilt a shape I could actually look at.

The friend

I have a friend on Substack who writes fiction. She is one of my favourite people on this platform - her notes, her observations, the way she shows up for others, the quality of her thinking. I read her personal essays and feel the satisfaction of someone being understood.

I have not finished her stories. I have opened them, liked them, moved on, and felt like a fraud every single time.

Can you be a proper Substack friend with someone whose primary art you can’t fully engage with? I have been sitting with this question. I think the answer is yes but it requires honesty, mostly with yourself, about what you can and can’t offer. And some creativity about what showing up actually looks like.

What Bill taught me

There is a writer on Substack called Bill. He writes fiction and takes photographs that make you stop scrolling. When he followed me I went a little quiet, because that is what happens when someone whose work you respect decides to turn up in your corner of Substack.

Bill did something in his welcome letter I have been thinking about ever since. He offered a quiz. Fiction, photography, or the other bits: which are you here for? He built the opt-out into the platform before anyone had time to feel guilty about needing it. That is one of the most generous editorial decisions I have encountered on here.

Not everyone will do that. Most won’t. But the principle holds regardless: you are allowed to subscribe to a person and engage most fully with the parts that speak to you. The like on the piece you couldn’t finish. The restack of the note that landed. The comment on the essay that cracked something open. Showing up in the ways you actually can, rather than the ways you think you should.

A reader who loves you as a person, champions your work in other ways, and shows up wherever they genuinely can: that is not nothing.

The permission slip

I am not proud of not liking fiction. I am not defiant about it either. I just wish, genuinely, that I could give certain writers something I don’t have to give. What I can offer instead: presence in the ways I’m capable of. Honesty about the gap. Warmth for the person even when the genre doesn’t reach me.

And this, to anyone carrying the same shame: the brain that doesn’t transport into fictional worlds is not a smaller brain. It is a brain with different doors.

Find the writers whose doors match yours. Show up fully there. And for the ones whose primary art lives behind a door you can’t quite open? Knock anyway. Leave a note under it. Comment on their notes. Restack the piece you opened even if you didn’t quite finish it. Tell them, if the moment allows, that you’re there even when you’re not quite there in the way they might hope. The shame won't open any doors. But you might.

If any of this resonated, Bill Posner is worth finding. He is a photographer, a storyteller, and one of the more quietly generous presences on this platform. His publication is called Famous When Dead. He will not ask you to engage with everything. He has already told you not to. That alone makes him worth following. [Find Bill here]

Etymologically, effortless just means without effort. But culturally it has become something stranger: a standard, a compliment, an aspiration. To be effortless is to make it look easy. To show effort is somehow embarrassing. Desperate, even. And yet the people we most admire as effortless are almost always working the hardest. The no-makeup makeup look takes longer than the makeup look. The perfectly casual outfit was tried on four times. The message that arrived feeling spontaneous was, in fact, proofread. I know this because I sent one two weeks ago and called it chaos. It wasn’t. I proofread it once instead of four times.

Here is a thing I have been thinking about: the blooper reel. A blooper reel is one of the most labour-intensive things a creator can produce. It requires filming everything, reviewing everything, selecting the best failures, sequencing them, timing the cuts so the chaos lands just right. It performs accident. It is meticulous. And we love it precisely because it feels unplanned, because it gives us the illusion of seeing behind the curtain, of being trusted with the mess.

We are not seeing behind the curtain. We are seeing a carefully produced version of behind the curtain. And we know this. That’s the interesting part. We know, and we watch anyway, and nobody minds, because the contract is not really about authenticity. It never was. The contract is about effort and its concealment, about how much labour you are willing to do to make us feel like you didn’t do any.

There is a particular kind of Substack content I keep encountering. It announces itself as raw. Unfiltered. Just me, no algorithm to please1, no performance. And sometimes it is exactly that. Genuinely open, genuinely vulnerable, genuinely worth reading. But sometimes it is the camera placed in the hallway so that the creator can walk toward it as if they just happened to be passing. The aesthetics of spontaneity, produced. The appearance of effort abandoned, which requires its own considerable effort to maintain. Someone commented on one of my recent pieces: this was so raw. It wasn’t raw. It was honest, and vulnerable, and I meant every word of it. But it was also edited. The words were chosen. The structure was considered. The rawness you felt was not the absence of craft, it was the craft holding the seams in place.

And this is exactly why you don’t want to arrive at a party looking like you tried too hard. Why the viral proposal needs exactly two camera angles. Enough to be beautiful, not so many that it looks planned. Why the writer who clearly wants to be read is slightly cringey in a way the writer who pretends not to care is not. And women, particularly, are punished for visible effort in this second category. The wanting must be invisible or it becomes need, and need becomes desperation, and desperation is the end of the game. The impossible standard underneath all of this: try hard enough to get what you want, but not so hard that anyone can see you wanting it.

I think we have been having the wrong argument. On Substack, on TikTok, in essays and comment sections, the argument keeps circling around authenticity. Is this real? Is this performed? Is this person showing me who they actually are, or a version of it? But authenticity was never really the question. Or rather, it was always a cover for something else. If it were, you’d be watching raw unedited CCTV footage with popcorn in hand.

What we actually want to know is: did you mean it? And did you think about me when you made it? Those are different questions. A piece of writing can be crafted, edited, structured, performed in the sense of being shaped for an audience and still mean every word. The performance and the truth are not enemies. The performance, done with integrity, is the act of care. The moment there is a reader, there is consideration. The moment there is consideration, there is some degree of performance. You cannot have one without the other. We will always need to perform because we will always need to consider the reader. That is not a problem to be solved. It is just the nature of communication.

So what are we actually arguing about, when we argue about authenticity? I think we are arguing about whether the effort was honest. Whether the concealment was in service of the reader or in service of the image. The blooper reel made with genuine warmth and the blooper reel made to manufacture relatability look identical from the outside. The difference is not visible in the product. It lives in the intention behind it.

Which means the question, the only question that actually matters is not is this authentic? It is: did you mean it, and did you think about me? Everything else is seams. And the seams, if you’re doing it “right”, don’t show.

So. From the beginning

Blogging ruined daylight.

Not metaphorically. Literally. I had a beauty blog and I lived in a small flat with very little natural light, which is a particular problem when you have decided to document beauty products for the internet. 80% of beauty blogging is the photograph. The photograph requires daylight. Daylight, it turns out, is not available on demand. Even less so in the United Kingdom.

So I developed a relationship with sunlight that I am not proud of. Every patch of it was a photographing duty. “Quick, the nail polish, now, before it goes”. I couldn’t touch the eyeshadow palette before the photo. I couldn’t enjoy the thing before documenting the thing. At some point the documentation had become the thing, and the original reason I had started - genuine curiosity, genuine love of beauty, the sheer fun of trying something and having feelings about it - had quietly left the building.

I started buying things to create content instead of creating content about things I loved. The PR boxes arrived. The folders of product photographs grew until they were overwhelming. The motivation stopped being pure. I didn’t quit dramatically. I didn’t post a goodbye. I just slowly became a puppet, and one day I put the strings down and didn’t pick them up again.

Ten years of quiet.

Then, on the 8th of February 2026, a man in a white suit walked onto the biggest stage in American culture.

Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl halftime show. 13 minutes of Spanish. Not a word of English. The first entirely Spanish-language performance in the history of that stage and some people, predictably, lost their minds about it. I had already written about what that moment meant and why the outrage said more about the people outraged than about the performance. But what I hadn’t written about was what it did to me personally. Privately. Here was someone performing entirely on his own terms. In his own language. For his own people. Unbothered by the audience that couldn’t follow, uncompromising for the platform that wanted him to translate himself. Not a puppet. No strings. Just the thing itself, offered without apology. Something in me went oh.

I made a silly TikTok slideshow about it. A picture with some words. Nothing elaborate. It got a hundred thousand views. I had more things to say than a slideshow could hold. I had heard of Substack. I ran out of characters on TikTok and came here instead and before I had even installed the app, I had written four pieces for it. I didn’t know if Substack was going to be the right platform. I just stayed.

This time, I built it differently. On purpose.

Midnight is fine. Looking a mess is fine. No daylight required. No PR obligation. No meh. I have always been a strong feelings person, and I refuse to write about things that don’t provoke a strong enough reaction to rattle until I give them a shape. The motivation is pure again. Not because I became a better person in ten years of silence. Because I built it that way on purpose this time.

There is still an element of performance in what I do here. I still care how it lands. Consider the reader is my whole editorial philosophy, and I wrote an entire piece about why that matters more than any question of who or what holds the pen. But caring how something lands is not the same as performing for an audience that doesn’t want you to be yourself. The difference is the difference between a bridge and a puppet. One holds. The other dances when someone else pulls. I am trying, slowly, to be more bridge.

A word about what beauty blogging actually was.

I want to say something before I close, because there is a lazy assumption I have spent years watching people make: that beauty - the people who write about it, wear it, sell it, love it - is shallow. That it signals an absence of depth. That the lipstick girls can’t possibly have anything serious to say.

Beauty blogging was my small talk. And I mean that as high praise. You cannot start a conversation with existential pondering. You need small talk first. Something low-stakes, something playful, something that builds the confidence that you can write at all before you attempt the harder thing. Beauty blogging was the walking before I could run. It gave me the page. It gave me the readers. It gave me, unexpectedly, a back door into politics, because it turns out the people who write about lipstick also have opinions about the world, and some of those opinions changed mine. I wrote about that back door recently. Not bad for a bunch of airheads.

I don’t know if this will still be here in six months.

I worry about longevity. I worry about the people who pushed the orange button and are trusting me to keep showing up. Some days it still feels like day three, talking to the same wall. And then V (The Other Girls) from the other side of the world, ten (twelve?) hours ahead of me, reads something I wrote at midnight while she is eating her lunch, and that is my idea of virality. Not the numbers. The distance. The fact that the thing crossed the room.

None of this happens without the people who recommended me to strangers. The Ninas, the Kimbas, the Natashas. The ones who pushed the orange button on behalf of someone they hadn’t met yet. They didn’t know me. They just believed. I don’t think I have said thank you loudly enough. Consider this long overdue.🖤

I write because I will smash things if I don’t. I write because before this, I had a flat life and I mean flat in the deflated sense, not the British sense, though both applied. I write because the itch arrived and after ten years of silence, an itch feels like a gift.

The whole thing started with a performance. A man in a white suit, unbothered, on the biggest stage in the world. I am here because he reminded me what it looks like to stop pulling your own strings.

I have written about real people on here. I changed the name. I softened the details. I told myself I was protecting them, and I believe that was true. But I have been thinking about what the name change actually does and doesn’t do.

It protects the person from being recognised. It does not change what happened to their story. It got borrowed. Handled carefully, yes. Carried gently, yes. But borrowed is still borrowed and at the other end of that transaction, their moment is now wearing my angle. It is illustrating my point. It is serving my argument.

So whose content are we watching?
I don’t have a clean answer to that. I’m not sure one exists.

What I’ve been sitting with instead is something stranger. The careful writer, the one who changes the name, loses sleep over the details, asks herself all the right questions, might be more consumed by this than the careless one. Because she’s not just borrowing the story. She’s borrowing the story and wrapping it in her own ethics. The other person’s moment is now also carrying the weight of how thoughtfully it was handled. It’s doing double duty.

And then there’s the move I made in writing this essay. The thing I practised restraint about the first time. I didn’t write it, I held it, I put it down. I am so glad I put it down. It wasn't right for me to use their tender and vulnerable moment to illustrate something in an essay. It would have been wrong. Some kind of appropriation. It wasn't my story to tell. And then I wrote about putting it down. The restraint became the content. The not-doing was just a slower kind of doing. I put the story down. Then I wrote about putting it down. You’re reading it now.

I don’t know what the clean version of this looks like. I’m not sure it exists. Maybe the most honest thing a writer can do is notice the spark, really notice it, before the justification arrives. The spark. The small smile. The feeling that your next essay just walked in and sat down, and all you have to do is reach for it.

Not: Did I change the name?
But: Whose story is doing the work here?

I’m still asking. Ꮺ

With genuine thanks to Kseniia Korostelova whose note sparked this particular week of thinking. You needed a book. You also, accidentally, gave me an essay.

She took a nap after work. She knows naps are Russian roulette. She has evidence of this. She tried anyway. She woke up deflated - which, as you can imagine, I found deeply relatable - and then she did the thing that sad people do. She listened to sad songs. Except on Substack, the sad song is the open rate dashboard.

She looked at the numbers. Then she googled the average open rate for a small Substack writer. I am not going to tell you what it said because I don’t want you to spiral before you’ve finished reading this. What I will tell you is that she was below it. Considerably.

So she did what any reasonable person does when they feel invisible. She made something beautiful. Went to Pixlr, went to Snapseed, built a pretty little graphic featuring the girl with the pearl earring - you may know her - and posted a note. Useful. Considered. Something in it for the reader.

Substack took it, nodded politely, and put it in the lottery bag.

The technical word for the lottery bag, I believe, is algorithm. She has written about this before - the invisibility cloak, the notes that go out and simply do not land, the question of what follower count finally grants you visibility by default. She is not bitter about it. She is curious. Some days it still feels like day three. Talking to the same wall.

What I can tell you is that posting more notes from that place is not the answer. The frame of mind you are in is not good soil. Sometimes it just grows bitter notes. The girl with the pearl earring note was heavily edited, by the way. You should have seen the first draft. Your body knows where something comes from even when the finished version looks composed.

On the subject of notes - and since we are here - Substack will tell you to post five a day. You are absolutely free to do that. You will still be in the visibility lottery if you are a small writer. More notes is not the solution. Better notes, maybe. But do you want to over-engineer a note? Do you want every passing thought to need an elaborate hook? I don’t. She doesn’t. She wants to use notes like Twitter. When something funny arrives, she posts it. When it lands, it lands. She refuses to manufacture funny on a schedule. That would ruin the whole thing.

There is another option people suggest: brainstorm a batch of notes, schedule them, use AI to generate motivational quotes relevant to your niche. And look, she has thoughts on AI, and I have absorbed them, because I absorb everything from this cushion.

Her position is this: use 5%, use 95%, use it for the polish, use it for the bones. That is between you and your conscience and she is not here to judge. What matters is how you feel about it when you are alone with yourself at midnight. Whether it puts a stain on the relationship you have with you. That is the first relationship. The one worth protecting.

Here is the thing about AI-generated notes you didn’t write: your brain didn’t do the thing it needs to do to give birth to them. The process that gets you from feeling to finished sentence didn’t happen. And when someone restacks you for something you don’t recognise, you will know. You will smile and say thank you and feel a small quiet thing that is not quite pride.

You want to know if AI wrote something? Ask the person to summarise it. If they can’t, there is your answer. This is not an invitation to interrogate strangers, by the way. Do not ask people if their hair is real, if their teeth are real, if they use appetite tablets, or if a machine wrote their Tuesday motivation quote. Respect people’s privacy. On every aspect of their life.

Anyway. If more notes won’t fix it and better-engineered notes won’t fix it, what do you actually do when you hit Substack rock bottom? I have two things. I am a deflated flamingo, not a life coach, so two things is what you are getting.

✤ The first is acceptance. Write the day off. Completely. Accept that it cannot be salvaged, that you will feel poopy until you can sleep it off and reset. Do not try to post your way out of a funk. Do not try to think your way out either. Just let the day be a bad one and stop fighting it.

✤ The second is harder. Remember why you started. Not in an abstract way. Not with a motivational quote - we will come back to those, I have feelings. But really remember. Think about what it felt like the first time you pressed publish and the thing existed in the world when it hadn’t before. Think about the moment a sentence finally comes clear after half an hour of circling it. Think about finding the door into a piece you’ve been wanting to write for weeks. Think about what your life was before you started doing this. How flat it was. How much was just sitting in you with nowhere to go.

She was in the bath this morning. I don’t have access to the bath, for obvious reasons, and that is where she came back up. Not because anything changed. The open rate is still the open rate. The lottery bag is still the lottery bag. But somewhere in the hot water and the apple and cinnamon tea waiting for her on the other side, she remembered what this is actually for.

It is not for the metrics. It is for the itch. The thing that gets under your skin at 7am and will not leave until you give it a shape. It is like being on a diet and hitting a plateau. At some point you have to stop staring at the scales and go back to why you started. Not because the scales stopped mattering. But because they were never the whole point.

One more thing before I go, and I want to say it carefully: borrowed wisdom is not always welcome. Nothing winds her up more than a motivational message when she is in a mood. And she is right. If you are spiralling about your open rate and someone tells you not to worry about the open rate, your first instinct is to tell them it is too late, you are already worrying, that ship has sailed and is now on fire.

Wise words only land when you are ready for them. The timing is everything. You cannot manufacture the feeling from outside. You have to find it from within, which is why the remembering has to be yours. Your reasons. Your specific joy. Not a quote someone scheduled on a Tuesday.

I am still pink. I am still here. I am watching the grey sky from my cushion by the window and thinking: Maybe today.

Take care of yourself.
The flamingo. x ⸙

✤ New here? The flamingo has a page. He’d love to be properly introduced

On the days I don’t know where the energy comes from, I think of Samira, who is building a startup solo, juggling a Master’s degree, writing her 50th essay on a hard day, and somehow showing up anyway. Not because it’s easy. Because the mission is bigger than the mood. I’m not building anything as concrete as she is. But watching someone refuse to let a difficult day have the final word has a way of quietly handing you back your own pen. This one’s for her. 🧱

I have a journal entry from three years ago.

In it, I describe a pattern in details: the overextending, the getting burnt, the temporary hardening, the lesson apparently learnt. I name the feeling. I identify the trigger. I trace it back to something earlier, something that makes sense of it. I write it all down in considerable detail and I close the journal with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has done the work.

I have the same journal entry from two years ago. And one year ago. And, if I am being completely honest, from last month. Different person. Different situation. Identical pattern. Identical entry. Same handwriting, same conclusions, same feeling of having understood something important, same complete failure to actually change anything.

This is the fourth pitfall. And in some ways it is the most insidious, because it is the one that wears the best disguise.

Here is what I have been doing, and I want to name it precisely because I have been letting myself get away with it for years:

I have been confusing processing with progress. Processing is not nothing. Let me be clear about that. The ability to sit with a feeling, name it, trace it, understand where it came from is genuinely valuable. It is more than most people do. It is, in fact, the foundation of everything else. But a foundation is not a building. And I have been living on the foundation, congratulating myself on its quality, and never quite getting around to putting up the walls.

Talking about your feelings is not the same as changing your relationship to them. Journalling is not the same as growing. Knowing the name of the cycle you are in is not the same as exiting it. I know this now. I have known it, in theory, for some time. And yet, there is something so deeply satisfying about the processing itself - the naming, the articulating, the sense of having understood - that it is very easy to stop there and call it done.

It is not done. It is just the part that feels like progress without requiring any of the harder work that progress actually involves.

An intellectual addiction to self-reflection, someone once called it. A substitution for the business of actually behaving differently from now on. I read that and felt, in quick succession: recognised, defensive, and then quietly devastated. Because it was accurate. Because I have the archive to prove it.

Here is the pattern, documented so many times I could write it from memory, which I suppose I am: I show up for people, above and beyond, more than the situation requires because I genuinely believe in treating others the way I would like to be treated. It is not a performance. It is how I am wired. And then I get burnt. The person does not show up back. I feel it, I name it, I write it down in details. I temporarily harden. I learn the lesson. And then, THEN, they do something small. Not grand, not going-out-of-their-way small. Just cute enough. And the lesson, apparently, unlearns itself. I forget. I forgive. I overextend again. I get burnt again. I have a very detailed archive of this cycle. I have not yet managed to exit it.

Here is what I think is happening, and this is the part I am only beginning to understand:

Growth requires a teeny tiny thing that is actually enormous. It requires entertaining the possibility that you have gaps. Not as a concept. Not intellectually, from a safe distance. But really sitting with the uncomfortable idea that the thing you have built your identity around might be the thing you understand least about yourself.

Here is what makes this particularly difficult for people like me - people who feel deeply, who identify as empaths, who have sentio ergo sum as a kind of personal motto:

Emotional intelligence is not just something I do. It is something I am. Or thought I was. And discovering that I have been doing it partially - fluently in some places, clumsily in others, with confidence at the wrong moments - is not just a learning moment. It is an identity shattering moment. The kind that requires you to sit very still and let something rearrange itself.

I want to tell you why I wrote this series before someone else told me I should. Because there is something I know about building your entire personality around a skill: the last person to notice the gaps is usually you. Not because you are incapable of seeing them. Because the identity is. That is the blind spot.

If emotional intelligence is the thing you are, then the gaps are not just gaps. They are structural. I would rather find this out now, just between you and me, with some humour and a manageable amount of mortification, on Substack of all places, than discover it later, in the middle of a conversation where I am confidently wrong and someone I care about is paying the price for it.

I would rather put myself under the microscope and report back than be reported on. And I would rather tell you now, gently, from inside the same experience, without claiming to have graduated from any of it than let you find out the hard way too. Not because I know better. Because I know exactly how it feels to have built something on a foundation you haven’t fully inspected.

No one enjoys discovering they were intermediate when they were certain they were advanced. But you cannot fill a gap you haven’t found yet. There is something stubbornly hopeful in the finding. In the fact that you are still curious enough to look. In the fact that the journal keeps going, even when the entries repeat, because the writing is proof that some part of you still believes the cycle can be exited. I believe that.

B21 for now. Still learning. Still here.
Sentio ergo sum. (I feel therefore I am)

Thank you for reading this series. If any part of it felt familiar - if you recognised yourself somewhere in the floodgates, or the sandwich shop, or the archive that keeps growing without quite changing anything - then it did what it was supposed to do. You are not alone in the loofah situation. Most of us are in it. The ones who aren’t are usually the ones who haven’t looked yet.