One of the stranger things about being here in Lesvos is that I am surrounded by people I want to know. People who interest me, people I find funny and with whom I can feel the beginnings of friendships, that lovely early-stage curiosity when someone is still mostly unknown to you and each new piece of information makes you want to move slightly closer. I love this part. There is something profoundly hopeful about a new friendship because you have absolutely no idea what you are looking at yet. This person might become someone you once met at a wedding on Lesvos, or someone whose kitchen you are sitting in fifteen years from now. There is no way to know. Then grief taps me on the shoulder. One minute I am talking to someone I genuinely want to talk to and the next I have completely forgotten how to relate to another human being. I can hear them speaking, I know I like them and that there is probably a version of me who has something to say back. I just can’t access them.

I become conscious of the mechanics of conversation: eye contact, question, answer, smile in approximately the right place, ask something back. Things I have done without thinking for thirty-eight years become strangely manual. There is suddenly a pane of glass between me and everyone else, and underneath it is this enormous fact that nobody else can be inside in quite the way I am inside it. Shei is dead. Then, sometimes ten minutes later, someone makes me laugh and the glass disappears. I become curious again. I want to know where this person grew up, who they love, what strange sequence of decisions deposited both of us on this island. I am beginning to understand that grief isn’t a place you go to. It’s more that it just sits down beside you and makes you briefly unable to remember how you ever belonged to the living. There is a photograph of me from a trip to Lesvos that I keep coming back to. I am naked on the beach wearing a bright pink balaclava. It is funny and, in my opinion quite hot, which is partly why I like it. It also seems, retrospectively, to contain something I didn’t know I was trying to say. I am at the same time completely exposed and completely hidden.

There is a version of me who can be naked on a beach on a Greek island, surrounded by queer people, taking up space without thinking very much about whether I am allowed to. There is another version of me who knows that being visible is not always uncomplicated. Neither is more real. I think I have spent years imagining that somewhere underneath all the contradiction there must be a coherent person I will eventually uncover. The real me. Someone who has resolved their competing desires, who knows what they want, who is either happy or sad, brave or frightened, private or exposed. But perhaps coherence is another thing I have been waiting for that isn’t coming. The person under the balaclava is the person wearing it. The person grieving Shei is the person laughing with strangers. The person who disappears behind glass in the middle of a conversation is the same person who desperately wants to know everyone here.

On Saturday in the late afternoon, a group of us swam out to the rock at Skala Eressos. The sea was choppy but the swim wasn’t difficult. Out at the rock, one of the brides remembered a close friend of hers who had died and something in me went. Shei died in Melbourne just over a month ago. I got back into the water and started swimming towards shore just ahead of the main group. I cried, really cried. The sea is useful for this. There is something liberating about crying in salt water because your body temporarily loses the ability to distinguish what belongs to it. Tears, sea, sweat everything returned to the same substance. It also helped that this was still, technically, a wedding celebration, so every so often some very hot dykes from Seattle would appear in a kayak and take my photo. From where they were, I presumably looked like I was having a lovely contemplative swim in the Aegean. They had no idea I was sobbing my eyes out. I would give them a watery grin and a small wave and they would paddle on. There was something almost offensively funny about it. I was experiencing one of the most acute waves of grief I had felt since Shei died, while occasionally stopping to pose for lesbians in a kayak. Maybe this is what I mean when I say life doesn’t take turns.

Kae Tempest has a line about a friend describing death as being like taking off a tight shoe. There is something almost unbearably gentle about the image: the body as this thing we have been wearing all our lives and death as finally stepping out of it. I don’t know what I believe happens after that. At the moment I am less interested in where Shei went than in the bewildering fact that I am still here. My lungs fill with air, my shoulders ache, I get hungry, I want things, I drink cold beer. The sun warms my skin and salt dries on it. My heart continues beating without requiring my opinion on the matter. The body is needy and embarrassing and temporary and miraculous. We spend so much of our lives dissatisfied with it. Too large, too old, too soft, the wrong face, another wrinkle, something hurting that didn’t used to. Then somebody dies and the sheer vulgar functionality of a living body becomes almost obscene. My lungs were filling with air. My arms were moving through water. I was crying because Shei was dead.

Somewhere in the water I had a deeply irritating thought: what if this is the good part?

I have spent a surprising amount of my life waiting for the part where everything settles down. I don’t think I ever explicitly believed there would come a period when nothing bad happened. I’m not an idiot. But I do seem to have carried around an assumption that eventually I would reach a more stable version of adulthood, some sustainable working arrangement with my own personality. The people I loved would remain conveniently alive. Then I could relax. I’m not yet forty, which feels simultaneously too young to be thinking this much about mortality and old enough to begin questioning the feasibility of the plan. Lately I have also been thinking about the instruction to be present, as though presence were somewhere I could successfully remain if I concentrated hard enough. But while I was swimming towards the beach on Lesvos, I was also in Melbourne.

So where exactly was I?

I think perhaps we have made the present too small. We talk about it as though it is a tiny room we keep accidentally leaving: come back, be here, put your phone down, look at the sunset, notice your breath. But perhaps consciousness isn’t a room. Perhaps it is more like the sea. The sea looks like one thing until you are in it. Then you feel the different movements inside it. A wave carries you one way while a current underneath it is going somewhere else. Warm water meets cold. The sea I was swimming through wasn’t still simply because I could point to it and say here. It was moving constantly and so was I. Maybe presence isn’t the absence of elsewhere. Maybe the present is precisely where elsewhere reaches us. Shei was not physically in that water but the fact that they had existed was. Melbourne was there as was yesterday’s wedding. So was the version of me who keeps imagining being eighty. The dead were there. None of this made the sea less real.

When you love someone they become part of the structure through which you experience the world. They alter your vocabulary, your humour, the places you know, the music you listen to, the things you notice, the person you become. Then they die, but the structure doesn’t disappear just because they do. There is simply nobody standing where they used to be. Lately I have been wondering what exactly this self is that grief is happening to. Which one is the self? The naked person or the masked one? The person who wants to be seen or the person who needs to hide? The person talking easily to strangers or the one who suddenly can’t remember how conversation works? The person grieving or the person laughing? Maybe I have been making the same mistake about myself that I was making about the sea: assuming that because something has one name, it must be one thing. The sea is full of currents moving in different directions. Maybe a self is too. Not a solid thing at the centre of experience, but something continually altered by who is looking at us, who loves us, who frightens us, where we are, where we have been, and who is no longer here.

Grief makes this impossible to ignore because grief is enormously egotistical. I miss you. I want you back. I wanted more time. Death happens to somebody else and grief happens to us and yet perhaps the reason grief can rearrange a person so completely is that the self was never self-contained in the first place. Other people get inside us. They leave sticky fingerprints. The dead don’t only live in our memories. They have already changed the person doing the remembering. Which brings me back to all these people around me whom I don’t know yet. I find this almost unbearably hopeful. Shei can no longer surprise me. I think this might be one of the cruellest things about death. There will be no new information, no new jokes, no unexpected opinion. No message beginning with something completely unrelated to whatever we last discussed. Their life was open, producing new things all the time and now it has closed and all around me are people who are still open. People I may never see again or that I might love or who might change me. Someone who is currently almost a stranger might one day become one of the people through whom I understand myself. I don’t know yet. This is perhaps the bargain I am struggling with. Life keeps asking us to attach ourselves to it after showing us exactly what attachment costs.

I remain (as always) suspicious of philosophies of grief that turn death into a gift for the living. I don’t want the lesson if the price of the lesson was Shei. I would happily be less profound. Give them back. Their death does not need to improve me in order to matter. But it has made certain forms of bullshit harder to sustain, and one of mine is the persistent belief that my real life is about to begin. After the next decision. After I know what I want. After my career reaches some imagined point. After I become better at relationships. After I work out whether I want children. After I have more certainty. After I become the sort of person who doesn’t spend an unreasonable percentage of their waking hours thinking about being a person. Then…what? Then I will arrive. But where? I thought the good part of life would be the part where fewer things were wrong. I am starting to think there is no such part.

There are weddings while people are grieving. There are terrible phone calls during beautiful summers. People fall in love while other people are dying. We laugh at funerals. We cry after weddings. The worst year of your life can contain one of its best days. We have a word for this: bittersweet. I can feel my eyes welling up even typing it, which feels like an enormous amount of emotional responsibility to place on a word that mostly makes me think of expensive chocolate. Bittersweet is what you call something when grief and joy have had enough time to become charming in retrospect. There was nothing charming about this. I wasn’t fifty percent devastated and fifty percent happy. I was completely devastated and completely happy. The emotions had apparently not been informed that they were contradictory.

Maybe life doesn’t take turns. I am sorry to inform you there is no queue. Joy doesn’t wait politely outside until grief has finished. Love doesn’t wait for fear to leave the room. The future doesn’t wait until we have made peace with the past. Everything enters at once like currents. Camus loved the sea. He wrote, “I will have always loved the sea. It will have always made everything peaceful inside me.” Good for Camus but here I was sobbing into it while smiling for lesbians in a kayak. But the sea did give me something, if not peace. It made abstraction difficult. You can think about death while swimming, but you still have to breathe. The body keeps interrupting philosophy. Maybe we have misunderstood what it means to live in the present. We imagine presence as a purified state: no distraction, no regret, no anticipation, no Melbourne. Just Lesvos, just the water, just now. But what if presence isn’t purity? What if it is capacity? The capacity to let grief hurt without requiring the day to become a bad day.

Maybe this is the mistake. We say “the present” as though it is one thing. But this present contains a wedding and a death barely a month old. Shei and strangers. A naked body and a covered face. The person I have been and people I might become. The present is grammatically singular. I am no longer convinced it feels that way to be alive. Maybe the opposite of presence isn’t thinking about the past or the future. Maybe the opposite of presence is refusing some part of reality because it complicates the story we would prefer to tell about ourselves.

I am sad, therefore I cannot be happy.

I am grieving, therefore I should not be dancing.

I am lucky, therefore I have no right to be sad.

I am afraid, therefore I am not brave.

I am hidden, therefore I am not free.

I am alive, therefore I should be grateful.

I am having an existential breakthrough on a Greek island, therefore I should probably not also be annoyed that my beer has gone a bit warm.

Apparently the fully realised human being has no petty grievances. They sound fucking exhausting. It is dark now. I am still sitting alone at Flamingo with my beer. Yesterday there were vows and dancing and two women celebrating the improbable fact that they found one another. Maybe this is the good part. Not because I have finally learned to live in the moment. Maybe the good part was never a destination. Maybe this is just what being alive looks like once you know what it costs. This, more than anything, is what frightens me about loving people after somebody dies. The world has shown its hand. I know now what attachment can cost and still I am sitting on an island meeting people I want to know. Still allowing the possibility that someone who is a stranger today could become part of the structure through which I understand the world, knowing there is no version of that bargain that guarantees I won’t someday lose them or they won’t lose me.

There was a current beneath me in the sea that day that I couldn’t see. Afterwards, a new friend told me they had been watching me from behind and thought I was swimming off course. I was genuinely surprised. I had thought I was swimming directly towards where I wanted to go. More than that, I had looked over at them and thought they were off course. Two people in the same sea, heading for the same shore, each using their own body as evidence that the other one was going the wrong way. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that. The past is underneath me. The future is pulling at me. The people I have lost move through me. The people I haven’t met yet are somewhere ahead.

I am still, somehow, a person who can feel devastatingly sad and extremely hot in a pink balaclava. Maybe here was never as small as I thought. Maybe the point was never to stay still. Maybe the point is that, knowing exactly what it can cost, I am still swimming through the current towards people.

I imagined that this was how the important decisions happened. One day you simply knew. Instead, I am thirty-eight and beginning to understand that time does not require my certainty in order to keep moving. It has been making its own quiet decisions in the background while I was congratulating myself for keeping every possibility open. The question used to be whether I wanted a child. Now another question has appeared beside it: if I do not have one, am I certain enough to allow that possibility to disappear?

They sound almost identical, but they are not. One is a question about desire; the other is a question about loss and increasingly, when I try to answer either of them, I find myself thinking about being eighty. Not parenthood, strangely or even babies. Not pregnancy or tiny clothes or a child asleep against my chest. I think about an old woman/person sitting somewhere forty years from now and wonder who will know me. I have constructed an unnecessarily bleak nursing home in my imagination. Everything is beige, the television is too loud, there are laminated menus and framed photographs of boats, and there I am surrounded by heterosexual couples who have somehow survived one another for sixty years and now spend their afternoons discussing grandchildren.

Someone asks whether ‘she’ ever married. Someone refers to the woman ‘she’ loved for twenty-five years as her friend. After a lifetime spent creating a life outside the traditional script, there is something almost comically cruel about the possibility of ending up institutionalised inside it. Perhaps this is a peculiarly queer fear, although I suspect the deeper fear underneath it belongs to everyone.

Who will know who I was?

Not simply who will feed me or visit me or notice when I need help, but who will understand the accumulated shorthand of a life? Who will know that I was once young, that I danced until morning, that I had disastrous haircuts and intense friendships and people I thought I would never recover from? Who will remember my parents when they are no longer here for me to ask about the years before I existed? Who will understand which version of a story is the one I tell in company and which version is true?

There is a form of intimacy that can only be produced by time. Someone knows how you take your tea not because you told them but because they have watched you make it for thirty years. They know which stories you exaggerate and which ones you minimise. They remember you before the illness, before the grief, before whatever age eventually removes from you. They possess earlier drafts of you. Sometimes when I see elderly parents with their adult children, this is what moves me. It is not the practical care, although of course that matters. It is the continuity. There is another person walking around in the world carrying decades of knowledge about them and I wonder whether I want a child or whether I want that continuity. These are very different desires and I am suspicious of myself whenever they become confused.

A child cannot be created as an insurance policy against loneliness. I know this. There are parents whose children live on the other side of the world, parents estranged from the people they raised, parents who spend Christmas alone. There are childless people whose lives are so densely populated by friendship and love that their funerals will require additional seating and many will have to stand at the back or even outside. Having children does not guarantee that somebody will hold your hand at the end, and not having them does not condemn you to solitude. Yet fear rarely disappears simply because you have produced a reasonable argument against it.

As a queer person, I have spent much of my adult life believing in chosen family. Not as a consolation prize for those of us who stepped outside heterosexual convention, but as one of the great inventions of queer life: the understanding that family can be made deliberately, that intimacy does not require blood, that the people who save you and are your safety net are not always the people assigned to you at birth. Queer people have always been extraordinarily good at making kin out of whatever is available. Friends become siblings, exes become family, the person you slept with twice fifteen years ago somehow becomes the person whose spare keys you keep. We build networks that make little sense on official forms and perfect sense to us. We also provide a vast amount of free community care to one another and I wonder how this translates when our bodies age?

There is enormous freedom in discovering that the traditional structure is only one possible way to organise a human life. There is also, if I am honest, a vulnerability in it that I did not understand when I was younger. Chosen families are not exempt from time. We joke about growing old together, buying a large crumbling house somewhere warm and becoming an eccentric queer commune with too many dogs and a complicated rota for cooking. It is an appealing fantasy until you remember that everyone in it will be developing arthritis at approximately the same moment. My friends will age with me, become ill, some will move away, some will have children and become absorbed into the intense gravitational field of their own families. Some will die before I do (some already have), or I may die before them.

Perhaps what frightens me is not the absence of children so much as the disappearance of witnesses. When you are young, you assume there will always be people around who remember you young. Then your grandparents disappear, your parents begin to age, friendships scatter across countries and continents, and slowly you realise that memory itself has a lifespan. I think this is partly why children appear in my imagination whenever I picture old age. Not because I expect them to look after me, but because I have absorbed, somewhere deep in myself, the idea that children carry a life forward. That thought makes me uncomfortable. It also makes me human. We like to pretend our motives for enormous decisions should be pure. We should have children because of an uncomplicated desire to nurture another human being. We should marry purely because of love (and financial benefits). We should move countries because of adventure and choose careers because of vocation.

But human beings are rarely propelled by one clean desire. We marry because we love and because we are afraid of loneliness. We move because we are curious and because we are running away. We pursue work because it matters to us and because we would like somebody, somewhere, to think we have mattered. Perhaps the desire for a child is allowed to contain contradiction too. I might want to parent somebody and also fear disappearing. I might want the great disordering love people describe when they talk about their children, while simultaneously mourning the freedom that love would consume. I might want somebody to carry fragments of me into a future I will never see, while knowing that it would be grotesquely unfair to make another human responsible for proving that my life meant something. And then, just as I begin to imagine that future I remember the condition of the world I would be asking them to inherit. This is where my thoughts about having a child become almost impossible to separate from climate change and war. I struggle to picture a baby without immediately picturing the year 2050. I calculate their age automatically. If I had a child soon, they would still be young when the consequences we currently discuss in graphs and projections had become the ordinary conditions of their life. I think about heat and fires and floods, about migration and food systems and coastlines, and about the strange fact that we already know enough to understand what is happening while continuing to participate in it anyway. Sometimes I imagine a future child asking me the question that people have always asked previous generations after catastrophe:

Did you know?

And the terrible, terrible answer would be yes.

We knew.

What does it mean to deliberately summon somebody into a future you are frightened of?

I have friends who approach parenthood with an optimism I envy. They discuss names and schools and whether they would like one child or two. Their imagination moves naturally toward birthdays, holidays, first days at school. Mine leaps several decades ahead and stages an ethical inquiry. There are times when having a child feels like an act of faith I am not sure I possess. Not faith that everything will be fine, because I do not think everything will be fine. Perhaps that is the particular cruelty of living through this period of history: we know too much for uncomplicated optimism but not enough to know precisely what kind of future we are preparing for. Yet I am wary of the idea that the uncertainty of the world makes parenthood uniquely irresponsible now. There has never been a safe century in which to be born. People had/have children during wars, occupations, famines, epidemics and economic collapse. People conceive/d babies while bombs fell over their cities and while governments persecute/d them and while the future looks/looked, from where they were standing, entirely uninhabitable.

For queer people especially, the argument that the future is too dangerous to create ourselves within it has an uncomfortable history. There have always been people who considered certain lives too difficult, too marginal, too undesirable to continue. Our existence has often been a refusal of that logic. Perhaps having a child in frightening times is not a declaration that the world is safe. Perhaps it has never meant that. Perhaps it is simply an assertion that a life can still contain enough love, beauty, meaning and surprise to be worth beginning even when suffering cannot be excluded from it. But then I recoil from the grandeur of that thought too. A hypothetical child is very easy to turn into a symbol. Hope, continuity, the future even resistance. An actual child would be none of these things. An actual child would be a person who woke me at four in the morning because they had lost a sock.

This is the danger of thinking philosophically about parenthood. The philosophy can swallow the human being. A child would not exist to redeem my faith in the future. They would not exist to cure my fear of ageing, continue my family, make my parents happy, populate my Christmas’ or ensure that somebody knew which songs I loved when I was eighty. They would arrive entirely uninterested in the existential crisis that preceded them. They would have a life that belonged to them and perhaps this is the part of parenthood I find most frightening: not the loss of sleep or money or spontaneous travel, but the creation of a person whose happiness I could never guarantee. There is a sentence parents often use, that having a child is like allowing your heart to walk around outside your body. People say this as though it is beautiful. I think it sounds horrifying. To make someone you love more than yourself and then release them into traffic and heartbreak and disease and school playgrounds and climate change and other human beings seems like an extraordinary act of surrender. I already find loving adults difficult enough. They can text. I cannot imagine the vulnerability of loving someone whose entire existence began because I chose it.

Then alongside all this moral and existential terror, there is the embarrassingly practical question of what would happen to the life I already have. I like my freedom. I have spent years constructing it. I like being able to leave. I like travelling. I like waking up and knowing that large parts of the day belong entirely to me. I like the possibility of deciding, for no defensible reason, that I would rather be somewhere else next month. For queer people, perhaps freedom has an additional charge because so many of us fought hard to obtain it. There is a particular exhilaration in realising that the life you were shown as a child is not compulsory. You do not have to marry the expected person. You do not have to organise adulthood around reproduction. You can invent something else. For years I thought liberation meant refusing the script. Now I am beginning to wonder whether liberation might also mean being able to choose parts of it without feeling that I have betrayed the person I fought to become. There is a version of me with a child that I can see surprisingly clearly. Their life is less spontaneous. There are small shoes by the door and fingerprints on things they has recently cleaned. They know the calendar of a school year and have opinions about packed lunches. Someone calls for them in the night and believes, for a few precious years, that they can fix almost anything. Their world becomes smaller in some ways and unimaginably larger in others. I feel tenderness towards that imagined me. I also feel afraid for them.

Then there is the person who never has a child. I can see them too. They have friendships that deepen because they have the time to tend them. They become an aunt or an uncle or a godmother or a guideparent or simply one of those adults who belongs to many younger people without having made any of them. Their life contains long dinners, sudden flights, quiet mornings and the particular luxury of being answerable primarily to themself. Perhaps they fall in love again at sixty-seven. Perhaps they live somewhere I cannot yet imagine. Perhaps younger queer people come to their house and leave with books they never get back. I love that me too. This is the difficulty neither future looks like a tragedy. We are taught to approach enormous decisions as though one path contains our authentic life and the other is a mistake we will eventually regret. We imagine that if we inspect ourselves carefully enough, we will uncover the correct answer hidden somewhere underneath the noise.

But perhaps there are decisions for which there is no correct self waiting to be discovered. Perhaps there are simply different lives, each containing things the other cannot. The parent may sometimes look at the life they surrendered and feel grief. The person without children may occasionally see a mother and daughter laughing together on a train and feel the ghost of an entire relationship that never existed. Neither feeling proves the wrong choice was made. It may simply be the cost of being able to imagine more than one life while only getting to inhabit one. Queerness taught me that there were more possible lives than I had been shown. I will always be grateful for that. It cracked open the architecture of adulthood and allowed me to ask questions that previous generations were often not permitted to ask:

Do I want to marry? Do I want monogamy? What is family? Where should I live? What does a meaningful life look like when reproduction is no longer treated as its unquestioned centre?

Possibility is intoxicating when you are young. Eventually, though, possibility asks to be converted into a life. That is the part I did not understand. At thirty-eight, my body has entered the conversation with an urgency my mind deeply resents. I would like another decade to think about this, followed by perhaps a short sabbatical, and then an extension if required. Instead biology maintains the kind of bureaucratic timetable I have spent my entire adult life trying to avoid. There is something almost absurd about having spent the first half of adulthood being warned that pregnancy could ruin my life, only to reach an age where I am suddenly expected to consider whether never becoming pregnant might break my heart. The cultural messaging changes without anybody issuing an update. For years, not having a child meant I had not yet made a decision. Now I can feel the meaning of the same choice changing beneath me. This is perhaps what ageing really is: not simply the body changing, but possibility becoming finite.

When I was younger, I thought mortality meant death. Increasingly, I think mortality first announces itself through doors. A door you could once walk through whenever you wanted becomes a door you would have to walk through soon, and then one day it is simply a wall. We experience this in small ways all the time. The country we never moved to. The career we never tried. The person we almost loved. Usually there is some fantasy that we could still return and become the person who chose differently. Parenthood is more brutal because eventually even that fantasy is taken away. Have a child and the person you were before becomes inaccessible in one direction. Do not have one and eventually the life in which you did becomes inaccessible in the other. Perhaps this is why the question feels so much larger than a baby. It is forcing me to understand that my life is no longer a rehearsal. I cannot indefinitely remain the person who might still do everything and beneath the question of parenthood lies another question I think many of us encounter in middle age, whether we want children or not: how do you make peace with the fact that every life is built partly from the lives you did not choose? There will always be another city, another love, another version of yourself glimpsed through a window. The fantasy of keeping every door open can look like freedom for a very long time. Eventually it becomes another way of refusing to live anywhere.

I return often to eighty-year-old me because I keep hoping they will tell me what to do. I imagine asking them whether they regret it. But perhaps by eighty they would find the question childish. Perhaps regret will not organise their memories as neatly as I imagine. Perhaps they will have discovered that lives refuse to divide themselves into right choices and wrong ones. If they had a child, perhaps they will have known a love so enormous that they cannot imagine having missed it, while still occasionally wondering who they might have been without it. If they did not, perhaps they will have lived a life richer and stranger than anything I can currently imagine, while still sometimes wondering about the person who never arrived.

Perhaps both versions of me will have been lonely. Perhaps both will have been loved. Perhaps both will have lost people they thought they could not survive without and then survived. Perhaps neither will believe they escaped uncertainty by choosing and perhaps I will be surrounded by people who know me. Some might share my blood. Some might not. Maybe by then queer people will have built better ways of ageing than the ones I am currently frightened of. Maybe our generation, having spent decades expanding the meaning of family, will also have to expand the meaning of care. That possibility interests me more and more. We talk about chosen family as something queer people create when we are young, but perhaps its most radical test will come when we become old. What would it mean to take seriously the promise that family is not merely who reproduces whom? What institutions would we build if we truly believed friendship could carry obligations as profound as blood? What would queer ageing look like if we designed it ourselves rather than hoping the heterosexual structures around us would eventually become hospitable?

Maybe the fear I have been translating into the question of children is partly a failure of imagination. Maybe I do not only need to decide whether to become a parent. Maybe I need to become more deliberate about building a life in which care moves in many directions and across generations, where being known does not depend entirely on having produced the people who know you. That does not solve the question. I am suspicious of essays that solve questions the writer is still living inside. I still do not know whether I want a child. Some days the longing feels almost physical. Other days I encounter a screaming toddler in an airport and feel I have been given a direct communication from god. Sometimes I imagine parenthood and feel an unexpected sense of homecoming and relief. Sometimes I imagine it and feel the walls closing in. Sometimes the climate crisis and the tense state of the world makes reproduction feel impossible to justify. Other times I wonder whether refusing to imagine future generations is exactly what despair wants from us.

I do not know whether hope means creating a child. I do not know whether freedom means remaining without one. I know only that neither life can protect me from grief, and neither can guarantee love. Perhaps that is what I have been trying not to understand. I wanted one choice to contain safety. I wanted the child to protect me from loneliness or childlessness to protect me from fear. I wanted one path to leave the other me behind without mourning that self. There is no such arrangement. Whatever I choose, I will lose a life I can already imagine and perhaps adulthood is not learning how to make decisions without loss, but learning that loss is sometimes evidence that there was more than one life worth wanting (which puts a smile on my face).

When I picture myself at eighty now, I try not to count the people standing around the bed. I try instead to ask whether I allowed myself to belong to people while I was here; whether I loved without treating love as protection against the future; whether I made a family, biological or otherwise, large enough to hold more than one idea of what family could be; whether I spent my life waiting to feel certain or eventually understood that certainty was never promised to me.

A friend of mine died recently, and grief has made the question of belonging feel much less theoretical. Another friend described me in a voice note the other day as ‘the stoic one,’ and I have been thinking about it ever since. I suppose I am. I am not always the person who says the thing at the moment it should be said. I contain things. I make jokes when I am frightened. I can love someone enormously while appearing, from the outside, almost entirely composed and lately I have found myself hoping that the people I love have always been able to see through that; that they know how much of me they occupy even when I have not had the language, or perhaps the courage, to tell them properly.

Because death has a brutal way of revealing how much of a person was living inside your ordinary life. Their absence is suddenly everywhere, and you discover that belonging was never some sentimental idea about who might one day stand beside your bed. It was happening all along: in voice notes and dinners and private jokes, in knowing who to call, in being expected somewhere, in the thousands of unremarkable exchanges through which we quietly become part of one another.

So amid the surreal soup of losing someone, there is one thing I can say with certainty: I have allowed myself to belong to people, and they have belonged to me. That does not protect any of us from loss. If anything, it guarantees it. But perhaps the point of belonging was never to make the ending less frightening. Perhaps it was to make the time before it matter.

I have spent years asking myself whether I want to make a person. I still don’t know. I only know that, for the first time in my life, not making one also feels like a decision.

This is how it happens. Not with monuments but with bin collections and the route home and learning where the light sits at six in the evening.

People say they have found themselves in cities. I don’t think that’s true, I think cities keep introducing me to the person I might have become if I’d arrived ten years earlier even twenty. I feel a melancholy wash over me for all the me’s that I could have been but was to afraid to venture in to.

At thirty-eight this feels less romantic than it used to. Every new place arrives carrying a quiet accusation. You could have been happy here too. You could have lived a big, bold life here. You could have been yourself.

No one tells you that freedom has a saturation point. That eventually, possibility stops feeling expansive and starts becoming formulaic. A year in Berlin is a year not spent beside your parents while they are still recognisably themselves. A child means not disappearing to a Greek island for six months. Staying means leaving parts of yourself. Leaving means staying somewhere else with a different you. There is no life that doesn’t quietly consume another.

I used to think commitment was choosing a person. Lately I think commitment is choosing which possible versions of yourself you are willing to let down.

Dublin doesn’t ask anything extraordinary of me. It asks for bins on Mondays. It asks me to keep showing up to the same friendships. It asks me to become someone whose life can be defined by opening the same front door over and over and over. Some days this feels unbearably small. Other days it feels like the most radical thing I’ve ever been asked to do.

Perhaps that is adulthood, not becoming certain but becoming responsible for your uncertainty.

Sometimes I think I don’t want another city at all. I want another lifetime running quietly alongside this one, where every version of me gets to stay long enough to become ordinary. One grows old in the warmth of a greek island, one raises children in the wild west of Ireland, one falls in love in Berlin and never learns the English word for the flowers outside her apartment because she never needs to.

Adulthood feels less about becoming someone and more about abandoning everyone you could have been. I want two lifetimes one where I stay and one where I leave. I used to think freedom meant having every door open. Now I wonder if freedom is having the courage to close one yourself. There are no wrong lives, only the impossible mathematics of having just one.

Dublin Lesbian Line has spent decades answering calls, holding people through loneliness, creating rooms where people could breathe, and saying again and again: you are not alone, you belong here. Now, somehow, I am part of holding that. I feel the responsibility to honour what came before me but also to push forward, to ask what else is possible, what more we owe each other, and what kind of queer future we are actually willing to build. That was what was sitting in me when I spoke at Dyke March. I wanted to talk about solidarity, trans inclusion, racism, the far right, Ireland, fear and how easily people who have been hurt can hurt other people unless we make a real practice of refusing to do that.

After the march, we ran Dyke Night, and honestly it filled me with hope. The contestants, the audience, the room, the range of dyke identity, queer identity, gender, expression, humour, beauty, strangeness and courage it was messy and alive and funny and hot and tender and completely ours. To have Jay Toole speak at both Dyke March and Dyke Night, a Stonewall survivor and a living part of queer history, made something very clear to me: legacy is not something we admire from a distance. It is something we carry. It is something we are handed. It is something we have to decide what to do with. Stonewall was not respectable. Queer survival has never been polite. The people who came before us did not fight so we could become smaller, safer, quieter versions of ourselves.

I am sharing the speech because I do not want the message to disappear into one afternoon. I want to keep returning to it and I want to make a public commitment to try to live the values I spoke about: to be braver, less respectable, more willing to be changed, more anarchist in my actions and more revolutionary not as an aesthetic but as a practice. Less obedient to systems that harm us. More committed to mutual aid, shared responsibility, collective care and direct action. More accountable in how I organise, how I listen, how I show up, how I respond when I get it wrong and how I refuse to let queer community become another place where people are pushed out. I hope people hold me to that. I hope people keep me accountable. And I hope, more than anything, that we keep making the circle wider.

Here is the speech.

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Dyke March Dublin 2026 Speech

Dykes of Ireland!

How are we feeling? We need to be loud today, because this is not the moment to be quiet.

My name is Val Hourigan, and I’m proud to be here representing Dublin Lesbian Line, one of Europe’s longest-running LGBTQIA+ services.bFor over forty years, Dublin Lesbian Line has been answering calls, holding space, building community, and saying something simple that can save a life:

You are not alone.
You belong here.

And I know those words matter, because many of us have spent our lives wondering if we do belong.bAt Dublin Lesbian Line, we know belonging is not theoretical.bIt is the voice on the other end of the phone.bIt is the room where someone can relax and feel safe to be themselves.bIt is the moment someone realises they do not have to explain who they are in the world in order to be loved.

So today, I want to ask a bigger question.

What kind of Ireland are we building?

A country that responds to fear with more fear?

Or a country that responds to fear with solidarity?

Because right now, we are being encouraged to fear each other.

Fear the migrant. Fear the refugee. Fear the trans person. Fear the queer person. Fear the traveller. Fear the person who looks different, sounds different, lives different, loves differently. And as dykes, we know a thing or two about being called too much.

Too loud. Too angry. Too intense. Too visible. Too much.

And honestly?

Sometimes they were right.

We are too much for a world that wants us small. Too much for a politics that wants us invisible. Too much for a country that wants progress without discomfort. So I say, let’s be too much.

Because the game is always the same. Find somebody with less power. Point at them. Tell everyone they are the problem. And hope nobody looks at who is actually holding the power.

Hope nobody asks who actually benefits. Hope nobody asks why there are no homes. Why there are no hospital beds. Why people can’t afford basic necessities. Why the escalation of the far right continues to go unchecked. Why many children of LGBTQ+ parents in Ireland do not have the right to a legally recognised relationship with both of their parents. Why trans people in Ireland continue to face some of the poorest access to healthcare in Europe.

Why, in Belfast, one truly horrific act of violence was used as an excuse to terrorise whole communities. Why people who had done nothing wrong were suddenly treated as if they had to answer for someone else’s actions.

Why, after the death of Yves Sakila, a Black man on Henry Street, are we still pretending that latent racism does not exist everywhere in Ireland?

As a white person, I am not here to speak for Black communities. But I am here to say that looking away is a choice. And we can never, ever choose silence over truth.

Dykes know something about being turned into the problem. We know what it feels like to be talked about instead of listened to. We know what it feels like when other people decide our lives are up for debate. And because we know that story, we have a choice.

We can repeat it.

Or we can break it.

And I want to say something today because I love this community enough to tell the truth.

Being oppressed does not make us immune from prejudice.

Being queer does not make us incapable of racism.

Being a lesbian, or a dyke, or queer does not make us incapable of transphobia.

Being marginalised does not make us incapable of harming other marginalised people.

And I am not standing here pretending I am above that.

I have had to learn this in myself too. I have had to notice where I wanted to be seen as good more than I wanted to be changed.

Recently, I heard Sara Ahmed, a queer feminist scholar, speak in Athens.

She said: “When you expose a problem, you pose a problem.”

So maybe part of our work as dykes is becoming comfortable being the problem. Sara talks about embracing the label of feminist killjoy. And I am proud to be a feminist killjoy.

Having courage in being a problem for racism.

Having courage in being a problem for transphobia.

Having courage in being a problem for every room that wants silence more than justice and equity.

So I say, let us be the killjoys when we need to be.

I do not want to tolerate queer politics or communities that just want a turn at being cruel.

I do not want feminism that needs an enemy weaker than itself.

I do not want a lesbian movement that survives by pushing trans people out.

I do not want an Ireland where people who were once forced to the margins fight their way in, only to shut the door behind them.

Liberation is ending the idea that anybody deserves less than another.

Nobody.

Not trans people.

Not migrants.

Not Travellers.

Not any person of colour.

Not disabled people.

Not Palestinians, Congolese, Sudanese.

Not any person, anywhere, who is being told their life matters less.

If the only boot we object to is the one oppressing us, then we have misunderstood freedom.

We do not build freedom by making our circle smaller.

We build freedom by making our circle bigger and braver.

Wider.

Stronger.

Harder to divide.

Every time we make the circle smaller, fear wins.

Every time we make the circle wider, we do.

And while they point us towards the vulnerable, we need to keep our eyes on power.

The people we are taught to fear are never the people who profit from our fear.

They point us towards the vulnerable because they do not want us looking at power.

And we will not be distracted.

Look around you.

Look at this march.

Look at the people who were told they were too much.

Look at us now.

Still here.

Still loving.

Still building.

Still marching.

Still refusing to disappear.

So hear us today.

Let every person who has ever been told they do not belong hear us.

You belong.

You belong.

You belong.

And we refuse to leave anyone behind.

They choose fear.

We choose courage.

They choose division.

We choose solidarity.

They build walls.

We build community.

We choose to stand shoulder to shoulder.

For all of us.

Resist and persist.

Solidarity forever.

Today I am in an enraged state ruminating on what it means to be a lesbian watching straight culture forgive men in real time.

There is a strange vantage point that comes with lesbian life. Not immunity, obviously. Lesbians are not exempt from male violence and in some contexts our refusal of cis men can make us more vulnerable to it: the offence taken, the fascination, the corrective impulse, the need to prove that our boundaries are negotiable but there is also distance. You spend enough of your life outside the central bargain of heterosexuality and certain rituals begin to look very odd. The comeback is one of them.

A powerful man is accused, exposed, found liable, disgraced and almost immediately the culture begins asking the same question in various disguises: when can we have him back? Not whether the woman is okay, not what it cost her to speak, not what kind of social machinery made the harm possible and the aftermath so predictable. The question is when his absence can end. How long the public must politely remember before forgetting becomes socially acceptable again. Even saying this person’s name makes me want to bellow in rage but it is a necessary evil.

Conor McGregor’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon was not interesting because it was surprising. It was interesting because it was so familiar. McGregor has been civilly found liable for sexual assault. That fact should alter the atmosphere around him; it should make certain forms of ease feel indecent. Instead, he was folded back into the ordinary grammar of celebrity: the chair, the host, the anecdotes, the geniality, the implication that everyone watching understood the terms of the performance. We were not there to think too hard, we were there to welcome him back.

This is where rape culture is most effective: not in the denial of facts but in the management of their significance. A court can find something, a woman can say something, journalists can report something and still the public machine can decide that none of it should be allowed to spoil the tone. The harm is not necessarily disputed, it is simply made secondary. It becomes context, unpleasant but containable, a dark smudge on the edge of an otherwise usable image.

That is why the Fallon interview felt so grim. Late-night television is not a court of law but it is a court of mood. It tells viewers what can be laughed through, what can be skipped, what can be reabsorbed into entertainment. The power of the talk-show sofa is not that it exonerates it is more subtle than that but it domesticates. It takes this man associated with harm and places him somewhere warm, familiar and non-threatening, surrounded by cues that instruct the audience to relax.

As a lesbian, I find this particular form of male rehabilitation almost anthropological. Heterosexual culture often seems less like a romance plot than an elaborate public relations department for cis men. So much energy goes into preserving their complexity, their promise, their woundedness, their right to be understood in full. Women are expected to be fluent in this complexity. We are asked to consider the pressures on these men, the demons, the childhoods, the addictions, the entourages, the mental health, the sporting genius, the wasted potential. A man’s behaviour is rarely allowed to stand alone; it is immediately given context and a backstory.

Women by contrast, are stripped for parts. A woman who speaks about sexual violence becomes a credibility exercise. Her memory is tested, her tone interpreted, her history excavated. Every ordinary human contradiction becomes a possible flaw in the case for her own suffering. Was she afraid enough? Clear enough? Damaged enough? Too damaged? Why did she go? Why did she stay? Why did she drink? Why did she text? Why did she wait? What was she wearing? The questions may differ by case, but the underlying demand is constant: become legible to us in precisely the right way, or risk being discarded.

This is the asymmetry that exhausts women. Men are given narrative. Women are given scrutiny.

And this exhaustion does not live only in spectacular cases. It is part of ordinary female consciousness, the dull admin of living in a world where male entitlement is both denied and accommodated. Women learn to make calculations so quickly they barely register as thoughts. We know which men not to be alone with, which jokes to laugh off, which rooms to leave, which routes to take, which friends to text, which stories to file away under “be careful” because there is no institution or category prepared to hold them. The official world tells us to report. The actual world teaches us to warn each other. We watch the friends carry on around these men knowing they have done terrible things but not willing to take the stand for the woman who has suffered.

Lesbians know this, too, though sometimes in a slightly different key. We are often told, implicitly or explicitly, that our suspicion of cis male power is ideological. As though distrust arrived first as politics rather than pattern recognition. As though women become wary of cis men because they read the wrong books, joined the wrong groups, or failed to appreciate irony. But lesbian distance from men can clarify what heterosexual obligation often obscures. When you are not invested in being chosen by cis men, their social centrality can appear less natural and more aggressively maintained.

That is not a claim of superiority; it is an admission of perspective. I am not outside cis hetero-patriarchy, no woman is. But I am outside enough of its romantic mythology to find the reverence for men’s redemption startling. The culture does not merely forgive men; it prepares forgiveness for them in advance. There are always people waiting with the language. He has been through a lot. He deserves to move on. He is more than this. He should not be defined by one thing. The “one thing” is often a woman’s life, but this rarely slows the sentence down.

What lingers for me is not only that McGregor was welcomed onto a mainstream American talk show. It is the ease with which public life can absorb knowledge of violence without becoming meaningfully changed by it. That is the lesson women receive again and again: being believed is not the same as being valued. A woman may speak, endure the consequences of speaking, be vindicated in some formal sense and still watch the room clap for the man.

There is a coldness in that which is hard to describe. It is not the hot cruelty of overt disbelief. It is worse maybe because it is compatible with knowing. It says: yes, perhaps; yes, we read that; yes, awful business; and now please the next segment.

The public rehabilitation of men depends on this ability to move on without ever quite saying what has been moved past. It does not require innocence. It requires familiarity. A few appearances, some jokes, a reminder of the old charisma, and the disgust begins to loosen. The man becomes available again: for entertainment, for fandom, for profit, for identification. The woman remains where she was left, attached to the facts everyone else has decided to metabolise.

This is why platforms matter. Not because every interview must become a trial, and not because every host is obliged to perform moral seriousness on command. Platforms matter because they are how culture distributes comfort. They decide who gets the benefit of warmth and who is kept outside it. They decide which facts are allowed into the room and which are treated as impolite. A friendly interview does not erase a civil finding but it does instruct the audience in how little that finding needs to interfere with the pleasures of celebrity.

For women watching, this is not abstract. It lands somewhere older than opinion. We recognise the manoeuvre because we have seen versions of it in families, workplaces, friendship groups, pubs, political parties, sports clubs, activist spaces, everywhere people decide that confronting a man will be more disruptive than quietly accommodating the harm around him. The scale changes the logic does not.

This is where the lesbian angle matters to me. Much of lesbian life involves building forms of intimacy, culture and kinship that do not require cis men at the centre and yet the world keeps dragging them back into the middle of the room. Even in our refusal, we are made to respond. We are expected to debate them, fear them, forgive them, analyse them, make space for them, understand them, and watch as their return is staged as though it were a public good.

I do not hate men. I hate the infrastructure built around their comfort. I hate how often female pain is treated as heavy, awkward, excessive, while male shame is treated as a tragedy requiring collective tenderness. I hate the sentimental language that gathers around powerful men at the first sign of consequence. I hate the way “nuance” so often means giving a man back his humanity by taking complexity away from the woman he harmed.

A better culture would not need women to be perfect before they are believed. It would not treat accountability as a temporary public relations problem. It would not confuse a man’s desire to move on with evidence that he should be helped along. It would understand that the question is not whether a man can ever exist again after harm but why his route back to affection is so clear, so staffed, so professionally lit.

That is the real obscenity of the Fallon appearance. Not simply that McGregor was given airtime, though he was. Not simply that the interview avoided the gravity of the civil finding, though it did. The obscenity is the invitation issued to the rest of us: to treat the matter as settled enough, old enough, complicated enough, boring enough, to enjoy the performance.

I am not interested in that invitation. Burn it down!!!

The demand, in the end, is not that we forgive. It is that we behave as though his return is none of our business. But women know better, we have always known that the room changes depending on who is made comfortable inside it.

A few days later, I attended a talk by Sara Ahmed through the Theros Transfeminist Lab. Ahmed spoke about the feminist killjoy as the figure willing to disrupt the happiness scripts that organise social life, the person who refuses the smoothing over of violence, who notices what institutions require us not to notice. I had read her before but sitting there in Athens, surrounded by the anarchic energy of the collective, I felt something less intellectual than cellular. A recognition or perhaps a remembering of parts of me that have been smoothed out over time.

What struck me most was not simply the politics itself but the atmosphere around it. The looseness, the seriousness without deadness. People seemed intellectually alive to one another. I realised how long it had been since I had inhabited a space where political thought, intimacy, humour, art and ordinary life moved together so fluidly. Don’t get me wrong Ireland has one of the strongest activist communities and population I know and am a proud part of but to travel and feel a synchronicity in another city felt like a spark ignited!

By the time I arrived in Lesbos something had already begun opening in me.

The first thing I noticed was time.

Tangential, drifting time filled with conversations moving from sex to Palestine to psychoanalysis to music to grief to somebody’s ex-girlfriend to what everyone was eating later. Nobody seemed particularly concerned with efficiency. Attention was allowed to wander. People sit outside late into the night smoking cigarettes, drinking beer slowly, bodies stretched across plastic chairs under yellow streetlight. There is no visible urgency to monetise the self.

I realised, with some embarrassment, that my nervous system no longer knows what to do with this.

At home, my life is organised around management: calendars, outcomes, responsiveness, professional competence, the constant low-grade performance of being dependable. I have become extremely good at inhabiting institutional time. Every hour accounted for, every feeling translated quickly into function. Even my exhaustion had become administrative.

This is the strange violence of professional adulthood under contemporary capitalism: not simply that it exhausts us but that it narrows the range of imaginable lives while convincing us we are being mature. Especially for queer people, who inherit histories of experimentation, collectivity and political imagination only to find ourselves increasingly folded into the respectable architectures of productivity. We become articulate inside systems that quietly flatten us and because I was functioning, I mistook functioning for living.

This winter I had felt increasingly depressed in a way I struggled to explain properly to myself. Not dramatic despair or collapse. More a growing sense of psychic enclosure. I kept trying to think my way toward a future and finding only blankness. I could imagine continuing. I could imagine succeeding. I could not imagine becoming more alive.

That distinction now feels important.

In Lesvos, something humiliating and exhilarating began happening almost immediately. I started writing constantly. Not structured writing necessarily pages and pages of notes, fragments, ideas, observations, desires, plans for projects, questions about the shape of a life. It felt less like generating ideas than uncovering a buried internal landscape I had stopped visiting. Everyone person I met and conversation I had fired me up and generated branches of ideas that I would sit in, in bed in my hungover state each morning.

I wrote about psychotherapy, DJing, writing, facilitation, queer cultural work, political education, parties, art, collective spaces, reading groups, anarchy, retreats, workshops. Ways of building community outside corporate metrics of value. Ways of earning money that did not require amputating large sections of myself in exchange for stability. I feel alive with the possibilities of living and the groundedness that being in this ancient place delivers me.

What unsettles me is not the fantasy of these things but their coherence. For the first time in years, the future does not appear as a sequence of professional escalations but as an ecology: a network of practices, relationships, politics, pleasures and forms of labour that could potentially sustain one another.

I realised that what I wanted was not escape from work. I wanted a different relationship to aliveness.

And all the while, my corporate job continued existing in parallel.

For the last few days I have been working remotely from Lesvos. At 10:45am I open my laptop and enter the clean abstract language of institutional life: deliverables, timelines, stakeholders, strategic alignment, employee engagement. I sit on calls discussing frameworks and operational decisions while still physically carrying the emotional residue of the night before: music vibrating through streets, hours-long conversations about gender and liberation, bodies pressed together dancing outside bars, people speaking urgently and imperfectly about how to survive the current political moment without surrendering joy entirely.

The dissonance has been almost absurd.

At moments I have felt as though I am moving between incompatible realities every few hours. One world organised around optimisation, risk management and professional containment. Another organised around collectivity, improvisation, pleasure, political feeling and embodied presence.

Yet the tension is not simple. The corporate world offers things the other world often cannot: stability, structure, money, legibility to the heteronormative class. I understand why people stay. I understand why I have stayed even if admitting this feels me with shame. Safety exerts its own emotional gravity, particularly after years of precarity or uncertainty. There is relief in becoming institutionally intelligible and lavishing in the pretence of its saftey.

But sitting here now, I think something more difficult has become impossible to ignore: safety can quietly become a mode of disappearance. Saftey can become a home for shame and a life lived outside ones true moral compass.

What Lesvos has given me is not certainty but scale. A sense of how large life can feel again.

I do not mean happiness exactly. Queer spaces are not utopias. They contain conflict, projection, exhaustion, performance, incoherence and in this case a lack of accessibility. There are marginalised communities within marginalised communities not having their needs met. They are shaped by privilege and instability like every other social world. Temporary spaces of intensity can also become addictive, their very impermanence heightening emotional charge. I am wary of romanticising any of this too completely.

However, there is something politically transformative about inhabiting a space where queer life is not merely tolerated but infrastructural. Where intellectualism is social. Where political feeling circulates openly. Where people build entire evenings around conversation, art, flirtation, collective analysis, music and care rather than treating these things as secondary to “real life.” Where bodies are allowed to soften outside heterosexual surveillance and capitalist time discipline.

I had forgotten what this does to the imagination.

Because imagination itself is social. Our sense of what is possible is produced collectively. Certain environments expand possibility; others contract it. Under prolonged institutional life, I think I had slowly lost access to forms of longing that once felt central to me. Or maybe I had never allowed myself to develop those forms of longing in the first place. Maybe there was never a place for them to metabolise.

Here, surrounded by queer collectivity and political openness, those desires suddenly became legible again.

I do not think this is incidental. Queer spaces have historically functioned not only as sites of identity but as laboratories for alternative ways of organising intimacy, labour, kinship, art and time. They create conditions under which people can briefly encounter themselves differently. Not more truthfully necessarily, there is performance here too but more expansively.

Expansion is the word I keep returning to.

I feel expanded intellectually, erotically, politically, creatively. More porous to feeling. More curious. More willing to imagine a life not entirely organised around fear. It embarrasses me slightly to admit the intensity of this shift because contemporary culture trains us to distrust transformation unless it arrives in ironic form. But something has undeniably moved in me during these weeks.

Sometimes at night, walking back through the streets after hours of talking and dancing and drinking, I feel overwhelmed by grief for how narrowed I have become without fully noticing. How much energy had gone into maintaining functionality. How often I had deferred the question of what kind of life I actually wanted because the practicalities of survival felt more urgent and survival is urgent. This is part of the difficulty.

I am thirty-eight years old. I live in a world where existing is expensive, fascism is resurging globally, queer and trans rights are under attack and financial instability shadows almost every creative or political ambition. The fantasy of abandoning structure entirely belongs mostly to the wealthy. I know this.

But I also think many of us have accepted forms of psychic diminishment as the unavoidable price of adulthood. We speak constantly about burnout while speaking far less about deadening. About the slow erosion of sensuality, collectivity, spontaneity and imagination under systems that reward productivity above presence.

What if exhaustion is not the only problem? What if the problem is also the shrinking of the possible self?

I do not know exactly what happens after this trip. I do not suddenly possess a coherent five-year plan. My job still exists, bills still exist, institutional life still exerts its pull. I will leave Lesvos in early June and return to Dublin carrying the same practical realities I arrived with.

But something has altered nonetheless.

I think before coming here I was trying to build a future out of endurance. Now I find myself wanting to build one out of aliveness instead.

Not a perfect life. Not an endlessly pleasurable one. But a life with enough space for political feeling, creativity, embodiment, queer collectivity, intellectual seriousness, intimacy and risk. A life that does not require severing these parts of myself in order to remain economically functional.

Perhaps that is what this trip has ultimately given me: not answers but a refusal. A growing inability to participate unquestioningly in forms of living that ask us to become smaller in exchange for safety (and I acknowledge my privilege in that).

I keep thinking about something implicit in Ahmed’s work: that becoming a killjoy often means becoming disloyal to the scripts that once organised your life. Refusing to call certain forms of diminishment happiness simply because they are socially rewarded.

Maybe that is what has happened here.

Or maybe I have simply remembered something I knew before I became so caught up in surviving. Perhaps the danger was never wanting too much but learning to want so little.

I hate capitalism, but I am increasingly concerned that I may be peak capitalism.

Not in the obvious way. I am not a venture capitalist. I do not own a standing desk treadmill. I have never referred to my morning routine as “non-negotiable,” nor have I attempted to optimise my sleep hygiene using data.

And yet I have started treating my weekends like distressed assets.

Every free hour must generate a return.

Rest, joy, meaning, queer connection, personal growth, personal projects, side hustles, DMCs. A vague but unmistakable sense that my life is, despite appearances, worth the extraordinary amount of effort it currently requires. This is because my life, at present, resembles a slightly overambitious administrative error.

I work more than fifty hours a week.

I am completing a master’s degree part-time, which means that once a month college consumes every waking minute of an entire weekend. Friday night until late. All day Saturday. All day Sunday. Other weekends vanish into assignments that breed quietly in the background until they suddenly require forty-seven references and a theoretical framework.

I see four therapy clients each week.

I attend supervision.

I volunteer with a charity.

At any given moment, I am behind on at least three things and disappointing at least one person, often myself. I frequently feel like a sub-par friend, daughter and sister.

I am deeply committed to all of these choices and periodically resentful of them, particularly when the direct debit notifications arrive with the confidence of people who assume I am financially and emotionally stable. They appear each month with the calm certainty of organisations that have mistaken me for someone with a five-year plan. This is the part no one tells you about pursuing meaningful work.

It is possible to love your life and still feel trapped inside it.

It is possible to feel grateful and resentful in equal measure.

It is possible to build a life that reflects your values and then find yourself staring at your calendar like someone reviewing the consequences of a series of legally binding decisions made by another person. That person was, of course, me.

So when I finally get a free weekend, I do not want to “just relax.” I want transcendence (ideally for under €25 and within walking distance)! I want the weekend to justify itself. I want to feel restored on a cellular level but also the scratchy throatededness of being up all night talking shite. Preferably the kind where I come home on Sunday evening feeling like my life is broadly on track, rather than like I’ve spent €42 to stand in a warehouse and shout “WHAT?” at strangers.

More specifically, I want to be surrounded by queer community. I want the kind of weekend where you come home sunburnt, emotionally regulated and inexplicably in possession of three new close friends and someone else’s artworks.

This is where the stakes become unreasonable. I do not merely want to “go to something.” I want to experience a temporary but convincing sense that I am exactly where I am meant to be. I want to spend time with people who understand me without requiring a glossary. I want to laugh until my face hurts. I want to have one of those conversations at 2am that makes me briefly believe human beings are fundamentally good.

I want the social equivalent of being plugged directly into a power source and because I have had glimpses of this, I know it exists. At Faoin Tuath Festival, for example, there are moments when life feels almost offensively aligned. You wake up in a field surrounded by queer people.

Someone is making coffee. Someone else is discussing attachment theory beside a compost toilet. There is music in the distance and a level of emotional literacy that would be clinically significant in any other context. For a few days, community is not something you are striving toward. It is simply the atmosphere.

You do not have to explain yourself. You do not have to justify your life. You just exist.

Because I have experienced this, I now approach ordinary weekends with expectations that are, on reflection, completely unsustainable. If I go to an event and it does not quite hit, I experience disappointment wildly disproportionate to the actual circumstances. I begin exploring whether ticketmaster can be held personally responsible for my unmet emotional needs and their general awfulness.

The music is fine.

The people are nice.

The evening is objectively pleasant.

Yet I leave feeling vaguely betrayed.

Not by anyone in particular, but by the persistent failure of ordinary life to replicate the emotional intensity of a queer festival in a field. I have spent money. I have allocated precious time. I have emotionally preloaded the experience with the expectation that it will restore my faith in humanity.

Instead I am on the red line luas home at 11:43pm, wondering whether I have once again misallocated a scarce and valuable resource. This is, I appreciate, an absurd amount of pressure to place on a Saturday night. It is also, I suspect, what happens when your free time becomes so limited that you begin expecting it to perform miracles.

Every available hour starts to feel precious. Every plan carries the burden of proving that the sacrifice is worth it and if it doesn’t, the disappointment is not really about the event itself.

It is about the larger fear that you are working this hard and still not living the life you are trying to create. That perhaps adulthood is just an endless series of obligations punctuated by intermittent attempts to remember who you are. That joy has become another item on your to-do list. That belonging is something you are trying to schedule between, QBRs, supervision and assignment deadlines.

This, I think, is the most capitalist part of all.

Not that I work too much.

Not even that I am tired.

But that I have internalised the idea that every moment must be useful. That rest must be maximally restorative. Community must be transformative. Even doing nothing must somehow be the best possible version of doing nothing. Even my lying on the couch now has key performance indicators. I want my weekends to deliver a measurable return on investment. When they do not, I feel as though I have failed.

But lately I have been wondering if the real issue is not that I am bad at relaxing.

Maybe the issue is that I am trying to compress all of the things that make life feel worthwhile: rest, friendship, belonging, laughing, languishing, meaning and queer community into the few unclaimed hours left after everything else.

That is a lot to ask of a weekend but I understand why I ask it.

Because the moments when I feel most alive are not frivolous.

They are not optional extras.

They are the reason I am doing any of this.

The work. The study. The therapy hours. The supervision. The deadlines. The direct debits. The constant low-level awareness that I am one overdue assignment away from becoming a purely administrative entity. All of it is in service of a future life that feels connected, meaningful, true and most importantly a tiny bit freer of this capitalist hellscape. I want each weekend to function as a small but convincing argument for my continued existence.

The moments when I feel connected, understood, and fully myself are not indulgences. They are not rewards I earn for completing my to-do list. They are the reason I tolerate the to-do list in the first place.

So perhaps I am not obsessed with maximising my time off. Perhaps I am trying to protect the few moments in which I feel most like myself. Perhaps the frustration I feel when something does not “hit” is not evidence that I am impossible to please.

It is evidence that I know what belonging feels like and I want more of it.

Which, when you think about it, may be the least capitalist thing about me.

Perhaps I am just a tired lesbian with five Google Calendars that look like cries for help and an entirely reasonable desire to spend what little free time I have feeling deeply alive.

And if I occasionally expect a €100 ticket and a field in rural Ireland to undo the cumulative effects of capitalism, burnout, debt and my attachment issues, I think that is, frankly, what they should be designed to do.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a crying on the kitchen floor, texting paragraphs kind of way. In a calm, administrative way. Like I’ve reviewed the evidence, taken everything into account and unfortunately the verdict is final.

This isn’t working. This has never worked. Something has gone fundamentally wrong in my human development.

What’s unnerving is how reasonable it feels.

I look at my life (the same life I had in August, the same friends, the same job, the same personality) and quietly decide that I’ve misunderstood something essential about how to be alive. That other people have accessed a version of adulthood that I have somehow missed entirely. That I am, at best, circling the drain of my own potential, occasionally waving in at it.

This winter, for example, I became convinced I needed to move to the countryside and have a baby. Not in a grounded, practical way. Just in a vague, urgent, almost spiritual way. Like time itself had turned to me and said: now.

I am 38, which means this thought arrives with just enough legitimacy to feel real and just enough panic to feel like a solution.

Winter me loves a solution.

She doesn’t get bogged down in logistics. She is vision-led. She opens Daft.ie and starts looking at cottages in places where the nearest shop is described as “a short drive,” which in Irish terms means you will not be leaving the house again until April. The listings are always some variation of “charming,” “peaceful,” and “in need of extensive renovations,” which feels less like a property description and more like a psychological profile.

And I think: yes. That’s it. I need less comfort, more hardship. A small child. Possibly a stove.

In this version of events, the child is also, crucially, my best friend.

We have a very strong bond. We don’t need anyone else. We spend our days inside the cottage, quietly thriving, occasionally emerging to interact with my family when I require support, like a sort of soft, rural co-dependency that I have mistaken for healing. Possibly a rescue dog and a cat who are also importantly, best friends.

This all makes perfect sense to me.

This is usually around 4pm, which in an Irish winter is effectively the middle of the night.

The sky has already collapsed. The light has withdrawn in a way that feels personal. I am eating toast with an amount of butter that suggests I am either preparing for hibernation or trying to lubricate my personality back into existence. The kitchen light is doing its best.

It is not a sun.

The thing is, I know this is seasonal.

I have years of evidence. I could map it. I could show you the steady decline of my personality as the days shorten, the way my sense of self becomes increasingly theoretical. I know that every winter I begin to believe that I have no friends, no life, no particular talents and that the version of me who seemed capable in the summer was, at best, a temporary administrative error.

And yet still, every year, I believe it.

Completely.

Ireland sits at roughly the same latitude as parts of Scandinavia, which means, scientifically, we should all be heavily supplemented, softly lit and emotionally supported through the winter months. Instead, we’re just out here. Raw. Eating soup in the dark.

Saying “sure look it” in a tone that suggests we have accepted something we haven’t fully understood.

At a certain point in January, I would genuinely consider going to Mass just to feel something. This is not a joke. I am not religious. I would describe myself as loosely agnostic on a good day, spiritually opportunistic at worst and yet there is something about the combination of darkness, ritual, free heating and other humans sitting quietly in a room that starts to feel… like a viable emotional strategy.

I don’t go.

But I think about it in a way that feels like a warning sign.

Winter me also quietly stops participating in her own life. I stop doing a proper food shop. Not entirely, but enough that meals become conceptual. I exist in a low-level, snack-based ecosystem. Toast features heavily. Butter continues to do most of the emotional heavy lifting. I contemplate melting butter and hot chocolate together in a desperate moment of treat need.

The idea of planning meals for a future version of myself feels wildly optimistic. Almost arrogant.

Because winter me does not believe in the future.

She cancels plans she was looking forward to. She assumes her friends have quietly moved on from her, not in a dramatic way, just in a natural, inevitable progression. She rereads old messages for tone like she’s uncovering a pattern.

Small things become evidence. Everything confirms the theory.

At some point, I attempt interventions.

I buy vitamin D. I take it once, with the intensity of someone expecting immediate transformation and when I do not become a new person within the hour, I abandon the entire concept.

I consider getting one of those SAD lamps (a literal, medical-grade sun) and then don’t, because winter me does not believe she deserves premium light. I think about booking a holiday in January. Somewhere bright. Somewhere warm. Somewhere with citrus fruit and a version of me who has never felt like this.

And then I don’t book it.

Because winter me cannot imagine herself in a future that feels good, and therefore sees no point in preparing for it.

Instead, I daydream.

This is where I become incredibly productive.

I construct entire alternative lives. In one, I live in rural Clare and make sourdough and speak very little, but with great meaning. In another, I’ve moved to the south of France, where I am barefoot, fluent, lightly mysterious and inexplicably good at hosting in my run down mansion.

In all of them, the key detail is that it is not January, and I am not myself.

And then, without any real input from me, it ends.

The May bank holiday arrives and I wake up as a completely different person. Not gradually. Not through effort or insight. Just suddenly. The light comes back and with it, apparently, my entire personality.

I have friends again. Real ones. People I recognise and who, crucially, recognise me back. There are plans. There are group chats. There I am replying to group chats. There are cans being had outside in that first slightly chaotic patch of sun where everyone is pretending they’re not cold.

I start replying to messages as if I have always been this responsive. I make plans midweek. I double-book myself like someone who fundamentally believes in her own social value.

I go for walks at 7am before work. This is perhaps the most destabilising development of all.

I get a coffee. I begin to recognise the same people doing the same thing and start to feel like I am part of a community, as though I have personally built the neighbourhood through consistency and eye contact. The local community garden is stunning through the metal railings in this early May light.

I start eating salads. Regularly. Without prompting. I develop an interest in herbalism, as though I’ve personally discovered plants and am now responsible for communicating their benefits. I put my bare feet on the ground and feel, quite sincerely, that this is what has been missing.

Not therapy.

Not growth.

Just… earth.

I go to the beach and walk into the sea like I am being gently reintroduced to myself. And the strangest part is that summer me has no real memory of winter me.

She does not sit in the sun and reflect on how convincing it all felt. She does not think about the cottages, or the baby, or the quiet certainty that everything was wrong.

She simply exists in a state of mild to moderate thriving and assumes this is the baseline.

They never meet. Winter me cannot imagine summer me. Summer me refuses to acknowledge winter me. I am just the body that hosts both of them, moving between states as the earth tilts, like some kind of seasonal timeshare arrangement I did not knowingly enter into.

It’s May now.

I’m fine. I have friends again. I have hobbies. I have opinions. I’m hot. I like my clothes.

If you see me this summer, confidently making plans, talking about the future like it’s guaranteed, just remember:

I am solar-powered.

Remove the light, and I will immediately begin planning a new life in a small, damp cottage with a child who is, primarily, my best friend.

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Not through anything dramatic or catastrophic, but through the sudden introduction of a different measure of time. A different measure of consequence. A different measure of what it means to live in a place, in a body, in a country.

I found out recently that Éamonn Ceannt lived in my house.

Not nearby. Not on the street. Here within the same walls I now move through daily, across the same floorboards that carry the weight of my routines, my distractions, my small persistent worries.

For anyone Irish reading this, the name will already carry weight. It’s not abstract. It’s familiar. A park, a station, a plaque. The kind of presence that moves quietly through the country, built into its geography, repeated often enough that it begins to feel stable. Known.

If you’re not Irish, the shorter version is this: he was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, a signatory of the Proclamation, executed by the British in 1916 at 34 years old. One of the people that fought for the freedoms I enjoy today.

That’s the official outline. The version that fits in books.

But I’ve been able to see something else.

Fragments, really. Small administrative traces that survive long after a life has ended. Documents that place him here in a way that feels almost unsettling in its ordinariness. Records that show he paid £2 a month in rent. A figure that feels almost abstract now, when houses in this area go for closer to three grand now. A different economy entirely. A different world.

I can see, too, that he had the first recorded wedding in Irish in over a century, in a church just down the road from here. A deliberate act. A choice about language, about identity, about what it meant to live in Ireland at that time. Not just politically, but culturally. Intimately.

These details don’t make him more heroic.

They make him more real.

I am 38 years old.

He died at 34.

I have already outlived him by four years.

It’s a strange thing to measure your life against. Not in a grand, historical way, but in a quiet, physical one. He lived in this house. Walked these rooms. Moved across these same floorboards. Whatever version of a life he was building here, it ended before mine has.

That comparison sits with me.

Not as guilt or inspiration. Something more disorienting than that.

A shift in scale.

I’ve been in a battle with this house since I bought it.

From the moment I walked into it, I knew it was mine. Not logically or financially. Certainly not practically. But with a kind of certainty that bypassed reason entirely given its myriad of issues. This is my home.

And it has been difficult in almost every way an old house can be.

The roof leaks. The wiring is crumbling. The structure resists me at every turn. It is cold in winter, damp in places I can’t fully reach and endlessly in need of work I am not sure I can afford. There have been long stretches where it has felt less like a home and more like something I am trying to survive. A slow, grinding accumulation of problems that never quite resolve.

It sits, too, in a part of the city that carries its own weight. Under-resourced, overlooked, often described in terms of what it lacks. I spend time here not only as a resident, but through my work, sitting with people moving through addiction, through recovery, through the fragile process of trying to rebuild a life under pressure. I see how environments shape what is possible. How they hold and constrain at the same time.

For a long time, my relationship to the house has been defined by that strain and then this knowledge arrives.

Not as a solution or redemption. But as a shift I cannot undo.

Because now, when I move through the house, I am aware of it differently. Not just as a problem, but as a place that has already held a life oriented toward something far beyond itself. A life that ended young, and yet continues to shape the narrative of the country I live in.

The texture of the struggle changes. My worries remain the same, but they no longer feel quite as total. There is something grounding in that. Not comforting. But clarifying.

I find myself thinking about the nature of our concerns.

About the difference between worrying about a leaking roof and worrying about the possibility of remaking a nation. About the scale at which a life can be lived, and the way that scale is often invisible from the inside.

The body does not distinguish neatly between forms of stress but history does. Sometimes, living inside a space like this makes that difference impossible to ignore.

I think, too, about the present.

About what Éamonn Ceannt would make of the Ireland that exists now. Not as a symbol, but as a person who once moved through these rooms with a particular vision of what this country might become. The neighbourhood is filled with Irish flags.

They appear in clusters draped across buildings, high on electricity poles. A visible assertion of identity. A declaration of belonging. But they are not aligned with the version of Ireland that was being fought for in 1916.

What once pointed toward liberation can, in certain contexts, become a way of drawing boundaries. Of defining who belongs and who does not. The flag has not changed. But what it is being asked to carry has.

I don’t know what he would make of that.

But I know that whatever Ireland was being imagined in this house, it did not imagine me and whatever Ireland is being asserted now, I am still not entirely sure where I fit within it.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to visit his grave in Arbour Hill and bring flowers. Not just for him, but for his wife and his son. To acknowledge the life they had together, however brief it was. The version of a future that existed, for a time, before it was cut short.

There is something about that that feels important. Not as an act of nationalism. Not as performance but something quieter.

A recognition of scale and of consequence. Of the fact that the life I am living now complicated, stressful, unfinished, happy is still a life that has been allowed to continue in a free country.

I don’t know what it means to inherit a space like this. I don’t know what responsibility, if any, comes with it. But I do find myself thinking differently about how I live here. About what it means to take a life seriously. Not historically. Not abstractly. But in the choices that shape it.

He lived in this house for a short time. Long enough to become part of a story that would outlive him. I will likely live here longer and the question, quietly, is what I do with that time.

The house does not resolve anything.

It holds.

It holds his life and mine and the vast difference between them.

It holds the version of Ireland that he fought for and the one that exists now.

It holds the tension between what was imagined and what has emerged.

And somewhere within that, it holds the quieter reality of what it means to live a life at all.

Not at the scale of history.

But at the scale of days.

And now, knowing what I know, even that feels different.

For a long time, I located the problem in myself. That seemed like the most reasonable conclusion. If relationships kept not working, then surely I was the common denominator. But over time and particularly through both personal experience and training in psychotherapy, I’ve started to think something else might be true. Not that I was simply lacking skills (although skills do matter) but that I had been trying to succeed within a model of relationships that was presented as universal, inevitable, and complete, when in reality it was only ever one version among many.

Many of us aren’t failing at relationships. We are failing at performing a model that doesn’t fit how we actually love. Most of us grow up inside a very specific relational script, whether it is explicitly stated or simply absorbed through repetition. It tends to follow a familiar arc: you meet someone, you become a couple, you build a life together, you prioritise that relationship above all others, and, often, you have children. This model is reinforced everywhere: in films, in school, in family structures, in law, in policy, to the point where it begins to feel less like a cultural norm and more like a natural law. Even when people deviate from it, the deviation is often framed as temporary, incomplete, or somehow less stable.

Writers like Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy, in The Ethical Slut, have long argued that the idea of love as scarce and necessarily contained within a single primary bond is culturally constructed rather than inevitable. More recently, Jessica Fern’s Polysecure has brought attachment theory into conversation with non-monogamous relationships, suggesting that security is not dependent on exclusivity, but on the quality of attunement, communication and care within and across relationships. Whether or not someone identifies with non-monogamy, these frameworks point to something important: the model most of us inherit is not the only one available.

If you grow up seeing only one version of how relationships are supposed to work, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between a problem with yourself and a problem with the structure you are trying to fit into. We are quick to pathologise people who don’t fit the model, and much slower to question the model itself. What gets labelled as being “bad at relationships” is often a series of adaptations that made sense in earlier contexts, but which don’t align neatly with the expectations of the dominant script. Not saying what you need because you learned that needs create distance. Choosing people who are unavailable because emotional inconsistency feels familiar. Losing yourself inside closeness because that is what you had to do to maintain connection.

I have been in relationships that looked right from the outside but felt like I was slowly disappearing inside them. There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes from being loved in a way that doesn’t actually reach you. None of these patterns emerge in a vacuum, and yet they are often individualised, as though they are personal failures rather than responses to what has been modelled, permitted, or even imaginable.

There is also, I think, a question of imagination that sits alongside the question of skill. It is not just that many of us were not taught how to communicate, how to repair after conflict, or how to tolerate vulnerability, although that is certainly true. It is that we were rarely shown a wide enough range of relational possibilities to recognise ourselves in them. For many queer people in particular, this absence is even more pronounced. You grow up without seeing your relationships reflected back to you in stable, ordinary ways and so you are left to assemble something from fragments: from friendship groups, from brief representations in media, from subcultures that may offer freedom but not always structure.

Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about this in the context of something quite concrete: the possibility of having a child. When I think about it, I don’t picture a couple. I don’t even really understand why that would be the only option. What I imagine instead is something closer to a network, people who are chosen, trusted, involved. Not orbiting a central couple but forming something more shared. Different relationships, different roles, a wider distribution of care. It feels, to me, both intuitive and grounded in the kinds of relationships I already value. Yet when I say this out loud, particularly in more mainstream or heterosexual contexts, it is often met with surprise. That reaction tells me more about the limits of the script than the limits of the idea.

None of this is to suggest that monogamy or traditional family structures are inherently limiting or wrong. For many people, they are deeply fulfilling and aligned with how they want to live. The issue is not the existence of that model, but the way it is positioned as the default against which all other forms are measured. When one structure is treated as the standard, anything outside of it can easily be interpreted as confusion, avoidance, or dysfunction, rather than as a different and potentially equally valid way of organising intimacy and care. We talk a lot about being “bad at relationships,” but we talk far less about how narrow the definition of a “good relationship” actually is.

At the same time, expanding the frame does not remove the need for relational skill. Whether someone is in a monogamous partnership, a non-hierarchical network, or something that does not yet have a clear label the fundamentals still matter. The ability to communicate honestly, to recognise and regulate emotional responses, to repair after rupture and to choose relationships that are capable of reciprocity and care these are not optional. But what changes is the context in which those skills are learned and applied. Instead of trying to become better at performing a model that feels misaligned, there is the possibility of developing relational competence within a structure that actually reflects how you experience connection, attachment and belonging.

There is inevitably, some grief in this process. Grief for what was not modelled earlier, for relationships that may have faltered under the weight of expectations that did not fit and for the sense of being behind or out of step with others who seem to move more easily within the dominant script. There is grief for me having reached my late thirties and still very much feeling like I’m trying to figure it out or that I have arrived to these realisations a bit late in life. But there is also something else. A kind of quiet expansion. The possibility that the problem is not that you are bad at relationships but that you have been trying to measure yourself against a version of them that was never designed to hold you.

Once you begin to see it you may not need to become someone different in order to love well, only someone who is working with a wider, more honest map of what love can look like.

Last week I was sitting in the waiting room at the NCT centre getting my car tested (a small purgatory familiar to anyone who drives in Ireland). One man there was furious about something. Pacing, swearing, confronting staff. Within minutes the emotional atmosphere of the room reorganised itself around him. You can feel male aggression the way you feel a drop in air pressure. Conversations shorten. Bodies tighten. Everyone’s nervous system recalibrates. A few days later, walking to the shop, two men (very drunk or high or both) started shouting at me as I passed. Nothing happened. But the calculation was immediate: distance, exits, whether to walk faster or slower.

Most women know this calculation intimately. Much of the public conversation about gender right now centres on male loneliness. But the emotional background of many women’s lives is not loneliness. It’s vigilance. That (and lesbianism) was the lens through which I watched Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. I watched it with anger, certainly but what surprised me more was the sense of distance. Because as a lesbian, I live slightly outside the emotional economy the manosphere is obsessed with. I don’t have heterosexual male friendships. The men in my life are overwhelmingly queer. My social world isn’t organised around male approval, competition for it or needing men in any manner in my day to day life. Watching the manosphere through that lens feels strangely anthropological.

The obsessive ranking of “high value men.”
The language of “alpha”.
The endless analysis of female desire.

It feels like watching a culture organised around a currency I stopped using years ago and once you see it that way, something becomes clear. The manosphere is often described as a philosophy of masculinity. But in reality it is something narrower. It is a philosophy of heterosexual status.

Who gets women.
Who doesn’t.
Who sits higher in the hierarchy.

Everything else (the podcasts, the evolutionary psychology, the self-help rhetoric, the money, the cars) exists to explain that hierarchy and make sense of one’s position within it. What struck me most watching the documentary was not simply the hostility toward women. That hostility is obvious. What struck me was how emotionally narrow the entire framework becomes the moment someone starts asking questions. The manosphere often begins with recognisable human experiences: rejection, loneliness, confusion about masculinity, the sense that the social rules have shifted without anyone explaining the new ones. But instead of exploring those emotions, the ideology converts them into hierarchy.

Loneliness becomes a ranking system.
Rejection becomes a theory about women.
Confusion becomes a rigid structure of dominance and submission.

The emotional complexity disappears almost instantly. The manosphere has a simple psychological trick: it takes emotional experiences and translates them into status. Instead of asking what am I feeling?, it asks where do I rank? The manosphere is not really a language for understanding emotion. It is a language for avoiding it.

Louis Theroux’s documentary exposes another feature of this world. Many of the men leading these spaces are not really thinkers in the traditional sense. They are performers. They operate inside an attention economy where confidence is branding and outrage is content. Masculinity becomes a persona. The louder the certainty, the stronger the engagement metrics. What appears, on the surface, to be a philosophical movement is often closer to a form of online theatre, a performance of dominance designed for an algorithm that rewards emotional intensity. But beneath the performance lies a genuine social tension.

For centuries, male identity came with a relatively clear social script: provide, protect, dominate and the world would organise itself around you. Economic necessity structured heterosexual relationships. Women needed men to survive and that reality shaped everything from marriage to masculinity itself. For decades, feminist writers have pointed out that heterosexual relationships have historically been structured not only by affection but by power and economic dependence. Marriage was not simply a romantic arrangement but a social contract in which male provision was exchanged for female labour, care and sexual access.

When women gain the ability to support themselves (financially, legally, socially) the emotional architecture of that arrangement begins to shift. What once looked like natural hierarchy begins to look more like negotiation. Across much of the world, that shift is already underway. Women are building lives that are not organised around male authority or approval. They can work, earn money, live independently and choose relationships rather than needing them. This does not erase inequality. Class, race, disability and countless other structures still shape who has access to those freedoms. But the underlying structure of heterosexual life has changed.

For the first time in history, large numbers of women do not need men in the way previous generations did and that transformation destabilises the old scripts of masculinity. When women gain independence, some men experience it as liberation. Others experience it as loss. The manosphere can be understood, in part, as an attempt to stabilise that loss. It offers a narrative in which the destabilisation of male authority is not a social transformation but a betrayal. Women become the agents of that betrayal. Hierarchy becomes the proposed solution. If men can simply climb high enough within the system (become “alpha”, become high value) the old order might reassert itself. But what is striking about this worldview is how little emotional vocabulary it contains.

Everything collapses into dominance and humiliation. Winners and losers. High value and low value. The complicated emotional work of intimacy: vulnerability, negotiation, mutual dependence largely disappears. Watching this as a lesbian, the entire structure feels strangely dated. My life, and the lives of most women I know, simply aren’t organised around male validation in the way the manosphere assumes. The central drama of that worldview: men competing for women’s attention within a rigid hierarchy feels like a stage play performed for an audience that has already left the theatre and yet the anger inside that play is real. The loneliness is real. Which means the personalities themselves are probably less important than the vacuum they are filling.

Ideologies like the manosphere rarely spread because they are intellectually persuasive. They spread because they offer emotional clarity in moments when people feel disoriented. The tragedy of the manosphere is not only that it teaches men to resent women. It is that it offers them a story about their lives that contains almost no curiosity about themselves. A movement that claims to explain masculinity ends up doing something much smaller. It teaches men how to rank each other. But it teaches them almost nothing about being human.

Today I found myself reading through the comments under an Instagram post asking a simple question: for the men who escaped the manosphere, what made you realise it was bullshit?

The answers were strikingly consistent.

“Realising I didn’t hate women, I hated myself.”

“Going to therapy.”

“Meeting a feminist and actually talking to her.”

“Opening up about being abused and having women respond with care instead of mockery.”

One man wrote that he had gone to a Pride event by accident and was startled by how visibly happy and kind everyone seemed compared to how he felt at the time.

What these stories have in common is not ideology but contact. Therapy. Vulnerability. Conversations that make emotional life and human connection larger rather than smaller. In other words, the exact things the manosphere teaches men to avoid. None of this suggests that change is impossible. If anything, it suggests the opposite. Men do leave these spaces. People do outgrow them but it also reveals something uncomfortable. Again and again, the way out seems to involve emotional care and very often that care is provided by women.

Women listening.
Women responding with empathy.
Women doing the work of holding emotional space.

For me there is a limit to how much of that labour can reasonably be expected.

The tragedy of the manosphere isn’t only the resentment it directs at women. It’s that it traps men in an emotional world so narrow that they often need someone else or something else to help them step outside it. Until men begin building cultures that allow for vulnerability, reflection and care among themselves, the cycle will continue. Because the real problem the manosphere is trying to solve is not women it’s loneliness. The ideology provides certainty where emotional exploration would provide ambiguity. The louder the certainty, the stronger the engagement metrics. Certainty especially for someone who feels lost is an extremely powerful product

The manosphere promises men power. What many of them seem to need is care. But after a lifetime of navigating male anger, the communities that offer me care, safety and joy are not organised around cis heterosexual men at all. There’s a part of me that wishes the ending to this story were different. In my twenties I had a large group of heterosexual male friends and one by one those friendships fell away as each of them, in their own way, let me down. I don’t remain close to a single one of them today. That pattern has been sobering but it hasn’t left me hating men. If anything, what I feel most strongly is fatigue. After years of living with the day-to-day consequences of male anger, the refuge I’ve found is not in trying to fix men but in building a life offline alongside women, trans and non-binary people in communities where safety and generosity feel ordinary and life expands rather than contracts.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know who I was. It was that I suddenly realised how many versions of that answer existed. There’s the work version. The college version. The family version. The writing version. The charity version. The friend version. Each one is true. None of them are the whole thing. In some rooms I’m the person who works in tech. In others, that part of my life almost disappears. I rarely talk about it with friends. I feel ashamed of it, even though it occupies an enormous amount of my time. I spend at least forty-fifty hours a week doing that job. It shapes my days, my stress levels, my routine, my energy and yet in the story I tell about myself socially, it barely appears.

In writing spaces, I’m the person who writes. That identity is allowed to take up more room. It feels more aligned with how I want to be seen, so I give it more oxygen. With my family, other edits appear. Certain aspects of my identity soften or fade. Not necessarily because they’re forbidden but because they change the temperature of the room. With colleagues, the opposite happens. My queerness doesn’t vanish exactly, but it becomes quieter. Simpler. Less complicated than it actually is.

None of these things feel like dramatic lies. No one is living a secret double life. They’re just small adjustments that make conversations flow more easily. But sitting in that classroom, listening to some people confidently describe their straightforward introductions, I realised something. I rarely introduce myself the same way twice. Each audience gets a slightly different draft. Queer people are used to this kind of editing. It starts early. You learn to read rooms. You learn which parts of yourself create curiosity, which parts create tension, which parts require explanation. You learn that sometimes the simplest option is to offer a version of the story that doesn’t require a follow-up conversation. Pronouns get adjusted. Relationship histories get smoothed over. Childhood stories get translated.

The truth isn’t hidden exactly. It’s just… edited.

The small lies we tell straight people are rarely dramatic. They’re just the details that get quietly rearranged so that the conversation can keep moving. But what struck me during that exercise was that the editing doesn’t stop with straight people. It spreads. Different rooms require different calibrations. The work room. The family room. The political room. The creative room. The room where people think they already know who you are. Each one invites a slightly different introduction. Each one asks for a slightly different version of the truth.

Sometimes it’s about safety. Sometimes it’s about energy. Sometimes it’s about avoiding the strange social friction that happens when you introduce too many complexities at once. Most people don’t want a layered introduction. They want something tidy. A headline version of a person. Name. Job. Where you’re from. Clean edges. But most lives don’t really work like that. I realised something else as I sat there thinking about the question. If every room gets a slightly different version of me, is there anywhere that gets the whole thing?

It’s not an easy question to answer.

My friends know parts of me my colleagues will never see. My colleagues know parts of me that don’t make sense in my writing life. My family carries a version of me that belongs to a different era entirely. Each one is accurate. None of them are complete. Maybe that’s not a failure of honesty. Maybe it’s just the reality of moving through a complicated social world. Identity isn’t a single speech you deliver to everyone you meet. It’s more like a set of overlapping stories, each one shaped by the room you’re in and the people you’re speaking to. Still, I keep thinking about the simplicity of the answers in that classroom. “My name is this. I do this for work.” A clean introduction. A stable identity. Part of me envies that clarity.

But another part of me suspects that most people are editing too. They just don’t have to think about it as consciously. Queer people become very good editors of our own biographies. We notice the adjustments because we’ve had to practice them so often. The small lies we tell straight people. The small edits we make for work. The quiet translations for family. The details we highlight for friends. Each one true. None of them the full story. Maybe the real answer to that classroom question isn’t simple at all. Maybe the honest introduction would sound something like this:

My name is Val and depending on the room you meet me in, you will encounter a slightly different version of me. All of them real. None of them the whole thing.

Not all editing is optional. Some people have the privilege of hiding parts of themselves when they need to, while others are read on sight, exposed before they’ve said a word. The world is constantly making introductions on our behalf, deciding what we are, what we mean, what can be done to us. Given what is happening in the world right now, that can feel frighteningly consequential. Not long ago, a man called me a faggot on the street, and I felt that familiar jolt of fear: the reminder that being visible is never neutral. An introduction is never just a name or a job or a neat little summary. For some of us, it carries the weight of risk, judgement, projection, and survival. Other people need to expand their thinking enough to understand that when they ask someone to introduce themselves, they may be asking them to measure not just who they are, but what it will cost to say it.

So maybe the real question was never “How do you introduce yourself?”

Maybe the question is: Who gets to be uncomplicated?

Because for some people, an introduction is just a name and a job and for others, it’s a quiet calculation. A reading of the room. A decision about which parts of yourself are safe enough to place on the table.

Every introduction carries a weight. Some people just never have to feel how heavy that is.

For a long time, I treated that as a nice detail. Lately, it feels more powerful, like a lens.

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In salt
In the ache behind my eyes
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In the moment my body learned
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Salted
Heavy
Pulling at the joints.

The snake moved anyway
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