Social anxiety tells us a lot of lies. It makes neutral faces appear unfriendly and groups of strangers seem like a threat. Like a hall of mirrors, a room of unfamiliar expressions looks distorted — full of judgment, scorn, and ridicule.

Something I’ve done for as long as I can remember is scanning any room I enter for the ally. Whether it’s a work event, a friend’s birthday, or a gathering at a pub, I’ve become adept at making that nano-decision of who is safest to approach.

It’s more complicated than simply going over to the people you know the best. I look for the welcoming ones who seem less likely to jeer at me for daring to come over in the first place. I seek out the kind faces who will invite me into the conversation, not block me out.

Who looks nice? Who looks hostile? Am I being weird? Where can I insert myself without feeling like an idiot?

Subscribe now

Because I spent a lot of my earlier years really believing every stranger had to be won over. Everyone in a room I entered would be more likely to hate me than accept me.

The reality is all these internal calculations are nonsense. This response is unnecessary. The vast majority of people you meet are fine. They’re not scary or intimidating or cruel. They’re just like you.

But for those of us with an anxious autopilot, it’s a habit we just cannot shake.

To paraphrase Jemima Kirke, we’re all thinking about ourselves way too much.

buy me a coffee :)

Something I wish I’d learned much earlier in life is what I now think of as my antidote to this predisposition. Instead of looking around, worrying about which clique of people I’ll fit in the best, I flip it on its head.

The best way I’ve found to feel less intimidated by other people is to become the person I’m always hoping to find: the friendly one.

I want to be the person who brings in the quiet soul whose eyes are anxiously darting around, who feels uncomfortable in their skin. When someone uncertainly walks up, I want to help bring them in with ease.

Social anxiety makes you experience a room as an audience when actually it is full of participants. You imagine everyone else as secure, established and judging you, while you’re the lone person trying to gain admission. But how many of those intimidating strangers are simultaneously thinking: Oh God, where do I stand? Do these people like me? Am I being weird?

How many of us are actually forcing that smile on our face, while an inner voice pleads with us to just go home?

A few years ago I learned that confidence is entirely made up. Nobody knows if it’s real or not from the outside. Learning that and really believing it is something of a superpower. So is becoming a safe person.

A lot of what we interpret as confidence is actually social generosity. The person who makes you feel comfortable at a party may be every bit as anxious as you are. They’re just directing their attention outward rather than inward.

Whenever I have those creeping questions in my head…

Do they like me? Do I belong here? Am I being annoying?

I instead ask myself: Who can I make feel comfortable?

Maybe it’s all in my head. But I really believe it changes the energy of the room completely.

I suppose I do still scan every room I walk into. I’m never going to break that habit entirely. But I can go in looking for something different now. I try to notice the person standing alone. I try to introduce people who don’t know each other. I turn my body when somebody approaches a circle rather than unconsciously closing it. I ask the person hovering at the edge a question. I try not to make someone earn their admission into a conversation.

We all breathe a little easier.

Confidence, or whatever it looks like, becomes less about whether I look like I fit in, and more about making somebody else feel like they do.

Welcome to WNH? Spotlight, a new series where I interview women doing awesome things.

Walking home from Soho one night, Ina Jovicic was in the middle of her master’s degree in entrepreneurship and waiting for the light bulb moment of what her passion project might be. Then she was attacked.

Four men surrounded her and grabbed her things.

“I just remember being super angry in the moment and adrenaline hitting me,” Ina told me. “I was like, ‘Hell no, you’re not going to be taking anything from me.’”

Ina fought back as hard as she could, getting dragged into the middle of the road. The thieves took everything anyway, leaving her with scratched-up knees. It was only when the fight or flight wore off that she realised the end result could have been much, much worse.

“It really opened my eyes and how often these things happen,” Ina said. When the police came, they told her three other women had been attacked before her just that evening. “I was like, ‘Why are you talking about this like it’s not a big deal?’”

Subscribe now

The police told Ina she should never fight back, that it was dangerous and she could have been stabbed — or killed. Then, confusingly, they told her they couldn’t gather any CCTV evidence because the crime wasn’t bad enough.

So what was the point in having it at all? she thought.

Ina decided to do something about it herself. She spoke to hundreds of women and every single one had their own story to share. So why wasn’t there anything available out there to make women feel safe when they walk home?

Instead, from the moment we’re old enough to go out by ourselves, women learn to silently calculate risk: which route to take, which dark alley to avoid, when to call a taxi, who to text when we get home.

But what if an AI could take some of that mental load away? Enter Ina’s creation: a mini AI bodyguard called eNO.

Ina spoke with criminal psychologists, police officers, self-defence experts — all of the stakeholders that could give her the full picture of what was missing.

“We’ve always relied on humans in the situations of danger,” Ina said. “That we will have the time to remember to push help button, that we’ll have the time to call someone on the phone for help, that we’re going to have time to scream, that we’re going to have time to film evidence, that we’re going to know what to do in the state of shock. It’s all super unrealistic.”

In comparison, AI is emotionless, Ina explained. It doesn’t get flustered. It doesn’t get a spike of hormones telling it to flee or fight for its life. It can keep watching and responding when we might be unable to.

The badge starts passively listening and watching the surrounding area for threats as soon as you switch it on. It analyses what it sees and hears for signs that you might be in danger. Then, if it determines that is the case, it kicks into action.

If the idea of an AI wearable constantly listening and watching immediately raises privacy questions, Ina says footage can’t simply be downloaded from the badge. The system is designed to encrypt what it captures, with relevant footage livestreamed to the monitoring centre and potentially to law enforcement when a threat is detected.

“You cannot even say anything, you cannot run, you’re stuck,” Ina explains. “That’s when the badge recognises this as threatening language and immediately raises an alert without escalating the situation in front of you.”

It vibrates to give you a sign that it’s working. It sends a livestream of the situation and your location to an Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) where trained professional dispatchers receive it in seconds. The centres already have systems for escalating verified alarms to police.

“They see where you are, what’s happening, who you are, and they confirm if the AI is correct and there is a danger,” Ina said. “And they push it to the closest police officers.”

The idea is that police could therefore be alerted while an incident is still unfolding, rather than after the victim is able to report it.

“Normally, when something happens, you call and they’re like, ‘Can you explain where you are?’ And you’re like, ‘I don’t even know my name,’” Ina said.

There’s also a feature that opens two-way communication with the perpetrators if the experts on the other end believe they can de-escalate the situation. Sometimes it comes down to saying the right words, which you are unlikely to be able to do when you’re the one in the midst of it.

It’s vital in the aftermath too, because survivors of attacks often second-guess themselves, thinking maybe it wasn’t as bad as they remembered it to be.

“That’s just because there is no evidence to prove it,” Ina said. “So that’s why that element for our users was absolutely essential.”

Further down the line, Ina even wants the badge to detect the physiological signs of something much harder to quantify: women’s intuition. So often, we just know something is wrong. We may not have picked up on the visual threat yet, but something in our gut tells us we’re unsafe. The way eNO would pick up on that is detecting spikes in heart rate.

“There’s also the feeling of sisterhood because when danger happens, the evidence goes to the police, but our internal server encrypts the whole thing and it anonymises everything — it only uses the scenario as a scenario example to train the AI to be able to recognise the next danger,” Ina said. “So in a way, the more women wear it, the more women are protected.”

Building cool technology is one thing, she added, but what matters more is how it makes us feel. “It’s peace of mind that we want to provide,” she said. That extends to friends and family who can choose to receive notifications when you get home safe too.

“We just cannot wait to see women wearing it and hopefully really making a difference to them,” Ina said. “For us that’s the most important part.”

In the past four years, since eNO was first created, Ina and her co-founders have raised two rounds of venture capital funding totalling $2.7 million. Kevin Hartz is among the investors, renowned for backing companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, PayPal, and Uber.

They are looking to launch in London by the end of the year, with New York City next and ambitions to expand to the rest of the world.

Women shouldn’t need an AI bodyguard. But here we are. We have reached the point where we’re teaching AI to recognise when a woman is in danger because women are still expected to organise their lives around the possibility that they might be.

As Ina put it, women and men supposedly have the same opportunities. But going to the same event isn’t quite the same opportunity when one of you has to calculate when to leave, whether to pay for a taxi, whether those shoes are safe to walk home in, and whether to carry another pair just in case.

“It’s a lot of this having to go out of our way in situations and places where we shouldn’t be thinking about everything extra we have to do,” Ina said.

If nothing ever happens, perhaps that’s the more interesting promise of eNO. An AI probably can’t prevent or save you from an attacker, but it might carry a little of the exhausting work of anticipating one.

Everything’s getting steadily worse. Facebook is a social media graveyard where the ghosts of early online creativity wait to be snuffed out forever and for its final users to die. X née Twitter is a fucking nightmare. Google Chrome just does not work. AI slop is everywhere. My whole feed is an ad. Bags of Doritos are tiny now. Cinema and theatre etiquette is dead. And I cannot sneeze outside in London without spending £30. Seriously, have you picked up a bag of Doritos lately?

The word “enshittification” has been travelling on the wind for a while, but we’ve all had too much to deal with to actually collectively crash out about it. The term was coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2022 to describe the way online platforms inevitably get worse as they stop prioritising the people who use them and start squeezing them for profit instead.

It was originally about the internet. But the enshittification has escaped.

Subscribe now

I can’t find it now, but I recently watched a TikTok posted of a woman completely breaking down over her HP printer that she’s had for more than ten years. She’s a working woman living paycheque to paycheque like most of us. Printer ink, particularly the branded kind, is incredibly expensive. The markup is insane. So she’s always gone for a generic alternative. Until now, when, according to her, an HP update meant the generic cartridges she’d relied on for years would no longer work.

This kind of capitalist greed rot has been creeping into our lives for a while like toxic mould around your bathtub. BMW literally tried charging people a subscription to activate the heated seats already installed in their cars a couple of years ago. We used to be able to buy Microsoft Office ONE TIME.

And then they have the fucking nerve to pretend they’re our friends online. Enshittification would perhaps be easier to tolerate if the people doing the shittifying would at least stop pretending they are Just Like Us™ and trying to join in on the banter. No! That is not for you!

Take social media, where they pop up in the comments section on TikTok with witty musings. They’ve systematically degraded the material experience of being their customer while simultaneously demanding a more intimate, human relationship with us. Your Doritos have shrunk. Your printer rejects the cheap ink. Your clothes are worse. There’s nobody to speak to when your flight is cancelled. And meanwhile Google is in your TikTok comments going hehehehe yass queen.

Take this example. Investigative journalist of our time Zoë Bread has been relentlessly pursuing the truth about a huge warehouse complex in Wigan that has caused horrendous disruption to residents. Suspected users of the warehouse including Sky, Tesco, and Specsavers have studiously ignored or dodged Zoë’s requests for answers, despite always showing themselves with remarks on viral videos whenever the opportunity arises.

@zoebreadtokstill nothing from specsavers?

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Again, just this week, my TikTok for your page landed me in some niche but relevant internet beef. A creator called Sopha Dopha made a lighthearted video about how there were not enough gluten free options at Sydney Airport. Rather than just take the criticism and do something about it for their coeliac customers, the account for Sydney Airport posted a snarky response, photographing gluten-free options on menus of various restaurants around the site.

In case my opinion on this wasn’t clear, I think this is a super weird way to respond to valid criticism.

Hey, you might say, they are Just Like Us^TM! It’s fun to be a little cheeky on the internet!

To that I say, bullshit. Cease your attempts at human intimacy immediately. I am not interested in a multi-billion dollar corporation getting in on the jokes when literally everything around us is crumbling. Flights are obscenely expensive. The least you can do is have some good food in your miserable airport.

buy me a coffee :)

A company can ignore a journalist asking legitimate questions about disruption affecting people’s homes one day and comment “mother is mothering 💅” underneath somebody’s TikTok the next. Sydney Airport’s response says it all. They don’t want to solve the complaint. They just want to win the online interaction.

Brands have never been more dedicated to sounding human while AI chatbots cosplay as people and automated phone lines and bureaucratic hellholes have made it almost impossible to actually speak to one.

I believe in having a laugh, I’d love to live in a world where I’m not angry about this. But that is not reality! If you insist on making our lives more difficult, more expensive, and more meagre, then shut UP. The internet is not for you. Go away and actually try to improve your shitty company.

Because customer service is dead. Entirely dead. Lose your baggage or have your flight delayed and good luck finding a human being with the power to actually help you. Try getting a refund for clothes that fall apart after one wash and prepare to enter a bureaucratic labyrinth designed to make you wonder whether the £40 you spent is really worth it. We deserve so much better.

We’re all working as hard as ever. Harder, if you look at the research. I spoke with Amanda Jones, a Reader in Organisational Behaviour and The Future of Work Education at King’s Business School, about this last year. “We are working harder progressively over time,” she told me. The idea that people are slacking off is a total myth. Even as workers supposedly “quiet quit” and check out of corporate life, the broader direction of travel hasn’t changed. We’re expected to do much more with much less.

We are constantly being asked to become more efficient while corporations are allowed to just get worse and worse.

The least they could do is provide us with products that work, clothes that are worth the money, to get to our holiday destinations when we scrimp and save to afford one, and to be taken seriously when we have a valid concern that needs addressing.

I saw a man called Scott on TikTok the other day ranting about something seemingly small: his coffee creamer. He’s been using the same brand for a long time, International Delight. He said the one thing he looks forward to in the morning is his coffee, and he loves this particular creamer. His favourite thing about this particular brand, he said, is the lid, because the design works really well. He went and got a new bottle. They’d changed it. It’s now skinnier and flimsier. It has a harsh edge making it more difficult to open. The whole thing feels cheaper. It sucks.

“So why am I mad about creamer?” he said. He is, but he’s also not. He’s mad about every tiny enshittification that came before it. This was just the one that broke him. Here’s what he said:

Scott’s video resonated so much because so many people feel the same. In the comments people described how they’ve also felt things spiralling downward and they’re sick and tired of being treated, quite frankly, like scum.

Everyone has their creamer lid. The tiny, stupid degradation that finally makes you look around and wonder why we’re all paying more for things that are getting worse. For me, it’s Magnums. Why are there only three in a box now when there used to be four? Three is never the amount you need!

Maybe this is the point where companies finally realise there is only so much value you can extract from something before people stop wanting it. Maybe the pendulum swings back towards quality. Maybe companies will remember that customers are people rather than recurring revenue opportunities to be squeezed until there’s nothing left.

Maybe?

Unlikely.

Money talks. Scott’s video was taken down.

It was Autumn-ish of 2022 when I realised my hair was falling out. Not the regular seasonal moulting. I’m talking clumps.

I noticed it in the shower at first. I’ve always been a bit of a crazy shedder when washing my hair so it took a while to clock it. But as the piles of hair I’d pull out became larger and larger it became harder to ignore. That’s when I also saw the strands all over my pillow and scattered over the bedroom floor.

By November, I was losing handfuls at a time.

Am I dying?

Am I going bald?

What the hell is going on?

Subscribe now

Read more

This summer marks a decade of living in London.

Ten years since I paid my first month’s rent. Ten years since I stopped commuting from the home counties. Ten years since, unprompted, I spilled my guts on Tumblr about the abusive relationship I’d just left.

I’ve stopped calling AL6 home, and replaced it with E3.

What have all those years given me? Ten years of friendships, of moving flats, meeting new partners, breakups, parties, new housemates, and, in more recent years, weddings and babies.

They’ve given me the wisdom of where to go, where not to go, what to take a chance on, and what roads on various evenings could lead to disaster, or a night of hijinks you simply cannot miss.

They’ve never failed to test me, to push me, to break my heart, or to mend it again.

Subscribe now

They’ve given me a career: from a doe-eyed student, to an eager junior writer earning £21,000 a year, to a jaded senior reporter in a global newsroom. I’m now back to earning less than I ever have as a freelancer. Oddly, the drop in financial security has come with a deep sense of calm. I’m off the conveyor belt for a while, and London has taught me that life carries on through periods of uncertainty. The city does too.

I’ve seen people come and go, and sometimes come back again. In earlier years I had expensive meals with pals that we certainly could not afford. There have been pub quizzes, all-night raves, birthdays, boring conferences, protests, coffees, and a lot of doughnuts, for some reason.

There’s been a lot of, What do I do now? Why did he ghost me? How am I going to pay for that? What rooftop bar should we go to? What’s on at the Tate? Why is it so quiet here? Why is it now so loud? This croissant is dry, why was it £4? How is that shop still open? Is it a front? What’s Nick Clegg talking about at this event? Did I really forget to cancel my Freddy’s Flowers subscription AGAIN?

I’ve welcomed two pets. Spent nine years in the same job. Lost weight. Gained weight. Rediscovered an athletic hobby. Tried Notting Hill Carnival exactly once. Got a master’s degree. Lived through a literal pandemic. Had the last years of my twenties stolen. Found a way to claw them back.

What lessons have I learned? Never order the watermelon cocktail. One balayage is enough. Going to Egg is never worth it. Live music always is. So is the theatre. And comedy.

Themed parties sound better than they are. But you’ll never regret seeing a returned distant friend you lost contact with. You should go to the after work drinks thing even if you’re tired. The friends you make at the office in your 20s will be some of the best you’ll ever make, and that chemistry will be hard to replicate. Don’t eat at your desk — go sit with people, even if you find them annoying.

A small New Years Eve is always the best New Years Eve. Settlers of Catan sucks. Board games, in general, are overrated, unless the mood is exactly right. Those flying lanterns are an environmental and safety hazard minefield, but I’m glad we lit them once. Don’t smoke inside unless you’re prepared to paint the walls before you leave or lose your deposit. Don’t get attached to glasses. Buy cheap ones until you hit 30. Better yet, steal them. The best thing you can order drunkenly at a kebab shop is a cheese and tomato pizza.

Don’t perform amateur flamenco dances at your flat with your friends unless you want several noise complaints. Go and show support for your friends’ creative projects, whatever they are. Buy more houseplants — they’ll make you more nurturing. Walk everywhere. Always try and catch a sunset pint if the opportunity arises. Your health is important, but you’ll never regret skipping the gym for an evening with your gang.

Bottomless brunch will ruin your life. Never trust anyone who brings mild cheddar for a cheese course. If two of your friendship groups don’t mix, there is a reason. Don’t do ketamine. A pick-me-up ginny will always work. You will lose jewellery, but don’t worry, it was made to be worn, enjoyed, then sent back to the universe.

Your friend does not want to look after your dog or help you move, but the real ones will do it anyway. Make yourself a mid-week piña colada occasionally (trust me). The thoughtful, loyal friend is one you should keep forever. Have a birthday party, but keep it small, and don’t involve multiple venues.

If you’re someone’s manager, don’t be a dick about it. Something you should absolutely splurge on is bedsheets. Some things are worth travelling the whole Tube line for (Kew Gardens). Others aren’t (The River Café). Don’t bother with nail art, it’s not worth the premium. Members clubs can be fun in moderation. Bring a face covering to festivals unless you enjoy coughing up black goo for two days. Buy the more expensive wine.

Padella is still good. Dishoom isn’t, just order it on Deliveroo. Don’t, under any circumstances, go to Ballie Ballerson. Dean Street Townhouse is always, always a good time. Spend £100 on gimlets made by the same bartender with one friend there.

Nothing good happens after 2am, but you may as well spend a few years finding that out.

Things you should have after a decade in a city: A favourite park, a favourite pub, a string of unfortunate dating stories, an allegiance to the East, West, North or South, the ability to make good coffee but buy it out sometimes anyway, beauticians you trust (especially for waxing and pedicures), a cat, perhaps two.

Most importantly, a collection of memories that drift into your mind without warning: friendship groups that formed, fractured and disappeared, leaving behind the reminder that not everyone is meant to stay forever, and that doesn’t make your time with them any less meaningful.

There’s something comforting about becoming part of a city’s ebb and flow. Places disappear. Your favourite yoga studio. A cosy restaurant. A club. A cinema. But knowing you were there means, in some small way, they continue to exist.

For all the change, there are constants too. People who’ve seen every version of you. Places that still hold your memories. Streets, smells and skylines that remind you you’ve lived a life here.

The last decade has taken me from a boy-obsessed woman in her mid-twenties with self-esteem issues who said yes to everything, to someone’s chosen person who is quieter and much more comfortable in herself (but still has a few self-esteem issues).

I can’t imagine putting myself in some of the situations I did back then. The late-night adventures happen less often now. The party invitations are fewer. The bedtime is earlier. But I don’t love life any less.

What’s replaced the chaos is a less scattered existence, and one where I know myself a lot better. I’m more certain of the choices I make, of why I might say no this time. The journey I’m on no longer includes figuring out where I fit into other people’s lives. That version of me is gone. I’ve left most of those insecurities behind.

A few persist, of course. Yet I’m grateful for what has stayed the same. In a couple of weeks, I’ll celebrate my birthday with many of the same people I celebrated with ten years ago.

I’m part of this city’s lifecycle now, just as it’s become part of mine.

Ten years is a long time.

And somehow, no time at all.

Hell is empty, and the devils are all here. In other news, I learned about something called “sharking” this week.

A few days ago, a woman named Julianne Shimer posted what she described as an “unfortunate PSA” on her TikTok.

“I was walking in Portland, Maine earlier today in broad daylight and someone threw semen on me,” she said.

And there it is. Another day, another woman recognising escalating violence before institutions are prepared to acknowledge it.

Subscribe now

Julianne described herself as someone who is always very aware of her surroundings. On this day, she was about to cross the street when a man in his early 20s pulled up near her in a truck. She didn’t think much of it at first because it looked like he was going into a store. Until suddenly, she sensed someone behind her.

“He seemed weirdly close to me,” Julianne said. “I was on very high alert, but I couldn’t really go anywhere. And then all of a sudden I see a weird motion behind me and I feel something wet land on the back of my leg.”

When she wiped it with her hand, she said she knew immediately what it was. She started running after the man and asking him what he threw on her. “He’s like, ‘Nothing, nothing,’” she said. “Broad daylight, mind you, at a busy intersection.”

Some witnesses stopped to help Julianne confront the man, but he managed to drive off. Julianne managed to get a picture of his licence plate and his face, so she was able to later identify him. She found out he’s 22, lives in the area, and appears to have a girlfriend.

“So why he’s doing this, I don’t know,” she said. (I reached out to Julianne on Instagram but she hasn’t gotten back to me. I’ll update this post if she does. But she did do an interview with a local news station which you can watch here.)

buy me a coffee :)

@roaming.rn @roaming.rn ♬ original sound - Julianne Shimer

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The man has since been identified by Portland police as Theo Orestis, and they are investigating the crime.

I wish the story stopped there, but unfortunately, this has become another case where the police have fallen short.

Why do I say that? Well, for starters, police on the scene didn’t want to take the DNA Julianne had collected. She said in her video that she’s seen enough true crime to know that a person who is capable of throwing their semen on someone in the middle of the day may well progress to further, even more heinous crimes in the future.

Julianne even posted a video of the conversation with the officer where she explicitly said this kind of behaviour could lead to the man raping someone.

“If this was a Class A crime, that would absolutely be tested,” he said. “I’m not diminishing what happened to you, that’s just the reality.”

I beg to differ. That’s exactly what it sounds like. It may be the legal reality, but it still diminishes what happened.

As usual, women are expected to collect their own evidence, and then, apparently, beg law enforcement to do something with it.

In the caption, Julianne explained that a woman on the scene connected her with her daughter who works in forensics. Women helping women! The phenomenon that makes me endlessly grateful for our solidarity, and endlessly angry that we have to rely on it so often at the same time.

She said detectives did eventually come to collect the evidence too. “They were equally confused that the evidence had not been taken the day of the incident, and they appreciated that I had kept it safe and available for their investigation.”

Something still isn’t sitting right with me.

The press release posted by Portland Police states that Theo Orestis has been charged with assault. At first, that seems fitting. Then I read this part:

“The circumstances of the incident meet the elements of the crime of assault, which is a Class D misdemeanor under Maine law. The substance involved does not change the classification of this offense.”

The substance involved does not change the classification of this offence?

I then realised, like Julianne, and like a lot of the people she’s reached with her video, that throwing semen on someone feels inherently sexual. It is incomprehensible why the law doesn’t recognise it as such.

I reached out to the police to clarify why this was the case, but I haven’t received a response.

Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris told reporters at News Center Maine that it’s a shortcoming of the current law.

“We said that we were concerned that what we were hearing was that the investigation was maybe not as thorough as what we would hope for,” she said.

“To be classified as sexual assault, there has to be something more than contact with a substance.”

She is now calling on legislators to consider changing the law to include things like the possibility of being placed on the sex offender registry, or having to take a class about gender-based violence.

Those suggestions don’t go far enough in my opinion, especially as, on further research, this is far from a one-time occurrence.

“Sharking” is a term used online to describe “masturbating in public and surreptitiously ejaculating on random women” according to a recent report in The Guardian which investigated this new way men in a pathetic corner of the internet have come up with to degrade us.

The report focused on a string of attacks at dollar stores in the US which were filmed and posted on incel forums.

Am I shocked? Surprised? Amazed at the audacity of rotten-brained men on the internet to come up with another way to humiliate women in public? No, no, and no, sadly.

Sometimes, when I’m walking, I look around and worry about this kind of thing happening to me. I tell myself I’m being paranoid, that it’s my anxiety talking. Bad things don’t happen that often.

But they do happen. They happen everywhere. In broad daylight, outside shops, on the bus, in your own home. Enough men have done “sharking” for the internet to invent a word for it. It’s not catastrophising to be shaken by that.

So. Take me to hell, I guess?

Cyclosporiasis outbreaks sweeping across the US. Ticks. Picking up my cats’ expensive flea and worming medicine. I guess it’s no surprise I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Nothing new there. I’ve been a bit paranoid about them for several years.

I think COVID had a lot to do with it, reinforcing the idea that too much close contact with anyone and anything could kill you. I’m desperately trying not to become one of those people who can’t shake hands, but alas. It just makes me wonder where they’ve been.

Why are they wet?! Have you just washed them?

On second thoughts, why aren’t they wet? When did you LAST wash them? Oh God. what. have. you. been. touching?

Public toilets unsettle me more than they used to. I now know about faecal clouds (I have Ayoade Bamgboye’s episode of the Off Menu podcast to thank for that one). Poo miasmas! Existing is quite frankly a nightmare!

But it wasn’t always that way.

Barefoot summers

As a feral child, I would sprint barefooted around my grandma’s garden with nary a concern. Cool and sensitive from the river that ran past her house, my feet would be sore from each agonising step I made on the gravel driveway before descending once more into soft cushions of moss and grass. Goose shit squishing between my toes? Whatever. I’d wash it off in the current soon enough.

So many sensations were all part of the fun of being young, of having no cares but what you might have for a snack when you came inside, when you might see your cousins again, what game to play. Experiencing the world first and assessing the danger later, if at all.

Scraping knees and elbows as I climbed to the top of trees.

Rolling around in fields where crickets pinged and buzzed around me.

Dipping my feet into water so cold it ached before becoming gloriously numb.

I miss them. I miss trusting those little girl instincts. I miss coming home muddy and scraped, with a new adventure to tell. In adult life, it’s not often I’m so carefree with my body. I’m too busy managing it.

In fact, sometimes it feels like I’m petrified of everything.

buy me a coffee :)

The things I can’t unknow

I was probably in my late teens before I even heard about ticks. At my grandma’s house, where deer, pheasants, rabbits and all kinds of creepy crawlies ran rampant, they were almost certainly everywhere. Fast forward to my mid-30s, living in London where my biggest wildlife concern is how derangedly and violently the foxes rip apart the bin bags on collection day, and somehow I’m terrified of them.

I wasn’t alone in thinking TICK ALERT when I saw the pictures of Harry Styles and Zoe Kravitz luxuriating in the grass at Hampstead Heath. There was even a column in The Guardian about it. Lyme disease on the rise, don’t you know?

I was recently in Paris watching the city’s teenagers jumping into the canals on scorching hot days. Something the apparently do all the time.

All I could think was: Amoebas. Brain-eating ones, specifically. Once your algorithm or latest hospital drama binge watch has taught you something, it rarely untells you.

Brain-eating amoebas exist in warm freshwater lakes, rivers, ponds and hot springs all around the world, according to the CDC. Does it list Parisian canals? No. But that doesn’t mean I’ll be taking any chances.

The internet has made us experts in the disgusting. Twenty years ago most people didn’t know what Cyclosporiasis was. Now the knowledge it causes explosive diarrhoea will probably stick with you forever

We know about bed bugs, flesh-eating bacteria, microplastics, and forever chemicals as well. It’s not useless information, but I’m tired of my mind treating every fact like a possibility.

Were our brains ever supposed to carry all of that information at once? It’s like I’ve become a risk assessor in my own life but the health and safety checklist is fucking impossible.

Wonder, interrupted

Women, in particular, are taught from an early age to think of our bodies as vulnerable. Worrying = responsibility. Don’t walk home alone. Watch your drink. Wear SPF. Check your breasts. Avoid this. Watch out for that. Vigilance feels like a full-time job.

The advice isn’t wrong — it’s all necessary. But I can’t help but feel I’ve steadily been inhabiting my body as though it’s permanently at risk.

With Paris, and the grass, and the Taco Bell of it all, I’ve been thinking about joy and the absence of it. Or the inability to feel it unbridled.

Enjoying things without any form of anxiety is an alien concept to me. I’d love to be that person. Someone who lives in the moment, who doesn’t worry about what could go wrong, who’s judging her. Living and feeling life for what it is, not what it isn’t. A blasé Parisian teen diving into water, however murky, because they feel alive.

Vigilance isn’t wisdom, that’s painfully apparent to me. As an adult I feel like I’ve accumulated enough knowledge to avoid dangers I never knew existed as a child. But that hasn’t freed me from anything or made me feel any more alive.

Back then I wasn’t spending every beautiful afternoon mentally calculating the odds of something going wrong with the goose shit and the river water. I was just there.

It’s not that I want to know less. I like science, I have two degrees in it. Understanding the world right down to the microscopic is a privilege. But somewhere between barefoot summers and brain-eating amoebas, I became someone who experiences the world through a running commentary of everything that could go awry.

I’d love to remember what it’s like to not fret. To not just let it go but to not feel the worry in the first place. I think that is what it truly feels like to be free, but boy it does not come easy.

How do you stay open to the world when you’ve learned so many reasons to be afraid of it? Maybe it’s lying languidly in the grass anyway, ticks be damned. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

Being a woman in the media… what to say? It’s tough. I often describe journalism as a little like drowning. You’re constantly kicking to stay afloat, and publishing a story buys you a few seconds to breathe before you start sinking again.

As a woman, it’s not just the work — the digging, the sourcing, the uphill battle of convincing editors our stories matter — but also what we absorb day after day in the news cycle.

It’s relentless. There’s always another story of harassment, stalking, coercion, and more of the horrors that persist.

Then we have to decide how those stories are told. We have to package them into something people will click on. What that ends up looking like can be pretty jarring.

Every headline is a choice. Does it begin with the woman who was attacked, or the man who attacked her? Does it describe Simone Biles as one of the greatest athletes of all time, or as an NFL player’s wife? Does falling birth rates become a story about structural inequality, or about women making the “wrong” choices?

That’s why RewriteHER, the tool Chloe Alana Williams (a partner at the global brand strategy and innovation agency 8TH DAY) created to fight back by rewriting biased headlines, caught my attention. She recently shared a LinkedIn post about a headline that made her “stiffen.”

“The blame was on the woman for being out late,” Chloe told me. “Then you begin reading the story thinking that it’s the woman’s fault.”

I spoke with Chloe this week about why that moment was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We ended up talking about why women have become a cultural scapegoat, how AI is inheriting old biases, and why language seeps into our mindset and shapes what we come to see as normal.

The idea for RewriteHER had actually been taking shape for two years, while Chloe researched a book about the way society treats women who don’t have children. She was perturbed by how they are all lumped together regardless of whether it was through choice, circumstances, timing, tragedy, or anything else, and referred to by some as “childless cat ladies.”

buy me a coffee :)

At the same time came the rise of the manosphere, political pressure around fertility, and an increasing tendency to blame women without asking why so many feel unable — or unwilling — to bring children into the world.

“In the past two years, women have become more of a target and an enemy,” Chloe said. “The rolling back of female autonomy in the US, the trad wife movement, the manosphere … they’re all getting airtime.”

People are angry and unsettled, she said, about a myriad of things, and everyone wants an enemy to blame.

“They’re pointing the finger at women,” Chloe said. “But we still have not seen the gender gap closing. There are no more women in senior positions than there were before.”

Men aren’t sole providers anymore — that’s women’s fault. They’re feeling emasculated now. Blame them for that too.

“Part of it is that it’s impossible now to have a family without two people working,” Chloe said. “It used to be that a man could support a family and everyone has to adjust to that new reality. Everyone’s dealing with these tensions.”

There’s a deeply ingrained problem in how violence against women is reported. But for Chloe, it extends far beyond the media. The same assumptions show up in workplaces, relationships, politics, and everyday life.

“You hear all the stories about how women just don’t apply for jobs because of the language of them and we kind of talk ourselves out of them,” she said. “All these little things are everywhere with the words that we use and how that impacts our perception and our behaviours.”

The rest of our conversation is for paid subscribers, where we cover how she built RewriteHER in a single weekend using AI, why she believes language shapes policy, and whether newsrooms could one day use tools like this before they hit publish.

But you can read Chloe’s article on LinkedIn here and try out RewriteHER for yourself here.

Read more

I wasn’t a natural-born feminist. That’s kind of hard for me to admit, but I know it’s true. It took me a bit longer to realise what it really meant, because for my first 24 years, if I’m being truly honest, I didn’t think about it too deeply.

I also had what I thought was a complicated relationship with other girls and women throughout my teenage years and early 20s. I judged their actions and opinions much more harshly than those of men. Internalised misogyny wasn’t a term I would learn until much later, but it summed up some of my own behaviour (which I regret) and what I observed around me (shameless plug 👇).

I loved girls at primary school. My first real heartbreak was going to a different secondary school to all the friends I’d spent those formative years with, and watching (most of) them slip away in real time.

My second was a boy. He pitted me against another girl in a way that would conjure up the worst parts of my personality: the desperation to be wanted, inferiority complex, codependency, and poor self-esteem.

My immature mind’s solution was to hate the girl. Hate the girls who acted this way. Hate the women who acted imperfectly. Find a way to beat them, to be more desirable, to be funnier, smarter, more popular. But it was always more about the boys — the ones who cheated, the ones who lied, the ones who would cut you out and expect forgiveness when they changed their minds.

It would be some time before I recognised this, however. The pattern seemed doomed to repeat itself and I caught myself making many of the same mistakes in my early 20s. I found myself on the other side — the girl I had once despised. I was so far away from my sense of self that I didn’t realise I’d become what had once hurt me so deeply. Or maybe I did. Maybe that was my way of controlling it, of finally freeing myself from the hold it had taken over me. I was projecting something, and whatever it was wasn’t healthy.

As I said, I didn’t think about feminism much at all.

That was until the day a judge denied Kesha’s plea to get out of her contract with Dr. Luke. Kesha was an artist I’d absorbed automatically as a millennial, blasting out of the speakers in bars and clubs we’d frequent on Friday nights. I wasn’t so much a fan of her as she was a staple in my life. Her songs about partying and a lack of self-awareness were mantras and rallying calls for our teenagerhood.

Her messiness was something we all saw in ourselves as 10 or so of us slept stiffly and uncomfortably on living room floors together, no inhibitions, our only pillow a stained and scratchy carpet, still dressed in our fishnets and too many necklaces, smudged panda bear eyes, with the sticky syrup of WKD and the first tastes of cigarettes on our lips. She was the soundtrack to our earliest experiences with impulse and regret, and our first digital camera memories to pull the blurry night into some kind of focus the next day.

She became more to me than that in February of 2016, though.

Kesha filed a civil suit against Dr. Luke, a producer and her ex-manager, in October 2014, accusing him of inflicting emotional distress, sex-based hate crimes, and employment discrimination. (He denied all charges, and sued Kesha the same year, saying she fabricated rape claims against him to get out of their recording contract.)

The judge ruled she would have to remain bound by her recording contract despite arguing that she should be released from it because of the abuse she alleged.

It was, if I can impossibly sum it up in one word, dreadful.

I remember reading about it on Lena Dunham’s ill-fated website Lenny Letter:

“When I saw the outcome of Kesha’s court case last Friday, I felt sick. Actually sick — I wanted to ask my Uber to pull over so I could throw up in a New York City trash can,” Dunham wrote.

“The photos of her beautiful face crumpled with tears, the legally necessary but sickening use of the word ‘alleged’ over and over in reference to the assault she says she remembers so vividly — it all created a special brand of nausea that comes when public events intersect with your most private triggers. I last experienced this when Rolling Stone botched a campus-assault narrative and as a result left millions of women exposed to doubt. I cried in a mini-mall in Brussels, imagining all the college-age girls suddenly changing their minds about coming forward against their rapists.”

Reading Dunham’s words, I knew in my heart that I agreed completely. I realised that at some point I’d stopped trying to compete with women and had grown to love them. I, too, looked at Kesha’s face and felt my heart break. It may have just been one of many stories that broke through and changed my perspective. It may have been the abusive relationship I was in the middle of but not yet awake to. I may have just grown up. It was probably thousands of different things that led me there. But I knew that day I would forever call myself a feminist.

I’ve been thinking about that day lately because Dunham has a new memoir out and, years later, the woman whose writing crystallised that feeling for me would have her own reckoning. Dunham defended someone she shouldn’t have defended, later apologised, and now writes with obvious shame about the whole ordeal and even says that she barely remembers making the statement. It’s messy and bizarre and very human. I don’t think that erases what her writing gave me in 2016, but it has reminded me that feminism has never been about finding flawless women.

The older I get, the less interested I am in deciding who counts as a “good” or “correct” feminist and the more I understand it’s messier than that. It seems women can fall on opposite ends of a spectrum and still identify with that label.

I’ve also been grappling with my energy levels for the whole thing. Sometimes I think it would be easier to be ignorant and not care so much when you hear another story of a woman being let down by the system, another allegation of rape or assault, another talented woman overlooked in favour of a lesser man, another bad man, another tough lesson a woman had to learn.

I guess I’m really tired. But then again, that’s why I started this newsletter.

I may be downtrodden and I may sometimes be depressed, and I may occasionally wonder whether it’s worth it at all. But what has stayed with me is that photo of Kesha in the courtroom. Her tears and how my heart went out to her in a way that’s stuck with me for a decade. Her beautiful face.

That photograph didn’t make me a feminist overnight. But it did mark the moment I realised something had already shifted inside me. I no longer looked at another woman’s pain wondering what she’d done wrong. I looked at it and knew someone else had done something wrong and she was paying the price. I saw the girls I’d judged, the women I’d competed with, and even the younger version of myself as complex, imperfect, and human too.

I’m still learning how to do that — to hold compassion for other women while extending it to the younger version of myself, too. I know I wasn’t born a feminist. That’s hard to put down in black and white. But I’ve learned that becoming one wasn’t a single moment. It’s something I have to keep choosing, especially when it gets difficult.

“Who’s here? I’m here. I win. I’m your best friend. I’m the best at being your friend. I love you the most.”

Over the years it’s become clearer to me that the Girl I have the most in common with is Marnie. I battle insecurities, I have a chaotic, sometimes unintelligible way of following my dreams, and I have a very complicated relationship with friendship. Thank god I don’t sing.

Marnie always wanted to be Jessa — Hannah’s true best friend. At least, she wanted to replace her. In the final episode, she crowns herself victorious of that title because she did what she always did. She showed up. Only when everyone else had fallen away did Hannah come anywhere near accepting that it was true, even though Marnie truly still fell short.

Friendship has never come naturally to me. That feels like a weird thing to say, because I obviously have people in my life who I call friends. Close ones. Chosen family even. But the back and forth, the politics of it all, the hierarchies, have always left me a bit in the dark and it took me a long time to realise what true friendship actually is.

A tough life lesson is one I’ve only really come to recognise recently. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put in, how much you try and become someone’s friend. They’re always just going to choose who they want to choose. It doesn’t matter if you’ve known someone longer, if you’ve put the time in, if you’ve sent them birthday cards, invited them to your own events, replied to their Instagram stories. They’ll feel closer to someone else for reasons you’ll never really get to know. Not because you did anything wrong, or because they’re cruel. Just because something between them clicks in a way it doesn’t with you.

It feels like an obvious point to make, but for a long time, I didn’t realise that, and it was a tough pill to swallow. I thought of friendships on a bit of a spectrum: you invest more time in the ones that mean the most to you, and it’ll be reciprocated. I don’t mean this in a transactional way, more a logical one. I thought everyone operated like this.

That’s until you hear someone you thought you were #1 to describe someone else as their best friend. That’s until you find out you don’t make the cut for a wedding. That’s until you see them all hanging out together on an Instagram story, knowing they didn’t even think to extend the invite to you.

Hours logged mean surprisingly little compared to the current moment. Wherever you rank in the immediate. Or, even worse, you don’t rank at all.

I thought friendship was cumulative. I thought every favour, every conversation, every time they confided in me was banked in a shared account. But friendship isn’t something tangible you can keep up with. It exists in the present, constantly evolving and reshaping itself. You can’t hold onto it — you just have to let it be.

I’ve been a bit of a ghost throughout my life, falling through the cracks.

I remember a family friend who I thought would be in my life forever started treating me differently when we entered secondary school. I remember being excited to see her after the school day. But the person I saw waiting for me with my mum at the bus stop wasn’t someone I recognised at all. All those hours spent playing games together, imagining grown-up futures, gone. Meaningless. I remember having to claw my way back into the friendship circle of the girls who had gone to a different school, the effort I had to put into not being forgotten as I watched them form bonds with others.

Meanwhile, at school I wondered why people would switch up on me, deciding I’m no longer someone they want to hang out with. I’ve always been more of a small group, 1-1 person, so finding out the girl I’d tied my cart to didn’t like me all that much isolated me pretty severely. Through anxieties, I imprinted her hot and cold behaviour onto everyone else at the school, assuming everyone hated me. I was weird, a loner nobody would want to talk to.

Looking back now, it wasn’t true at all. Most of the girls in my class there were lovely. But it’s funny how the mind can play tricks on you, how one person’s actions can influence how you feel about yourself and the world around you. How it can warp your sense of value, turn you into what you feared all along: A loser. Nobody’s friend. Nobody’s best friend.

Boys complicated things further. Especially growing up in the MySpace era where we were literally told to rank our “Top 8” friends. The spirals I would go down.

At 15, my first love treated me poorly in the way teenage boys tend to do. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too with a female “best friend” he’d longed after for years. The way he and the friend in question acted tarnished how I felt about women for a good decade.

I remember so much rage. What to do with it? I didn’t have the tools to articulate it. I didn’t realise I was being gaslighted. Not just by him and her, but all of my friends at the time. They welcomed her in. They made it easier for them to betray me. They told me I was the one being crazy for having a problem with it.

My sense of justice I’ve always felt very strongly — what was it for? It was clearly misplaced. Why was I being punished? What did I so fundamentally misunderstand about friendship that I was the one left cast aside?

This was all a lifetime ago but the scars persist. That ache of not being good enough and not understanding why. The only way to let it go is to realise none of it was ever in my control. Nothing my brain and body was capable of doing would have had any impact. They simply chose the lives and relationships that made sense to them. I just wasn’t at the centre of those choices.

I’m not saying any of this for pity. I am very happy with the friendships I now hold dearly. People have now chosen me. Friendship isn’t something you earn. You can’t get promoted for working overtime. Really it’s something you’re offered regardless of all of that, outside of any dataset.

Whenever I feel the competitive, scared girl reach out from the past I tell her that she’s understood. I tell her she’s liked. I tell her she can stop trying to earn invitations that were never hers to earn. I tell her she was just trying to balance an unsolvable equation while everyone else was getting on with their lives.

She may not have been invited to that thing, but that’s OK. She doesn’t need to win. She doesn’t need to be the best. It doesn’t mean she’s worth any less to anybody.

Somewhere along the way I stopped trying to become indispensable. I stopped trying to make everyone’s Top 8. I stopped measuring my worth by whose wedding I made the cut for, or whose social media posts I appeared in. The friendships I have now don’t require campaigning or an underlying feeling that they constantly need to be convinced.

Marnie thought friendship was something you won through loyalty, and so did I. If she was always there, eventually she’d be considered Hannah’s best friend. I thought the same thing. I made the same errors. You can’t outwork someone else’s preferences, but you can keep showing up for the people you care about. You just have to take the ego out of it, and realise that for a friendship to work, nobody is keeping score.

Looking over our shoulders. Walking a little faster. Keeping our phones in our hands. Sharing our location with a friend. Holding our keys in our fists.

We all know the drill. Being a woman means doing all these things subconsciously as we move through the world.

We’re taught these things so early they become little rituals we hope will keep us safe.

If something does happen, we’re told to report it. Gather evidence. Do everything “properly.” We learn to build our own case before anyone else has even decided whether ours is worth believing.

Saskia Ponting did everything right. But it wasn’t enough.

On her way home from work drinks on May 28th in Cheltenham, Saskia was sexually harassed by a group of teenage boys who made sexually explicit comments and suggestions of rape. At least two of them then followed her. It was around 7.50pm.

Not late at night. Not down an isolated alleyway. But on a busy high street on a light summer evening.

“It’s really strange feeling when you are aware that you are far older than them and it’s still really intimidating,” Saskia told me.

“Being in that situation as a woman, your survival instincts just kick in. You consider escape routes, you check your surroundings, and you just feel that force of dread and you do everything you can to get to safety.”

What she remembers most is the fear. It was one of those encounters that probably lasted only a couple of minutes, but stretched into something much longer inside her own mind as her heart pumped, blood rushed in her ears, and adrenaline started racing through her body.

“I remember feeling scared and holding onto my phone really tightly,” she said. “I remember getting ready to call my partner. I remember increasing my pace and constantly looking over my shoulder.”

Saskia had already thought ahead. What if they followed her around the corner? To her car?

This is another invisible burden women carry. We become investigators in the crimes committed against us.

We memorise street names. We notice where CCTV cameras might be. We think about escape routes. We decide whether it’s safer to call someone or stay quiet. We collect evidence before anyone has even asked for it because simply saying “this happened” doesn’t cut it.

Saskia reported the incident to Gloucestershire Constabulary at around 3:30am. She didn’t want anyone to question why she waited. She and her boyfriend put together as much evidence as they could, including screenshots of the Google street view route she walked, the street addresses of shops she walked past, and a list of banks and shops that would have CCTV footage.

“You believe that the system is there to protect you and prevent it from happening to someone else,” Saskia said.

But around 48 hours later, she received an email from Gloucestershire Constabulary saying that one officer had assessed the information and closed the case. The investigation had barely seemed to have begun.

Despite providing a detailed timeline and identifying numerous locations where CCTV might exist, Saskia was told there were no further lines of enquiry because the suspects were unknown.

It is difficult to see how less than 48 hours would have been enough time to exhaust every obvious line of enquiry — to review the CCTV Saskia identified or make meaningful progress towards identifying the suspects.

Saskia said it felt like “complete gaslighting.”

“It just sends a message that what happened to you doesn’t matter enough to warrant actual police time,” she said.

Saskia did what many women do when they’re unheard and posted to TikTok.

@saskiajaynexothe police taking a sexual harassment report seriously in the big 2026?? of course not @GloucestershirePolice #fyp #storytime #womensrights #harrassment #femalerage

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Her video gained some traction, and soon afterwards, Gloucestershire Constabulary contacted her again to tell her the case was reopened.

When I approached the force for comment, it admitted the investigation had been prematurely closed before all lines of enquiry had been completed. Officers apologised, reviewed CCTV from multiple locations, and have since identified three suspects while working to identify a fourth.

That is, of course, good news. It is more than Saskia expected after the case was reopened because every passing day makes investigations like these harder. Getting any witness statements after the fact is always a race against time. People forget and move on, and opportunities are lost.

“We fully recognise that Ms Ponting did not receive the level of service that we aim to provide,” the police’s statement said. “Hearing her talk about her distressing experience on social media and the subsequent police handling of it, we can understand why she feels let down by our response to the incident. On this occasion we are sorry that the service provided did not meet the level expected.”

But is that good enough? Should women have to build an audience before they receive the investigation they were entitled to from the beginning?

It’s Saskia who has had to adapt. She’s already changed the route she takes from work, and her sense of fear is now more prevalent than its even been, simmering in the background of her everyday life.

“We have to change our lives as a response rather than the perpetrators having to change their behaviours and change their lives,” she said. “It’s completely backwards.”

That’s the contradiction at the heart of almost every conversation about women’s safety. We are constantly reminded of everything we should and should not do. Don’t walk alone. Don’t wear that. Stay alert. Share your location. Report it immediately. Gather evidence.

But what if that’s still not enough? Why is so much less attention paid to what should happen after we’ve done everything we were told to?

On April 1, the UK government announced it was cracking down on sex-based harassment in public, claiming that women and girls would be safer to walk the streets freely without fear of public sexual harassment. It seemed to address these very questions.

The press release acknowledged that when stalking and harassment go unchecked, more serious crimes follow. As a result, a new law of sex-based harassment offence and police statutory guidance were introduced to insure perpetrators would “have nowhere to hide and face real consequences,” it said.

“Instead of forcing women and girls to change their behaviour, we are going after those who choose to target and intimidate them,” Jess Phillips, the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls at the time, said in a statement.

“These new laws put the focus on perpetrators. If you harass someone in public because of their sex, it will not be tolerated and you can face a criminal record and up to 2 years behind bars.”

Saskia said combating this “gateway behaviour” was one of the major reasons she wanted to report what happened to her.

“The police, politicians, they need to stop treating street harassment, stalking, and all of these things as minor instances,” she said. “The perpetrator learns that they can absolutely do that and get away with it.”

Everything you need to understand the story is above the paywall. If you'd like to read more about Saskia's experience, her reflections on what happened, Gloucestershire Constabulary's full response, and the Government's comments on the issue, I'd really appreciate your support by subscribing.

buy me a coffee and I'll send it to you

Read more

People say I’m being dramatic when I tell them I don’t want to get on any more planes. I’m not sure if I’m being 100% serious when I say it. But I am sick of being treated like scum.

With the blood-sucking gate agents who seem to delight in informing you the bag allowance has shrunk yet again, budget airlines squeezing more money out of you at every turn, the pitiful and ever-decreasing leg room, the terrible food, the general sense everyone hates you — it’s just bad vibes. Really bad vibes.

I know that writing off air travel altogether means I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face, that once you’re at your destination you forget the hell that came before. But getting on a plane in 2026, when every part of the industry seems to be dedicated to slashing costs and making you feel less human, doesn’t fill me with confidence.

Stories about rogue passengers opening emergency doors, old aircraft losing wheels and external panels, and violent turbulence haven’t exactly made me feel better.

Logically, I know flying by plane is statistically the safest way to travel, and cognitive bias means I only remember the bad things that happen.

But something I truly cannot ignore is how we are treated as people. How we have to endure multiple hours of discomfort for the privilege. How increasingly it feels as though our wellbeing comes second to efficiency, cost-cutting, and profit.

I was reminded of this when I saw a TikTok recently posted by a woman named Fulvia Fossati.

Fulvia, who is six months pregnant, was flying from Florida to Washington DC earlier this week. But she was kicked off the flight she had already boarded.

This is called “bumping” — the airline industry’s term for involuntary denied boarding — and it is legal in the US. According to the Department of Transportation, bumping exists at all to make up for “no shows.”

@fulviavocalcoachIt’s unbelievable how greedy these companies are and how law enforcement is there to protect them and their profits instead of protecting the people, please help me share this video #pregnant #baby #frontierairlines #airport #police

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

“Bumping, also known as ‘denied boarding,’ happens when there are more passengers scheduled to fly on an airplane than available seats,” the website reads.

Passengers in these cases may be entitled to denied boarding compensation, depending on the price of the ticket, how much later they arrive at their destination, and whether the flight was domestic or international.

There are some complexities in how bumping is carried out. Usually, airlines can’t bump passengers who have already boarded.

The details of exactly what happened to to Fulvia aren’t totally clear. I reached out to both Fulvia and Frontier to get some clarity.

A Frontier spokesperson first said they were “aware of this matter, looking into it, and working to connect with the customer directly.”

On asking further questions, they told me the investigation was ongoing, and they were “waiting for more details from the customer to fully understand her perspective.” They added they had provided Fulvia with a full refund, reimbursement for her travel on another airline, and a $200 voucher.

In other words, the airline has explained how it responded to the complaint. It has not explained why the complaint happened in the first place.

They did not confirm whether the flight was oversold, whether Fulvia was involuntarily denied boarding, or whether she had already boarded when she was selected.

Nor did they address her claim that she was removed because her fare was lower, explain why she was selected instead of other passengers, or clarify whether DOT denied boarding compensation was paid.

To get to this point, Fulvia had to go through the humiliating ordeal first.

It leaves me with two major questions:

• Would she have received the refund, reimbursement and voucher if 590,000 people hadn’t watched her TikTok?

• Would the airline have responded at all if the internet hadn’t done what the internet always does and demanded answers?

In the video, Fulvia alleged that she was told by airline staff that someone else had paid more for her ticket. She said she had already boarded the plane when she was told she was being removed from the flight. Fulvia added footage of the incident to her video which shows she was already on the plane when four officers came aboard to escort her off.

I’d like to state again that Fulvia is six months pregnant.

Whatever the legalities, it’s difficult to understand why a visibly pregnant passenger who had already boarded the plane — and who told staff she was in pain and needed to get home — was considered an appropriate candidate for removal.

According to Department of Transportation guidance, passengers who have checked in on time and hold a confirmed reservation are generally eligible for denied boarding compensation when flights are oversold. Whether those protections were followed in Fulvia’s case remains unclear.

“The only explanation they gave me was basically that I paid too little for my ticket, but I paid the price that they asked,” Fulvia said in her video. “I told them I was pregnant and actually I was already in pain and with a lot of fatigue before even getting to the airport. I told them I needed to go home. I cannot stay. I cannot even carry my own personal item that’s in the overhead bin.”

Fulvia said one airline worker told her they would never remove someone who is disabled or travelling with small children. She told them she was pregnant. According to her account, it made no difference.

Fulvia said this was when her husband got upset and told the staff they weren’t going to leave. That’s when the officers came aboard.

“Since we refused to leave, they called the sheriff and four officers were there to take down this pregnant lady that wanted to go home,” Fulvia said, showing footage of what occurred. “They asked us to gather our belongings and to get off the plane.”

According to Fulvia, she wasn’t offered a refund or compensation up front.

Fulvia confirmed to me that she had been in communication with Frontier since she posted her TikTok (which had 590,000 views last time I looked), but described the experience as “very overwhelming and stressful.” She is currently looking into the matter with her lawyer.

So the investigation is ongoing. We might not ever know exactly how and why Fulvia ended up feeling so mistreated. But whatever happened on that plane, Fulvia summed up her experience rather poignantly:

“Pregnant women get support and care and respect all around the world, but not with Frontier Airlines.”

There’s nothing I love more than women enjoying an inside joke because there is nobody funnier than a group of women who have collectively decided to commit to a bit.

It’s especially good when a man is the prompt.

Sometimes it involves convincing a father that a decorative rock is worth an absurd amount of money. Other times it’s a collective ploy to convince a stranger that he has been cursed. And plenty of the time, it involves gathering in comment sections to thirst over men in ways that are somehow simultaneously feral and wholesome.

It’s one of my favourite genres of internet humour because the joke is rarely aimed at the person at the centre of it — at least not maliciously.

That’s why the Anthropologie rock was one of my favourite internet trends last year.

If you missed it, it was essentially a scheme for women to poke fun at the way the men in their lives perceived their consumerism as pointless or ridiculous.

For example, one daughter gave her mother the “rock” in a gift bag for her birthday. The mum, playing along, burst into tears of faux gratitude. The stepdad, like most men who were subjected to the prank, reacted with a mix of utter bafflement and complete outrage.

“It’s something you said you really wanted,” Erin, the daughter, says as her mum unwraps the present. “I scoured everywhere. I really struggled to find it.”

“I hope it isn’t what I think it is Erin. because they’re bloody expensive,” her mum responds, in an acting stint worthy of an Oscar. The stepdad can’t believe what he’s watching as she weeps, and it is truly something to behold.

@erin_evansI can’t stop laughing at this 😭 Merry Christmas everyone!!

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I was reminded of the trend recently when I saw a creator called Katherine, who goes by the name Trippy Witch on TikTok, describe a recent internet interaction.

Katherine said a friend tagged her in a Facebook post by a man named Trav who was asking for mystical aid.

“Anyone know a witch that can do me a favour?” Trav wrote. “I got cursed last night when i was out and I’m not happy about it. Deadly serious, whatever the fuck that was it needs undoing sharpish.”

In comments he further explained what happened, saying a woman grabbed him when he told her he didn’t like her tattoo, and started speaking “gibberish or some ancient language.”

“I’ve googled it and none of the above is a good thing,” he said.

Katherine immediately understood the assignment. She commented below, saying Trav would be able to reverse the curse if he “hope on one leg in a circle anti clockwise 33 times.”

When Trav replied asking if this was a real solution, Katherine doubled down. She told him to film himself doing it and she would be able to tell if it had done the job or not.

Trav, taking the issue very seriously, did just that.

“Oh, oh wow,” he said after 33 jumps. “I feel loads better. That should do it, yeah, I’m really happy with that.”

@trippywitchofficialOne for British witch tok

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Trav may or may not be in on the joke — it’s hard to tell. But it almost doesn’t matter. It’s just as funny if he dedicated himself to the bit as it would be if he genuinely thought he’d been cursed and this was the solution.

As always, though, the funniest part is in the comments. They are where the real comedians live.

buy me a coffee :)

“circles were too wide,” one person wrote. “you have to hop in a circle more in one spot. that definitely didnt work.”

Others pointed out that Trav had actually done 34 jumps, not 33, which unfortunately meant the curse had returned.

What I love about both of these examples is that the joke isn’t really directed at the dad in the rock video or at Trav. The audience is other women laughing along.

They are collaborative acts of nonsense. Everyone understands the rules of the inside joke, and everyone tries to make it a little funnier than the person before them.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, particularly when women get behind a trend online and happen to be horny about it.

The comments section under videos of men dancing their little pants off, completing plank challenges, chopping wood, carrying heavy things, or simply being comfortable in their masculinity while showing a softer side are often completely feral.

What I love so much about it is it’s not exactly objectification.

The attraction is real, don’t get me wrong. Nobody is pretending otherwise. But female thirst online often turns into collaborative comedy which is worth so much more. Thousands of women participate in a shared language of collective appreciation and increasingly deranged online behaviour, like trying to tempt a man over to them with treats as if he were a cat: “pspspspsps.”

What makes it feel different from the kind of uncomfortable objectification women have historically experienced themselves is that the humour and the appreciation exist together in a harmless way. The goal isn’t to diminish someone into a body for some kind of gratification, but to turn a feeling into a joke everyone can contribute to.

In the same way women collectively decided an Anthropologie rock was the perfect gift, or that Trav’s curse had returned, they build entire comedic worlds around horniness too. And I think that’s beautiful.

When women collectively decide to spend their time convincing a guy on Facebook that he’s cursed, or writing increasingly unhinged love letters beneath a heavily panting man, they’re building this world together on an internet that is often described, and experienced, as a place of outrage, cruelty, sexism, and culture wars.

So instead of a place of fear, it’s one giant inside joke where nobody gets hurt.

Long before 300,000 people were listening, Melissa Byrne was talking to herself.

As a youngster, she would film herself speaking out loud. She filled journals with her thoughts and feelings, sometimes writing in multiple notebooks at once. Looking back, she wishes she had kept them.

“I burned them all when I was a teenager,” she told me. “I thought I didn’t need them anymore.”

Melissa had a lot to process. She is a survivor of mental, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of family members, with whom she has been no contact for nearly six years.

Today, TikTok has become her new journal. Since she started sharing her experiences online in 2023, over a quarter of a million people have followed along. Many arrived because of her candid discussions about abusive family dynamics and recovery and stayed because they recognise something of themselves in her story.

“It felt like the first time in my entire life that I could just speak and nobody would tell me to shut up,” Melissa said.

Melissa doesn’t just discuss her past — she also touches on body image, gives “big sister” advice, and shares charity shop hauls (she has a real talent for finding hidden gems). But it’s her radically honest accounts of what she’s been through that have provided a hand for so many people’s inner child to hold.

“I’ve always felt drawn to conversation, but also creativity as well,” Melissa said. “I realised that through talking about stuff and opening up conversations, people were coming in and going, ‘Oh yeah, I relate to that. That happened to me.’ And it very quickly became a community.”

As conversations around narcissistic abuse and toxic family dynamics have become more mainstream in the past few years, Melissa felt the perspective of someone speaking openly about what those experiences actually felt like was missing.

“There’s nobody actually talking about it,” she said. “I couldn’t see much to do with a lot of the stuff that I ended up choosing to speak about. So that’s where I’ve managed to find my little space on the internet.”

That “little space” has grown far beyond anything she expected.

“I don’t really pay attention to the actual volume or the numbers because it scares me a little bit,” Melissa said. “The actual number itself, it has not sunk in and I don’t know if it ever will. But it’s a massive, massive privilege to have.”

A community of people who get it

I didn’t want to speak with Melissa about her past and everything she went through with her family. She has documented that in detail on her social media with “POV” videos showing what conversations with her mother were like, and storytimes where she’s incredibly candid about the abuse she was subjected to by multiple family members.

What’s more interesting is what she’s built. Scroll through the comments on almost any of her videos and you’ll find people sharing experiences they may never have spoken about elsewhere. Some have survived serious abuse. Others grew up in homes where arguments were constant, where they learned to walk on eggshells, where anxiety, people-pleasing, or self-doubt followed them long into adulthood.

@melissajbyrnexThis happened towards the end of our relationship, where conversation hit a dead end. She never wants to know about me, just about drama.

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Everyone hasn’t experienced the exact things Melissa has. What resonates more broadly are the after-effects: the hypervigilance, the imposter syndrome, and the feeling that something wasn’t right long before they had the language to explain it.

As someone who experienced so much hurt and fear as a child, it seems to be a massive priority for Melissa to surround her life, both online and off, with peace. And that’s a great comfort to a lot of people watching.

“The main thing that I’ve benefited from the whole experience is community,” Melissa said. “It’s invaluable in that sense. It doesn’t matter how many followers I’ve got or if there are any earnings behind it — it’s all about that community and speaking about things that need to be spoken about.”

Or buy me a coffee—I'll send it to you

Read more

To quote Amy Poehler: “My phone is my best friend.”

It’s where my friends are. It’s where I read the news. It’s where I work, text, shop, learn random facts, fact check those facts, lurk on Reddit, scroll TikTok, play games, and reboot.

It is, according to the latest aesthetic cycle of doom, giving me “tech neck.”

For those unaware of the latest insecurity you’re supposed to have, tech neck refers to the lines and wrinkles that apparently develop on your neck from looking down at your phone too much. Women are now being encouraged to tackle it expensively with everything from red light therapy and collagen masks to invasive cosmetic procedures.

Oh, please. I refuse to engage with yet another shame tactic from an industry that profits from the very behaviour it’s warning me about. The same industry that wants my attention now wants me to feel bad about what giving it my attention has apparently done to my neck.

I don’t care. In fact, I have decided to love my tech neck instead.

I’m not trying to reclaim a beauty standard or start a movement. I’m just tired. I’m so fucking tired.

I’m tired of living in a world that keeps inventing new ways for women to feel bad about themselves.

buy me a coffee :)

We already live in an existence of contradictions. Dress nicely, be put together, have your nails and hair done, but don’t you dare spend your money. Don’t you get into debt, you monster.

While we’re at it, we should probably scrutinise your body as well. We’re in the body positive era, right? Wrong. It’s a mirage. Everything we experience in our capitalist surroundings is by design, and the end result is to spend more time engaging with the things that they say are making us ugly. It’s a circle of hell only dragging us deeper.

Cellulite. Thigh gaps. Hip dips. Buccal fat. Arm jiggle. Smile lines. Eleven lines. Nasolabial folds. Eyelids (REALLY?). Teeth. Hair lines.

Now it’s your neck. How did you let it get like that? What’s wrong with you?

It’s the sheer hypocrisy that makes me ill. We’re living in a world that revolves around screens. Most of us work on computers all day because we have to. But sure, let’s pretend spending eight hours hunched over a laptop is a personal lifestyle choice.

Don’t stare at your phone, though you kind of have to if you want to get anywhere or do anything. Our phones are our maps, our wallets, our social lives, our cameras, our diaries, our entertainment, our connection to friends and family.

Employers expect us to be reachable. Banks expect us to use apps. Restaurants want us to scan QR codes. Entire friendships now exist through group chats.

Yet any physical consequence of that is our own personal failing. This was your doing, missy. It’s your fault you spend this long looking at a screen, nobody else’s.

I just don’t buy that. It’s utter BS. Just the same old tired script.

Have a body? Make it smaller.

Have pores? Disgusting. Buy some strips.

Getting older? Fix that.

Have a neck? Apparently that’s a problem now too.

Be polished, but don’t spend too much money. Take care of yourself, but don’t be vain. Age naturally, but not too visibly. Participate in modern life, but don’t let modern life leave any marks on your body.

I can’t get through the day without being notified that I have another seventeen flaws I haven’t noticed yet. I applaud the business model that is designed to make us feel slightly dissatisfied at all times, I truly do. The business model that profits from us analysing whether characters on TV shows have a smaller waist, thicker hair, nicer skin, longer legs, a line-free neck...

I’m good. I’m done.

These lines may have come from looking down at my phone. They may have come from getting older. They may have been there all along and I’m only noticing them now because somebody decided to give them a name — to make them something to fix.

No thanks. You can keep the serums. I’m not buying them, and I’m certainly not buying the shame. The beauty industry would prefer I looked at these lines and saw a treatment plan, a basket, and a checkout page.

I look at them and see a neck.

So I’ve decided to do the opposite. I love my tech neck.

What is financial freedom? It’s a surprisingly tough question to answer in the current world, particularly for millennial and Gen Z women.

Bills are sky high, rent and mortgage payments swallow huge chunks of our paycheques, and many of us are seriously wondering whether having children is even a financially sensible decision. The milestones that once signalled stability like a good job, a paid-off mortgage, and a nice car in the driveway (hell, a driveway at all), can feel increasingly out of our reach.

According to personal finance coach, author of What No One Tells You About Money, and co-host of The Ramsey Show, Jade Warshaw, that’s changed what many women aspire to.

“A status symbol would be to be able to pay for daycare every month and it not be a struggle for me,” she told me. “A status symbol would be to be able to buy all four tyres instead of just replacing the one that’s got the hole in it.”

These might sound like modest dreams, but they reveal how many women increasingly value time, freedom, and peace of mind over the nice expensive things we were taught to chase. Because let’s be honest: how many of those designer clothes and nice cars are actually symbols of freedom, and how many are symbols of debt?

“I feel like the status symbols that people want today have way more to do with feeling peace on a month-to-month basis, not feeling paycheque to paycheque,” Jade said.

Or buy me a coffee—I'll send it to you

With a cost-of-living crisis, inflation, housing costs, and childcare considerations, our aspirations have become more immediate and practical.

Many women are privately questioning whether the traditional path to success is worth it. I’ve spoken to some of them. But publicly we’re still expected to look like we’re thriving and hustling our way through life.

“Last time I checked, I think it was 78% of people were living paycheque to paycheque,” Jade said. “If you’re in a group where everybody’s acting like everything’s cool, then somebody’s lying.”

Read more

In my near 35 years of life, I’ve developed a better grip on what my brain is up to. I can’t lie — sometimes it’s a total mystery to me. But I’ve spent a good chunk of time reporting on mental health, psychology, and personality types to have a better chance of deducing what’s going on up there.

I’ve definitely gone through all the stages of burnout. Sometimes the symptoms were obvious, with body exhaustion, brain fog, and a lack of motivation. Other times the signs were more subtle and crept up on me.

Last summer, after being laid off and finding myself jobless for the first time in more than a decade, I expected to feel relieved. But I felt frozen instead.

I wasn’t depressed. I wasn’t particularly anxious. If anything, I felt optimistic. For the first time in years, my future felt entirely open. I could finally pursue projects I’d been putting off and really consider what I actually wanted to do with my life.

The problem was that I couldn’t seem to do any of it.

I could look after myself. I could meet friends. I could spend hours thinking about what came next. But when it came to actually making progress, my brain seemed to have other ideas.

Over the following year, three phrases popped up which helped me understand what was happening. They came from interviews, social media, and conversations with experts while reporting on burnout, neurodivergence, and work.

Looking back, all three helped me understand something I never had words for before.

Why some days I couldn’t think straight. Why motivation seemed to vanish without warning. Why rest wasn’t something I earned after work, but something that made work possible in the first place.

I guess you could say it’s “capacity.”

I know that in the media we love a trendy buzzword, but these terms stuck with me because they helped me make sense of experiences I’d struggled to explain — and gave me clues about what to do next. More than anything, I learned there’s a lot that’s in my control, and a lot that isn’t.

I encountered them in a particular order:

1. You’ve been laid off. Now what? AKA Functional freeze.

2. Getting shit done. AKA Scary hour.

3. You’re in the zone. Now come out for a little while. AKA Cave time.

Buy me a coffee! :)

Phase 1. Functional freeze

When you suddenly find yourself out of the situation that was draining you, you’d assume your mind and body slowly start returning to normal.

Not so much.

I first heard the term “functional freeze” from Charlie Hunter, who I interviewed about being a corporate dropout and the broader vibe shift among women questioning the traditional career ladder.

After Charlie quit her corporate job, she went travelling in Southeast Asia for two months. But when she got back, she found it really hard to do anything.

We’ve all experienced the desire to sofa rot and binge-watch a show while we recharge. This was different.

“I realised that I thought those two months would be enough time to wash the past decade-plus off me and really reset myself, my nervous system, and my whole life force,” Charlie told me. “But I realised I was still so burnt out that I needed more time.”

The phrase immediately resonated because I spent months feeling exactly this way. I was stuck despite desperately wanting to move on. I wasn’t sad. If anything, I felt hopeful. But hope and capacity are not the same thing at all.

Charlie, it turns out, went through the same thing. She picked up some freelance work here and there, but it was minimal. Instead, she spent a lot of time trying to enjoy herself. She felt a lot of guilt doing that because her career thus far had been jam-packed and moving at 100mph.

“Now I was at home and I was like, oh my God, I don’t even want to check my email,” she said. Charlie later learned this is known as functional freeze: a state where you’ve been operating at such a high level for so long that your nervous system is effectively exhausted. As a result, it starts conserving energy wherever it can, leaving you feeling numb, stuck, or unable to move forward.

When everything is go, go, go, you don’t have time to cry. You have to move onto the next task. Then, when you step out of that environment, you feel even more worn out.

“That’s why you find it so hard to do your thing, and you find yourself even more exhausted and burnt out,” Charlie said. “It’s a strange feeling, but it’s because your nervous system is actually trying to conserve that energy.”

The solution? Taking your time. Because time is the only thing that works. Nourish your body, do breath work, get back in touch with your hobbies, and move gently.

Then you “really start to retrain your subconscious in the nervous system that it’s safe, and so then you can get back to a place of having much more capacity again,” Charlie said.

“So many people experience it,” she said. “When I found that out, it made me feel so much less alone.”

Phase 2. Scary hour

Around four or five months into my newfound freelance life, the mist started lifting a little. I could string sentences together again. I found the motivation to actually get on top of my finances. I started a Substack!

It didn’t all come at once, of course. But step by step the tasks that felt mountainous suddenly felt doable.

This was around the time I learned of the phrase “scary hour” — when you put aside one hour to do all those boring tasks you’ve put off.

For me, the worst tasks are anything admin, and they can range from sending a follow-up email, to going to the dry cleaner or post office, to sending details to my accountant.

Psychologist and neurodivergence expert Dr. Perpetua Neo helped me understand why putting a name to this is so powerful. For neurodivergent people, she explained, so much battery is wasted by beating ourselves up about what we should be doing.

Once you stop feeling guilty, then you can hack your brain, she said. And the first step to doing that is realising momentum and dopamine are your friends.

For example BJ Fogg, the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, came up with the term “tiny habits” to explain how one small action can change everything. For example, if you want to get more consistent at flossing your teeth, set yourself the task of flossing just one. You’ll probably find you end up doing all of them sooner than you think.

The key, Dr. Neo says, is making the first task laughably small.

“Let’s say for scary hour, I’ve got three tasks to do,” she said. “I would give myself a time window that is so stupidly small that I’m not going to resist.”

Set an alarm for maybe four minutes, she said, and dedicate that time to starting the task. When the alarm goes off, snooze it, and repeat. By then, you’ll probably find you have enough dopamine buzzing through you to complete it.

“The human brain is all about tricking it,” Dr. Neo said, a bit like how we trick children into eating vegetables by cutting them up so small into food. It’s all about momentum. Because all the motivation in the world means nothing unless you’ve got momentum behind it.

“Most people think that you can just find motivation,” she added. “You don’t find motivation. Motivation is like a cat. When it comes, it comes. When it goes, it goes.”

Phase 3: Cave time

Once you’re out of the darkness, you don’t have to stay outside all the time. In fact, “cave time” is really important for neurodivergent people. It’s a term I heard from somatic clinician Ellowyn Lauren Rose.

In a TikTok she described cave time, or hibernation time, as a period of time where we have no expectations and no external demands.

Sensitivities to stimulation and surroundings, social tracking, and masking are “extremely energetically draining and taxing on the nervous system,” Ellowyn said in the video. That means one good night’s sleep just isn’t enough.

@jennifer.lauren.roseFor many neurodivergent people (ADHD, AuDHD, Autism, highly sensitive nervous systems), true recovery requires something deeper than just sleep. We need time periods where there are: → no expectations → no external demands → low stimulation → no need to track, manage, or emotionally attune to others I call this “cave time.” It’s normal. It’s needed. And it’s what a lot of us need to truly reset.

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Christal Castagnozzi, a psychologist with ADHD and autism who specialises in neurodivergence, told me that the burnout cycle compounds over time, so it’s no wonder we can feel exhausted even after sleeping for 10 hours.

“The way that we take care of our nervous system is by protecting ourselves, grounding, doing things that are relaxing,” Christal said. “It can look very different for lots of different people — spending time at home, having headphones on, doom scrolling.”

It might be spending more time on social media or watching 11 episodes of Friends. It could be done inside, on the sofa, or outside in the park. Some activities may have their downsides, Christal said, but “it’s not a perfect world.” Some days, one person might spend the whole day in bed, but the next out at a painting class with a friend. It’s all about balance.

“I feel like the specific friends that I have that are just low maintenance are also neurodivergent,” Christal said. “You can go to their house and you guys can sit on the couch and just be together and it, feels like home. That in itself is recharging.”

It’s not black and white. Christal said she naturally designates one day a week to cave time. But she still feels an internal battle with herself, and the voice at the back of her head telling her she should be doing something else.

“It can be hard feeling like I’m letting people down or I’m asking for help or showing that I’m struggling, because our self-worth, how good we feel about ourselves, it’s often shown in our quality and what we are outputting,” she said. “But I think cave time is super important, otherwise we don’t have the fuel.”

What all three taught me

Once we reach adulthood and our prefrontal cortex has fully developed, it’s easy to think we’re “done.”

But as I get older, I think I’ll still be figuring out how my brain works forever.

That’s probably a good thing. Development doesn’t stop when we reach adulthood. Every life stage seems to reveal a new layer of ourselves.

What I liked so much about these three phrases is that they don’t treat productivity as something moral.

I didn’t have to beat myself up for losing it, for not being able to do the things that once came so easily.

• Functional freeze helped me understand that exhaustion isn’t laziness.

• Scary hour taught me that momentum matters more than motivation.

• Cave time helped me see rest as maintenance rather than a reward.

They also taught me that self-awareness has to come with honesty. It’s vital to know yourself as best as you can, and to recognise when your coping mechanisms are starting to do more harm than good.

Dr. Neo said, for example, any medicine should be taken at the correct dose. The same should be said for cave time or any other coping mechanism.

“The behaviour can be a vitamin or you can OD,” she said.

“We need social interaction, otherwise your brain is going to start to interpret neutral faces as dangerous, or as scary,” she added. “There’s nothing wrong with scrolling, but if it takes over your life and you’re not sleeping for days on end, then there’s something wrong”.

So you have to ask yourself what level of behaviour is a vitamin, what level of it is an overdose. That, of course, will be different for everyone.

What these phrases gave me wasn’t exactly a foolproof productivity hack, but the language for the experiences I’d spent years trying to explain.

And once you can name something, it’s often a lot easier to work with it.

I watched a lot of Scrubs when I was a teenager. That was back in the day when you had to own the DVDs, watch re-runs on E4, or download them from Pirate Bay.

It was recently when I decided to binge watch it again — which I haven’t done in at least 15 years — that I realised how much it shaped my personality. A lot of my humour and mannerisms have been gleaned from JD’s tone of voice, including phrases I’ll utter randomly (“Hooch is crazy”, “MISTAAAAAKE”, “Knife wrench! For kids.”)

buy me a coffee :)

It also taught me so much about love, life, and loss that I’ve completely taken for granted.

In some ways, Scrubs hasn’t survived the curse of time and it’s very dated in parts. That’s pretty apparent watching it in 2026. But there’s still a lot that feels painfully relatable in the way it portrays grief, past trauma, insecurity, and complicated feelings for friends who maybe should’ve stayed just friends.

Nostalgia is nostalgia whether it’s problematic in hindsight or not. It doesn’t really care whether something aged well. Returning to a show I used as a comfort blanket during periods when being a teenager felt particularly hard still feels like a warm hug.

That was until Season 2 Episode 10 when something felt off.

In “My Monster,” JD realises he was sabotaging his relationship with the gift shop girl because he really wants Elliot. He walks up to her in the bathroom while she’s brushing her hair and makes a move while “Dreaming of You” by The Coral plays in the background.

The humpy-bumpy song is the perfect companion to the couple clumsily stumbling and kissing around the apartment while they remove each other’s clothes. It’s revered on Reddit and old fan forums as a perfect scene, with the awkwardness only adding to how hot and real it feels.

It had been over a decade since I’d seen that episode and, streaming it on Disney+, I genuinely thought I was in an alternate reality. Because the song wasn’t there anymore. Instead, it was one called “Dirty Minds” by Here Come the Mummies.

Was there an extra scene I’d forgotten? Had I misremembered the order of events?

No. It turns out streamers didn’t have the rights to all the music in Scrubs, so parts of the soundtrack were edited over years later.

Now I’ve noticed it, it’s impossible to ignore. A load of the songs have been changed. That’s particularly weird for someone like me (and I think a lot of people my age) who learned a lot about music from Scrubs.

I was introduced to Colin Hay, Joshua Radin, Say Anything, and so many more because of that show. To this day I can’t hear the opening to “Winter” without welling up.

The whole series feels out of tune now, like I’m revisiting a memory where someone’s subtly rearranged the furniture. Or one of those dreams you have where you’re in a familiar setting but everything looks a bit askew.

Maybe that’s what feels strange about nostalgia in the digital age. You think you’re revisiting the exact same thing, whether it’s an episode, the same song cue, the same emotional rhythm, only to realise the artefact itself has changed.

Streaming makes culture feel permanent because everything is available all the time, but it has also made it strangely fragile. Songs disappear because of licensing deals and entire shows can vanish from platforms overnight.

What unsettles me is that digital culture can mutate our experiences retroactively. The version of Scrubs I’m watching now isn’t quite the same version I watched as a teenager, even though it’s presented to me as identical. The emotional texture has been altered years after my memories were formed.

I don’t want to get too 1984 about it, but what happens to our memories when the scenes we attached to them stop feeling fixed?

It also got me thinking about nostalgia in the digital age more broadly. Something special about that particular kind of memory is that it’s shared to some degree. I think back to the friends I had at 15, how we used to hang around in parks, try our luck at the local corner shop to get a big bottle of WKD Blue, browse MySpace for the perfect profile song, navigate tensions and breakups, and eventually leaving each other to go and drift off into our adult lives.

It’s happy and sad at the same time. And music is the perfect language for that feeling when you don’t quite have the words.

Do teenagers all watch the same TV shows anymore? Regardless of their tastes, are they all aware of the same music? In 20 years, will they look back with a shared fondness for this moment? Or will nostalgia become more fragmented because culture itself is more fragmented — spread across Netflix, Paramount+, Spotify, TikTok, and a thousand other digital spaces all competing for attention at once?

I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad that young people have so much more access to art and culture than we did. But I do wonder whether they’ll lose something too.

Maybe future nostalgia will feel different because the culture surrounding it is different. Less monoculture and more algorithmic rabbit holes where people travel further and further from one another. Fewer universally shared soundtracks and musical journeys.

At the same time, there’s also a kind of digital togetherness now where strangers from around the world can bond over a mutual appreciation for a subculture, subreddit, or niche YouTube channel.

I suspect everyone will still have their own version of this feeling I’m describing: returning to something they once loved years later to find that it’s changed.

The person they were back then, though, will still be there waiting for them.

As a journalist, it’s left unsaid (and largely assumed) what I think about AI. But my feelings are more complicated than simply fearing that it will make my job obsolete.

As a freelancer, most editors ignore my emails. That’s just a fact I’ve had to learn to live with. In a media landscape shaped by shrinking budgets, smaller teams, and a relentless focus on originality, every pitch has to land perfectly to even be considered.

Most of the time, I have no sparring partner when it comes to my ideas. Are they any good? Are they a fit for this publication? Am I onto something, or completely delusional?

AI cannot replace an editor. But it has become useful as a place to speak ideas “out loud” instead of screaming into the email void. A way to turn the nebulous into something more concrete.

It’s also a topic we can’t — or shouldn’t — avoid, even if we do hate it.

Enter Grace Reuben, founder of The AI Girls Club — a community designed to help women better understand AI, its risks, and its growing influence over everyday life.

I first came across Grace on TikTok, where she was discussing the 2026 Stanford AI Index report, which found that entry-level roles are among the jobs most exposed to automation, with women disproportionately represented in many of those positions.

As someone who often writes about the workplace, and who also often feels a bit ignorant about the wider AI conversation, her content was exactly what I was after. Short, digestible explainers about what’s actually happening in AI, beyond the usual buzzwords and panic.

“I think that women have a right to know the whole story, not just what’s considered easy enough for us to understand,” Grace tells me. “This really is our time to be learning, and I just strongly believe that women are being left out.”

@theaigirlsclubThe 2026 Stanford AI Index has confirmed what many people feared. Entry-level jobs in professions most at risk from AI are already being reduced, while mid-career and senior positions have held steady or grown. Women are disproportionately represented in the administrative and service roles most exposed to automation. This is not a future warning. It is already happening… Sources: Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, 2026 AI Index Report, April 13, 2026 / MIT Technology Review, April 13, 2026

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

More than just productivity hacks

Grace’s interest in AI began with a sense of competition. She had a company which helped women with nutrition and fitness, but suspected the majority would soon be turning to AI instead.

From there, she set up an AI-created platform called Bridal Body with an AI coach called Bridie who provides personalised nutrition guidance, workout support, supplement advice, and answers questions.

Grace coded it all from scratch with AI tools like Claude.

“I am the least likely person to code ever,” she said. “And because of that, I realised: if I can do this, other people can too.”

Grace also came to realise that what the tech industry is telling us about AI is very, very different to the way AI is covered in mainstream news. There are flashes of concern with coverage of job losses, cheating in schools, and deepfakes, but Grace believes the broader conversation around regulation and governance remains inaccessible to most people.

“AI is currently less regulated than a sandwich,” she said. “It literally is — there are fewer rules than the food in your fridge.”

The frustration here is that development is accelerating faster than governments can respond. If we let AI get to a place where it’s more intelligent than us, that can’t be reversed.

“Our future is not looking too positive if we don’t raise awareness about the regulations that need to happen,” Grace said. “I don’t want to just build something if I think I’m using technology that could potentially cause harm to people in a few years’ time.”

That concern eventually became the foundation of The AI Girls Club. Grace never set out to be an expert, but to make the conversation feel less exclusionary.

“This is the biggest technological transformation of our lifetime,” she said. “So it’s absolutely bewildering to me to not include women in this conversation.”

There are already plenty of TikTok accounts that focus on how to level up with AI, but fewer which focus on the governance and safety.

“I created [The AI Girls Club] because I felt like women were almost entirely missing from this whole conversation,” Grace said. “And I really want to change that.”

Grace believes AI awareness shouldn’t be reserved for Silicon Valley or the tech industry. It should reach ordinary women too, but in a way that goes beyond branding exercises about “levelling up” and staying competitive.

“AI is moving so fast and it’s moving in such a technical language that most people feel like A, they can’t keep up, or B, it’s just not for them,” she said. “So I’m really trying to close that gap because this is going to affect all of us.”

‘We deserve the whole story’

Most of my own feelings about AI stem from the contradictory information I’ve found in articles or on LinkedIn: you should use it or you’ll fall behind; you should avoid it because it’s dangerous.

“There are those two sentences and it kind of stops there,” Grace agreed. She remembers speaking with her friends and they’d have surface-level conversations about AI, only for the topic to quickly dissolve into something else.

“We go, oh, it might be dangerous. Anyway, what do you want to eat for lunch?” she said. “We’re not dumb. We deserve to have these facts too and really know what’s going on.”

There’s also an unspoken assumption that the only AI risks that women can handle hearing about are deepfakes and job losses.

“Those are serious issues, of course,” Grace says. “But if we’re like, well, women don’t understand bioweapons or mass surveillance, so let’s not include them in the conversation, that’s not fair on anyone.”

Reese Witherspoon came under scrutiny when she posted a video recently warning women that they would get left behind if they didn’t embrace using AI.

For Grace, it missed the mark — but not for the same reasons as many critics. She was frustrated by how narrowly the conversation was framed.

“I don’t think the answer is just use more AI so you don’t fall behind in productivity,” she said. “There’s a lot more going on.”

The girlbossification of AI — where women are encouraged to optimise themselves faster and harder through technology — feels like another demand for constant adaptation disguised as empowerment.

The backlash to Reese Witherspoon’s comments, along with similar messaging from figures like Mel Robbins, Sheryl Sandberg, and Zara Larsson, is interesting in itself. It suggests many women are increasingly not buying that framing.

“I’m getting that a very strong opinion from social media that people do not like AI,” Grace said. “And to be honest, I think that’s great.”

Grace’s concerns extend beyond productivity tools or chatbot etiquette. She worries about surveillance, the power of tech CEOs, and the possibility that humanity may lose control over systems more intelligent than ourselves.

She worries about how improper use may lead to cognitive decline. She thinks about how Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, last year said there’s a 1-in-4 chance AI ends very badly for humanity. If climate scientists warned us there was a 25% of a tsunami hitting tomorrow, would we just ignore them?

“Or would we talk about it, raise awareness, and at least be prepared if that 25% chance ends up being true?” she said. “I really feel like women deserve to have that chance to be prepared too.”

Not all researchers agree with the most catastrophic and existential AI predictions, but concerns around automation, misinformation, the environment, labour disruption, and corporate power are being taken more seriously.

The whole point of The AI Girls Club is to give women a place to start engaging with all of the above and more. Grace wants women to join the conversation there even if — especially if — they disagree with everything she says.

“I really didn’t think that we as a society were going to dislike AI as much as we have, and I’m quite happy with that,” she said. “We don’t have to accept a world where the most powerful technology ever built has no rules.”

The first meet-up for members of The AI Girls Club is happening in June! It’s sold out, but follow Grace on Instagram and TikTok so you don’t miss the next one.

“I just quit my 40% tax bracket corporate job with no job to go to,” says Lauren, a fashion content creator who goes by itsmelaurenv, as she films herself leaving her office for the last time.

“Fuck. Is this the most unhinged thing I’ve ever done? Yes. Do I have any savings? No. I just can’t do it anymore. The corporate world is rotting my brain.”

Something is changing.

buy me a coffee :)

The data isn’t painting the full picture yet. It may not for a while. But culturally, the shift feels real: the corporate girlie — the final evolution of the millennial and Gen Z girlboss raised on hustle culture — is losing her shine.

At least the idea that it’s anything to aspire to is.

It’s not because women aren’t ambitious anymore. Far from it. It’s because ambition, as we were sold it, isn’t delivering.

@itsmelaurenvIs anybody out there actually thriving in the corporate world? 🥴

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Here’s what we do know:

• In global workplace research, 83% of workers say work-life balance matters more than pay.

• A recent CNBC poll found that 45% of women workers feel burned out, with work-life balance explicitly noted as a factor in turnover and dissatisfaction.

• A 2026 report in India deduced that nearly 8 in 10 women would take a lower salary in exchange for the flexibility of working from home.

• In the same data, 83% of women also reported avoiding job applications due to concerns about poor work-life balance.

• According to LinkedIn, about 40% of Gen Zers and millennials would take a pay cut for more flexibility.

• Around 1.1 million UK workers left a job in the year prior to July 2025 due to a lack of flexible working options.

I’m seeing it everywhere: In TikToks filmed from bathroom stalls. In Pilates instructors who used to work in finance. In coffee shop owners with law degrees. I’m seeing it in myself.

It isn’t just about my redundancy (which I’ve spoken about to death). Sometime in the last 12 months I’ve realised that I — like many others — was getting the “corporate ick.”

On social media, some are screaming into the void. “This can’t be it,” they say, as they look forward and anticipate 40+ more years stuck at a desk clicking around a pitch deck, Slack notifications, performance reviews, until they retire. If they ever can.

Others are doing something about it. I spoke with two of them:

Sam Loeffler, a coach and content creator under the handle Sam Beyond Corporate, who helps other people explore alternative paths.

and Charlie Hunter, a self-described corporate dropout on TikTok, who went from brand marketing and corporate comms to freelancing and hasn’t looked back.

From top performer to burnout

Sam worked in corporate for more than 10 years throughout her 20s. She started out in consulting and then brand management, which she thought was her dream job. She was great at it, getting promoted quickly and money followed.

But the more she climbed, the more stress, pressure, and anxiety she felt.

“I was working a lot because I’m someone who cares and goes the extra mile,” Sam told me. “It became all consuming in a really unhealthy way.”

At 30, Sam decided to take a sabbatical. She thought it would by just a few months off, but it turned into her taking a completely new path.

“In that eight months, it was the first time I hadn’t worked since I was 15,” Sam said. “I just used my savings to go on a spiritual journey. I did a lot of reading, reflecting, travelling, and started doing things to gain new skills that aligned more with my interests, trying to explore what am I meant to do, because I knew marketing and corporate just wasn’t it.”

Three years later, she hasn’t looked back. She had been making $180,000 a year, but her freedom and happiness was worth so much more.

While she still took some contracting work to help her find her feet, the plan was to build her way out of corporate life altogether.

Now she’s a full time coach who posts on TikTok and shares her wisdom on her newsletter Life Beyond Corporate.

@lifebeyondcorporateIts a messy beautiful thing. #fyp #corporate #identity #identitycrisis #millennialcareercrisis

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

‘Someone’s lied to us’

Charlie left private wealth management last February after years of climbing. From a large bank to a smaller firm, she found herself wearing “all the hats” for one salary. The burnout had been building for years.

“My biggest thing is I wanted autonomy,” she told me.

Like many high-achieving women, she’d been busy since adolescence: university, work, competitive dance for 14 years. Achievement was default mode.

“Then you get into the workplace and you’re 22 and you’re already burned out,” she said. “By the time we hit 30, we’ve had over a decade of it.”

For millennials and older Gen Zers, there’s an added friction. We watched our parents grind to buy houses and find stability. But that doesn’t feel guaranteed anymore.

“Someone’s lied to us,” Charlie said. “They said, as long as you have that good job, life will take care of you. It worked for the generations before us, and they sold us this vision, but everything’s changing. So I think that’s why people are just like, screw this.”

On the flip side, people are living longer — and not always in ways that look dignified or fulfilling.

Charlie’s grandmother is 103, which gives her an added insight.

“You just realise that life can be really long,” she said. “You want to be able to use these years so that at the end it’s like, oh, I’m so happy with everything I did. I didn’t waste it.”

Charlie can’t picture 50 years chained to a desk. The 8am starts. The 6pm finishes. The constant “on call” expectation. The glorification of being available at all hours and weekends. At some point, she realised no paycheque was worth that trade.

“That’s kind of a crazy feeling to have where you’re like, wow, I don’t care,” she said.

“I just knew that climbing the ladder, I could make X amount, but I would be married to whatever company I’m working for. And I thought, if I’m already working 24 7, I may as well do this for myself.”

@itscharliehunterep. 3 Corporate Dropout Diaries ✨ quitting your job is a huge mindset shift. Do these things first before you leave. #corporatedropout #corporatedropoutdiaries #careerchange #careercrisis #fyp

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

No more grinding for someone else’s dream

Now when Charlie works long hours — and she does — it’s on her terms. It’s her time, nobody else’s.

This is something that struck me when going freelance too. I don’t feel like I’m cheating myself or wasting my time when I stay up late for a call or to polish a draft. I was doing that as a staff journalist at times anyway. But now, it’s my choice. It’s all about what I put in to get out. And that is very freeing.

Best of all, nobody is looking over your shoulder. If you want a day off because of menstrual cramps or you’re just not mentally with it, that’s your prerogative.

Explaining any of that to a boss can feel so inhuman, even if you have a great manager.

“They forget so much of what actually being human is like,” Charlie said. “And I get it. They have to run a business. I understand that we have to make money to do X, Y, Z. But it’s just so rigid in a lot of these corporate places that just doesn’t allow for any humanness to come through.”

Sam thinks there has been a shift in what people expect too — a new wave of thinking. Our parents and grandparents largely had the feeling that work isn’t supposed to be particularly enjoyable, but you “grin and bear it” anyway.

“You can call it consciousness evolving or people just awakening,” she said. “But there’s an aspect of people wanting more out of life.”

People aren’t against working, but they want to be off the 60-hour a week treadmill. They want to have meaning and do something with their lives they can be proud of.

“When you’re in this corporate insanity bubble and your work’s also not having any impact, you go crazy,” Sam said. “For better or worse, I feel like once you become aware of some of this stuff, it’s like you can’t unsee it.”

For Charlie, the first eight months working for herself were hard. She ripped through her savings (again, hard relate from me!) and she felt uneasy at times. But she kept telling herself this is what she prepared for. This is why she saved. She’s put a support net in place — she just had to trust it.

“There’s some scary months, but now I’ve gotten to this point where I feel so aligned, everything is starting to come through,” she said.

Charlie leaned into her spiritual learnings to remind herself to appreciate the journey and stay present to really soak in what she was doing.

“Maybe it’s the millennial thing, we’ve just been so trained to be achievers that we forget it’s OK to rest,” Charlie said.

“You’re allowed to, you are worthy of that. You don’t have to be proving yourself all the time to be worthy,” she said. “You are worthy because you exist.”

For a generation raised to believe worth had to be earned, that might be the most radical career advice of all.