When my grandmother fell pregnant with her first child, her mother gave her a pail of eggs to sell at the nearest market so that she could gather some cash to buy baby clothes.

My gran was embarrassed at the idea that she’d be the only new mother in the hospital with a newborn wrapped in bits of cloth. So she walked the 10km round trip to the market to sell the eggs from the farm and buy a couple of baby items. When she dressed my uncle in them in the hospital, she said she felt proud.

I’ve been thinking about this recently, and about how much the concept of enough has changed in the space of three generations.

I was born in communist Romania in 1988, a year before the regime fell. I first came to the UK in the early 90s and was raised in an ex-mining village just outside Rotherham. The question of how much money is enough is one that’s been asked by successive generations in my family.

My maternal grandparents grew up in the countryside and were subsistence farmers. Both left school aged 12 and worked until their mid-20s on their respective family farms, growing crops and livestock for food and clothing. For many years they traded in goods rather than money.

Eventually, the land they’d called home for generations was absorbed into a collective farm as the communist government collectivised agriculture. The collective, though, was not the fair utopia it had been billed as, and they would often take more than was being produced, leaving the rural workers with nothing to eat.

My grandma and grandpa packed up a few belongings and moved to a town some hours away where my grandpa got a job in a mine. My grandma’s parents didn’t want her to leave but, as she once said to me, “What was the alternative, stay and starve?”

For them, ‘enough’ meant sufficient food to feed the family.

For my mother, ‘enough’ meant something else. As capitalism took hold in Romania she found herself emigrating for the chance to build a more prosperous life. ‘Enough’ meant more than mere survival.

And for me, it means something different still. I suppose, like most millennials, I grew up believing it wasn’t enough to earn well and have a nice house, you should also ‘follow your dream’ - a concept which has become problematic as economic conditions have worsened over the course of this century.

My grandparents wanted enough to live on. My mother wanted enough to build a better life. I grew up expecting work to provide both those things, as well as a sense of purpose. Increasingly, though, as the working world tilts on its axis, I’ve been wondering whether I can afford to ask so much of it.

I was seeing some friends recently. I count myself as lucky because I have extremely talented and clever friends, many of whom earn five to ten times what I do. Yes, actually five to ten.

Growing up, my parents worked minimum wage jobs, in a factory and a shop, respectively, and sometimes money was tight. Now, I would consider myself comfortably middle class. Not in the same league as some, but I can afford many of the trappings of a middle-class life. I live in London, I buy £5 pastries at the weekend and can afford to go out for dinner when I want to. By so many standards, I feel rich.

What I don’t have is the same kind of financial cushion as my friends - the kind that allows me to make decisions without worrying about the consequences. I have some savings and I try to put something aside each month. But often my bank account runs to zero and I have basically no pension to speak of. Right now I can afford the life I have but I wonder about its precarity.

My friends made specific choices which have brought them to where they are today. They followed career paths which may not have been their ‘dream’ careers but which fulfilled other needs: security, options, the ability to plan. As 40 looms, I’m beginning to appreciate how much those things matter.

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I don’t think this is just a case of toxic comparison-ism. It’s not that I covet their cars and houses but I suppose I envy their security; I want to feel that the life I’m building won’t be easily knocked off course by whatever crisis or revolution comes next.

I assumed that if I worked hard at something I cared about, I’d eventually have both the satisfaction of doing meaningful work and the security of a comfortable life. Now, I wonder whether the two are mutually exclusive (for all but a lucky few).

Given the various upheavals of my childhood - moving to a new country where I knew no one and didn’t speak the language, being poor, being unhomed - perhaps there is no cash amount that will ever make me feel truly safe and insulated from the shocks of the future. But there is something about this moment in particular that plays on my mind.

For a long time, despite earning very little, I felt secure enough because I am resourceful and not precious - I would take any work to make ends meet. That fact remains true but the circumstances have changed, the work itself seems increasingly less available and my resourcefulness less reliable.

It’s not just my industry that feels unstable; jobs losses are being felt across many facets of the employment market as companies turn to AI. I see people drawing comparisons with the Industrial Revolution, arguing that ultimately more jobs were created and lives were improved - all of which may be true for future generations, but it offers little comfort to those whose livelihoods are destroyed in the transition.

Looking at my daughter, I wonder what the next half-century will bring. What will she need? What opportunities will be available to her, and what will they cost?

My grandmother walked ten kilometres to sell those eggs to give her baby something she couldn’t otherwise afford. She wanted dignity, not just survival. My mother left her country in the hope of giving her child - me - a more prosperous future. To them money represented choice and freedom from fear.

I grew up with that freedom and chose to pursue a career I cared about and for a long time I saw that as progress.

Now, with a daughter of my own, I find myself wondering whether I’ve made the right choices so that I can offer her that same freedom.

I have some new followers who are here because I put a call for pitches out. Hi to you all.

The reason I put that call out is because part of my job is to find and commission human interest and personal stories, particularly ones that might spark conversation.

I suppose I also put the call out because I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that exchange.

I was a freelance writer for a long time and, honestly, I loved it. I loved the freedom and the variety; I loved the fact that I could make a living from following my curiosity. But as I got older the economics became increasingly difficult to ignore.

If you’ll allow me a small flex, the month that I took my staff job at The Telegraph, I had a 4,000-word feature published in The Guardian, a 2,000-word feature in The Sunday Times News Review, and pieces in various magazines (ELLE, UnHerd, Vogue etc).

In many ways, it was one of the most successful months of my career. I had been sending out pitches and grinding out copy for over a decade to get to a point where my articles were appearing in the publications I most admired.

The problem was, even at that career high point, I wasn’t exactly raking it in. The rates I was being paid had not gone up for many years. In fact, most publications were tightening budgets; they were commissioning less or asking for more while paying the same. The economics of the whole thing seemed off.

The twin spectres of AI and the collapse of the traditional media business model, hovered over an industry that already seemed like it was held together by the goodwill of people who were prepared to work for less than they were worth.

All of which is an extremely long preamble to my main point, which is that I get how hard it can be to eke out a living from writing, and how dispiriting it can be when you try and try and hear nothing back.

I started working in this industry in 2012, I went freelance for the first time in 2017. Over the years, whenever I’ve been in a position to commission people, I’ve always tried to spread the wealth. So while I’ve got some budget at my disposal, I’m determined to help some of you get published.

I’ve already commissioned a few of you! What these pitches had in common were unique insights into unique situations. Each one made me think ‘huh, I’ve never heard of this before’ or ‘wow I wonder how this person felt after that happened’ or some such.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s what actually makes me say yes to a pitch, and why I sometimes say no.

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I can tell when you haven’t read the publication

I can usually tell fairly early on whether someone has read the paper. Often, the idea may be perfectly serviceable but totally wrong for The Telegraph. Equally, the best pitches I get are ones where the writer clearly knows the readership, and their idea is tailored to suit that readership’s interests.

So, this is a fairly basic piece of advice but if you’re about to pitch a story, it’s always worth reading through the other stories that the publication has published recently. Can you see your story fitting into this stable? If so, why?

The vertical I commission for is here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/real-life/

When I was freelance I would re-write my pitches depending on who I was sending them to. You don’t have to subscribe to every single publication to keep abreast of what is being commissioned - I use Readly, it’s an app and for £12.99 a month you can read the most recent issues (as well as all back issues) of every magazine and newspaper from Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harpers Bazaar to The Guardian, Observer (and all the weekend supplements).

At the very least I’d scroll through to make sure I wasn’t pitching an idea that was too similar to something they’d just published.

(This is not a paid ad for Readly and I will earn absolutely nothing if you click on that link).

I want to be able to see the headline

When you’re pitching you’re effectively trying to get an editor to imagine what your article will look like in print (or on a screen, you know what I mean) and a big part of that is the headline. The one on your pitch will almost certainly not be the headline that is used on the final story but it gives the editor an idea of what you think the main thrust of the piece is.

I prefer straightforward headlines over mysterious ones. ‘My life was changed for the better the day my mother died’ is more interesting to me than ‘meditations on a mother’s passing’. Perhaps the former sounds callous but if that’s the point you’re getting at in your piece, it’s best to just be upfront about it.

Something needs to surprise me

A good question to ask yourself is ‘what’s the consequence?’ - and the answer will also help you formulate your headline.

I get a lot of pitches that are like ‘this thing happened to me’ (for instance, ‘I did no work for a year’) which is fine, but an experience isn’t necessarily a story, I need to know what happened as a result of your experience - what happened/ what you discovered/ what surprised you.

‘I did no work for a year’ might become ‘I did no work for a year and no one noticed’.

This latter headline is the title of a Substack that I bought earlier this year. It wasn’t pitched to me, I just came across it - but it’s a good example of how an experience can become a compelling story.

You’ve got an event followed by an unexpected outcome - and that outcome raises many questions about the nature of work, productivity etc.

Sometimes I get pitches where the consequence is simply too predictable. ‘My wife left me and it ruined my life’ for instance. The problem here is that even while it’s huge and significant experience, as a reader, I don’t see what the article will tell me that I don’t already know.

‘My wife left me and I realised I had no friends of my own’, on the other hand, suggests a potentially interesting story about marriage and loneliness.

If, once you’ve worked out the ‘consequence’ part of your headline you realise it’s all just a bit predictable, then perhaps you just need to reframe your story.

A good question to ask yourself is ‘and then what?’

‘I gave up social media for six months’

And then what?

‘I became happier’

And then what?

‘I realised that social media wasn’t making me unhappy, it was disguising how lonely I was.’

That could be something.

I need to know what the actual story is

You don’t need to go into masses of detail in your pitch but it’s useful to include a few bullet points of what you’d cover / who you’d speak to and what conclusions you’d come to.

Be specific! For instance, if the main thrust of your article on the cultural ascendency of Stroud is about three events that happened in the past six months, then I want to know what the events are, who was there and why they’ve made Stroud so culturally relevant.

I almost never commission a piece where the writer is offering to ‘explore’ something - you sort of need to have explored it all already so that your idea is fully formed.

(Btw I’ve never been to Stroud but I hear great things).

I need a reason to publish it now

I get a lot of pitches that are like ‘this amazing / horrific thing happened to my grandmother’. I am specifically looking for family saga stories, so I like to read these but where they tend to fall down is that it’s not clear why the story is relevant now.

Is the astounding thing that happened to your granny somehow echoing in your life right now? If so, how? Or is the astounding thing that happened to your granny part of a major investigation / public inquiry / being used as part of a political campaign? Readers will often be like ‘why is this relevant to me in this moment?’ so it’s worth asking yourself that question when you’re pitching.

This goes for almost any pitch regardless of the subject matter. It should be clear why it’s important to publish your story now. Are there new stats which make it relevant? Are you riffing off a news story you’ve just seen? For instance, a news story about a rise in church vandalism might make the perfect hook for a report on how your local community banded together to catch church vandals (I would actually really like to commission something like this!)

Tell me something I haven’t heard before

If you’ve managed to find and interview a completely astounding person who has never appeared in another publication, that’s really attractive to an editor. Equally, if you’re pitching something that has been covered lots of times, what is your unique perspective?

If your story relies on you getting an interview with a specific person, I would probably get in touch with them before you pitch to see if they’re open to being interviewed. If they are, include that in your pitch - ‘I’ve already spoken to XXX and they’d be happy to be featured’.

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Sometimes I say no to good ideas

Ultimately, journalism isn’t just an exercise in creative writing. You’re providing a service to the reader. It’s something I always keep in mind when commissioning. A ‘no’ isn’t necessarily a reflection on the quality of your work. More often, it’s about whether I think what you’re selling is something our readers want to buy.

You might have written a brilliant pitch, but if I can’t imagine our readers clicking on the headline, it’s probably not going to get commissioned. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, it might just be the wrong idea for that particular publication.

So try not to take rejection too personally. And don’t assume that a ‘no’ from one editor means the idea isn’t worth pursuing elsewhere.

I was watching the Hulu documentary about the early 00s reality series The Swan. ‘Ugly duckling’ contestants were put through a battery of plastic surgeries (as well as punishing diet and exercise programmes) so as to be transformed into beautiful ‘swans’. They were also offered life coaching, which mainly seemed to consist of the show’s creator - Nelly - telling them that, despite all her efforts, they were still fat and ugly.

The documentary was, essentially, entertaining - your usual ‘accountability doc’ fare, attempting to prise contrition from the hardened executives who made the show 20 years ago, while rehashing the gory, humiliating details that made it compelling in the first place. As you might expect, however, there was little contrition to be found among its makers. Nelly refused to be interviewed.

The one plastic surgeon who agreed to be in the show was essentially Teflon to the very idea of accountability. With the emotional intelligence of a bedpost, he could not see what the issue was, even when confronted with footage of the distraught ‘swans’. Reflecting on his consultation with a contestant who had spent her life feeling ‘less than’ because of burn scars, he conceded that he might handle things differently now — but only because getting a dog later in life had taught him empathy.

Anyway, none of that is really my point. What struck me was that, even as the documentary invited us to feel horrified (and I was horrified because these women were abused for the sake of a reality show) I found myself thinking that, if The Swan were offered today, plenty of people would still take part.

For all our pearl-clutching over shows like this, plastic surgery has been normalised to the point that it is barely seen as a medical intervention. A tweak here, a nip and tuck there? That’s just basic self-care. Remove half an eyelid and re-stitch your face? It’s empowerment baby.

Perhaps it would be packaged more elegantly now - in the language of wellness and self-actualisation, with better aftercare - but if they ran the same advert today, offering people the chance to be ‘worked on’ by LA’s best surgeons and become their ‘best selves’, they would be fighting them off with a stick. And it would be worse now because the contestants would come armed with a working knowledge of every procedure available to them, and probably a pinterest board full of inspo pictures.

We keep looking back at the horrors of the noughties, and many writers of my generation (myself included!) have made a healthy living out of revisiting just how awful it was - and how much trauma we all carry as a result. It was pretty gross, to be fair. Anything above a size 6 was considered fat. That shit stays with you.

But imagine the material the accountability documentaries of the future will have to work with…

I commissioned an article for the newspaper I work at, about Rachel Cusk’s upcoming novel. Rumours in literary circles are that the book is about Natalie Portman, who is a friend of Cusk’s.

In the book, a writer offers to author the autobiography of a famous actress. By the end of the process, the actress feels quite affronted by how she’s portrayed in the autobiography.

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The novel makes the actress - whose life story has lots in common with that of Natalie Portman - seem like a kind of empty vessel who struggles to feel love and cannot engage with the world in the same way as the rest of us, because of her fame and beauty.

For the article I commissioned (read it here) the journalist managed to track down some people who know Portman, who could give us an insight into how she feels about the rumours that the unflattering book is about her.

What they said was that it’s not about her and even if it was she wouldn’t give a fuck because there are more important things going on in the world.

Fair enough.

A few days later she announced she was pregnant. So she really isn’t an empty vessel.

I love Rachel Cusk because her writing is so extraordinary. I get to the end of every page and want to re-read it just to properly absorb it. Equally, her books don’t grip me and I rarely finish them in a single stretch, if at all.

I’m reading the new one now. It’s great! I’ll probably never finish it.

BODY: Bad cervix

Having had one premature baby, I would prefer never to do it again. Sitting next to the incubator staring at this tiny fragile life thinking “please don’t die”. Making deals with a god you’re not even sure you believe in, about how you’ll stop going on benders and stop being rude to your mum, how you’ll start going to church and give more to charity, if he promises, please please, to just let this baby be okay.

I don’t know if I can face that again. This week, though, I came across several new pieces of research which look at the impact that c-sections can have on your future fertility.

My first child came early after my waters broke spontaneously. This means I’m already at higher risk of having another premature baby (don’t ask me why, it’s just statistics). Added to that, I had an emergency c-section - a procedure which I thought was safe, and uncomplicated but which, it now transpires, was neither.

The procedure - for various reasons - was administered when I was 9cm dilated (10cm is full dilation, when the baby moves into the birth canal). New research by the birth charity Tommy’s shows that the later in your labour you have a c-section, the more likely it is to leave scarring on your cervix. And people who have c-sections at full dilation (10cm), have a significantly increased risk of having a pre-term birth the next time they have a baby.

Basically, to carry the baby, your cervix has to stay closed. The scarring left from a late stage c-section can mean that the cervix can’t stay closed through your second or third trimesters. You could find yourself miscarrying at 19 or 20 weeks; or having a baby barely into your third trimester which will live for the first months of its life on the NICU ward.

The former experience was documented by the journalist Ariel Levy in her book The Rules Do Not Apply, who gave birth to her son at 19 weeks in a hotel room, while on an assignment in Mongolia. She writes how she held him in her hands and watched him die.

Even with the best medical care, a baby born at 19 weeks cannot survive outside of the womb. I remember reading the book years ago, when it first came out, feeling devastated by her account but detached from it completely. Now, it hurts just thinking about what that poor woman experienced.

There was a very moving article in The Times, written by Cathy Adams - ‘Did my c-section ruin my fertility?’ - about new research showing that scarring left from c-sections also impacts your likelihood of being able to conceive the next time you try.

As she writes: “Women are warned of myriad risks before they choose to have the procedure — blood clots, organ damage, uterine rupture — but the official Nice guidelines do not mention an impact on future fertility, which to me now seems outrageous. I was cautioned only to try to wait 18 months before having another child, to give my uterine wall time to recover. What no one mentioned was that the c-section could cause a defect in my womb that might bring about secondary infertility.”

C-sections are often framed, culturally, as the easier option for those who are “too posh to push”; a medicalised birth that skips the hard parts of labour. But you’re cutting through multiple layers of tissue in someone’s abdomen, and that tissue doesn’t always heal cleanly, and that the consequences can follow you into pregnancies you haven’t even decided whether you want yet.

Why does no one tell us? In her article, Adams points out that “C-sections are now the most common means of birth in the UK”, I wonder how many women are truly aware of the implications. I know I certainly wasn’t. Now, if I wanted another child, I’d have to factor into the decision making process the very real possibility that scarring from my first birth means I won’t carry that child to term.

SCROLL: Ariana Grande cba

Ariana Grande really doesn’t want us to talk about her body, to the point that she’d rather remove herself from the public arena (i.e. she “will be taking a step back from visibility” when her tour ends, since her appearances have led to “endless, ongoing public scrutiny”) than have to address it any more. Unfortunately, her thinness is quite hard to overlook. I understand that celebrities get sick of answering the same questions but sometimes they’re really the only questions we’re interested in knowing the answers to.

The most interesting thing I’ve read on it, though, is a piece in The Conversation, about the difference between scrutiny and concern.

The psychologist Vivienne Lewis writes: Scrutiny begins with appearance, while concern begins with wellbeing. Scrutiny asks, “What does this person look like?” Concern asks, “How is this person coping?”...Many people defend comments about a celebrity’s appearance by saying they’re simply expressing concern…Before saying anything, ask yourself: am I commenting on this person’s body, or am I checking in on the person? That shift, from appearance to wellbeing, can completely change how your concern is received.”

No point in furthering the discourse other than saying that I hope whatever is going on with her, that she’s okay and has good people around her.

I was walking home the other day, pushing the buggy, child asleep, or feigning sleep. I just read Down the Drain, the Julia Fox memoir and was thinking about why I liked it so much. It was a very entertaining read. It was incredibly well reviewed when it came out in 2023 but I only just got round to it.

In the meantime - between the book’s publication, and me reading it - I had a baby. I think that has added to my experience of it. What struck me the other day in particular is the fact that Julia Fox touched the void, and then she became a mother. And I’ve never read that experience before.

I can’t tell you exactly what the void is because everyone experiences it differently, but I guess for me, the void is the knowledge that everything is meaningless. Every action and every being; all the silly joys or petty grievances we harbour, all the crap we buy to express our individuality. All the things we think are important but which aren’t, because we are not important. That is the void.

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I felt the void most acutely in my later twenties and early thirties. I felt like wow, okay, everything is meaningless, how do I live with that knowledge?

Now, imagine being a mother while also knowing the void.

Mothers are meaning-makers. They build bodies with their bodies, and then they build worlds for those bodies to inhabit. Mothers create rules and boundaries so that children can grow-up believing that the world is safe and legible.

And you have to do that despite knowing that everything is meaningless; and without showing that you know that everything is meaningless, because children shouldn’t be confronted with the void until they are robust enough to face it on their own.

I’ve read about people who are forced to confront the void because they become mothers - but Fox’s book is one of the first that felt like a portrait of a person who stood on the precipice of the void, and went on to become a mother while also knowing that the void was there.

Another book that I read recently, that also engaged with the void, was Jem Calder’s I Want You to be Happy. This has been touted as the book of the summer and I took it on holiday with me, thinking it might be a jolly book for the poolside.

It was not. It was incredibly bleak. The void there is to do with capitalism. I want to say something clever about it but it’d be too much of a stretch right now.

Even though it was bleak, I was gripped from start to finish so I would recommend this book, particularly if you’re trying to wean yourself off TikTok (which, avid followers of this blog - all three of you - will know is one of my worst vices).

BODY: Polynucleotides only work half the time

I had these injections under my eyes. Salmon sperm DNA to make my under eye area brighter (!!)

I don’t know if it has worked - but the doctor who administered the injections (which FYI hurt a lot) told me she didn’t rate them.

She said that the companies who make polynucleotides have mounted an incredibly effective marketing campaign, targeted particularly at millennials (“lots of girls your age”) but that in her experience they only work on about 50 per cent of people. For the other 50 per cent, it’s a waste of money. She said I should let her know if it’s worked.

I can’t tell, if I’m honest, which might imply that I fall into the ‘waste of money’ camp.

And my under eyes ended up all blobby and strange for a number of days afterwards. I blamed it on hay fever, which I’ve never had.

SCROLL: I had a job interview

I had an interview last week for a new job at the same company I’m currently working for. I was shaking, I think from the adrenaline. I think I would be good at the job so I wasn’t scared of being caught out. I was nervous and wanted to effectively communicate my rightness for the job but I’m not sure why that made me quiver and shake.

I tried to stop myself from doing it because I thought it probably seems unprofessional, to be quivering like a leaf, despite the fact that the questions you’re being asked are fair and straight forward. I don’t know if the interviewer noticed, but if she did, she didn’t mention it, so at least there’s that.

Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model arrived on Netflix this week, part of a peculiar modern genre - the accountability documentary - in which we package 15 years of collective complicity into a tidy three-part indictment and aim it squarely at one person, in this case, Tyra Banks.

The doc is a behind-the-scenes account of the reality show’s tw…

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When I was born, and for the first five or six years of my life, I had a different name - different first name, different surname. Then when I came to England, both were Anglicised. I took my stepfather’s name, Jones.

At that point I had two aliases: the name I was born with and the name it was changed to. As I got older and accrued more official documentation - passports, driver’s licenses - the aliases multiplied. The middle name on my birth certificate appeared on some documents and not others. Different parts of my names were spliced together in different combinations. I became a palimpsest of bureaucratic identities, none of them quite adding up to a coherent person.

The surname on my birth certificate is the name of my father, who left when I was three - a violent man. We speak maybe twice a year; for many years we didn’t speak at all. Jones is my stepfather’s name. He raised me, but he died when I was nineteen. He was also a violent man, and an alcoholic.

Having multiple aliases was only once a problem. It was my last day of university and I was sitting outside one of the bars at Leeds Student Union. The day was balmy and close, clouds keeping the heat in, a ferocious sun breaking through every hour or so. I was drunk and dry-mouthed. The future was everywhere - spooling out in every direction.

My mum called to say my British passport renewal application had been rejected. None of my aliases matched - the name on my application was not the name on my driver’s license, and neither was the name on my birth certificate. My citizenship documentation listed all my names in a jumble, as if two people had sat side by side, linked arms, and written their different names on the same dotted line. She told me I’d need to call the passport office. I panicked, though I can’t remember what I said, only her response: “Calm down, they can’t just take your passport away. It’s an administrative thing.”

I called immediately and spoke to a very nice woman. It was, really, just an administrative thing. She told me I had to pick a name for myself and stick to it on all official documentation. Otherwise, I would have to go by all five names listed on my citizenship papers - how mortifying. I chose Alexandra Jones.

I have no strong connection to this name, or to any of my names. The act of choosing should have felt significant maybe, but it didn’t. I was drunk and picked Alexandra Jones the way you might pick a password - arbitrarily, under mild duress, with no particular attachment to the outcome.

I had been known as Alex Jones since school, and at university. I lost the middle name. Lost all the others too - including the one my family in Romania still uses for me. No big deal. It was simply the configuration of my various names that seemed least likely to cause further administrative problems.

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I was thinking recently about my immigration status. I received British citizenship around thirty years ago - I can’t remember when exactly, or how. I assume my mother filled in forms and I was taken to meet various bureaucrats in grey rooms in Manchester or London. If I was made to take a test, I don’t remember it.

Often, I forget that I’m not, actually, English - or rather, that I wasn’t born here and didn’t speak the language when I started school. It is a privilege to forget, given that there are people who are born and raised in this country, who have never called any other place home, who are made to feel alien because of their race or religion. I am allowed to forget because I am white and pass so thoroughly as English; not just English but Home Counties English - the cradle of middle-class, ruddy-faced, inoffensive Englishness.

Someone said that recently, that they thought I was from the Home Counties. I think they meant it as an insult, but I don’t really care. At some point in my twenties, I realised that I am basically a void, a blank space onto which people project whatever they want. Sometimes, when I tell them I started life in another country, they say “yeah, I can see that,” and I think: no, you can’t. What you see is permission to retroactively construct a narrative that was never there to begin with.

That void is probably to be expected. Identity is supposed to be built on continuity - of place, of family, of name. But when your name keeps changing, when the thread that’s meant to connect you to your past is cut and reknotted so many times that you can’t trace it back to any origin that feels true, it’s a little more tricky.

I’ve been thinking about this because Jim Ratcliffe recently told Sky News that Britain is being ‘colonised by immigrants,’ citing wildly inaccurate population figures. And I thought, like me? I guess I am one of those. Was he talking about me?

I wonder if my status as an immigrant matters, materially speaking. If I can pass completely undetected, can I even call myself an immigrant? I am part of the statistics, without a doubt.

Ratcliffe - who moved his billions to Monaco to avoid British taxes - wants immigrants to either disappear or leave. Nigel Farage, whom Ratcliffe praised, has made a career of demanding that immigrants ‘integrate’ while simultaneously marking anyone who looks or sounds foreign as perpetually suspect.

I did integrate. I learned English, took an English name. I pass so completely as English that I have become illegible even to myself.

My whiteness grants me a kind of camouflage, but underneath there is no solid ground - just shifting names, fragmented documents, a self assembled from administrative compromises. It’s possible that people project onto me because there is nothing stable enough to resist projection.

This isn’t some big trauma, I feel lucky, I can be whatever I want. I grew up poor in the north but can code-switch fluently enough to pass among the very upper of the middle classes. My whiteness, my unplaceable accent, my unremarkable name - these are the papers that matter more than any official document. They grant me passage through a country that has become increasingly hostile to people who look like they might not belong, even when they do.

3

When it came to naming our baby my boyfriend asked if I didn’t feel like she should have my last name too. It was a nice gesture, he was trying to be considerate of my feelings. Of course I said no - this fake name, the baggage that comes with it. I no longer speak to my stepfather’s family. The Joneses. It would have been absolutely arbitrary.

My boyfriend meanwhile is close to his family, who are wonderful, and his name means something to him. It is nice that our daughter has his name and is part of something that goes back many generations.

Because we don’t share a surname, whenever I take her out of the country - to visit my family in Romania, for instance - I have to travel with her birth certificate, which lists me - well, Alexandra Jones - as her mother.

It’s a small bureaucratic inconvenience but it is understandable. Every time I am stopped at passport control and asked to show her birth certificate, I think about the fact that my boyfriend does not have to perform this ritual. When he travels with our daughter, no one questions whether she’s his. The shared surname is enough. But I am tethered to that birth certificate, to the documentary proof that Alexandra Jones is her mother, even though Alexandra Jones is an alias I created for the sake of paperwork.

I’ve been feeling stuck and uninspired for a while. The baby - not really a baby any more, she talks and has teeth, but also not not a baby - has been ill. And then I was ill. It wasn’t bad, just endless and inconvenient. The weather has been grey, I’m sure you’ve seen. Work has been work. Individually, these things don’t usually have the power to derail me - but taken together, the accumulated weight of many tiny, inconvenient miseries have left me feeling particularly blah.

I have ordered a SAD lamp.

I do my best to give motherhood the good PR it deserves but like all things, it is not unremitting joy. What I have resented in the past couple of days is that being mother often comes down to completing a huge amount of mundane tasks; back to back, 24 hours a day, forever, wiping noses, arses, surfaces etc. I listened to a podcast about 18-year-old women in America’s deep south who dream of living a ‘trad life’ and felt a kind of preemptive schadenfreude for them, like ‘you just wait…’

Of course, life with a child is punctuated by moments of dazzling joy but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I spend a lot of time performing the same repetitive actions, reading the same children’s books, three or more times in the same day. On holiday in the summer someone said that I must struggle with how repetitive it is and no one has ever said that to me before but it’s entirely true. I feel frustrated and crave novelty.

One of the biggest learnings about parenthood is that you don’t become altruistic if you weren’t before. Making personal sacrifices, even if it’s for your kid, is still hard. I genuinely believed that as soon as you had a child you stopped feeling it - as if the child acted like an anaesthetic to the pain of not doing exactly what you want to do at any given moment. Turns out that’s not the case. I mean, it’s not like I would have done anything noteworthy. I would most likely have watched 29 hours of Gilmore Girls.

Regardless, I got into a funk thinking about all the freedom I had before, that I could go anywhere and do whatever. That I went on holiday with a stranger more than once. That one of those strangers ended up being my boyfriend for two years.

I revisited the piece I wrote about the holiday we booked 12 hours after we met while I was in my funk and it quickly cured me of any yearning for a time when I could book a flight with a stranger. The holiday was fractious, to say the least. The article I wrote about it a few years later, though, did pretty well.

Here it is with some nice sunny photos, to ward off the grey etc.

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I Went On Holiday With A Man I’d Known For 12 Hours

Dusty Rome, in mid August. Thirty-eight degrees and nowhere to hide from the relentless sun. The shadows have shrunk back to hug the buildings. We lean against the warm wall of our hotel, trying to decide where to go. We are both nursing dry-mouthed hangovers and the heat feels like a living thing, a swarm. It surrounds us, pressing in. The streets are mostly deserted but for men on scooters who buzz past, loud and threatening like wasps.

“Lunch first?” he suggests. I nod.

This is romance, I tell myself. I am in Rome (where the word was invented) with this man who is...well, at this point I’m not sure exactly who he is. Sweat pools at the base of my spine and trickles down my legs.

Dusty Rome, in mid August. Thirty-eight degrees and nowhere to hide from the relentless sun. The shadows have shrunk back to hug the buildings. We lean against the warm wall of our hotel, trying to decide where to go. We are both nursing dry-mouthed hangovers and the heat feels like a living thing, a swarm. It surrounds us, pressing in. The streets are mostly deserted but for men on scooters who buzz past, loud and threatening like wasps.

“Lunch first?” he suggests. I nod.

This is romance, I tell myself. I am in Rome (where the word was invented) with this man who is...well, at this point I’m not sure exactly who he is. Sweat pools at the base of my spine and trickles down my legs.

Earlier I’d sat on our bed and watched him try on shirts. “Why did you bring so many shirts?” I asked. “Packed quickly,” he replied, trying on another. I hadn’t brought much – two dresses, a pair of shorts, a few T-shirts. He’d hung six shirts in the wardrobe the night before (checked, plain, florals). This morning I spotted more in his bag.

“We’re only here for six days,” I said. He looked at me in the mirror and shrugged before trying on another.

I felt, for a second, unmoored. Why was I here? Then I remembered: romance.

We’d met two weeks before at the wedding of mutual friends in the rolling Italian countryside. I was newly single and had just quit my full-time job to go freelance. For the first time in my adult life, I had no one to answer to. We chatted, then went back to my room. By the time I threw him out at 6am, we’d covered the basics (where we grew up, what we did, hobbies) and we’d had sex.

“James is nice, isn’t he?” I said to my friend when I woke up. “I think his name is Sam,” she corrected. Later that day, he offered my friends and I a lift to the airport.

On that journey our plan was hatched: we’d come back in a week, he’d show me Rome. “I love Rome...it’ll be really fun,” he said. And what better way to exploit my newfound freedom than spending six days in a European city with a man whose name I wasn’t sure of six hours earlier?

We both took it at face value that a holiday with a relative stranger would, at worst, make for a hilarious story in years to come. It made sense in a way. If apps have boiled down the complex business of dating to four flattering photos and a two-line bio, why can’t intimacy be fast-tracked by a spontaneous week in a foreign country?

It took about 13 hours for us to realise that we might, actually, hate each other. (Which I guess is intimate in a way; it takes many couples years to reach this point.)

The Cambridge English dictionary defines spontaneity as “the quality of being natural rather than planned in advance”; sitting on the bed that morning I thought about how this holiday felt unplanned but also, somehow, unnatural.

On the street we start walking to somewhere. Neither of us is sure where, exactly, just that when we see what we’re looking for, we’ll know. He slips his hand into mine, intertwining our fingers. I allow the gesture to stand but it feels awkward.

Do you hold hands with someone you barely know? I can tell that he feels awkward too but we go on. A trickle of sweat runs down my arm, over my wrist and between our two palms. They squelch together for a few more seconds before I silently take my hand back.

We find a place to eat and eat pasta, because it is Rome. We order wine and by 3pm are drunk again. We talk about our lives and relationships. He says I’m arrogant. I say it’s no wonder he’s been single for five years.

Back into the heat we amble between the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Galleria Borghese. Rome is beautiful and exhausting; by early evening the wine buzz has worn off and I cannot be bothered to make more conversation. He suggests another landmark, I sit down heavily on a bench and roll my eyes.

“I’ve seen Rome before, you know,” he says. “I feel like I’m dragging a moody teenager around. I really didn’t think I’d meet someone who was even lazier than I am.”

“Arsehole,” I mutter under my breath.

The last time he was here, it turns out, was with his ex-girlfriend. He brought her for Valentine’s Day. When we go to see the Vatican he takes his camera out and moves me into a specific spot so that he can recreate a photo he has of the two of them, with me in her place. “It’s funny,” he says.

“It’s really weird…” I move away. He often makes jokes that aren’t actually funny.

I roll my eyes again and again until finally I say: “Why does everything have to be some weird ‘banter’?”

“Sorry,” he replies. “I’ve gotten too used to lads’ holidays…I’ll try to be less of a dick.”

That night, we eat more pasta and drink more wine. We talk about our families and why we do what we do. He’s not so bad, I decide. After dinner I skip drunkenly through quiet streets and the strap on my sandal breaks. I take the shoe off and hurl it away.

“Are you just going to walk around barefoot?” he asks, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

“Not fully barefoot – I’ve got one shoe on.”

On the way back to the hotel, we stop in a cocktail bar. The walls are painted red and the people inside look at us, two drunk Brits (one wearing an overly elaborate shirt, another missing a shoe), with stylish Italian disdain.

After espresso martinis (he calls it ‘expresso’) and negronis and Aperol and negronis and shots, we go back. In the night I wake up feeling existential. It is dark and above the quiet whoosh of the air conditioner I hear him breathing next to me. It feels, I think to myself, deeply intimate to listen to this relative stranger sleep.

“Sam…” I say, into the darkness, “Wake up…” I prod him.

“Huh? What?”

“You’re breathing too loudly.”

“Erm...sorry,” he says, turning away from my sharp elbow.

The next morning we decide to do what real Italians would in a heatwave and leave the city. “Let’s just go to the nearest body of water,” I say. So we hire a car and drive to Bracciano – a lake town about 45 minutes away.

The car smells like hot plastic and I navigate badly. “Just follow the dot,” he shouts. “But the roads are all overlapping,” I cry back. He snatches the phone from my hand and holds it for the rest of the journey. I look out of the window at the parched Italian countryside, the colour of vanilla gelato.

We arrive at 7pm with nowhere to stay but are buoyed by a flaming sunset, castle and glittering lake. Drinking Aperol in the cobbled square, beneath the clocktower, he tells me that “Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise got married here.”

“Oh...cool,” I reply. “Bodes well for us.”

I’d suggested we check for available rooms before leaving Rome but he said it would be fine, that there was bound to be somewhere. It is dark, the hiss-hiss night sounds of insects are loud and I am drunk again by the time he looks up from his phone. “There don’t seem to be any hotels available…”

I sigh and mutter, “Probably should have booked somewhere…”

He looks up at me: “You are the most frustrating...I hate you so much.” And then he gets up and walks away. I sit for a moment with this news. We’d both suspected that we might hate each other. Our conversations were often fractious, rife with miscommunication. To say it out loud though… The watery yellow light from the bar makes the cobbles threatening; I feel like if I try to walk, I’ll trip and embarrass myself. And, I realise, I’ve got nowhere to walk to. I start to cry. Because I’m in this beautiful place, with a man who hates me.

He comes back, materialising out of the darkness. “Oh god, don’t cry.” He pats my hand. “Okay sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” He pats up my arm, then my shoulder. “Sorry?” he holds the half-empty glass of Aperol spritz up to my face.

“Why are you trying to placate me with Aperol spritz?” I cry loudly.

“I don’t know!” he cries back. “I don’t know what else to do!” We both start to laugh.

“Can I just look for somewhere?” I ask. He passes me his phone and 10 minutes later I find an Airbnb.

The next two days we call a truce. We both make an effort. There aren’t many tourists, but the ones that are there seem to be on honeymoon. We haven’t even been dating long enough to be in our honeymoon phase, let alone on an actual honeymoon.

Every so often, walking down a higgledy cobbled street with flowers erupting from hanging baskets above our heads and little, fat Italian grandpas shooting the breeze over coffee and cigarettes, we look at each other, confused. Why did two strangers come here together? “We’ve got quite a sibling vibe, haven’t we?” he says at one point.

“That’s gross,” I say back. “You’re just an antagonist.”

There are shoots of love, though, I think, budding out of the manure. On the last night, eating dinner in a restaurant over the lake, he looks at me and says: “I think one of us is going to get hurt.” I say nothing, but I know that what he means is: “I think I really like you.” Then, the electricity in the town goes out, plunging us into pitch darkness. The waitress lights hundreds of candles and somewhere a violin starts playing. I wonder whether it’s the rich truffle pasta or the romance that is giving me a stomach ache.

That was two years ago.

Instead of going back to my own flat after the trip, I went back to his. “Can’t get enough of me…” he said. He seemed smug and a little put out.

I don’t know if you should go on holiday with someone you’ve just met but I do know that you cannot manufacture intimacy – it takes time for someone to learn that you are bad at navigating, even when it just means following the dot, hate sightseeing, or that an arm pat (or an Aperol spritz) is no substitute for a hug when you are upset.

We defied our own predictions. We were together for two years, only breaking up recently. In the messy months after that trip, we oscillated – sometimes I was the bad one, sometimes he was. In the end, though, we both got hurt. But I guess we’ll always have Rome.

Originally published Jul 2019

Lily Allen’s West End Girl feels like the first album to really delve into the emotional hangover of non-monogamy. It’s essentially a study of what happens when the words we use to civilise desire - ethical, open, boundaries etc - collapse under the weight of our hurt and grief.

When I first listened, I kept flashing back to a piece I wrote for Vogue a few years ago, about how the language of non-monogamy was being co-opted to justify bad behaviour. This was 2022, we were all still high from our post-pandemic release.

In it, I spoke to the journalist and author Emily Witt, whose book Future Sex helped define the modern conversation about open relationships, and to Leanne Yau, a non-monogamy educator who’s spent years trying to preserve the ethics of a movement that was meant to be about care, honesty and responsibility.

I also interviewed countless people on the receiving end of what you might call “performative openness” — relationships that looked progressive on paper but, in practice, left them feeling disposable.

I’d written it after living through my own version of what Allen describes… through the destabilizing chaos when you’re in a relationship that you’ve labelled ‘non-monogamous’, ‘open’ or whatever but which is, in fact, just a bad relationship.

I thought it might be worth another read in this context…

When Did Calling Yourself Polyamorous Become An Excuse For Terrible Behaviour?

With apps such as Feeld taking over the dating sphere in London and beyond, polyamory and ethical non-monogamy are suddenly part of the common parlance. But, asks writer Alexandra Jones, have these newfound labels become just another way to avoid taking accountability for other people’s feelings?

October 2022

“This language was supposed to be about trust, honesty, communication and commitment – defining commitment in a different kind of way.” Across a staticky Zoom call, Emily Witt and I are comparing notes on non-monogamy. “It was supposed to prevent lying and concealment,” continues the journalist and author of the seminal 2017 book Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love. “But I don’t really see it accomplishing that anymore – it actually seems to be giving people an excuse to act worse than ever.” She is in her office in New York, I’m in mine, in London – but despite an ocean of distance, our “notes” are markedly similar. “I’m sure this will feel familiar to most people on dating apps right now,” says Witt, rolling her eyes.

There had been a time when, like Witt, I approached non-monogamy with a kind of puppyish idealism. It was 2017 and terms like poly and ethically non-monogamous (ENM) had just begun to penetrate the mainstream – as refreshing as a cold Pepsi on a hot day. It felt like the start of something brave and new – the start of a redefinition, as Witt says.

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Recently, though, I’ve begun to wonder whether we weren’t all a little too hasty in embracing this newfound terminology. For far too long, all I have heard is horror stories – friends (almost always women), unmoored by the dynamics in these “relationships”. “Nowadays,” says Witt, “you see the term ‘ethically non-monogamous’ [on someone’s profile] and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the person will behave ethically or articulate what those ethics mean. More often it’s like they’re making a pronouncement: ‘Play at your own risk, I’m not going to take any emotional responsibility for you.’”

Take 31-year-old Kate, for example. She recently matched on Feeld with a man who was in an open relationship. What she liked about him – let’s call him Shaun – was that he went to great lengths to be clear about how and why he’d opened the relationship with his “primary partner” (whom he’d been with for five years). He was clear about what his boundaries were, and how he hoped to bring other people, like Kate, into his life. It was refreshing, she explains, to have such a forthright conversation about what they both wanted. She hadn’t set out to date like this, but Shaun made it all sound so easy.

Plus, she had recently found that the ubiquity of non-monogamy – if not in practice, then certainly in app bios – made it hard to avoid. “There are maybe three monogamists left inside the M25,” she quips. “And they’re all short.” She had a lot in common with Shaun, and they had a similar sense of humour, so after a week of messaging, she was excited to meet him for a drink. That first date was fun, they shared a kiss and kept talking. After their second date, Shaun came back to Kate’s and they slept together. “At about two in the morning, he turned to me and said, ‘By the way, my girlfriend and I have a rule that we can’t stay the night at other people’s places.’” In all the many hours of conversation about Shaun’s boundaries and his primary partner’s comfort levels, this “rule” had never come up.

“He got up, got dressed and left. I was just lying in bed feeling really… I mean, it affected me, mentally. I felt used,” Kate tells me. And the worst part, she points out, is that she felt like she couldn’t voice her discomfort. “I thought it was illogical for me to feel used, because he’d been upfront about having a primary partner – and having a responsibility to that person… but he never said he wouldn’t sleep over, and if he had, I wouldn’t have had sex with him.” Afterwards, Shaun’s communication slowed, he became evasive or unresponsive, and eventually told her that he’d decided – for the good of his primary relationship – that he wouldn’t see the same person more than once. “It was like he’d used all this language about compassion, and openness – about bringing people in ‘ethically’ – to lure me into a false sense of security about how he’d treat me. Then, as soon as we’d had sex, he used his non-monogamous status as a way to absolve himself of any responsibility to me. I’d rather he’d just said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not into this anymore.’ Instead, I was left feeling like it was my own fault that I was hurt, because that’s just what I’d signed up for.”

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For Leanne Yau – a non-monogamy educator and founder of Poly Philia, a platform that offers digestible information on poly best practice – this is the absolute antithesis of what a poly lifestyle is meant to be about. She opens our conversation with an emphatic, “I have a lot to say on this issue.” Yau, who has spent years advocating for this community, is irked by the influx of people co-opting the language of non-monogamy, without ever trying to understand the theory behind it. “Unfortunately, a lot of people have begun to conflate polyamory with being single and casually dating,” she says. “But being poly or ethically non-monogamous is about responsibility, and taking responsibility for your partners: you factor them into your decisions, you consider their feelings, you uphold your commitments to them and respect their boundaries. You strive to be open, honest and compassionate towards them – it isn’t just a matter of reading someone their rights then doing whatever you want.”

The problem clearly isn’t the relationship configurations themselves – which, as Witt points out, were always meant to be about defining commitment, rather than safeguarding apathy. For her, it comes down to dating apps, which have spread the language of non-monogamy so widely, “that people who may not have heard the terms before, read a book like The Ethical Slut or come out of a subculture where these practices are discussed and studied, will go on a dating app, see ‘ethical non-monogamy’ or ‘poly-curious’ and take it to mean whatever they want it to.” Witt has often found herself untangling the miscommunications borne of this new world where two people might use the same word to mean two completely different things. “For instance,” she says, “I’ve had a guy whom I was dating – and whom I wanted a relationship with – say that he would be polyamorous with me.” Polyamory, as Witt understands it (and as I understand it, too), is the practice of having many concurrent relationships. If anything, it is a deeply committed way to live. Witt continues: “I said to him, ‘Are you saying you want to be my boyfriend? Because that’s not the vibe that I’m getting at all. It seems like you want to do whatever you want – and if it’s convenient for you to hang out with me, then you’ll be there, but otherwise not.’” They broke up soon afterwards – as she suspected, when he said “polyamorous”, he didn’t mean “boyfriend”. “But if I’d taken him at face value, I could have ended up quite badly hurt.”

This story is echoed by a friend who’s recently sworn off dating anyone on the ENM spectrum. “I’ve just found that what a person usually means is that they want to have regular sex without committing to you or to anyone – or they want the full relationship experience but without taking accountability for your feelings.” She says that, after trying this a few times, the lack of “stability and safety” that she felt in these relationships left her constantly on guard. “Ultimately I felt like people were whitewashing their bad behaviour by couching it in these terms.”

“What is interesting to me,” says Sarah, who is 33, has been single for two years, and dates mainly via Feeld and Hinge, “is that we are well-versed in the red flags of jealousy and possessiveness – and we avoid these like the plague – but there is another end of the spectrum now, equally dangerous in some ways, where someone uses non-monogamy to convey a sense that they are so free-spirited that they simply cannot be pinned down. I’ve noticed increasingly that it’s older men who are calling themselves ENM – Peter Pan boys in their forties, who have learned a new language to help them avoid accountability and protect their ‘free to fuck anyone I like’ status. It puts the onus on you, like, ‘Am I going to eat the crumbs you’re offering, knowing that I’ll never feel satisfied, or do I just walk away?’ And if you don’t walk away, then it’s all on you.”

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Witt sees the rise in people proclaiming themselves poly as part of a wider trend within the app-sphere for “pop psych” explanations for our behaviours. “I’m sure you’ve seen all that stuff about attachment styles and ‘love languages’,” she says. “If another guy tells me he’s ‘avoidant’, as if it’s some way to excuse behaving irresponsibly towards someone, I might actually scream.” For Yau, the misuse of poly and ENM terms comes down to the fact that we live in a highly individualistic society. Non-monogamy is ultimately a relational state – something that’s meant to be discussed, explored and defined by the people engaging in it. It’s not so much something you “are”, as something you do with other people – so the premise of it breaks down when we use it to defend or prop up a behaviour, like, “sorry, this is just who I am”. Personally, I feel a lot of compassion for people who are blundering their way through this new world. I spent a year in an ENM relationship doing just that – and looking back I can see myself in many of these descriptions of bad behaviour.

I learned rather quickly that the utopian ideal of “anything goes as long as we’re honest”, could, in practice, be corrupting, painful and humiliating. It wasn’t because I personally was a bad-faith actor – as I said, I entered with an idealistic outlook – but rather that I hadn’t taken the time to properly educate myself on what was required. Also – and perhaps most crucially – my partner at the time wasn’t really up for it. He went along with it because those were the only terms I was offering – at first uncertainly, then with a gusto which was mainly borne out of a desire to “teach me a lesson”. He was hurt that I didn’t want to be with him exclusively, so then he slept with other people to show me what this hurt was like – and when he did, I was rarely allowed to express dismay because “I wanted this” and “this was my choice”. Both of which were true – I did want it, it was my choice – but I’ve never felt such searing hot jealousy as the time he came home from a wedding and explained that the reason he’d stopped replying to my messages halfway through the evening was because he was sleeping with a bridesmaid. As a friend said to me at the time: “There are only ever two people in an open relationship, the one who wants it and the one who’s crying themselves to sleep at night.” Somehow I was both.

All of which is to say that I’m not here to call anyone out or point any fingers. I’d like to think that most people don’t have bad intentions – we’re all just trying our best. It’s just that as people calling themselves “non-monogamous” take up more and more space within the dating sphere, we must try to understand the emotional sticky patches – the murkiness, as well as the light. It clearly isn’t ever okay to make someone feel disposable – but it’s particularly not okay if you’re co-opting terms which have been specifically developed to guard against that. At this point, you’re not just hurting someone’s feelings, you’re making them question what right they have to be hurt – a strange kind of gaslighting.

After a drunken night out, a friend sends me a link to an article by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, a review of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation by Christine Emba, in which Emba explores the concept of “sexual liberation” as it currently exists. There’s one particular line, my friend says, which made her think of our discussion about ENM: “What passes for sex positivity is a culture of masochism disguised as hedonism. It’s what you get when you liberate sex without liberating women.” In a way, she says, this is how she feels about non-monogamy now: we are more liberated than ever before from the old strictures of monogamy – but we’re not evolved enough to know what to do with, or how to act in, our freedom.

Originally published October 2022 on Vogue.co.uk

In recent years I’ve often found myself increasingly preoccupied with the cultural space that trauma occupies. I think everyone has experiences that are, if not ‘traumatic’ in the strict clinical sense, then trauma-adjacent: stressful, unsettling, the after-effects linger in your system for days, a chemical trace of fear that makes your breath quicken and your fingertips tingle.

As a journalist (and especially as a female journalist), you’re often encouraged to turn those experiences into copy: the tell-all essay that positions you as a survivor of sexual assault, grief or mental health crisis, alcoholic, drug addict etc - pick your slot in the carousel of traumatic confessions (no shade, I’ve written my fair share of these).

The appetite for these stories was supercharged with the advent of social media, mental health influencers and particularly TikTok. A few years ago there was a unique kind of lawlessness to how mental health was positioned on that particular platform. From addiction influencers who livestreamed their cocaine binges to people posting live from respite care after a suicide attempt. I found it fascinating that the darker the stories, the more followers and engagement these accounts got.

At some point, trauma had gone from a clinical diagnosis to something closer to cultural currency.

That’s what I explore in my latest piece for The Sunday Times. Seeing it in print this weekend was both thrilling and a little unnerving - partly because it feels like the conversation around trauma is not an easy one to have and certainly not from the perspective of an impartial bystander. You’re talking about people’s lived experiences, their pain and I worried that, in trying to compress the theory of trauma-as-commodity into 1400 words, I would come across as glib, heartless or dumb. Maybe I did?

There is real power in naming our pain, and in sharing our stories. But there’s also a whole industry built around turning both the story and the sharing into a product. And in the meantime, the definitions of what even counts as a ‘trauma’ have widened beyond recognition.

📰 The full article which appeared in this weekend’s Sunday Times is below, available to paying subscribers. The bits in italics where cut for space, I’ve added them back in due to vanity.

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By all accounts, the overabundance of internet slop that we’re all exposed to nowadays - even those of us who aren’t as hooked on TiketyTok as I am - is making us dumb, depressed, anxious and possibly infertile (if not clinically, then certainly on a practical level in that we’d rather stay home and consume content than go out and eat a dick).

Shitposts and meme culture are radicalizing teenagers and degrading our critical faculties - and while watching a woman eat a 5kg ‘monster burrito’ at warp speed is damn entertaining, it’s probably not enriching my soul in any meaningful way.

Anyway, what I’ve found is that when I get out of the habit of reading, I need to return to a book that I once found deeply entertaining to get the reading mojo back. After a few nights it’s like that part of my brain has come back online (and my cravings for monster burrito content have quietened).

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So this isn’t a list of the best books I’ve ever read - although, all the ones below are really great, beautifully written, some bordering on genius - it’s a list of books that I found funny, interesting and gripping enough to keep the itchy scrolling finger from straying over to my phone.

I've tried to avoid the blindingly obvious (like Great Expectations at Christmas or whatever) but if you're looking for something joyful or strange that will actually hold your attention, maybe one of these is worth a try?

Or just enjoy your downtime on food-challenge-tok, no judgement.

Crudo by Olivia Laing

Okay, so, ‘experimental’, ‘stream of consciousness’ and ‘written in real time’ doesn’t exactly scream ‘entertaining’ but this book, christ, I re-read parts of it maybe once a month.

If you haven’t read it, my attempt to explain might put you off but basically, it’s Laing writing as the artist Kathy Acker… Acker died in the late 90s, but I guess in the timeline of the novel, Laing imagines what Acker would think if she was still alive to experience the advent of social media, Trump’s first presidency, Brexit etc - the slow disintegration of society as we once knew it.

Laing wrote it in ‘real time’, meaning that she bashed out a couple of thousand words each day for a few months, reacting to the news cycle in 2017. So what you're reading is effectively her first draft, which obviously makes me feel profoundly mediocre by comparison but whatever, I guess we can't all be geniuses.

Anyway, all of that is just background really because the most important thing to know is that it’s fucking funny, and sharp - a satire on class, wealth, social media. It takes the piss out of what society has become in prose so precise that reading it puts me into a kind of flow state.

My friend Zoe said she didn’t really like this and didn’t get why I loved it so much but whatever, it’s great!!!

Expectation by Anna Hope

I've re-read this so many times I've lost count - I've been trying to pinpoint exactly why I find it so compelling. Ostensibly there's nothing wild about the story - it follows the lives of three female friends as they navigate later adulthood (like in your thirties etc - what’s the bit after youth but before middle age?) But it's beautifully written, stark, evocative and structured in a way that ratchets up the tension to the point where you're desperate to find out what's going to happen next.

Hope captures the ache of unmet expectations, the shape-shifting nature of female friendship, the quiet desperation of wanting more from your life.

And all the characters feel real, like real people.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Should have won the Booker a few years ago IMO. It's about different generations of an Irish family and again, Murray is a master of structure - he leaves each chapter on some kind of emotional cliffhanger so it's a very compulsive read.

It’s also genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Which is rare. The humour sneaks up on you, just as the emotional depth hits like a freight train. Gripping, moving, occasionally unhinged – a perfect reading-reset book.

Luster by Raven Leilani

This book is all nervous energy and emotional combustion. It follows Edie, a twenty-something Black woman who starts an affair with an older white man in an open marriage – and then ends up moving in with him, his wife, and their adopted daughter.

Leilani’s prose is jagged and brilliant and her observations about power, art, sex, precarity, New York, weird jobs, loneliness etc are darkly funny and occasionally brutal.

Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

This book is strange and haunting in the best way. A woman returns from a deep-sea research mission... different. Her wife begins to wonder who – or what – actually came back.

It’s tender and eerie and beautifully written. The prose has this dreamy stillness that pulls you under, like the sea itself. It’s not fast-paced but it’s totally immersive, i.e. a perfect break from the visual chaos of the internet.

This year was the first time that I went to the festival since having a child. In previous years I’d always ignored any little munchkins I came across because - and I think it’s true for most of us - other people’s children (their thoughts, feelings, needs etc) basically didn’t exist to me until I had my own (and even now, only barely).

This year though I couldn’t look away - and without exception every child I saw at Glastonbury looked sweaty, red-faced and depressed.

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They were either crying, staring disconsolately at the ground or clutching to a parent as if to a liferaft in open water. I saw a fair few literally cowering in fright.

I’m a fully grown woman who’s navigated some of the world’s weirdest places and even I found Glastonbury a bit much - so busy, so loud. Why would you do that to a child when their brains haven’t yet developed stress regulation or the ability to cope with huge amounts of sensory input.

I generally don’t pass judgement on other people’s parenting choices because it’s not like I know what I’m doing - but every time I saw a tiny baby being thrust through a crowd of twentysomethings on ketamine, I felt deeply triggered.

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God, maybe I’m a boomer now? I saw that the Independent interviewed a woman who’d come to the festival with her toddler and her three month old baby and I found the comments predictably depressing - full of judgemental know-it-alls rushing to troll a young mum who was clearly incredibly careful and loving. But I also…ugh, hate to admit it, kind of agreed with them.

Before having her, I always thought I’d be brave enough to take my kid anywhere - and on the whole, I’ve pushed myself to take her with me on holidays and trips where I could have easily left her behind. I took her to Greece when she was four months old and interrailing last month. And I know that as long as one of her parents is around, she’s happy even in the less kid-friendly environments. But walking around Glastonbury last weekend, I really couldn’t imagine subjecting my daughter to it.

One of the things that has surprised me most about this whole parenting experience is that it dialled up my empathic sense to a level that’s probably incompatible with living a chill life.

I always felt like I was a pretty empathetic person - being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is an important part of being a journalist - but there is something about experiencing up-close the extreme vulnerability of a newborn that has altered my brain chemistry. Tiny, helpless and completely at the mercy of a caregiver, seeing how we all start life has genuinely given me a new perspective on human beings and on how vulnerable we all are at some point.

In some ways, I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate to say that taking a baby into a noisy environment is bad for them. Most of the ones I saw were wearing their little ear-defenders, and were strapped close to their parents so presumably they felt safe and happy. It’s just that in my emotionally pulpy postpartum state all I kept thinking was ‘god, that baby looks really scared’ and it all made me feel quite depressed.

I was 15-years-old the first time I remember having my BMI calculated. A GP was quizzing me on weight gain (“it’s the pill,” I told him, “it makes me hungry”).

He pointed to a chart that was pinned behind him: “you’re getting into the unhealthy ranges,” he said. “Remember: the pill isn’t putting food in your mouth.”

I don’t think I was too bothered by this conversion at the time. In fact, I thought it was kind of brilliant that a simple equation could tell the doctor so much about my health. Over the years, I clung to the range as a marker of optimal wellbeing. I rarely questioned the efficacy of BMI given that everything pointed to it being

Recently though, I’ve been wondering.

That equation now underpins entire healthcare systems; it is used as a gatekeeping tool for everything from fertility treatment to surgery; it is used to sell drugs and therapies, to shame, to pathologise.

And yet, the science supporting it is looking increasingly shaky.

Meet Adolphe Quetelet

The Body Mass Index (BMI), has its roots in the 19th-century work of Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet. Born in 1796 in Ghent, Quetelet was a mathematician, astronomer, statistician, and sociologist. His interdisciplinary pursuits led him to seek patterns in human characteristics with the aim of defining the “average man” through statistical methods.

Between 1830 and 1850, Quetelet developed what he called the Quetelet Index, a simple formula: weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared (kg/m²). His objective was not to assess individual health but to understand population averages, particularly among white European men.

He argued that by identifying the average of various human traits, a standard or norm could be established. Quetelet believed that deviations from this norm represented abnormalities or pathologies. As he explained at the time: “if the average man were perfectly determined, we might consider him as the type of perfection; and everything differing from his proportions or condition would constitute deformity or disease.”

For over a century, the Quetelet Index remained a tool primarily for academic studies, without widespread clinical application, though that began to shift in the mid-20th century, largely because insurance companies began to recognise the correlation between body weight and mortality rates.

In the 1940s, Louis Israel Dublin, a New York-based statistician and the vice president at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, developed height-weight tables based on data from policyholders, aiming to identify “ideal” weight ranges associated with lower mortality. These tables were among the first tools insurers used to assess individual health risks related to body weight.

By the 1950s, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company had officially adopted these tables, applying them to their underwriting processes. The company observed that higher body weights were linked to increased claims, prompting the use of weight as a factor in determining policy premiums and eligibility.

It was the American physiologist Ancel Keys, however, who settled on the Quetelet Index as the most effective way to assess obesity in epidemiological studies. This was in 1972 and it was during this period that he coined the term Body Mass Index (BMI), rebranding Quetelet’s formula for broader use.

Keys emphasised that while BMI was suitable for population studies, it was not appropriate for individual diagnoses. Despite this caution, BMI gained rapid traction in both research and clinical settings due to its simplicity and ease of use.

By the 1980s and 1990s, BMI had become the standard for assessing obesity, replacing earlier, more varied definitions of excess body weight.

If this romp through the history of BMI shows us anything, it’s how arbitrary a BMI actually is.

Quetelet’s initial ideas were shaped by 19th-century beliefs about morality, appearance, and superiority. The implication that deviations from average were “deformities” laid the groundwork for systems of thought that were racist, ableist, and deeply exclusionary.

It’s not that BMI is completely useless

BMI can show broad trends in population health - but when it’s applied to individuals, it quickly falls apart.

It doesn’t tell you anything about where your body stores fat. It can’t distinguish between fat and muscle. It doesn’t consider age, sex, ethnicity, or bone density. You could be a sprinter with a high BMI, and still have extremely low body fat. Equally, your BMI could be in the “normal” range but you might have poor metabolic health.

And while BMI is often used as a gatekeeping tool it doesn’t even predict risk equally across groups. Asian populations, for instance, tend to experience obesity-related illnesses at lower BMIs, while Black populations may be healthy at higher BMIs. A one-size-fits-all number doesn’t reflect the full picture.

The future is nuanced

Earlier this year, 58 researchers in the US proposed a new framework that looks at body composition, fat function, and organ health – not just a single ratio.

The European Association for the Study of Obesity also launched a model that distinguishes between pre-clinical obesity (where fat isn’t affecting your health) and clinical obesity (where it is). This is key: not everyone with a high BMI is sick. Not everyone with a “healthy” BMI is well.

Some doctors now use waist-to-height ratio, DEXA scans, blood work, and even fitness tests to get a more accurate picture. It takes longer but it’s better.

At the population level, BMI is still helpful. It can be used to track trends, enabling governments to make best guess analyses about where and how to send resources.

But for most of us - particularly if we’re interested in understanding our health - it’s probably time to move on.

For too long, BMI has been used as a definitive statement on our health. Health is complex. People are complex. And one number has never told the whole story.

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BMI is still shaping how our bodies are judged and treated. Let’s start asking better questions – about what health looks like, and who gets to define it.

Exactly a year before I gave birth, almost to the day, I was in Paris with my mum. The trip was a present for her birthday, just the two of us - a cold, sunny spring vibe in the city of lights and she asked me the question every childfree 34-year-old woman rolls her eyes at: do I want children?

Did I? We were walking down the Champs Elysee, I was vibrating from the maybe five coffees I’d had that morning. The truth was, I didn’t know. I sort of thought I’d have them in that vague and nonspecific way that people think about going to the dentist - like, you know you will at some point, but when and how is a problem for future you.

Plus as I'd gotten older and watched more of my friends have children, I realised that I never saw a model of parenthood - or family life - that particularly appealed to me. I found the idea of suburbia depressing, I didn’t like the thought of package holidays, the lives of parents seemed shrunken and predictable compared to the freedom and adventure available to child-free people. My mum said, diplomatically, that I could choose to make it whatever I wanted it to be, that parenthood didn’t need to look like it did for other people.

A year later, I went into early labour and a year later still, two weeks ago, I celebrated the baby’s first birthday. The truth is, I tried not to think about the decision too hard. I realised that there are no guarantees in life and that either way, it’s a risk.

I once read an article by a Harvard professor who studied decision making. She said that in the grand scheme of things, there really is no right or wrong decision because we can’t predict what will come afterwards. She said that any decision is only what we make of it so, instead of wasting our energy trying to work out the ‘right’ thing to do, we should just make a decision quickly then put all our energy into making it the right one. I'm not saying that anyone should have a baby on a whim but it's a sentiment that gives me a lot of comfort when I feel overwhelmed with the enormity of this new life - it’s not like the other choice would have been better or easier, either one is just what I make of it.

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Anyway, a few reflections, based on my (admittedly minimal) experience of parenthood…

It might not start with fireworks

I didn’t get that immediate, explosions and fireworks, all-encompassing love thing that some people get. Perhaps it was the shock of her early arrival, the emergency c-section, the strangeness of the NICU ward, which I haunted at all hours in my pyjamas - sitting in the chair next to her incubator at 3am or standing, pressing my face to the perspex as she slept.

The love came in waves, over the first few days and weeks, like when you stand in the surf and get slammed by the sea, over and over. Love! Love! Love! A tide coming in. It was really crazy and wonderful - I learned I had the capacity to feel huge emotions.

I think it’s weirdly pressurising when people say, ‘as soon as you see the baby, you’ll be in love’ because firstly, giving birth can be very confusing so it’s totally normal that you might see the baby and feel confused. And secondly, it implies that you don’t have to work at it but I think you do, and should. I don’t mean ‘work’ like grinding out a day at the office; I just mean you hold the baby, talk to it, sniff its little head, spend time with it near/ on you. The weight of the baby on your chest feels fairly profound. And the bond grows like a new organ, like new skin, you feel it all over your body - I can’t stress enough how physical and strange the emotions are. And even though it wasn’t the ideal birth, and even though I found it really scary at times, it was an incredibly unique experience.

The 4pm buyer’s remorse doesn’t last

Recently I contributed to an article that Stylist magazine put together (I’ll be working there for the next few months); they got experts and mothers to answer questions about motherhood - it’s such a wonderful, life affirming article - you should read it if you have time.

Anyway, the question I answered was ‘what if I regret it?’ It made me think back to the times when she was really tiny and we had to wake-up every two hours to feed her (yes, that includes through the night, I was quite astounded when they told me, at the hospital, that I'd have to get up even in the night, even if she was asleep herself, to feed her).

At about 4pm each day I’d get this heavy feeling of dread - reflecting on how much my life had changed and how much I was not looking forward to the night ahead.

This buyer’s remorse, where you feel pinned down by the weight of the responsibility you’re now faced with, is quite a well known phenomenon, though I don’t think many people talk about it.

I’d certainly never heard anyone mention it before. You think, “shit, this is a nightmare, what have I done?” especially with the first baby because you have no idea how long this awake-every-two-hours thing will go on.

In hindsight, I guess I wish I’d known that it was okay to feel that way, that the adjustment is a big one but that it passes. The baby sleeps more, you sleep more and the whole situation becomes more manageable. And this leads me onto…

You evolve into a person you don’t recognise but in a good way

Obviously, I missed my old life. Especially at the beginning, especially at 4pm. I missed freedom and the sense of possibility and innumerable other things. I missed feeling like myself, I missed not worrying all the time.

What I wish I’d known was that this grief fades away and the things I once missed so desperately, I now think about only rarely.

I think I evolved into a new version of myself - one that has different tastes and interests to the old version. There are things that I now find gratifying that would have put me into a coma before.

I definitely don’t feel completely zen or like everything has ‘clicked’ or any of that old bullshit - I just don’t miss my old life so much.

Evolving into the new version of took a bit of time, and in the transition period I had days when I’d think ‘fuck I want to go back to how it was before’.

I don’t think this evolution is specific to having children - it’s like if you change jobs, sometimes you spend the first six months feeling ill-at-ease in new company and missing the place you worked before, despite all its many flaws. But then you get used to it and realise even if it's tough, you’ve learned a lot and you’ve moved forward in your career.

As time wore on, I felt like I was learning a lot and moving forward in my life - it’s such a dizzying, discombobulating feeling, to actually feel yourself changing. But it’s also quite cool and interesting.

There’s no sleep hack and sleep training is a myth

After you’re through the initial three months, social media will encourage you to begin nighttime routines in preparation for your baby sleeping through the night. I think I got served maybe 4,000 of these videos.

The fact is, unless they’re a good sleeper, they won’t sleep through the night irrespective of how you routine them and what hacks you try.

Sleep training works! For like a week. And then they revert to an approximation of how they slept (or didn’t sleep) before and you have to perform the whole depressing ritual again. And all along, sleep deprived and raw with hormones, you’re berating yourself because you followed every hack, stuck to every meticulously timed routine, and the baby still doesn’t sleep - and you’re sure you must be at fault somehow.

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I honestly now wish I hadn’t bothered. I think they eventually just start to sleep for longer periods without any intervention - and I could have saved myself a lot of berating and stress in the meantime.

The people who tell you that it will always be hard are wrong

For me, it got way easier after six months. And easier still at 12. A friend who has two children recently said she didn’t enjoy motherhood until they were 18-months-old - that’s not to say she hated it before that, it’s just that she really started to enjoy it after that point.

Honestly, as far as I can tell, it gets easier and more joyous as time goes on. I wish someone had said this to me when she’d just been born and I was scared and stressed - instead I mainly got things like ‘oh you just wait until X happens, then you’ll wish you could come back to this point.’ It’s such a loaded, upsetting thing to hear if you’re struggling.

It’s also bullshit.

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There’s only one secret to motherhood

I was at a birthday party a few months before I got preggo and got chatting to a friend whose baby was five months old. She said “the only secret to motherhood is having a really good, supportive partner.”

I’ve reflected so many times over the past year on how wise these words were. I cannot stress enough how in awe I am of any person who does this by themselves - because it would have finished me off.

It’s not just about having someone there who’s willing and able to get involved with the practical things like nappy changes and nighttime feeds, though of course that’s crucial - it’s also about knowing that that person will be kind and understanding and there for you regardless of how you are. You feel so raw and vulnerable in the first few months that even seemingly innocuous things can send you spiralling. I can’t imagine how hellish it must be if you’re with someone who expects you to be upbeat and on the ball, to keep the house tidy and cook the dinners and just be the way you were before.

‘Before’ suddenly seems so far away - you’re looking at earth from the moon. You know what it’s like down there but you can’t reach it, no matter how hard you try.

I’ve never had to rely on someone so much - not since my own mother - and I count myself lucky every single day that my baby’s dad is the man he is.

It’s been a few years now since I first started writing about psychedelics. In that time I’ve been to retreats, visited clinics, attended conferences and have met dozens of amazing researchers who’re working to revolutionise the field of mental healthcare, one shroom trip at a time.

I’ve also become more of a skeptic.

In 2022, I interviewed the prominent New York psychiatrist Dr Jeffrey A. Lieberman — professor and chairman of Psychiatry at Columbia University and the director of New York State Psychiatric Institute. He was horrified by the rapid growth of the ketamine economy in the US, which he called “commercial opportunism”, with clinics putting profits ahead of the wellbeing of patients.

Now, a few years down the line, it seems that Matthew Perry has become the first high profile casualty of the ketamine boom though, if you scratch beneath the surface stories of addiction and abuse aren’t hard to find.

One of the leading voices investigating the dark side of psychedelics is Jules Evans, his publication Ecstatic Integration is well worth subscribing to if you’re interested in this world.

Dr Lieberman also argued that even in the most exciting psychedelic studies — the ones which made global headlines for treating depression with psilocybin — the psychedelic “showed not robust superiority to a standard antidepressant, it showed kind of marginal superiority on some things.”

My own scepticism isn’t down to the fact that I don’t believe these drugs work. At the very least, I think most people who take them will have a good experience (assuming they’re careful with how much they take, and they feel cared-for etc).

But over the years, I came across way too many people who expected too much of these drugs; they thought tripping on acid or magic mushrooms would save them, heal them or show them their life’s purpose. They thought they would meet god and work through their childhood traumas.

Often they were left underwhelmed though for some, the impact was a lot more serious.

Here are two women whose stories have stuck with me over the years:

After 20 years on antidepressants — and fearing that she would never live unmedicated — L, who was in her 40s when I met her, decided to participate in a psychedelic drug trial. In one session, she experienced her mother in the form of a song:

“I realised I had a real sadness around my mum’s quality of life,” she explained. “She had a degenerative condition so I cared for her for the last 15 years of her life.

“During the psychedelic experience, though, there was a song that kind of symbolised my mum, and it started off with this horrendous discordant sounding note. I thought, ‘Oh, that's my mum. It's wrong. It doesn't fit, it's ugly and pointless.’ But then as the music continued, other instruments were introduced and that sound — which alone had sounded so discordant and broken — formed part of the most beautiful symphony. All of a sudden I had this realisation like ‘oh my god, I’m looking at this all wrong.’

“When you zoom out, when you get out of that narrow, depressed way of thinking, and you look at the bigger picture, you can see how the parts fit together. So I was able to zoom out from just the negative thoughts around my mum’s condition, and to see her life in a wider context.”

In the months after meeting her, my mind would often drift back to her words. When she was first prescribed selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) — or antidepressants — in the late 1990s, L had been told that her psychic pain was the result of a neurochemical imbalance, a simple lack of serotonin in her brain, which could be topped up, and kept full with the right kinds of drugs. In the intervening years, she experienced periods of wellness and periods of despair, but in the main part the drugs worked to blunt the sharper edges of both her depression and her joy.

Then she took psilocybin and went deep down into herself and found that her pain was not the result of faulty neurochemistry but of a profound trauma. Was this true of most depressions, I wondered, do they all have roots? That was the word that L had used, the psychedelic helped her get to the ‘root’ of her depression.

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The world never made space for L’s specific type of grief, meted out over the span of 15 years. And so she reshaped herself around it, pushed it down and attempted to live her life regardless.

There were hundreds of other stories, like this one, of people who’d sought psychedelic treatment for medically-diagnosable mental illnesses and came face to face with some long buried trauma. Did excavating all this grief and trauma really work to excise it?

When I was an insomniac child my mother would come and shine a light on each item in my room that had taken on monstrous qualities in the dark. “See, it’s just this,” she’d say, “this isn’t so scary.” Was it really the same with mental health, could you excavate a trauma, hold it up to the light and find that, poof, its effect on you disappeared?

In the months after she’d participated in her first clinical trial, L experienced the worst depression she’d ever had. “Rock bottom worse,” she told me. So could her treatment be characterised as a success, or a failure? Her story, like so many others, was written up for a medical journal, her experience was boiled down to quantifiable data, to a one or a zero. Which was she? One or zero?

And it wasn’t just people with diagnosable illnesses who were coming to psychedelics. There were also people like M, a 72-year-old retiree from America whose husband had died a year before I met her on a psilocybin retreat. We sat together one afternoon in the shade of a palm tree, our toes buried in the fine white sand of a pristine beach, and M told me how for many years she was a stay-at-home mom, raising her two children but sure that there was something else out there for her — a different kind of life, filled with passions that she could never quite grasp. Every so often, while making dinner for her family or picking up her children from a playdate she would get the sense that an invisible curtain was separating her from an alternate reality — that there was another version of her somewhere, untethered from the grinding responsibilities of being a mother and a wife. As she got older, she yearned to touch this other self and became more and more convinced that in doing so, she would finally understand true fulfilment.

How to tear down that curtain, though? During their forty year marriage, she and her husband had rarely left their home state — they never quite had money to spare for fancy vacations and anyway, her husband wasn’t fond of travelling. When he died she realised that time was running out and that if she wanted to know this shadow self, her true self, she would need to act now. She decided to take their little savings pot and use it to see the world.

M’s story, her search for purpose and meaning in a world which could be grindingly mundane, felt like a familiar one. Who hasn’t, at one point or another, yearned to get closer to their own essential truth.

The day after the psilocybin ceremony, I asked her how her first trip had gone. “I think I was surprised that it wasn't beautiful,” she said plainly. “There weren't any pretty colours and bright lights and rainbows — and I didn't wake up feeling refreshed and renewed and free of trouble. I woke up feeling pretty much the same as I had before.” It was a sad and uninspiring end to her psychedelic journey, and I tried to comfort her when she cried from the bitter disappointment of it. The fact is, most psychedelic experiences are like this, relatively few seem to prompt big, mystical awakenings and realisations, though much of the literature that’s currently available, certainly in most newspaper articles, might lead people to believe otherwise.

I was just a floating sense of dread, eating chocolate biscuits in the ether. My body had changed quite radically in the months leading up to birth (like, duh!) - and then it stayed changed.

I won’t bore you with any of that old ‘it grew a life’ crap - because of course, a miracle happened and I was super grateful. But almost all of my friends who’d performed that same miracle managed to perform the reverse miracle afterwards. They reverted into the bodies they’d lived in before with frightening ease.

This feels like a very unfashionable thing to say but lots of women really do just ‘snap back’.

Many looked even better. We’re fed this myth that mums end up all saggy and misshapen - in actual fact, a woman’s body has this truly wild ability to reconfigure itself after birth, the organs slot back into place, the rib cage shrinks, the hips realign. Sometimes there are marks and extra skin but not always - and, if my friends are anything to go by, not even that often.

Some people - though again, if you look purely at statistics it's actually a minority - gain weight. Around 15% of women will be more than 10lbs heavier than their pre-pregnancy weight a year after giving birth. 85% revert to their pre-baby weight.

I say this not to shame anyone but more as a corrective to this odd and pervasive narrative that a mother's body is somehow “ruined” by pregnancy and birth. Most people just go back to how they looked before.

I was - and am - part of that other 15%. When I took the photo I felt like I no longer understood what I actually looked like; my boundaries had all been redrawn. I kind of loved it - I was bigger, I had more body fat, there was something incredibly tactile about this new body.

But I also hated it. I hated that my clothes didn’t fit and that I was so far from the ideal I'd been taught to aspire to. The part of me that hated it was the part that had grown up with size zero, whippet-hipped girls, with bobble heads all over the front pages of magazines. The circle of shame. Etc.

And all of this was happening against a backdrop of GLP-1 advancements, Ozempic mania, newer better tweakments.

Susie Orbach, the psychiatrist who wrote Fat is a Feminist Issue, once told me that our bodies are under constant attack, from the diet, fashion, beauty, “wellness”, fitness and many other industries - from the whole body beautifying industrial complex - and it leaves us vulnerable to exploitation in myriad ways. I want to look at those attacks; at how body image is constructed and mobilised against us. At the science of the body, and how it's changing. What it even means to have a body now.

From regenerative aesthetics to the conspiracy theories around obesity via the history of slimming world.