Dear Pangram,

I used to write badly in peace. Mystery novels scribbled in fountain pen across the back pages of my school notebooks. Flash fiction on classroom whiteboards after the bell. Speculative stories assembled from playground gossip, recorded in my diary in invisible ink (for security reasons). And once, song lyrics on my bedroom door in Sharpie, a project my parents were noticeably less proud of.

The quality of the prose was questionable, naturally. I had only been on Earth for all of nine years, and my understanding of the human condition was correspondingly limited. But so was my understanding of how awkwardly I might describe it, so I wrote with the sparkling confidence this afforded me.

Sixteen years later, the anxiety arrives before the words do. I still write everything by hand, though the notebooks have evolved into an e-ink tablet, where my stray thoughts get stitched together into something resembling a narrative. Whatever misshapen creature crawls out of that is then dragged into Scrivener for extensive cosmetic surgery.

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I used to love this part. Scrubbing in, snapping on the gloves, and laying out my instruments. All twenty-six letters and every mark of punctuation, gleaming on the tray. A nip here, a tuck there. But lately, certain instruments have acquired a label. WARNING - SUSPICIOUS. I reach for an em-dash, for the words sharp or quietly and my hand stops in midair. Worse still, I’ve started botching my own writing. A sentence heals beautifully, its awkwardness smoothed away, and for one glorious second, I’m proud of my handiwork. Then the dread creeps in. No, it’s too… polished. What if the new mechanical arbiters of humanity decide no human hand could have arranged these words so neatly? So I inspect the sentence again and—gee, it does look a bit off. Look at it, grinning back at me with its full set of porcelain veneers, every word straightened, whitened, arranged into a pretentious little smile. Back on the operation table it goes. Scalpel in hand I unpick the stitches, remove a semi-colon, perhaps leave a clumsy phrase untouched, conspicuous as a crooked scar.

Then comes the inevitable Cycle of Self-Doubt, courtesy of having a neurodivergent, pathologically perfectionist brain yet wanting well-adjusted strangers to enjoy the products of its chaos. Usually involves several rounds of redrafting, followed by redrafts of the redrafts, and then a few more for good measure, until every word has been stared at so long it dissolves into a meaningless bag of letters. By this point Diarrhea sounds like a beautiful girl’s name and a Pacifier could be something you’d drive through the countryside.

Then there’s the bilingual audit, an additional layer of suffering that comes with being a French girl who insists on writing in English because, well, why the hell not? Except now I can no longer tell whether a word actually exists in either language, so back to Google Translate I go for the hundredth time. French to English. English to French. Whatever, I hate this word, anyway. Delete. Now my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with sandpaper, and I haven’t eaten anything except the insides of my own cheeks—which have provided little nutritional value—so the verdict is in: this is a steaming pile of shit.

But then there’s an appeal from a tiny voice somewhere in the back of my head:

...is it, though?

Just enough hope to justify another redraft, followed by a stern pep talk in front of the mirror inside my mind. You’re a good fucking writer. You’ve worked hard on this piece. And it deserves to be read. Right. Okay. Guess we’re doing this. Before my inner-critic can produce a counterargument, I copy-paste the whole thing into Substack and position my cursor over Publish. Except I can’t bring myself to click. Not yet.

Haven’t you heard? Apparently spending countless hours writing something, dragging it through a labyrinth of revisions, and negotiating a temporary ceasefire with your own self-doubt just to convince yourself it’s worth sharing isn’t enough anymore.

Because now there’s a new bouncer standing between Writer and Reader.

I know damn well I wrote every word. I’ve got the handwritten drafts and the empty coffee cups to prove it. But I’ve read the stories. Writers accused overnight, opportunities withdrawn, reputations dragged through the mud by a percentage spat out by a machine. In this new-age witch hunt, the verdict precedes the trial. And by the time you’ve unearthed your notebooks and timestamps, assembled your evidence and prepared your defense, the crowd has already moved on to the next person on the pyre. Some will be afforded the grace of an explanation; but I know better than to assume that the benefit of the doubt will be extended equally.

As much as my impostor syndrome hates to hear it, I’ve got a Swiss Army knife of a brain. In my twenty-five years on this Earth I’ve amassed a rather eclectic collection of skills and accomplishments. Somewhere near the top of that list is learning the language I’m writing in right now, and mastering it well enough that it got me through the doors of Curtis Brown Creative and the University of Oxford.

Unfortunately I’m also a Black woman (yikes). And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that no matter how many rooms you’ve earned the right to enter, there will always be a bouncer standing at the door, raising their hand. Papers, please. Over time, you develop a peculiar habit of anticipating suspicion, rather like walking out of a shop empty-handed, having stolen absolutely nothing, yet feeling the inexplicable need to look innocent. Before anyone has accused you of anything, you’ve already begun preparing your defense.

Wow, you’re so articulate! Holy shit, if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard those words. At dinner parties, on first dates, in seminars, from teachers and strangers, delivered with a raised eyebrow and an O of a mouth, as if I’d pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I just said serendipitous, babe—no need to alert the Nobel committee, you illiterate fuck. Can’t say that, obviously. Wouldn’t want to appear angry, so I smile, tilt my head, and offer a Thank you! :)

God, does it get exhausting. Having to establish your credentials halfway through a conversation, as though your vocabulary required a license. Eventually, you learn to spare yourself the trouble. Shrink the vocabulary. Throw in a Really? I had no idea! Play down an achievement. Dim your light just enough that nobody feels compelled to inspect the wiring.

In 1773, to publish her landmark book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the enslaved African-American poet Phillis Wheatley was forced to undergo an examination and obtain a signed attestation from eighteen of Boston’s most respectable white men, assuring readers that, yes, she’d written the words herself.

Jesus, poor Phillis must be rolling in her grave. Two hundred and fifty-three years later, we’re still being asked to prove that our words belong to us. Only now, no need to round up eighteen respectable white men anymore. Just submit the contents of your brain to a robot for a routine humanity inspection!

The Judges have swapped powdered wigs for lanyards and Patagonia vests, and discovered a brand new territory to colonize: human expression itself. The scheme is rather ingenious. First, swallow the fruits of centuries of human creativity. Our books, love letters, articles, stories, all our wonderfully idiosyncratic ways of arranging twenty-six letters into infinite combinations of meaning—down the hatch it goes. Like force-feeding a goose for foie gras, tip it all down the machine’s throat until it’s fat enough on our words to start speaking in our voice.

Then unleash the machines and let them vomit their synthetic slop into every conceivable corner of the internet. Once there’s so much vomit in the soup that nobody knows what they’re being served anymore—well, there’s a gap in the market, isn’t there? Why not turn the very suspicion this industry created into another thing to sell?

Introducing the SCAN FOR AI Detector: a button-shaped bouncer, raised on a diet of human writing, now stationed at the velvet rope between Writer and Reader, deciding who gets the little wristband that says Human. So, to recap: a robot hands out humanity badges to humans. Round of applause, everyone. What a fucking brilliant business model. Oh, and in case you’re dissatisfied with the verdict, you can always report a detection error. Although I confess I’m rather unsure how one goes about proving to a machine that one is human.

So tell me, Pangram; do I sound human enough? Or shall I misspell serendipitous, or sabotage a perfectly good sentence so it looks sufficiently organic, or leave a clumsy metaphor lying around like a dirty sock on the floor? And if that won’t do, what will? My handwritten drafts? A signed statement from my mother confirming that she did, in fact, give birth to me? Perhaps I should round up eighteen respectable white men to put their signatures beneath a statement confirming that I, a young Black woman, am indeed capable of writing my own damn words. With my human hands, no less, and my human brain and my very human body, which eats and shits and bleeds and occasionally produces something worth reading. If you’d like photographic evidence of any of that, Pangram, I’d be delighted to send you a picture of my middle finger.

I’ve already spent far too much time editing myself down to accommodate other people’s expectations; I sure as shit refuse to do so to fit a machine’s.

Believe me, I don’t want genuine human creativity to sink at the bottom of a sea of AI slop either. My time and money are not resources I intend to waste on someone whose entire creative process consists of typing a prompt and pressing Enter. But feeding writers’ work into unreliable AI detectors built on the same technology we’re trying to protect ourselves against cannot possibly be the solution.

We’ve somehow arrived at a place where the people responsible for creating the problem are also profiting from our desperation to solve it. But I have some wonderful news: perhaps we don’t need another fucking algorithm to tell us what to think. In fact, you don’t need to buy the solution; you already own it. It’s sitting right between your ears, and you’ve been using it to form your own opinions your entire life.

So instead of Scanning for Artificial Intelligence, how about we start Scanning with Human Intelligence?

Read five sentences. If they don’t speak to you, move on. No harm done. If they do, read five more. Support the writers whose words resonate with you. Get to know the mind behind them. Ask questions. Take an interest in how they create. There are plenty of us who would be absolutely delighted to bore you to death with the intricacies of our creative processes, and all the very human labour that goes into stringing coherent sentences together. Surely asking how the sausage gets made is a better way to celebrate creativity than forcing writers to mutilate their prose to please a fucking button.

And on that note, Pangram, should this rather indignant essay still fail to establish my humanity, I would be delighted to provide my bloody tampon for independent verification. Though I’d advise against feeding that into your machine; those things don’t flush well.

Bleedingly yours,

Mel ♥

#ScanWithHI

Once upon a time, there lived a little girl at the edge of a great wood. She was a tender little thing, apple-cheeked with limbs made plump by butter and bread and plentiful suppers. Upon her head she wore a hood of red velvet, a gift from her doting grandmother. So fond was she of this garment that she wore it through every season, even when the summer heat flushed her flesh as red as the cloth itself. Thus the creatures of the wood called her Little Red Riding Hood.

I must say, what a tragic waste it is for a child to grow up. What is gained in years is lost in flavour, for the flesh hardens, the blood grows bitter and all that honeyed innocence is spoiled by the ugly ravages of living. Fortunately, our dear little Red had yet to suffer such a fate. She was soft in body and spirit alike, raised by her mother to be charitable towards all God’s creatures. An admirable principle—though one that has furnished many a hungry mouth. Little Red greeted everyone she met upon her travels, quite ignorant that not every creature blessed with a mouth intends to use it for conversation. There was not a mean bone in her body; though this was just as well, for any respectable cook will tell you that sweet bones make the finest broth.

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I had been expecting the child that morning. Word of her grandmother’s illness had reached the village some days before, and a grave illness it was said to be. The poor old soul was bedridden, wasting away by the hour, with little hope—so the neighbours whispered—of seeing another spring. Such things have a way of stirring the maternal conscience, don’t they?

Red’s mother had kept her daughter away from the cottage for some time. She had her reasons, no doubt. Still, no respectable Christian mother would deny a dying woman the comfort of her only grandchild. All that remained was to be patient. Sure enough, just as the morning sun began to warm the moss, a spot of crimson appeared among the trees. Now here, now gone, it bobbed between the trunks. What a pretty sight she made! Skip-skip-skip along the path, a little basket swinging from the crook of her arm. Already my mouth had begun to water, and I was considering which part of her I should like to try first when—thwack!

An axe struck a tree somewhere beyond the path. Then came the crack of splitting timber, followed by the coarse laughter of men. Woodcutters. Damn them. Three of them, perhaps four, close enough to come blundering through the undergrowth at the first scream; and scream she certainly would. Nothing stirs a man’s courage quite like the prospect of being called brave, and I had no desire to furnish those great fools with an opportunity for heroism. I would have to be delicate. So I wiped the wetness from the corner of my mouth, and called to her in my most agreeable voice.

“Good day, little Red.”

“Good day,” she answered.

“And where might you be going so early, all by yourself?”

“To my grandmother’s cottage. She is ill, and Mother has sent her some cake and butter.”

“What a dutiful child you are! And where does this poor grandmother of yours live?”

“A little way into the wood,” she said. “ Her cottage stands beyond the mill, just beneath the three great oaks.”

I peered into her basket. “And what have we here? Bread and butter for a dying woman, but not a flower to brighten her bedside? Dear me.” I looked towards the trees. “Why, there are some lovely witch hazels growing just over there.”

Red followed my gaze. Beyond the path, a cluster of yellow blossoms trembled on their bare branches.

“Oh, but those are Grandmother’s favourites!”

“Are they indeed? Then how pleased she would be to have some.”

The child took a step towards the flowers, then stopped. “But I mustn’t be late. Mother told me to keep to the path.”

“Quite right of her.” I considered the flowers a moment. “Though I should think a few blossoms worth a little delay, particularly when one cannot know how many mornings the poor woman has left.”

That troubled her. She looked down at her basket, then towards the yellow flowers. “I suppose I could pick just a few.”

“A few would be plenty, my dear.”

And off she went, pushing through the leaves and humming a merry tune as she picked her way from flower to flower. Once her voice had faded into the trees, I turned and took the path towards the cottage.

A thin wisp of smoke rose from the chimney. The little gate hung open on its hinges, as it had done for years. Beyond it the garden had surrendered to the weeds. Nettles crowded the doorstep. The roses had begun to strangle one another, and a fat blackbird was helping himself to the last of the currants.

Inside, the air smelt of woodsmoke and the bitter herbs drying in bunches above the hearth. The windowsill was crowded with jars of fat, seeds, and thorns swimming in cloudy vinegar. A bowl of soup had grown cold on the table, its surface puckered with a greasy skin. Above the door hung a little bundle of twigs bound with red thread. I drew the shutters until there was barely enough light to find my way about the room. Then I attended to the bed, giving the pillows a good beating and straightening the coverlet. Afterward I retired behind the dressing screen, where I struggled for some moments with my rather cumbersome attire. It had become quite intolerable in the heat—what a relief to be free of it! Just as I climbed into bed, there was a scrape of shoes upon the stones. Knock-knock-knock.

“Who goes there?”

“It is me, Grandmother. Little Red Riding Hood.”

“Oh, what unexpected joy! Come in, sweet girl.”

A moment later the child appeared in the doorway, a bunch of flowers clutched in one hand and her basket in the other. “Grandmother! I’ve brought you cake and butter and flowers.”

“So I see, my dear. How lovely you are,” I said. “Now put them on the table and come here. Let me have a look at you.”

She did as she was told, though she lingered a moment over the flowers, carefully spreading their stems across the tablecloth. At last she came towards the bed.

“Mother says you have been very ill. She says you must eat the cake, even if you haven’t any appetite.”

“Oh, I have an appetite, my dear. You needn’t worry about that.”

A faint smile crossed her lips, though her attention had wandered to my hands, which lay upon the coverlet.

“Grandmother, what long fingers you have.”

I glanced down. Dear me, the child was right! They did seem to have grown somewhat. The nails had begun to curl over the tips, despite my having trimmed them that morning.

“All the better to hold your little hands with, dear.”

I held one out to her. She looked at it for a moment before placing her own upon it. How small it was. I could close my fingers entirely around her wrist, right now, and for a delicious instant I entertained the possibility of doing just that—but no. Not yet.

“And Grandmother, what great eyes you have!”

“All the better to see you with, dear.”

“Only they look so strange.”

“Do they?”

She nodded. “They’re quite… red.”

“It is the fever,” I told her. “It does dreadful things to a body.”

She appeared to accept this explanation though she had stopped smiling altogether. Her gaze moved over my face, then down towards the coverlet, beneath which my feet had begun to ache unpleasantly. When I stretched them out, something cracked.

The girl startled. “What was that?”

“Old bones, my dear. You’ll have them yourself one day, if you’re fortunate.”

Beneath my nightdress, my stomach gave an indignant growl. The smell of her youthful flesh had filled the room, so horribly distracting.

“Come closer, sweetheart. Give your grandmother a hug.”

But she stood rooted to the floor. “Grandmother,” she whispered, “what a big mouth you have.”

“All the better to buss you with. Now, come here.”

I caught her by the wrist and drew her towards me. Her shoulders hunched almost to her ears. But just as my lips approached her face, she recoiled. Her eyes had fixed upon my cheek. I knew at once what she had seen. Beside my ear, where the powder had grown thin, a little patch of skin revealed its greenish hue.

“Don’t stare, child. It is the sickness.”

She swallowed.

“Grandmother,” she said, her voice scarcely louder than a breath, “what big teeth you have.”

Well. Little point in further pleasantries.

I parted my lips. “All the better to EAT YOU WITH!”

I shall not trouble you with every particular of what followed. Suffice it to say that the child did not go quietly. Most surprising, given how little there was of her. There was a great deal of kicking, scratching, a rather unfortunate quantity of blood and a dreadful mess upon the bedclothes. But such are the inconveniences of a good meal. My, my, how succulent she was!

I allowed myself a little rest afterwards—one ought never to exert oneself upon a full stomach—then set about putting the room to rights. There was a good deal to be done and there was still the matter of the wolf. His skin lay in an untidy heap where I had left it upon returning home, already beginning to give off a foul odour. I gathered up the remains, carried them out behind the cottage and buried them beneath the brambles. Poor creature. For all his fearsome reputation, it had proved to be disappointingly meek. Frankly I had found the filthy business of cloaking myself in its skin more troublesome than the slaughtering and carving.

By sunrise the villagers would come looking for the child. I should have to tell them some dreadful story, of course—perhaps feign a few tears—but the lie will require little effort. A missing girl. A wolf in the woods. They’ll supply the rest themselves. After all, wolves have always made such satisfactory villains.

Thankfully, the little red hood had escaped the worst of the mess. A shame it would have been to ruin such fine craftsmanship. A few specks upon the velvet, a ribbon had come undone, but nothing I could not mend. I rubbed away the stains and settled by the hearth with my needle and thread. Once the stitches were done, I smoothed the red hood upon my lap then carried it to the wardrobe, where I hung it alongside the other little mementoes I held so dear.

Welcome to On Speaker. Every episode starts with one intrusive thought—a question, moral dilemma, hot take, or hear-me-out theory—and we unravel it through thought experiments, personal stories, and the sociopolitical forces shaping the way we think.

🎧 Episode one of On Speaker is about creative ambition, delusion, money, identity, and the strange social rules around who gets to call themselves an artist.

We get into why creativity only seems to earn respect once it becomes profitable, the terror of walking away from the life you’re “supposed” to want, why writing a novel can make you question your will to live, and how to make enough room in a crowded life for your creative ambitions to take root.

★ If you enjoyed (or hated?) this episode, let me know!! Rate it, like it (or dislike it?), subscribe, send it to someone who needs to hear it—whatever feels right. I’m building On Speaker in real time, so your feedback genuinely helps shape what it becomes ♡

Question of the day: what delusional dream are you building that reality hasn’t caught up with yet? Tell me in the comments :)

Let me tell you about the day I found out what Ms. Claudine had been hiding.

It started with the grey. For months she’d been letting the silver thread through her roots. Then one appointment, it was gone. In its place was this flat, deadened brown that could only have come from a box with a one-digit price tag and a smiling woman on the cardboard who looked nothing like Ms. Claudine. But what gave it away was underneath. When I ran my fingers through her chin-length bob, nothing came loose. No fine hairs vining around my knuckles. No strands shedding away. Gone was the papery, famished texture of the ends. Her whole head had this conspicuous, cortisol-free gleam to it. Instantly I knew it didn’t come from that old-school pomade she’d been shellacking on like spackle on a cracked wall. This was something else. The glow came from the other side of the scalp. Something inside Ms. Claudine had finally been fed.

There were the obvious tells, too. The new Lancôme lipstick lacquering her smile, the concealer pressed into her laugh lines, and the phone, always facedown on the armrest now. Any fool could’ve read those signs and followed them straight to whoever had Ms. Claudine box-dyeing her roots and putting on Lancôme lipstick. Any fool but her husband, apparently. I only know him as the muffled voice on the other end of calls she takes out in the parking lot, hand cupped over her mouth or pressed to her temple. Afterward, she comes back in with that tight smile, nailed on as if to hold her face together.

Once, Ms. Claudine’s phone buzzed face-up, and I stared at the family picture filling her lock screen, searching her husband’s face for the thing that once made her say yes. It’s there, if you squint. A ghost of something handsome. Probably had a few decent years in his twenties. Now he reminds me of my grandma’s old loveseat. Overstuffed in the wrong places, sagging, and taking up space no one has the heart or energy to haul to the curb.

If Ms. Claudine were cutlery, she’d be a butterknife. Something made to be handled without thought, passed from palm to palm. Taking up just enough space to be useful, and not an inch more. She’s the sort of woman no one notices until she steps one foot outside the shadow. One held gaze, one No without the cushion of a smile lifting her deep brown cheeks, and suddenly it’s all eyes on the edge of her. Only they don’t see assertive, direct, or knows-what-she-wants. For women like Ms. Claudine, they see intimidating. Loud. Aggressive. So she files herself down to an acceptable width, smooths what they told her was too rough. And part of that happens in my chair every six weeks, where I melt the 4c out of her and press it into something socially acceptable.

Curious what happens next (or just want to support your girl)? Upgrade to unlock the extended opening below + full access to For Your Eyes Only series, while helping fund the time I spend bringing these stories to life 🩷

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Cherry jam, blood, cherry-blood. The jar has flowered beside his head, the two reds running together over the white tile in a gleaming syrup. The man is curled beside the island, his shirt shrink-wrapped to the slow bellows of his stomach. A fly cleans itself at his mouth. I think of the crab apple Mother used to wedge between the Christmas pig’s teeth. Perhaps he could wear one. Wouldn’t he look darling?

The heat has glazed his forehead. On the radio the woman said it would reach 106, maybe 107 degrees. While I iced the cake I listened to her instructions: no strenuous exercise, don’t travel unless necessary, do not leave babies or animals inside parked vehicles, if you suspect heatstroke, call 911 immediately!

Now the cake is overturned at my feet, buttercream slumping onto the tile. The little roses tumble—one, then another—dropping into the cherry-blood. Oh dear, what a mess. Peter hates a mess. I need to clean this up before he gets home. Quick, quick. He’ll be home any minute.

The red-dark stain is already creeping into the grout, which is porous. I know this because Peter told me when we first moved in, pressing his thumb into the pale seam between two tiles. Porous. Do you know what porous means? I did, but knowledge was one of those things Peter preferred to spoon-feed me himself. Interest rates. Foreign wars. How to use the dishwasher. Why the thing I remembered happening had not, technically, happened that way. Before work that morning he latched every window in the house, despite the glass scorching my palm. Keep them shut. The air outside is worse. Perhaps I should have listened, but oh well.

The bottles knock shoulders when I open the cupboard. Folex. Dawn Platinum Powerwash. The Pink Stuff—that should do it. A wet grunt behind me. The man beside the island; his fingers scrape weakly at the tile. One trembling hand rises, the gold band on his fourth finger catching the light. His cracked lips part. Water, perhaps? Or why?

No, no. Shh. I can’t get distracted. Peter will be home soon. So I kneel, work the paste into the grout, and scrub in small, careful circles. Crimson turns raspberry. Raspberry blushes into rose. Rose pales beneath the sponge. There. Much better. Isn’t that lovely?

Above the neckline, the shadow I powdered this morning has begun to show through. Yellow rind, plum flesh. SatinSkin Powder-to-cream Stay-All-Day Concealer, the little tube lied. Full coverage, flawless finish, up to twenty-four hours of imperfection-proof wear. Oh God, Peter cannot come home to me looking untidy. Any minute now, I’ll hear the small metal scrape in the lock. Hurry, hurry.

When I lift the lid, the freezer exhales a heavenly white breath. Cold cups my burning face, and now I’m laughing and laughing because it feels so good it’s obscene!

Out comes the Christmas ham. Bags of peas. Yellow packet of fish fingers. Three chicken breasts welded together in a pink-white fist. At the very back is the top tier of our wedding cake, wrapped in cloudy plastic and furred with five winters of frost. Five years today, would you believe it?

I fold the man the way I fold Peter’s laundry; carefully, tenderly, with a great deal of feeling. Then I tuck a flowered tea towel under his cheek so the freezer’s ribs won’t print themselves on his face, because it is a beautiful face, it really is, and I take a moment with it. The nose. The little smiling scar under the lip. Familiar, somehow. How funny.

Down comes the lid. I sit on it and smooth the lemon skirt beneath my thighs, letting the cold seep through the cotton, up between my legs, all the way to the shadow at my throat. Above the garden, the cicadas are screaming in the scorching air. The sky is ripening, slowly bruising purple-blue.

Any minute now, Peter will be home.

My sweet, darling Peter.

I hope he hasn’t forgotten our anniversary.

While you’re here, I’ve linked a few other pieces below that you might like:

★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 stars)

Before the shit-talking begins, let the record show that I entered this book in good faith. The premise was pure literary cocaine: a genre-blending tragicomedy on a Tolstoyan scale, with political intrigue, workplace satire, domestic drama, and ecological horror, all told through the POVs of 8 billion unreliable narrators? It dangled every piece of intellectual bait I am constitutionally incapable of resisting, so naturally I bit. Come on—how could I not? The only appropriate response to such a glittering pitch was Hell yeah, sign me up.

Reader, believe me when I tell you that I arrived in World open-hearted and naïvely optimistic (which in hindsight may be the worst possible preparation against what awaits.) So pull up a chair, because we need to discuss what happened next.

Ordinarily I’d save the worst for last, but every element appears to be competing rather aggressively for that position. So in the interest of fairness, I’ve decided to simply spin the great Wheel of How-the-Fuck-Did-This-Get-Published and begin wherever it lands.

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And it appears we have landed on plot. For context I may be a meticulous writer, but as a reader I’m Generosity in a periwinkle cardigan, willing to meet a text halfway with a box of cookies and the benefit of the doubt. But holy fuck did this one test the limits of my goodwill.

Swiss cheese. Apparently that’s the material from which this entire novel has been constructed (although that comparison may be unfair to Swiss cheese, which at least has a decent flavour and enough structural integrity to hold a sandwich together). Let’s unpack the legal system for instance, which is apparently impartial and perfectly just. Well, so long as the person caught in its jaws is sufficiently poor.

God forbid a common mortal misses misses so much as a phone-bill payment. Suddenly the entire system bares its sharp teeth. First come the fines. Then the threatening letters, then more threatening letters now accessorised with penalty surcharges and the possibility of imprisonment, just in case the first batch failed to produce the correct amount of terror. Eventually a uniformed clerk behind frosted glass explains with a grim expression that sorry, there’s nothing they can do.

But give a straight white male character a terrible tan and enough money, and poof—the legal code sublimates into a Pinterest board.

Laws? Eww, how gauche. These are merely tasteful suggestions regarding how one might ideally conduct oneself, curated around the vague aspirational theme of Being a Good Person. Save to board? ☺︎ .✦ ݁˖ ⸜(｡˃ ᵕ ˂ )⸝♡

So I’m sure you’ll be thunderstruck to learn that most of the characters who discover morality is optional decide not to burden themselves with it. Please take all the time you need to recover from the shock.

Now on to the pacing. For the first hundred pages the deranged velocity felt exhilarating, the sort that makes you miss your bus stop or emerge at 4 a.m. with sandpapery eyes. Problem is, in World, the brakes never engage.

On page 2020 twelve major plot twists occur within the span of twenty-four hours. TWELVE. I counted, then checked the date because surely I’d missed a discreet Several Years Later—but nope, still Monday. Each twist gets roughly two paragraphs of yelling and crying before another catastrophe elbows it out of the page. That’s how life goes in World. No time to process anything because it hops from catastrophe to catastrophe.

Collective grief over a bunch of dead kids is interrupted by a sex scandal. By morning the fetid-looking creep has issued a Notes app statement apologising for whatever may or may not have happened, which he definitely did not do. Before the internet can complete its dissection a war breaks out. Then the war is interrupted by a bald man striding onto a stage and announcing, to ecstatic applause, that the new cobalt-powered model is 12% thinner, and it comes in rose-gold, what an inspiring step forward for humanity!!!

And don’t make the mistake I did, foolishly expecting a recovery chapter after the explosion. World responds to explosions by setting off more explosions until the apocalypse becomes background noise, like roadworks outside your apartment.

So to you, Anonymous Author, chapeau! Against all odds World has accomplished the unprecedented: making the end of civilization feel monotonous.

And while we’re on the topic, let’s talk about the villains. Every well-written antagonist has some elaborate theory of their own heroism. Believing they’re saving the world is a little dusty, but they’re at least driven by one self-flattering delusion explaining why destroying it is necessary. So I kept waiting for the Trauma. A tragic childhood perhaps. Absent father. Or a beloved three-legged pet whose mistreatment had inspired a lifelong vendetta against this cruel, cruel world. Anything—even some microscopic fossil of humanity beneath the Tom Ford suit—would’ve helped. But nothing.

Alas, they just want more money.

There you have it, dear reader: the complete psychological profile. They have money, but would prefer to have all the money, presumably to prevent the general public from misusing it on reckless indulgences such as food or shelter. Apparently no one in the editorial department entertained the chin-stroking possibility that perhaps these characters might require an actual personality.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, the villains are also cartoonishly unsubtle. I’m talking Totally-Spies-antagonist levels of discretion, minus the camp costumes and the cathartic arrest before the credits. Zero rhetorical restraint, they simply announce the evil plan out loud??

Screw show-don’t-tell. Introducing tell-then-hold-a-press-conference-to-clarify-exactly-how-evil-the-plan-is. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not throw in a complimentary Nazi salute for good measure?

So… why one star? Well, because while the billionaire villains interrupt regularly scheduled programming to explain yet again why mass suffering is necessary for the greater good of their investment portfolios, ordinary folks keep uplifting one another. Neighbours leave groceries outside each other’s doors during a pandemic. Someone offers half of what little they have while saying no trouble at all. Two strangers sit nervously across from each other on a first date. A bunch of people who would’ve never crossed paths gather online and build communities out of words. Magical, isn’t it?

Against all available evidence, this implies that somewhere beneath the flaming shit-show that is World, there remains a humane core. Occasionally it claws its way to the surface and presses its nose against the page—then breaking-news, another extinction-level threat arrives and shoves it back beneath the ink.

So the single star belongs to the ordinary people who remain kind without any promise that their kindness will be rewarded. World may not have earned my optimism, but they have. Which is presumably why I continue to believe (against my better judgement and several hundred pages of evidence) that the next chapter might be the one where the torn edges finally begin to stitch themselves back together.

So here goes my final verdict: would not recommend. But unfortunately hope is literature’s most persuasive narcotic, to which I appear to have developed an embarrassing dependency, so yes I will keep reading. And who knows, maybe I’ll get my happy ending. After all, stranger plot twists have survived the editorial process.

At some point, in exchange for tracking your REM cycle, you granted an app permanent custody of your biometric data, your commute, your shopping habits, your toilet-scroll history, plus the right to sell the resulting portrait of your life to a shell company registered in a windowless office somewhere in Delaware.

You clicked Accept without hesitation, trusting the consequences to remain comfortably abstract.

And yet here you are. Suspicious of me. Fair enough, you should be.

Strange things can happen when you enter another person’s mind. So before proceeding into mine, please familiarise yourself with the risks.

As a gesture of goodwill I have made these Terms & Conditions both comprehensible and short; two features the genre has historically resisted (you’re welcome).

By continuing, you agree to the following:

1. You’re getting access to my nudes. This is where the respectable outer layers come off, and I expose my most unhinged thoughts for public consumption. Whatever’s pacing the length of my skull, I unbuckle its muzzle and let it out onto the page.

   There is no menu, but here is what’s in the kitchen:

   • Weekly exclusive content: fictional essays, flash fiction, poetry, satirical cultural critiques, memoir-adjacent philosophical musings, and other literary experiments

   • Thought-provoking questions you should probably be asking yourself

   • Unsolicited life and writing advice1

   Mostly I just play with words and see what happens.

2. Warning: human-made content. The intended publication frequency is one piece per week. However actual results may vary depending on caffeine intake, hormonal fluctuations, and whatever life decides to drag through the front door. Some weeks, Inspiration arrives wearing six-inch heels, slightly manic and carrying three essays. Other weeks life puts its boot on my neck and you receive a few Notes, a vague sign of life, and my warmest regards. Sorry, there’s no algorithm here promising perfect consistency. Just a girlie, doing her best under unstable geopolitical conditions.

3. Screw sub-for-sub. This is a read-for-read space. With respect, I’m not interested in collecting subscriptions like business cards at a networking event where everyone is clutching a warm glass of wine while side-eying the exit. Hard pass. What I do want is to create a space for people who want to read and be read. So if you would rather form an actual connection than perform one for a metric, you’re in the right place. Here you’ll have regular opportunities to share your work, meet other wonderful writers and build mutually supportive creative friendships.

4. Tonal Whiplash waiver. Tonal consistency is neither guaranteed nor particularly desired. One week you may receive a philosophical spiral about multiplicity of identity. The next, a list of 10 reasons why your corporate job Is basically BDSM. The week after that, an investigation into why first dates feel like airport security.

   So if you like your newsletters thematically predictable, love that for you. Unfortunately mine is written using a neurospicy brain with no interest in packaging the sprawling absurdity of human existence into one algorithm-friendly content pillar. Come on, where’s the fun in that?

5. Anyone whose worldview begins in hatred and ends in “-ist” or “-phobic” is encouraged to steer clear. Disagreement is welcome, curiosity is welcome, different perspectives are welcome—but dehumanisation and fascism? Yawn. Seriously, try knitting or something. I promise there’s better hobbies out there.

6. For the real freaks, there’s more. For Your Eyes Only is a collection of what-the-fuck stories I unfortunately experienced: unhinged dating experiences, creepy encounters (including but not limited to the occasional stalker and a landlord from hell), trips abroad that went spectacularly off-script, and other completely outlandish chains of events that may sound fictional but, tragically, are not.

   For the price of a matcha, you’ll unlock the full series and make a girl really really happy! More importantly your support helps me protect the time required to keep making the essays, stories, and literary experiments I love sharing here. Think of it as funding independent literature. Or subsidising the consequences of my poor judgment. Either interpretation is acceptable.

   That said, there’s absolutely no pressure. 99% of what I publish is free, and sharing, commenting, recommending my page, and simply reading my words are all excellent forms of support.

   ---

By subscribing you accept all of the above, and forfeit the right to say I didn’t warn you.

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Welcome in ♡

If you have already accepted these T&Cs, you are authorised—encouraged, even—to forward them to anyone who might be willing to sign on the dotted line :)

Identity of the contracting party. Before surrendering access to your inbox, you are entitled to know whose brain you are entering.

I’m Mel, the human behind the voiceover (by the way please excuse the chaotic collision of French, British and whatever-else-I’ve-picked-up-along-the-way accents; recording this was so terrifying that this may also be my first and final venture into audio…)

Yep, you heard that right. I’m French, and English isn’t my first language. This publication exists on the other side of a great deal of time, effort and nerves. So although the occasional linguistic oddity may slip through—and comma placements remain governed largely by instinct and vibes—please know that every piece published here has fought its way across at least two languages to reach you.

As a woman of colour from Guadeloupe and shaped by years of living across different countries, I write from a cross-cultural lens that informs the sociopolitical questions at the heart of my work. Now based in London, I recently completed the six-month Curtis Brown Creative programme, and I’m currently studying Creative Writing at the University of Oxford while developing my debut speculative thriller novel. This page is where the ideas that don’t fit neatly inside it come to stretch their legs and remove their panties.

When I’m not writing, I’m usually reading—shocker—building my sustainable fashion brand, or serving as a full-time butler to two deeply ungrateful Shiba Inus.

At twenty-five, you’re a baby bird with a terminal illness.

Don’t worry you’re sooo young, they coo in one ear whenever a rejection email lands in your inbox, a Hinge date ends with you Redditing “is it a red flag if”, or you’re anxiously standing before the bathroom mirror wondering whether you’ve missed the narrow window in which retinol could’ve saved you.

Meanwhile in the other ear, sometimes from the same person and without pausing for breath: sooo… where do you see yourself in five years?

Oh, didn’t you know? Thirty is a customs checkpoint. The moment you blow out the candles, an unsmiling official appears behind a little glass booth.

Papers, please. Current occupation? Relationship status? Property ownership? Skincare regimen?

Ah, still “figuring things out,” are we?

Right. Step aside, ma’am. You’ll be detained in the Nowhere Holding Area with all the other women suspected of wasting their twenties.

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I’ve reached the age where I’m still morally permitted to be “figuring things out”, though the phrase is beginning to give off a faint sour smell. At 22, it smelled like perfume. Clarins Eau Ressourçante. Bright morning, open windows. Every wrong turn in the maze of my life could be explained by the forgiving fact that I was becoming. It also helped that my frontal lobe was provably unfinished, a medical fact I could deploy whenever necessary (after quitting a job, returning to an ex, or making any decision suggesting my brain hadn’t yet completed the required training).

But in your mid-twenties figuring things out starts emitting this foul odor people gossip about after you leave the room. Oh my god, is she still trying to decide what to do with her life??

So, there. To whom it may concern; yes, I am.

Because it took a master’s degree in International Marketing & Brand Management, several internships, all seasoned with a succession of long-winded Teams meetings to arrive at the expensive conclusion that I find the entire profession so. fucking. dull. My apologies to anyone in the industry—sending love and sparkly wishes that your latest campaign hits all the KPIs ☺

Sadly I couldn’t imagine spending one more second of my limited time on Earth in a conference room with the editorial team, the sales team, the finance team, (and several other teams whose names implied great authority while their functions remained unclear) while we brainstormed innovative ways to manufacture enthusiasm for a product none of us gave a flying fuck about.

Yep. This was the job. Persuade people who also don’t give a flying fuck about the product to give a tiny, temporary fuck. Just enough to add it to the cart. Then they’ll use it once or twice, before consigning it to a drawer and forgetting about it. In time it would complete its journey to the landfill where it’ll lie for centuries among thousands of other products just like it. Anyway, sign here for me?

Thank you, but I think I’ll keep what remains of my waking hours, if that’s okay. Besides it was time to set out on an even more perilous expedition; finding a full-time job. A few mental breakdowns later, and after yet another rejection from a firm whose application process required me to look a lacquered-haired tech bro in a Patagonia vest in the eye and say “I’m a team-player who thrives in high-pressure environments!!!” I’d finally fulfilled my corporate-roleplay quota. And as catalogued in 10 Reasons Why Your Corporate Job Is Basically BDSM, the corporate world offers an impressively elaborate hierarchy of humiliation. There were several levels left below me, which I had no intention of visiting.

Fuck it. Capitalism may have robbed 7-year-old me of her dream of becoming a full-time author, but plot-twist; 25-year-old me has come to snatch it back.

So I pivoted. Well, “pivoted” is the LinkedIn, responsible-adult-sounding word. The less elegant truth is that I fled from the path I’d spent years carving and wandered towards another one carrying nothing but a notebook and an absurd quantity of delusion.

Admittedly, I was no stranger to making consequential decisions on short notice.

Between my bachelor’s and my master’s came COVID, and hybrid classes struck me as a well-timed scam delivering full-price education at half the experience. So naturally I pressed the gap-year button, packed my bags, and moved to Paris to start the sustainable fashion brand I’d dreamed of building since I was a little girl playing Style Savvy post-curfew on her pink Nintendo DS. Incidentally this was an excellent experience. Five stars. Not necessarily a financially sensible one, but those two categories rarely overlap.

So this time, instead of pursuing a sensible 9-to-5 office job like most of my peers, I applied to Curtis Brown Creative and to Oxford University to study literature. Good thing I have a documented history of being delusional until reality proves me otherwise. Because miraculously, I got into both.

The words bloomed in my inbox like a bouquet handed through the screen. Congratulations! We are delighted to inform you…

This should’ve been exhilarating. Look at that, gift-wrapped evidence of forward momentum! Instead I felt dread, as though I’d somehow bluffed my way into a room whose door had been locked behind me.

Twenty-five is the waiting room between Potential and Failure. Here I am, queuing at the border of adulthood beneath a departures board flashing contradictory instructions. Travel now!!! Save money!!! Settle down!!! Take risks!! Enjoy yourself!!! Get serious!!! And while I sit beneath the fluorescent lighting of my own self-consciousness everyone keeps glancing at the board, waiting to see which destination my name will appear beside.

But the longer I sit there, the more it occurs to me that no one has ever produced the original copy of the Schedule. Who the hell decided thirty was the age by which I should have chosen the right career, found the right person, and developed a convincing sense of purpose? Who sold me on the idea that life is a single staircase rising into the clouds, all of us crowded onto it, expected to place our feet on the same steps and climb as high as we can before time ran out?

As far as I can tell, the people who allegedly set those milestones are mostly dead, probably men, whom wouldn’t have spared me an afterthought while alive, and certainly aren’t standing at some imaginary finish line with Dom Perignon and a smiling foil balloon that reads CONGRATULATIONS!

I could arrive at every checkpoint at the right time and still find no prize waiting, because the Schedule was assembled from other people’s insecurities, inherited expectations, obsolete ideas about what a respectable life should look like, and then strapped to my chest before I could even crawl.

And if the timeline is made up, I cannot be late.

So, an addendum to whom it may concern: no, I am not behind. I am exactly where a person shaped by my particular history, circumstances, mistakes, privileges, losses, and mildly unhinged decisions would be. This life has never been lived before; there is no earlier draft against which to measure it. Comparing its progress against someone else’s is like criticising Gone Girl for failing to follow the plot of The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook.

And hell, if faceless lawmakers and several generations of dead men have all had a hand in writing the rules by which I measure my life, then perhaps it’s time I picked up the pen.

For Your Eyes Only is a collection of what-the-fuck stories I unfortunately experienced: unhinged dating experiences, creepy encounters, unexpected plot twists, and other completely outlandish chains of events that may sound fictional but, tragically, are not. Upgrading gives you access to the full series, and helps me protect time to create the literary experiments I love sharing with you all—but there’s absolutely no pressure!! 99% of what I publish is free, and there are so many other ways to support my work if you enjoy it! 🩷

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I arrived in California for an exchange semester during a rare convergence of catastrophes best described as everything going to shit. Trump was president. A new virus had started colonizing the news, blooming across every screen in grainy red graphics. We had not yet agreed what to call it—SARS-CoV-2, coronavirus, or according to the President of the United States who had apparently conducted his own groundbreaking epidemiological research, the Chinese virus—or how frightened we were supposed to be. So we settled on business-as-usual.

At dawn, the campus sprinklers awoke and glazed the grass. Hummingbirds drove their needle-beaks into flowers. Students crossed the quad holding iced coffees and matchas, eating from one another’s plates, laughing with their mouths open. We breathed directly into each other’s faces with the reckless innocence of those smiling people in the first ten minutes of a disaster movie. Who could have guessed that, a few months later, every cough would sound like a murder confession? That a significant portion of the population would develop maskne, and that hand-sanitizer dispensers would appear beside every campus door like so many plastic priests, waiting to absolve us one pump at a time? Pretty sure that even whoever’s up there running the universe hadn’t seen that plot twist coming.

I had been there less than a week when a girl stopped me outside the student union.

“OH. MY. GOD. I love your hair!!” she squealed.

Plausible statement. My hair did, in fact, look damn good that day. Unfortunately I had not yet learned that in California, compliments are their own form of currency; could be a greeting, a sales technique, or the opening act of a felony.

Before I could thank her, three more girls materialized at her side. Glossy, cupcake-looking, all speaking in italics and wearing the same lacquered smile. Then came the downpour of compliments. My outfit. My face. My French-British-American accent—oh my God, soooo cute. One of them even touched my hair with the tip of her two fingers, ever so gently, as if checking whether I was real.

Immediately, something tightened beneath my ribs, but unfortunately I tend to treat awkwardness like a foul drink someone has to finish, and then appoint myself as the designated swallower. So I smiled and played along.

They asked where I was from, where I lived, whether I knew many people here yet. Then one of them—a blonde girl in a zig zag headband and a vaguely cannibalistic air—asked if I wanted to join their Bible study group. I did not. But I also did not know how to say No, thank you, your collective energy suggests an organ-harvesting scheme.

So I settled on, “Sure.”

They took my number. The messages began that evening.

so lovely meeting you!!! 🥰🥰🥰

are you free tonight??? 👀👀

what about tomorrow?? 🥺💓

still coming Sunday, right? we’re sooo excited, can’t wait to see you!!! 🤩✝️

Every day I replied with a new excuse:

sorry can’t, philosophy homework :(

family phone call, apparently it’s an emergency :(

got a stomachache—must’ve been the sushi I ate last night :(

On Friday they invited me for drinks in one of their dorm rooms. Girls night ;) By then I’d ran out of excuses, and that sounded safe enough. It was on campus. The walls were thin enough for screaming to result in the cops being called.

The room smelled of vanilla body spray from Victoria’s Secret. Fairy lights looped across the walls, bathing everything in its pink glow. They poured vodka and cranberry syrup into plastic cups and arranged themselves around me on the carpet, knees pointing inward. Every one of their ever-smiling faces turned toward mine. Where was I from? Did I have siblings? Was I dating anyone? Did I live alone? Did my parents call often? Every time I asked something in return—Where are you girls from? How do you all know each other?—they fed me some vague answer before steering the conversation back to me.

I kept my cup between my palms without drinking, the plastic sweating against my skin. Sorry girlies, I’d seen Get Out. Cinema had prepared me for this exact scenario, and I was not going to waste the training.

After a while, the constant anxiety became boring. So I began lying.

I invented a half-sister in Switzerland, then promoted her to a moderately successful art curator with a married lesbian lover. Next I acquired an emotionally unstable best friend who believed her ex-boyfriend was communicating his desire to get back together through Taylor Swift lyrics. By the end of the night, I had assembled an entire counterfeit life, and despite the audience, was beginning to enjoy the improv.

The girls nodded with grave, syrupy sympathy. They told me I was brave, such a good friend, such a good sister, so so kind. Then the cannibal-adjacent blonde clasped her hands beneath her chin.

“So you’re coming tomorrow, right? Bible study?”

Fuck me. I had become so absorbed in playing faux Mel that I’d forgotten about Bible study.

“Yeah, of course,” I said, already developing symptoms of whatever illness I would be coming down with tomorrow.

The next afternoon they texted me an address. The study began at ten p.m. Yep, ten p.m. I’d never attended Bible study before, but shouldn’t it happen at eleven in the morning, with tea and supermarket cookies?

I Googled the address. Nearly an hour away. Off campus. The pin sat in an industrial area, surrounded by a few buildings with no photographs. I stared at the blue pin glowing on my screen, which seemed to say, Here is where you will discuss 1 Corinthians 13:4–7, and lose a kidney.

All afternoon my phone shivered in my bag.

You’re coming right?? 😊💕

Can’t wait, it’s gonna be so much fun!!! 🤗🤗🥳

As the light drained from the windows, the sweetness began to curdle.

Are you on your way??

Do you need a ride?

We can pick you up. Just send us your location.

Why aren’t you answering?

We know your address. We can come get you.

This was when the improv stopped being fun.

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What is the self?

We’re all one, yet many. A colourful congregation housed inside one body. The Traveller. The Lover. The Daughter. The Psychologist. All my Selves, sharing the rooms of my mind.

To understand oneself is to learn to live with your housemates. Some are quiet. Some are loud. Some talk over each other. Others sleep peacefully, until something—a storm, a spark—stirs them awake.

Then there’s the Performer. She’s the one who wakes up first. She decides which face I’ll wear, which smile to attach to it, which costume to package it all in. A cream blouse for the job interview. A black silk dress for the date this evening—though maybe that’s too much. Will he think I’m too much? Maybe jeans and a halter top instead.

The Performer modulates my tone and edits my sentences before they leave my mouth. She is careful. She has to be. It’s a delicate act, being a woman of colour in this world. The shade of your skin stains everything: how they see you, how they hear you, the space you’re allowed to take up. This means practising constant calibration: how much of yourself can you show without being punished for it?

You must wear your struggles like an accessory. Visible enough to suggest resilience, but discreet enough not to make anyone flinch. You must be palatable. Digestible. Fierce, but not frightening. Speak in italics. And, above all, never, ever, say the r-word (heaven forbid you call a racist a racist!)

The Performer’s closest ally—and her worst enemy—is the Overthinker. The one who whispers behind my thoughts, fogging the room. She second-guesses the lipstick shade, rewinds the sentence, dissects the breath between words. Was I too awkward on the phone with the sushi guy? Four salmon nigiri, four spicy tuna rolls, salted soy sauce, wasabi. A sentence so simple, yet I managed to lace it with hesitations and unnecessary apologies—as though I were confessing to murder instead of ordering dinner.

I never invite the Overthinker in, yet somehow, she knows the code to every door. Showing up unannounced is her specialty. That, and asking impossible questions (or maybe that’s the Philosopher, their voices tangle sometimes).

Do we choose our Selves, or do they choose us? Do we shape them, or do they shape us?

Perhaps we’re all editors of our own multiplicity, constantly revising the story of who we are.

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As the Big Sister of two twenty-something babies—yes, they’ll always be babies to me—I’m constantly discovering the strange gravity of love. Its pull. Its price. How it feeds with one hand and takes with the other. The Big Sister is the family’s sous-chef; always juggling pans, cleaning up messes, making sure nothing burns. But when you spend your days tending the stove, who tends to the person under the white hat? Who checks that the heat isn’t slowly boiling her from the inside out?

The thing about standing in the kitchen too long is, eventually, you adapt. Touch enough hot pans, and your skin thickens, learns to cope. Eat enough spice, and your tongue stops flinching. Except the burn still burns. It might not scorch the flesh, but it seeps beneath it. Every time you fill their plates by emptying your own, you burn a little more, until one day you smell smoke and realise you’re on fire.

The first time I had an anxiety attack—after months of airing out everyone else’s darkness while choking on my own—I split in two. Body and mind tore along the seam, and no matter how desperately I grasped at the threads, I couldn't stitch myself back together. My limbs wouldn’t stop shaking. My heart slammed against my ribs, rattling my bones. Around me, the bedroom melted, closet and dressing table and bookshelves bleeding into one swimming blur. You’re going to die, my body screamed. You’re dying. But my mind was screaming over it. You’re not dying. You’re being dramatic. How pathetic. For God’s sake, pull yourself together; your siblings are next door, they’ll hear you!

All the while I was trapped somewhere in between, pounding on the doors of myself, begging to be let back in.

It took an uncountable number of hugs and squeezes from my forever-baby siblings before a window finally cracked open inside me. Then slowly, the smoke escaped.

There were many other anxiety attacks after that one, despite the assurances of the Psychologist and the Empath. Of all my mindmates, they were the most certain. They swore I was safe from the fire. After all, I can read people so easily, map their feelings, hear what they mean before they even speak. If I could put out their flames, surely I could manage my own. But they were wrong. Expensively wrong, since my fire extinguisher came in the form of £150-an-hour therapy receipts, an anxiety disorder diagnosis, and a cocktail of Sertraline and Alprazolam to keep the blaze at bay. Turns out fluency in human emotion doesn’t make you human-emotion-proof.

To be human is to feel. That’s our design. A body made of nerves and emotions, all scattered into different Selves, clicking and assembling into the puzzle of who we are.

There’s one piece I still haven’t managed to fit: the Lover. A paradox, that one. Torn between loving to love and having enough love, yet craving more, yet not right now. Loving means giving away a piece of yourself and hoping they’ll do the same. But there are no guarantees. That’s the risk, the beautiful horror of it. Sometimes the trade is even. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you give everything and get nothing back.

But why gamble pieces of my heart for a little more fullness, when it’s already overflowing? I was born and raised in paradise—otherwise known as Guadeloupe—with the best family I could have wished for. Seven souls I’d choose in every lifetime (the last three being bundles of sunshine wrapped in fur and carried by four paws).

My mother is the family’s head chef. She manages our team of five, handling every small fire that flares up in the kitchen of our lives. Such a demanding role, yet she shoulders it with such grace that I rarely noticed its weight. Even now, only in fleeting moments do I glimpse her Performer straining to hold the pieces together under the heaviness of stress, exhaustion, grief.

The first time I ever saw her cry was when our grandfather died. It startled me, seeing water in a woman I’d always known as a flame. But perhaps that’s the nature of strength; the balance between burning and cooling. Even the sun, after all, must rest behind the horizon before it rises again.

The Sun is another one of my mother’s Selves. The centre around which we all spin. Even across different time zones, her light reaches each of us.

Every morning, as kettle steam fogs the window, blurring my garden into an impressionist smear of London autumn, my phone lights up:

Bonjour ma Melou ♡

I can almost hear her across the Atlantic, the smell of coffee and sea breeze mingling in the kitchen as she calls out, “Darling! Your glasses are by the fruit bowl, not the bedside table!”

After a swim in the turquoise waters of Saint-Anne, she rings my little sister in Paris, reminding her to rest her eyes between med school revisions.

Later, between two Teams meetings, another ping:

Bonne nuit ma chérie ♡

Bisous maman, I text back.

Trick. It’s 1 a.m. in London. You should be asleep. Enough writing for today.

Then, while waiting for my dad to get home for dinner, she sends my brother a link to a Canada Goose jacket—he should get this one, the quality’s amazing. Soon Montreal will be buried in snow, she wants him warm.

My mother has always kept us warm. Her Sun helped us grow, from seeds to sprouts to flourishing plants. Maybe one day, I will bear fruit and scatter seeds of my own.

If I do, I hope my Sun shines as brightly as hers.

If my mother is the Sun, my father is the Pulse that keeps our solar system alive. He, too, wears many Selves. The Doctor rises before dawn, leaving the house while the world is still dreaming. By the time the roosters sing, he’s already somewhere in the interventional cardiology unit, gloved hands inside someone’s chest, performing whatever magic turns a crooked heart back into a beating fist.

Then the work follows him home. Five doctoral theses waiting to be marked. The one on myocardial infarction—where did he put it again? While he’s looking, his medical research draft stares from the computer screen: Cardiovascular Risk Factors in the Caribbean, edits due Monday. Meanwhile, the red bubble above his email app swells—seventy-three, seventy-four—unread messages from the cardiology department he keeps beating.

With a schedule that barely fits inside twenty-four hours, you’d think the Doctor would swallow my father whole, leave no room for the rest of him.

Yet somehow, I never felt his absence. The Dad in him always found ways to bend time around us. One minute he’s dissecting a heart, the next he’s yelling because I hit him with a red shell in Mario Kart. Or enduring the millionth Harry Potter rewatch my sister insisted on, both of us fighting sleep halfway through Order of the Phoenix. After long days in high school, he’d sit beside me for hours, translating abstract horrors like normal distribution and integration theory, then spend twice as long talking me off the ledge of despair they drove me to.

Even now, 6,641 kilometres away, I still feel his hand on my shoulder in moments of self-doubts, and hear echoes of his pep talks—don’t rest on your laurels, just as I’m about to.

The heart my father protects beats beyond the walls of the hospital. It isn’t only inside people—it is the people. It’s Guadeloupe herself. Her veins run beneath soil and sea, feeding palms, cane fields and rivers. But her heart is strained; her arteries clogged with the vestiges of history, aching from wounds that never fully healed. Unfortunately, there’s no prescription for colonial residue, no cure for groceries priced forty percent above the national average.

Still, every day, my father finds ways to keep Guadeloupe’s heart beating. Sometimes it’s stopping to buy a sandwich for a homeless man, even when he’s running late. Other times it’s fighting for the hospital’s future, standing firm before the cold men in suits who talk of “efficiency” and “restructuring,” wearing empathy like a costume while they turn public health into another market to conquer.

I used to wonder how my father does it. How Givers keep giving, pouring from a cup that never seems to refill. But over time, I realised that it does. It refills slowly, but with things far more precious than gold or glory; tearful smiles, whispered thank-yous, steady heartbeats, storms that fade before they form. Honestly, what could be worth more than that?

Perhaps that’s how our Selves are made, by pouring into each other. Every encounter—whether it’s a glance exchanged on the bus, or a promise made beneath a floral arch—is a trade: a fragment of them, for a fragment of us. And somewhere in the mix, we change shape.

The Big Sister is moulded by the siblings she protects, the parents she learns from, and everyone she meets in between. The Performer edits her lines according to the world’s cues; a smile, a raised eyebrow, then a mental Post-It—rewrite later. The Writer seasons her stories with crumbs borrowed from strangers’ lives.

We’re all pieces of each other, shaped by everything we give and everything we take.

And maybe this ever-changing mosaic is what we call the Self.

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Always arrive at least three hours before the flight. You never know how long Relationship Security is going to take.

At Customs, a woman with violet half-moons beneath her eyes sits behind a pane of scratched glass, stamping passports with a grim, butcher-like rhythm, like she’s tenderising meat.

Stamp. Slide.

Stamp. Slide.

“Purpose of visit?”

“Long-term. Hopefully.”

“Length of stay?”

“Three weeks, potentially.” I adjust my grip on the handle of my carry-on. “Depending on chemistry.”

Her wet, red-rimmed eyes lift to mine.

“Have you ever cheated?”

“Once. In high school.” The strap bites into my palm. “But we weren’t really together-together. It was sort of a… like, a blurry situationship thing.”

The woman makes a note.

“Any outstanding exes packed in your carry-on?”

Heat creeps into my face. “Yes.”

“Did you pack your own insecurities, or were they given to you?”

“Some of them.”

She exhales through her nose, pressing her clipboard flat the smudged plexiglass.

DID YOU PACK YOUR OWN INSECURITIES?

☐ Yes

☐ No

There used to be a third box: It’s complicated. But apparently, it was holding up the line. People kept feeding it twenty-minute monologues—attachment styles, childhood trauma, “the context”—until the queue wrapped around the terminal. They sealed it over post-COVID. Only yes or no now.

“Yes,” I say. “Sorry. First-date jitters.”

I offer her a small laugh, which she doesn’t bother looking up to decline.

“Were any given to you by a parent or previous partner?”

“Inherited, mostly. My mother supplied the foundation. A few came from my ex; he’d leave them lying around and I’d pick them up. Force of habit, I guess. And a lot came from the news. There’s a whole Donald Trump pouch in there.”

She studies my face for a beat. I keep my eyes on the coffee cup beside her elbow, its plastic lid ringed with fuschia lipstick, until the stamp cracks against my passport.

Approved. Slide.

I gather my things and move toward security, where presumably, the real humiliation ritual begins.

The queue snakes between retractable barriers. A sign hangs above it: Please place all memories in the tray. Sentimental items will be assessed. Liquids over 100ml not permitted.

Six bags. Thirty-five springs of a life, condensed, sorted, and forced into six clear zip-locks. Don’t ask how long that took. Thumb-sized capsules crowd against the plastic, translucent and aquarium-blue, knocking softly together as I lift them from my carry-on. Memorias. Funny how innocuous they look. Like glowing vitamins, the kind you’d swallow with a glass of water after breakfast for better skin and improved cognitive function. Except each one contains a piece of me I had to extract, file down, and seal into a travel-sized container so it could pass inspection.

The departure board flickers overhead:

NOW BOARDING

CASUAL — 18:40 — GATE 3
LONG-TERM — 19:15 — GATE 14
FRIENDS-TO-LOVERS — DELAYED

My sister thought arriving three hours early was psychotic. Three hours?? she’d texted. Your Hinge date still lives two hours away, right? Or did she relocate to Antarctica? Three little dots, then: Does she even know you go to therapy for this?

Good thing I didn’t listen. Look at this queue. An endless stream of bodies clutching little zip-lock bags of themselves, shuffling forward an inch at a time. After what feels like a century, the barrier unhooks in front of me with a metallic clack. My turn.

I place all six zip-lock bags in a grey plastic tray. The officer behind the belt wears blue gloves and a fitted navy uniform that, from a distance, does him one hell of a favour. Almost fooled me, until he looked up. His badge reads MARTIN.

Hi, Martin. Congratulations on being the man assigned to inspect the chemical composition of my murky emotional history.

“Any liquids?”

“Just a few bottled-up emotions.”

I nod toward the tray. One of the bags is swollen with little travel-sized bottles, their liquids shifting viscously when the conveyor belt shudders.

“Anything over one hundred millilitres?”

“I’ve been in therapy for almost a year, so they should be within regulation.”

Martin picks up a swamp-green bottle and presses it with his gloved thumb, raising it to the light.

“Is this Jealousy?”

“Mostly managed. Seventy-five millilitres. I measured.”

No response from Martin as he lowers the bottle back into the plastic bag. The belt jolts forward, and my zip-locks disappear through the curtain of black rubber teeth. A low mechanical whine as the scanner swallows the lot. Then Martin’s monitor wakes. Six translucent shapes surface against a dark grid, each ringed in colour. Two green. One orange. Three red.

Oh, God. Here we go.

Martin taps the orange-flagged bag. One by one, my Memorias flood the monitor. His gloved finger drifts across the rows of thumbnails, until he presses one. A video starts playing.

My daughter, asleep on my chest. Her fever has finally broken. Her hair is pasted to her forehead in mahogany commas, one fist knotted into the collar of my T-shirt. On the bedside table beside us: the uncapped bottle of paracetamol, the sticky plastic syringe with its plunger at 120. I remember sitting agonizingly still beneath her. Bladder screaming. Pins and needles colonising me from the ankles up. Still I sat there in the dark, sweating through my shirt, afraid to breathe past a certain depth. Because if I moved, she would wake, and if she woke, she would get sick again, wouldn’t she?

Martin watches the memory play out for a few seconds, expressionless as a fridge.

“Does your date know you have a child?”

I swallow.

“Not yet.”

His eyes lift from the monitor, brows furrowed.

“I mean— I was going to tell her. Obviously. It’s just not the kind of thing you put in a text. You can’t really send, Hiii, lovely chatting to you, by the way did I mention I have a six-year-old human dependent with an ex-con who owes me three months of child support? Anyway, see you Thursday!”

His face remains a closed door. “When were you planning to tell her?”

“Tomorrow. Thursday.”

“Mhm.”

He scrolls through the remaining orange-flagged Memorias, eyes sweeping the titles.

ST. AUGUSTINE’S HOSPITAL — BALANCE OUTSTANDING: £14,200
DAN — BLOCKED / UNBLOCKED: 17 TIMES
HINGE+ — AUTO-RENEWAL: ON

“How many other people are you talking to?”

“Three.”

Martin waits, apparently expecting the humiliating appendix. Oh, fuck off.

I let out a breath. “There was one woman four weeks ago. We went out once, we made out but nothing happened after, unless you count both of us liking each other’s Instagram stories for six days afterwards. Then there’s another one. Small-talk mostly. Sometimes we sext, but only when one of us has a few glasses of wine—actually, I’m pretty sure she’s married. And the third is a man I’m too polite to unmatch. He’s very sweet, but come on. Forty-two in September and still living your mum’s basement?”

Once again, not a twitch from blank-faced Martin. He taps one of the red-flagged bags, his chair creaking as he swivels to face me.

“And this?”

I fold my arms over myself.

“Just some mental clutter.”

“It’s flagged as sentimental.”

Fuck.

Tap, tap, goes Martin’s gloved finger on the red cluster. “So, anything to declare?”

My gaze hooks on the red-rimmed thumbnails across the monitor. There he is. All the stupid little scraps I have never managed to throw away, despite years of therapy. His hand spread over my stomach when Maya was still only a flutter beneath my ribs. The blue tick under a message he never answered. The marble lobby of the Radisson Blu in Lisbon—was it the Raddison? — where he kissed the side of my neck and promised we would come back once things “settled down.”

Four years of him, reduced to a fistful of tiny capsules pulsing redly on Martin’s screen like an infected rash.

“Two of those bags are about my ex,” I say. “Daniel. We were together for four years. He’s Maya’s dad.” I rub my thumb along the side of my index finger until the skin warms. “Well. Biologically, anyway. Functionally, he’s more of a deadbeat sperm donor. The only useful thing Maya got from him was his eyelashes.”

“Are you still seeing that Daniel fellow? In any… capacity?”

The laugh blows out of me before I can smother it. “God. No. On top of being an asshole he was a two-pump chump, believe it or not. Then he’d have the audacity to lie there, glistening and panting like he’d run a marathon. Frankly, I was doing charity work.”

This earns me the smallest flinch from poker-faced Martin. Oh, Martin. So you are human after all.

“Still occupying headspace?”

“Not really.” I swallow. “Only occasionally.”

Martin lifts a handheld reader and passes it over the three red-flagged bags. Beep. Beep. Beep. Then the little screen brightens beneath his thumb, coughing up its verdict in angry red letters:

EXCESS EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE — NOT PERMITTED ON BOARD

“I’m afraid these can’t fly with you.”

“But that one’s not even about Daniel.” I point at one of the bags. “That one’s mine. It’s me.”

“The scanner detected an elevated concentration of people-pleasing, chronic self-sabotaging, as well as a need for constant validation and some low-grade catastrophising, here, in the lining.”

Martin’s lips tightens in what might be sympathy or indigestion. Hard to tell.

“We can’t clear passengers carrying active sentimental residue,” he says. “You may surrender the items here, or step out of line and retain them. Your choice.”

I look down at the zip-lock bags sweating under the red scanner lights. There is a strange hammering in my ribs. Panic. No, why panic? Martin’s right. This is excess. Elodie is waiting beyond Gate 14 for a woman with her life folded flat and packed light, small enough to fit beneath the seat in front of her. Someone uncomplicated. That’s who she deserves. Not— this. Not someone who arrives dragging a decade of damage behind her like a rotting corpse.

Behind me the line breathes down my neck. Somebody’s wheelie case clips my heel. Once. Twice. Move.

“Fine,” I say. “Take them.”

A nod, then Martin lifts the three bags and feeds them to the confiscation chute one after another. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. I brace for the tear, for Daniel’s rugged face to rise up in me, or my mother’s voice—but nothing comes. Instead, something gives. A whole rigging of knots unfastens beneath my ribs at once. For a second I feel so light it frightens me. Weightless, like a held breath finally released.

There was something I was thinking a second ago, wasn’t there? A because, a reason it mattered. What was it, again? I feel around for the thought, but there’s nothing there. It’s like walking into a room and forgetting what you came for. Except I am the room. An empty room in an empty house gutted of its furniture, spotless and blank.

“There. You’re all set.”

Martin gestures towards the body scanner. I step through the arch. It doesn’t make a sound. Nothing left in me to catch. Above my head, a green light blinks on.

“All right, ma’am,” Martin says, smiling now. “You’re cleared for boarding. Safe flight.”

On the other side I collect my three bags from the grey tray. The blue capsules glow through the plastic. Weightless little things, aren’t they? Light as anything. Light as nothing. For a few seconds, I stand there waiting to miss something, though I can’t remember what. I try to reach for the ache, but there’s only the clean white quiet of the empty room.

The carry-on glides behind me as I turn towards Gate 14, whispering over the polished floor. I have never travelled this light. Never been so easy to carry.

I picture Elodie looking up when I arrive. What will she find when she looks at me?

Then I glance down at the case trailing behind me. Whatever is in there, I hope there’s enough left of me for her to fall in love with.

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I’m here to bully the words out of your head. And you’re here because your novel has been living in there for far too long. How long, exactly? Months? A year? Perhaps since that one unremarkable Tuesday when you were people-watching, procrastinating or staring out of a train window, and a what-if wandered into your head. This is it, you thought. This is the book.

Good ideas are like fine wine. Or so we tell ourselves. They age beautifully in the dark, don’t they? The longer you leave them sealed away at the back of your mind, the more exquisite they become. In there, they’re untouchable. Immune to criticism. But the moment you uncork them, expose them to the air, spill them on the page; suddenly they are vulnerable to all the ordinary humiliations of being real.

Which is terrifying.

So you leave them there. Tell yourself you’re too busy. Tomorrow will be the day., pinky promise! Then you sit in front of the blank page—and suddenly you need another coffee. Oh, and maybe now’s a good time to reply to that email from three weeks ago. And god, your room has never been so untidy!

So tell me; what’s it going to take to get you to stop carrying this story in your head and let the damn thing exist?

A stranger willing to haunt the library of your conscience, armed with unreasonable persistence and a metaphorical gun to your head?

Good news. You’ve met her.

Welcome to the very first edition of Write Or Die.

FYI: this is the only one I’ll post publicly. From next week, these will only be sent to my subscribers (free and paid, everyone’s invited!) So, if you need someone to lovingly bully you into finishing that draft, pull up a chair.

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Inside this week’s issue

• One tough-love writing truth you probably don’t want to hear (but probably need to)

• Gun To Your Head: five rapid-fire questions to answer into the comments. (don’t overthink it!)

• 5-minute Creative Exercise of the week to get your gears turning!

A tough-love writing lesson you need to hear:

Readers don’t care about your story. They care about why your story matters to the people trapped inside it.

You might be obsessed with your magic system, the centuries of family lore you’ve mapped out on an unhinged amount of post-its. But to a stranger, your story is just another arrangement of words—until someone inside it wants something badly enough to make us care too.

You’ll hear people say your job as a writer is to make readers ask, What happens next? But I disagree. Or at least, I think that’s only half the question. The real page-turners make you ask, What will this person do now?

A murder happens. A kingdom is attacked. Someone falls in love. Yawning. But who is standing in the middle of it? What are they willing to sacrifice? What lie have they built their life around? What impossible choice are they about to make?

That’s what makes readers stay up until 2 a.m.

So the next time you’re obsessing over your plot twist or your world-building, ask yourself: Why does this matter to the person living through it?

If the answer is, because otherwise Chapter 12 can’t happen, we may need to dig deeper.

If the answer is, because telling her sister the truth means admitting she’s been sleeping with her husband, therefore losing the only family she’s ever had, now we’re getting somewhere.

Readers don’t fall in love with stories. They fall in love with the people who make those stories impossible to walk away from.

Gun to Your Head…

Five rapid-fire questions. One-sentence answers in the comments. (fine, I’ll answer them too, mutual vulnerability and all that)

Let’s see if you’re still breathing by the end.

1. What did you write this week?

2. How much time did you spend writing?

3. What did you struggle with writing this week?

4. What is one concrete writing goal for next week?

5. When we meet back here next Friday, will you have done it?

(Yes)

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5-minute Creative Exercise of the week

One exercise I was taught at Oxford University by a brilliant flash-fiction auhor and Creative Writing professor is this:

Set a timer for one minute and write whatever comes into your head. No plan, no deleting, no trying to sound clever; just keep your hand moving.

When the minute is up, look back and find one thing that catches your attention: it could be anything—a word, a strange image, an awkward sentence, or even a mistake. Whatever makes you pause.

Now set a 4-minute timer, and use that as your starting point.

The point isn’t to write something good; it’s to surprise yourself. And your subconscious is usually far more interesting than your inner perfectionist gives it credit for! If you give it a go, I’d love to hear what it sparked in the comments!

In fact, the seed of my latest piece came from this exact exercise:

If you’re still here, thank you for reading all the way to the end! I hope this gave you a tiny shove toward the page, or at least made you feel slightly less alone in your strange-but-relatable specific habit of avoiding the thing you love most.

And if any of this helped, stick around, I’d love to have you here!

See you next Friday for round two of lovingly bullying you into writing. <3

While you’re here, I’ve linked a few other pieces below that you might like:

They say I’m both alive and dead, as though I’ve achieved something rare and mystical by transcending the ordinary limitations of cathood.

But I haven’t. I am dead.

Observe the setup. I’m in a box. There is a vial of poison, a hammer poised above it, and a nest of wires and mechanisms I lack the hands to comprehend—I am a cat, after all; my intellectual pursuits tend toward sleeping in inconvenient places, passing judgment, and sweeping objects off tables while maintaining unwavering eye contact. But there is one variable in this experiment I understand far better than its architects: the waiting. The poison may already be loose in the air. The poison may never be released. After enough hours crouched in the dark, turning those possibilities over and over like a mouse beneath my paw, you realise: who the fuck cares?

What matters is that I have been condemned to inhabit the long, airless hallway between life and death.

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Death, at least, has the decency to occur. It arrives, it concludes. Most importantly, it does not require your continued participation. A quick poison, a bullet, a failing organ—and there you go, excused from the matter entirely. Death is many things, but at least it is not indecisive. A door left ajar is another story. Maybe. A life wedged between two endings. That, my friend, you must attend.

At first I found it exhilarating. Every version of me stretched outward like the branches of a tree. Dead cat! Living cat! Fortunate cat! Doomed cat! I must admit, it took me a while to understand that being suspended between all those outcomes forever is worse than suffering either one.

Out there, from what I’ve gathered, a whole civilization has organised itself around the principle of the unopened box. Applications under review. Results pending. We’ll be in touch. Seen at 2:14 PM. Maybe next quarter. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. Trap a being between outcomes and, turns out, you don’t need poison at all! The endless anticipation metabolizes the body on its own. The heart performs the labour for you, obligingly, reporting for work every day and receiving nothing in return but another day of waiting. Leave the lid cracked, call it hope; a brilliant system, truly.

Whatever’s in the box doesn’t need to kill you; it simply needs to convince you that whatever eventually will hasn’t happened yet.

By now I’ve been here so long I’ve forgotten the dimensions of the container. The walls seem closer and closer every day. I miss the outside, though I’m beginning to forget what it was like. Was there ever an outside?

Perhaps I’ve been here all along. Perhaps this isn’t a box at all.

After all, the only difference between a box and a coffin is hope.

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I’m not racist—
but where are you really from?
there is a sharpness in you,
an edge that will not dull,
a flame that will not fade.
 
That feral fist of hair
coiled high above your scalp,
a storm rooted to your skull,
defying gravity’s pull.
 
You surge beyond every border
I drew to contain you.
 
I’m not sexist—
but what was I meant to read?
The varnish on your lips,
sugar glazing their curve,
the soft whisper of silk
hissing against your skin,

I took what you laid bare,
The page you left open.

Don’t you dare refuse the story
I traced across your body.

I’m not ableist—
but must everything bend?

At what point does the world
stop breaking its back, 
stop splitting its mouth
to swallow every body,
every difference,
every need?

You pry it open,

mould it into strange shapes
until its bones draw thin
under the weight of us all.

I’m not racist.
I’m not sexist.
I’m not ableist.

I’m not the problem.

But—

Hear me out: the modern workplace is essentially BDSM, stripped of the only two features that might make it worthwhile — consent and orgasms.

Stay with me.

There’s something about corporate life that has always felt vaguely, inexplicably erotic.

The first time I walked into an open-plan office, I had the distinct sensation of having wandered into a fetish community without being handed the glossary. Everyone else seemed to know the rules. The office was full of BDSM language. Take ownership. Lean in. Be accountable. Show initiative. Demonstrate commitment. Sure, these may arrive gift-wrapped as “opportunities to grow”, but if you peel back the bow, aren’t these simply commands?

Besides, my supervisor’s management style was structurally identical to that of situationship. Weeks of silence. Then one random Friday at 6 PM, an email marked urgent. A brief period of sudden demands. Then the withdrawal: Thanks, I’ll let you know when I need you. After that, nothing until our forty-five-minute Monday Teams check-in, which my psychological wellbeing depended almost entirely on by the third month. This dynamic produced the same peculiar state of hypervigilance and embarrassing gratitude for scraps of attention.

Eventually, I understood that the power structure is identical to a dom-sub dynamic. DOM gives instructions. SUB follows them. DOM controls access to information, opportunity, and approval. SUB performs gratitude for whatever portion of these they receive. The only meaningful difference between this and BDSM is that BDSM practitioners are typically more honest about what they’re doing.

In the workplace, there are numerous rituals that encode this hierarchy into the connective tissue of every working hour of your grown adult life. And the great roleplay we’ve all committed to is that this is a meritocracy.

So, how corporate-kinky are you, really?

Time to find out. Here are 10 typical Corporate-BDSM behaviours. For each statement that applies to you, put a finger down. At the end, we’ll calculate your Corporate BDSM Score and determine whether you’re merely adjacent to the lifestyle or fully immersed in it:

*For the purposes of this exercise, please answer honestly. Your supervisor will not be informed, I promise*

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1. You wear a collar. Corporate calls it a lanyard. Color-coded by clearance level, it displays your name, your photograph, and the degree of access you’ve been granted by the DOMs.

2. Every day, you call another human being Boss. Sure thing, Boss. On it, Boss. Absolutely, Boss. If you’re slightly less committed to the bit, you might soften it in casual conversation; the manager, the top dog, I’ll check with the head honcho (which is the linguistic equivalent of taking off the collar for bath time. You still sleep in it.)

   Fun footnote: the word boss entered American English from the Dutch baas, meaning master. If you put a finger down, sit with that for a second.

3. You publicly perform gratitude toward an employer, for free. Yes, I’m talking about LinkedIn. Which is, if you look at it with fresh eyes — which I urge you to do — is pretty much BDSM as content strategy. Every day, thousands of adults log on to announce things like:

   Thrilled to begin this exciting new chapter!
   Honoured to join such an incredible team!
   Grateful for this amazing opportunity!

   When the honest translation is closer to: I have agreed to exchange 80 000 hours of my one finite human life for a salary slightly above minimum wage and the occasional office sushi order.

4. You require permission to urinate.

   Technically, no one is stopping you. You could stand up mid-meeting and simply leave, because you are an adult and you pay taxes and the door is right there. But you don’t do that. What you do is wait for a pause, then you excuse yourself in a murmured, half-apologetic register, using the exact tone of a seven-year-old asking for the hall pass.

5. Once a year, in a humiliation ritual solemnly titled the Performance Review, you sit across from another adult while they read aloud from a document describing your worth as a human being.

   And you nod. And you thank them. And you ask how you can do better.

6. You have eroticized your own exhaustion.

   Last night, I was here till nine. I haven’t taken a real break in weeks. You compete to suffer most legibly, to be seen straining under the weight. Because in the office, endurance isn’t endurance — it’s devotion. If you’ve put a finger down, congrats! You have confused punishment with virtue and called it work ethic, which is exactly what a SUB would do.

7. You work in an open-plan office.

   The concept of an open-plan office is officially branded as a collaborative space, but really it’s a panopticon designed by someone who read Foucault and jerked off to it. You are watched, you know you’re watched, so you perform being watched accordingly. And should you earn a promotion, you are permitted to do some watching yourself. You are, of course, still being watched.

8. You have begged — and it is begging, let’s not be precious about this — for thirty minutes of a superior’s calendar.

   You put in the request. You waited for the request to be granted. You attended the thirty minutes. The thirty minutes were requested for you to ask a single question that could have been answered in a four-word email. You thanked them afterward.

9. You dress to signal compliance, or aspiration, or (if you’re truly ambitious) both simultaneously.

   The cream-coloured blazer, non-threatening Mary Janes flat. Or, alternatively, the Patagonia vest: the fleece vestment of someone who is virtue-signaling, who would like you to know they have interiority, they go outside, they are Not Like The Other Subs.

10. At the end of the day, you docilely wait to be released.

    I think that’s everything; unless anyone needs anything from me? Nobody ever needs anything (except the occasional asshole who suddenly does), but you must be formally dismissed. The ritual of the asking and smiling while closing your laptop must occur before you are permitted to go home to your life.

If five or more of your fingers are down, I’m sorry to inform you that you have been in a long-standing BDSM power dynamic with a rotating cast of mediocre men and the occasional mediocre woman, and you have smiled through it, and called it a career, and perhaps even been grateful for it.

Here is what I also want you to know: your kink is not without its rewards! Occasionally your “Boss” may nod at you across a conference table after you’ve said something, and the serotonin release is indistinguishable from joy. That’s the genius of the corporate BDSM system: it doesn’t need to give you much, because it has trained you to find the smallest things ecstatic.

Don’t worry, this is a safe space. No kink-shaming here. We are all somewhere on the spectrum.

So tell me: how many of your fingers are down?