Lately, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that those small, repetitive moments are not interruptions to life; they are life. A beautiful, interesting existence isn’t built only from highs. Sometimes it’s built from laundry and waiting rooms and evenings that don’t ask much of you at all. So I’ve been trying to romanticise the mundane by doing ordinary tasks differently.

If you’re also someone who feels chronically underwhelmed by everyday life, maybe try some of these.

• Little displays: Stacking books just right, arranging a vase of flowers, tidying a single corner of my desk. My space starts to feel intentional, like a small world I’ve shaped with care. My space now reminds me of the lived-in rooms from 90s romcoms, the kind belonging to thoughtfully chaotic women with inner lives you instantly trust. I love that for me.

  

• Breakfast like it matters: Whether it’s a fruit salad that inexplicably cost me over £10 to make for one person, or a cup of instant coffee from a £1 box of 8 sachets, I’m learning to treat both with equal care and attention. I take a little photo whatever it is, print it out on my Kodak instant printer and stick it into my journal with a few sentences of whatever comes to mind.

• Learning for the fun of it: I’ve been going down rabbit holes on things I know absolutely nothing about. Reading about obscure histories, niche topics, or slightly useless facts just to feel my brain wake up a bit! I think boredom isn’t always about needing more excitement, sometimes it’s just about needing curiosity.

  

• Music as a mood: I put on a specific movie soundtrack and let it score whatever I’m doing, like folding laundry, making the bed, walking home. Suddenly the ordinary feels a bit more cinematic. It might sound obvious, but for a long time I defaulted to audiobooks or podcasts, needing a voice constantly speaking into my brain just to make the simplest tasks bearable. This is different, music is different, it asks nothing of me, and yet transforms the mundane into something unexpectedly alive.

• Small connections: Smiling at a stranger, leaving a kind word for a barista, noticing someone’s laugh and smiling at them. Tiny reminders that the world is full of intersecting lives. I’ve been going out of my way to connect to more strangers and have had so many interesting (and some unhinged) conversations since I started being intentional with this.

  

• Mini rituals: Lighting a candle before I write, pouring tea into the same cup every morning, pressing flowers or leaves into a notebook and writing down where I picked them from. Tiny things that quietly mark the day as mine.

• Noticing myself: Writing a sentence about the day, a fleeting thought, a dream, or even just a feeling of boredom. Watching my life grow in small daily records, like a diary of imperceptible yet cumulative change. I’ve noticed I write less and less about how bored I am and more about just me.

I wrote this for me and for all of you who also chase thrills, who feel bored of life often, who always want the next rush. There’s nothing wrong with us but sometimes it’s nice to remember that life isn’t only in the big moments. It’s in the small ones too, the overlooked, “boring” moments. They’re the stitches that hold the whole thing together, the texture of a day, the feeling of being alive. Once you start intentionally noticing and experiencing them, even just a little, life feels fuller, slower and more alive.

The Cool Girl used to wear Converse with mini dresses. Then she did coke and stayed out until the early hours of the morning before a work day. Then she did pilates at 5am and drank lumpy green juice. Then she was a pouty doe-eyed skinny girl with ambiguous wealth and a nicotine addiction.

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Society pretends she is legible. That she can be identified by a uniform of sorts, like a certain pair of shoes or a particular haircut. The Cool Girl usually has a curated disinterest. She also eats so many burgers but stays thin. She cares, but not too much. She wants sex, but never needs it. She has opinions, but none that disrupt the room. She is always “effortless”.

The Cool Girl is a product. We are sold lists! Cool girl films! Cool girl books! Cool girl aesthetics! Cool girl apartments! Cool girl behaviour! As if “cool” were something you could buy, rehearse, or master. But cool is subjective. It always has been and when you trace who gets labeled a Cool Girl or an It Girl, the pattern is painfully consistent. She is usually white. Usually thin. Usually rich.

The Cool Girl myth depends on the idea that there is a correct way to be desirable, interesting, and worthy of attention. Fiction at its best dismantles that lie and shows us women who are unmarketable and unforgettable. Women whose power comes from refusal rather than refinement.

Think of the Cool Girl monologue in Gone Girl, which names the performance as just that, a performance, but still positions the Cool Girl as something men demand and women internalise.

What gets lost is that the women who feel most alive on the page are almost never “cool”. They are abrasive, hungry, embarrassing and devoted to the “wrong” things. They are too much, too loud, too obsessive, too sincere, too messy.

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Then there’s the women of Neapolitan Novels. Lila and Lenù are not aspirational icons by societies standards. They are volatile, competitive, brilliant, cruel, loving, contradictory. Their lives are shaped by class, rage, intellect, and desire. They are never cool but they are real and that reality is what makes them compelling.

Then there is The Vegetarian, where refusal itself becomes a threat. The protagonist opts out of desirability, domesticity, and coherence. Her rejection of norms is not cute or ironic. It is low-key disturbing and it costs her everything.

I think it’s time we take the Cool Girl to the guillotine. She’s done. Actually, she never existed!

She’s just a costume stitched together by male gaze, algorithms, scarcity, societal demands and sexism. Nothing and I mean nothing is cooler than authenticity. If you naturally fit whatever this era is calling “cool,” good, be that, fully. If you don’t, also good, be that, loudly. There is no higher status than being yourself without flinching. No performance, no sanding down your edges and no pretending you don’t want what you want.

The coolest thing you can do is to stop asking the internet what the “Cool Girls” are doing and just fucking live.

There are no “It Girls”. There are only women being temporarily crowned because they fit the mood of a moment. Cool is not a stable identity, it is a projection, and projections always say more about the viewer than the subject.

The most interesting women in literature are not described as cool. They are difficult. They are inconvenient. They are real. They are alive.

Between (roughly) 1450 and 1750, Europe experienced a wave of witch persecutions that led to an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 executions and around 75–80% of those accused were female, often widows, healers, or women who existed slightly outside the boundaries of what their societies considered “acceptable”.

In other words: inconvenient women.

And while we like to believe we left the witch trials in the 17th century, along with leeches as a medicinal practice, I regret to inform you that witch trials never ended. We simply modernised them.

The Perfect Witch

Witches, historically, had certain traits. They were usually:

• loud

• independent

• inconvenient

• sexually suspicious

• or simply disliked

Many of the accused women were widows, healers, “outsiders”, or women who didn’t fit neatly into social expectations. They were women who refused to behave correctly. The historian Carol Karlsen notes that many of the women accused during witch hunts were those who held property or social autonomy that made others uncomfortable.

We like to think we’ve evolved, right? We no longer drag women into town squares and accuse them of sorcery and we don’t build pyres or gallows.

We simply burn them in newspapers, television segments, comment sections, Reddit threads, and algorithmically boosted outrage cycles.

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The Modern Day Witch Hunt

The Case of Britney Spears

In the early 2000s, Britney Spears became the most famous woman in the world and then one of the most publicly destroyed.

By 2007, paparazzi followed her constantly, photographing every breakdown, haircut and hospital visit. Headlines mocked her mental health, late-night comedians turned her crisis into punchlines, entire tabloids built covers around the spectacle of her “losing her mind.”

In the years that followed, it became clear how extreme the situation had been. She spent 13 years under a conservatorship that gave her father control over major aspects of her life and finances. https://www.nytimes.com/article/britney-spears-conservatorship.html

Looking back at the footage now, it doesn’t feel like celebrity gossip. It feels more like watching a public execution conducted by flash photography. These villagers had cameras and we were the crowd rooting for her end.

The Case of Princess Diana

Princess Diana was pursued so aggressively by paparazzi that it became an international obsession. Photographers followed her constantly, tabloids dissected her marriage, her body, her relationships and her mental health.

When she died in a car crash in 1997 while being pursued by paparazzi in Paris, the global reaction was a mix of grief and a very quiet, uncomfortable question:

Did we do this?

Investigations confirmed that paparazzi were following the car before the crash.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Diana-princess-of-Wales

For years the media had built a narrative around Diana as unstable, emotional, dramatic.

A perfect modern witch.

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The Case of Amber Heard

If you want to see a digital witch trial in real time, look at Amber Heard.

During the 2022 defamation trial between Heard and Johnny Depp, social media platforms became saturated with memes, mockery and edited clips portraying Heard as a liar, a villain and a maniac.

Researchers later found that much of the online conversation was shaped by coordinated harassment campaigns and viral misinformation.
https://theconversation.com/amber-heard-and-johnny-depp-how-social-media-shaped-public-perception-of-the-trial-184463

Amber Heard and Johnny Depp were two people in a toxic relationship who accused each other of abuse, but the court of public opinion delivered its verdict long before the legal system did. Heard became the internet’s villain.

No stake required, just a Wi-Fi connection and a screen to watch it on.

The Algorithm Loves a Witch

Nothing unites a crowd like a shared villain, and modern media ecosystems are built to amplify whatever keeps people watching and usually, it’s a woman’s downfall.

Studies of online harassment show that women, particularly women in public life, face disproportionate forms of gendered abuse online, including sexual harassment and stalking. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/01/13/the-state-of-online-harassment/

Which is perhaps why the internet and the media have become so efficient at recreating the emotional mechanics of a witch trial.

Look at Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. A “wardrobe malfunction” happened involving both performers. Jackson faced years of career punishment, radio bans, and public shaming. Timberlake? The man who actually ripped open a panel of her jacket exposing her breast? Award-winning career intact.

Then we have Monica Lewinsky versus Bill Clinton. A consensual relationship turned into a global scandal. Lewinsky was humiliated on late-night TV, called “hysterical,” “naïve,” and “manipulative.” Clinton stayed in office and largely escaped lasting reputational damage.

Even Amy Winehouse, whose substance abuse and erratic behaviour were dissected endlessly by tabloids, became the embodiment of public spectacle and moral failure. Male musicians with similar struggles were “tragic geniuses”; she was a cautionary tale.

History has always been suspicious of women who behave incorrectly, women who are too loud, too ambitious, too independent, too messy, too human. In Salem, they called them witches. In the modern media ecosystem, we call them content.

In 1692 they gathered in church halls, now they gather in comment sections.

But the emotional machinery is almost identical: Identify a woman behaving incorrectly. Turn her into a symbol. Strip her humanity. Watch the spectacle.

We like to believe the witch trials were a tragic historical anomaly, a strange moment when rational society briefly lost its mind. But history has a sense of humour! We didn’t stop burning witches, we just replaced the fire with attention and attention, it turns out, burns just as hot.

References used:

Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe

Ronald Hutton, The Witch

Anne L. Barstow, Witchcraze

I joined Substack in late January of this year with no real intention beyond reading. I’ve always written in the solitude of my own company and kept it to myself. Writing, for me, has always been private, almost secretive. A place to put the thoughts that don’t quite fit anywhere else.

I’ve always felt like the words I write don’t suit my facade. On the outside, I’m jovial, an over-talker. Pretty much the same class clown I was at eight years old, just slightly more self-aware. I deflect with humour, I say things in a jokey tone, even when they’re not jokes at all as a defense mechanism and also because I love making people laugh.

On the inside, though, it’s… heavier, quieter, darker and I don’t really share that part of myself with people I know. Even when I try, I soften it, I dress it up and make it palatable. I think everyone who knows me would consider me quite a private person.

So writing here has been unexpectedly cathartic. A kind of release I didn’t realise I needed. But more than that, what I didn’t expect was all of you.

I’ve spent the last couple of months reading work on here that has genuinely floored me. People writing about things that are deeply personal, painful, funny, strange, niche, political, poetic, factual, sometimes all at once. Pieces that made me laugh, pieces that made me uncomfortable, pieces that stayed with me long after I closed the tab.

There is so much talent here and a lot of it goes unrecognised. I think that’s what made me want to do something about it, even if only in a small way. So I hosted a competition. I received 138 submissions, which is still a number that feels slightly unreal to me.

To make it fair I asked seven very voracious readers in my personal life to help “judge”. Each of them read through the pieces and came back with their top five. For context, all of us, the readers, the “judges” are so different to each other. Some grew up poor, some didn’t. Some are atheists, some Christian, one Muslim. Some are men, some women, two non-binary. Some gravitate toward fiction, others toward poetry, others toward essays dense with facts and references.

There were no rules for what made something “the winner.” No criteria beyond: did it move you? And that could mean anything. Shock. Recognition. Emotion. Curiosity. Discomfort. Beauty. I didn’t ask them to justify their choices because I didn’t want to. who am I to interrogate why something resonated with someone? I specifically asked them not to tell me why they chose what they chose.

So, with that in mind….

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The Winners

🥇 1st Place (£60)
The Roots of the Olive Trees

🥈 2nd Place (£30)
The Waiting Room

The Sunday Brew

The Waiting Room

It’s a random Thursday, the end of January, and I’m sitting in the waiting room of the neurology department anxiously waiting for my appointment, which was supposed to be at 9:30 am. I sat in the chair opposite the door with my mother sitting right next to me. The waiting room is packed. People are coming and going constantly. A middle-aged woman was si…

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2 months ago · 10 likes · 14 comments · The Sunday Brew

Runners Up

Born There Made Here

This Is Not Content

Born There, Made Here

Excerpt #1 from my memoir, Your Dad Is a Dog, a work about exile, inheritance, and self-reinvention. These serialized fragments offer glimpses of the larger, rights-exclusive manuscript, intended for future print and digital publication. Follow me here on Substack for future installments—each stands alone, yet together they trace one story of metamorpho…

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3 months ago · 11 likes · 22 comments · Kian Razi

Is Black Femininity Just Cosplaying

ms justice attorney, nana.

Is Black Femininity Just Cosplaying Whiteness?

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a month ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · ms. justice attorney

Eyeball to Eyeball

Emmett Tatter

Eyeball to Eyeball

In July 2012, I was shipped to Suwannee CI’s confinement after being at Lake Butler (Reception and Medical Center) for close to two years. While at Lake Butler, I was surrounded by death. Surrounded by chaos. If it wasn’t for my friends and books, my mind might have left me. That was where I was first truly introduced to pure evil. I wrapped bodies of d…

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2 months ago · 60 likes · 63 comments · Emmett Tatter

To everyone who submitted, thank you. Genuinely.

It’s not a small thing to share your work, especially the kind of work many of you submitted. It takes courage to be seen like that, even on the internet, even behind a screen. Please don’t feel discouraged if your piece wasn’t selected, I would give each and every one of you my money for your work if it wouldn’t bleed me dry after a few wins...

I’m already planning another competition in May for my birthday, another small way of giving back to the writers on this platform who deserve far more recognition than they often receive. This is just my way of saying: I see you and your work matters and thank you. <3

I would encourage anyone reading this to read the featured pieces, but also please feel free to share your own work in the comments to help others discover your writing.

The wine bar has the kind of lighting designed to make everyone look wealthier and more interesting than they actually are.

Low amber bulbs hang from their nooses, brick exposed, small marble tables barely big enough for two glasses and on the wall, a large chalkboard that lists obscure natural wines in looping handwriting.

Everyone speaks just a little too loudly. All of them so interested in what they have to say but vacant when they have to listen.

They lean across tables as if the room is a movie set about beautiful people discussing groundbreaking ideas instead of a room full of people pretending they understand what volatile acidity means.

I ordered a Portuguese orange wine because the waiter said skin contact three times and that seemed important. He said it reverently too. S k i n c o n t a c t.

I imagine him man-handling the grapes himself with his chubby ringed fingers.

Across from me, Lou is explaining something with enormous seriousness about a man she matched with on Hinge.

“He’s a creative strategist,” Lou says, lowering her voice dramatically, as if the phrase might attract journalists or someone who actually gives a fuck.

“What does that mean?” I ask but I don’t care.

“I actually don’t know,” Lou says.

She shrugs and takes a long sip of wine then stares at it like a coroner evaluating a corpse.

The wine bar smells faintly of candle wax, citrus peel, and damp wood. I can detect Santal 33 somewhere nearby.

Near the window a man is explaining fermentation to a woman who looks like she had long ago accepted that this was her evening.

“Natural wines are basically alive,” he says.

Alive.

At another table someone is photographing their glass from three different angles.

A man in an oversized blazer keeps saying fermentation notes like it is something erotic and salacious.

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I hate it.

I hate them.

I also hate Lou.

Lou has the bright, frantic energy of someone who believes a personality can be assembled entirely out of Pinterest vision boards and familial wealth.

I take another sip of the orange wine. It has the same dry, sour taste it had earlier, like a bruised apple that has been left in a shoe to ferment.

The waiter had described it as complex. I had suspected that meant unpleasant and I am correct, as always.

I imagine the grapes sitting together somewhere in a dark cellar, pressed against each other inside their skins, slowly dissolving into something expensive.

Skin touching skin. Fermenting quietly.

Lou is still talking. Something about a weekend in Margate, something about a ceramics workshop, something about holding space for creativity.

I stop listening.

Instead I look at my reflection in the window beside our table. The candlelight softens me slightly in the glass. I look expensive and beautiful, as always.

By the time we leave, the street outside has that late-night London stillness that feels like both peace and a held breath.

Taxis slide past with soft mechanical sighs. The kebab shop at the corner spills warm light onto the pavement. A couple argue beside a bike rack.

We hug goodbye outside the tube station.

“Text me when you get home,” Lou says, pulling her coat tighter around herself as the cold air hits us.

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, Lou.”

Lou squints at me suspiciously.

“You’re going to walk home from the station?”

“It’s literally twenty minutes.”

“That’s still twenty minutes.”

“I walk it all the time.” I shrug.

Lou shakes her head immediately.

“I hate that you do that.”

“Why?”

“Because men are weird,” Lou says, lowering her voice like she is sharing a state secret. “Like properly weird.”

“They’re just people.”

“No they’re not,” Lou says, exasperated. “Not at night. Not when you’re a woman by yourself. They become something else.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Just text me when you get home,” she says again.

“I will.”

Lou hesitates one last second, then she leaves.

The platform is almost empty but there’s a man in a puffer jacket watching TikToks without headphones. The sounds burst out in annoying jabs and I want to grab his phone and throw it onto the tracks.

Or maybe grab him and throw him onto the tracks.

When the train arrives, I catch a glimpse of myself in the darkened glass doors.

My hair smooth, lip gloss intact, little black dress, coat buttoned neatly.

I love the way I look in this body.

Small, polished, expensive.

The kind of woman people assume needs protecting.

When I come up from the station, the street is darker than I expect.

One of the lamps has gone out, leaving a stretch of pavement swallowed in shadow.

The air smells like damp brick, fried oil drifting from somewhere down the road and the signature scent of weed.

I start walking.

Click.

Clack.

Click.

Clack.

Closed shops slide past on either side of the street and my reflection appears and disappears in dark glass. I admire how long my legs are.

Click.

Clack.

Halfway down the road I notice them.

Three men. They are still far enough away that most people would not have paid attention, but I notice.

Three shapes moving badly through the night.

Too loud.

Too loose.

The way some men walk and talk when they are performing for each other.

They have not seen me yet but I know they will.

“Well hello, you’re a beautiful little thing aren’t you!” one of them calls.

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I do not respond.

“Oi, did you hear him?”

I keep walking.

“Don’t be rude, we’re giving you a compliment.”

They spread out slightly as they approach, a slow widening arc. A predatory tactic.

My heart begins to beat harder. Not faster. Harder.

The men smell like lager and sweat when they get closer.

“Where you going, sweetheart?”

I look straight ahead.

“Too good to talk?”

“Bet she thinks she’s something.”

“Look at her, fucking slut. Walking like she’s in a fucking perfume advert.”

I do have a good walk. I have practiced it, actually. Years of watching myself in shop windows. Shoulders back, chin level, effortless.

Another step. Another.

The street narrows slightly ahead where a service alley cuts between two buildings. A weak yellow bulb buzzes above it.

One of the men moves closer.

“Why you ignoring us you stuck up bitch?”

His hand brushes my arm.

A hand touches my waist, then another.

Then the shove.

The world tilts suddenly. I stumble into the alley, one of my boots slipping slightly on the damp pavement.

“Careful” one of them laughs.

Another grabs the back of my neck.

“Someone needs to teach you some manners.”

My back hits the brick wall with a thud and for a moment I go very still.

Small.

Quiet.

The perfect frightened girl.

One of them leans close enough that I can smell beer souring on his putrid breath.

“Thought you were better than us, didn’t you?”

His fingers tighten around my wrist and his other hand gropes my breast roughly.

That is when I smile. Not nervously, not politely.

A slow, delighted smile. It is a very pretty smile.

The kind someone gives when they have been waiting a long time for the main course.

Ravenous.

Something shifts in my mouth. Soft and wet, a quiet clicking sound.

Something inside my body relaxes, like a knot untying. My spine loosens first, then my jaw, then my teeth. It feels so good.

I can hear their breathing. Three separate rhythms. One fast, one uneven, one steady and stupid.

The man pressed against me has not realized anything is wrong yet.

His pulse beats against my skin, slow and heavy and I think of wine sat in a barrel fermenting quietly. Skin contact, just like the waiter said.

My hand moves so quickly it looks like a trick of the light. Fingernails sliding into the soft hollow of his throat, a sharp crack, the delicate snapping sound of cartilage giving way.

A symphony.

Blood comes out in a sudden hot rush, splashing across my perfectly blushed cheek.

The second man stares, confused, his alcohol poisoned brain buffering.

I bite him before he can step back. My jaw widens with a slick popping noise, teeth lengthening as they slide into place like knives finding their sheaths.

I tear into his neck with the enthusiasm of someone ripping open a bag of crisps after a long day. I love crisps. My favourites are Walkers cheese and onion flavour.

The third man screams and tries to run but slips on something wet.

My body is different to the one they pushed into this space. Taller. Spine slightly hunched, shoulders rolling forward with a predatory looseness.

My fingers have lengthened into narrow hooked things, nails dark and thick like polished bone. Blood drips from them and my delicate chin.

A dark stain spreads across his crotch. Pathetic.

“Oh my god,” I say lightly, in the same practiced voice I used earlier ordering wine.

“You’ve pissed yourself.”

“Please—” But I am already moving.

There is a dull cracking sound when I grab his arm. Bone. It folds strangely, beautifully.

The smell of his piss reminds me of the orange wine.

That same sour edge, that fermented heat. Something that has been sitting quietly inside a body for a long time.

“Oh,” I say softly.

“That’s interesting.”

I laugh, like the delighted sound someone makes when bubble wrap pops unexpectedly well.

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When it is over, the taste lingers on my tongue. Warm, metallic, sour. Almost pleasant. I know someone in East London would pay £14 by the glass for this taste.

I frown slightly when I catch a glimpse of my reflection in a window.

“For fuck sake.” I mutter.

My lip gloss is completely ruined.

I pull the small tube from my bag and reapply it carefully, then straighten my coat and flatten my hair back into submission.

Perfect, as always.

I nudge one of the bodies with my boot.

“And these were my favourite Miista boots, prick.”

I land a final kick to the third man’s limp contorted body and step back out onto the pavement to look back and admire my work.

I imagine the grapes again, sitting together somewhere in a dark cellar, pressed against each other inside their skins, slowly dissolving. Skin contact. Fermenting quietly.

The street is still empty and dark but a bus rumbles faintly somewhere in the distance.

My phone buzzes

Lou: Text me when you get home!!

Me: Home safe x

Lou: Okay good, I was worried you’d been abducted by some horny men hahah

I smile slightly. If only she knew.

Then I start walking again.

Click.

Clack.

Click.

Clack.

Ten minutes down the road a group of men stand smoking and laughing loudly.

One of them notices me walking past.

His voice follows me down the street, then his feet start to move.

“Oi.”

I do not stop.

But I do smile.

Click.

Clack.

Click.

Clack.

The night is still young.

Recently, Timothée Chalamet “joked” in an interview that he wouldn’t want to work in ballet or opera because they’re the kinds of art forms where people say, “hey, keep this thing alive even though no one cares about it anymore.” (ITVX)

The remark was followed by laughter, a quick “all respect” tossed in after the fact, and joking that he just lost 14 cents in viewership.

And what struck me wasn’t even the irony that Chalamet comes from a family deeply connected to ballet, his mother and sister trained in it. (Vanity Fair) What struck me was something else entirely: how casually one artist dismissed two of the oldest, most demanding, and most disciplined professions in the performing arts.

Opera and ballet are not fragile relics begging for relevance. They are living art forms built on centuries of human devotion and contrary to the joke, people care about them very much.

The Discipline Behind the Curtain

I write this with deep admiration for both ballet and opera. I have sung my whole life and while I am not classically trained by any means, I studied ballet and opera in both my bachelors degree and my year at a musical theatre academy.

And let me tell you something: That shit is hard.

The physical discipline required is on another level entirely. The control, the precision, the strength, it is a kind of athletic artistry that most actors could never replicate. Ballet demands an almost impossible relationship with the body: hours at the barre, muscles held in unnatural positions, ankles and toes absorbing the shock of endless jumps, dancers balancing their entire weight on the tips of their toes.

It is beautiful on stage because it is brutal behind the scenes.

And then you have Opera.

Opera asks something equally extraordinary of the human body, except the stage is the throat. Opera singers train for years to build the breath, control, and resonance needed to send their voices soaring above an orchestra without the help of microphones. Entire roles require singers to sustain demanding arias, dramatic phrasing, and impossibly high notes while filling vast theatres with sound powered only by lungs, diaphragm, and technique. The body becomes an instrument that must be cared for with almost obsessive discipline.

You cannot fake ballet. You cannot bluff your way through opera. Nepotism may open doors in many industries, but it cannot place someone en pointe or carry a soprano through a full aria.

Those things require years, decades of work, of discipline, of attention and love. Working alongside those artists was one of the most inspiring experiences of my life. Their dedication to their craft was unlike anything I had ever seen.

The Myth That “No One Cares”

If ballet and opera were truly dying art forms, the numbers would show it and guess what? They don’t.

Globally, the opera industry alone generated roughly $3.4 billion in 2024, with projections estimating it could reach over $5.3 billion by 2033 as audiences continue to grow through live and digital performances. (Dataintelo)

In the UK, opera performances brought in £93 million in box office revenue with 3.4 million attendees in a single year, reflecting steady audience growth. (Archyde)

Major institutions continue to thrive, like The Royal Ballet and Opera in London, which reported over £170 million in annual income, with box-office revenue alone rising dramatically as audiences returned after the pandemic. (Civil Society)

People care. They buy tickets. They travel to see performances. They study the art forms. They train their entire lives for them.

Stop Blaming Women for a Man’s Words

Something else happened after Chalamet’s comment started circulating online. The internet did what the internet always does and many people blamed a woman, specifically, his girlfriend, Kylie Jenner.

I kept seeing variations of the same response: What do we expect, he’s dating Kylie, which raises a question that seems painfully obvious. Why is it that when a man says something deeply stupid, the blame immediately shifts to the nearest woman? He said it. Not Kylie.

We have no idea what she thinks about opera or ballet. She might adore them. She might attend them. She might fucking hate them. She might cry through Swan Lake for all we know.

But instead of holding a man accountable for his own words, the internet reflexively turns to blaming the woman standing beside him, especially because she’s a Kardashian/Jenner. It’s tired and it’s so lazy.

If we are going to critique a comment, then critique the person who made it. That person is Timothée Chalamet.

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Hollywood Has Been Living Off Ballet and Opera for Decades

The irony of dismissing ballet and opera from within the film industry is comical because Hollywood has been mining them for inspiration for decades...

Take Black Swan, starring Natalie Portman. The film, centered entirely around the brutal psychological world of ballet, grossed over $329 million worldwide and won Portman the Academy Award for Best Actress. (Source: Box Office Mojo)

Or The Red Shoes, one of the most influential films ever made about dance, still studied in film schools decades later. Or Billy Elliot, a story about a working-class boy discovering ballet that became a global box-office success and later a wildly successful stage musical.

Opera, too, has repeatedly shaped cinema.

Films like Amadeus, which centers around opera composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, won eight Academy Awards and remains one of the most celebrated films ever made. Let’s see whether Timmy is still in the lead for his Oscar after the “14 cent drop in viewership”.

Hollywood has built entire careers and award seasons on stories born from these art forms, so to suggest they are irrelevant feels a little like biting the hand that feeds you.

Art Should Lift Other Art

Opera and ballet have survived revolutions, they have survived wars. They have survived centuries of cultural change and they will survive the occasional careless remark from an actor in an interview chair.

Art forms that demand this much discipline, devotion, and beauty do not disappear simply because someone claims they are irrelevant. They endure because artists continue to give their lives to them and because audiences, generation after generation, keep showing up!

So if you ever find yourself sitting in a dark theatre while a soprano’s voice rises through the orchestra or a dancer lifts effortlessly into the air, remember this:

You are not witnessing a dying art, you are witnessing one of humanity’s oldest!

Still, the fantasy sells.

Over the past few years a steady stream of influencers have relocated to Dubai for one reason or another, though the reason most frequently left out of the caption is simple: zero income tax. In Dubai, the money you make online basically stays yours. And so they moved their ring lights and brand deals to the desert, turning the city into the ultimate influencer backdrop.

But, as conflict in the region edges closer, missiles have begun appearing in the background of those same balconies and rooftop bars. Suddenly, influencers who built their lives inside this immaculate fantasy (and avoiding any discussions of politics and human rights) are posting wide-eyed videos asking for peace, urging empathy, explaining how frightening it all feels. Which, of course, it is. War is frightening when it reaches your infinity pool, so let’s talk about it.

“This Isn’t Meant to Be Happening Here”

Let me just say, fear is human and anyone would be terrified watching explosions near their home, but the hypocrisy and selective empathy is very loud. One plea in particular went viral for all the wrong reasons. Australian influencer Louise Starkey posted video from a balcony in Dubai during missile strikes, saying, “It’s not meant to be happening here.” It’s a really fascinating sentence if you sit with it: “This isn’t meant to be happening here.” As if violence will take your postcode into consideration, as if death respects skyline aesthetics of your instagram backdrop. Where, if not there, is it meant to be happening?

I looked at Louise’s content before the strikes and scoured the web and I couldn’t find a single post/story/comment expressing concern for Palestine, or for any country embroiled in conflict, or for the civilians living through full-blown genocide. She pleads for peace now that war is knocking at her door, but not before. Why do we think that is? Because apparently, it’s meant to be happening over there, elsewhere, not Dubai.

Dubai has sold itself as life outside of reality, a place where the rest of the world’s problems simply do not apply, where the biggest disruption is a sandstorm interrupting brunch but that illusion collapsed when missiles flickered overhead and if the rumors are true, the government is working overtime to make the outside world believe everything is fine!

The Hypocrisy of Selective Empathy

Let’s talk about selective empathy, because there’s nothing wrong with fear but there is something deeply wrong with where and when that fear is amplified.

While Dubai based influencers are suddenly begging for peace, urging global empathy, there are entire crises they spent years studiously avoiding talking about on their curated feeds. In Gaza, entire neighbourhoods have been flattened, hospitals bombed, children killed. Journalists have been livestreaming under fire and this has unfolded for years in plain sight. Visible to us on the same screens as their luxury Dubai lifestyles.

Other influencers in Dubai have taken to social media to either normalise the situation or pivot quickly from fear to reassurance once headlines broke. An example of this is Maëva Ghennam, a French reality TV personality who initially expressed fear and called for urgent help, only hours later to flip her tone and praise life in Dubai and its air‑defence systems, reinforcing the “it’s safe here” narrative despite missiles flying overhead.

And let’s be clear: calling for peace when your own view is disrupted is not the same as advocating for peace generally.

The very fact that so many creators had spent years avoiding any coherent messaging about geopolitical violence (from Gaza to Sudan to Yemen) but suddenly find their voice once luxury is threatened suggests something ugly about how empathy is deployed in Dubai influencer culture.

The message is this: Empathy is situational, not universal.

Is Dubai Silencing the Truth?

We’re right to critique these influencers, their videos in full glam with missiles in the background, their selective empathy, and the culture of silence and spectacle they perpetuate. But if we stop there, we miss the bigger picture: the system that shapes and sometimes silences them.

It’s one thing to curate an Instagram feed but It’s another thing entirely when the state itself effectively forces the curation for you. It’s been reported that in the wake of Iranian missiles and drones targeting the UAE, ordinary residents and influencers alike have faced explicit warnings about what they can and cannot post on social media.

Authorities have publicly reminded residents that sharing rumours, “false information”, or any content that contradicts official statements may be treated as a criminal offence, with penalties that can include fines of at least AED 200,000 (≈ £42,000) and up to two years in prison. (Khaleej Times)

In recent days, mass text alerts reportedly sent to residents warned that photographing or sharing images of sensitive locations, or reposting unreliable content, may result in legal action, language that has inevitably changed online expression. (arabtimes)

The result isn’t just curated content: it’s curated truth.

Glamour, Fear, and the Price of Silence

Look, we get it, the zero‑tax thing is irresistible. Of course we all want more money. Influencers are popular because the demand exists. We, as a society, consume their content, boost their numbers, click the links, double‑tap the glamour, and once they’re earning an obscene amount, of course they flock to Dubai. Makes perfect sense.

But understanding context doesn’t mean giving a free pass. We can and should critique them for their selective empathy. We can question why videos begging for peace, declaring how terrified they are, are simultaneously shot in full glam, hair impeccable, makeup untouched by missile dust. We can ask why the state is so intent on silencing the truth, why the rules and warnings exist to protect appearances instead of people.

We can demand that these influencers, and the culture they perpetuate, acknowledge the history of corruption, exploitation, and erasure in Dubai. That the wealth they enjoy is built atop invisible slave labour. They don’t get to make millions off our attention then claim immunity from critique when the veneer cracks (veneer pun intended). They don’t get to grow filthy rich while insisting that tone‑deaf fear is above questioning. We can, and we must, hold them accountable.

It has this insane power over how we move through the world, what we post, what we say, who we approach, what we admit to wanting. There are entire lives built around avoiding the possibility of someone, somewhere, thinking that’s embarrassing.

But embarrassing according to who? And who the fuck cares?

“Cringe” is a social tool used as a way of keeping people small, uniform, self editing. If you are afraid of being perceived as cringe, you hesitate before trying. You dilute your enthusiasm, you don’t share the thing you made, you don’t raise your hand to speak. You stay safely ironic, safely detached and safely invisible.

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I know this because every time I share something I’ve written on substack to my personal Instagram, I am fully aware there are people watching it thinking, what is she doing. What’s wrong with her. Since when is she a writer. She is so cringe. I can almost hear the imagined commentary in real time. The internalised audience of old acquaintances, distant mutuals, people who knew earlier versions of me and feel entitled to quietly question the new one.

But here’s the thing. I don’t give a fuck.

Obviously I have moments of hesitation before doing something a little “out there”, but I refuse to let the possibility of someone else’s secondhand embarrassment dictate whether I show up as myself. Because the alternative is lying to myself and that, to me, is far worse than being cringe.

To be cringe is to be free.

To me, being cringe means you allowed yourself to be seen in motion rather than only presenting the finished, socially acceptable version of your life. And yes, that visibility can feel awkward because people might judge you, they might misunderstand you or they might think you’re doing too much.

But people think things regardless.

Embarrassment is one of the biggest forces holding us back from lives we actually want. The conversation you don’t start because what if they think you’re weird. The opportunity you don’t go for because what if you look out of place. The room you hover outside of because what if you don’t belong there. The creative project you keep private because what if someone laughs.

And yet every interesting person you admire has, at some point, been deeply cringe. They started publicly, they tried visibly, they existed before they were impressive. Nobody emerges fully formed and socially approved unless they’re a nepo baby, which I am unfortunately not, though I too would love the ease of generational confidence and connections but for the rest of us, there is only trying in public.

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I’ve started approaching life with an acceptance that embarrassment is inevitable. If I want to speak to someone, I will, even if we don’t know each other. Even if my voice does that slightly awkward thing where there’s a weird bubble in my throat and I sound like Kermit the frog. I would rather risk a moment of awkwardness than carry the lingering what if.

If there’s a room I want to be in, I try to be in it. I send the email, I show up alone, I introduce myself. I stand there feeling slightly exposed and hope something unfolds. Sometimes it doesn’t and sometimes it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes I leave thinking, well that was humbling. But sometimes it leads to conversations, connections or opportunities that would have never existed if I had prioritised looking cool over being myself.

Cringe culture thrives on spectatorship, it exits in people watching others attempt things and reacting with irony instead of empathy. But most people are too consumed with their own internal narratives to truly fixate on yours and even if they do judge you, that judgment rarely carries the weight we imagine it does. It passes. Meanwhile, you keep moving.

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I think the real cringe is living a life dictated by imagined audiences, constantly editing yourself into palatability. I think pretending you don’t want things you deeply want just to look nonchalant is holding you back! Silencing your interests, your ambitions, your softness, your enthusiasm because you’re afraid of looking stupid.

There is nothing embarrassing about being in progress.
There is nothing embarrassing about starting something new.

So I think, post the thing. Speak first. Apply. Create. Walk into the room. Be visibly new. Be visibly trying. Let people misunderstand you. Let people roll their eyes. Let some moments fall flat. Be yourself, what ever that looks like to you. Get to know yourself outside of other peoples perceptions and expectations.

No-one’s opinion of you will matter as much as the life you build by refusing to shrink.

Cringe is a made up concept, but freedom is not. <3

1. Jeffrey Epstein: The Demand Was Already There

2. Technically Legal, Morally Questionable: The Countdown Culture

3. When Men Liked Me Most: Puberty Under Surveillance

4. The Lolita Effect: The Costume of Innocence

5. You’re Describing a Child: Small. Hairless. Soft. Obedient. Do You Hear Yourself?

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My posture is atrocious. My spine feels like a question mark that’s been held too long. My mouth tastes like burnt coffee and mint, a strange sterile bitterness. Soft techno hums through my Sony headphones, supposedly engineered to cancel out the world, and yet I can still hear my cat taking a shit in his litter tray three feet away. So much for noise cancelling.

I’m midway through an email. Polite, professional. Warm but not too warm. The kind of woman I’ve learned to be through the years.

My fingers hover over the keyboard.

They twitch.

At first I think it’s just a cramp from too much typing or too much caffeine. But then the bones shift. It’s subtle. A tightening. The skin pulls taut. My hands shrink inside themselves. The veins retreat. The knuckles soften.

Pink nail polish blooms across my nails like a rash.

I stare.

The ache in my lower back begins to dissolve. The chronic, adult pain I’ve come to accept as rent for existing in a body with bills and grief and deadlines and lack of movement. My shoulders narrow. My waist cinches in. My thighs thin. There’s suddenly less of me pressing into the hard wooden chair.

My head throbs. A sharp adolescent ache right behind the eyes.

I stand up too quickly and the room tilts. My legs are shorter, my hip bones reappear after years in hiding. My stomach grumbles, high and tight and I’m suddenly starving. My breasts shrink and sting like they’re arriving for the first time again.

My tattoos drain from my skin as if someone is pulling ink out with invisible syringes. My arms go blank. My ribs bare. My stories erased.

I lift a strand of hair and it falls pin straight against my chest. It smells burnt. That acrid sweetness of a cheap straightener held too long in one place. Beneath it, fruity Hollister perfume clings to my pulse points, aggressive and sugary.

My toes are painted the same pink as my nails.

I walk to the mirror.

She’s there.

Fifteen.

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She looks like me but she doesn’t. Thick mascara caked onto her lashes like tar. Dream Matte Mousse foundation sitting claggy and wrong on skin that doesn’t need it. Small pearl studs in her ears. No hole where the nose ring should be. Her eyebrows are bushy, untamed, unaware of threading and lamination and the tyranny of trends.

Her eyes are wide. Not naive. Just open. There is wonder in them. And ache. So much ache.

She is so much smaller than I remember.

I forget how little space she took up.

I step closer. She steps closer. We are inches apart now, separated by glass and years.

“I know you,” I say.

Her mouth trembles like she’s about to apologise.

“You’re okay,” I tell her. My voice sounds older. It sounds tired and sure all at once. “Everything is going to be okay.”

She doesn’t believe me. I can see that immediately. At fifteen, everything feels terminal.

“You’re going to go through things that you think will break you,” I say. “They won’t. They’ll bend you. They’ll bruise you. But you won’t snap.”

Her eyes flicker, suspicious.

“You’re strong. You’re kind. You’re going to move to Rome for a bit. And New York. You’ll find a home in London. You’ll go to university and get a first class degree.”

Her lips part slightly at that. She has no idea.

“Your dad is going to die at 56,” I say, softer now. “And it will split you open. Your heart will break a few times. Properly break. You need to stop making yourself sick. Please. When social media becomes a thing, try to stay away from it. Don’t hand your worth over to Instagram like it’s a coat you don’t need anymore.”

She flinches at the word sick. She knows what I mean.

“If an older man with tattoos who plays the guitar tries to speak to you, run.”

Her cheeks flush. Shame lives there so easily.

“You’re so smart, Whitney. You can do whatever you set your mind to. Be nicer to your Mum, it’s her first time living too. You don’t have to carry everything alone. Learn how to talk about your feelings. Let people see the real you. You don’t always have to make them laugh, especially when you feel like you’re drowning, okay?”

Her mascara is starting to smudge.

“It’s not your job to regulate everyone else’s emotions. And at work, one day, try not to overshare just because you want to be understood. You don’t owe everyone your insides.”

The room begins to shift.

I see it first in her hair. The pin straight lengths start to kink, then curl. The burnt scent lifts and softens. The Hollister perfume fades, replaced slowly by the woody, almost sacred note of Santal 33. My skin prickles as tattoos bloom back across it, black lines surfacing like something breaking through water.

I need more time with her.

“You’re going to be so happy,” I rush. “And so sad. I won’t lie to you. It will get hard. But you know yourself. You know you can do it. Stay close to your family. Open your heart. You’re beautiful. Focus more at school and less on boys, please.”

Her freckles begin to dissolve. My nose ring forces its way back through flesh with a sharp sting. My breasts fill out. My hips soften. My mouth plumps with residual lip filler. My teeth brighten. My makeup sharpens into something more precise. More curated.

She’s disappearing.

“You can do anything you set your mind to,” I say quickly. “You’re going to learn hard lessons but you will survive every single one. You have people who love you. You are going to be okay. You are going to be so happy.”

The girl in the mirror blurs.

And then she’s gone.

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I’m 29 again, standing in my East London flat, 3000 miles and fourteen years away from the bedroom where she once lay awake cataloguing every flaw like it was homework.

I can smell my cat’s shit in the litter box. My spine throbs, that familiar adult ache settling back into place like it never left. My phone buzzes against the desk. Slack. Email. Something that needs me.

The half-written email is still open on my laptop. Polite. Sanitised. My mouth tastes like coffee again. Bitter. Minty. I’m not hungry anymore.

I look down at my hands.

Longer now. Inked. Adult. The skin looser across the knuckles. Nails bare because I can’t be bothered to paint them or to pay someone else to do it for me. They look capable. They look tired and boring.

Everything is exactly as it was before.

The techno hums. The fridge hums. London hums outside the window like it doesn’t care who I’ve just been.

But I miss her.

I miss her ferocity. The way everything felt catastrophic and holy at the same time. The way she believed love would either save her or kill her. The way she wrote secrets in the journals and thought the world might end if someone read them.

I didn’t realise she was still in there. Not as a wound. Not as something to fix. Just always with me.

She didn’t disappear, she just becomes, me.

I’m in my kitchen, at the cheap wooden table we found on the street, its surface scrubbed raw to remove some questionable stains before it earned its place here. I sit on vintage Ercol chairs we salvaged from a rubbish tip in East London. They’re the kind of chairs that could fetch £300 each on eBay if we were more sensible about money. They are beautiful, yes, but wildly uncomfortable and my lower back is already screaming at me to sit somewhere else.

To my left is a glass of water, to my right is a stale instant coffee that has congealed into something cold and questionable.

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I feel everything today. It swirls inside me like a storm and yet my eyes blur over the screen, the words refusing to land. Ideas sit in my mind, waiting like nervous patients in a doctor’s office but I can’t for the life of me summon a single one into the light.

I breathe. I shift. I rub at my lower back. I try to put the fog inside me on the page but can’t. Maybe it’s the wine from the other night, maybe I’m residually hungover. I keep thinking, just write something. You feel a lot right now, so just fucking write something. Something poignant, life-altering, or at least vaguely interesting. How hard can it be?

And then the question hits: what do you write when you do not know what to write?

And I know, I feel it, that I’ve found it. I’m going to write about what to write when you don’t know what to write. I’m going to write a few prompts, a few sparks, just single sentences that might catch fire in me, in you. Something to help us put feeling, curiosity, interest onto the page.

I rise to the microwave and revive the congealed sludge back into something more like coffee and take to the keys to give you, me, some prompts to use, or not, when the words will not come. After all, writer’s block isn’t a lack of talent, curiosity, ideas, or motivation. Sometimes our brains are just full of too much, too many thoughts, too many feelings, and nothing wants to line up in a way that makes sense on a page.

Love.

Love is rarely neat. It is longing, delusion, projection, devotion, timing, fear. It is as much about who we are as who we choose.

• Write about the first time you realised you loved someone, not when you said it, but when it quietly settled in your body.

• Describe a relationship that taught you more about yourself than about the other person.

• Write a letter to someone you almost loved, but didn’t and explore why “almost” still lingers.

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Desire.

Desire is not only sexual. Sometimes it is hunger, ambition, yearning, wanting more than you are told is possible.

• Write about something you want but feel embarrassed admitting.

• Describe how your desires have been shaped by what you were taught was “appropriate.”

• Write about pleasure as you understand it now and where you first learned about it.

Loss.

Loss is not always death. Sometimes it is distance. Sometimes it is a version of yourself you can no longer return to.

• Write about a version of yourself you’ve outgrown. What do you miss about them?

• Describe the moment something ended without naming what it was.

• Write about a place you can never return to in the same way again.

Grief.

Grief rearranges the furniture of your mind. It sits in rooms you didn’t know you had.

• Write about the smallest detail you remember about someone you’ve lost.

• Describe how grief shows up in your body; where does it live?

• Write about something unexpectedly beautiful that happened in the middle of your sadness.

Culture.

Culture shapes us before we even have language for it. It tells us what to value, who to fear, what to aspire to.

• Write about a belief you inherited that you later had to unlearn.

• Describe a moment you felt out of place. what made it clear you didn’t “belong”?

• Write about a tradition you love, and interrogate it gently.

Current Affairs.

We are living through history and scrolling through it at the same time. It is exhausting to witness and impossible not to.

• Write about a headline that made you feel something physical; anger, fear, grief, fatigue.

• Describe how staying informed has altered your nervous system.

• Write about the tension between wanting to look away and refusing to.

Identity.

Identity can feel like both shield and burden. It is something we claim and something projected onto us.

• Write about a label you resist and why.

• Describe a moment you felt fully seen.

• Write about a contradiction within yourself that you are learning to hold without resolving.

The kitchen is quiet, except for the hum of the fridge and the distant traffic outside. My coffee has cooled again, waiting for its second revival. My back aches and my spine has curved into the letter C. My thoughts are still swirling, still storming, but there is a pulse now, a rhythm, a place to begin.

And that is enough for today.

In this essay, I want to talk about the industry, the people who profit most from it, the complicated questions around ethics and regulation, and the cultural consequences of a world in which so many have learned about desire, pleasure, and intimacy through pornography. I want to explore what it does to our ideas of lust, connection, and consent and why that matters for all of us, not just the performers or the consumers. But all of us, including children.

To understand what’s happening, we need to look at not just the consumption but the industry, the incentives, and the cultural consequences of an economy built on sexual content and dubious consent.

A Billion‑Dollar Industry Controlled by a Few

The scale of modern pornography is huge. Globally, online porn generates tens of billions of dollars every year, estimates suggest the industry’s revenue may be as high as $97 billion worldwide, a figure that eclipses even the Hollywood film business.

But that wealth is concentrated. A handful of corporations dominate the digital infrastructure of porn. The biggest player, a conglomerate now called Aylo (formerly MindGeek), owns or controls dozens of the internet’s largest porn sites, including household names like Pornhub, YouPorn, and RedTube. Another major player, WGCZ Holding, runs huge platforms like XVideos and XNXX.

These companies are often opaque in ownership and largely unaccountable to labour protections, regulatory scrutiny, or social responsibility standards that other media industries face.

A Broader Cultural Reckoning

Critiquing pornography is not the same as condemning desire, sexuality, or fantasies. I’m all about sexual exploration when it’s consensual. This is about examining how desire is shaped by corporate incentives and digital architecture and how that shaping affects our bodies, relationships, and expectations. Some online discourse insists that suggesting women not participate in pornography is un-feminist, that liberation means doing whatever you want and yes autonomy matters, of course it does, but it doesn’t erase the structural exploitation, monopolies, or the cultural consequences that teach many of us what pleasure, intimacy, and desire are “supposed” to look like.

There is also a darker link we can’t ignore: pornography intersects with violence, degradation, and misogynistic subcultures. Studies show that high consumption of violent or degrading sexual content correlates with normalised aggression and violence toward women. (Pornography and attitudes supporting violence against women: revisiting the relationship in nonexperimental studies by Gert Martin Hald, Neil M. Malamuth, and Carlin Yuen). When adult content is taken as instruction rather than fantasy, dominance, control, and submission stop being symbolic and start shaping real-world behaviour.

In corners of the internet (“red-pill” podcasters, manosphere communities, misogynistic influencers) porn becomes evidence to them that women crave domination, that men are entitled to female bodies, and that feminist critique is naïve and I don’t think this is accidental. It is a feedback loop where pornographic imagery fuels narratives that justify disrespect, contempt, and violence toward women. When fantasies of dominance are celebrated rather than interrogated, they bleed into language, expectations, and behaviours, shaping how men see women’s bodies and how women see their own.

Everyone Is Watching… Even Children

Access to pornography is unprecedented: vast swaths of the internet are pornographic (looking at you X), and exposure often begins far earlier than most people realise. Some data suggest that the average age of first exposure to online pornography is around 11. Eleven.

When children, teenagers, and young adults learn about sex from platforms designed to generate ad revenue, it’s no surprise that their expectations can become warped. Traditional porn isn’t made for education or mutual pleasure; it is constructed to maximise arousal and repeat clicks. Viewers learn sexual scripts that emphasise performance, stamina, spectacle, and dominance rather than mutuality, consent, communication or real pleasure.

This is the risk of internalising pornographic performance as a model of how sex is meant to feel, look, and function, often long before viewers have any relational context in their own lives.

The Business Model is Designed for Maximum Profit, Not Ethical Practice

Unlike film or music, where studios and workers operate within regulated frameworks (or should), the pornography industry operates in a weird legal grey zone. Performers and creators often have no guarantee of safety, pay, or rights to their own work. Porn sites profit from massive traffic (often including pirated content) and many of those profits flow upward while actual creators see very little of it.

So, performers generate the content, but the infrastructure that exploits, distributes, and monetises that content is controlled by corporations that often operate offshore, with minimal accountability. Who gets paid? Not always the people on camera. Not always the people whose bodies fuel the revenue.

We celebrate “creative freedom” and “sexual liberation,” and we should, but we rarely ask: at what cost, and under whose terms?

There is virtually no global framework regulating pornography with respect to worker protection, age verification, or ethical labour standards.

Pleasure Isn’t the Same as Performance

This is where the cultural cost becomes personal.

When you have a generation whose primary reference for sex comes from videos engineered to trigger dopamine, the line between intimacy and spectacle blurs. Research suggests repeated exposure can desensitise viewers and increase the demand for more extreme content, not because humans suddenly prefer cruelty, but because the reward systems in our brains adapt to novelty and stimulation.

That’s why what once felt taboo becomes normalised, and why so many users unwittingly adopt fantasy aesthetics as realistic expectations. Porn choreography is about visual impact, not relational reality and without adequate sexual education, many people internalise what they see as truth.

Power

Arguments about pornography often get bogged down in moralism, but the deeper issue (in my opinion) is about who benefits, who suffers, and who gets to define norms.

The people who shape the industry’s algorithms and revenue streams are rarely the performers whose bodies create the content or the consumers whose expectations are influenced by it. A tiny corporate elite profits from an economy of spectacle, while the downstream effects on relationships, self‑image, respect, communication and consent are externalised onto individual consumers navigating their desires alone.

This imbalance mirrors other capitalist logics:
Profit over people. Growth over wellbeing. Scale over nuance.

Pornography is not just an industry. It is a cultural force and let’s just be real, one that deserves scrutiny because it doesn’t just reflect desire, it shapes it. I think we need to ask ourselves what kind of sexual culture we want to cultivate, who gets to define it, and who suffers from the narratives we normalise.

Because when an industry this powerful goes unchecked and when it profits off human bodies and teaches a generation what pleasure is supposed to look like, that’s no longer just entertainment. That’s shaping the emotional architecture of intimacy itself.

So I’ll leave it with a few questions: Is there such a thing as ethical pornography? How can we keep children safer? How can we create clearer boundaries between fabrication and real life? What do you make of the lack of regulation? And ultimately, how do you feel about the porn industry itself?

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I am an angry woman.

Female rage is never one singular thing. It shifts differently across race, class, culture, disability, sexuality, geography. But there is a shared thread that hums, that stretches between all of us women.

I write this essay from my own experiences and perspective: that of a white woman from a lower, now working-class background. I write as someone who has been consistently underestimated. As a girl who was desired for her body before she even understood it. As someone who has moved through emotionally abusive relationships and carried the ache of being let down by a father figure. I can’t and don’t claim to know what female rage looks like for every woman everywhere, but I recognise the thread that runs beneath it and that is what I want to explore in this essay.

Female rage is not just anger.
It is the sediment of a thousand small indignities.

It is learning early that your safety, desirability, and likability are social currencies. It is realising that the world will punish you more for expressing anger than it will punish someone for causing it.

Female rage lives in the body before it ever reaches the voice. In clenched jaws. Tight shoulders. The polite laugh that tastes bitter. The tears that arrive instead of shouting because somewhere along the way you were taught anger was unbecoming, hysterical, too emotional.

Being a woman is wondering why caution feels like second nature. Why keys instinctively slide between your fingers like Wolverine on dark walks home, shaped into makeshift claws just in case. Why a night out with friends can shift into emotional management when a drunk man inserts himself into your space and you find yourself smiling politely, nodding, calculating the safest way to disengage without escalation. It is the reflex of saying I have a boyfriend even when you don’t, because fictional male presence can feel safer than a clear no.

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It is the discomfort that sits in your throat when asking for more money at work. The rehearsed sentences. The apologetic tone. The internal negotiation between knowing your worth and fearing you will be perceived as difficult, greedy, ungrateful. It is hyperawareness as a default setting. The constant scanning of surroundings, the mental mapping of exits, the outfit calculations that weigh self expression against potential interpretation.

We have to be nice, but not too nice. Friendly, but not flirtatious. Confident, but not intimidating. Attractive, but not inviting. It is an exhausting choreography of self monitoring that often goes unseen and unacknowledged. Being a woman can feel like existing inside an invisible rulebook. You are not only navigating the world, you are navigating how the world might perceive your navigation of it.

And beneath all of this sits a quiet, simmering question.
Why does so much of our energy go toward managing the possibility of harm rather than simply living?

I believe that what distinguishes female rage from other forms of anger is not that it is deeper or more valid, but that it is historically suppressed, pathologised, or aestheticised. Angry women are hysterical, dramatic, difficult, ungrateful, crazy. Our anger becomes spectacle or punchline. So female rage often mutates and it becomes passive aggression, self destruction, perfectionism, withdrawal, sarcasm, people pleasing followed by burnout. Sometimes it implodes. Sometimes it explodes. Either way, it is rarely allowed to exist plainly.

This is why seeing female rage depicted honestly in media can feel fucking electric. Recognising it outside yourself creates a strange validation, like someone has translated a language you didn’t know others are also fluent in. Here are some examples:

• In Gone Girl, rage is meticulous, performative, terrifying. Amy Dunne weaponises the expectations placed upon her, turning the “cool girl” myth into something monstrous and revealing how suffocating that can be

• Black Swan captures rage turned inward, perfectionism so intense it fractures identity, the violence of trying to embody purity and darkness simultaneously. A personal favourite of mine.

• In Pearl, rage is lonely and grotesque, born from isolation, thwarted ambition, and the unbearable gap between fantasy and reality.

• In Black Panther, female rage takes on regal weight through Queen Ramonda, whose grief and fury are controlled yet seismic, a reminder that anger can be both dignified and devastating when born from loss, protection, and injustice.

• Lady Bird (my favourite film ever) offers a quieter version, adolescent rage shaped by class anxiety, maternal tension, and the desperate need to become someone beyond your circumstances.

• In The Break-Up, rage sits inside domestic imbalance, the exhaustion of emotional labour unacknowledged until resentment spills over. (I hate this film).

• Hidden Figures portrays controlled, dignified rage, the kind that simmers beneath professionalism while confronting structural injustice daily.

• G.I. Jane channels rage into endurance, proving strength within institutions determined to break you.

• And Set It Off shows collective rage shaped by systemic barriers, friendship, survival, and the desperation of limited choices.

What connects these portrayals is not that the women are always right or even likable. It’s that their anger is legible. It refuses the neatness society often demands of women’s emotions.

The question, to me, then becomes what to do with this rage once you recognise it.

Because female rage is so powerful, but directionless rage can (and in my experience, will) corrode. Turned inward, it becomes self sabotage (also my experience). Turned outward without reflection, it can harm others or reinforce the very systems that created it. The goal is not to suppress rage but to metabolise it. To treat it as information, as signal, as energy! Channelled well, female rage can be generative.

It can become boundaries where there were none or stronger ones where there were some. It can become the courage to say no without cushioning it or the refusal to stay in dynamics that diminish you. It can become creativity, writing the thing you were afraid to articulate (me right now). It can become political awareness, recognising patterns beyond your individual experience. It can become solidarity, seeing your anger mirrored in others and realising you are not alone or irrational. It can become ambition, a refusal to remain small for comfort.

Female rage is not inherently destructive. It is protective. Protective rage draws lines for us, it clarifies what hurts, what is unfair and what cannot continue. It disrupts the expectation that women should endlessly absorb discomfort for the comfort of others (people pleasing). Female rage is not cruelty, but self respect in motion. The rage does not erase our softness but instead I think it protects the conditions under which our softness can safely exist. In that sense, rage is not the opposite of love but love refusing harm.

Rage can burn, yes.
But it can also illuminate.

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I started Substack exactly a month ago as someone who has been writing for over a decade and never sharing it. My writing lived in notebooks, notes apps, forgotten docs… very much a private practice. Pressing publish felt terrifying but here we are, exactly a month in and a community of over 580 people.

So here’s what my first month actually looked like:

✦ I engaged meaningfully

• I commented on posts and notes I genuinely liked, not hoping for a follow back, just because something resonated. Substack is built for conversation, and people can tell when you’re being real versus networking

✦ I ignored engagement bait

• You’ll see posts promising subscriber trains or “I’ll subscribe if you do” energy, it’s tempting, especially when you’re new, but community doesn’t grow from transactions

✦ I just shared essays when they felt ready

• I didn’t have (and still don’t have) a posting schedule, some weeks I posted a couple essays, some weeks none. Removing pressure made writing feel alive instead of performative

✦ I replied to comments

• If someone took the time to respond to my writing, I replied back, not out of obligation, but because conversation felt like the whole point. This is where readers start feeling like people, not numbers

✦ I used Notes casually

• Notes tend to boost visibility and discovery so I’d post a few a week, sometimes a few a day depending on how online I was. They’re low pressure but connective

And that was genuinely it. No strategy, no niche, just writing, reading, responding, existing.

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If you’re thinking about starting a Substack, here’s how you can begin in a simple, informative way:

✦ Start with one post

• Don’t overthink your archive or wait until you have multiple essays ready

• Your first post can be an introduction, a reflection, or something you already wrote

✦ Don’t stress about having a niche

• Some people write about one specific topic, others write across life, culture, feelings, work, creativity

• Readers often subscribe to voice and perspective more than subject matter. Your themes will naturally emerge over time

✦ Write an About page that feels human

• Think of it as a soft introduction, not a professional bio

• Tell people what they might feel when reading you rather than listing credentials

• It helps readers understand your world

✦ Use Notes as a playground

• Share small thoughts, questions, lines from drafts, moments from your day

• Notes help people discover you and understand your voice in fragments and they also remove the pressure that every idea needs to become an essay

✦ Read and engage meaningfully

• Substack thrives on thoughtful interaction so comment when something moves you, restack pieces you love, reply to conversations

• Community grows through shared attention. gotta share the love!

✦ Find your natural rhythm

• Weekly schedules work for some, intuitive posting works for others, consistency helps, but sincerity matters more

• Readers would rather receive something real occasionally than something forced frequently

✦ Be patient with growth

• Subscriber numbers grow quietly and often unpredictablyhe meaningful moments are the conversations, replies, and connections that form around your writing

• Slow growth tends to feel more sustainable and personal <3

✦ Let yourself be new and slightly messy

• Your voice will naturally evolve the more you publish. You’ll grow, refine, and surprise yourself over time, which is part of the beauty of writing publicly.

• Your early posts might feel vulnerable, rough around the edges, or not quite “there” yet, and that’s completely okay. That tenderness is often what makes them resonate most.

The biggest thing I’ve learned in this first month is that you don’t start a Substack because you already have readers. You start to meet them. You start because somewhere out there is someone who will feel less alone after reading a sentence you almost kept to yourself.

If you’ve been hovering over the “start writing” button, consider this your quiet encouragement. You don’t need a perfect plan. Start small. Stay human. Let it grow slowly.

And press publish.

It is not narcissism. It is humanity. We want our existence to register somewhere outside of ourselves. We want the effort noticed, the love returned, the details remembered. The way we like our coffee. The things that make us anxious. The small victories that felt enormous to achieve. Beneath so much of our behaviour sits the same fragile question: do I matter here?

Psychology has suggested for decades that recognition is not a luxury but a need. We learn who we are through reflection. Through being mirrored by caregivers, friends, partners. Attachment theory tells us that feeling seen helps us feel safe. Validation helps shape identity, self worth, emotional stability. When someone reflects us back with care, we feel anchored in our own lives. When that reflection is missing, we spend years searching for it in achievements, relationships, or strangers’ approval.

What we often dismiss as attention seeking is, more quietly, connection seeking. A desire not for spectacle, but for acknowledgement. Not to be famous, but to be understood.

Social media has complicated this longing in ways we are still learning to name. Recognition now happens publicly and loudly. People go viral overnight. Aesthetic lives are rewarded with applause, sponsorships, even homes built from curated moments. Winners appear to keep winning. Visibility begins to look like proof of worth.

It creates a strange emotional dissonance. We compare our layered, complicated lives to highlight reels that look endlessly affirmed. We mistake metrics for meaning. We start to believe that being seen must be loud, large, and public to count. But being known by thousands is not the same as being understood by one. Virality is attention without intimacy. Praise without context. Recognition without relationship.

And still, we scroll, hoping some of that light might land on us too. Especially if you are someone who makes things and shares them. If you are a creative, the longing to be seen sits inside the act of creating itself.

It is hard not to compare. You publish an essay you are proud of and it drifts past unread. You share a photograph that felt like lightning to capture and it disappears into the algorithm without ceremony. The silence can sting more than criticism. And the thought arrives quietly but persistently: what is the point?

Not because you do not love the work, but because creating is an offering. A hope that something honest you made might land somewhere and make another person feel less alone. We are told not to care about validation, to create purely for ourselves, but that is easier said than done. The desire to be received is not vanity. It is connection.

There is a small, almost embarrassing grief in feeling like something you created with love vanished on arrival. Not because you wanted applause, but because you hoped for witness. To want your art to be seen is simply an extension of wanting your humanity to be acknowledged. That is the quiet tension of being creative. We know the work matters beyond attention, but we are still human enough to feel its absence.

I think we are all carrying this same longing and often pretending we are above it. But to want recognition is to want connection. To want acknowledgement is to want intimacy. To want to be seen is simply to want proof that our lives touch others in meaningful ways.

So notice people. Say the kind thing. Reflect them back with care. Support their work. Sometimes the smallest recognition can steady a person in ways you will never fully understand. And in offering it, you may discover that you were never as invisible as you once feared.

We are all, in quiet and ordinary ways, hoping to be witnessed by each other.

An ode to my 20s.

To my 20s, thank you. Thank you for being chaotic, glamorous, heart-breaking, fun, silly, scary, and everything in between. Thank you for the nights out that lasted until the sun came up, for the hangovers that made me question my life choices, for traveling and moving abroad more times than I can count. Thank you for keeping my body going even when I tried to starve it. For reminding me that time is borrowed, not owed. For showing me what true love and friendship feel like.

Thank you for giving me scenes that looked like a 90s romcom, all sunlit mornings and accidental kisses, but also a horror movie, with moments that made my stomach drop, and a thriller, full of chase, confusion, and near misses. Thank you for episodes that felt like The US Office, awkward, hilarious, painfully human, and occasionally unbearable.

Thank you for getting me into spaces I could never have dreamed of: drama school in New York, where every day felt like a masterclass in ambition and fear; performing on stage in London, where lights, applause, and nerves collided into something electric; sitting in writing rooms with the Royal Shakespeare Company, surrounded by voices older, louder, and infinitely wiser; crying alone on bathroom floors, getting lost in foreign cities, lost to myself and thrilled by it; having my passport stolen and ending up at the UK embassy with tears streaming down my face, humiliated and exhausted and alive.

Thank you for the many lives I lived in my twenties, the person I was, the person I thought I was, the person I almost became and for teaching me that even the messy, chaotic, terrifying versions of me were so worth meeting.

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The Sisters I Chose, The Lessons They Gave

The era of friendships that felt like lifelines. Work best friends who witnessed my professional highs and quiet bathroom breakdowns. Group chats that doubled as therapy, comedy club, and emergency hotline, where voice notes carried things we did not yet have words for.

To the friends who did not stay, I still love you. You were chapters, not mistakes.
To the friends I met in my twenties and get to carry into my thirties, I love you in that steady way only time can build. To the girls I have travelled with, cried with, laughed with in hotel beds like we were teenagers again. To the drama school girls who taught me confidence, and yes, to the ones who tried to shake it too. Lessons on lessons.

To the girls I started my twenties with and now start my thirties with, thank you for showing up through every ridiculous phase and every quiet moment. To the friends in drama school who picked me up from the floor after a shitty audition and made me laugh when I thought I couldn’t, thank you for believing in me when I doubted myself. To my university friends who spent countless all-nighters in the library, surviving deadlines, panic, and cheap coffee together, you are unforgettable. To the girls I got ready with on bathroom floors or in the corridors of our dorms, whispering secrets, debating life, and practicing laughter that could fill an entire city.

Friendship in my twenties was loud, messy, complicated, messy again, and sometimes heartbreakingly brief. It was the infrastructure that held me together while everything else was changing. And for that, I am endlessly grateful.

The Years I Got Lost and Loved It

The decade I packed a suitcase and moved to Rome, romanticising everything and somehow ending up in a mansion living in a boarding room barely bigger than my bed. The year I met two of my dearest friends under foreign skies, the kind of friendships that feel sealed by distance and chaos. The era of careless tattoos and impulsive decisions that felt like proof I was alive and entirely mine.

The summers that felt endless until they didn’t. Cheap flights, overpacked suitcases, photos where I look sunburnt and euphoric. Thank you for the holidays where nothing life changing happened except the quiet realisation that joy can be simple and sun drenched.

Drama school in London, with stints in New York that felt like postcards from the girlhood dream I carried for years. Performing, creating, being ridiculous with my girls under stage lights that made everything feel possible again.

The years that led me back into classrooms. University tears, deadline panic, self doubt, and the quiet triumph of graduating with a first class degree that felt less like intelligence and more like endurance.

The City Taught Me Patience, Pain, and Pride

The era of living my city girl life in London. Late trains, overpriced coffees, long walks home with music in my ears pretending I was in a film. Soho House memberships that felt aspirational until I realised I preferred noisy pubs and familiar corners. Thank you for the illusion and the clarity. Both felt necessary.

The times my stomach hurt from laughter that left me breathless and from hunger I pretended was discipline. The years I thought the skinnier I was the better I was, negotiating worth through mirrors and calories. Headaches from cheap wine hangovers and from staring at screens for ten hours straight, chasing productivity like it was proof of value. My twenties were not always kind to my body, but they taught me how to listen to it eventually.

The decade of jobs that were either a stepping stone or a lesson in resilience. Offices that felt like sitcoms. Offices that felt like psychological experiments. Thank you for the work best friends who made survival feel like a bit and the paychecks that funded the version of life I was building outside of fluorescent lighting.

The years of discovering my taste in everything. Clothes, music, books, people. Buying things I adored and things I now pretend never existed. Thank you for the experimentation. Growth is expensive in both money and dignity.

Scenes I’ll Rewatch Forever

The years of going home and noticing time had been busy without me. Parents softer around the edges. Family dynamics subtly rearranged. My childhood bedroom frozen like a museum exhibit dedicated to a girl I still feel close to. Thank you for the bittersweet reminder that growing up is also watching the people you love age in real time.

The years of thinking about the future like it was a looming deadline. Marriage, children, stability. Moments of panic followed by moments of calm acceptance. Thank you for letting me hold both the ticking clock and the expansive horizon without forcing an answer.

The decade of nostalgia for girlhood. I missed sleepovers, missed the simplicity, missed the version of me who thought adulthood meant certainty. And yet, in my twenties, I still carried pieces of that childlike girlhood, sleepovers were rarer, yes, but more sacred. The afternoons we napped together, sprawled on beaches, the flights we took chasing sun or city lights, those moments were tiny portals back to a simpler, softer time. Nostalgia was painful because it was gone, but it also never truly left. Thank you for teaching me that the little girl I was did not disappear. She just got better taste, more complicated feelings, and more money.

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The Men Who Taught Me How Not to Settle

The time of bad dates that doubled as character development In Rome. Men who taught me the difference between charm and performance in London. Conversations that felt electric until they didn’t In Cambridge. Thank you for the stories. Even the ones I tell with a tight smile and a strong drink or the ones I use in two truths and a lie.

The years of crushes back home that made ordinary days feel cinematic. Checking my phone like it owed me money. Overanalysing punctuation like it was evidence in a trial. Thank you for reminding me that hope can be so humiliating and fun.

The decade where love arrived in different costumes. Relationships that felt like a curse. Relationships that felt like lessons. Breakups that rearranged my routines and my playlists. Thank you for showing me that heartbreak does not kill you, it just edits you.

And then my 20s gave me him. Who I adore in a way that feels calm rather than consuming. The kind of gentle love my younger self did not believe existed. The quiet reassurance, the laughter, the steady presence that feels like coming home without having to shrink. A soft ending to a decade that often felt loud.

Learning Time Is Borrowed, Not Owed

The decade where I lost a parent and learned, in the sharpest, most painful way, that time is borrowed, not owed. Loss made me braver, more present, and deeply appreciative of the people who showed up. And it also made me less tolerant of the ones who didn’t. It taught me where to spend my time, who is deserving of my energy, and that sometimes family doesn’t show up the way you hope. It reminded me that blood isn’t always thicker than water, and that chosen family, the people who arrive, stay, and hold you through the chaos, often matter more than anyone expected.

Grief taught me that pain and joy can coexist, that the same hands that hold you through heartbreak can carry you through moments of sheer delight. That some losses never fully disappear, but they can make life richer, sharper, more tender. It taught me patience with myself, empathy for others who carry invisible burdens, and that being alive is a fragile, luminous thing.

I’m still learning. I’m still processing. I’m still growing. But every loss, every heartbreak, every quiet moment of grief has carved a little more space in my heart for love, laughter, and the people who are truly worth keeping.

Goodbye, 20s.

My 20s, you were messy and magical and occasionally humiliating. You were laughter in loud bars and quiet mornings where I felt entirely at peace with my own company. You were learning my limits, testing my resilience, falling in love with people and cities and versions of myself that would not all make it to 30.

Thank you for the mistakes that now feel like stories.
Thank you for the friendships that became infrastructure.
Thank you for the love that softened me and the heartbreak that clarified me.
Thank you for proving I could survive uncertainty and still remain hopeful.

I’m leaving you with better boundaries, deeper friendships, and significantly less tolerance for nonsense. But I’m taking your optimism with me.

You were not perfect. You were occasionally chaotic and financially questionable.
But you were alive. Loud. Tender.
And I loved you while I was living you, even when I was tired, confused, or checking my bank account with one eye closed.

Here’s to you.
And here’s to whoever I become next.

Every week, without fail, I watched it with my mum. It was ritual. It was appointment television. I can still picture the living room light, the sofa, the way the theme music felt like a drumroll for drama. I remember everyone, not just the winners, not just the girls who made it far, but the ones cut early, the ones who barely got screen time, the ones whose names dissolved into credits. I remember thighs being “too big,” noses being “too hooked,” hair being “wrong.” I remember judges saying things to young women that would have made grown adults crumble. I remember the cruelty feeling casual. Normalized. Entertaining.

Sometimes I cried for them. Truly cried.
Other times, I leaned forward, hungry for it, because it was so dramatic and so addictive and I didn’t yet have language for what that said about the culture, or about me.

I loved it.
I loved Tyra Banks. She was probably the first celebrity I ever understood as a household name. She felt omnipotent. Powerful. Protective, even. This was framed as opportunity, after all. This was supposed to be a door opening. I, as a young girl with a dream of being an actress, loved the idea that I could get given that dream in an 8-episode TV show.

Years later, in my early twenties, I watched it again while searching for a new comfort show. Which is depressingly ironic because it’s a show built on humiliation, psychological warfare, and body surveillance. These young women were perpetually uncomfortable. That’s when the spell cracked. I thought: Was it always like this? Was I just too young to see it?

One storyline never left me. Not once.
Shandi Sullivan, Season Two.

Looking back now, I remember thinking, why is a modeling competition showing us young women drunk in bathrooms with men they don’t know, men clearly facilitated by producers? Now as an adult I think, why is no one intervening when this girl is visibly out of her mind intoxicated? Why does the camera keep rolling? How did they know what someone consents to when they are drunk? How did they air someone’s darkest night and call it storyline? How did that footage make it past a single adult in the room?

There we were, watching a young woman unravel on television. Watching a drunk 19-year-old dry hump in a jacuzzi with Italian men approved by production and crew. Watching the emotional turmoil that plagued her afterwards. I remember Shandi sobbing. Now, I see her saying she wanted to die. That made the final cut. This was America’s Next Top Model. A show about photoshoots and runways and dreams.

Watching the documentary that just aired on Netflix, I’m grateful Shandi finally has space to speak in her own voice. That matters. It really does. But watching the adults involved, now older, now polished, now media-trained, sidestep accountability makes me fucking furious. Watching responsibility evaporate into vague statements about “production” and “not having control” feels like a familiar trick. Because even if you didn’t orchestrate it, you benefited from it. You read the script. You delivered the lines. You framed the morality play.

Tyra trying to distance herself with “I didn’t have anything to do with production”, lands hollow. She attempts to remove herself from it now, as if it was not her show, as if she was not its face, its promise, its authority. As if those girls did not idolize her, did not believe she held the key to the life they wanted. She even says she has a gift for knowing what people want to see. But who wanted to see this. Where did a young woman’s breakdown belong in a show ostensibly about modeling and opportunity.

Ken Mok says, in defense, that they scaled it back, edited it down, showed only a little, as if restraint absolves harm. As if filming a girl curled on the floor, devastated and dissociated, becomes acceptable because not all of it made it to air. It did make the cut. It aired nationwide. It became a hook to bring viewers back the following week. And now, years later, the adults in the room speak in careful distances and technicalities, denying authorship of the machine they helped build. But someone pressed record. Someone approved the edit. Someone decided her worst moment was content.

Editing some of the trauma out does not undo the harm. Filming it at all is the crime. The complicity is the point. Everyone saw what was happening. Everyone let it happen anyway and then turned it into viewership and profit.

These weren’t faceless contestants, nameless extras in a reality show experiment. They were young women, barely adults, thrust into a world that measured their worth in inches, angles, and screen time. Tyra wasn’t just the host. She was their idol, their deity, the person they believed could unlock doors they had dreamed of for years. She held power in the room simply by existing there, and with that power came responsibility. When you are the face of something, you cannot opt out of care. There is a duty to those who look up to you, who are under your care, whether it is written into a contract or not.

I’ve always been fascinated by what drives people, why they do what they do. As a child, I was often called nosy; as I grew older, I learned to temper that impulse out of politeness. But now, having spent the past three weeks sharing my own writing on Substack (what a joy it’s been) I found myself wanting to understand why writers write.

I asked ten writers this simple question, and their answers were raw, intimate, and profoundly relatable. And now I turn to you, reading this: even if you don’t share your work, even if your writing is private, what draws you to the page (or the notes app)? What keeps you returning to writing, again and again?

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Anyway, here’s what they shared:

1. The Archivist

I write so I don’t forget. Or worse, so I don’t rewrite the past into something easier than it was. Every sentence is a way to hold time still, to pin the moments down before they slip away.

- Thomas, 29, Dublin.

2. The Bleeder

If I don’t put it somewhere, it stays in my body. I write fast and often. The page is not for anyone else. It is a place to empty myself and breathe again.

- Amy, 34, Michigan.

3. The Confessor

There are things I can only admit when no one is listening. I speak out loud but in silence. I confess without judgment. The page lets me tell truths I could never say to anyone face to face.

- Alé, 19, Valencia.

4. The Translator

I feel things too deeply to trust them. Writing turns them into something legible. It gives my feelings edges, form, and a shape I can hold and understand.

- Mike, 49, London.

5. The Witness

Someone has to say this happened. Someone has to notice the things that vanish if no one speaks. I write to make sure the overlooked, the small, the hidden is seen.

- Dianne, 56, Devon.

6. The Alchemist

If it hurt, I want to turn it into something useful for me and others. I like to see it as not erasing suffering but turning it into something useful. The words take weight and shape it into something I can carry instead of something that crushes me and then disappears.

- Precious, 27, Chicago.

7. The Escape Artist

I write to leave the room I am in. To move without moving. To be somewhere else, someone else, for a few hours. Writing is my passport, my small rebellion, my freedom. I don’t live a life I’m proud of, but when I write, I can be anyone and be anywhere. I write to be free.

- Anonymous, Ukraine.

8. The Connector

I want to reach a stranger and say me too. I write with someone out there in mind. Every sentence is a bridge. Maybe I’m just lonely and feel connected most through the written word. I don’t know but yeah, I write to reach others and I read to be reached by others.

- A.J, 30, Paris.

9. The Liar Who Tells the Truth

I hide behind characters and plot and I invent so I can be honest because I lie so often in my real life lol. Fiction for me is a cloak that allows me to speak my own truths without being exposed too sharply to the world. I can tell the truth and not have it connected to me if that makes sense.

- Daniel, 28, Brighton.

10. The Addict

Honestly I have tried not writing and I do not recommend it. Writing is a habit I cannot stop. A condition I live with. The better question would be why don’t other people write? I write because I just have to. I’ve written my whole life.

- Lou, 37, Boston.

Why I Write

I write for a mix of all of the above. I write to share, to connect, to be seen, to make others feel seen. I write because I have a lot to say, because I feel a lot. I write because I don’t outwardly talk about my feelings.

I’ve written in notebooks for over two decades. I’ve written on slow, stubborn laptops, the kind that take a moment to wake, that creak and hiccup as if the machine itself is holding its breath with me, Word documents filling slowly line by line while I wait for my thoughts to catch up. I’ve written in the glow of my notes app, in textbooks at school where margins were little cages for my restless sentences.

I’ve been scribbling and typing and recording for as long as I can remember, carrying the act of writing with me like a secret talisman. And yet I’ve only just, as of three weeks ago, dared to share it and it’s been an extremely freeing time.

- Whitney, 29, London.

And now you, reader. Do you write? If you do, why?

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The world didn’t need to explain this to me directly because it had already done the work. The girls on TV were smooth and narrow and emptied out like aspirational ghosts. “Curvy” arrived as a warning. “Fat” as a threat. And just like that, my body stopped being something I lived in and became something I monitored.

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Puberty didn’t knock. It kicked the door in.
My hips arrived before my confidence. My thighs met like lovers. Adults commented. Casually. Like they were discussing the weather.
You’re filling out.
You’ve got a woman’s body now.

As if that wasn’t a fucking threat.

By my teens, my body had become public property. A group project. A discussion. Something to be assessed and adjusted.

At house parties, I perfected the art of holding a pillow over my torso. Not hugging it but deploying it. Strategic coverage. A soft shield against the flash of a camera, the sweep of a boy’s eyes, the risk of being caught from the wrong angle.

I learned how to stand so my stomach disappeared.
I learned how to sit like I was apologising for taking up space.
I learned how to laugh it off when someone said something about my weight, like it was a harmless observation and not a tiny incision.

My body wasn’t a home then.
It was a stage.

Here’s the gross part no one glamorises: I used to suck my stomach in so hard for so long that when I finally let go, my gut would ache. Like a muscle that had been clenched through a disaster. I’d peel myself out of jeans at night and watch the red grooves bloom across my skin, proof of a day spent holding myself in.

Sometimes I’d press on my stomach in the mirror just to see how much it moved. Like it was something separate from me. Like it was evidence.

Adulthood gives you language but not mercy.

Now I know why I feel this way. I can trace it back to systems and industries and a beauty economy that would collapse overnight if women woke up feeling neutral about themselves. I know my discomfort was cultivated. Designed. Monetised.

And still, my first instinct is to flinch.

I live in my body like someone who understands the floor plan but still dislikes the furniture. I know this is my home. I know it has kept me alive through grief and illness, but some days I feel like a guest in a place I’ve lived my whole life. I keep waiting for the renovation to end. For the day I’ll finally arrive at myself and think, Now I’m allowed to live here peacefully.

But the truth is brutal and freeing: there is no finished version.
This is it.

This body has held every version of me. The pre-teen who learned to shrink without instruction, the teenager who used pillows as armour, the woman who knows exactly where the rot came from and still smells it some days.

My body is not the enemy.
But it has been occupied.

So I’m doing something deeply unsexy and wildly radical: I’m staying. I’m calling it a home even when it’s uncomfortable. I am done evicting myself. This is my body. It is soft in the “wrong” places and loud when I want quiet and occasionally gross and absolutely mine.

Not because it isn’t true, but because it’s incomplete. Because it risks flattening a childhood that was also full of effort, love, and a single mother who worked herself into something like myth. My mum held multiple jobs at once, carried the household on her back with a kind of stubborn grace. She was a superhero in the way real women are: exhausted, practical, unwavering. And still, we struggled.

Poverty isn’t the absence of care. It’s the presence of constant calculation. It is a product of a system that leaves some people scrambling to survive while others exist without consequence.

I don’t remember a specific moment when I realised we had less money than most people around us. It was more like learning a language by immersion, slowly, subconsciously, through repetition.

Our house was small, but we had one. Sometimes the floor caved out, but we had one. I went on school trips when I could. Not all of them, but a couple, and I remember them vividly because they felt earned. The Picasso Museum in Madrid where I bought charcoal pencils and a sketch book. And at Christmas, our tree was never bare underneath. There were presents. There was so much effort. Handmade banners for birthdays. Life was about adaptation, about making do and making meaning. My childhood holds so much meaning.

I noticed other people’s houses too. This is something children aren’t supposed to notice, but we do. Few homes felt familiar, normal in a way that didn’t require explanation. Most felt vast, echoing, furnished with rooms that existed for no discernible purpose. I knew instinctively, at the time, where I belonged and where I didn’t.

I also knew, just as instinctively, that I didn’t want to invite those friends to my house. Not because I was ashamed of where I lived, but because comparison is a door that doesn’t close once opened. I worried that seeing my home through someone else’s eyes would introduce a hierarchy I was trying very hard not to feel at the time. So I kept parts of my life separate. And sometimes that separation stalled friendships, or at least that’s how it felt to me, like closeness had a ceiling I couldn’t break through.

School made the differences louder.

There were trips I didn’t go on, opportunities I quietly stepped away from. I learned that “optional” often means “available to some.” I learned that saying no enough times makes people stop asking. That opting out early can feel safer than explaining later. What I didn’t yet have words for was how much this shapes a person, how it teaches you to be low-maintenance, undemanding, grateful for scraps of inclusion.

Children of wealth (actually just children who weren’t poor or from turbulent households) were treated as full of potential, their mistakes forgiven or overlooked. Children of poverty were scrutinised, judged, and quietly relegated to a lower rung. I remember a maths teacher when I was sixteen who embodied this bias. She judged students based on whether their last names carried an echo of wealth and where I’m from, those last names are very distinct and identifiable. She favoured those from “better” areas or families. I learnt early that I would have to work twice as hard to prove myself, while others could simply exist and be accepted.

I saw her in a shop this past Christmas when I flew back home and wanted to scold her, to make her feel some small measure of the inequity she modeled. But there is no reckoning for bias like that, no trial, no apology. It is a wound I carry, mine to name and mine to heal. I still dislike her, but it’s not a bitter dislike anymore. More like a dull disappointment in someone who could have been so much more to so many of us.

Not all adults reinforced the hierarchy of wealth. I had an English teacher who saw me, who looked past last names and the signals of class and into the person she was teaching. She commended my potential, encouraged my ideas, and treated my efforts as worthy, not incidental. I don’t think she knows the impact she had on me, but she absolutely did. Her recognition taught me that being from a poorer background did not make me invisible, that merit could be seen and valued even when the system seemed stacked against you.

I started working at fifteen. I learned the value of money and hard work long before I learned what ease felt like. Long before I learned that some people grow up without ever hearing their parents worry about keeping the lights on.

Growing up poor does something specific to your psyche. It wires you for self-sufficiency.

You become good at coping, bad at receiving. Good at working, uneasy with rest. Even now, as an adult, I feel a flicker of guilt when I spend money on myself without justification. I rehearse reasons in my head, as though I might be audited at any moment.

This is not a story about blame. My mum did everything she could, and more. It’s not a story about shame either. The truth is, it wasn’t a simple story of lack. Sometimes we had nice things, really nice things. Sometimes we didn’t have running water. When we didn’t, we were still bathed, just creatively. Kettles boiled, bowls filled, routines improvised. There was and is so much dignity in the effort. We were never dirty, never neglected. We were never hungry either, at least not us, the children. If there was hunger, it belonged to my mum. Plates were filled, lunches packed, dinners stretched. Whatever scarcity existed, it stopped with her. We were fed, even if she wasn’t always full.

It’s worth saying that there is no shame in struggling, even though that truth is rarely reflected back to children who are. I didn’t know that growing up.

What I did know was how sharply class divided everything around me, and how being from a very small place made that divide impossible to escape. Wealth and status weren’t just numbers or background details, they were signals, and they shaped how people treated you at every turn, even as a child. The area you lived in, the clothes you wore, the holidays you did or didn’t take, all became shorthand for who you were allowed to be.

Yes, poverty left its mark, shaping caution, vigilance, and self-sufficiency, but it also left something else: ingenuity, resilience, empathy, and an ability to notice what others need. I make a spectacle of people’s birthdays so they feel seen, because that is what my mum did for us. I am creative. I know how to make the best meals out of fridge scraps. I know how to make people feel included. I am resourceful, adaptable, and persistent. I can stretch what I have, find joy in small things, and turn limitation into opportunity. I wear my childhood like a badge of honour, because it is one, and because it taught me lessons no privilege ever could.

There is no shame in your struggle. If you are a parent struggling now or a child or teen experiencing financial hardship, I see you.

I am you.