Today is International Women’s Day, and I’m writing this from the dining table while listening to Radio 3 Unwind. I’m sitting down with my laptop and a going-cold cup of tea, after Virginia Woolf’s famous essay A Room of One’s Own popped into my head. In it, she reflects that for a woman to write fiction, she needed two things: money and a room of her own (ideally with a door that closes). What she really meant, perhaps, was time to think and the freedom to exist inside her o

Often, when we’re chasing perfection, it can feel like everything goes wrong at once. One thing breaks, then another. A friend seems a bit distant and then an unexpected phone bill arrives. Before long, we start telling ourselves that everything has gone to shit and it’s all our fault.

I wrote this in *2019, during a season when dating apps were very much part of my life. I was swiping, matching, unmatching, overthinking bios, overanalysing silences, trying to make sense of a dating culture that was both convenient and exhausting.

All day I’ve been telling myself I must write a letter of light. I must write a letter of light. That it has to happen, because it’s Tuesday, because that’s the plan, because that’s what I said I’d do.

Dear Imperfectly Perfect Human, Woah. If you’re in the UK right now…how much rain? I don’t remember it ever raining quite this much. I’ve been waking up intermittently to the sound of my windows weeping and the night-time-nerve-inducing howling of the wind. It’s giving s oggy socks and serious melancholy. It feels relentless. I don’t remember there ever being quite so much of it before. And rain is such a perfect example of our resistance to the way things are. Us Brits talk

“You look too young for Botox,” the practice owner said as I got up from the waiting room chair.

January has a bit of a bad rep, doesn’t it? Yesterday was “Blue Monday”, supposedly the most depressing day of the year. A phrase that sounds official enough to believe, but let this letter enlighten you that this is not a fact backed by science or psychology at all, but a marketing campaign from 2005 designed to sell holidays during the post-Christmas slump.

We’ve never had more tools for wellbeing, yet so many of us still feel like we’re failing at it. That question has followed me around for years. A bit like the voice from the chap from the headspace app.