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Beauty and the Brick
I’m not sure how many of you have followed the Samantha Brick saga, otherwise known as Brick-gate or, as I’ve decided to rename it, Beauty and the Brick. She’s a 41-year-old woman who wrote a piece for...
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A space for sadness
Over the last few weeks, since my previous blog post, I’ve felt a lot of sadness. The tears have been flowing with a frequency I haven’t experienced in quite a while. I always find this worrying. Is...
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The curse of the capable woman
I spent the August bank holiday weekend with a bunch of intelligent, capable, successful, sporty women in their late 30s and early 40s. We were doing what independent, childless women of our age do on...
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Cultivating compassion
I just starting rereading my last blog post and I couldn’t get to the end, so if you did, congratulations and thanks for staying with me! But I’m thinking that perhaps it’d be good to write shorter...
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I know who I am
On Tuesday of last week, a few hours before a scheduled phone call that I was pretty sure would mark the end of a brief courtship with an attractive man I really liked but kind of knew wasn’t for me...
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Dread
I can remember it vividly. I left the gym at Belvedere’s, my senior school in Liverpool, and walked past the netball courts and out onto the street, where Mum was sitting in the car waiting for me. I...
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I want to be me
I want to be me, I thought, as I cycled along the Bournemouth seafront this morning. Not someone else. Not that woman over there with the toned, slim legs or the long, thick, glossy hair. Not that...
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The Embrace
I speak to my Mum and hear the relentless passage of time. In her voice, I hear my difficulties, struggles, doubts, insecurities and pain, magnified a hundred times, exaggerated by age, by decades...
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Talking About Love
In the hours after publishing my previous post – The Magic of March – I worried I hadn’t sounded positive or excited enough about my wonderful engagement news. I read it back a few times. Had my...
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Self-love is where it starts
Valentine’s Day isn’t easy for some of us. Everywhere we look, there are hearts, flowers and chocolates. Or couples smooching and holding hands. Some of us can ignore it. Some can dismiss it and...
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The danger of ‘if only’ thinking
I spent a lot of my childhood peering through other people’s windows, both literally and metaphorically, wishing that my life was more like theirs. Wishing I lived in their house. Wishing I had their...
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Change is possible and it starts with self-love
It’s nearly 10 years since I wrote my first ever blog, on a site I called Just As I Am – An Experiment in Self-Acceptance. It was the eve of Lent, 2011, and I’d had it. I’d had it with self-criticism....
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I celebrate you
Giving myself some space I know it’s hard to get out of bed sometimes; that you wake up feeling overwhelmed with grief and fear, with tears in your eyes. I know it often feels like you’re floundering,...
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Self-love is way more than a massage
When we think of self-love, we naturally think of massages and bubble baths. And don’t get me wrong, I love a good soak and I adore being massaged. But self-love, in my book, goes way beyond that. And...
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