Confidence
You do not need to be less of anything to be enough
Women are taught to reduce almost everything about themselves and call it good manners. A cornerstone piece on the habit of shrinking, and what…
The archive
Journal
109 pieces on clothes, rooms, books, food and the ordinary business of taking up space.
Notes
To the woman starting again
For anyone beginning again after a hard stretch — an ending, an illness, a change you did not choose. A short letter about the…
Life
I am not building my life around other people’s approval anymore
Approval is a strange currency. You can spend years earning it and still not be able to buy anything with it. On the small,…
Books
Some books are not meant to be finished
I abandoned a prize-listed novel at page ninety and felt immediately, uncomplicatedly happy. On the rule of fifty, sunk costs, and why finishing is…
Plus-Size Living
You can want better health without hating your body
Body acceptance is not a rejection of health, and wanting to feel stronger is not a betrayal of yourself. A careful look at a…
Style
I stopped dressing to look smaller
Almost every styling rule I was given had the same hidden objective. Once I noticed it, most of my wardrobe stopped making sense —…
Confidence
Confidence is much quieter than I thought
I spent years waiting to feel a certain way before I did anything. It turns out confidence is not a feeling that arrives first…
Home
On buying the chair I could not justify
I walked past it four times before I bought it. On taste, money, the ridiculous sums we do to make wanting things respectable, and…
Beauty
Beauty was never a size
The reassurance that everyone is beautiful has always felt thin to me. This is an attempt at something more honest about what beauty is…
Style
Clothes are supposed to fit you — not the other way around
A size on a label is information about a garment. Somewhere along the way we started reading it as a grade for the person…
Relationships
The friendship that ended quietly, and what it left behind
No argument, no betrayal, no final conversation. Just two women who slowly stopped being the person the other one told things to, and the…
Books
The books that gave me words for things I couldn’t explain
Long before I could describe what was happening to me, I could recognise it on a page. On reading as vocabulary rather than escape.