Clouds have blown over our ferns, frangipani and bromeliads in the garden. I have woken up and moved through my morning rituals: take retainers out, scrape tongue, drink water, meditate, make myself a matcha, drink it on the old wicker sofa on the balcony and think about what to have for breakfast while letting sunlight stream into my eyes. I order a breakfast bagel on my phone, return to the twilight of my room, get back into bed and pull my laptop onto my legs. They are stretched out in front of me while I lean against the soft pillows, thinking about what to write, how to begin, today.
Writing, when it’s not boring, is dangerous. Writing is exposing ourselves. Our lives, our loves, our relationships, our despairs, worries and hopes. Good writing is dropping the wall in front of the heart and peeling back the scars, leaving the reader nodding, “me too”. More on that, soon, here.
My writing has evolved and grown and changed in recent years, but one format I like coming back to is a simple email. That’s where I want to stay today.
I make my life transparent in these letters to you. Often with more ease than one would expect, but not always. I write candidly about the way I try to meet the gaps in my care as a child, I reveal aspects of my lifestyle that are often unmoored, and I wear my heart on my sleeve when it comes to my romances. I’m also particularly interested in the fascinating tension between destiny and free will, investigating how much of our lives and future we can consciously design. Somehow, all these topics weave together.
Oh! It’s started raining! Perfect. Perfect start to the day, which I had planned to spend the first half of in bed writing. Nothing makes me happier than the sound of rain onto the terracotta clay tile roof above me while I write.
The rain lightens and a notification lights up my phone signalling that my breakfast bagel is here. I jump out of bed in my striped cotton hot pants and old Urban Outfitters t-shirt that I slept in and go to the front door, letting the drizzle softly cover me. The foster puppies are nipping at my ankles, and just as I open the garden door, the delivery guy pulls up on his scooter and hands me a cardboard box, before wizzing off again. The puppies have run off towards the kitchen willing me to give them breakfast but it’s not time yet.
I make my way back into bed with my hot bagel of eggs, melted cheese, soggy tomato, lettuce and crispy bacon, and eat half before returning to these words. The other half can be saved for lunchtime. The rain starts to press down harder again. I am dry and warm and happy.
build your body of work with me
Sometimes people ask what it takes to live the way I do, and beyond consistent courage and trying again and again and again, and trust in self and life, it’s something I’ve only been able to name recently: building a body of work. A way of moving through the world and giving back to it that is mine and only mine.
My friend Anne recently texted me, writing, “I loved what you wrote about adaptability and how we can flourish moving forward in ’futureproof your life’. I have journals full of concepts and connections, and I can finally see how they all weave together, and there’s a certain direction.” This is true for so many women. All our lives, unwittingly, there is a pull towards building this body of work. The niche is you. The audience is the people you love.
I first tested out Practical Dreamer as a 1:1 experience for my private clients late last year, and when it sold out twice in a row, it was clear that this process was needed. I spent the first few months of this year refining it into a group programme:
practical dreamer: a three month mentorship for women ready to build their body of work: click here to learn more
Over twelve weeks you will excavate what you know, clarify what you want to build, and make something real: a body of work that is owned entirely by you and offered generously to the world. You will leave with something to say and something to give.
Access is only through application, and applications close at the end of May.
I’d like to do another q&a with you!
Please bring all your burning or ordinary questions of any kind and enter them anonymously here. Hopefully it’ll be less dramatic than last time, where I could feel in my bones that something was wrong. I was so tender I cried during the q&a, and the next day my boyfriend abandoned me in nyc.
latest letters you might have missed:
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I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced that being beautiful is every woman’s birthright and that it costs approximately nothing when you stop outsourcing it to an industry that profits from you believing otherwise. Most of what gets sold to us as beauty enhancement is, if we’re being honest, beauty subtraction. A slow, expensive erosion of the thing that was already there. Every woman I know is stunning. Reclaiming that — your actual face...
how to know if you're living in the wrong place
Whenever they get a chance, the mosquitoes swarm, attacking my exposed legs. In the morning I slip out of the air-conditioning in a t-shirt and panties, into the outdoor kitchen to make a matcha or cacao, braving the hungry creatures of the tropics. I stand there in the half-dark, waiting for the water to boil, watching the garden breathe.
future-proof your life
Human beings have been dying into new identities for as long as human beings have existed. The difference now is that many people have built almost their entire sense of self around institutions that may not exist in the same way ten years from now. If the structures most people have built their identities around start disappearing, whether that’s because of AI, redundancy, motherhood, illness, divorce, burnout, heartbreak, relocation...
how to change direction
Sitting under the shade of a gazebo, my best friend from university (college for my American friends) asks me if I remember how we used to talk about uncertainty. About how we didn’t know what we wanted to do after we finished… My mind blank, I don’t remember, but I believe her. There are seasons in life that return us to this place over and over again.…
The rain has stopped since I started writing an hour ago. The sun is spilling in from between the leaves that shade the entry to my chamber. Last week, the weather started becoming a little cooler, a little drier. I don’t have to shelter in the stale air-conditioning of my room in the middle of the day quite so much anymore.
Even here, the seasons tell of change, of untold stories and unknown futures that lie ahead. I think about the question again. “What does it take to build a life that is truly, honestly who we are?” It takes love. Love for yourself, for your potential, for your desires.
One of the most painfully devastating things I see women do is pour their love into the potential of someone else, where it is taken for granted and wasted and squandered away because they do not love themselves. I’ve done it too. That’s how I know. Ultimately, the only person we owe that kind of investment into is ourselves.
It takes delusional dreaming and trying and failing and letting yourself be seen in process in public. It takes patience and presence and hope. It takes letting yourself be seen. Letting yourself be perceived and judged. And since we are doing it anyway, why not put on a show?
