Editorial: Breaking, Growing, and Going Global - Milestone Issue and International Distribution

And so it is, dear reader. We arrive at a milestone that feels less like a corporate achievement and more like a collective indrawing of breath. As you hold this issue, our past work and these current pages are being moved across borders. They are arriving in retail outlets, bookshops, and libraries across 86 countries. It is a vast, mechanical process—palettes, shipping lanes, and digital servers—but at its heart, it is simply a conversation that has grown louder than I ever dared to hope.

To understand why this moment carries such weight, I must tell you where I was before the first page was ever designed.

In January 2024, the world had narrowed to a single point. I found myself standing on a ledge, looking down. I was not caught in a momentary gust of emotion; I was precise. I was counting the distance to the ground, calculating the physics of it all to ensure that if I jumped, the ending would be absolute. I wanted the silence to be permanent. I looked at the grey horizon and saw a life that had become a series of closed doors.

All of 2024 became a year of breaking and growing. It was a year where the old structures of my existence were dismantled, sometimes by my own hand and sometimes by the sheer force of circumstance. Breaking is a quiet process. It happens in the middle of the night, in the back of removal vans, and in the terrifying gaps between who you were and who you are becoming.

By May, I had moved to a new country. Everything was unfamiliar—the light, the air, the sounds of the street. I was two weeks into this new life, still carrying the physical and mentail bruises of a past life, when this little magazine went live on 12 May 2024.

I remember the hum of the laptop in the quiet room. I remember thinking that if a hundred people showed up—if a hundred strangers found something of themselves in these pages—I would be grateful. I thought a hundred readers would be a victory.

On that first day, within the first few hours, more than 10,000 of you arrived.

I sat and watched the numbers climb, and for the first time in a very long time, the world felt wide again. The ledge I had stood on felt like a lifetime ago. The rest, as the old saying goes, is history. But history is not made of dates; it is made of people.

No one builds a sanctuary alone. This magazine is a house built on the strength of those who stood in the gaps when I was too weary to hold the weight myself. There are women who blazed a trail for me from that very first issue, lending me their light when my own lamp was flickering. To Julie Hayes, Jamie Baughman, Kendra H, Charlotte McKissick, and Pat Allchorne: you gave me your strength to lay this foundation. You saw the vision when it was nothing more than a fragile hope, and you stayed.

Then there is the man who witnessed the breaking and stayed for the mending. To Mike: you did more than just help me grow a business. You gave me my laugh back. You took this little dream and tended to it with me, turning a solitary spark into a fire that could keep us both warm.

The growth we saw on social media in those early, frantic days was fuelled by people who believed in the power of connection. Michelle Wollaston, Annette Densham and Jamie Tedrick-Monroe, among others, were the hands that helped us reach further than I thought possible.

And to our sponsors, who looked at our mission and decided it was worth the transition to print: thank you for believing that ink and paper still matter in a digital age.

And then, there is you.

Whether you have been reading since those first hours in May 2024, or if you have just found us today in a shop in a city I have never visited, thank you. You are the reason the magazine is a reality. Every time you open these pages, you validate the idea that our stories are worth telling.

The next few weeks will be beautiful chaos. We are currently navigating the logistics of a global presence, figuring out which issues are landing in which corners of the map, and keeping our contributors informed as we expand. It is a logistical puzzle, a whirlwind of activity, and a tribute to how far we have come from that quiet room in May 2024.

We often think of milestones as finish lines, but they are actually just vantage points. From here, I can see how far we have travelled, but I can also see the road ahead. It is a road I am now very much looking forward to walking.

Thank you for being part of this story. 

I am because we are. We do not walk this path alone; we carry the lanterns of those who went before us, and we light the way for those who follow. — African Proverb