DWC Short Story: Sourdough and Other Lies I Told Myself

The house on Lavender Lane had ivy crawling up its bricks like nature’s own wallpaper. The shutters were painted a tasteful sage green, the type of green that made estate agents use words like "charming" and "sought-after." Every Sunday morning, the scent of baked bread wafted through the windows, mingling with the soft trill of birdsong.

It was, by most accounts, idyllic.

And Ellie Jenkins was utterly, completely miserable.

Not that anyone could tell. Oh no. She wore her contentment like a cardigan—buttoned up neatly, well-pressed, no wrinkles allowed. At thirty-four, she had the dream life she’d built with architectural precision: a well-paying remote job in marketing (with flexible hours, mind you), a handsome husband who ironed his own shirts, and a home that looked plucked from the pages of Country Living.

On Instagram, her life was a carousel of pastel-filtered perfection: homemade sourdough, autumn wreaths, slow walks with their golden retriever, Winston, who had his own bow tie collection. Strangers called her "goals." Friends called her "lucky."

But Ellie? Ellie had started calling herself a fraud.

It began on a Thursday, oddly enough. Thursdays were usually her favourite. The rush of the week was over, but Friday wasn’t yet upon her with its noisy promise of leisure. Thursdays were a quiet in-between. Safe.

This particular Thursday, Ellie stood barefoot in her kitchen staring at a single spoon in the sink. Just one. Slightly sticky with peanut butter. And for reasons she couldn’t quite explain, it broke her.

She stood there, hands trembling slightly, blinking as if someone had flicked on a light inside her. Her life—this life—was beautiful. But it didn’t feel like hers.

Later that afternoon, she found herself lying on the floor of the pantry, eating dry Weetabix with a teaspoon because she couldn’t be arsed to find a bowl. Winston stared at her, head tilted in canine confusion.

“I know, mate,” she mumbled. “It’s the nutritional equivalent of chewing cardboard. But here we are.”

Winston sniffed the Weetabix with suspicion and backed away, choosing instead to lick the refrigerator door. Ellie briefly wondered if he was the only creature in the house living authentically.

It wasn’t that she hated her life. In fact, she felt almost guilty for being unhappy. She and Daniel had worked so hard for all of this. The Pinterest-perfect home, the dinner parties with roasted butternut squash risotto, the matching his-and-hers bicycles parked beside the shed.

But it had all started to feel like theatre. Like she was playing the role of “Happy Woman in Her Thirties” and forgetting her lines halfway through the act.

One Saturday morning, Ellie wandered into the conservatory where Daniel was reading The Economist with a mug of Earl Grey and his reading glasses perched dangerously on the end of his nose.

“Do you ever feel like you accidentally built the wrong life?” she blurted out, interrupting his article on fiscal policy.

Daniel looked up, blinking. “Are you having a stroke?”

“No,” she said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “I’m having an epiphany. Possibly a breakdown. It’s unclear.”

He set the magazine down slowly, as if it might detonate. “What do you mean, ‘wrong life’?”

“I mean,” she sighed, “I ticked every box. I built everything I thought I wanted. And I should be happy. But I feel like a… like a paper doll version of myself.”

Daniel rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You’re unhappy with me?”

“No! I’m not saying I want a divorce and to run away with a bearded poet named Sven. I’m just… asking if you’ve ever looked around and thought, Whose life is this?”

He was quiet for a long while. Then: “I thought that last year. When you bought that teal juicer.”

She blinked. “You hate the juicer?”

“I loathe the juicer,” he confessed. “It sounds like a rocket launch every morning and the juice tastes like lawn.”

Ellie laughed. A real one. The kind that made her chest shake.

Maybe they were both a little lost.

She started small.

She cancelled her standing Friday hair appointment and let her curls go wild. She bought mismatched mugs from the charity shop instead of sipping from the white porcelain ones with gold lettering. She stopped pretending she liked yoga and started taking boxing classes at the community centre, where she accidentally punched the instructor in the face on her first day.

“Sorry, Debra!” she’d yelled, mortified.

Debra, pressing an ice pack to her nose, just grinned. “Best jab I’ve seen all week. You coming Tuesday?”

She started journalling again, like she used to when she was nineteen and wrote about everything from existential dread to the size of her crush’s earlobes. Somewhere in the back of her wardrobe, buried beneath a box of Christmas decorations and an old foot spa, she found her teenage diaries.

“Oh my God,” she whispered to Winston one evening, leafing through an entry titled: Things I Will Be When I Grow Up.

1. A novelist
2. A detective
3. A person who wears red lipstick on weekdays
4. Owner of a talking parrot
5. Unapologetically weird

She looked down at herself in her matching cashmere loungewear set, holding a mug that read but first, coffee. She had become precisely none of those things.

One Tuesday afternoon, Ellie walked into the village bookshop and asked for a notebook that "smelled like dreams and poor decisions." The teenage clerk, who had an eyebrow piercing and a permanent look of existential fatigue, raised an eyebrow.

“Second shelf. Next to the novelty erasers.”

Ellie took it home and wrote three words on the first page:

Who am I?

That night, she asked Daniel if he wanted to join her in writing answers.

He shrugged. “Sure. But only if I can use my Star Wars pen.”

They sat cross-legged on the floor like teenagers at a sleepover, surrounded by half-eaten biscuits and open notebooks.

Daniel’s first answer:
Someone who secretly wants to teach pottery in Italy.

Ellie’s second answer:
Someone who misses the sound of chaos.

Winston, for his part, just farted and rolled over.

Things didn’t change overnight.

There were still bills to pay, laundry to fold, Zoom calls to attend. But Ellie no longer curated her life like a museum exhibit. She stopped posting on social media altogether. When her friend Maisie texted, “Haven’t seen your sourdough lately! All OK?” Ellie replied:

Still alive. Just realised I don’t actually like sourdough. I was peer pressured by Instagram.

Maisie replied with a single heart emoji and then sent a voice note confessing she hated turmeric lattes.

One Wednesday, Ellie walked past an old shopfront that had been vacant for months and noticed a small handwritten sign in the window:

Looking for something more? Let’s talk. – Margaret

Intrigued, she pushed open the door. The bell above it let out a sad wheeze, like a kazoo on its last breath.

Inside was a dusty space filled with mismatched chairs, a kettle older than most living humans, and a stout woman with turquoise glasses and a cardigan covered in llama badges.

“You’re early,” Margaret said cheerily, as if she'd been expecting her.

“For what?”

“Your life. Sit. I made ginger biscuits.”

Margaret, it turned out, ran a “soul reboot circle” every week. Which sounded alarmingly cultish. But Ellie stayed. Margaret spoke about rediscovering joy, about the dangers of curated perfection, about dancing to terrible music in your kitchen with a ladle for a microphone.

And Ellie, somewhere between the third biscuit and the guided breathing session, felt something unlock.

Over the following months, Ellie changed more things.

She painted the guest bedroom bright yellow “just because.” She started writing short stories again—about girls who ran away with circus bears and tea kettles that granted wishes. She even got a tiny tattoo on her ankle of a paper plane, the symbol of uncharted journeys.

When her mother came to visit and saw it, she gasped, “Oh, Eleanor, are you having a midlife crisis?”

“I hope so,” Ellie beamed. “It’s about time.”

It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes she missed the predictability of her old self, the clean lines and crisp linens. Sometimes she wondered if she’d lost her mind along with her matching cushion sets.

But one day, she found Daniel building a makeshift pottery wheel in the shed.

“I signed up for an Italian course,” he said, sheepishly. “Thought I’d start with something ridiculous.”

She kissed him on the nose. “You’ll make a marvellous potter.”

Winston barked in agreement. Or indigestion. Hard to say.

On the anniversary of her epiphany, Ellie threw a party in the garden. Not a themed soirée with coordinated canapés. Just a good old-fashioned knees-up with fairy lights and bad karaoke. There was a limbo competition that nearly took out three spines, and someone put a balloon animal on the barbecue.

At one point, Margaret pulled her aside and asked, “So, Miss Ellie Jenkins, do you feel like you’ve found the right life now?”

Ellie looked around—the chaos, the laughter, her curls wild in the wind, Daniel singing off-key into a spatula—and smiled.

“Not quite,” she said. “But I think I’ve finally stopped living the wrong one.”

And on the kitchen counter, among the clutter of life—unwashed mugs, a rogue sock, a note that read buy more cheese—sat a single, sticky spoon.

And Ellie, for the first time in a long time, felt free.