Dr Jacquiline Cox DWC Weekly Issue 101

On the thirteenth of this month, the gates open.

That is the phrase people use, and they use it plainly, the way you or I might say the shops open at nine. In Singapore and Penang, in Taipei and Kaohsiung, in Hong Kong and Guangzhou and a few hundred smaller places nobody writes travel pieces about, the seventh month of the lunar calendar begins. For the next four weeks, the boundary between the living and the dead is held to be thin enough to cross. Ancestors come back to visit their families. Spirits with no descendants left to remember them wander, hungry, looking for someone kind enough to feed them.

So people feed them. Rice and oranges and roast pork appear on kerbsides and in car parks, laid out on newspaper with three sticks of incense pushed into the ground beside them. Joss paper burns in metal drums until the air above the estates goes soft and grey and smells of hot ash. Paper houses burn too, and paper cars, and paper mobile phones, because the dead are presumed to want what the living want. In Singapore and Malaysia there are getai, open-air stage shows with singers and comedians and far too much amplification, and the front row of chairs is left empty on purpose. Those seats belong to guests you will not see.

I want to say something about how that lands on a Western ear, because I know how it lands. It sounds like superstition dressed up as tradition. It sounds like a month of avoiding swimming after dark and postponing weddings and declining to whistle at night for reasons that will fail every test a rational person can devise. And a certain kind of reader, meeting it for the first time, will want to explain it. Will want to locate the psychological function, the grief-processing mechanism, the useful social glue underneath. Will want to translate it into terms that make it acceptable.

I have done this myself. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice what I was doing, which was demanding that a four-thousand-year-old practice justify itself in my vocabulary before I would treat it as serious.

Here is the thing I have come round to. Logic is a magnificent tool for establishing whether something is true. It is a poor tool for establishing whether something matters. A woman kneeling on a Penang pavement at ten at night, arranging oranges for a mother who died in 1994, is doing something that answers to a different authority altogether. She is keeping a promise. She is teaching her daughter, who is standing beside her holding the incense, that the dead stay in the family. She is joining a line of people stretching back further than any of us can properly imagine, all of whom did this, all of whom were remembered in turn.

Culture teaches four things that logic, left alone, tends to skip.

It teaches respect, which is the willingness to let something be important to somebody else without requiring a demonstration. It teaches knowledge, because you cannot respect what you have taken no trouble to learn, and Ghost Month rewards trouble: the Taoist strand and the Buddhist strand, Zhongyuan and Yulanpen, the Vietnamese Vu Lan with its emphasis on filial devotion, the Japanese Obon that grew from the same root and became something of its own. It teaches patience, because a month-long observance conducted by other people, in a language you may not read, on a calendar you do not follow, asks you to hold your questions and simply watch. And it teaches acceptance, which is the hardest of the four, because acceptance means allowing that a person can hold a belief you consider mistaken and still be your equal in every way that counts.

We publish in a hundred and six countries. That number is easy to print on a media kit and harder to actually live up to, because living up to it means our readers in Kuala Lumpur and our readers in Cheshire are reading the same page, and one of them has spent every August of her life doing this, and one of them has never heard of it. My job is to make the second one curious rather than amused.

So: if you are somewhere in the world where this is happening, walk around the offerings rather than over them. Leave the front row empty. If an older relative tells you to be home before dark, be home before dark, and let the reason be that she asked.

And if you are nowhere near it, the seventh month still has something for you. It insists, for four weeks a year, that the dead are owed something by the living, and that the forgotten dead are owed most of all. Whatever you believe about the mechanism, that is a proposition worth sitting with.

The gates open on Thursday the thirteenth. They close on the tenth of September.

A short guide to the seventh lunar month, for readers encountering it for the first time and readers who want the dates to hand. Practice varies enormously by country, dialect group and family. Treat this as an orientation rather than a rulebook.

There's a version of healing nobody claps for.

The kind that doesn't come with applause, announcements, or validation.
The kind that strips you in private before it ever reveals you in public.

I used to think elevation felt like celebration.

But what I didn't know… what nobody really prepares you for… is that sometimes the very people you thought would celebrate you will be the ones who quietly struggle with your growth.

And sometimes… it's not strangers.

Sometimes it's people you respected.
People you poured into.
People you never thought you'd have to discern.

That's where the mud comes in.

Because rain?
Rain feels like promise.

Rain feels like prayers being answered.
Rain feels like doors opening and purpose unfolding.

But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing. (James 1:4)

But mud?

Mud is messy.
Mud is confusing.
Mud is when things don't look like what God showed you.

I will lead the blind by ways they have not known… I will turn darkness into light before them and make the rough places smooth. (Isaiah 42:16)

I remember being in a situation where I had to face something uncomfortable — something I didn't want to label, didn't want to confront, didn't want to believe.

Because when you admire someone… when you've shared space, vision, or even vulnerability with them… you don't expect tension to come from that direction.

But growth has a way of exposing what comfort tries to hide.

Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? (Galatians 4:16)

And in that moment, I had to sit with a hard truth:

Everybody assigned to your life is not assigned to your next level.

That doesn't make them evil.
That doesn't make you better.

But it does mean… something has shifted.

Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3)

And if you ignore it, you'll start shrinking to maintain something God is trying to move you out of.

That's the part nobody talks about.

The grief of outgrowing dynamics.
The confusion of feeling a shift before you have language for it.
The internal battle of choosing peace over familiarity.

Because let's be honest…

It would be easier to stay the same.
To keep things smooth.
To avoid the awkwardness, the distance, the unspoken tension.

But peace doesn't live in pretending.

Let us not grow weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. (Galatians 6:9)

And purpose doesn't survive in places where you have to dim your light to stay accepted.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. (Matthew 5:14)

So I had to make a decision.

Not out of anger.
Not out of ego.
But out of alignment.

I had to choose growth… even if it meant distance.
I had to choose clarity… even if it meant silence.
I had to choose myself… even if it meant things would never feel the same again.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart… and He shall direct your paths. (Proverbs 3:5–6)

And that's when I realised something:

The mud isn't there to stop you.

It's there to test your footing.

To see if you're going to keep moving…
Or go back to what was comfortable.

For we walk by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:7)

And if you keep walking?

Eventually…
Your feet adjust.

Your balance strengthens.

And what once felt messy…
Becomes necessary.

For I know the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you. (Jeremiah 29:11)

So if you're in a season where things feel unclear…
Where relationships feel different…
Where growth feels heavier than you expected…

You're not off track.

You're just in the mud.

And trust me…

That's still part of the rain.

Stop Sitting on Your Story: Why Now is Your Time to Speak

Let me say this plainly:

Your story is not random.

And it's definitely not something you went through just to stay silent about it.

And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony… (Revelation 12:11)

Some of you are sitting on books.
Sitting on testimonies.
Sitting on messages that could literally shift somebody's life…

But you've convinced yourself you're not ready.

Not polished enough.
Not healed enough.
Not "together" enough.

Let me free you real quick —

Healing doesn't disqualify your voice.
It qualifies it.

My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Because people don't connect to perfection.

They connect to truth.

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (John 8:32)

And the truth is… somebody needs your story the way it is.
Not five years from now.
Not when everything looks pretty.

Now.

Write the vision, and make it plain… (Habakkuk 2:2)

I've worked with women who have survived things most people wouldn't even speak out loud.

Domestic violence.
Loss.
Rejection.
Abandonment.
Identity struggles.

And what I've seen over and over again is this:

The moment they stop hiding…
Everything starts shifting.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted… (Isaiah 61:1)

Not just for them —

But for the people assigned to them.

Because your story isn't just about what you went through.

It's about what someone else is trying to survive right now.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God… (Romans 8:28)

And your voice might be the confirmation they've been praying for.

That's why I created platforms like Women of the Waiting Room and Through the Rain.

Not just to publish books…

But to create space for women to be seen, heard, and healed out loud.

This isn't about writing for attention.

This is about writing with intention.

Turning pain into purpose.
Turning survival into strategy.
Turning your voice into legacy.

To every thing there is a season… (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

Because when you finally decide to speak?

You don't just tell your story —

You take your power back.

If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31)

And if you've been feeling that pull…
That nudge…
That quiet voice telling you it's time?

Listen to it.

Because the truth is —

You're not waiting on the right time.

The right time has been waiting on you.

Adare is the village they put on the postcards. Thatched cottages along the main street, a golf resort at one end, coaches from Shannon stopping so that visitors can photograph the roofs. At around six in the morning on 7 June 1996, an An Post van carrying cash pulled up on that street with an unmarked Garda car alongside it.

Detective Garda Jerry McCabe was fifty-two. He was from Ballylongford in County Kerry, had worked as a mechanic before joining An Garda Siochana in 1964, and had five children. His partner that morning was Detective Garda Ben O'Sullivan. A Provisional IRA unit drove a jeep at speed into the back of their car. A second vehicle arrived and its occupants opened fire with automatic weapons. McCabe was killed where he sat. O'Sullivan was hit around eleven times and survived.

Ann McCabe, a garda's daughter who had married a garda, became a widow before seven o'clock in the morning.

What follows is the part this column exists for, because the killing is the thing everybody remembers and the thirty years afterwards is the thing almost nobody does.

Four men — Kevin Walsh, Pearse McAuley, Jeremiah Sheehy and Michael O'Neill — went on trial for murder in 1999 and pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Ann McCabe has said publicly, many times, what she thinks of that outcome, and her objection has never been squeamish or vague. Witnesses were intimidated, she has said, and that is where the manslaughter pleas came from. Two further members of the gang left the country in 1996. They have never stood trial, never been convicted, and are reported over the years to have been living abroad. They are not named here, and they should not be named anywhere, because no court has found them responsible for anything.

Then came the politics. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998 provided for the early release of paramilitary prisoners, and the four men convicted in the McCabe case were held to fall outside it. That exclusion was a political decision rather than a change in the law, and it had to be defended repeatedly, most visibly in 2007 when a proposal to release them was floated and then abandoned. Ann McCabe was at the centre of that fight. She was not a campaigner by temperament or training. She became one because the alternative was watching it happen quietly.

She has also asked, publicly and repeatedly, that Sinn Fein condemn the men who killed her husband rather than the killing in the abstract. The party has condemned the killing. Whether that satisfies the question she is actually asking has been argued about in Irish public life for twenty-five years, and it is not this magazine's argument to settle.

The genuine legal change of those decades came late and came sideways. The Criminal Justice (Victims of Crime) Act 2017 put on a statutory footing what families like the McCabes had been requesting as a favour for twenty years: the right to information about an investigation, the right to be told about decisions, the right to be treated as a participant rather than a spectator. Ann McCabe spent the first two decades of her widowhood without any of that in law.

Ben O'Sullivan, who survived the ambush, died in 2022.

On 7 June this year, the thirtieth anniversary, a Mass was held at Holy Rosary Church on the Ennis Road in Limerick. The Tanaiste, Simon Harris, paid tribute to McCabe as a dedicated servant of the State who died in the line of duty. Chief Superintendent Derek Smart of the Limerick division said the investigation remains very much live and asked again for anyone with information to come forward. Kenny Donaldson of the victims' organisation SEFF was there. So were McCabe's children and grandchildren, including a son and a grandson who joined the force themselves.

Ann McCabe spoke afterwards, as she has spoken after every one of these. Thirty years was hard to believe, she said. Grief is not just for now, it is forever. Her life stood still on 7 June.

That is what she does now, and it should be said clearly rather than sentimentally, because there is a habit of describing widows of this kind as dignified and leaving it there, as though dignity were a personality trait rather than a job of work. She turns up. She gives the interviews. She keeps two men who have never been tried in the public record, year after year, so that the file cannot quietly become historical. She has done this while raising five children and burying her husband's partner and watching politicians of every party decide how much of her case they were willing to carry.

A live investigation, thirty years on, exists partly because somebody refused to let it stop being one. That is the scar, and that is what shines.

The case in sequence, drawn from court records, Garda statements and contemporaneous reporting. Where sources disagree, the discrepancy is noted rather than resolved.

Two weeks before Christmas, at a time when everything already feels stretched thin, I received news that would stop most people in their tracks.

My mother had cancer. It was terminal.

The next morning — and every morning until the Christmas shutdown — I went to work. I chaired meetings. Managed competing priorities. Reassured a team member who was struggling. Responded to pressure with the calm I was known for.

No one at work knew what I was carrying.

From the outside, I looked exactly as I always had: steady, organised, reliable. And that's the point. Many women learn how to keep showing up long after something inside them is already breaking.

This isn't an unusual story. It's the quiet experience of countless women who continue to function at a high level while holding immense emotional weight beneath the surface. They don't fall apart. They don't ask for help. They don't step back. They absorb more.

I had been that woman for years. The dependable one. The capable one. The person others relied on when things were hard. That identity ran so deep that even people close to me didn't see when the load became too heavy.

By the time I stepped into a demanding role, my personal life was already shifting. I had left a long-term relationship and was navigating single life for the first time since my twenties. I was supporting my young adult children through their own emotional upheaval while trying to steady myself. At the same time, I was holding responsibility for others and meeting expectations that didn't pause just because life was changing.

Everything converged at once. I was managing pressure on the outside while my inner world was quietly coming apart.

Then came my mother's diagnosis.

Coordinating care. Navigating family dynamics. Dealing with systems and decisions. Preparing for loss. All of it unfolded alongside my everyday responsibilities. Stepping back didn't feel like an option. I had already been cast as the one who could cope.

There is a blind spot in how we talk about women's wellbeing. Many women become emotional stabilisers in their families, friendships and communities. They read the room. Smooth tension. Hold context. Carry what others can't or won't. Much of this labour is invisible, but it is essential.

I call this invisible capital. It's the emotional, relational and mental energy women draw on to keep everything functioning. It's rarely named, rarely protected and often assumed to be limitless. We meet expectations while managing private grief, responsibility and pressure because we've learned how.

But just because we can doesn't mean we should.

In my work now, mentoring women through transitional seasons of life, I hear the same pattern again and again. Women who appear capable and composed on the surface, but are quietly exhausted underneath. Women who feel responsible for everyone and everything, yet strangely disconnected from themselves.

This kind of exhaustion doesn't look dramatic. It looks like the woman who always says she's fine because she doesn't have time not to be. It looks like the one who absorbs everyone else's emotions and never makes space for her own. It looks like sitting in the car for a few minutes before going inside, gathering yourself for what's next.

Eventually, the weight becomes impossible to ignore. Not because a woman is weak, but because she is finally honest. This isn't a breakdown. It's a moment of clarity.

What women need in these moments isn't another strategy for pushing through. They need space to listen to what their life is asking of them now. They need permission to redistribute responsibility, to stop carrying what was never meant to be held alone.

When invisible capital is acknowledged, something shifts. Boundaries become clearer. Decisions feel steadier. Wellbeing stabilises — not because life suddenly becomes easy, but because the emotional load is no longer carried in silence.

The hidden cost of being a capable woman is not fragility. It's the weight of everything she holds while continuing to stand upright.

And when that weight is finally named, women don't disappear from their lives. They step back into them with clarity, authority and direction.

Feyre (Fayruh) is the youngest of her sisters, but the one who is holding the family together since her mother died and her father, a cripple, seems unable to. Nesta, the oldest, does as little as she can get away with, and views life with a permanent sneer; Elain, the middle sister, is a gentle soul, happy to tend the garden. The story opens with Feyre out hunting in the woods to keep the family from starving. She had promised her mother on her deathbed that she would look after them all.

When she finds a deer and gets ready to fire an arrow at it, an enormous wolf appears from the forest, and all Feyre has is three arrows and a hunting knife. Two of the arrows were too small to kill the wolf, but the third, made of ash wood, would do the trick. As he leaps at the deer, Feyre fires her arrow. How to get two animals back home … she skins the wolf – his pelt would sell for good money, and wraps it round the deer which she slings over her shoulders and makes for home.

The village is to the south of Prythian, the land of the faeries, separated by The Wall. These faeries are not your cute winged beings of our children's stories, but a force to be reckoned with, ruled by the High Fae who have unimaginable powers. As the sisters return from selling the wolf pelt and deer pelt and finish their evening meal, they are disturbed by a roar and the appearance of a wolfish being bursting into their cottage accusing them of murder. As Feyre owns up to killing the wolf in the woods, the beast demands that the terms of the Treaty between mortal lands and Prythian be fulfilled: a life for a life. The choice is to die there and then, or go to the north and live in Prythian for ever.

So Feyre's new life begins, in a strange land, the land of faeries, divided into seven courts. The beast, back in his form as High Fae, rules the Spring court. His name is Tamlin, and he is powerful as all the High Fae are, but they are all under the sway of Amarantha, whose sadistic tortures and ways of killing are legendary. The faeries Feyre comes into contact with all have masks, which they cannot remove unless Amarantha is defeated. Feyre's plan to escape seems impossible; no human has ever managed to leave the territory alive.

There is a way to break the spell, which we – and Feyre – do not learn of until the last quarter of the book. Despite falling in love with Tamlin, Feyre does try to escape and ends up being dragged back to Amarantha's court, only to find Tamlin in a zombified state beside her. Feyre is given three tasks to perform and a riddle to solve, which no one believes she can carry out. If she is successful she is promised her freedom.

She successfully passes all the tests and solves the riddle, and Amarantha is incensed when Feyre refuses to deny loving Tamlin, for Amarantha wants him for herself. Slowly she breaks the bones in Feyre's body, starting with the ribs and ending with her spine. What happens then you must read for yourself; it proves what we all know: love is stronger than hate.

For anyone who enjoys Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, this book will leave you hooked and wanting to read more (there are more in this series). I ordered the next two before I was much more than half-way through, knowing that I wanted more of this mythical land. I am now on Book 3; the war between good and evil continues.

In the early 1970s, a woman who had been raped and who walked into an American emergency department could expect to be examined, documented and discharged. What had happened to her mind was somebody else's department, and in practice it was nobody's.

Ann Wolbert Burgess, a psychiatric nurse with a doctorate from Boston University, thought this was an odd way to treat an injury. With Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, a sociologist at Boston College, she set up one of the first hospital-based crisis counselling programmes for rape victims, at Boston City Hospital. The mechanism was simple to the point of looking like nothing: when a rape victim arrived, somebody would go and sit with her, and somebody would ask her what had happened and then listen to the answer.

They did this for long enough, and recorded it carefully enough, to notice a pattern. Recovery moved through identifiable stages. Symptoms clustered. The same responses recurred across women who had never met, which meant they were responses to the event rather than quirks of personality. In 1974, Burgess and Holmstrom published the paper that named it: rape trauma syndrome.

Two things followed from that paper, and the second one is the reason most people have now heard of her.

The first was legal. Before rape trauma syndrome entered the scientific literature, a woman whose behaviour after an assault looked wrong to a jury — too calm, too composed, too slow to report, unable to keep her account in order — was a woman whose account was doubted. Naming the syndrome gave courts a framework for understanding why survivors behave as they do, and it has shaped legal decisions ever since. Their research also carried a finding that was genuinely novel in the early 1970s: that sexual violence is about power and control rather than sex.

The second was stranger. Burgess had written an article for the American Journal of Nursing about treating rape victims in the emergency ward. An emergency department nurse read it and mentioned her name to an FBI agent who had been handed the job of teaching special agents about rape victimology. In 1978 the telephone rang in her office at Boston College. The caller was Roy Hazelwood of the FBI, and the unit he was ringing from was the Behavioral Science Unit, then barely formed.

She went to Quantico to teach agents how to interview. That is the part worth pausing on, because the popular version of criminal profiling is all about the offender, and the skill she brought was about everybody else in the room. How to ask a question that does not lead. How to sit with an account that arrives out of order. How to record what somebody says without deciding in advance what it means.

The collaboration lasted decades. Burgess worked with FBI agents on the study of serial offenders, and on the links between child abuse, juvenile delinquency and later offending — a line of research that underpins a great deal of how sex crimes against children are investigated now. She was elected to the American Academy of Nursing in 1977 and to the Institute of Medicine in 1994, and chaired the National Research Council's task force on violence against women in 1996. In 2016 the Academy of Nursing named her a Living Legend.

If her name sounds faintly familiar to people who have never read a forensic nursing paper, there is a reason. In the Netflix series Mindhunter, the academic who joins the FBI's profiling unit and insists on methodology is Dr Wendy Carr, played by Anna Torv. Carr is Burgess's counterpart. The real version is a nurse, which the series changed, and which rather makes the point about who gets credited for this work.

She has also spent decades as an expert witness, which is the least glamorous and possibly the most consequential part of the whole record. Her knowledge of victimology and trauma has been called on in cases from Erik Menendez to Bill Cosby to Larry Nassar — courtrooms where the entire question was whether a survivor's account could be trusted, and where somebody had to be able to explain, on the record and under cross-examination, why trauma looks the way it looks.

All of it traces back to a decision made in a Boston hospital half a century ago, by a nurse who thought the psychological injury was worth treating and that the fastest way to find out what had happened was to ask.

Born in October 1936, Dr Burgess turns ninety this year and is still teaching, still publishing and still appearing in court.

The puddle at the bottom of Bellweather Lane had been there for eleven years, which everyone agreed was unusual for a puddle, and which nobody had thought about for longer than four seconds at a time.

It sat in the dip outside number forty-one, where the pavement had given up. In August it was a damp patch with ambitions. In February it was practically a feature. The council had been out twice, looked at it, written something down, and driven away. Marguerite Pike had walked around it every weekday morning since she moved to the lane at twenty-nine, which made her forty now, and which made the puddle a colleague.

On the Tuesday in question it had been raining since four. Not dramatic rain. The other kind, the sort that arrives without announcement and settles in like a relative, and which turns the whole street the colour of weak tea. Marguerite had slept badly, missed her bus, dropped her keys in the hall, and discovered at the door that her umbrella had chosen this morning to become a bowl.

So when she reached the bottom of the lane, she did not go round.

She would say afterwards that it was not defiance. It was arithmetic. Her shoes were already ruined. Going round took four seconds. She had, at that moment, no four seconds to spare and nothing left to protect.

She stepped in.

The puddle was eleven feet deep.

There was no falling, exactly. Falling has a direction. This was more like being politely absorbed, the way a biscuit goes into tea, and Marguerite had time to think oh and then well and then she was standing in a corridor made entirely of rain.

It was a corridor because it had walls, and the walls were water going upwards, which she decided not to examine. The floor was dry. The light came from somewhere above and arrived green. And directly in front of her, sitting on a three-legged stool with a ledger open on his knees, was a heron in a waistcoat.

"Name," said the heron.

"Marguerite Pike."

"Puddle of entry."

"Bellweather Lane. The one outside forty-one."

The heron ran a feather down the page. "Forty-one. Forty-one. Right. You're the one who goes round."

"I'm sorry?"

"Eleven years." He turned the ledger so she could see it. There was a column of dates, thousands of them, each one with a small tick. "Every morning. Round the left side, usually. Occasionally the right, when the bins are out."

Marguerite looked at eleven years of her own mornings, recorded in a heron's handwriting, and found that she had nothing whatever to say.

"Most people go round," the heron said, not unkindly. "That's the arrangement. If everyone came through we'd have queues, and the Department would have to put in a booking system, and then it stops being a puddle and starts being a service. Nobody wants that."

"The Department."

"Standing Water and Adjacent Matters." He said it the way a man says the name of a company he has worked at for a very long time. "We do puddles, ponds that don't appear on maps, the wet bit at the end of a canal, and anywhere a gutter has been blocked long enough to develop opinions. Not the sea. The sea is entirely separate and, frankly, unbearable about it."

She looked down the corridor. It went further than the width of Bellweather Lane, which she noticed and decided not to examine either. Doors on both sides, at intervals, in colours that did not match.

"Now." The heron closed the ledger with a snap. "You get one."

"One what?"

"One of whatever's down there today. It changes with the weather. Drizzle gets you the Lending Library of Things You Nearly Said. Heavy rain, you'd have got the Orchestra. Sleet, and it's the Department of Left Gloves, which sounds dull and is the most popular room we have. Today is persistent moderate, which is" — he consulted a card — "the Room of Slightly Better Decisions. Third door. Mind the step, the step's theoretical."

"How do I get back?"

"Same way. You can't get lost in a puddle, Miss Pike. That's the entire point of a puddle."

She went past the first door, which was blue and had a small brass plate reading Lost Property (Sounds), and from behind which came, quite distinctly, a dog barking in 1987. The second was unpainted and had no handle at all, and the heron said "don't" without looking up.

The third door was green and had a brass handle shaped like a moth.

Behind it was a room that looked a great deal like her own kitchen, except that it was full of versions of the kitchen, laid over one another like tracing paper. In one of them the back door was open and there was a dog. In one there was a piano where the freezer should be, and someone was playing it badly and laughing. In one, on the table, sat an envelope she recognised: the application she had filled in four years ago for the job in Truro, and had not posted, and had eventually used to prop up the wonky end of the bookshelf.

In this version it had a stamp on it.

Marguerite stood in her own kitchen, several times over, for what felt like a long while and was probably not.

"You can't take any of it with you," said the heron from the doorway. "In case you were wondering. People always wonder."

"Then what's it for?"

"Seeing," said the heron. "You'd be amazed what people manage once they've seen a thing. Terrible waste, a room like this, if nobody ever fell in."

On the way back along the corridor she asked him how long he had been doing this, and he said longer than the lane had been called Bellweather, and before that it had been a cart track, and before that a stream, and the puddle was the last surviving four feet of the stream, which had simply declined to leave when the rest of it was built over.

"It's not a hole in the pavement," he said. "It's a very old thing being patient."

She came out the way she went in, which is to say upwards and wetly, and found herself standing in the dip outside number forty-one with both shoes full of water and the rain still going and precisely eleven seconds having passed.

The 8.14 had gone. She caught the 8.41.

On the Thursday she went round the puddle, out of habit, and felt oddly rude about it.

On the Friday she went through, and it was drizzling, and she got the Lending Library.

The Library is a long room with a low ceiling and shelves to the end of it, and on the shelves are the sentences. They are kept in jars. Each jar has a label in the same handwriting as the ledger — the date, the room it was said in, and the name of the person it was not said to. A great many of them are from kitchens. A surprising number are from cars. The librarian is a moorhen of astonishing rudeness who will tell you that borrowing is limited to one at a time and that late returns are noted.

Marguerite borrowed a sentence she had failed to say to her sister in 2019. She returned it eleven minutes later having finally used it, and the moorhen wrote something down and looked at her with what was arguably respect.

On the Monday there was a downpour, and she got the Orchestra.

The Orchestra is ninety musicians made of rain, in a hall with no ceiling, playing something enormous. You cannot request anything. They play what the weather is doing above them, translated, which means that a squall becomes brass and a long grey afternoon becomes forty minutes of cello. Marguerite sat on a bench that turned out to be a bench-shaped quantity of held water, and listened to Tuesday, and was late for work, and did not care.

In September she got the sleet, and therefore the Department of Left Gloves, and understood at once why it is the most popular room they have. It is not about gloves. It is a warehouse, enormous, racked to the roof, and every rack holds the other one. Every glove dropped in a street, every earring lost down a drain, every single sock, every second cufflink, every half of every pair of anything that ever got separated in the wet. And at the end of it, in a small quiet annexe with a chair in it, are the people. Not really the people. The other half of a conversation that got cut off. You sit in the chair and you get four minutes.

She did not talk about what happened in the chair, afterwards, to anybody. The heron did not ask.

There are rules, and she learned them the way you learn the rules of a place you visit often. You get one room a day. You cannot bring anything out, and you should stop trying, because the moorhen sees everything. You do not go through the unpainted door. You do not ask the heron what is behind the unpainted door. Whatever you do, you do not tell anyone where the puddle is, because a puddle that gets a queue gets a booking system, and a puddle with a booking system fills itself in out of sheer embarrassment, and then the whole thing is gone and it is your fault.

And you must go through occasionally, even when it is inconvenient, because the ledger is real and the ticks are real, and there is a column on the right-hand page that Marguerite has never been allowed to read.

In November she posted an application to somewhere that was not Truro, because the room had been about the stamp rather than the county.

In March she stood at the bottom of the lane in a downpour with her sister beside her, having spent the entire walk down failing to explain, and said, "You just have to step in it," and her sister said, "Marguerite, it's a puddle," and stepped in it, and was gone for eleven seconds, and came up with her whole face changed.

The puddle is still there. The council came out again in the spring, looked at it, wrote something down, and drove away.

So the next time you are late, and soaked, and standing in front of one — consider that the four seconds you would spend going round it are, on the whole, the least interesting four seconds available to you.

Mind the step. The step is theoretical.

Five true things about rain, for readers who have just been told an untrue thing about a heron.

There are many personal reasons not to drink alcohol, and these days there's a whole plethora of 'adult' beverages available that are below 0.5% and even 0.0% (that '.0' seems a tad superfluous though; "Our drink has lower than zero percent alcohol, and we've added a .0 to prove it"). Again this is fine, and they're suitable for those who wish to avoid alcohol for whatever reason either permanently or just at that moment.

But turning over that beverage you instantly see a minimum age displayed, a warning not to drive or operate machinery, and to avoid if pregnant, so what's going on?

In short it's a mix of the law, stupid people, simplicity, and the manufacturing process. Now granted, laws do vary from country to country, and often depend upon the location of consumption, and the strength of the beverage as well, but there does seem to be some sort of an agreement around the world in regards to these non/low alcohol products, even if, for example, the age limit in a particular territory is lower or higher.

We'll begin with a very easy to understand explanation that will quickly descend into absolute nonsense, because of course it does.

If you make a beverage and it is derived from an alcoholic one, then you must have a warning on it. End of. And because of this the manufacturer will simplify things for themselves by using a base label that has all these warnings already on them; why waste time and money creating a new base label?

But there's a little more to it than that, because despite back in the day when pregnant women were actively encouraged to drink a 'wee dram of whisky' or a half pint of Guinness, it is generally regarded as a bad idea, and the same is actually true for zero alcohol. Why? Because that 0.5% and 0.0% cannot be guaranteed.

Because of the way it is made, there will always be trace amounts of alcohol in it, and whatever the number states, it can potentially be higher than that. So this is also why you are told not to drive; granted you would need to consume more pints — or shots — than you've ever consumed before (yes, even you) just to get to the equivalent of a 5% pint, but this is where the stupid people part comes in: you can't sue if you were explicitly told not to drive. Gotta stop that sort of stupid behaviour straight off the bat.

So that's it: low to zero alcohol doesn't necessarily mean no alcohol at all, and this is why it has the warnings and age restrictions.

But what of food you may ask? That's not a drink so does this fall under the same remit? This is where it all starts to get a tad silly and is treated differently around the world.

In law, if a dish contains alcohol above 0.5% firstly it must say so, secondly you must have an alcohol licence, and lastly it cannot be ordered or served to minors (local laws differ as to the age). We've covered this before, but essentially to remove all alcohol from a dish and just be left with the flavour takes hours and hours. Ergo, no minors. I once made an 'on the fly' orange jus to be served with a crème caramel that contained about a quarter of a shot of whisky per serving. It was rather lovely, but beyond telling people it had whisky in it, the establishment in question cared not who ordered it. Illegal yes, but quite frankly nobody cared.

But it is also to do with the classification and a couple of exemptions. The TL;DR version states that if it is drinkable then it falls under the law, if it isn't then it doesn't — although sometimes it does. Crystal clear, right?

Because some foods produce alcohol naturally they don't fall under the same rules. Rye bread, sourdough, even burger buns (but perhaps not from famous fast food chains), all contain some form of alcohol, as do ripe bananas and other fruits, and kombucha, soy sauce, vanilla extract, and many more (that latter one can be as high as a hard liquor). None of these require warnings, although in Muslim countries they might be limited to 'over 21 and non-Muslim' for religious reasons. Not all liquids, you understand, are suitable for drinking, which is why cooking wine might state a minimum of 5% but requires no warning at all because the salt content would likely kill you before you got drunk (same for soy sauce).

This is also why that 5% bourbon BBQ sauce has no warnings; it's not meant to be drunk. And this is where it gets very silly because in a restaurant they would have to inform the customer and refuse service to minors if they served this sauce, but there isn't a problem if you buy it off the shelf for use at home, plus a child could buy it.

And it is others of this ilk that fall into this exact same loophole that solely depends upon whether you are a commercial establishment or just a shopper. Crystal clear again, right?

In short, if it's a liquid and it's meant to be drunk, there's the warnings; if it's foodstuffs and you are a commercial business you also must have them, unless you are a private customer in which case do what you like, which also tends to extend to drinks (still 21 in the USA, but practically non-existent in many European countries).

A quick reference to what carries a warning label and what does not. Rules vary by territory — this is the general shape rather than legal advice.

Let's talk about the spider plant — aka Chlorophytum comosum — one of the most beloved, air-purifying, pet-friendly, beginner-welcoming houseplants of all time. If you've ever been gifted a "baby" spiderette in a solo cup or rescued one from the clearance section of a hardware store, you know the thrill of seeing those slender striped leaves arch and sprawl like a botanical fireworks display.

But here's the thing: while spider plants have a reputation for being low-maintenance, they're also a little dramatic if their needs aren't met just right. And if you've ever ended up with droopy leaves, brown tips, or a soggy mess of roots, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Let's dive into what makes spider plants awesome — and why they sometimes throw a fit, plus how to master both soil and water propagation like the houseplant whisperer you were born to be.

Benefits of Keeping a Spider Plant Around

Before we talk plant tantrums, let's appreciate why we keep inviting these leafy divas into our homes:

Air Purification: NASA (yes, that NASA) included spider plants on their list of top air-purifying houseplants. They can help remove indoor pollutants like formaldehyde and carbon monoxide.

Pet-Friendly: Unlike many houseplants that are toxic to cats or dogs, spider plants are safe to have around your furry companions. (Though some cats love to chew on them, so be warned!)

Baby Makers: These things reproduce like rabbits. Once mature, they'll throw out arching stems with little spiderettes that you can snip and grow into new plants — perfect for sharing, gifting, or building your own jungle.

Decor Goals: Whether trailing from a macramé hanger or perched on a shelf with leaves cascading down, spider plants bring instant life to any room.

Growing in Soil: The Classic Approach

This is the method most people start with — and it works beautifully if you get a few basics right.

Potting Mix: Go for a well-draining soil mix. A general indoor potting mix is fine, but adding a bit of perlite or coarse sand helps keep things from getting too compact and wet.

Pot Selection: Drainage holes. Non-negotiable. Spider plants hate sitting in water, and a pot without drainage is just an elegant trap for root rot.

Light Needs: Bright, indirect light is ideal. Too much direct sun will scorch the leaves, but too little light and your plant might get leggy and sad.

Watering: Here's where a lot of us go wrong. Spider plants don't like to dry out completely, but they're also quick to sulk if overwatered. Water when the top inch of soil feels dry — and if you're unsure, wait a day. They'll forgive you for a little thirst more than they will for soggy feet.

Growing in Water: Hydroponic Chic

Spiderettes (those little plantlets on runners) can be rooted in water like champs.

How To: Snip a spiderette that already has little nubs of root and place it in a glass of water, just enough to cover the base. Change the water every few days to keep it fresh.

Pros: It's fun, clean, and you can literally see the roots growing. Great for kids or impatient plant parents.

Cons: Long-term water growing isn't always ideal. Spider plants rooted in water tend to grow smaller and need careful transitioning if you plan to move them into soil later. Plus, mineral buildup or algae can become issues over time.

Root Rot: The Silent Killer

Ah yes, the nemesis of many a hopeful houseplant keeper. Root rot is caused by too much water and poor drainage. It turns your spider plant's roots into mushy, brown, stinky sadness — and if left unchecked, it can take down your whole plant.

Signs of Root Rot: Yellowing or wilting leaves, even when soil is moist. Mushy, discoloured roots. A sour smell coming from the pot. The plant just looks… off.

What to Do: Gently remove the plant from its pot. Trim away any black, mushy, or smelly roots with clean scissors. Re-pot into fresh, dry, well-draining soil. Let it dry out slightly before watering again — and promise your plant you'll never let it sit in soggy despair again.

Pro Tips from the (Well-Soiled) Trenches

Humidity Helps: Spider plants like a bit of humidity, especially in winter when the air inside gets dry. A pebble tray or occasional misting works wonders.

Avoid Fluoride: These plants can be sensitive to the fluoride in tap water, which can cause brown tips. Use filtered water or let tap water sit overnight before using.

Don't Panic About Brown Tips: A few are normal, especially on older leaves. It doesn't mean your plant is doomed — just that it's adjusting.

Spider plants are like that one friend who's low-maintenance but still expects a text back within five minutes. They don't ask for much, but when they're unhappy, they will let you know. Luckily, their complaints are usually easy to fix — and when you get it right, you'll be rewarded with vibrant, arching foliage and a literal bouquet of baby plants to multiply the joy.

Have your own spider plant saga or weird tip that's worked for you? Bring it to the DWC Community — plant people love a good success story (and a plant fail we can all laugh about later).

The spider plant at a glance, for anyone who has just been handed one and has no idea what they have agreed to.

For much of my life, I felt different, but I could never quite explain why. My emotions were intense, relationships often felt complicated, and I constantly struggled to understand both myself and the world around me. A simple disagreement could feel devastating, a change in plans could completely throw me off balance, and social situations often left me exhausted. For years, I blamed myself for not being able to navigate life as easily as it seemed everyone else could. When I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD, trauma related), I finally had some answers. The diagnosis helped explain the emotional intensity, fear of abandonment, and difficulties I had experienced throughout my life. While receiving the diagnosis brought relief, it also brought fear because of the stigma attached to BPD. I worried that people would only see the label and not the person behind it.

What I didn't realise at the time was that BPD was only part of the story. Years later, I would also learn that I am autistic. Receiving an autism diagnosis as an adult was both eye opening and heartbreaking. Suddenly, so many pieces of my life made sense. My sensory sensitivities, difficulty interpreting social cues, need for routine, tendency to mask who I was, and constant feeling of being out of place were not character flaws. They were signs of a neurodivergent brain trying to survive in a world that often wasn't designed for it. Looking back, I realised I had spent much of my life trying to fit into expectations that never aligned with how my brain naturally worked. The exhaustion, anxiety, and self-criticism I carried for years were often the result of masking and trying to be someone I thought I needed to be.

Learning about both diagnoses helped me better understand myself, but understanding alone wasn't enough. I had to learn new ways of coping, healing, and navigating life. Through therapy, education, and personal growth, I developed skills that allowed me to manage overwhelming emotions, challenge unhealthy thought patterns, and better regulate my nervous system. I learned grounding techniques when my emotions felt overwhelming. I learned how to identify triggers before they escalated into crises. I learned the importance of boundaries, self-awareness, and self-compassion. I also learned that many of the struggles I experienced were not signs that I was broken. They were signs that I needed different tools, different support, and a deeper understanding of myself.

The journey was far from easy. There were setbacks, difficult days, and moments when I questioned whether I was making progress at all. But healing rarely happens in a straight line. Each challenge taught me something valuable about resilience, growth, and the human experience. Over time, I became fascinated by psychology, trauma, addiction, recovery, and human behaviour. I wanted to understand why people struggle, how people heal, and what helps individuals move from survival to growth. That curiosity eventually led me to pursue higher education, earn professional credentials, and become a counsellor.

Today, I recognise that living with both BPD and autism has shaped the counsellor I have become. These experiences taught me empathy, emotional awareness, resilience, and the ability to meet people where they are without judgement. They taught me that healing is not about becoming someone else. It is about learning to understand, accept, and work with who you are. My experiences allow me to connect with people who feel misunderstood, overwhelmed, or stuck because I know what it feels like to wonder if things will ever get better. I know what it feels like to carry labels and diagnoses while still searching for hope.

If you are living with BPD, autism, or any diagnosis that makes you feel different, I want you to know that your diagnosis does not define your future. It does not determine your worth, your potential, or what you are capable of achieving. You are not broken. You are not too much. You are not beyond help. Growth is possible. Healing is possible. Success is possible. The path may look different than someone else's, but different does not mean less. My journey taught me that some of the things we once viewed as obstacles can become our greatest strengths. The experiences that once made me feel disconnected from the world eventually helped me find my purpose within it. Today, I help others navigate their own journeys, and every step of my path, even the difficult ones, helped bring me here.

Here's the problem

Creating content isn't optional anymore. Whether you're building a business, growing a community, or sharing a message that matters, showing up consistently helps people get to know you, trust you, and understand how you can help them.

Most people start each week with good intentions. They promise themselves they'll finally become consistent. They open ChatGPT or another AI tool, ask for content ideas, make a few edits, and publish a post. The next day they repeat the process, but on a completely different topic.

One day they're talking about self care. The next day they're discussing mindset. Then they share a business tip, followed by an inspirational quote because it felt relevant in the moment. Every post may offer value, but together they don't tell one clear story.

Your audience sees helpful information, but they aren't sure what specific problem you solve or why they should continue following you.

The problem isn't a lack of creativity or discipline. The problem is that your content starts over every single day instead of building momentum around one important topic long enough for people to remember it.

The cost of constantly changing directions isn't just inconsistent posting. It creates weak positioning, mixed messages, and an audience that struggles to connect your name with the transformation you provide.

Here's the shift. Instead of asking AI for random content ideas every morning, use it once each week to identify one Weekly Focus and build seven different conversations around that single topic. Rather than restarting every day, your content builds upon itself throughout the week.

The Safe2Talk2 Method

This is a simple system you can use every week: choose one Weekly Focus, create seven different conversations around that focus, and commit to following your plan instead of reinventing it every day.

Step 1: Choose one Weekly Focus

Start by identifying one challenge your audience is facing right now. This becomes your Weekly Focus.

Open ChatGPT or your preferred AI tool. Before entering a prompt, think about the people you serve and describe them in one simple sentence. For example: “People healing from trauma who are ready to stop surviving and start living”, or “Helping professionals who want to avoid burnout while serving others”, or “Individuals in recovery who are learning to rebuild their lives.”

Once you've described your audience, use this prompt:

Act as a content strategist. My audience is: [describe your audience in one sentence]. Based on this audience, list five practical challenges they are currently facing. Recommend the ONE challenge that would make the strongest Weekly Focus for next week's content. Choose the challenge that appears most often in real conversations, has meaningful consequences if ignored, and is something I can realistically teach or guide people through. Finish your response by writing: Weekly Focus: [insert recommended topic].

Review the five ideas AI provides. If the recommendation feels right, continue with that focus. If another topic better fits your audience, simply choose that one instead.

Copy your Weekly Focus into your notebook, Google Docs, Notion, or wherever you plan your content. Keep it visible throughout the week. Every post you create will connect back to this one topic.

Step 2: Create seven conversations around your Weekly Focus

Now ask AI to transform your Weekly Focus into a complete seven day content plan. Use this prompt:

Now that we've identified the Weekly Focus, help me create a seven day content plan around it. Use the Weekly Focus we selected. Create: two educational posts, two mindset shifts, two practical action or how-to posts, and one personal story or lived experience. For each content idea include a compelling opening hook and one clear sentence describing the main takeaway. Keep every idea specific, practical, and easy to understand.

This structure works because each type of content serves a purpose. Educational posts build credibility. Mindset posts help people see their situation differently. Practical posts encourage action. Personal stories create connection and trust. Together, these seven conversations reinforce one important message from different perspectives without becoming repetitive.

Once AI generates the ideas, don't worry about editing them yet. Copy them into your planning document or calendar and assign one topic to each day of the week. Now you've eliminated the daily stress of deciding what to post — instead of guessing every morning, you're simply following the plan you already created.

Step 3: Follow the plan

Once your seven content ideas are planned, your goal is to stop second-guessing yourself. Each day, return to the same AI conversation and use the following prompt:

You are my content writer. Weekly Focus: [paste your Weekly Focus]. Today's content idea: [paste today's topic]. Platform: [Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.]. Audience: [briefly describe who this post is for]. Write one complete social media post that begins with a strong opening hook, uses short paragraphs and simple language, stays focused on today's content idea, develops one main message, and ends with one clear call to action that encourages readers to comment, share, save, or learn more. Only provide the finished post.

Generate one post each day based on your content calendar. After AI writes it, personalise it. Add your own experiences, your own voice, and your own personality. AI should support your message, not replace it.

The goal isn't perfection. The goal is consistency.

A real-world example

Without a Weekly Focus: Monday you post about self care. Wednesday you post about mindset. Friday you post a business tip. Sunday you share an inspirational quote. Every post may be valuable, but none of them build on each other.

With a Weekly Focus: Monday you introduce one challenge your audience faces. Tuesday you educate them about why it happens. Wednesday you help them see the problem differently. Thursday you teach one practical strategy. Friday you share another actionable solution. Saturday you answer a common question. Sunday you tell your personal story and connect it back to the week's message.

By the end of the week your audience understands exactly what you help people with because every conversation points back to the same transformation. Your content becomes intentional instead of random.

One mistake to avoid

Don't change your Weekly Focus halfway through the week simply because another idea sounds exciting. Write new ideas in a Future Weekly Focus list and save them for another time.

The more consistently you stay with one topic throughout the week, the stronger your message becomes. Consistency creates trust. Trust creates relationships. Relationships create opportunities for transformation.

Your action steps

This week, choose one Weekly Focus and write it at the top of your content planning document. Use AI to create seven different conversations around that one topic and assign one to each day of the week. Each day, use your writing prompt to generate one post, personalise it so it sounds like you, and publish it without changing your Weekly Focus.

At Safe2Talk2, we believe meaningful conversations create meaningful change. You already have the knowledge, experience, and heart to make a difference in someone's life. This system simply helps you organise your message so people can clearly understand who you are, what you do, and how you can help.

One conversation can start a journey. Seven intentional conversations can build lasting trust.

Here is a habit worth building, and it costs nothing: assume nobody is going to tell you.

Nobody sent a letter when Making Tax Digital changed. Nobody rang when the cookie rules tightened. Nobody will be in touch about whatever changes next, either, because there is no department anywhere whose job is to find every sole trader and small limited company and explain what now applies to them. The information exists. It is published, it is free, and it is usually written in plain enough English. What does not exist is anybody to bring it to you.

Most people who run something small discover this the same way: through a fine, a letter, or a conversation with somebody who found out the hard way first. It is a bad system and it is unlikely to improve, so the practical response is to stop waiting.

Two days ago is a good example.

On 2 August, a substantial tranche of the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act started to apply. Not the whole thing. The Act has been arriving in stages since it entered into force in August 2024, and a set of amendments adopted at the end of July pushed the heaviest obligations further out. What began applying on Sunday is the transparency layer and, importantly, the penalty regime.

Three things about that are worth sitting with if you run something small.

The first is reach. The Act applies to organisations established in the EU, and also to anybody, anywhere, who places an AI system on the EU market or whose system's output is used in the EU. A woman in Warrington with a website that takes European customers is inside the scope of a European regulation. This is the same structure as GDPR, which caught out an enormous number of people who had assumed it was somebody else's problem.

The second is the word deployer. There is a widespread and comfortable assumption that using somebody else's AI tool means somebody else carries the obligations. The Act does not work that way. If you deploy an AI system, including one built entirely by another company, you have duties of your own. The subscription does not transfer the responsibility.

The third is that the obligations now live are the ordinary ones. If a customer is talking to a chatbot, they have to be told they are talking to a machine. If content is synthetic, it has to be marked in a machine-readable way. Systems already on the market before 2 August have until December to meet the marking requirement. These are not exotic technical duties reserved for laboratories. They describe what a great many small businesses are already doing, usually without thinking of it as regulated activity at all.

And the penalties are not decorative. The upper tiers of the Act run into millions of euros or a percentage of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher, which is a formula designed specifically so that size offers no shelter.

There is one genuinely good piece of news, and you would only know it if you read the thing: the Act carries a simplified compliance framework for smaller organisations, and the recent amendments widened it considerably, to companies with up to 750 employees and 150 million euros of annual revenue. Simplified guidance, standardised documentation templates, access to regulatory sandboxes, reduced fines. That is real help, and it is sitting there, unadvertised, in a document most affected businesses will never open.

Which is the whole point. The same reading that tells you what you owe usually tells you what you are entitled to. People skip it because it feels like homework and because the assumption runs deep that somebody official would say something if it mattered.

Nobody says anything. That is the arrangement.

So build the habit. Once a quarter, spend an hour on the primary sources for your own trade: the regulator's website rather than a summary of a summary, the government guidance page rather than a LinkedIn post about it. Subscribe to the one trade body newsletter that covers your sector properly. When a new tool arrives in your business, ask what it does with data and who is responsible when it goes wrong, before it is embedded in everything.

Because the sentence that gets people is always the same one, and it works in every era of every technology: it was possible, so it seemed fine. Possible and permitted are different words, and only one of them is a defence.

A short orientation to where the EU AI Act stands as of this issue. It is a summary rather than legal advice, and anybody with real exposure should read the primary text or take proper advice.

My son sprayed air freshener in a room, and we both stopped dead in our tracks and looked at each other.

I said, "You know that smell."

I literally can't smell it without being transported back two years, to when our well went dry and we lived without running water for nearly two months while I worked and saved enough money to drill a new one.

He laughed and joked that the smell gives him PTSD.

That year was the hardest year of my life. I went through an incredibly painful relationship and breakup. My dad got sick, and then my dad died. I was barely making ends meet. Our well went dry. I broke my clavicle. I nearly totalled my car when I hit a deer. I was chasing some guy who had literally no real interest in me as a partner. I struggled with massive depression and anxiety while also working through post-divorce healing.

It was just one thing after another.

In the two years since, I've doubled my income. I've worked through the grief of losing my father. I've worked my ass off to create financial peace and stability for myself and my kids. I started a book and began writing articles for this magazine. I have travelled. Tried a million new things. Found out I like a few of them. Found out I'm terrible at a lot too. Laughed the whole time while I put myself out there to find out who I am, after being a wife and mother as my entire identity for so long.

And yes, I've dated and failed at several attempts to find a relationship since then. That's okay. I'm still building myself, and I simply haven't found what I'm looking for yet. That person hasn't found me yet either. I'm not disappointed by that.

Those failed attempts taught me a lot about myself — what I want, what I don't want, and what I'm no longer willing to settle for. It's just more life and living to inspire my growth, my writing, and whatever I decide to do next.

But when I really think about it, none of those are my biggest accomplishments.

What I actually accomplished was learning to love myself. I built confidence. I learned to understand myself instead of beating myself up when I still have weak moments. I built resilience. I learned that when life falls apart, I can trust myself to figure it out.

And I do it a little less messily each time.
I laugh at the mess a little more each time, too.
Somewhere between then and now, I gained myself back.

Being human is not hard because you're doing it wrong, it's hard because you're doing it right.
— Glennon Doyle

Same smell. Completely different life.

When we deny our stories, they define us. When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.
— Brené Brown

That's what I mean when I say that eventually, we get these moments when we can look over our shoulder and say:

"Damn. Look how far I've come."

What was your last "over the shoulder moment"?

If you're feeling the weight of struggle, grief, loneliness, or just feeling not sure of who you are or where you're going … you don't need all the answers right now. You get to try and fail a million things and it comes to you along the way. Promise.

Dear Keri,

I have been baking from home for two years. It started as something I did around my job and it is now most of what pays the bills, along with my husband's wages. Birthday cakes, celebration cakes, boxes of brownies for the school fair. I am good at it. I have repeat customers and a waiting list in December.

My closest friend lives four doors down. We have known each other for eleven years. Our children grew up together. She knows exactly what I do, because she has sat in my kitchen while I have done it, and she knows the money side too, because I have told her, in some detail, on days when it has been tight.

In two years she has never once ordered anything from me.

She buys constantly from other people. There is a woman round the corner who does cupcakes, a man on the next street who has started doing sourdough, and someone from her work who does those big American-style cookies. She posts all of it. Every time. Beautiful photographs, tagged, with a caption about supporting small businesses and how important it is to shop local.

Last month it was her mother's seventieth. She ordered a three-tier cake from a bakery in town. She showed me the picture on her phone, in my kitchen, standing next to the oven I bought on finance.

I have never said anything. I would never ask a friend to buy from me and I am not asking for a discount arrangement or anything awkward. But every single one of those posts costs me something I cannot quite name, and I am starting to feel differently about her, which I hate, because she has been a good friend to me in every other way I can think of.

Am I being petty? Do I say something? And if I do, what on earth is the sentence?

— Rising, in Cheshire

Dear Rising,

You are not being petty. You are being accurate, which is a different thing and much less comfortable, because petty can be talked out of and accurate cannot.

Let us name the actual injury, because it is not the money. You have a waiting list in December. One cake from one friend would not change your year. What lands badly is the gap between the caption and the conduct. She is publicly, repeatedly, enthusiastically committed to the principle of supporting small local businesses, and the one small local business belonging to the person she has known for eleven years is the single one she has never used. Your brain has noticed the inconsistency and will not stop noticing it. That is what brains do.

Now, the part you will like less. There are several ordinary explanations, and none of them is that she thinks little of your work.

The commonest one, by a distance, is that buying from a friend feels fraught. She does not know whether you would charge her properly or knock it down, and both possibilities embarrass her. She does not know what happens if the cake is wrong. She has sat in your kitchen and heard about the tight months, and some people respond to that by deciding that asking you to work would be an imposition rather than a kindness. It is muddled thinking and it is extremely common. Strangers are easy. Friends come with a bill you cannot read.

The second explanation is duller. She has stopped seeing it. You are her friend of eleven years who happens to be in the kitchen a lot. The cupcake woman round the corner is a business, because that is the only thing she is. Proximity does that to people, and it is not personal even though it feels entirely personal.

Either way, silence will not fix it, and you have already discovered the cost of silence: you are quietly revising an eleven-year friendship in your own head, on your own, without her having any idea it is happening. That is a much worse outcome than one awkward conversation.

So here is the sentence. Say it lightly, in person, not over a message, and do not build up to it for twenty minutes first.

"Can I ask you something that has been sitting with me a bit? You order from everyone on the street and you have never ordered from me. Is there a reason? I would honestly rather know than guess."

Then stop talking. The stopping is the important half.

What you are likely to get is a startled apology and a version of the first explanation. What you should do next is remove the obstacle out loud: tell her what you charge, tell her you charge everyone that, and tell her you would much rather she ordered from you at full price than tiptoed around you at a bakery in town. Say the price. People need the number.

If she becomes defensive, or tells you that she does not like to mix friendship and money while continuing to post about shopping local, you have learned something real. You are allowed to feel differently about her afterwards. You are not obliged to stop being her friend. You are permitted to notice that she is loyal in some ways and careless in others, which is true of almost everyone and does not always mean the end of things.

One more thing, and I mean this practically rather than sentimentally. Stop treating your business as a subject friends are supposed to work out on their own. Tell people what you do, plainly and often, the way the sourdough man clearly does. Post the availability. Say when December is filling. You have spent two years being too polite to your own livelihood, and that habit costs you far more than one friend ever has.

— Keri

On 12 September 1953, at St Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island, Jacqueline Bouvier married Senator John F. Kennedy in a gown of ivory silk taffeta with a portrait neckline, interwoven bands of tucking across the bodice and great circular tucks sweeping round the skirt. It is one of the most photographed dresses of the twentieth century. The newspapers described it in detail the following morning and did not print the name of the woman who made it.

Her name was Ann Cole Lowe.

She was born in rural Alabama around 1898, into a family of dressmakers. Her grandmother had been born into slavery and had built, with Lowe's mother, a business sewing for wealthy white Southern women. When her mother died in 1917, Lowe was sixteen and there were four unfinished ball gowns on the table for the wife of the governor of Alabama. She finished them. That is the beginning of the story, and it sets the pattern for everything that follows.

She went to New York to study at a design school that put her in a room by herself, away from the white students, and she completed the course anyway. She opened Ann Lowe Originals on Madison Avenue. She dressed the Auchinclosses, the Roosevelts, the du Ponts, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts. Her gowns were sold through Henri Bendel, Neiman Marcus and I. Magnin. At her peak she was producing something in the order of a thousand one-off gowns a year for New York society. When Olivia de Havilland collected her Academy Award in 1947, she was wearing one.

Almost none of it carried her name.

The Bouvier commission came through Janet Auchincloss, the bride's mother, whose own wedding dress Lowe had made in 1942 and whose daughters' debutante gowns she had made as well. The job was fifteen dresses: the bride, the bridal party and the mother of the bride. The work took roughly eight weeks and was finished in late August.

Ten days before the wedding, a water pipe burst in her workroom. Ten of the fifteen dresses were destroyed, the bride's gown among them.

What Lowe did next is the part of this story that ought to be taught in business schools. She told nobody. She bought the fabric again out of her own pocket, hired emergency seamstresses, and remade in eight days what had taken eight weeks. Every dress arrived on time. She had expected to clear a modest profit on the commission; she lost several thousand dollars on it instead, which in 1953 was an extraordinary sum for an independent dressmaker to absorb in silence.

Then she drove to Newport to deliver the gowns, and the person who answered the door at the Auchincloss estate told her that people like her used the back entrance.

She said that if she went in through the back door, there would be no dresses at the wedding.

She went in through the front.

That exchange has been retold enough times to have acquired the smoothness of legend, and it is worth resisting the smoothness, because what it actually describes is a woman in her mid-fifties, at the end of ten days of crisis, several thousand dollars down, standing on a doorstep and calculating in real time that she had exactly one piece of leverage and that this was the moment to use it. It was not a flourish. It was a negotiation, conducted alone, with the entire year's most photographed event as collateral.

The credit never came. When the bride was later asked who had made the dress, the answer identified the designer only by race — a "colored woman" — rather than by name. Lowe worked another decade and more, was chronically undercharging, lost an eye to glaucoma, faced bankruptcy and tax debt, and died in 1981 having never had the commercial career her skill warranted.

The recognition arrived late and posthumously. Her gowns are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian and the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Exhibitions have been mounted. Children's books have been written. A film has been announced.

None of which reached her. That is usually how this goes, and it is worth saying plainly rather than wrapping it in redemption: the work was extraordinary, the credit was withheld while it could still have changed her life, and the correction came forty years after it would have mattered.

She is on this list for the dress. She belongs on it for the eight days.

The gown, the commission and the details that tend to get lost in the retelling.

A line has been going round social media, posted by the entrepreneur and podcast host Scott D Clary, and it has been shared enthusiastically enough that you have probably met it. The claim is that the way you feel about yourself at eleven at night, alone with your thoughts, is the truest indicator of your mental health, and that everything else is performance. It closes with a question: what happens when the lights go off and the audience leaves?

It is a good line. It is doing something worth doing, which is pointing at the gap between how people present and how they feel, and that gap is real and worth talking about.

The diagnostic part, though, is close to backwards, and it is worth taking apart carefully, because a great many people read that post at eleven at night, felt terrible, and concluded that the terrible feeling was the truth about them.

It probably was not.

Late evening is, for most people, the worst possible moment to assess anything at all about themselves, and the reasons are mundane and physical rather than spiritual.

You have been awake for sixteen hours or so. The mental machinery that handles perspective, that weighs one bad thing against nine neutral ones, that interrupts a thought before it becomes a spiral, runs on the same finite resource as everything else you have spent the day doing. By late evening it is depleted. This is not a character flaw and it is not a hidden self surfacing. It is the same reason you make worse food decisions at eleven at night than at eleven in the morning.

Your body is also running a different chemistry. Cortisol, which is high in the morning and helps you feel able to face things, is at its lowest in the evening. Body temperature is falling. If you are the sort of person who wakes at three and finds everything catastrophic, you already know this effect from the other end of the night.

And crucially, the distractions are gone. The post treats that as the point: with the audience gone, the truth emerges. But distraction is not only performance. A good deal of what fills a day is engagement with actual life — work that matters, people you like, problems you are solving. Removing all of it does not reveal the real you. It removes a large part of the evidence.

Think about what the 11pm assessment actually has available. It has your memory of the day, which is weighted heavily towards the bit that went wrong. It has the future, unresolved. It has no task to be competent at, no person to be kind to, no ordinary feedback of any kind. Judging yourself on that evidence is like judging a restaurant on a photograph of the empty dining room at two in the morning.

Here is the more useful version of the idea, because there is one in there.

What night-time thinking is genuinely good at showing you is content. Not verdict — content. The same three things tend to come back: the conversation you handled badly, the money, the thing about your mother. That recurrence is real information. It is telling you what is unresolved, which is useful, actionable and worth writing down.

What it is poor at is judgement. The conclusions it reaches about your worth, your future and whether any of it will ever improve are produced by a tired brain at the low point of its daily chemistry, and they should be treated with roughly the confidence you would give a decision made at the end of a fourteen-hour shift.

So take the content seriously and hold the verdict lightly. Write the recurring items down in the morning, when you can look at them with the machinery working, and see which of them is a problem to be solved and which is a fear to be sat with.

And if the eleven o'clock version of you is unrelentingly harsh, night after night, for weeks — that is worth telling somebody about. Not because it is the truth, but precisely because it is not, and a pattern that persistent is usually treatable rather than deserved.

The lights going off does not reveal who you are. It reveals what you have been carrying, with the lights off, and tired.

If you are reading this late and the thinking has already started, here are five things that reliably help. None of them is a cure and none of them requires you to feel better first.

The thing nobody tells you about an old dog is that you will not notice when it happens. There is no morning when she is suddenly elderly. There is a slightly slower turn at the bottom of the stairs, and then a preference for the shorter route, and then a day eighteen months later when you realise she has not been upstairs since spring and you cannot remember the last time she was.

Ageing in animals is like that. Gradual enough to be invisible, and then abrupt.

The thresholds are worth knowing because they are earlier than people expect. Cats and small dogs are generally considered senior from around eleven, and geriatric from fifteen. Large and giant breeds get there far sooner — a great dane is a senior citizen at six or seven. Rabbits, guinea pigs and the smaller mammals compress an entire old age into a few months. If you have an animal in that bracket, the first practical change is straightforward: switch from annual check-ups to every six months. Twelve months is a long time in a life that runs at this speed, and most of what can be managed well is manageable only if it is found early.

What tends to arrive, in rough order of how commonly it goes unnoticed:

Pain, particularly arthritic pain. Animals conceal it. What you see is behaviour rather than limping — reluctance to jump, irritability when touched in a particular spot, a cat who has stopped grooming her back half, a dog who has become oddly grumpy with children she used to tolerate. Grumpiness in an old animal is very often pain, and pain is very often treatable. This is the single most under-treated thing in senior pets.

Dental disease. Common, painful, and quietly responsible for a great deal of weight loss and misery.

Cognitive decline. Real in dogs and cats both. Night pacing, staring at walls, forgetting a trained routine, becoming lost in a familiar room, changes in the sleep cycle, accidents in the house from an animal who was reliable for a decade. It has treatments and it has management strategies, and it is worth raising rather than filing under "she's just old".

Sensory loss. Deafness and failing sight, both of which animals compensate for so well that owners often miss them entirely until furniture moves.

Most of the adaptations are unglamorous and cheap. Rugs and runners on hard floors, because slipping is frightening and it makes an arthritic animal reluctant to move at all. A ramp at the one step that matters. Litter trays with a lower side, and more of them, and nearer. Raised bowls. Beds downstairs. Shorter, more frequent walks rather than the old long one. Keeping the layout of the house consistent for an animal whose eyesight is going. Clipping nails more often, because a pet who moves less wears them down less, and overgrown nails make walking worse, which makes movement less, and round it goes.

Then there is the other half of this, and it is the half people avoid.

Most owners face the decision about the end of an animal's life at the worst possible moment: exhausted, frightened, in an unfamiliar consulting room, at a time of night when nothing good happens. They make it having never once thought it through, and then carry the manner of that decision for years.

It is enormously kinder to yourself to do the thinking early, while nothing is urgent.

The thinking has three parts. The first is defining, in advance, what a good life looks like for this particular animal — not animals in general. Write down the three or four things that are most her: the greeting at the door, the patch of sun, eating with enthusiasm, the walk to the corner. Those become your markers. When most of them have gone and are not coming back, you have your answer, and you have it in your own handwriting from a calmer time.

The second is the practical conversation with your vet, held before you need it. Ask what the likely trajectory of her condition is. Ask what the end tends to look like and what the emergencies are. Ask whether they offer home visits for euthanasia, or can recommend a service that does, because being on her own bed rather than on a steel table matters to a great many people and it cannot be arranged at short notice. Ask what your aftercare options are, and what they cost, so that nobody is choosing a cremation package while crying at a reception desk.

The third is the part people are embarrassed to admit: deciding who you want with you, and what you want to do afterwards. An hour, a walk somewhere, nothing at all. It is not morbid to know this in advance. It is the same category of sense as knowing where the fuse box is.

One more thing, said plainly, because it is the fear that drives most of the worst outcomes. Owners delay because they are terrified of going too early, and so they consistently go too late. Almost nobody looks back and wishes they had waited longer. A great many people look back and wish they had done it a fortnight sooner, while she could still enjoy the last good day. Given a choice between a week early and a week late, veterinary professionals will tell you, quietly and almost unanimously, which one they would choose.

The grief afterwards is real grief and behaves like it. If it floors you, that is proportionate rather than excessive, and there are pet bereavement services — the Blue Cross runs a free one in the UK — staffed by people who will not find you ridiculous.

And if there is another animal in the house, watch them. They often change for a few weeks: off their food, searching, more clingy or more withdrawn. It usually settles. It helps to keep their routine boringly identical while everything else is not.

In 2008, an Argentine director named Andrés Muschietti and his sister Bárbara made a three-minute short film, essentially for their own amusement. Two small girls, a corridor, a mother calling. Guillermo del Toro saw it, and five years later it was a feature with Jessica Chastain in it, opening at number one in the United States and taking around $148 million against a budget of roughly $15 million.

That is an unusually clean example of a thing working, and it is worth knowing before you watch, because the seams show in an interesting way. Mama is a three-minute idea stretched to a hundred, and the stretching is where the film becomes something more peculiar than the marketing suggested.

The setup

It is brisk and bleak. At the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, a man loses everything, kills his business partners and his estranged wife, takes his two young daughters and drives them off a mountain road in the snow. They survive. They find an abandoned cabin. He is about to kill them there too when something in the cabin stops him.

Five years later the girls are found. Victoria, the elder, played by Megan Charpentier, has some memory of being a child in a house. Lilly, played by Isabelle Nélisse, was a toddler when they vanished and has none. She walks on all fours. She does not speak to people. Both of them refer, calmly and constantly, to Mama.

Custody goes to their uncle Lucas and his girlfriend Annabel. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays both Lucas and the dead father, which is a neat piece of casting economy and does quiet work on the theme. Chastain plays Annabel as a bass player in a punk band who has just taken a pregnancy test and been visibly, enormously relieved by the result, and who is now unexpectedly in charge of two damaged children. It is a properly unusual horror lead: a woman with no maternal instinct at all, written without contempt and without a redemption arc waiting to pounce.

The entity

What follows is a haunting, and the haunting is conventional in its furniture — the dark hallway, the thing in the wardrobe, the child talking to nobody. What lifts it is Mama herself.

She is not malevolent in the ordinary sense. Javier Botet, the Spanish actor whose extraordinary physicality has provided half the memorable ghosts of the last two decades, plays her as something that floats and folds and moves wrongly. But the film's actual argument is that she is a mother, and the horror comes from her being a mother without limit and without judgement. She fed those girls for five years. She kept them alive. She also cannot conceive of any reason why they should ever be with anybody else, and the film treats that possessiveness as grief rather than evil. The backstory, when it arrives, is a sad one about a woman and an institution and a stolen child, and it explains her without excusing what she does.

The result is a horror film in which three characters — Annabel, Mama, and the dead mother whose place both of them are standing in — are all versions of the same question: what does a child owe the woman who kept her alive, and what does that woman get to claim in return?

Where it slips

It does not entirely hold. The third act tips into full computer-generated spectacle, and the effects that unnerve at the edge of frame become considerably less frightening in daylight and in full view. There is a psychiatrist doing research who exists largely to find things out on the audience's behalf. It is rated PG-13 and it earns that rating honestly — almost no blood, a great deal of dread — but if you want to be scared witless for a hundred minutes, there are more efficient films.

Worth your evening?

Yes, and it improves on a second watch, provided you go in knowing it is a drama about mothering wearing a horror coat.

It earns its ending, which is unusual and genuinely upsetting rather than triumphant, and which del Toro reportedly fought to keep. Thirteen years on, that ending is the thing people remember, and it is the reason the film is still worth two hours rather than a footnote in a director's biography. Muschietti went on to It and a great deal else, none of it this strange.

A sequel has been in development at Universal since 2016 and has never moved. On the evidence of the ending, that is probably for the best.

There is a particular kind of listener this show is built for, and if you are her, you will know within one episode.

She has consumed a great deal of personal development material. She has the books, several of them annotated. She can recite the frameworks. She has done the morning routine and the gratitude practice and the vision board, and some of it helped and none of it moved the actual thing. And she has begun to notice that an entire industry has grown up around making women feel briefly better about staying exactly where they are.

That is the gap She Who Dares is aimed at. The show's premise, in its own words, is women who are done playing it small, and the promise is the conversation underneath the cliches rather than another restatement of them.

Two things about that framing are worth drawing out, because they are less common than they sound.

The first is the pairing of wellness and business in one show rather than two. Most podcasts pick a side. The business ones treat a woman as a set of revenue problems and the wellness ones treat her as a set of nervous-system problems, and a woman running something real is obviously both at once, usually in the same hour. A show that refuses to separate them is describing the actual conditions rather than a tidier version of them.

The second is the word capable. The promise is a business that reflects what you are actually capable of, which is a more uncomfortable proposition than it first appears. The comfortable version of empowerment says you are already enough and asks nothing further. The version in that sentence says something harder: that there is a gap between what you can do and what you are currently doing, that the gap is yours, and that closing it is work rather than mindset. Women who are tired of being flattered tend to find that enormously relieving.

It sits in the Wellness and Business categories of the DWC Podcast Directory, which is our running list of shows worth your time, assembled for women navigating midlife with intention and for the wider world listening alongside them. The directory carries a single listing type — no tiers, no paid priority placement, no sponsored top slot. Everything in it is there because somebody thought it was good.

If you want the fast test of whether a show is for you, it is usually the first two minutes of any episode rather than the description. Put it on while you do something else and see whether you find yourself stopping the something else.

A Favour My Friend

I'm writing my girlfriend because you're tried and true,
Who won't faint at the task I ask you to do.
' I need you to do a favour for me,
One that I don't want my children to see.'

When my time has come and I'm declared dead,
Go straight to my house to the door that is red.
Let yourself in , don't call or shout,
Understand this is a mission
No backing out.
Bring gloves, tongs and black bags as well,
You're not here for a chat or a fond farewell.
March to my bedroom , Steady your breath
You're about to encounter,
My life after death.

Brace yourself darling , You're in for a shock
At the preponderance of history
Contained in this lot.
There's toys that came with delicious delight
Ticklers and stuff that glowed in the night.
G-strings like floss for a daring day
Tassels that twirled in a titty display
Dildos and paddles, a buzzing brigade

A veritable museum of the choices I made.

Now gather them gently
No judgement , no grin,
These were companions through thick and sin.
From youthful mischief to marital play,
Through phases of 'why not' and 'seize the day'.

You'll see the stages to life there my peer,
'The Hopeful', 'The Wild' the ' Still Got It years.'
And somewhere between the kids
And the tea.
Lived a version of me still cheeky.
Still free.
I never quite cleared out that drawer of delight
Though I could have I suppose, out of mind, out of sight.
But each little relic, absurd as it seems
Held laughter and courage and
Half forgotten dreams.
Pack it all up and stash it away ,
In the red bin, for Friday's garbage day.

Not the green bin, the red bin , make sure it's the red bin , otherwise the recyclers will go through it and then there will be a rude letter. Oi that'd be pretty funny ay. I can just imagine the look on my kid's faces . Hilarious last laugh. I'll leave the bin up to you my friend. Thanks in advance , Jules xx