Galit Benrobi DWC Weekly Issue 114

There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives in autumn.

The light comes in lower. The mornings take a little longer to warm. And one by one, the trees begin to let go of everything they spent the whole year growing.

I have always found that moment strangely moving. A tree does not argue with the season. It does not cling to its leaves because it worked hard for them, or because it is afraid of how it will look without them. It simply understands, in the way that only living things understand, that what was built in spring was never meant to stay forever.

What we spend our lives building

Most of us spend years building something. A home. A marriage. A career. A family. A version of ourselves that we can recognise in the mirror and present to the world with some confidence. We pour ourselves into it, season after season, and somewhere along the way we start to believe that if we build it well enough, it will hold.

And then life changes it.

Sometimes the change is the one we hoped for: a child who grows into someone extraordinary, a business that finally finds its feet, a love that deepens with time. And sometimes it is the change we feared most. A diagnosis. A redundancy. A relationship that ends. A version of ourselves that no longer fits, however hard we try to button it up.

I know that second kind of change well. Many of you have written to me about yours. There is a grief in watching something you built begin to fall away, even when part of you knows it has to. You can stand in the middle of your own life and feel like a tree in late October, branches bare, wondering who you are without the very things you spent so long growing.

What the leaves already know

Here is what autumn keeps teaching me.

The tree is still a tree. Stripped back, it is more itself than it has been all year. Every line of it is visible. Every branch that held through the storms is still there. And underneath the soil, where nobody is looking, the roots are quietly doing the work that will carry it into spring.

Change is rarely easy to accept. It asks us to let go before we can see what comes next. But just as leaves are shed in autumn, we change. And more often than we dare to believe in the middle of it, we become better: softer where we needed softening, stronger where we needed strength, and a little more honest about who we really are.

The lives we build will change. The lives we change, our own and the people's around us, are where the real story is written.

Thank you

This week, I want to say thank you.

To every reader who opens DWC on a Tuesday, shares a story with a friend, or writes to tell us that something in these pages reached them at exactly the right moment. To every contributor who trusts us with their words, their experience and, very often, their hardest chapters. To our Cornerstone Partners, who have walked beside this magazine through every season. And to our sponsors, who have stood with us through a difficult year.

On 17 November, DWC will appear on our first three billboards, in Times Square, New York. One celebrates our best-selling covers. One features our Cornerstone Partners. One honours the winners of the DWC Content Creator Awards.

When we started this magazine, the idea of women's stories lighting up Times Square felt like something that happened to other people. It is happening to us because of you. Every one of those faces is there because a reader somewhere chose to read, buy, share and believe in the stories we tell.

So whatever season you find yourself in this week, whether you are building, letting go, or standing bare-branched and waiting, please know this: you are part of something that is growing. And we could not have built it without you.

On 17 November 2026, DWC Magazine appears on its first three billboards, in Times Square, New York.

The first time I stepped inside Théâtre Sainte-Catherine for its free Sunday-night improv workshop, I felt as though I had entered another dimension.

The theatre was gritty and grungy, tucked inside Montreal's vibrant Village near the city's red-light district. Yet inside that unpolished room, I discovered a world filled with laughter, silliness, connection and possibility.

More importantly, I discovered a part of myself that felt like home.

It wasn't entirely unfamiliar. My first encounter with something resembling improv had happened many years earlier, when I was in Grade One. An outside facilitator came into our classroom and led us through a series of playful, improvised exercises.

I had no idea what we were doing. I only remember laughing, and laughing and laughing. I simply could not stop. It was probably the most I had laughed that entire year.

Little me felt completely alive.

I didn't have the language to explain it then, but I knew I wanted to experience that feeling again.

Fast-forward to my early thirties, standing in that Montreal theatre among people who also wanted to express themselves through spontaneity and play. Something inside me awakened. The games required me to listen, respond and surrender to what was happening in front of me. There was no time to overthink, rehearse or retreat into self-consciousness.

I had to be present.

That experience reminded me of snowboarding, an extreme sport I had practised for several years. On a snowboard, you cannot become lost in thoughts about yesterday or tomorrow. You must feel your body, respond to the mountain and remain intensely aware of the moment beneath you.

Improv asked the same of me, although with far less danger and considerably more laughter.

Through my years of practising and teaching yoga, I had learned that quieting the mind allows us to encounter life as it is actually happening. The present moment is where our creativity, intuition and vitality live. When we become consumed by self-criticism, intrusive thoughts or endless mental noise, we can lose touch with the magic of the Now — the state of presence at the heart of Eckhart Tolle's teachings.

Improv became another form of spiritual practice for me.

On stage, we played games with wonderfully ridiculous names: Bunny Bunny, Yes, And and Yes, Let's. From the outside, these exercises might appear silly or insignificant. But within that silliness, I experienced an energetic force unlike anything I had felt before.

Improv gave me permission to play without needing to be impressive. It taught me to trust my instincts, take up space and allow myself to be seen, even when I didn't know what would happen next.

That is where improv can profoundly affect our self-esteem.

Every time we contribute an idea, use our voice or step into a scene without knowing where it will lead, we practise trusting ourselves. Every time another person accepts our offer and builds upon it, we receive the message: Your contribution matters. You belong here. We can create something together.

Confidence does not always arrive before we take the leap. Often, it is created through the experience of leaping, and discovering that we can survive, adapt and even have fun along the way.

So many of us carry layers of conditioning that tell us to be quieter, smaller or more acceptable. We learn to fear mistakes, judge our natural impulses and hide the playful, expressive parts of ourselves. Improv gently helps us peel away those layers. It replaces perfection with curiosity, isolation with connection and self-consciousness with creative freedom.

To be silly without shame is liberating.

To express yourself without apologising is empowering.

To be fully present with another human being is an act of connection, and, perhaps, an act of love.

Today, after years of performing and teaching comedy improv, yoga and creative expression, I remain passionate about bringing this work to workshops, festivals and speaking events around the world. I have seen how improv can help people open their voices, strengthen their self-esteem and reconnect with the joyful parts of themselves they may have forgotten.

Because improv is not only about being funny.

It is about becoming more alive.

And sometimes, the path back to ourselves begins with the simplest invitation:

Yes, let's.

Content note: this article refers to rape and sexual assault.

On Monday 9 November, at Southwark Crown Court in London, Mr Justice Bennathan sentenced Russell Brand to ten years and six months in prison for one rape and three sexual assaults.

This column begins with the women, because the case began with them.

Six women, separately

In September 2023, a joint investigation by The Sunday Times, The Times and Channel 4's Dispatches carried anonymous allegations against Brand. The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation that month.

The six women whose accounts reached court came forward after that broadcast. Each went to the police on her own, years after the events. The prosecution told the jury the women were strangers to one another, and that each had stayed silent for years, held back by guilt, shame and the fear of being blamed. Each keeps lifelong anonymity under UK law.

In April 2025, the Crown Prosecution Service authorised five charges involving four women, covering 1999 to 2005. In December 2025, it authorised two more, involving two further women, both relating to 2009. The cases were joined, and the trial opened on 12 October 2026.

The verdicts

On Thursday 5 November, after more than nine hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Brand of raping a young fan in 2009, and of sexually assaulting three women: an MTV worker at a party in a Soho bar in 2004, a Capital Radio worker in 2005, and a Channel 4 worker during a filming project in 2009.

The jury acquitted him on three counts: a rape alleged in Bournemouth in 1999, an attempted indecent assault alleged at MTV in 2001, and an oral rape alleged in 2004. Brand, 51, denied every charge.

He was remanded in custody that afternoon. Refusing bail, the judge said he regretted the hardship to Brand's children, and that the hardship had been caused by their father's serious criminal offending.

In their own words

Before sentence was passed, four of the women's victim impact statements were heard. The prosecutor read three. One woman read her own, from behind a screen that hid her from everyone in the courtroom except the judge.

She told the court she had spent years in shock and turmoil, and had lost respect for herself. She had come to see herself as damaged goods, afraid of giving off signals that someone might take the wrong way.

The woman raped in 2009 described living with trauma. She struggled to eat and to sleep, feared she might have contracted HIV, and took two to three months off work. The judge noted that the rape still affects her ability to form friendships and to trust people.

The woman assaulted while working on a Channel 4 project said she had felt powerless at the time, and had lost her trust in people since. The woman assaulted in 2004 or 2005 said she hoped he would never be allowed to hurt another woman.

What the judge said

In his sentencing remarks, Mr Justice Bennathan said Brand had told a series of lies during the trial and had shown a "casual and arrogant disregard" for women who said no. He described a man who believed fame meant he could act however he liked, whenever he liked.

Then he turned to the women's rights, in a passage several newspapers carried on their front pages the next morning. Whatever women wear, wherever they go and whatever they drink, he said, they keep the right to say no, and the right to demand justice from the criminal courts when a man acts without their consent.

He also paused to pay tribute to the determination and bravery of the women who had come forward.

Brand is expected to serve around two-thirds of the sentence, roughly seven years, before he is eligible for release, and the remainder on licence.

Why this belongs here

Women who report sexual violence are asked the same questions again and again. Why did you wait? What were you wearing? How much had you had to drink? Why did you go into the room? Those questions are put to them in police stations, in courtrooms and, most relentlessly, online.

On Monday, a High Court judge answered every one of them at once, in open court, and put the answer on the public record.

The six women in this case each did something that costs a great deal and is rarely thanked. Each walked into a police station alone, many years after the fact, knowing the man was famous and knowing what would be said about her. Each gave evidence in a trial the whole country was watching. Four heard the jury return guilty verdicts on the counts concerning them. Two heard the jury acquit, under a criminal standard of proof that asks a jury to be sure.

The Metropolitan Police has said it is assessing further allegations from two more women. Brand has not been charged in relation to them.

The scars in this story belong to the women, and so does what shines: the decision each of them made, alone, to walk into a police station and say what happened.

The case in sequence, drawn from Crown Prosecution Service and Metropolitan Police statements and from Associated Press and Press Association court reporting. The six women keep lifelong anonymity under UK law and are identified here only as the court reports described them.

Across forty-two years of work, I have managed teams, led people, and occupied positions of responsibility in different contexts. I have also been a friend, a family member, a colleague, a community participant. And across every single one of these roles, there has been an unspoken expectation that I would be the nurturer. That I would read the unsaid needs. That I would be the one who holds space for other people's struggles, fears, and emotional weight. This was not because I am a mother. It was because I am a woman, and women are cast as nurturers everywhere we go.

A woman in a leadership role is expected to be warm, approachable, emotionally available to her team. A woman in a friendship is expected to be the one who checks in, who remembers the details of your life, who asks how you are really doing. A woman in a family is expected to manage the emotional dynamics, to smooth over conflict, to be the one who holds everyone together. A woman in any space is coded as the one who will provide comfort, who will manage the feelings in the room, who will make it safe for everyone else to be human.

Watch what happened to Human Resources in Australia. In the 1970s it was ninety per cent male and it functioned as administration and compliance. Then women began moving into those roles in significant numbers. By now, Human Resources has transformed into "People and Culture", and it is eighty-four per cent female. The field did not become more valuable. It became more emotional. More relational. More about managing the human experience rather than managing employment. Women brought the capacity to see people, to care about their experience, to read what was underneath the surface. And organisations said: yes, keep doing that. But they did not say: we will pay you appropriately for this, or we will share this labour with our male colleagues, or you do not have to absorb what is not yours to carry.

And this is precisely why women leave these roles. Forty-three per cent of women leaders are burned out, compared with thirty-one per cent of men at the same level. Nearly forty per cent of women looking for a new job cite burnout as their main reason. I left management because I was exhausted. Not from the work itself, but from managing the emotional behaviour of adults who were less regulated than my own children. They would make a request, not get what they wanted, and immediately escalate to a higher authority — exactly as a child would when one parent says no. When that didn't work, they would cry to senior management about being treated unfairly, about not being valued, about the injustice of it all. I was expected to manage their emotional response to not getting their way whilst maintaining my own composure and my role as the nurturing container. The work was not the job. The work was managing other adults' emotional regulation failures while my own needs disappeared.

This happens everywhere women occupy any role of responsibility. In leadership, in friendship, in family, in community. We are expected to be the emotional container, the one who reads the room, the one who manages what is unsaid. And because we have been trained since childhood that our value lies in our capacity to nurture, we say yes. We absorb the expectation. We make ourselves available for the work of managing other people's emotional experience.

What is rarely named is that this expectation lands on women regardless of whether we are mothers. A woman without children still mothers everyone around her. A single woman still carries the expectation of being the emotional caretaker. An unmarried woman is still cast in the role of nurturer. It is not about actual motherhood. It is about the cultural positioning of women as the ones who will provide emotional labour everywhere.

The signal arrives when you realise you are holding something that was never yours to hold, carrying expectations that were placed on you simply because of your gender. When you recognise that you have been positioned as the emotional infrastructure in every domain of your life. When you understand that you have been doing work that is neither named, nor paid, nor shared, nor chosen.

That clarity is directional. It is telling you something about boundaries, about where your responsibility actually ends, about what you are built to carry versus what you have agreed to carry out of conditioning and training.

The question is not how to become a better nurturer. The question is: whose emotional needs am I responsible for? And when you have an honest answer to that, everything shifts.

Cyprus was well known for the number of girls and women who went there from places such as Thailand and Sri Lanka to work. They often left their children back home with other family members, and sent back as much of their wages as they could for support. It could be years before they saw their own children, whilst working as nannies to other people's offspring in Cyprus. Some of them became prostitutes.

Thus the idea came to Christy Lefteri, growing up in London as a child of Cypriot refugees. Her story is fictional, but inspired by the women who sacrificed so much.

Petra, mother to Aliki, hires Nisha, whose daughter Kumari is left with her grandmother in Sri Lanka. Nisha speaks to her daughter every night, mothering her from a distance. Aliki is a withdrawn child in many ways, but she responds to Nisha far more than to her own mother.

Yiannis lives in the flat above Petra, and ostensibly earns a living by foraging in the woods to sell to restaurants, but in reality traps the songbirds which stop off in Cyprus during their migration, which restaurants will pay top money for. As he and Nisha begin to fall in love, she wants him to stop killing the songbirds, but he has a boss to whom he is answerable and feels he cannot get out.

The more we learn about Nisha, the more we are drawn to her: her sacrifice, her dedication to her new family whilst still keeping in touch with her own; her kindness and her honesty — all these make her so likeable. So when she disappears one night, just after Yiannis has proposed to her and promised to stop killing the songbirds, we are as perplexed as he and her employer are. The police are not interested, believing that foreign girls up and go whenever they please, but Nisha has left behind her passport and personal things of great importance to her. It is down to Petra and Yiannis to try to discover what has happened.

When they learn that Nisha is not the only foreigner to disappear, and then a body is found, it is plain that something is badly wrong. They discover the reality of the lives of Nisha's friends, girls like her who came to earn a better life for their families and were used shamelessly. The trapping and killing of the songbirds is not an easy read, but it emphasises the parallel with the plight of the migrants who are just as helpless to escape the lives they have been drawn into.

It is a poignant book, eminently readable, and with a message that we all need to hear.

Content note: this article refers to the abduction and abuse of a child.

On 27 August 2013, a bright, observant nine-year-old girl boarded an overnight coach in Barcelona. She was about to take her first flight, to Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia. Her parents had agreed to the trip. The man taking her was a neighbour who had made himself indispensable to a struggling family, and the holiday was presented as a reward for her good school results.

Her name was Nada Itrab. She would not come home for seven months.

L'Hospitalet de Llobregat

Nada was born in 2004 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, on the edge of Barcelona, into a family of Moroccan origin living with serious financial hardship. It was exactly the kind of household a predator looks for: stretched, isolated, grateful for help. The neighbour offered help. He gained their trust. Then he asked to take their daughter abroad.

Seven months

Soon after landing, Nada was told that the documents she needed to return to Spain had been lost. When the man learned that the police were looking for him, he gave her a new identity, a new name and a new story, and took her deep into the jungle.

For seven months she was held there. She was made to work on coca plantations and was subjected to repeated sexual abuse. She has since spoken publicly about what happened to her, in her own words, and DWC will not repeat the details here. She was a child, and she survived.

She kept hoping. She has said that hope was what kept her alive.

The first rescue

In Spain, the search was relentless. Officers from the Guardia Civil worked with Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra and the Bolivian authorities, and four Guardia Civil agents travelled to Bolivia and stayed for a month following her trail. A phone call made by her captor helped them pin down his location.

In March 2014, they found her in the jungle and brought her out. Photographs from the day show a little girl in a blue headscarf crossing an airfield beside a smiling Guardia Civil captain. She had turned ten in captivity. She has called her rescue the best present of her life.

The second rescue

Coming home should have been the end of the story. It was the start of another one.

After her return, Nada was placed in juvenile centres under Catalonia's child protection services. By her own account and that of the journalist who later helped her, she received little specialist support for what she had been through. Nobody, she has said, spoke to her about the kidnapping for years. She sealed it away, minimised it, even idealised parts of it, because that was how she had survived. She went through depression and periods of very dark thoughts.

Then, in her late teens, Neus Sala found her.

Sala, a Catalan crime journalist with more than thirty years in broadcasting, was making a podcast about the rescue. What she found was a young woman with brilliant grades who had been left almost entirely alone. Sala helped her secure her legal residency, find therapy and specialist support, and take a path into university. The two of them began, slowly, to write Nada's story down.

Why she is on this list

Nada Itrab survived something no child should ever have to survive. Then she survived what came after: the silence, the institutional neglect and the long years of carrying it alone.

She could have kept it sealed away. Instead, in her early twenties, she put her name to it. She has said that she is telling her story with one aim: that no more girls go through what she did. Neus Sala has described her ambition as wanting to be, in her words, the Malala of trafficking.

She is not defined by the worst thing that was done to her. She is defined by what she has chosen to do with it.

Nada Itrab is now in her early twenties, and has turned her story into a book and a cause.

The first time it happened, Iris Kemble was nineteen and three weeks into her second year at university, living in a narrow terraced house by the canal with four other students and a boiler that knocked like someone wanting to be let in.

She woke at ten past three. She knew it was ten past three because the red numbers of her alarm clock were the only thing she could see clearly. Everything else in the room had gone thick and grey, like the air before a storm. She tried to sit up. Nothing happened. She tried to lift a finger, to turn her head, to open her mouth and shout for Priya across the landing. Nothing. Her body lay on the mattress like something that belonged to someone else.

And at the foot of the bed, something was sitting.

It was tall, even seated, its head almost brushing the sloped ceiling. It had shoulders and long arms that rested on its knees, and where a face should have been there was only a smooth, pale blankness, like the inside of an eggshell. It did not move towards her. It did not reach for her. It simply sat, and after a while, very softly, it began to hum.

The tune was slow and low, three notes rising and one falling, over and over. Iris did not recognise it. She lay there with her heart slamming against her ribs, unable to scream, while the thing at the foot of her bed hummed a lullaby into the dark.

Then, between one breath and the next, she could move. She sat bolt upright. The room was empty. The duvet at the end of the bed held a long, shallow dent, as if something heavy had just stood up.

In the morning she looked it up, the way everyone does. Sleep paralysis. The brain wakes before the body, still locked in the stillness of dreaming. It is common, she read. It is harmless. People across the world have seen figures in the room during it for as long as there have been rooms. There was a whole page of names for the visitor: the Old Hag, the Night Hag, the shadow man.

None of the pages mentioned humming.

It came back the following week, and the week after that. Exam season made it worse, and so did coffee, and so did nights out that ended at the kebab shop at two. Each time she woke frozen at ten past three, it was there, folded at the end of the bed, its blank face turned towards her, its long fingers laced. Each time it hummed the same three notes up and one note down.

By November she had stopped screaming inside her own head. By Christmas she had started, very quietly, to listen.

It was hard to explain, and she never tried to explain it to anyone. Her mother had moved to Spain with a man called Keith. Her father sent money and very few words. Her housemates were kind, in the busy way people are kind when they are nineteen and in love with their own lives. Nobody had sat with Iris in the dark since she was small.

The figure did. It never hurt her. It never moved closer. It sat with its terrible patience and hummed, and the weight of it on the end of the mattress was like a hand on the blanket. She began to find the melody stuck in her head in lectures. She began, she realised one night with a jolt of shame, to look forward to ten past three.

"You look knackered," Priya said in February. "Are you sleeping?"

"Sort of," Iris said, and smiled, and changed the subject.

It was her personal tutor who sent her to the doctor, in the end, after Iris fell asleep in a seminar on the Brontës and woke saying a word nobody recognised. The doctor was young and brisk and kind. He asked about the paralysis, and Iris told him about the waking, and the stillness, and left out the tall thing on the bed.

He talked about sleep hygiene and screens and caffeine, and then he wrote her a prescription for tablets to steady her sleep and keep her alert through the day. "Most people find the episodes stop altogether," he said. "You should get your nights back."

He was right. The first week, she slept from midnight until seven and woke feeling light and empty and clear. The second week, the same. At ten past three, there was nothing at all, only the red numbers and the dark and the boiler knocking.

She was surprised by how much she missed it.

On the tenth day, she came home from the library at four in the afternoon and found mud on her bedroom floor.

Footprints. Bare, long and narrow, much longer than any foot had a right to be, pressed into the dark floorboards in wet grey silt that smelled of the canal. They began at the window, which was shut and locked. They crossed to the foot of her bed. And there they stopped, two prints side by side, as if something had stood very still, waiting for her to lie down.

She told herself it was one of the boys playing a joke. She mopped it up with shaking hands and did not mention it, because she knew, the way you know things in dreams, that none of them had done it.

The next day there were more. A trail from the wardrobe to the bed. Another from the door. The day after that, they were in the kitchen, circling the chair where she sat to eat her toast, and on the stairs, and in the bathroom, leading up to the side of the bath and stopping there. The mud was always fresh. It was always wet. Once, she found a strand of weed caught in it, green and slick and cold.

And the humming had started again. Not at night. In the day. Faint, at the edge of hearing, three notes up and one note down. She heard it in the shower. She heard it on the bus. She heard it in the silence of the library, so close behind her ear that she spun round and found only a boy in headphones who stared at her and moved tables.

It was not angry. She understood that, somehow, and the understanding was the worst part. It was not trying to frighten her. It was trying to do what it had always done. It was trying to sing her to sleep.

On the fifteenth day she came home early, and the house was empty, and the footprints led from her bedroom window, across the floor, up the side of the bed and onto the pillow.

She sat down on the edge of the mattress. The room smelled of wet stone and river. Her eyelids were very heavy. She had not taken that morning's tablet. She was not entirely sure she had forgotten.

The clock said ten past three.

Somewhere very close, the humming rose, three notes up and one note down, and the mattress dipped at its far end under a long, familiar weight.

"I know," Iris whispered. "I know. I'm tired too."

When Priya came home at six, the door to Iris's room was open. The bed was neatly made. On the floorboards, side by side, were two sets of muddy footprints, one long and narrow and bare, one small and human, both leading to the window and none leading back.

The window was shut, and locked from the inside, and somewhere out on the dark water of the canal, someone was humming.

The humming figure is fiction. Sleep paralysis is very real.

One of the most damaging ideas people carry into healing is the belief that progress should move in a straight line.

Forward.
Upward.
Consistent.
Predictable.

People expect that once a wound is addressed, it should stop hurting. Once a lesson is learned, it should remain integrated forever. Once peace is found, it should stay untouched.

But healing does not move like machinery. It moves like weather.

It arrives in cycles.
In seasons.
In waves that return carrying familiar emotions in different forms.

Some days you feel grounded, clear, deeply connected to yourself. Other days an old grief rises unexpectedly and suddenly you feel fragile again. One moment you believe you have fully moved beyond a certain pattern, and the next you find yourself emotionally activated in ways that feel painfully familiar.

This can create enormous shame if you misunderstand what healing actually is.

People often interpret the return of old emotions as failure. They assume that if sadness resurfaces, they must not have healed. If fear returns, they must still be broken. If a familiar wound aches again, all their progress must have disappeared.

But healing is not erasure.

You are not meant to become someone untouched by your past. You are becoming someone who can move through the echoes of it without abandoning yourself.

That distinction matters.

The emotional seasons of healing are not signs that something is wrong. They are evidence that the nervous system heals in layers. Each season reveals what you are finally ready to process, understand, or integrate more deeply.

What once overwhelmed you completely may now only visit briefly. What once consumed you for months may now move through you in days. This is still healing, even if the emotion itself feels familiar.

Weather does not apologise for returning. Neither should grief.

Many trauma survivors become hyper-focused on permanence because instability shaped their early experiences. They crave certainty. They want reassurance that once they heal something, it will stay healed forever. But humans are not static beings. Life continuously changes us. New experiences interact with old wounds. Growth creates new perspectives on old memories.

A grief you felt at twenty will not feel the same at forty. Not because the grief was fake before, but because you have changed.

Healing unfolds through revisitation.

You revisit old pain with new awareness.
You revisit old memories with greater compassion.
You revisit old fears with stronger boundaries.
You revisit old identities with less attachment.

This does not mean you are trapped in the past. It means your relationship to the past is evolving.

Weather patterns teach us something important. Storms are temporary, but they are also natural. Rain does not mean the sky is failing. Winter does not mean spring disappeared forever. Emotional seasons deserve the same understanding.

There will be periods where you feel expansive and deeply connected to life. Creativity flows. Relationships feel easier. Your body feels regulated. Hope feels accessible.

And then there will be seasons where you feel inward again. Tired. Reflective. Tender. Emotional. Uncertain. You may need more rest. More solitude. More gentleness with yourself.

Neither season is wrong.

The problem begins when we judge ourselves for changing.

Modern culture often rewards consistency over humanity. It praises productivity, emotional control, and visible progress. But healing asks something very different. It asks for responsiveness. Presence. Adaptation. Honesty.

There is wisdom in recognising what season you are in emotionally rather than forcing yourself into one you are not.

Some seasons are for growth.
Some are for grieving.
Some are for rebuilding.
Some are for resting.
Some are simply for surviving long enough to reach the next opening.

All of them matter.

One of the most difficult aspects of cyclical healing is the fear that difficult emotions will last forever once they return. Trauma often teaches permanence. Pain once felt endless. So when sadness resurfaces, the nervous system panics and assumes you are back where you started.

But you are not who you were then.

Even when old wounds revisit you, they are meeting a different version of you now. A version with more awareness. More language. More resources. More self-trust. More capacity to stay present.

This changes the entire experience.

The goal of healing is not to eliminate emotional weather. It is to develop enough internal grounding that you can move through all seasons without losing yourself entirely inside them.

You begin to trust that difficult feelings can move.
You stop catastrophising every emotional shift.
You stop demanding constant positivity from yourself.
You stop viewing healing as something you either succeed or fail at.

Instead, you begin living in relationship with your humanity.

There is profound freedom in this.

You no longer need to force yourself into artificial stability. You no longer interpret every difficult season as evidence of brokenness. You begin to understand that emotional movement is part of being alive.

The nervous system relaxes when it is no longer punished for changing.

This does not mean surrendering to chaos or giving up on growth. It means understanding that growth itself is cyclical. Integration happens through repetition, not perfection.

A tree does not bloom all year long. It still remains alive during winter.

You are allowed seasons too.

And sometimes the most healing thing you can do is stop demanding permanent sunshine from a human life that was always meant to contain weather.

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.

We're not talking foodstuffs that are outright banned due to religious reasons like pork or beef, nor for conservation reasons, or indeed anything that shouldn't be served to pregnant women, just things that somewhere in the world you simply cannot serve or indeed purchase.

Do we start with the infamous haggis and that you can't buy it in the USA because 'lungs of a sheep'? Nah, that's far too easy, we're going deeper and weirder than that. Although we should point out that a staggering 33% of American visitors to Scotland believe that a haggis is actually a wild small creature with two legs of differing heights enabling it to easily roam the Scottish hillsides (2003 survey). No, we are not joking.

Cultural protectionism, myth, lies, technicalities, health, and simply 'just because' have all caused certain foods to experience the ban hammer, with some still standing to this day. Obviously you would immediately suspect a couple would fall into this list, such as our first one…

Pufferfish

European Union

We know it's deadly, and we know it's a Japanese delicacy that can only be prepared in that country by chefs who have undergone years of intensive training, but the EU doesn't care. You can't buy it, you can't serve it, you ain't getting it. End of discussion.

Casu Marzu

European Union

And the territory doesn't care for this cheese either, and yet whilst it is banned outright, it manages to worm (and, yes, that's a pun as you're about to discover) its way into not being banned whilst simultaneously still being banned.

The cheese is created using live maggots, which break down the fats and — crucially — remain alive when you eat the cheese. Yeah, you can kinda figure out why the EU has placed a complete and total ban on it. In fact it's banned almost everywhere, and it's practically impossible to get it out of Sardinia (the only place where it is made) in the first instance, and should you attempt to, heavy fines could be forthcoming.

The caveat on the total ban that isn't a ban, is that the Italian government placed Casu Marzu on the Traditional Agri-Food Products (PAT) list, thereby protecting its long history. Still can't pop to the store and buy it, though you can make it for yourself, or wander off and find a Sardinian farmer who will give you some.

If a cheese wriggles in the forest, and there's no-one around to eat it, is it still available?

Ackee

United States, 1973 to 2000

It's a fruit. It's sort of savoury, mild, nutty, and buttery. And for twenty-seven years, America banned it.

It is a native fruit of West Africa, and by virtue, Jamaica, where it is also the National Fruit. Those of you who think that perhaps the reason is because of hallucinogenic properties are wrong, it's simply because an unripe one is highly toxic and can kill you quite easily.

One must wait for it to naturally ripen, open up, and then the yellow parts taken and boiled before consumption. The US Food and Drug Administration banned imports in 1973, and only relented in 2000, for canned ackee from approved processors. Fresh ackee still can't get in.

Tomato Ketchup

France

OK, so not France entirely, it's their school canteens. The French are very passionate about their food and as such cannot be having ketchup ruining classic dishes, ergo it is banned. Save for when it isn't.

Even the French concede that people like French Fries (that are Belgian, so pommes de terre frites it is then), and so if fries are being served then the kids can have ketchup, but only then and at no other times.

Norwegian Salmon

China

Odd one this, as it wasn't technically banned, and neither does that (non) ban exist today, but it was an actual thing this century.

Some folk get really really upset when they don't win a Nobel Peace Prize, and equally so when someone wins it they outright are unhappy about who actually does. This was unofficially the case in China in 2010.

The Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Peace Prize much to the chagrin of the Chinese authorities who introduced additional security measures for Norwegian salmon that essentially were impossible to pass. This resulted in crates of the fish sitting there at ports unable to go anywhere and ending up rotting away. The trade was destroyed overnight without having to go through the official rigmarole of placing a banning order.

It has since been lifted and no such issues exist today; the first seven months of 2026 have seen over 75,000 tonnes shipped into the country from Norway, an almost 50% increase on the previous year.

Absinthe

Various

Drink too much and you'll see pink dragons wearing sandals. That rumour persisted for decades, especially in North America, and a rumour is all that it was because it was never true. It stemmed in large part from wine producers panicking, thinking it would steal their share of the market, so they lobbied hard to get it banned.

It contains thujone (a compound in wormwood) that supposedly causes hallucinations, and so they warned authorities that if it wasn't stopped there'd be floods, earthquakes, and cats and dogs doing it with each other; of course prohibition then turned up that just compounded the issue.

Trouble was there was never enough thujone in it to do any of these things, and to consume enough to be able to chat with pixies, one would have died of alcohol poisoning long before. But it still took ninety-five years for the American ban to be lifted, and even then it could only contain 10 parts per million. Europe had already decided on 35 per million (Canada varies by province), and places that ban alcohol altogether didn't matter anyway.

Marmite and Vegemite

Denmark

Marmite's slogan is "You either love it or hate it" — Denmark outright banned it. Of course this had nothing to do with the nation taking the slogan literally, but what was in it.

Denmark has this odd law which was being interpreted to state that foodstuffs could not be fortified with vitamins and minerals without prior authorisation. Neither Marmite nor Vegemite had asked the Danes, and as such it was ban hammer time.

Paperwork was submitted and the Danes went, "Okay thanks, no problem". The drink Horlicks also fell foul of this law.

Samosa

Somalia

There's reasons, there's weird and odd reasons, and then there's this one. It is however important to note that it isn't the country of Somalia as a whole, just various regions under the control of Al-Shabaab militants.

Samosas are triangle shaped, and triangles are… Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Points awarded to you for saying the Holy Trinity. Can't be having food that is 'too Christian'. This ban is still effective in some places where the militants remain. Yes, triangles. Three points. Trifecta. God. Son. Holy Ghost.

Now whilst this is genuinely what was announced, by loudspeaker from the back of trucks in 2011, Al-Shabaab later claimed the ban was about health rather than theology. But the triangle story was the one that travelled, so the Holy Trinity it was then.

So now that we have covered God in Somalia we may as well dive off into the deep end and go full batshit mental. Suffice to say some of the following bans were implemented by crazy types.

Margarine

Canada (and the State of Wisconsin)

France invented the stuff in 1869, so once again industry lobbied the powers that be to ban it. It acted like butter, lasted longer than butter, and whilst it didn't taste like it, it was obviously going to take away butter's lovely money because it was far cheaper, and that just wasn't a very nice thing to do.

Canada banned it for sixty-two years, from 1886 to 1948 (with a temporary lifting from 1917 to 1923, when the First World War left butter in short supply), and Wisconsin kept its ban on yellow margarine until 1967; oh those lobbyists looking after us all.

And yes, margarine bootleggers were an actual thing.

Coffee

Sweden

This one from the vaults of 'Look at this sort of crazy', culminated in twins who were prisoners and had been sentenced to death. Several times saw coffee banned or heavily taxed during the latter 1700s and early 1800s, until it was finally lifted in 1823.

King Gustav III was of the opinion that coffee was a slow poison and therefore very much a problem, and he was intent on proving it; this is where the twin convicts enter the story.

The story goes that he commuted their death sentences, but instructed them that one must drink three pots of tea a day, whilst the other three pots of coffee — surely the coffee drinker would not be long for this world.

In 1792 Gustav III was assassinated, and the twins kept on drinking. The doctor in charge of this experiment passed away, and the twins kept on drinking. In fact it was the tea drinker who died first at the grand old age of 83, with the coffee drinker living longer.

Sweden is now one of the highest per capita drinkers of coffee in the world. Cheers, Gustav.

Home Cooking

USSR

The perfect socialist state cannot allow cooking at home; in Soviet Nation, Mother Russia does your cooking. And that was the whole idea, even to the extent that kitchens were not being built in new homes.

Everything had to be centralised, even calorie intakes, so huge communal facilities existed where everyone was expected to go. Obviously the size of the country made this policy impractical, as people in the middle of nowhere kept on a-cooking.

Home Cooking and Foraging

Cambodia

What's good for Soviet Russia is good for Pol Pot's Cambodia, only to add foraging for wild food in for good measure.

When you are the dictionary definition of a 'psychotic and sadistic madman' what else are you supposed to do? Did we mention that foraging could mean death because it was an act of individual sabotage against the state? Let's not go fishing this weekend, huh?

Everything

North Korea

Finally we arrive at the most secretive nation on the planet, where technically speaking absolutely everything is banned. Sort of.

You can buy hamburgers, pizzas, and the like, but only in Pyongyang and only if you have money, so that's pretty much everyone ruled out. But what you apparently can't do is call them by their western names; you can't buy a hamburger, but you can buy dajin-gogi gyeopppang (double bread with ground beef).

Ice cream is eseukimo (Eskimo) or eoreumboseungi, and karaoke machines are on-screen accompaniment machines.

I am just hungry thinking about it.

If you live somewhere warm, December can mean flying from a humid thirty degrees into a grey, biting zero. It might be a Christmas visit to family in Europe, a first snowy holiday, or a work trip that happens to land in the middle of winter. Either way, the change catches most people out, and it usually starts at the airport doors.

A little planning makes the difference between a trip you remember for the cold and a trip you remember for everything else.

Dress in layers, not in one big coat

The secret to staying warm is trapped air, and the easiest way to trap air is in layers. Think of three.

A base layer against the skin, ideally merino wool or a synthetic thermal, which moves sweat away from your body. Cotton feels comfortable but holds moisture, and damp cotton makes you colder.

A middle layer to hold in warmth: a fleece, a wool jumper or a light padded jacket.

An outer layer that keeps out wind and rain. In wet cold, a waterproof shell matters as much as warmth.

Layers let you adjust. Indoor heating in cold countries is often fierce, and you will want to peel off on trains, in shops and in restaurants.

The parts people forget

Most body heat escapes from the parts we leave uncovered. Pack a hat that covers your ears, a scarf, gloves, and warm socks. Bring shoes with a good grip; pavements can be icy, and summer trainers with smooth soles are a common cause of winter falls. If you will be walking in snow or slush, waterproof boots are worth the space.

You do not need to buy everything before you go. Coats, boots and thermals are often cheaper and better suited when bought in the destination, especially in the January sales.

Your skin and your sinuses

Cold air outside and heated air indoors are both very dry. Skin used to humidity can crack and itch within days. Pack a rich moisturiser, lip balm and hand cream, and drink more water than you think you need.

Your allergies may change too. Pollen is usually low in a northern winter, but indoor triggers such as house dust mites, pet hair and mould can rise when windows stay shut and the heating is on. If you rely on antihistamines or a nasal spray at home, take them with you.

Medicines across borders

This is the part most worth checking before you fly. Some common medicines, including some allergy, cold and pain treatments, are restricted or banned in certain countries. Japan, for example, prohibits medicines containing pseudoephedrine, which is found in some decongestants sold freely elsewhere.

Before you travel, check the rules of every country you are visiting, including transit stops, on its embassy or government website. Keep medicines in their original packaging with the pharmacy label. Carry a copy of any prescription and, for anything controlled, a letter from your doctor. Pack enough for the whole trip plus a few extra days, and keep it in your hand luggage, not your hold bag.

Choosing your baggage

Winter clothes are bulky and heavy, which changes how you should pack.

Wear your bulkiest items on the plane. Your coat and boots weigh nothing in your allowance when they are on you.

Use compression or vacuum bags for jumpers and thermals. They save space, though not weight, so keep an eye on the scales.

Think about the case itself. A hard-shell case protects fragile presents and keeps out snow and rain on the walk to the station. A soft-sided case or duffel is lighter and squeezes into tight spaces, but choose a water-resistant fabric. Either way, sturdy wheels matter on wet, uneven streets.

Check your allowance before you go, and weigh your bag at home. Excess baggage at the airport costs far more than adding a bag online in advance.

When you land

Put your layers on before you leave the terminal, not after. Give yourself a day to adjust; cold weather and long flights together are tiring. And look after your hands, feet and ears: if they go numb, white or hard, get somewhere warm straight away.

Then go out and enjoy it. There are few things better than a warm drink in a cold city, watching your breath turn to cloud.

The idea began with my own CV, during a period of uncertainty at work. I needed to rebuild it. My instinct was to approach that task as an engineer. I wanted a clean link that worked on any device and made my experience and projects easier to explore.

I built a page for myself. Yet changing the format left me with decisions no layout could settle. Which parts of my work deserved attention? What connected them? What could someone understand from a job title, and what was I leaving them to guess?

Those questions became the more interesting part of the project. I had set out to improve how I presented my career. The work also made me consider how I understood it.

The work behind the words

My background spans software engineering, telecommunications, machine learning, computer vision and scientific research. Each term says something accurate. Together, they still ask a reader to do considerable translation. A list of technical fields gives you categories. It does less to explain why the work mattered to the person doing it.

In my scientific work, I applied machine learning and computer vision to beam measurements and calibration. Software had to interact with real systems, imperfect data and operational constraints. That context matters. It explains why useful engineering involves more than making something work under ideal conditions.

A short entry can name those methods and projects. Explaining them to someone outside the field requires another step. What needed measuring? Where did software help? What did I contribute? Those are the details that let a reader see beyond the vocabulary.

You may recognise the same gap in your own work, even if your field is entirely different. A title can locate you within an organisation. A description of a difficult decision can show how you work. The two tell a fuller story together.

More space meant more decisions

A CV has a useful discipline. Space is limited, so you choose. Moving my experience onto a page gave me room to explain more. It also gave me room to make the reader work harder. Extra space does not decide what deserves to fill it.

That brought me back to the person opening the link. They might know little about my field. They might have only a few minutes. I wanted them to understand the work without needing to decode every technical term. Keeping everything would have made that harder.

I began to see the task as editing. A project needs enough context for someone to understand its purpose. My contribution needs to be clear within the wider effort. Any detail I include should help the reader follow that explanation. The page still needs an end.

There is a responsibility in that selection. A neat account can make an uncertain process sound inevitable. A sentence about a team can quietly become a claim about one person. I want my account to survive a conversation with someone who knows the work.

Finding the connection

Building for myself led me to a wider question. Why should explaining your professional experience require learning web design first? I had the technical skills to build my page. Someone with equally substantial work might have neither those skills nor the time to acquire them.

That question grew into a business: helping people turn the CV they already have into a personal website, without needing to design or build one themselves. It also helped me recognise a connection across my own work. I am interested in making complex technology useful. That means paying attention to the person trying to use it, alongside the engineering that makes it possible.

Explaining those problems gives me a way to connect research with building a business. The projects differ, and the connection needs explaining. I do not need to suggest that every career move followed a plan. I can describe what connects the work from where I stand now.

You can look for that connection without forcing your career into a tidy plot. Perhaps a recurring problem has followed you between roles. Perhaps different jobs have asked you to explain, organise or build. A useful account can acknowledge changes in direction and still give someone a way to understand them.

Being visible on my own terms

For me, visibility comes with choices about what to share. Public work can support an explanation. Private details can stay private. Confidential material belongs outside the page. Having more room to tell a story also means deciding where its boundaries should be.

I want the result to sound like something I could explain in person. Clear language helps me check that. If a description depends on impressive words, I need to ask what those words actually show. A plain account of a real contribution gives the conversation somewhere useful to begin.

The CV remains part of that picture. It offers a compact record that another person can scan. I wanted room beside it for the questions a record leaves open. Building that room made me take more care with the explanation itself.

If your own career summary feels incomplete, start with one piece of work. Write down the problem, your contribution and the detail a stranger would need to understand it. Check whether the account is fair to everyone involved. Then read it aloud.

Keep the CV nearby while you do it. Put the two accounts beside each other and notice what becomes visible. That difference is where I would begin the next conversation.

We have all done this at some point in our lives.

Instinctively, we reach for the dimmer switch. We soften our approach when meeting new people, hoping for acceptance and connection. Even on a first date we tell ourselves, let's not reveal the quirky bits just yet. Too soon. Too much.

We quiet our enthusiasm. We soften our opinions. We tone ourselves down so we don't blind anyone.

Is your personal approach more like — WARNING! May need sunglasses, my light is shining bright?

While a bold and authentic few may thrive this way, most of us stay safely in our comfort zones. We wait for the dust to settle before revealing our true selves. And some never do.

What feels like a survival strategy, dimming our light, is actually a slow erosion of who we really are.

So let's unpack this.

What is our light?

Our Light is a metaphor for our unique vitality.

It is not about being happy or positive all the time. It goes much deeper than that. It is your spark. Your curiosity. Your honesty. Your enthusiasm. Your genuine interest in life. It is the blend of your emotions, passions and values, shaped by everything you have lived through.

It is the part of you that wants to grow, express, connect, feel alive and conquer the world!!

Other people often experience your light as inspiration. Some admire your courage to be yourself. Others are drawn to your calm, your passion, your steadiness or your fire. We are all authentic in different ways and our light looks different in everyone.

And maybe that light could change the world, or at least soften it a little.

Why do we dim it?

There are many reasons.

Often we play small for social acceptance. We learn this early at school, in friendships and later at work. Fear of not fitting in, fear of rejection, fear of being misunderstood all teach us that blending in feels safer than standing out.

On a nervous system level, being too much can feel unsafe. Shining your light often requires courage, and courage can feel like threat. The body reacts as if it is heading into battle.

For many of us, dimming started in childhood. We learned to hide emotions to stay safe, to avoid overwhelmed or emotionally unavailable parents. Staying small felt protective.

We also dim ourselves to manage other people's discomfort. No one wants to make others feel uneasy. We fear they will not stay, or worse, that they will become resentful or hostile in response to our light.

At its core, dimming is driven by fear.

Fear of rejection.
Fear of not being accepted.
Fear of failure if we shine.
Fear of success if we shine and life changes, expectations rise and visibility increases.

Pause for a moment and notice which of these resonates most for you.

How do we recognise our light?

If you have been dimming for a long time, recognising your light can feel surprisingly hard.

So start with curiosity.

What makes you rant in a good way? What topics could you talk about for twenty minutes straight without trying? That natural flow and passion is part of your light.

What did you love as a child, before conditioning set in? Before the world told you what was cool or acceptable. Were you a performer, a builder, a peacemaker?

What do you do just for fun that never bores you, even if others find it difficult? What do people consistently ask you for help with?

Now notice the contrast.

Where do you feel heavy?

Heavy is the opposite of light.
Anxious instead of excited.
Drained instead of alive.
Fear instead of love and compassion.

There is a pattern here. Your light is natural. When it is not dimmed, it does not need forcing. It simply emerges.

Another clue is jealousy. That sting of envy when you see someone else doing something bold or expressive is often your light recognising its own potential in someone else.

How do we turn the dimmer switch back up?

Slowly. Gently. Intentionally.

You do not need to be your fully unfiltered self at a large family wedding or a work meeting. Start small. Test and progress.

Wear the weird hat you have been hiding at the back of the cupboard. Share a small opinion calmly and genuinely and notice how it lands.

You will not be everyone's cup of tea and that is okay; acceptance is the key here.

As you test and progress, you build the capacity to process rejection, handle loss and create boundaries when needed.

Move from calculated speech to more spontaneous conversation. Leave the "they will think I am weird" filter behind.

Create no-dimming zones. Your car. Your desk. Your bedroom. Your garden. Spaces where you do not have to censor yourself.

And when people react, because some will, try reframing it. Instead of telling yourself to stop, see it as recalibration. They are adjusting to your new frequency.

When we become more authentic, raising our energy becomes easier. And with that, we naturally attract more of what aligns.

Understanding the cycle

There is a powerful cycle that builds momentum once you recognise it.

Courage → Vulnerability → Authenticity → Confidence

When you have the Courage to be Vulnerable, you access your Authenticity.

Authenticity builds Confidence.

And Confidence creates more Courage. The cycle continues.

This is where things start to shift.

You now can stop apologising for being honest. Honesty is a cornerstone of authenticity.

You can try saying no instead of yes just to keep the peace. Protecting your energy matters.

Stand a little taller in your posture. Let your body language support you now. Notice the energy that returns when you stop hiding.

Share your nerdy hobbies. Talk about what lights you up with genuine excitement.

A cosmic invitation to shine

As Brené Brown says, "Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we are supposed to be and embracing who we are".

As I write this, we have just passed the Scorpio new moon of 9 November, a moon associated with depth, honesty and shedding whatever no longer belongs to us.

With the Gemini full moon arriving on 24 November, in a sign of curiosity, expression and saying what you think, it feels like a clear invitation. It is time to be who you want to be. Do what you love. Take up space.

Because when you are willing to fully be yourself, you do not just heal. You give others permission to do the same.

Marianne Williamson writes in A Return to Love: "As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same."

If you are not dimming your light, you are shining it for the world to see.

So shine.
Bright.
Authentically.

Dear Keri,

I don't really know how to write this, so I am just going to say it. I have been in tears on and off for a week, and it isn't because of anything that has happened to me. It is because of how the people around me have reacted to the news.

Every time a rape case is on the television, someone I love says something that makes my stomach drop. My brother-in-law said at Sunday lunch that a man can't even look at a woman these days without being accused of something. A man at work said these accusations are destroying men's lives and nobody cares about that. What hurt most was that two women in the office agreed with him, and one of them said women should think about what they were doing before they "cry rape" years later.

I said nothing. I sat there and said nothing, and I have been ashamed of it ever since.

I have a daughter who is fifteen. I keep thinking about what she hears when the adults around her talk like this, and what she would do if something ever happened to her. Would she tell anyone, after listening to all of this?

I don't want to start a war at every family meal. But I can't keep swallowing it either. How do I answer them? And how do I stop it eating me alive?

— Heartsick, in Manchester

Content note: this answer refers to rape and sexual assault.

Dear Heartsick,

First, the shame. Please put it down. Saying nothing at a table where you are outnumbered and caught off guard is what almost everyone does. It is a freeze, and it is human. You are writing to me, which means your silence that day was a pause, and pauses end.

Second, you are distraught because you are paying attention. Weeks like this one are hard for a great many women, and especially for women who have been hurt themselves. You are far from the only reader who has spent this week with a knot in her stomach.

What the figures say

It helps to have one or two facts in your pocket, said calmly.

In 2013 the Crown Prosecution Service in England and Wales published the first detailed study of false allegations. Over seventeen months, there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and 35 prosecutions for making a false allegation of rape. The Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, Keir Starmer, said that false allegations are serious when they happen, because they can ruin a reputation, and that they are very rare.

Both halves of that sentence are true, and you can say both. A man who is falsely accused suffers a real harm. That harm is uncommon. The far more common harm is the one that never reaches a courtroom at all: the Office for National Statistics has found that fewer than one in six women raped in England and Wales report it to the police.

And when a case does reach court, a jury hears the evidence, a judge directs them on the law, and a conviction requires them to be sure. A man convicted after that process has had a trial, not an accusation.

How to answer them

You do not have to win a debate over the roast potatoes. You only have to stop the room from assuming everyone agrees. One calm sentence does that.

"False accusations do real damage, and they're rare. Most women who are raped never tell the police at all, and I think about why."

Then stop. You may not change your brother-in-law's mind at that table. You will have changed what everyone else at the table heard, and that includes your daughter.

To the woman at work who talked about women crying rape years later, if you ever feel able, it is fair to say: "People often take years to tell anyone. That's normal, and it's usually because they're afraid of exactly this kind of reaction."

Your daughter

She is the reason this hurts so much, and she is also where you have the most power. You do not need to wait for the next headline. Tell her, plainly, on an ordinary day: if anything ever happens to you, I will believe you, I will not be angry with you, and we will work out what to do together. She will remember that sentence long after she has forgotten what her uncle said over lunch.

Looking after yourself

Turn the news off when you need to. Mute the group chat. Leave the room if you have to; you can say you need some air. Talk to someone who will listen without arguing: a friend, your GP, or a support line. If this week has stirred up something of your own, the people on those lines are there for exactly that.

You are not overreacting. You are reacting, and caring this much is the right instinct to pass on to your daughter.

— Keri

If you need to talk: Rape Crisis England and Wales, 0808 500 2222, open 24 hours; Rape Crisis Scotland, 08088 01 03 02; Australia, 1800RESPECT, 1800 737 732; United States, RAINN, 1-800-656-4673; Malaysia, Talian Kasih, 15999.

Every Saturday, a little girl in New York was left at the city aquarium while her mother worked. She would stand with her nose pressed against the glass for hours, watching the fish, imagining herself underwater with them. She was nine years old, and she had already decided what she wanted to do with her life.

Her name was Eugenie Clark. The world would come to know her as the Shark Lady.

A girl in a man's science

Eugenie Clark was born in New York City on 4 May 1922. She studied zoology at Hunter College, then earned her master's degree and her doctorate at New York University, at a time when women were rarely welcome in field science.

She was a pioneer of scuba diving for research, at a time when the equipment was new and most researchers still studied fish from the deck of a boat or in a jar. Her first book, Lady with a Spear, published in 1953, told the story of her early diving expeditions in the Pacific and the Red Sea, and it became a bestseller.

The laboratory

Among the readers of Lady with a Spear were Anne and William Vanderbilt. They offered to fund a marine laboratory for her on Florida's Gulf Coast, and in 1955 Clark opened the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Placida. It started with almost nothing: Clark and a local fisherman and shark catcher named Beryl Chadwick.

It grew into Mote Marine Laboratory, now based in Sarasota, one of the most respected independent marine research centres in the world.

What she discovered

Sharks were widely regarded as mindless killing machines. Clark proved otherwise. In the late 1950s, she trained lemon sharks to press a target to earn a food reward, showing that sharks could learn visual tasks as quickly as some mammals.

In the Red Sea, she studied a small flatfish called the Moses sole and found that it secretes a substance sharks find repulsive, and in 1972 she published the discovery: a natural shark repellent. She explored underwater caves in Mexico and found sharks resting motionless inside them, apparently asleep, which challenged the long-held belief that all sharks must keep swimming to breathe.

Over her career, she wrote more than 175 scientific papers, discovered several new species of fish, and made deep dives in submersibles. She became a professor at the University of Maryland in 1968 and published a second book, The Lady and the Sharks, the following year.

Why she is on this list

Eugenie Clark spent seventy years telling the world that the animal it feared most deserved understanding instead. Sharks, she said, were beautiful, and a sea with plenty of them was a healthy sea. She said it in scientific papers, in magazine articles, on television, and in front of countless schoolchildren, and she was still diving in her nineties.

She did it in a field that had not wanted her, as a woman of Japanese and American heritage in mid-century America, and she built the laboratory that would train generations of scientists after her. She died in Sarasota on 25 February 2015, aged ninety-two.

Somewhere right now, a girl is standing with her nose against an aquarium tank. Eugenie Clark is the reason she can become whatever she decides she wants to be.

Eugenie Clark died in 2015. The work she began continues.

Most of us think of blackheads as a nose problem. But plenty of women find them across the upper back, the chest and the shoulders too, often noticed for the first time in a changing-room mirror or when a strappy dress comes out for the summer.

They are common, they are harmless, and they are very treatable. They are also stubborn, which is why it helps to understand what is going on before reaching for the scrub.

What a blackhead actually is

A blackhead is a pore, or hair follicle, that has become plugged with sebum, the skin's natural oil, and dead skin cells. Because the top of the plug stays open to the air, it darkens. It is a common myth that the dark colour is dirt, which is why scrubbing harder rarely helps.

The back, chest and shoulders have a high concentration of oil glands, which is why body blackheads cluster there.

What makes them worse

Sweat that sits on the skin. A workout, a hot commute or a humid night, followed by hours in the same clothes.

Friction and pressure. Tight sports bras, backpacks, bag straps and synthetic fabrics that rub and trap heat.

Heavy products. Rich body oils, thick moisturisers and hair conditioner rinsing down your back in the shower can all clog pores.

Hormones. Many women notice changes around their period, with some contraceptives, in pregnancy, or in perimenopause. Conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome can also play a part.

Some medicines. Steroid medicines and some other treatments can trigger breakouts. Never stop a prescribed medicine on your own; ask your GP or pharmacist first.

Everyday prevention

Shower soon after exercise, or at least change out of damp kit. Choose loose, breathable fabrics where you can. Wash towels, pillowcases and gym clothes regularly. In the shower, rinse out conditioner first, then wash your back and shoulders. Look for body products labelled non-comedogenic, which means they are formulated to avoid blocking pores.

From the pharmacy

Several ingredients sold without a prescription can help. Salicylic acid body washes and sprays work inside the pore to loosen the plug. Benzoyl peroxide washes help, especially where blackheads sit alongside red spots, but they can bleach towels and clothing, so use white towels. Lotions with glycolic or lactic acid gently exfoliate the surface.

Start with one product, a few times a week, and build up as your skin allows. Dryness and stinging are signs to slow down. Give any treatment six to eight weeks before deciding whether it works, because skin takes time to turn over.

Medication from your GP

If over-the-counter products have not helped after a couple of months, your GP can prescribe stronger options, often a topical retinoid, which helps prevent pores from clogging in the first place. Where blackheads come with lots of inflamed spots, painful lumps or scarring, your GP may suggest other treatments or refer you to a dermatologist. Retinoids are not suitable in pregnancy, so tell your doctor if you are pregnant or trying to conceive.

What about food?

No single food causes blackheads. Some research has linked diets high in sugary, refined foods, and in some studies milk, with acne. It is reasonable to eat more whole grains, vegetables and protein and fewer sugary snacks, and to notice whether your skin responds over a couple of months. Cutting out whole food groups is best done with advice from your GP or a dietitian.

Natural options

Tea tree oil has some evidence behind it for mild spots, in low-strength gels of around five per cent. Never use it neat, and patch test first, because it can irritate. Aloe vera gel can soothe skin that has become dry from other treatments. Skip the internet favourites of lemon juice, toothpaste and baking soda, which irritate the skin without clearing pores.

And resist squeezing. It pushes debris deeper, inflames the skin and can leave marks that last far longer than the blackhead would have.

When to see someone

See your GP if breakouts are painful, leaving scars, appeared suddenly in adulthood, or come with irregular periods or new hair growth, which can point to a hormonal cause worth checking.

A simple routine for clearer skin on your back, chest and shoulders. General guidance only; if you are pregnant, take regular medication or have a skin condition, check with your GP or pharmacist first.

Content note: this article refers to suicide and overdose.

Lately, I've been writing for the dead.

That sounds a bit more dramatically gothic than it actually is. I haven't taken to wandering cemeteries at midnight in a black frock with a shovel. I've simply been asked to write a few eulogies for people instead of my usual scribbles for DWC.

It is an honour to be asked. But these have not been easy eulogies. They have been for people whose lives ended in suicide, an overdose or after they had committed something terrible. The sort of deaths that arrive dragging an enormous amount of baggage behind them: grief, anger, shame, guilt, judgement, the what ifs, the maybes and that particularly cruel little sentence:

If only I had…

And inevitably someone asks: Why write something loving about them? Surely, after what they did, they don't deserve to be honoured? That's where we misunderstand what a eulogy can be.

I am not writing a character reference for the dead or glorifying them. I am writing to bring the essence of someone into the room for those that loved them. A parent's love does not simply evaporate because the last chapter of their child's life was terrible. You don't flick back through twenty or thirty years and suddenly find every birthday, scraped knee, Christmas morning, ridiculous haircut, school photo, first bike and belly laugh has disappeared. It was all real and I feel very strongly that the ending shouldn't get to rewrite every page that came before it. Yet when someone dies in circumstances that carry shame or public judgement, the people who loved them can almost feel they have lost the right to grieve openly. How do you say, "I loved him," when someone else is thinking, "Yes, but look what he did"?

How do you mourn the child you knew while acknowledging the adult who caused terrible pain? I don't pretend that's easy. I don't believe a eulogy should sidestep the truth. If something dreadful happened, it cannot be covered with a few nice words and a strategically placed bunch of lilies. The tragedy has to be acknowledged. Otherwise there is an elephant sitting squarely in the middle of the funeral and everyone is politely pretending they can't see it, but everyone can feel it. Mourning fully with the heart is then less possible.

Acknowledging a terrible act and remembering a whole human being are not mutually exclusive. I have learnt this lesson repeatedly through life: good people can make terrible choices. Jails are full of them. Human beings are much more complicated than the little boxes we like to put them in. We all like to believe,

I would never…

Maybe.

Most of us are capable of far more good and bad than we imagine. In fact I think honestly that we are all capable of terrible/miraculous things. Sometimes it takes a catastrophic alignment of circumstances, fear, anger, illness, despair, substances, opportunity or one dreadful decision. That doesn't excuse harm. It simply reminds me that there but for the grace of God go I, or loved ones I know.

So when I write one of these eulogies, I spend time with the family. Not twenty minutes with a notebook and a list of dates. Hours. It is an intense time with strong feelings that are hard and exhausting to be around; walking into the room can be like walking through emotional molasses, especially at the start before we begin our journey into the past. I am strengthened in my resolve because I know I am bringing a gift. It may not seem like one at the outset, but it will be very precious by the time we are finished. One of the best things I've discovered for the foundation of this gift is the humble family photo album. There they are. Before the tragedy. A skinny little kid on a bike.

A mop of red hair.
Freckles.
A dimple in the chin.
A grin with two teeth missing.

And I start asking questions.

"What sort of bike was that?"

Immediately a parent's face changes.

"Oh, he loved that bloody bike."

"Did he?"

"Wouldn't get off it. Rode it everywhere."

"Was he a daredevil?"

And suddenly we're not talking about how he or she died.

We're talking about how they lived.

That's what I'm looking for.

Was she funny?
Was he stubborn?
Did she sing badly?
Did he always pinch the good biscuits?
Was that dimple there when he was sixteen?

Who was always late?
Who couldn't stand peas?
What made them laugh until they couldn't breathe?

Photographs are wonderful for this because they return people to moments before anybody knew the ending. For a little while in the telling of the stories, a mother or father gets their child back, a few moments of innocence. This is a great gift in times of despair, in the face of tragedy.

Sometimes fewer voices are better. At an ordinary funeral, everyone can chime in, and that's as it should be. But with these particular eulogies, too many voices can blur the person I'm trying to project. Old sibling rivalries creep in. Different versions compete. Pain speaks loudly.

So I listen closely to the people who knew the earliest chapters. Because the first thing that happens when your children do something terrible or tragic is that people start to doubt and question: perhaps those past memories aren't true? That is what tragedy steals first: all the chapters except the last one, reducing people to the worst thing they ever did.

In hindsight I don't think I write for the dead at all. After all, the dead don't need my words.

I write for the mother who needs permission to remember the little boy on the bike.

I write for the father who still remembers the freckles on his six-year-old's face.

For the sister who remembers the stupid jokes and camping in the paddock.

For the family and friends trying to hold love and horror in their heart at the same time.

I hope my words help the living remember the whole person, honestly, carefully and with enough tenderness that, for a moment, the last page doesn't have to swallow the entire book.

If you are struggling, or grieving a death like these, support is available. Australia: Lifeline, 13 11 14. UK and Ireland: Samaritans, 116 123. United States: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, call or text 988. Malaysia: Befrienders KL, 03-7627 2929.

When videogames began (and they are way older than you think they are — no, way older than that), characters — or sprites as they were back then — were essentially nothing more than sticks and blocks. They were to all intents and purposes genderless, but you just know that that moving stick was a crude representation of a man due to the over-elaborate packaging the game came with that depicted something the technology of the day couldn't possibly even dream to be, let alone actually be. Women, you understand, were not meant to be gamers, and served only one purpose within a game itself: to be either rescued or desired, and occasionally both.

Some of you may still be of this (wrong and outdated) opinion, but with 48% of all gamers being women (around 1.4 billion of them), that ship has well and truly sailed away into the distance.

Women in games now have depth, character, power, emotions, and everything else attributable to a man; sometimes more so. Sure, there are still elements of "ooh, save me, big and strong hunky warrior man, for I am but a weak woman" but they are thankfully becoming less and less.

There are also far more women programmers these days — although there have recently been unfortunate massive lay-offs across every sector — and women's stories are now being told. It is naïve to think this is not mostly down to economics and that to discount 1.4 billion women kind of defeats the point of capitalism, but it isn't entirely because of this. Women game, ergo women want to be represented.

So who are these characters in videogames that are representing women everywhere? The ones that female gamers wish they were, or are excited to be a part of a story they can control? There have been many — too many to list — but we've got it down to ten; ten where it's explained as to why they are here. If this was written in the latter half of 2027 then there might be a case to be had for the inclusion of Lucia Caminos, the first non-optional female lead in the main GTA series in the (at the time of this publication) upcoming GTA VI, and that she and Jason Duval (the second playable character) are based on the infamous Bonnie and Clyde. Beyond being portrayed as pragmatic about her own ambitions, distrustful, and wanting a better life than the one she grew up with, we know very little of her — she also has just been released from incarceration. Next year we will know, and then perhaps she might warrant being on this list; it all depends upon whether Rockstar have done her justice or not.

We appreciate that there will likely be cries of "How could you miss XXX!" or, "You went with that one when XXX is literally in the same damn game!?" but no two lists are ever going to match nor will everyone all agree. You are more than welcome to add your own choices and explain why.

Note that we have tried to avoid unnecessary spoilers where possible.

Lara Croft

Tomb Raider (1996–present) · Various platforms
Women in development: minimal in 1996, certainly more so these days

We may as well get this one out of the way and address the gigantic elephant in the room that existed with Lara when she first (literally) jumped onto the screen: she was initially designed for men and adolescent boys, and it worked too as they flocked to her in their millions, and adorned their walls with posters of her.

Sexy, thin waist, giant breasts that defied physics, a bottom you could bounce a coin off, a ponytail, a couple of loaded Heckler & Koch USP Match pistols, and an English Lady no less with the accent to boot. There's absolutely no one who can stand there with a straight face and say otherwise, and this was further exacerbated when Angelina Jolie portrayed her on the silver screen — not that we are in any way blaming her for any of this, as she certainly added grit to the character despite the movies not being that great.

She has come a long way since then. Gone are the boobs that don't quit, gone are the hot pants, gone is the "look how beautiful I am bouncing around wielding two pistols". Although to be fair, despite the pixelated pin-up she was created to be, she was always depicted as a tough protagonist who did not shy away from danger; the female Indiana Jones so to speak, just a far better looking Indiana Jones with giant breasts.

But now she is anatomically correct, replete with clothing that actually served a purpose and the conditions she was facing. Emotionally deep with a vulnerability, but she fights men like a man because she doesn't need or require one — for want of a better phrase — she's scared but not frightened, and she pushes on when others would not.

She's still phenomenally gorgeous of course, but that sort of thing has been going on in entertainment for over a hundred years. And the game designers have not entirely shied away from the fact that you are in control of a good looking woman facing some really nasty evil men potentially placing her in that sort of danger. Indeed there was one such scene in the 2013 reboot that suggested, if only for a very brief moment, that Lara would be put under that sort of danger throughout the game; the backlash was immediate and swift requiring the developer, Crystal Dynamics, to release the statement: "Sexual assault of any kind is categorically not a theme we cover in this game."

Lara started out as every man's desire, now she is a female character both sexes happily want to play with.

Samus Aran

Metroid (1986) · Nintendo

This was one of the first huge shocks for gamers worldwide; he, Samus, was in fact a she. Such is it ingrained into us as a society that the hero, the fighter, the hardened warrior, is always a man and an overly muscular man at that, that absolutely no-one saw it coming when it was revealed that 'no he ain't'.

Admittedly this reveal was in 1986, so technology was sorely lacking, resulting at the end of the game the small pixelated Samus removing his entire armour only to reveal Samus standing there in a bikini and actually being a woman. Ideal? No. But it was effective and hammered the point home in an instant.

Nintendo knew exactly what they were doing, and went as far as referring to Samus in the English language version of the manual (remember those beautiful things?) as a 'he'. But it wasn't just for finishing the game though, the player had to finish it ridiculously fast — under one hour fast — to get this reward (under three hours saw Samus in a leotard, and under five removing just her helmet).

This flipped everything we knew about videogames, especially coming from a company that regularly had a Princess rescued by an Italian plumber. Oddly the decision was made halfway through creating the game and not at the pre-development stage, and it was instantly put into the end of the game.

Admittedly one male trope was switched for another (always a man, to 'hey guys, here's a half naked lady'), but the message still worked. Here was a suited soldier — a cyborg — taking on aliens alone, no love interest, no back-up, and our innate assumptions that this powerhouse was a man.

Samus has been copied over and over again, but she was the first.

Elizabeth Comstock

BioShock Infinite (2013) · Various platforms

This was another masterstroke in assumptions; here we have a young lady who is in need of rescue and to be escorted to safety from a violent, xenophobic, class-based society built literally up in the clouds. Companions you see are there only to be helpless, in need, occasionally an annoyance, and protected at all costs lest you must restart the level again; especially women companions. Not Elizabeth.

At first she helpfully never gets in the way of your shooting and bludgeoning (it is quite a violent game to be fair), she aids you by scavenging of her own accord during fights, and she does not have a health bar. But more than that, she dictates how you play and where you go, as she manipulates the terrain and literally tears apart reality.

We (Booker, the male protagonist) meet her as this wide-eyed innocent young woman who seems to be captivated by the most innocuous of things. There is no cheap sexual attraction at all, and it ends with her being the most intellectual and powerful being within the game; she even became fully playable in expansion games (without her godlike abilities).

Once again, damsel in distress is completely turned on its head.

Sadie Adler

Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) · Various platforms

History hasn't been kind to women, and the late 19th century American wild west was no exception.

We meet her hiding under her bed in her ransacked house, her husband having been murdered by a gang. She is the definitive victim, and as Arthur Morgan, for that is who we play as, we are expected to see her as that perpetual domesticated victim. She most definitely is not.

She may, at times, be forced into domestic duties much like the other women portrayed, but it is clear she hates it, and is always demanding to be part of Arthur's gang's next exploit; there are genuine killers in this gang and she more than holds her own. Neither is there any sexual attraction of any kind, just a pure mutual respect from all.

Sadie is a product of a violent world but she doesn't just embrace it, she becomes more than it, to the extent that her fellow male gang members are often scared of her vengeful ways. At no point does she ever play the victim — Sadie is out for sadistic revenge.

Her story is an absolute joy to behold.

GLaDOS

Portal (2007) · Various platforms
Women in development: unknown but several — Kim Swift was instrumental as the Lead Designer

GLaDOS completely nixes the sexual tropes by making her an artificial intelligence (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) depicted by hanging wires and a chassis. Despite this though, she is a standout in female character design as she is one of the most psychologically complex and deeply humanised characters ever put into a game.

Sex is generally used in one of two ways: seduction as a weapon, or as a distraction. Neither apply here. Logic, wit, passive aggression, and omnipotence are the order of the day, and being voiced brilliantly by Ellen McLain, she mixes generic monotone with malice, pettiness, and insecurities.

Her story continues in the sequel and delves deeper into her past and how she came to be.

Aloy

Horizon Zero Dawn (2017) · PlayStation
Women in development: a significant number in leading roles, with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion

The setting is a futuristic post-apocalyptic world where huge robotic beasts roam free, and the peoples of the land are based upon Native American tribes, and this shines through in the clothing, weapons, and culture.

Aloy was part of a tribe but cast out as a baby and raised by another outcast; superstitions rule her childhood, the same ones that saw her shunned at birth. But her new world becomes led by science and logic, and when leaders try to anoint her as The Chosen One she rejects this dogmatic notion because of her new learnings. Her role, she believes, is to learn why the world is now the way it is and to fix it.

There are potential love interests throughout but these are all shunned — she has no time for romance and neither would it serve her any purpose — companionship can help, but love will not aid her endeavours.

We do learn who her 'mother' is, and whilst it turns out she is a direct copy, she forges her own distinct personality and dictates her own destiny.

There are many, many other female characters within the game, all of whom are portrayed as realistically as possible; gamers have praised Horizon for its depiction of diversity.

Mae Borowski

Night in the Woods (2017) · Various platforms
Women in development: unknown but Bethany Hockenberry was a co-writer

Mae is a flawed and messy 20-year-old drop-out, has severe mental health issues, and suffers from depersonalisation and derealisation disorders — the world around her feels like meaningless geometry and random empty shapes. She drinks too much, and constantly says the wrong things, but there is a willingness to know she can't get through this alone and needs outside help from those around her.

She is also a dark blue cat.

The story begins with her returning to Possum Springs, and hanging with her friends (one of whom is a chain-smoking crocodile). During a Halloween festival she witnesses a teenager being kidnapped by what appears to be a ghost. Collectively they try to unravel the mystery, all the while Mae spirals downwards as her condition deteriorates.

Her story is interwoven with humour, and everything about her is treated as just being 'normal'; her upbringing, her past love lives, and being part of a world that doesn't seem to care about her or anyone, as her small town suffers from a slow economic death.

It was praised for tackling mental health, but it is important to note that Alec Holowka, a co-creator of Night in the Woods, died by suicide in 2019, after living with his own severe mental depression. He had also just a few days prior to this been accused of physical and mental abuse of a woman he had once lived with.

Kassandra

Assassin's Creed Odyssey (2018) · Various platforms
Women in development: undisclosed, however, the game was created and presented with inclusivity and representation in mind

Women warriors are almost always depicted as wearing the absolute bare minimum of armour, so that we can delight in the athletic tone and build and the push-up armoured bra — yes, we are looking at you Wonder Woman and co.

Not so with Kassandra.

This Spartan trained mercenary wears what the men wear, and her muscular, battle-scarred physique tells its own tale. But her garb is just one element of why Kassandra stands out: a warrior she may be, but her personality is allowed to shine through. Educated, able to hold her own with philosophers, usage of wit and humour when it fits, and quick to anger yet empathetic towards children and outcasts.

Much of her path is chosen by the player, and this extends to romanticism if so chosen, but it's always on her terms.

Society of the day was patriarchal and is mirrored as such within the game, yet she lives outside of those confines which allows her total freedom, and the more we learn about her past and the path she will take, the more we become invested in her.

Oddly, there are two protagonists to choose from: Kassandra and Alexios. It matters little who the player chooses at the start, but at the pre-development stage it was decided that there would be just one; Kassandra. Alexios was only added after Ubisoft executives strongly objected as they believed that 'women don't sell games'.

As it turned out, players instinctively went with the woman, which is regarded as the canonical choice. It sold a lot.

As a side note Ubisoft was accused, around this time, of having and encouraging a highly misogynistic work environment, and many women came forward at the trial. Three executives — Thomas François, Serge Hascoët, and Guillaume Patrux — were given suspended sentences, and fined by the French courts. This was gaming's #MeToo moment.

Commander Shepard

Mass Effect series (2007–13) · Various platforms
Women in development: unknown, however many recognisable names were behind them including Karin Weekes and Jo Berry

'Femshep' as the gaming community refers to her, is considered to be the gold standard in non-objectified female protagonists in videogame history. The reason behind this lies in the writing, as she is not the female hero; she is the Commander, the last line in defence against an intergalactic threat. In fact remove her image and you wouldn't even know her gender. No one ever talks down to her, no one ever questions her because she's a woman; she has earned respect from all and this was handled with perfection by the voice actor, Jennifer Hale. Every moment of peril, compassion, humour, and crushing weight of trillions of lives is conveyed by Hale superbly.

Once again, the player can elect to play as a man, and whilst the man was more popular, those who went the other way stumbled upon perfection.

Shepard (the woman) is legendary in the gaming world.

It was announced in October 2026 that BioWare, the studio of more than thirty years behind the Mass Effect series amongst others, is to be shut down by its parent company EA, as part of around 400 job losses. Perhaps we will never see Commander Shepard ever again.

Senua

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (2017) and Senua's Saga: Hellblade II (2024) · Various platforms
Women in development: unknown amongst a small team, but women were involved, as was diversity

Grief, psychosis, and vulnerability is where Senua lies, and with the work of Melina Juergens — and it is important to note here that she was not a trained actor, but in fact a video editor at Ninja Theory — behind the scenes, we witness blood, sweat, vomit, and hyperventilation; raw terror, but defiance is there for all to see.

But Senua's mental health is not a plot device; Ninja Theory worked heavily with neuroscientists and mental health advocates to capture her perfectly.

Hellblade concerns itself with entering the underworld, and Senua's journey there. Normally we experience these travails because of vengeance or to rescue the female love interest, but here Senua is attempting to rescue the soul of her murdered lover, Dillion, killed by Norse raiders, while she carries the scars of her own abusive father.

Whilst officially classed as a dark fantasy action and adventure game, it is in reality a psychological horror steeped in Norse mythology, as we witness what she sees through her own eyes.

The creation and depiction of Senua was lauded for never being afraid to showcase deep psychosis and the perseverance to push through, whilst believing it all to be a curse that she genuinely deserves due to holding onto guilt with all the tragedies that have happened around her. It is this guilt that drives the narrative above all else.

So there we have it. Ten characters that buck the trend of the 'helpless woman'. As said earlier, perhaps you were surprised not to see Tifa Lockhart, or perhaps Jill Valentine, or someone else, but then if they were here then you can be assured that someone would say "You included Tifa but not XXX!" — even in gaming you can't win.

Beverly Sutphin is the mother everyone on the street wishes they had. She makes breakfast with a smile, keeps a spotless house in the Baltimore suburbs, is devoted to her dentist husband, Eugene, and worries about her teenage children, Misty and Chip, in exactly the right amounts.

She is also, it turns out, prepared to kill anyone who is rude to her family, or simply rude.

That is the whole premise of Serial Mom, John Waters' 1994 black comedy, and it is a perfect one. Waters takes the most respectable figure in American life, the cheerful suburban homemaker, and lets her loose on the people who break the small rules of polite society. A neighbour who steals her parking space. A teacher who criticises her son. People who forget to rewind their videotapes.

Kathleen Turner, on fire

The film belongs to Kathleen Turner. She plays Beverly as a woman of total, sunny conviction, switching from a lilting homemaker's voice to murderous calm in the space of a breath and somehow making both feel like the same person. She is never winking at the audience. Beverly genuinely believes she is doing the right thing, which is exactly what makes her so funny and so unsettling.

Sam Waterston is wonderfully bewildered as Eugene, a gentle man slowly realising that his wife may be the reason the neighbourhood keeps shrinking. Ricki Lake and Matthew Lillard are terrific as the children, who discover that having a notorious mother does wonders for their social standing. And Mink Stole, a Waters regular, is a highlight as the neighbour on the receiving end of Beverly's escalating campaign of obscene telephone calls.

Suburbia, sharpened

Waters made his name with deliberately outrageous underground films, and Serial Mom came at the point when he was working with bigger budgets and Hollywood stars. The bad taste is still there, but it is aimed with precision. The pastel kitchens, the church bake sales and the obsession with etiquette are all lovingly recreated and then gleefully detonated.

Underneath the jokes is a real target. The more Beverly kills, the more famous she becomes, and the film's second half turns into a satire of true-crime celebrity: the merchandise, the television movie rights, the fans outside the courthouse. Released the year before the O. J. Simpson trial, it looks remarkably prescient now, and in the age of true-crime podcasts and streaming documentaries it has only grown sharper.

The trial

Without giving too much away, the courtroom scenes are the comic peak of the film. Beverly decides to defend herself, and her approach to cross-examination is unforgettable. Look out for cameos from Suzanne Somers, Patty Hearst, Joan Rivers and Traci Lords, each of them in on the joke.

Where it slips

The episodic structure means some of the murders land harder than others, and a stretch in the middle relies on the same joke a few times too often. The violence is cartoonish rather than graphic, but it is there, and anyone expecting a gentle comedy should know what they are getting.

It was not a hit on release. It took in less than eight million dollars against a thirteen-million-dollar budget, and reviews were mixed. It closed the 1994 Cannes Film Festival out of competition, and has since found the audience it always deserved, as one of the most quoted cult comedies of the decade.

Watch it with someone who has ever felt judged at the school gates.

Every week the internet decides what everyone is talking about. A celebrity feud, a reality TV meltdown, a strange new trend, a red-carpet moment that somehow becomes a referendum on the state of the world. Most of us catch it in fragments, in headlines and half-watched clips, without ever quite knowing what happened or why it mattered.

Shameless is where those fragments get put together. It is a great way to learn about the weird and wonderful topics dominating the zeitgeist, told by two hosts who take the fun seriously and wear their intelligence lightly.

What an episode sounds like

The main show runs through the pop culture stories of the week: who said what, who fell out with whom, what the internet is arguing about, and what all of it says about fame, money, gender and the way we live now. Michelle and Zara talk the way two friends talk over a long lunch, finishing each other's sentences and then stopping to ask the question nobody else has asked.

Alongside the weekly round-up, the show runs interview episodes with well-known guests, which tend to go further than the usual promotional chat because the hosts have done the reading.

Who are Michelle and Zara?

Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald are Melbourne writers and journalists who met as colleagues at the women's media company Mamamia. They pitched a pop culture podcast there, and when the idea was turned down, they made it themselves.

The first episode went out on 12 March 2018, recorded with almost no podcasting experience and, by their own telling, on a bedroom floor. The pitch was simple and stuck: pop culture for smart people who love dumb stuff.

From side project to media company

It caught on quickly. Apple named Shameless among its best podcasts of 2018, and in 2019 it won Most Popular Podcast at the Australian Podcast Awards. Within a year, the pair had taken it full time.

The show grew into Shameless Media, an independent company publishing podcasts, books and newsletters, which Forbes Australia has reported passing 100 million downloads. Michelle and Zara still host the original show.

Why it belongs in DWC

There is a version of pop culture coverage that sneers at its audience, and a version that sneers at its subjects. Shameless does neither. It treats the things millions of women genuinely enjoy as worth thinking about, and it is often sharper about fame, gender and the media than coverage that takes itself far more seriously.

If you have ever felt slightly embarrassed about how much you care what happens on a reality show, this is the podcast that tells you to stop being embarrassed and start asking better questions.

New listeners do best starting with the most recent episode. Pop culture moves fast, and the show is at its best when the story is still warm. Put one on during a commute or a walk, and see how long it takes before you laugh out loud in public.