Ruth Elliott-Booth DWC Weekly Issue 113

On 8 October, UN Women Australia announced its theme for International Women's Day 2027. It is three words and a question mark: How Much Longer?

I have read a great many campaign themes in my working life. Most of them are written to make you feel good about a problem. This one is written to make you count.

So let us count.

In September, UN Women and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs published the Gender Snapshot 2026, the yearly measure of how the world is doing on gender equality. At the current pace, full equality is 171 years away. Every target under the global goal for gender equality is off track for 2030. Funding for gender equality has fallen to its lowest level since 2021. Women hold 27.4 per cent of the seats in the world's parliaments. In the past twelve months alone, 316 million women experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner.

Then there is the law itself. Around the world, women hold roughly 64 per cent of the legal rights that men hold. The UN's estimate for closing that gap at the current rate is 286 years.

Two hundred and eighty-six years. That is longer than the United States has existed. It is a figure so large it stops meaning anything, which is precisely why I want to bring it down to the size of a single life.

What waiting actually looks like

Women in Switzerland voted in their first federal election in 1971. In one canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, they were still barred from voting on local matters until 1990, when the Federal Supreme Court ordered the canton to let them in. A woman born there in the year the Second World War ended was forty-five before she could vote in her own community.

In England and Wales, a husband could not be convicted of raping his wife until 1991, when the House of Lords finally ruled that the old marital exemption had no place in modern law. Women had been saying so for well over a century.

In the United States, the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced to Congress in 1923. Congress passed it in 1972. Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify it in 2020, meeting the threshold the Constitution sets. It has still not been certified. A woman who marched for it as a student is now in her seventies, and the amendment she marched for is still sitting in a drawer.

In Saudi Arabia, women were allowed to drive in June 2018. Some of the women who campaigned for that right were in detention when the day came.

When the law waits for a death

Some changes arrive only after a woman has paid the full price for their absence.

In February 2020, Hannah Clarke and her three children, Aaliyah, Laianah and Trey, were murdered in Brisbane by her estranged husband. Her mother later said Hannah did not realise she was in an abusive relationship, because she was not being physically hurt. Coercive control — the isolation, the surveillance, the slow tightening of every rule — was not a crime. Her parents, Sue and Lloyd Clarke, spent the next five years making sure that it would be. Queensland's coercive control offence came into force on 26 May 2025. It is called Hannah's Law.

In France, rape was defined for decades by violence, coercion, threat or surprise. When Gisele Pelicot was drugged by her husband and assaulted by dozens of men while unconscious, that definition was shown to the whole world for what it was: a law that asked a woman to prove she had resisted, in a case where she had been made incapable of resisting at all. Fifty-one men were convicted in December 2024. In October 2025, the French Senate voted 327 to nothing to define rape as any sexual act without consent. Gisele Pelicot gave up her anonymity so that the shame would change sides. It took her doing that for a country's law to move.

Why the answer keeps being "later"

Laws protecting women are rarely refused outright. They are delayed. They go to committee, to consultation, to review. They are described as complicated, or premature, or something for the next parliament. Each delay sounds reasonable on its own. Laid end to end, the delays become a life.

The cost of every year is carried by someone specific. In Australia, at least 54 women had been killed by violence this year by the time UN Women Australia launched its theme in October. Every one of them had a name, and every one of them lived inside a system that was still deciding how quickly to change.

That is what the question asks of all of us. Of governments, first, because they hold the pen. But also of employers, of newsrooms, of the friend who says now is not the moment to raise it. How Much Longer is a question about patience — specifically, about whose patience the world keeps spending.

What we can do this week

Find out what is waiting in your own country. A bill stalled in committee, a review that has run for three years, a promise made at the last election. Write to the person who represents you and ask one plain question: when?

Then keep asking. Every law in this letter changed because women refused to stop.

The second tab of this letter sets out the dates side by side. Read them slowly. Every gap between two dates is a woman's life lived without protection that was already overdue.

The years between the first demand and the change in the law. Dates are drawn from government, court and UN sources. Where a change is still pending, the clock is still running.

The power of NeuroSomatic Flow®

In 2020, while the world was in lock-down, I received a diagnosis of Axial Spondyloarthritis.

In short, it is an arthritic condition affecting my spine and sacroiliac joints, but it also impacts my peripheral joints as well.

I manage pain and fatigue on a daily basis, of varying degrees, and it can sometimes be quite intense to live with.

Society tells us that to be a valuable member of the community, we need to work and earn money, but I very quickly realised that I could not manage my symptoms well enough to be reliable in the world of work without doing even more harm to myself.

As a result, I lost a whole part of my identity almost over night, and felt like an ‘other’, separate from the rest of the working population.

My world became very small. I tried to conserve the small amount of energy I had, while learning to live with pain and debilitating brain fog — it resulted in a lot of life having to shrink and fall away.

I lost the ability to see a future for myself, and lost hope that I would find myself anywhere but where I was in that moment.

I am not ashamed to say that I entered a really dark and hopeless place during that period of my life, and I couldn't see any way out.

It took me many years to process the grief involved in receiving a life-long chronic illness diagnosis and I had to figure a lot of it out all by myself.

Three years later, I discovered I was autistic and it gave me a new lens to translate my experiences through.

Soon after, I was called to take part in an online summit called Take Up Space.

One of the guest speakers was Jinju Dasalla of NaiAsa Institute. Hearing her talking about NeuroSomatic Flow®, neuroplasticity and The Goddess Brain® ignited something in me that I hadn't felt for a very long time. As soon as her talk ended, I ordered a cheap set of poi and didn't really put them down.

I consumed all of NaiAsa Institutes free offerings, and then took the leap to sign up for their NeuroSomatic Flow® Level 1 training.

I also received some 1-1 coaching with Jinju alongside, and this is where things really started to shift for me.

There is something hugely powerful in being held in a safe space by someone who genuinely wants to see you step into your authenticity.

She saw something in me that I was unable to see within myself at the time, but I also inexplicably trusted her guidance.

It really did feel like Divine guidance had brought us together and I surrendered to the process completely.

I am now a certified NeuroSomatic Flow® Teacher & Coach, having completed two more levels of training after the first. I did not imagine at the start of this journey that I would find myself here, or feel so passionately about bringing this work to others.

NeuroSomatic Flow® is a healing and coaching modality that supports the release of limiting patterns, rewiring of the nervous system, and unlocking of flow, so you can reclaim what's missing. It has expanded my life in the most profound and unexpected ways.

I dream of a future again, and can see all the infinite possibilities of life laid out before me. I do not have so much fear of the unknown, instead I am able to see the joy in the everyday, small moments.

Being able to find tiny anchors is such an important skill when living with a chronic health condition, and I wish that there were more support available for people like me in learning this skill earlier in our health journeys.

The greatest gift I've received and nurtured on this path is the relationship that I have with myself. I have been able to let go of old stories that have held me back and kept me small, and created new stories and ways of being that I have been able to step joyfully into.

Life can feel very uncertain and difficult for everyone at times. This journey has proved that, if we build a strong foundation within ourselves and learn to trust that our bodies are here to support us, and that we deserve to receive the love of ourselves, we can return to ourselves over and over again.

So much in life changes, shifts and evolves. We lose people, things and sometimes even pieces of ourselves, but I truly believe that there is always a place within us that we can return to.

A deeply unmoved place that has been there for the whole of our existence. A place covered up by stories collected from the world and from others, stories that hide our magic and cause us to lose sight of who we are at our cores.

There are many ways we can uncover our true selves, and for me, NeuroSomatic Flow® has been a powerful modality that has handed me back the keys to my own life — a life that has received me with open arms.

In the summer of 1978, a twelve-year-old girl stood in a courthouse in Youngstown, Ohio. The man married to her mother had been arrested for raping her. As the case went on, she went to kiss her mother goodbye. Her mother turned her cheek away.

They did not see each other again for nearly fifty years. The next time Amy Acton saw her mother's face, it was in a political advertisement.

This column is about what happened in between.

A childhood without a floor

Amy Leigh Stearns was born in Youngstown on 16 February 1966. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she lived with her mother. By the time she was twelve, she had lived in around eighteen different homes. One winter, home was a tent in a campground.

Her mother remarried. Court records later obtained by journalists show that her new husband had been indicted for incest four years before. Between the ages of roughly nine and twelve, Amy was sexually abused by him.

In July 1978, her father went to the police. Her stepfather was arrested that month and, in September, indicted by a grand jury for sexual conduct with a child under thirteen, covering December 1976 to April 1978. He pleaded not guilty. Amy testified.

He never stood trial. In October 1978, the court recorded that he had "willfully vacated his last known address" and that his whereabouts were unknown. Two warrants were issued, one that month and another in December 1981. Deputies went looking for him at the campground and were told he had not been there for years. Her mother went with him. According to Amy's brother, Philip Stearns, she stayed married to him until he died.

Amy and Philip were removed from their mother's care. Their father took them in.

The life she built

With her father, Amy found the thing she had never had: a floor. At Liberty High School she joined the National Honor Society and was crowned homecoming queen in 1984. A hospital stay in childhood had first drawn her towards medicine, and she followed it — to Youngstown State University, to a medical degree at Northeast Ohio Medical University, and to a master's in public health at Ohio State.

She chose preventive medicine and public health, and much of her early work was with children. Treating young patients during the crack cocaine epidemic, she saw the same thing again and again: the harm in a child's life usually begins long before anyone in a white coat meets them. Her campaign credits her with starting the first residency rotation in child advocacy, and with leading Project L.O.V.E., a partnership between a hospital and its community focused on preventive care for children.

She has spoken openly, for years, about the abuse and about the therapy that helped her live with it. She told the story long before any election, in a newspaper interview in 2019, the year she took office.

The first woman to lead Ohio's health department

In February 2019, Governor Mike DeWine appointed her director of the Ohio Department of Health. She was the first woman ever to hold the post. A year later, COVID-19 arrived, and Amy Acton became one of the most recognised faces in the state, standing beside the governor at the daily briefings.

Her decisions in those months drew both deep gratitude and fierce criticism, and they remain contested in Ohio. The backlash also turned personal: armed protesters gathered outside her home. In June 2020, she resigned. She went back to the Columbus Foundation and to work on community health.

October 2026

In 2026 she became the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio. On the night of 19 October, a one-minute video began circulating online. It featured her mother, Donna Arthur, who said she loved her daughter, called her a liar, questioned her account of her childhood — including the winter in the tent — and urged Ohioans not to vote for her.

The next day, her opponent, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, confirmed that the advertisement came from his campaign and described it as legitimate. His campaign said her mother had not been paid, and argued that voters deserved to scrutinise both candidates. The advertisement went to television.

The court file told a different story from the advertisement. A local television fact-check examined the campaign's claim that Amy had fabricated her childhood, compared it with the 1978 police and court records and a sheriff's report placing her stepfather at the campground, and rated the advertisement false.

Responses crossed party lines. Governor DeWine, a Republican, urged the campaign to take it down, saying it was wrong to run it. President Trump praised the advertisement and said he had advised that it stay up. Her brother Philip recorded his own video, calling it a despicable low.

Amy answered in her own words. She wrote that she had been abused between the ages of ten and twelve while her birth mother did nothing to protect her, and that she would not allow a man to treat her childhood as a complaint.

Ohio votes for its next governor on 3 November, the cover date of this issue. Whatever the result, the record of 1978 stays exactly as it was.

Why this belongs here

Survivors of childhood sexual abuse are disbelieved often, and by the people closest to them more often than by anyone. A twelve-year-old who testifies is believed by a court and left by a parent. A woman who speaks about it in middle age is asked, again, to prove it.

Amy Acton has spent her adult life in rooms where children's harm is measured: clinics, child advocacy programmes, a health department in a pandemic. She came from the place most survivors are told to stay quiet about, and she made a career out of looking straight at it.

The scar is real, and the paperwork from 1978 still carries the proof. What shines is what she built on the other side of it.

The case and the life, in sequence, drawn from Mahoning County court records as reported by NBC4, Signal Statewide and the Associated Press, and from Amy Acton's own public statements. The stepfather is not named in this piece.

Roni Millard sat across from me recently on Soul Loom Podcast, you can listen to her episode here, and within the first few minutes of that conversation I recognised the shape of a story I have heard, in different forms, from dozens of women over more than two decades of working with women who built careers out of sheer will. She arrived composed, articulate, entirely in command of her own account, and it was only as we went deeper that the real conversation began, the one underneath the polish, about a body that had been trying to get her attention for the better part of fifteen years before she finally listened.

Roni built her career the way so many ambitious women do, and if I am honest, so did I. I entered the corporate world too — different rooms, different titles, but the same undercurrent running underneath all of it, chasing targets that were never quite the last target, performing at a level that read as effortless to everyone watching. What nobody watching could see was the toll accumulating underneath it for Roni. By thirty-nine she was diagnosed with osteoporosis after a fracture she initially mistook for a limp. Not long after came anaemia, endometriosis, a miscarriage, the kind of relentless physical unravelling we would spot in a heartbeat if it were happening to a friend, and yet almost never see clearly while it is happening to us. Roni did what high-performing women are trained to do. She fixed each symptom in isolation and kept moving. “I could fix them and I did invariably fix them,” she told me, and for a long time that was enough to keep the pattern hidden, even from herself.

It took a breast cancer diagnosis at forty four to make her ask the question properly. Not what is wrong with my body this time, but as she put it to me directly, “what was I actually building this for.”

What she named next is the part of our conversation I keep returning to. She traced the engine underneath all of it back to something far simpler than ambition. “What I loved the most was I loved feeling needed,” she said. “I was constantly seeking external validation. Had I done well, had I done well enough.” It was never really about the targets. Achieve one thing and the goalposts moved to the next before she had allowed herself a single moment to register what she had just done, and she described the toll of that loop plainly: “I never stopped enough to really enjoy what I had achieved.”

This is the part of the story I want every woman reading this to sit with, because it is not really Roni's story alone. It is the shape of a pattern I see constantly in women fifty and over who are standing at the edge of their own version of this reckoning, whether the trigger has arrived yet or not. We are taught to read ambition as virtue and exhaustion as proof of commitment. Roni kept her own diagnoses private for years, for reasons that will sound familiar to almost anyone who has built a career inside a system that rewards invulnerability. “I didn't want anyone to feel sorry for me,” she said. “I didn't want somebody to look and say, oh, she might not be fit for a future promotion.” So we perform wellness the way we perform everything else, and the performance becomes indistinguishable from the truth, until something arrives that cannot be managed quietly.

What changed for Roni was not simply recovery. It was a complete recalibration of what she considered non-negotiable, built on a single line she offered almost in passing but which has stayed with me since: “you cannot pour from an empty cup.” She now protects seven hours of sleep, aiming for eight when she can, the way she once protected a quarterly target. She has stopped eating past early evening so her body can spend the night repairing rather than digesting. She talks about her relationships in terms of what she calls penthouse friends and basement friends, an honest audit that extends beyond friendships into every relationship she carries, and she is unapologetic about who she has let go as a result.

The detail from our conversation that I have not stopped thinking about is the exercise she now gives her own clients. Sixty minutes, a piece of paper, two columns. What drains your energy. What elevates it. Three things in each, nothing aspirational, nothing that requires a holiday to fix. “The minute you take that first step,” she told me, “there is kind of this way that the universe goes, finally listening.” The point was never the list itself. The point is that most of us have never given ourselves permission to sit still long enough to write one.

Roni's insights on the executive health trap facing senior leaders have already been picked up nationally, and it is not hard to see why. Her healing did not begin with the cancer treatment. It began the moment she stopped treating her body's signals as inconvenient interruptions to a life she was otherwise managing well, and started treating them as the most reliable information she had. That distinction matters enormously for any woman who has spent decades being praised for pushing through. The body is not competing with your ambition. It has been trying to direct it the entire time.

I often think about the women I work with who are, right now, at the anaemia stage of their own story, or the cracked heels stage, quietly explaining away a signal because acknowledging it feels like it might cost them something they are not ready to lose. Roni's story is not a cautionary tale about corporate life. It is an invitation to stop waiting for the diagnosis that finally gives you permission to listen. You already have permission. You have had it the whole time.

The question worth asking, whether you are thirty-nine or fifty-nine, is not whether your body is speaking to you. It already is. The question is what you are going to do about it before it has to shout.

Michelle Wollaston's full conversation with Roni Millard is on the Soul Loom podcast. Listen below, or find it wherever you listen to podcasts.

Soul Loom is Michelle Wollaston's podcast exploring the threads that hold a life together — direction, purpose, transition, and what it means to truly know yourself. Find more episodes at michellewollaston.com.

It is difficult to find something to say about this book that hasn't already been said. I read a variety of books, either for pure pleasure or for doing these reviews (and the two are not mutually exclusive), but after reading a few crime novels I found this to be so refreshing. If you need a book to relax to, with some gentle humour, interestingly different characters with no axe to grind, this must surely be the one.

Leonard and Hungry Paul are both in their thirties, and Leonard's mother, with whom he lived, has just died. He works creating articles for a children's encyclopaedia, but longs to write his own book, bringing to life Roman times as seen through the eyes of a young boy. He thinks that the encyclopaedia approaches things from too academic a view; surely children want to identify with those they read about? So, on the side, he is creating his own version of Roman history.

Hungry Paul doesn't have a full-time job; he works spasmodically as a postman, and lives with his parents. His sister Grace is due to get married shortly, but does not live at home. We are told that she habitually looked out for Hungry Paul when he was growing up, and it appears to be a habit that she cannot break. Her parents are easy-going and accepting of the way their life is, and she takes it upon herself to try to organise everybody in the way she thinks is good for them, not realising that her family is content with things the way they are.

Leonard and Hungry Paul enjoy board games, and get together frequently in an evening to play, during which time they often have some quite in-depth conversations, with Hungry Paul offering philosophical views which would maybe surprise those who don't know him well. He generally doesn't speak much, and when his mother takes him with her to the local hospital to visit lonely patients, he is the only one who can connect with Mrs Hawthorn, who seems not to like people at all and just wants leaving alone. Hungry Paul sits and holds her hand for the time he is there, both of them content with the silence.

He enters a competition to find a suitable sign-off at the end of emails, different from the more official sign-offs after hand-written letters, and wins a substantial amount of money. Leonard, meanwhile, has his eye on Shelley at work, who finds him attractive in his otherness, his completely different approach to life, and a relationship gradually develops. When Leonard discovers she has a son, Patrick, suddenly his writing of Roman history takes on new meaning; he can write about a Roman boy Patrick's age. He also illustrates, and with a now focused enthusiasm he persists till the book is finished.

These two men, each preferring quiet to noise, each gentle in their dealings with others, each mainly happy with their own lives, are an antidote to the rush and hurry of today's world, and left me wanting to know more people like them: kind, unassuming, content with their lot yet open to possibilities, and not expecting much more than their own little world can give them. This is truly a gem of a book.

(And in case you are wondering, we never get to find out why Hungry Paul is called Hungry Paul…)

On 9 October 2026, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Peace Prize would go to an eighty-five-year-old lawyer from Durban. Navanethem Pillay, known to everyone as Navi, became the first South African woman to receive it.

It is worth starting with where she began, because almost every door in her life was one she had to build herself.

Clairwood, Durban

She was born Navanethem Naidoo on 23 September 1941, the fifth of eight children, and grew up in Clairwood, a working-class Indian neighbourhood of Durban. Her grandparents had come from Batlagundu in southern India in the 1890s as indentured labourers on the sugar plantations of Natal.

She studied at the University of Natal, and when the apartheid government's Separate Universities Act moved students like her to a college for Indians that did not teach law, she won an exemption and went back to finish her degree. She qualified in 1965.

The firm she had to build

No law firm would take her on. She later explained why with perfect bluntness: they could not have white employees taking instructions from someone who was not white. So in 1967 she opened her own practice, the first woman who was not white to do so in Natal.

For the next twenty-eight years she defended people the apartheid state wanted silenced: members of the ANC, the Black Consciousness Movement, the Unity Movement and others. In 1971, when her own husband, Gaby, was detained under the Terrorism Act, she went to court to stop the police using unlawful interrogation methods on him, and won. In 1973 she won political prisoners on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela among them, the right to see their lawyers.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, she went to Harvard, and became the first South African to earn a doctorate in law there.

Rape as genocide

In 1995, nominated by President Mandela, she became the first woman who was not white to sit on the High Court of South Africa. She often said that the first time she ever walked into a judge's chambers was the day she walked into her own.

She stayed there only briefly. The same year, the United Nations elected her a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up after the 1994 genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were murdered in around a hundred days. For its first four years she was the only woman on the bench.

In 1998, in the case against Jean-Paul Akayesu, a former town mayor, the tribunal's judges ruled that rape and sexual violence could be acts of genocide. It was the first time an international court had said so. Pillay, who had pushed the questioning of witnesses that brought the sexual violence into the record, said afterwards that rape had been treated as the spoils of war since time immemorial, and would now be treated as a war crime.

That judgment is now cited in courtrooms and conflicts around the world. Every prosecution of sexual violence as a weapon of war since stands partly on it.

She went on to become the tribunal's president, from 1999 to 2003, and then a judge of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The world's human rights chief

In 2008, the UN General Assembly confirmed her as High Commissioner for Human Rights, the most senior human rights post in the world. She held it for six years, and spoke out on discrimination, torture, the death penalty and the rights of women and of lesbian, gay and transgender people at a time when many governments did not want to hear it.

After she left the post in 2014, she did not retire. She chaired the International Commission Against the Death Penalty, sat as a judge in the genocide case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice, and from 2021 chaired the UN's independent commission of inquiry on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. In 2025, that commission concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, a finding the Israeli government rejected. She stepped down from the commission in November 2025.

Why she is on this list

Navi Pillay was told, at every stage of her life, that the place she wanted to stand was not hers to stand in. A university said it. Every law firm in Durban said it. An entire state said it.

She did not argue the point. She built the room, walked in, and then kept making the room bigger for the people behind her: for prisoners denied lawyers, for women whose rape no court had counted, for victims of crimes the world had not yet found the words to prosecute.

On 10 December, she will collect the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

At eighty-five, Navi Pillay is still working, and the last few weeks have brought the largest recognition of her life.

In the quiet town of Winterhaven, the snow always seemed to fall a little thicker than anywhere else, and the Christmas lights glowed a little brighter. At the bottom of the high street, wedged between the baker's and a shop that sold nothing but candles, stood a narrow window with gold lettering that read Eve's Curiosities.

Eve Mayfair was seventy-eight, widowed, and kept the kind of shop that people visited once and talked about for years. Tin soldiers with chipped paint. Porcelain dolls in faded lace. Glass baubles so old the silvering had begun to cloud, each one hung on a thread above the counter like a held breath. Everything in it seemed to whisper of Christmases nobody alive could remember.

Everything except the gingerbread man.

He was never in the window. Customers only knew he existed because of Eve's late husband, Harold, who had liked to tell the story at the pub. A doll the size of a small cat, made of stiff brown fabric stitched in the shape of a gingerbread biscuit. White icing piped in thread around his edges. Two black buttons for eyes. And a smile, sewn in red, that ran a fraction too far across his face. A fraction past friendly.

"It's only an old toy," Eve said, whenever anyone asked. She said it lightly. She never said it twice in the same conversation.

Edgar Vaughn

One hundred and twenty-five years earlier, Winterhaven had a baker named Edgar Vaughn, whose gingerbread was famous for three counties. People queued in the snow for it. Then came the winter of the fever, and the winter after it, when the mill closed and the money went, and the Vaughns could no longer pay for flour, or coal, or a doctor.

Edgar went door to door. The families who had queued for his gingerbread every Christmas closed their doors on him, one by one, politely. By the new year his wife and their small son were buried in the churchyard on the hill.

He never baked again. Instead, he sat up through the long dark of that January with a needle and thread and the last of his wife's sewing basket, and he made something. He stitched it from the tablecloth they had eaten their last Christmas dinner from, the one still stained with what had been spilled on it that night. He made it in the shape of the thing he had once been loved for. And as he sewed, he spoke over it, words that were half prayer and half something older.

Every fifth Christmas, he told it. Find them. Find their children, and their children's children. Teach them what it is to have the door closed on you.

Then he wrapped it in brown paper, left it on the doorstep of the richest house in Winterhaven as a Christmas gift, and walked out of town in the snow. Nobody ever saw him again.

The doll passed from house to house after that, and every house it passed through was a house Edgar had knocked on. There were fires. There were falls on icy stairs. There were marriages that cracked in a single night and never mended. The town forgot the connection long before it forgot the accidents.

The attic

Harold Mayfair had bought the doll in a house clearance in 2001, for the price of a pint, because he thought it was funny. Within five years he had stopped thinking that. On his deathbed, he took Eve's hand and held it hard.

"Never give it away," he said. "Never try to destroy it. Just keep it. And keep it quiet."

For twenty years, Eve did. She wrapped the doll in a wool blanket, sealed it in a tea chest, and pushed the chest to the far end of the attic, behind the Christmas decorations she no longer had the heart to use. And every fifth Christmas, she sat up all night downstairs with the radio on and the lights blazing, and listened to the attic floor.

Soft thuds, like something small dropping from a height. The smell of fresh gingerbread drifting down the stairs when nothing had been baked. And once, very late, the sound of a child laughing somewhere above the ceiling.

She told no one. Who would she tell?

The auction

This year, the Winterhaven Historical Society came calling about its Christmas auction, and Eve, who was tired in a way that sleep no longer fixed, said yes. She gave them three boxes of antiques. At the bottom of the third, wrapped in its blanket, was the gingerbread man. She told herself it was the society's problem now. She did not tell them what it was.

It sold for twelve pounds to Lydia Brooks, who had moved into the big house on Hill Lane in September with her husband, Tom, and their children, Max, eight, and Emma, five. Lydia thought it was charming. She set it in the middle of the dining table on Christmas Eve, between the plate of biscuits and the glass of milk the children had left out for Father Christmas.

The big house on Hill Lane had once belonged to the Ashcrofts. The Ashcrofts had closed the first door on Edgar Vaughn.

That night, the doll woke.

Christmas Eve

It started with the smell. Gingerbread, thick and warm, then something sweeter underneath it, sweet in the way fruit is sweet just before it rots. Then came the sounds. Small, soft footsteps pattering across the hall floor. A thin, patient scratching, like a fingernail drawn slowly down a window.

At midnight, Emma padded into her parents' bedroom holding her bear by one ear.

"Mummy," she whispered. "The gingerbread man is walking."

Lydia told her it was a dream, and took her back to bed. Tom laughed it off. But by two o'clock neither of them was laughing. The tree lights downstairs had started blinking in a rhythm that was almost, but not quite, a heartbeat. The baubles had turned on their hooks so that their reflections all faced the stairs. And the doll was no longer on the dining table. Tom found it on the bottom step, facing up.

He carried it back. Ten minutes later it was on the landing.

At three in the morning, Lydia woke and found it sitting on the chest of drawers at the end of their bed, button eyes fixed on her, its stitched smile wider than she remembered. She grabbed it, ran barefoot down the stairs and threw it as far as she could into the snow.

When she came back into the sitting room, it was propped against the fireplace, warm and dry.

The game

By morning, the house had stopped pretending. Windows cracked in long, slow lines with no stone to blame. Something dark and sticky, like black treacle, beaded along the skirting boards. The jingle of the sleigh bells on the front door became a slow, mocking chime that sounded whether the door moved or not.

Worse were the children. Max and Emma were frightened of the doll and drawn to it at once. It whispered to them, they said. It promised them sweets and presents if they would only play its game.

Lydia went into the kitchen at nine and found Emma standing on the worktop, the bread knife held loosely in her small hand. Her face was perfectly calm.

"The gingerbread man says you're not nice, Mummy," she said, in a voice that was flat and not quite her own. "He says nobody in this house was ever nice."

Father Callahan

Tom drove to the church through the snow and came back with Father Callahan, a priest who had served Winterhaven for thirty years and had heard every rumour the town had to offer. He stopped dead in the doorway of the house on Hill Lane, as though he had walked into a wall.

"This is no ordinary haunting," he said quietly. "This is a grievance."

He had read the parish records. He knew about Edgar Vaughn, and the fever winter, and the doors. The old stories agreed on one thing only: whatever Vaughn had made could only be unmade where it had been born, in the ruins of his bakery at the edge of town.

The doll seemed to understand. The moment the priest finished speaking, every light in the house went out. The walls shuddered. The smell of gingerbread thickened until it caught in their throats. In the dark, Tom and Father Callahan chased the doll as it scuttled across the floorboards on its stiff little legs, laughing a high, thin laugh that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.

"You cannot undo what has been done," it hissed from under the sideboard. "The fifth Christmas is mine."

Tom caught it with both hands, threw it into the steel document box from his study, and locked the lid.

The bakery

All the way to the edge of town, the box hammered against the floor of the car. The ruins of Vaughn's bakery stood in a field gone white, four broken walls and a chimney breast open to the sky. The night was so cold the air hurt, and yet it seemed to hum, as if the whole field were holding its breath.

Father Callahan prayed. Tom set the doll on the old hearthstone, soaked it in petrol and struck a match.

The scream that came out of the fire was not a human sound. It went on and on, high and shrill, until the children covered their ears. And for a moment, in the tall orange column of the flames, there was the shape of a man — thin, bareheaded, his face twisted not only with rage but with something much older and much sadder than rage.

Then the fire sank, and there was nothing on the hearthstone but grey ash.

After

The Brooks family left Winterhaven in the spring. They never really said why. Eve Mayfair heard the story from the priest, sat down in the back of her shop among the tin soldiers, and cried for a long time. Then she climbed to the attic, opened the empty tea chest, and folded the blanket away for good.

The curse was broken. Everyone said so.

Only, the people who walk their dogs past the old bakery field in December say that, on still nights, if you stand by the broken chimney, the air still smells faintly, unmistakably, of gingerbread.

And this year is the fifth.

The gingerbread man is a figment. These are not.

There is a strange kind of vulnerability that comes after you have survived enough to become aware of yourself. It is the vulnerability of being seen when you are no longer willing to disappear. It is one thing to tell your story. It is another thing entirely to allow someone to know you as you are today, without editing yourself according to what you think they might want from you.

For a long time, I believed being loved meant being adaptable. I thought love required understanding everything, forgiving everything, accommodating everything, and finding a way to make myself fit wherever I had decided I belonged. I became very good at reading people. I could sense changes in tone. I could recognise distance before someone acknowledged it. I could tell when someone was upset even when they insisted they were fine. I learned to anticipate needs, prevent conflict, and adjust myself accordingly.

At the time, I thought I was simply caring. Looking back, I can see that some of what I called caring was actually survival.

When you grow accustomed to relationships where safety depends on another person's mood, you become an expert at monitoring the environment. You learn to study facial expressions, pauses, silence, body language, and changes in energy. You begin adjusting yourself before anyone asks you to. You become less concerned with what you feel and more concerned with what everyone else might be feeling.

Eventually, shrinking becomes automatic (this has surely been my case).

You do not necessarily think, I am going to make myself smaller today. It happens quietly. You choose not to say what you really think. You decide that something bothering you is not important enough to mention. You laugh something off because explaining why it hurt feels like too much work. You say yes when you mean no because you do not want to disappoint someone. You become comfortable being uncomfortable if it means everyone else can remain comfortable.

Then one day, healing brings awareness. You realise that you have spent years protecting relationships by sacrificing pieces of yourself.

That realisation can be painful because it forces you to reconsider what you previously called love. It does not mean every relationship was fake. It does not mean every person intentionally harmed you. It means that you finally have enough distance to see the role you played in maintaining certain dynamics.

Sometimes I was the person who stayed quiet. Sometimes I was the person who overgave. Sometimes I was the person who tried to understand everyone while refusing to admit that I needed understanding too. Sometimes I was the person who confused being needed with being loved.

There is a difference.

Being needed can create a powerful sense of importance. When someone depends on you emotionally, financially, practically, or psychologically, it can feel like proof that you matter. But being needed is not the same as being known. It is not the same as being respected. It is not the same as being cherished for who you are rather than what you provide.

Learning that distinction changed the way I approached relationships. I began asking myself a different question.

Can I be completely myself here?

Not the most patient version of myself. Not the most understanding version. Not the version who knows exactly what to say. Not the version who never needs anything.

Me.

Can I be tired here?
Can I disagree here?
Can I say no here?
Can I change my mind here?
Can I have a bad day here?
Can I have an opinion that is different from theirs?
Can I ask for something without feeling guilty?
Can I be emotional without being labelled difficult?
Can I be successful without making myself smaller so someone else does not feel threatened?
Can I simply exist without constantly monitoring whether I am still acceptable?

Those questions became important because healthy love requires more than affection. It requires room.

Room to breathe.
Room to become.
Room to be imperfect.
Room to have a separate identity.
Room to experience emotions without immediately being punished for them.

For someone who has experienced abuse or prolonged emotional instability, that kind of room can feel frightening. It sounds wonderful intellectually, but the body may interpret it differently.

The mind may say, This person is safe.
The body may say, Wait.

The mind may say, They have never given you a reason not to trust them.

The body may say, That is exactly what you thought before.

This is where healing becomes an experience rather than simply an idea.

Trust is built through repetition

One safe conversation does not erase years of unsafe ones. One healthy relationship does not automatically erase every relational pattern your nervous system learned before. Safety has to become familiar.

That happens through moments that may seem insignificant to someone else.

You express a need and the other person listens. You say no and the relationship continues. You disagree and nobody threatens to leave. You become emotional and nobody uses your vulnerability against you. You make a mistake and you are not humiliated. You ask for space and it is respected. You need reassurance and you are not mocked for needing it.

Over time, these experiences begin creating a different internal expectation. Maybe I do not have to disappear to stay connected. That realisation can be life changing.

Because many people who have experienced trauma carry an unconscious belief that authenticity is dangerous. Somewhere along the way, the nervous system learned that being fully visible increased the possibility of harm.

So we hide. We hide our anger because anger once created consequences. We hide our sadness because sadness was dismissed. We hide our needs because needing anything made us vulnerable. We hide our excitement because joy was followed by disappointment. We hide our opinions because disagreement created conflict. We hide our strength because strength threatened someone. We hide our softness because softness was exploited.

Eventually, we can become so accustomed to hiding that we no longer know what authenticity feels like.

Healing becomes a process of meeting ourselves again.

Not the person we were before everything happened. That person may no longer exist in the same way, and perhaps trying to become that person again is not the point.

The goal is to discover who we are now when survival is no longer making every decision.

That person may be more complicated than the old version.

Maybe I am softer in some ways and stronger in others.
Maybe I have boundaries I did not have before.
Maybe I am less willing to tolerate certain things.
Maybe I am more compassionate because I understand pain differently.
Maybe I am more discerning because I know what manipulation looks like.
Maybe I am more protective of my peace because I finally understand its value.

This is not becoming difficult. It is becoming honest. And honesty changes relationships. Some relationships become stronger because there was finally room for the real person to enter. Others become uncomfortable because the relationship depended on the smaller version. That can be heartbreaking.

When you stop overfunctioning, someone may accuse you of changing.
You did.

When you stop accepting behaviour you once tolerated, someone may say you are selfish.
You are not.

When you stop explaining every boundary until the other person approves of it, someone may say you no longer care.
You may care deeply.

You have simply learned that caring about someone does not require abandoning yourself. That lesson is difficult because many survivors have been conditioned to measure love through sacrifice.

How much will I give?
How much will I tolerate?
How much will I forgive?
How much can I endure?
But perhaps a better question is this. How much of myself can I remain connected to while I love another person?

That is a completely different measurement. It moves the focus from endurance to mutuality. Healthy love does not ask one person to disappear so the other can remain comfortable. Healthy love allows two people to have needs, boundaries, preferences, histories, and individual identities.

It does not mean there will never be conflict.

There will be conflict.
There will be misunderstandings.
There will be disappointment.
There will be moments when one person needs something the other cannot immediately provide.

Healthy love is not the absence of those experiences. It is the ability to move through them without destroying each other or abandoning yourself.

That is what I had to learn.

I had to stop believing that another person's discomfort automatically meant I had done something wrong.

Someone can be disappointed with me and I can still be a good person.

Someone can disagree with me and I can still be worthy.

Someone can misunderstand me and I do not have to spend hours convincing them of my intentions.

Someone can decide they do not want to continue a relationship and I can grieve without deciding that their departure proves I am unlovable.

This is what happens when self-worth becomes less dependent on external approval.

You become freer. Not invulnerable. Free.
Free to love without constantly calculating the cost.
Free to care without taking responsibility for everything.
Free to give without giving yourself away.
Free to receive without immediately feeling indebted.
Free to be seen.
That last one may be the hardest.

Being seen means allowing someone to encounter the parts of you that are not polished. The tired parts. The uncertain parts. The emotional parts. The stubborn parts. The joyful parts. The ambitious parts. The wounded parts. The parts still learning.

You stop trying to present a finished version of yourself.

You begin allowing yourself to be human.

And perhaps that is what love after trauma ultimately asks of us.

Not to become fearless.
Not to trust everyone.
Not to ignore our instincts.
Not to pretend the past never happened.

It asks us to stop assuming that the only way to remain connected is to become smaller.

You are allowed to take up space.
You are allowed to have a voice.
You are allowed to have needs.
You are allowed to be complicated.
You are allowed to be loved without performing for it.

The right relationships will not require you to disappear in order to stay.

And the deeper healing is realising that you no longer want relationships that do.

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.

No matter where you are in the world, have a quick think about breakfasts and what they typically are to your locale. No, not what you eat — if anything at all — what most people eat and what they consider to be normal for the country as a whole.

Maybe it's a rice type thing (India), maybe it's cold meats and bready substances (Germany and other parts of Europe), pastries (Belgium), perhaps it's steamed buns (China), something with 'breakfast' tacked on at the front that could and is easily served at any other time of the day (USA), or perhaps be a multitude of other things.

But there is one breakfast that reigns supreme. We are not saying it's the greatest, but we are saying that pretty much everyone knows of it even if they've never had one: The Full English.

But do you know what exactly one is? What makes it 'full'? Why English but not British? Are there undefined rules dictating what it supposedly comprises of? Is it still a breakfast if it's eaten at 4 in the afternoon? And why so many questions?

Let's get the easy one out of the way: what exactly is a Full English Breakfast?

The Fry-Up, The Full Monty, a Cooked Breakfast, actually began in Victorian times as a display of hospitality by the wealthy. It continued on into the Industrial Age whereby those required to work 37-hour shifts in one day, could shove a meal so vast down them at stupid o'clock, that it could keep them going until they got home. It is dense, it is heavy, and contains more calories than an African Elephant could possibly consume in a day.

What it comprises of and are non-negotiable in so far as to their inclusion is back bacon (not streaky, we are talking proper meaty bacon here with a thin rind), long and fat pork sausages (but definitely not 'breakfast sausages' as these are terrible, go get some proper bangers — thus called because they sizzle and pop in a frying pan), fried eggs (runny or fully cooked if that's your thing), black pudding (blood sausage comprising of oatmeal, pork fat, and seasoning), baked beans, tomatoes, buttered white toast or white fried bread. Oh, and it must be butter and not some margarine spread; that nonsense can go get in the sea. And the bread must be proper bread and not the supermarket sliced crap; thick and hearty to withstand lots of butter, or being shallow fried.

Without all of these components it is neither English nor is it Full. However, as with all things, this has changed somewhat. Now you must still have all of the above items, but these days you can also add mushrooms (either loads of buttons or a giant portobello), and some form of potato be it hash browns or similar.

Traditionalists will scoff at the addition of these two, but as both can be very tasty indeed, it is neither here nor there if you happen to include them, and to be honest why not? However, one element must always be true: if it can be fried, then it really should be. Beans, we can forgive, but everything else? Into the frying pan. Yes, you can order it with scrambled or poached eggs, but this is akin to ordering a large Big Mac meal with extra onion rings, plus an apple pie and an ice-cream, and then asking for a Diet Coke. Everyone knows what you're doing so you may as well stop it now.

One thing to note is that I am aware of some places that will deep fry items, particularly when there is a mad rush to get a plate out in under a minute because of a mistake or an order at the very last second. This really should be a 'no'. Fried, yes; deep fried, no (but hash browns are okay done this way).

You will also notice that all items are pluralised. This is for a reason; if you don't get at least two of every item then it's not worth bothering with at all, and the owner of the establishment must be taken out back and given a swift kicking.

As for accompaniments, the sauce really should be HP Sauce (fruity, salty, tangy) and not ketchup. The latter is acceptable to a degree but do not be surprised if you are castigated for using it. Any other sauce is a treasonous offence. Salt is okay — not that it really needs it — and the drink served tends to be what is lovingly referred to as Builder's Tea. This is tea that will put hairs on your chest and will happily dissolve your teaspoon if left in the cup a little too long. Coffee never used to be a thing, but enough people drink it with this meal that it is now sort of normal. OJ is okay for children, and should you be eating this in a pub then — no matter if it's 6am or not — a pint (or two) is regarded as the correct thing to do.

As an aside HP Sauce is considered quintessentially British, and for a time it was (thus named for the Houses of Parliament depicted on the front along with Big Ben), until Heinz bought HP and then moved production from Birmingham to the Netherlands, leading MPs to denounce the decision, with Birmingham MP Khalid Mahmood holding up a bottle in the House of Commons in protest. It's still manufactured in the Netherlands, and yes, is very much still considered to be British.

But why not British Breakfast and what of 'Full'?

Britain has, like many other areas around the world, regions that are proud of their heritage, and this is multiplied exponentially when it comes to the separate entities England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. If you are in any of these and ask for a Full Breakfast, then that's what you will get, but they all differ ever so slightly. Scotland also includes Lorne Sausages (they are square), Tattie Scones (made from potato), and naturally Haggis. Wales has Bara Lawr ('laverbread' that's actually seaweed with rolled oats and bacon fat), and do not be surprised to find cockles on your plate as well. Northern Ireland will also include potato/soda farls (a sort of bread/scone), and if we also include The Republic of Ireland you'll find soda bread and white pudding as opposed to black — the difference being that white does not contain pork or beef blood, but has suet and pork fat, creating a slightly different taste and texture.

But ostensibly they are basically the same. As for 'Full', well that's a combination of restaurant speak (full = all the things), and to distance it from their European counterparts where 'Continental Breakfast' means bits of things, and not a proper heart attack on a plate.

Full English has obviously travelled further, which is evident when you see signs outside restaurants around the globe promoting their 'Full English Breakfast', but so often getting it completely wrong especially when there are no British people working in the kitchens.

Are there any rules?

Glad you asked, because yes there are. Aside from everything where possible must be fried, and that single items are a no-no, plus the Builder's Tea and HP Sauce, there's also the placement of said items on your vast plate.

Now there are those (we shall refer to them as heathens), who care not for what goes where, but it is of paramount importance that wet things do not sit next to other wet things.

The eggs cannot be placed next to the beans for example, nor adjacent to the tomatoes. The eggs — and they really should be sunny side up, and unbroken — are there to be dipped into with a sausage, or some bacon, or fried bread. Nobody wants bean juice infiltrating the pristine white parts of the egg; these two must sit as far away from each other as possible. This is where the wall of meat comes into play, creating a barrier between them. The same is especially true of the fried bread; this must stay completely away from wet food so it remains untarnished and wholesome revelling in its coronary inducing splendour.

If the diner wishes to allow these items to come into contact that's on them, but it is not for you to dictate otherwise. Some establishments will utilise small pots and saucers for the beans and bread so that it is impossible for any contamination to occur, but this is amateurish at best, and points at the lack of any and all planning of placements.

Occasionally you will hear a British sort saying they had/will be having a Fry Up for dinner. If this is at home then you can absolutely guarantee that it will indeed be a Full Breakfast. There is unequivocally nothing wrong with this, and is more popular than you might think, but if they happen to go out to eat it and it isn't in a 'proper' Café (or a 'Greasy Spoon'), then it could very well be the abomination that is the 'All Day Breakfast'.

This. Is. Not. The. Same. Thing.

It will likely not be Full, and neither will it be as large. It is a pathetic excuse for a 'breakfast' and you must stay well clear. The items will be singular plus some items will not be there at all, and because it is served outside of normal breakfast hours it will be more expensive.

The vegetarian Full

Naturally some things have changed with the times for you can easily sit down to a vegetarian Full English. The trouble with this, however, that as it is a relatively modern invention, the rules have not been set in stone, so it has become a bit of a wild west as to what it should and should not include.

Eggs, beans, tomatoes, fried bread, and mushrooms are a given, but we have to find replacements for the bacon, sausage, and black pudding; this is where the problems start. Halloumi can kind of substitute for bacon, but this too must also be fried, but the sausages and black pudding? It isn't unusual to see a sliced avocado sitting there, although quite what that is supposed to be representing no-one can say. But now you can easily procure vegetarian sausages, and quite incredibly black pudding, too. I have tried the former — many versions of them — but nah, not for me. The latter? Not a clue, but I'd be willing to give it a go out of curiosity if nothing else.

This is where the humble potato comes into play, and if it has infiltrated the traditional Full, then why not here? Again, there are no set rules for the vegetarian Full so before ordering one it's best to check out what you'll be getting.

The Monday rule

However, there is one extra extra rule that only ever applies to Monday mornings. The previous day you would likely have partaken in a Sunday Roast — a meal of gigantic proportions — and it is also likely that there would be some leftovers.

So you gather them all together — everything — and mix it through the mashed potato. This is then formed into patties, which are then shallow fried, before being added to the Full English plate. Naturally there's no need for any hash browns on a Monday morning, as this stodgy (but now crispy on the outside) addition contains all the potato you could ever need. Plus turkey, and Brussels sprouts, and sausages, and stuffing, and peas, and cauliflower, and… you get the idea.

Yes, that is eaten alongside all the other aforementioned items. At 6am. Possibly with a pint or two.

So now you know everything you need to know, particularly if you have never had one, and we recommend that you at least try one, if only to see if you can finish it, especially at six in the morning. And with a couple of pints.

The same breakfast, five accents. What turns up on the plate depending on where you order it.

Every year, the same few weeks between mid-December and early January see millions of people try to get home, get away or get to someone else's home at exactly the same moment. Airports, stations and motorways all run close to capacity. Prices rise with demand. Winter weather adds its own surprises. And the margin for error, which is generous in May, shrinks almost to nothing.

None of that means you should stay home. It means the trip that goes smoothly in December is usually the one that was planned in November.

Book now, and book flexibly

Seats and fares for the busiest days — the last weekend before Christmas and the first weekend of January — tend to rise steadily as the dates approach. If you have not booked yet, do it now, and favour fares and tickets you can change. A slightly higher price for flexibility is cheap insurance in the one season when plans most often shift.

Look at the days either side of the peak. Travelling on Christmas Eve morning, on Christmas Day itself or midweek in the gap between Christmas and New Year is often noticeably quieter and cheaper than the Friday everyone else picks.

Budget for the whole trip

Year-end trips have a way of costing far more than the ticket. Airport parking, checked bags, seat selection, fuel, tolls, meals on the road, taxis at both ends and presents in your luggage all add up. Write the full cost down before you commit. Then add a buffer for the evening something goes wrong and you need a hotel near the airport.

Plan for delays before they happen

Assume at least one thing will not run on time and make your plan survive it. Leave longer connections than you think you need. Avoid the last flight or coach of the day, which has nothing behind it if it is cancelled. Keep medication, chargers, a change of clothes and children's essentials in your hand luggage, not your hold bag.

Know your rights. For flights departing the UK or EU, or arriving there on a UK or EU airline, passengers delayed by three hours or more at their final destination may be entitled to compensation, as well as to meals and, if needed, overnight accommodation. Compensation is not paid when the delay is caused by extraordinary circumstances outside the airline's control, which can include severe weather. Rules differ elsewhere, so check your airline's policy and your country's regulator before you go, and keep every receipt.

Travel insurance bought at the time of booking, not the week before, gives the widest cover. Read what it says about missed connections, weather and strikes.

Car, coach or plane: an honest comparison

There is no single right answer. Each option wins on different things, and the best choice depends on the distance, who is travelling and what matters most to you.

Driving gives you the most control. You leave when you want, stop when you need, and carry as much as the boot holds, which matters with children and presents. For families or groups splitting the cost, it is often the cheapest way to cover a medium distance. The trade-offs are real: the roads are at their busiest before Christmas, winter weather makes long drives more tiring and more dangerous, and one driver doing six hours alone is a safety risk. If you drive, have the car checked, plan rest stops every two hours, and carry blankets, water, food and a charged phone.

Coaches and buses are usually the cheapest option per person, often by a wide margin, and they spare you the motorway and the parking. They also tend to have a lower carbon footprint per passenger than either driving alone or flying. The costs are time and comfort: journeys are longer, timetables are less frequent over the holidays, luggage space is limited, and traffic delays affect you just as they affect a car. They work best for solo travellers and couples on a budget who can afford a slower day.

Flying is the fastest option over long distances and often the only practical one across seas or between countries. Over shorter distances, the time saved in the air is easily lost to getting to the airport, security, waiting and baggage reclaim. Peak-season fares and extras can make it the most expensive choice, and when disruption hits, it hits hardest: one cancellation can strand you overnight. Fly when the distance justifies it, book early, and build in time.

A simple rule of thumb: for short trips, the coach often wins on cost and the car on convenience; for long trips, flying usually wins on time. Whatever you choose, the calmest journeys are the ones with a little slack built in.

On the day

Check your flight, coach or route before you leave home, not at the airport. Download your tickets and boarding passes rather than relying on signal. Arrive earlier than you normally would. And give yourself permission for the journey to be slow. The destination will still be there, and so will the people waiting for you.

For most small business owners, December is a blur of last orders, end-of-year sales and trying to switch off for three days. January then arrives with a list of resolutions that are usually forgotten by February.

There is a better use of the quiet weeks between now and the new year. Three jobs, done properly, will make 2027 easier than 2026: get the legal basics straight, take back control from the algorithms, and choose what deserves your energy.

1. The legal basics

Most small businesses do not get into trouble through anything dramatic. They get into trouble through things that were never set up, or set up once and never checked again. The details vary by country, so treat this as a list of questions to answer for your own business, and check your government's official guidance.

Your structure and registration. Are you registered correctly as a sole trader, partnership or limited company, and are your details with the registrar and tax authority up to date? In the UK, Companies House has been bringing in identity verification for directors and people with significant control, so check whether yours is done.

Tax. Know your deadlines and set money aside as you go. In the UK, Making Tax Digital for Income Tax has applied since April 2026 to sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000. From 6 April 2027, it extends to those over £30,000, which means keeping digital records and sending quarterly updates through compatible software. If that is you, the time to choose software and sign up is now, not in March.

Data protection. If you hold customer names, emails or addresses, you handle personal data. You need a clear privacy notice on your website, a lawful reason to email people, and safe storage. In the UK, many businesses also need to pay a data protection fee to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Terms, returns and contracts. Your website should state your terms of sale, delivery times and returns policy clearly, and they should match consumer law where you sell. Service businesses should use a simple written agreement for every client.

Insurance. Check whether you need public liability, professional indemnity, product liability or employers' liability cover, and whether your home insurance covers business stock or equipment. Most do not.

Your name and your work. Check that nobody else has registered your business name as a trade mark, and consider protecting it yourself if your brand is growing.

New rules on technology. If you use AI tools with customers, check whether transparency rules apply, such as the EU AI Act for businesses selling into Europe.

2. Coping with algorithm changes

Every year, at least one platform changes how it shows posts, and a business that relied on it watches its reach fall overnight. It will happen again in 2027. The answer is to stop building on ground you do not own.

Own your audience. An email list is the only audience no algorithm can take away. Make growing it the first priority of every post, offer and event.

Use two channels, not seven. Choose the two platforms where your customers actually are, and show up there consistently. Spreading thinly across every app is how small businesses burn out.

Make content that works anywhere. A useful idea, written well, can be a post, a short video, an email and a blog article. Write once and adapt, rather than chasing each platform's latest format.

Judge by results, not reach. Views rise and fall with every update. Enquiries, sales and email sign-ups are what pay the bills. Track those monthly and let them tell you what is working.

Do not rebuild everything after one bad week. Algorithm changes usually settle. Give any change a month of steady posting before you decide it has broken your business.

3. What to focus on in 2027

Your existing customers. It is usually far easier to sell again to someone who has already bought than to find someone new. Thank them, ask what they need next, and make it easy to buy again.

Your pricing. Costs have risen. If your prices have not, your profit has quietly fallen. Review them before January and raise them if the numbers say so.

Your cash flow. Know what comes in and goes out each month, and keep a buffer for the quiet months.

One clear offer. If a stranger cannot tell what you sell within five seconds of landing on your page, that is the most valuable thing to fix next year.

Rest. A business that runs on an exhausted owner is fragile. Put your time off in the diary first, and build the year around it.

None of this needs a big budget. It needs a few quiet afternoons between now and January, and a decision to start the year deliberately rather than reactively.

When we first start a healing journey, we always hear, "You need to love yourself first." But what does that actually mean?

I think it means being brave enough to face my own mistakes and patterns without shaming myself. I can accept them as things I need to work on, not as evidence that I'm a broken human, but as evidence that I'm a human who is always evolving.

I think it means to know those echoes of voices from my past are just that. Echoes. I don't need to believe them anymore. Those belonged to someone else. Not me. I have my own voice to listen to, and I trust and believe in myself to only need my own.

It means giving myself the same compassion, care, and respect I so easily give to others. And when I make that the bar for how I treat myself and others, it also becomes the bar for how I allow others to treat me. I don't look at someone who consistently doesn't meet that bar as a challenge to overcome. I see it as information: they aren't playing life at the same level I am, and I don't need to convince them to.

I'm human. I still catch myself falling into behaviours I don't like or patterns I know no longer serve me. Self-love means letting go of perfection and practising better behaviours, messily. I would rather imperfectly practise something healthier than keep repeating an old behaviour simply because I know how to make it look good to everyone else.

Saying no and walking away sound easy, but they aren't always our natural settings. They take practice. Sometimes I make myself do the healthier thing even when my feelings haven't caught up yet. And when my emotions win and I fall back into an old pattern, I allow myself the mistake. Then I go back and try again.

I let those moments become the moments that build me instead of the moments that break me.

I let myself have slow, tearful days. I let myself try new things and suck at them. I explore different parts of life because I'm still discovering who I am after grief, loss, hurt, and anger. I don't have to have the answer. I'm allowed to find out as I go.

I also look at what I was trying to get from an old relationship and ask myself: How can I begin giving some of that to myself?

I do the same thing with fantasies.

Maybe I want to run away. We all have those moments. Instead of judging the fantasy or impulsively acting on it, I look at the wall of grief behind it. Maybe what I actually need is rest. So I let myself feel the grief. I let myself move slowly for a while. And I find ways to give myself some of the relief that the fantasy of running away is trying to tell me I need.

Sometimes a weekend trip alone gives me exactly that.

I've learned that I can't build happiness out of a geographical location. Happiness isn't waiting for me on the other side of the next accomplishment either.

I can let happiness and joy be simple things that exist in a moment.

They don't always have to be something I work so hard to attain.

That is where we begin to build inner peace. It is the quiet understanding that I am enough as I am. I can grow without believing I am broken. I can change without rejecting who I have been. I can be proud of who I am while still becoming who I want to be.

I am enough as I am, and I am beautiful in everything I represent, not because I have perfected myself, but because all of it belongs to me.

Confidence is what grows as I do it and no longer need anyone to notice it. When I stick to my values and give myself the space to make mistakes, I learn how strong I am. How resilient I am. I grow the belief that I can overcome all, even if it takes me longer and doesn't look as good as I want it to. Most of my ugly moments grew me the most, and I am proud of what I did to grow in those times. I learn to adapt those lessons to the next lesson on the roundabout in life.

Most of all, I think my definition of walked love is always living, because it is a breathing thing within me. It grows as I grow.

What is self-love to you?

How do you work to build it within yourself?

Dear Keri,

It is the beginning of November and I am already dreading Christmas, and I feel ridiculous saying so.

I have three children. Between my side and my husband's, there are eleven nieces and nephews, four grandparents, six siblings and their partners, and a list of teachers, neighbours and friends that seems to get longer every year. In my family, Christmas means a mountain of presents. Everyone buys for everyone. The children compare. The adults compare too, though they would never admit it.

Last year I spent far more than we could afford, most of it on a credit card I only cleared in August. I told myself never again. This year my husband's hours have been cut, prices are higher, and I have looked at the list and genuinely do not know how we are going to do it.

What I really can't face is being the one who breaks the tradition. My sister-in-law has already sent the family group chat a link to her children's wish lists. My mother has said she is "looking forward to a proper Christmas this year". If I turn up with less, I know what will be said, even if nobody says it to my face.

I want my children to have a lovely Christmas. I just don't want to spend the whole of next year paying for it.

How do I get out of this without everyone thinking we are mean, or that something terrible has happened?

— Wrapped Up, in Kent

Dear Wrapped Up,

You are not ridiculous. You are early, and early is the best possible place to be. The families who solve this always solve it in November. The ones who leave it to the week before end up exactly where you were last year.

Start with the thing you already know: last year cost you eight months. That is the real price of a Christmas that runs on a card, and it is worth saying out loud to yourself, plainly, before you speak to anyone else. You are not choosing between a lovely Christmas and a mean one. You are choosing between a Christmas you can afford and one you will be paying for next August.

Now, the part that will feel hardest and turns out to be easiest. You are almost certainly not the only person in that group chat who is quietly panicking. In a family of that size, with prices where they are, I would put money on at least two other adults feeling exactly as you do and waiting for somebody else to say it first.

So be the somebody. Send a message to the adults, not the children, and make it a proposal rather than a confession. Something like:

"Lovely as it is, our present list has got enormous, and I think a few of us are feeling the pinch this year. Shall we try something different? A Secret Santa for the adults with a set budget, and the grown-ups just buy for their own children and godchildren. What does everyone think?"

Then stop typing. Let it sit. You may be surprised how quickly the relieved replies come in.

There are several versions of this that work, and you can offer whichever suits your family best. A Secret Santa among the adults, with a firm limit. Presents for children only, with adults buying for one or two cousins rather than all eleven. A family experience instead of presents — a walk, a pantomime, a big shared lunch where everyone brings one dish. Or simply a cap, agreed in advance, on what each person spends per child.

If someone pushes back, and someone usually does, keep it short and warm. "We've had a tight year, and we'd rather spend Christmas with you than worrying about money." No one who loves you can argue with that sentence. Anyone who does is telling you something about themselves, rather than about you.

As for your mother and her proper Christmas: a proper Christmas has very little to do with the size of the pile. Ask her what she remembers from the Christmases of her own childhood. I can almost promise you it will be a person, a song, a meal or a joke, rather than a parcel.

Your children are watching this too, by the way. What you show them this year matters more than anything you could wrap. A parent who says "we're doing it differently this year, and here's why" is teaching them that money is something you manage, not something that manages you. That is a present that lasts considerably longer than a toy.

For the children themselves, a few small, well-chosen things they actually asked for will mean more than a heap of things they didn't. A stocking, one present they are longing for, and time with you. Most children, given the choice, would take the time.

Finally, once you have agreed what you are doing, set the budget, write it on the fridge, and pay for it in cash or debit. No card. You have already shown yourself what that costs.

You asked how to get out of this without everyone thinking you are mean. Here is the honest answer: most of them will think you are brave, and a few of them will thank you privately in January.

— Keri

If Christmas debt is already a worry, free and confidential help is available. In the UK, StepChange (0800 138 1111) and the National Debtline (0808 808 4000) offer free debt advice. Elsewhere, look for a not-for-profit debt advice service in your country before taking on any new borrowing.

On 12 November 2004, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter was flying near Baghdad when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded at the feet of one of its pilots. Captain Tammy Duckworth of the Illinois Army National Guard lost her right leg near the hip and her left leg below the knee. Her right arm was badly broken. Her crew got her out.

She was thirty-six. What she did with the next twenty years is why she is on this list.

A childhood on the move

Ladda Tammy Duckworth was born in Bangkok on 12 March 1968, the daughter of an American veteran who worked on refugee and development programmes and a Thai Chinese mother from Chiang Mai. She grew up across Southeast Asia — Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore — and spoke Thai and Indonesian.

When she was sixteen, the family moved to Honolulu. Her father was out of work for a time, and they lived on public assistance. She has spoken about selling roses at the roadside to help pay the bills. She graduated from high school in 1985, then from the University of Hawaii, and went on to a master's in international affairs at George Washington University.

Choosing the helicopter

She joined the Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps in 1990 and was commissioned in 1992. When it came to choosing a speciality, she picked flying helicopters, one of very few combat roles then open to women. She transferred to the Illinois Army National Guard in 1996, and in 2004 she deployed to Iraq.

After the grenade, she spent more than a year recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She received the Purple Heart there and was promoted to major. She learned to walk on prosthetic legs. She stayed in the National Guard on a medical waiver and retired in 2014 as a lieutenant colonel.

From the ward to the Senate

The years after her injury turned into a career of public service, much of it on behalf of veterans. She led the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs from 2006 to 2009, then served as an assistant secretary at the US Department of Veterans Affairs until 2011.

In 2012 she was elected to the US House of Representatives for Illinois, and in 2016 to the Senate, where she was re-elected in 2022. She became the first woman with a disability elected to Congress, the first Thai American woman in Congress, and the first female double amputee in the Senate.

The baby on the Senate floor

In April 2018, Duckworth gave birth to her second daughter, Maile, becoming the first sitting senator ever to give birth while in office. The Senate's rules did not allow children on the floor, which meant that a new mother who needed to vote had a problem the institution had never been asked to solve.

She solved it. The Senate agreed by unanimous consent to a resolution she sponsored, allowing senators to bring a child under one year old onto the floor during votes. The next day, Maile became the first baby on the Senate floor, wrapped in a blanket, in her mother's arms.

It was a small rule change, and it was not small at all. It said, in the formal language of the institution, that the people who make the laws can be mothers of newborns, and that the building would have to adjust to them rather than the other way round.

Why she is on this list

Tammy Duckworth has been many things that rooms were not designed for: a woman in a combat cockpit, a double amputee in the House, a mother with a ten-day-old baby who needed to vote. In each case, she turned up, and the room changed.

She has described every day since 2004 as a gift. Her memoir, published in 2021, carries that title. It is a phrase that could sound sentimental from someone else. From a woman who was pulled out of a burning helicopter, it reads as a decision about how to live.

Tammy Duckworth is serving her second term as a US senator for Illinois.

Every year, somewhere around the first week of November, the same thought arrives. There is a dress for the work party, a family photograph, a mirror in a brightly lit restaurant. And there is a voice that says: if I start now, properly, I could lose a stone by Christmas.

That voice means well. It is also the reason so many people arrive at Christmas exhausted, irritable and heavier than when they started.

Here is the gentler version, and the one that actually works.

What eight weeks can really do

There are roughly eight weeks between now and Christmas. For most adults, the NHS suggests that a safe rate of weight loss is around half a kilogram to a kilogram a week — roughly one to two pounds. Over eight weeks, that is somewhere between eight and sixteen pounds at the very most, and for many people the realistic figure will sit at the lower end.

That might sound modest. It is also enough to change how your clothes fit, how well you sleep, how much energy you have at four in the afternoon, and how you feel walking into a room. Those are the things you will actually notice on Christmas Day.

Why crash diets backfire

When you cut food dramatically, your body does what it was designed to do in a famine: it holds on. Energy drops. Concentration goes. Sleep suffers. Irritability rises. Much of the early weight lost on a very low-calorie diet is water, which returns the moment you eat normally again, and the rebound tends to arrive right on time for mince pies.

Very restrictive diets can also mean missing out on the protein, iron, calcium and vitamins you need, at exactly the time of year when colds are going round and the days are short. And for many women, especially in perimenopause and menopause, under-eating can make tiredness, poor sleep and mood swings noticeably worse.

Why over-training backfires too

The other temptation is to throw yourself into exercise — daily high-intensity classes, punishing runs, two sessions a day. Bodies that are not used to that load do not respond by getting fitter faster. They respond with aching joints, strained muscles, broken sleep and injuries that stop you exercising altogether.

The NHS recommends that adults aim for around 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, cycling or swimming, plus strengthening exercises on at least two days. That is about twenty minutes a day. It is a target, not a minimum to be doubled, and if you are starting from very little, it is something to build towards over weeks rather than achieve on day one.

Rest days are part of the plan. So is sleep. Muscles repair and appetite hormones settle while you rest, not while you push.

What actually helps

Eat a little less, not a lot less. Small, steady changes add up: slightly smaller portions, one less biscuit at eleven, a sandwich instead of a pastry. Nothing you will resent by week three.

Fill half your plate with vegetables. They fill you up, keep you regular and carry the vitamins winter tends to strip away.

Include protein at every meal. Eggs, fish, beans, lentils, chicken, yoghurt. Protein keeps you fuller for longer and helps protect muscle as you lose weight.

Watch what you drink. Alcohol, sugary coffees and fizzy drinks carry a surprising share of daily calories, and the run-up to Christmas is full of them. Alternate with water, and choose your occasions.

Walk, every day if you can. A brisk twenty-minute walk does more for most people than an hour of exercise they dread. Daylight is a bonus at this time of year.

Lift something. Two short sessions a week of bodyweight squats, wall press-ups or light weights help protect bone and muscle, which matters more with every birthday.

Sleep. Short sleep pushes up hunger and cravings. Protecting seven or so hours a night is one of the most effective weight-loss tools there is, and the least talked about.

Be kind to yourself in December

There will be a party where you eat the canapés and a Tuesday where the walk does not happen. That is not failure. That is December. The point of a gentle approach is that one evening cannot undo it, so you simply carry on the next morning.

And on Christmas Day itself, eat the dinner. Enjoy it. A body that has been treated well for eight weeks will cope perfectly well with a roast and a slice of pudding.

When to talk to someone first

If you have a medical condition, take regular medication, are pregnant, have a lot of weight to lose, or have had a difficult relationship with food or exercise in the past, speak to your GP or a pharmacist before changing how you eat or move. They can help you find an approach that is safe for you, and many areas offer free weight-management support.

A loose shape for the next eight weeks. Every week builds on the one before, and none of them asks you to do anything drastic. General guidance only; if you have a health condition, check with your GP first.

What does it mean when you look back on an event from three years ago, and you know that you were an established business woman and still attending events, now, you come across people you haven't met before. How do we, as women, support our younger selves by making sure we don't undersell ourselves?

When we meet new people, we're not coming out in business. Our network isn't shrinking, our merits and achievements aren't reduced in size, yet I find so often in myself and in other women this constriction of setting intermediate boundaries within groups.

Holding your resume front and centre in your own mind as you mingle with networking crowds is obviously a tactic to anticipate confidence and the expectation of guidance towards possible new friends, and being attentive is a skill. But if being attentive requires a deletion of everything in the forefront of my frontal lobes, then that's when I have to put my foot down. Saying "no" emotionally to the type of person that is so full of exuberance for their own experience while completely ignoring the witnessing that maybe is an aspect of their inflation of the moment.

Saying "no" to witnessing someone else's complete undoing around public speaking and their moment on stage feels to me like nothing more than a swampy river that I need to cross without getting eaten by a crocodile.

Their undoing starts out as your opportunity to show empathy. You listen kindly and with warmth. You begin in the most thoughtful way to project that moment in the conversation when they will inject something that lets you off the hook. I mean, the investment in the meeting and chat can be anything, and usually works out wonderfully because you're there to meet and chat and network with like-minded people.

But you start to realise there's no interjection coming and that you're standing there not as the important, stimulating, interesting person you came to be and to meet, but a prop. This person talking has only your witness, your imagination and possibly your heart. You look into their eyes, only lip service returns as their guide to help you along. You feel the sense of time, a clock and a wall. How you can see the texture of their clothes and the thickness of their guided transactional steps taking them to the event.

But they have no cue. They are the holders of valour when you need bravery.

They are stoking the flames of women's rights and powers with their emotions so clearly not within the room you have met because they are formulating the way they have been promoted, not as promotion but as victory.

When you're wanting strength and future momentum and it's the truth to your life, just remember that in that moment when the person you've never met claims to be giving you an ear, no one is there to say well done to all your achievements. Give yourself a massive pat on the back because you could be much stronger, wiser and wealthier than the truth of your emotional guidance. Your closest contender could be suffering a pet death or someone recently diagnosed with cancer.

It's so hard to tightly squeeze those Kegel-exercised muscles together and just bear through when no one has actually listened to your junket story of how your business rose to success out of the ashes of despair. But you will live again. You will have stepped through the paradigm of dignity so that the next opportunity shines.

Attentive, without disappearing

There's something interesting in the tension between being genuinely attentive to other women and disappearing yourself in the process.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet lessons of business that nobody puts on the networking agenda. We are told to connect, collaborate, support and listen. We are encouraged to make space for everyone else, and rightly so. But making space does not mean vacating the room.

You can listen without becoming invisible.
You can acknowledge another woman's fear without adopting it.
You can celebrate someone else's success without placing your own achievements beneath theirs.
And you can walk away from a conversation without deciding that you have somehow failed at networking.

Coming out in business, perhaps, is not about announcing yourself. It is not about walking into a room with a louder voice, a longer resume or a perfectly rehearsed story. It might simply be about remembering that you were already there.

You were already building.
You were already learning.
You were already surviving the moments that nobody in that room knows anything about.

The woman you were three years ago deserves some recognition too. She walked into rooms without knowing who she would meet. She made mistakes. She probably said yes when she wanted to say no. She listened when she wanted to speak. She gave away pieces of herself because she was still learning the difference between connection and obligation.

And maybe the woman standing in that room today doesn't need to do that anymore. You understand how things work and your presence has shone through without even serving the explorations of the past.

So, well done.

You don't have to prove that you belong.
You don't have to shrink your achievements to make someone else comfortable.

And you certainly don't have to disappear from your own story just because someone else has started telling theirs.

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do in business is simply remain present as yourself.

That is not coming out. That is remembering you never went away.

In 2017, in Zimbabwe, an elite team of fully armed anti-poachers came to be: the Akashinga. It means The Brave Ones in the Shona language.

Their task was simple: guard the wildlife of Phundundu Wildlife Area. That team, which numbered only sixteen, is now vast, and patrols vast swathes in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Botswana. The difference? They are all local women, survivors of domestic abuse, sexual assault, single mothers, widows, and orphans. They purposely recruit marginalised and vulnerable women from rural Zimbabwean society.

Africa's first and only all-female, armed, anti-poaching unit, and the recruitment process is gruelling because being a survivor only gets you through the door; special forces style tactical training, including camouflage, tracking, unarmed combat, and democratic policing — all must be learned and mastered before being recruited into the team.

It is the brainchild of Damien Mander, a former Australian special forces sniper, and his thinking was simple: recruit members who cared deeply for their surroundings, but also for their community. It is a well known fact that women in rural communities reinvest around 90% of their money back into local society, thereby allowing those around them to grow.

These women — many of whom would be entirely disregarded — could simultaneously protect nature and the families around them; these funds being put back into society were helping pay for schools and hospitals, all from just protecting the wildlife. And it is working.

Wildlife in the area has increased by 400%, elephant poaching has decreased around 80%, and systematically replacing commercial trophy hunting with community led sustainable management.

Chillies, bees and smoke

And it isn't just the commercial hunters either. A wandering elephant can easily destroy an entire farm in one night looking for food. Communities who are witness to this devastation are more likely to hunt down these rogue elephants and kill them, but pre-emptively teaching them how to build walls of capsaicin can prevent the destruction in the first place; elephants' trunks are highly sensitive and detest the heat compound in chillies, and will actively avoid going near them, as too will a fence of bees, an insect elephants will actively avoid. Even mixing crushed chillies with dried elephant dung and setting them alight will keep these majestic animals at bay due to the acrid spicy smoke.

In all cases, the Akashinga lead with non-lethal responses no matter the animal. Fires, bright lights, loud sounds, even firing blanks, anything to scare the animals away.

And because the teams are locals who understand the region, communities are far more likely to trust them, even when on the odd occasion a villager has been killed, or more likely livestock animals by an intruding lion; they sit down with them, teach these people, and offer compensation.

Their funding? Public donations, corporate sponsorship, and international philanthropy as they are a registered charity in the US and Australia. The Judith Neilson Foundation for instance gave them a massive AU$1,000,000 grant for recruitment and building of infrastructure. National Philanthropic Trust, the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, and the New York Community Trust all donated huge sums of money. All of this allows public donations to go directly to funding their endeavours.

Without a single shot

But here's the thing: whilst Zimbabwe allows these female rangers a 'shoot to kill' policy when it comes to poachers, it is strictly enforced by law and does not give them carte blanche to do as they like, allowing deadly force only when absolutely necessary, and only for self-preservation of themselves and team members.

Since 2017, they have been responsible for more than three hundred successful arrests of poachers and traffickers, and — this is the important part — without a single shot fired in the line of duty. Damien Mander's philosophy was always to de-escalate situations quickly, as he knew from experience in the Special Forces that heavily armed men will always, to a fault, resort to exceptional violence to resolve a conflict, and these men enter the areas fully armed with AK-47s and are trigger happy.

There have been deaths unfortunately amongst the Akashinga, but it is to be noted that all of these were not from aggression, but from simply performing their duties. Three members of the team, for instance, tragically lost their lives on the 25th of March 2018 in a drowning accident: Ranger Tendai Hunawe, Ranger Edzai Malunga, and Ranger Instructor Tarzman Foma.

Make no bones about it, this is a highly dangerous job, but these women enter it and perform knowing each mission could be their last, and yet, every single day they show up and perform an incredibly valuable job protecting the region, their families, their communities, and each other.

And they refuse to stop, even when they lose one of their sisters; to stand down would be dishonourable to their fallen companions.

In 2020, National Geographic made a short documentary, Akashinga: The Brave Ones, executive produced by James Cameron.

The Akashinga: warrior women with one mindset — protect nature to ensure their own survival.

Lacie Pound smiles at her bathroom mirror, practising the laugh. She tries it brighter, then softer, then brighter again. Outside, everyone she passes holds up a phone and gives her a score out of five, and she gives them one back. A good morning to the barista is worth a few tenths of a star. A frosty lift ride costs her.

That is the whole world of Nosedive, the episode that opened Black Mirror's third series and its first run on Netflix in October 2016. It is set in a pastel town where every interaction is rated, and the average of everyone's ratings decides where you can live, what you can rent, which flights you can take and who will still talk to you.

Ten years on, it plays less like science fiction than it did at the time.

The setup

Lacie, played by Bryce Dallas Howard, is a 4.2. Respectable. She wants to be a 4.5, because a 4.5 qualifies her for a discount on an apartment in a gleaming development she has toured and cannot otherwise afford. A consultant tells her plainly that the fastest way up is approval from high-rated people.

Then her childhood friend Naomi, played by Alice Eve, a glossy 4.8, asks her to be maid of honour at her wedding. A room full of high-rated guests. A speech. It looks like the answer to everything.

What follows is a single long journey to that wedding, and it goes wrong in increments. A spilled coffee. A cancelled flight. A raised voice at an airline desk. Each small humiliation costs her a fraction of a point, and each lost fraction makes the next humiliation more likely. The episode's title is the shape of the plot.

Why it works

The script, by Rashida Jones and Michael Schur from a story by Charlie Brooker, understands something sharper than "social media is bad". It understands that the system rewards performance of emotion over emotion itself, and that the people who suffer most are the ones trying hardest to play by the rules. Lacie is no villain and no fool. She is a woman doing exactly what she has been told, and the rules punish her for every flicker of a real feeling.

Howard is extraordinary in it. She plays Lacie's smile as a piece of equipment, something switched on and held in place by effort, and you can see the effort slipping long before the plot lets it fail. Critics singled her performance out at the time, and she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for it. The final half hour, when the smile stops working, is some of the best acting in the whole series.

Joe Wright, better known for Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, directs it like a period drama set in a theme park. The palette is all peach, mint and powder pink. Seamus McGarvey's photography, nominated for both a BAFTA and an Emmy, makes the world look as pleasant as it insists it is, which is exactly what makes it frightening.

The woman in the lorry

The episode's best scene belongs to Cherry Jones as Susan, a lorry driver who picks Lacie up from the side of the road. Susan is a 1.4, and entirely at peace with it. She tells Lacie why she stopped caring about her score, and the reason is quiet, specific and devastating. Then she offers her a drink.

It is the one moment in the episode when someone speaks to Lacie without calculating what it will cost them, and the contrast with everything before it lands hard. For a lot of women, especially women who have spent years being pleasant for a living, that scene is the reason the episode stays with them.

What has changed since 2016

When Nosedive came out, the conversation was about whether something like this could ever happen. Ten years later, star ratings decide which drivers keep working and which hosts keep listing. Follower counts open and close doors in industries that never used to care. Algorithms quietly reward the pleasant, the polished and the endlessly agreeable.

None of that is the episode's literal world. All of it is the episode's logic. That is why it is worth watching again now, rather than remembering it as the one with the pastel colours.

Where it slips

It is long for its idea, at just over an hour, and the middle section on the road repeats its point more than once. The satire is broad at times; a few of the high-rated characters are cartoons. Some viewers find the ending abrupt.

The ending is also its most hopeful moment, and without giving it away, it asks what is left of a person when the score finally stops mattering. The answer turns out to be rather a lot.

There is a story many women are told about midlife, and it tends to come in one of two versions. In the first, the best years are behind you and the job now is to manage the decline gracefully. In the second, you are meant to tear everything down and reinvent yourself from scratch, ideally with a new business, a new body and a new wardrobe by spring.

Becoming Her starts from a quieter and more useful idea: that you do not have to start over. You can move forward from exactly where you are, carrying everything you have already learned.

Who is Victoria Lefebre?

Victoria Lefebre is a certified manifestation and mindset coach, and she hosts the show weekly. Her focus is on women in the middle of their lives who are ready for what comes next, and on the three areas where midlife tends to shake things loose at once: health, money and the sense of who you are.

Why those three belong together

Most shows choose one. Health podcasts talk about bodies, money podcasts talk about pensions and pricing, and mindset podcasts talk about identity as if the other two did not exist. For a woman in her forties or fifties, they arrive tangled together. A change in health changes how much energy there is for work. A change in work changes money. A change in money, or in a marriage, or in a family, changes who you think you are.

A show that holds all three in one conversation is describing midlife as it is actually lived, rather than as a set of separate problems to be solved in separate apps.

Why it belongs in DWC

A great many DWC readers are at exactly this point: established, capable, and quietly asking what the next twenty years are for. A podcast that treats that question with seriousness and hope, rather than panic or nostalgia, fits naturally alongside the rest of this issue, from Ruth Elliott-Booth's cover story about rebuilding after a diagnosis to Jaala on self-love in practice.

The quickest way to know whether a show is for you is still the first two minutes of any episode. Put one on during a walk and see whether you find yourself slowing down to listen.