WELCOME BACK

Last month, we worked on permission. Taking it back and claiming authority over your own life…

Some of you burned papers at the new moon. Some of you are still working on saying “no” without explanation. Some of you claimed one permission and discovered seventeen more you still need to take.

That’s all good. That’s the work.

Today we’re doing something different but very much related: The Mess Inventory.

We’re going to examine every area of your life and ask: Is this mess mine? Is it someone else’s I’m carrying? Is it glorious (evidence of living) or symptomatic (evidence of drowning)?

By the end of this workshop, you’ll know:

• What mess is actually yours
• What mess you’re carrying for others
• What mess is creative chaos
• What mess is depression or dysfunction
• What you can set down
• What you need to keep
• What needs help you’re not getting

Like much of this work thus far, its going to be uncomfortable.

We’re going to look at the parts of your life you’ve been avoiding looking at. The piles of stuff you’ve been dodging for months or years.

But avoidance costs energy. Examining costs energy once. Avoidance costs energy over and over and over.

Shall we begin?

PART ONE: WHAT IS MESS, ACTUALLY?

Before we inventory it, we need to define it.

Mess is not a moral category.

It’s not evidence of virtue or its absence. It’s not proof of your worth or lack thereof. It’s just: disorder. Incomplete systems. Things undone. Chaos where you hoped for order.

That said though, it is worth considering that there are different types of mess. And that they require different responses.

THE FOUR TYPES OF MESS

Type 1: Creative Mess (Keep It)

This is evidence of work in progress. Projects mid-development. Ideas being explored. Making that requires materials spread out.

Examples:

• Books stacked by your reading chair because you’re reading five simultaneously
• Craft supplies covering the table because you’re in the middle of something
• Papers and notes everywhere because you’re writing
• Garden tools not put away because you’re coming back to it tomorrow

Characteristics:

• You know what it is
• You know why it’s there
• It doesn’t bother you (much)
• It’s in service of something you care about
• It’ll resolve when the project does

Response: Leave it. This is GENERATIVE chaos. Evidence of living, and for the most part, not dysfunction.

Ghosts are neither guests nor tenants. They don’t pay rent or negotiate terms for having us host them. They simply arrive in grief-wrapped memories and they take up residence in your actual, breathing life. Not metaphorically. Or in some poetic sense. Actually.

I live with a ghost now. Ben’s late partner is as present in our relationship as the furniture, as the routines he still keeps, as the silences that open up when certain songs play or certain dates arrive. She’s not a memory I can respectfully acknowledge and move past. She’s a permanent third presence, and loving him means making space for her. Learning to honour a woman I never met because she shaped the man I’m learning to love.

Her name was Gemma. I’m naming her because she was real, because she deserves to be more than “the late partner” or “the ghost.” To still be credited as herself. She was beautiful. I’ve seen the photographs, the way light loved her face, the way Ben’s face changes when he looks at those images. But she’s not in this house. Not in any way you can point to. In his early grief, Ben emptied everything. Stripped the walls. Tore up the floors. Ripped out the kitchen. Chipped away plaster until rooms were raw wounds.

I don’t think he was trying to erase her. He was trying to leave without leaving her behind. Trying to take their life with him by destroying it, so it wouldn’t sit there waiting for him like Casey Afflek in A Ghost Story, standing under a sheet in an empty house, watching life continue without him. Better to tear it all down than abandon her to rooms that would go on existing without her in them. Better to make the house uninhabitable than live in the mausoleum of what they’d built together.

And yet, of course, she’s everywhere. Because we women, we are houses.

That’s the terrible thing. She’s here in the absence. In the scar of what’s been removed. In the bare floors and exposed brick and the kitchen brutally torn out. The house itself is a monument to grief. Not beautiful, not decorated, but raw and terrible with its own mourning. Ben trying to take Gemma with him by destroying what they’d made together.

There is no tidy narrative of moving on here. This is Wuthering Heights shizzle. The dead refusing their exile, the living unable to stop calling them back, and everyone involved too honest to pretend it’s anything other than complicated and occasionally unbearable and somehow, impossibly, a form of love. Because here’s what Emily Brontë understood that most ghost stories don’t: the haunting is not the problem. The haunting is the truth.

It’s the pretending we’re not haunted that kills us.

We do not pretend here and sometimes it is beautiful and sometimes it is terrible. Ben and I are both neurodivergent. We recognise it in each other the way Catherine and Heathcliff recognised themselves. Not just through diagnosis or language but through the fundamental shape of how we move through the world. The way we both need routines that look like rigidity to outsiders but feel like survival to us. The way we both experience emotion at volumes that seem disproportionate and somehow savage to neurotypical observers. The way grief, for him, isn’t something fading on an appropriate timeline but something that lives in his nervous system permanently now, a ghost made of neurons firing in patterns worn deep by love and loss. Passion that has us tearing strips off each other.

His response to Gemma’s death wasn’t just sentiment. It was his brain trying to process the impossible: that someone can be gone and still be everywhere. He made the life they’d shared physically impossible to continue. He destroyed every surface they’d chosen together, every room they’d lived in, every visible manifestation of the future that died with her. It didn’t work. It can’t work. I understand this because my own neurodivergent brain does the same thing with obsession, with the need to return again and again to Haworth, to the moors, to Wuthering Heights itself. We’re both wired to feel everything too much and to build elaborate structures to contain it. The ghosts aren’t optional. They’re souls beyond our own, that we have no choice but to house.

This isn’t superiority. If anything, it’s impediment. This permeability between self and other, this inability to maintain clean boundaries between what’s mine and what’s theirs, between who I am and who I’m loving. It means I can understand Catherine and Heathcliff’s warped devotion because I’m capable of that same warping. It means I live in Gemma’s house even though there’s no trace of her aesthetic anywhere, can’t tell where her absence ends and Ben’s grief begins, whether I’m honouring her or drowning in the space where she used to be?

I live in this house the way the second Mrs. de Winter lived in Rebecca’s Manderley, except there’s no sinister Mrs. Danvers preserving a shrine. There’s the opposite. There’s evidence of deliberate, systematic destruction. And somehow that makes the haunting worse. At Manderley, Rebecca was everywhere. In the monogrammed brushes, the chosen fabrics, the perfect rooms. Here, Gemma is everywhere precisely because she’s nowhere. And therein is the sorrow.

Nobody tells you that Wuthering Heights is actually a ghost story. They call it a romance, a Gothic novel, or a study in obsession. Anything but what it really is: a book about the unbearable weight of the dead on the living, and how sometimes we become our own ghosts long before we die. Think about what actually happens in the novel: Catherine dies halfway through, and then the entire second half is Heathcliff trying to follow her into death while simultaneously making everyone else’s life hell.

He’s not living.

He’s haunting his own existence, a ghost wearing flesh that inconveniences him.

Waste laid bare and vicious and terrible and destructive. While the world watches on bewildered.

“I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” he howls at her corpse, and we’re supposed to find this romantic, but really it’s necrophilia of the spirit. He’s in love with a dead woman. More than that: he’s in love with being dead alongside her, and furious that his body won’t cooperate with his soul’s departure. When Catherine’s ghost appears at the window in the novel’s opening, that scene that terrifies Lockwood so thoroughly he rubs her wrist against broken glass to make her let go, we’re witnessing something more primal than Gothic convention. We’re seeing what happens when desire refuses mortality.

But we’re also seeing something else: what happens when a neurodivergent mind latches onto a pattern it can’t release.

Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine has the quality of a special interest taken to its most terrible extreme. A monotropic refusal to let go because letting go doesn’t make sense, a type of hyperfocus that won’t disengage, the inability to shift attention even when the object is gone, the way his entire cognitive and emotional architecture re-organised itself around her and cannot be rebuilt without her. This isn’t just romantic excess. It is a brain that cannot stop doing the thing it does, even when the thing is destroying him. Ben tearing apart a house so the life he had with Gemma couldn’t continue without her, that’s the same impulse.

The neurodivergent need to do something with grief, to make it physical, to destroy what can’t be kept rather than watch it become something else without her in it.

Catherine cannot rest because Heathcliff won’t release her. Heathcliff cannot rest because Catherine won’t wait. They’re locked in an eternal mutual haunting, each blaming the other for dying first or living too long. This is the romance we’ve cherished for nearly two centuries: two people so consumed with each other they cannot even die properly. And here’s what disturbs me most, what keeps me driving north to Haworth with increasing frequency now that I’m deep into my fifties: I understand the appeal. Not because I’m better equipped to handle it, but because I’m worse equipped to resist it.

For here’s the thing about Wuthering Heights that divides readers into camps more sharply than almost any other novel: it’s a book soaked in raw, uncomfortable sensuality, and if you’ve never experienced that particular flavour of desire, the kind that obliterates reason, that operates below language, that exists in the body before it reaches the brain, the book will always remain opaque to you. Bewildering. Excessive.

Melodramatic.

Because there are people who’ve lived entire lives in clean rooms with good lighting and appropriate boundaries, where passion arrives neatly packaged and desire knows its place and love follows a comprehensible arc from meeting to commitment to contentment. Hollywood love. Sanitised. Linear. Neurotypical love, perhaps, or at least the version of it that assumes everyone feels things in predictable, manageable increments. Those people read Wuthering Heights and see only dysfunction. They see Heathcliff’s obsession as pathology to diagnose, Catherine’s declaration “I am Heathcliff” as codependency requiring intervention.

They’re not wrong, exactly.

They’re just dry.

But those of us who’ve leaned into terrible passion, who know what it is to want someone so completely that the boundary between self and other dissolves, who’ve felt desire like a physical pain in the solar plexus, who understand that sometimes love does feel like dying and you do it anyway because the alternative is worse, we read this book and recognise ourselves in the wreckage. We know that Heathcliff opening Catherine’s coffin eighteen years after her death to look at her face isn’t romantic, but we also know it’s true. Some hungers don’t respect the decency of graves. Some brains don’t let go just because they should.

This permeability between self and other, this thing that makes perfect sense to those of us whose boundaries have always been more permeable than they’re supposed to be, is both gift and curse. It means I can love Ben while he grieves Gemma because I don’t experience her as competition so much as continuation. She’s part of him, woven into his nervous system, and loving him means loving the shape she made of him. But it also means I sometimes can’t tell where my grief for my own life ends and his begins, where my identity stops and his starts, whether the sadness I’m feeling on a Tuesday afternoon is mine or his or Gemma’s somehow bleeding through the stripped walls of this house.

Catherine telling Nelly “I am Heathcliff” isn’t metaphor for people like us.

It’s description.

It’s what happens when your sense of self is less solid structure and more permeable membrane, when you absorb the people you love until you can’t perform the surgery of separating their feelings from yours, their history from yours, their ghosts from yours. This is what made Catherine and Heathcliff so devastating to each other. Not that they loved too much, but that they couldn’t maintain the boundary where one ended and the other began. They were psychologically enmeshed in a way that made Catherine’s marriage to Edgar not just betrayal but amputation, and Heathcliff’s response not just grief but the howling of a severed limb.

I walk through this house that Gemma walked too, a house that Ben systematically stripped of the life they’d made, and I absorb her absence through these porous boundaries until sometimes I can’t breathe for the weight of what’s not there. There are exposed brick walls where plaster used to be. Concrete floors where she chose something warmer. A kitchen brutal and bare. But somehow that makes her more present, not less. The violence of the destruction is louder than decoration would be I think? So I sleep in the bedroom where Ben tore up the carpet. I cook on the landing he gutted. And I live in the architectural manifestation of grief that tried to take a life with it by destroying the container.

This is not the Gothic horror of Rebecca. There’s no malevolence here, no Mrs. Danvers whispering poison. It’s just difficult. It’s just living in a house that’s falling down, that’s raw with its own mourning, that was systematically destroyed so the life it held couldn’t continue without her. The house is terrible in its honesty. It doesn’t pretend grief can be redecorated over. It shows you what grief actually looks like: the skeleton of a home that can’t quite become whole again because making it whole would mean the life they had together could continue without her in it.

And that’s unbearable.

The second Mrs. de Winter spends that entire novel trying to become Rebecca, to match her sophistication, to fill the space she left. I’m not trying to become Gemma. But I’m also living in the violent evidence of her absence, watching her daughters grow up, alongside Ben, sleeping in rooms he stripped bare trying to make their life impossible to continue, and sometimes the permeability of my boundaries means I’m not sure where her ghost ends and his grief begins, where the house’s mourning ends and mine starts. Sometimes I walk through rooms and feel her in the wrongness of what’s not there. In the places where choices should be but aren’t, where warmth should exist but doesn’t, where a woman’s life should have continued but was made impossible as testimony to grief.

This is the impediment of understanding Catherine and Heathcliff too well. I can’t maintain the clean separation that would make this easier. I can’t love Ben without also loving the shape Gemma made of him, while simultaneously resenting the sadder parts that may not have existed if she hadn’t. I can’t live in this house without absorbing its grief, can’t maintain the boundaries that would protect me from the haunting because my neurodivergent brain doesn’t build those walls very well to begin with. The house is falling down around us, literally falling down, and we have lived in it anyway because leaving felt like one more abandonment. One more way of saying the life they had doesn’t matter anymore. And though of course that isn’t true, it is also too true to be a lie?

Emily Brontë was almost certainly neurodivergent. The evidence screams from every biography: her profound difficulty with social situations, her preference for solitude that went beyond mere introversion into something more fundamental, her ability to create entire elaborate fantasy worlds with her siblings that were more real to her than actual social obligations, her intense bond with animals, her resistance to conventions that made no sense to her even when compliance would have made her life easier. The way she literally walked herself to death rather than submit to medical treatment that seemed pointless to her. The way she could write a novel this visceral, this soaked in sensory detail and overwhelming emotion, while living an outwardly restricted spinster’s life in a parsonage.

She understood sensory overwhelm. The moors are full of it, every description thick with wind and cold and the scratch of heather and the uncertain ground beneath your feet. She understood obsessive focus. The way Heathcliff literally cannot think about anything except Catherine for decades, the way Catherine’s entire illness is triggered by not being able to reconcile incompatible needs. She understood the feeling of being wrong-shaped for the world you’re forced to inhabit, of being too intense, too much, too unwilling to modulate yourself into something acceptable.

Catherine and Heathcliff read as neurodivergent to me in ways the book never names but absolutely shows. The way they communicate in a private language nobody else understands. The way they’re feral children together who never quite learn to mask properly. Heathcliff never manages it at all, and Catherine’s attempt to perform as Mrs. Linton literally kills her. The way they both experience rejection and abandonment as something that reshapes their entire neurology permanently.

The way neither of them can do things by halves.

It’s everything or nothing, obsession or exile, life or death!

The sensuality in Wuthering Heights isn’t pretty. It’s not soft-focus sex scenes or tasteful fade-to-black. It’s Heathcliff and Catherine as children sleeping in the same bed, their bodies knowing each other before sex enters the equation. It’s the physicality of the moors. Mud and rain and wind that gets inside your clothes, inside your skin. It’s Catherine pulling out her pillow feathers with hands that want to tear at something, anything, because her body is a cage and desire has nowhere to go. It’s Heathcliff clutching at the earth of her grave, trying to claw his way down to her. It’s bodies as sites of suffering, of longing so intense it becomes indistinguishable from violence.

It’s also the sensuality of neurodivergent experience. The way we often feel physical sensations more intensely, the way emotion lives in the body as much as the mind, the way desire can become a form of sensory overwhelm. The way Catherine describes feeling Heathcliff in her body, not metaphorically but as an actual physical presence, makes perfect sense to those of us whose sense of self-and-other has always been more permeable than it’s supposed to be. We don’t have the clean edges. We leak into other people and they leak into us. We carry our loved ones in our bodies, in our nervous systems, not as romantic metaphor but as lived experience. This is why Gemma is in the walls of this house for me. Not haunting in the ghost-story sense, but present because my boundaries are too porous to keep her out, because loving Ben means absorbing his grief, his memories, his past, his violence of destruction, until they become partially mine too. The stripped walls and torn floors aren’t just his grief. They’re mine now too, absorbed through the permeable membrane of my neurodivergent empathy.

This permeability is why we’re moving to Yorkshire soon. Not to Haworth itself. That would be too much. But to Hebden Bridge, over the moors from where the Brontës walked. Ben needs the canal the way the Brontës needed the moors. That specific landscape that speaks to his particular neurology, the rhythm of water instead of wind, the contained movement of boats instead of the exposure of hilltops. I want the hills, though I’m not a natural climber. I’m trapped by lungs that scream and legs that burn, by a body that finds the moors challenging and curious rather than easy. I want to be that free in the nothingness but I struggle with every step. The moors defeat me.

And still I want them.

Still I drive north to be humiliated by them, to clutch at shop windows halfway up Haworth’s terrible high street, to understand in my refusing body what Catherine meant about being exiled from the place that feels like home.

We’ll live between spaces: a narrowboat and a house, separate places that belong to both of us, room to breathe apart while being together. Space for each of us that doesn’t require constant proximity, that understands neurodivergent love sometimes means loving best from adjacent spaces rather than overlapping ones.

The moors will be close enough to feed my feral thing without drowning in it. Close enough to visit when I need them, to fail at climbing them, to want what my body can’t easily give me. The canal will give Ben what he needs. The specific rhythm of water, the contained movement, the particular kind of solitude that floating offers. And Hebden Bridge sits between them, valley town that understands outsiders, that’s always been a place for people who don’t quite fit anywhere else. We’re leaving this house where the life he had with Gemma was made architecturally impossible, this house that’s falling down with its own grief, going somewhere that offers landscape for grief to move through without demanding it take any particular shape.

The moors don’t ask you to moderate your feelings, you see? They don’t require you to move on according to appropriate timelines. They simply are. Vast and harsh and indifferent to human need for closure. They also don’t care if you’re fit enough for them. They defeat you anyway. They let you want them without being able to have them easily. The canal offers something else: containment without confinement, movement without destination, solitude that isn’t isolation. Perfect for a widower whose grief won’t follow the rules and a woman whose boundaries have always been too permeable to protect her from other people’s pain. Perfect for two neurodivergent people who need both togetherness and separateness, who understand that love doesn’t require constant occupation of the same space.

We need space where Gemma can be allowed to wander free from the kind of trauma that besieged her in life, where Ben’s haunting can exist without walls stripped bare to contain it, where I can love him without living inside the physical manifestation of grief trying to make a life impossible, and failing. Yorkshire offers this. The moors for me to want even as they defeat me, the canal for him to move through, Hebden Bridge between us like a hinge. A landscape so overwhelming that human ghosts become just part of the general haunting, where the wind carries everyone’s grief and the heather blooms regardless and the stone walls endure whether we endure or not. Where water moves and takes things with it, where you can live on a boat that’s both home and escape.

Where separateness doesn’t mean distance.

Emily Brontë understood that desire isn’t civilised. That it doesn’t follow rules or respond to reason or care about who gets hurt. That sometimes the body wants what it wants with a force that makes morality irrelevant. She was a virgin when she wrote this, at least we assume she was, dying unmarried at thirty, but she understood carnality in a way that has nothing to do with technical sexual experience and everything to do with being a body that feels without the mediating influence of propriety. A neurodivergent body that experiences everything at higher volume, that can’t dial down intensity to socially acceptable levels.

The people who struggle with this book are often the ones who’ve never let themselves be irrational. Who’ve never made a catastrophically bad decision driven purely by want. Who’ve never stayed in something that was destroying them because leaving felt like amputating part of themselves. They read Catherine’s choices and see weakness where those of us who’ve been, or who are Catherine see terrible, painful honesty. She knows Edgar Linton is the sensible choice. She knows Heathcliff is damage. She chooses both and it kills her, and that’s not a failure of judgment. It’s the inevitable outcome when a body tries to contain contradictions that large.

This is why I can manage a ghost in the middle of my relationship. Why I can love a man whose dead parter will always be his first love, his deepest grief, and his permanent haunting. Because I learned long ago that nothing worth having is linear or pure or clean or easy. That love is almost always haunted by something. Past lovers, past selves, past certainties that died hard. That if you wait for uncomplicated, you’ll wait forever, and even if you find it, it probably won’t be worth the safety it offers.

Those of us this way inclined, those of us who read Wuthering Heights and nod in recognition rather than recoil in horror, we’ve already made peace with the glorious mess of it all. We know that passion is often pointless, that it rarely leads anywhere productive, that it can destroy more than it creates. But we let ourselves be possessed by it anyway. Not because we’re self-destructive, though sometimes we are. But because the alternative, the dry, contained, sensible life where everything makes sense and nothing overwhelms, feels like death by other means.

We can rationalise the ghost because we understand that intensity doesn’t follow the rules. That you can love someone completely while knowing they carry someone else in their heart. That desire doesn’t require exclusivity to be real. That sometimes the most honest thing you can do is acknowledge the haunting and make space for it rather than demanding it be exorcised for your comfort. Ben’s neurodivergence means he can’t just “move on” the way neurotypical grief advice suggests. His brain doesn’t work that way. Mine means I understand this without him having to explain it, because my brain doesn’t work that way either. And my permeable boundaries mean Gemma’s ghost doesn’t threaten me. It inhabits me, the way all the people I love inhabit me, the way Catherine insisted Heathcliff inhabited her. She inhabits this house, and I absorb her absence until it becomes mine too. At once threatened by it and so very aware of the absolute privilege of bearing witness to it, of being allowed to hold grief in my arms and nurse it into something that will in the long term, I hope, give it meaning.

I’m fifty-three and the wild hasn’t died in me. It’s being suffocated, which is different, which is worse, which is the actual violence that Catherine Earnshaw was trying to articulate when she pulled out her pillow feathers and talked about being exiled from the moors. The ghost of who I was isn’t haunting me from the outside. It’s trapped inside, clawing at the walls of propriety and reasonable adult behaviour, and some days I can feel it throwing itself against my ribs like Catherine at that window.

I still want everything. I still feel desire and rage and ambition and grief with the same intensity I did at twenty, except now there’s this exhausting overlay of having to manage it, of having to translate these enormous feelings into appropriate adult-sized responses. Of having to suffocate the feral thing so it doesn’t frighten people. Of having to mask my neurodivergence in ways that drain every ounce of energy I have. This is what Catherine meant when she said “I’m tired of being enclosed here. I’m wearying to escape into that glorious world, and to be always there.” She wasn’t being metaphorical about heaven. She was talking about the moors. She was talking about the version of herself that existed before she learned to perform civilisation.

Before she learned to mask.

She dies not because the passion kills her but because the suppression of it does. The ghost she becomes after death is just the externalisation of the ghost she was forced to become while living. The Catherine who could exist without performing propriety, without pretending to be someone she fundamentally wasn’t. I understand this now in my body, not just my mind. The wild thing won’t stay buried. It rattles its chains. It demands acknowledgment. And every time I make the drive north to Haworth, I’m not visiting the Brontës’ graves. I’m feeding the thing inside me that refuses to die quietly.

This is exactly the Catherine-Heathcliff-Edgar triangle, played out again with different people. Gemma as Catherine. The one who died too young, who haunts everyone left behind, whose absence shapes everything. Ben as Heathcliff. Obsessed, struggling to move on, destroying the house they shared so their life couldn’t continue without her, making the haunting worse through his attempts to take her with him. Me as Edgar. Trying to love someone whose soul will always partially belong to someone else, trying to make a life in a house where the ghost screams from every stripped wall, learning to accept that I will never be first, never be most formative, never be the love that breaks him.

This is the version of Wuthering Heights nobody writes: where Catherine dies but Heathcliff and Edgar both have to keep living, and that’s somehow harder than the novel’s version where death eventually solves everything. Where you have to get up every morning and choose the haunting. Choose to honour the ghost. Choose to love someone whose heart has a permanent room reserved for someone else. Choose to live in the house the ghost was violently removed from, which only made her more present. Choose, eventually, to leave the house falling down with grief and move towards landscape that understands grief doesn’t resolve.

It just changes shape.

Emily Brontë would understand this. She lived in a house full of ghosts. Her mother dead young, Maria and Elizabeth dead in childhood, Branwell dying slowly of drink and disappointment. The parsonage wasn’t a home; it was a way station between life and death, everyone drifting through on their way to the graveyard that pressed right up against the house. She wrote about people who couldn’t let go because she lived in a family that wouldn’t, that kept the dead as vivid as the living, that understood you don’t “move on” from grief. You just make the ghost more comfortable.

She understood that the choice isn’t between being haunted and being free. The choice is between which ghosts you’ll honour and how. And she understood something else too: you cannot understand Wuthering Heights without understanding that the moors are not backdrop. They’re where the truth lives, where you can’t perform wellness or emotional regulation because the wind will literally blow them off you.

I realised this the second or third time I climbed the path towards Top Withens, when the mist came down so thick I could barely see my own hands, and I understood with my body what Emily Brontë understood with hers: this landscape is liminal. The veil between worlds is tissue-paper thin up here. The dead don’t stay buried in Yorkshire soil. They walk. They scratch at windows.

They refuse their exile.

Every time I stand on the moors, I’m struck by how deliberate they feel. Not natural in the sense of random or neutral, but natural in the sense of having intention? The moors want things. They shape things. They punish presumption. The Brontë siblings walked these moors daily, in all weather, telling each other the stories that would become their novels. They knew every bog and stone, every place where the path disappeared into heather, every sudden drop where the land simply stopped and you had to remember not to keep walking.

They understood that this landscape makes you honest. It won’t tolerate pretence. You can’t perform up here. The sensuality of the moors is harsh. It’s not about beauty in any conventional sense. It’s about the body’s response to cold and wind and the uncertain ground beneath your feet. It’s about rain that soaks through to your skin and mud that sucks at your boots and the way your thighs burn climbing and your lungs scream for air. It’s physical in a way that forces you to be present in your body, to feel every step, every breath. This is the landscape that taught Emily Brontë what desire feels like. Not the sanitised Hollywood version, but the Haworth version, where wanting something is a full-body experience that hurts.

For those of us who are neurodivergent, the moors offer something essential: a place where sensory input is so overwhelming that you stop trying to modulate your response to it. You can’t mask against wind this fierce. You can’t tone down your reaction to cold that bites this deep. The moors demand your full, unfiltered neurodivergent response, and they don’t judge you for it. Catherine and Heathcliff running wild on the moors as children weren’t just playing. They were existing in the only environment where they didn’t have to pretend to be smaller, quieter, more manageable than they were.

The heather I will walk through is the same species Emily walked through. The stone walls are older than the Brontë family, older than the English language in its current form. The wind has been having this exact conversation with this exact hillside for millennia. When Catherine tells Nelly she is the moors, she’s not being metaphorical.

She’s explaining taxonomy.

She’s the same kind of thing as this place: impossible to domesticate, punishing to love, magnificent in her refusal to be otherwise.

But before you can reach the moors, you have to survive Haworth’s high street. You know what’s humiliating? Nearly dying on a Yorkshire high street while trying to reach the Brontë parsonage. Not metaphorically dying. Actually, physically, clutching at shop windows and wheezing like a broken accordion while my heart tried to jackhammer its way out of my chest. The main street in Haworth is vertical. It’s not a street. It’s a punishment for hubris. It’s cobbled with stones that have been there since the 1600s, the kind of cobbles that say “Emily Brontë walked here in a corset and full skirts and didn’t complain, so shut up and keep climbing.”

I was maybe halfway up, past the Black Bull where Branwell drank himself to death, past the tea shops with their neat little displays of Victoria sponge and scones, when my body staged a mutiny. My thighs were burning. My lungs were screaming. I had to stop and press my hands against the window of some shop. I don’t even remember which one, I was too busy trying not to pass out, just to stay upright. The window glass was cold. Old. The kind of glass that has imperfections, that shows you a slightly warped version of yourself. And I thought: Emily touched these stones. Maybe she looked through this glass. These shops have stood here since she was alive, selling different things but occupying the same stubborn verticality, the same refusal to make anything easy.

She climbed this street multiple times a day. Sick, eventually, with tuberculosis eating her lungs, and still she climbed it. Still she walked the moors beyond, where the ground is uncertain and the wind tries to push you horizontal and every step requires commitment. This is not romantic. This is not quaint literary tourism. This is understanding in your trembling legs and screaming lungs what it meant to live here, to be her, to write that book from this body in this place. The steepness isn’t incidental. It’s essential. You cannot be lazy in Haworth. You cannot drift. Every destination requires effort, requires your body to insist on arrival against the landscape’s resistance.

Wuthering Heights is written from a body that climbed that hill daily. From lungs that knew what it was to fight for air. From legs that understood the difference between going up and coming down, how descent requires a different kind of strength than ascent. When I finally made it to the top, eventually, wheezing, possibly crying a little though I’ll deny it, I understood something visceral about why the Brontës wrote what they wrote. This place demands everything. And if you’re the kind of person who gives it, you have nothing left for polite restraint. If you’re neurodivergent and already giving everything just to navigate a world that wasn’t built for your nervous system, a place like this that demands total authenticity becomes paradoxically restful.

You can stop pretending.

The moors won’t judge you for being too much. They won’t judge you for failing them either.

The thing about Haworth is the Brontës don’t feel like history. They feel like ghosts. Everywhere and immediate and more alive than most living people manage to be. Not in the tourist-kitsch sense, though God knows the village trades on them shamelessly. Every third shop is “Brontë this” or “Wuthering that,” selling tea towels and mugs and bookmarks with Heath Cliff looking moody on them. But underneath the commerce, behind it, threading through it, the actual presence of them. Three sisters and one doomed brother, all dying too young, all burning too bright, all of them still there in the stones and the wind and the particular quality of light that comes through the parsonage windows.

I feel Charlotte in the museum, anxious and dutiful, trying to make sense of Emily’s genius for visitors who want it explained. Charlotte who tried so hard to make Emily palatable, to apologise for the “coarseness” of Wuthering Heights, who herself was probably neurodivergent but learned to mask better than her sister ever could or would. I feel Emily on the moors, obviously, everywhere, in every gust of wind and patch of heather. She’s not peaceful in death any more than she was in life. She’s insistent, demanding you pay attention, refusing to be decorative or comfortable or tamed by literary history. Branwell’s in the pub still, probably, drunk on potential and disappointment, his ghost the saddest kind. The one who knows he wasted it. And Anne, gentle Anne who everyone forgets, who wrote books about how women survive men’s violence and addictions, who watched her brother destroy himself and wrote it down with unflinching clarity, she’s there too, quieter but no less present, the ghost who doesn’t demand attention but deserves it.

They’re not museum pieces. They’re not tourist attractions. They’re ghosts in the realest sense: presences that won’t disperse, that inhabit the landscape, that make themselves known whether you’re ready for them or not. Walking through Haworth after dark, which I did once, stupidly, you don’t feel alone. Not in a threatening way. Just in a crowded way. Like walking through a party where you only recognise half the guests, and the other half are dead but haven’t noticed yet.

The Brontës cough and rage and burn through that village still.

Vibrant as heather, stubborn as stone, refusing their exile from the land they turned into literature. Wild and true and refusing to die.

So here I am, fifty-three years old.

The wild thing in me hasn’t died either. It’s just learned to be quieter, more strategic, more patient. It waits for the drives north. It waits for the moments when I’m alone and can let it out without witnesses. It waits for the nights when I write and the carefully constructed adult dissolves and the feral thing underneath gets to speak.

Gemma didn’t choose death. Death chose her in the most outrageously sad way and who would blame her for wanting to haunt the life that was once hers? And now I sleep in her bedroom, choosing to honour her, and to acknowledge her absence rather than heer presence. Choosing to drive north repeatedly to feed the ghost inside me that won’t stay buried and shouldn’t have to. Choosing the beauty in the horror, the meaning in the cruel and the pointlessness of death, the truth in the terrible passion that makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t lived it. Choosing to love another neurodivergent person who understands that ghosts are real and intensity is not pathology and some of us are simply wired to feel everything at volumes that would break neurotypical hearts.

Choosing too, to move toward Yorkshire, towards landscape that won’t ask us to be reasonable. Space that doesn’t spell constant proximity, that understands neurodivergent love sometimes means loving best from adjacent spaces altogether, at least in the short term as we learn to live not in yesterday (impossible), nor in tomorrow (unimaginable), but in the now of who we are together. Where the moors will be close enough to visit, to want, to fail at, to be defeated by, but not so close we’re suffocating inside the obsession. Where the canal can take grief and move it horizontally, where water understands what wind understands: that some things don’t resolve.

They just keep moving.

The moors will outlast all of us. The stones of Haworth’s terrible high street will still be vertical when we’re dust. The Brontës will still haunt that village, coughing and writing and burning through the centuries. The canal will still flow through Hebden Bridge, carrying narrowboats and ghosts and grief that needs somewhere to go. And Wuthering Heights will still be there. Not as a romance but as a ghost story, not as a warning but as a recognition: some of us are simply made this way. Greedy for life, for love, for intensity. Unable to do moderate. Unwilling to suffocate the wild thing even when civilisation demands it. Neurodivergent in a world built for other nervous systems, finding our truth in books written by people whose brains worked like ours, who understood that the ghosts won’t stay buried because they were never meant to.

The ghosts won’t stay buried. And thank God for that.

We women are houses, and Ben, Ben is a boat.

Hello. What’s new? Here at Chaos Central, Meep has contracted the plague (a cold) and appointed himself Supreme Guardian of a bit of plastic the size of my thumbnail. While I am self-medicating with narrowboat videos – these slow, hypnotic canals being my current drug of choice, all over again, and Ben has escaped to the wilderness with his spanielly mates.

It is Sunday. I have committed the crime of sleeping through morning. Then I drank enough coffee to fuel a small village, which naturally made me immediately comatose (because my body is hilarious), so I slept again. And then, plot twist, I felt absolutely zero guilt about any of this because I am a proper grown-up who can sleep whenever she bloody well pleases.

Except that’s a lie.

I talked about this with Ben this morning. I said “I might stay in bed all day long.”

He said, “Yes, do.”

“I’m not sure I can,” I said. “I’ll feel naughty in my head.”

And “Me too,” he admitted. “But we need to teach ourselves we’re safe. That if we need sleep and there’s nothing urgent, we’re allowed to sleep.”

And then he went to the shop and brought me soup to sip in bed. And told me to sleep afterwards and I said I would and then as soon as he left the house again, I felt naughty in my head and got up and cleaned what amounts to cleaning here, and then I got dressed and ate a tangerine and drank a gallon of water and I was up and not asleep at all and so I put Youtube on the TV, in search of my favourite narrow-boater and then of course I opened my laptop because if I am upright I should be working because how else will I afford tangerines? And soon I was not sleeping at at all, pushing my exhaustion into the dark cupboard at the back of my skull, and overseeing a war between the cats over said piece of plastic and watching a woman living a dream life tootling up and down the canals, reading books she finds in telephone box libraries and frying halloumi in orange Le Creuset pans.

And now Ben is home with muddy feet and it is five o’clock in the afternoon and it is still light and that means Spring is on the way and I don’t know what to do with that, because I don’t feel ready, as if I have only just settled into Winter and want to stay awhile? But time is rude and life moves on and so must we. The house sale has reached the this is really happening stage. Between us, Ben and I have sold exactly one house in our entire lives (my cottage, a decade ago; him never, despite living in many). So our anxiety is doing spectacular acrobatics: Will the buyer flee? Will the searches uncover something apocalyptic? We simply don’t know, don’t know, don’t know. Heckity pie, I wish we knew.

I barely remember selling my darling cottage. It was less than a year after Mum died and I was walking through fog. People tramping through, saying nothing, judging silently, all of it borderline hellish, so I accepted the first offer just to make it stop. Because trauma makes fools of all of us, doesn’t it? That house was haunted by ghosts: Mum. The hope Finn’s dad and I felt when we first bought it, before Finn was even dreamed into being. The Richard years, those unspeakable horrors I still can’t speak of, the thing that happened after he was gone that I have never found words for. All of it terrible and beautiful and gone, so the house had to go too, so I could breathe again.

How much I say here in these diaries without saying anything at all. Because I still can’t. Still can’t put it into words.

Late afternoon. I have done ten minutes with my pink weights and I am a woman ready for ANYTHING. Ben is giggling at his phone and the lady boater is filming herons and making pizza and visiting a floating market and I am ready to party. Because my days are utterly upside down and these hours, five to seven o’clock, are when I become fully alive. Most awake. Most capable of world domination. Also the hours when I annoy Ben most spectacularly: dancing as I shimmy past him, talking at the speed of light, making myself laugh at my own jokes like the absolute menace I am.

But a person who finds herself hilarious is probably a person who should sit down and behave, so instead of staging my nightly one-woman comedy extravaganza, I’m finally surrendering to Sunday. Browsing Borrowbox and borrowing this and this and this for the late hours, when Ben is asleep and I am not, for lately I cannot read in daylight and almost need midnight to be able to make sense of story and words. Like some sort of literary vampire. Perhaps then a castor oil facial, which renders my skin plump and glowing but gives permission for brewing spots to make themselves loud and angry. A price I am willing to pay because there is something lovely about waking to skin younger overnight. A plate of salt beef and pickles? A glass of Malbec and an episode of Goggle box we missed on Friday night because we were yet again haunting the streets of Hebden Bridge, peeking into the windows of closed shops (cheese – oh my! – and organic food and gorgeous flowers) and establishing the whereabouts of the post office and the Library because we may yet choose a life of cottage and boat on the canal.

Now. Ben is out fetching supplies. The house is quiet for a while. Only the drip of the bath tap to provide a rhythm for the dance party in my head. An online newspaper to close down on my phone because anymore of all that is the horror of the world right now will undo me. A child to chase because I haven’t heard from him for a day. Cats to separate in case they eat each others ears, and candles to light so I take a long wash in the darkness of the bathroom.

And so it goes on, and so it goes on, and so it goes on. And Ben will laugh because I will make him laugh and the child will just turn out to have been working very hard indeed and the cats will curl up next to each other in the manner of a married couple relieved the war is over, and all shall be well, because all is always well in the end, and if it isn’t well then, it isn’t, as my Mum used to remind me, the end at all.

When I was younger, I believed that order was a form of love (I could not gift myself).

The way my mother set the table with her quilted lace placemats as if performing domesticity on the surface (while everything underneath stayed wild and unmanaged), could soothe her constantly anxious mind.

I thought: this must be how we hold things together.

This is how we show we care.

But somewhere in my fifties, standing in a house with plaster dust covering everything I own, I began to suspect I had confused love with control.

Devotion with suppression.

The sacred act of tending with the violent act of erasing.

What changes when we recognise the violence of the tidy?

I.

Let me tell you what Anne Carson said about fragments: “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”

The tidy house is a tragedy.

Because it erases the rage.

Because it blows the grief away.

Because it insists that everything broken must be hidden, that everything spilled must be immediately cleaned, that the evidence of your living, your rage, your grief, your hunger, your need, must be smoothed over before anyone sees.

My Mum set the table like a stage set. But the mirrored doors of her wardrobe wouldn’t close properly. The cupboards were stuffed with a hundred versions of the woman she might on any given day, be.

(She is so much with me right now. Eleven years gone).

And I inherited both: the performance and the mess.

But.

What if the mess is the prayer?

What if the unwashed dishes are not failure but offering?

What if the unmade bed is a form of resistance?

II.

Hildegard von Bingen had visions. She called the life force viriditas: greening power. The force that makes things grow, that breaks through stone, that refuses containment.

You cannot tidy viriditas.

You cannot organise the life force.

It grows where it wants.

It makes a mess.

It leaves evidence.

Hélène Cixous wrote: “I am spacious, singing flesh.” Not contained flesh. Not managed flesh. Not flesh that has learned to take up only the acceptable amount of space.

Spacious.

Singing.

Spilling over.

The house I live in now is falling down. There are holes were windows should be. The floorboards are being ripped up. Everything hidden is somewhat exposed: the old wiring, the rotting joists, plumbing without sinks. Places where time tried to patch and hide and make do.

It is a metaphor so obvious it embarrasses me.

But metaphors become obvious because they are true.

What are we hiding when we tidy?

What rot are we papering over?

What structural damage are we pretending isn’t there?

My mother hid hers behind the perfectly set table.

What am I trying to cover with the facade that all is well? That all is immaculate and just as it should be?

III.

In Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, we watch a woman perform her domestic routine in real time. She peels potatoes. She makes meatloaf. She polishes shoes. The camera never looks away. Three hours of domestic acts, performed with precision.

(I can’t stop talking about it. Cannot stop watching it. Kinship. Horror).

And then.

A potato falls.

The routine cracks.

And violence enters.

The film understands what many of us spend our lives trying not to know: the line between domestic order and domestic violence is thinner than we pretend. The same hands that smooth the sheets can smooth over the truth. The same attention to detail that creates beauty can create a prison.

Akerman shows us that the violence is not in the mess.

The violence is in the demand for perfection.

The violence is in the watching.

The violence is almost always in the domestication of what will not be contained.

IV.

Here is what I am learning:

That mess is honest.

That mess tells the truth about time.

That mess says: someone lives here. Someone is in the middle of something. Someone is becoming something they have not yet become. Something is being born.

(And in the mess here, something in me cannot be unborn, so I can no more stuff the anger back inside me, than I could have my child back in my womb).

Bhanu Kapil writes books that refuse to be books. She calls them “anti-books.” Fragments scattered across pages. Stories that won’t cohere. She buries manuscripts in gardens and digs them up changed by weather and worms and time.

She understands that some things cannot be contained.

Some things must be approached obliquely.

Some things must be allowed to decompose and transform.

The same is true of living.

You cannot define it by tidying it.

You cannot understand it by organising it.

You must bury it in the garden.

Let it rot.And see what grows.

There are no soft landings tonight. It’s a vicious, dull February night, and I am here, still in my odd, nylon, emerald green robe, (a Mildred without her George), my journal beside me, raw pages blank and accusing, ink waiting to draw blood. And there shall be blood. (For if we will not draw it, let it or spill it for ourselves, who will?).

I’m eating seafood sticks and drinking black tea, no milk because it went off overnight, no sugar because it fell behind the cabinet and we cannot reach it, no mercy, because self-anthropology isn’t therapy, it’s vivisection and I’m discombobulated by it, turning the blade on my own life because what I’ve seen isn’t pretty. It’s feral. And true. And the only way out. You in?

Once in the dim glow of this bedroom at dawn, armed with nothing but a chipped mug of tea gone cold and a notebook yanked from the back of a drawer, I decided to become my own anthropologist. Not the dusty academic sort, but a sly observer of the self, peering into the rituals of everyday existence as if I were Jane Goodall among the chimpanzees: except the chimpanzee was me, fumbling with a biscuit I was calling breakfast, abundant with worry and awash with regret.

The night before Ben had spilled chilli sauce on his bedside table and it had dried blood red on the marble. I saw it but didn’t wipe it. But that spill stopped something inside me dead. Why wasn’t there a bit of me rushing to wipe away the congealed evidence of a rubbish kebab? Why wasn’t I upset that he (let alone me) hadn’t wiped it either, when the once-upon-a-time me may have stood with a cloth under his chin, a walking bib ready to save surfaces from stains and grown-men from dribbled chaos? The answer stung like a slap: our lives are garbage heaps of artefacts, habits, and the sweetest lies we whisper to stay small. This isn’t gentle archaeology. It’s digging with bare hands in soil that smells of rot and resurrection. And it’s only when we NOTICE it, the loose, drifting material of life as Virginia Woolf might have called it that we can begin to examine it.

Of course, we women have been gutting themselves like this for centuries, in attics that smelled of mildew and fear, under the glare of husbands, fathers, bosses, churches. Woolf carved out psychic territory in “A Room of One’s Own” and treated the self like a flawed, raging protagonist. While Anais Nin’s journals were battlefield dispatches from the trenches of desire, masks ripped off, blood and lipstick everywhere. “We write to taste life twice.”

(Scratch it deep; the second taste is always sharper, saltier, truer).

There’s a photograph Margaret Mead kept on her desk at the American Museum of Natural History: herself at seven years old, sitting cross-legged in a Pennsylvania meadow, notebook open, pencil poised, studying a colony of ants with the fierce concentration of someone who already understood that paying attention was a form of love. When asked about it years later, she said something that should be embroidered on a cushion: “I was learning to look at what was actually there, not what I expected to be there.”

She was talking about ants. But she might as well have been talking about us. Because we are terrible anthropologists of our own lives. Or at least I am, and should probably learn to speak only for myself and not as the collective “we”, that Finley is always telling me off for. But do bear with won’t you?

So we arrive at fifty-something having spent decades as unreliable narrators of our own experience, editing the field notes in real-time, adjusting the data to match the hypothesis we’ve already committed to. We’ve conducted our research with contaminated instruments: the male gaze, the mama gaze, the magazine gaze, the mirrored gaze. All of it confabulated and befuddled into myths about ourselves we buy and swallow whole, because we decided a long time ago, that we cannot trust ourselves, and must therefore rely on the dubious opinion of every dog and its Mother.

But what if we started over? What if we approached ourselves the way Mead approached the Samoan islanders, with ferocious curiosity and without the burden of who we’re supposed to be?

“I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.” —Madonna

The Field Site

Your life is not a self-help project. It’s a field site. You are both the anthropologist and the tribe. This distinction matters enormously. A field site is observed, but project is fixed. A field site reveals patterns. A project imposes them.

Sarah Ban Breathnach understood this when she created “Simple Abundance” in 1995. Though she called it gratitude, what she was really teaching was anthropological observation. Write down five things. But not five things you should be grateful for. Five things that actually happened. Five pieces of data from the field.

And she is beautiful and so important and she changed my life, but I need sharper language right now.

You see the anthropologist arrives with questions, not answers. She notices what people actually do, not what they say they do. But even digging through life for that which to be grateful for isn’t enough, because we are still bringing whimsy and romance to life in order to frame it as something to be grateful for. So the committed anthropologist tracks patterns across time and takes nothing at face value. She digs and squints and takes a magnifying glass to all, the way Mary Oliver turned attention into a blade: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work” she said as she stood in the wild until astonishment sliced through numbness. Because noticing is combat. A way to go to war with that numbness so our whole selves are not lost to mere acceptance.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” – Joan Didion

Keeping House, Keeping Self

Here’s where it gets domestic, where the anthropology meets the dishwater. Because how you keep house- or don’t – is field data of the most revealing kind.

As you probably know, I am writing this from a falling-down house mid-renovation, selling out from under me while I try to make sense of domestic sovereignty from a place of profound unsettlement. Twenty-one years I’ve written about home, and now I’m learning that home was never about the house at all. It was about attention. It was about the rituals we perform in domestic space that either keep us caged or set us free.

Watch how you move through your rooms. Do you straighten cushions for invisible judges? Do you close cupboard doors because “that’s what you do” or because it genuinely pleases you? I caught myself once trying to teach myself how to make the bed with hospital corners perfect, tight, miserable and realised I was performing “good woman” for absolutely no one. The bed doesn’t care. There’s no hospital matron or army sergeant watching. The only person suffering that performance was me.

The dishes in the sink aren’t moral failures. They’re anthropological evidence. Mine piled up most when I was writing well, when I was so deep in the work that domestic performance fell away entirely. For years I called this “letting myself go.” Now I call it “letting myself be.”

M.F.K. Fisher understood this. Her kitchens were sites of sensual observation, places where she studied herself through what she cooked, when she cooked, who she fed. She wrote about a perfect omelet the way an anthropologist might describe a marriage ritual, with attention to every gesture, every choice, every meaning beneath the surface. “First we eat, then we do everything else,” she said, and she meant it. Food wasn’t separate from life. Kitchen wasn’t separate from self. It was all ONE field site.

What does your kitchen tell you? Mine used to say I’m someone who hoards interesting ingredients I never use, sumac, za’atar, and preserved lemons going murky in their brine. These were aspirational artefacts, evidence of a self I thought I should be. Though the actual self all too often made toast and called it dinner. Both are true. Both evidence.

Then along comes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the mestiza cantadora who hands you the real weapon. In Women Who Run with the Wolves she drags the Wild Woman archetype out of the cave where patriarchy buried her. La Loba, the bone woman, circles the desert collecting scattered bones of the self. When she has them all, she sings: low, guttural, ancient, until flesh, fur, and fire return.

And that is your task now: to collect your own scattered bones. The diet you abandoned, the voice you swallowed, the desire you called “too much.” To sing them back to life.

Estés warns too, of Bluebeard, the inner predator who sweet-talks you into smaller rooms, prettier cages. He’s the voice that says a good woman keeps a perfect house. He’s the voice that says your worth is measured in gleaming counters and folded laundry.

Stalk him. Name him. Cut him.

Mid-life is the time Estés says we finally hear the howling. No more pretending. No more domestication. Not domesticity, domestication. There’s a difference. Domesticity is the art of making a life within walls. Domestication is the breaking of your wild nature to fit someone else’s idea of proper. I don’t want that any more. I turned out to be rubbish at “proper”. I want authentic, meaningful creative ritual steeped in the hours that spell domesticity and make it holy. I want to merge with the domestic, not be controlled by it.

So let’s claw your wildness back from the places it was beaten out of you. The scars are doors. Every deep wound a threshold back to the instinctual self.

Ready to Start the Dig?

Don’t flinch now: I did warn you this work gets ugly. Start then with the artefacts of your habitat. That pile of unread books by the bed reeks of guilt. Mine: Zadie Smith’s essays jammed against du Maurier’s Rebecca, hoarding stories of women who unravel because my own seams are splitting. Bits of me spilling out left, right and centre.

Curate your evidence like a crime scene: the tarnished locket hiding a younger, braver face; the postcard from a trip you never took; the chipped teacup that survived your mother’s rage, (even if she threw all the others at your father’s head). These objects testify.

And those teacups, let’s talk about them. I collect them, chipped and pretty, rosy things with hairline fractures. A friend once called it clutter. I call it the museum of survival. Every chip, a story: this one fell when I slammed the cupboard after a fight; this one belonged to a woman who drank her grief in careful sips; this one I bought the day I decided to leave a job that was killing me slowly and went junk-shopping instead. Everything I own has a story, data to be added to my field notes so that slowly. but surely i can banish all that screeching its story too loudly.

Colette’s Paris apartment was chaos and genius; make yours the same, lived-in, honest, gloriously feral. Stop trying to scrub glorious mess into rigid conformity. Observe where the tidying feels like work. Colette understood that a too-tidy house is a too-tidy life, and neither bears close examination. Don’t waste your time but do as Woolf did: Her diaries are thirty volumes of field notes on the daily life of one Virginia Stephen Woolf- not just the grand intellectual moments, but the texture of ordinary days. She tracked her moods like weather patterns, treated the self like a flawed, raging protagonist. “What is a woman?” she asked, not politely, but with teeth. She noticed everything: what she ate, the colour of the day, whether she made pudding or bought it. The domestic was never separate from the intellectual for Woolf. It was all one field of study. The quality of the light in her room mattered as much as the quality of her prose. The state of her house reflected the state of her mind, and she tracked both with equal ferocity.

Here then is what you do: for one week, you document yourself the way you might document a fascinating stranger. Not to judge. Not to improve. Simply to see.

What time do you actually want to wake up, versus when you force yourself awake? What do you reach for when you’re anxious? I once spent a month documenting my relationship with biscuits and discovered I only wanted them after phone calls with a particular person. The biscuits were never the issue.

When do you perform? Every time you sense performance, make a field note. You’ll be astonished how much of your day is theatre. Only when we peek behind the stage-set do we understand how the play is being directed.

The Rituals and Belief Systems

Every culture has rituals that look insane from the outside and inevitable from the inside. Your intrinsic culture, the rules and values and rituals intrinsic to who you are is no different.

What are your cargo cults? In anthropology, cargo cults are rituals people perform in imitation of something they once saw work, even after the original context has vanished: like islanders building fake airplane runways hoping planes will return with goods, long after the war has ended. We do this too. We perform rituals we inherited without questioning whether they still serve any purpose. I have a friend who irons tea towels because her mum does, even though she actively resents ironing and doesn’t care if tea towels are wrinkled. When pressed, she said, “But what kind of person doesn’t iron tea towels?” But an anthropologist would note this as a ritual maintaining a social order that no longer exists – or building a runway for a plane that will never land.

My own cargo cult? Candles. I buy them obsessively, beeswax pillars, French tapers, votives in mismatched holders, burning only the cheapest and stashing the others away for better days, because I decide most are just too lovely to burn. Too special for an ordinary Tuesday. And this, right here, is the sickness. The belief that I’m not special enough for my own beautiful things. That I’m saving them for some future version of myself who’s finally good enough.

NOTE TO SELF: Burn the candles. (This is not a metaphor. It’s an order. Actually burn them). See also posh lingerie, good glasses, and fabulous coats.

Delve deeper into the rituals that define your tribe of one. Breakfast: is it a hurried gulp or a ceremonial pause? Mine has long been pure evasion, coffee gulped, toast burned, sink glaring like a witness. Why the evasion? Because dishes represent the unglamorous underbelly, the evidence that I’m not the pristine, organised woman I sometimes pretend to be. Dishes = mess, not of the glorious kind, but with good coffee and artisan bread I can kid myself I am living the dream. Field/noted.

Glennon Doyle names this in Untamed: “The truest, most beautiful life never promises to be an easy one.” Write that down on the scar days: those days when old wounds throb, when you’re confronted with evidence of every time you tried and failed, when the past won’t stay buried. The diets that crashed, the hobbies you ghosted, the loves that left chemical burns. The unmade bed, the pile of laundry that lives on the chair, the bathroom you avoid cleaning because it would require admitting how long you’ve been avoiding it. These are data points, not defeats. Scars are just proof you survived something. They’re doors, remember? Every deep wound is a threshold.

Life’s detours have teeth. You can’t avoid them, but you can examine them.

Spot the places you strain until your jaw aches: midnight Instagram, curating a life that never existed; schedules so tight they choke circulation; the performance of having it all together when the truth is you’re held together with coffee and spite.

Spot the trying-too-hard: rictus smiles at family dinners, staged bookshelves. Release them like shedding dead skin. Gilbert: “Do whatever brings you to life.” Then do it harder.

Often, you’re performing rituals for gods who left years ago. You’re keeping house for a mother-in-law who died in 1987. You’re proving something to a teacher who never even noticed you. You’re maintaining standards nobody asked for and nobody cares about. Tasks no-one is ever going to feel grateful for, no matter how hard you jab your pen on the pages of your gratitude journal.

The Pattern Recognition

After you’ve collected data, you will start to see patterns. Not the patterns you expected. The ones that are actually there.

• You notice that every time your ex-partner calls, you eat carbohydrates for three hours afterward. You notice that you write better at 10 PM than 6 AM, despite forty years of believing you’re a morning person. You notice that the days you don’t shower until noon are often your most creative days.
• You notice that your house is cleanest when you’re most miserable. That you deep-clean when you’re avoiding something. That the impulse to organise the spice drawer alphabetically only strikes when you’re terrified of the bigger work.
• You notice that you’ve spent thirty years saying you’re an introvert, but the actual field notes show that you’re only drained by certain kinds of people. Specifically, people who want you to be smaller than you are. You’re fine with intensity. You’re exhausted by dimming.
• You notice that you say “sorry” seventeen times a day, “I don’t know” when you do know, “does that make sense?” after every third sentence. You notice that what you call “anxiety” arrives most reliably on Friday mornings, which is when your mum used to pick you up to go shopping with that particular face. You’re fifty-three and your body is still responding to a ritual that died with her and will never have to be experienced again.

This is the lightbulb moment: the official story you’ve been telling about yourself is not borne out by the data.

The woman you’ve been insisting you are doesn’t match the actual evidence. What the field notes show is someone who’s been trying to fit into a culture that was never designed for her. What the field notes show is someone who’s been performing being overwhelmed when actually she’s just been bored by smallness.

Pema Chödrön says: “The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” And we are ready for the new aren’t we? The gloriously, messy NEW.

Feral Rest as Research

Feral rest is non-negotiable. Not cute, lavender scented naps. Real hibernation. Phone in another room, curtains sealed, burrow under every blanket you own until the bed becomes a den. Lie there like an animal that has finally stopped running: panting, relieved.

This is where housekeeping becomes self-keeping. The unmade bed isn’t lazy, it’s a nest. The bedroom door closed at 2 PM on a Tuesday isn’t depression, it’s den-making. And its safe to let the dishes wait, to let the laundry sit and to let the dust gather like snow while you dig a little deeper in search of pattern and trope.

So feel the shoulder knots from decades of invisible carrying. Hear the thoughts you usually drown out with productivity. Let patterns surface like bruises: the way you apologise for taking up space, the hunger you call “emotional,” the way you flinch at silence. All of it.

Journal the raw data, the sweat, the breath, and the exact ache, because this is reclamation. Estés would say you are La Loba in the dark, singing your own bones back together. I would say you are letting your own glorious mess wrap round you like a blanket and its ok to curl up under it, foetal position, until you are ready to be born again.

I’m doing this now, in this falling-down house. Learning that you can keep yourself even when you can’t keep the house. Learning that domestic sovereignty was never about control: it was about attention. About noticing what actually nourishes you versus what you’ve been told should nourish you.

Making Yourself Strange

The culture you’re studying is the only culture you’ve ever known from the inside. You can’t see it clearly because you’re too embedded in it. So you need to make yourself strange to yourself.

Simone de Beauvoir did this. She wrote about herself in the third person, creating distance between the observer and the observed. It’s both disconcerting and brilliant.

Try this: Write about yourself in the third person for one day. “At 2 PM, she felt the familiar tightness in her chest when she opened Instagram. The subject exhibited classic avoidance behaviour, making tea instead of finishing the email she’d been dreading. She rearranged the tea towels, still un-ironed, with aggressive precision, as if domestic order could substitute for emotional honesty.”

The comedy of distance. The clarity of observation. The liberation of seeing yourself as a person doing things rather than as a collection of failures and virtues.

The Emic Versus Etic Perspective

Anthropology distinguishes between the “emic” perspective (how the culture understands itself) and the “etic” perspective (the outsider’s analytical view).

The emic view: I’m a failure because I haven’t published the book, lost the weight, organised the closets, kept the house the way my mother kept hers, the way the magazines say I should.

The etic view: This is a fifty-three-year-old woman who’s been performing someone else’s idea of success while ignoring her own actual life. The data suggests this is a cultural problem, not a personal failure. The data suggests that “keeping house” was always code for “keeping women small.”

See the difference? It’s the difference between “I’m broken” and “I’ve been living in a system that breaks people.”

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” —Alice Walker

The Counter-Evidence

A good anthropologist actively looks for counter-evidence. What doesn’t fit the story you’ve been telling?

You say you’re bad with money. But the field notes show you kept your family afloat for fifteen years through precarious times. You say you’re not creative. But the field notes show you’ve been solving problems inventively every day, you’ve just been doing it in forms that don’t count as art. You say you’re a bad housekeeper. But the field notes show you keep the things that matter: the people fed, the animals loved, the work done, the door open to whoever needs shelter.

Anaïs Nin, that diarist par excellence, spent her life writing battlefield dispatches from the trenches of desire, masks ripped off, blood and lipstick everywhere. Her journals were less confessionals than field notes. “We write to taste life twice,” she declared. Even she knew: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

This is the terrifying, exhilarating work. Building a case against your own official story. It’s like being a detective investigating your own life and discovering you’ve been framed. And its kind of appalling. And there’s room for grief in it too you know? No-one is asking you to LIKE the realisation that you have been playing a part for the best part of your life…

Think of Frida Kahlo, that vibrant vortex of pain and paint, who turned her broken body into art. She wasn’t trying to be perfect; she was excavating truth, bedecked in flowers and folklore. Her house, Casa Azul, was a riot of colour and life, cluttered with folk art and ex-votos and the beautiful debris of an examined life. Wreckage into thorns that bloomed. Let her be your beautiful, berserk and broken muse. Learn from how she channelled all that she observed in herself.

The Cultural Context

You cannot understand yourself outside your context. You’re a woman in mid-life in a culture that systematically erases women in mid-life. You’re someone trying to rest in a culture that treats rest as moral failure. You’re trying to keep house in a culture that says a woman’s worth is measured in her ability to make everything look effortless.

When you’re exhausted, is it because you’re weak, or because you’ve been running uphill in concrete shoes your entire life?

Gloria Steinem said: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” The anthropological truth is that a lot of what you think is wrong with you is actually a sane response to an insane culture.

This doesn’t mean you’re not responsible for your life. It means you can stop blaming yourself for struggling against currents you didn’t create.

The Thick Description

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined the term “thick description,” the kind of observation that captures all the layers of meaning embedded in a moment. Not “she closed the door” but “she closed the door the way her mother used to, with that particular firm-but-not-slamming gesture that meant I’m not angry but you should know I’m disappointed, a door-closing that carried three generations of Methodist disapproval.”

And this is how you need to observe yourself. Thickly.

Not: “I felt anxious today.”

But: “At 3 PM, when I should have been writing, I felt the familiar flutter in my chest and instead of investigating it, I cleaned the kitchen with aggressive efficiency while mentally composing the email I should have sent two weeks ago, each wipe of the counter a small act of self-flagellation, each gleaming surface a performance of competence for the ghosts of every woman who ever judged me.”

M.F.K. Fisher did this with food, which was really her way of doing it with life. She never just ate a peach. She ate a peach in August 1935 in a garden in Dijon while thinking about death and desire. Her books are anthropological studies of appetite written by someone who understood that you can’t separate what you eat from who you are from what you want from what you’ve been told you should want.

“First we eat, then we do everything else.” – M.F.K. Fisher

What are you hungry for? (This is the field note that matters. This is so very much the biggest part of our work together, you know?)

Don’t Romanticise, But Don’t Run (or Ruin) Either

Don’t romanticise the dark, but don’t run from it either. Oliver’s command: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Carve it into your page. Let it direct your mind?

Celebrate the feral quirks: the teacup museum of ghosts who will not hush; dancing alone to Ella Fitzgerald until the rug burns your feet; the way you howl in the car at red lights; the dinner plates that don’t match because you’ve broken enough sets to know that matching is overrated.

Mae West sneered: “I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

But know that there will be pitfalls. Envy that tastes like metal. Regret that wakes you at 3 a.m. The shame of the messy house when someone drops by unexpectedly. Improvise like de Beauvoir over bitter coffee, Wollstonecraft with her revolutionary snarl.

Release the trying-too-hard like shedding dead skin. Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic urges: “Do whatever brings you to life, then. Follow your own fascinations, obsessions, and compulsions.”

Acknowledge an Encyclopedia of Dangerous Feelings of your own devising.

Map brutally, Estés-style—each feeling a bone to collect:

Envy: Venom spike. (What caged part of you is it howling for?)

Regret: Spectral chains. (Wallow until you taste the lesson, then burn the note).

Wildness: Primal surge under the ribs. (Release it weekly: scream, run, create, let the house go to hell for a day).

Shame: The Bluebeard voice whispering “too much,” “not enough,” “what will people think.” (Stalk it back to its lair. Often you’ll find it sounds exactly like your Dad, or a magazine, or a man who left twenty years ago).

Track patterns – betrayals, flashes, howls – as your unmaking map. Note it all down. Cosset and nurture it until the truth of who you are merges with ambition for she you want to be.

The Field Notes Are the Point

In the end, the field notes are not preparation for some future analysis. The field notes are the life. The paying attention is the thing itself.

When you treat yourself as a field site, everything becomes interesting. The way you make coffee becomes a ritual worth noting. The way you avoid making the bed becomes data about what you’re really avoiding. The things you reach for when you’re lonely, the lies you tell yourself in the morning, the truths your body speaks in the afternoon.

You’re writing the ethnography of your own life, and it’s the only one that will ever be written. No one else is embedded this deeply into the minutes of your day.

From Woolf’s psychic rooms to Oliver’s wild vigil to Estés’ bone songs, from Colette’s smoky, unapologetic flesh to Coco Chanel barking “I don’t do fashion, I am fashion,” women have been here, sifting the silt. I’ve said it before – we are part of a lineage: stylish rebels who understood that keeping house and keeping self were never separate projects, and that sometimes you have to let the house fall down to discover what you’re really keeping.

As Nin put it, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” In studying yourself, you expand infinitely.

So grab your notebook, your metaphorical trowel, your claws if necessary, and dig. Who knows what rituals you’ll rewrite, what myths you’ll debunk? What bone will you sing back to life first?

“Write what should not be forgotten.” —Isabel Allende

Your life is what should not be forgotten. Not the performed version, not the one where the house is always clean and you’re always together. The actual, embodied, daily, messy, true thing.

That’s the field site. You’re standing in it right now, dishes in the sink and all.

Take notes. Dig until it bleeds truth. Because here’s what I’ve learned from one dried puddle of chilli sauce on marble: I spent decades as a human bib, standing ready with a cloth to catch every spill, save every surface, perform “good woman” for ghosts who weren’t even watching. Now I see the spill and think: evidence. Data. Proof of a life actually lived rather than endlessly tidied. I watch and I learn. Ben’s rubbish kebab left its mark. So can I. That’s the field site. I’m standing in it right now, stains and all.

Taste it twice won’t you?

There’s a certain irony in watching TikTok discover what some of us have been accidentally living for decades. The “frazzled English woman” aesthetic, has been having what the internet calls a moment, for a couple of years now. Which is to say, it’s being photographed, hash-tagged, and ultimately, performed.

Those of us who’ve been actually frazzled, rather than aesthetically frazzled, are watching this development with the kind of complicated relief you feel when someone finally admits they understand something you’ve been saying all along, whilst simultaneously packaging it for algorithmic consumption and totally stripping it of context.

Twenty-one years ago, when I started BrocanteHome, this aesthetic was simply called vintage. Or sometimes shabby, if you were being generous with the pale florals. More often, it was called scruffy because the cultural conversation around domesticity was still dominated by the tyranny of minimalism, something that ultimately became the Marie Kondo fantasy of perfect control, and the Kinfolk aesthetic of empty surfaces and muted palettes. We were meant to be aspiring to white walls and the conspicuous consumption of emptiness, to homes that looked like nobody actually lived in them. Ushering in what I suppose is a sort of aesthetic Calvinism: the belief that virtue could be demonstrated through renunciation, and that the good life was always a sparse one.

But some of us were yearning for something else entirely. For Elizabeth David’s kitchen with its earthenware and copper, her insistence that cooking was an intellectual pursuit worthy of serious prose. For Bloomsbury style domesticity – Vanessa Bell’s painted furniture at Charleston, the beautiful chaos of artistic households where Duncan Grant’s canvases jostled with Clive Bell’s manuscripts. About that particular strand of English bohemian living that runs through Virginia Woolf’s diaries and Vita Sackville-West’s gardens at Sissinghurst, where intellectual life and domestic life weren’t separate territories but deeply and inextricably intertwined.

The golden age of domesticity: that strange post-war period when women were meant to find complete fulfilment in perfect housekeeping, had given us women’s magazines at their most preachy, spewing the fantasy that domestic perfection was both achievable and desirable to such excessive degree, so that by the time feminism had its second wave, we’d collectively rejected the whole palava. Betty Friedan may have taught us that the feminine mystique was a trap, but we’d also, somehow, rejected the value of domestic life itself, throwing out the baby of lived experience with the bathwater of oppressive expectations.

I came after all of that. Hot on the heels of my Mum, who simultaneously rejected even the notion of domesticity, while in her own mind, felt thoroughly trapped by it. So there was something borne in me that turned out to be the reclamation of domesticity on my own terms. Not as performance, not as perfection, or even ssomething to be resented, but as what Rachel Cusk calls “the work that makes all other work possible.” The real, unglamorous, essential labour of making a life.

The Gloriously Messy Philosophy, Unpackaged

The gloriously messy philosophy isn’t new. It’s a direct line from Bloomsbury aesthetics, from Nancy Mitford’s Curzon Street flat with its battered sofas and first editions, from the way Elizabeth Jane Howard lived: good furniture slowly going to seed, excellent wine served in whatever glasses were clean. It’s Iris Murdoch’s chaotic North London house stuffed with books and cats and philosophical arguments conducted over burnt dinners. And it’s Jeanette Winterson’s insistence that domestic life and artistic life are the same life, that there’s no separation between chopping vegetables and writing sentences. That beautiful blur I have long struggled to put into words of my won, knowing only that for me work and home were one and the same thing.

This philosophy extends back further still: to Gertrude Jekyll’s approach to gardens, where beauty emerged from seeming chaos. To the aesthetic movement’s rejection of Victorian propriety in favour of lived-in beauty. To every English woman who understood that layers tell stories, that complexity is more interesting than control, and that a life of the mind requires a certain amount of domestic disorder because tidiness takes time that could be spent reading, writing, and thinking.

It’s Georgian tables coexisting with Turkish market rugs. Laura Ashley curtains from 1994 that needn’t be replaced simply because they’re no longer fashionable. A stove that’s been the beating heart of a kitchen since the Blair years, perpetually covered in evidence of actual cooking rather than styled vignettes. Moroccan bowls from a trip in the early 2000s sitting alongside inherited Wedgwood, because the anthropologist in us understands that domestic spaces are archaeological sites, each object a stratigraphic layer revealing how we’ve lived. Who we are to found in the stacks of our days piled haphazardly wherever domestic nature forms them.

Currently, I’m living in a house mid-renovation that we’re selling. Every surface is temporary. The plumbing is questionable at best. Nothing matches because nothing’s meant to be permanent. Because the good things are packed away. Everything that isn’t purely functional simply non-existent within these four walls so there is nothing of beauty on which the eye can really come to rest. So I’m aching, actually physically aching, for my own version of the frazzled woman’s dream. A proper kitchen with plumbing that doesn’t require negotiation. A walnut wardrobe filled with clothes that won’t need to be packed again in three months. Space for my books that isn’t provisional, that acknowledges reading as essential infrastructure rather than decorative choice.

The homes and gardens magazines are currently celebrating precisely this chaos with their perfectly frazzled interiors. Meanwhile, I’m living the reality: the actual disorder of displacement, of making do, of trying to write about domestic sovereignty whilst having none of my own. Rather like being asked to write about swimming whilst drowning, the irony isn’t entirely lost on me, but I’m just too tired to fully appreciate it?

The frazzled English woman aesthetic is what this philosophy looks like when it’s been filtered through TikTok’s algorithmic attention economy, styled for House & Garden’s editorial calendar, and presented back to us as discovery rather than recovery. It’s the visual manifestation of a truth that women in their forties and fifties have known for years: perfection is exhausting, impossible, and ultimately boring.

The Interior We’ve Always Inhabited

The kitchen I’m dreaming of, the one I’ll have when we’re done with the selling and the moving, will almost certainly not feature an AGA. It likely won’t be sprawling. It might be in a city apartment rather than a country cottage, compact rather than generous, vertical rather than horizontal. But the accidental intention will be the same. The aesthetic, if we must call it that, remains constant regardless of square footage or postcode. Whether it’s a two-bedroom flat in a Victorian conversion or a small cottage with low ceilings, the philosophy adapts without diluting.

There will be a table, made from elm if I’m lucky, and pine if I’m practical. The kind that takes decades of use and only gets better. Some form of shelving, a dresser if space permits, displaying Burleigh pottery alongside those Moroccan bowls from the early 2000s, my Mum’s Christmas dinner service, and the accumulated detritus of a life lived with priorities other than visual coherence.

There will be a sitting room with a plump velvet sofa, probably bought for a song , definitely lived-in (thought not as lived in as the glorious Liberty mustard yellow one we bought last year, now destroyed by muddy spaniels). William Morris cushions, fighting for space with needlepoint treasured by a stranger’s grandmother. Walls thick with art: My naive portaits’s of stout chldren, a terrible junk-shop watercolour, a landscape painted by my Dad, and a child’s drawing, because curation is less interesting than accumulation. A bookcase housing Anita Brookner and Angela Carter, Penelope Fitzgerald and Rosamond Lehmann, Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters, arranged by no system more sophisticated than spatial availability and the occasional thematic cluster that emerges organically, and is quietly celebrated everytime I find myself standing in front of laden bookcase, happy that mine has always been a life decorated with words.

A mantelpiece, if there is one, functioning primarily as a horizontal surface for invitations that I can’t quite throw away, postcards from the National Portrait Gallery, and a sturdy clock to beautiful to discard. This is what Donald Winnicott would call a transitional space, neither entirely functional nor entirely decorative, but holding the tension between use and beauty. Between our inner worlds and the objects we need to plant us in time and space.

This isn’t shabby chic, which requires both intention and a Farrow & Ball budget (Elephant’s Breath, presumably, or perhaps Pigeon). This is what happens when you prioritise living over styling, when you understand that patina is what Walter Benjamin called “the aura,” the evidence of time and use that separates authentic objects from their reproductions. When you’ve read enough Bloomsbury diaries to know that the most interesting people have always lived this way, that Virginia Woolf’s writing room at Monk’s House was a glorious mess of manuscripts and cigarette ash.

The World of Interiors has always understood this better than House & Garden ever could. Their version of the frazzled English woman, with its unusual interiors and genuinely literate approach, has always been truer than the manicured fantasies you find in magazines that prioritise visual coherence over lived reality. World of Interiors has spent four decades mixing high and low, historical and modern, ecclesiastical and domestic, understanding that “startlingly beautiful things” can coexist with genuine chaos. They’ve always known that the most interesting spaces are created by artistic bohemian types rather than data-driven stylists.

House & Garden is now calling this “layered English style,” as though they’ve discovered a new colour rather than simply noticed what’s always existed. The December 2022 Vogue featured it under “An Actual Frazzled Englishwoman Dissects the Trend,” commodifying authenticity even as it claimed to celebrate it. TikTok is obsessing over it with the intensity it previously reserved for clean girl aesthetic and coastal grandmother, each trend cannibalising the last in the endless churn of content. Interior designers are being quoted about antique brass hardware and the resurgence of lived-in luxury, as though luxury could be anything but lived-in without becoming mere display. Pinterest searches have surged by 1,000% year-on-year, which tells us more about Pinterest’s algorithm than about actual domestic life.

When I started writing about this in the early 2000s, during Britain’s brief flirtation with Cool Britannia and just before the financial crash would make austerity the new aesthetic, it was called vintage at best, untidy at worst. Now it’s trending because the wheel never stops turning, and latterly seems to be gathering speed: consume, spit out, repeat.

The Women Who Showed Us How

British cinema has always given us these women, we’ve just been too busy calling them eccentric to recognise them as a tradition, a lineage, a way of being that constitutes genuine cultural knowledge. Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility, channelling Jane Austen’s own domestic reality: a woman writing masterpieces at a small table in the drawing room whilst the household chaos swirled around her, her genius emerging not despite the domestic context but within it.

Kate Winslet in The Holiday, inhabiting a Surrey cottage that’s essentially a film set version of what Rosamond Lehmann’s actual houses looked like, or Elizabeth Bowen’s Bowen’s Court before it was demolished, beautiful, crumbling, full of books and ghosts. Juliet Stevenson in Truly, Madly, Deeply, grieving in a North London flat that could be Iris Murdoch’s house in Charlbury Road (currently for sale!), books, scarves, evidence of an intellectual life lived without apology, where philosophy and domesticity occupied the same conceptual space.

Kristin Scott Thomas in Four Weddings and a Funeral, all cut-glass accent and beautiful tailoring with something perpetually undone, like Diana Mosley before the fascism, or Nancy Mitford before the exile. Helena Bonham Carter in everything, channelling that particularly English combination of eccentricity and elegance that runs from the Sitwells through Edith Sitwell’s fur coats and medieval jewellery to now, a tradition of women who understood that conformity was the enemy of both thought and beauty.

Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne in The Favourite captures something essential about female power and vulnerability coexisting in the same body, the same quality you find in Antonia Fraser’s historical subjects, women who were simultaneously formidable and falling apart. More recently and less socially highbrow, Dawn French in the sitcom Can We Keep a Secret? inhabiting a house that’s the platonic ideal of frazzled English domesticity: beautiful, cluttered, lived-in to the point of archaeological significance, where every surface tells a story and nothing matches because matching was never the point, and Olivia Coleman again, playing a music teacher in Flowers, where the house tumbledown and chaotic and somehow still visually stunning, reflects the family’s collective depression. So too, Carey Mulligan in An Education, learning that sophistication and disaster can wear the same clothes. Judi Dench in Notes on a Scandal, demonstrating that intelligence doesn’t preclude chaos, though perhaps it requires it.

These weren’t caricatures. They were in direct lineage with actual English women of letters and influence who lived in beautiful chaos because they were too busy being interesting to worry about whether everything matched, too intellectually serious to waste time on domestic performance.

A Personal History of Being Perpetually Undone

I haven’t arrived at this aesthetic as trend adoption or mid-life crisis. I’ve been genuinely frazzled since approximately 1995, when I realised it was possible to care deeply about both A.S. Byatt and batch cooking, both Seamus Heaney and seasonal living, and that keeping everything completely organised simply wasn’t compatible with maintaining an intellectual life, no matter how many routines and rituals I tried to hammer into my days, because the brain space required for perfect domestic order is the same brain space required for reading Possession or understanding The Death of the Heart and there are only so may hours in a day? Because too, the women I did know with immaculate houses, didn’t house countless stupid amounts of books, or spends days squirrelled over journals trying to fashion words into meaning. They lived and they cleaned and they organised, but try as I might to live like that, we were simply not the same. I was. not superior, just different: frazzled in a head awash with frantic theory, while they were serene with quiet purpose and clarity of purpose, and never the twain would meet.

When I started BrocanteHome in the early 2000s, the domestic landscape was dominated by minimalism and the Martha Stewart fantasy of domestic perfection as moral achievement. The feminist project, in its necessary rejection of the feminine mystique, had been to reject domesticity entirely. Which meant we’d lost the thread that connected us to women like Elizabeth David, who wrote about food and domesticity as genuine intellectual pursuits worthy of the same attention as literature or politics.

We’d lost Constance Spry, who understood flowers as art before art historians would admit it. We’d lost the entire tradition of women who’d made domestic life into something worth writing about: not in the Good Housekeeping sense of instruction and perfection, but in the sense of what Rebecca Solnit calls the real work of living, the unglamorous essential labour that makes everything else possible. Housework and interiors blended into one revered pursuit and there wasn’t room for the chaos that comes with creativity, so performance of housewifery swept away authenticity and too many belongings, proof of soul and spirit, became threat to order and conformity.

I was never quite on-board because I’ve spent two decades as the woman who arrives places in yesterday’s mascara, not as a style choice but because I was reading late and morning came too soon. I’ve hosted dinner parties where the starter is ambitious and the main is Aldi, served with equal confidence because the artificial hierarchy between homemade and bought is another form of domestic oppression. I’ve carried the good handbag with the broken clasp, the cashmere jumper with the moth hole , and swung the vintage scarf, high enough around my neck to cover my mouth, (in the hope that too may words will not come slipping out). All of it, not as performance, or even fashion, but because these were the good things I owned and I was too busy actually living, reading, writing, working, mothering, to curate a perfect version for public consumption.

My bookshelves, when I have proper ones again, when this nightmare ends and I’m no longer living in provisional hell, will never be organised by anything more sophisticated than what fits where and occasional thematic clusters that emerge organically. Iris Murdoch next to Nigel Slater, Anita Brookner beside Nigella Lawson, because the division between high and low culture is a false one perpetuated by people who’ve never had to actually live. Maggie Nelson’s Bluets next to Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal (I do insist you read this one), because colour theory and cooking belong together, don’t you think?

When I started writing about the gloriously messy philosophy, I wasn’t issuing a manifesto so much as documenting what was already true and connecting it to a tradition that predated us both: the tradition of English women who refused to choose between domestic life and intellectual life, who understood that both could be pursued with equal seriousness, that thinking and cooking and reading and cleaning were all part of the same essential human project of making meaning from matter.

As philosophy, it arrived in fragments, in the mess and the realisation that the performance of perfection had been exhausting since the Thatcher years, when aspiration became the national religion and domestic display was reimagined as personal achievement.

And I was finally done: the irony being that I think it was as my mind finally frazzled into truth in an environment where there was no choice but to focus wholly not on aesthetics, but on books and words and theories, that I was finally able to understand what had been nagging me all along.

When the Aesthetic Finally Catches Up

What’s both gratifying and mildly irritating about seeing the frazzled English woman aesthetic everywhere now, is that it represents culture finally catching up to what some of us have known all along.

We never needed permission to be this way. We’ve been doing it regardless, often entirely without premeditation, whilst being made to feel vaguely apologetic about it, as though living fully were somehow a moral failing. But there’s something validating about having the arbiters of taste finally admit that a house that looks lived-in is better than one that looks like a showroom, that a woman with interesting layers is more compelling than one who’s got it all tidily together and that complexity is more interesting than the performed simplicity of minimalism.

The gloriously messy philosophy and the frazzled English woman aesthetic are the same truth expressed in different languages, different media and different economies. One is internal acceptance, rooted in a historical understanding of how interesting women have always lived: messy, complicated, intellectually serious and domestically chaotic. While the other is external performance, filtered through social media’s attention economy and styled for maximum engagement, packaged for consumption rather than lived experience.

Both celebrate complexity. But only one requires a ring light and a content calendar, only one is subject to the tyranny of social media platforms, where everything must be constantly produced, updated, refreshed, and made new even when the whole point is supposedly to celebrate the old.

Living It Without Performing It

If you’re sitting there thinking you’ve been like this all along, you’re correct. You’ve been in a tradition that stretches back through Bloomsbury, through Victorian bohemians like Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s circle, through every woman who’s understood that a life of the mind requires a certain amount of domestic disorder because time is finite and choices must be made about how to spend it.

The way to live this, rather say than perform it, is to stop asking for permission and to understand that you’re part of a lineage, not a trend. Your home tells your story. Those books piled everywhere exist because you read, because reading is essential infrastructure not decorative choice. The fabric waiting to be made into curtains, the seeds waiting to be planted, the half-finished projects, these are merely evidence of a creative, ambitious, curious life, not proof of failure. What looks like chaos to the outside eye is actually sophisticated priority-setting: you’ve chosen reading over tidying, thinking over organising, living over curating.

So mix your eras without apology, un-compromised by historical awareness. Georgian table, Victorian dresser, mid-century modern chair, that rug you bought on holiday in Morocco. Your home should look like you’ve lived, traveled, inherited, collected: a material autobiography, an archaeological site of accumulated experience. Even if most of that travel has been to car boot sales in Liverpool, which are themselves archaeological sites of other people’s domestic histories.

Wear your good things daily. Your grandmother’s pearls whilst gardening, as Vita Sackville-West did. Your good coat over a jumper from the charity shop. This mixing of high and low isn’t styling; it’s understanding that the division between them is artificial, a class marker that has nothing to do with actual beauty or utility. It’s what Pierre Bourdieu called challenging “the logic of distinction”: refusing to participate in the social game of taste as status marker.

Keep flowers. Even if they’re past their prime, even if the vase is actually a jug, even if you’ve forgotten to change the water. Elizabeth David did this. Constance Spry wrote books about it. Vita Sackville-West understood it as essential. Fresh flowers, or freshish flowers, say you’re still trying, which is more honest than pretending you’ve achieved some permanent state of perfection. They’re also memento mori, reminders that beauty is temporal, that decay is natural, that entropy is the law. Proof of life despite evidence of death.

Accept the patina. Your copper pans have oxidised like the ones in Elizabeth David’s kitchen. Your linen is soft from years of washing, like the napkins at Charleston. Your wooden table bears marks from decades of use: cigarette burns, wine rings, knife scores, each one a story. Your face has lines from years of living. Patina is what makes things beautiful. It’s what separates the authentic from the performed and the lived from the staged.

Have more books than shelf space. Nancy Mitford did. Iris Murdoch certainly did. Virginia Woolf famously did. Stack them horizontally when vertical space runs out, pile them by the bed in geological strata of reading intention, use them as impromptu side tables. They’re not clutter. They’re evidence of an examined life, material proof that thinking IS work, and that intellectual life requires physical infrastructure.

Waiting for the Moment to Pass

The truth is, those of us who’ve been living the gloriously messy philosophy for decades are watching this aesthetic moment with complicated feelings. It’s validating to be told we’ve been right all along, that what we’ve been doing for years is suddenly desirable. It’s also exhausting to watch something genuine, something we almost could not help, and something rooted in a real tradition of English women’s domestic and intellectual life, get turned into content, flattened for algorithmic consumption, and stripped of context and history and meaning.

So there’s a part of us that will be quietly relieved when the frazzled English woman aesthetic moves on to whatever comes next in the endless churn of trends. Not because we don’t want the validation, but because we’d quite like our actual lives back. The messy bits, the unstylish bits, the bits that don’t photograph well in good light or translate to TikTok’s vertical video format. The bits that require actual plumbing and aren’t provisional, that can’t be performed because they simply are and do not translate well to the proliferation of dreamy, ethereal and oh so edited “day in the life” videos now purporting as domesticity.

We’re women in our fifties now. We’ve earned every bit of our beautiful chaos through decades of living, reading, thinking, working. We’ve lived enough life to know that perfection is boring, impossible, and not remotely desirable. We’ve read enough, Woolf and Murdoch, Brookner and Carter, Mantel and Waters, to understand we’re part of a tradition, not a trend. That what we’re doing has intellectual lineage and historical weight and that it means something beyond aesthetic performance, because it has to, or heavens to Betsy, tell me, what was the point?

The frazzled English woman aesthetic is having its time in the algorithmic sun. But we’ve been having ours for decades, long before anyone thought to give it a name or a hashtag or a Pinterest board with 1,000% year-on-year growth. We’ll still be here when the moment passes, when TikTok moves on to whatever’s next, when the content creators need fresh material and the aesthetic magazines need new features.

The aesthetic will move on, but we will remain. Gloriously, authentically, unapologetically messy. Creating accidental vignettes of beauty, born purely of a well-trained eye and a need always to surround ourselves with proof of who we are, and rooted in a tradition that understand domestic and intellectual life as inseparable, and that recognise perfection as both impossible and undesirable. Part of a lineage that runs from Bloomsbury through to now, from Virginia Woolf’s cigarette-ash-covered manuscripts to Elizabeth David’s earthenware bowls to the old reclaimed table I once owned, covered in books and crumbs and half-finished cups of tea. God how I miss it.

So when when we’ve moved and I finally have my own version of the frazzled woman’s dream, with plumbing that works and shelves that aren’t fashioned from the deep skirting boards here, it likely won’t look like the cottages on TikTok or the Georgian townhouses in House & Garden. It might be smaller, more urban, and almost certainly compromised by practical realities like budgets and availability. But I’ll be living it as it was always meant to be lived, scaled to whatever space I inhabit. Not as content. Not as aesthetic. Not as performance for algorithmic consumption. But as life itself, in all its beautiful, complicated, intellectual, domestic, gloriously messy reality.

The same philosophy, just differently housed.

It was a blustery night. Rain lashed at the windows and there I was, ears pricked like a watchdog’s, straining to catch the sound of scavengers returning for the tumble dryer. You see, they’d already made off with the washing machine being stored in the garden, bold as brass in the dead of night, and I was out for revenge.

Though quite what I was planning on doing if they did rock back up, all (North Face) striped t-shirts and swag-bags I couldn’t tell you, I only know that they would likely have had to deal with a very naked me screaming like a fishwife, and would forever more tell the local criminal fraternity to avoid our house because Titty Faloo lives there and she is fierce.

Yay, then for the kind of glorious news that has had me practically levitating with relief: we’ve sold the house! Hands shook, contracts due to be signed at any moment! I can scarcely believe it. The thought of no longer having to wash my knickers in a bucket has had me so giddy that any passing scrap-hunting burglar might well have found me swinging from the chandeliers in unbridled celebration. Because while we may not have a functioning bathroom sink, I made damn sure to hang the happiest of crystal-dripping lampshades the very day we moved in, for who am I, if I am not a glorious, complicated mess who prioritises sparkle over plumbing and romance over practicality, holding onto the memories of us dancing to Purple Rain in that shabby-tatty-chic room, all peeling paint and possibility, and choosing joy in the chaos. Always.

But heck the shenanigans. Saturday night the electricity went off after I popped a few samosas in the air-fryer and apparently blew a fuse (literally not metaphorically). So off Ben went in search of the fuse box and a few minutes later the whole house lit up, because we in our infinite muddle had taken it for granted that the lights in most of the house simply didn’t work, and hadn’t explored even the notion that many of the fuses had simply blown before we moved in to sell, when all it took was a flick of a switch to brighten our lives up and render us almost normal human beings again. We’d accepted it, the way you accept so many small indignities when your life resembles a sitcom written by someone with a particularly dark sense of humour. And oh how we laughed, because we’ve been burrowing around for months clutching our phone torches and relying on candlelight as if we were hobbits not humans at all…

Thank heavens then for the ability to make light of what has felt like the most infinite of darknesses.

Today though. And still the wind is bashing the windows -a storm called Chandra taking liberties with trees blowing wildly and gubbins tossed through chaotic air. And I am here feeling overwhelmed by all that needs to be done and so very keen to have someone come wave a magic wand and fast forward me a couple of months in to a future where I am settled wherever we end up settling. So I have started squirrelling things away, creating a new life box, filled with soap and books and candles and journals and dreams I cannot bring myself to touch right now because I need safer, lovelier walls around me, long enough to relax enough not to keep depriving myself of all those things I once took for granted.

Outside, I can hear the distant sound of a couple rowing again, their voices carried and distorted by the raging sky. Darkness has settled in properly now, that particular winter darkness heavy with texture. The cats are restless, padding from room to room, unsettled by the wind’s violence. Raffy, the eldest of our dogs and the most sensible (and grumpy) soul in this household, snoring contentedly on the bed, oblivious to weather and worry alike.

I’m cozy from the waist up, wrapped in my green cardigan: the one that feels like a hug, the one I wear when the world feels sharp and poky. But my feet are turning blue because my laptop is surgically attached to my knees and I cannot quite summon the energy to stand up and either turn up the heating or fetch socks. My fingers, you see, have been fuelled by a cup of ludicrously strong coffee, and the words are flowing faster than I can type them. To stop now would be to lose the thread entirely. And I need that thread right now.

Because some days have their own taste don’t they? This one is bitter/sweet, both words, both true, impossible to separate and I cannot put my finger on exactly why. It’s a complex mélange of earthiness and something sulphurous, mixed with moments of the truly exquisite and sometimes, it’s hard like iron, blood on a split lip, and all at once too, sweet like baklava, or silly, like popping candy.

I am antsy. Worried about Finn, who seems so very sad. Annoyed by anything that stands between me and the work I want to do. Simultaneously glad about plans cancelled and frustrated because I haven’t left these four walls for a week and I do believe I am suffering from cabin fever and have become quite unreasonable because of it, the sort of unreasonable where small things feel enormous and enormous things feel impossible and you can’t quite trust your own reactions to anything, though the the thought of putting on actual clothes and being sociable felt Herculean, and relief felt like a gift.

But still. Still, the words come. Still, I’m wrapped in my green hug of a cardigan. Still, old Raffy snores his reassuring snore. Still, we sold the house, we sold the house, and somewhere out there, beyond this storm, beyond this strange liminal space we’re occupying, there’s a future waiting.

A future with working lights and properly laundered knickers.

Would you blame me if I said I simply cannot wait?

Mid-life blesses us with knowing that comes with being done. Not done for, heck no. Done with. Done with the performance. Done with the optimisation. Done with pretending that comfort is something we’ll deserve once we’ve earned it through sufficient productivity, thinness, or achievement.

For too long, we were told that comfort was the opposite of ambition. That cosy was code for “giving up.” That if we weren’t striving, improving, or becoming our best selves, we were somehow failing at the project of womanhood.

What magnificent, profitable lies.

The truth is this: comfort is a form of resistance. In a world that profits from our exhaustion, our perpetual inadequacy and our perpetual and deluded belief that we’re always one purchase/workout/habit away from being acceptable to God knows who, choosing to wrap yourself in a charity shop cardigan at 3pm on a Tuesday is a revolutionary act. It says: I matter exactly as I am. My nervous system matters more than my to-do list. My need for cosy rest isn’t weakness, its revolution.

This A-Z is not about Instagram-worthy self-care (candles arranged just so, hashtag blessed). It’s about reclaiming the messy, imperfect, deeply unflattering vocabulary of actual comfort. The kind that looks like failure from the outside but feels like homecoming from within.

Consider this then, your permission slip. A manifesto and a love letter written to all. the parts of you that are tired of trying.

Afternoon Naps

The delicious defiance of horizontal hours while there’s still daylight being wasted. Not planned. Not sleep hygiene. Just the sudden overwhelming need to lie down right now with your shoes still on and your mouth slightly open, dignity entirely negotiable. The afternoon nap is the glorious mess in action: choosing your body’s needs over productivity’s demands.

Ambient Chaos

Not the curated ambient noise of productivity apps, but actual domestic chaos. The radio you forgot to turn off. The neighbour’s argument bleeding through the walls. Your own washing machine making that sound it’s been making for six months that you keep meaning to investigate. The soundtrack of real life, unglamorous and insistent. Not silence, silence is for people who have got their act together, and try as we might, I’m really not sure we are they…

Sometimes I get a feeling I can’t explain. A sort of stop the world, I don’t want to get off, but I do want to sit down and take a magnifying glass to all that has gone before. To look at the richness and calamity of a life less ordinary, to rip it up and search for reason in the cracks and to just, I suppose, breathe, before the next chapter begins.

It feels enormous, this muchiness inside me. Unexamined, like thoughts and moments, and tragedies and joys have all just been chucked into a garage willy-nilly while so much of me longs to have the time to go in and index it all, pack it boxes befitting of sentiment, and take some of it to the menders shop to put it all back together, exactly the way it should be.

For the next chapter is just around the corner now. And its a good job really, because holding my breath in anticipation of it, was starting to give me chest ache.

We think (whisper it in case we tempt fate) that we have sold the house.

And honestly the muchiness in both of us has gone through the roof. In the way it only does when something we want and need to come true, does look like it might come true, and thus we might be required to do lots of little things before we can do a great big thing and its all a bit much and a tiny bit terrifying, so we find ourselves giggling under the duvet in case he who wants the house turns up with a removal van and turfs us out before we have wholly emptied the loft.

What a pair of drama-queens we are. So yes. The page it is a-turning. And we are all of a fluster pondering on who we might be if we aren’t who we are now, and simultaneously laughing at the very idea that we will ever be different, because isn’t it true that wherever we go, there we are? Yes, but no, but…

Over the last year we have spent two months (quite accidentally) living in a gorgeous Abersoch lodge and various nights in some lovely, little bijou apartments and truth be told, we are shaped by our surroundings when our surroundings aren’t so constantly overwhelming us. Its a difficult thing to admit, but neither of us have the executive function to manage all the things, so we need a life where all the things are gently taken out of hands so we can spend a little while unreeling the tight little balls of tension we have become. It’s the muchiness, you see? Double the trouble and all that jazz…

Anyways, it’s Friday night, and that spells takeaway and wine and old episodes of First Dates in our house. Because Friday nights are not for faffing with trying to wash dishes in the bath, or balancing a ready meal on the top of the airfryer, pray, no child– Friday nights are for lighting candles and summoning a tiny bit of the decorum we both once had and virtual people watching via Fred and Merlin and making each other laugh, because laughing matters above all else doesn’t it?

So I’m sitting here with a face-mask and a smile. The bath is bubbling (plates and forks aside) with a foamy coconut oil I can smell from here, and Ben is again teasing me about “freshening up” as if it is a once-a-week occurrence. I am dreaming of a life now. A life where I can share more than what the weather is doing to the tin rooves beyond the window. Where I can cook again and share details of the meals we eat, the places we go and the little tiny somethings I acquire after an afternoon in a bookshop or a morning spent people watching with coffee that doesn’t come from a jar.

I so very much want to live again. For it hasn’t been that here. It has been the bare bones of a life wrapped in the intimacy of knowing someone deeply, but it hasn’t been varied enough to inspire? Though it has been in its own way so very necessary. A deep dive into our own psyches that might have been unimaginable for many but speaks of two things I think for us: a kind of resilience we have had no choice but to learn, and time to let the aftershock of exhausting lives reverberate within a space that may not have much in the way of luxury but was the safe space we probably needed.

Now though: I want flowers next to the sink, and hot chocolate spun in my Velvetiser. I want long showers with the luxury of products I wander into town and choose and afternoons spent reading the books I have been quietly stashing away. I want to run on a treadmill again, do yoga on a floor that won’t splinter my bum and eat salad because I can keep it cold in an actual fridge! I want a cupboard filled all over again with jars full of dried pulses, herbs, spices and truffle oil: a freezer in which to keep all the ingredients for smoothies I will sit quietly and sip first thing in the morning, candles that aren’t the tea-lights I have been lighting recently, because anything else seems a waste. I want to take proper baths, get into bed in a room that makes me smile, hear the radio playing in another room, and watch Meep snuggling up without the slightly bewildered look he has been wearing for months now. I want it all.

A few years ago, I used to come to these pages and say I want my life back. But this isn’t that. I love my life now. I genuinely love it. I am working in ways I have never worked before and I close my eyes and fall asleep at night, because nothing in my body hurts and I have the head space to know exactly what I need, and because there isn’t a version of the life that went before I yearn for (except perhaps for the blissful hours spent with the weight of a sleeping baby in my arms), so I just want this life with a few mod-cons please and thank-you kindly… a home I can invite Finn into all over again, because never having him here has been hard in ways I could not have once imagined.

And here we are on the verge of it all. And here we are too, on another Friday night in which I will order the saag aloo that is my latest food fad and sip rhubarb fizz and pretend I’m not sneaking photos of Ben so I can remember these nights for always, in another life where the soft terracotta of dried plaster isn’t the backdrop to love, and muddle and the ghost that sits between us.

Not long now. Not much time left to pause and allow myself to spread my muchiness all over the floor and turn each part over in my hands, not long until there will be no time to navel-gaze because there will be a life to live and books to read and flowers to buy and places to go.

Oh! The places we will go!