Happy Christmas and be kind to yourself

And always make sure you have your own back

I am writing this on Christmas Eve. I’ve laid the table with a paper tablecloth from Tesco. There is already a blob of butter stuck on it. I have set two wooden soldiers on there too (one arm stuck on with blu-tack), and some leftover napkins from last year (brussel sprouts in party hats singing). I always get this feeling the night before it all kicks off. The adrenalin. Also tiredness. And a bit of anti-climax. This thing that is on our radar from about October onwards. This thing that is all about what other people want.

Many years ago I would wonder why my mum was locked in her room with a sewing machine whirring till midnight. Why she went to bed early the next night. She made a lot of our presents on that sewing machine. She didn’t rest or sit down. Christmas was all about work and striving to make things as good as they could be. Christmas was never about her needs.

Many of us will be happy when Christmas passes, and may even feel sad that we haven’t done it quite as we should have. If you’re thinking those thoughts already then STOP.

Think instead about how next year it can be more of the Christmas you want (I know with small kids this is tricky but it shouldn’t mean compromising everything you want).

2023 was a weird year. I started this year in a shit job. I hated it. It was relentless. My boss was mean. The targets were unrealistic. They changed each week. We had spreadsheets we had to update with our progress and I quickly realised that nothing I did would ever be enough. I had to sit whilst a woman from HR talked me through the hours in each day and asked why I couldn’t achieve what had been set down for me to achieve. She asked me to account for every single hour of every single day as if all I actually did in life was work. Besides this was the job of three people (and I work pretty hard so it was possibly even the job of four). I resigned. Things got worse. More people left. I got people contacting me months later with work trauma. Even though I realised it was a bad company with bad management it blew a massive hole in my confidence.

I spent the last three months of that job doing nothing but writing blog content about urinary incontinence. Literally that was all I wrote about. My boss asked me to write 10 posts and I think I ended up writing 22. By the end, I knew more about urinary incontinence than most doctors. I could write an entire book about it in fact, and if you want to know what happens to your pelvic floor, and why you sometimes pee when you run for a bus, well hit me up, and I’ll write you a blog post or ten about it. Something jaunty and accessible. Something likeable and friendly. Something that you’ll read and perhaps forget in about forty seconds.

I ended up coming out of that job feeling knackered and with zero confidence. I’d been a Managing Partner many moons ago, and here I was churning out blogs that nobody would read (because let’s face it when was the last time you actually read a blog about urinary incontinence?) I’m telling you this because you may find yourself in a similar place. It might not be work related. It might be that you feel bad about something else- your relationship is stagnant or you feel disconnected from your friends. I want you to know that it will change but you need to think about what you need. Stop thinking about pleasing others. Then go for it.

Stop going on diets. Stop trying to be a better parent and berating yourself each day because you’ve screwed something up. Stop looking at other peoples’ houses/relationships/cars/kids/holidays and thinking they have things sorted.

I went through months where I thought I was unemployable. I was too old. Washed up. A writer of books that didn’t sell in their millions, not even in their thousands to be fair. I had a call with a publisher and she told me to write romantic fiction. Another told me to write a misery memoir and really drill into the nitty gritty of my past. Instead I started this Substack and wrote consistently. Three posts a week if I could squeeze it in. I talked about suicide, grief, menopause, work, ageing, relationships. All the things I said were true. I got messages from so many women saying they felt relieved that there was someone else having these feelings too. Feelings of inadequacy. Of restlessness. Of defeat. They particularly liked the writing about influencers who are just as messed up are regular people and often even more so. They liked those because it reminded them that we are all humans and none of us have perfect lives.

I thought about all those incontinence blogs sitting on that platform. I tried to see it as a positive instead. All those words were good practice- they were all about a subject many aren’t particularly interested in but they helped me write in a more succinct way. They honed my craft. THOSE INCONTINENCE BLOGS ACTUALLY MADE ME A BETTER WRITER. They also made me realise that I would never ever write one more piece of content about incontinence (here I am though and this is kind of about incontinence). I was low when I was writing those. I felt really really low. And now I am better, so much better. And part of that is because I drew a line under that job. I moved on. It was pretty unpleasant but I looked out for myself.

Always look out for yourself. HAVE YOUR OWN BACK. Next year make this your motto.

Thank you for reading. Please do keep reading. I love you. I see you. I want you to imagine all those incontinence blogs. I want you to imagine them disappearing into the millions of other useless blogs that have been written. They are being sucked into a funnel of useless content. One day an alien will access this funnel because it’s been blasted into space via an AI satellite and this alien will read one and he’ll say- ‘Hell this girl can really write convincingly about incontinence. I wonder if she’s written anything else?’

That will be the moment things really change.