I found Lilly.

She was hiding behind good crockery and scented candles.

Mar 31, 2026

I started this little project with no grand plan. I sat down one afternoon with a vague, itchy feeling that I had something to say, and the quiet suspicion that if I didn’t start saying it soon, the feeling would calcify into resentment, which is, as far as I can tell, what happens to most women who keep swallowing their observations.

So I wrote. And then I watched. That, I now realise, is what the past year has mostly been: inward retrospect dressed up as outward observation. I went to a speed dating night for a friend I adore. I fielded letters from women who were being gifted gym leotards by families who had somehow never met them. I paid attention to what people said out loud versus what they actually meant. I kept one eye on the room and one eye on my tongue.

It was, in all honesty, a very good year to stay quiet and watch.

‘The people who always had an answer for everything are now, quietly, talking to themselves.’

Because something shifted out there this year, and I’m not sure everyone has named it yet. People’s lives are turning inward. Not by choice, necessarily, but by a kind of exhaustion that’s hard to argue with. A full-time job no longer funds a full life; it just funds the basics, and barely. And society turns out to be a remarkably harsh critic, with very little to show for itself in its own choices.

Here is what I know: you cannot outsource yourself. You can delegate the dishwasher and the tax return, but the business of knowing who you are and what you want and what you will and will not accept is entirely yours to manage.

This is not a bitter observation. It’s a liberating one, once you sit with it long enough.

Lilly, for those who are new here, is the version of me that tells the truth without the preliminary apology. She’s the one who knows that wilted petrol station gerberas are not a love language. She’s the one who goes to a speed dating event with no personal agenda because her friend needs a witness. She is not a character I invented. She is the person I stopped talking over.

There are a lot of us, I think. Women who have spent decades being competent and accommodating and quietly, expertly invisible to the people they love most. Women who are brilliant at reading a room and hopeless at insisting that the room read them back. Writing this newsletter was, more than anything else, the practice of insisting on being read.

I didn’t know that when I started. I thought I was being funny. I was, sometimes. But underneath the jokes about caramel cakes and possums in the roof was something more stubborn: the insistence that a woman’s inner life is worth the space it takes up on the page. That her opinions on socks with brogues and the Roman Empire meme and the precise indignity of a last-minute Mother’s Day gift are legitimate cultural data.

Here is the thing about time, and I say this as someone who has spent a great deal of it underestimating its speed. It does not wait for you to feel ready. It does not care that you are tired from a week that consumed everything you had, or that you had a very good idea in the shower that has since evaporated. Time is not neutral. It is always doing something to you, whether or not you are paying attention.

Which is why this, whatever this is, a newsletter, a running commentary, a letter to strangers who feel oddly familiar, matters. Not because what I write will change the world, but because the act of noticing and naming things is the closest I have found to being genuinely present in my own life.

So. Was Lilly lost? Not really. Was she hiding? A little, behind the good crockery and the scented candles and the years of being very helpful and very capable and very careful about what she said. But she knew where she was the whole time. She was just waiting for someone to stop talking long enough to ask.

This is not a goodbye. I am constitutionally incapable of a tidy ending. It is more of a pause. A breath. A moment where I look back at the year of watching and listening and quietly losing patience with the world’s more spectacular nonsense, and I say: yes. That was worth doing. More of that, please.

Grab your coffee. Or your cocktail. We’re still looking.

With love, and very little patience for wilted gerberas,

Love, Lilly x

#lillyiscomingbacksoon

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