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After I developed long term illnesses, I spent a very, very long time trying to regain my health.

It became my primary motivator and my focus.

Years and years spent chasing after a dream future. While missing the reality of my present.

I saw my health status as being the thing that was standing between me and the life I wanted to be living.

I was like Del Boy. Living with the fantasy that “This time next year” I’d be well again. If I could just find the missing pieces of my health jigsaw puzzle.

I searched and searched for the one thing that would tip me over into beginning to get well again.

If I could just become well enough...

Everything else would follow.

I’d travel more. I’d invite people over without mentally calculating how many days I’d need in bed beforehand and afterwards. I’d write more. Laugh more. Decorate. Create.

I’d be more productive.

Stop being a failure.

Getting my health back became the key I believed would finally unlock the door to my life and my future. I believed what the wellness industry told me about personal responsibility and helping myself.

After years and years of searching for ways to fix myself, I’ve finally stopped.

Because I’m not broken.

And neither are you.

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Last month I wrote about the lies the wellness industry tells us.

One of the biggest lies I think we’re told is:

The life you want exists somewhere in the future when you’re a better version of yourself than you are now.

A healthier version of you, or a slimmer version of you, or a more stacked version of you, and definitely a more disciplined version of you.

That version of you who gets up at 5 a.m., drinks things that resemble pond water, breathes correctly, stretches correctly, journals correctly, before enthusiastically and perkily making your way to the gym while the sun is still putting its hat on.

I’m exhausted just writing that out.

In these fantasies that we’re sold, and the lies about life that we’re told, the finish line keeps moving.

There is always another fecking thing to improve. Another habit to stack, another book to read, another expensive product to buy. Another expert explaining why the last expert was completely wrong.

The wheel forever and ever reinvented.

It’s an incredibly clever business model.

For a long time, I didn’t question it, because when you’re ill, you want to believe there is a way out and a way back “up” to health.

As if you’ve fallen into a hole and if you can just find the right length of ladder you can heave yourself back up onto the main road of life and travel along with everyone else to bigger and better things.

Hope kept me going when I was dealing with horrible symptoms and the isolation they bring with them.

One of the things it took me far too long to understand is that hope and endless striving to be and do more aren’t the same thing.

At some point, I’d completely swallowed the belief that chasing health was a proactive and responsible way to live my life.

It was fecking exhausting because every choice and decision I made about how to live my days was somehow connected to a fantasy future version of myself.

My life became conditional on having more energy, finding the answers the doctors couldn’t find. Finding a treatment that worked, having less pain.

Just generally being a better person than I was.

There wasn’t anything about my life that I didn’t feel ought to be improved because I’d been led to believe that being chronically ill was somehow a personal failure and if my life as an ill person was a failure then I needed to do more to be a success.

So everything became about “then” and not “now”.

It was like living while asleep. I was never fully present to anything that was happening to me “now”. My whole life was on hold for something different. Waiting for another life to start if I could just somehow be different.

What a terrible fecking way to live a life.

What a terribly disrespectful way to see myself.

What an awful way to view my body which was trying so hard to do everything it could to function and move me through the world.

But nothing it did was good enough in my wellness industry influenced eyes.

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It was towards the end of 2023, when I hit the 20th anniversary of being diagnosed with a long term illness that I suddenly woke up.

It suddenly dawned on me…

“Fucking hell. It’s 20 years since I was diagnosed and I’ve done absolutely fucking everything the wellness industry told me to do and I’m still fucking ill.

WHAT IF I NEVER GET WELL?

OH MY GOD! WHAT IF THIS IS IT?

WHAT IF THIS RIGHT NOW IS MY LIFE AND THE PAST 20 YEARS HAVE BEEN AN ABSOLUTE WASTE OF FOCUS AND TIME BECAUSE I WAS NEVER GOING TO GET WELL AGAIN ANYWAY AND I’VE BEEN CHASING A LIFE THAT IS NEVER GOING TO FUCKING HAPPEN?

FUCKING HELL.”

I can honestly say, that wasn’t the chirpiest of mornings I’ve ever had.

And then my partner at the time, who I was very much in love with, decided to add a nice drop kick to the guts of the situation by telling me one afternoon that my disabilities and illnesses made his life feel small and he was prepared to carry on being in a relationship with me but even after years together he was never going to marry me or live with me.

Yeah.

That day was an absolute doozy.

It was at that point that something deep inside me woke the hell up.

It was time to lose 168 lbs in an afternoon and to think seriously about what in the actual feck I was doing.

Because, friends, I was so tired.

Bone deep wearily tired.

Just beyond exhausted.

Of all the trying.

All the years and years of trying so hard to be somebody the world was telling me I needed to be and then being given message after message that I just wasn’t cutting the mustard.

In that moment, when my partner said what he said, on the same day that I was really seeing that 20 years had passed with no hint of the life Id been trying so hard to create, something broke.

And that breaking woke me the hell up.

From a kind of living dream.

I found myself just wanting to let go of all of it and stop fucking searching.

I had no searching left in me anymore.

Everything suddenly felt much clearer.

I was hurting deeply, but that pain was very, very clarifying.

I was absolutely done trying to do and be more.

Utterly done.

Instead, I wanted to start living.

MY life.

The one I was fucking in. Not the future one where I was different, better, more and less all at the same fecking time.

I looked at my ex as he said the word “small” and I knew that I was at the end of who I’d been trying to be.

IT ALL HAD TO GO.

THE LIFE I’D BEEN LIVING JUST HAD TO GO.

I HAD NO MORE TRYING TO HEAL LEFT.

I told my ex his offer wasn’t going to work for me.

I wasn’t anybody’s compensation prize and I certainly knew I didn’t make anyone else’s life small.

His lack of imagination and commitment did that for him.

And I stopped trying to be be a better version of myself somewhere in the future and I decided I was done telling myself that I wasn’t good enough just as I am.

You could try for 20 years to heal and be better and still not be enough in someone else’s eyes, including your own.

I was utterly done with that horseshit.

It was fucking time to decide for myself if I was enough.

To decide how I wanted to define what kind of life was worth having and living.

Rooted in reality NOW not fantasy in the FUTURE.

God, it was freeing.

I immediately lost 168 lbs by showing my ex the door and waving him goodbye. (In your face, wellness industry. How’s that for self-improvement, eh?)

Then I grieved.

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I went into an immediate illness crash and had six weeks of the worst physical pain I’ve ever experienced.

Non-stop 11/10 level pain for six weeks, 24 hours a day and no painkillers worked to lessen it.

It was absolutely brutal.

It was the worst illness flare of my illness life.

And I cried and screamed into pillows.

I started to grieve for all of it.

The life I’d wanted.

The career, friends, marriage, and financial autonomy I’d lost.

I grieved the children I hadn’t been able to have due to illness, but very much wanted.

I grieved the loneliness. The isolation. The invisibility. The loss of being able to participate in the world the way I wanted.

The loss of being able to dance.

The loss of my physical strength.

The projections other people laid over me. Those who could not see me beyond the limitations of how I could move.

I grieved all of it.

Every day, for weeks, and then months.

It wasn’t the surface level “tidy” type of grieving of a few tears dabbed with a clean hankie.

I raged.

Absolutely raged it all out.

Through all the physical pain, the emotional pain came in waves.

I had no idea when it was going to end or who I’d be on the other side of this hideously dark tunnel.

I scared the postie when I opened the door to receive a parcel and he caught sight of the state of me.

I went to the dogs friends and they were not fluffy poodles.

I was feral.

And I knew I had to let it all come up and out of me.

I knew I had to let it forge me in its fire.

Even as I hated every single moment of it.

It was terrifying.

Deeply, existentially terrifying.

But. I knew I couldn’t keep living a life that wasn’t connected with who I actually already was. In the present.

I had to let go of the fantasy version of past me before illness, and future me after illness that I so desperately wanted.

And I had to meet the reality of me and all my pain.

Because I was so tired of trying.

I genuinely had no clue what I was supposed to do with myself.

For over twenty years I’d had a purpose every single day I woke up.

My job, according to absolutely everybody, including me, was to get well.

To search, keep trying, keep hoping, keep improving, keep becoming.

So when I suddenly decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore, I felt completely bloody untethered.

I mostly lay in bed (because I physically couldn’t do anything else), absolutely rinsed, thinking,

“Well... now what the feck am I supposed to do?”

When you’ve built your identity around trying to escape your own life, stopping trying to escape yourself and your own life feels really, really horrible.

Like crashing into a brick wall and being shocked awake to find yourself in a pile of broken… everything.

I’d catch myself sitting in the garden and think,

“What if I just cant be happy and calm? How the feck do you feel safe in a life and a body that hurts you every day?”

I’d make a cup of tea and wonder whether there was another article or book I ought to have read about mitochondrial dysfunction, gut bacteria, inflammation, nervous systems, hormones, trauma, supplements, or antioxidants.

Trying had somehow become my full-time occupation. Even while lying disabled in bed. So if I wasn’t trying anymore...

Who the feck was I?

At one point I wondered if this was it.

If I’d moved into a much worse state of chronic pain than I’d been in before. But as suddenly as it flared, after weeks and weeks of feeling tortured by it, it started to slowly lessen to more manageable levels.

And I started to think about what the feck my life was going to be about, if I wasn’t trying to be Jesus, in order to heal myself. Who was I if I was ill and just fully accepting that this was what my life experience was? Could I be happy? How could I be happy? What did I want my life to feel like? What did I want my life to mean? Was happiness even the right thing to be searching for? What if the meaning of life was something else entirely and if it was, what the fuck was that?

Yes, friends, I went there.

I actually started pulling at that existential thread.

I know.

Dangerous.

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Do you know what answer I got? It was embarrassingly ordinary

I just wanted my nervous system to be able to simply “exhale”.

I wanted to be able to lower my shoulders from where they were stuck touching my ear lobes.

That was it.

I didn’t want a flashy life. I didn’t want to be someone else.

I just wanted to wake up and feel safe.

FEEL SAFE.

Just me.

Without anyone else trying to make me feel safe.

I wanted to find my home within myself. I wanted to enjoy my own home. I wanted people around me who loved me and who made me laugh. I wanted conversations that stretched my mind rather than drained my energy. I wanted beauty. Not expensive beauty or “magazine beauty”, or performative beauty.

Real beauty.

A peaceful, mundane Tuesday afternoon. A bunch of flowers from the supermarket. My favourite tone of pale blush pink on my bedroom walls. To make me smile every time I opened my eyes in the morning. A favourite mug. Pint-sized. Not teeny, tiny. But pretty. Beautiful and big enough to hold my ridiculous pint of decaff coffee that I love every morning. That I drink in my little garden, while watching my frogs.

Also, soft lighting. Music. My favourite books stacked on a table. Fresh air through my open window. The first signs of spring. Cherry blossoms everywhere. Fresh clean cotton sheets. Pillows. All the pillows. Autumn leaves. Birdsong. The little dog I’d been dreaming of having since being four years old, but had never been able to bring home.

None of these things cure chronic illness. They’re not meant to. Their purpose is something much smaller. And much more important.

They remind us that life isn’t only made up of symptoms.

Somewhere along the way, while dealing with the pain of our bodies and the pressures of surviving, and seeing all the beautiful, perfect lives on social media, we’ve somehow lost touch with tiny, ordinary things that make us happy. As if we’re supposed to want more. We’ve been taught to admire huge accomplishments and massively impressive transformations. I keep seeing them online. The dramatic before and after shots and videos. The “comeback” or “breakthrough”. The surgeries that change faces and bodies. The grinding workouts that flatten stomachs and bring sponsorship deals and external signs of “success”.

The people who “fought” their illnesses and healed themselves with nothing but vegetables and a willingness to go the distance.

As if everyone else is just fannying around not fighting hard enough.

Ordinary things and dreams don’t get many headlines or many followers. Nobody writes a bestselling memoir called “Menopausal Woman Has Quite a Nice Tuesday.”

But I truly think those ordinary dreams are not small.

Because if you really look closely at people’s lives, they’re almost entirely made of those ordinary Tuesdays, drinking a lovely coffee out of an enormous favourite mug and listening to the birds.

I wondered about what I had been doing all those years chasing wellness, and whether I was chasing down (metaphorically obvs) someone else’s idea of success.

Why was my life only worth something if I had full health?

What kind of a prick would believe that, and was I one of them?

(“Huge ones” and “Yes” were my answers to those last two questions , if you’re curious.)

The older I get, the less convinced I am that “becoming” is life’s greatest achievement. No matter how many times the wellness industry and social media tell us otherwise.

Instead, I think it might be “noticing”.

Paying attention.

Perhaps it’s creating a life that feels like it fits like a hand made suit just for you and the people closest to you that you love. Whether it looks that way to anyone outside it is irrelevant.

That day when I realised I’d spent 20 years chasing something that I hadn’t even got close to achieving, and my ex said the word “small” to me, I realised I was done self-improving in order to be well.

Not because I lacked ambition. I’m as internally driven as the next type A personality.

It was time to question where my ambition for wellness had come from in the first place.

I realised I’d spent years pursuing health and personal goals I hadn’t consciously chosen. I’d just absorbed and internalised ableism and was living as if what it told me was true.

The idea that a successful life should be impressive. That if I was ill I should focus everything on not being what ableism decided was a failure and instead get myself well and get back to being productive. As if it were ever true that illness is failure and not working was laziness.

That perfect health should be at the centre of everything (“You haven’t got anything if you haven’t got your health!”) and anything else wasn’t worth having.

If I never hear the words…

Growing.

Scaling.

Optimising.

Improving.

Maximising.

Again, there’s one enormous ambition that will have been achieved right there.

Those words make me feel sick.

Because optimisation and satisfaction are not the same things and wellness and happiness do not necessarily lead to each other.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with improvement. I’m very glad someone improved indoor plumbing. I’m enormously grateful someone looked at a human riding a horse and thought, “There has to be another way.”

But I refuse to live my life anymore existing in a permanent state of renovation! Our bodies, homes, careers, relationships, friendships, hobbies. Fecking hell. Even rest has become competitive! Apparently we’re now meant to have “high-performance recovery.”

For the love of gawd, make it stop.

It all just makes me want to bellow:

JUST FUCK OFF! REALLY, GO OVER THERE! AND WHEN YOUVE FUCKED OFF OVER THERE DONT TURN BACK JUST KEEP FUCKING OFF UNTUL YOU’RE OVER THE HILL. YOU’RE TRYING TO IMPROVE.”

It’s remarkably difficult to enjoy the life you’re living while being constantly encouraged to imagine a better one.

Ordinary IS NOT mediocre.

Illness IS NOT failure.

Contentment IS NOT complacency.

The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced we’ve become completely disconnected from what actually makes a human life great.

We know how to optimise almost everything now. We can track our sleep, our heart rate, our calories, our steps, our productivity, our finances, and our habits.

We’re living under the most intense scrutiny of ourselves BY ourselves.

And we’re lonelier, more anxious and more dissatisfied than ever, I think, while simultaneously being told that if we just tweak one more thing we’ll finally become the person we’ve been trying to be all along.

I’m done.

I’m not raising my standards of who I am and who I think I should be any more.

Since I stopped trying to be a different me?

I’ve never felt happier.

Honestly.

The joy of just being able to be me is just the loveliest feeling.

I’m ill, yes.

So what?

This is it.

This is my life.

Just as it is now.

I might fall down a hole next week and it could all be over,

I’m supremely grateful that I’ve had 2.5 of the happiest years of my life so far just enjoying my little life with my frogs and my tiny pond and learning to love me well.

(Much better than that eejit who said I made his life small.)

I’ve strengthened my friendships, I’ve had my home decorated. I’ve learned about frogs and the tiny lives they live. I’ve spent time with my flowers and the butterflies. And the bees. I’ve listened to the birds. I’ve sat in my garden in the rain and felt it on my skin. I’ve nurtured my heart. I’ve delighted in myself.

I’ve stopped chasing perfection. I’ve stopped trying to be better/more and learned to love “enough”.

My life might be small according to someone else’s definition, but my joy is huge. I don’t make anyone else’s life small. I live the size of my life fully and I’ve made space in it for all the people who love me well.

At some point I may decide to share my lovely little peaceful life with a man who loves me and my life as much as I do. And build a new one with him.

But for now, I want to say, with so much love and respect for the struggle.

You do not have to be more.

You do not have to strive and chase.

You can be enough, with or without illness.

Your pain matters and your wanting for health matters.

But do not sacrifice your search for health on the back of a wellness industry that is designed to make you believe you are lacking when you most definitely are not.

I wish I’d understood this more 20 years ago and not wasted all that time trying to be a different version of me than I was.

The very strangest thing is that once I stopped trying to change and be more, I became a much bigger version of myself.

Please forward and share this article with anyone you feel might benefit from it. Particularly anyone you know who lives with chronic illness and/or disability and has to deal with the impact of the wellness industry’s lies.

Also, please share Moss and Matchsticks with anyone you think might enjoy my way of looking at the world and who would appreciate being part of the Moss and Matchsticks community here on Substack.

You’re very welcome here.

Please subscribe for free using the Subscribe buttons in this article to receive my posts direct to your email inbox. Download the Substack app for access to my daily Notes and observations on life. These include more of my art and my jokes. You’re welcome and I’m sorry.

All images and words are copyrighted to Moss and Matchsticks 2026.

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I saw a post on Substack recently celebrating the healing power of sunlight.

Before anyone starts aggressively throwing a vitamin D supplement at me, let me be clear:

Sunlight is good.

Fresh air is good.

Nature is good.

I am not about to spend 3,000 words arguing in favour of living in a windowless bunker illuminated (softly) only by the glow of a laptop and simmering middle-aged resentment.

What interested me wasn’t the sunlight.

It was something within the post that I find quite insidious.

The post laid out a kind of story:

Once upon a time, doctors understood the healing power of sunlight.

In an age before Big Pharma, health care and wellness involved using “natural” things to optimise us.

Then pharmaceuticals arrived.

Then the people who made money from the pharmaceuticals forgot about natural things.

And then, the rest of us all forgot and became riddled with unnecessary chemicals and nasty medicines that harmed us.

Until only the most well-informed and clever people now currently understand that “natural” is best.

Everyone else is a brainwashed eejit who doesn’t understand how to be healthy.

The implication being that modern medicine took a wrong turn somewhere along the historical path, and that most of human suffering could be solved if we’d simply stop ignoring the wisdom of our ancestors and spend more time outside.

It’s a very, very seductive story.

Over-simplified.

But seductive.

It tells us if we return to the wisdom of our forefathers and their natural remedies we can strengthen our immune systems enough that we won’t have any need for Big Pharma and its toxic medicines.

But I’m going to happily blast that story out of the water by saying:

Do you know who ate a totally organic diet?

Spent hours in the sun?

Didn’t eat a single highly processed food?

Drank fresh fluoride- and chlorine-free water?

Breathed in fresh, clean air every day?

Lived without plastics and pollution?

Ate only freshly grown vegetables and whole foods?

EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING BEFORE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION!

AND MOST OF THEM DIED A HORRIBLE DEATH BEFORE THEY’D REACHED MENOPAUSE/THE POINT OF EXPERIENCING ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION DUE TO AN ENORMOUS STRANGLING PROSTATE.

Before the Industrial Revolution, global mortality rates were exceptionally high and extremely volatile, resulting overall in an average human life expectancy of only around 30–40 years. These figures were primarily driven by extremely high levels of child and infant mortality.

Most of which we’ve managed to limit, in no small part, due to the magic of vaccinations.

That being,,, erm,,. science

When modern medicine and public health interventions took hold, global mortality rates underwent the most radical transformation in human history.

Between the mid-19th century and the present day, death rates dropped severely, life expectancy doubled, and the reasons why people died completely changed.

These changes took place due to scientific advances that increased our understanding of how disease took hold and the public health measures and medicines needed to prevent and treat it.

But today, it’s as if we’ve forgotten all of that important data.

If Beverley (who is usually white and bored) in Oklahoma tells us in her podcast from her middle-class, very affluent-looking kitchen that juicing broccoli with the essential oils of a mermaid’s toenails can cure cancer, apparently the world now believes her.

I’ve lost count of the number of times, as a disabled person with chronic illnesses, that I’ve been asked if I eat wholefoods, have changed my diet to cut out processed foods, if I’m getting enough sunlight and time “in nature”. Have I tried organic wholefoods only? Am I drinking celery juice? Taking supplements? Tried breathing properly? (Yes, I’ve actually been asked if I’m breathing properly. Er… I dunno, I just know if I stop doing it how I’m doing it, it probably isn’t going to end well. )Cut out processed sugar? Am I filtering my water? Do I practise yoga and meditation? Have I checked my house for mould? Checked my fillings for mercury? Am I familiar with how the body keeps the score? Polyvagal theory? Have I tried sitting with a bucket on my head in the middle of the woods at night and had people throw grapefruit at me while chanting “om” at the owls and beating me with bulrushes?

The answer to all of those is a resounding YES!!

I have!

(The woods thing was when I was a student and, honestly, didn’t really have anything to do with wellness and was more about boozeness. I joke. I haven’t done it but would in a heartbeat if I thought it would help in any small way.)

So, back to that post I saw about spending time in the sun.

It had a huge amount of likes and restacks.

And, depressingly, I think I know why.

(Get comfy, I’m going to share some thoughts on that.)

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Because it makes illness feel simple.

The wellness industry has built an empire on the lie that illness is simple.

That your body is trying to tell you something.

That everything happens for a reason.

That every symptom has a root cause.

That every root cause can be found.

That every illness can be healed.

That every problem has an answer.

And if you’re still sick?

Well, you just haven’t found the answer you need yet.

You haven’t eliminated enough foods.

You haven’t healed your gut.

You haven’t regulated your nervous system.

You haven’t balanced your hormones.

You haven’t detoxed.

You haven’t grounded.

You haven’t meditated.

You haven’t bought Karen’s £497 course on healing ancestral trauma with cauliflower yoghurt and a vision board.

There is always another opinion with a microphone.

And the answer always seems to be available for immediate purchase behind a paywall.

From someone with precisely zero medical experience but who watched a YouTube video, then did an online course and ultimately reached the pinnacle of their training by healing their toenail fungus with vinegar and tenacity.

The reason these wellness stories sell so well is because uncertainty is terrifying.

The idea that illness can hit for no apparent reason, stay with you for decades, and refuse to respond to your years-long best efforts to get rid of it is deeply frightening.

Most people would rather believe illness is controllable.

Even if that control is imaginary.

Actually, especially if that control is imaginary.

Because if illness is simple, then illness is preventable.

And if illness is preventable, then we are safe from being hit with the health tragedy stick.

Or at least we can pretend we are.

The problem is that many of us who are actually ill eventually discover something very complicated and full of grief.

Illness isn’t simple.

Not even remotely.

I’ve lived with chronic illness for many years.

In that time I’ve tried things.

Many things.

ALL THE THINGS.

Sensible things.

Ridiculous things.

Things that helped.

Things that did absolutely bugger all.

Things that definitely made me question my life choices and contingency planning.

And one of the most surprising discoveries I made was that the longer I was ill, the more years I followed the people who sounded like they knew what they were talking about and found myself in yet another wellness dead-end berating myself for failing to get well, the less interested I became in certainty.

The less interested I became in miracle cures.

And, ultimately, the less interested I became in people who seemed very confident.

Because confidence and understanding the complexities of illness are just not at all the same thing.

The healthiest people among us often believe illness is simple because they haven’t had reason to discover otherwise.

They still imagine the body is a predictable machine.

Put good things in.

Get good results out.

They believe their health is a result of their wellness efforts and not actually down to luck and a whole big dollop of herd immunity granted to them by science.

They have health privilege and don’t even know it.

They believe if they exercise, sleep, eat vegetables, manage stress, they will avoid illness knocking at their door and dismantling their ableist assumptions.

And largely, for many people, the things they do to look after themselves are beneficial.

But they are not even slightly the whole picture. Our bodies are very finely tuned and balanced. Our external world influences far more than we realise. And our genetics and generational history affect us in ways scientists don’t even understand after years of study.

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To think that a middle-aged woman bouncing around in Lululemon leggings, waving turmeric at you, is going to have the answer to why your vertebrae are crumbling or your brain developed a tumour is to simplify a miracle of nature and flatten the complexities of our relationship to our world, our history and our genealogy to a disrespectful degree.

I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news but, I promise you, there will be a day where the promises of the wellness industry won’t be enough.

Not because you have failed to look after yourself but because, as much as billionaires would like us to forget, WE ARE NOT IMMORTAL AND MONEY DOES NOT BUY TIME.

And most of all:

HEALTH IS A TEMPORARY STATE, NOT A FIXED REALITY.

I’m going to say it again for the people at the back.

Health is a temporary state, FOR EVERYONE, not a fixed reality.

There will come a time for everyone when a doctor looks quietly at you and a diagnosis is given.

Or an accident takes place.

Or cancer develops.

Or an autoimmune condition arrives.

Or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis turns up after a virus.

Or a neurological illness surprises its recipient.

A time where something regarding your health comes knocking that medicine doesn’t understand.

So, then suddenly “wellness” becomes less easy to understand.

The uncomfortable reality is that many illnesses remain poorly understood.

Some people do everything right and still become ill.

Some people do everything wrong and live to ninety-eight.

Life is not fair.

Bodies are not spreadsheets.

And biology does not care how much turmeric you’ve consumed.

One of the things that frustrates me about wellness culture is that it victim blames some while telling others they are powerful.

It tells people they can heal and have agency.

Which sounds lovely.

Until you realise what’s actually hidden behind that perspective. It’s nuanced but it’s there.

If healing is entirely within your control, then illness must be your fault.

If health is a choice, the inverse of that means that sickness becomes a failure.

If wellness is available to everyone if they do the right things, then those who remain ill must not be trying hard enough.

This is why chronically ill people are so often bombarded with advice and are so frequently furious about it.

People cannot tolerate randomness, so they look for explanations.

Have you tried yoga? Have you tried cutting out gluten? Have you tried meditation? Have you tried positive thinking? Have you tried sunlight?

(Ma’am, have you tried shutting up?)

The underlying belief is always the same.

Surely it can’t be this complicated. Surely there must be an answer. They must be lazy and inhaling Benson & Hedges with a side order of McDonald’s and despair for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But sometimes there isn’t an answer we can pinpoint or understand. Sometimes there is just a frightened person trying to manage the changes and new reality, rather than being able to travel towards a cure. Sometimes there is just learning to adapt.

With no recovery.

Sometimes there is grief, and then possibly acceptance.

Sometimes there is a person in a life that now holds a number of different realities and truths, because an illness can’t be cured, and that’s not the ill person’s fault.

It isn’t their fault that they got ill and it isn’t their fault that they can’t get well.

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That truth is very much harder to sell.

No one is getting rich telling people:

“Life is uncertain, bodies are vulnerable, and some things remain beyond our control. Soz.”

There isn’t much money in that.

There is, however, a great deal of money in convincing relatively healthy people that illness is simple and that their health is being granted to them because of what they’re doing, and that level of health will continue to be a fairly permanent state if they continue what they’re doing in order to be well.

Because simplicity, certainty, fear and hope all sell.

And we are usually quite happy to buy into the dream that we won’t be touched by illness and suffering if we do all the right things.

I was a ballet dancer with 20 years of training.

I ran.

Swam.

Rock-climbed.

I didn’t really drink alcohol.

I didn’t smoke.

I ate wholefoods and slept well.

I used sunscreen.

I hydrated well.

I did everything right.

And at 28, I got ill and then I didn’t ever get well again.

No matter what I tried.

At age 28. The peak of my youth.

And believe me when I say I tried.

When you get ill that young you (ironically and metaphorically) throw everything you’ve got at the problem.

But, let’s go back to that post I saw online about sunlight.

The photograph of patients lying in the sunshine in that post tells one narrow story.

What it doesn’t show are the children who died before antibiotics.

The women who died in childbirth.

The people who died from infected wounds.

The people whose illnesses did not respond to sunlight.

The dead aren’t really ever mentioned in wellness narratives because they ruin the simplicity.

We don’t generally like to live day by with the existential reality that we’re all only a couple of missed breaths away from permanently leaving the room.

It’s a lot of dread for a human brain to sit with without causing you morph into Munch’s Scream.

The truth is that sunlight can be beneficial.

Modern medicine can be beneficial.

Nature can be beneficial.

Pharmaceuticals can be beneficial.

These things are not enemies.

And this is definitely not an “either/or relationship.

When used together they can be powerful, but there are no simple answers and health is not a permanent state, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves it can be if we just do all the right things.

The world and systems we live in are more complicated than the wellness industry would have us believe.

And health, and how to have it, is much more complicated than the wellness industry would like us to believe.

So before you look at a person with chronic illness and clumsily decide to infer that they are not trying hard enough to be well, please remember the likelihood that, yes, they’ve tried everything and they know something you don’t:

Namely, that illness is not anything to do with what they have or haven’t done, and your unsolicited advice is making them feel well enough to start punching throats.

Please forward and share this article with anyone you feel might benefit from it. Particularly anyone you know who lives with chronic illness and/or disability and has to deal with the impact of the wellness industry’s lies.

Also, please share Moss and Matchsticks with anyone you think might enjoy my way of looking at the world and who would appreciate being part of the Moss and Matchsticks community here on Substack.

You’re very welcome here.

Please subscribe for free using the Subscribe buttons in this article to receive my posts direct to your email inbox. Download the Substack app for access to my daily Notes and observations on life. These include more of my art and my jokes. You’re welcome and I’m sorry.

All images and words are copyrighted to Moss and Matchsticks 2026.

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In the sit-com “Friends” Monica asks Chandler if he thinks she’s “high maintenance” and when he tentatively replies “Yes”, she’s devastated.

Chandler rescues the moment by telling Monica that it isn’t a problem that she’s high maintenance because he loves “maintaining her”.

It was a surprisingly powerful insight and reframing of a toxic label for a 90s sitcom interested mostly in Friday night laughs.

I want to tease apart the myth of “high maintenance” because it’s one of those labels that’s almost always said with a big dollop of judgement and a little side order of unseen gaslighting attached to it.

Nobody says it admiringly.

It’s usually shorthand for:
“Your needs are inconveniencing me slightly and I’d prefer it if you stopped expecting me to care about your individual way of needing to be loved.”

This is a very interesting dynamic to me, because there’s actually no such thing as a low-maintenance human being.

There are just people who:

• know what they need and say it out loud,

• people who haven’t worked out what they need yet,

• and people who learned to bury their needs because every time they expressed them someone acted like they were a problem.

That’s it.

The world is not divided into “high-maintenance” and “low-maintenance” people.
It’s divided into people whose needs are visible, and people who’ve been taught and trained to hide them.

I’ve come to this conclusion, basically, because all of us want things.

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We all of us have a very specific way of needing to be loved rooted in our past experiences, our fears, our wounds, our likes, our preferences, our ways of communicating and our wounds.

All of us.

We want to feel safe, chosen, considered, wanted and understood.
We want to be spoken to kindly.
We want affection in the ways that are meaningful for us.
We want honesty.
We want tenderness when life is hard.
We want someone to notice when we’re struggling instead of being completely oblivious.

Some people are just more able to be honest about that than others.

And honestly, in my opinion, a lot of “low maintenance” behaviour is just highly skilled self-abandonment.

Really.

We get so many messages from our highly individualist systems that tell us that having needs automatically makes us needy.

And that needing maintaining makes us burdensome.

Having needs and being needy are not the same thing.

I’m going to say it again for emphasis because I feel so strongly about this.

HAVING NEEDS AND BEING NEEDY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.

Even cars need the right type of petrol to run smoothly, alongside an oil change, air in the tyres and a good ole service once in a while (definitely a euphemism).

CARS.

So I have questions.

Such as:

Why do we believe that the best way to be a human, trying to function in a relationship, is to pretend we have no needs?

And that if we do have needs, why do we put so much pressure on ourselves to be the type of solid individual who meets all those needs ourselves?

Somewhere along the way due to the hyper-individualistic systems constructed around us that we are expected to adapt to living within, we stopped understanding interdependence and began talking only about the binary of independence or dependence.

And defining ourselves from within those binaries.

Low maintenance or high maintenance.

I feel so strongly about how awful this is for us soft-hearted and tender human beings that I’m going to swear here.

Brace yourselves.

This is utter horseshit.

What happened to the middle ground of understanding interdependence and the balance of being able to voice our needs?

Accepting that one important part of interdependence is the balance of understanding both adults in the relationship also need to be maintained in ways that are particular to their individual humanity?

People may not be able to meet those needs, but we get to have them without guilt or shame and we get to voice them.

And the people we are relating to get to decide if they can contribute to understanding and respecting those needs and meeting them with love.

Accepting influence from the other.

Respecting wounds, a past, a fully layered, complicated human.

Instead we are told that the best way to function in a relationship is to be:

“Easy.”

Easy going, low drama, chilled out.
Someone who doesn’t ask for much.

Meanwhile we’re emotionally doing advanced “mental relationship maths” trying to work out how to have needs without anyone getting irritated with you.

We learn to:

• wait until they’re in a good mood,

• phrase things carefully,

• keep our upset hidden or manageable,

• never need reassurance “too often,”

• monitor their feelings while quietly swallowing your own.

And then people praise us for being “so easy to be around.”

Of course they do.

We’ve removed ourself emotionally from the relationship.

The “cool girl” fantasy is built on some very flawed logic.

And constitutes a mythical woman who:

• never complains,

• loves whatever he loves,

• doesn’t need reassurance,

• doesn’t ask “what are we?”,

• doesn’t get upset,

• doesn’t have complicated emotional responses,

• somehow remains permanently sexually available while requiring absolutely nothing emotionally in return.

Conveniently, she barely resembles an actual lovely, complicated human being.

She’s actually adapting to am emotionally neglectful situation by becoming co-dependent.

To be blunt, that woman, the “cool girl” is basically a woman-shaped support animal for emotionally avoidant people.

She’s a myth created by misogyny and patriarchy to serve the needs of others virtuously, while being asked to deny and abandon her own.

And women try to conform to this stereotype because we’re taught to believe its appropriate behaviour within relationships and we’re also socially rewarded for making our own needs invisible.

The myth is so popular, it was actually featured in the most successful sit-com ever rooted in friendships and relationships.

Monica Geller was consistently framed as being high maintenance because she was organised, tidy, had boundaries around how she liked people to use her plates, how she liked her space to be.

It was seen as comedic fodder that she had actual needs.

When I hear or see these sentences:
“I’m really low maintenance.”
“I barely need anything.”
“I’m just chilled out.”

I shudder because they’re often simply code for:

“I pretend I don’t have emotional needs in order to be chosen by men as someone easy to be in a relationship with.”

I don’t want to sound snide but am aware I’m going to when I say most strongly…

Congratulations on your lifelong career in dissociation, I guess.

Becoming disabled with chronic illnesses has blown this entire myth apart for me.

Thank God.

Because once you can no longer convincingly perform “easy,” you discover very quickly how much of modern life is built around rewarding people for pretending they don’t need support.

The more visibly human your needs become, the more likely you are to get labelled:
difficult, demanding, intense, hard work, too much, inconvenient.

Burdensome.

But often what people actually mean is:
“Your reality is making me confront the fact that human beings require care and I find that deeply uncomfortable and don’t want to have to participate in giving that care.”

Which is not the same thing.

A chronic illness needs accommodating.
A traumatised nervous system needs gentleness.
A neurodivergent brain may need clarity, not endless, stressful guesswork.
A disabled body may need planning, flexibility, pacing, and a lot of rest.

None of that is moral failure.

None of that is being a burden.
It’s just reality.

IT’S HUMAN.

Not sorry for shouting.

Please hear me.

Because you deserve more than mythical labels and relationship gaslighting.

Also, can we talk about the fact we use the word maintenance positively for almost everything except people?

We maintain our house because we want it standing and functional and comfortable to live in .
We maintain our car because we’d quite like the brakes to work.
We maintain gardens, friendships, skin, teeth, boilers, muscles, and wooden floors. We even maintain dresses we accidentally wash at forty degrees and then feel we have to apologise to when they come out of the wash looking like they now belong to a Borrower.

Everything valuable requires care.

And you are supremely valuable and you not only require care, you deserve it.

But the second a relationship requires emotional tending often people suddenly start acting like it’s an unreasonable burden.

Relationships need maintenance.
Of course they do.

They need communication, repair, attention, curiosity, reassurance and adjustment when life changes.

That isn’t dysfunction.

That isn’t about being burdensome or too much.
That’s just the basics of intimacy.

We are not actually designed to function as completely self-sufficient little islands, who occasionally have sex and share bills.

We are interdependent creatures.
We always, always have been.

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As the saying goes “it takes a village” but we’ve destroyed those beliefs and replaced them with:

“It takes a very successful independent individual who does everything themselves, rarely asks for helps and pushes themselves beyond personal limits in order to look like they’ve got everything together and walks around in a force-field d of quiet desperation until collapse because we’ve been sold the lie that having needs is high maintenance”.

I also think a lot of people have confused emotional neglect with independence.

Because there is a huge difference between:
“I enjoy autonomy”
and
“I have trained myself not to need anything because needing things goes badly. People leave, or distance, or ignore.”

Autonomy is freedom.
Training yourself not to have needs is actually just survival.

We deserve so much more than just to simply survive in our relationships.

We deserve to thrive.

We thrive when we are nourished.

Understanding our needs and being able to communicate lovingly around them gives us the opportunity to get them met or meet them ourselves warmly, which then helps us to thrive.

There is so much shame around all of this.

Which I find very, very sad.

That shame sounds like:
“Sorry, I’m being needy.”
“Sorry, this is probably too much.”
“Sorry I’m hard work.”
“Sorry I’m emotional.”
“Sorry I need reassurance.”

And also, how many times do we apologise for crying?

The ultimate expression of vulnerability and pain.

We apologise for it.

As if to be tender is to be wrong when it’s actually our human condition.

I feel this applies to both men and women but also, especially women.
Especially disabled people.
Especially traumatised people.

As though having needs is some sort of embarrassing character defect instead of the most normal thing about being alive.

The truth is, wanting to be loved well is not high maintenance.

Wanting:

• honesty,

• kindness,

• consistency,

• emotional safety,

• consideration,

• attunement,

• affection,

• communication,
  is not excessive.

It’s just human.

And honestly, I think a lot of us have spent years trying to become “low maintenance” when what we actually wanted was to be around people who didn’t resent us for just simply being human.

That’s really important for us to remember about ourselves.

Because the right people don’t make you feel like every need you express is an inconvenience.

They don’t act personally persecuted because you require care sometimes.
They don’t make closeness something you’re constantly in danger of losing just because you feel vulnerable, or unsafe, or insecure, or low.

They help maintain the relationship too by understanding that needs are part of being human.

We cannot function without having needs.

It’s just how we’re made.

And when people expect us to be low maintenance as a constant state, what they’re really saying is, “I don’t want to have to care about your needs. They inconvenience me.”

We deserve people in our lives who understand it’s human to have needs and want to help maintain us.

Steadily, willingly, and in a way that demonstrates that it really matters to them.

There are no low-maintenance people.

Just people whose needs are ignored.
People whose needs are hidden.
People whose needs are met.
And people still trying to convince themselves they don’t have any needs at all in order to be loved.

Don’t be a low-maintenance person hiding your needs from those around you.

Speak tenderly and kindly to others of your needs and let them show you if they care about them or not.

They may not be able to meet them, but whether they care or not that you have them at all is a very important piece of information.

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I didn’t join Substack to write about myself.

I’m fundamentally a very private person who doesn’t enjoy being in the spotlight, (hence my anonymity here).

I came to write about burnout, love and life. My thoughts on the things that have impacted my life and that I see around me. In case anything I’m noticing might resonate with other people. Essays for anyone who’s felt too much or not enough.

I didn’t come here to be particularly specific about myself.

Writing helps me make sense of the world.
I don’t feel I have anything particular to teach people.
I just have thoughts that feel better outside me instead of left untended on the inside of me.

But the more I write about what I see outside myself, the more I find some people making assumptions about what that reveals about me.

So I’m turning my pen inward on myself again. Not because I intended to write about myself, but because it feels relevant to show you who is doing the looking at the things I see in the world. To give understanding around how and why I say what I say.

I recently wrote a note about non-forgiveness. I said that not forgiving people who have contributed to unforgivable harm can be a grounded and healthy boundary, not a moral failing. I said that forgiveness is not a requirement for inner peace. I’m aware that viewpoint goes against a cultural trope we are taught.

The idea that forgiveness is the end point.
That if you’ve really done the work, you will arrive there.

And that if you don’t, there must be something in you that hasn’t been resolved.

(Women are taught this early. Not always directly, but definitely through what is expected of us. The expectations of how a good girl and a good woman “should “ behave.)

After posting that note, I received pushback. And within that pushback was the assumption that I must be angry. If not angry, then bitter or, at least, brittle. That I was carrying something corrosive inside of me due to advocating for non-forgiveness, that I needed to be guided away from, ideally by someone wiser who had learned the hard lessons I had yet to encounter.

I don’t write as an authority over anyone else or their experience. I am not asking you to agree with me or to adopt my positions as your own.

I write as someone who has a very clear and warm authority over myself.

I don’t presume to have any authority over anyone else here.

I am sharing my perspectives from my own understanding of my own interior world.

And I want to tell you how I came to the understanding I came to, because that understanding matters.

Firstly, differing perspectives are genuinely welcome on my Substack.
What I don’t accept is being redefined.

If a person’s view of me is filtered through their own projections rather than my actual words, I will say so clearly. I’ve reached an age and a place in my life where I am not available to be told who I am by someone who has just met me via a note on a computer screen. And feels entitled enough to believe they have the authority to tell me who they think I should be, or what I should do with my own inner world.

Because of this, I want to talk about the pushback that people experience online.

And when I say people. I mean women. And when I say pushback, I mean control.

I want to say clearly:

There is nothing wrong with feeling angry.
There is nothing wrong with being a woman and feeling angry.

What I find interesting is how quickly others feel compelled to try to manage and minimise that anger due to finding it uncomfortable.

It’s acceptable briefly, as long as it becomes something else.
Reflection, growth and then, forgiveness.

There is an expectation that we don’t stay in what is perceived as the heat of non-forgiveness. Particularly as women.

There is nothing wrong with being a woman who writes about things she is angry about.
There is nothing wrong with writing that forgiveness is not a prerequisite for internal peace.

Feeling angry is not the same as being brittle and bitter.

Anger is a guideline. A warning.
That something valued is being violated or threatened.
That a boundary has been crossed.

It is the body’s way of communicating that we need to notice something and take steps to distance ourselves or implement an action to protect ourselves.

Of course how we express anger and communicate it to others has impact.
No one should be expected to be an emotional punchbag for anyone else. Nor a physical one.

But having clarity, speaking openly about topics that create anger, and expressing personal boundaries about dealing with those issues does not equate with a need to deal with internal bitterness.

That leap is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

And as I value internal peace and understanding, I’m being clear here, because that conflation of clarity with bitterness is something I keep stumbling across online.

And it tells me something important about how people police the interiority of women.

Which frankly, gives me the heebie-jeebies.

It isn’t enough as a woman that we have to look a certain way on the outside to have value, we also have to feel a certain way on the inside in order to not be seen as angry or hateful.

Not just how we behave, but how we process what’s been done to us or what we’ve experienced.

A lot of this comes from a very old script about how “goodness” should look.

Be kind. Be soft. Be understanding.
Even when what you are being asked to understand or experience is harm.

That script has been laid over women for a very long time.

I’m going to give you some context about me.

So that you can understand how I’ve come to the perspectives I have.
Not because anyone needs to explain themselves, I know I don’t, but I’m generous and also honest, so context might help you feel clearer about my perspectives.

I have built and refined my own interior world over many years of hard internal work.

Before I became ill, I was very externally focused.
I didn’t enjoy self-reflection. I was actually quite afraid of my inner world.
I could feel the complexity of my feelings and wasn’t sure I wanted to look at what might be lurking behind them.

And then my life changed entirely, and I went from being someone who moved through the world with considerable speed and energy, travelling widely and being incredibly physically active (I studied ballet for twenty years and was also an avid rock-climber), to someone who was asked by very unexpected circumstances to stop.

Completely.

I became disabled with illnesses that massively affected my energy levels. The world I had known (all the movement, speed, energy, the exploration, the externally focused connections) was no longer available to me in the way it had been.
I simply could not access it.

My energy levels were minimal. I became largely housebound. Often bedbound. The stillness that most people experience briefly and often very, very uncomfortably became my permanent place of living.

Before that happened I had spent years building a certain understanding about our inner world. I was curious about how people thought and felt, but terrified of looking at my own inner world. And being the person I was, I had decided early that if something terrified me it was definitely the right direction to head in. Towards the thing that scared me most.

I worked as a teacher and lecturer, ultimately specialising in early years education and the psychology of learning. Which meant I spent years studying how human beings develop, how we process experience, how we form the internal architecture that shapes our lives.

I also trained as a Reiki master teacher, a process that took two years and demanded an intense relationship with energy, focus, presence and the human body’s own intelligence. I trained as an aromatherapist and masseur to understand musculature, and plant healing. I was fascinated by how plants and their essences could heal the body and soothe the mind. I studied Transcendental Meditation and have used it every day since (twenty seven years and counting now. I can hardly believe it.)

Before I got ill I was not a stranger to inner work.

But I had no idea how much I would need what I had spent so long learning for others, to be used to save myself.

Or that living with illness would need everything I had learned and still ask me to go much, much further.

In the early days of that transition from full physical health to disabled and mostly housebound and often bedbound, I understood something very clearly.

I was possibly going to be with myself in that stillness for a very long time.

Not a realisation I particularly relished.

I did not want to turn the lens on myself.

And I knew the question of whether that experience would be tolerable or intolerable rested almost entirely on what I found when I went looking inside.

I could see two roads very clearly.

I could live hating this new version of myself and this new-to-me life, which would have been a very long and very dark sentence.

Or I could use the same skills I used when I was exploring the external world, turn them inwards and explore myself. Excavate all of it. Go looking in every corner of myself, including the dark ones, (especially the dark ones), and find out what was actually there.

Because I knew I had to make friends with myself. Be happy with who I was. So that I could spend those long quiet hours, days and years with someone I actually liked.

Otherwise it was going to be a really fucking miserable experience of a life. Trapped in a quiet room with myself for a very long time, not liking the company I was keeping.

So, I excavated.

In the hope it would give me back my physical health.

That was all I wanted. My old life back.

I want you to understand what that meant for me in practice.

It meant sitting up close with every trauma I had experienced and not looking away from them.
It meant meeting all the dark, lonely, hurt, wounded parts of myself I had spent years avoiding.
All the fear, the grief, the rage, the shame. And staying with them long enough to understand them. And myself.

It also meant I had to develop a relationship with silence that I could love.

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I, literally physically, could not run away from myself, so I couldn’t fill the silence with other people, sports activity, connections, doing, working, partying, or any of the myriad ways we distract ourselves from ourselves.

I have been on an extended silent retreat with myself for two decades.
A kind of nun without a convent. Minus the celibacy.

Two decades of largely uninterrupted time with myself, with only occasional visits into the external world to have hospital visits, medical appointments, the odd cinema trip and the odd meet up with friends or family.

I could not easily access the external world and use it as a retreat from my internal world when that world became painful or intolerable. My body wasn’t able to do it in the same way any more.

I have done an intensive emotional-muscle building programme for all those years and now I’m emotional-muscle stacked.

(If only my emotional-muscle six-pack were visible, I’d make a fortune on social media.)

A genuine discipline of returning, again and again, to stillness. Whether I wanted to or not. To having to get to know all of myself. Whether I wanted to or not.

I can confidently say, that in the beginning, I most definitely did not.

I also want you to understand what all of the surprising results of this have been.

Not suffering.

I know, I was surprised by this one too.

There has been immense physical and emotional suffering on the journey, I’m not going to bypass the reality of that, but the end result has not been a continuous state of suffering.

There has also been immense endurance, but that too has led to somewhere else.

Joy.

Genuine, daily, joy.

I have discovered that it isn’t the big things that are most meaningful to me.
The small things fill me up completely.

My inner world is rich and spacious and entirely my own.

Now, I am not afraid of stillness. It rests me. It helps me breathe into myself and life more deeply.
I am not afraid of silence. It sustains and nourishes me.

I have met myself in the very darkest of places and this has given me peace with everything I found about who I am there.

Not because I bypassed any of it or covered it over with something more palatable, but because I went through it.

All of it.

A big, long, dark tunnel of internal shit.

Honestly… It was awful.

I’d really managed to gather an impressive amount of darkness to navigate.

Wading sometimes. Shouting about how much it was all pissing me off other times. Having a good cry along the way.

And came out the other side with extraordinary clarity about my own inner terrain.

This has been a huge surprise to myself.

But also something incredibly hard won.

And incredibly precious to me.

I say this not to make you feel sorry for me. I don’t feel sorry for myself. My life is not small or pitiable. It is enormous in all the ways that matter most to me.

I say it because I want you to understand the foundation I am speaking from when I speak about things like non-forgiveness. I am not speaking from unexamined reactivity. I am not speaking from a wound I haven’t looked at. I am speaking from two decades of looking at everything. Teasing it apart. Feeling all of it.

Honestly if enforced navel-gazing paid anything, I’d be laughing at my ever-increasing riches every time I turned over in bed.

So when I say that not forgiving people who have enabled genuine harm is a clear and healthy position, I mean it.

From a place of self-love, warmth, compassion for self, and care for a person’s own internal congruence.

I have been over this territory. I have had to give a lot of forgiveness to myself and others.
I know what forgiveness is and what it isn’t.

I know the difference between carrying something that really corrodes you and making a considered decision about what you will and will not extend to people who have caused damage in the world.

Non-forgiveness, for me, is not anger.
It’s not bitterness.
It’s not rage.

It also isn’t punishment.
Or retribution.

It’s a boundary rooted in clarity.

And clarity doesn’t always metamorphose into forgiveness, even though we are often told that it should.

I feel anger sometimes. It is a clear emotion that passes through me and moves on.
I am not an angry person.

Bitterness is what happens when pain goes unexamined and hardens. I have examined every corner of my pain so far (I’m sure there will be more. No one gets out unscathed and we don’t ever stop feeling pain.)

I don’t hate.

I see non-forgiveness as a clear-eyed refusal to extend something that hasn’t been earned and in some cases cannot be earned by the scale of what was done.

And, instead, believe we sometimes need to hold on to our congruence before we give ourselves to others what we may not feel able to kindly extend to ourselves.

Sometimes we need to stay close to our fidelity to ourselves before we are pressured to give forgiveness to someone else.

You do not need to absorb harm and then give forgiveness in order to be redeemed from harm.

That idea has done a lot of damage and caused a lot of shame.

Particularly to women who have already been taught to override themselves.

What concerns (and irritates my ovaries) is how readily people reach for the explanation that must mean I haven’t healed, grown, or learned.

The assumption that a truly enlightened person would definitely arrive at forgiveness.

That non-forgiveness is a “way station” on the road to something better, a sign that the work is incomplete. I want to challenge that assumption, because it’s not a universal truth. It is a cultural habit, and like many cultural habits it has been absorbed so deeply that people mistake it for wisdom.

There is also a specific hypocrisy I want to bring attention to.

Many of the people most committed to instructing others about forgiveness and letting go of anger are the same people who have looked at genuine cruelty, dishonesty, and the deliberate harming of vulnerable people and found a way to be comfortable with it. They clutch their pearls at a swear word while excusing the inexcusable. They sanctimoniously direct strangers towards peace while remaining entirely unbothered by policies that actively harm people. That inconsistency is not something I am willing to politely overlook in order to make anyone comfortable.

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I am also disabled. I have noticed that people struggle to hold the idea of a disabled person who is not seeking sympathy, not embittered by their circumstances, not in need of “redirection toward the light”.

When I write with clarity and directness about the things I see, some people feel compelled to look for an explanation that lets them stay comfortable. Perhaps she’s angry. Perhaps she’s in pain. Perhaps she just needs someone to show her a different way. The possibility that I am simply clear, that I have arrived at my positions through decades of careful internal work rather than through unresolved emotion, seems to be genuinely difficult for some people to see.

Women are often taught that we have to absorb other people’s harm in order not to invite further harm. That we must be forgiving and gentle.

That staying forgiving keeps us safe.

That others possibly don’t mean what they’re saying or doing.

We are taught to understand the motivations behind why, over understanding and honouring the impact on our own bodies and nervous systems. And that’s something I want to challenge.

You do not need to absorb harm and then give forgiveness in order to be redeemed from harm.

You get to choose to honour your own non-abandonment of self.

You get to say, I understand what was done and I don’t forgive it. It was significant harm. I don’t want to diminish the impact of that. I honour myself, I honour my healing, I let you deal with the impact of your decisions yourself, I choose not to be involved in your absolution.

This isn’t bitterness or brittleness.

It’s the warmth of compassion in action.

Compassion for the self, and the tender gentle parts of us that were harmed.

It isn’t unchristian, or non Jesus-like.

It’s a choice not to pick up and carry the patriarchal belief that women must absorb harm in order to be fully a woman.

We can be gentle, warm, nurturing, loving, kind and also boundaried and principled.

So to come back to my original note, about non-forgiveness that brought people to my page to tell me what I must and mustn’t do with my inner world.

It is diminishing, not devastating, but definitely diminishing, to have someone arrive in your space and tell you what you’re feeling and what you need.

So I want to be direct. I am not angry. I am not bitter. I am not embittered. I am not in need of guidance toward forgiveness or joy or peace (because I have all three in abundance). What I have, and what I will not be redirected away from, is clarity. The ability to look at something clearly and name what I see. The ability to tease apart the threads of a complicated situation and speak precisely about what I find there. That took two decades to really develop. And it is a very precious gift.

I went from travelling the world to travelling inward. The inner journey turned out to be the longer one, and the more interesting one, and the one that has given me the most. I am genuinely at peace with the life I have.

I write from that place.

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Thank you for reading Moss & Matchsticks.

All words © Moss & Matchsticks 2026 . All rights reserved.

Images sourced from Unsplash and Pexels. Free for use under their respective licences.

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Thank you for reading Moss and Matchsticks.

I write about relationships, boundaries, disability, ableism, sex and intimacy, and chronic illness. Some of the things that can feel complicated.

I revisit the same themes from different angles. My hope is to make you laugh and feel understood.

If you’d like to keep reading, you can subscribe for my monthly newsletter posts, sent out on the last Sunday of each month. I also write daily notes about politics, life from a feminist perspective, and conversations with my lovely 85-year-old dad.

It’s lovely to connect with you. I’m really glad you’re here.

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I want to write here about the manosphere.

The men who embody its red pill teachings, and what I saw as a teacher that speaks to what is happening now within our society.

Teaching, at its essence, is about patterns.

About breaking down skills into small consecutive pieces that fit together in a patterned way to create the whole.

And walking children through the steps of those patterns until they’re able to understand and replicate those patterns themselves.

The patterns of letters to make an alphabet, the patterns of numbers to make equations. The patterns of letters to make words and the patterns of words to make a book.

Patterns everywhere.

Not just in the skills they’re learning academically, but also in the behaviours of the children and how they connect with their peers, teachers, and learning tasks.

Teaching is most often about behaviour patterns.

Managing 30 children and their individual patterns of behaviour and how they connect with and attach to their peers and teachers.

When I was teaching, I worked primarily across the primary age range, with some shorter periods of time working with middle school and secondary age children. For the purposes of this essay I want to focus on my direct experience with primary age children, and the specific pattern of behaviour I would knock up against that made classroom management extremely difficult.

In all my years of teaching and within every single class of children I taught there were always children who could not healthily build attachments with me or their peers.

No matter how many different children I taught and came across with this difficulty, the pattern of behaviour was always the same.

Boundary violations, physical violence, manipulative behaviours, emotional violence.

All present within the one child.

Sometimes the classroom would contain only one of these children. Other times there were several.

And in every case they were, most often, boys.

Teachers are very skilled at seeing patterns.

I am very skilled at seeing patterns within educational subjects.

And also within behaviour.

Particularly power dynamics.

And the pattern of behaviour I saw with the little boys who could not attach and connect healthily was very often of its type across all the boys who displayed it.

And what was most interesting was that there was also a consistent pattern of behaviours that the parents of these children would have.

With the exception of Autism and some learning disabilities, I noticed that children who were having difficulties attaching very often had parents who were complicated humans to deal with.

The parents of the boys who struggled to healthily attach often included a father who was either emotionally absent and emotionally neglectful, or physically and emotionally absent or neglectful. Sometimes the fathers were also physically abusive. But not always.

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The factor that was most often patterned across the dynamic was that the father was not fully present for their son in the ways that mattered. The emotional absence and neglect were the dynamic that was most often observed by me. Physical abuse intensified the dynamic, but wasn’t always present. The emotional absence and neglect were.

The second aspect I noticed in the parents of those boys was that the mother led within the partnership. She was the more dominant emotional force. She was much more emotionally present, but not in a measured, balanced way.

The mothers were very “inflated” in their emotional presence.

They were either very dominant, over bearing, controlling and forceful, with me and their child, or they were very emotionally overwhelmed, struggling to manage their circumstances, and dominated within themselves by their own emotional world and experiencing huge emotions they were struggling to regulate.

Before we go any further here, I want to be very specific in stating that I am not blaming women for men’s misogyny. I am not blaming either sex for the overall responsibility of creating misogyny.

I am laying out the repeated dynamic I saw across the children I taught.

The boys in my classes who struggled to create healthy attachments with me and their peers were almost universally enmeshed with their mothers.

This wasn’t a case of single parent families leaving boys devastated due to the lack of a father figure.

It was something much more nuanced than that.

It was situations where the mother’s emotional presence in her son’s life was so huge that it left him no space to create a self.

Single mums who treated their sons as their partner. A child husband. Who they parentified. Who became the mother’s emotional confidante. Or a mother whose child felt she was so vulnerable that she needed their childhood support because the mother couldn’t maintain her autonomy alone.

These boys were completely enmeshed with their mothers due to their mother’s own unconscious parentification of their child, either through vulnerability, loneliness or coercive control.

The mother would have a very strong personality.

She would be a powerful force.

They would be co-dependent, on their child and husband if married.

Communication between the parents would be poor, whether the parents were together or separated.

The mother would overstep boundaries with me.

Be considered “pushy.”

There would often be a vulnerability around the mother — she would either have a very strained relationship with the father that caused volatility, or she herself would be struggling to deal with life circumstances that created a partner vacuum that left her feeling intensely alone and isolated, for the son to step into or be pulled into.

The sons became the emotional partner of the mother. Supporting her emotionally by being present, while also feeling protective of the mother’s vulnerability — too young and powerless as a child to change it.

The mother often clung to the boy emotionally without realising that she was parentifying her child.

The boys were often suffocated by the emotional weight and presence of their mothers, so that they could not, in any meaningful way, create an internal self.

They functioned as their mother’s vessel for carrying her fears and control.

These mothers were often either passively aggressively controlling of their sons or actively and openly controlling of their sons.

The boys were suffocated by their mother’s lack of healthy boundaries.

In order to try to create an internal self, they would have to sever from their mothers in a big and unpleasant way.

As their mothers didn’t usually allow this, the boys projected their severing onto their peers, creating physically violent altercations, manipulations, bullying and emotional violence in the classroom.

Pain and suffocation projected outwards in an attempt to sever from their mothers and self actualise.

What was also projected outwards was their contempt for their mother for constraining them so severely and causing them huge internal distress at not having autonomy.

Even at 4 years old, the contempt and grief were present.

The fathers = Distance

The mothers = Overwhelmingly present.

The foundations already built.

These four year old boys were not misogynists. They were painfully wounded.

But wounds that go unaddressed and unsupported don’t stop calcifying.

As these 4 year old boys moved through the primary years, as the dynamic with their mothers intensified, and as the absence of their fathers deepened, the wounds they carried hardened. The contempt that began as grief became something more solidified. I observed that by the time they left primary school the emotional framing and psychological architecture were very much formed.

Not completely solid, but deeply present.

As these boys progressed through the school system a further pattern of lack of accountability was seeded.

Due to the mother’s parentification of her son and her poor boundary awareness, the child was rarely held accountable by the mother.

They were excused instead.

The mother could not see that her child husband would in any way behave appallingly.

Or were unable to address the issue due to their own overwhelm.

So the boys struggling to attach knew that whatever their behaviour, there were no consequences at home.

No boundaries.

No solid edges to hold them safely.

This actually served to increase their contempt towards their teacher and also their mother.

They learned they could control the mother, and possibly their teacher, by triangulating them.

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And these boys grow up.

Into men who carry their resentment at being suffocated and parentified by their mothers, alongside an empty inner sense of self.

Brittle in their notions of who they are and rigid in their belief they are not wrong.

Still struggling to sever from their mothers and to self actualise.

While empty in their understanding of their inner worlds, lonely in their inability to healthily attach, angry in their devastatingly heavy relationship with their mother, entitled in their lack of understanding and care around boundaries, these 4 year old men act out their need to self actualise on any poor woman who crosses their path.

The pain of their lack of being healthily mirrored back to themselves by an aware adult figure, and the weight of their being enmeshed with their mother, very much alive and awake in their adult nervous systems.

They are unable to connect, unable to self actualise and unable to function healthily in relationships, their loneliness growing ever more profound, all while in a much bigger, stronger body than the child who acted out.

They turn on their computers and listen to every trust me bro podcast with their red pill teachings they can find, and the inner emptiness they’re feeling is filled with a fallacy — that their pain is caused by women not wanting to attach to them, rather than being given the understanding that they have been deeply harmed and are fundamentally unable to attach.

The problem is not in the women.

It is in them.

And I know that not every boy who becomes an adult incel has been suffocated by his mother.

And I know that women are not to blame for their sons falling into incel culture. That responsibility alone falls on the shoulders of all those unhealed men who are filling their unactualised inner selves with erroneous projected blame.

But I’m writing this here because in my experience, the majority of the boys in my class who ever had problems attaching healthily to women and their peers had some version of this pattern behind them.

It was incredibly sad to witness.

A tragedy in the making. Waiting to unfold after the arrival of the internet.

An emotionally and/or physically absent or neglectful father combined with a strong mother figure who parentified her son and refused to hold him to be accountable for any harm he caused others. And who both left him without healthy mirroring and enough space for him to be able to detach from her and self actualise.

A father unwilling or unable to step into full emotional responsibility and connection with his son and a mother who took up too much of the space left by that absence.

A powerfully dysfunctional dynamic in combination with each other.

Not every boy who grows up within this dynamic becomes a recruit for the manosphere, but most every boy I saw who had trouble attaching healthily and displayed antisocial behaviour (again, with the exception of Autism and some learning disabilities) had this parental dynamic behind him. In my opinion, this leaves them very vulnerable to the teachings of the manosphere.

Which brings me to Andrew Tate. A man so fortified and defended against his own inner world he seethes in every moment with projected rage.

He has created, for himself and others, a story of blame that releases him from personal accountability and responsibility. That disguises his immense vulnerability from himself. And projects an image of masculinity so underpinned by mythological thinking, that a person can only surmise that the vulnerability he is defending against is very large indeed.

So when I look at Tate and those others like him, I don’t see strength. I see heavily defended vulnerability.

Which ultimately is weakness.

Not because to be vulnerable is to be weak, but because to be so defended against your own vulnerability makes a person unable to be flexible, loving, empathic, compassionate, altruistic.

And to be human without those capabilities severely limits our ability to experience the wholeness of who we are and to build true healthy connections that nourish.

The men of the manosphere are 4 year old boys in adult male bodies raging at women for their own fundamental inability to attach.

Defended, overblown, fantastical levels of masculinity projected out onto the world and debasing women in order to feel powerful.

There is nothing powerful about a man who has to fight so hard to defend his masculinity.

Everything they are teaching damaged boys coming up into the world behind them is wrong.

Anyone who has to demand subservience does not truly feel powerful.

Truly powerful people are not threatened by others.

They’re curious about them.

Respect is given freely.

Dominance that has to demean in order to command respect is weakness masked as power.

The boys being taught that dominating and demeaning women will bring them the connection they’re yearning for are creating hell for themselves.

More isolation and resentment layered over loneliness.

The answer isn’t to create a false dominant self that only exists in the outside world.

It’s to teach those young boys how to self actualise and create a solid foundational inner self.

To heal their enmeshment wound and to teach them how to securely attach.

© 2026 Moss & Matchsticks. All rights reserved.

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Christina Applegate has recently published her memoir “You With the Sad Eyes” where she discusses her life and her experiences of developing Multiple Sclerosis (MS).

As a disabled woman, I wanted to read her words around her life and her experience of developing disabilities and I wanted to love her book.

And, mostly, I did.

She has done something profoundly honest.

She hasn’t sugar-coated her life or disabled experience.

She has been willing to be very vulnerable about both.

She chose not to “sprinkle sugar on shit”.

As a result, writing this post has been an intense and sometimes uncomfortable process.

I want to start by saying, as emphatically as I can, that I love and admire Christina Applegate.

I respect her deeply.

I am not writing this to question her character, her illness, her trauma or the way she is trying to live a disabled life that is new to her.

I am not interested in tearing another disabled woman down.

What I do want to write about is what happened in my body and brain while I read her memoir, and why, at sixty-three percent of the way through, I had to stop reading for a week before picking the book back up again.

Where I am reading from:

Christina and I share something in common.

Like Christina, before I was disabled, I was very active and loved above all else, to dance.

Intensely so.

I moved through the world, and understood it, through my body and movement.

I studied ballet for twenty years, and was happier en pointe rather than on flat feet on the ground. Dancing meant everything to me. I processed my emotions through movement to the music. I got lost in classical music and felt a freedom dancing I’ve never experienced anywhere else, doing anything else. I took ballet classes several times a week, starting classes at the age of four years old.

Dancing was like breathing to me.

I was also a rock climber and scuba diver. I loved swimming and being in the ocean and water in general. The freedom and strength I experienced in my body was profound and marked my relationship with the world.

That changed.

I have now lived a disabled life for a long time. It’s difficult to articulate the internal journey of my life as I’m aware of the very fine line of being seen as pitiable, or inspirational. It’s also hard to clearly express the very real and profound grief journey that I’ve been on around the physical losses I’ve incurred and the impact they’ve had on my life choices and relationships. I don’t see myself in any kind of inspirational way. I also don’t perceive myself as pitiable in any way either.

This is simply… my life. My utterly normal life. That I was born into.

I don’t have the option of another type of life. This is very much it. I don’t see my life as marked by tragedy or pain. It’s simply the life I’m in.

So, like Christina, I lived one way and then things happened and now I live another way.

Like Christina, I have experienced both perspectives. A very active non-disabled first half and a disabled second half.

I don’t wake up and battle with reality. I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because my illnesses in and of themselves are not terminal. Maybe because I’ve lived with disabilities long enough that I’ve moved through the feelings of devastation and am very much now solely concerned with living each day as purposefully as I can.

Losing my health and losing my mum and best friend to terminal illnesses very much woke me up to how we are all living on borrowed time. We get the life we get and we live the life we’re given. I know it sounds bleak and I know it sounds dismissive, but it’s honestly how I’ve always seen things for as long as I can remember.

So I came to Christina’s memoir as:

• someone who remembers being able-bodied

• someone who has lived in a disabled body for a long time

• someone who understands how traumatising that transition can be

• someone who doesn’t think of disability as a second, lesser life. There isn’t a “real me” before disability and a “ruined” version after. There’s just… my life

I was ready for Christina Applegate’s memoir to be raw. I was not prepared for how much it would frustrate me.

What I recognised in her memoir:

There is a lot in the book that I recognise and feel alongside her. I recognise the grief for the old body. I recognise the frustration of needing help with things you once did without thinking. I recognise the logistics, the endless admin of being ill. The pain and exhaustion.

So when people say the memoir is raw and vulnerable and funny, I do not disagree. They are right. She is saying things that many people with chronic illness and disability will recognise. That honesty matters. But that is only half of what happened for me as I read.

Where it tipped into “chuck the book at the wall” territory:

About sixty percent of the way in, I developed an actual headache. I found myself in what I can only describe as “chuck the book at the wall territory”. I put it down and realised I could not pick it back up again that night. I wasn’t able to pick it up and finish it for a further week.

I had to take a breather.

For me, the painful part was not that the book contains Christina’s devastation. Of course it does. MS has done brutal things to her life and body. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

The painful part was the way disability and illness are mostly framed through devastation and loss, with very little sense that disabled lives can be full, ordinary, beautiful lives in their own right.

Reading it from this side of disability, the tone began to feel as if people like me are living lives that are so awful as to be almost unliveable. That there was a “real” life, and then this ruined version that barely counts. And I simply do not see disabled lives that way at all.

Yes, there is devastation. Yes, there is grief and rage and loss specific to the challenges of chronic pain and the changes that come with disability. I won’t in any way diminish, dismiss or invalidate any of those true lived experiences.

There is also:

• normal everyday living

• routine

• laughter

• relationships

• ridiculous TV

• sex and desire

• boredom

• cups of tea

• ponds and frogspawn

• friendships

• intimacy

• emotional growth

• a deeper understanding of difference

• unpicking our own ableism

• travel

• fun

• pets

• being a full whole human being

The wholeness of that reality feels absent from Christina’s memoir.

The humour is there, but it mostly sits inside devastation, not alongside a disabled life that is still a life. After a while, my body and heart could not take any more of that framing. I had to stop reading.

Because. for me. the absence of those very important aspects of a disabled life frame disability in a way that I feel is ableist.

“This is my therapist now”

In interviews around the book, Christina has talked about writing it as a way to excavate her trauma. She has said, in various ways, that the book is a place where she can say the things she might say to a therapist.

I understand that instinct completely. When something enormous has happened to you, a page can feel like the only place safe enough to fully hold all of it. I have done my own version of that in my writing. I’ve excavated my journey in my journals to such a degree I have instructed friends that if anything were to happen to me they have to go in and burn those bad boys before anyone who wouldn’t understand them can read them.

The difficulty is that a therapist’s office is private. A book is not. A therapist’s job is to hold your raw, unprocessed grief without judging you, and to keep it from spilling harmfully into the wider world. A publisher’s job, bluntly, is to sell as many copies as possible.

Christina is, as I perceive it, quite understandably, in the early, brutal stages of disabled grief. She has not had the fullness of time to metabolise this into a fully settled sense of “this is my life now”. She may never want to reach that place. She doesn’t have to. It’s her life and she gets to decide for herself how she wants to navigate and frame her lived experience of her disability and life changes. No one should suggest otherwise.

I am not suggesting otherwise.

The memoir reflects where she is. And where she was when she wrote the book is at a point where she needed to excavate her pain and howl and scream.

A completely legitimate response.

That is not any kind of moral failing. It is a very necessary part of the process of dealing with such immense change to her life and bodily experience.

The problem is what happens when a “mid-process howl” is treated, in public, as if it is the whole, healed truth of what disabled life is.

The view from long-term disabled life

I do not have MS, so I am not speaking for anyone who does. My illnesses are different. The specifics of her pain are not mine to comment on. What I can speak from is over 20 years of being diagnosed and classified as disabled.

For me, there is a point where your body’s limitations stop being an endless shock and start simply being the shape of your days. Where aids and adaptations stop feeling like intrusions and just become “the things I use” and “the needs I have”. Where you no longer spend time comparing your life now to your life before being disabled, because you are too busy living fully in your experience now .

It is not necessarily tidy. There are flares, crashes, appointments, humiliations, losses. Alongside the realities of living with chronic pain. But who honestly lives a tidy life? I don’t know anyone, able-bodied or not, that lives a life that isn’t messy and complicated.

It is the systems we have to live within as disabled people that bring the difficulties and disable us. Systems that deny us adequate financial support and adequate person-centred health care. Most disabled people deal with medical gaslighting, very real financial hardship, if not outright poverty. Damaged living standards, damaged prospects. Job losses, marriage breakdowns, all on top of being disabled.

From here, reading Christina Applegate’s narrative around disability, that is almost entirely framed within devastation, anger, disgust and loss, is like being told, over and over, that the only honest way to live in a body like mine is to hate it. That if I am not permanently destroyed or repulsed by my illnesses, I must be in denial or somehow sugar-coating my life.

Because this is where she is now in her disabled experience.

Very much grieving and very much angry about what has been taken from her by the illness she’s living with.

But I want to say, because it matters and needs to be said, she is living her experience of disability from such a financially privileged position. Able to afford support. Able to afford the best medical care. Able to pay for help, a special diet, medications, to be surrounded by people who want to acknowledge and hear her experiences as a newly disabled woman with a book deal to tell her story of it.

Most disabled people are disappeared due to lack of the resources they need to be visible.

Also, a lot of what is jarring for me in this memoir, is the ableism around work and a person’s worth hidden in the grief. If you’ve built your identity around being productive, useful and constantly in motion, disability won’t just feel like loss. It will feel like your value has been taken too.

I experienced this grief stage in my experience with disability. It is a profound agonising experience to grieve ones physicality.

That is where my frustration comes from. Not at Christina at all, she is doing what I did earlier in my disabled life. Grieving her losses and raging about them.

It is a vital part of the journey with disabilities.

I am frustrated with the idea that Christina’s memoir unwittingly supports, that devastation is the only way to view disability.

And I am frustrated with the lack of acknowledgement that there is huge privilege around her experience of disability.

I don’t believe that is Christina’s fault.

When a widely read memoir like this is received by huge numbers of able-bodied readers, who are inevitably reading her story through their own frameworks, the ableist trope of “poor her, that’s devastating, but isn’t she inspirational” gets quietly but powerfully reinforced across society.

The cultural problem: who gets the megaphone

If this memoir were a private journal, none of this would be my business. She would be free to pour out every bit of horror and grief without anyone thinking it meant anything about others who are disabled.

But it is not a private journal. It is a major celebrity memoir with huge reach and glowing reviews. The language around it is full of words like “raw”, “honest”.

Non-disabled readers are being told: here is a real story of what disabled life is like. With the unspoken inference being “of somebody who was once blonde, skinny and beautiful but who has changed. Someone who had everything but now… (insert head tilt)... is disabled.”

As if it’s the most awful tragedy anyone could ever journey through.

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I’m not denying the losses and the grief as not being significant, traumatising and real. But disabled lives are not so diabolically terrible as to be unliveable, as they are so often framed.

And devastation is not the only framework for disability to be placed within.

Disabled lives are lives.

Containing all of the aspects of non-disabled lives.

And while non-disabled readers are reading Christina Applegate’s memoir and feeling the tragedy of her situation, as if that’s all there is to see and feel, there are disabled readers like me, and like some of the people who have replied to my Notes, who are quietly stepping away or feeling unsettled because the tone is rooted in expressing anger and pain at what is seen as catastrophe.

Disabled lives are not catastrophes.

Catastrophe and loss can be part of how a disability happens (or not) but disabled lives are so much more than pitiful tragedy.

What I’m seeing:

• Christina is telling her truth, from where she is.

• The industry seems to be treating that stage of grief as if it is the definitive map of disability. At least no one in the publishing sphere that put this memoir out into the world and publicised it is framing it otherwise.

• And the rest of us are left to live life inside the wider assumptions that doing that creates within society as a whole, when able bodied people read of this experience of disability and view it through the ableist lense of “disability is tragedy and not much else”.

Responsibility without blame

I believe Christina wrote honestly from a place of grief and deep loss. Her need to process the huge change in circumstances of her life is valid and important.

I also think that when any of us publish work about disability to a huge audience, there is a responsibility that comes with it.

Not to be perfect. Not to be inspirational. But at least to be aware that our personal story will not be read in a vacuum.

And it leaves me wondering if anyone at all in the “chain of command” at Christina’s publishers has any lived experience at all with disability.

And whether anything I’m writing about here was discussed before publishing.

I understand and admire Christina’s wish to be honest.

This is not about demanding toxic positivity. I do not want a “brave little soldier” memoir. I am not asking her to pretend that the reality of her grief and loss do not exist or should be sanitised in any way. I hate that kind of flattening. It dishonours a person’s lived experience of their illness and disability.

What I long for, is a sense that disabled life can be many things at once. That devastation may be a very painful chapter, not the end of the book.

Why I am writing this at all

Reading Christina’s memoir was painful for me. Writing this essay has felt complicated. I know there will be people who read my perspective as jealousy, or cruelty, or a refusal to let a disabled woman be angry.

That is not what this is.

I am writing because, as I read the memoir, my disabled body started to become exhausted and hurt. Because my head ached from holding the difficult tension between recognising her pain and feeling somewhat erased and diminished by her framing. Because other disabled readers have quietly told me they felt something similar.

I am writing because I want us to have room for:

• Christina’s devastation

• the gentle normality of long-term disabled life

• the experiences of people born disabled who never had a “before” to mourn, and don’t experience their disabled life as tragic in any way because it isn’t

all at once.

And I am writing because I do not want silence from people like me to be mistaken for agreement that this is all we are.

If you are disabled and considering reading it

If you are disabled and thinking about picking up the memoir, my only encouragement is to go gently. Some readers will find deep validation in her honesty. Some, like me, may find themselves in “chuck the book at the wall territory” by two thirds of the way through. Both reactions are valid.

You are not failing at solidarity if you have to put the book down. You are not lacking compassion if your body says “enough”. You are not ignoring ableism if you find nothing but solidarity in its pages.

I respect Christina for her willingness to be vulnerable, to face her trauma and to excavate her grief. I also want to say, her devastation is not the full story of disabled lives. It can be a chapter.

If you do read it, my suggestion is to view it as one woman’s very valid, very important mid-grief story, but not as the final word on what disabled lives are.

Because disabled lives, including Christina’s, including mine, including yours, are more than devastation. They are messy, complicated, painful, funny, ordinary, specific and beautiful. The same as any other person’s life.

We deserve stories that make room for grief, but I don’t feel we should stop there. We deserve stories that also incorporate all of the other equally valid aspects of disabled lives. And we deserve framing in our wider culture that understands that fully.

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Copyright © 2026 Moss and Matchsticks. All rights reserved.

If you enjoyed this post, please share it with anyone you also think might find it meaningful.

Thank you for being here.

Please let me know your thoughts about Christina’s memoir in the comments as I’d be very happy to hear your perspective.

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One of my favourite films (alongside To Kill a Mockingbird, Rear Window, and Jaws) is Amélie.

I have always appreciated her quiet way of being and her love of small things: her pretty home, her solitude, and her turning into a wall of water when trying to talk to a man she liked.

I can relate.

​I am a strange mix of contrasts.

I love quiet, books, and small, beautiful things.

I also love speaking clearly when I write, having honest conversations over polite ones and exploring ideas and places (I travelled extensively and worked overseas for many years before developing long term illnesses.)

As a small child, I was fascinated by the tiny details in everything. A flower, a blade of grass, the smell of sea air, the words on a page I desperately wanted to understand.

My brain worked very quickly and was endlessly curious.

My mum often told me, “You were always so busy from an early age. We never had to entertain you or find things to keep you occupied. You made all your own games and were always finding little things and creating ways to play. You were just always so busy with yourself.”

​I found the world endlessly fascinating and full of beauty.

I was also deeply feeling.

I felt huge joy if I saw something I perceived as beautiful, and deep sadness for anything or anyone I perceived as suffering or in pain.

It wasn’t always an easy process to feel so much about so much.

​I have a sister. We are very different. She is petite, tiny, and traditionally beautiful. She is very active and very outwardly focussed.

I am quite shy and quiet, and I love quiet things and am more inwardly focussed.

I also have a different look than my sister; I’m taller and curvier, with big eyes and a different kind of beauty altogether. For a time in my early twenties, I was asked to model clothes for a company. As an introvert, I didn’t find it easy, but I made some lovely friends and had fun.

I tell you this, not out of vanity or hubris, but to explain that the way I look has generally brought a lot of attention, but I have not always enjoyed that experience.

Because people do not always look at my eyes when they talk to me. They look elsewhere.

​I was cat-called in my school uniform.

People were often less interested in my thoughts than how my body or face looked.

My relationships were with people who pursued me heavily for my surface, only to become angry with me about my mind. When I became more than they saw at a surface level, I became a problem to be solved and an irritant to be minimised.

I received messages that I was “high maintenance,” “too much,” and “hard work.”

​My brain is incredibly busy. It is endlessly curious. It moves quickly and sees patterns in language and power dynamics at incredible speed.

I love books and learning.

I don’t think “too much” although I’ve been told countless times I do.

I don’t ruminate, although that judgement has also come my way repeatedly.

My mind just likes to run free.

For many years, I hid my thoughts. I had received so much feedback that I thought too much or that I was too sensitive. I found myself living this strange duality of being sought out for my surface and rejected for my depth.

It was, at times, incredibly lonely.

​I became a teacher and a lecturer.

I loved creating pathways through which children could learn.

I started out teaching Shakespeare to middle schoolers, and everything to eleven-year-olds. While also teaching adults how to teach.

Then, I discovered four-year-olds and their endless curiosity.

I retrained as an early years specialist and spent my days with tiny humans who have an endless capacity for joy, laughter, and wonder.

They made me laugh, and I made them laugh too.

I was very, very good at guiding them through the network of skills they needed to thrive.

A lot of the children I worked with were from families seeking asylum, or from backgrounds where they had experienced considerable trauma.

I gave a lot to them because they needed it and because I had a lot of joy and love to give.

It was not an easy job. There were a lot of demands on my time, energy and emotional depth.

​Still, my internal world wasn’t well understood by the external world, because how I looked seemed to heavily influence who people thought I was.

I am quiet and reflective, funny and curious. Gentle. There are parts of me that are incredibly tender, and other parts that are incredibly still. I am quick to laugh and smile.

I find it very hard not to feel the hurt in other people and see clearly their need for support.

Empathy is my superpower but it has also been my kryptonite.

Because I have a brain that moves incredibly quickly while also loving stillness above all things.

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Which brings me to writing on Substack.

​I don’t post my face on Substack because I want the peace of being able to share the tender parts of me, and the parts of my brain that make me laugh out loud. And the patterns I see in words, and what’s hidden behind them.

I find it very difficult to be “looked at”.

I don’t enjoy being in the spotlight.

I want the peace of letting who I really am be seen, without the noise of what I look like making me misunderstood.

​I don’t know if I’m beautiful; it’s always in the eye of the beholder.

I don’t really think beauty is about the surface.

But my face and body have created a lot of “noise” in my life.

Both have caused anger and derision to be directed at me.

Like most women, they have attracted predatory behaviour.

I’ve experienced rage, violence, and other behaviours that were terribly painful to experience.

​Something about my brain and how I looked not matching up to the projections people laid over me made me feel it was better not to be all of who my brain told me I was.

So, I write anonymously.

I write so that I am heard and understood for my heart and my mind, and not my face and body.

Because my heart is the most important thing about me.

​And I’m incredibly grateful for my brain.

I don’t know if I will ever share my face on Substack. I possibly will.

But for now being able to write and say the things my heart wants me to say is bringing me peace and helping me feel seen for who I am and not what people decide I am.

Thank you for hearing me and, ultimately, seeing me.

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© 2026 | Moss & Matchsticks. All rights reserved.

Friends, before we start, this is a long one.

Its about ICE.
Take time to take a break if you need to.
I’ve had some important thoughts I wanted to share with you, but in order to do so I needed to write for longer.

I hesitated to post this today, in light of what happened to Alex Pretti yesterday.

Silence serves no one when abuses are unfolding so I’m sending this out to you with love for your bruised and hurting heart.

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ICE, and what I’m noticing

I had planned to write a different post today.
I write to process what I’m feeling.
Words bring focus and clarity to my feelings about the world and myself within it.

As a result, I’ve found myself writing a lot about relational dynamics within close relationships here on Substack.
Because relational dynamics interest me a lot, and affect us all.
I like to be able to bring clarity, if I can, to my thoughts and understanding of relational dynamics that can feel complicated or hidden.
I’m fascinated by hidden power dynamics and how they’re communicated between individuals and groups.

Recently, I’ve been witnessing what’s unfolding in the US and I’ve been having strong feelings about it.

I’ve also been noticing how the dynamics of interpersonal relationships on a small scale seem to translate into systemic relationships on a larger scale.

So I find myself here, typing… about ICE.

Because I’ve been watching the footage coming out of Minneapolis. The ICE raids.

I’ve been thinking about Renee Good, and the small children who have been detained.

In the images circulating of recent immigration enforcement actions (the arrests outside homes, the presence near schools, the removal of families) the raid teams appear overwhelmingly male.

Granted, the ICE personnel are masked, but based on overall height, weight, body mass, voice tone and depth, the personnel all seem to be predominantly men.

This interested me, so I googled to see if I could find any official statistics on how many women are involved in immigrant raids.
There aren’t any.

All I could find were some percentages of how many women work in ICE.
Roughly 15% of ICE personnel are women.
Women work across the agency, including in law-enforcement and investigative roles.

And I wondered: Why aren’t we seeing more women on these ICE raids?

Before we go any further, this post is not an exercise in man-bashing or lazy gender stereotyping.

It’s me exploring my thoughts and sharing them with you.

Please feel very free and easy to feel something different to me.

Great, OK, let’s continue…

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Thinking about the personnel directly involved in the raids, from my observations, it seems to be a very male-dominated part of the organisation.
That may be a coincidence, or it may be optics, or it may simply be who happens to be on camera.
But even this narrow view of the whole can still be important data.

So, let me start by saying, I don’t think governmental institutions simply just enforce government policy.
I think to a great degree, they also select people for positions based on certain psychologies, reward certain traits, and filter out those not psychologically congruent to undertake what’s required of them.

I think that can be said for all institutions and systems.

And also, I know the simple answer to why I’m not seeing more women on the frontlines of the ICE personnel undertaking raids is “patriarchy”, because women have knocked up against that glass ceiling for as long as we can remember.
Systemic structures that keep women out.
Or, if they enter, subject them to sexism, misogyny and abuse.

But I’ve been wondering if something else might be happening too, and that’s what I want to discuss here.

I started to think about what kind of work the ICE raids involve, and who is willing to do it.

(For me, and the purposes of this post, the question is not whether women are technically eligible to do this work.
The question is what kind of work this is, and who it’s attracting to apply for positions and who it’s repelling.)

What raid work actually requires

Immigration raids are often described in bureaucratic language: “operations”, “enforcement actions”, “removals”.
But the day-to-day reality of raid work is not an abstract concept that we are distanced from.
It is immediate, embodied, and relational.

To carry out this work, a person must be able to:

• enter places where fear is present and treat it as a “procedure”
  
  

• override instinctive responses to distress, especially from children
  
  

• see domination as “professionalism”
  
  

• accept that harm to vulnerable people is a necessary by-product of “doing the job”
  
  

• see their actions as part of a moral framework they support, as determined by others higher up
  

This is not a moral judgement about individual agents.
It is a description of the psychological “framework” the role requires.

Undertaking immigration raids demands a significant ability to distance oneself from what the role requires individuals to do.
The ability to see suffering and not feel morally responsible for it.

It requires emotional numbing, not necessarily as a “pathology”, but definitely at the very least, as a skill.
The work cannot be done consistently without it.

This is why institutions that rely on coercion must normalise language that attempts to minimise the harm.
“Processing.”
“Transport.”
“Custody.”

Each term removes the human body and the singular person from the sentence.
The choice of language matters.

Over time, this becomes the emotional standard expected for the role.
So people who cannot maintain it leave, burn out, transfer, or never apply in the first place.
People who can maintain it, or who find meaning, status, or identity within it, remain in the role.

In effect, the functioning structure of the system asks:
Can you live with becoming the kind of person who does this repeatedly?

This is how institutions shape themselves without ever issuing an overt directive that says, “Only a certain kind of person is welcome here.”

I know it might seem obvious to say this but it’s important to be overt:

When looking at those involved in ICE raids, it seems to be that people who are comfortable functioning within hierarchy, obedience, and state-sanctioned force are the ones who are applying for the positions and being given the roles.

This is not unique to immigration enforcement.
It appears in prisons, policing, militaries, and corporate structures where harm is bureaucratised and responsibility is diffused across the whole system.

Over time, the organisation ends up staffed by people who can live with what the work requires.

Which brings us back to what I’m specifically noticing about the videos of ICE raids and the apparent absence of women ICE personnel involved in them.

What I’m noticing regarding gender and the immigration raids

It’s my belief that women have a different relationship with vulnerability, due to size and physical strength, socialisation, responsibility within family roles, and lived experience of male violence.

For many women, harm is not experienced as the outcome of a rule or policy, but as something immediate, happening between people, with consequences that are felt and carried.

I don’t believe this is due to any innate virtue or sensitivity.
I believe it reflects how responsibility, expectations of empathy, and exposure to vulnerability are carried through interpersonal relationships, and how difficult it becomes, as a result, to treat harm as distant or purely procedural.

When you look at ICE personnel involved in immigration raids in Minneapolis, where the targets are frightened parents, very young children, and families being pulled apart, the cost of participating is much harder to see in an abstract way.

So, to return to my original observation, the absence of women ICE personnel taking part in these raids matters.
As information.

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Men, as a group within the constraints of the patriarchal system they grow up in, are more heavily socialised to experience hierarchy as meaningful.

From childhood onwards, many boys are placed in situations where they are ranked against each other.
At school, in sports, in games, and later in work, they are encouraged to compete, to win, and to see comparison as normal.

Authority figures in these settings are usually male, and obedience to them is presented as sensible and necessary.
Respect is often tied to position or title rather than to how authority is exercised or wielded.

In these environments, control over others is frequently reframed as leadership rather than as a problem.
Force, or the threat of it, is ever-present in the background of these experiences as something that ultimately maintains authority.

Over time, this teaches boys a practical lesson:
Hierarchy is not just a way of organising people.
It is where status, identity, and meaning are rooted.

When men later enter institutions structured around rank and obedience, those systems often feel very familiar.
Carrying out orders can feel like fulfilling a comfortable role rather than making a personal moral decision.

I don’t believe these traits are innate in men.
They are cultivated, rewarded, and reinforced.

In contrast, women are more likely to experience harm relationally.
Socialisation and lived experience train women to quickly recognise and take note of who is being affected, how, and what the harm is.

When harm is distant or theoretical, many people can tolerate it.
When harm is happening in front of us, and is directed at children or families, tolerance becomes much harder to maintain.

This difference does not make women morally superior.

It does, however, largely determine who is willing to take on roles that require routine and very visible harm to people who are ultimately powerless.

There is no rule preventing women from applying for ICE positions that involve raids.
There is no policy preventing women from being assigned to raids.

Despite this, raid teams remain overwhelmingly male.

Why?

Institutions that rely on force need the people who can shut down their inner resistance and still feel justified in what they’re doing at the end of the day.

When you look at the absence of women from immigration raid teams, it suggests to me that many women may be less willing to make that adjustment.
Not because they are morally “purer”, but because many women do not want to be part of systems that normalise violence. Because they are systems women have experienced from the other side, and often been victimised by.

I’m not suggesting women inherently have more integrity than men.
But I do believe more women are actively walking away from systems that perpetuate cruelty as normal behaviour.

Why misogyny is an incomplete explanation

It would be easy to explain this pattern solely through misogyny: hostile environments, harassment, exclusion, male “gatekeeping”, because obviously all of that exists and isn’t in any way insignificant.

But misogyny alone does not explain the uneven gender imbalance we are seeing in these raids today.

Women work in dangerous and physically demanding roles equally alongside men in policing, the military, in intelligence, and in prisons.

What I think distinguishes the work of ICE raids in Minneapolis now isn’t just the danger or physical demands involved.

I believe it’s how evident the harm is.

The people being harmed aren’t abstract enemies.
They are families in their homes, or going about the mundane daily tasks of life.
Frightened parents.
Very young children.

This makes the work harder to make peace with morally.
And less attractive to people who do not want to set their conscience aside.

What this tells us about power

Power doesn’t just coerce others.
I fundamentally believe it often changes the people who hold it.

When we look at who ends up doing this work, we see what the system expects from people and who people entering the system are very likely to become.

If an institution’s most visible employees come from a narrow psychological profile and specific demographic of the population, that points to a pattern.
It reflects the kind of person who can do the work and still see themselves as decent.

A state can only separate families and detain children if it can find people willing to do it and keep doing it, day in, day out.
Looking at who does that work, and who doesn’t, can make how the system is built more visible.

The can reveal the moral frame it operates within.

So with ICE raids, we are clearly seeing male dominated authoritarianism, accepted systemic violence, state sanctioned abuse, and no legal constraints.

This strikes at the very heart of what democracy means.

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I believe the absence of women on ICE raid teams suggests that the work is suited to people who can:

Easily see harm as intrinsically part of doing their duty

Handle creating and witnessing fear as part of the job

Believe harming others is part of their service to the world

It suggests to me that many women, when faced with that choice, decide not to do this work.

They don’t make a stand and they don’t announce it, instead they simply don’t take part.

I don’t think that absence of women is random, and it also isn’t insignificant.

It tells us something about the kinds of people a society needs in order to carry out certain actions, and the kinds of people institutions lose and harm when those actions become normalised.

Because the men who are taking part in ICE raids now in Minneapolis will be fundamentally changed by what they do.

Whether they realise or not.

For better or for worse, in the true meaning of that statement.

And the violence they are engaged in and enabling doesn’t just harm the people they are abusing. It harms them too. And the people closest to them.

They become even more numb to their own feelings.

Further trapped in the system they are upholding.

That we are not seeing women on the frontline of these ICE raids in Minneapolis gives me hope.

In an age where women are not excluded across the board by misogyny, women seem to be very definitely walking away from those roles that would involve violence towards others who are vulnerable.

As women we may not hold the political power in the numbers we would like in order to be able to change our systems from the top down.

And yes, there are women within government and within ICE who are doing work that enables and supports the work of the ICE raid teams.

But, looking at the possibility that very many women are simply quietly refusing to engage with this kind of work that violates, abuses and harms the vulnerable, and are simply not present on the front lines of these ICE raids does mean that we do hold power to change things from the bottom up.

Women have power from the bottom up here because this kind of violence only happens if enough people are willing to keep doing it.

Policy doesn’t remove families from homes or take children away. People do.

When fewer people are willing to take on that work, the system starts to strain.

Fewer people apply. Fewer people stay. The work gets concentrated in a smaller, narrower group.

That makes the system more rigid and more extreme, and it makes what it’s doing harder to hide.

It becomes more obvious who is doing the work, and what that work actually involves. These systems rely on looking ordinary, like this is just another job, done by all sorts of people.

When women, who are otherwise present across policing, the military, prisons and government, are missing from this specific role, that sense of ordinariness breaks down.

The abuse becomes more visible.

The system becomes more brittle.

And that brittleness limits how easily this work can be sustained, or defended.

I believe this is already happening.

The images of groups of angry men, abusing vulnerable people, are being filmed precisely because they look and are clearly so extreme.

As far as ICE is concerned, women seem to be choosing non-violence, and that absence of women is quickly making the violence within the system much more brittle and much more visible.

Because although the men are masked, their actions are not.

And the violence they are engaged in is intensifying as the morally corrupt system itself causes those doing the job to adjust to the extremes of what they’re being allowed to do without legal constraint.

I don’t think that’s meaningless, especially in light of what’s unfolding in Minnesota right now, where hundreds of federal immigration agents have been deployed and at least four children, including a five-year-old, have been detained in neighbourhoods and near schools, sparking fear and a huge community response.

Absence can be a type of resistance too.

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© Moss & Matchsticks, 2026. All rights reserved.

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Somehow, against all odds (and with only minimal bribery), we’ve done it. We’ve managed to hit 1,005 subscribers.

One thousand and five of you have chosen to hang around here at Moss and Matchsticks while I vent my grievances at anyone scrolling by.

There’s a note I wrote in my diary that says, “If it doesn’t make you laugh, don’t post it.”

It’s my rule for myself.

And it seems to be serving me well so far. (At the very least, it’s helped me avoid veering off into the painfully earnest tone of my early diaries. I read one back recently and wanted to hit myself with a spade, and also question my dad around whether we were related to Adrian Mole.)

So here we are.

No monetised wellness sales funnels.

No life hacks.

Just, hopefully, a kind place on Substack, where we’re waving across the internet to each other in our pyjamas, shouting, “You losing your marbles too?! Yay! Come on in, the water’s lovely.”

Moss and Matchsticks is not a how-to guide.

There is definitely no downloadable workbook.

I can’t teach you how to thrive (I’m still working on figuring that one out for myself and would hate to steer you in the wrong direction. Unless onto the sofa was where you were headed anyway.)

But if you, too, are someone who has ever:

• Had a minor existential breakdown while trying to find a matching pair of socks

• Decided you’re allowed to eat an entire bag of Kettle Chips in the bath because “life is hard and I am not”

• Wondered when your get up and go got up and f*cked off

Then congratulations.

You are now a member of the Secret Society of the Quietly Knackered.

Welcome, welcome. Thank you for being here and for staying after reading more.

No meetings or minutes.

Just hugs, really.

A few well-placed swears.

And maybe the odd Bourbon/Custard Cream or Victoria Sponge (for someone who can no longer eat processed sugar, I’m aware I talk about baked goods a lot. A LOT. Yes, I may miss them.)

I’ve very lightly highlighted the important bit in this image in case anyone missed it. Subtlety is my strength. I’m not one to make a fuss.

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Reaching 1,000 subscribers is a very meaningful milestone for me.

Not because numbers matter that much (I know we all say they don’t, while quietly tracking them like Tom Cruise hunted down - sorry, wooed - Katie Holmes), but because being seen does matter.

Especially when you’ve spent years feeling invisible, or too weird, or too sensitive, or just too bloody tired to keep up.

It took me a long time to believe that my voice had enough value to share here.

That softness and gentleness were worth writing about without needing to be turned into some kind of “brand strategy”.

That writing from a place of being exhausted, or living with grief, or simply talking about the ridiculous hilarity of surviving day-to-day, would be things people wanted to read about.

That those small things could count for something important.

That being disabled and being seen could both happen simultaneously (even when writing anonymously, especially when writing anonymously).

That living a quiet, unremarkable life and writing about it would be met by people who wanted to read more.

Not because of low-self-esteem, but because there are so many messages given to us every day that tell us life is only important if it looks and sounds a certain way.

A great big middle finger to that, eh, lovely friends!

So yes, I watch “the numbers”. But what they represent is more than just numbers.

To me they’re Connection.

A warm and lovely ecosystem of strangers who feel like kindred spirits and people who are becoming friends. People who get it. Who read something I’ve written and go, “Oh thank god, I thought it was just me.”

That’s why I write.

Because I want us all to feel less alone.

And if what I write makes you laugh out loud, or feel a bit less isolated, or able to lie down on the sofa for a well-earned cry and then a nap, that’s more than enough for me.

Honestly, most of us aren’t “Elon Musking” life and aiming for world domination, are we? We’re trying to get through the day without yelling at the kids or hiding in the shed.

We’re trying to answer intimidating or vacuous emails without rage-typing.

We’re trying to exist in a world that keeps enabling and rewarding noise and bluster and violence, when all we want is a bit of peace, some authentic connection, some laughter, and possibly a decent biscuit.

And still we keep on showing up for our lives and the people in them.

Even when we’re shattered.

Even when we’re spinning plates, possibly eating cereal for dinner, and pretending our face mask wasn’t mostly just an excuse to avoid people.

You are all genuinely lovely.

If you’re here, reading this, part of this warm and wonderful group of kind people who’ve joined me here… Thank you.

Thank you for letting me write vulnerably and honestly.

For appreciating my terrible jokes.

Thank you for getting it, even when it was littered with some light swearing, dripping in fury masked as mild irritation, and written by someone wearing their dressing gown inside out.

You matter. Your way of being You in the world matters. Your kindness and softness matter.

And I’m really f*cking glad you’re here.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to celebrate with a bag of Wotsits (other brands of crisps are available), and a lovely bath.

M x

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All words and images are Copyright Moss and Matchsticks 2026. Please do not reproduce without prior permission.

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If you’re anything like me, and find yourself staring down the barrel of Christmas Day while feeling wrung out, exhausted, over-stretched, under-hugged and ready to one-finger salute Mariah Carey each time she comes on the radio, this post is for you.

You’re probably sick of people telling you to take deep breaths and enjoy the magic. And you’re definitely not interested in another chirpy take on “surviving the season”.
You might be actively fantasising about cancelling everything except those morsels of magic known as pigs in blankets (I’m mostly vegetarian for the rest of the year after watching a pig do a jigsaw {I kid you not}, but make a very apologetic exception for my Christmas lunch.)

I’ve legitimately cried in the pyjama section of Sainsbury’s before now, so if you feel like you’re about to lose your sh*t in the wine aisle, come on in and have a read.

This isn’t advice. I’m not trying to fix you.
It’s just a few things I’ve been clinging to that make all this feel a bit more doable.

(My small 7 inch potted Christmas tree with tiny bobble hat topper is all I could manage this year)

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Things to remember:

1. You are not your to-do list.

I mean, I love a to-do list as much as the next type A personality. Especially if it’s colour-coded. And if it’s laminated and comes with its own dry wipe pen to cross things off? Ooh, mama....
Even one scribbled on the back of an envelope makes my heart flutter, but our worth is not measured in productivity.
And rest is not wasted time.
Honestly, lying still, staring at the ceiling counts as a form of spiritual practice, if you do it with enough conviction.

2. Grief doesn’t need an anniversary to floor you.

Sometimes it’s incredibly rude and just arrives uninvited.

And doesn’t wipe it’s feet on the doormat before it settles in.
You’re making a sandwich, or watching Stranger Things, or trying to decide if you can be bothered washing your hair, and suddenly you find it’s there again.
A wearying heaviness that, even though it’s so familiar, still takes your breath away.
Let yourself feel it.

Don’t fight it.

Don’t try to wade through the weight of it.

Just let it be what it is.

Each time we’re feeling it, we’re taking steps to move through it.

3. You don’t have to make meaning out of everything.

Sometimes things hurt and that’s it. That’s the end of that sentence.
Sometimes the lesson is just: “That was effing awful and I survived it.”
No phoenix rising miraculously from the ashes ready to start an online coaching business with what has been learned. No growth. No TED Talk. No toxic positivity about what can only be described as utter horse-do.
Some of the best people I know have become who they are not because pain made them better, but because they stayed soft.

They didn’t harden against their pain.

They didn’t decide to build walls against hurt.

3. You are allowed to say no without offering a PowerPoint presentation of your reasons why you’d rather not participate in forced Christmas fun.

The word “no” is a complete sentence.

You don’t owe anyone a paragraphs-long explanation of why you can’t come, just to protect your energy.
You’re allowed to opt out of the party, the call, the favour, the obligation, even the group chat and the entire month of December.
Silence is definitely not a sin.
You’re not here to give yourself burnout in order to be palatable, or to frog-march yourself through every boozy invitation that is extended your way.

4. Some of us are walking miracles just for getting out of bed.

I mean it.
If you’ve managed to hold a conversation this week, or feed yourself, or change your sheets, or put your pants on the right way round, or smile at someone even though you’re feeling utterly broken open, that’s incredible.

Honestly.

All bad jokes aside.
And, if you haven’t managed any of those things, and you’re still here, still breathing and trying, still clinging to your emotional support teabags and breakfast Milk Tray, you are wonderful.

That counts.

Cracking open a box of choccies and having them for breakfast, because your existential breakdown is making it hard to organise a light meal of pre-prepared oats and ten of your five a day, is adulting at an entirely appropriate level.

Especially when life feels too much and everyone around you is enjoying playing with baubles and entertaining that effing abominable elf on his fooking shelf. (Whoever decided that people needed more ways to have a nervous breakdown at Christmas should be done for crimes against Christmas humanity. )

5. You don’t need to be festive if you’re not feeling it.

There is no moral failing in quietly just getting through Christmas.
You don’t have to watch The Holiday and feel full of sparkle. (I love Jude as much as the next woman who enjoys a chiselled jawline and a nice woolly jumper, but this year I’ve had the definite urge to chin the smugly handsome bastard.)
You don’t have to decorate the house or bake anything shaped like a gingerbread man.

You can choose to let it all go.

For now, or forever.

You can be kind to your heaviness.

You can stay in your jarmies with a blanket and a biscuit and call that an act of respect for your tender heart. A beautifully quiet kind of holy act.
God won’t smite you for not doing Secret Santa.

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A final thought for you as we thunder towards Christmas Day… If you find yourself in a pile of wrapping paper, quietly having a cry, remember:

There are thousands and thousands of people who find Christmas the saddest time of year, and no matter how many baubles the world tells you to hang around your home, none of those decorations heal overwhelm, grief, loss, or trauma.

It’s absolutely OK if you don’t want to join in.

Do whatever holds you together, or lets you tenderly fall apart.

You get to decide what nurtures you.

That’s it, really.
Just a handful of things I’ve come to know, from under my hot water bottle, and ridiculous pile of duvets.

I’ll be back soon with more posts in 2026.

In the meantime, a huge, genuine thank you for all your comments and support over the past few months as I’ve shared my thoughts here.

You are all lovely.

M x

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All words and images copyrighted to Moss and Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce without prior permission.

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I was with my mum in the hospital for her final moments.

I was by her side 24 hours a day for the last eight days of her life.

It was the end of October. Just a few short weeks after she received her final diagnosis.

She was dying, and I knew it. I slept on a one-and-a-half seat sofa in the corner of her hospital room for those eight nights.

My body bent into awkward positions, and my heart breaking.

There were leaves falling from the trees outside. The pavements and gutters slick with them.

Inside my mum’s hospital room, just the heavy sound of a woman I loved disappearing, struggling breath by struggling breath.

And her abject grief at leaving. She was only 69.

Her death wasn’t peaceful.

Something happens to you when you fully witness someone die like that.

When the end of their beloved life is so raw.

And painfully swift in weeks, but agonisingly slow in minutes.

It stays with you. And it permanently stains your internal calendar.

For me, the stain leached from the autumn leaves of October into the fairy lights and wrapping paper of December. Into every inch of my heart that was struggling to say: How do I tell you that this whole time of year is the sound, taste, and smell of loss to me?

Because, just as I was learning how to navigate autumn, five years and two months later, almost to the day, my best friend died.

She was funny and feisty and gentle and strong.

She and her husband had carried me through the loss of my mum.

She was everything you’d want in a co-conspirator. Sharp and witty and loyal. We were a coven of two.

She died between Christmas and New Year.

That strange week where the world is hungover on sugar and turkey leftovers, and people are languid with loved ones in front of all the Christmas telly.

She had a rare, brutal, degenerative disease. By the time it ended, she was locked in. Fully conscious until the last week or two. I can’t fully remember the exact timeline. It was so painful to live through again after the loss of my mum.

Inwardly, my beautiful friend was fully herself. But unable to move. Unable to breathe on her own. Trapped in a body that had become a prison.

In the ICU, in the months before she lost all movement, the staff gave her clay to work with, to try to keep some hand strength.

On this particular day, when I visited, I sat down next to her bed, picked up a piece of clay, looked at her, and without a word, began shaping an anatomically correct penis and balls.

She looked at me and without blinking, did the same. Her husband was reading the paper and didn’t clock what we were doing. We sculpted silently, eyes locked, like schoolgirls. On the edge of laughter and fully rooted in rebellion.

Old enough to know better.

When we were finished, we placed our anatomically impressive offerings side by side on her hospital bed tray.

Two clay dicks (and two proud dickheads) quietly smirking in the face of death.

The ICU beds were close together.

There were nurses and doctors everywhere. But we let those clay cocks sit there.

Because this was our love story wrapped up in a moment:

Mischief, belly laughs, and utter filth and defiance in the face of despair.

And I want to say clearly to all of you, what a love. What a deep and bonded with laughter and mischief love. What a fucking brilliant, irreverent afternoon. The two of us sculpting clay cocks in the ICU like witches flipping off death itself.

She was speaking in whispers at this point. Attached to tubes and machines. But she could still raise a middle finger with her eyes and some clay sculpting.

It never entered my head that she wouldn’t find it funny and join in when I started modelling my clay knob.

Because, of course she did.

Not because we made a habit of making penis jokes (we mostly laughed at ourselves and our own ridiculous humanity). Or ever spent our time graffiti-ing them anywhere and everywhere.

But because when someone hands you clay in the ICU ward and expects you to make something non filthy, but you’re living through a horrendous illness and you know where it’s leading, the only reasonable thing to do in that moment is flip the finger to all of it and make a glorious dick.

Because nobody wants or needs a pitiful head tilt, or a any kind of response that says “Oh, how awful/I feel so sorry for you”.

Your chosen sister wants to know you still see the wholeness of her and her stunning long red curly hair and her mischief.

Of course she would. We were a coven of two.

And love only gets stronger when a body is dying.

This is why Christmas feels complicated for me now. Not because I’m broken. But because the cost of love is grief, and I have loved deeply. And Christmas is where the losses all join up.

They come quietly in October when the leaves start to fall.

And I remember my beautiful mum who didn’t want to say goodbye.

And then, when the John Lewis ad first appears each year, they come wrapped in ribbons, and memories of Christmas Day nights all together, laughing and playing Christmas games.

They show up in the smell of mince pies and the sound of Last Christmas playing on the radio. And they start to whisper: This is when you lost her. This is the second time you learned how death really is.

This year, I took a 7-inch potted pine and hung a few tiny pompoms on it.

That was it.

Not because I don’t care. But because I do. Because I still believe in beauty (and always will, no matter what life brings) even if it’s small and quiet.

That little tree is a small honouring of all the laughter we made together. It feels defiant. Because it says: “I am still here. I remember who I loved. I will never forget them.”

This isn’t a story about how I found joy again. This is a story about love, loss, and what it means to feel both joy and grief through the whole of autumn and winter.

While other people are celebrating with a family still around them.

It’s a story about me. A woman who slept contorted on a sofa in a hospital room. So that she knew she had done everything she could do to witness everything her mum went through. (Because in my mind, if my mum had to go through it and I couldn’t take it from her, at least I could stay and see it all. So my mum knew she was seen in those final days and fully loved in all of it.) And a woman who sculpted clay dicks with her dying best friend. Because even in the most painful of times, the love is always bigger than the fear.

It’s also a story about the devastating heartbreak of knowing what and who you are losing. And what living on with that loss will mean. So you make clay dicks in the ICU because you meeting your friend there in the laughter is somehow holy.

I will never get over losing them.

My mum.

And my best friend (and chosen sister) of over 30 years.

Not because I am maudlin or don’t want to heal. But because these women were two of the greatest loves of my life, and I will tell the story of my nights listening to my mum’s breathing while squashed on that sofa. Her grief at not wanting to leave. And later, those defiant clay cocks. Until the day I stop breathing myself.

The love doesn’t end just because their lives did.

Their love for me, and mine for them, pulses through everything in me.

It is sewn in stitches through the tapestry of my life.

Every Christmas was made joyful and fun by both of them. Their Christmas food (homemade pâté, boiled ham, and sherry trifle with lady fingers). Their love of decorating their homes. The laughter together every Christmas Day and Christmas Day night.

Their beautifully wrapped and thoughtful gifts that showed me every year that they knew me and loved me. The Christmas markets and Christmas shopping. The whole lovely seasonal lead-up and New Year’s Eve watching films together.

All irreparably changed.

And now my dad is repeatedly in and out of hospital growing ever more ill and frail. And I know, at some point in the not too distant future, I’m going to go through it all again. Loving him deeply and losing him.

This year, I don’t have the heart or the energy to sprinkle Christmas sugar on “grief shit”.

Next year I will. But not this year.

So Christmas used to be my everything, but because of life and loss it has become a complicated time for me. And I know I’m not alone in this.

If you are in a similar place, I see you and am sending you love.

This year my little pompom-covered tree is carrying the weight of all my Christmas joy, and love, and grief.

And I love that tree so much for what it stands for.

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All words and images are the Copyrighted to Moss and Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce without permission.

We looked at boundaries as a promise.

This week, I’m going deeper into looking at boundaries and how they are part of the process of deepening intimacy through conflict.

Yes, conflict is actually an important part of deepening intimacy.

I’m writing about this because there’s a quiet cultural myth that really grinds my gears, that says intimacy is built in the easy, soft moments of a relationship.

Often people will swear blind that intimacy comes from ease.
From how many things you have in common.
From the effortless banter.
From the chemistry. (How many times have you heard “There was no spark, I’m looking for the spark”?)
From the “we just get each other” fantasy that lasts right up until someone’s nervous system gets triggered and their head explodes.

Ease is gorgeous.

And also completely useless for showing you who someone is.

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We often talk as if intimacy grows out of ease. As if harmony is the gold standard of a healthy relationship.

And I’ll be honest, I’ve dated men with whom I had the most gorgeous ease.

Where I had thoughts that sounded something like this:

Oh look, we’re laughing, we’re ordering tapas like a couple in a Netflix series.

(And my inner narrator started telling me I should have considered packing an overnight bag.)

Or this:

Maybe he really is this lovely and I’m not just getting carried away by the lighting.

(Key finding after further events: I was indeed getting carried away by the lighting.)

But ease isn’t intimacy, it’s just the very early warm-up act.

Ease doesn’t create intimacy.
Conflict has a big part in creating intimacy.

(It took me years to realise this, mostly because ease is so pretty and feels lovely, while conflict feels awful and shows up looking like it slept in the car for a week.)

Ease tells us nothing about how someone handles reality.
It’s the showroom floor version of a person.

Polished, great lighting, no sign of wear.

Conflict is the MOT test.

The moment the ego, nervous system, and upbringing all burst through a door like Phil Mitchell in a “Doof Doof” moment at the end of Eastenders.

You want to see someone’s capacity for intimacy and depth?
Cause a mild inconvenience.
Ask them a genuine question.
Express a need.

Say “No”.

The real stuff of relationship growth begins somewhere very different than the place of ease that happens at the surface level of a connection.

Relationships grow and deepen as a result of how we handle conflict and set boundaries within moments of conflict.

And when I say “conflict”, I’m not talking about the dramatic kind of conflict that involves screaming matches and slammed doors. I’m referring to the small, sudden ruptures that happen when something doesn’t “land” well. The moment the other person’s behaviour bumps right up against our internal sense of what feels respectful, kind, or safe.

We’ve been taught to fear this moment, because the myth that tells us ease is the finish line has taught us that conflict is the start of the end.

But intimacy is born in that uncomfortable moment where our stomach drops and our nervous system wakes up like a dog that can smell a bone.

I wish I had understood a lot earlier in life that intimacy isn’t created when everything is easy.

It’s created when something isn’t.

It’s created when someone shows you who they are at that point where ease disappears.

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Most people think conflict is a sign of relational trouble.
But conflict is simply where two realities meet. And two sets of histories and wounds get woken up.

It’s the place where our truth brushes up against theirs, where our needs rub against their habits, and where our lived experience grazes irritatingly across their reality.

Where the stories from our past start to determine the stories we tell ourselves about the person in front of us.

Conflict says nothing about whether a relationship is healthy.
It simply says:
“We’ve reached the part where honesty is required.”

And what happens next, honestly, is the place where everything about the relationship gets decided.

Most relationships don’t fail because of conflict.
They fail because nobody knows how to move through it without harming the other.

Or worse: one person refuses to.

We’ve all met people who only know love in the absence of any friction.
Where the tiniest request for change feels like a betrayal to them.

Where a calm conversation about their impact on us gets twisted into a judgement on their worth.
Where the slightest disagreement escalates into drama, rage, withdrawal, or passive-aggressive shutdown.

With people like that, conflict is explosive because it threatens their emotional survival strategies. They can’t tolerate difference. They can’t tolerate discomfort. They can’t tolerate the idea that love, connection and friction can exist in the same room.

And so the relationship becomes a performance, a kind of emotional dance to keep their nervous system calm at the expense of your own.

That isn’t intimacy.
That’s endurance.

(And endurance is great if you’re running a marathon, not if you’re just trying to have dinner on a Tuesday. Believe me, I know of that which I type.)

But with emotionally mature and relationally literate people, something else happens entirely.

Conflict becomes an opening.

A deepening.

A moment where we both get to find out whether this connection can hold the truth of who we actually are.

Because this is what I wish I had known and now want you to know:

Intimacy is not built from compatibility.
It’s built from repair after conflict.

Anybody can feel compatible with you when you’re laughing over wine.
Anybody can admire your mind when the conversation is flowing.
Anybody can be gentle when nothing is at stake.

The question is who can stay present, respectful, and curious when something feels painfully uncomfortable.
Who can “meet the moment” rather than collapsing into defensiveness.
Who can tolerate feeling exposed without making the other pay for it.

Who can say, “Tell me what didn’t feel good,” mean it, and want to really know the answer.

That is intimacy.

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Conflict creates the opportunity.
Boundaries shape how to respectfully acknowledge each others needs.
Repair creates the intimacy.

If we take conflict out of a relationship, we take the growth out with it.
We take out the possibility of depth.
We take out the possibility of knowing each other at all.

People mistake conflict-avoidance for peace.
But conflict-avoidance is the birthplace of resentment.
It’s the soil where all the unspoken things ferment and create a relational “cess-pit”.

The “easy” relationships where nothing ever ruptures are often the emptiest or most surface level. Shared diaries and schedules but very little emotional resonance.
Because nobody is bringing their full self.
Nobody is risking truth.
Nobody is showing where their painful edges are.

And without edges, we have no solid shape and understanding of where to hold each other gently.
Without that lovely, loving knowledge of a person, we have no intimacy.

Conflict is not proof the connection is weak.
Conflict is proof the connection is alive.

It means there’s something here worth negotiating.
It means the emotional stakes exist.
It means the relationship matters enough to feel.

And this is where boundaries come in.

People often talk about boundaries as if they’re preventative or pre-emptive, and by that I mean, as if you politely outline your preferences before anything goes wrong. In real life, boundaries surface because something has already felt off.

A boundary isn’t a preamble.
It’s a response.

It’s the moment you name the rupture and ask the relationship to grow.

It sounds like:

“I want us to stay connected, but I need us to handle this differently.”
“That didn’t sit right with me so can we talk about it?”
“When you said that, I felt really hurt because...”
“I need you to hear and understand how that felt.”
“This matters to me.”

These aren’t ultimatums.
They’re bids for connection.

And how someone responds to those bids for connection is the clearest indicator of the intimacy they are capable of.

Some people meet boundaries like children who’ve had their toys taken away.

They sulk, weaponise silence, accuse us of overreacting, or collapse into self-pity in order to be rescued them from the discomfort. Or they leave.

With them, conflict exposes their relational limits.

(And it’s very important to understand this so that we save ourselves from years of emotional over-functioning because of their relational under-functioning.)

And others meet boundaries with steadiness, and maybe some discomfort, some awkwardness, but with an absolute willingness to stay in the room. (I cannot tell you how much I love those men {and women}, the ones who can navigate their own distress enough to be able to stay. You are gorgeous and I adore you.)

With them, conflict deepens the connection.

Because conflict is the truth of two different perspectives.
And truth is intimacy.
And boundaries are the way we move through truth without abandoning ourself or each other.

Conflict says:

“We’ve hit a crossroads.”

Boundaries say:

“Here’s how I can stay with you at this crossroads.”

Repair says:

“I hear you, I want to understand, help me to understand, do I understand? And then, “Let’s take the next step together.”

This is the relational scaffolding it often takes time to learn:

Rupture → Boundary → Repair → Deeper Intimacy

Without rupture, there’s no opportunity for greater depth.
Without boundaries, there’s no clarity. Without repair, there’s no trust.

We are not intimate because we share soft moments.
We are intimate because we survive hard ones with our dignity intact and our boundaries expressed, understood and respected.

Writing this piece matters to me because I want to write against the embedded cultural fantasy of effortless connection and say very clearly:

The most intimate relationships are not the smoothest ones,
but the ones where two people know how to handle friction and disagreement with respect, love and care.

The ones where nobody disappears.
The ones where nobody retaliates.
The ones where nobody punishes the other for having feelings.
The ones where the conflict is met not as a personal attack,
but as a chance to understand the person in front of us more fully.

This isn’t traditionally romantic.
But it is adult.

And also hugely romantic in an adult way.

(I have to be honest and say, nothing turns me on more than a man who knows himself well enough to be able to stay lovingly in the room when conflict hits. For me, there is nothing hotter and sexier than a man who knows how to navigate conflict. That’s a hill I’m prepared to sit on and shout about for a while, if not actually perish.)

And very few people are actually equipped for it because we’re not overtly taught to see it and understand it. We often just live the consequences of being in relationships where we’re trying to keep the peace instead of knowing how to build intimacy.

Most relationships stay shallow because one person (or both people) refuses to enter conflict at all or they lash out in defensiveness.
The relationship stays comfortable but thin, or uncomfortable and bulked up on resentment.
The people in the relationship are polite but emotionally undernourished.
Pleasant but fundamentally disconnected.

I know this because I’ve lived it.

If we want depth, we have to be willing to let the relationship rumble a bit.

Because the moment we say:

“That didn’t feel good,”
or
“I need to slow this down,”
or
“I want us to handle this differently,”
or
“I felt hurt when that happened,”

we’re offering the other person the chance to meet us in a deeper place.

Sometimes they will.
Sometimes they won’t.
Both tell us the truth about whether to stay or go.

But if a person can meet us with honesty, openness, and willingness, we get something we cannot access through ease alone:

The intimacy of being fully known.

This is the heart of relationships for me:

Conflict is the gateway to intimacy.
Boundaries are the bridge.
Repair is the what carries us to the other side.

Without conflict, we cannot know someone.
Without boundaries, we cannot navigate someone.
Without repair we cannot trust someone.

Intimacy lives exactly in the place most people avoid.
The place where feelings get complicated, truths get uncomfortable and nervous systems get very, very rattled.

But if we can stand there, and someone can stay there with us,
We find ourselves in the place where the real relationship begins.

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All words and images ©Moss and Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce without consent.

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Before we dive in and look at the confusing world of Boundaries:
If you’ve ever felt like too much, not enough, or are quietly hauling everyone else’s chaos uphill while your own needs sit in a bin bag behind the shed, you’re in the right place, and this post is for you.

So, in our journey through relationships (particularly as people with hidden disabilities and chronic illness) we’ve talked about reclaiming our sexuality.

About being seen as desirable, not despite our disabilities, but without them being seen as a condition that cancels our worth.

We’ve looked at what it means to refuse the label of “burden.” To say: actually, I am worthy of full commitment. Of presence. Of being chosen, not simply tolerated. Not kept on the side-lines for when it’s convenient.

You’ve seen the images I created. Disabled people not as inspiration porn or pity projects, but as glamorous, vibrant icons who are bold, beautiful, whole.

We’ve talked about how over-functioning (constant doing, proving, and anticipating) is not the same as wellness. And how that performance can become its own kind of addiction. One that leads, quietly and inevitably, to burnout.

And in today’s post, I want to talk about something that threads through all of it.

Boundaries.

Because without boundaries, none of what I’ve just described is sustainable. We can reclaim our sexuality, be seen as whole, and build healthier connections, but if we can’t hold a boundary, we will keep bleeding energy to people and situations that erode us.

So let me be very clear:

Boundaries are not about controlling anyone else.

We don’t set boundaries to dictate what other people should or shouldn’t be doing.

We set them to decide what we are available for. What we will allow into our space, our bodies, our minds, our time, our energy.

A boundary isn’t bossiness or coldness. It’s not a rejection or a punishment.

It’s a declaration of care.

Care for ourselves, yes, but also, care for the people we’re in relationships with, because boundaries make it possible to connect without us feeling resentful or confused.

They’re not walls. They’re not ultimatums. They’re not revenge.

They’re the “relationship container” that makes safety possible.

And this is something I learned. Backwards. (Not the recommended route, but highly effective if you enjoy slow emotional unravelling over several long years.)

I was a teacher for years before developing long-term illness. I worked with children who struggled with boundaries every single day. From day one of my training, we were taught: set boundaries early. Set them clearly. Hold them consistently.

And I did. I was good at it.

No one ever called me “controlling” for doing it in the classroom. In fact, it was seen as professionalism.

It was safety. For me and the children

It was how the children I taught learned to trust me implicitly. How they felt cared for and valued in our classroom.

Because they knew exactly where the line was, and that I would hold it without flinching.

But outside the classroom… that was something of a different story.

When I set boundaries with certain men, I found that I wasn’t perceived as clear. I was seen as “difficult.”

When I said no calmly, I found myself labelled as “cold.”

When I asked for respect, I was “bossy.”

When I asserted my needs, I was “controlling.”

And not in the slightly muttered, quietly grumbled way you might expect. That word “controlling” was used directly. Accusingly. As if I were doing something inappropriate simply by having limits.

The exact same skill that made me trusted and respected in a professional role became, in the personal realm, a reason to dismiss me. Or punish me.

And this is the part where I feel sad writing it out: I internalised that.

Even with all my training, I questioned myself.

Because these people deeply mattered to me on an intimate level.

I became hesitant. Apologetic. I shaped myself around other people’s discomfort, afraid to be seen as too much, too firm, too clear.

And so I became the queen of over-functioning. In relationships. In friendships. In family dynamics.

Years of saying yes when I meant no. Years of absorbing things that hurt me, tolerating behaviours that confused or disrespected me. Just to avoid being called that word again.

“Controlling.”

It took me a long time to see what was really happening.

I wasn’t being too much.

I was being clear.

And clarity makes insecure people uncomfortable. Especially when they’re used to women smoothing everything over, “padding” the truth, or absorbing the cost.

Because clarity means: I’m not playing that role anymore.

I’m not the girl who says it’s fine when it isn’t. I’m not the woman who smiles while swallowing a no. I’m not the person who takes on everyone else’s emotional labour and leaves no space for herself.

What a boundary actually is

A boundary is not about punishment or control.

It’s a promise.

It’s me saying: “If you do X, I will do Y.”

Not to hurt you. Not to dominate you.

But to take care of me.

It’s not: “Don’t raise your voice at me.”
It’s: “If you raise your voice, I’ll leave the room.”

It’s not: “You have to respect my art.”
It’s: “If my art is copied, I’ll ask for it to be removed. And if it isn’t, I’ll escalate.”

It’s not: “You can’t cancel on me again.”
It’s: “If it keeps happening, I’ll stop making plans with you. I need to feel like my time matters too.”

It’s not about changing their behaviour.

It’s about stating ours.

It’s a self-honouring move. Not a manipulative one.

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And here’s why this matters so much when we’re living with hidden disabilities or chronic illness:

We’re already carrying more.

More planning. More prep. More recovery. More behind the scenes planning than anyone can see. (Picture a duck gliding across a pond. With chronic pain, a looming sense of existential regret, and a to-do list taped to its head.)

So when someone consistently drains our time, energy, or emotional safety, and we don’t hold a boundary, we don’t just lose a bit of peace.

We lose a lot of ourselves and our very precious energy.

Sometimes, the cost of not setting a boundary is a full week of pain and recovery. Or a complete dysregulation of our nervous system.

And we can tell ourselves: “It’s not worth the fight.”

But that’s just gaslighting ourselves into abandoning our needs.

That internal fight, between what we know is true, and what we’re willing to tolerate, is the fight that’s burning us out.

If we don’t speak the boundary, our body will.

Burnout doesn’t just come from doing too much. It comes from absorbing too much.

The weight of all the boundaries we didn’t set. The quiet violations we let slide. The repeated moments of swallowing discomfort and then soothing ourselves by calling it “compromise”.

Eventually, our body keeps the boundary for us. Usually by simply collapsing. (Not dramatically. Just with a quiet and solid “thunk” like a Victorian woman fainting, but with a touch less lace, and definitely more rage.)

Our body goes on strike.

I know all of this, because that’s part of what happened to me.

I thought I could push through everything, tolerate everything, explain everything. I thought being liked was safer than being clear.

It absolutely wasn’t.

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Some signs we might need a boundary:

• We feel drained after seeing someone.
  
  

• We find ourselves rehearsing conversations that haven’t happened yet.
  
  

• We dread replying to certain messages.
  
  

• We say “it’s fine,” but it doesn’t feel fine. (And we find ourselves Googling “signs of internalised rage” with one eye twitching.)
  
  

• We feel resentful, but also guilty.
  
  

• We find ourselves distancing from someone rather than having a direct conversation.
  
  

• We find ourselves over-explaining our choices or shrinking them to seem “less difficult.”
  
  

These are signals. They are not weaknesses.

They’re the body and nervous system trying to get our attention. Trying to say: Something needs adjusting and you are allowed to adjust it.

A few practical scripts:

If it helps, here are a few small, clear phrases to try out:

• “Thank you, but that doesn’t work for me.”
  
  

• “I need a bit of time to think before I reply. I will let you know on Monday”
  
  

• “I have a lot I’m dealing with right now and don’t have the energy to do that.” (This sentence alone can save you four weeks of stress diarrhoea.)
  
  

• “That doesn’t feel respectful, so I’m going to end this conversation. We can talk about it again when things feel calmer. I’m going to take 20 minutes to clear my head and will call you back in 20 minutes to finish the conversation respectfully. ”
  
  

• “I care about you, but I need some space for myself right now.”

• “No.” (The word “no” is absolutely a complete sentence.)
  
  

These aren’t ultimatums. They’re clear communications about what you need in order for the relationship to function in a way that’s sustainable for both of you.

Why boundaries feel so hard

Because we were often raised, especially as women, or neurodivergent people, to mask, be nice, not clear.

To be liked, not respected.

To keep the peace, even when it hurts us.

And if you’ve lived through trauma, rejection, abandonment, or gaslighting, then boundaries don’t feel safe.

They feel really dangerous.

Because in our past, they were.

But that doesn’t mean they always are now.

It just means the nervous system often doesn’t know the difference between “this is unsafe” and “this is unfamiliar.”

So if we feel panicky or guilty every time we set a boundary, it doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong.

It can mean we’re doing something new.

We can learn to sit with the boundary burn that comes after honouring ourselves.

Boundary burn hurts less than full burnout.

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What I want you to know

Setting boundaries is hard because:

• The people who force us to say the boundary out loud are the ones who already overstepped it. And when we stop giving them emotional space they were never entitled to, they get angry.

• We feel guilt and fear when we know that anger is coming. That “boundary burn” is the cost of not abandoning ourselves.

Set the boundary anyway.

Their reaction is their responsibility.

Not abandoning your needs is yours.

If someone experiences your boundary as a violation of their personhood, they’re proving in real time why the boundary was needed in the first place.

You’re not cruel for asking for space.

You’re not controlling for choosing peace.

You’re not bossy for protecting your energy.

And you’re not wrong to say, “No.”

One last thing

We don’t have to get good at boundaries overnight. They’re not a personality trait that we’re born with, they’re a practice. A skill to be learned like riding a bike.

We can start small.

We can choose one relationship with someone kind and trusted.

We can choose one dynamic.

One thing that makes us feel tense, or over-loaded, or over-stretched.

And try naming it out loud.

I always write the difficult thing out first in my journal. And then explore how the issue makes me feel and what I’m feeling that’s difficult to name.

What’s not working.
What hurts.
What could change if I was able to be really honest about my needs.

Then I take one small action to honour that truth.

Sometimes I can’t tell the person involved straight away. I have to sit with it for a while, get really clear and deal with my nervous system freaking out.

Until I’m ready to find the verbal words.

In doing that, I’m respecting my own boundary of “not yet”.

Because every time we honour our own boundary, even shakily, we’re building something stronger for our relationships to stand on.

It may not win us a popularity contest. But it will stop us 1. offering lifts to people who make us want to chew glass, and 2. rage hoovering at 2am.

Intimacy is built in the moments we say “No” just as much as it’s built in the moments we say “Yes”.

And if you’re someone with a hidden disability, recovering from burnout, or have a nervous system already working overtime, here’s what I deeply wish I’d fully understood earlier: boundaries aren’t cruel or dramatic, and they’re not a luxury.

They’re what stop your life quietly collapsing in the background while you smile and say you’re fine.

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P.S. If you’re new here, Hello! (and welcome). The posts that lead up to this one are all in my posts archive. If you want to read them, this order helps bring you up to speed:

1. This Was Supposed to be a Sex Story

2. I’m Writing About Sex Again

3. Divine Icons

4. Divine Icons, Issue 2

5. Sexy Isn’t the Half of It

6. I Tried to Fix my Life With a Spreadsheet and Now I Just Cry Into Colour-Coded Blocks

This week has been A WEEK.

I’ve been in an illness crash.

I’ve needed to rest.

I didn’t want to miss my usual Sunday post, so instead of writing, which takes a lot, I decided to paint instead.

So, I made you some free phone wallpapers.

Because life is A Lot and sometimes you just need something lovely to stare at while pretending you’re checking your calendar.

Two images: One with roses.

One with the sea.

For those of us who feel everything but can’t always find a name for it.
I wanted to give you something beautiful that might make you feel like you could breathe for a moment.

So I made something layered, and scalloped.

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I painted her to help with the pain I was feeling and then wanted to give her to you.

Around her halo it says:

Softness is not a weakness.
It’s a way to survive beautifully.

Second one’s for the lads.
Or the sea-lovers. Or anyone emotionally limping past the Rioja shelf.

It’s blues, sea greens, and a huge sky.

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So you might feel that freshness and soothing that only the sea and sky and give us.

It says:

Softness isn’t weakness.
It’s where strength has space to breathe.
– Moss & Matchsticks

That’s it.
Just a couple of quiet things you can keep on your lock screen like emotional support art.

For when the day’s a bit too much.
Or when someone says “you’re very sensitive” like that’s some kind of problem.
Or for when you almost sob because they’re out of your fave Viennetta again.

Softness isn’t weakness.
Our softness is our humanity, and us being human in a world that keeps trying to knock up against us and make us hard.

So please click on each image and save it to your phone, or print it out for your wall.

All I ask is that you respect my gift and don’t use it for re-sale. (I’m giving it away but it’s still mine.)

I also wanted to say thank you for all your support over the past few weeks since I started on Substack and have been trying to find my rhythm.

I’ve found that a post every Sunday is more than I can manage at the moment, so I’ve decided to write a long-form post every two weeks on a Sunday, so my next post into your email inbox will be in two weeks time and every two weeks after that.

I’ll carry on chatting away in the notes and writing daft memes. Substack Club, Uncle Trevor’s wisdom, and a Mossy Manifesto. A Mossifesto, if you will (I can only apologise for the terrible pun).

I will catch up with replying to all your comments and messages as soon as I can.

I hope you love the art I’ve made for you as much as I loved painting and making it.

Big love,
M x

P.S. Tap and hold on mobile (or right-click on desktop) to save.
Use it as a lock screen, wallpaper, or just something lovely to keep in a frame.

When Habit Stacking Becomes Workaholism

Habit stacking.

A phrase that seems to be all over the internet right about now.

It feels like I can’t breathe without being presented with a coach or expert telling me I’m doing it wrong.

That I should be breathing more slowly, more deeply.

While also maximising my productivity while breathing.

So that I’m not only doing more, but I’m doing the more I’m doing even more efficiently.

To maximise my life, my time, my habits and my wellness.

I thought I’d hit peak burnout when I was tracking my protein, my mood, and my morning routine.
But no, I apparently forgot to kegel-lift a gemstone while manifesting abundance.

Jade egg, anyone?

Welcome to modern womanhood: where even our vagina is expected to have a personal best.

Originally, habit stacking sounded like the productivity skill of dreams:
Build small, positive actions into existing routines and voilà! you’re practically meditating while brushing your teeth and planning your lifelong legacy while feeding the cat.

First introduced and then popularised by James Clear in Atomic Habits, habit stacking was meant to help people build helpful routines by anchoring new behaviours onto already well-established ones.

It’s a brilliant idea.

And when done well, it can ease us into better sleep patterns, creative practices, or even emotional regulation, without the mental load of “starting from scratch,” because we’re piggy-backing onto already established habits.

Unfortunately, like so many wellness trends, it has a “dark twin.”

Enter: workaholism disguised as improving the self.

What happens when the innocent-seeming habit stack becomes a towering, teetering list of self-improvement rituals?

What happens when your morning cup of tea isn’t just a moment to rehydrate and relax and instead becomes the launchpad for 9 “stacked behaviours”: gratitude journaling, affirmations, cold exposure, yoga, Substack analytics, face yoga, lymphatic drainage, and five pages of your novel?

What happens when your life becomes a never-ending sequence of self-improvement routines?

Fucking hell.

I’m exhausted just writing about it.

Rise, grind, journal, collapse. Rinse and repeat until you finally “find yourself” (under a weighted blanket, mildly concussed and whispering “fuck off).

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Because…

That’s not wellness.
That’s burnout we’ve actually been gaslit to schedule on a calendar.

And the worst part? Everyone will praise us for it.

We’ll be called “disciplined.” “Driven.” “Organised.”
We’ll be admired for your “commitment” and “consistency.”
We might even feel bloody brilliantly virtuous.

Until we notice our nervous system is fried and our joy has quietly packed its bags, fucked off, and been replaced by an exhausted pool of quiet despair and a rinsed-out feeling of failure.

When a Good Idea Turns into a Bad Pattern

At its core, habit stacking is supposed to be about ease.
Inviting more flow into our lives by minimising resistance to change.

It’s supposed to be about narrowing the distance between us and the life we’re trying to live.
The idea being: pair a new habit with an existing one, and the muscle memory takes over.

But many of us don’t approach change with ease.
We approach it with fear.

Fear of falling behind.
Fear of not doing enough.
Fear that we’re only valuable if we’re productive.

We stack habits not because we’re thriving but because we’re terrified of failing, which becomes terrified of stopping.

For people already wired for overachievement, especially those of us shaped by trauma, people-pleasing, or perfectionism, habit stacking can become the newest tool in an exhausting arsenal of doing much more in order to be enough.

It offers the illusion of control and virtue, while quietly carving into and deepening the neural pathways of over-functioning.

And I don’t feel this is a rare occurrence.
That only a very few become addicted to over-functioning.

Most people who get excited about habit stacking aren’t the ones sleeping ten hours and enjoying slow breakfasts. They’re the ones already burning the candle at both ends to survive, and habit stacking becomes one more way to feel “in control” of life circumstances that are often already very difficult and very unsustainable.

It’s not bad to want structure.
But it becomes dangerous when that structure becomes the scaffolding for our self-worth.

The cultural backdrop of our world really doesn’t help.
We live in an era where productivity is seemingly a moral virtue.
Where tracking our habits is promoted as a kind of self-mastery but resting is called laziness.

Where apps constantly poke at us with rewards for ever longer streaks, stats, and daily wins until we’re not fully human anymore.

We’re like Wallace when he gets strapped into his robot trousers.
And finds himself stealing an enormous diamond while fast asleep in his metal robot kecks… which do all the walking for him, while he delightfully and floppily snoozes through the whole thing in his lovely string vest.

That’s us.
Even as we’re trying to do better...

We’re knackered and strapping in for more.

5 am yoga pose: “existential regret with fitbit”

When Workaholism Wears a Wellness Mask

It’s easy to spot the 80-hour-a-week corporate workaholic.

It’s harder to recognise the tender overachiever, the mindful burnout, or the artistic entrepreneur who habit-stack themselves into collapse in the name of “balance.”
(Believe me when I tell you, I’ve been there. I, my dear friend, am a cautionary tale.)

Because the truth is, burnout doesn’t always look like breakdown.
Sometimes it looks like:

• Smiling through twelve stacked habits before 9am.

• Feeling shame if we don’t complete our morning routine of perfect performance before we’ve even properly woken up.

• Using meditation to improve our efficiency, instead of seeing it as a legitimate place to rest.

• Seeing rest as recovery after more work, not as a right in itself.

• Getting twitchy when “free time” isn’t accounted for with a task or achievement.

This is how workaholism overlays wellness.

It whispers: You’re only worthy if you’re improving.
It pushes us to stack every moment until we can’t breathe.
It makes the number of habits we’re stacking the actual architecture of our self-worth.

We don’t notice at first, because so much of it looks good.
It’s not the kind of compulsive behaviour that raises eyebrows.
It’s the kind that gets admiration for being “so together.”

The danger isn’t the habits themselves.
It’s the loss of space in our life for the full human expression of who we are.
It’s the shrinking of our free time.

The destruction of our rest time.

The disappearing of our time to daydream and just fucking BE.

Why This Happens

Underneath the obsession with stacking habits is often a desperate need to feel in control.

And for many, that comes from lived experiences of being out of control, whether through trauma, neglect, illness, or just the plain unadulterated chaos of life.

If you’ve ever felt like your life depended on being totally prepared, emotionally self-managed, or seventeen steps ahead, habit stacking might feel less like a helpful tool and more like the safety net that’s holding all our responsibilities together.

What began as a gentle idea to look after ourselves and increase our ability to do things that are about self-care can quietly become compulsive.

The more we stack, the more we feel we should.
The less room there is for mess, joy, or spontaneity.

And for those of us who’ve lived through periods of feeling immensely vulnerable via illness, burnout, anxiety, grief, there can be a strange comfort in routines.

In making life predictable and orderly.

There’s absolutely no shame in that at all.
And absolutely no judgement here.

But in order to really take care of ourselves, we need to look at why we’re doing what we’re doing.

Is this desire to improve built from self-love?
Or is it built from fear?

Does it make us feel grounded, or guilty, or even worse, utterly miserable?

Because in all honesty:
Not every moment has to be used as an opportunity to be more or better.
Not every day needs to be productive.

We are allowed to just do nothing, and the world won’t fall apart.

We are allowed to believe that we are enough just as we are.

We are allowed to enjoy all the beautiful things we’ve already improved in our lives.

We don’t have to keep striving ever onwards for more.

Ultimately, when we follow the threads behind the constant drill to optimise, we find capitalism, and its constant need for productivity in order to keep the markets rolling.

But you are not a cog in a money-making machine.

You are a soft living, breathing being with dreams and needs.

In a world that constantly gives us ever more reasons to work harder,
rest is fundamentally an act of resistance and self-love.

She’s about to beat her personal best… with a baseball bat.

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Choosing Wholeness Instead of Hustle

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
Many of us have walked a very fine line between good intentions and obsession.

It’s not weakness.
It’s our internal patterning.
And we can unlearn it.

So how do we know when habit stacking is helping, and when it’s hurting?

A few things I noticed in myself:

• Feeling anxious when I missed a habit, not just disappointed.

• Needing to “earn” rest by completing all my stacked behaviours.

• Finding myself optimising rest itself (“biohacking” sleep, stacking supplements).

• Feeling like my habits ran me, and weren’t supporting me.

• No longer remembering why I started, only that I “should” keep going.

• Looking for a blank half hour to rest… and realising there isn’t even time enough to breathe.

Reclaiming balance might mean binning some of our habit stacks.

It might mean:

• Looking at our patterns with honesty.

• Letting some habits go.

• Doing less and learning to tolerate the panic that follows.

• Sitting on the sofa without a self-help podcast playing in the background.

• Drinking our tea without turning it into a ritual. Just… y’know… drinking it.

And yes, it might feel excruciating at first.
(I hated it. With the passion of a thousand perfectionistic suns.)

That’s withdrawal from productivity as identity.

But over time, we notice something else.

Space.
Quiet.

A lovely restful moment where nothing is being done for achievement and yet somehow, we still feel okay.

Healing doesn’t have to look impressive

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Final Thought: You Are Not a Spreadsheet

Your life isn’t a system that you have to optimise.

You are not a business, even though social media will very much tell you over and over again that you are.

You’re not failing if you didn’t meditate, stretch, journal, hydrate, cold plunge, and visualise abundance before breakfast.

You are not a productivity tool.

You are a person with rhythms, moods, limitations,
and a very, very important soul.

Habit stacking can be beautiful.
It can be soft. It can give us anchors in our day.

But if your wellness routine leaves us feeling more exhausted than nourished,
it’s not working.
It’s just another cage we’ve built around our tender heart.

Maybe the most radical habit to stack is this:
Gentleness.
Gentleness with softness.

A gentle mind.
A kind schedule.
Days with space enough to relax,
without constantly trying to change who we are.

We are not here to be a success story.

We are here to be alive.

We do not have to kegel-lift dead weights in our lady foof to be fulfilled.

We’re allowed to tell Gwyneth, and everyone flogging pelvic gemstone enlightenment
to shove their jade eggs where the sun don’t shine.
(Which, ironically, is exactly what they were designed for.)

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All words and images are copyrighted © Moss and Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce.

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I’m writing here on Substack as a kind of sacred middle finger.

To reclaim what was taken, and, in reclaiming it, offer it to you in all its vulnerability.

In case there’s anything in my words that you can mine to help you protect your health or your peace.

Or both.

Ok. So this week I’m going a little deeper into my own personal story.

Not to trauma dump, centre myself or wallow.

But to give you a more solid understanding of what I’m doing here on Substack and why I’m doing it.

I’m absolutely bricking it to do it, but I’m doing it anyway.

After telling you all to think about and focus on the possibility that we can be disabled and sexy, I’m now going to really fuck you off by telling you: sexy, and focussing on sexy, is the easier bit.

Sorry.

I meant what I said in my pieces about being sexy and disabled, but I didn’t say all of it.

Because this conversation is deeper than lace underwear, being glamorous and those slow-mo glances over a cocktail glass.
(I mean, I’ve seen them in films but usually I’m too busy trying to fish out my olive rather than mastering sexy slow blinking. And who can do that anyway and keep a straight face? I tried to slow-mo glance at a bloke once and am pretty sure I just convinced him I was myopic.)

We’ve talked about the stereotype of disabled people being boxed in as not sexy, asexual, or the ultimate ick … someone’s kink.

Fetishised or erased.

Either or.

At the extreme ends of the spectrum.

Now I want to say something else. Something a bit more nuanced.

So firstly, sexy is definitely already part of who you are.

We talked about it in my posts “Divine Icons” and “I’m Talking About Sex Again”.

You are sexy. No question.

(Yes, even in those baked-bean stained joggers. You’ve got the goods. Never doubt it. They’re just a bit covered by last night’s dinner. No worries, lovely pal, that can be sorted.)

And your sexiness itself is sacred.

It is an expression of life, your vitality, your divinity, and your sensual truth.

It is part of your humanity and as such, is never not a truth about you.

But I don’t want to just give you that affirmation and then wander off. Because that would be doing what the internet (and possibly the world) already does, giving us a little dopamine hit of visibility and then not following up with more substance.

So, please indulge me, and let me go further.

Let me tell you what I really think.

And I know you already know this, but I’m going to say it anyway.

Sexy isn’t enough on its own.

And that means I want to start talking about self-esteem.

Because in a world that is constantly trying to erase disabled and chronically ill people, our self-esteem really takes an absolute bashing, doesn’t it?

Holding onto our sense of wholeness can be challenging when we’re treated by society as a burden, and, ironically, too much and not enough all at the same time.

Too hard to be in a relationship with because of our limitations. Not fun enough when pain rears its head.

Supposedly, too high maintenance.

So, today, I want to talk to you about our wholeness, and pull it into focus alongside our sexiness.

The part of us that knows we’re not just a moment of glamour in someone else’s timeline, or a sparkly surprise that gets filed under “fun experiences” and never gets revisited.

We’ve established it: you’re sexy. Full stop.
Sexy in joggers, sexy with your mobility aids, sexy while reheating last night’s pasta.
Sexy isn’t in question.

It’s easier to perform sexiness as a shield in a world that honours image.

It’s much harder to insist on being held, fully, when the mask comes off, the ache returns, and your body stops conforming to what the world calls ‘normal.’

Sexy is a beautiful note in the song of you.

But we must never mistake it for the whole concerto.

You are not here to be someone’s quick fix, their weekend fling, their little moment of fantasy before they wander off to find “real life” with someone else.
That’s crumbs.
That’s bargain-bin love dressed up as connection.

And crumbs will make you believe you should be grateful.

That the snack is all you’re worth.

That you’re too much trouble, so you should take what you can get.

That’s the lie that disabled people are told about themselves when we venture out into the ableist world of dating and building relationships.

And it’s a kind of violence.

It hacks away at our belief in our wholeness and tries to tell us we will never find the fullness we might be seeking.

And to clarify, there is no judgement here.

Sexiness and sex are beautiful, vibrant expressions of our humanity.

And we should be able to participate in them fully, with full consent and respect for our wholeness as consenting adults if we want to.

But I want to go further and say clearly:

You’re not here to be someone’s sexy moment, sexy snack, sexy bag of Wotsits that they fill up on without ever sitting down for the full meal.
You, my gorgeous sexy disabled and chronically ill friend, are the absolute whole fucking feast.

The whole table.

The candles, the wine, the conversation, the laughter, the mornings after.
Sexy is one dish and you are also the entire banquet.

And this is where I want to tell you a little bit more about me and how I know what crumb-love feels like.

It feels like waiting for a text that doesn’t come.
It feels like planning your week around someone who isn’t planning around you.
It feels like being told you’re gorgeous, brilliant, sexy, but not “easy” or “low maintenance.”

It feels like you’re not someone they could ever really choose.

I once loved a man who ultimately told me my illnesses made his life feel “small.”

Who wanted to travel more, go further, as if love is measured in air miles, not presence.
He wanted me when it was shiny, effortless and for a time, a little more than that.
But the moment I truly, fully needed him to sit at the table, fully commit and stay, he pushed his chair back.

He told me he couldn’t live with me.
Would never marry me.
That my life was too limited.
That I was too hard to integrate.
That I didn’t “fit.”

But he was happy to continue as we were.

The heartbreak wasn’t in thinking he was right.

I never believed that.

I knew my life wasn’t small.

I knew my heart was vibrant, and that my capacity to love was far bigger than the story ableism tried to tell about me.

That my physical body was heroic for doing all it could to keep me in the world the way it was able to.

I knew I wasn’t hard to love.

The utter heartbreak was realising that he believed it.

He believed I was burdensome.

He believed I was not someone to commit to.
That after all that time getting to know each other, he could only see me through the lens of ableism.

That was the knife that gutted me.

It isn’t cruel people who believe ableism’s lies.

It’s, very sadly, a lot of society when it comes to making a commitment.

Most people don’t understand they’re believing the ableist lies and would be hurt to be told that they are.

But for very many disabled and chronically ill people, it’s a truth they often knock up against when dating or even when already in committed relationships.

Most people prefer to think of themselves as compassionate and committed but in reality, this isn’t always the case.

Ableism is so insidious it can be unmasked painfully even within people we’d least expect to find it.

And here’s the truth:

I walked away.

Even though I loved him deeply.
Even though he was someone I never wanted to say goodbye to.
Even though he offered me something of what I wanted and wanted me to stay on those terms.

Because I, and disabled people and chronically ill people, like everyone else, deserve more than crumbs that will never fully feed us.

I’m disabled and chronically ill. I’m also sexy, funny and kind.

Because disabled people are always more than one thing.

I’m a whole person.

A complicated, messy, multifaceted, lovely person.

And honestly?

I knew something then and I still believe it now:

I would rather be alone and emotionally nourished by myself than in a relationship and be given crumbs.

So here’s what I want you to know.

Sexy isn’t the half of it.

Sexy is gorgeous, yes.
Delicious, yes.
But sexy is the surface sparkle, the easy win.

What matters, what truly fills us, is firstly choosing ourselves in our wholeness and then being chosen in our wholeness by others.

Not just for the candlelit moments or the perfect angles, but for the messy kitchens, the brain foggy mornings, the body that sometimes breaks and needs rest and care and still carries so much radiance.

You are not someone’s crumb.
You are not the side order, the guilty secret, the little snack they grab when no one’s looking.

You are the feast.

You are the laughter and the wine and the mornings after.
You are the conversation that deepens, the loyalty that holds, the kind of love that fills your heart and softens your weary body and keeps filling.

And if anyone ever makes you feel like you’re “too much” for wanting and being the feast, when they’d rather you showed up as a snack?
That’s their appetite, not your lack.

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So don’t shrink yourself down to crumbs.
Don’t doubt the beauty of who and what you are.

Because you are sexy, yes.
But you are also vast.
Tender.
Fierce.
Hilarious.
Glorious.

You are the whole lovely delicious banquet.

Ableist crumbs don’t just show up in romance either.
They creep into friendships.
Into family.
Into the way the world treats us.

The “inspiration” label slapped on us for simply existing as we are.

The invitation that never comes because they’ve decided for us that it’s “too much” for us to be there.

Crumbs dressed up as kindness are still crumbs.

And the danger is we start believing what is being mirrored back to us so consistently.

And we can find ourselves swallowing the loneliness.
Convincing ourselves that a handful of crumbs is better than nothing at all.

We can find our self-esteem being eroded by these consistent messages form a wonky world.

But crumbs keep us small and very hungry.
Feasts make us expansive and fill us up.

And here’s the secret: we disabled and chronically ill people know feasts better than most.

We know what it is to stay.
To endure.
To pay attention.

To fully hold someone in their wholeness because we’ve had to fight for our own.

We know that “hard to love” is a myth.
That “too much” is a reflection of someone else’s emotional poverty.
That sexy means nothing if it’s not backed by care, by showing up, by choosing someone again and again even when it’s not convenient or picturesque.

So no, sexy isn’t the half of it.

Sexy is already here, baked beans, mobility aids, reheated pasta and all.

The rest, the depth, the loyalty, the humour, and all the warmth of our emotional depth and fire, that’s the part they miss when they look at us through ableist blinkers.

Those are the very parts of us that make us the feast.

And I want to say this gently, with love for the parts of you where you’ve been hurt by someone else’s unconscious ableism that you’ve been forced to carry.

Because I know, like me, some of you will have been rejected, written off, or labelled “too much” by people who only ever wanted the easy bits.
The shiny dates, the holidays, the sex without the real intimacy.
They didn’t want the full experience of a human life, they wanted a postcard version.

But “high maintenance” is a myth.

Everyone is high maintenance, because love is maintenance.

Love is making soup when someone’s sick.
Love is putting the bins out when the other can’t.
Love is patience and late-night rows and mornings where you choose each other all over again.
That’s the commitment.
That’s the tasty, joyous feast.

It’s the sprouts and cabbage alongside the cake and desserts.

Every single person comes with their own map of losses and griefs, of wounds and disappointments. Every single person comes with baggage that’s heavy to carry.

None of us get out unscathed.

Every single person has their own need to be loved well.

And learning to love someone well takes commitment, time, sensitivity and empathy.

So when they walked away, it wasn’t because you were too much.
It was because they wanted less.

And less is all they’ll ever have.

And as you move forward, thinking about the possibilities available for you in your life, never believe that you are a burden. Or too much. Or not easy to love.

Never accept a version of love that doesn’t hold you fully.
Never just settle for the snack of sexy if what you’re really needing and wanting is the full feast of love and presence.

Because you don’t exist to be admired from afar or lusted after in private or ghosted when life gets real.

You deserve better than that ableist standard of love.

You deserve arms that want to hold you.

A heart that wants to know your heart even when it’s hurting.

A body that wants to understand and respect yours.

A safe haven that feels like home.

You deserve to be fed, not starved.

And you deserve to know that all of this is possible. Because it is.

But first, you have to stop accepting crumbs.

So that you can start to notice who only wants Wotsits.

And clearly see who wants to be invited to the feast.

The ones who know that love isn’t a side dish, and neither are you. You’re the whole bloody table, and they’re lucky to have a seat at it.

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Called…

Divine Icons.

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Art I made for you, grounded in presence and strong visibility. With warmth, wit, and buckets of love for disabled and chronically ill people in all our humanity, glamour, and sexuality.

If you missed it, you can find that post here:

You met Vivienne and Colette.

And saw compression socks redefined as the new fishnets.

This week, I wanted to give you three more Divine Icons to hold onto, Diana, Simone and Rebecca.

For the days when your beauty and vivacity feel stripped away.

Please say hello to Divine Icons Issue No.2 and this edition’s cover star, Diana.

Who needs glass slippers when they’ve got a sparkling diamond walking stick?

Diana reminds us to be proud of our mobility aids. They give us freedom and glamour combined.

And in this issue, Simone (above) knows that the most powerful thing we can do is be fully all of who we are, in whatever room we’re in.

Don’t hide your compression socks.
Don’t feel shame for your orthotics or your flat shoes.

Know in your bones that your comfort and your aids make it easier for you to do lots of things, like - I don’t know, climb any tall lover like a tree. (When you want to. And when everyone is consenting, obvs.)

Because we are absolutely hot sauce, disabled or not.

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Show up exactly as you are. If you want to, in full glamour.

Vintage dress.

Bit wicked.

Compression socks and orthotics, obviously.

None of it needing any explanation or justification.

You are beautiful. You are handsome. You are valuable.

You are not less than. Your need for the fullest expression of who you are, including being sexy, is an absolute right.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.

Those ableist messages that tell us we’re burdensome, too much, too complicated?

They’re not true.

You are gorgeous just as you are.

Rebecca’s love language? Hot water bottles and vermouth.

She knows hotties are the new hot.

We can cancel the party if we have to. And throw a better one on the sofa.

Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t accessorize a hot water bottle with an alcoholic beverage in a zazzy glass.

It’s called balance.

Wear your compression socks and hottie with pride.

Pair them with your loungewear. And know this: no one has to perform glamour to make others feel better about our pain. That’s ableist nonsense.

But being disabled and chronically ill doesn’t disqualify you from being glamorous when you want to be.

Gawd, you’re stunning!

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In Issue 3 of Divine Icons we’ll be meeting some of the guys who bring serious swagger on wheels.

- Moss & Matchsticks: For anyone trying to stay soft in a world that’s burning.

© Moss & Matchsticks, 2025. All writing and artwork are original. Please do not reproduce without permission.

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From my bed.

The beginnings of the glamour magazine we never had but always deserved.

Today I’m introducing the series, which I’ve called Divine Icons, and am sharing two pictures I made.

These are for anyone who has ever felt “invisibled” by someone else. Or unseen by society.

Beautiful divine babes. Each with their own specific disability, and their own sexy, glamorous, gorgeous divine wholeness. Each in situations where disabled people are rarely represented in the media.

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We don’t take a knee, we show some knee.
And a delightful pair of compression socks.
Because compression socks are the new fishnets.

We deserve to see our bodies celebrated and represented with our mobility aids and support animals, in the beautiful, glamorous places that we are erased from in glossy magazines and media.

This isn’t about saying we have to be glamorous to matter. It’s about showing that our glamour has always been here.

Whether or not the world chose to see it.

This isn’t inspiration porn. No one’s overcome anything except being invisibled.

For generations, disabled people (and the aids we use) have been treated as something to hide. As though being disabled cancels out glamour, sexiness, desirability. We’ve been cast as pitiful, or else fetishised as someone else’s kink.

Neither of those stories belong to us.

Divine Icons is my way of using my love of art and my art skills, to paint a different picture: glossy, unapologetic, playful, chic. Proof of what has always been true but rarely made visible in this way.

This isn’t about saying we all have to be glamorous to matter, or about fitting every disabled person into a narrow frame of beauty.

It’s about reclaiming sexiness for ourselves.

Showing that our mobility aids belong in these images of glamour, and that they never cancel out our desirability.

We are not burdensome.
We are not asexual.
We are whole, radiant, and gloriously sexy as we are.

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Compression socks are not the end of glamour.
I’m reframing them as the new fishnets.
A walking stick isn’t a symbol of loss.
It’s a diamond accessory, a statement piece.
A wheelchair doesn’t erase sex appeal.
It exists right there with it.

This series is rooted in love.

For disabled and chronically ill people who never see themselves reflected as whole, desirable, radiant. It’s for everyone who has ever looked at themselves in the mirror and thought: less than.

I want you to see these images and know: you are not less than. You are beautiful. Vibrant. Radiant. Sexy.

These two are just a beginning. I will make more for you as and when I have the energy. A series of gorgeousness coming straight to your inbox to remind you of your beauty and power.

Each one its own glimpse of disabled and chronically ill women and men in their radiant and beautiful humanity.

To be disabled is to be told, again and again, that our beauty, our sexiness, our wholeness don’t exist. That has invisibled too many of us.

Divine Icons is the showing of our beauty, our humour, our light, our wholeness. The proof of what has always been true.

Because, even though we get a lot of messages telling us otherwise, being glamourous, sexy and disabled has always belonged to us.
And it always will. On our own terms.

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And yes, like you, I have had deeply painful experiences of being invisibled.

By systems and by individuals.

The pain I experienced was in discovering they believed ableism so completely.

While revealing they were completely blind to my fullness.

So this is for you. In all your disabled and ill fullness and beauty.

Because I understand that pain and I want you to, perhaps, consider a different possibility for you.

You were never less than whole.

You are never less than whole.

With all the love in my heart…

Take a look at Divine Icons, and Vivienne and Colette.

Showing that compression socks are the new fishnets.

I’ve spent a long time creating them for you. Tweaking every detail. I wanted them to be poised, and unapologetically glamorous.
Beautifully chic.

Vivienne with her diamond walking stick and compression socks, and Colette with her cochlear implant and compression socks.

Gorgeously framed and represented.

Because we are whole - sexy and disabled.
Even when the magazines refused to print it.

They’re not trying to make a point.
They’re just being themselves.
Cochlear implant, compression socks, diamond walking stick and all.
Beautifully, unapologetically, visibly here.

I made these because we shouldn’t have to fight this hard just to be seen.
Because beauty doesn’t stop at disability.
I know these images don’t fix anything and we deserve so much more than where we are.

But they’re a start.

M x

All words and images are copyrighted © Moss and Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce.

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Original artwork and writing © Moss & Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce without permission.

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I know. I didn’t think I’d be here either when I signed up to Substack a little over two weeks ago.

I honestly didn’t know “writing about sex” was going to become a bit of a niche area for me. But since we find ourselves here…

Might I suggest you buckle up.

Today’s thoughts come courtesy of my therapist (earns every penny) and my experience as a woman being funny, sexy, beautiful and disabled.

And could I just take a moment to say, this is not my personal assessment of myself.

I’ve had feedback.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people (and by “people” I very much mean men. Not the good ones, you can stay) have a lot, A LOT, to say about women.

So, yes, over the years, I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m funny (Quantifiably true. People very much laugh in my company and I’m almost 100% sure it’s with me not at me).

It’s been mentioned once or twice that I’m sexy.

I’ve also been told I’m beautiful (although I have insider knowledge of how often I look like a sentient potato in a wig. If you’re wondering how often, it’s often). And I most definitely am disabled, although they’re hidden disabilities, so that just adds to the confusion.

Funny, Sexy, Beautiful, and Disabled.
Apparently, that’s confusing for people.

I was talking to my therapist today about the exhaustion.
Not the physical kind, though I’ve got that too.
I mean the kind of exhaustion that comes from living in a world that keeps trying to put me in a box.

I’ve noticed that ableism means that a lot of people struggle to understand the nuance of a disabled life and prefer to focus on binaries.
Binaries make things less complicated.

If I’m beautiful then that gets mistaken for wellness, so I can’t be ill.
If I’m disabled, then I must somehow be pitiable.
If I’m funny, then I must be feeling 100% OK and not be experiencing any pain.
If I’m sexy, have desire, am sensual and want touch, then I surely can’t be disabled, (because, apparently, disabled people are meant to be asexual inspiration arcs or the focus for someone else’s kink).

And, above all else, disabled people must live in the extremes of duality:
We must not exist in the middle ground and be both dualities at once.

Complexity is too heavy to carry, so I’ve come to understand.

Current systems only seem to support disabled people when we’re tragic enough to be pitied, and not at all strong enough to push back.

And that’s a reality too many of us live with. And it’s so very draining.

Doctors look at exhaustive medical histories and still say, “You look well.”

If we can walk a short distance then we must not need a wheelchair.

If we use mobility aids then we are no longer sexy.

If we’re disabled and sexy, then we become a category on Pornhub but not fully seen.
We couldn’t possibly just be a human, in our wholeness, who enjoys sex.

It seems that the world wants to choose one part of disabled people and pretend that’s all there is.

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You would think it goes without saying, but sadly it doesn’t:
I, and every other person with disabilities, am a fully rounded human being, with the very same wants, needs, desires as anyone else.

You would think that the most painful part of living with chronic illness and the disabilities that come with them would be the symptoms of the illnesses and the losses they incur, but, honestly it isn’t:

The most painful aspect of living with disabilities and illnesses is Ableism.
And the losses of self that are imposed on disabled people. By the heavy blanket of judgement and expectations that is laid over people who do not have a body that fits the general mould.

I am not solely disabled by the illnesses.
I’m disabled by a society riddled with ableism that won’t let me be all of who I am without demanding that I fight for it.

And that constant fight to be seen and valued and delighted in as a whole person is, honestly, more fucking exhausting than the illnesses combined.

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We can be disabled, sexy, handsome/beautiful and complex, without having a background narrative arc of triumph or tragedy.

I believe it’s very important to believe in our own sexiness as a disabled person and not internalise the ableism that tells us that because we are disabled we are no longer sexy.

This isn’t about performing sexiness. It’s about dismantling the belief that disabled people can’t be sexy at all.

Which simply isn’t true.

When I say I’m sexy and disabled, people sometimes reply with things like “I admire the mindset.”

That’s not a compliment. It’s patronising.

It reduces lived truth to “positive thinking,” as if disabled people being sexy is just a matter of attitude, not reality. It’s a way of keeping us in the box of “inspiring” instead of recognising that our bodies and identities hold sexiness without needing anyone’s approval.

With respect (but not much) I didn’t meditate myself into cleavage. Saying I’m disabled and sexy isn’t an affirmation, it’s a fact. Disabled and sexy exist in the same body.

For me and for every other disabled person.

Because we are gorgeous and whole.

Perfect in our individual ways of being.

And very, very sexy.

Here at Moss and Matchsticks we celebrate every person’s right to celebrate and enjoy their wholeness.

We don’t need to let go of important parts of ourselves because someone else has decided we deserve less than all of who we are.

To put it succinctly…

I’m on a personal mission to change the way the world sees compression socks and the people who wear them.

I understand this may be an uphill struggle. I’ve seen compression socks.

However, I am fortunate enough to have my compression socks to help keep my blood pressure stable, as I (metaphorically, obvs) climb that hellish mountain.

I’m sexy enough to carry that look off.

And so are you.

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© Moss & Matchsticks 2025. All work original.

Original artwork and writing © Moss & Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce without permission.

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My dad is 84.

I don’t know how much longer we’ll have together, so I ring him every day to check in.

Mostly, he can’t get to the phone before it goes to voicemail. Or he’s wrestling with the Bluetooth on his hearing aids. Switching between his phone and his watch, and ending up in an I-know-the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house-I-just-don’t-know-where mess.

So I spend a lot of time like a Borrower, shouting up to him from his wrist or pocket. Meanwhile, he’s walking round the house wondering who on earth has got their radio on so loud he can hear voices shouting through the wall.

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We tried video-calling a few times. It was lovely. I got to see the inner workings of his ear. And, after I asked him to move the camera so I could see his face, the upper workings of his nose.

My favourite thing, though, is his invention of the Reverse Call-back.

Me: rings Dad. Call rings out.
Dad (immediately): calls back to tell me he can’t call back and will call later.

It’s like phoning the chippy to say:
“I can’t order food right now, but don’t worry — I’ll deffo be starving later.”

It makes me smile every time.

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Underneath the comedy, though, is something tender and really touching for me. The Dad-logic that tells him to tell me: “I’m here. I love you, and I’ll call you back soon.”

So he calls me back.
To tell me he can’t call me back.

I know these small moments will be the ones I remember when he’s no longer here.

The times he called me back… to tell me he couldn’t call me back.

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Original artwork and writing © Moss & Matchsticks 2025. Please do not copy or reproduce without permission.