(Inspired by a piece of the same name by , check out his brilliant work!)

This poem is about the kinds of knowledge that can only be learned by living. The things that cannot be outsourced because the time they take is the point.

Because being changed by love is the point.
Because carrying loss is the point.
Because a life is not built from answers, but from attention.

An attempt, perhaps, to put language around the parts of being human that refuse shortcuts:

“Please Use AI”

Please use AI
when your mother dies.

Ask it what grief feels like.
Let it explain bereavement
in twelve clear bullet points.

Do not spend years
finding her
in the supermarket
by the tomatoes she always bought,
in the smell of rain on warm pavement,
discovering new ways
to miss her.

Please use AI
the next time you fall in love.

Ask it how to know
whether someone is the one.

It will give you a faster answer
than watching a person become familiar,
learning how they take their tea,
which floorboards will wake them,
how their silence sounds
when something is wrong.

And please use AI
for your wedding vows,
your eulogies,
your apologies.

Why struggle
for the right words
when a machine can give you
beautiful ones?

Words untouched by shaking hands.
Words that have never sat beside
a hospital bed.
Words that have never known
the terrible privilege
of having something to lose.

Meanwhile

I will be over here
watching someone I love
fall asleep on the sofa,
the television talking to itself,
rain tapping the windows,
the dog twitching in her dreams,

wasting my life
on these small unremarkable moments
that become,
without asking permission,
the whole thing.

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A few nights ago, I stood barefoot in my kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil.

The windows were open to break the heat and somewhere outside, a fox screamed into the dark with that almost human sound that always startles me no matter how many times I hear it. The radiator pipes knocked softly in the walls, though it is summer and they should be been silent. The whole flat felt full of small movements. Cooling metal. Wind lifting the curtain slightly from the sill. The low electric hum of things continuing.

And suddenly I thought of my mother. Not in the sharp, catastrophic way grief sometimes arrives. Not as anguish exactly. More like recognition. As if the room itself had briefly tilted toward her shape.

Grief has changed the way I experience ordinary matter.

Heat especially. The warmth left behind in bedsheets. Steam against my face. Sunlight resting on my skin. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about how recently warmth belonged to a body. How strange it is that heat can leave us and continue elsewhere. Into fabric. Into air. Into walls.

Into the world.

There is a truth in physics that grief keeps returning me to: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form.

I don’t mean this literally. Or perhaps grief loosens the meaning of literally.

Because bereavement does something peculiar to the mind. It makes you resistant to disappearance. The body understands death intellectually long before it understands it emotionally. Emotion keeps searching for continuity long after logic has closed the case.

And so you begin looking for people everywhere.

In habits you did not notice becoming your own. In phrases that leave your mouth carrying someone else’s cadence. In the instinct to reach for a phone before remembering there is nowhere for the call to go. In gestures inherited so completely they feel biological.

Sometimes I think grief is partly the refusal to believe that a life can simply stop.

Not memory or influence or love. The actual energetic force of a person. Their particular way of moving through the world. Their laughter disturbing the air. Their hands warming ceramic mugs. Their body taking up physical space beside yours and altering, however slightly, the atmosphere around it.

My mother cooked with cast iron pans blackened from decades of use. Even now, when oil hits heat and the kitchen fills with that first rich smell of onions softening, I feel something in me recognise her before I consciously think of her. Something quicker than memory. More bodily.

As though part of loving someone deeply is allowing them to rearrange your internal architecture permanently.

The truth is, we leave traces of ourselves everywhere.

Skin cells caught in blankets. Fingerprints on glasses. Hair wound into coat linings. Heat absorbed into furniture cushions. Vibrations from our voices travelling outward in widening waves long after the sound itself disappears.

Science can explain this plainly. Matter transforms. Energy transfers. Nothing is annihilated. But grief reaches for these ideas with almost spiritual hunger because they offer language for something mourners feel instinctively: the sense that the people we love do not become nowhere all at once.

They become harder to locate.

I think this is why certain moments undo us unexpectedly. A stranger laughing in the exact cadence of someone gone. A perfume molecule trapped for years in the collar of a coat. The radiator knocking at night in a rhythm so familiar your body responds before thought catches up.

Tell me that is not a kind of haunting?

Tell me love does not alter the molecular structure of a life?

Lately I have been thinking, too, about my own eventual disappearance. Not in a morbid way, I feel more curiosity than fear.

One day, my own energy will loosen from this body. The heat of my hands will leave the objects I touch. My voice will stop arriving in rooms. The particular arrangement of atoms currently calling itself me will scatter outward into other forms.

And yet.

I keep hoping some part of me will remain in motion.

Not grandly. Not monumentally.

I hope someone I love will stand in sunlight and think of me without sadness swallowing them whole. I hope my laughter lives on in somebody else’s mouth. I hope the people I leave behind feel, in ordinary moments, that they were loved very well.

Maybe this is all any of us are really trying to do. Leave warmth behind us. Leave evidence of having been here.

Perhaps grief itself is evidence too. Proof that one life pressed hard enough against another to leave an imprint.

These thoughts about where energy goes developed first into a poem and I wanted to share it with you:

“Field Notes on Energy”

Nothing disappears.
This is the first law:
the heat of her hands
did not vanish.
it slipped quietly into the walls,
the kettle steam,
the breath of trees.

Every atom that held her
refused extinction.

Her laughter loosened particles into the air.
Her pulse disturbed the fabric of things.
Even now, the world carries
the riot of her being.

So when I stand in sunlight
warming my face,
when the floorboards creak at night,
when the radiator spits and knocks.

tell me that isn’t her
still pressing herself
into matter.

Perhaps this is the closest grief comes to faith. A quiet turning toward the idea that love does not end where presence ends, but continues as change, as diffusion, as the slow becoming of everything into everything else. That what we call loss is only the limits of our seeing, not the limits of what remains.

And so we learn to live inside this strange inheritance: a world still full of the people we have loved, altered into light, into heat, into the ordinary shimmer of matter moving on.

-

There are days when I feel split into two versions of myself.

One that moves through meetings and timelines and carefully shaped language, speaking in the measured cadence of strategy and delivery. A version of me that knows how to hold complexity without letting it spill, how to translate urgency into something legible, something others can carry without becoming overwhelmed by it.

And then there is the other version.

The one that feels everything underneath it. The one that notices the emotional undercurrent of a room, the subtle shifts in energy. The one that takes those things, those fleeting, almost invisible human moments, and holds them differently. Turns them over. Feels their weight. Begins, instinctively, to translate them into something else. Something that can be shaped. Something that can become, eventually, language.

It is not that one of these selves is more real than the other. It is that I have been taught to understand only one of them as work.

The other is called something softer. Less urgent. A hobby. A side practice. Something indulgent, something optional, something you return to once the real labour of the day has been completed.

But the other version of me is not something I do.

It is something I am.

I did not come to writing through discipline. I came to it through rupture.

For a long time, it lived quietly alongside everything else. Something I returned to intermittently, something I held without fully claiming. My mother never hesitated in the way I did. She spoke about my writing as if it were already a fact. Not something I might become. Something I already was.

You have a gift, she would say, with a certainty that felt almost immovable. I heard her. But I did not believe her or build my life around that truth.

It took her dying for something in me to shift.

Grief did not arrive gently. It did not ask for permission. It cracked something open that refused to close again. In that opening, language began to move differently. Not as something I reached for, but as something that insisted.

Poems lodged themselves in my bones. Prose threaded through my veins. Words came not as decoration, but as necessity. As heat. As something that needed to be carried out of me before it burned.

I began to write because I did not know what else to do with what I was holding.

It didn’t feel like expression.

It felt like survival.

We are told, in ways both subtle and constant, that what counts is what sustains us.

That the work that matters is the work that pays. That legitimacy is something you can point to in numbers, in income, in the visible structures of career and progression.

Everything else is positioned somewhere beneath that. Secondary. Supplementary. A passion, if you’re lucky. A distraction, if you’re not.

There is a particular kind of diminishment in that framing. As if proximity to survival makes something real. As if the things that do not generate income are somehow less essential to the life that is being lived.

But I have started to understand something else.

Art is not what I get paid for. It is what I am.

I have spent years building a life in a career that matters.

I am a human rights campaigner and strategist. It is work that asks you to stand close to injustice without turning away. Work that requires clarity, precision, emotional discipline. Work that has taken me into rooms where decisions carry real consequence, where language is not abstract but active, shaping what becomes possible for people’s lives.

It is an honour to do that work. A privilege to be trusted with it. A responsibility I take seriously.

And still, something else has always been running alongside it. Not in competition or contradiction but as a parallel current.

When does art count?

My cousin (though he is more like my brother) is a singer-songwriter.

We spoke recently about this strange expectation that art only counts when it is your primary income. As if needing to live, to work, to move through the ordinary structures of the world, dilutes what you are. But it is the opposite.

To be close to life, to be moving among people, to be witnessing how they hold themselves together, how they fracture, how they love, how they endure, this is where everything comes from.

Art is not separate from life. It is made from it.

And more than that, the artist is not just someone who observes. The artist is a filter. A way of taking what is felt but not yet formed, what is lived but not yet named, and turning it into something that can be seen, held, recognised.

We trade art like lanterns in the dark.

We pass the light between us.

We say, look here.

I have felt this too.

The artist is the being that makes that possible.

The instrument through which the invisible becomes visible. The hand that reaches out and says, this is human. You are human. Feel.

There is something deeper here that I cannot explain cleanly because it is not clean. Because writing, for me, is not only about noticing. It is not only about shaping experience into language. It is more urgent than that, more physical.

I do not write because I have something to say. I write because something in me refuses to stay silent.

There are words that sit too long inside my body, thick and unmoving, until they begin to press against the inside of me like something alive. There are feelings that rot if they are not given air. There are moments that lodge themselves in my throat, in my chest, in my gut, and will not release me until I have turned toward them fully and invited them out in whatever form they demand.

If I do not write, those things do not disappear. They stay and they harden. They move through me in ways I cannot control, in ways I can only feel. A kind of internal pressure, a build of something that has nowhere to go.

Writing is how I break that open. How I pull what is buried up and out by the root, even when it is ugly, even when it is unfinished, even when it comes out in fragments.

This is not a hobby. This is not optional. This is the difference between containing something and being consumed by it.

There is a kind of quiet violence in being told that this does not count unless it pays.

That this is something extra. Something indulgent. Something you can take or leave. As if the part of you that makes meaning, that reaches for connection, that insists on expression even when it is inconvenient or unseen, is somehow less real than the part that sustains you materially.

But what if it is the opposite?

What if the art is not what sits on the edges of your life, but what runs through the centre of it? What if it is not secondary, but foundational?

I think about the people who feel this same pressure. The ones who carry something in them that has not yet been given form. The ones who have been told, directly or indirectly, that this part of them is not serious, not sustainable, not enough.

I know that feeling. I know what it is to hold words inside you until they begin to ache. I have sat on the bathroom floor with words clawing their way out of me. I have written through the burn of things I swallowed too long. I have felt language arrive not as craft, but as something closer to truth than anything I could have planned. Less like creation and more like release.

So I do not feel split in the way I once did. There is not a version of me that works, and another that writes.

There is just me. Moving through the world in different forms, yes. Speaking different languages depending on what is needed. But underneath it, the same current. The same need to take what is felt and turn it into something that can be held.

Art is not the thing I return to at the end of the day. It is the thing I am inside of, all the time.

It is identity. Not income. Not category. Not something to be justified or proven or made legible to anyone else.

Just this:

A way of being in the world that refuses to stay quiet. I am no longer willing to call that anything less than what it is.

This is not about choosing art over work. It is about refusing the idea that they were ever separate.

About understanding that what I am building in one space is not diminished by what I am building in another. About trusting that the words will come, because they always have. Because they are not external to me. They are made from the same material as my life.

I do not write because I am paid to.

I write because not writing feels like a kind of disappearance.

And I am no longer willing to disappear from my own life.

-

I have been thinking about scale.

About how grief arrives not as an event, but as a landscape. Something vast enough to alter the proportions of everything inside it. It is not simply that something has happened. It is that the world itself feels reconfigured in response. Light falls differently. Time moves without its usual edges. Even the body seems to lose its sense of orientation, as if it no longer quite knows where to place itself.

My grief feels like this.

A winter coastline. Slate water. Iron sky. Wind worrying the ribs.
A house with all the curtains torn down, light falling hard on everything, leaving nowhere to soften, nowhere to hide.

It is large in a way that resists containment. There is no gesture that meets it fully. No action that reduces it to something manageable. For a long time, I thought that meant I was failing to respond to it properly. That if I could just find the right way to move, the right sequence of actions, I might be able to close the distance between what has happened and what I need it to be.

But grief does not yield to scale in that way. It does not shrink to meet your capacity. And so something else begins to matter.

Not the grand gesture. Not the moment of revelation. But the small, almost imperceptible returns of something like warmth.

A chocolate cookie eaten on a park bench beside the first daffodils of spring.
A teaspoon of honey folded slowly into hot tea, the steam rising to meet your face like a hand you did not realise you needed.

These are not solutions. They do not resolve anything. They do not answer the scale of what has been lost. But they interrupt it, briefly. They place something small and steady alongside something vast.

I am beginning to understand that this is not accidental.

Small joy has its own logic.

It arrives in the body first. In the senses. In things that ask very little of you beyond noticing.

The citrus snap of peeling an orange, oil misting the air.
The cool, laundered hush of clean sheets, the brief astonishment of sliding into them.
A yellow takeaway cup, warmth held between your hands.
Butter surrendering to hot toast, salt catching the light for a moment before it disappears.

None of these moments ask you to be transformed. They do not demand that you be better, or stronger, or further along in your grief. They simply exist, and in doing so, they offer a kind of quiet companionship.

Big grief speaks in absolutes.

It tells you that nothing will be warm again. That what has been lost has altered the conditions of the world permanently.

Small joy does not argue with it. It answers differently. Like a match struck in the dark. A brief flare. That stubborn gold tongue of flame that insists, however quietly, that warmth still exists somewhere.

This is how I am learning to live now.

Not by overcoming grief. Not by resolving it. But by carrying it. A wet wool coat in summer, heavy, animal, still holding the shape of the storm it came from.

It doesn’t leave. But alongside it, there are these other things. These small, precise instances of something still working. Still offering itself.

The soft concussion of rain beginning on the roof.
A dog leaning its full, unquestioning weight against your legs.
The bus arriving at the exact moment you have stopped looking for it.

These are not remarkable moments in themselves. That is part of their power. They don’t belong to a different life, or a future in which everything is repaired. They belong to this life. The one that is already marked by loss.

And yet, they remain available.

I think we often misunderstand what it means to survive something.

We imagine it as movement. As progress. As a gradual return to a former state of wholeness. But what if survival is not a return at all?

What if it is something quieter.

A gathering.

These small things. Buttons of brightness. Thimblefuls of sweetness. Moments that do not resolve the darkness but puncture it, lightly, allowing something else to come through.

I find myself collecting them without quite meaning to.

The hiss of onions in a pan.
The low, forgiving sun through the kitchen window, dust moving slowly in its light.
The improbable blue of the sky after days of rain.

They do not change the fact of grief. But they change the experience of living inside it.

I am not healed. I am not finished. But I am, slowly, being held together by these small, incandescent threads. Not enough to erase what has been lost. But enough to make something like continuity possible.

Small joy does not replace grief.

It sits beside it.

It freckles it.

A whole universe made bearable not because the dark has gone, but because there are still, somehow, stars.

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The first time I understood that love could not always arrive as action, it came to me in a hospital room at dusk.

The blinds were half-drawn, bending the last of the light into thin grey stripes across the blanket. Somewhere down the corridor, a machine kept time in small, obedient beeps. My coffee had gone cold on the windowsill, the paper cup softening where my fingers had held it too long. On the tray table sat things that still belonged to the world of doing: notes from doctors folded into quarters, a phone charger looped into itself like a question, the pen I had been using to write down medication names I could no longer bear to hear. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic and coffee gone stale, that strange combination of sterility and human waiting that hospitals seem to hold in their walls.

For so long, love had looked to me like movement. Love was what happened when you acted quickly enough. It was the flight you caught at the last minute to be there, the extra question asked before the consultant left the room, the meal carried through the front door before anyone had time to admit they were hungry.

It lived in responsiveness, in competence, in the ability to close the space between suffering and what might soothe it. This is how so many of us are taught to recognise devotion. In the visible gestures. In usefulness. In intervention. In the speed with which we can close the distance between pain and response.

I had spent years becoming fluent in that language, built whole parts of myself inside it. I knew how to act when something was wrong. How to gather information quickly, how to translate fear into logistics, how to make the atmosphere of crisis feel briefly more bearable by placing structure around it.

There is comfort in action because action creates the illusion of edge, the sense that suffering has borders if only we are disciplined enough to find them. But some rooms, some moments, undo that illusion.

By evening, the room had changed. The light had thinned into reflection, turning the window into a dark mirror that reflected us back instead of the city outside. The stripes on the blanket had dissolved. My mother was asleep, or somewhere close to sleep, her breathing slow and uneven, each inhale carrying that strange dignity the body has when it is working so hard to remain itself. Time no longer moved in tasks. It moved in breaths, in shadows shifting across the wall, in the slow cooling of coffee neither of us would drink.

The doctor had already spoken in the softened language of thresholds. Comfort. Peace. Keeping her settled. The words had entered the room like a second weather system, changing the pressure of everything inside it. His words had the strange stillness of something final. They did not open onto a next step. They simply asked us to remain inside what was already true.

There was nothing left for me to do.

I remember sitting there with my hands empty. Not metaphorically. Actually empty. No pen. No list. No phone in my hand. No one left to call. No question that would alter the shape of what was coming. They had spent weeks reaching for something: a notebook, a nurse, a glass of water, a new idea, a way through. Now they rested against each other, still and strangely separate from me, as if I was only just noticing how much of my love had always needed somewhere to go.

I just had the cotton chair beneath me, the hum of the overhead light, the faint medicinal smell that clung to the curtains, and the unbearable plainness of being there while someone you love moves toward a place you cannot follow.

What stayed with me from that evening was not helplessness, though there was some of that too. It was the dawning understanding that presence asks its own kind of discipline. The room did not need my efficiency anymore. It asked for something quieter and far more exacting: my full attention. To stay beside someone you love when nothing can be altered is a kind of moral and emotional labour we speak about far less often than action, perhaps because it leaves so little visible evidence behind.

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There is another form of love that begins exactly where usefulness ends.

It lives in the staying. We are rarely taught how to recognise this as love.

I used to think presence was the gentler cousin of action, something softer, less muscular. But there is nothing easy about remaining with what cannot be changed. To stay asks more of us than doing does.

Doing lets us move around the truth. It gives the hands somewhere to go. A task to interrupt the terror. Presence offers no such mercy. It asks us to sit inside reality without rearranging it into something easier to survive.

The great violence of our culture is not only that it worships productivity, but that it has taught us to confuse intervention with love itself.

As if love only counts when it alters the ending. As if tenderness must produce an outcome. As if witnessing is what remains when courage has left the room.

I think of all the ordinary places this misunderstanding lives. The friend who rushes too quickly toward advice because silence feels negligent. The family member who fills every pause because grief makes them feel powerless. The instinct to solve another person’s sorrow before they have even finished naming it.

We confuse motion with care because motion is easier to recognise. It gives us something to measure. How often do we reach for action not because it serves the other person, but because it protects us from the helplessness of simply being there?

That hospital room taught me there are forms of love that ask nothing more glamorous than witness.

A damp cloth for her forehead folded and unfolded in your lap.

The small sound a radiator makes when the building settles into night.

Your own breathing unconsciously matching the rhythm of the person beside you.

Nothing is changing. Everything is changing. And still, you stay.

I think this is where love sheds its performance.

This understanding now follows me into other parts of my life. Into friendship, where being truly present can matter more than the right words. Into grief, where love continues as attention long after the person is gone.

Into womanhood itself, where so much of what we are taught to offer is bound up with usefulness, anticipation, and response.

Staying revealed that love does not become smaller when it cannot act. It becomes purer. Stripped of outcomes, it returns to its simplest and most sacred form. Attention. Witness. A refusal to abandon another person to the loneliness of what is real.

There is a kind of holiness in being accompanied by someone who does not flinch from the truth of your experience. Because they are willing to let their presence become a place where your reality is allowed to exist fully. No false hope. No rushing toward a version of events that feels more survivable.

Just the quiet dignity of being met where you are.

To be witnessed without being managed. To be seen without being turned into a problem to solve. To be allowed the continuity of your own pain without someone reaching immediately for a lesson.

What we lose when we stop believing that love requires action is not love at all. We lose the theatre of usefulness. The comforting fiction that effort and devotion are always synonymous. But what opens in its place is far more beautiful.

The ordinary sacredness of staying.
Evening light slipping quietly from the room.
Two bodies breathing the same dark into being.
A daughter learning how to let stillness be its own expression of love.

I think this is why it changed me. The lesson was never simply about death, though death made it visible. It was about love itself, and the ways we narrow it when we insist that it must always arrive as action. Some of the deepest forms of love are made in ordinary rooms, in the soft light of evening, in the moments where nothing changes except the fact that someone is no longer alone inside what they are facing

Love not as force.
Love as witness.
Love as the gentle, disciplined art of remaining.

There is something radical in trusting that this is enough. Not because it resolves suffering, but because it honours it.

It is not the memory of how efficiently we moved. Not the lists, the plans, the frantic reaching for more time. But the tenderness of who stayed long enough for the room to become sacred.

Long enough for silence to stop feeling empty. Long enough to understand that love does not always save. Sometimes it simply sits beside what cannot be saved and makes it less lonely.

And there is nothing small about that.

There is, in fact, an entire worldview inside it.

The women I love are all made of rituals.

Orange peels left to dry on radiators, their scent slowly releasing into the room by evening. Rings slipped off and lined beside the sink before peeling potatoes or washing rice, the water turning cloudy around their hands. The first onions dropped into hot fat, that immediate sweetness rising through the house like an announcement that something is underway.

My friends. My aunts. My mother. My grandmother before her. Each of them has taught me, in ways both direct and unspoken, that the ordinary acts of care are never only ordinary.

A meal placed in front of you before you knew you were hungry. A hand at the small of your back as people move through a doorway. The instinct to notice who has gone quiet at the table. The call placed before the crisis fully declares itself. The warning folded into advice. The advice folded into love.

These things are often reduced, culturally, to the invisible work of women. As if care is quiet. As if attentiveness is instinct rather than discipline. As if tenderness is somehow lesser than force.

But the women before me were never lesser. They knew how to feed and defend in the same breath.

This is what I inherited long before I had language for it: that womanhood was not fragility, but form. A way of shaping the world through vigilance, memory, precision, and care so practiced it could look effortless to anyone not paying attention.

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My mother taught me this first through food.

In the South, and in her household, we took care of each other with food. Not simply as kindness but as lineage. An archive of survival passed hand to hand through recipes that were never really recipes, only memory translated into action.

She taught me to cook long before I understood why it mattered. Not gently though, that wasn’t her way. She believed competence was a way to love. If you knew how to feed yourself, you would never be helpless. If you knew how to feed others, you would never be alone.

So I, a scrawny little child in pigtails and denim cut-offs, stood on a chair beside her stove while she moved quickly, efficiently, narrating only what was necessary.

Watch the heat.

Taste as you go.

Respect the food.

There was nothing ornamental about the lessons. But this was how she loved. This was instruction in vigilance. In responsibility. In how attention itself can become care. I realise now she was teaching me far more than cooking.

She was teaching me how to stand inside life.

How to recognise when something needs more time.

How to understand that good things cannot be rushed without consequence.

How to trust the body as an instrument of knowing.

Every woman in our family cooked. My aunts, moving through kitchens that seemed to expand around them. My grandmother, who could build a meal out of almost nothing, who knew how to stretch ingredients without ever letting it feel like lack. They who arrive at your door already asking what’s in the fridge, sleeves rolled up before you’ve had time to answer.

Food marked everything. Nothing in those kitchens was accidental.

The women before me turned hunger into feast, yes, but also uncertainty into structure, fear into preparedness, scarcity into sustenance.

They braided survival into something shining. This is what the women before me understood. In practice not theory. They were not soft in the way softness is often described. They were not quiet, not passive, not easily dismissed. There was nothing fragile about them.

They were, all of them, silk wrapped around knives.

River-mouthed. Moon-pulled. Moving through the world with a kind of intelligence that did not always announce itself, but was always there.

They knew how to cut without appearing to move. Prayer in one hand. Fruit in the other. They fed and defended in the same breath.

This is what I inherited.

It strikes me now how easily the world mistakes these acts for something small. As if the keeping of thresholds—birth, illness, meals, memory, grief—is secondary to the more visible performances of power. But it has always been women who keep the centre from collapsing.

Women who remember the birthdays and the bedtimes.
Women who know whose grief needs broth and whose needs silence.
Women who hold the stories when others are too frightened to speak them aloud.

My mother did this. My aunts do this. My friends do this in ways that continue to astonish me. This is ritual. And it is here that the irony becomes impossible to ignore.

We live in a culture that still so often reduces women’s labour - especially care - to something natural, sentimental, or expected. As if it emerges effortlessly. As if it does not require skill, vigilance, moral imagination, and enormous stamina.

There is deep misogyny in that reduction. It rests on the assumption that women’s work is “innate” rather than earned, invisible rather than expert, a given rather than remarkable. What is being diminished is not softness itself, but the extraordinary strength embedded within it.

Softness, in the hands of the women who raised me, was never surrender. It was strategy. It was the ability to remain open-eyed and tender-hearted in a world that often mistakes hardness for power.

I have watched women do this work. I have watched them protect what matters most. Not loudly. Not for recognition. But with a consistency that borders on the extraordinary.

It’s ironic, really, that protection is so often framed as something external, that needs to be given or provided, something visible, something performed. Because the deepest forms of protection I know look like this: a room held together so that others can fall apart safely inside it; a life organised, quietly, so that other lives can continue.

This is not softness as surrender. This is softness as structure. Softness as something honed. Softness as the sharpest thing in the room.

It shapes you. Even now, I can feel it in myself. In the way I move toward people when they need something. In the way I notice what isn’t being said. In the way my tenderness arrives already alert, already fully aware.

My softness has an edge but it is a blade that does not need a throat. Not because I chose it that way but because it was taught. Because I watched women who understood that care, to be real, must also be protective. Must also be willing to hold a line. Must also be willing to withstand.

This is how identity is formed, I think. Not in declarations or in singular moments but in repetition. In the small, ordinary acts that accumulate until they become a way of being.

The women I love did not sit me down and explain what it meant to be strong. They showed me.

In the way they fed people. In the way they stayed. In the way they refused to let things fall apart, even when it would have been easier to step back.

And I carry them now. Not only in memory, but in practice. In the habits I repeat without thinking. In the instincts that rise before I have time to question them. In the quiet, persistent knowledge of how to take care, how to hold, how to remain.

This is the inheritance. It is something lived. Something that continues. And perhaps this is what we miss, when we reduce softness to something lesser. We fail to see what it is actually doing.

Holding the centre.
Maintaining the thread.
Keeping the world, in all its chaotic fragility, from coming apart completely.

The women I love are all made of rituals.

And through them, so am I.

I sat down to write today with a familiar hesitation.

Not writer’s block exactly. Something quieter, more self-reflective than that. A question that has started to arrive more and more often in my life: Can I keep speaking about my mother? Or perhaps more truthfully: Am I allowed to?

The question itself feels revealing.

As if grief is something that should eventually become occasional. Something reserved for the marked days: birthdays, anniversaries, Mother’s Day, the first autumn without her, the second. As if love, once interrupted by death, is meant to learn restraint. To appear only when invited by the calendar. To behave.

The world knows how to make space for ceremonial grief. It understands flowers in cellophane sleeves, cards chosen under bright shop lights, the softened posture people take when they ask how you’re doing this day of all days. There are sanctioned containers for sorrow. Public scripts. Days where grief is briefly allowed out into the light before being gently returned to the attic or the basement where we are expected to keep it.

But that has never been where grief lives for me.

It is not the big days that undo me most, though I brace for them and know their shape as they approach. It is the ordinary days that split open without warning. The moments too small to prepare for. The places where love returns not as spectacle, but as texture.

This morning it was as ordinary as picking up my phone. Seeing a trending photo on social media and not realising how long I’d lingered on it. A baby otter balanced on its mother’s stomach, drifting lightly on the surface of the water. Its body completely at ease. No tension. No effort. Just the quiet certainty of being held.

The caption read: floating with mama.

I kept scrolling. More appeared. Kittens piled on top of a cat with the kind of confidence only love permits. A baby buffalo lowering its head in playful defiance. Each one the same, in a way.

The internet doing what it does best, making something simple enough to travel quickly. Something almost absurd in its sweetness. On the surface, it is just that. Small creatures leaning instinctively toward the body that made them feel safe.

And yet I found myself unable to scroll past it.

Not because it is cute, though it is. Not because I am especially interested in animals, though who among us is immune to a baby otter. But because something in the repetition catches at me. The phrasing. The rhythm of it. With mama. As if those two words alone contain a whole architecture of safety. Proximity as its own kind of world.

It lands somewhere physical. A soft ache beneath the sternum. A slight tightening in the throat. A warmth that rises before thought can arrange itself around it. The body recognising something the mind has not yet named.

Because this is where grief actually lives.

Not in the anniversaries, but in the moment I wasn’t paying attention. Not in the dramatic days, but in the quiet places where the ordinary brushes against the wound and, instead of reopening it, reminds you what it was made from.

Love.

I think sometimes people imagine grief as the thing that breaks us apart. The force that fragments a life into before and after. And of course loss does rearrange the world. My mother’s death did that. It altered the internal geography of my life so completely that even now, I still sometimes reach for landmarks that no longer exist.

But I think the deeper fracture is not grief itself. It is the expectation that grief should remain separate from the rest of living.

That it should have its place, its allotted time, its acceptable forms. That it belongs in rituals and memoirs and the obvious moments, but not in the making of coffee, not in the walk to the station, not in the strange tenderness of seeing ducklings follow their mother across a pavement and feeling your throat tighten before you understand why.

We misunderstand grief, not because we don’t feel it, but because we try to contain it. Only allowing it to appear in the appropriate places. Because it shouldn’t live here, in the middle of everything.

So we learn, slowly, to edit it. To let love appear only in designated spaces. To keep functioning as if the ordinary world has not been permanently altered by who is missing from it. To return ourselves to something more manageable, more presentable, more intact.

That, more than grief itself, is what fragments us. The small daily labour of pretending the absence is not ambient.

Grief is not an event I revisit; it is a condition of continued love.

It is woven into the mundane, stitched into the hem of the day, folded into the seams of ordinary life so thoroughly that sometimes I only notice it by the way something in me catches.

Standing at the kitchen counter with the kettle just clicked off, the quiet rush of it settling. The faint smell of toast catching slightly at the edges. The shape of a morning that has been repeated enough times to feel automatic. The voice in my head that still sounds like hers when I need courage. The way I still hear her insistence that I write.

With mama.

I think that is what those small images are really touching. Not just the fact of missing her, but the deeper recognition that love does not disappear simply because its original form is gone.

Something of being held remains in the body long after the arms themselves are no longer there. A way of leaning toward warmth. A way of reaching instinctively for steadiness. A way of moving through the world that still carries the shape of what once made you safe.

Grief, at its most ordinary, is the ache of absence and the quiet recognition of what has stayed.

Even now, in another country, in a life that has been rebuilt around her absence, I am still living with mama in the ways that matter most.

In the instinct to reach for warmth.
In the courage to tell the truth.
In the refusal to abandon tenderness just because the world rewards numbness.
In the page itself, where her belief in my writing still steadies my hand.

Grief does not live apart from life. It lives inside it. In the kitchen. In the body. In the weather. In the captions beneath baby animals. In the ordinary tenderness of continuing. In the small, unremarkable moments that pass without ceremony.

The fracture was never that I miss her too often. It was the fear that there might not be space to in my life, my work, my relationships, my writing.

But grief has never asked permission. It moves through the day with the same quiet insistence that love does. Not waiting to be invited. Not staying where it has been placed. Just appearing, again and again, in the ordinary places where life is still happening.

This is what keeps me whole now. Not the absence of grief, but its presence. The way it stitches her back into the day, not as wound, but as inheritance. Not as interruption, but as continuity.

Her love still finds me. In the page. In the way I notice. In the life I am still making.

And maybe that is the quiet truth beneath all of this:

we do not break because of grief.

We break when we ask love to leave with the person who carried it.

There’s a Chinese restaurant in my hometown in North Carolina, set back in a small strip mall where the asphalt holds the heat and the shop signs fade unevenly in the sun.

Ting Hao.

From the outside, it’s easy to miss. A pane of glass, a door that sticks slightly before it opens, a sign that hums faintly when it’s on. Inside, the air is always warm, carrying garlic and something deeper, broth, maybe, or time. The floors are grey tile, worn soft in the places people stand to wait. The tables are slightly unsteady, their surfaces catching the light in small, dull reflections. Green plastic chairs that scrape gently when you pull them out, that never quite sit level.

It has looked the same for as long as I can remember.

The owner is almost always there. Moving between the counter and the tables, answering the phone, calling out orders in a rhythm that seems continuous, as if it never fully stops, even when the room is quiet.

We have been going there since I was a child. Sitting at one of those tables, adjusting the wobble with a folded napkin if we needed to. My order never changed (which is very unlike me). Beef and broccoli. The beef soft enough to give without resistance, the broccoli still holding its shape, bright and green, the sauce thick and dark, heavy with garlic. And egg drop soup. Always the egg drop soup. Pale gold, with those thin ribbons of egg suspended through it, catching the light as you lifted the spoon. It tasted like something that had been allowed to take its time.

We went when it was cold outside. We got it To Go when someone was sick. When the day had worn us down in a way we didn’t quite name. It wasn’t a place for celebration. It was a place you went when you needed something to settle.

Years passed. I left town. College, then further. Different cities, different rhythms. Eventually landed London, where everything moves with a kind of forward pull: trains arriving, doors closing, people folding into the pace of it without hesitation. You learn quickly how to keep up. How to move through a day without pausing too long in any one place. How to become, in small ways, interchangeable to fit what’s needed.

When I go back home, I try to fit in time to have a meal at Ting Hao, even though it isn’t very often. Usually enough time has passed in between that whole parts of my life have shifted, rearranged themselves into something new.

But each time, the owner remembers me. Not hesitantly. Not as a question. She looks at me, and something in her expression settles immediately, as if placing me back into a continuity I hadn’t realised was still intact.

It always catches me slightly off guard. That moment. Brief, but precise. Like being recognised in a language you didn’t know you were still speaking.

The last time I went was after my mom died. I don’t remember deciding to go. It felt more like being pulled there by something quieter than thought. My body, maybe. Or habit. Or the memory of a place that had held us before I understood what that meant.

Everything had changed of course. Not in the way people describe change, as something gradual or directional. This was different. A kind of break in the structure of things. The world still moving, but no longer arranged in the same way around me. Grief sitting just beneath everything, close enough that even ordinary moments felt altered by it.

I ordered my usual: beef and broccoli, egg drop soup. I remember the steam rising from the bowl, soft and constant. The surface shifting slightly as I moved the spoon through it. The smell of it: warm, familiar, almost too much and not enough at the same time.

And then she saw me. The owner. And she smiled in recognition.

“Hi Joanna!”

No pause. No searching. Just that same immediate placing. It landed differently then.

Because there was so much in me that had nowhere to go. Grief that didn’t have a clear shape. Love that had lost its direction but not its force. A kind of internal disorientation that followed me even into small, contained spaces like this one.

But at this moment, none of that needed to be explained. I didn’t have to account for who I was now, or how I had changed, or what had happened in the years between. How the version of me that had sat in that chair as a child was not separate from the one sitting there now.

She saw me ,and the same as always, knew me. I felt it physically, that recognition. It was quiet: a softening in the chest. A slight loosening, as if something that had been braced without me noticing had been allowed, briefly, to rest.

Like being seen without being asked to present yourself.

What We Don’t Notice We’re Losing

There are not many places or people like that. That remember you without needing to. That hold some continuous thread of your life without marking it, without recording it, without turning it into something visible.

The truth is most things don’t work like that. Most things ask you to move on. Or to change and become someone who can.

You learn, slowly and then all at once, how to keep pace with what is needed. How to respond quickly. How to make yourself understandable in short forms. How to move between roles, between versions of yourself, without lingering too long in any one place.

You learn how to be efficient with who you are. It doesn’t feel like a loss at first. It feels like competence. Like adaptability. Like growing up. Like living well inside the conditions you’ve been given.

But over time, a kind of separation starts to happen. The thread between different parts of your life becomes thinner. Less held. Less visible.

Who you were in one place does not always travel easily into the next. What you have carried—love, loss, memory—does not always have anywhere to land. It sits just beneath the surface, present but unacknowledged, moving with you but not held by anything around you.

And so you begin to exist, in small ways, in parallel. Different versions of yourself, each one real, each one necessary, but rarely gathered into a single, continuous line.

It becomes normal.

The fragmentation.

The sense that your life is made up of parts that don’t fully meet. Until, occasionally, hopefully, something interrupts that pattern.

A place that has not required you to become new in order to belong. A person who meets you not as you are presenting yourself, but as someone they already recognise. Who doesn’t ask you to summarise. Who doesn’t need the context filled in. Who remembers, without making a point of it, how you take your tea. The fact of your presence, not as something new, but as something returning.

There is a steadiness in that. A lack of friction. You don’t feel yourself adjusting, or translating, or preparing to be misunderstood. You don’t feel the small, almost invisible work of making yourself legible. You are not ahead of yourself, or slightly outside yourself, anticipating how you will be received.

You are just…there.

There’s a kind of rejoining. As if the distance between different versions of you has, briefly, closed. As if the past has not been left behind, or filed away, but is still present, held somewhere, intact, part of the same line.

It is a simple thing, to be seen like that, but it is not a small one. Because it restores something that is otherwise easy to lose without noticing. The sense, the truth, that your life is continuous.

That who you have been, who you are, and all that you are holding, belong to each other. That you do not have to keep assembling yourself, piece by piece, in order to move forward. That there is, underneath everything, something that has been allowed to stay.

A life is not only made in movement, or in becoming, or in keeping up with what is asked, what is streamlined, what is clear. It is also made—quietly, almost invisibly—in the moments where you are seen in a way that does not require you to divide yourself.

Where nothing in you has to be set aside in order to belong. Where you are not assembled, but recognised.

Like sitting at a slightly unsteady table, your knee pressed lightly against its edge to keep it still. Steam rising from a bowl you don’t have to think about ordering. The first spoonful exactly as you remember: warm, familiar, unchanged.

And something in you settling in response. Not because anything has been fixed. Not because anything has been explained. But because, for a moment, nothing in you has to shift.

Nothing has to be left behind.

Nothing has to become anything else.

And you are not held together by effort, but by the quiet, unmistakable feeling of being seen.

And, in that, remaining whole.

It’s Mother’s Day here in the UK. The world is soft with daffodils and sun, florists spilling onto pavements, balloons rising, tables crowded with laughter and raspberries, roast, stories spilling from mouths into the air. A bright day for mothers.

In recent pieces, I’ve written about leadership and integrity, the ways we carry responsibility and release it, how we remember what matters in fractured worlds. Today is different, but not entirely.

Because underneath it all, whether navigating power or grief, it’s still about what keeps us whole, the weight of love, the persistence of memory, the costs we carry.

For me, it’s quiet. A year and three months since my mom died, and the world still feels off-kilter without her in it. Grief doesn’t follow calendars. It doesn’t fit into neat lines, or count the months like they’re steps on a staircase. Some days it feels heavy, some days almost gentle, and then it rises again like something that has been waiting, patient and precise, to be noticed.

I think about my mom constantly. How we weren’t perfect, how we argued, how we misunderstood each other, how we were stubborn and ungraceful at times. And yet, always, beneath any friction, there was this: a shared desire to love, to stay real, to be present in each other’s lives because we cared for each other. That was our gift. To be authentic with one another, to show up in the small, ordinary ways, to keep choosing each other, imperfectly but fully.

Death has a way of sharpening vision.

It rearranges the world until the things that are truly sacred glow with a quiet insistence. A photograph taken without thought. A voice on an old voicemail. A card that says simply thinking of you. A cup of tea shared in the kitchen, sunlight spilling across the table like yolk, hands brushing. These are the moments that remain bright, the scaffolding that holds memory together.

I find myself now noticing the details I used to overlook. The small gestures that seem so ordinary when life is uninterrupted suddenly feel immense: the tilt of a head in curiosity, the way sunlight curves over a shoulder, a laugh that lingers in the air longer than expected, the hush of a room for just a moment, the brief warmth of a hand pressed into mine. These quiet touchstones of everyday life become small joys which help us survive big grief.

Time passes, and still, I carry her. Not as an absence I can measure or tally, but as a presence that folds into the seams of my life, tucked into the lining of everything I do, everything I see, everything I try to remember.

Grief doesn’t come with a schedule, and neither does love. They move sideways, overlap, ebb and swell in ways we cannot predict.

So today, while the world celebrates loudly, I carry her softly. I sit in the sun with a slow coffee, with daffodils by my side, and I feel her in the ordinary. I thank her for carrying me first, for loving fiercely, for insisting that I write, for being my most loyal companion. I remember the small ways she showed up for me, and I try, in my own imperfect way, to return the grace.

I celebrate her not only in the way the world marks mothers today, but in the quiet, persistent presence that she still inhabits in my life. The life of memory. The life of love. The life that endures, folded into the seams.

We all carry people inside us: some living, some gone. And in the act of carrying them, in noticing them, in honouring them, we discover what is sacred: the love we are entrusted with, the grace we have the chance to give, the fragile, luminous fact that we are here together at all.

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What Leadership Training Teaches

There is a version of leadership that can be taught in slides.

• Vision statements.

• Stakeholder mapping.

• Conflict resolution frameworks.

• The art of influence.

I have sat in those trainings. I have delivered some of them.

You can learn how to build a strategy. You can learn how to deliver it. You can learn how to speak with authority, how to hold a room, how to translate complexity into bullet points that move a board or persuade a funder.

What you cannot be trained for, at least not easily, is the moment you realise the strategy and your conscience are not entirely aligned.

Leadership training rarely prepares you for moral loneliness. The moment when a room moves confidently in one direction and something in your body quietly resists.

It does not prepare you for the meeting after the meeting, when you sit alone replaying what was said and what you did not say. It does not prepare you for the subtle recalibrations required to stay employable. It does not prepare you for the quiet knowledge that being “effective” and being “true” are not always the same thing.

We talk about resilience as if it is stamina.

As if it is about enduring long hours, high stakes, relentless change. But the deeper resilience required of leadership is interior. It is the resilience to remain ethically awake.

Power Distorts the Air

Power alters the atmosphere around you.

People soften their disagreements. They manage your perception of them. They bring you polished versions of reality. Over time, it becomes harder to know what is unvarnished and what is curated. Harder to tell whether your decisions are grounded in truth or in what is simply the most convenient version of events.

Leadership training teaches you how to manage others. It does not teach you how to manage your own proximity to distortion.

And not everyone experiences that distortion in the same way. Power does not land evenly on the body. Race, gender, class, immigration status - these things shape who is believed, who is protected, and who is quietly expected to absorb the cost of decisions made elsewhere.

No one warns you that success narrows your field of vision. That the higher you rise, the fewer people will risk challenging you. That the more responsibility you carry, the more tempting it becomes to justify compromise in the name of stability.

The weight of keeping something afloat can make almost any decision feel defensible.

There is a particular pressure in social impact organisations, perhaps even more so than in more corporate ones. When the mission is moral — when the language is justice, equity, liberation — the gap between rhetoric and reality can be excruciating.

It is one thing to navigate compromise inside a system that never claimed purity. It is another to do so inside spaces that speak constantly of transformation.

Particularly for those who already know what it means to live inside systems that misrecognise or marginalise them.

Leadership training does not prepare you for the ache of that gap.

It does not teach you what to do when an organisation’s values are aspirational rather than embodied. It does not tell you how to lead when you can see both the beauty of the mission and the fractures in the structure.

And yet this is where many leaders find themselves.

Trying to hold complexity without becoming cynical.

Trying to be strategic without becoming slippery.

Trying to protect people without protecting dysfunction.

The Interior Work of Leadership

The truth is that leadership is not only about direction.

It is about digestion.

You are constantly metabolising competing demands: the board call in the morning, the staff concern in the afternoon, the message from a community partner asking why something suddenly feels different than it did before, the demand to work later and later just to keep up.

Funders. Politics. Risk. People’s livelihoods. People’s hope.

You absorb tension so that others can function. And if you are not careful, you begin to internalise that tension as normal.

No framework tells you how to measure the cost of that.

There is a version of leadership that prizes certainty: the confident voice, the decisive plan, the clean narrative of success. But increasingly I find myself drawn to a different model.

One that makes room for doubt without collapsing into paralysis.

A leadership that can say: this decision is imperfect. This system is flawed. I am implicated and I am trying.

That requires a different kind of strength.

Not the strength of control, but the strength of coherence. The willingness to interrogate your own reasoning. To ask who benefits from a choice and who pays for it. To recognise when the institution’s survival is not the same thing as its integrity.

These are not competencies easily listed on a CV.

They are practices. Often invisible ones.

The private reckoning before the public announcement. The moment you notice something drifting out of alignment and decide not to look away. The sentence you keep intact rather than dilute.

Leadership training can teach you how to guide others.

But the deeper work of leadership is learning how to remain morally awake while holding power.

Integrity doesn’t usually shatter; it thins.

Not in dramatic moments, not in the boardroom showdown, not in the public scandal, not in the headline. It thins on a Tuesday afternoon when you decide not to push the point because everyone is tired. It thins when you soften the language in a blog or report so it’s “more palatable.” It thins when you tell yourself, this isn’t the hill.

I have been in rooms where the air shifted…not because something outrageous was said, but because something necessary wasn’t.

There is a particular silence that arrives when truth hovers and no one reaches for it. It feels almost physical. A tightening at the back of the jaw. A warmth in the chest. The body registering what the minutes will not.

Leadership training teaches you about influence, negotiation, strategy. It does not teach you about this moment. It does not teach you what to do when your values enter the room before you do.

Integrity, I’ve learned, is less about grand gestures and more about micro-decisions. A sentence left uncorrected. A harmful framing allowed to stand. A policy justified because “that’s how it works.” A budget approved that quietly contradicts the mission.

None of these, alone, feel catastrophic. That’s the point.

We talk about corruption as if it begins with greed or malice. But in my experience, it often begins with fatigue. With pragmatism. With the steady pressure to be reasonable. To be strategic. To be a team player.

The language of erosion is gentle.

Now isn’t the right time.
We need to pick our battles.
Let’s not alienate stakeholders.
We can revisit this later.

Later is a soft graveyard for convictions.

I don’t say this from a place of moral superiority. I say it as someone who has felt the cost of both speaking and not speaking. There is a loneliness in being the person who names the thing. There is also a loneliness in not doing it.

The body keeps score either way.

For a long time, I thought integrity was about bravery, about having the courage to stand up in the obvious moment. But more often, it is about endurance. About holding alignment over time. About noticing when your language and actions drift from what you believe.

There is a subtle grief in realising you have adapted to something you once resisted.

You start by translating your values into “organisational language.” Then you translate them into metrics. Then into key messages. And somewhere along the way, you forget the original sentence as you would have spoken it, unedited.

I have watched good people bend in order to stay. I have watched them tell themselves that proximity to power is necessary for change. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it simply changes you.

Systems have gravity. They always pull towards self-preservation.

Towards reputation management. Towards sustainability over truth. And if you work inside them long enough, you begin to orbit their logic.

The question is not whether you will feel that pull. You will. The question is: how will you know when you are drifting?

For me, it has become a bodily practice. A returning. When I feel the tightening, when I hear myself explaining something I don’t quite believe, I try to pause. To ask: Who am I protecting right now? And more quietly: What is this costing me?

Integrity is not purity. It is coherence.

It is the alignment between what you say in public and what you whisper to yourself at night. It is the ability to recognise when those two things begin to separate and the willingness to close the gap.

We tend to imagine the loss of integrity as a dramatic fall. But most of the time, it is sedimentary. Layer upon layer of accommodation until you wake up and realise the landscape has changed.

I am less interested now in heroic leadership than in honest leadership. In leaders who can say, this is hard, without disguising it as strategy. In people who notice and name the erosion early. In organisations that make room for dissent without punishment.

The work, I think, is not to avoid pressure. It is to remain human inside it.

To keep asking, even on the tired Tuesdays:

Is this still true?
Is this still me?

And if the answer is no, even quietly, to decide what you are willing to do next.

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