So, I don't really have the answer

I created a mail club as the antidote to internet slop

Jasmine Leann — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:45:59 GMT

Like literally every other human on the planet, I hate being on my phone. Can I actually put my phone down? Well, we know the answer to that one.

The wave of ‘analog’ hobbies as a trend is a very telling sign of just how exhausted we all are of being on our phones and the endless addicting doomscrolling we can’t seem to escape. So much so we need to go online to learn how to be offline.

And so, the renaissance is coming. People are handmaking their own Louise Carmen journals, learning to knit, growing herbs, doing yoga, colouring, junk journalling, reading and much more. I love to see it and my desire to live a more ‘analog’ life grows daily. Although I don’t believe I want to live fully without social media and a fully functioning phone - it has its uses - but I am finding my boundaries and rituals.

Boundaries such as no social media before 10am (ish) and after 8pm (ish) and trying to have a phone free sunday. I love the idea of spending Sunday morning in my local cafe, sipping a flat white and reading a newspaper, being present and educated (or performative as the internet would probably say) but there is only one problem…

newspapers fucking suck.

Misery, dread, horror, racism, transphobia, misogyny, you name it it’s in the weekend papers. I leave the cafe a nervous wreck, and not because I had a large cold brew on an empty stomach but because the broadsheet I just spent too much money on has rotten my insides.

I don’t want to scroll, I don’t always want to read a book, I definitely don’t want to read the daily mail on sunday, magazines are full of ads, I can’t keep journalling about the same 3 problems in my diary…

So, I created my own paper - The Sunday Dispatch mail club.

The Sunday Dispatch is a monthly delivery, an invitation to spend time offline. Hand written and packaged by me your delivery will include:

A postcard
2 x stickers (1x word of the month, 1 x wildcard design)
A curated playlist / postcard
13 page ‘newspaper’ filled with articles, poems, book recommendations, cd recommendations, journal prompts, positive news stories, untranslatable words from around the world and more.

So, I invite you to put your phone down and pick up The Sunday Dispatch instead.

Free worldwide shipping.

All my love,

Jasmine x

I hate being on my phone, so I created a Newspaper

Jasmine Leann — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:23:26 GMT

Like literally every other human on the planet, I hate being on my phone. Can I actually put my phone down? Well, we know the answer to that one.

newspapers fucking suck.

I don’t want to scroll, I don’t always want to read a book, I definitely don’t want to read the mail on sunday, magazines are full of ads, I can’t keep journalling about the same 3 problems in my diary…

So, I created my own paper - The Sunday Dispatch. And it’s available to you too.

The Sunday Dispatch is an invitation to spend time offline, to slow down. A chance to enrich, discover and educate, neatly packaged and delivered to your doorstep once a month. My hope is you put down TSD feeling better than when you picked it up. For you, I have created the ‘good/newspaper’.

TSD includes book recommendations, poems, CD recommendations, an article highlight of fellow substackers, positive news stories, untranslatable words from around the world, journal prompts, an article of my own writing, postcard, stickers, a specially curated playlist that follows a theme. This months playlist theme is “get out of my room mum you don’t understand” teen angst.

It’s your moment to sit down and unplug, dive into being present with something that won’t make you feel like shit and without having to look at a screen.

You can sign up for the first months issue now, which I shall be shipping out on 1st of July.

I hope you enjoy reading the ‘good/newspaper’

All my love,

Jasmine x

The Sunday Dispatch - Your Weekly Good/Newspaper

Jasmine Leann — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:11:08 GMT

Hi babes!

Welcome to another issue of The Sunday Dispatch and welcome to spring! This is your weekend Good/Newspaper delivery filled with a look back of the week just gone. Books read, food eaten, Substack essays enjoyed, words inspired. An encouragement to enjoy all things offline (whilst ironically delivering to you online, I know I know). And also delivering to you on a Monday this week but who cares, time is a construct anyway lol.

The last few weeks have been really transformative for me as I turned 30!! Finally! Under the sun in Lanzarote I said goodbye to my 20s and arrived at 30. I’ll be honest, I am SO glad to be here. The end of my 20s was like trying to get to the end of a book you know you should have put down 3 chapters in but now you HAVE to finish it. I was crawling through the last weeks of the decade where my skin felt like a jacket that was too tight but I wasn’t allowed to take off yet.

The thing I found most odd was how in a way, I also felt nothing?

I went to the beach for sunrise on my last day as a 29 year old and as I looked out at the sea - whilst it was overcast and there was no sunrise to be found - I felt… nothing?

I am a deeply aware person - often to my own detriment and exhaustion - and I was expecting all these epiphany’s to arrive, downloads from the universe to come, realisations to appear and it just…didn’t happen? My brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool. Jerome text me from the hotel and said “I hope you’re having the most special time down at the beach” and I was like I AM NOT LOL. But when the 28th of March rolled around I felt pure elation. Dolly Alderton talks about arriving at adulthood when you’ve always felt like a grown up and that’s what it feels like to be 30, I feel like I’ve kinda always been 30.

I didn’t feel any of the cliche “my life is over, I’m so old” bullshit that American Rom Coms have taught us, making sure we are ever aware that there is a ‘prime’ for women and soon we shall be past it! What horror! That I shall no longer be deemed to be in my 'prime’ or attractive by Darren aged 47 who has a wife, 2 kids, a beer belly and comments on women’s instagrams about how they’ve let themselves go.

How ever will I cope dear reader.

I was ready, I am ready for this next decade. Every woman I speak to says it only gets better from here and I believe them. It already has. It is wild to think that a few years ago I was deeply conflict adverse and frightened to stand up for myself, scared to speak a truth for the sake of “having an easy life” and “keeping the peace” - neither of which was ever the result of my silence anyway.

Whereas now, I think telling someone to Fuck Off would genuinely make my day and if I’d had the strength to do so previously it would have solved A LOT of my problems in my 20s. The older I get the more I relate to Patsy Stone.

So, let’s begin the weekly R.E.P.O.R.T.

Reading:

I have just finished Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. It was a fantastic read and I’m saying this as someone who stopped reading ‘self help’ books (especially those written by men, I touch on that here in my piece about my love/hate relationship with London).

My life drastically improved when I stopped reading self help books, there comes a point when so much of the information is not new to you and it’s just that, more information. We already live in information overload, every post online is trying to sell us something or teach us something and it gets fucking tiring and boring. Everything we are digesting is telling us what we’re not doing, what we don’t have and what we should “run don’t walk” to buy and optimise and streamline and “chat gpt can do that” and Fuck. Off. I just want to live!!!

So I did what any reasonable woman would do and began reading romantasy. I fell back inlove with reading, my imagination alight again, my tube journeys from work now an exciting journey on the back of a dragon or the night court or a magical witches bakery. I don’t care if people judge, I don’t care if people think it’s silly or not “real literature”, people only say this because the audience for romantasy is predominantly female and therefore it must be undermined and not taken seriously.

I gave myself permission to let it be fun and light and unserious. Reading isn’t a punishment, not every second of life is about self improvement or optimisation, it’s about living and find the most fun way to do so.

So, I don’t know why I picked up this bo. It’s taken me about 8 months to read, which seems in keeping with the title lol. But, maybe in my recent desire to try and build myself a new life outside of a corporate job WITHOUT burning out I reached for the book to find answers and answers I did find!!

The book focuses on 3 main principles:

Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Focus on quality

I touched on this, in my essay about London. I realised I was trying to do all the things and all of them not very well or with much consistency. Also focusing on things that weren’t really going to move the needle towards my overall goal. The book is example after example from some of the most well known households names (past and present) living by these methods whilst looking at our modern day post pandemic work life with an understanding lens, not patronising or accusatory. I also appreciate the matter of fact style of this book, Cal Newport is a full time professor and that comes across in his style of writing, which feels almost essay like and which I appreciate. As someone with ADHD and a busy life I enjoy the prose being “in this chapter I will explain x, which is why Y and in the end I will explain by Z”.

It is an easy read, that you can put down, pick up and come back to that will certainly improve your life should you stick to its advice. I would whole heartedly recommend.

Eating: Thai Square, London

I love Thai food. It’s my favourite cuisine (and my favourite country). This past weekend I had a surprise birthday weekend stay with my mum and the first stop was for lunch at Thai Square. The food was sublime, fresh and full of flavour with a classy twist and good portions. The 20% service charge is a little lumpy but the staff certainly did their best to earn it.

Playing: Project Hail Mary (spoiler free don’t worry, I’m not a dickhead)

I love the cinema. I hate modern movies. Netflix lighting, lazy dual screen script writing and the ever incessant storyline of “nearly middle aged man has to save the world & doesn’t have much time to do it” with one token hot female character. BORING.

So, I only go to the cinema when there’s something I really want to see & Project Hail Mary had bypassed my attention. I must have seen the trailer at some point? But I can’t remember much about it. I read the premise and I thought here we go again, another movie about a man saving the planet; unlikely to believe considering they are the ones currently destroying it in the real world but the girlies on substack insisted this is a movie made for the cinema experience, made for the big screen and the experience of watching with every ounce of your attention.

The girlies were right, goodness me were they right. I didn’t watch the trailer again, I just booked tickets and went so I had NO IDEA what to expect. What I found was an incredible piece of cinema, made with such heart and dedication. The score is enchanting, the acting sublime, the story of friendship, of doing what needs to be done, of what we think of ourselves, who believes in us and how we let ourselves be loved. The visuals are breathtaking, even more so since I hadn’t watched the trailer so I was truly seeing it all for the first time. You don’t know where the movie will go, not only as it jumps between past and present but because the script isn’t lazy or obvious, it trusts and allows the actors (and set/prop detail) to tell us what we need to know, it doesn’t spoon feed you what is happening. I plan to see it again in the cinema, which I never do. Please, I implore you, buy the ticket, DON’T watch the trailer, DO buy some popcorn and enjoy the experience of cinema.

Obsessing:

I am also obsessively playing Sunday Morning Comin’ Down by Kris Kristofferson from the movie soundtrack. I only ever knew Kris from A Star Is Born, my mums favourite film (hi mum love you), so I am enjoying this new exposure and 4:33 seconds of heartache on repeat.

Do I still hate London a year on? Spoiler, I'm still broke

Jasmine Leann — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:01:28 GMT

8(ish) months ago I wrote this piece:

and recently it’s received a new wave of readers, I’ve had a few comments asking for an update on where I am now, do I still hate London? Have I moved out of the city?

Which has led me to reflect on where I am now, to take a moment to pause and think, do I still hate London?

Firstly, yes, I am still very much here living in the city.

Secondly, yes, I am still broke lol.

When I wrote the original article I was in the first weeks of a new job. My previous job had stripped me of all confidence and left me feeling burned out, wobbly - both emotionally and physically - and like my overall sense of self was a bit of a silly joke. Hence why I left.

I was also living in my second flatshare with someone awful, again.

To have both your work and home life be battering you from both sides means you live life as an open nerve. You walk through the streets like your skin is sensitive to touch, every bump from someone on a busy tube, every charity person following you down the street, everytime it costs you £14 for a pret lunch you know you can’t really afford, it feels so visceral, so raw, so abrasive. It just makes it all feel shit. Well, it is shit.

But here I am, still and I’m loving London again. In 8ish months I am now in a position of enjoying the city, even without the masses of money I am trying hard to manifest lol. Is it because of spring? Is it because of my lifestyle changes? Is it that I love London specifically or instead just love my life a bit more now? Is it because I turned 30?

I re-read the essay and still firmly stand by everything I said. Everyone is existing in a different London and this comes down to access, money, class and race. And capitalism, it’s always fucking capitalism.

Saying that, there are several things that have changed for me in the past months to lead me to not hating it as much:

I finally escaped flat sharing hell.
It is so genuinely insane to me that we have to share our LIVING space, our HOME, the space where we are most vulnerable, have all of our worldly possessions and eat, sleep and shit with ABSOLUTE STRANGERS. Evolutionary it is quite dangerous when you think about it. Anyone can make a good first impression and anyone can keep a good act up for a few weeks until their true selves come out. Which is what happened to me, twice over. The feeling of dread coming home every day makes anywhere you live awful. It’s just in London you don’t really have a choice. To live in a constant state of fight or flight in what is meant to be your safe space wears you down, the constant thinking about your actions to avoid confrontation, getting woken up at all hours by slamming doors, people not being very clean, not being very considerate, mood swings and the most miserable person I’ve ever met. There is only so much one can take before you just end up living in your bedroom. The last 2 years I have been paying half of the rent for a whole flat, only to live squashed in one room as act of self preservation. The bedroom becomes everything; you eat your dinner on your bed, watch TV on your bed, scroll on your phone on your bed, eventually you keep a kettle and coffee pod machine in there to avoid even being in the same room as your flatmates. I posted a video about this on Tiktok, 250k views and 150+ comments later I realised I was very much not alone.
In January I finally escaped flat sharing hell (I moved in with my boyfriend, I spent a lot of my life single so very much understand the struggle of affording London life as a single person) and for the first time in years I have eaten my dinner at a kitchen table, I have sat on my sofa. You can’t even begin to understand the joy of sitting on a sofa when you have lived shut away in your room. The feeling of being able to breathe, to take up space, to let your energy expand and to relax, finally relax, is like no other. I cried and cried and cried for weeks after I moved, realising just how much the emotionally toxic situation had affected me and ruined my health.
In London, unless you have parents to pay your rent, it’s almost impossible to afford rent on your own and unfortunately, the salaries that all the middle aged men who can’t even download a PDF are on just don’t exist anymore for the younger generation, it is stagnant out there floating around £35-£45k if you’re lucky. So you either flat share, live super super far out and spend all your money commuting or move in with a partner if you have one.
One thing flatsharing did teach me, as a chronic people pleaser and conflict avoidant, was how to stand up for myself.
People test you early on, they see how much bullshit they can get away with and that lays the foundation of your relationship. You HAVE to set people straight from the get go, you have to let them know NOT to try their shit with you! Do NOT tolerate bad behaviour early on or they will keep pushing and pushing and you keep suffering and suffering trying to keep the peace whilst building resentment inside. You become the “Jasmine doesn’t mind” person and if you do finally find the strength to stop tolerating bullshit it causes more issues later down the line because people get used to being able to use and abuse you for their gain.
I changed jobs - for 2 reasons
As I mentioned earlier, I was in a job that was also making me miserable. I had to commute a long way and the working environment was toxic. Seeing me say an environment was toxic a second time brings up feelings of being “too dramatic” (definitely internalised misogyny, men are way more dramatic) but I think in hindsight, I was just numb to how rubbish these things both were at the same time. The brain can only comprehend so much. My thermometer of shit tolerance was broken and I was stuck inside the middle of it all trying to survive whilst battling SIBO (digestive issue, it’s awful).
I became the butt of the joke in my old office, anything that made me me was fodder to be laughed at. I became ferociously private in order to protect an ounce of self dignity. I just didn’t feel like a serious person, I was gaslight by my manager daily and made to feel so silly. And I’m not. I’m actually quite cool and extremely competent. I have eclectic tastes yes, but I am not someone to be laughed at and I am not a loser. I will always laugh with you, I am not proud, but this was different. My confidence was stripped from me and I am still piecing it together all these months on, learning to take myself seriously, believe in myself.
In some offices/teams, there is only a certain amount of room for the cool kids, for the top of the hierarchy and you will be beaten down if you threaten that. If you feel you are not welcome in a team OR they are happy with your silence/servitude -LEAVE. Do not stay where you are tolerated. Go where you are celebrated. This is London, the job market is hell yes but there is ALWAYS another job out there for you, even if it’s for a temporary fix just get yourself out of unhealthy situations as fast as possible so you can heal, recover and see your next move clearly.
Along with changing to a more friendly environment I also moved to what I recently learned is called a “high income low stakes” job. I use the term High Income lightly lol but I get paid comfortably for what I do with waaaaaay less pressure than previous environments.
The driver behind my job change was to create more space in my life, in both time and mental capacity as well as emotionally. This meant finding a job closer to home, better hours and less responsibility. I did make a small sacrifice, it is not all rose tinted, I am in a FTC hoping to be made permanent at a later date, this to me was a sacrifice I was willing to make in order to make my present reality more tolerable.
I don’t let the city grab me and shake me around anymore
If you don’t get hold of London first, London will get hold of you. Now, I follow its tide, I let it rush over me like I’m a rock at the bottom of a stream. It is sooo easy to get swept up in the collective frenetic energy. Hoards of people stomping down the pavements at 5:30pm trying to get home, huffing and puffing at anyone in their way, bags hitting you as you go past, no spacial awareness as everyone has headphones on. Existing in this way helps no one and nothing. Stressing after work racing to the tube will not get you there any faster. I promise you it literally doesn’t!!! We don’t walk that fast as humans. All we are doing is making our lived experience moment to moment unnecessarily stressful and raising our cortisol. Also it’s hard on your legs.
Now, I try to make moment to moment as least stressful as possible in a thousand small ways. How you do anything is how you do everything. You have to start the day on the right foot in London or it quickly bashes you around, it’s better to stop and breathe and then carry on. If there are people existing in a calmer version of London, why can’t I create that for myself day to day? Because I actually do want to punch the charity guy in the face when I’m over stimulated and my bag is slipping off my shoulder and I’m on my phone and I’m running a bit late and my music is still playing whilst he’s talking to me and where are my office keys… but no one is forcing me to live this way.
I have calmed down and slowed down. I work with London, not against it.
Firstly, I don’t walk down the street on my phone anymore. Trust me this is life changing - for you AND everyone around you. You are being more annoying than you realise when you’re walking on your phone, you think you’re being aware of your surroundings but you’re just not. The brain cannot multitask, only rapid switch. So trying to walk around one of the busiest cities with the highest phone theft rates on uneven pavement replying to a text will do no good for your nervous system. I also cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen people nearly get run over because they are on their phones crossing the road. Instead, I pull to the side if I have a message I need to reply to asap or I wait until I’m on the tube, at home or at the office to use my phone. I am in motion, I am walking, I do not need to be on Tiktok walking down the street, this is real life, NOT Wall-e.
Secondly, I have learnt the art of transitioning. I touched on this in my essay about phones and the internet having a destination (which you can read here) but basically, infinite scroll and the cross contamination / ever availability of the internet means we rarely allow one part of our day to finish and another to begin. Once upon a time you left the office and walked to the station, that was it. Your work day was over and you wound down on your walk, reflecting on the day just gone. There was no mishmash of work/home/iphone/tiktokt/fitbit/stimulation/netflix/headphones/instagram/bbc.
You walked out the door, head up and your brain / nervous system was aware that work was over and now you are travelling home.
Whereas now we leave the office carrying our laptops in our bags, scrolling on our phones down the escalators, looking at content that you cannot scroll to the bottom of made 4 days ago, 6 weeks ago, 2 years ago, watching netflix shows on our phones on the tube to continue watching them on the big screen when we get home. We scroll tiktok at our desks, on the toilet, on the tube, in our beds, at our kitchen tables. Everything is everywhere all at once. How can we differentiate between work time and home time and rest time when all the things exist in all the places available at all the times. We don’t recognise we are home and it’s rest time because we walk through the door phones in hand, getting teams notifications on our apple watches. The evenings pass by in a blur because there is no transition, no definitive cut off, no moment our brain says okay that part is over and this part can begin.
Add all this to one of the busiest cities in the world and it’s an overstimulation nightmare. Our tolerance becomes less than zero and exhaustion through the roof.
I have learnt that every part of the day needs to exist in it’s own entity. When I leave work I walk to the station, no phone no headphones no rushing, it is already so busy around me I don’t need to add to it and I sit on the tube and be present. I allow my brain to register that I’m not in the office anymore, even if it’s just a few minutes before I get my book out, I just allow. Allow allow allow. I arrive home from work and take 10-15 minutes to register I’m home, I’m safe, it’s time to relax. This is not scrolling on your phone on the sofa with your shoes still on. I head outside (if you can do that in your flat), take some breathes, look at the world around me, just sit. Sometimes I just sit and stare into space lol the point is I’m allowing one chapter of the day to close and another to open. There is more space in your life than you realise when you’re not stuffing every available second with distraction and multitasking.
I don’t let the London get hold of me and shake me around, YOU are in control. The city is the same, but how I choose to engage with it has changed. Peace isn’t found, it’s chosen. Even in a busy city.

I get hold of the day before it gets hold of me

I said in my last piece:

“How do I build a business that earns me money whilst commuting, trying to fix my health, working out and going to the gym, cleaning, tidying, cooking, morning routine, night routine, reply to my never ending 12 WhatsApp’s, keep up with my family, friends, boyfriend, hobbies, skincare, scrolling, so much scrolling, my full time job, side hustles, front hustles, back hustles, it’s all a hustle.”

and I don’t really have the answer. As women we are told we can have it all and do it all - we can’t. We are extremely capable and competent but we cannot do it all, not without it causing a detriment to our health or our dreams. In the list above something is always going to be slipping and do you know what? fine. okay. I’ve given up giving myself a hard time about it, I’m doing the best I can whilst the world is on fire.

But what I have realised is I was trying to do it all at the same time instead of being intentional with my time. I have combined ADHD so I often just barrel forward hoping for the best, like a digger pushing a pile of sand. I wasn’t actually aware of my time, just the feeling of not having any of it left every day and a million tasks in my head not completed.

I recently got myself a 24 hour diary and had a mental breakdown.

I mapped out the time of each day I was sleeping, getting ready for and actually at work. The image below will forever be etched into my brain. There is no time left, like literally no time.

I have been giving myself a hard time about not fitting it all in to...

2.5-3 hours in the evening.

You’re telling me in 2.5 hours (if there’s no tube delays) I’m meant to be cooking, cleaning, clothes washing, tidying, replying to messages, hitting the gym, making lunch for tomorrow, spending time with Jerome, catching up with family, having a hobby and working on my side hustle, reading my book, maybe watching an episode of something and winding down for bed?

Right, okay.

Don’t even mention going out with friends one night in the week, that will derail everything!

This is fucking terrifying. People spend their WHOLE LIVES doing this. I AM CURRENTLY SPENDING MY LIFE DOING THIS. We work all this fucking time every day only to be left with no spare money at the end of the month?!

I am very lucky to work a half day Friday and only commute 30 minutes to my job but fucking hell, it’s rough.

This has inspired me to no end.

Life can change so quickly when we’re ready and work towards it. Nothing changes if nothing changes. So, now I have more capacity inlight of my home and work life easing up I have begun a very gentle “sprint”. I would like to say now I would not have been able to do the below last year when I wrote my original essay, I did not have the capacity.

I recently read Cal Newports book Slow Productivity and it’s fantastic. I stopped reading self help books and especially self help advice by men as so often the advice is not in alignment with how I want to live as a woman. The motivation advice from men is about CRUSHING it and SMASHING it and NO DAYS OFF with 5am wake ups with COLD SHOWERS AND ICE BATHS AND RUN 200 MILES I’M DAVID GOGGINS AND I’M NOT WORTHY UNLESS MY TOE NAILS FALLING OFF FOR RUNNING SO MUCH BCOS #HUSTLE AND #GRIND AND ANYTHING WORTH HAVING IS ACHIEVED THROUGH THE STRUGGLE AND PAIN.

Babes, no.

Calm down.

If that had worked for me before I wouldn’t be here printing documents for Michael who’s on 5x my salary, I’d be on a beach in Thailand with a cutla million in the bank.

I don’t subscribe to the struggle. I don’t subscribe to suffering and pushing and #hustle. I do not chase, I attract. Pushing to the point of burn out didn’t work, so maybe it’s worth having a go at chasing my dreams with ease? Working in alignment with what feels right?

I am creating an intentional and calm approach to my own work, in a reduced way, focusing on consistency over intensity and high quality output.

These are the 3 main premises of Slow Productivity:

Do fewer things
At a natural pace
Obsess over quality

So what is a “sprint”? (I use this word lightly, I’m doing more of a long hike where you don’t get out of breath lol)

A ‘sprint’ is a period of time where you focus on a reduced set of goals or tasks to push progress forward. This is not a forever state. For me, this phase is the next 3 months.

I realised I was chaotically filming Tiktoks on my lunch breaks and sometimes bashing out a few thousand words on Substack and a Youtube video here or there BUT I was thinking about it all the time 24/7 along with the gym and all my other life admin etc etc. The digger pushing the sand with no end goal.

All thoughts, little action, high stress and a lot self resentment for not achieving much.

Instead, I am choosing to carve out time in the morning before work to slowly chip away at 2 things that I realise don’t burn me out:

Substack
Youtube

I don’t enjoy the disposable nature of Tiktok, the way you need to grab peoples attention in 0.001 seconds and a good video will slowly disintegrate to the bottom of the internet dumpster because you have to post 15 times a day to gain a following. I also cannot tolerate influencer voice anymore and I think as a society we are all shifting in what content we want to see. We don’t want to see more Day In My Lifes with finger taps on a moisturiser bottle and “omg I’m literally obsessed with this product run dont walk girlies!”.

Instead, I enjoy writing, I enjoy long form youtube videos, both watching and creating. I love going on Youtube to watch someone like Hitomi Mochizuki or Ruby Granger and seeing a big back catalogue of art and watching a vlog from 3 years ago.

P.s (Ruby Granger has a wonderfully whimsy character she writes letter from on Substack as called Agatha Armitage. I would so reccomend reading amidst all the “how to” lists and ai slop, this is light and wonderful and fantastical and takes you off into another world)

The answers to what we want to do and what we crave are always there, we just need to look for them.

So I am putting down Tiktok and picking up a warm herbal tea, first thing in the morning and getting to writing. I get hold of the day before it gets hold of me. I gently, bit by bit, move the needle forward every morning. It is slow, but it is moving, which is the main thing. I’m not thinking about it all the time, but instead doing it slowly every day. This also gives me a chance to reflect on what I created the day before. I am not randomly staying up until midnight creating something mediocre on a whim to post and then be exhausted the rest of the week and overall achieve nothing. I am instead solely focused on quality work which will eventually mount up and create a success. It will look like it happened overnight but it won’t have. It will have happened for 45 minutes, every morning, across a longer period of time.

What this does mean is I have to be SO intentional about my time. The phrase discipline equals freedom is so true and I have gained SO MUCH mental capacity back, which is a pleasant surprise. I don’t revenge procrastinate in the evenings because I KNOW when my personal time is, it’s in the morning and the sooner I get to bed the sooner it arrives.

By staring my life directly in the face, looking at the reality of my time (and lack of it) and making conscious choices I have instead gained mental real estate back. I am not giving myself a hard time thinking about working out on a Monday evening then feeling shit because actually I feel quite tired and there was a tube delay and if I don’t do it today then what about tomorrow and I didn’t get any editing done and why am I still up scrolling I’m just going to be tired in the morning. Instead, I KNOW my workouts are at the back end of the week when I have more time, more energy, and working out at 7:30pm isn’t going to make me wired and eat dinner late.

Am I just a woman who has discovered the art of being organised? Maybe. But so many of us are just blindly moving through the every day letting life happen to us when we want more for ourselves. Especially living in London when we get dragged along the current.

Luck is when preparation meets opportunity and I recently heard the phrase stay ready so you don’t have to get ready. Am I ready for my dream life? Am I ready to actually leave corporate life and work for myself again?

Is it hard to get up? Yes. Do I still wish my corporate days were shorter? Also yes. I resent the system but I am in it so what else am I going to do? Am I going to continue living overstimulated stomping down the road after work watching netflix and letting life pass me by whilst I give myself a hard time for not achieving what I want? No.

The system is against us, capitalism keeps us busy and overworked and underpaid and tired but I think what has changed London for me is my choice after choice to leave anything that is taking from me so I can build instead.

And that is my advice to you in creating your London, keep moving, keep leaving, keep creating, keep changing, keep figuring it out. I could still be sharing a flat with a couple who keeps me awake until midnight and then wakes me up at 6am, I could still be travelling an hour to a job which is grossly underpaying me and treating me like shit. But I’m not, I’m not because I moved and that didn’t work so I moved again. I’m not because I changed my job and then changed it again. London will pick you up and bash you around but it is also a ride you can step off and watch from the sidelines, quietly until you learn how to drive it yourself.

There is ALWAYS another London than can exist for us and that’s coming from someone still working a corporate job, still commuting and still not rich. Just because everyone else is suffering and miserable doesn’t mean you need to be as well.

London is the bear, if you run from it it will chase you, nipping at your heels, but I have instead turned and faced it head on. It is not running from me, but instead walking side by side with me, we are sharing some snacks, laughing, it may turn on me again but for now, I’m working to keep her in my good books.

P.s I also started beginners ballet to do something fun and silly and not serious and have a life outside of work. I post little vlogs about it every week on TikTok and Youtube if you want to watch.

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

The Sunday Dispatch is an invitation to spend time offline, to slow down. A chance to enrich, discover and educate, neatly packaged and delivered to your doorstep once a month. For you, I have created the ‘good/newspaper’, it includes book reccomendations, poems, CD recommendations, an article highlight of fellow substackers, positive news stories, untranslatable words from around the world, journal prompts, an article of my own writing, postcard, stickers, a specially curated playlist that follows a theme and more! You can sign up here.

Buy Me A Coffee / Donation:
I will always keep my writing and videos free from paywalls. I am a girls girl, but it does take time to produce the work you enjoy. If you enjoy what I create and want to show your support for my work (and hopefully my exit from the corporate world finally!) please consider buying me a coffee or donation below, thank you!

Support my work here thank you

Can I tempt you with another piece?

Put down the fucking oura ring for goodness sake

Jasmine Leann — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:18:35 GMT

Hi babes,

We are back with the second instalment!

If you’ve read part 1 and the introduction, I thank you so much for much for doing so and I hope some of what I have written thus far has been useful!

If you are new here, hi hello thanks for coming. I am sharing 30 things I learned by 30. Yesterday I shared my first 3 and today we’re ploughing through a few more.

I am turning the big three ‘O’ in less than two weeks and honestly - I cannot wait! Every woman I talk to says life gets better in your 30s and I believe it. I am ready to shed this skin of my 20s.

If you haven’t already, you can read the introduction to these pieces about turning 30 here, it lays out a little of my background as a 29 year old who is here giving out life lessons and advice. Because what could a 29 year old possibly know about life? To be honest who knows anything about life? After 2 businesses, 6 years of travel, 3 years of corporate, 3 years of living in London, 10 years of therapy and 1 job for a celebrity I feel I have a few things that might be of help in this chaos of living we find ourselves in. I am excited to see what I will have learned by 40 (may the universe let me get there!) for life is a continual process of learning and growing and developing and if you’re not doing any of those things, you’re probably making the lives of those around you miserable lol.

Please, only take what resonates and leave the rest. Not everything I say is going to apply or hit home and that’s fine! We are all living different lives.

Okay then girlies let’s begin!

Joy is the thread that holds life together.
It really is about joy. Everything in life improves when you put joy at the forefront. Even at funerals, after all is said and done and we’re at the wake standing around drinking cups of tea, joy is where we land, discussing joyful memories and joyful moments shared.
The absence of joy creates a life hard lived. Days are suffered and tolerated. Negativity becomes not only within reach, but our go to way of being. When we move with joy as our main intention life flows, it feels lighter, you lift the energy of those around you and isn’t that how we create a better world? Starting with those around us? When people create for the joy of it, success follows faster than those who create from desperation because joy is a high vibrational energy.
Joy is a practise, like meditating, it’s easier to get to the more we try. Life will always have its hard moments but NEVER and I mean NEVER be too proud or too cool to express your joy. When we give ourselves permission to express ourselves we, by proxy, give others permission to as well.

You don’t need an electronic device to tell you how you slept.
You don’t. You really really don’t. Breaking up with my fitbit was the best thing I did. You don’t need a little computer to tell you how you slept. You don’t need a robot in the shape of a ring to tell you you might be pregnant on a Tuesday at 2pm whilst you’re at work. You don’t need the mini machine marketed as a watch but is actually just a small iphone to tell you when you’ve been a bit lazy and haven’t done enough steps. And a workout is still a fucking workout regardless of whether you have the knowledge of how many calories you burned.
The answers are within you. You know if you haven’t done enough steps, you know if you’re a bit tired and should probably do a lighter workout to help with recovery, you know if you didn’t sleep great and if you need a robot strapped to your wrist to tell you that, then I hope you get to know yourself soon.

The answers of what you’re looking for are probably there. We leave ourselves clues.
I recently started ballet again at 29 and it has been such an incredible journey so far. I’ve been posting about it a lot on Tiktok and have been taken aback by the response and the fact that several women have been inspired to start classes too!
Starting ballet again has been life changing, honestly. At the start of this year I was feeling low in every way possible: hating the fact I have a 9-5 (8:30-5:30 to be exact), hating where I lived, hating the evenings disappearing, hating that I was doing nothing but going to work and coming home, hating any time I actually had plans because I resented ‘losing’ a precious evening, hated my body, my health wasn’t great, my fitness non existent, it was all rubbish and I realised I was desperate for something to make me ‘me’ outside of just being miserable. I had spent so long surviving and just trying to get to ‘the next’ that I had forgotten about living in the every day.
Where were my hobbies? What did I actually do with my time outside of just scrolling? I called myself a yogi but hadn’t actually done any yoga in ages, lol. I see people talk online a lot about not having any hobbies, not having third spaces, not knowing how to find out what they enjoy and I was the same. Where do you even begin?
I was on a train in the first week of January and I saw a poster for the Ballet, it clicked. I am always watching videos of ballet dancers on youtube shorts. Watching their routines, WIEIAD, following different musical theatre casts in their “A Day In The Life whilst I’m in Legally Blonde The Musical” etc etc and the answer was staring me right back in the face. The answer had been there all along, what I was yearning for, what I was missing, what I was second hand living through my screen.
How much of our lives have become watching other people live and do the things we want to be doing? We can actually do them too, we just have to recognise that we want to and that we can.
I googled Ballet classes in London and found a school perfectly inbetween my work and home. Isn’t this what I moved to London for? To have the world at my fingertips. Within 3 days I was there at a taster class at the beginning of term and it’s been the best thing ever. I look forward to it every week, I love making my little videos about it, I love the fact I have a regular third space to go to every week, I love that I know the route inside out now, I love that I can say “sorry I can’t on Thursday I have ballet”. But it has also been SO confronting and challenging on my confidence, being in a body I was struggling to look at kindly after weight gain, feeling shit about my level of fitness compared to everyone else, struggling to find a leotard in my size BUT with every week that I stand in that class and look at myself in the mirror I am meeting the new version of myself. I was meeting myself at my hard edges and I am better for it.
The point of this story is there were clues to what I was yearning for right there, all along. I missed dance. I missed being connected with my body. I missed having something to do after work on the regular.
That person online that kind of annoys you but you keep watching their videos even though it’s like poking a bruise? It’s because they possess something you yearn for. Whether it material or how they live their life or their way of being. The videos you continually watch on Tiktok, the posts on Instagram, the themes you keep coming back to, the books you look at through the window, your favourite influencers, the person you can’t stop looking at on the tube, the colleague you’re envious of, they are your key, the answer is there, you are leaving yourself clues to what it is you want or what you feel is missing. What really fucking pisses you off is often because it’s what you know you lack or what you desire.
So step back and have a little look, you might find yourself there.
A little bit of chocolate every day makes life worth living
Amidst the current day Ozempic epidemic and everyone becoming deathly skinny again like it’s the early 2000s but weirdly all pretending they’re not (?!) it is more important THAN EVER to make sure you’re not starving yourself of something sweet and delicious and life affirming every day. Your life could fucking end tomorrow you know that don’t you? Life is to be LIVED and loved and enjoyed and it’s absolute chaos out there right now DO NOT deny yourself pleasure. We should all be seeking pleasure out every day and if that comes in the form of 4 squares of dairy milk at the end of the day then HAVE IT. And if you’re uncomfortable accessing pleasure then babes please take the self restraints off for the love of god it is not the 1800s and we are not mormons! It won’t derail your diet, it doesn’t make you a piece of shit, it doesn’t mean you’re unhealthy.
Eat the chocolate.

Okay let’s leave it there for today babes, I will stop shouting at you about eating chocolate. Please do leave a comment below of any life lessons you’ve learned!

I will see you in the next piece,

lots of love,

J x

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Support my work here

Can I tempt you with another one?

Your choices don’t have to make sense to anyone else

Jasmine Leann — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:25:16 GMT

Hi babes,

I am turning 30 in less than two weeks and honestly - I cannot wait! Every woman I talk to says life gets better in your 30s and I believe it. I am ready to shed this skin of my 20s!

If you haven’t already, you can read the introduction to these pieces about turning 30 here. I would suggest reading it because not only is it great but also because it lays out a little of my background as a 29 year old who is here laying out life lessons and advice. Because what could a 29 year old possibly know about life? To be honest who knows anything about life? After 2 businesses, 6 years of travel, 3 years of corporate, 3 years of living in London, 10 years of therapy and 1 job for a celebrity I feel I have a few things that might be of help in this chaos of living we find ourselves in. I am excited to see what I will have learned by 40 (may the universe let me get there!) for life is a continual process of learning and growing and developing and if you’re not doing any of those things, you’re probably making the lives of those around you miserable lol.

Please, only take what resonates and leave the rest. Not everything I say is going to apply or hit home and that’s fine! We are all living different lives.

Right then babes, let’s begin!

Your choices don’t have to make sense to anyone else.
We’re diving right in here girlies. I think we have all experienced asking a friend or family member “do you think this is a good idea?” on something we have actually already made our mind up about, not getting the response we hoped and then feeling deflated, sad and discouraged. It is human nature to check in with the tribe to see if our peers are on board because it means we’re less likely to be ostracised from the pack. But babes, it is YOUR life. You don’t need permission from anyone but mostly, it doesn’t even have to make sense to anyone else. You are the one getting up every day, living through the paces of the life that has developed from the choices you’ve made. YOU are living it. Not your mother whom you don’t even share a roof with anymore, not your friend who works from home so doesn’t understand being in the office 5 days a week, not your brother who is a boy so doesn’t understand what it’s like to live as a woman.
And there may be times in life you want to leave that job, or move flat, or let go of friendships or get your haircut in a new way and someone will say “what are you doing that for?” or “I dunno I don’t think that’s a good idea…” and well, THAT’S FINE. They can think that all they like, it doesn’t have to make sense to them for you to live your life the way you want.
You don’t need permission to make the choices you know in your gut are correct. You see the vision. You see the plan. And even if you don’t have a plan, you’re trusting your instincts and that is all your need because when you open your plans up to others, they might project their own fears onto you and that doesn’t help anyone. People think you’re mad at first but a genius when it’s successful! Funny that.
So, make your decisions, quietly, and trust yourself.

Stop, breathe and let one thing end before another begins.

Stop dragging your stress from one moment to the other like a wet rag collecting dust. We feel more frazzled than ever, we say time is flying by and “where are the days going?!” and yet we are slipping and sliding from one moment to the next, distracted, on our phones and apple watches and scrolling and facetiming and starting dinner before we’ve even taken our shoes off whilst Netflix is already playing in the background. There is no clear cut. We are bringing the stress from moment 1 of our day into moment 3 and 5 and 7 and now it’s moment 9 and we’re frazzled and snappy and stressed. We are not allowing one element of our day to end before another begins and this is how life is passing in an overwhelmed blur.

Once upon a time our newspapers were on 24 hour cycles, our work only existed in the office, our communication was only via calls or text (no whatsapp and insta and tiktok and facetime and linkedin and imessage and facebook and and and and). When you finished work you left and went home and that was done for the day; you sat on the train - not scrolling - and could wind down and acknowledge work was finished. One thing ended, before another began. Now, we get on the tube and begin the infinite scroll, or watching Netflix or still replying to emails, getting Teams notifications from those still in the office. We’re not giving ourselves a moment to acknowledge that one part of our day has ended so we can transition into the next.

When meta introduced ‘infinite scroll’ and netflix introduced ‘autoplay’, it changed our sense of time forever. Everything exists all the time everywhere 24/7. I wrote about this in my piece on how the internet used to have a destination, whereas now it exists with us everywhere all the time - in bed, on the bus, on our watch, attached to our fridges if we want it to.

But we do have control over this. When you get home from work at night, before you eat, before you drive, when you get in the shower, when you arrive at work in the morning, before you sit down and start replying to all your messages from the day, just pause and take a breath (or several ideally). Acknowledge that once you’re at your desk the commute is over and yes it was hot and stuffy and that dude’s smelly armpit was in your face but now, you’re here, you’re at your desk, you have your coffee and that it is over. The deep breath helps us acknowledge that dinner is ready and the chaos of cooking is done and we can just sit and enjoy our meal and calm down and everything is fine and we are not at work now and it’s okay to relax. We often feel like we have NO TIME AND OMG I’M SO BUSY AND TIME MOVES SO FAST. It actually doesn’t, if you stop, and breathe. Encourage your kids to take a deep breath before they eat dinner.

I promise you this creates so much space in your life. It makes life seem calmer, it gives us a buffer and lets us decide how we want to move into the next moment, it allows us to decide who we want to be in each moment instead of being on automode. Creating this sense of calm is hard when so much of society thrives on stress, that being ‘busy’ is a social currency, that society hates to see a relaxed woman but honestly? Who cares. I don’t subscribe to the ‘stress’ simply because.. I choose not to! I spent a lot of my mid 20s playing the “very stressed busy important gal” and all it did was burn me out. Our grandparents were on to something sitting down to enjoying a cup of tea and they are right…it’s these damn phones!

Nivea Creme is the best moisturiser you will find for under £10 - or ever to be honest.
It is so cheap, you get SO much in the tin, it lasts forever and has a close ingredient and benefit profile to the £2,155 La Mer moisturiser. It is so moisturising, not greasy, you don’t need to put on loads, it leaves you feeling dewy and fresh and make up applies perfectly on top.
Expensive is not always best! Nivea Creme forever and always.
Okay girlies I will stop us there for today, I had originally planned to do 5 in this post but I do like to yap lol.
Please leave a comment with any life lessons you wish to share below, I would love to hear them. And remember it is a privilege to age!
See you in the next post,
J x
Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.
I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:
The Sunday Dispatch is an invitation to spend time offline, to slow down. A chance to enrich, discover and educate, neatly packaged and delivered to your doorstep once a month. For you, I have created the ‘good/newspaper’, it includes book reccomendations, poems, CD recommendations, an article highlight of fellow substackers, positive news stories, untranslatable words from around the world, journal prompts, an article of my own writing, postcard, stickers, a specially curated playlist that follows a theme and more! You can sign up here.
Buy Me A Coffee / Donation:
I will always keep my writing and videos free from paywalls. I am a girls girl, but it does take time to produce the work you enjoy. If you enjoy what I create and want to show your support for my work (and hopefully my exit from the corporate world finally!) please consider buying me a coffee or donation below, thank you!
Support my work here
Can I tempt you with another one?

I can't wait for my 20s to be over

Jasmine Leann — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:30:01 GMT

Hello my loves,

I am turning 30 in a mere matter of days and honestly, I cannot wait. I have tried to write a piece called “the unbearable weight of the end of your 20s” multiple times but I’m having a bit of writers block around it. All I know is, I’m ready to shed this skin of my 20s, especially considering the middle years of 25/26/27 are a blur due to the pandemic and now suddenly I am in my last days of 29.

The life I had built in my early 20s got whipped away from me in a matter of weeks (much like everyone’s life during 2020) and I have frantically scrambled to find my path ever since. Have I found my path yet? I don’t know. I had outgrown that early 20s life (travelling, backpacking, working in hospitality), yet I can’t say I settled into the life I tried to build of my middle 20s either as a world changing unprecedented event was unfolding (I built a photography business and started a clothing brand for several years), and then in my late 20s I have done more scrambling amongst 3 flat moves and 3 job changes in London (the corporate hellscape, recovering from self-employed burnout, toxic flatmates and health issues) and after all that, I’m still figuring it out.

So now I’m here, at 29, fed up of the corporate world, trying to build an income to be self-employed but to not burn out again, desperate to travel again but not in the way I did before, keep my roots in London but not in an 9-5 misery way; I’m trying to keep all of my fav bits of my 20s whilst leaving behind what I have learnt doesn’t serve me.

I think the stereotype is to have a meltdown about turning 30 and that it’s “old” but I don’t align with this at all. Firstly, it is a privilege to age, sadly many do not get the chance, and I am grateful for every day I get on this earth. Secondly, Women seem to blossom in their 30s. Every Woman I speak to says “life gets better in your 30s” and I really believe it.

Your boundaries are firmer, the people pleasing diminishes as you realise people are never pleased anyway so you might as well do what you want, you realise people are only ever projecting their own issues onto you so it’s never personal, they just need to sort their own shit out. You learn that really everyone is just a scared child acting from a place of fear - fear of not being heard, fear of looking silly, fear of being left out, fear of not being good enough. You learn that your body shape actually looks better in mid length skirts than jeans, that getting laser is the best money ever spent even if it feels like the appointments never stop, that coffee on an empty stomach is never a good idea no matter how tempting. You realise that one friend actually hated you all along and that that boyfriend also secretly hated you and was jealous of your light. You learn that a few deep breathes go a long way, that when the darkness creeps in in your head a shower and hair wash does wonders to bring the light back, that it is always a good idea to tell someone on the street that you like their outfit/hair/makeup, it will make their day and yours too. You learn that looking put together makes you feel better, that often you’re not depressed you just haven’t seen the sun in a while, you learn never to trust people who hate cats and that you are not in trouble, no is going to tell you off or have a go at you, you’re a grown up now. You learn that a Dyson airwrap was never worth the money and you should stick to defusing your hair, that a little bit of chocolate every day makes life worth living, you learn that it is not a crime to grow and change and that no matter how painful, you need to leave behind those that will not grow with you. You learn there’s no point being a snob about ‘real books’, you love a kindle and a hardback for their own reasons, you learn that life exists in the grey areas, and that everyone is living for the first time, and you’ll only ever be as young as you are today, so move with love and fun and joy and remember that no matter how bad it gets your coffee will always taste good again and the music will sounds so good and you’ll hear your loved ones laugh and remember that life is for living and you’re glad to be getting older and you learn, what a privilege it is to be alive.

So with all that laid out before you, I shall follow up with my first 10 lessons in another post, I’ll see you there.

J x

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Support my work here

the internet says boobs are back, but mine ruin my life

Jasmine Leann — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:05:26 GMT

*Dear reader, I talk about having an ED in this piece, only a little bit but I wanted to give you a warning incase you may need it. all my love x

I grew my boobs early, like, really early. I have a vivid memory of being in primary school and wearing my first “bra”, a sort of cotton crop top and it had ridden up. A classmate of mine was laughing at me because they could see it under my school shirt. I think that was the first time I had ever covered my boobs to hide, and I don’t think I have ever stopped hiding since.

The first thing people respond with when I say “I hate my boobs” is:

“People pay good money to have big boobs y’know!!” and to be honest I want to scream in their face or just slap them really fucking hard.

Yeah, well I DIDN’T pay for them Susan and I DIDN’T WANT TO.

I can’t remember life without this barrier, and it is a barrier. It is the elephant in every room I am in and I cannot out chase it. No amount of self-love and “body neutrality” will change how I feel about them.

I hate having big boobs with every cell of my being.

Visibly invisible

Getting boobs early in secondary school cursed me to “no man’s land”. I was both extremely visible and invisible at the same time. The boys in my school obsessively talked about them, stared at them, they aimed for a grope at house parties whilst everyone was extremely drunk and I was not (I grew up with older siblings in an alcohol friendly house so by the time I was 15 there was no novelty to be had around drinking. I also don’t enjoy the feeling of being drunk).

But a grope was all they were aiming for as I was also “chubby” and therefore deemed unattractive by 99.99% of my school year. No one had any interest in dating me or ‘having a crush on me’ yet I was always the first one aimed for physical attention once the Smirnoff ices were flowing. These were my first lessons in how men see women as objects and objects only. Objects for their own pleasure, their one-sided missions.

My one physical asset, that I cannot control, was deemed my only worthy point of interest. A shame really considering I’m incredibly witty with a great taste in music, but boys don’t like it when girls are cooler than them! (Which is most of the time btw. Also, I use the term chubby lightly here as even though I was bullied for being fat, when I recently looked back at old photos I saw a healthy child. (I talk about it in this piece.)

The girls were equally as hands on, I remember going through a phase around year 9 where people kept asking me if they could touch them. Yes, you read that right. In p.e changing rooms, in form rooms before the day started at those dreaded house parties. People wanted to feel my boobs like I was a circus act with an enormous growth, that if they didn’t ask me now they might never touch boobs again. I felt hideous, embarrassed, violated, lampooned and completely unsexy, which is odd considering they are deemed a sexual item.

On various school trips my bra would end up on someone’s head. I would dread if there was ever a swimming excursion on a school trip as I knew all the attention would be on my boobs. During P.E I would hide in the showers to change into my sports bra whilst everyone else remained outside chatting able to just slip on their polo, at sleepovers I would keep my bra on until the last moment and slip it off once everyone else had gone to sleep, getting up early to put it back on before everyone woke up, my own secret schedule. I am both too visible and invisible.

one of many instances on school strips my bra would end up as the entertainment

It is an odd place to exist in this chasm when you’re a developing teenager. I was too fat to be one of the cool girls, too big chested to buy clothes in my age range, too chubby for anyone to have a crush on me, chest too big to casually run around the school field on lunch break, too adult a body for high school but too young for the real world. Both extremely visible and wholly ignored at the same time.

I spent a lot of my GCSE period studying from home due to complications with appendicitis and I was in a long recovery. It was bliss, honestly. Painful yes, but sweet relief. I thrived not being in the school environment, my grades shot up, I resat a lot of my exams from the previous year to improve my grades and I loved being at home; partly because I was bullied at secondary school and this was a way to avoid that and I can’t deny that part of this was also due to being to able to hide my body, to not have to be in school in uniform every day, to not have to feel out of place as the chubby big chested caricature next to all the skinny cool girls.

I left school as soon as I could, I went to college at 16 to do musical theatre, despite getting great academic grades and the anxiety of those around me for choosing the arts. The college I went to was also a university. Suddenly, I was around people who looked like me, acted like me and didn’t care about my chest (…as much lol).

During this time, I developed an ED and became dangerously thin but my boobs still remained, only to a small degree but, they were there. My heart recently cracked in two when a friend of mine saw these ED photos of me and said “your boobs are still big even at that skinny!! they’re still out of proportion to your body!” and I wanted to curl up in a ball and die. Because they don’t, they actually look small for once and I was also not far from having a heart attack during that time because my body was so under nourished and under stress in my desperate need to take up less space. All I ever wanted was to take up less space. All that suffering, all that hunger, all that pain and yet still, my boobs were the first thing mentioned, the word “big” thrown around like it doesn’t cut me a thousand times over with every mention.

I recovered from my ED over the next 10 years (as much as one can, I don’t think an ED ever leaves you) and with that my boobs have slowly increased in size to become unmanageable again.

I am turning 30 in a matter of weeks, and I am trying to lose weight not only because I want to but because I want breast reduction surgery.

The last few years have been one of extreme growth, change, challenge and high stress. This high stress and a diagnosis of SIBO means I have gained a lot of weight and subsequently still hate my body, mostly because my boobs have gotten a lot bigger and it makes the day to day existence in my skin unbearable. I have worked through A LOT of body positivity and body neutrality - I wrote a piece about the internal struggle of wanting to exist in a different body - and there comes a point where you just have to accept you feel the way you feel.

I find a lot of modern day self help and mindset teachings are about convincing yourself to feel something different than you actually do, that your thoughts and feelings are not real, you just feel like shit because you just haven’t mastered them yet (you idiot), and I do believe this to a degree. I believe you can manifest anything you want by being delusional enough and changing the thoughts you repeat to yourself on a daily basis but that being said, sometimes we can’t ‘out self help’ how we feel deep down.

This is something I had to come to terms with in deciding to lose weight again, that there is no more self love to generate, no more body neutrality to find, no more inner work to be done - I just wanted to lose weight and that’s fine and I need to stop gaslighting myself into thinking I will ever believe something different. THIS IS HOW I FEEL and maybe it’s not that deep.

The same goes for my boobs, no amount of inner self healing, self love, stepping into my feminine, my divine is going to outdo how I feel about them and what my lived experience is moving through the world day by day - it’s fucking hard work.

Bras are expensive and I have to get fitted every time, do I have double boob going on? this shirt doesn’t fit and the button is stretched, this is now 3 sizes too big just to fit my chest, now I look like a tent from the side or like I’m hiding a forbidden pregnancy, stop glancing at my boobs I can see you, this is too low cut and now I look over sexual, actually it’s not sexual I just have boobs, stop fucking staring at my boobs Micheal I’m trying to talk to you about the meeting tomorrow, these pyjamas are cute! oh wait, my boobs are sagging too low for the cute pj vest top, these pjs would look better if my boobs were up here, burn the bra! peek the nipple! actually no I can’t do that, let’s go for a run but urgh the effort to strap them down in 2 sports bras, my neck aches, why? have I slept funny? Oh yeah, it’s my bra is pulling on my shoulders, seriously please stop staring at them, “your boobs are massive!” yes I know babes thanks for mentioning it, “oh baby whats that red mark on your skin?” don’t worry darling it’s just where I’ve had my bra on all day, “it looks like it hurts?” it does, my love, it does.

And so, I hate my boobs and I always will.

And on the other side of 30 I will get a breast reduction and feel the freedom that awaits me, to meet who I can be when I don’t have a barrier between me and the world, when I don’t have something keeping me low to the ground, heavy, static and frigid, when I can jump and dance to my favourite song, to dance, to dance to dance and to feel free,

to finally feel free.

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The Sunday Dispatch - Your Weekly Good/Newspaper

Jasmine Leann — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:06:42 GMT

Welcome to the third issue of The Sunday Dispatch (and welcome to 2026!!) Your weekend newspaper delivery filled with a look back of the week just gone. Books read, food eaten, Substack essays enjoyed, words inspired. An encouragement to enjoy all things offline (whilst ironically delivering to you online, I know I know).

So, let’s begin.

It’s been a few weeks (cough cough months) since I’ve delivered The Sunday Dispatch on your doorstep dear reader and my deepest apologies. A while ago I came to the realisation I was burnt out. I looked around at the never ending mess of my room, my lack of energy to do the things that are good for me (and I enjoy), the constant state of tired and wired and I thought something isn’t right. First I recognised the signs as depression but I thought.. I’m not depressed, for once lol.

Part of the journey to recovering from burn out is first admitting you’re burned out. I put an immediate stop on everything in life that wasn’t the bare basics, removing the pressure and expectations from anything that wasn’t recovering. I looked at my never ending stream of whatsapps that need replying to and said love you all, chat in a few weeks, made zero plans and I mean ZERO, my wonderful Mum came up to London and spent a whole day with me getting my environment straight again. Tidy space tidy mind after all. It’s been a period of change, one that has me recovering from being in fight/flight everyday and leaving a toxic environment behind, that takes processing and rest, gentle soul rest. I didn’t realise just how much of my confidence had been stripped from me, and slowly gaining that back also comes with it’s own set of emotions. So I took a few weeks to sit, process, rest, let things catch up and settle into place.

But, I am slowly reappearing again, so let’s begin.

Welcome to 2026

I don’t know about you but I feel there is something spicy in the air for 2026. I don’t normally subscribe to ‘new year new me’, often shouting from the rooftops instead that the real new year is the Spring Equinox in March BUT I’m feeling a crackle in my blood, a spring in my step, a zing in the air. I think everyone was collectively glad to leave 2025 behind and I have decided to stop waiting for my life to begin (as one of my all time favourite songs goes) and get back out there in the juice of life. I don’t want to just go to work and then come home and hide in my room. I want to be OUT THERE in the world.

1000 no’s

This week I saw 2 videos online that have changed the way I want to approach this year. The first is from Gabriella Carr - she posted how she is trying to get 1000 rejections, 1000 nos. She has put herself out there: applying for a dual passport & got accepted, she auditioned for a play & performed 11 shows, she reached out to a bunch of brands and received multiple deals. Hell, she even made the tiktok about it that got 2.5 million views!

And the second is Ankita Tejwani who is working with a high performance coach who set her the homework to try and get 5 rejections a week - which makes a successful week!

This is about audacity calibration, reducing our sensitivity and for being brave enough to ask for what we want. We recieve 100% of the things we don’t ask for or something like that lol - basically you don’t ask you don’t get. Open mouths get fed the most and I thought yeah, I have been tucked behind my desk at my corporate job with my mouth shut climbing the walls that things aren’t happening for me… well have I asked for them? Have I tried? Or am I expecting someone to burst through my office door and rescue me like a knight in shining oppournity based armour.

Books -

Throne Of Glass. Fucking Throne Of Glass. Excuse my swearing so early on but these bloody books nearly killed me, and I am glad they are over. I have mixed feelings in all honesty, I respect the story arch of the characters and the confidence in which Sarah J Maas has to hold a character through such extreme change. She is not afraid to go deep and wide in storylines and character development but I was exhausted. I did the Tandem read and thank god I have a kindle. I read book 6 and 7, both hundreds of pages long, at the same time. You download the reading order and switch between the two books ticking off the chapters on a list. But honestly by the 8th book I was crawling on my hands and knees screaming “release me from these shackles.” I couldn’t google what happened, I HAD to finish it as I had invested so much time and she often writes so many surprises into her storyline I didn’t want to miss how they got there. I do think they were great overall, but maybe I don’t have the stamina like some of those booktok girlies.

I am an ACOTAR girly to my core, maybe because I’m a hopeless romantic.

I shall be waiting a little while before I pick up Crescent City.

My Christmas Read

Okay so as you can see the first draft of this was written before christmas lol so take this as something to read for 2026 christmas (we all know how fast time flies).

As sweet sweet relief from 900 pages of war and faeries I have picked up another one of the Dream Harbour books as my Christmas (re)Read. It’s quite amusing the tone shift, it feels like going from LOTR to a childrens picture book but for that I am grateful. I have spoken of the Dream Harbour series before and they are silly, light, hallmark movies in book form and it’s just what I need. It’s Christmas!! I am busy enough, I need something fluffly. Also I LOVE the book cover, it feels like carrying a christmas decoration with me. Sometimes life is not that serious and neither should the books we are reading be.

Back To Analog

I’m seeing a renaissance online; with the horrors of AI persisting and people realising they want more from their life than to spend 20 hours a day looking at various sized screens a new trend has emerged to bring back Analog. I’m seeing posts and videos about going back to DVD and even VHS! Moving away from streaming services and owning our media again. Getting library cards, buying CD’s and using paper planners again. I am very very much here for it! My only worry is we have enough items on the planet already, everything you’re after already exists and I don’t want the analog trend to by proxy just overproduce more stuff that isn’t recyclable and damages the earth (much like AI which is extremely damaging for both the environment and our brains).

I wrote a piece similar to this topic called:

The piece is about giving the internet a destination again, like when we used to have a computer in the corner of a room. You’d go to it, use it and then step away. It had boundaries. Whereas now the internet / social media is in bed with you, it’s on the toilet whilst you take a shit (gross and confronting but true, wtf are we doing?!), it’s in your hand when you should be enjoying your food or talking to your partner, it’s on the bus when you should be letting yourself think, it’s everywhere.

And in my own move to be more analog and not just scroll Substack notes and actually read peoples full posts I have begun printing them out! (and before anyone mentions it yes I will recycle the paper)

Why are so many films shit?

A piece of writing I enjoyed recently touches on 1. sometimes being pissed off (which we should allow ourselves to feel more) and 2. why so many films and tv pieces are so shit compared to what they used to be and it comes down to shit writing and shit dialogue.

angel cake

hey so, nobody talks like that

i decided to walk over to my bodega after having an unremarkably bad day. i tend to do this on days like this and tell myself, “MONEY IS NO OBJECT!” as though i am a newly adopted orphan into a generationally wealthy family. i crashed through the door and walked over to the expensive little bullshit beverage section and picked out 1 fresca, 1 diet coke…

a year ago · 2412 likes · 99 comments · emily north

Okay my loves, I think that is all the catching up I have to do this week! It’s good to be back!

Have a wonderful week and remember life is yours for the taking!

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

Support the newspaper here

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I don't need more body positivity, I want to lose weight.

Jasmine Leann — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:49:49 GMT

Please note: this is my own lived experience, I write personal essays I am talking about my own body & mine alone. I am trying to be honest and much of my experience is hypocritical, that is kinda the point of the essay and the human experience as a whole. Trigger warning - this piece talks about eating disorders, please do not read on if you feel this will do you harm.

I don’t know if there’s ever been a time in my life where I wasn’t thinking about losing weight. I genuinely mean that statement too, I viscerally remember watching Disney Channel, yes DISNEY CHANNEL and sucking in and holding my stomach during the ad breaks because somewhere amongst the magazines and diet culture inherited from the women around me I was taught that this was a quick way to tone up my stomach, to clench it tight for the ad breaks…on Disney Channel. The seeds were sown early on that it is not safe in my body. That every moment is a chance for punishment for the body I’m in or to partake in the never-ending work to change it (or further punishment for not doing so).

This seemed the only goal of the women around me, the only topic of conversation amongst my mum and her friends, tv adverts showed me the 2 week Kellog diet, my sister doing the army diet, my aunt doing the cabbage soup diet, there wasn’t a woman I didn’t know who wasn’t always aspiring to be thinner, whatever it takes.

For I was taught one could always lose a few pounds, even at 9 years old it seems.

I think back to my sweet soft little child self, and I wish I could get on my knees and give her a hug, stroke her hair and tell her she is enough. As I write this, I wonder if I would actually have the strength to look her in the eyes and say that, for I would be saying it to myself after all, which means I would have to somewhat believe it, and
do I?

Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been about losing weight, becoming smaller. And then alternatively fighting against that thinking. If 50% of my brain space is spent with body and food noise and then more brain space following up fighting against that, how much of myself is left that isn’t actually thinking about losing weight? (this is how the patriarchy keeps us distracted btw)

This is a tale as old as time, for women.

I have been through hell and back in my body, relationship to food, my body image, and yet still, at 29, here I am, again, working on losing weight. And I feel weird about it, guilty about it, I have so many mixed feelings about it.

Weight loss, fucking weight loss, ever present, ever conflicting in my brain, ever the frustrating hum of my life I can’t seem to tune out from. Because I do still want to lose weight, but now it comes from a place of love, of personal choice. Or does it? Or is it internalised fatphobia and misogyny still playing a part? Is it my eating disorder? Is it diet culture? Am I truly making this decision for myself? I feel embarrassed to still want to lose weight because how unfeminist of me! I should love my body no matter what! Fuck society! But maybe I feel more comfortable when I’m not this big, I prefer my boobs smaller and it’s easier to buy clothes, but actually no! The world should be more accessible! But I do feel more myself when I’m a smaller size, or is that conditioning? Is it that deep? Maybe I just want to feel fitter in the gym? Maybe I need more self-love? Or is self-acceptance? Or is it body positivity? Am I allowed to use that term? Body neutrality? Am I doing it for me, truly? Who cares! If it makes me happy that’s okay! Or am I a modern woman failing against the tides of diet culture, still?! Or maybe I could just stop thinking about it and live! But then maybe I’ll put on more weight? And so, it goes on and on and on.

This is the never-ending quandary. Even when we break free of so much that has controlled us, we are still left wondering if we are making our own decisions or if they’re governed by the nonstop conditioning that has come before us and still exists around us.

And it’s boring. Honestly, it’s so fucking boring but it’s my truth, it’s my past, it’s made me who I am, it’s been my lived experience as it has for many many women. And even though I wish to move on with my life, create new ways of being, I can’t turn my back on all that has come before pretending it didn’t happen. Because it is both behind me and still a part of me, I am not where I was but still it lingers and still,

I want to lose weight.

Who I was, who I am

I have never been small, in physique, in spirit, in personality. I’m the youngest daughter with much older siblings and an Aries. A firecracker as my boyfriend calls me. I have always been full of life despite life sometimes being unquantifiably hard on me.

I have lived a big life thus far and I want an even bigger life for my future, yet I have always always always wanted a smaller body. Seems ironic when I type it out.

I have lived in many different body shapes. As a young child I was cursed with the worst possible condition for a girl in school - according to how every middle-aged Woman around me acted - the dreaded “puppy fat”. Typing that out now I’m like what does that even mean? Where did it come from? Do puppies even have fat? Puppies are cute. If they didn’t have fat they wouldn’t be able to grow. What is the meaning of this ridiculousness?

I just googled it and it’s meant to mean that the state is temporary, for puppies are not puppies forever. Therefore, this state of fatness you find yourself in sweet child is temporary, so don’t panic! We must label it as so or we may all collapse of disgust if we think it will last forever!

Alas, I carried on always being the bigger one throughout my whole school life and growing my boobs frustratingly early. It became all I was known for, equally sexualised and pushed away. Boys obsessed with my big boobs yet too embarrassed to be known to find me attractive for I was also “chubby”. I was pretty, I knew they found me pretty deep down, but I was still always the fat one. It’s interesting for me to type these words now as an almost 30-year-old woman, as last week my boyfriend and I were showing each other pictures of our school times, and the wind was knocked from me. These photos, I look like a child, I am a child, and I am also not as fat as I was bullied to believe. I always felt so big, unable to fit in the space amongst all the cool skinny girls, the flat chested girls I envied so much as they ran freely around the field flirting with boys on lunchbreak as I watched from the sidelines knowing I can’t run without a sports bra strapping me down.

We feel so grown up at school, yet deep down we know we’re not and here I was in both a woman’s and a child’s body, not fitting into either world. Too big for one and too young for another. But from where I stood in the middle one thing felt true, there was just too much of me.

I left school as soon as physically possible, leaving everything and everyone behind.
It is possibly one of the happiest days of my life being free of that high school, whoever said school was the best years of your life were lying. I think only the people who peaked in high school say that.

For I left and did actually ‘peak’ after, free of the chains of all that came before, I flew. I became the girl who left school and got hot. Like in the movies where they remove her glasses and take down her hair and suddenly everyone sees what they didn’t see before. Except I had my braces removed and lost 4 stone. It was true redemption, and I loved every second, I won’t sit here and pretend I didn’t. Seeing everyone else stuck in sixth form at the same school whilst I was at college, shiny grown-up college, 2 towns away and 4 dress sizes smaller, it was sweet sweet redemption.

And so, we move to the next Tale As Old As Time for Women; I took it too far and developed an Eating Disorder.

Dear Reader, I will talk about this subject in plain hard truths, if you feel it may be triggering for you please do not read ahead.

This time was also a vulnerable time in my life as I was surrounded by the grief of losing several significant family members in a short period. One night at a party I got chatting to an old face from school and she quizzed me about my newfound weight loss, kind of incessantly in hindsight. I don’t know how it happened, but we became fast friends, joint at the hip. Well, this is the vanilla version, in truth she was very unwell with an Eating Disorder and the thing with ED’s are they love company and competition. She saw me grieving, now slimmer but with a heavy heart and took me in, showing me her ways; I was sad and impressionable. She wanted an ED buddy, and she made one in me. I thought she was helping me with my goal to lose more weight, showing me things I didn’t know, we were determined together and just healthier than everyone else! That is what I believed at the time and the world rewarded me for it. People were nicer, men were a lot nicer, I got my first boyfriend, could easily buy any clothes off the rack, skinny privilege is real and I was having a great time.

But in the hands of that old friend my healthy natural weight loss developed into unhealthy obsession, I myself became deeply unwell and changed forever. Our every waking moment was about food, losing weight, exercise. Gymming to ‘burn off our breakfast’, spending all day texting about what we might drink on our night out, so we had the least number of calories and I remember on said night out we ordered a pizza and only ate the toppings and cheese, because you know, calories.

Instagram was different then and didn’t have the safety blocks in place like it does now, there were endless pages encouraging ED’s, tips and tricks on how to lose weight, skinnyteas and sweet potato brownies. The vines of my eating disorders slowly spread into every crack of my soul, leaving a path that will never be fully repaired. It seemed everyone knew I was ill apart from me and my family. I had gone from a size 18/20 in school to a size 8, bones physically protruding, I stopped eating carbs, then gluten, then became terrified of alcohol for it was ‘empty calories’, I would stumble into the gym extremely faint from excessive black coffee and lack of food, the hair on my arms grew to keep me warm, my throat would bleed from making myself sick too much, my wrist bruised from the continual snapping of my hairband every time I almost gave in to a hunger craving. But I was happy, I was now skinny! The world got better and better around me because of it and so my suffering seemed a reasonable pay off. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels remember! (this is a fucking lie btw)

The people in my life didn’t intervene because:

1. I had got what I always wanted
2. I had got what they always wanted: to lose weight.

On a random day, as these things often happen on, it all came out, we all admitted I had a problem, and I was shipped off to a clinics out-patients department to get better. This was the start of many years of therapy, having multiple eating disorders are complex and ED’s love attention, especially if it’s “look how sick I am!” because that means you must be skinny, even if your body dysmorphia doesn’t believe it so.

I would like to say here that Eating Disorders exist in every body size. Losing weight can be a side effect but it is a mental illness, not of the body, but the mind.

Slowly, the vines of said Eating Disorder retreated but I will never be the same. It is so sad to think that this relatively short period of my life has changed me forever. I say having an ED is like carrying a backpack full of rocks with me every day, some days it’s heavier than others, sometimes the straps break, and all the rocks come falling out, some days the rocks look like shiny diamonds and it’s tempting. I celebrated my first bulimia free Christmas only 4 years ago, and a small part of me is always scared I will go tumbling down the hill again and the vines will get me before I have a chance to stand up and run.

In the years that followed through my early, mid and now late twenties my weight has fluctuated but in a steady incline. At every stage, like most Women, I look back at old photos where I felt too big too much too large and lament at how “skinny” I was and “didn’t appreciate it at the time.” My body dysmorphia means I have never looked in the mirror and seen my true body reflected back at me, only whenever I look back at photos. It is an odd feeling to actually be the size now that I always felt I was back then.

The feelings I have towards my body always force me to live in the future, like a body on hold, a skinny-ness in waiting. I’m not actually this size don’t worry everyone it’s just temporary! I am just a skinny person wearing a fat suit and if I can just get on top of things it will change. I am not present because I treat myself and my body like I am in a liminal space, waiting to live until the real slimmer version of me turns up. Maybe the puppy fat mentality never really left me. This is touched on in Act 1 of this amazing episode of This American Life called “Tell me I’m fat”. It’s almost 10 years old now but the episode still stands as a great piece.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction

In my mid-twenties, amid the chaos of the pandemic, I went on a Body Positivity rampage. The pendulum of my body issues swung the other way, and I began posting online - pictures of my body, my rolls, I stopped shaving my armpits, posting about my relationship with food on Instagram. I felt the weight of all that had before me as a millenial woman with diet culture and I had survived Kayla Itsines problematic Bikini Body Workout 2014 instagram days and so I shall make it my personal mission to fight against it all! I was in full “stick it to the man fuck the patriarchy” mode and using my weight as the modus operandi. I think in part this was me processing my weight gain, processing being back in the UK during a world changing pandemic with nothing to do but once again, focus on my body. Posting photos and captions informing everyone it was okay if you had *insert body part and said issues society has come up with about it* and “can we just normalise !!!”. I was screaming from the rooftops that it was okay to live in my body, are you listening society? This is okay!!

The only person I was trying to convince, was myself. My weight and my body were still the centre of my life, but now I was standing on the other side of the same door. And existing in this space online can be tough because you are always one post away from saying the wrong thing, using the wrong phrase, ironically these spaces online that are about acceptance and breaking problematic norms can actually have the harshest keyboard warriors in.

Despite that, I think this kind of “self-acceptance” content online can be helpful for those who need it, we can’t be what we can’t see and representation is SO important - I balled my eyes out when there was an almost main character with hearing aids in the last season of Sex Education - but it also sits on my mind that maybe we’re keeping some it alive by still continuously and constantly talking about it? The whole “let’s normalise!!” movement I think can stop us being able to get on with life and actually normalise these things? The best way to normalise things is to… act normal? Not mention it all the time? I dunno.

It makes me think of the speech in the Barbie movie as for me, a half millennial half gen z, it felt a little obvious and trite but still a great moment in the movie, and then I read about a girl who felt the same until her mum asked her to find the speech and print it off for her, because she’d never heard a woman say things like that and it moved her so much. These things are obvious to those who hear it all the time, but someone out there will need it.

It is also life changing when we choose to follow people who look like us online. Again, we can’t be what we can’t see. There are many incredible fat and midsize creators out there yet unfortunately the mainstream Body Positivity movement is fading away as the Ozempic Boom increases. People we once looked to as body role models are now dropping weight faster than the speed of light. Which is absolutely their right to if they want to because it’s their body and I have also wanted to lose weight my whole life and they are entitled to do what they want, but it’s confusing out there - so, I don’t really have the answer on that one.

Anyway, in my pursuit of rejecting all the self-body hating and expectations of me as a young attractive woman and getting swept up in this online community I actually went the other way. I stopped looking after myself and taking pride in myself. My big “fuck you” to societal expectations and the patriarchy was to stop putting effort into anything relating to my body all together because there are more important things to life than that!! I was a smart feminist modern woman!! I would not be distracted by such things!! and the result? I actually felt like shit. This had a knock-on effect on my life, as I felt my appearance and confidence deteriorating my attitude and engagement
in life deteriorated too.

Great, so I’m still unhappy with my body and my weight but now I look and feel like shit too. Wonderful!!!

As I crested the hill over my mid-twenties and started moving closer to 30, I realised I did want to start taking pride in myself, for myself. I wanted to learn new hair styles, I didn’t want to wait until my body changed to start dressing how I wanted, put the effort into my makeup, actually learn how to do make up, I wanted to be girly, get in touch with my feminine side regardless of my body size. I feel like I went through a second puberty, or to be honest a first puberty. I didn’t really have all the angst, growing pains, self-exploration and crushing on boys like everyone else did in my teenage years. I grew up in a house full of adults, so I was 12 and then I was a grown up, I just kind of arrived and stayed there.

Whereas now I was entering a period of self-exploration, of self-allowance. Allowing myself to stop stomping around in defensiveness and self-rejection lead anger at the world and instead leaned into my softer side, my girly side, to allow myself to feel girly, in body and energy. I realised I had kept ‘girly’ at arm’s length for a few reasons:

1. I felt to be taken seriously as a young woman in business and also existing primarily in my feminine rage (which I believe is a good thing and still carry with me today) I ended up acting like a man. I didn’t feel I could be a feminist and be ‘girly’. I would never be taken seriously. For years strong women in the media have been depicted in power suits with ball busting attitudes, which I love, but I was
taught that was the only way to be taken seriously. Not too sexualised and definitely not in pink. The post Barbie Movie world is different, women are reclaiming pink, girliness, that we can be taken seriously whilst still loving lip gloss and cute outfits. There is strength in our soft edges. But this was not the representation I had growing up.
2. I felt too big and too busty to be girly, I was too clunky. That cute girliness was not for people like me, it was reserved for the skinny girls, as was shown to me everywhere growing up, the girly girl was always as thin as a tissue, light and small and dainty. Anyone my size on TV or in books was often the villain, the loser, the one left out, the who had to change, or they were just the one dimensional overly sexualised booby curvy one. I felt that girliness only existed for when my body was small enough for it. Once again living in that state of pause because of my body.

In deciding to look after myself again and focus on my appearance I felt guilty, kind of weird about it, like I was being a bad feminist maybe? Going against everything I was posting online. if I accepted and loved myself so much, why did I want to do all this stuff? The very act of putting effort towards it feels like a crime against oneself. (and that maybe the folks online were going to come for me). That I was once again falling into the grips of diet culture and societal expectations, and it took a while for me unpick the fact that I wanted to do it for me. Not for anyone else but for the fact that it just made me feel better and more myself and that should be enough. I liked wearing makeup, feeling good in my clothes, dressing up nice regardless of the time or place. That I deserved all these things at any body size. I wanted to become a classy woman, and I did so, but it took a lot of small steps to get there.

I believe in the phrase ‘how you do anything is how you do everything’ and I am a visual person, so for me swapping out my coffee stained baggy t shirt that was hiding my body because I didn’t feel I deserved to look nice for a beautiful matching pair of PJ’s did actually make me feel good in myself, made me feel like ‘that girl’ as the internet says and that had a knock on effect on my life. My big body is deserving of all these things. As I mentioned earlier, when I stopped putting effort into my appearance it had a knock-on effect on my life, the same happened but in a positive way when I started to again. Which made me feel weird.

It’s a bit like shaving your armpits. We start doing it way too young because society and the patriarchy tell us it’s disgusting and unhygienic, every woman on TV looks like a naked mole rat, thus so must I at 13. Then, if like me, you go through a phase of rebellion against it all you stop shaving your armpits - fuck men and what they think! I’m free! I’m not doing it for them anymore!

And then eventually (not everyone though, good for you gals who stick to it) you realise you prefer shaving your armpits, you actually feel cleaner without the hair there so start shaving again, this time for yourself. Or you pay to get laser, so you never have to think about it again. It’s still shaving your armpits, but now you’re doing it because you want to do it, not because someone else is telling you to.

I move through my late 20’s on this second puberty, the outside affecting the inside which then affects the outside reality. I became my version of ‘that girl’ (there’s that term again), I wear red lipstick every day and heels almost every day, because I want to, because it makes me feel badass and gives me confidence, existing in a body bigger than I had been in years but was slowly starting to feel more confident than ever.

I am art

Earlier this year I actually started Life Modelling. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, sounds hypocritical doesn’t it considering I’ve just spent 3000 words slagging my body off. But this whole piece is hypocritical because that’s the human experience. But I went, I stripped off, and I laid there, butt naked. And I felt great.

It was life changing. This body of mine was art, because I decided it so. It was just a piece of art for people to draw, not sexualised, not demonised, just art. They could have put a vase of flowers in the centre or my body, and the experience would have been the same - draw this how you wish and turn it into an art piece, no opinions, no judgement, just creation.

As I walked around in the break looking at what people had created, I saw myself in a new light. A friend had said to me the year before “you have a body like an ancient statue, like a Greek statue” and looking at these sketches, I finally saw it. I was actually grateful to have this body because it made interesting art, the students said how interesting it was to draw my body and I finally thought, thank goodness for these curves!! Thank God I have all this juiciness.

When I first started doing it all the poses I did were self complimentary, long lines and feminine like a renaissance painting - and then I started to learn through the guidance of an amazing teacher (hi calvin) that this wasn’t about me, it was about the students, it was about creating negative space with my body, challenging the artists infront of me with my limbs and hands in new positions, not the obvious positions. I don’t stand gracefully, with the perfect thigh gap and hand on my hip, posing like I have all of tiktoks eyes on me. I just stand, feet pointed at different angles, foot up on a block, hand holding a stick, I am a human form and that’s that.

I have loved doing it, it truly takes you out of yourself, honestly. It makes you get over yourself so quickly. These are art students who want to get on with their drawing and have paid to be there, they don’t care what you look like or what size you are, there isn’t time or space for shyness or insecurity. Just strip off and get on with its babes, it’s just a body. Everyone in the room is aware we are not 8 years old giggling at the word boobies; we are all grown up serious artistes who are above such lowly behaviour as body judging!

I finally saw my body as something to be marvelled at and appreciated.

Ozempic knocked at my door

And then I lost my health. Which changed everything, again.

I developed extreme digestive issues that took a long time to get diagnosed. I rapidly gained weight and ballooned out in inflammation; every meal I ate it led me to become so swollen I felt my skin was going to rip. This body I had put through hell on my own doing was now putting me through hell back against my will and I was so mad at it.

I had betrayed my body in so many ways over the years and now I was angry it was betraying me back. I was also, once again, in a state of pause because this wasn’t actual my body everyone, I’m just sick! Several A&E visits and many many tests across many months and I was finally diagnosed with SIBO.

I am still on the path to healing, and it is something I will have to manage my whole
life. It is so hard to speak to your body nicely when it looks like you’re 29 months pregnant just for eating lunch. It bought up so much from my ED. I was still looking in the mirror and not recognising myself, partly because of body dysmorphia and partly because I was now sick.

I was unable to work out for so long because SIBO causes malabsorption of nutrients meaning I was deeply fatigued and under nourished yet had gained a lot of weight. Confusing. I was having to avoid gluten and dairy and sugar and then LOW FODMAP and every food felt like an enemy. I was restricting but not losing weight because of it. What a clusterfuck eh.

And to top it all off, my gastroenterologist was fatphobic. Amidst all my suffering, my
stomach pain, my fear of literally any food making me ill she focused mainly on my weight gain. From the first appointment she was recommending Ozempic to help with the weight gain as she was on it herself and apparently “it was life changing.” We chatted about my history of ED’s, and I said I wasn’t sure and that I only wanted to find out what was wrong with me first and heal. I also pointed out the most common side effect of weight loss drugs is…stomach issues and I’m here with…stomach issues. It didn’t feel like ethical medical practice.

I left the first appointment and cried on the side of the road to my mum, as I had gone there to finally get my digestive issues resolved and not only could she not see past my weight, but I was posed with a choice I didn’t ask for. All my life I had wanted a pill to make me lose weight and suddenly I was being offered it, in the form of injections and I found I didn’t want it. I was so confused and so angry and so sad. I thought I must be seriously obese if she’s offering this to me, even though I knew I wasn’t. I was thrusted into the mental gymnastics of a circus I didn’t want to take part in. I didn’t want to have the medical and moral quandary of Ozempic injections, I just wanted to not be sick anymore.

All this previous life I had lived, all this self-hatred about my weight, all the physical and mental suffering my ED had put me through, all the rejection of diet culture and loss of confidence, all the small steps I had taken to finally build my confidence back up, a lifetime of being desperate to lose weight suddenly compounded and was thrown in my face as I was offered the “magical drug” and I said…no.

I said no. I said I didn’t want it.

I was offered everything I’ve ever wanted on a plate and yet now, it wasn’t the most important thing in my life anymore.

To be clear, I do not think weight loss injections are a good thing for the everyday person and I truly believe the long-term effects will be catastrophic. The short-term side affects people are ending up in hospital with are awful and we don’t know what the long-term side effects are yet. I may have hated my body all my life, but not THAT much to risk it, and that was a huge revelation.

It has been a turning point in the relationship with myself and my body, to say no to Ozempic. It made me realise once upon a time I did damage my body to lose weight but that I had been through enough all these years, that my body is just trying to keep me alive, she is tired, society can go fuck itself and my body is not so much of a crime that it needs to be stabbed in the leg with needles every week just so I can barely finish my dinner and be skinny.

No,
absolutely not.

So, this leads me to where I am now. Healing from SIBO, finally, it’s slow progress but I’m getting there and the result of that? I am losing weight naturally as well as putting some time into hitting the gym again and I feel great for it. I am just about to turn 30 and the 30+ glow up is a real thing. My body feels like it is entering a new phase of life but that might also just be getting older and finding yourself.

And I can’t lie, it feels good to lose weight again. The internet police may come for me all they like but I am just being honest. And I feel weird about it again, a massive hypocrite. It’s like the piece I wrote about being embarrassed to be in a relationship, that I am still one of the girlies who hates men and thinks women should run the world but here I am dating a man and drunk in love. Can I still be one of the girlies and a strong independent woman if I’ve got a man? I wrote it before that Vogue article btw.

Can I want to lose weight in a nontoxic non diet culture way?

I suppose the main difference is now I appreciate my body from where I’m standing, I’m no longer in a state of pause, I am grateful she has kept me alive, I actually do like having curves now, I feel girly and “womanly” whatever that phrases means, I know how to dress so as to feel good and confident in myself.

And part of that “self-love” is realising I don’t actually need more self-love, I do just want to lose weight. That’s it. It’s just that. I just prefer existing in a smaller body than the one I am in now and that is not a crime. I am not falling for diet culture, I am not taking Ozempic, I am not “body positive” so much that I ignore how I actually prefer
existing. I like being fit in the gym, I like exercising because it’s fun, it makes me feel amazing and massively helps my mental health, it also helps my SIBO and gut motility to exercise, it means I have a lower risk of breaking a bone if I fall over, it’s easier for me to have smaller boobs, it’s easier to move through life, I find stretching and yoga easier when I’m slimmer and that is okay to admit. I no longer workout from a place of
punishment.

I think we as millennial women have been through so much suffering at the hands of diet culture we have fervently pushed back and rightly so, but then it feels like a crime to do the thing we have been pushing against. I feel like an addict hiding my behaviour. I think of Lizzo, someone who has advocated for fat and plus size women but herself has been through a “weight release” (I actually really like this term) and has been attacked badly for it online, yet she is still a big woman and always will be but wanted to work on her body/weight/health and so you can’t win.

You can love your body and still want to change it. Sometimes loving your body IS changing it. It’s looking at yourself and saying, maybe I do need to lose some weight, maybe I do need to eat a few more vegetables and that is not a bad thing. It is not a crime. Loving your body is exercising and stretching in whatever format connects to you, it is your vessel that carries you through this world.

So, as I think back to 7-year-old me, watching Disney Channel and holding her stomach in during the ad breaks, and whether I’d have the strength now to look her in the eyes and tell her she is enough…

I believe I would.

I’d say let’s go get ice cream and then tomorrow I’d probably go to a spin class. Not
because I hate myself, but because, I simply want to.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

I wanted to share some other amazing pieces that touch on this topic too which not only inspired me but gave me the confidence to write this piece and be completely honest:

“is everyone just lying when they say things like “I just try to get in some movement” or “I’m working out to be strong, not thin”? Is it really possible to put on pants and not think they’d look better if you were smaller?” - I saw this piece when it was first written in the summer and was probaly the seed sown in the back of my mind. Sarah writes about going on holiday and body image, need I say more.

Might I Suggest... from Sarah F.

So does everyone just constantly think they're too big?

Note: I’m talking about my body and how I feel in it in this post. I’m trying my best to be honest about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking, and in doing that, I use words like “fat” or “bigger” or talk about how being bigger is a bad thing. This isn’t how I’d speak about or to someone else. That’s kind of the whole point of getting to a better place…

a year ago · 4192 likes · 465 comments · Sarah F

“I do not know any woman who has not tried, at least for a day, starving herself.”
I literally cannot stop thinking about this

ocdiva’s Substack

When can we comment on an eating disorder?

TW: I talk at length about disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and similar subjects throughout this piece. Please abstain from reading if those are difficult topics for you…

8 months ago · 1059 likes · 97 comments · ocdiva

I love Graces subtsack (piece below), I love her stream of consciousness in the room with you style writing that has me constantly smiling and laughing even when the topics are heavy. This piece really connected with me, in regards to having a digestive issue, weight gain and body confidence

if you get what i mean?

not every body is beautiful.

i’m no stranger to a bad body image day. my longest bad body image day actually lasted around 11 years, and we became so close over that period of time that the bad body image and i had cute little nicknames for each other. i’d call it anorexia, and later bulimia, and in return it would call me disgusting, worthless, and whisper sweet nothings like “you…

10 months ago · 92 likes · 31 comments · ⋆⭒˚.⋆ grace ⋆⭒˚.⋆

This piece is really interesting and something I think about a lot with the whole Ariana Grande body talk / situ. The elephant in the room and that sometimes, we do actually have to talk about it, mention it, acknowledge how someone elses actions (even their body) might be having a negtive effect on your audience.

Adult Brace

#11 I'm just gonna say it

This week, I’ve been thinking about bodies…

2 years ago · 2659 likes · 206 comments · Eleanor Biggs

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

Support my work

Grieving the old, whilst the new is still forming

Jasmine Leann — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 13:07:01 GMT

Today I realised maybe it’s time to put some energy towards letting go, grieving old versions of me, but in a positive kinda way? I think? It sounds counter intuitive doesn’t it.

For 10 years of my life I have made videos and vlogs online - youtube, insta, tiktok, travel photography too - and in the last 2 months I have discovered my evergreen skill is writing. It’s like I have been walking up a down escalator this whole time, only to turn around and start going the right way. It feels electric, exciting, it flows, it’s easy it’s difficult it’s joyful it’s infuriating it’s hard work it’s enjoyable it’s confronting it’s healing, it’s all the things.

You don’t decide to start writing, writing arrives at your front door in the middle of the night and wakes you up, shaking you by the shoulders. I can’t even remember the day I decided to write on Substack or when/how I wrote my first piece but now it’s what consumes my thoughts and makes my fingers itch to create more. It just, arrived.

I left my last job saying “I’d like to create more space in my life to see what comes up” and in all honesty, I wasn’t expecting it to be something new. I thought it would just be more of what I was already doing.

And although this is thrilling, it’s also kind of confusing. I have always made ‘content’, vlogs, videos, I have always been face facing to the world, human facing and now I am word facing.

Before, I would plan days out to vlog what I thought would get me views or build an audience, it was a show, a performance, the algorithm the tune I would dance to but now it’s slow Saturdays in coffee shops, quietly punching away at my keyboard, just me and my heart palpations because I shouldn’t have had that second cold brew, it’s writing from what’s within, not what’s influencing me from the outside.

It’s pure flow not forced productivity.

And with that, comes a new me. A new way to spend my time, to process my thoughts, new art, for now it is art, not ‘content’. I am not creating the television of my life anymore, and that feels odd. It’s different, not good or bad, just different; like a new pair of shoes I love but haven’t worn in yet - I’m working out what outfits they go with, how far I can walk before getting blisters. Soon, they will meld to the shape of my feet, and I won’t be able to imagine a life without them.

I feel guilty for not doing the other stuff anymore, I miss it, even though in practice I wasn’t actually getting a lot of vlogging done because I found it labour intensive, time intensive & hard to fit in around a full time job. Exhausting to dress up on the weekend to have a day out in London filming vlogs when I just wanted to relax, recover from the week. I realise now it was exhausting because it wasn’t in my natural creative flow, it wasn’t in alignment, it didn’t fill up my cup and I think this is me admitting that to myself for the first time.

Was it fun once I got going? Yes. But did I procrastinate and put it off every week? Also, yes. I was pushing forward with it because it’s what I have always done, it’s who I’ve always strived to be.

It’s hard to acknowledge that the things we once thought we wanted to do maybe aren’t ‘it’ for us anymore. It’s the sunken cost fallacy but to ourselves, to our identity, to our imaginary commitments and agreements, to the devotion of such things. It’s the ‘but I’ve always done this?’ and now you’re choosing to do ‘that’ instead.

I choose not to spend any time regretting, or thinking I had ‘wasted’ time doing the other stuff, because I believe everything happens in divine timing - I had to become this version of myself first to be able to create in this new way.

And now there are actually lots of new things about me - I dyed my hair for the first time in my life & I feel like me turned up to 100. I changed jobs, I’m back to the gym, my diet is different, I’m in a relationship now so my time is spent differently. I think one leads to the other. How you do anything is how you do everything and in giving myself permission to dive into something new creatively it actually gave me the confidence (and self-permission) to dye my hair and much like the writing, now I can’t imagine things any other way.

And although I can’t imagine things any other way, the dust also hasn’t completely settled yet on all this newness, I am not she anymore, but I haven’t yet become her.

Even writing this piece is new, this ‘stream of consciousness I’m just gunna hit publish kinda piece’ is new; so far, my style has been 5000+ words of personal essays/social commentary that take me over a week to write with meticulous editing. And that is new too, what do you mean I’m spending a week writing and thinking and editing, letting the piece come to me instead of opening tiktok filming on my lunchbreak and shooting from the hip posting hoping it will go viral?

I still want to create videos, to vlog but I think it will come back when I am a full time writer, with more time and capacity. When my neurodivergent brain isn’t burnt out from the play pretend of office life and instead free flowing to potter around my house and create videos how I want to create, not cramming editing in at 11pm in a way I think will build a personal brand in the shortest amount of time possible.

And so, it’s time to grieve that part of myself, to put her on the shelf for now in pursuit of my new creative joy, to hopefully one day dust her back off and squeeze her tight like an old stuffed teddy, to say hello friend, I missed you.

It’s time to allow myself to be someone different, to create different, to exist and speak different. There is no risk of influencer cadence here, just me and my keyboard, my new hair and the gentle steps towards a new horizon of my future, as a writer.

For friends, I am indeed, a writer.

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Support my work

The internet used to be a destination

Jasmine Leann — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:44:02 GMT

I want to feel the grit of life between my fingers, not the smooth edges of an iphone.

I have bags under my eyes, the type of bags no amount of eye cream and sleep will fix & like an addict in denial, I am refusing to acknowledge I have a problem. I know I have a problem, I know what it is and I am running out of things to blame it on.

Because I am addicted and the chances are, you are too. The chances also are… you know it too.

It’s the phone. These fucking phones. And phone addiction is real.

I don’t know exactly when it happened but one day the phone became in control of me, instead of me in control of it. And I think more of us are living like this than we want to admit.

I am exhausted and burnt out but with a constant feeling of internal fizziness I can’t seem to soothe. I can no longer blame it on my job because I changed that & love it, on feeling lonely because I met the love of my life l and the world is now technicolour, on my living situation because I have a great flat & love London, on not having a passion because I found writing on Substack and feel more creatively alive than ever; I am running out of excuses other than what I don’t want to acknowledge is actually making me feel this way…

My. Phone.

You might have read the words ‘phone addiction’ and felt them a little extreme, separate from yourself and your actions. Maybe you pictured the young man gaming on his xbox for 14 hour straight, or maybe the tween on snapchat who can barely sit through a meal without texting their friends and has little in person social skills.

These caricatures of extreme behaviours feel separate to us, affecting only the younger generation, we say statements like ‘back in my day *insert your anecdote of choice about phones or computers*, but I believe more of us are suffering with phone addiction than we want to admit, mostly to ourselves.

We know it on a cultural scale: we bitch and moan about people looking down at their phones and getting in our way when we walk down the road, we read mental health ‘how to’s’ which remind us to be present in the queue at the supermarket instead of scrolling, we get upset with the lack of community and third spaces, but what I think most of us are not admitting, is that we are the culture, we are community, we are the people also suffering, also looking down, also not in control. We are in uproar when our local places close down, but do we stop and think “when was the last time I actually visited it?” We are not visiting, engaging, connecting, because we’re mostly on our phones instead.

The phone behaviour we partake in seems inoffensive, minor, non-destructive in the moment, but the reality is not so. Small waves repeatedly crashing over time erode the shore, just like the ‘158’ phone pickups in a day and 4.5 hours of screentime erodes the soul, wastes our precious time in life and disrupts our personal relationships.

I used to be able to turn my phone off overnight, go to the toilet without taking it with me, watch a programme beginning to end. Once upon a time it was just… there, an accessory to my life, something I owned like everything else, chucked in my bag along with my favourite lipstick as I head out the door and then one day it became my centre of gravity.

The claws of my right hand gripped around the latest iphone whatever number ProMax, never to release again.

And, with all addiction, the first step is to admit I have a problem.

If I can’t wait for the lift without mindlessly tapping away at various apps, if I’m immediately whipping my phone out to scroll whilst my friend nips to the loo, if I can’t watch a film beginning to end without also scrolling on instagram tiktok substack youtube gmail the news linkedin the group chat the whatsapp the messenger chat…

then, Dear reader,

My name is Jasmine Leann and I am addicted to my phone.

Before you read on, I want to note, I use the term internet and social media interchangeably in this piece. They are one and the same in a lot of what I’m talking about, so I don’t write both. I hope you can use your brain and critical thinking skills to work out what I mean.

The internet as a destination

Once upon a time the internet and social media was a destination. Our phones were used for connection, our ipods used for music, our digital cameras for photos and our computers for the internet. Each with a specific, unique function. Each with their own set of boundaries and limitations.

The internet didn’t travel. It didn’t exist on the bus, in bed, at the dinner table. It existed on a stationary computer in a corner of your home or at the library, maybe at school if you’re 29 like me. It was a location you actively and consciously travelled to. It was a solid, unmovable thing.

You knocked on the door of the internet and kicked your shoes off at the entry way out of respect. It was colourful, exciting, clunky and a lot of the internet was static. Static webpages or sites which you interacted with mostly as a sole user. You created your own world on the internet and then once you had spent your time there you laced your shoes back up and left, closing the door behind you. You could engage and then you could leave. It had a beginning, middle and end - a sense of separation.

If you ended up spending too much time online there was no hiding it. As your computer was most likely in a shared space you were at least semi aware of your use, either because you were kicked off when someone else needed to use it, your mum was shouting at you that it was time to get off the computer, or it was now nighttime and everyone had gone up to bed and you were the last one left downstairs with all the lights off. Not necessarily public shaming, but a social awareness of our use of it.

Bit by bit, the boundaries begun to merge as accessibility and cross contamination of function became the priority: my iPod could now play the film twilight on itss teeny tiny screen, I could take pictures on my phone instead of my digital camera, I didn’t need to pay for ‘credit’ anymore so now I could endlessly message my friends on my phone anytime anywhere instead of waiting to use MSN on the desktop at home.

Small, exciting changes. Changes that made life easier.

Just like when the MP3 player came out and now you didn’t need to carry around your CDs or hold the walkman flat in the back of the car so it didn’t skip, not only did it make life easier but it gave us more access to what we love.

And, I think, access is our condition.

Everything in modern day life is about ease, access and removing as little friction as possible. Almost anything that requires effort, intention, interaction, interdependence can now be done on our phones. It is seamless, sleek, done in as little clicks as possible, you don’t even need to move off the sofa or hell, even sit upright. Actually, don’t even worry about doing it at all you’ve just set up a subscription for it to be delivered every month.

My phone is stuck to me with a glue I can’t seem to pull off, but I am the one constantly reapplying it.

The Big 3

Slowly, overtime, access grew, and our devices shrank, in both size and numbers. Access to function, information and time. In exchange for ease of access we have given companies access to our attention, but the exchange is far from equal.

Access to function is the journey of having everything we need to use at our fingers on a single device.
- Money? on a card on your phone.
- Torch? on your phone.
- Groceries? on your phone.
- Camera? on your phone.
- Work? on your phone.
- Your Vinyl collection, CD collection and DVD collection? on your phone along with every other piece of media ever created in the history of time before this day.
- Calculator? on your phone.
- Plane tickets? you get the idea.
Once upon a time each of these elements required action, movement and effort. Moving from A to B to complete a task, sometimes they even included interaction and interdependence, but with our phones all of that is gone. If you owned a torch you’d get up off your seat and look for it, if you couldn’t find it, you’d then have to go out to the shop to buy one. Action, movement, effort and potentially connection. Engagement with the physical world around us. This is the grit of life.

Now, all of these elements are obsolete. Swipe down and tadaa, you have a torch. If that’s not bright enough, 3 clicks and I’ve just ordered one on Amazon. No movement, no effort, no engagement, no conversation. Just the smooth sleek effortless access from your phone. Engagement with the digital world instead.

Is it more ‘convenient’? Yes. Is it actually giving us a good ROI and we’re now enjoying all this additional free time, mental space and energy to enrich our lives? No. We’re more miserable and exhausted than ever. (I would like to state here there are benefits to this ease and accessibility and for the Disabled community these things can be life changing.)
Access to information

We actually don’t need to know all the things all the time. If constant access to the internet was beneficial, why are we all suffering from ‘brain rot’? We have the worlds information accessible at our fingertips but what has happened? We live in an attention economy, scrolling between a handful of apps full of replicated content whilst critical thinking is at an all-time low. Instead of learning and knowledge we have become addicted to the televisation of other people’s lives. We endlessly consume content as we sit there un-content in ourselves and ironically, as we scroll to entertain ourselves from even the tiny morsel of boredom or sticky emotions we might feel, we inadvertently make ourselves feel worse.

Every scroll brings a whiplash of emotions, the human brain isn’t designed to process so much so rapidly. I will scroll and the sequence goes: make up video - buy this! - recipe - viral dance - bombing of Gaza - cute cafe in London - viral trend - war in Ukraine - buy this product - man charged of rape - extreme weather 12,000km away - cat video - buy this product - viral dance - my friends Tiktok - you’ll never believe what happened when! - watch this on Netflix - buy this and on and on and on.

On the outside we look like still life statues, movement reduced down to just the single swipe our thumbs but on the inside we are creating an emotional storm we cannot weather. We have overstimulated our brains, overpacked ourselves with emotions and information and only pushed the original feelings we were avoiding down further. This paralyses and numbs us.

I would like to state here in no way am I putting the blame on you, dear reader. There are endless books and articles about the addictive nature of social media and how companies spend millions honing their apps to become the most addictive as possible. We are all stuck on a merry go round we can’t jump off. And in the most internet condition possible of having to caveat every statement one makes, I’d also like to say the internet is incredible for the spread of knowledge and change in society for important issues that need it, look at the shift in the knowledge of systemic racism during the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police in 2020, or the rallying of vital protests to help end the genocide in Gaza.
Access to time

“Time is moving so fast nowadays”. I hear this statement a lot and I feel it myself. In theory, having all this convenience at our fingertips should free up time, yet we feel like we have less time than ever. Our digital lives are now swallowing up the time in our physical lives, it is a new burden. We have ‘gained more time’ from the convenience of phones but the tech companies ensure we use that new free time…on our phones still. In a dream world where we can get our shopping delivered to our door we would be using that free time to partake in community and be with our loved ones, but most often times, we don’t, we’re just sat on our arses scrolling.

In a single day we go to work, exercise, commute, do the dishes, the laundry, call loved ones and just as we sit down to relax in the evening, our digital lives pop up in our faces like a jack in the box: 6 Whatsapp messages to reply to, the group chats, the hen do chat, the 12 reels you’ve been sent, the 16 tiktoks you’ve been sent, imessage, facebook messenger, facetime, scrolling here scrolling there scrolling this way that way and suddenly it’s time for bed and there was no time for yourself. The day passes in a blue light blur.

We look at our tiny screens in the morning on the way to work to pass the time, just to work on our medium sized screens all day, to come home in the evening and sit in front of our large screens whilst we simultaneously look down at our small screens.

Then it’s time for bed and we have been a slave to our screens all day, no time for anything else, no time for ourselves, so in a desperate bid for some control we engage in ‘revenge nighttime procrastination’.

Infinite scroll means everything slips from one to the other, we are swimming around in the constantness of it all. The next netflix episode is always available and plays before we have a chance to decide if we’d rather head to bed, on social media we scroll scroll scroll in the seamless sleek never ending rabbit hole that has no date, no time, no edges, no boundaries, no beginning middle and end, just flick flick flick of the thumb to find the next next next. What are we searching for? Or, are we running instead?

We have all been up, having a ‘quick’ scroll on Tiktok at 10pm to suddenly realise it 11:45pm and your 8 hours of sleep ahead has turned into 6.25 hours accompanied by the blanket of regret and shame to carry you through the night. This habit slowly chips away at one’s health, ones soul, ones drive to do literally anything in life other than more scrolling to avoid our shame and unease.

If someone asked me to do an hours yoga at 10pm I’d laugh and say ‘no, there’s no time! I must get to bed I have work tomorrow!’, yet most nights before I know it I was falling down the infinite scroll rabbit hole, my time evaporating beneath me. This is the same time that I would have said I couldn’t do any yoga, but instead I’m now letting the phone own it. To quote what I said at the beginning of the essay, “one day the phone became in control of me, instead of me in control of it.”

The time exists, the same time still exists as it’s always done. We have not gained more or less hours in the day. But we used to own our hours - to some degree obviously, if you have a 9-5 like me then unfortunately your 9 to 5 minus your lunch break belongs to ‘the man’ but the hours around that should be mine, they are mine. I lose so much of my life to the corporate world I should be protecting my free hours with a mothers strength but instead I have been willingly setting them alight under the blaze of my iphone, throwing them out the window with reckless abandon.

I cannot believe that my life has become paying for apps that are made to block other apps only to end up using apps on my ipad. The phone has become the maypole of my life and day & night I dance around it to a song that never ends.

The chronic condition of I can’t be botheredness

I find that the biggest side effect of my never ending overstimulation and high screen time is that I can’t be bothered to do anything anymore. And I don’t mean in a wider sense, if you met me you’d think that I was an incredibly capable human being - full time job, heading to the gym, cooking 3 fresh meals for myself every day, immaculate personal hygiene and presentation, but it’s the other parts that make a life I seem to have lost all drive to engage in. I am gaslighting myself about how I really spend my time. The elements above are about surviving, the basic functions, but what about the things that make the human experience enjoyable, fulfilling, bring us joy and creative expression? Hobbies, you might call them. Hobbies that aren’t attached to your iphone. Imagine I die tomorrow and my last week on earth was spent with 6hours and 40 minutes screen time a day.

Overtime, as everything became more accessible, I seem to have become more effort adverse in response.

This also shows up in my friendships, where now my time spent with friends has become solely catching up, like a monthly review meeting instead of actually doing activities. Friendships and relationships are not management chores, touching base to barely keep them alive. We are meant to engage and nurture and design, not monitor.

As Israa Nasir writes in this brilliant piece: “Being in community is romantic in theory—but inconvenient in practice. It requires time, patience, and the willingness to experience discomfort. It asks you to show up even when it’s awkward.” And the phones have made us so self obsessed, learning too much therapy speak online that we actually just stop going out of our way to help people, to show up for our friends, to do things without getting anything in return. The internet created ‘Main Character Energy’ but babe the play is fucking boring without all the other people on stage. Also, the theatre is empty, no one is watching you as much as you are watching yourself.

Anyway, back to what I was saying, being on my phone all the time has made me fucking lazy and there is no other way to put it. It has also made everyone else lazy too, we need everything spoon fed to us in the most reductionary way possible with 0 nuance and 0 critical thinking.

I want to do some watercolours after work but then I have to get out the jar of water and some tissue paper and my paint tray and… I can’t be bothered. I’ll just quickly sit down and look at Tiktok to rest before I get up and do it and BAM, I have managed to push the effort far enough through the passing of time it’s now bedtime and oh well!! Maybe tomorrow night!!

I want to do some yoga before bed but I have to get my mat out and pick a video online and…ahh I’m tired I’ll just quickly look at this video on instagram and BAM... you get the idea.

I have managed to reduce my lived experience down to watching others live online instead. I say I love to paint, but when was the last time I actually sat down and painted? Or have I just been watching other people paint on youtube shorts? I say I’m a yogi, but how often am I actually doing yoga? Or am I watching someone else do it online. I watch so many cosy junk journaling videos yet the pages of my journal remain empty. I am still clinging on to these labels of hobbies of the past but the way I am actually living doesn’t align with that. Like an addict, this habit crept up on me and now I don’t want to admit how I am actually living.

Access to avoidance and being able to numb oneself has become automatic, we don’t even realise we are doing it until 20 minutes of scrolling has past and you arise from the stoop overstimulated and undermotivated. I end up either ‘can’t be bothered anymore’ or I feel so stuck in the room of shame that I end up scrolling some more. Annoyed and upset with myself for wasting yet another evening, I scroll to avoid the feelings, thus leaving me further burnt out and under slept and over stimulated and the cycle repeats, thus creating a life not well lived.

I want to be bothered; I miss having the focus and energy. Being able to engage with things properly with my full attention, I miss being able to go about my day to day life without this centre of gravity of my fucking phone. And I know I’m not the only one because there are countless videos of women on TikTok sharing what they’re doing to ‘unrot’ their brain. We are now so addicted we are having to watch videos online that are teaching us how to not live online.

We are all nostalgic of times past and sick of the way we live now because there is so much content online showing the way we used to live, the comments filled with hundreds of people lamenting of how life will never be the same and the phones ruined everything.

And they’re right. It is a collective feeling, a collective addiction but like I said earlier we are the culture, we are the people who stopped going to malls, we are the people using AI for dumb shit instead of using our brains whilst every chatgpt prompt kills the planet a bit more, we are the people looking down every spare minute of the day. We pretend we’re better than everyone else who is on their phone but, we’re not.

It’s the social norm and just because everyone is doing it doesn’t make it healthy or okay. Katherine Martinko writes in this fantastic piece about how we have all become so fucking rude and how we have normalised scrolling on our phones when we’re having a conversation. Imagine you’re talking to someone, and they whack out a book, a full paper book and start reading it whilst you’re talking. You’d be like errm excuse me wtf that’s so rude, we’d never stand for it. But now we sit there scrolling on our phones whilst our friends and family talk to us and we don’t treat it the same way. The phone in control of us, not us in control of it.

As Katherine says “We do not wish to live in a world of a**holes, so do not be one. Be a civilized human who acknowledges the presence of others, even if it feels “inconvenient” to you. Get over it. Get used to it. It gets easier with practice. I will never forget the advice offered by Celeste Headlee in her great book, We Need to Talk. She said, “Be present or be gone.” If you can’t commit fully to a conversation, leave that conversation. Do it properly or don’t do it at all. Even if you have to do it explicitly, saying, “I’m sorry but I just can’t focus on this right now,” that’s a kinder gesture than imposing your distraction, your pathetic half-focus, on a person who does not deserve it. Again, it doesn’t have to take a long time; an attentive two-minute conversation is much better distracted 20-minute one.” Read the piece, it’s great.

So, what happens when you put the phone down?

I have done social media detox’s several times, going cold turkey as it were and it’s a wild ride. It’s genuinely terrifying how unsettled and anxious ones brain gets when you can’t access Instagram or Tiktok. Picking up your phone and fighting the urge to redownload, that feeling you’re missing something, of checking the weather or literally any app to try and replicate that hit of dopamine, genuine anxiety at not having your phone with you.. like seriously folks wtf. We used to be anxious about being eaten alive by the bear in the woods and now I’m anxious I don’t have a tiny rectangle electronic human made device near me. Ew.

The first few days are horrid honestly but then you break through the other side and it’s wonderful. This sounds so cliche but it’s true - you start to notice nature more, seeing a butterfly becomes such a joy whilst also realising you probably would have missed that had you been on your phone, forcing yourself to experience things without constantly documenting it. It feels weird to walk down the street without something in your hand, to just stand and wait for the train, to look around you and not make eye contact with a single person because they are all distracted, you feel more connected to the world around you whilst simultaneously feeling more isolated too.

Everyone else is still looking down, you’re talking, and your friend picks up her phone and says “I’m still listening carry on!”. It’s shit and you feel like you’re in an episode of Black Mirror once you finally look up. It feels really shit to be catching up with your parents when you visit and they’re scrolling on facebook, to be in bed with your partner whilst they have a quick scroll on a Sunday morning, to quietly stop talking to your friend as they begin to scroll and they didn’t even notice you had gone quiet. And then you become a preacher, like a born again Christian, preaching to whoever will listen, judging everyone for living a different path when you truly know the right one! The best one! Come join me in salvation!

Going cold turkey isn’t the answer. I’m not here to lament to you about doing social media detox’s because you can watch enough people on youtube teach you how to do that. Also, it’s just not realistic, is it? It’s great for short term relief, to rebalance and reset. Once you go back online you realise it is all exactly as you left it, there’s a new trending audio you hear every second piece of content and it kinda creeps you out, you didn’t miss out on anything and it’s kinda disappointing, but like with all bad habits it slowly creeps in, bit by bit and suddenly you’re back to 5 hours screen time a day.

I don’t want to cut out social media and my phone completely, there has to be a happy medium. I like watching videos online, being able to get journaling ideas and funny memes, watch tarot videos and cat videos and interesting quotes that get me thinking or inspired, pictures of my dream life I can use for my vision board. I like the internet, I like social media, I like my phone.

Much like alcohol, the thing itself isn’t bad, it’s quite nice to have a glass of wine on a weekend and enjoy it. But 4 glasses every night and it becomes a problem. A bit of social media is good, it’s fun, it’s engaging, but 6 hours of screen time and it becomes a problem.

And so, if I want to spend less time on my phone and more time in the real world, the internet is where I’d go to find a local paint class, find the latest exhibition, the events happening in my community, which feels counter intuitive right? Using the internet to find where not to be on the internet? How can we win?

But the answer lies within that sentence. The key phrase here that I think changes everything is “go to find”.

The internet as a destination 2.0

In order to take control of my life I need to put the internet in a destination, again, like it’s 2009.

That is where things went wrong. The link between all I have spoken about above is that the internet is EVERYWHERE. On the bus, in bed, at the mall that is barely hanging on for dear life as everyone is lazy and shops online now, in the queue at the coffee shop, between me and my parents conversation, it is ever present. There are no boundaries, no steps inbetween. It is not oxygen, yet we treat it like so.

But it doesn’t have to be with us everywhere all the time all at once. The internet can be a place we go to; we visit, we use with intention and have boundaries. Social media and going to get a coffee can be two separate experiences, I want them to be two separate experiences. I don’t want to slip and slide around in the soup of overstimulation and information, I need distance.

Like with any bad habit you’re trying to break, creating extra steps and additional effort between you and the thing helps break the automatic actions we’re stuck in. If you’re trying to lose weight, putting the sweets and chocolate in a bag inside a box on top of your fridge that you need to use a stool to reach means you are way less likely to eat them at 11pm, you think eeeeh I can’t be bothered. Or if you can be bothered, all the additional steps create a moment of pause to decide who you want to be, how to want to live, whether your goals outweigh the desire in that moment. As you stand on the stool to reach up in the dark you stop and think, ‘do I really want the chocolate? Or is something else going on? I think maybe I’m anxious about that meeting I’ve got tomorrow and I’m avoiding sleeping.’

The brain takes the path of least resistance and wants to self soothe as quickly as possible and this is where the tech companies have got us, they have removed every single obstacle between you and scrolling.

And so now I’m applying this same principal to the internet and social media. I am putting my phone in a metaphorical box on top of my fridge.

I have taken all social media off my phone and have it solely on my ipad or my desktop. It has a destination once again.

Have you tried scrolling on Tiktok on your desktop? It’s way less fun than doing it laying down in bed on a phone 2 inches from your face.

And I’m still learning how to live like this. This isn’t a “I’ve been doing this for a year and now I’m better than you” end to the piece. This is a, jesus christ I just need to work out something so let’s give this a go I think this may be the answer.

And it’s awkward, it’s hard work, it’s clunky. It requires rewiring your brain, intention, memory. I still post on social media & want to create a career in the digital space so how do I still do that without the ease of it all at my fingertips? It means taking out my louise carmen dupe from etsy and writing down a list of content I want to post and then resisting the urge to just download the apps and then intentionally doing it when I’m home. It kinda sucks, but you know what? It feels fucking good gang. Like the workout you didn’t want to do. It is sweet sweet relief. Social media is like the lion I wrestled and now it’s my house pet.

With the internet and social media in a destination I am now, finally, in control of it instead of it in control of me. Social media stays in the house whilst I go out to live. My digital world exists at home whilst I go out into the real world.

I can use it with intention. I have to wait until I get home and yeah that’s annoying in some sense but trust me the excitement wears off really quick once you finally get it. I can still post a picture of my croissant and flat white when I get a coffee on the weekend, but I take the picture and then put my phone away. Then when I get home later I post it. Like when we all used to go clubbing and then upload 200 photos from our digital camera on facebook the next day hungover. The events were separate, intentional.

One was actually happening, one was the memory. Moving social media to a destination means I have stopped trying to create a memory out of every present moment. Trying to immortalise my coffee experience whilst I’m actually still living in it.

And the Renaissance is coming. People are moving back to paper planners, in person events, poem subscriptions that arrive in your mail box. This is the grit of life. Standing on the tube without scrolling, thinking, coming up with ideas, realising there’s more to life than this and let’s do something about it. It’s smiling and saying hello to the stranger in the lift in your building, who then isn’t a stranger next time you see them, complimenting that girls outfit in the cafe not knowing that she actually really needed it that day to help her confidence, it’s underlining the pages of the book you’re reading, chatting to the owner of the corner shop who has the batteries you need instead of ordering them on amazon, it’s picking up that piece of litter, it’s looking where you’re going when you’re walking down the street, it’s messaging your friends to go to the market on Sunday instead of having a ‘catch up’, it’s seeing inspo for a handmade christmas online and then inviting your sister to make paper chains with you on Friday night, it’s buying an almond croissant and enjoying every bite, it’s clicking open the CD case on an album you haven’t listened to in ages and hearing the spin of the disc, waiting the extra seconds before the player starts and smiling realising you forgot the first track because now you just listen to the singles on spotify instead, it’s seeing a nice sunrise and not taking a fucking photo and posting it online but just looking, seeing, experience, engaging.

We are not victims to the phones, we are active participants. And I want to actively partake in my life again. I want my life and social media to be two different things. I no longer want to be a voyeur of my life but in it. If we don’t want to live in a world of people always on their phones, put down the fucking phone.

Because I don’t want to feel the smooth edges of my iphone for the rest of my days, I want to feel the grit of life.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

Buy Me A Coffee / Donation:
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Could I tempt with you another piece?

The Sunday Dispatch - Your Weekly Good/Newspaper

Jasmine Leann — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 20:43:16 GMT

Happy Sunday and happy autumn!

Welcome to the second issue of The Sunday Dispatch. Your weekend newspaper delivery filled with a look back of the week just gone. Books read, food eaten, Substack essays enjoyed, words inspired. An encouragement to enjoy all things offline (whilst ironically delivering to you online, I know I know).

So, let’s begin.

Books -

The Strawberry Patch Pancake House - Laurie Gilmore

I would like to start by saying if you are expecting the literary parallel to Jane Austen, you will not find it in the Dream Harbour series but that is exactly the point and the joy of this series. I mentioned last week how I don’t really do ‘bubblegum tv’ - watching 13 episodes in a row of a poorly written TV series that relies solely on the laugh track to carry it in order to rest and switch your brain off, it’s just not for me. But the Dream Harbour series / easy reads are my version of that. Honestly, it was the covers that drew me in and then I fell in love with the books. Each book centres on a different establishment / couple in this quant New England town with all the same town characters popping up throughout. Other titles include The Pumpkin Spice Cafe and The Christmas Tree Farm - they are basically Hallmark Movies but without everyone pretending sex doesn’t exist. In these books, you will get a little bit spice and hallelujuah, what’s life without a bit of spice eh. They are so cliche and require 0 mental thinking, they don’t need to be read in order and you can allow yourself a break from reading that forces you to feel clever or learn something.

Reading is not and should not be performative, it’s meant to be a warm blanket on the soul. It doesn’t need to be clever in order to be worthy. Some things are just for fun. These books are a respite from the seriousness of the world. I think also there is an innate need for me to defend these because whenever something is deemed ‘girly’ it is discredited and automatically judged as silly. Look at how much men want to knock the ACOTAR books as just silly little girl reads yet there is a whole trend on Tiktok of ‘husbands reading ACOTAR’ where they realise our silly little girl stuff is actually very good and very enjoyable.

I also love how each book comes with a Spotify playlist to accompany and this cover has adorable sprayed edges. I like to collect books as possessions, not just to read but for the item itself and I love anything that is an experience - these books feel like an experience. An excuse to put down the serious and pick up the playful.

Films -

The Smashing Machine

About 4 minutes in to this film I remembered I don’t like fighting & watching it makes me anxious and unsettled. I am a spiritual girly extremely in touch with her feminine, so why was I watching a film about fighting lol.

The trailer is truly stunning and that is what hooked me, along with the curiosity to see The Rock actually act for the first time in his life as someone other than The Rock. Visually, this film is remarkable. Shot mostly on film and some VHS to capture the feel of the time I really was enamoured with the visuals of scene after scene and the way it was shot - where we feel like we’re a moving part of the film. Not quite documentary style but definitely not the slick panning shots of pristine marvel movies, maybe sometimes it was close to a home movie? The attention to detail in the sets, props and then filming of them is a quiet success which is probably what gives it the home movie feel.

The film overall lacked a good sense of pacing unfortunately, although there were several emotional peaks throughout aided by the use of music which I am a sucker for.

The acting was really fantastic. The Rock has finally, at the age of 53, understood the concept of acting and he smashes it out the park along with Emily Blunt who plays her character like a second skin. The complex back and forth of their relationship in the film I think is something a lot of people can relate to, frustrating yet not quite wholly toxic but not quite healthy either. Overall, I’m glad I saw it but I won’t watch again for a while. Especially considering I don’t like fighting.

Online:

I saw this on Tiktok and it’s so stunning, so clever, so beautiful.

@shelle566 I love the idea of doors opening into all that is possible #3dpaperart #foryou #paperart #minibook

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In case you missed it:

My latest essay:

A thought to end the week on:

Allow things to surface, instead of forcing to create them.

This is a tough one to embody in the world we live in now where it’s more more more all the time. Life is moving past us at a rate of knots and it feels so counter intuitive to just stop, breathe, see what comes up. I forced myself to put this into practise after I published my last essay (I’ve never met a mother I wanted to trade places with) and it has done quite well. Buzzing on the high of people reading it I felt immediately like ‘okay, what’s next! I should be writing!’.

This is a recipe for burnout and shit work. I have burned out in the past pushing to make content when it wasn’t in alignment or I was tired, rushed and guess what, it never done well. Whereas it took me a week to write that piece but it flowed from me and it wasn’t hard - it was in alignment and guess what? It has done incredibly well and created many useful discussions in the comments.

There is no rush for the next, let the now breathe.

And so I had to trust myself that the next thing to write would indeed surface if I gave myself time to breathe, let my mind wander. Lo and behold on a random Saturday night as I was scribbling in the notebook the idea for the above came to me; these feelings of uncomfortableness I have around finding the love of my life and being a feminist / tiktok feminism. It still took me 4 days to find the courage to write it and when I did 2000 words fell out of me in one sitting. All because I didn’t rush, I allowed it time to naturally float to the surface. It’s okay to workout what you wanna say. It’s okay to decide how you want to respond, it’s okay to take a breathe before you dive in to your dinner.

So I implore you, this week, allow things to reveal themselves instead of forcing to create them.

Have a great week and I’ll be seeing you between the pages of The Sunday Dispatch next week!

Love always,

Jasmine x

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

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Can I tempt you with another piece?

A relationship with a man improved my life, how embarrassing.

Jasmine Leann — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 19:59:42 GMT

Just a reminder, I write personal essays from my own lived experience. This won’t cover or feel relatable to every women’s experience & that is okay. Hope you enjoy the piece!

I am a feminist, probably what some problematic middle-aged men would call a ‘raging feminist’ and I have always been a ‘strong independent woman’, as it were.

I think this stems from 2 places:

Inherited from my Mother
Who is an icon through & through. She was born in an era where you still needed a man’s signature to get a credit card and yet she is more badass than any man I’ve ever known.
Necessity
I haven’t had a lot of strong male figures in my life and due to what used to be called “puppy fat” and misogynistic fatphobia of young boys and men I have spent majority of my life single.

I have literally had to go at it alone; I didn’t really have a choice; until like most young women we look around at our prospective male options and think... yeah, I am choosing to be single. It’s bleak out here.

Until recently I had never had a proper boyfriend. I had the usual first relationship at 16 that was less than a year, became my whole world and inevitably broke my heart.

Then the emotionally manipulative one and then the one I tried to fix before sending him off to his forever home.

All short lived, all exhausting and disappointing and all inevitably ending in me having a glow up afterwards. Each one in their own way trying to dim my light, asking me to be smaller, to be less, to be quiet. First, they fall in love with my brilliance and then they end up hating me for it. Men have loved me, but they never liked me (maybe just the idea of me).

And so basically all of my 20’s were spent traveling, running 2 businesses, surviving a pandemic. Where would I have the time for a relationship!! It’s not possible!! Although I did let a twin flame situationship nearly kill me for like 2 years, but we won’t talk about that.

Once upon a time (literally my grandma) women had to rely on men for housing, shelter, money. Marrying was an act of survival, and the only path was becoming a mother and staying married regardless of your safety within that marriage, of whether you were in love or happy or following your own passions and dreams. Whereas now, only 2 generations later I am ONLY marrying for love, you either add to my life or don’t exist in it.

And back then, I didn’t mind always being the single one as my life was so full, I genuinely had no desire for a man to weigh me down and people were constantly telling me at parties and gatherings that I was doing the right thing, traveling and experiencing life instead of mortgages and mediocre sex. I felt I was finally freeing my lineage, breaking hundreds of years of my ancestor’s oppression of being forced into marriages and children by instead being on a beach in Thailand, and I was. My mum would have lived a totally different life had she been born in a different time, so, I bought her with me too. That lineage of suffering ended with me and Linda on the beach sipping a mango smoothie, freedom at last! Our ancestors smiled down on us.

And yet, somewhere along the way I realised I was lonely.

This is blasphemous in the eyes of the ‘strong independent woman’. How could I be lonely for something so disappointing? What about my female friendships being enough? I’m a modern woman! Female friendships are meant to fill all the holes in my life, what is this loneliness I feel, I don’t understand?

It was a crashing realisation to me that although my life was full, glowing, colourful, actually what I felt was missing was a relationship. No number of businesses and countries visited and female friends were going to fill the hole of my yearning. I have so much love inside of me and I wanted someone to give it to. I am also a romantic, a hopeless giddy romantic who was yet to experience any proper romance. I had become hard, tough, bulshy, strong, shouty; I had become a man in my pursuit of feminism, and I realised I wanted to soften my edges, meet my feminine and let someone in. (I would like to say here that being feminine IS being strong, they are not separate of each other. But I wanted my strength to lie in my softness, not in my hard edges)

It’s embarrassing to want a man. We are living in an age where women are overtaking men at a rate of knots, and their PR image has never been worse. In a system that was set up to directly hinder us we are still overtaking men in education, finance, the happiness index, you name it. Let alone the fact men are constantly trying to murder us as we go about our daily lives. Why would we waste our time (and risk our safety) going over to the emotionally immature man’s bedroom which contains a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a pillow as thin as a tissue and actual suspicious tissues lying around the floor. Ew. No thank you. I’ll stay, safe, in my own girly house that I pay with my own money and do a facemask, thanks.

Women are doing the inner work, earning the money, living the life, why would we want to allow a man in? A man whose bumble profile reads ‘6,2” as apparently that matters’ even though he’s 5,7” at max, doesn’t wash his ass properly, has 0 hobbies and hasn’t asked me a single question about my life in the 2 hours we’ve been sat in this bar.

And yet, as time passed and life happened, I grew tired. Tired in a myriad of conflicting ways:

Firstly, I got tired of doing things on my own, doing life on my own. And I don’t mean going to the cinema, I mean hardcore moments in life. This feeling would always rear its head when life was difficult. I once got part of my hearing aid stuck in my ear 6 hours after landing on a solo 2-week beach holiday in Spain. I was already burned out (hence the holiday) and then this happens. I ended up sobbing in a rural A&E waiting to have it plucked out for like 3 hours straight, not because of the small tubing stuck deep in my earlobe, that took about 2 seconds to remove, but because I had to be strong, again, on my own and I was bone tired. Bone fucking tired of having to always do it on my own. There was no one for me to lean against, no one to call a taxi for me, no one to hug me, no one to laugh with me as we roll our eyes and say, “it could only happen to me!”.

It was just me in that moment, having to delay all my actual feelings & emotions until it was resolved. Knowing in every moment like this I have to keep it together until later, I can’t process my true feelings of being scared because I need to deal with the situation and keep myself safe. I have to be my own guardian, my own parent and my own partner in every difficult situation in life. Maybe I just want to be able to crash out and panic knowing someone else has got me.

It appeared in the micro moments too, when I’m on my period and I’m exhausted and I still have to do the washing up, get the food shop, do the laundry. It’s tiring having to do all the things all the time.

I realised yes, of course I can be strong, of course I can deal with any situation on my own but maybe I don’t want to anymore. It took me until recently to actually allow myself to be held by my female friendships. I would never burden anyone with what was going on in my life. But who am I proving this independence to? I don’t get a medal for being a big girl and handling every situation well and eventually when you do handle every situation well people stop checking on you. I just wanted to come home at the end of the day and someone else have run me a bath and made me some iced water accompanied by a kiss on the forehead.

Secondly, I grew tired of the actual dating scene. It’s fucking horrendous out there and that is not an exaggeration. Everyone is tired of dating apps. There is a cultural exhaustion with the concept, and it’s affects yet here we are still engaging with it like someone has a weapon to our head. Couples who met on tinder 10 years ago giving you the advice to keep going as you ‘have to kiss a few frogs’… a few?! That is an understatement.

On dating apps, the ratios of men vs women are way out of balance: men typically take up 60-70% of active users. This number is ironic to me considering that almost every male profile I encountered on the apps were filled out with the least amount of effort possible. So many profiles yet such little intention. Hobby sections left empty and all of 3 words in their bio - if a bio at all - yet they came in abundance. I’m talking thousands of likes and potential matches, literally thousands of men across several apps who had already swiped yes on me. It’s both intimidating and exhausting. If someone does make it through the net the conversation is painful, either like pulling teeth or obsessive messaging that lacks any substance and with no actual intention of meeting up. There are only so many ‘hey’ messages one can receive and still feel hope in life.

I may be a raging feminist, but you can ask me out to dinner Michael, chivalry may be dead but it can be resuscitated. I swear men want to be the women in relationships, they just won’t admit it but that is a conversation for another time.

Or, alternatively, you get love bombed after the best date of your life and then ghosted.

I tried the old-fashioned way, I was constantly writing my number down on pieces of paper and handing them out to men I found attractive in the actual real face to face world but, sadly, I never got a reply.

If you’re my parents, please don’t read this next line: finding sex wasn’t an issue. Not only am I a woman (that’s good enough for most men) I am also objectively attractive with massive boobs. I am thicker than I’ve ever been but in my late 20’s as I started to date older men who had shed their internalised teenage boy fantasies (do they ever, really) I have never had so much attention. This was confusing for me to process as most boys had been embarrassed about finding me attractive in our formative years and then when I lost a bunch of weight and gained an Eating Disorder at 18 I became the fat girl who left school and got hot; suddenly everyone wanted me even though I had a lollypop head. Thinness = attractiveness is what the world taught me. So, at 29 and a size 18 I couldn’t wrap my head around how this had completely swung around again and now men wanted me.

This is where I was tired too. I was tired of being lusted after but not known. Leered at but never pursued. My body is a constant free show for men to gaze at, drinking me in before they get caught but what about my soul? Men wanted to sit in dark bars with me with the promise of sex, but no one wanted to actually know me after the chase. They listened and smiled and said, “wow that’s so impressive!” but there were no follow up questions, no authentic interest, no offers of coffee in the park on a Sunday the following week to hear more about what makes me, me.

The other factor here is, most men are not comfortable dating women who are more successful than them and they almost always assume they are more successful than you, which is hilarious considering they literally work in recruitment and their only hobby is watching the football. I would smile through endless dates being mansplained to whilst they didn’t ask me a single question about myself. I sat there knowing I worked for one of the most famous people in the world, rent a top floor London flat with a view of the city, I travelled for 6 years, run 2 businesses, where I live has a swimming pool… A SWIMMING POOL ffs, yet, no one was interested to learn about it. I would leave dates and genuinely, if you had asked him what I did for work he wouldn’t be able to tell you. And I’m not boasting about the above, these are literally just the facts of my life, and I got bored of being the most interesting person out of the 2 of us.

The dating pool was rapidly shrinking as my life was growing. Men want a girlfriend; they don’t want to be a boyfriend. They want arm candy, not a partnership. They want to talk at you, not with you. How can men get away with treating you with the bare minimum when you’ve built yourself your own oasis of a life. Men cannot get away with disrespecting you when the very life you have built demands respect. Their insecurity was blaringly invasive, like the big light on at nighttime and so, they fled, realising they weren’t fooling anyone. How dare I be cooler than you eh.

I felt like my man was out there slaying life whilst I was also out here slaying life. How does one cross paths when you’re both slaying? People tell you you need to not focus on it and a relationship will appear when you’re least expecting it and then people tell you it’s a numbers game and you’ve just got to be more active on the apps and then people tell you it’s probably someone you’ve already met and I used to think, I fucking hope not.

Yet despite this absolute shit show of modern dating, still, I yearned. Still, I knew he was out there and, he was.

As with all algorithms my feeds are filled with TikTok’s that are of interest to me, of people who reflect my life and that happens to be women living their best lives without men, making content with trending audios stating “why would a man be there!” and content about princess treatment which mainly shows very rich very muscly brown men sending bunches of 300 roses after the first date. In my never ending exhaustion and frustration of the shitty dating pool in London (voted worst city in the world for dating by Time Out readers) I had ended up reaching for the most extreme alternative, my dream fantasy world of TikTok content of men who take action, men who are ‘successful’, who want to make your life easier, men who will pay for dinners instead of claiming you are a gold digger for wanting your 1 glass of rosé to be paid for out of courtesy and chivalry. I had fetishised the whole Dubai / Arab man and their lifestyles. I believed this was the only way a man was going to win me over and be enough for me. Rationally, I know content on the internet is not always real or it’s just a snippet, yet I was being drawn in, and my desire was slowly being altered. Which is ironic considering I was looking for a deep connection but was then fantasising about and consuming the surface level.

The other end of the spectrum of content I was consuming was the anti-man anti boyfriend content. Women exclaiming their lives were so perfect and full they couldn’t possibly tolerate a man near them. They had worked hard in their pursuit of feminism and independence that to then get married or have a boyfriend would simply ruin it all. Like a stain on a white outfit. We don’t want to hear about your boyfriend Sarah! You can’t be a feminist AND have a man near you, that defeats the point. People like Florence Given who couldn’t poooooossibly in all her ‘feminine deliciousness’ tolerate a man!! Imagine it!!

*I would like to state here this is not in reference to safe spaces for women. The biggest danger to women’s lives and safety are men and those spaces are sacred, important and so desperately needed. That is not the point I’m touching on here. I would also like to say that a lot of ‘girl boss’ spaces have also just become spaces that reflect what exist and are created by men - they lack diversity and accessibility. These spaces are filled with privileged, non-disabled white women. In my personal experience I stopped going to a lot of ‘women only’ events as someone who has a hearing impairment and exists in the disabled community.

These types of content are not harmful or life changing in its individualism, as standalone pieces of content they are relatable, but as with all indoctrination it is an accumulation of all that becomes the one. Shavings make a pile after all and if you’re consuming 150 TikTok’s a day, across time these waves of sentiments crash against the shores of your mind to change the landscape.

So here I was, endlessly scrolling TikTok, my life reflecting those of the women who were so full and happy, and I agreed with it all, yet I also felt something was missing. It was probably just society telling me I needed a relationship to feel whole, wasn’t it? Maybe I just need even more self-love.

This constant swinging back and forth feels like the journey of shaving your armpits; first you do it because of social conditioning and boys, then you stop shaving in rebellion and freedom and then you start shaving again because you realise you prefer it and eventually you spend a couple of hundred pounds getting laser just to make life easier. The action is the same, why we’re doing it is what changes.

I got stuck living in the echo chamber of content that was either you give me princess treatment and pay for everything or get out because you’re an embarrassment and I’m a silly girl for letting you near me. I didn’t realise how much this content was affecting me. I was yearning and also hopeless, frustrated yet also disgusted, confused and ultimately embarrassed to want a relationship. You can’t be what you can’t see, and I wasn’t being shown content of anyone who existed in both hemispheres. How could I be so happy and content with my life but also feel like something was missing.

And something was missing. If I had lived the rest of my life single in the life I had built it would be a beautiful fantastic life, but then I met him and my life became technicolour.

Last year Jerome gently arrived in my life. He is sweet and kind and soft, so deeply interesting and passionate. At first, in complete honesty, I wasn’t sure. I had never met a man so gentle, and a man so set on pursuing me. I didn’t know how to process this soft yet firm masculine. This was not the archetype of “man” I had been lusting after on TikTok. I almost pushed him away because of this even though he was what I had been searching for all this time. I feel cringe even saying that to be honest, but it’s true.

I have learnt that true love (and a healthy relationship) is emancipation.

I had experienced and been taught that relationships weigh you down, men basically want another mother, they will steal your spark, and your inevitable disappointment or ghosting is only around the corner and yet, I was set free. I have become myself but more so, even better so.

It’s like this man has gathered all the sparks the past men had stolen from me and gently handed them back to me.

The first time I went to his house I remember bracing for impact, waiting for that single lightbulb and tissue bedsheet and yet, I found lamps, books, so many books, a piano, Taylor Swift posters, dress pillows on the bed. I was impressed and then quickly thought fucking hell Jasmine is this really where the bar is? He turns to me and says “errrm there is a gift for you on the bed”. We stare at each other, this gift is a threshold, more than me being in his house. This moment stands on a tightrope, if we fall left, he has got me something way off brand and performative, if we fall right he has got me something just to try and sleep with me, or maybe, we stay upright and this gift is a step forward to the other side. Women always know and he is smart enough to know that too.

I see a beautifully wrapped present gently placed on the pillow. I pull apart the vintage style woodland paper and words escape me, it seems we shall stay upright on the tightrope and take another step forward after all. Staring up at me is the Barbie coffee table book I had mentioned on our first date, I had seen he had it on his Instagram (he is a film nerd) & mentioned how I had asked for it for my birthday, but no one had got it for me. He had come home after our first date and bought it for me just in case we ever made it to this moment. I sit there, looking at it until I hear “do…do you like it?”. I realise I have tears in my eyes, and this man is terrified he’s completely fucked it. He is next to me as I write this and he laughs deeply and says yeah, he was terrified he’d completely fucked it.

And these thoughtful moments are a plenty. I was concerned it was the excitement from the beginning, but it turns out, he just genuinely loves me. To quote Joni Mitchell he is ‘as constant as a northern star’. And that is hard to allow, to know you deserve, I had spent so much time shouting from the rooftops that I did deserve it that when it came, I didn’t know how to stop shouting, I didn’t know how to climb down from the roof. What do you mean you just... like me? What do you mean you think I’m cool?

The real work begins when you find safe love and a safe masculine figure.

So, finally, I get what I want, what I have desired, for the first time in my life I am in a real grown-up relationship with a real grown-up man. I am the happiest I have ever been, my confidence is growing, my life getting sparklier with every day he is in it, I am growing as a person, he is growing as a person and yet… the embarrassment is still there, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I’m embarrassed to be a girl utterly in love with her boyfriend and that this relationship is changing my life for the better, in ways I never imagined. To be loved properly is to bloom; I planted the seeds myself, but he is my sunshine.

The embarrassment is in no way placed on Jerome. I’m incredibly proud of him as a man. He is very talented, a ‘raging feminist’ himself, a massive nerd, he calls me impressive constantly and holds me so I can rest - emotionally, physically and spiritually. He also looks like superman, so you know, that helps.

With all this loveliness, why do I feel weird about it all? Why do I feel embarrassed about how much time I spend with him? Am I cheating on my feminism? Am I becoming another one of those boring girls whose whole personality is her boyfriend?

I look at my sister and her boyfriend (and my now beautiful nephew) and I don’t think these things at all. My sister deserves love, a soft life, I saw her bloom in the arms of Jack, and it was so special to see, especially after all that she has endured at the hands of the fucktards who came before. My sister is one of the strongest people I know and being loved properly is also what helps her be so. So why do I feel weird that it’s my turn? People are in relationships all around me, getting married all the time, I have yearned and yearned and yearned and now I have it so what’s my fucking problem?

Why am I worried about losing myself when having met ‘my person’ I feel more myself than ever? He supports me, listens to me, he gives me so much confidence, literally no one is a bigger supporter of my dreams than Jerome. In being loved properly I am glowing, I am stronger, I am lighter, I can move through the world differently now because not every moment is an opportunity I’m looking to meet someone. I can simply just be, I can rest. Things may be shitty at work, or I might be anxious about something but that’s okay because now I have someone who makes life all the more tolerable - he is my peace. I have ADHD that I am currently trying to get medicated for and so having not only a partner but a man in my life he creates the masculine structure I need to bounce around within. He calls me his firecracker and for good reason. He helps me with the timings of trains I need to get and keeps me on track, he helps me when I need to rest and I wasn’t going to, he helps me when I say ‘I need to put washing away it’s been 3 days’, and he softly holds me accountable to do it. I will be beating myself up about being messy and he grabs my hands and gently slides off the boxing gloves. There shall be no more bruises.

Maybe I feel embarrassed that another person has made me better, surely self-love was all I needed right? What could someone provide me that I couldn’t provide myself? Let alone a man, ew. I had wanted to not do it all on my own and now I don’t have to, so why am I shy about it?

To be honest, I feel like I am gunna be kicked out of the girl gang, like maybe I need to wear a badge when I’m with him that says ‘don’t worry! I’m still my own person! I’m still one of the girlypops!’. I worry resentment will build towards me as I seemed to have found shelter in the storm whilst everyone else is still out there getting battered by the rain, I shout from under the cover ‘Don’t worry! It will be your turn soon!’

When people in relationships used to say this to me, I wanted to punch them in the face and rightly so. Now I am worried I am becoming the one about to be punched. It’s like when someone who is rich says ‘money doesn’t buy you happiness’ and you’re struggling to pay the bills.

I don’t know why I think I’ll be kicked out the feminism club for having a man and being in love because I don’t think that when I see another woman in love. Grace Beverley just got married and she is hands down one of the most impressive women who has ever existed. I loved watching her wedding content, I love watching her be loved properly, I love watching her literally build an empire. Do I think she’s less of a feminist? Less of a woman because she has a man? No. Literally never.

It’s bizarre existing in the small gap in the middle. My TikTok is filled with women sharing their horror stories of men and I’m like yup hard relate but then I look to Jerome, and I think but not anymore. My friends share their horror stories in the group chat and I think yup hard relate but not anymore - I’m the only one in the group chat who has found the golden ticket so far and I feel guilty about it; even though my friends love Jerome, they say he has set the bar, he literally sits round with the girlies like one of us (don’t worry, I’m not one of those girls who brings her boyfriend to everything).

I think this is also a generational thing, I asked my friend in her 40’s about all this and she was like Jasmine what are you on about literally no, life is all about love, finding love, it’s the greatest gift finding a life partner.

One of the only people I see balance these scales is the feminist icon herself Drew Afualo. There is a trend on TikTok of content saying the girls who end up with the best boyfriends are those who hate men and so end up with the best - Drew being a living example. She is openly in love with her man all whilst her whole brand is on calling out shitty men.

How my life functions is changing too, I don’t rely on my friends the way I did before as I mostly go to Jerome first, he is my life partner, we chat all day and so I feel guilty about not engaging with my friends as much - I’m meant to be one of the girls! When I was single, I would get annoyed at my friends in relationships when I didn’t hear from them as much but now I’m in a committed relationship, I get it. There is only so much time and energy in the day and I am someone who struggles with the emotional burden and introvert tax of texting as it is. So now I just have another thing to feel guilty about.

There are also TikTok’s pointing out this sentiment, that you are actually meant to like your partner, they are the person you are meant to spend the most time with, who you go to first about your life, who you want to do things with, that is the status quo. You wouldn’t get married to your partner and then barely spend any time with them, that is not the point of a marriage.

But when I really think on it, my pursuit of finding Jerome is a feminist one, because I have built my own life before him, without him and if he left, yes, my heart would break beyond measure but soon I’d stand, soon I’d brush myself off and I’d carry on. I haven’t stuck around tolerating men who made me miserable, I haven’t got married and pumped out a baby as society told me too and like lots of women do to keep their men in their lives. I haven’t done it because I don’t want one (see my most recent essay ‘I have never met a mother I wanted to trade places with’) People kept saying to me, ‘but what if you meet someone and they want kids?’ and I would say ‘well then I won’t be with them.’ It’s that simple, but it’s that simple because I’m grounded in who I am as a woman and I’m grounded in my feminism, so I ended meeting someone who is also a feminist and thinks the ground I walk upon lights up.

I am a ‘raging feminist’ (as all women should be, if you are not angry you are asleep. Female rage is a powerful powerful powerful thing, if only we tapped into it more the world would be a different place) and in my original pursuit of hating men they were still the centre of my life. It’s like people who were once religious but then become atheist and spend all their time arguing that God isn’t real - religion is still the centre of their life, they’re just standing on the other side of the same door.

And it’s okay to want love and to be loved.

Being with a good man actually makes me a better woman. I can lean into my feminine. I can be a raging feminist and so can he. I can be an angry woman and then let him be the man. It is exhausting existing as a woman in this world, and he helps me lighten that load. He gives me hope that men can do the work. He sets an example of what a true man is and it’s not an ‘Alpha male’ that’s for sure. Maybe men can look to him and see that there are other ways to ‘win a woman’. He is healing my masculine wounds, and I may be a modern woman, but he is a modern man and we are setting an example of what can be possible. I said earlier you can’t be what you can’t see and maybe we are becoming what we needed to see.

Love is emancipation because it has set me free. Love is the strong concrete launching pad for me to jump and fly from.

Isn’t every song about love, every movie about love, everything we do in life is for love or the lack of it. We see TikTok’s of neglected cats and dogs that say, ‘to be loved is to be changed’ and, the same exists for humans too.

And, I no longer have to exist in the lack of it, I grew my own love from within, like the roots of a tree and Jerome, my sunshine, has helped me bloom.

And with my bloom I shall continue on in the world, with renewed strength, renewed confidence, and continue to piss most men off.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

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The Sunday Dispatch - Your Weekly Good/Newspaper

Jasmine Leann — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:45:14 GMT

Good afternoon my loves,

Happy Sunday.

Welcome to the first issue of The Sunday Dispatch. Your weekend newspaper delivery filled with a look back of the week just gone. Books read, food eaten, substack essays enjoyed, words inspired. An encouragement to enjoy all things offline (whilst ironically delivering to you online, I know I know).

So, let’s begin.

Books:

Rewitched - Lucy Jane Wood

I absolutely adored this and autumn is the perfect time to read Rewitched. A while ago I moved away from reading only self help books that were mostly written by men and my life drastically improved. I am a fully fledged booktok ACOTAR girly & I hold no shame. I don’t really watch TV and don’t enjoy the whole ‘bubblegum tv’ watching experience - if it’s got a laugh track and 19 seasons the chances are it’s not for me but I’m learning that a trashy cliche easy read book (The Dream Harbour series has me in a chokehold) is my equivalent.

I thought that’s what I was getting into with this, I mean look at the cover it’s just stunning (I added the book corners myself because I am a nerd). Witches, Bookshops, Magic, Coffee, Handsome Grumpy Male Character… it’s got all the ingredients of a basic Victoria Sponge but I was pleasantly surprised to be delivered a Mille Feuille in a book. This might be a reflection of where I am personally in my life as it mirrors the journey of the main character. I am on the countdown to turning 30 and making youtube videos about trying to find myself and my spark again (which you can watch here and in Rewitched the main character Bella’s “30th birthday brings a summons from her coven, and a trial that tests her worthiness as a witch, Belle risks losing her magic forever.” And although I don’t have summons from a coven (unfortunately) it felt like reading an alternative universe of oneself. It is cosy, sweet, autumnal & so so magical.

London:

Pirates Exhibition - Greenwich National Maritime Museum

A theme you will pick up here is I enjoy existing in the world of fantasy in almost every way possible and this was a fun way to spend an hour in London. It’s been many years since I ventured over to Greenwich and I forgot how lovely it is especially if you’re a foodie like Jerome and I. For £15 you get to step into the history of Pirates from movies, artwork, videos games, female pirates, swords, modern day piracy and real maps and diaries from past pirates. It’s worth it to drag yourself over to the other side of London to then enjoy all the other elements of Greenwich like the market and The Cutty Sark.

The Internet:

James Clear - 3-2-1 Newsletter

I am big fan of this weekly newsletter. James shares 3 ideas, 2 quotes from others and 1 question to ask yourself every Thursday. It takes literally 2 minutes to read and I always come away with something interesting.

Substack:

When was the last time you made a simmer pot? If ever? I enjoyed this quick cosy read from that ventured beyond the usual advice on Tiktok of “do a facemask and watch Gilmore Girls” (which I love doing don’t get me wrong) but after a little rootin’ around her substack I found many joyful pieces gently guiding me away from my phone and towards a present life.

From Me to You

The Ultimate No Spend, No-Plans Weekend Itinerary

Hi again… so this weekend no plans, no commitments, and no spend…

10 months ago · 1243 likes · 34 comments · Nancy Yin

In case you missed it:

This week I published a piece called:

And it’s received quite the response. I was so nervous to share this, it took me a week to write and I wasn’t sure if I was just coming across a raging bitch. Turns out I wasn’t and over 15k views later on an excerpt I read on Tiktok hundreds of women feel the same. We are never alone in our feelings, but sometimes it just takes someone to be brave enough to say it outloud for us to know so. And I will gladly take the podium when it comes to choosing to be child free. I only received 1 hate comment and 1 regressive religious comment about submissing as a woman so that’s pretty good going in my book.

A quote to end the week on:

Who are you when no one is watching?

October welcomes us with open arms next week and I feel it’s a great time to reflect and adjust to how we want to live and whether our actions are in alignment with that. This doesn’t automatically mean you need to start getting up at 5am and doing more more more, this may be an invitation to reflect on whether you’re truly resting when you’re alone, whether you feed yourself properly when it’s just you to cater for, whether you’re slipping an extra coffee in the afternoon when you said you’d start focusing on your sleep hygiene. Be gentle with yourself friends, it’s okay to change, but from a place of love, not punishment.

And with that, you have reached the final page of your Sunday paper. I’m off to make a simmer pot and gaslight myself into pretending I don’t have a corporate job to wake up to tomorrow and in fact work for myself.

Love always,

Jasmine x

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.
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I have never met a mother I wanted to trade places with

Jasmine Leann — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 12:31:34 GMT

*I would like to preface this essay by saying if you are suffering with the heartache of childloss, miscarriage, struggling to conceive etc, this may not be for you. I wish to always remain sensitive to people’s pain and please, do not read on if you feel this may hurt you. Maybe, you’re not the target audience right now & that is okay.

I have never met a mother I wanted to trade places with.

I have never wanted children. The desire never surfaced, the yearning and the broodiness never arrived. The genetic sequence of motherhood seems to have skipped me.

Most people say to me ‘You’re so young! You’ll change your mind yet’ but I have observed that this statement only comes when you don’t want children. If you do want children, it’s met with the alternative ‘Oh how wonderful!’.

Funny really, people are only too young to make decisions when they are not the same decisions as everyone else’s.

I am at peace with not wanting children, it’s never crossed my mind to be otherwise in all honesty. I am actively glad to be pursuing a child free life and on an almost daily basis my boyfriend and I find ourselves in situations where we turn to each other and say ‘…and now imagine doing this with a child!’. We laugh, we scoff, we look at each other in disbelief and continue on our day thanking the heavens for 21st century contraception and being able to use the toilet in peace.

And although I have my peace in this decision, it does come with forms of its own unique sadness.

Other Mothers

The first one being other mothers. As I am very open and unapologetic about not wanting children, I seem to have opened the door to back-alley confessions. Whether exhausted, manic, drunk, flustered, mothers of all varying degrees of unsteady grab me in corners of parties, gatherings, baby showers, shop queues and spill their regrets to me. I seem to have become a safe haven for confession. Confession of their sin of motherhood regret. “I wish I’d never done it. I love my kids, but it was a mistake. I did it too early. Why did I give up my career? Why didn’t I give up my career? Why am I doing both?! I hate my husband. Why doesn’t he wake up in the night when the baby is crying?!?!”

And I stand there, listening, and I truly don’t know what to say. Which for those who know me is really a rarity. I can deal with any personality and any sensitive topic. I will approach the person freshly suffering from unfathomable grief and know how to handle the situation but this? I don’t know what to say, because all I can think of is ‘Well, I told you so’.

This would earn me a slap in the face and rightly so. No one likes to be told that. But I don’t know how to respond because, well, we know what’s involved with having a child. It’s not like booking a holiday and not knowing what hotel you’re going to. It’s literally the thing that everyone does. I have the same information as you and that is exactly why I don’t want kids. What did you think would be involved? We’ll revisit this later.

The encounter leaves me with sadness, sadness for how women lose unquantifiably more than men when entering parenthood, part of themselves they’ll never get back from this irreversible decision; physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually (and career wise let’s not forget).

I am the odd one out, the one with an “unpleasant” outspoken opinion about parenthood (I see the way people look at me when I’m honest), yet, once the kids are here it’s me who is cornered, it’s me who has to listen to the confessions of regret, collecting them like trinkets I didn’t ask for. And then, once I am carrying the weight of these confessions I am meant to get back out there & continue the play pretend like you didn’t just tell me you hate your kids? Right, okay. Thanks for that.

I feel sad to be ostracised for my life choices only to then be told I was right, in hushed secret whispers, like we can’t let the gang know or there’ll be trouble. I feel left out of the gang I didn’t want to be a part of all whilst everyone tells me the gang is rubbish anyway.

It’s okay to not want children as long as you’re quiet about it and act as though it ‘never quite happened’ for you, not that it was an active choice.

The Culthood of Parenthood

Honestly, I feel parenthood is a cult. Parents know what it’s like on the inside yet refuse to be completely honest incase they scare away any new members. They may touch on the surface of discontent yet continuously exclaim “but it’s all worth it for the good bits!”. Which I have deemed is about 4.7%. And then as soon as someone falls pregnant, it feels like something from a vintage Disney film. Everyone starts cackling their evil villain laughs, rubbing their hands together saying “Welcome to the dark side! You’ll never get a full night’s sleep again! You’ll never use the toilet alone for the rest of your days! Peace and quiet? Say goodbye to those! A calm holiday? Never… NEVER I TELL YOU! Mwahahahahaaa.”

People love company in their misery. They want those around them to make the same decisions / mistakes they do so they can feel comfortable in their choices. If everyone is suffering the same, it’s not a mistake anymore because we’ve all done it! But the well slept child free couple that arrives to the party? They can go fuck themselves because how dare they.

Let’s circle back to what I mentioned earlier about knowing what’s involved in parenthood. I know parents refuse to be completely honest because my sister has just had a baby. I have been an insider on the sidelines and let me tell you no one will have researched as much as my sister. My sister truly has a village, a tribe, a sisterhood around her and yet still, she was left in the dark about so much. My sister is a force to be reckoned with who doesn’t hold back (maybe it runs in the family lol) and is now on a mission to be as honest as possible and I respect her for that. Of course, there are things that you truly just learn on the way, and nothing can prepare you for. That is the go-to parenthood phrase, “nothing will prepare you”, which I do believe, but a little less forceful convincing and little more brutal honesty would save a lot of people regret and heartache.

I would also like to take this moment to say my sister created the most perfect little baby boy. The love I feel for that child consumes me and overflows with no bounds. Being an auntie is truly so so wonderful. It was fascinating to feel the genetic switch when I realised, I have a nephew, how I would protect that child with my life and I have never felt a love like it. But it still didn’t do anything for me wanting to have my own. I kept waiting for my ovaries to start glowing or something, but they just didn’t. And no offence to my sister, but as I learnt more and more about what truly happens during pregnancy and the changes in your body, I kept thinking, absolutely fucking not. No thank you.

Did you know you can lose all your teeth during pregnancy? Yeah, I didn’t, but now I do and you do too.

Same street, different sides of the road

When someone decides to have a child, we no longer exist in the same hemisphere.

The way it feels is like we are all standing down the same side of the street and as someone decides to pursue parenthood they cross the road. We are still down the same street but now we are looking at each other from different sides. Close, but always separate. You have crossed the street and I’m still standing here watching you all, one by one, decide that that postcode is better, even though I thought we were all having a good time over here. I look around confused, where is everyone going? Why are they leaving? There will always be a divide, and we will never be standing on the same side of the street again.

People can do what they like, I’m not saying they can’t. But it is a personal sadness that comes with their decision. It’s something that affects me privately and personally, because now and for the rest of time we will not understand each other. We are just not the same, they are like everyone else who wants children and I’m the one who doesn’t. Why are you like everyone else and I’m not? I grieve how things were, knowing that this chapter has firmly shut in an instant. The door of that reality as you know it slams in your face with no warning. Inevitably we will struggle to meet up for coffee, when we do it will be interrupted 19,000 times by a screaming child and tantrums, resentment will build because I am not exhausted and covered in sick, new Mum friends will soon replace me, until I then cycle back round to become the shiny friend who they live through precariously. There is a before and an after. (I would like to recognise that this feeling probably goes both ways, because mum friends will understand the struggles on new parenthood and I won’t).

Women I follow on social media who fall pregnant I have to unfollow because I am no longer the target audience. Most people lack media literacy these days, but I like to think I am smart enough to know when content is no longer for me and once someone is pregnant it is just not relatable to me anymore. I don’t want my feed to be filled with mediocre husbands’ buildings cots and pregnancy photoshoots, the announcement of the babys arrival and then the journey afterwards as they ‘find themselves again outside of being mum’.

They have crossed the road, and I shall wave goodbye from here.

There shall be no holes

One thing that does make me laugh is the stereotype of a life unfulfilled with no children. There is this assumption that I will wake up in the dead of night at 42, sweating, sad, heartbroken to find there is a huge child shaped hole in my life and that everything is meaningless without becoming a mother. That all my accomplishments and work thus far have been pointless if I am not a mother. That the only possible way for me, as a woman, to be fulfilled and happy and have a long-contented life is to splinter myself off in the never-ending service of another human being (or multiple beings), because what is a woman if she is not constantly a slave to someone else’s needs? God, forbid she chooses herself, continuously, for the rest of her days and find fulfilment in herself alone.

Why is society so uncomfortable with seeing a relaxed woman? We are far too comfortable to see women frazzled, exhausted, covered in various food bits wiping the mouth of her 3rd child whilst also holding down a job and a home and a social life and looking after the dog. We love to see women suffer because that is our duty, what is expected of us, who are we if we’re not making everyone else’s life easier? Whilst also slowly losing ourselves in the process. This has been our history for hundreds of years and although feminism means we can now work and earn our own money in high paid jobs, we are still also doing all of the stuff we were doing before. We got equality (kinda) but what we really need is equity.

To put it simply: I don’t want it. I don’t want to be that woman. I don’t want to be overstimulated and under slept and covered in crusty food and always eating last. And this is where the sadness lies for me because I just don’t understand why so many people do and I don’t. What am I missing? It’s like that one person in your workplace everyone loves but you know deep down they’re a dickhead and you can’t understand what everyone else sees.

I want to pursue a life of pleasure, luxury, ease and most people find that hard to swallow. How dare I. They beckon for me to cross the road and join them and still, I refuse. How audacious and self centered of me.

Not my skill set

The other part to acknowledge is that I’m not sure I’d be a great parent, and I don’t think enough people look inwards first before having a child. The great millennial journey is to work through the trauma our boomer parents have instilled on us due to the trauma their post war parents instilled on them. We are a generation of The Great Undoing - ending trauma cycles, going to therapy, trying alternative holistic health practises, gentle parenting and Ashwagandha. Life has changed and evolved so much in such a short amount of time we are the first generation figuring it all out, but not everyone unfortunately. A lot of people are pumping out children without sorting their own issues out first, either within themselves or within their relationships and marriages.

For me, I have done a lot of inner work - nearly 15 years of various therapies and treatments to work through what needs to be worked through so I can live a better life internally. Things may not have been my fault, but they are my responsibility to work through, so I don’t make those around me suffer as a result of my moods and actions. And in that, I realised I don’t have enough to give to a child. I just wouldn’t be able to give all that needs to be given. I am very sensory sensitive, and I do not want to be short tempered with my child who has called my name 15 times in 2 minutes and I’m snapping at them because the light is too bright and I can feel my socks under my shoes and please stop shouting my fucking name at me.

It makes me so sad how often I hear people talk to their children with such disrespect. Parenting is hard, bloody hard, I recognise that, but I feel so sad to see 90% of children with ipads in their faces, no manners, parents screaming at them for the smallest of things and I just know I don’t have what it takes to be any better than that. I don’t trust myself not to become resentful towards a child who didn’t ask to be born just because society convinced me this was a good idea and now, I hate it. Everyone is convincing me to have a child whilst they struggle to even be a parent themselves in this modern-day world.

Having a child vs being a parent

Let’s not forget that 9 times out of 10 women become the default parent. Men so often want their wives to be pregnant, but they don’t actually want to be a dad. The follow through isn’t there (the first stage is when men want a wife but not to be a husband) and we find out once it’s too late. The reality kicks in, the tiredness grows, and the excitement decreases and suddenly, where is he? We still live in a world where we are praising men for “being such a good dad” when he is simply just picking up the baby at the family bbq. Are we really still that behind?

I know my partner would be a great Dad but not only do neither of us want it we don’t want to put our relationship, dreams and careers on the line. I don’t want to wake up and find that maybe, in some alternate universe, he isn’t. I don’t want to lose what we have to swap it for parenthood.

Women make up for men’s regret in not wanting to be a parent and instead fill in the gaps, they extended the extra 30%, kick the football around the garden when dad isn’t interested. It breaks my heart because as if we don’t have enough on our plate already, we’re now being both parents.

One good thing to come out of Tiktok is the rise of women being honest about the reality of it all. I’ve seen many videos and comment sections talking about how you’re expected to bond with your baby immediately but it doesn’t always happen and the reality of being handed this child that is meant to change you’re life and you’re just looking at it like… okay? thanks? what do I do now? I mean how often do you hear women talking honestly on the street about not loving their child instantly, you’d never do it because you’d be kicked out of the village. It’s our primal instincts to protect our status and space in our community and that would ensure an arms lengths approach from most people. But with the safety of our teeny tiny screens women are now being brutally honest and for that I am glad, I hope someone out there feels less alone in the chaos of it all.

And it also reminds me on a daily basis that I’ve never met a mother I wanted to trade places with. I look at the lives of women I am aiming to achieve myself and a child is never there. The most loving thing I can do for my children is to make sure they are never born. I do have so much love to give inside of me but I will be responsible enough to give it to the right place. And where is that place you ask? My cold heart who doesn’t want to be a mother, who could she possibly give love to?

You’ll laugh, because it’s so stereotypical but my heart aches for a little cat, to rescue an older cat from the shelter who deserves a second chance in a loving home when everyone else is buying up new kittens, I want to say 'I choose you, you’re enough’. I tear up just thinking about it honestly, the love I feel for this little four legged animal I haven’t even met yet makes me want to burst, it makes my skin feel electric and to think I can do this over and over again; adopt little paws who need love, for I have so much love to give them.

So, after all, maybe I am meant to be a mother, but just not in the way we know it.

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

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Could I tempt you with another piece?

Help me pick a Youtube Video title please!

Jasmine Leann — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 13:56:23 GMT

Hello my loves,

I am creating a new weekly Youtube and Substack series where I look back on the week - sharing thoughts, feelings, things I’ve loved, books I’ve read, quotes I’ve heard, restaurants I’ve enjoyed BUT I need help picking a name. I would love The Sunday Times but, of course, it is copyrighted.

Here are some of my choices:

Thank you!

Is London giving me the ick, or am I just broke?

Jasmine Leann — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 12:48:59 GMT

It’s 6:47am and I am stomping down the road to the nearest overground station, the brisk walk & fresh early autumn air feels cutting against my lingering cold. Mind you, I have a full beat on too - hair, makeup, steamed dress all before 7am. The tube strikes mean I will end up having a 2hr 17minute journey into work which should normally take me 31 minutes. I will end up doing over 8000 steps all before 9am. Bliss! The dream! A perfect Monday!

I have lived in London for over 2 years now and I promised myself I would never become a grumpy Londoner. I can’t say living in London has ‘always been a dream of mine’ as I had never actually envisaged myself settling anywhere. I had travelled for 6 years before the pandemic and assumed I’d always continue in a way, as one does when you’re 19 and don’t mind going to and from your parents’ house. (I would like to state here before assumptions are made that I paid for all my travels myself, working and traveling at the same time). The only ‘homey’ style dream I’d ever had is to rent a flat in Bangkok, spend parts of my year there and use it as a base to travel more. This desire has never left me. I am working back to time and money freedom so I can travel again and I will, if it’s the last thing I do, have a flat in Bangkok.

I grew up in Chelmsford, Essex, the OG commuter town which eventually grew to become a City (it has a cathedral & monopoly board, I think that’s all you need to qualify). I spent a lot of my childhood going to London. My parents are from London, Romford born and bred, my dad worked in the city his whole life, I was taking the train to central on my own as a teenager, so London was never a big deal, it just was. I have never been a ‘big trip to the city’ gal with my comfy shoes, cross body bag and a matinee show to mamma mia (although I am an ex-theatre kid so I am the mamma mia part I can’t deny).

Even when the pandemic hit and I found myself back in the UK at my parents’ house, I still wasn’t dreaming of living in London.

After several years of lockdowns and scrambling to find a sense of identity now I was stuck in my hometown (which I despise, a tale as old as time eh) I realised my old life didn’t exist anymore and it wouldn’t again.

This comes with a sense of grief I think most of us are only just realising we are suffering from, 5 years on.

I was grieving 2 elements:

1. The fact my old life didn’t exist anymore
2. The fact I didn’t want it too either

I landed in the UK in 2020 on my 24th birthday, I pulled my mask down and looked up 3 years later to realise I was now 27 and the pandemic was ‘coming to an end’ (I use that term lightly).

It was time for action, movement, something, literally ANYTHING.

I originally looked at moving into a flat in Chelmsford. Hilarious now when I think back on it considering like most people, I don’t like my hometown. I just needed to move out of parent’s place, asap. Like yesterday.

Then came the idea of moving to London. The Big City.

Suddenly, London, which had been accessible and non chalant all my life, became Oz at the of the yellow brick road.

Was I moving towards London or away from Essex?

I didn’t tell anyone because I knew it would be met with the same switch. From casual London we visit all the time to ‘how you gunna do that then?’. The provincal restraints would reveal themselves.

So, I decided to get my first corporate job in the city to be able to afford the move - which I also didn’t tell anyone about until I got it. The less noise the better when you’re deciding to change your whole life. Remember, your choices only have to make sense to you.

This was a shock move. I had been anti corporate my whole life thus far, doing anything and everything to earn money apart from selling myself out to ‘the man’. And yet here I was, craving structure, a grown-up salary, private health insurance if I was lucky. I knew it was the quickest gateway to move to London, and I had convinced myself I was immune to the side effects of full time salary work. It couldn’t possibly happen to me! I’m different!

6 months later I moved to London, and it was everything I wanted it to be. Privacy, freedom, life bursting out at the seam’s day or night. I could become the woman I wanted to be, dressing how I wanted - classy, classic, heels every day. In suburbia my wardrobe is suitable for weddings and Saturday nights out but in London? I can Become Her, my version of Her.

It was like I had lived in London all my life. It made sense. I belonged here. I slotted in like a square peg in a square hole. My external surroundings now matching up with my inner world which runs on x3 adhd speed.

A year in I moved flats away from my crazy first flatmates, I feel that it is a rite of passage to have at least one living situation as such. I found a shiny new job too and I was well on my way living loving laughing my London life.

Until I look up again and realise it’s 250 days until I am 30 and I don’t recognise myself, seemingly out of nowhere. I don’t understand when this happened, why this has happened, I’m living the dream aren’t I? … aren’t I?

In this second year I got sick with SIBO (which I am still recovering from) and my shiny dream job stopped being my dream job. Suddenly I am fustrated with slow walkers and the constant hyper vigilance needed to live in London has worn me down. I look in the mirror and I am tired, puffy, not partaking in any hobbies that isn’t scrolling on my phone, even though that isn’t a hobby. It has been a slow sinking, and I didn’t realise until the water was up to my neck. I was meant to be immune to the side effects of corporate life remember!

The light had gone from my eyes. I know how the light can exist because I experienced it when I was travelling / pre pandemic life and then somehow, suddenly, I am a city worker trudging along the central line like a zombie wanting to punch the busker in the face because I have listened to him sing the same song 5 days a week for a year. I am a faceless ‘salaryman’, lost in the crowd on an escalator, my body blurring into the next and the next and the next. Everyone is someone and no one in London.

Most people over 40 will say “welcome to the real world! That’s just life!” but I don’t want to meet you in your misery. I refuse and yet somehow, I am. The world is different now and so am I, but not in the way I had hoped.

This is not a “I miss backpacking!” quater life crisis…well, maybe it is. Is this what happens just before you turn 30? Is it my saturn return? Is it just capitalism getting the better of me after 2 measly years in the coporate world.

I love the vibrancy and energy of the city, but the hyper vigilance is what has worn me down the most. (Apart from the restraints of corporate work and many thanks! kinds regards!).

It exists in several ways:

Firstly, phone theft is phenomenal in the city - £50 million worth of phones were reported stolen in London in 2024 and that is just what is reported. Men and boys on electric bikes, dressed in black will snatch phones straight out of people’s hands, whilst they’re using them. No matter the safety measures you take it feels you cannot win, it is just a matter of time until you’re next. Let alone the fact that actual theft in shops is on the rise too. Almost every shop has a security guard, I don’t remember the first time I saw a security guard outside Tesco, but now it seems an anomaly if there isn’t.

Secondly, the city feels on edge. The cost-of-living crisis is affecting everyone, and I feel a tenseness in the people around me. Folks are looking for an excuse to lash out. I sit on the tube, and it feels like everyone is looking around to catch eyes with someone the wrong way just to start a fight. I hear at least one verbal dispute a week and keep my head down hoping it’s not me next.

Then, there are the charity people outside the tubes, dressed in blue jackets and wide smiles who bombard you, following you shoulder to shoulder saying things like “miss, I love your style, where did you get your shoes from, can I have a moment of your time” and no matter how many times you say no they still walk next to you, invading your personal space and unfortunately I have an approachable face lol. I am not knocking the work, I respect the guys out there in the cold, we need chairty work for these causes, desperately, I am simply exhausted with the methods of being followed every time I step out the tube.

Walking from A to B is a nightmare as everyone is looking down, barely aware of their surroundings, knocking into one another as the contents of the next TikTok is more important than looking at where they’re going before they cross the road. Sometimes I feel like I am living in an episode of Black Mirror when I look around the tube at everyone staring down at their devices hunched like a wilted plant, also knowing full well I am the same.

Also, the homelessness. I feel a constant sense of guilt. The problem is worse than ever, and the way we handle it as a country is shameful to say the least. There are thousands of empty of buildings in London alone and yet homelessness is only increasing. Every day someone gets on the tube, with their speech of pleas for money and food, mostly to be ignored until they move to the next carriage and try again. Along with those who have serious mental health issues, roaming the streets shouting and screaming to no one in particular. It breaks my heart and frightens me at the same time, I don’t know what to do so I do what everyone else does, which is keep my head down and I hate myself for it.

We are all overwhelmed, overworked, underpaid, overstimulated, and I can feel it, scratchy on my skin like a cheap cardigan.

I texted a friend of mine asking her about this exhaustion with hypervigilance and she said you become blind to it after 15 years in the city. You eventually just move down Oxford Street and don’t even notice anyone; you just stay in your bubble and the rest blurs out.

I can’t say this gave me much comfort to be honest.

I say all of this, yet if I was forced to leave London today, I would be hysterical with tears. This is my home! I would cry out. I am the British version of a New Yorker, in a toxic relationship with the city I love to hate. Because I do love it here, but I am also tired. I can’t say which single element has made me tired, it’s all of it and none of it.

And because I do love the city it got me wondering if it’s less to do with the city and more with how you have access to it. As often what wears me down is work, being out and about in the rush hours, commuting, traveling around the city at 5:30pm.

The actual city I love, the coffee shops and culture, that I will hear music on a random Tuesday night & see people dancing in the street. Museums and parks and gardens, history jam packed into every square mile, different cultures existing side by side, every cuisine you could imagine at your fingertips. Stuff happening, it’s always happening, every hour of the day.

I once worked for rich people in a nice borough of London and let me tell you the air feels different over there. People walk slower, no need to rush and stomp when you know you can jump in a taxi to take you across London whenever you need, when time is your own and the supermarkets are overpriced, quiet, no security guards needed.

I could take the tube from either Holland Park or Shepards Bush, they are almost exactly a mile apart in distance but worlds apart in behaviour and energy. They are 2 different London’s. Back-to-back, facing away from each other pretending the other doesn’t exist.

I am desperately trying to jump from one world to the other. I am actively trying to become rich, and I have no shame in saying that. I know we love to see women suffer; tired, career AND kids and doing it all but, that won’t be me. I aim for a life of pleasure, slowness, ease and I shan’t be shamed for it. But am I able to create that world whilst trapped in the rat race of the other?

I couldn’t possibly move back to suburbia for several reasons: too boring, too expensive to commute, too many underlying tones of racism with the locals, too many Costas.

London is beautiful and amazing but there are a million different London’s that exist and I realise my version of London - living pay cheque to pay cheque, 5 days a week in the office, squeezing my spare time in at 5am before I leave for work at 7:30am, never going to the museums because I can’t face South Kensington on a Saturday - is different than the London I know can exist for me. This version of London I am living in is wearing me down and it comes down to money. If I had the money to access the city the way I wanted to, I bet I wouldn’t feel like this. Money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it does pay off your stress, which feels very close. It gives you options, freedom of choice, accessibility, ease. It gives you food delivered to your door instead of the chaos of Aldi, it gives you calm taxi rides instead of someone’s elbow in your ribs on the central line, it gives you quiet shopping experiences instead of the hunger games of Primark on Oxford Street. It changes the sensory input of your environment, and this accumulates to a nice life well lived.

So how do I create a new London whilst living in this one? I just wrote a piece about breaking up with rushing and trying to bring more ease into my life, so how do I create a whole new reality without burning out in this one? Is it possible? Will I just have to ‘Lock in’ and work harder for an unpredictable period of time?

How do I build a business that earns me money whilst commuting, trying to fix my health, working out and going to the gym, cleaning, tidying, cooking, morning routine, night routine, reply to my never ending 12 WhatsApp’s, keep up with my family, friends, boyfriend, hobbies, skincare, scrolling, so much scrolling, my full time job, side hustles, front hustles, back hustles, it’s all a hustle.

Yet the one thing I’m trying to invite in is more ease, more abundance. If more more more was working surely, I’d be rich by now? Surely my version of London would be different.

I think maybe these are all just standard questions about life one asks at this age.

I know in my core that another London can exist for me, and I shall wait it out. I heard a woman on TikTok say move to a city you can’t afford and figure it out. This much is true but I’m sure someone first said that when the world wasn’t on fire like it is today.

So for now, I will keep my head down, ‘lock in' slowly and consistently, keep moving forward towards my version of London at the end of the yellow brick road and much like my life the last 5 years I will look up again and find myself in a new place suddenly.

And hopefully that new place will be in a coffee shop, on a Tuesday afternoon, never having to email ‘kind regards’ ever again.

I posted a follow up piece! Nearly a year on since writing this a few commenters asked for an update, if I’m still and do I still feel the same?

You can read the update here:

I run a mail club! The Sunday Dispatch:

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live online here.

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I am a woman, so I must rush

Jasmine Leann — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 14:12:41 GMT

There are 3 types of rushing I experience:

Rushing because I’m late (I have ADHD time blindness so I am lucky enough to experience this every single day anytime I try to go anywhere)
Rushing to avoid someone (hastily making that cup of tea in the office before Dereck from accounts wants to stand too close and ask about your weekend)
Internal, nervous system rushing.

The last one has been my steady companion for as long as I can remember. But now it’s time to say goodbye, to let go, to break up with it, although it does mean I will probably have to be nicer to myself in its absence, which is really quite frightening.

Internal rushing is something I believe many women experience. It’s the feeling under our skin, the nervous system fizziness which leads to day to day tasks being frantically rushed: brushing your teeth with reckless abandon, scrubbing the dishes like you’re on 2.5x speed, stomping down the road like you’re being stalked by Dereck from accounts, typing text replies at breakneck speed.

It is an overall feeling I describe as being ‘pinched’. Basically the opposite of relaxed, even though if you saw me on the outside I wouldn’t look too stressed but internally, I am rushing. Like the feeling of having that extra coffee you know you shouldn’t have had.

Rushing where, for what, for whom? Don’t ask me because I don’t have the answer. All I know is, this task needs to get done and I am acting like it takes 5 minutes but I only have 3 to do it.

I want to pause here for a moment to make sure the mental image we are building is correct and not one of internalised misogynistic stereotypes. I am not the ‘manic woman’, frantically hoovering the house shouting at her husband that there’s always more to do and he never helps clean!!

It is much more sublte; under the skin and rattling my bones.

I’ve watched enough Tiktok videos about cortisol to understand that this internalised rushing is my nervous system out of alignment and, most likely, that I’m not feeling safe enough in my own body to just breathe deep and slow down.

I have always been filled with kinetic energy, is it because I’m an Aries? The youngest child? Neurodivergent? Full of unreleased trauma or am I just simply full of beans and it’s not that deep?

In my early 20’s this kinetic energy was directed towards creativity, traveling and running. Yet somewhere in a post pandemic world as I hurtle towards my 30’s (which I am excited about by the way, it is a privilege to age and women in their 30’s & 40’s glow with an energy that one can only accumulate with time) this kinetic energy is now directed at brushing my teeth with unnecessary force and speed. Is it because I now have a corporate job and the responsibility of bills that this life force energy is spilling over, bursting at the seams and desperate to escape into something meaningful aside from team meetings and ‘kind regards’.

I realise I have become reliant on this fizzy rushing energy to give me the feeling of “keeping me on track”. And it is just a feeling, it’s faux productivty. The phsyical version of organising your files instead of writing the piece; feels good but doesn’t actually get us any closer to the goal.

I think majority of people have ‘busy’ and rushing as their life long companion too. It is the first thing people say when you ask “how are you?”. I’m sure 7/10 people will say “good, busy but all good you know what it’s like” (the statistic is completely made up but 100% correct by my own calculations).

I just recently left my job for a new one in the pursuit of creating more space in my life, intentioanlly moving away from ‘busy’ and that feeling of there never being enough hours in the day. An inconvenient work schedule meant I was always rushing home to try (and fail most nights) to avoid a 9pm dinner time. I was rushing to complete the next task all the time because I felt once I ‘got it all done’ then I could finally sit down, relax, ‘have time’. I had time if only I could get these things done!

I was rushing to get to the other side of it all. Which is a false belief because we don’t get time - we create time. We have to choose the time to sit down, to stop, to create, to pause or life will just happen to you and you’ll be rushing your life away moaning there isn’t enough time. There is, but we make it so.

In this new chapter of my life where I do, infact, have much more space, I am uncomfortably confronted by this constant rushing as now I don’t need to and yet I still am.

I wrote in my last substack about getting the very thing I wanted - more space in my life - and then ironically not knowing what to do with it:

(read it above) and I feel this may be a parellel experience or as the Thai’s say:0 same same but different. I have been craving a slower pace of life, wanting to create space to see what emerges instead of forcing things to be in the tiny gaps of time I had available. Less rushing, less stomping around, less working more creating and now I can finally stop rushing, I can’t seem to.

What happens if I choose to let go?

What happens if I let go of rushing, of being pinched in a false sense of personal control. What happens if I truly do decide to trust fall into my feminine intuition and follow a path of flow and rest, ease, reflection and intentionality. Especially because I don’t think I have a single relaxed woman in my lineage nor around me today. It would feel like swimming against the tides that surround me every day.

Society - especially London - hates relaxed people, especially relaxed women.

Oooh boy do we hate to see a relaxed woman (especially WOC). It will almost always be followed by thoughts and feelings of fustrated ‘who does she think she is’ and ‘must be nice’. Assumptions of mens money filling bank accounts and that to be relaxed one must also be self obsessed, self indulgent, luxuriating (how dare she!). We can’t bare to see a woman not suffering the way we are. As women we want companionship in our suffering, which is reasonable, but not when the suffering is of our own doing.

I suppose my fear is that if I stop rushing and feeling ‘pinched’ I will become lazy. I will simple melt and slobber away like jelly left on the side on a summers afternoon.

This is amusing really, due to the fact I have never been lazy in my life. There is no evidence in my personality of lazy. I have always had multiple jobs, multiple hobbies, I have run 2 businesses - at the same time, travelled for multiple years. I don’t ever drink more than 2 alcoholic drinks for I hate the feeling of not being able to make the most of the next day. And yet I feel I may wake up tomorrow and suddenly have had a personality transplant if I choose to stop rushing. If I let go of the tension the real me is going to spill out everywhere and I won’t be able to stop myself.

The rushing is like keeping an eye on myself. If I chose to relax, who is going to monitor me, if not myself?!

And there it is, the scary part. Learning to trust myself, to cosy up to myself, to meet myself in the deep breathes, to acknowledge that I don’t need monitoring, I don’t need to be "shoo’d’ up the backside onto the next task all the time, I’m okay as I am. It’s okay to let go of the tension. I am still me, and maybe a better me on the other side.

I can simply just, be.

The tasks will get done.

The creativity will flow - undoubtedly more so.

The texts will get replied to, the dishes washed, the pavements walked upon and I can just be.

To break up with rushing is a continual choice of ferocious presence. To stop and pause when I’m smashing away at my keyboard and breathe, to remind myself it’s okay, and then again 10 minutes later when I’m doing it again. Like training a pet to do a trick, except the trick is me telling my nervous system 15 times a day we’re not in danger, and the danger is just myself, thinking I’m a piece of Sh*t if I’m not productive.

This essay is a difficut one to end because it is an ongoing story, there is no clean break. Much like a real breakup, you may not be speaking anymore but you are slowly unpicking them from your day to day life, ever present and out of reach at the same time.

So this is me, saying goodbye to rushing. Saying goodbye to what feels uncomfortably familiar, goodbye to indoctrinated forms of false productivity, goodbye to all the rushing and suffering inherited from my female ancestors, goodbye to what women around me have convinced me is being worthy, goodbye to self monitoring.

And hello to ease.

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The old life is gone, the new one has not yet arrived

Jasmine Leann — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:37:08 GMT

There are 212 days until I’m 30 and I’m currently existing in the ‘inbetween.’

Last week I left my old job & this week I started my new one.

I am excited, exhausted, lost in the mush of not having a new normal yet but knowing my old one doesn’t exist anymore. The tube journey is different, the alarm set for a different time, meals are cooked at new hours.

The old chapter of my life lingers like the smell of smoke after blowing out a candle. The wick is still warm but it no longer has the ability to burn (me out. lol).

The new chapter is yet to fully emerge, it is just becoming, being created and shaped… by me. This inbetween is an inevitable part of life we simply cannot avoid or prepare for. We will all exist in the inbetween at some point or another. It is both a pause and a beginning whilst also still kind of an end too. It’s all the things, happening at once.

This inbetween can feel really uncomfortable, even if it’s what we prayed for. I’m so brain tired from learning all that comes with a new job; so much information in such a short amount of time but equally I’m full of excited energy at all the new. So much new around me and within me. I’m not who I was before, but I am yet to become who I am to be.

In this inbetween the possibility of becoming a completely new version ourselves feels all the more attainable. It grazes the tips of our fingers with promise, are we going to grab onto it and start meditating before work or let it slip out of reach with each swipe of the 11pm doomscroll. It is the ‘grown up’ version of marching through the school gates with your new pencil case on the first day of term on a fresh September morning. Full of “this year, I’ll be different.”

This decision to find a new job was made to create more space in my life and these first weeks are rooting around to see where that space lies.

Amusingly, after what felt like an eternity of longing for more space and more time to do my hobbies, I have sat on my bed each night this week (amongst the post new job exhaustion & the blessing of my luteal phase) and said… well, what now?

I say amusingly because this ‘problem’ feels so completely ‘corporate’ adult, something I had promised myself I would never become and yet, I have. Jobs are a means to an end for my wider life. I do not subscribe to the narrative of ‘living to work’. I left my last job because my life had become so narrow and yet here I am, with the promise of ‘hobby time’, the very thing I have been day dreaming about and.. I don’t know what to do.

How do I place a hobby on a Tuesday evening when normally it’s what I do on a Saturday morning? How do I spend my evenings with lower cortisol and earlier dinner times? How do I move around in a space that isn’t crushing me with rushed 9pm scoffed dinners and revenge night time procrastination. What to do with the very thing I actually wanted.

Am I going to have to… reparent myself?! How boring and utterly predictable…“late 20’s something struggles to find life outside of work and commuting”.

I’m being dramatic, it isn’t that bad and it wasn’t before. I have hobbies, or at least things I know I enjoy doing… just don’t ask me the last time I actually did them.

And so there it is, the lesson of my own personal inbetween: who do I want to become with my free time? How do I teach myself to transition into a slower more creative flow of life where I have the space to allow things to emerge instead of forcing to create them? How do I follow a steadier pace of life whilst still creating my dreams and a full time job until my dreams pay my bills? I don’t want to stuff more and more into my life to replace what I have chosen to let go of, inevitably leading to burnout again, but this time taking a route of my own doing.

It is the great question we all face really, how do we do it all when we have a full time job?

It’s hard to be in the inbetween. Everything stops and everything starts all at once.

I wasn’t who I was but I am not yet who I am, but what I do know is, I should probably start watercolouring on a Tuesday after work.

Thank you for reading! You can find where I live here.
Buy Me A Coffee / Donation:
I will always keep my writing and videos free from paywalls. I am a girls girl, but it does take time to produce the work you enjoy. If you enjoy what I create and want to show your support for my work (and hopefully my exit from the corporate world finally!) please consider buying me a coffee or donation below, thank you!
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Can I tempt you with another piece?