No one asks to be born. Yet here we all are, existing solely on the terms of our parents' decision.

I was lucky to grow up in a household where the news of the day was discussed openly and honestly. I knew how media spin works, and who decides which stories get airtime. At the same time, I fooled myself into believing that this issue shouldn’t be discussed because it’s ‘complicated’. I refuse to do this anymore.

We binge. We binge-eat, we binge-drink, and we binge-watch. We inhale content without question—especially when it’s fiction hiding under the cloak of reality. And who’s to blame? The viewers, or the participants?

Whether you’ve been together for years or it was a brief but meaningful summer of love, deciding whether to share joint custody of your friendship group is a decision many people face after a break up.

Sometime around June of 2020, about three months into the pandemic, my mental health began to plummet. The overarching stress of the lockdown - job uncertainty, being half a world away from my family, the complete lack of meaningful social interaction - compounded with some earlier life stresses and began to stack up, like a teetering pile of books, just waiting for that final novel that sends the whole thing catapulting over your living room floor.

One day we'll be able to talk about sex the way we talk about the weather - sunny with a chance of orgasms and a few wet and slippery showers expected later in the day. Pack your umbrella now because I'm doing my part to spread the sexy word. When we don't talk about it enough, we don't give room to talk about a fundamental part of human nature.

What if I told you that while I sit here and write this piece, my husband is out on a date with another woman? What if I were to follow this up with an admission that he’ll very likely bring her home and that I’m fully supportive of this ongoing situation. Further to this, what if I divulge that I was out with someone else two nights ago, and I stayed with them for the weekend?

I cannot tell you how many times someone has told me that I won’t ever get a boyfriend because of the photos I post on Instagram.

My dear survivor, I need you to remember that your answer is no - that is definite. Whether you verbally said it or not, that simply does not matter here.

To me, feeling connected via shared experiences and through digital storytelling is a mode of intimacy. Through interviews and thought-pieces, I’ve carved out a space for togetherness with complete strangers.

Knowing how to write this without it reading as a boo-hoo me diary entry feels almost impossible, except to explicitly state that this is positively not a boo-hoo me diary entry. What it is, in fact, is an admittance that I royally fucked up my move to New York, in every way that one can fuck up uprooting their life and moving across the globe.

We’ve all been there, well that might be an overstatement, I’ve definitely been there. Scrolling on Tinder or Bumble or another surface-level dating app to the same effect. Watching matches pile up with no real hope of a substantial relationship being the end result.

Two independent women, marrying into two different families, to two men who had grown up in the public eye at such an extent that the public felt the owned a part of them. Each coming from a royal family, literally or figuratively, about which people have curious fascinations.

We’ve all been there, well that might be an overstatement, I’ve definitely been there. Scrolling on Tinder or Bumble or another surface-level dating app to the same effect. Watching matches pile up with no real hope of a substantial relationship being the end result.

‘Cat Person’, written by Kristen Roupenian and published by the New Yorker, is a fictional short story that quickly and unexpectedly quickly hurricaned its way to global success. Cat Person tells the story of two people: Margot a college student, and Robbie, a man in his thirties, who fall into flirtation and ultimately end up having unsatisfying, fantasy-shattering sex