We spend a lot of time looking for — and discussing — red flags. Whether it’s in a friendship or a romantic relationship, we’re often aware of potential red flags.

We’ve all heard them before: they put you down, they refuse to apologise, and so forth. But something that we consider less is potential green flags in a friendship. The moments that confirm someone as a good friend, as a healthy influence in your life.

It can be big things as well as small things; it can be what they say, or rather what they do. But there are tiny…

Let me start by saying that I know there are awards for books. There’s the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, Costa Book Awards, and many more. But even though we have these literary awards, they would never be glammed up in the manner that film awards are.

You miss the hype leading up to the event, the promotion and the cut-throat competition. You also miss the various scope of awards. A film can be awarded for acting, screenwriting, costume, lighting, cinematography, and so much more.

Whilst a book is usually awarded within its genre and nothing else. We spend so…

A lot of people don’t know I have Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s not something I actively hide but merely comes from when they met me or whether I felt comfortable opening up. Once people know I have BPD, they tend to see me in a different light and sometimes even fear me. BPD still comes with a lot of stigma and a lot of assumptions.

I’ve never really felt like I ‘fit in’ with the image of BPD, despite knowing that it can come in all shapes, sizes and levels of functioning. There are so many things that I wish…

I talk about Borderline Personality Disorder a lot, and there are two reasons for this:

1. It has shaped me in so many ways and explains a lot about me.
2. No one else is talking about it.

I’m not here to play the ‘who has it worse?’ game, as each mental illness is a struggle, and each struggle is subjective to the individual. People have it worse than me, others may not have experienced the same difficulties yet, but we all deserve to be recognised in our pain. So I won’t claim that BPD is the worst mental illness, as I…

Death is not something you know until you know. I’ve chosen to start this with a pointless sentence, one that seems so obvious that it’s absurd. I’ve chosen to start this with his death, rather than his life, because that’s how it works in my mind. I don’t first think of his smile, his soft voice, his gentle nature and his unwavering love for me. Instead, when my mind tries to wander to him, his death confronts me, like a bang, like a slap, like a wall that blocks me from him. But two years have passed, and now I…

Sometimes we get so focused on the act of reading that we don’t actually read. We take in words, flip pages, and tick another book off our list, but we didn’t really read that book. But rather, we went through the motions of it and looked at it as a book rather than an opportunity. An opportunity to learn, an opportunity to feel, and an opportunity to escape. This applies to non-fiction as much as fiction, for if you’re skimming through a self-help book, you’ll likely take little from it.

When you read a book, I want you actually to…

Friday the 9th of April, 2021 was a momentous day. You may have noticed something, be it the uncontrollable sobs of women forcing themselves through a breakup album or even the sound of wine bottles being simultaneously uncorked across the globe. Because on Friday the 9th of April, Taylor Swift released her first rerecorded album, and Swifties got to live through the delight of ‘Fearless’ all over again. It didn’t matter that we’re in our twenties or thirties now, singing about high school crushes and loss. …

This is an article about hair. It’s not an empowering feminist essay about body hair, nor a stylistic look at haircuts and how they evolve. It is an article about hair or rather one hairstyle in particular. Today I’m going to talk about the ‘Lob’, also known as the long-bob, and why this hairstyle is more than just a hairstyle.

The Lob marks a milestone in a woman’s life, the moment when she stops conforming to outdated views of femininity and instead chooses not to hide behind her hair. It often marks another sadder milestone, employed when a woman is…