It was an entirely ordinary weekday afternoon.

Or at least, it was ordinary until it wasn’t.

This was during what I can only describe as the great squishy renaissance of 2026.

NeeDoh was difficult to get hold of, I was somehow doing a remarkably good job of selling squishy things on the internet, and for a while my TikTok Lives had become slightly ridiculous. On a good day there could be two, three, sometimes four hundred people watching concurrently while I squeezed brightly coloured objects, talked absolute nonsense and periodically delivered one of my recurring lectures on why men are, broadly speaking, the worst.

It was a niche.

But it was my niche.

Weekday afternoons tended to be quieter, though. The strange little pause between lunch and whatever happened next. I’d recently got some squishy brains in and I was sitting there doing what I did every day: talking to strangers, reviewing toys ostensibly designed for children and adults with anxiety, and somehow making a living out of being extremely, relentlessly myself on the internet.

And then a young Scottish man appeared in the chat.

For the purposes of this story, we’re going to call him the Emotional Support Scotsman.

Because some parts of this story belong to me, and some parts still belong to him.

He asked whether I had anything that might help with anxiety.

I did.

Obviously.

I was practically running an online emotional-support-object emporium at this point.

So I started showing him squishies.

There is something quite funny about knowing now what I didn’t know then.

Because much later, he told me that the entire purpose of coming into my live had been to find something that might calm his anxiety.

Instead, apparently, he saw me and his heart started beating faster.

Which feels, in retrospect, like a fairly significant design flaw in the anxiety-management plan.

He told me later that he had never seen anyone who looked quite so alive.

Colourful. Animated. Completely myself.

He would eventually describe me as “chaotic as fuck, but in the very best way”, which might be one of the more accurate descriptions anyone has ever given me.

But I didn’t know any of that yet.

At that moment he was simply another username moving through a very busy chat.

Except somehow he wasn’t.

I followed him back.

I still don’t really know why.

I don’t routinely follow people who come into my Lives. If I did, I’d be following approximately half of Britain and several enthusiastic American women who collect stress balls.

But something made me press the button.

Maybe he mentioned Scotland. I have, as subsequent events have rather conclusively demonstrated, a weakness in that geographical area.

But then he said he’d just finished university for the year.

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Philosophy.”

And that was it.

My brain stopped.

Because underneath the woman waving a squishy brain around on TikTok, underneath the brightly coloured dresses and the jokes and the constant chatter, is somebody who can happily disappear for three hours into a conversation about existentialism, ethics, Sartre, Beauvoir and why human beings behave the way they do.

Suddenly I desperately wanted to have an actual conversation with this stranger.

I remember saying something along the lines of:

“God, I would love to talk to you about philosophy right now, but unfortunately I’m trying to sell squishies on the internet.”

And perhaps that should have been my first clue.

Not that anything dramatic was going to happen.

Not that I was about to fall in love.

Certainly not that, months later, I would be sitting at my desk crying while trying to work out how to write the story of us.

Just that something had shifted.

Very slightly.

Almost imperceptibly.

A man had walked into my TikTok Live looking for something to calm his anxiety.

I was karate chopping a squishy brain.

And somehow, amongst hundreds of usernames appearing and disappearing from a screen, we noticed each other.

That was all.

For now.

If you're arriving here first

There She Is, a story about love, loss and finding myself again

This is a story about love.

Which sounds terribly Moulin Rouge, I know. And, to be fair, there is a man involved. There is romance. There is longing. There is probably an unreasonable amount of emotional weather.

But this isn’t really a story about the love between a man and a woman.

It’s about the love a woman slowly learns to have for herself.

It’s about being seen.

Properly seen.

Not glanced at. Not admired from a distance. Not told you look nice in a photograph and then everybody moves on with their day.

I mean being seen in that very rare, slightly terrifying way where somebody looks at you and somehow reflects back a version of yourself you had forgotten existed.

And then one day, there she is.

Hence the title.

I’ll explain that properly later.

This story begins in spring and moves through one extraordinary summer. A season of love, yes, but also one of confidence, desire, grief, ridiculous laughter, nervous-system chaos, questionable decisions and the slow rediscovery of a woman I genuinely thought I had lost somewhere along the way.

For a long time, I assumed change happened because we decided to change.

We bought the book. Joined the gym. Downloaded the app. Had a revelation in the shower and announced that, from Monday, everything would be different.

Sometimes it does happen like that.

And sometimes another human being wanders unexpectedly into your life and, simply by seeing you differently, gives you permission to see yourself differently too.

That is what this story is really about.

There is a man in it. For the purposes of these pages, you may occasionally hear him referred to as my Emotional Support Scotsman.

He will survive this.

This is not an exposé, a revenge story or an attempt to put another person on trial on the internet. It is a work of creative non-fiction based on my own experiences, memories and feelings. Some details may be changed, combined, softened or omitted for privacy, because everybody appearing in somebody else’s story is still entitled to have a life of their own.

But the emotional truth is mine.

And that is the bit I want to write down.

Partly because I don’t want to forget it.

Partly because I suspect there are other women who have reached a certain point in their lives and quietly wondered where the hell they went.

Women who became mothers, workers, carers, wives, ex-wives, responsible adults, people who remembered everybody else’s birthdays and dental appointments and somehow stopped appearing on their own list of things worth looking after.

And then, perhaps unexpectedly, something happens.

Someone says something.

Someone looks at you.

You catch yourself in a mirror.

You take a photograph.

And for one tiny second you think:

Oh.

There she is.

I don’t know exactly how this story ends yet.

Maybe that’s because I’m still living it.

What I do know is that it began with love, moved through loss, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, I found myself again.

So I’m going to tell you how that happened.

One small chapter at a time.

Read - This is where it started