The Toxic Pink Blancmange

A drama queen’s field guide to falling apart productively

A Disclaimer, Because Apparently I Need One

I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this. It feels self-indulgent, a little silly, and frankly a bit much, even for me. But by now you’ve probably clocked that I’m a drama queen. I love deeply, I care deeply, and I care about things I have absolutely no business caring about. I pay for that. Often in cortisol and wine.

So here we are. Strap in.

The Tidal Wave

A friend asked me a deceptively simple question recently

what do you actually want to do?

He’d just sat through another full-blown weather event of me. Picture it, I’m trying to start a business, which means I’m self-funding it like some kind of unhinged bootstrap evangelist, begging the universe for investment while simultaneously trying to make my social channels not look like a cry for help. I’m working with a leather maker on test products that may or may not ever see daylight. My mum isn’t well, and that sits in my chest like a stone I refuse to put down. I don’t feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be in life, whatever that even means anymore.

And underneath all of that, quieter but somehow louder, is the low hum of everything else. The pressure to maintain a figure that apparently requires more effort than running an actual company. The exhausting binary of “are you straight or are you queer, please pick a team and stick to it” as though my identity is a seating chart. The sense of being watched, assessed, judged, found wanting, on a constant loop

I gave him all of it. Unfiltered. In one breath. Bless him.

The Blancmange Diagnosis

He didn’t flinch. He just asked, calmly, almost gently,

why do you care about the stuff you shouldn’t?

And then he did something worse than telling me off. He described me. Accurately. He said I have a genuine talent for taking every issue, every worry, every flicker of anxiety, every half-formed insecurity, and squashing it all into one enormous, wobbling, toxic pink pile of blancmange. No structure. No edges. Just one shuddering mass of everything, all at once, equally important, when none of it is equally important. I cannot, apparently, pull out the bits that matter and quietly set down the bits that don’t.

Rude. Accurate. Devastating.

It’s so easy to say. “Just compartmentalise.” Three syllables, sounds so tidy, sits so smugly on a self-help tote bag. And yet it might as well be a foreign language to me. I understand the words. I cannot perform the action. My brain does not have drawers. My brain has one drawer, and it’s already overflowing, and I keep shoving more in and sitting on it to make it shut.

The Backwards Escalator

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about trying to fix yourself while still living your actual life it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like standing on an escalator that’s running the wrong way.

You speed up. You really commit to the walking. Lungs burning, certain you’re finally getting somewhere. And you look up and you’re further back than when you started. Not because you stopped trying. Because the effort and the direction were never actually aligned. You can sprint on a backwards escalator forever and call it main character energy, but you’re still going down.

That’s what this year has felt like. Hustling on every front the business, the brand, the body, the identity, the family, the never-ending performance of being fine, actually, I’m great, don’t worry about me and somehow sliding backwards the harder I push. Which is its own special kind of exhausting, because at least if you’re standing still you can blame the standing still. When you’re sprinting and still losing ground, there’s nowhere left to point the finger except inward. And I am extremely talented at pointing it inward.

Babies, Bank Balances, and a Brief Flirtation With the Devil

Right. Since we’re confessing things tonight, I’m thirty. The clock isn’t so much ticking as it’s taken up a second job as my conscience, ringing at 3am to ask if I’ve thought about my eggs lately. I have. Constantly. Mostly at the worst possible moments, in the queue for an oat flat white, mid-spreadsheet, watching a stranger’s toddler have a meltdown in a supermarket aisle and thinking, simultaneously and with equal conviction, absolutely not and I want that so badly I could lie down on this floor and cry.

Both things are true at once. That’s the annoying part. Nobody warns you that you’re allowed to feel two opposite, enormous feelings with the exact same intensity and neither of them is lying to you.

I am, genuinely, gut-punchingly envious of my mum friends. I watch them do the school run and something in me aches like a phantom limb for a life I’ve never lived. And then I watch them do the school run again, on four hours’ sleep, having not had an original thought or a hot meal in eleven months, and I think do you know what, actually, I’d quite like to keep my freedom, thank you very much. I like that my Tuesday answers to nobody but me. Both feelings. Full volume. All the time. Deeply restful. Ten out of ten, would not recommend.

And then there’s the small matter of with whom, exactly, I’m meant to be doing this. Man? Woman? Do I even get a vote, or does the universe just hand me a profile and a deadline? Remember earlier, when I mentioned the joy of being told to pick a team, straight or queer, like ordering off a set menu? Turns out the menu also does a co-parent option now, and it wants to know if I’d like a pension with that.

Which brings me, naturally, to the worst idea I’ve had all year should I just let someone a sugar daddy, a sugar mummy, doesn’t matter, take your pick foot the bill? Hand over my financial anxiety in exchange for handing over my Tuesdays? It’s tempting the way standing near the edge of a cliff is tempting. Not because you want to jump. Because some small, deranged corner of your brain just wants to know what the air would feel like on the way down.

And here’s the bit I’ll say plainly, because I think plain is the only honest way to say it, I know, first-hand, that getting paid to be wanted on demand is not the easy money it gets marketed as. I’ve heard enough, from enough women who’ve actually lived inside that industry, that dynamic, to know it costs things nobody itemises in the brochure. So no. That’s not my route, and I’m not pretending it is for the sake of a punchy paragraph. And yet. And yet. The fact that I think about it at all says less about the offer and more about how tired I am of doing every single part of this the business, the body, the bank account entirely on my own two feet.

So Here’s My Actual Question

I want to be clear, because everyone hears “ambition” and pictures a yacht, I don’t want to be a millionaire. I want no debt and a smallish, steady income. That’s the whole fantasy. Unglamorous. Almost embarrassingly modest. And if you gave it to me tomorrow, I could tell you, with zero hesitation, exactly what I’d do with the time it bought me, I’d read. I’d write. I’d learn how to use a video camera. I’d run until my legs gave out and swim until the cold stopped registering as cold. I’d love properly, without quietly doing the maths on whether I could afford to.

So I’m asking you. Genuinely, not rhetorically, not as a content hook, what choices do you make to engineer your own luck? Because I have worked hard. Knuckles-bleeding, no-days-off hard. I am just not sure I have ever worked smart, and nobody tells you there’s a difference until you’re thirty, exhausted, and doing long division on your own worth at midnight.

If anyone out there has the map for the love of every friend who has sat patiently through my weather systems, for the love of my own fragile sanity, for the love of all that is pink and toxic and blancmange-shaped inside me please. Show me the way.

The Truth That Will Apparently Make Me Angry First

There’s a line I heard once, often credited to Gloria Steinem:

the truth will set you free, but first it will [piss you off]

(https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/611353/the-truth-will-set-you-free-but-first-it-will-piss-you-off-by-gloria-steinem/9780593132685).

I think about that line a lot lately, mostly because I have no idea which truth it’s referring to. That’s the bit nobody warns you about. It’s not like the truth shows up wearing a name tag. I’m not even sure I’d recognise it if it sat down next to me and ordered a coffee.

Is the truth that I’m not actually upset about the business, the funding, the leather samples that may never become a real product? Or is that just the socially acceptable, fundable, postable version of upset, the one I’m allowed to say out loud at a dinner table without anyone looking at me strangely? Is the real truth buried somewhere underneath, in the part of me that’s terrified about my mum, terrified about my own mortality by proxy, exhausted from being asked to declare an identity like it’s a visa application, tired of being looked at and measured and never quite landing in the “acceptable” column either way?

How do you tell the difference between the truth and merely a truth? The convenient one. The one that’s easier to sit with because it has a five-step solution and a podcast episode dedicated to it, instead of the one that actually has teeth.

I don’t know yet. I genuinely don’t. And I think that not knowing is the actual answer my friend was circling when he asked his question, because you cannot compartmentalise what you haven’t even correctly identified yet. You can’t sort the blancmange into neat little Tupperware containers if you don’t know what half the ingredients even are.

So, What Do I Want To Do?

Here’s my honest answer, which is not really an answer at all, I don’t know yet, but I think I’m finally willing to look.

I think the question underneath the question isn’t “what do I want to do.” It’s “what am I so afraid of admitting that I’d rather drown in a pink dessert metaphor than say it out loud.” And that’s a much scarier sentence to sit with than a business plan or a content calendar.

So what’s next. What leap of faith does this actually require.

Maybe it’s letting the business be allowed to be hard without that meaning I’m failing. Maybe it’s letting my mum be unwell without making her illness about my own spiralling anxiety, and instead just being present for her, which is the only thing she’s actually asking of me. Maybe it’s deciding, once and for all and only for myself, that my identity does not require a verdict from anyone, least of all me, and that “I don’t know yet” is allowed to be the whole sentence. Maybe it’s stepping off the backwards escalator entirely, accepting the slightly humiliating stillness of standing in one place for a minute, just to see what it feels like when I’m not sprinting anywhere at all.

I don’t have a neat bow to tie on this one. I’d love to end with some triumphant little sign-off about how I’ve found clarity and bought a vision board and everything’s sorted now. I haven’t. I’m still mid-blancmange, mid-escalator, mid-truth, mid-everything.

But I wrote it down. Out loud. In public. Which, for a drama queen who’d usually rather perform composure than admit confusion, might just be the leap of faith in question.

We’ll see what’s on the other side of it.

The Career Ms 💋