A note before we begin...

This diary occupies the curious space between memory, imagination and mischief. Some of it may have happened. Some of it may have happened differently. Some of it may not have happened at all. Names, places, timelines and identifying details have been altered, blurred, borrowed and occasionally invented. You’ll have to decide for yourself what belongs where.

Mum went home this afternoon.

I love her. I just don’t like her and I wanted her to leave.

Those two things can both be true.

The house feels different after her departure already. Quieter somehow. Even Pickle seems to have relaxed. He spent most of the evening asleep on the sofa, as though he’s finally decided that the emotional Tornado which was intermittently blowing through the house this weekend has now passed, and it’s time to relax.

George still hasn’t messaged back. It’s been twenty-four hours now. Not that I’m counting. (I’m absolutely counting). We had a little flurry of messages over the weekend and, if I’m honest, I’d quietly allowed myself to hope. Nothing dramatic. Nothing romantic. Just enough to make me wonder whether perhaps he’d found a little more room in his life than he’d had before. Then... silence again. I’m disappointed. But I’m not devastated. Those are two very different things.

Tomorrow morning I have a Zoom Dungeon session with my lovely subject, Robin. We’re doing his final outfit-run-through before The Bondage Ball in London next weekend. He’s still worrying about whether his latex trunks, collar and lead are submissive enough and wants me to cast an experienced eye over the whole outfit before he commits. I have to admit, I’m really looking forward to seeing him again.

Not because Robin occupies the same intense cubby-hole in my heart as George. He doesn’t. But because Robin is real and is eagerly engaged and he occupies my curiosity. And I like him a lot. He’s growing on me.

Every time we meet I come away understanding something I didn’t understand before. Yes, about him as an individual but also about trust in general, often about men as a species, and almost always about myself.

The funny thing is that none of that has been occupying my mind today. Today, my mind has been, annoyingly, ‘full of Mum’.

If you’d dropped in for Sunday lunch, you’d probably have thought we’d had a perfectly lovely weekend.

Nobody shouted.
Nobody slammed any doors.
There weren’t any huge rows.

That’s the confusing bit.

The bruises never come from the obvious places.

They just arrive one perfectly ordinary sentence at a time.

She looked at me over breakfast one morning.

Mum: “You’ve had something done.”

Me: “I’m sorry?”

Mum: “Your face.”

A little pause.

Mum: “You used to have such a beautiful face.”

Later she notices my running kit drying over the banister.

Mum: “You’re looking awfully thin.”

Another pause.

Mum: “You’re not taking that Ozempic stuff, are you?”

Me: “No, Mum. I’m training for a marathon. Again…”

Then there’s the oat milk flat white from the farm shop after my run.

One coffee. One.

Mum: “No wonder you’re always struggling financially.”

Apparently the downfall of my personal economy can be traced directly to artisan coffee. Who knew?

Old Lucie would have explained. She’d have presented evidence.

Exhibit A. “But Mum, I don’t drink.”

Exhibit B. “But Mum, I don’t smoke.”

Exhibit C. “But Mum, I buy about one takeaway coffee a week.”

Exhibit D. “And Mum, To the best of my knowledge, economists have yet to identify oat milk as the leading cause of financial collapse.”

Instead...

I just drink it. And I enjoy every sip.

I’m beginning to suspect emotional maturity might simply be savouring your artisan coffee without an ounce of guilt before it goes cold.

The hardest part isn’t actually the comments about me and the endless sniping character assassination. It’s listening to the world she lives in:

Women should stay (in abusive relationships).
Women should forgive (white men - especially the sort in the Epstein Files - but NOT Megan Markle!).
Women should stop expecting so much (why can’t they just be happy with their lot? Women are just so selfish and greedy these days).
Women should be grateful (…if your man doesn’t beat you then you have nothing to complain about. In my day we just ‘put up and shut up’).
Women should be pure (sex is for procreation and god forbid it might be mutually pleasurable).

It isn’t that she says those exact words every five minutes. It’s deeper than that. It’s the current running underneath and woven into almost everything she says. I mean, seriously, ‘The Manosphere’ does not need Andrew-awful-Tate when my mother is around…

And then there is YouTube.

Good Lord.

If algorithms had personalities, Mum’s would wear a hair shirt, carry a self-flagellation whip and be pronouncing the arrival of the apocalypse before teatime.

Now, I want to be clear that she hasn’t been to church for decades and was never particularly bothered by religion per se, yet somewhere along the way in the last few years, YouTube seems to have quietly ordained her into a US-style Christian Fundamentalist, chief lay person leading prayers in a bizarre Youtube congregation of fear. Video after video reinforces everything she already believes and suspects about the world. And makes the noise of it louder.

The more youtube videos she watches in her feed, the more certain she becomes that the country is going to hell.

Listening to it all weekend has been utterly fascinating. Not because I agree with any of it one iota. But because I’ve realised I have an algorithm too. I’ve been thinking about that all afternoon.

The algorithms.

It strikes me that we’re all being shaped by them now. Some consciously. Some not.

Mum’s algorithm seems to wake up every morning expecting the worst. It serves her another helping of fear, another warning about society collapsing, another reason to mistrust people, another reason why she needs to fear ‘A.N. Other’, another story about why women should stay small, stay safe and stay frightened…

By the time she’s had her second cup of tea, the world has become an even more dangerous place than it was when she woke up.

Mine looks very different.

Poetry. Neuroscience. Attachment. Tantra. Power. Sexual Politics. Recovery. Writers. Psychologists. People asking thoughtful questions. Women doing extraordinary things. Conversations about healing. About courage. About becoming more fully yourself.

It occurs to me that perhaps we’re both reinforcing the worlds we already believe in. The difference is that Mum doesn’t seem to realise she’s living inside an echo chamber.

I hope I do.

I’d like to think I question my own assumptions often enough to stop my algorithm becoming my religion. Whether I succeed or not is another matter.

The funny thing is that, despite all our differences, we’re both searching for exactly the same thing.

Safety.

Mum tries to find it by anticipating every possible danger.

I choose to find it by becoming comfortable with uncertainty.

She wants certainty before she lives. I’ve decided life doesn’t work like that and choose to leap in life before I know ‘the net’ is there… in the belief that the safety net I am seeking will appear - but only when I’ve had the courage to leap.

The more I think about it, the more this apprenticeship starts making sense in ways I never expected.

When I first began, I thought I was learning how to dominate.

What I’m actually learning is how not to hand my nervous system over to somebody else’s algorithym.

This weekend every instinct in me wanted to react to my mother.

To defend myself.
To explain.
To justify.
To say loudly, “Please stop talking to me like that.”

Instead, I did something that would have been impossible a few years ago.

I submitted to myself.

That sentence has been rolling around in my head ever since.

“I submitted to myself”.

Not to Mum. Not to keeping the peace. Not to pretending her words didn’t hurt.

I submitted to the higher version of me who already knew how I wanted to behave. The version who didn’t want another family argument. The version who didn’t want my twelve year old daughter to see two generations of women yelling at each other across the kitchen. The version of me who knows Mum is never really talking to me at all. She’s just speaking on auto-pilot from inside the only operating system she’s ever known, albeit unconsciously.

For most of my life I thought strength meant pushing back, proving the obvious awfulness of her opinions and prejudices.

This weekend I’ve become convinced strength sometimes looks like something much quieter. Not silence and reaction-paralysis born of fear. But silence and ‘no reaction’ as a specific course of action - chosen with intention.

Not because you’ve been overpowered. But because you’ve decided your peace and your nervous system is worth protecting.

Oddly enough, this is beginning to feel like the most dominant and dominatrix-y thing I’ve ever done.

Not dominating another person. Dominating my own impulse to react.

No fresh trauma has been created this weekend!

That feels important.

The old bruises are still there. Some of them always will be. But they’re beginning to make sense in a way they never have before. I’m not looking at them through the eyes of the little girl who desperately wants her mummy’s approval.

I’m looking at them through the eyes of a woman who approves of herself.

That feels like a very different place to stand.

I really can’t wait to see Robin tomorrow. I suspect we’ll laugh more than we analyse. Knowing Robin, he’ll apologise at least twice for worrying about his outfit. Knowing me, I’ll remind him that confidence is always more attractive than perfection.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

Perhaps I’m saying it for both of us.

George still hasn’t messaged.

I notice that thought drift through my mind as I write this. Then it drifts away again. I’m oddly grateful for that.

Pickle is snoring at the end of the bed. My lipstick came off an hour ago. My leather bra is hanging over the chair waiting for tomorrow’s Zoom Dungeon session.

And for the first time in a very long while, the loudest voice in my head sounds like my own.

I think that’s enough for one Wednesday.

Goodnight.

A note before we begin...

This diary occupies the curious space between memory, imagination and mischief. Some of it may have happened. Some of it may have happened differently. Some of it may not have happened at all. Names, places, timelines and identifying details have been altered, blurred, borrowed and occasionally invented. You’ll have to decide for yourself what belongs where.

George is still here.

Not physically. I mean… in that peculiar way someone can quietly occupy a corner of your heart without constantly occupying your thoughts.

He pops into my mind when I’m driving, or halfway through making a cup of tea, or out running with my dog-bestie, Pickle. Sometimes I’ll read a poem and instinctively wonder what he’d make of it. Sometimes I’ll see something hilarious on Instagram and my first instinct is to send it to him... then I remember I probably shouldn’t. Other times, hours pass without me thinking about him at all. Then something entirely ordinary reminds me of him and he’s back again, as though he’d only been in the next room.

It’s oddly peaceful.

For a while I wondered whether this apprenticeship, and all these fascinating men I’ve started meeting, were simply filling the space George currently occupies.

I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.

George still has my heart.

My subjects have my curiosity.

Those are two entirely different places.

The more time I spend with my subjects, the less interested I become in wondering whether George will ever come back, and the more interested I become in questions that feel much bigger than George.

Why do some men find surrender so liberating?

Why do others spend their whole lives terrified of it?

Why have I mistaken empathy for self-abandonment so many times?

And what, exactly, makes another human being feel safe?

George hasn’t answered any of those questions. If anything, he’s left me with more of them. But he has ignited something.

If we’d never met, I honestly don’t know whether I’d have had the courage to begin this apprenticeship. I don’t know whether I’d have become quite so fascinated by this strange dance between dominance and submission, not just in relationships, but in politics, leadership, families and everyday life.

Whatever happens between us, I’m already grateful for that.

Anyway.

I’ve been thinking about Malcolm again.

Malcolm is one of my subjects.

He’s also one of Britain’s most infamous Tory politicians.

Which means that several times a month, one of the men my younger self would have assumed held all the power logs onto Zoom, calls me “Mistress” and willingly hands that power over for a little while.

Life is gloriously strange.

The thing that fascinates me isn’t that he’s a politician.

It’s that every time Malcolm appears on my screen, my mother somehow joins the session too.

Not literally.

Psychologically.

She appears somewhere in the back of my mind and quietly whispers,

“They’ll wipe the floor with you.”

Poor Malcolm.

He has absolutely no idea he’s helping me dismantle a sentence that’s been following me around for most of my adult life.

Mum wasn’t trying to hurt me when she first said those words.

That’s what makes them so difficult to unpick.

She genuinely believed she was describing how the world worked. Men like Malcolm occupied one world. Women like me occupied another. If I was fortunate, perhaps I’d marry one of them. Support one of them. Organise their diary. Make sure everyone had enough tea.

But stand alongside them?

Challenge them?

Lead them?

No.

That wasn’t how she’d been taught the world worked.

It’s extraordinary how someone else’s certainty can quietly become part of your own architecture. Even after you’ve consciously rejected it. Somewhere beneath the degrees, the marathon medals, motherhood and a decade of sobriety, that sentence was still sitting there.

Anyway.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Because Malcolm wasn’t Malcolm then.

He was simply a man I happened to meet over coffee.

Well...

Coffee and a strawberry tart.

I’d been to a PTA meeting at the children’s school that morning. Committee business. Fundraising. The annual mystery of why every school event appears to require someone to volunteer for the raffle. Entirely ordinary motherhood.

The only reason that matters is because, for once, I’d actually made an effort.

Normally I’m either in student nurse uniform, running kit or wearing something that says, “I got dressed in about fourteen seconds.”

That morning I’d somehow ended up looking rather... competent.

A well-fitting pencil skirt.

A cream silk blouse.

Charlotte Tilbury lipstick in Cinematic Red.

Heels.

The sort of woman who looked as though she knew how to use Excel. I don’t. But for a couple of hours I looked as though I might

.
Instead of driving straight home, I found myself turning into The Gleneagles Hotel.

I have a slightly ridiculous affection for the place. Not because I can afford to stay there. Good Lord, no. Every now and again I’ll treat myself to one extravagantly overpriced coffee, sit with my laptop for an hour or two and write.

It’s become one of my favourite little rituals.

Mum, of course, would tell you this is precisely why I’m not independently wealthy. She has a long-standing suspicion that takeaway coffee is the gateway drug to financial ruin. To be fair on me... this particular coffee turned out to have a surprisingly handsome return on investment.

I was standing in front of the cakes when the whole thing began.

Choosing cake has always felt strangely emotional to me. It somehow feels as though you’re rejecting all the others, and I can’t help wondering whether the Victoria sponge notices.

Then I saw the strawberry tart.

There is something unapologetically cheerful about a strawberry tart. Red, glossy and slightly ridiculous. Exactly how a tart should be. Voluptuous, tantalising, inviting buds of perfectly placed strawberries. A glaze so shiny it looks almost theatrical.

This tart wasn’t simply sitting there.

It was flirting.

I was still deciding between that and something involving pistachio cream when I became aware of somebody standing beside me.

I looked up.

Oh.

That’s interesting...

It was Malcolm.

Or rather... someone who I had, until that point, loved to loathe. And the man who would eventually become to me, just… Malcolm.

Malcolm has one of those ridiculously familiar faces that normally lives on television panels, newspaper front pages and in the comments sections where everyone seems absolutely certain they’re right.

The strange thing was... I didn’t really feel anything.

No intimidation. No excitement. No overwhelming urge to tell him exactly what I thought of some of his mindbendingly questionable politics.

Just curiosity.

I’ve always preferred meeting people to meeting their reputations.

He smiled. I smiled back. I smile at almost everybody. It’s become something of a reflex over the years. Occasionally it’s got me into trouble, but more often than not it simply starts conversations that wouldn’t otherwise have happened.

We collected our coffees. I remained committed to the strawberry tart. Life is uncertain. Cake shouldn’t be.

A few minutes later I was sitting with my laptop, wearing my eye-colour-complimenting, green tortoiseshell reading glasses and attempting to write.

A shadow appeared beside my table.

I looked up. It was Malcolm.

Him: “Do you mind if I join you for a minute?”

Me: “Hmmm. Sure. Why not?”

He sat down.

I made a completely conscious decision not to acknowledge that I knew who he was. Not because I was playing some elaborate psychological game. I simply realised in that moment, that I was much more interested in meeting the man than meeting the public figure.

It must be exhausting, I imagine, to spend your life walking into rooms where everyone has already decided exactly who you are before you’ve even opened your mouth.

We talked. Not for very long. Ten minutes perhaps. Maybe fifteen.

Long enough to forget he was famous.

Writing.
Poetry.
Scotland.
Travel.
Words.

A tiny bit about politics, although not enough to truly disagree.

The weather, because we’re British and contractually obliged to mention it within the first quarter of an hour.

It was surprisingly easy. That’s what I remember most. Easy.

Not exciting. Not electric. Not one of those conversations where violins start playing in the background and the audience knows something important has just happened.

Just... easy.

I remember thinking he was unexpectedly likeable. Not charming. Not charismatic. Those words don’t feel quite right. There was simply something gentle about him that sat oddly alongside the public version I’d seen over the years.

Perhaps that’s true of all public figures. Perhaps we’re all softer when nobody is watching. Eventually he glanced at his watch and stood up.

“I should let you get back to your writing.”

I smiled.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he paused.

“Would it be alright if we stayed in touch?”

I’d mentioned that I wrote online and he said he’d like to read more. It seemed a perfectly ordinary request. So I gave him the details of my Substack.

We wished each other a good afternoon and went our separate ways.

Whatever it was that had just happened, I reflected that I’d enjoyed the conversation as much as the strawberry tart.

Then life carried on, as it always does.

University. Children. Marathon training. Trying to remember whose PE kit needs washing. Writing. Running. The wonderfully ordinary business of everyday life.

A couple of weeks later Malcolm got back in touch.

He’d been reading.

We exchanged a few messages. Then a few more.

Nothing happened particularly quickly. Looking back, I’m rather glad about that.

The best things in my life rarely arrive with fireworks. They tend to wander in quietly, make themselves comfortable and only reveal their significance later.

Somewhere amongst those messages I found myself telling Malcolm about the apprenticeship. Not everything. I’m beginning to realise there are different ways of telling the truth. Sometimes you throw every window open. Sometimes you leave one slightly ajar and let people wander through it if they’re curious enough. But I did tell him I was training as an apprentice dominatrix.

There was a pause. Not an awkward pause. A thoughtful one. Then he started asking questions. Good questions.

I’ve always liked people who ask good questions. They’re usually far more interesting than people who already think they know the answers.

One conversation became another. Then another.

Eventually, under the gentle guidance of my Dominatrix Training Mentor (who I will write about in more detail in due course), Malcolm became one of my subjects. Even writing that sentence still makes me smile.

Every couple of weeks he appears on Zoom, greets me with a wry smile, calls me “Mistress” and we disappear into our little virtual dungeon.

I know. It sounds completely ridiculous. Sometimes I have to stop halfway through a session and remind myself that this is, in fact, my actual life.

The funny thing is that very little of our time together is about domination in the way most people imagine it. There’s very little shouting. No demeaning humiliation per se. No desire to make another human being feel smaller.

Quite the opposite.

What I’ve discovered is that the more someone trusts me, the less interested I become in power for its own sake. I’m much more interested in what happens when another human being feels safe enough to put their armour down.

Malcolm spends his public life carrying an extraordinary amount of responsibility. Whether I agree with his politics is almost beside the point inside our little Zoom room.

For an hour or so he doesn’t have to persuade anyone. He doesn’t have to defend anything. He doesn’t have to perform certainty. He simply gets to explore another part of himself.

I’ve started to wonder whether that’s what good submission really is. Not weakness. Not humiliation. Trust.

That surprises me.

If you’d asked me six months ago what a submissive looked like, I suspect I’d have imagined someone lacking confidence. Now I’m beginning to think exactly the opposite.

Perhaps it takes a remarkably confident person to hand over control willingly? Perhaps strength isn’t always about holding on? Perhaps, sometimes it’s about knowing when it’s safe to let go?

The irony, of course, is that while Malcolm is learning how to submit, I’m quietly learning how not to. Not my opinions. Not my instincts. Not my voice.

Every now and again Mum’s voice wanders into the metaphoric room in my head.

“They’ll wipe the floor with you.”

She says it with exactly the same certainty she always did.

Only these days the sentence doesn’t seem to land in quite the same place.

Not because I’ve proved her wrong. I haven’t.

Life simply keeps presenting me with evidence she wasn’t entirely right.

That feels strangely peaceful.

Anyway… It’s getting late.

Pickle (who is sleeping on the bed next to me) has sighed three times, which is usually his way of telling me to stop overthinking and turn the light off.

George still wanders quietly through my thoughts. Especially at this time of night when I long to hold him and stroke his cheek and kiss him gently.

Malcolm will almost certainly be in Westminster tomorrow arguing rhetorically about something important. I’ll be in gym kit ferrying kids about and finishing a university essay.

Life is gloriously strange.

And I still maintain that the strawberry tart was an excellent investment.

Yours, with love,

A note before we begin...
This diary occupies the curious space between memory, imagination and mischief. Some of it may have happened. Some of it may have happened differently. Some of it may not have happened at all. Names, places, timelines and identifying details have been altered, blurred, borrowed and occasionally invented. You’ll have to decide for yourself what belongs where.

Well…

Ever since writing about Tallie earlier this week, I have been thinking about her. Not Tallie herself, exactly. I haven’t seen her for decades and, until I started writing the last instalment, I’m not sure I had thought about her properly for years.

It’s funny how writing does that. You think you are describing somebody else and then realise you have accidentally opened a cupboard in your own brain and everything has fallen out.

What I’ve really been thinking about is the girl I became around Tallie. The girl who was so delighted to be included that she would happily sit outside somebody’s boyfriend’s bedroom for four hours and think she was having a marvellous time.

I had plenty of friends. I wasn’t lonely. I wasn’t bullied. I wasn’t the girl sitting alone in the library eating a squashed sandwich while everybody else had fun. I just had this rather enormous capacity for devotion, particularly towards certain people who seemed cooler, cleverer, more sophisticated or somehow more important than me. And at that point I picked Tallie to be devoted to.

Looking back, it was almost embarrassing.

Actually, no.

I am trying to stop saying that about myself.

It wasn’t embarrassing. It was interesting. There is a difference.

Anyway, the reason all of this has been rattling around my head is that I have begun to wonder whether that girl ever entirely disappeared. Because I have a slightly uncomfortable suspicion that I recognised her inside myself again.. about eight months ago.

This time she was forty-four, wearing considerably better shoes, and she met George.

I have been trying not to write about George.

Clearly, that has gone well.

George is a professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University in New York. Poetry, mostly, which sounds terribly glamorous until you discover that he gets genuinely excited about line breaks and wears an unfeasable amount of tweed.

I am fairly certain American universities issue it when professors receive tenure. One office, one complicated coffee order and twelve brown jackets.

We met at a poetry convention in Edinburgh last autumn. I had gone because I love poetry and because a weekend spent listening to people argue about metaphors is my idea of enormous fun.

George was speaking on one of the panels. I wish I could say the first thing I noticed was his beautiful face or the intensity of his eyes, but it wasn’t.

It was that he listened.

Really listened.

This sounds like an incredibly boring quality to fancy in a man until you meet somebody who actually does it. Most people are listening just enough to identify the point at which they can start talking again. George listens as if your answer might genuinely alter something inside him.

It is deeply attractive.

Also slightly unnerving.

That afternoon I read one of my poems during an open session. George came over afterwards and, rather than telling me it was lovely, which is always nice to hear but not particularly memorable, asked why I had chosen one particular image halfway through it.

I explained.

He frowned.

Then he said, very calmly, “I wonder if you lost your nerve there?”

Honestly.

Who says that to a woman they have known for approximately seven minutes?

Apparently George does.

He didn’t mean I had physically lost my nerve. He meant I had flinched inside my own poem. According to him, I had stepped away from what I really wanted to say and replaced it with something safer.

I argued with him, obviously.

Then, halfway through arguing, I realised he might be right.

Infuriating.

There is something surprisingly intimate about being read properly. Not admired. Not flattered. Read. George didn’t treat my poem like a delicate little thing that needed encouragement. He treated it as though it mattered enough to challenge.

We spent the next forty-five minutes discussing my own writing, which is always an excellent way to make me forget the passage of time.

That conversation became dinner, then coffee, then another walk because neither of us seemed particularly interested in allowing it to finish. We talked about poetry, politics, children, grief, faith, love and the peculiar business of trying to become ourselves while simultaneously pretending we already know who we are.

Quite a lot for a first evening, really. Most people manage careers, siblings and perhaps a brief conversation about their last holiday.

Neither George nor I appear to be particularly gifted at small talk.

He is quietly funny, deeply principled and occasionally rather cutting. Not cruel, exactly. Precise. He can remove unnecessary words from a sentence and unnecessary nonsense from a conversation with roughly the same efficiency.

He also doesn’t appear especially interested in being liked.

I find this both admirable and completely baffling.

I have spent enormous portions of my life making sure everybody is comfortable. George seems to have decided that adults are responsible for managing their own comfort, which feels simultaneously revolutionary and rather rude.

The following day we walked around Edinburgh for hours. We wandered into bookshops, argued about poems and drank a medically inadvisable amount of coffee. We talked and laughed until my cheeks hurt, and then, eventually we kissed beneath one of those dark stone buildings that make everyone feel as though they have wandered into a nineteenth-century gothic novel.

The kiss was not nineteenth-century.

Poetry. Bookshops. Coffee. And then… the astonishing but strangely unconsciously expected discovery that our bodies appeared to speak exactly the same language as well as our brains.

The sex was extraordinary.

Not flashy. Not theatrical. Not the sort of thing anybody needed to win a medal for. It was extraordinary because we just seemed to fit together properly, like two pieces of a sexual jigsaw that had somehow been travelling around in different boxes before finding each other.

I did not want Sunday morning to arrive.

Having to peel myself away from his body was one of the hardest things I have done in years. Although, thinking about it, perhaps not quite as difficult as trying to peel a wetsuit from my curvy teenage body at yacht-club sailing lessons.

Honestly.

Some forms of trauma remain stored in the hips.

I can still viscerally remember my voluptuous 14 year old self standing in a changing room, trying to extract myself from wet neoprene while naturally slight girls seemed to slide effortlessly out of theirs. There is nothing dignified about hopping on one leg while a wetsuit remains emotionally and physically committed to your left ankle.

Latex, incidentally, is not much better.

Sorry.

Where was I?

George.

I remember standing on the platform waiting for my train home and thinking, Well, that’s inconvenient.

Not because I had decided he was The One. Life has made me suspicious of that particular story.

It was simply that connections like that do not happen very often. I had met somebody whose mind fascinated me, whose company made me laugh and whose body seemed to fit mine in a way I hadn’t known was possible.

The odd thing wasn’t just that I liked George.

The odd thing was that I rather liked myself when I was with him.

It has taken me forty-four years to realise those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

George got a flight home to New York and I got the train home to the Highlands.

Within a few hours I was back inside my normal life. University studies. Children. Laundry. Running. Gym. The ongoing mystery of why teenage boys are so monosyllabic.

Everything looked exactly the same, which felt rather odd because I didn’t.

Not dramatically different. I hadn’t returned from Edinburgh with a new haircut, a tattoo or a sudden plan to emigrate. I had simply met somebody who had shifted something inside me, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with that information.

George and I started writing to each other.

Proper emails.

Not, What are you up to? followed by a photograph of somebody’s lunch. Long emails about books, poems, politics and whatever we happened to be thinking about that day. He sent me writers I hadn’t read. I sent him voice notes that started out as two minutes and somehow became twenty-three.

Occasionally we spoke on the phone, usually after negotiating the time difference badly enough that one of us was starting the day while the other had already put on pyjamas and cleaned their teeth.

Sometimes we wrote frequently. Sometimes a week or two passed. Then an email would arrive containing a poem, a question or one extremely George-like observation about a sentence I had written, and the whole connection would open up again.

Every now and then, usually after a particularly beautiful email, I found myself checking the cost of flights to New York.

Purely academically, obviously.

At first, none of this felt difficult. It felt unforced. There were no promises, dramatic declarations or discussions about what we were becoming. George had his life. I had mine. We had simply met unexpectedly and found each other fascinating.

The only slight complication was that George was grieving.

His wife had died two years earlier. She had been bis childhood sweatheart. The great love of his life and the mother of his two tweenage children. He didn’t speak about her constantly, but she was there. Not like a ghost haunting the edges of every conversation, more like part of the architecture of him.

He once said, over the phone, that some days it still felt disloyal to enjoy himself.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

So I said nothing for once. Evidence of extraordinary emotional development.

George is very good at containing himself. I don’t think he is distant because he enjoys being mysterious or wants women to chase him. I think he is trying to function. Trying to parent. Trying to teach. Trying to hold grief in a shape that allows him to get everyone through the day.

He is one of those men who can make discipline look almost like a moral principle.

This is both impressive and extremely inconvenient.

He can be warm, funny and unexpectedly tender, then disappear into himself with very little warning. Sometimes he replies to an email the same evening. Sometimes I imagine the email has been delivered by steamship, hand-sorted in New York harbour and carried to Columbia by a particularly tired horse.

He does reply properly, though.

Not quickly.

Properly.

Which sounds lovely until you are waiting six days for one.

About two months ago, the gaps grew longer. His emails became shorter. Phone calls stopped almost entirely.

Nothing dramatic happened.

That was almost worse.

There was no row. No betrayal. No terrible message. Just a subtle closing of the door. Not slammed. Not locked. Held slightly further away.

I wish I could say I responded with the calm self-possession of a woman training to become a dominatrix.

I did not.

Outwardly, I was reasonably restrained.

Inwardly, I became a small emergency control room staffed by anxious interns.

Had I said too much? Had I not said enough? Was he frightened? Was I frightening? Had he met somebody else? Was he overwhelmed with work? Was he grieving more deeply? Had he simply reread my poems and decided I was enormously overrated?

The human imagination can produce a remarkable amount of material when nobody has given it anything useful to work with.

The important thing is that George had not actually done anything wrong.

He had been honest from the beginning that he did not have the capacity for a relationship. He had never asked me to wait. He had never encouraged me to build my life around him, rescue him, heal him or make his grief easier to bear.

He had not clicked his fingers.

And yet I could feel myself preparing to run towards him.

That was the slightly alarming part.

George is not Tallie.

Tallie, if I am honest, was using me. We were young and I don’t need to make her into a villain, but I was useful to her and she knew it.

George is not using me at all.

If anything, I think he is trying rather hard not to.

Which is deeply inconvenient because it means I cannot blame him.

I am left having to look at myself instead.

Somewhere along the way, whether George had written to me that day became strangely important. A reply could make everything feel brighter. A silence could colour the entire afternoon.

I noticed I had started checking my inbox before putting the kettle on in the morning.

Never a good sign when I can’t function without my first mug of Yorkshire Tea.

The confusing thing is that the connection has also done wonders for me. I have written more in the last eight months than I had in years prior. I have questioned myself more honestly. I have taken my work more seriously because George took it seriously.

He has inspired me.

Galvanised me.

Annoyed me into becoming braver.

Something about meeting him seems to have unlocked an enormous room inside me, and I am not entirely sure whether I want to decorate it, study it or lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a while.

Possibly all three.

That is what makes this so difficult to understand.

It is not simply that I have become overly attached to a man who lives on another continent and does not currently have the emotional space for me. That would be inconvenient but relatively straightforward.

It is that the connection has made me feel more alive.

And then his absence has made me feel as though I might disappear.

Those two things seem rather too closely linked for comfort.

Anyway, somewhere between checking my inbox, reading about attachment, writing increasingly intense poetry and pretending that flights to New York were a legitimate academic interest, I started reading about power.

Not political power. Not money or status.

The quieter kind.

The push and pull between two people.

Who moves forward.

Who steps back.

Who waits.

Who accommodates.

Who begins organising an entire emotional universe around somebody who has not asked them to.

I had always assumed dominance and submission belonged mainly to a particular sexual world.

Then I started wondering whether they were everywhere.

In friendships.

Families.

Work.

Love.

In the message typed, deleted and rewritten six times.

In the person who occupies the room and the person who quietly moves their chair back.

In the woman who thinks she is being loving while gradually handing over the keys to herself.

I don’t know exactly where all this is leading yet.

I only know that one evening, after reading about power dynamics for several hours, I bought a pair of fingerless latex gloves.

Which is probably not everybody’s response to unresolved romantic tension.

Still.

Here we are.

Until next time…

Yours with (restrained) love,

Dear Reader,

This post is a note let you know, that alongside my Generative Humanity Substack, I’ve also been quietly experimenting with a new creative writing project.

It’s called Diary of an Apprentice Dominatrix: Power, Politics & Parenting | My Midlife Experiment in Playing Patriarchy at Its Own Game.

Think of it as a fictional diary inspired by real questions rather than real events. It’s my slightly unconventional way of exploring power, boundaries, relationships, identity and, ultimately, what it means to be human.

The next instalment will be landing shortly. If you’d like to catch up first, you can read the introductory post and the first two instalments below:

If it sounds like your sort of thing, I’d love you to come along for the ride. If it isn’t, that’s absolutely fine too. You’re very welcome to unsubscribe from the diary at any time while remaining subscribed to Generative Humanity. There will be no hard feelings. Or punishments.

Thank you, as always, for giving me the freedom to explore, experiment, play, and to follow my curiosity.

With love,

Lucy ❤️
Aka…

A note before we begin...

This diary occupies the curious space between memory, imagination and mischief. Some of it may have happened. Some of it may have happened differently. Some of it may not have happened at all. Names, places, timelines and identifying details have been altered, blurred, borrowed and occasionally invented. You’ll have to decide for yourself what belongs where.

A couple of weeks ago I made the mistake of telling one of my best friends, Helena, that I’d started training to become a dominatrix.

She laughed.

Not a polite little chuckle.

A proper, head-back, “Oh Lucie...” sort of laugh.

Then she looked at me and said, “Lucie darling, You’ll make a rubbish dominatrix, I’ve never met anyone more submissive than you.”

Honestly.

What a thing to hear over coffee.

I laughed too (awkwardly) because, well, what else do you do? Helena wasn’t being unkind. Quite the opposite. She adores me, and I adore her. She’s one of those friends who’s earned the right to tell me uncomfortable truths because she’s stood beside me through enough of life to know me properly.

The trouble was...

The more I thought about what she’d said, the less certain I became that she was wrong.

Which was deeply irritating. Especially when I’ve spent good money on my training course and was now questioning if my latest foray was a financial as a well as a personality clashing mistake.

The strange thing is, I’ve never thought of myself as lacking confidence. I’m the woman who’ll happily stand up in front of hundreds of people with a microphone. At school I was always the first one volunteering, the first one suggesting some ridiculous adventure that everyone else would regret by teatime. Even now I am the first one on the dance floor,

I’ve never been frightened of being seen.

So how could somebody who knows me so well describe me as submissive?

I’ve been carrying that question around with me ever since.

Although, the more I sit with it, the more I wonder whether submission is even the right word.

Perhaps devotion is closer.

I’ve always loved making people happy. I love cooking for people. Encouraging them. Championing them. Remembering tiny details they’ve told me months earlier. Buying silly little presents that remind me of them. Sitting beside them when life falls apart.

Not because I’m trying to suck up to them. But because it genuinely makes me happy to see them in all their wholeness. Sometimes in their brokenness. Sometimes in their glory. To just bear witness to them as humans doing their utterly unique human thing, experiencing their very personally unique trials and triumphs.

I’d always thought that this capacity to make people feel special and loved was a lovely quality.

Until, perhaps, it stops being a choice.

Or because it is actually just part of some unconscious ‘good girl’ conditioning that I never before noticed was there…

That’s the bit I’m trying to understand.

Because somewhere along the line, I have also learned the painful lesson that gushing generosity of spirit can sometimes quietly become self-abandonment, and from the inside that being generous and supportive and self abandonment can feel oddly close but are also energetic oceans apart.

Watching my daughter over the last year has made me think about this even more.

She’s twelve now, and I find girls absolutely fascinating at this age. I don’t think personalities suddenly emerge in early adolescence; I think they simply become easier to see. The little traits that have always been there begin to play out more obviously. Some girls naturally lead. Some naturally soothe. Some charm. Some organise. Some quietly make themselves smaller in order to belong.

I find it endlessly interesting to watch.

Perhaps because it’s also taken me straight back to being thirteen.

Tallie was a girl at school, a year or two older than me, whom I absolutely adored.

Not romantically.

I simply thought she was magnificent. I had a proper girl crush.

She was funny, glamorous, confident and impossibly cool. If she invited me to her house I felt as though I’d won the lottery. I couldn’t quite believe that somebody like her wanted somebody like me around.

Looking back now, I can see my friendship with Tallie wasn’t at all equal, although I don’t think that’s because either of us was particularly calculating. We were just young.

Her mother wouldn’t let her visit boys on her own.

So she’d invite me.

Then she’d disappear for snogging sessions with her boyfriend while I sat patiently outside his bedroom for hours waiting for her to come back out.

Even typing that sentence now feels faintly ridiculous.

Another time she wanted to go for a walk with a different boyfriend but wasn’t allowed unless a girl went too. So I spent the afternoon walking alone on the opposite side of the road while the two of them wandered along together hand in hand and gooey eyed.

Honestly.

It’s like something out of a slightly tragic schoolgirl sitcom.

At the time, though, it never occurred to me that anything was odd.

I wasn’t cross.

I wasn’t resentful.

I was simply thrilled to have been included.

That little girl me wasn’t weak.

She wasn’t pathetic.

She wasn’t spineless.

She just wanted to belong.

These days I don’t feel embarrassed for her anymore.

I just want to give her a hug.

What’s interesting is that I had plenty of other friendships that felt completely different. Friendships where there was no obvious leader, no subtle competition and no sense that somebody was permanently holding the emotional upper hand.

There was just... ease.

Some days I organised everything.

Some days somebody else did.

Some days we laughed until our stomachs hurt.

Some days we cried together.

Nobody disappeared.

Those friendships are still here forty years later.

They’ve survived bereavements, marriages, divorces, babies, sobriety, career disasters, financial worries, menopause, teenagers and all the other wonderfully ordinary catastrophes that make up a human life.

I’ve never once felt I had to become less of myself in order to be loved by those women.

Which makes me wonder whether Helena wasn’t really talking about submission at all.

Perhaps she was noticing something much more specific.

A tendency I have to admire certain people so much that I quietly hand them more authority over my own life than they ever asked for.

The other day my daughter came home upset after another wobble in one of those complicated little friendship triangles that seem to appear in Year Seven.

Nothing dramatic had happened.

Nobody had been particularly horrible.

She just didn’t feel quite right.

A little left out.

A little uncertain.

Instead of asking who’d upset her, I found myself asking a different question.

“Who makes you feel most like yourself?”

She didn’t even hesitate.

“Charlotte.”

I smiled.

Charlotte is one of those glorious children who’s completely herself. Funny. Goofy. Slightly eccentric. Entirely uninterested in trying to be cool. She isn’t manipulating anyone. She isn’t trying to be the centre of attention. She simply gets on with the business of being Charlotte.

“What is it about Charlotte?” I asked.

My daughter thought for a moment.

“I don’t worry when I’m with her.”

That sentence has been rattling around my head ever since.

I don’t worry when I’m with her.

Not...

“She’s the popular one.”

Not...

“She always chooses me.”

Simply...

“I don’t worry.”

It stopped me in my tracks.

Because I suddenly realised that perhaps I’d spent much of my own life asking entirely the wrong question.

Not...

Who loves me?

But...

Who do I become when I’m with you?

Do I become more myself?

Or less?

Do I laugh more?

Or monitor myself?

Do I breathe more deeply?

Or quietly hold my breath?

It was one of those strange moments where you’re trying to help your child make sense of the world and suddenly realise they’re gently helping you make sense of your own.

Perhaps that’s what Helena accidentally gave me over coffee too.

Not a criticism.

A question.

One that, somehow, has led me all the way to a dominatrix apprenticeship.

Although quite how we got from schoolgirl friendships to leather corsets, I’m still not entirely sure.

Perhaps we’ll save that for next time.

A note before we begin...

This diary occupies the curious space between memory, imagination and mischief. Some of it may have happened. Some of it may have happened differently. Some of it may not have happened at all. Names, places, timelines and identifying details have been altered, blurred, borrowed and occasionally invented. You’ll have to decide for yourself what belongs where.

Kateryna reached across and squeezed my knee.

I put my hand over hers and squeezed it back.

By this point, tears had already started dropping onto my laptop keyboard.

It wasn’t what I’d expected from a Thursday morning lecture on person-centred nursing care.

The nurse lecturer was describing a patient in her seventies. I hadn’t looked after this particular woman, but I felt as though I knew her. I’d met versions of her on almost every ward I’d worked on. Different faces, different names, but the same look of absolute terror.

The woman had been labelled as “difficult”. She’d been screaming, scratching, kicking and trying to climb out of bed. Staff had become increasingly frustrated and, eventually, several people were trying to restrain her.

Then somebody read her notes.

Years before, she’d survived prolonged domestic abuse.

Now she was delirious with a urinary tract infection. In her confused mind, the nurses weren’t nurses anymore. They were the people who had once frightened her. The hands trying to help her felt like the hands that had once controlled her.

She wasn’t being difficult.

She was surviving.

I’m often moved in lectures, but today I cried more than usual.

The reason it hit me so hard is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived through something similar.

A couple of years ago, after what began as an intensely loving relationship slowly became one of fear, control and coercion, I ended up in hospital with what was labelled a nervous breakdown. The police became involved and wanted me to press charges, but I was too frightened and exhausted to do that. I did leave though. I disappeared from the world for almost a year while I slowly tried to rebuild a nervous system that no longer believed it was safe.

I’m not writing this as a victim story.

I’ve no interest in writing one of those.

If anything, this diary is an inquiry.

I’m fascinated by power.

Why we hand it over.

Why some people abuse it, consciously and unconsciously.

Why kind, capable, intelligent people can slowly lose themselves without even realising it’s happening.

And, perhaps most importantly, how we find our way back.

Listening to the lecturer, I suddenly realised that the woman in the hospital bed wasn’t frightened of the nurses.

Her body had simply learnt that authority meant danger.

That thought landed somewhere deep inside me.

Because I know what it’s like when your body reacts before your brain has caught up. I know what it feels like to mistake safety for threat, and threat for love. Trauma does strange things to us. It isn’t irrational. It’s physiological. Your wounded mind and body is simply trying to keep you alive using yesterday’s map.

When I finally looked up, Kateryna was already looking at me.

She didn’t say anything.

She just reached over and squeezed my knee.

Kateryna is a Ukrainian refugee. Before the war she completed a PhD in psychology in Kyiv. Now she’s retraining as a nurse here in Scotland. Her daughter is studying nursing too. Her son is still in Kyiv, serving as a soldier.

Sometimes she cries.

Sometimes I do.

Mostly we just understand each other.

There are friendships built through conversation.

Ours seems to have been built through recognition.

By the end of the lecture my laptop was damp, my mascara had almost certainly migrated somewhere towards my ears, and I’d been reminded once again that every patient has a story we can’t see.

Which brings me, rather unexpectedly, to why you’re reading this diary at all.

About a month ago I decided to train as a dominatrix.

Even now, typing those words makes me grin.

If you’d met me ten years ago, you’d probably have described me as warm, enthusiastic, slightly chaotic and endlessly accommodating.

Confident?

Yes.

Outgoing?

Definitely.

Dominant?

Absolutely not.

Or at least that’s what I thought.

Then my wonderful (mind-blowingly cosmopolitan, beautiful and accomplished) gym buddy, Leila, persuaded me to try on a black leather corset and it’s various accoutrements one afternoon.

I looked in the mirror and a huge smile spread across my face.

Not because I looked ridiculous.

Quite the opposite.

There was something shocking but unexpectedly familiar about the woman looking back at me.

She stood differently.

She occupied the space around her differently.

She looked... comfortable.

Self-possessed.

As though she’d stopped apologising for existing.

It wasn’t specifically sexual.

It felt psychological.

I’d stumbled across a version of myself I hadn’t met before.

Looking back now, I don’t think I was ever naturally submissive (although for most of my life that has been my unconscious modus operandi).

I think I simply became extraordinarily accommodating.

My nervous system had learnt that keeping other people happy was often the safest place to be.

Confidence, I’ve discovered, isn’t the same thing as power.

I’ve been confident for years.

Power feels quieter.

It doesn’t need to control anybody.

It doesn’t need to win.

It simply knows where it ends and where somebody else begins.

Since trying on that transformative leather corset, I’ve become quietly fascinated by the world of BDSM. Not particularly because I want to inflict pain or dominate people, but because it seems to ask questions that most of us spend our lives avoiding.

Who has power?

Who gives it away?

What does consent really mean?

Where is the line between surrender and submission?

Can authority exist without cruelty?

Can softness exist without self-abandonment?

The more I learn, the less interested I become in leather and latex.

Although, for the record, they do suit me rather well.

What fascinates me is presence.

Boundaries.

Compassion.

Authority.

The ability to remain kind without disappearing.

Perhaps learning to become a dominatrix won’t teach me how to dominate anybody else.

Perhaps it’ll simply teach me how to stop abandoning myself.

So that’s what this diary is.

Not a handbook.

Not a manifesto.

Certainly not a midlife crisis.

An inquiry.

One day at a time.

Anyway...

That’s enough for today.

Coming up, I’ve got the kids’ school speech day, then another week of uni lectures ahead of me, gym sessions with Leila, running training for a marathon later in the year, approximately twelve pounds in my bank account, and a dominatrix training course that I’m simultaneously ridiculously excited and mildly terrified about.

I have absolutely no idea where this journey is going.

Which, I suspect, is exactly why I need to take it.

See you next time…

I should probably explain myself.

Actually, no.

I should probably explain why I’m not going to explain myself.

This isn’t really a diary about becoming a dominatrix.

Well... it is.

But not in the way you’re probably imagining.

This is a diary about power.

About pleasure.

About submission.

About dominance.

About money.

About motherhood.

About trauma.

About health.

About wellbeing.

About death.

About class.

About war.

About sex.

About squeezing the juice out of life before it’s too late.

About why a perfectly respectable, midlife, middle-class (admittedly massively broke) single-mother, career-pivoting student nurse with three children, a wardrobe full of Boden knitwear, and a WhatsApp full of school-gates messages…. has become convinced that training as a dominatrix might be one of the most profound, healthy and wonderfully exciting things she’ll ever do in this life.

People often ask whether this diary is based on truth.

The answer is... I’ll let you guess.

For the legal record though…

Names and characters are almost entirely made of mashed-up twinkles in my mind’s eye.

Businesses, places, and events are all very likely products of my wildly over-active inventiveness.

Locations and real-world details are blurred.

Scenes have probably considerably improved with retelling.

I’ll leave you to decide which bits belong in memory and which belong in imagination.

Because that’s rather the point.

I’m not interested in shock or harm.

I’m interested in the underlying truth in everything.

And one truth keeps following me around.

Power games based on submission and domination are everywhere.

They’re in marriages.

Hospital wards.

Politics.

Boardrooms.

Bedrooms.

School gates.

Family WhatsApp groups.

Bank accounts.

Governments.

Religions.

Dating apps.

Even supermarket queues.

We spend our lives negotiating dominance and submission.

Who speaks.

Who apologises.

Who takes up space.

Who earns.

Who serves.

Who asks permission.

Who assumes they don’t need to.

For most of my life, I believed I was making free choices.

I’m beginning to wonder whether I was simply very well trained.

This diary is my attempt to find out.

Not by reading another psychology book.

Not by doing another self-help course.

Not by sitting on another meditation cushion (although I do love a bit of transcendental meditation).

But by cracking my whip, stepping into a leather corset and six-inch Jimmy Choos and pondering the question from the opposite direction.

What happens when the woman who has spent a lifetime unconsciously submitting (and being blown around inside patriarchy like a feather) decides to learn how to dominate?

I genuinely don’t know.

That’s why I’m writing this.

One final thing.

Please don’t mistake this for a diary about sex.

Although there will no doubt be much of it…

Sex is simply the doorway.

Power is the room we’re walking into.

#andsoitis