One of those end of year round-ups

With added cheese.

David Lammy made me buy it.

At the checkout of Aldi yesterday (which, if you haven’t already found this out, is not only cheaper than every other supermarket by a country mile, but also has the best CHEESE), I overheard a middle-aged wild-haired woman not dissimilar to myself say to her cashier as she stuffed her bags frenziedly, “I just can’t wait for Christmas to be over now!”

He was aghast.

“You can’t wait for it to be over?!”, he quizzed, clearly presuming he’d misheard.

She didn’t bother to explain. I wouldn’t have bothered either. She just laughed maniacally, rammed her ready readers on the top of her head and paid for her trolley load of planned meals, biscuit selections and family sized nut packs that she and I both knew would only last her til Thursday once her children had descended on it like a plague of locusts.

Yes yes, I know it’s supposed to be the most magical time yadda yadda, but today I am feeling harassed. For some reason I’ve done barely any present buying yet, nor do we have a tree. This year it’s as if the festive season has ambushed me while I was still thinking about getting round to putting some of the summer shoes in a box or wondering whether this would be the year I managed to get the holiday snaps printed into one of those fancy albums. There might still be time, I was thinking. It’s only October. But no it wasn’t. It wasn’t October at all. Turns out I completely misjudged it.

All of this is really leading up to saying that, whilst I had planned on an in depth piece today on a weighty topic, instead I’m just going to chat to you a bit about how the year has been and where I’m up to, because, quite frankly, that’s easier and quicker to write and will leave me more time for traditional activities like panicking and cheese eating.

At the start of this year as some of you who’ve been here a while will know, I was right in the thick of it with ‘book 4’, which I still can’t really tell you about. Whilst I was working up to the deadline of the end of June for the first draft, the new edition of Give Birth like a Feminist came out, with a brand new chapter (you can read an extract here). At the same time, I experimented with recording eight episodes of a Give Birth like a Feminist podcast, which was a really steep learning curve but hopefully valuable (I’ve got a possible podcast planned here at The Mule next year, watch this space!)

Writing here on substack is very immediate, just like it used to be years ago when I was on blogger. Quite quickly after publishing a post, you can see whether people are a bit interested, or not bothered, or if the reaction is on fire. When I wrote posts like this one in March about Kelly Jay Keen and how the smearing of women’s reputations is as old as the hills, the reaction lit up. I think at the time I was feeling the push and pull between the book I had been commissioned to write (which is not directly about gender ideology), and my own need to explore this topic which, for now at least, feels more important than anything else.

But I’m also wary not to shut myself off from all other topics or areas of thought, and I find that’s really easy to do with the gender discussion. The whole thing is just so OUTRAGEOUS (for goodness sake please tell me I’m having a bad dream when Peter Tatchell is telling me that a porn addicted man in a wig is helping us to get more women MP’s??) that it’s incredibly difficult not to let it completely take over. And perhaps that’s the right thing to do, in terms of standing up to this unprecedented threat to women’s rights. But on the other hand, it’s not necessarily good for a person’s mental health, not to have any balance. So I’ve tried to keep writing about ‘other stuff’ too, and my piece about 'disrespecting the mother’ reminded me just how wonderful it can be when you write from the heart and it really resonates with others.

I want to keep doing that, and keep mixing it up, but I’ve also discovered this year just how much of an appetite there is for writing that exposes and analyses the madness of gender ideology. My posts this year about things that have happened to me personally, such as having my words changed in a quote for a magazine to take out ‘woman’, have been some of my most popular. And of course, the most popular of all has been The Word is Woman. I can still remember how I published The Word is Woman #1 and then went to a festival with my eldest daughter. All the time we were there I kept getting notifications about more and more likes and subscribers. I cannot tell you how great that felt!

That post was the starting point for my going ‘all in’ here on substack. It was like something suddenly clicked and I could see a way to making writing work for me, something I’d been trying to do for nearly 14 years. I will admit to you that I felt in quite a lot of despair about my finances and my career for the first half of 2023. But substack has given me hope in the past few months, as my community of paid subscribers here has grown. I’ve felt social media begin to lose its grip on me. I’ve stopped pitching - although I have had a few commissions. It’s been nice not to feel at the whim of editors, or to have my words changed, or to being forced to use female pronouns for men. Here I write when and what I want, and I write for you.

So thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here and for supporting me. In 2024, I will be continuing with the current schedule of The Mule: one post on a variety of topics (NOT just gender!) early in the week, and The Word is Woman each Friday. For now, I’ll keep up the Sunday threads for paid subscribers, and see if they gather momentum. As I’ve said, there is a new podcast in the pipeline. Hopefully there will be a book in 2024, too, and you lot will be the first to see the cover and hear all about it. And I’ll also be running Writing for Change, a monthly writing group via zoom for paid subscribers only. You can read more about that, here, and I’ll be sending out more info on it soon.

On Friday I’ll send out the final The Word is Woman of 2023, and after that I’ll be taking a week off (or maybe two) to do deranged and frantic stuff with wrapping paper and then collapse face down in a plate of Aldi cheese. Won’t it be great when it’s all over?! Cheers! See you on the other side, Milli x