Hey Reader,

We went on a narrowboat holiday. The idea was to slow down. What actually happened was three kids in a very small moving space and me having never been on one before, wondering why I'd agreed to this!

Home, it turns out, is the slow part of my life right now. Not a holiday to escape it.

One of the days we went through the Preston Brook tunnel. Long one, about fifteen minutes end to end in the dark. I braced for it the way you do. All that not being able to see, engine noise off the brick, water black on both sides.

But when we went in, I could already see the other end. Just a small blob of daylight, right from the start. It never disappeared the whole way through.

I don't know why that surprised me as much as it did. I think I'd assumed the middle of something like that would be pure dark, no evidence of where it was heading. It wasn't. The light was there the entire time. Just small, and a long way off, and real.

That's stayed with me all week, because I keep hearing some version of the same sentence from women around this stage of life. Not a crisis exactly. More like:

I don't think I can keep living like this, but I don't know what I want instead.

If that's a sentence you recognise, I'd actually like to talk to you about it. Not a pitch, nothing to buy, I'm still working out what this even looks like. Just a real conversation, if you're somewhere in that tunnel and want to talk about what you can and can't see from where you are.

Reply to this email if that's you. I read every one.

Big love,
Sarah