I Will Not Sell My Life

Over Christmas I spent hours renovating a pair of metal garden gates that are more than a century old. They’re heavy, awkward, rusted in many places, and stubborn in the way only intricate things can be.

I worked on them day after day, in cold air, with sore hands, in our drawing room in front of the fire, stopping only when the light went or my body insisted. They are still not quite finished.

It was, by any modern standard, perfect content. The gates. The house. The time of year. The implied leisure.

The woman in the countryside doing something tactile and meaningful with her hands.

I could already see the captions forming themselves if I let them. I didn’t.

I didn’t photograph it. I didn’t narrate it. I didn’t turn it into a story anyone could consume.

I noticed, as I worked, how relieved I felt not to explain myself.

This is not new for me. I have never been someone who exposes herself routinely. I will write what I want, when I want, how I want. I will open doors when it suits me. I will close them when it doesn’t.

What I have never agreed to is the idea that success, or legitimacy, or seriousness, is conditional on a steady drip-feed of my inner life, my domestic arrangements, my body, my children, my love life, my pain, my joy, my so-called relatability.

Here’s the thing.

I could leverage my life if I wanted to.

The country house.
The origin story.
The body.
The brood.

It would work.

I know exactly how it would work.

But I am not willing to let the market colonise my interior life.

Everywhere I look, women are being told — kindly, helpfully, and day-in day-out relentlessly — that this is the cost of being taken seriously.

Show a little ankle, they say. Just enough to humanise yourself. Just enough vulnerability to smooth the path. Just enough disclosure to make your authority palatable.

I am human without showing my fucking ankle.

“Hands on Ankles” Jo Ann Callis

The phrase itself makes me bristle. It belongs to a long history of women being instructed how much of themselves may safely be seen.

Ankles were once hidden for a reason.

They were controlled. Policed. Sexualised. Regulated. And here we are again, centuries later, being told that a measured reveal — not too much, not too little — is the correct way for a woman to be granted credibility.

I am bored by this. Deeply, grindingly bored.

I am bored by the rituals of compliance — my own and other women’s.

Our emotional tap-dancing. Our careful calibration. The expectation that I will soften, explain, expose, and of course perform.

I am bored by the idea that wanting something large requires a display of emotional obedience first.

What I am exhausted by, more than anything, is the constant insistence that video is the price of seriousness.

That if I won’t put my face, my house, my children, my body into a feed, I must not really want it badly enough. That my thinking, my work, my voice somehow count for less if they are not accompanied by visual proof of a life being lived correctly.

I am anti compulsory intimacy.

I do not believe access equals connection. I do not believe exposure equals trust.

I do not believe that showing more of myself makes me more real. And I am no longer pretending otherwise.

Over Christmas, as I worked on those gates, I kept returning to a question that has been whirling in me for a while now:

How emotionally exposed am I expected to be in order to be allowed serious ambition?

Because I do want scale and impact, without having to liquidate my private life into proof of worth.

The pressure to constantly explain, reveal and perform myself makes withdrawal look like rest and refusal look like retreat.

I oscillate between wanting to semi-retire — as if that were even possible — and wanting to make wild, rebellious, gargantuan change-making moves.

The conditions attached to ambition have become so narrowing that oscillation feels like the only honest way to live inside them. I want less noise and more gravity. I want to convene, not broadcast.

I want interest and engagement based on my work, not my exposure.

What I don’t want is to earn any of it by turning my life into a product.

There is a lie at the heart of online success culture, and it’s one we rarely interrogate honestly.

The lie is that you can do the work and document the work simultaneously without cost.

That you can live a real life, do meaningful labour, and also narrate it constantly without something giving way.

Take a cleaner. If she documented her work — wrote about it, filmed it, reflected on it — when would she clean?

Take a midwife. If she captured the inner texture of her working life in real time, would she not be adding another quarter, at least, to her workload?

The idea that one can both do the work and endlessly story the work collapses the moment you apply it to labour that actually has to be done.

Which tells you something important.

If someone has endless time to show you what they’re doing, it’s often because someone else is paying the bills. Or because the real job is no longer the work itself, but perception management. Selling the idea of a life rather than living one.

And this is where women are hit hardest.

Because for women, selling online rarely stops at selling expertise.

We are expected to sell our privacy. Our backstories. Our wounds. Our relationships. Our children. Our marriages.

We are expected to offer a past, a present, and a future — preferably with a redemption arc — and to keep them all emotionally accessible.

Backstories work best when they include trauma or disadvantage. Any will do. It’s awkward if you grew up in a reasonably stable, ordinary family — not poor, not wealthy, not abusive — but you’re encouraged not to give up hope.

There will be something. A secret or maybe a struggle. A narrative you can excavate if you dig hard enough. And once you’ve laid that groundwork, you move on to the next layer of exposure: relationships. Children. Desire. Discontent. Healing.

I know a heavyweight journalist — I’ll call her Nancy — whose pivot in recent years has been almost entirely inward.

Investigation has given way to personal exposé after personal exposé. HRT. Sobriety. Hair. ADHD. Parenting. School gates. In-laws. County life.

I sometimes imagine her lying in bed scanning her own existence for the next viable angle. A nipple hair feels inevitable. Marriage remains untouched, for now. She’s still married. Her husband is the main earner.

I don’t say this with cruelty. I say it with compassion and clarity. This is what the system rewards. This is what it asks for.

And I am no longer willing to pretend I don’t see it.

If I were Dan — if I were a man with my experience, my intellect, my ambition — I would simply be getting on with my work. No one would be waiting for me to soften it with confession. No one would be advising me to reveal a carefully measured sliver of my private life to smooth the path.

No one would be mistaking visibility for seriousness.

That difference has become impossible for me to ignore.

So I’ve been thinking about what it actually looks like to share without selling your soul.

To offer something real without surrendering your interior life, and to let people in without handing yourself over.

Not:

Lifestyle reels.
Day-in-the-life footage.
Domestic voyeurism.
Soft-focus competence porn.

So here’s what I do instead.

I speak after the work is done, or half-done, or abandoned, never while I am inside it, never while it requires my attention.

I talk about what shifted in my thinking, what clarified or broke open, rather than offering a visual inventory of my home or habits.

I use voice without body — audio, conversation, reading — where thought can arrive without surveillance or self-monitoring.

I let objects carry the trace of work instead of offering tours of my life: gates that have been handled, tables marked by use, letters written and sent, rooms returned to quiet after people have gone. Evidence, instead of access.

I share in intervals, rather than feeds — irregular, deliberate, refusing the demand for constant availability or narrative continuity.

These are aesthetic and ethical choices about form and conduct, about how I live, how I appear, and what I refuse to give¹.

I am not short of material. I am surrounded by it.

I simply refuse to confuse having a life with selling one.

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On Sunday 25 January, I’m hosting a Hellfire Salon. It’s free and online.

This is for people who are tired of being told that the way forward is to be more visible, more open, more personal, more human — on demand.

We’ll think about ambition, visibility, power, privacy and the rule that says credibility hinges on likability, disclosure, or “relatability” and wanting scale or seriousness without turning your life into marketing collateral.

About branding that reflects how you actually work, not branding built on constant access to you.

If you want in, reply to this email and I’ll send the details.

Sunday 25 January — 4pm UK / 5pm CET / 11am EST / 8am PST
60 minutes. Nothing recorded.

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Those garden gates are up now. I’m still working on them. They will hang properly. They will do their job. But they will not need a caption.

And neither do I.

I am not retreating. I am not hiding. I am not withholding out of fear.

I am simply done with showing my ankle to be taken seriously.

And if that makes my ambition harder to categorise, sell, and package, so be it.

I am still here.
I am still working.

And I am not performing my humanity for anyone.

1. This isn’t about never using video or visibility. It’s about choosing the terms under which I appear and refusing those that require routine exposure as proof of seriousness.