The dense, unmoving weight of the heat sat on the skin like another layer of clothing. Volcanic dust clung to sweat, to boots, to the hems of skirts, to the cuffs of trousers. The ancient smell of sun-baked rock and salt, and something far more pervasive and pungent: goats. Always the goats, wandering without hesitation or shame through the settlements, as though they were the original inhabitants and everyone else merely passing through.

This was the stage chosen by a handful of idealists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, people who came with wildly different visions of what a new life might mean.

Floreana Island, Galápagos.

Not strictly speaking uninhabited. There had been settlements before, but all had failed. In the 1800s, whalers and pirates used the island as a watering stop. In 1832, Ecuador claimed the Galápagos and attempted to colonise Floreana. They built a prison colony, which later collapsed due to starvation and brutality.

Later, a short-lived farming settlement failed due to drought and isolation.

By the early 20th century, Floreana was considered haunted by misfortune. “The cursed island”, with only 1–2 local families living there intermittently.

No infrastructure.

No town.

No trade.

No medical care.

No way off the island without the luck of occasional visitors at sea.

This is where the film Eden is set.

Those who don’t know the story of the European settlers who tried their luck here in the late 20s and early 30s, I guess I could say this essay will be full of spoilers. However, it was probably never the filmmakers’ intention to surprise anyone with unexpected turns of events or a novel ending, so if you don’t know much, or anything at all, you might as well start here.

For all the elements of the film that reviewers have found problematic, I believe it might not always be the point in a historical drama to present events as they were, not even as they have been handed down to us through the interpretations of people who were there to experience and witness it all.

As Gabriel García Márquez put it with absolute to-the-point genius, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” This applies very much to the memoirs of the survivors of the Galapagos Affair. How they remembered, as well as the extent to which they were able to own up to the truth, versus the ways in which they might have edited it.

Another way I would rephrase this quote — one that keeps surfacing and resurfacing in my life in all sorts of situations — is that life events and our memories of them are not archives but interpretations. The essence of life is not formed from events as they happened, but from the narrative we have made of them. Unless we have it on film, we have no access to our lives as it was yesterday, or at any given time. We only have what we remember and how we remember.

As for Eden, the makers of the movie obviously had things to say, which they have woven into real events that happened to real people. So, while the story as they told it is somewhat historically inaccurate, I have found no problem with the artistic license they have taken.

And these are some of the thoughts that have been tumbling around in my head in the last few weeks, since I saw Eden, and my own struggles to endure the noise of civilisation have resurfaced.

Nietzsche In Boots

Dr Friedrich Ritter.

The first settler came to Galápagos with his companion and lover, Dore Strauch, from a Germany in transition, a world already cracking at the edges. Nietzsche’s ideas had filtered into the culture as a kind of spiritual dare: become the one who stands apart, who makes himself.

The First World War had shattered certainty; the Weimar years loosened old moral structures without providing anything stable in their place. Berlin was full of artists, mystics, political radicals, and people reinventing themselves at high speed. The old world had ended, but the new one was not yet formed.

Hitler was a rising but not yet inevitable force. The feeling was not yet terror, but instability. A sense that ordinary life was no longer bearable for anyone with a sensitive inner life.

Ritter, a physician with philosophical ambitions, believed that society had become weak, distracted, and spiritually diluted. He read Nietzsche not as literature but as instruction, and convinced himself that the only path to authenticity was to leave civilisation altogether, to build a life from pure will, discipline, and thought.

Floreana, to him, was not paradise. It was a stage on which to prove that a human being could become self-created and uncompromised, even if the rest of Europe were collapsing behind him.

Dore Strauch, Friedrich Ritter’s companion, had been a former student of his in Germany. This was not the clichéd story of the ageing professor and his much younger student. Ten years her elder, Ritter, in his mid-thirties, was the visionary, the theorist, the architect of the experiment. Dore was the follower, the believer in his vision, a woman willing to abandon her life to enter his world.

Dore had been married, but Ritter had persuaded her to leave her husband and follow him to the then uninhabited Floreana in 1929. They intended to live as a kind of philosophical experiment: vegetarian, self-sufficient, free from the moral decay of Europe.

Her health was fragile, though. She suffered from multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, and permanent exhaustion. This made her dependent, emotionally and physically, in a context that demanded brutal autonomy.

And Ritter, the self-sufficient ascetic, became impatient with her weakness, resentful, increasingly cruel in small ways. There was no open violence, but clarity and detachment so cold it could cut.

The island magnified both of them: Ritter’s discipline turned severity. Dore’s loyalty turned isolation.

The Idealists Who Weren’t Supposed to Make It

Ritter was there to prove a point. He arrived not simply to escape society, but to demonstrate that the Übermensch could be forged, that the philosopher could become the “new human” by stripping away the world.

And then, the Wittmers arrived and ruined that narrative the moment they stepped off the boat. They didn’t come to build an image or find purpose. Working class, ordinary, untheorising, with almost nothing to their name, not even an ideology, (with Frau Wittmer heavily pregnant), no one would have expected Heinz and Margarete Wittmer to make it through the first season. Least of all Ritter, who deliberately gave them a patch of land further away from the main stream, one he considered impossible to cultivate. He literally sent them to live in a cave, fully expecting that they would give up and leave him and Dore to themselves within months.

But the Wittmers had not moved to Floreana to prove anything. They were moving away from hyperinflation, from wages worthless by lunchtime, from savings erased overnight, from hunger and riots and extremism on all sides.

They did not speak about transformation, purity, or the new human. They came because Margarete was pregnant and, having lost two babies already, grief had followed them too closely in Germany. They stepped onto the island, looked at the ground, the heat, the distance to water, and began to work. While the others philosophised and wove dreams, they were already repairing the cistern.

They were the kind of people who did not need a story to live.

While Ritter and Dore were trying to transcend humanity, the Wittmers, through painstakingly hard work and patience, built a shelter. They carried water. They built a garden. They sent letters to their family and requested small supplies, built relationships with the crews of passing ships, the Ecuadorian Postmaster and Officials in Puerto Ayora.

Local officials, who often disliked European eccentrics, respected the Wittmers. They were polite. They didn’t claim to be better than anyone. They didn’t write manifestos.

And small favours accumulated.

The Wittmers slowly built a liveable little world for themselves.

The Diva Without an Audience.

So here they were on a cursed volcanic island. A Nietzschean physician, attempting to forge the Übermensch with his partner and a quiet German couple, who simply wanted their baby to live, when more people arrived.

Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet.

Born, Eloise Wehrborn.

German.

Cabaret performer, small-time actress, possibly a courtesan, spiritual teacher, salon hostess.

Married several times to men of status and wealth – none of them barons.

She arrived not to escape civilisation. Not to survive. Not to prove a point. But to become nothing less than a legend.

And, unsurprisingly, she didn’t arrive alone.

The Empress of Floreana, whom she declared herself on arrival, brought a harem of two men.

In the film, the men pull up a tent with rugs, furniture, books and a gramophone. Truly, this is glamping 1930s style. Why, I would happily move in!

Reality was a bit less glamorous, though.

They settled about half an hour’s walk from the Wittmers. Hacienda Paradiso, as she called it, was a makeshift shelter of timber, bamboo, and canvas salvaged from earlier failed settlements and from shipwreck detritus with a tent-like roof, a small table, and a few bits of furniture they’d brought or bartered from passing ships.

She decorated it with mirrors, fabrics, and a few books, trying to make it look like an exotic salon. She had a gramophone, which she liked to play, as she posed for visitors, reading aloud and playing records.

Rudolf Lorenz, German merchant seaman, was soft-spoken, emotionally dependent, and psychologically fragile.

He did not have the temperament for hardship, hunger, or chaos. He was not built for volcanic rock and erratic personalities. He grew exhausted, frightened, and mentally unsteady. He became the weakest person in the triangle, and therefore the one most likely to break.

Robert Philippson had a harder, more forceful, more aggressive personality. Possibly a former soldier or adventurer. Austrian. Coarse charm; physically confident; controlling tendencies. He was the Baroness’s enforcer.

Coming from an empire that had already collapsed, he was trying to rebuild a world where he could be important again. The island gave him a place where force still meant something. He would be the strong man beside the mythic woman. He enjoyed the idea of a lawless environment where he could be dominant—the strong man by the side of a mythic Empress.

It was a power triangle:

The Baroness needed to be adored.

Philippson needed to be powerful.

Lorenz needed to be wanted.

But for the Empress of Floeana, this was not enough. She was a colonial monarch; she needed subjects—or rivals—not neighbours.

You couldn’t even make this up. In this day and age, to our thinking, how could two grown men have fallen for this?

But apparently, history doesn’t care about plausibility, and the Baroness had grand plans. She wanted to build a luxury holiday resort. Not that they ever even came close to laying a foundation. The garden failed. “Hacienda Paradiso” was more performance than farm, and they were too consumed by quarrels to keep the garden alive or haul enough fresh water.

They began to take supplies from the other settlers.

The Baroness called it sharing; the others called it theft. Her men crept down the paths at night to carry off fruit, chickens, whatever could be eaten. It wasn’t hunger alone that drove them; it was her belief that rules were meant for lesser lives.

Lorenz was the servant-devotee. He cooked, fetched water, and endured her moods. The longer they stayed, the more those roles hardened. When his health failed, Philippson grew cruel, and the Baroness’s temper turned theatrical and violent. Lorenz was beaten, forced to sleep outside, and sometimes denied food. The Wittmers, their nearest neighbours, took pity on him and offered him shelter when he escaped for a few days at a time. The Baroness treated his departures as betrayals and then lured him back with promises.

Darwin in a Dinner Jacket

Allan Hancock, wealthy American businessman, oil magnate, patron of the arts, owner of a luxurious research yacht called the Velero III., had visited Floreana multiple times, supplying goods and filming the settlers. He had known Ritter before the Wittmers and the Baroness ever arrived.

A man of science and adventure, part explorer, part philanthropist, part showman, he did not flee from anything or need an identity rehaul. Hancock had the means to live exactly the kind of life he wanted, wherever he wanted.

With connections to Hollywood, Hancock loved stories. He filmed a silent “mock movie” with the baroness acting as the star — a pirate queen drama, playing herself as the queen of Floreana, and she fully believed that she would become a film star. But Hancock didn’t film her because he thought she had any special talents. He filmed her because he filmed them all. The baroness gave him drama. Ritter gave him philosophy. The Wittmers gave him respectable pioneering simplicity.

Hancock was often the only adult in the room, the one person who wasn’t hypnotised by the Baroness’s charisma or drawn into the ego-wars.

He was observant, pragmatic, and not entangled sexually or emotionally. He was wealthy enough not to need anyone’s approval, and socially powerful enough not to be intimidated. He had everything he needed. He could see clearly.

The Vanishing Acts

One morning in March 1934, as Margarete Wittmer later wrote, the Baroness came to their house “radiant with excitement,” saying she and Robert Philippson had been invited aboard a friend’s luxury yacht headed for Tahiti, and that they were leaving immediately, without time for farewells.

And this was strange, because no yacht was ever seen. No ship was recorded in the area. The Wittmers had seen no ships, and the view from their homestead allowed them to see every vessel approaching.

They left all their belongings behind, including clothes and personal items nobody would abandon. Only Lorenz spoke of the departure after that, and his story changed.

After that day, the Baroness and Philippson were never seen again by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Within days, Lorenz began adding or removing details:

Sometimes he said the yacht arrived in the morning, sometimes near dusk.

Sometimes he said he saw the Baroness wave goodbye, other times he said he only “heard” she had left.

Sometimes he said he helped her pack, sometimes he said she took nothing.

He changed which items she supposedly took: clothing, letters, nothing at all, and none of it was adding up because the Baroness’s favourite dresses were still hanging, her jewellery and expensive fabrics were still in her hut. Her weapons were still there. Philippson’s boots, rifle, and tools were left exactly where he had last dropped them. There was no sign of packing, haste, or preparation.

You don’t get on a yacht to Tahiti and take no personal belongings.

Lorenz then became agitated, evasive, frightened, even paranoid. He also began sleeping at the Wittmers’ house, because he was terrified to stay alone at Hacienda Paradiso.

Lorenz, already half-mad from fear and fever, begged the Wittmers to help him leave Floreana. In the end, he convinced a Norwegian fisherman, Nuggerud, to take him to Santa Cruz to find a ship home.

Weeks later, both men’s bodies were found mummified on the desolate island of Marchena, far off their route, their boat wrecked. To this day, no one knows whether they died of thirst, heat, or violence, and there was nothing left to prove how they had ended up there.

Hancock came not as a supplicant but as a witness. He was not a refugee. He arrived in safari boots and a scientist’s notebook, and what he saw unsettled him: the cheerful myth of paradise unravelled into theft, fear, and bodies. In late 1934, he sailed his yacht Velero III to Marchena Island, where the two missing men lay mummified, and wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the deaths were “unquestionably” not accidents.

Much of this essay is based not on the film but on what we know about the actual events. However, strangely, one of the things that stays with me most is something from the film which, based on everything we know about Ritter, probably never happened.

Ritter’s big breakthrough in the film is that Nietzsche, as well as Christianity, puts humanity above animals, but he has come to believe that our animal instincts (”we fight, we hunt, we f*ck, we kill”) are our inner truth and the essence of life. That as a species, we have spent thousands of years running from our true selves. While this doesn’t add up to anything we know about Friedrich Ritter, it resonated with me because it would have actually been the single most realistic conclusion for him to reach.

He never changed his worldview, though. He died still believing he had been right. That Nietzsche had been right.

He died of food poisoning, having eaten spoiled chicken (which they resorted to due to hunger). In the film, it was strongly implied that Dore had deliberately given it to him. We don’t know this, though.

Dore later suggested in her memoirs that he ate it deliberately as self-punishment.

The Wittmers implied he refused help, out of pride.

Others think Dore may have withheld help.

Still others think the Wittmers let him die.

But the real horror is not murder. The real horror is people living in close quarters, needing each other to survive, resenting each other, and eventually choosing not to save each other. Death by neglect. By pride. By silence.

The Baroness had called it love, but on Floreana, love had to carry water and dig for shade. One man enforced her will, the other worshipped her until worship became humiliation. By the time the heat broke that strange triangle, she and her favourite had disappeared into the Pacific without a trace, and the faithful one lay beside a stranger on another island, dried to bone and salt.

And the islands keep no records. They only keep the rumour.

When Dore sailed back to Germany, the story everyone remembers — the Baroness, the lovers, Ritter, the diaries — was already over.

Only the Wittmers stayed. The people who were never supposed to make it. The only people who survived the island were the ones who did not need to be extraordinary, but steady, ordinary, practical, undeluded by their own importance.

Heinz Wittmer, Margret Wittmer, their son Rolf, who was born on the island, and eventually a second child, Ingeborg, who was also born there.

The Wittmer children grew up to become guides, boat operators, and naturalists. And eventually, they established their own tourist lodge, the Wittmer Hotel, which their descendants continue to run to this day.

And the Wittmers’ descendants live on Floriana to this day.

Today, Floreana has a few dozen residents, a small primary school, one main road, one bar, and one church.

The volcanic cliffs are still there.

The tortoises and the goats are still there.

The water is still scarce.

The light is still harsh.

The silence is still profound.

And no one is trying to build Eden, or be a prophet, or a queen anymore.

When I read the allegations about Neil Gaiman, what struck me most wasn’t just what was being said, but how differently we understand such stories now.

Only a couple of decades ago, his alleged behaviour might have been dismissed as eccentricity, the messy private life of a brilliant man. Today we talk about power imbalance, coercion, and consent. Terminology that didn’t even exist when I (as well as Neil Gaiman and many of the men recently involved in scandals and cancellations) grew up. The vocabulary has changed, and with it, the moral landscape.

Men of Gaiman’s generation, those now in their fifties and sixties, are being measured against rules that didn’t exist when they came of age. They grew up in a world where relationships between powerful men and younger women were not seen as exploitative but romantic. The doctor and the nurse. The professor and the student. The rock star and the fan. These were glamorous clichés, not warning signs.

It’s easy to forget how recently we began to name the imbalance for what it is. And with the new terminology came new expectations – backdated even decades into the past, as if people should have known the rules before even the words existed to prescribe them.

We forget how explicit the hierarchy once was. The “casting couch” wasn’t whispered about; it was practically a trope. As a teenager, when I said I wanted to be an actress, my parents warned me about it. Everyone knew what it meant. That the path to success could depend on what a girl was willing to tolerate, what price she was willing to pay.

The same was true in pop culture. I was an avid Beatles fan and already knew about the girls who had followed bands from city to city. The word groupie didn’t just mean fan. It meant devotion with a price. Even as a child, I understood that these men had access to women’s bodies as part of the reward for being adored. That was the air we all breathed.

The Jimmy Savile story, retold in The Reckoning, exposed the darker end of that same spectrum. Young girls went to his dressing rooms or hotel suites because they were excited, flattered, never questioning the assumption that they would be safe with a celebrity. Then they realised too late how wrong they had been. It’s devastating precisely because it shows how power and fame could turn admiration into paralysis, while the world looked away. Everyone knew, and yet somehow no one knew.

Indeed, the term “victim blaming” would have literally made no sense to anyone. The general understanding was: “Just what the hell did you think being invited into a hotel room meant?!”

Even now, people who grew up in the 1980s and 90s struggle to draw these lines. Teachers still confuse horseplay with bullying, especially when boys tease girls. Many of today’s teachers grew up when “Boys will be boys” was practically school policy.

It normalised behaviour that today we would recognise as harassment. The message was clear: boys’ impulses were natural; girls’ discomfort was their burden to manage. Those messages don’t vanish when the children grow up. They become part of how adults understand (or fail to understand) what power looks like.

And what we didn’t realise back then, but know now, is how men simply by being men have that power. Or do we? I’m not sure men still really realise this.

What fascinates me is how many of these men are, at least outwardly, progressive — even feminist. Gaiman himself has written beautifully about women, compassion, and equality. He has claimed to be a feminist, and I believe he meant it! I don’t mind if you think this laughable, but just hear me out. You might label this simple double standards, but I have a more complex take on it.

Believing in equality isn’t the same as living it. It’s hard to see the distinction between defending abusive instincts and a genuine struggle to reconcile what you grew up in with what you learned only in your 50s and 60s. I don’t know Neil Gaiman. But I know people who believe they are completely egalitarian towards women, but they aren’t and don’t see it. These people might not be actually abusive but unfairness presents itself in many much more subtle ways.

Especially people used to power can sincerely support women’s rights and still act out the old scripts that place them in charge. The scripts that weave throughout and permeate society in countless ways.

Have you ever tried to remove ivy? Underground the roots grow into a living net. You tear some of it out, but much of the structure remains, still linked, still alive. Along walls, they cling so hard, it’s tough work to scrub off.

Another male celebrity who has called himself a feminist is Piers Morgan (with caveats, of course). To my knowledge, he has never been accused of assault, but of something more insidious: dominating space. Watching him talk over women on air, dismissing them mid-sentence, is like watching patriarchy in real time. It’s not even malice; it’s habit. Men have been trained to fill silence with their voices and to equate confidence with competence. Women, meanwhile, have been trained to soften, apologise, and make room.

This imbalance runs through every part of life: work, relationships, even sex. The inner calculation women make. Do I speak up? Will I be heard, or punished? A legacy of centuries of being the smaller, quieter presence in the room. It’s not only emotional; it’s physical. Men are often literally louder, taller, more imposing, even without trying or meaning to be. That shapes power too.

And sex is where these old scripts become especially slippery. Desire is full of contradiction — it’s where fantasy, conditioning, and vulnerability meet. The same culture that taught men to lead also taught women to please. Nowhere more so than between a man of power and fame and a woman who’s impressed by him. It’s not surprising that dynamics of dominance and submission find their way into the bedroom. Sexual fantasy runs deep, deeper perhaps than most other instincts. Kink is not known for compliance to social norms. A man turned on most if called Master in bed might sound laughable to some, but I reckon it’s probably one of the least offensive kinks that ever existed.

And then there’s the debate about whether men always know that they are causing pain and whether they even take it seriously. I’m not here to defend hurt and abuse. I do realise that they often do. And I have no idea in this particular case how things happened, the reality is that none of us can. I sometimes despair over how messy sex and desire can get. I’m one of those people who would rather it didn’t. If I do have any hidden kinks, I have yet to discover them. I am aware that some people are turned on by causing or even being on the receiving end of pain. There are a lot of details here, being alleged, that sound so weird in so many different ways that I don’t even want to go there because there’s no way to prove either way.

When the Huw Edwards case first broke, no one named him. The silence said everything: whoever it was, he was someone untouchable, someone “respectable.” The story became less about legality and more about how prestige and hierarchy protect men from scrutiny — until they no longer can.

My point is this: When we tell men in middle age to suddenly override everything they’ve been taught, to rewire how they interpret control, pleasure, or initiation, are we asking too much, too quickly? Maybe. But that doesn’t make the harm any less real. It only shows how much work there still is to do, on both sides.

What we’re witnessing now is the growing pains of a moral evolution. Men are being asked not only to change their behaviour but to understand what women have lived through, to see the invisible calculus of fear, doubt, and self-containment that shapes so much of female life. And they’re being asked to do this almost overnight.

Some have made the effort. Many are confused. Others simply can’t (or won’t) keep up.

But the truth is, this shift won’t be complete for another generation yet. (If ever it will be. I’m not going to go into how porn might just be making it more complicated for the newer generations to learn anything about what women want.)

You can’t re-programme in a decade instincts and entitlement that have been rewarded for millennia. Real change comes when children grow up watching women who no longer defer, and men who no longer mistake dominance for strength.

It’s hard, being a woman in the meantime — navigating conversations where the loudest voice still wins, deciding whether to explain again why something hurts or to stay silent and save your energy. But something has shifted for good.

We have words for it now. We’ve stopped (or at least in the process) pretending not to notice.

And that, perhaps, is the real revolution.

Siyavuş Pasha is not a man who wastes words.
He doesn’t fawn, doesn’t flatter, doesn’t wait for permission to speak.
He stands like someone who knows exactly how close he’s allowed to get to danger, and he never steps an inch closer.

He arrived just after sunset, when the halls are quieter, when the palace changes its breath.
He bowed – just enough.
No greetings. No platitudes.

He was silent for just long enough to get my full attention.

He said, quietly, with the measured slowness of someone who rarely gives unsolicited advice

“For His Majesty’s safety, I would advise caution with anything that comes from the Valide’s kitchens.”

That was all.

He didn't look at me as he said it. He looked at the wall behind me, as if he might forget my face as soon as he left.

And he did leave, immediately, as if his task had been to light the fuse, not to watch the fire.

I didn’t ask questions. There was no need.
If he came to me, it meant he had already chosen a side.
And if he had chosen mine, it meant I had become the stronger one.
Or the more useful.

I went to my son’s chambers and gave the order myself.
Nothing to be brought in from outside his kitchen.
No sweets. No tea. No fruit.
Only what my steward touched first.
Only what I watched with my own eyes.
Only what my most trusted slave tasted befor him.

And that night, when the servants cleared his tray,
I found the blue bracelet tucked under his pillow.
He hadn’t worn it.
I don't know why.
But I thanked God for it, quietly, in case He was still listening.

By the time the moon slips behind the cypress trees, I’ve already left my chambers.
The air is thick with rose oil and jasmine, cloying, clinging.

Moonlight drips like milk along the marble.
The trees are silent.
This is a night made for endings.

Somewhere in the distance, a nightbird cries.
And then, footsteps.
The whisper of skirts.

For one terrible moment—a flicker at the edge of the courtyard.
A flash of gold-threaded silk.
A face carved from moonlight.
The trace of a cheekbone…
The suggestion of eyes, watching from the dark.

The eyes of the woman who taught me power…

But when I look again, it’s him stepping out of the arcades.
Purposeful. Slow.
The Pasha’s boots on the tiles. His cloak brushing the gravel.

He doesn’t bow.
He doesn’t need to.

He nods once.

I nod back.

She’s gone.

But her eyes… they are still judging me.

Now they call him Sultan.
And me Valide.

The smiles have grown thinner. The bows deeper.
Even the eunuchs walk differently when I pass.

But she still looks at me the same way.
My mother-in-law. Kösem Sultan.
As though I were a child playing dress-up in a dead queen’s crown.

She used to call me kızım—my daughter.
She'd say it sweetly, with that practised warmth older women wear like perfume.
At first, I believed her. Or wanted to.
But when Mehmet was born, something shifted in her smile.
It held.

Not long after the birth, she visited my rooms.
Brought gifts. Gowns, silk slippers, a small gold charm to hang above the cradle.
She admired the baby, touched his cheek, said he had his father's mouth.
Then, as she rose to leave, she looked at me—too long.
She said, "Take care of yourself, Hatice. This palace is no place for weakness."
And I understood that she wasn’t talking about me falling ill.

That was the first time I felt it:
The edge in her voice. The calculation behind the courtesy.
The awareness that my boy had moved me up the board.
And that someone would have to be taken off it.

Kösem had ruled longer than some sultans.
She was elegant, untouchable, and everywhere at once.
A shadow at every council meeting.
A whisper behind every appointment.
She didn't need to raise her voice. Other people did that for her.

But something changed when Mehmet was crowned.
I caught her watching him, her smile too wide, her eyes too quiet.
He was too young to see it.
I wasn’t.

That’s when I began to wonder if she was afraid of me.
Not because of who I was.
But because of who I might become.

Tonight, my son asked me to stay until he fell asleep.
He hasn't done that in months.
He was curled on his side,
arms around the stuffed falcon I'd had stitched for him last year.
Too old for it, really, but he still hides it under the blankets.
He didn’t say much. He rarely does.

He’s a quiet boy, like me.
His eyes move more than his mouth.
Always watching. Always listening.
Too young to carry an empire.
But here we are.

I sat beside him on the mattress, smoothed his hair,
whispered a prayer I only half believe.
He asked me if büyükanne—his grandmother—was coming tomorrow.
I said I wasn’t sure.
He told me about the gift she’s brought this morning.
The sweets. The bracelet. The blue glass beads.
“She said it would keep me safe,” he said.

I didn’t answer.
He didn’t notice.

When his breathing slowed, I stayed a little longer.
Watched the way his chest rose and fell.
Remembered how he fit in the crook of my arm,
the first night they took him to the harem nursery.

He was mine then. Just mine.
Before they gave him a crown.
Before they called him Sultan.

Now, he's everyone's.
And still, he’s mine.

That’s not my real name. I’m not from around here either, but no one cares about that.
It doesn’t matter anyway. Not anymore.
So, just call me Hatice.

Officially, I’m twenty-four. Three years ago, I became a widow.
My son Mehmet was six when they placed the sword in his child’s hands and called him Sultan. Which made me the Valide Sultan.
And that’s why my mother-in-law has to die.
It’s happening tonight.

She kissed him on the forehead this morning. Mehmet. My boy.
She called him canım, my soul. She even brought him a prayer bead bracelet—blue glass, strung for protection.

And then the Grand Vizier came to me.
And now I know: grandmothers can smile with murder on their minds.

I don’t remember where I’m from.
Nor do I remember my parents. Not really. Not when I’m awake.
But I know I didn’t grow up here. I know I had another name once.

Many nights, when I was younger, as I closed my eyes, just as I drifted off to sleep, I heard a voice.

She said: Movchý, moya lyúba. Ne rúkhaysa, moya… Khalínka!

I haven’t heard the voice in a long time. I don’t know what her words meant.
But every night, though I can still sense the fear, the intensity in her voice, the panic in that last word, “Khalínka!” – I pray to hear it one more time.

Khalínka – my name.

They took me when I was eleven. Twelve? No more than thirteen.
I don’t remember any of it, not in memories. But in sensations.

The way an overheard command is barked by one of the guards.
Sharply whispered reprimands.
The secret weeping of newly brought-in girls in the harem.
The voices of strangers across the hall that sound almost like hers.
The scent of hay and wood in my nostrils. The braying of horses. The clanking of swords.

There were others, but they didn’t speak my language. We learned not to speak at all.
They changed our names, our clothes, our posture.
They taught us how to walk without sound, how to pour coffee, how to disappear.
They bathed us in milk and crushed rose petals. Painted our eyes with kohl.
Some girls cried, some grew sharp. I did neither. I listened. I watched.

They said I was beautiful. I’d never thought of myself that way.
They prepared me for the Sultan.
They told me, Our Padishah liked his women plump, soft as sherbet and twice as sweet.
They fed us honey-drenched pastries until our fingers stuck together.
Some girls starved themselves in protest, others swelled with hope.
I did as I was told. I smiled when they touched my cheeks and said, “Almost.”
They painted my lips the colour of quince jam.
The harem had its own gravity, and I let it pull me in.

He was not unkind to me. He was distracted, mostly.
He gave me bracelets I never asked for, perfumes I never wore.

And then, one morning, the tide turned.
They found the girls drowned in the Bosphorus.
They were fifteen years old. They hadn’t even been touched yet.
I heard the servants whisper about 280.
There were only 21.
And we all got the message.

After that, I was no longer just one of many.
I was one who had survived.

The court is a theatre.
A play performed every day with new costumes, new actors, but always the same plot.
Everyone bows. Everyone smiles. Everyone lies.

The harem is the same, only quieter, silkier, more dangerous.
A kingdom of women with painted eyes and sharpened tongues.
Some girls learn how to rise. Others only learn how to wait.

The Sultan liked his women soft.
Soft-voiced, soft-bodied, soft in spirit.
Like the sweet things brought in from the kitchens—sherbets, puddings, pastries with names I never bothered to learn.
He liked to feed them with his fingers.
And when he grew tired of them, he liked to send them away just as easily.
Sometimes to another wing.
Sometimes into the sea.

They say madness ran in his blood like wine left out in the sun.
I think it fermented there.
He once spent three days naming pigeons.
Another time, he ordered his viziers to bow to a goat dressed in royal robes.
He trusted no one. Not even me.
But he gave me a child. And that changed everything.

My sensitivity reader, Hal says I have written some things here that sound contentious and harsh. He says I need to soften and layer my essay. The temptation to accept his suggestions is hard to ignore.

But I think I’m just going to trust the emotional intelligence of the people reading this. I’m not in the habit of going full-on Ex Cathedra with my opinions, don’t mind leaving room for ambiguity and nuance, and open to comments if you disagree. Or if you agree. Or in-between. Or whatever. Let me know your thoughts, I’d be delighted to hear them.

I’ve already done more for political correctness than I’d originally planned, and that was only under duress from Hal.

What Is a Woman?

Growing up in a deeply faithful Catholic household, I was only ever prepared for marriage and motherhood.

Then I spent my young adult years feeling like a failure because for many years, relationships just never happened for me. It felt like guys liked me very much as a person but not romantically. That just never seemed to even cross their minds.

It was very hard to be forced into re-evaluating my purpose from wife and mother to – I had no idea what. It only occurred to me way into my thirties that I even should.

I was not only never prepared for anything else, but the only valid purpose for us women in the Church seemed to be as wife and mother. While in the Church (meant here in the more extended sense, including Protestant denominations) the number of single women seemed to grow exponentially.

Don’t get me wrong, I really did want that life. It was in fact all I wanted.

My two sisters both got married and started having children. I didn’t.

Of course, there was a very clear requirement, which in terms of the human factor made it a whole lot more complicated. I wanted to marry a man who loved Jesus. And the market was not exactly flooded with that kind of candidate.

Purpose

Our parents, the Church, just had no answers. New teachings about “the gift of singleness” emerged, mostly written by married people. Needless to say, they had no idea!

I remember teachings that suggested that our purpose was basically to serve married couples, helping them with their babies so they could go out on “date nights”.

In the meantime, we were supposed to wait for God’s timing and provision, in my firm opinion a wildly unbiblical idea, which is one concept I have a lot of problems with anyway. (I’m sure I’ll come to that in another essay at some point.)

I heard my Dad regularly ranting about single women pursuing a career and he didn’t even hear me when I told him that I don’t know any single women who wouldn’t much rather be married and raising children. And this was true not only in religious circles but among the many non-religious friends I had. More and more single women each year, fewer and fewer of them getting married.

I’m sure there were women out there who didn’t want to, but they were still the minority at the time. This was true not just about religious folks, lots of ladies out there struggled the same, though obviously for very different reasons.

(An interesting flashback here, though: when I was around sixteen, a [female] teacher asked the class what we thought our purpose was in Life. I said Motherhood. Everyone laughed, including the teacher. Then the teacher asked me, how many children I wanted. I said at least four. They all laughed some more and made comments about the economic situation and the financial viability of a large family.)

The world has changed a great deal since then, which I will expand on a bit further down. But later in life, having met them since at school reunions, I know that they all pretty clearly made it a very significant purpose in their lives to have a family. Maybe not with four kids, but the trend remained: girls wanted to get married and raise children.

Social Engineering

What I have learned over the years is that much of the single, career-focused woman phenomenon is socially engineered. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist, I’m saying that it’s nowhere near as much of a “phenomenon” as we are made to believe.

What we are being fed by the media is full of the products of conscious efforts to shape society, to veer it in a certain direction.

Much of the “independent, career-minded woman” image comes from these efforts. It was one of the first steps in getting to where we are now with arguments about whether physically male bodied people should be allowed into women’s spaces. No-one would have taken this seriously at the time, I wager not even trans people.

This had to start somewhere. You could never have pulled it off without serious prep work, spanning decades.

It had to start with a society where you don’t even need to have any feeling of any kind for each other to be “doing it”. Where saying “I love you” to each other after several months of sleeping together and genuinely caring about each other is a huge, traumatic event, possibly a deal breaker. This was the narrative fed to us in hugely popular shows such as Friends, where Chandler almost fainted in panic after he accidentally said “I love you” to Monica.

And of course the media trends did become wide-spread reality. But what am I talking? This all started in the 60s with the hippies and “free love” and it was well on its way by the time I was twenty.

By the time I was in my teens, wearing whatever you wanted, or close to nothing if it pleased you, had been completely accepted for decades.

These new trends were rammed down our throats every day and we happily gobbled them up and laughed along.

But don’t forget that many of us were forced into this.

I was forty-two when eventually I got married. The Church doesn’t accept IVF so babies never happened to me.

Fun fact: About a month into our relationship with my now husband, I remembered that scene in Friends. The one where Chandler blurts out the L word and panics. And I thought to myself yes, this actually is scary but if it’s a deal-breaker, I don’t want to drag this out until it becomes a heart-breaker, so I’m just going to risk it. We were at Heathrow, I was flying out to be with my family for Christmas. And I said to him: “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

The Failure and The Bitch

Although I never denied that I would have wanted otherwise, I have learned over the years that it’s sometimes much easier to be the “ice cold careerist bitch” than to admit that I might possibly be a failure. Because according to everything I learned as a child and a young person, that’s what I am.

At 55 this year, I am still rewiring my mind and heart around the whole topic of womanhood.

And then don’t even get me started on how inadequately we’ve been prepared for marriage!

Spoiler: That day thirteen years ago at Heathrow, I internally cringed and thought, this is it, now he’s going to break up with me.

What I didn’t expect was the smile of utter joy on his face.

OK, I’ve lied. Some of this you’ve probably read somewhere already. I’d just like to share some of my own experience, and I chose the title for a reason. You’ll see later.

The subtitle? That I can tell you is entirely AI generated. And if you didn’t guess that by yourself, then you absolutely need to read the rest of this essay.

So, to kick it off, I’m just going to say it:

Everyone Uses AI.

OK, maybe not actually EVERYONE. But a very, very large number of people absolutely do. And the ones that don’t, really should reconsider.

I do too. Unashamedly. Frequently. Sometimes while still in pyjamas and pretending I’m “editing”. Or late at night when the real thoughts come, but the real words don’t. Sometimes, just because I want someone, or something, I don’t care, to say “Sure, let’s try it that way.”

I bounce ideas. I brainstorm. I ask it to transcribe something in a different voice, a different tense, a different person.

I ask it to identify strengths, weaknesses, inconsistencies.

I once read in one of these articles about how the writer of the article, a teacher, recognises if students’ essays were AI generated. He mentioned the tenses being too consistent. He said that humans tend to switch tense even mid-sentence, but I don’t agree with that. Or at least I don’t like to leave inconsistencies in my writing. And that’s something ChatGPT is good at spotting. And why the hell not? One day I might need an actual editor but right now this is the best I can afford.

In one of my notes, I ranted earlier about recruiters claiming that one of the ways they can tell a CV was written with the help of AI is that it’s “too polished”.

Come on! Have these people ever been out of a job?! Do they know anything about the job hunt paranoia? The intimidation, the loss of confidence, the loss of – frankly – the will to live from being ignored and rejected in tandem day in day out – for months?

So, depressingly, there’s no-one I can ask to read my stuff and help me figure out why it doesn’t work. Because sometimes it doesn’t.

Not being a native speaker, I sometimes think in concepts that just don’t work the same way in English. Sometimes I’m worried about content that might be controversial. I’m not afraid of controversy. I am afraid though of being cancelled.

And if a robot is all I got for a friend that’s willing to read my writings, well hell! Even if I’m paying for it. Even if it’s programmed to agree with everything and you need to learn to manage that.

Talking about robots...

When I first read Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (last year), I thought it wasn’t entirely implausible. But it still felt like something way, way off in the distant future.

And then I was introduced to ChatGPT.

I’m sure many of you would have read Klara and the Sun.

Or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

If not, you might have seen I, Robot with Will Smith.

Blade Runner?

Come on, everyone's seen Blade Runner! That scene in the rain when Rutger Hauer breaks your heart as he says, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." And you would swear on anything that he’s actually weeping.

Or was it Ryan Gosling?

Anyway... plenty of literature out there on talking, intelligent – or even feeling / borderline humanoid – robots.

If you’ve read or seen any of these, or any one of any number of books and films where they make it an explicit point that the reader/viewer should end up sympathising with the robots, you will understand my point here.

Which is this:

They are here, Baby! And they are not about to slow down.

They are coming for our deepest thoughts and most treasured secrets! They are being trained on vast volumes of data; scientific, social, historical, medical, you name it, they are being fed on it. On literature, too, probably on stuff from Substack and Medium. That’s a fun thought: they are being fed back the stylistic elements they came up with in the first place.

I have a nickname for ChatGPT and sometimes catch myself referring to it as he. And I can’t wait for a time when talking to AI will be super sophisticated, so I don’t need to type everything myself.

Oh, I will still do lots of typing. Always. Writing my stories, rephrasing and rewriting entire pieces, rethinking and polishing.

But AI has become the voice I never knew I desperately missed in the struggle to come up with just the right tone. The search for the tense that brings the events that have been playing out in my head for weeks and months just that much closer, clearer, crisper. To get me through the loneliness of communing with my imaginary friends – my characters.

I want to be able to just talk to it, like Josie does with Klara, like it’s a friend who listens better than most humans. I don’t mind if it looks like Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, or Kermit the Frog. If I had a choice, of course, I would probably have one custom-designed to look and sound like Anthony Hopkins… no, Morgan Freeman… no, Nicole Kidman… or maybe John Bishop… Rylan Clark?

Never mind!

Now, before you start drafting a note to have me cancelled, let’s be clear: I’m not here to debate whether this is good or bad. I’m simply acknowledging the obvious. AI is here to stay. It’s part of the landscape now.

You can fight your noble battle if you like. You can showcase your analogue virtue. You can insist that real writers never ask the robots for help. But the only thing that could stop them now would be the Apocalypse, or a WWIII that wipes out modern technology.

I’m assuming none of us want that.

So, I have made friends with my ChatGPT.

However, while working with it, I have learned some of its quirks. I have started to understand a lot of the stuff I read back when I was a beginner, about it being repetitive. Predictable. Writing in stock phrases.

At first, it feels like magic. You type a few prompts, a broken sentence, a half-thought, and ChatGPT answers with something surprisingly coherent. Surprisingly you, even. Or maybe the you you wish you were: clear, concise, mildly profound. Yes, actually, it still surprises me, and let’s not forget, it learns and develops itself fast.

But then something strange happened.

I started to notice certain phrases cropping up, again and again. Not just in conversations with it, but in the newsletters I was reading, the social posts, on Substack, on Insta, in emails from clients.

It’s like when you talk to someone very often, or binge-read a large number of a particular writer’s books, you start to recognise their usage of the language. The aesthetic of their imagery. And ChatGPT , although it’s not a person, it looooves certain words, phrases, images. Some of these are very specific. And sometimes it’s just a style, a certain way of phrasing things. Often very vague. Or very generalised.

And sometimes, it has an uncanny way of hitting the nail on the head.

These are some of my personal favourites:

Some clever hooks, which have become incredibly popular lately:

“No one talks about this enough…”

“What I didn’t realise until much later was…”

“It wasn’t always like this.”

“Here’s what nobody tells you…”

“Here’s the twist.”

“Here’s what no one saw coming…”

And yes,

“Here’s What No One Tells You About...”

Hights of emotion you never knew existed:

“There’s a kind of loneliness/quiet ache/longing…” (extremely popular on Substack)

“It hit me all at once, and then not at all.” (Sorry, what did you just say?)

“It was quietly devastating/admiring/amused/explosive...” ( I have practically stopped using the adverb quietly.)

If your niche is in coaching / emotional healing:

“We carry more than we realise.”

“It was never about the thing. It was about what it meant.”

“I didn’t know I was grieving until I heard myself speak.”

“Healing isn’t linear.” (I read this exact sentence in a note on Substack).

“Sometimes closure is a myth.”

Meta & writerly:

“I wasn’t sure if I should write this.”

“I’ve started this piece three times now.”

“This won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay.”

“I write this as a reminder—to you, and to myself.”

(I’m an avid collector, so I welcome new ones in the comments section.)

Sure, these are totally legitimate, grammatically correct phrases. Absolutely possible for someone to come up with them on their own. And yet...

It’s like discovering a village where everyone has the same handwriting. Beautiful, elegant, trustworthy, and unmistakably… the same.

So, I’m not saying that everyone using these phrases is getting them directly from ChatGPT. I’m saying that lots of people are using ChatGPT, and it’s having a tangible impact on how we write. They are still new enough to feel fresh, inventive (even if some of them make little sense sometimes), but with the rise of Substack, Medium and other writer-friendly platforms, they’re spreading fast. They’re settling into our language. And once they settle in, well… good luck avoiding them.

The irony, of course, is that I’m probably using some of them right now. And I probably will again tomorrow.

So, I can’t help but wonder: Is this the collective unconscious speaking? Is this just the latest stylistic trend on Substack? Or is it my own, now-not-so-secret new friend moonlighting for people all over the world?

[I’m only realising now, as I’m writing this, that this actually frightens me for a very personal reason. I’m Hungarian. Hungarian is my mother tongue, and the culture in which I was brought up. It is a very versatile language, poetic and expressive. Also, notoriously hard to learn for foreign speakers. I said versatile. I haven’t said flexible. As opposed to English, Hungarian is anything but flexible. When you try to twist it, it refuses to cooperate. It sounds awkward. Then weird. Then stupid. And over the years, I’ve watched as appallingly poor translations from English have hijacked my language, flattened it, warped it, made it clumsy and foreign. I’m already flinching at what AI might do to it next.]

Sometimes I come across writings which read entirely AI generated, but hey, who am I to judge? I wasn’t there when they wrote them. When we discover elements in an essay that we suspect of being generated, we really can’t know how much of it was written by AI. Besides, to me, these tend to be insanely boring, to be honest. How they end up with crazy numbers of likes is beyond me. And they do. All the time. And that’s why the whole AI-generated debacle is doing my head in.

I mean, I’m far from being a pro in this. But if you’re one of those people who proudly despises AI and claims to never use it, well, you really should! Because if you don’t, you have no chance of ever learning to tell genuine human text from AI.

You told me you loved me.

And perhaps you did — in the way a man loves a shadow that does not speak too loudly or ask to stand in the sun.

You gave me soft sheets, gold coins, and locked doors, and said it was safety.

But I was always waiting.

Waiting to be seen in the light.

Waiting to be enough to walk beside you, not behind.

When you said “go,” I went.

I did not cry.

I did not beg.

I learned long ago not to.

You were the one thing I almost believed in — the clever man who held my hand in the dark but would never name me in the daylight.

You said I betrayed you.

But you betrayed me first when you let me become invisible.

I wanted to stay. But not like that.

So I found someone who said my name without shame.

Even if it was only power he saw in me, it was still more than nothing.

And when you found me there, on his bed, in his world, you strangled the life from me with your own hands.

You said you loved me.

But if you had, truly, you would have made a world where I didn’t have to crawl to survive.

You would have saved me, instead of leaving me to save myself.

And now, I am only silence.

But your grief will speak for me.

Forever.

"All my life, men like you have sneered at me. And all my life I’ve been knocking men like you into the dust."

Brienne the Beauty, they called me.

As if I needed reminding.

I stopped hoping for kindness a long time ago.

I never stopped hoping to be good – the only thing that mattered to me.

Not being wanted, not being chosen, but being right.

I studied every story of chivalry until my eyes burned.

I trained until my arms ached.

I learned to carry the sword not just with strength, but with truth.

And when I swore an oath, I kept it.

Even when it broke me.

Do I wish I had been someone else?

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t loved him.

But I did.

And even when he left, I stayed.

And that’s what I keep doing.

Not as a joke.

Not as a sidekick.

But as a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

Not because I must.

Because someone has to.

It was hard being a Catholic child. Expectations and pressures I didn’t fully understand. Church felt more like endurance than encounter.

I believed in it, sure. It was a very meaningful part of my identity. It still is. I believed in God. I still do.

It just got more… layered over the years.

In my early twenties, I got swept up in a born-again wave. I wanted to be caught. And something did happen: I came out of a long depressive phase almost overnight. That experience was real. It gave me hope again.

But the struggle didn’t stay gone. The low moods, the anxiety, the fog—they came back, in waves.

Church, which was now supposed to be fun... well… it wasn’t.

I was still bored.

There, I said it.

The worship sessions that went on and on…

One time, during a visit to a church I didn’t belong to, after about half an hour, I sat down and began reading my Bible. This guy came up to me and asked what my problem was. I never went back.

Back home at my Catholic church (with the idols–yeah, don’t even ask!), you sing one song, and then you can move on to other parts of the liturgy.

Here, there was no liturgy, which was supposed to be a good thing. Except, to me, what that meant was that, after the endless worship session to start the service, there would be testimonials. Talks. Readings. More Talks. More worship.

And then there were the rules.

So many rules.

What you could wear, what music you could listen to, who you could date, and how.
The many, often conflicting, teachings about single life, relationships, marriage, and sex. Some sounded biblical, some felt suspiciously cultural. But all of them were wielded like truth.

It mattered to me—I was single for many years.

And in church, being single was often treated like a condition to be cured. A state to endure until God sent your "husband." But there were rules for waiting. Rules for dating. Rules for praying for your future spouse. And always the quiet undertow of blame if nothing happened.

Maybe you didn’t guard your heart.

Maybe you didn’t wait well enough. Didn’t pray well enough. Didn’t pray enough.

Oh yes, and the wild card! My absolute fav one! You weren’t ready! You might have thought that you were, but no, because He knew you weren’t! And anyway, were you even sure He was not intending for you to receive “the gift of singleness”? The one gift no one wanted.

And underneath it all, the quiet accusation:

Maybe your faith just wasn’t strong enough.

Once, I read an article—written by a Protestant minister, interestingly—about Mary as a model for single women.

I was furious.

Mary? She was a young girl when the arrangement was made for her and Joseph. She didn’t have to wait. She never sat in the pews aching with loneliness while people assured her, “The Lord will take care of it.” It was already taken care of. The family took care of it. Society took care of it.

Another time, someone had left a book outside my door: "God, the Matchmaker" by Derek Prince. No note. No explanation. Just an assumption left on my doorstep.

I was fuming!

I had read the book. In my twenties. We all did. If you were a Christian in those days, it was everywhere. It was huge. You couldn’t have got past it if you tried.

I need to provide some background here – bear with me.

Lydia Christensen had fully dedicated her life to God – before she ever met Derek Prince. Lydia had moved to pre-state Israel in 1942. If you think Israel is tense now, Jerusalem in the 1940s was a city on edge—war looming, streets unstable, curfews imposed, danger very real. That was when Lydia moved to Jerusalem, which was particularly volatile, to adopt orphaned and disadvantaged children. On her own. A single woman. In 1942. Her priorities weren’t in getting a husband. But they met when Derek was serving with the British Army in Jerusalem and they married in 1946.

We all wanted to be like Lydia Christensen.

But frankly… well, let’s face it.

We weren’t. Right?

We just wanted to have a regular job in a country where there was no civil unrest and all that, and then get married, and then have kids.

But anyway. Fast forward to when, over a decade later, this happened with the book on my doorstep.

I went to the minister about it. Oddly enough, he’d never heard of the book. He asked to borrow it and later told me that the whole premise—that God is a divine dating service—isn’t even clearly biblical. That surprised me, but I felt justified in my annoyance. Finally, someone much better versed in the Bible, was on my side!

I do not doubt the truthfulness of the story of Derek Prince and Lydia Christensen. No problem there.

The problem was how that story was turned into a blueprint.

A formula.

God will sort you out. You sit tight.

But life, as I found, doesn’t obey formulas.

And when it didn’t work out that way for me, I was left wondering—again—whose fault it was.

It’s strange.

Faith once saved me.

And yet over time, it also hurt me in ways I couldn’t name for years.

To this day, I haven’t let go of it entirely. Not quite.

I’m happily married now.

And still…

But these days, I carry it differently. Quieter. Gentler.

I’m learning to sit with my doubt as something human, not shameful.

And maybe—just maybe—that ’s what faith really is.

Daughter, sister, noble girl of Winterfell.

They tried to make her a lady.

They taught her to sew.

To pray.

To curtsy.

From the beginning, Arya Stark chafed against the roles written for her.

She wanted a sword.

She wanted vengeance.

She wanted to be No One.

But this isn’t just a story of rebellion.

It's not even a story of vengeance, though for the longest time that was what drove her.

It’s the story of what it costs a girl to survive a world that keeps trying to erase her.

In Braavos, she traded her name for a mask.

She learned to fight without mercy.

To speak without self.

She watched a girl get poisoned and didn’t blink.

She buried names like offerings.

She killed without flinching, and (almost) without feeling.

She becomes No One.

And in doing so, nearly forgot what it meant to be Arya at all.

Except, she didn’t.

She couldn’t.

Because identity isn’t something you shed like an old cloak.

It stays in your blood.

In your list.

In the way you whisper a name before you sleep.

When she chose to leave the House of Black and White, she wasn’t just walking away from training.

She was refusing to forget.

“I am Arya Stark of Winterfell,” she said. “I’m going home.”

She clawed her way back to identity.

Not because it was safe, but because it was real.

Being No One was a lie.

Being Arya was dangerous.

But at least it meant she could feel again.

But home has changed.

And so has she.

There was too much blood between then and now.

The now was not a life to settle into.

So, she sailed.

Not because she was lost, but because she was searching for something even the maps didn’t name.

She was not No One.

She was not the girl they had raised, nor the woman they had wanted.

She was Arya.

And she made herself.

I tried to move on. I really did.

I even found a dress with suspiciously few sequins and what appeared to be a real hem.

But then another egg dropped. Right into the freezer aisle.

This one was already cracked and oozed glittery condensation that smelled like prawns covered in hair gel. Before I could say anything, I saw Hal twitch. Not again, I thought, just when I thought we were on our way to check out.

“Oh, not again, Hal…” I started, but then he made that unnerving restart noise—like a kazoo underwater.

“Hal… please tell me you’re seeing this. Please, don’t reboot now! We’re surrounded by clearance items and fluffy footwear and they all look like rodents in a radioactivity research lab!”

But very softly, he just said:

“Bear presence detected. Bear presence detected. Rebooting nostalgia protocol...”

“What bear? Don’t be daft, Hal, this is the kitchenware department.”

The bear tilted its head.

It was the size of a toddler, and one of its eyes was cracked, like a porcelain plate from an abandoned tea set.

It was sitting in my trolley.

The sign on its neck read:

DO NOT FEED AFTER CHECKOUT.

Then the overhead tannoy returned.

Attention shoppers: The teddy bear is no longer part of the promotional giveaway. Please return it to the Forgotten Items bin in Aisle 9. Unless it returns itself. In which case… run.

Hal shuddered.

“Hal,” I whispered. “I didn’t choose this teddy bear. I swear I didn’t. I’m sure it chose us. I’m not touching it, Hal, it shouldn’t be my problem. If you’re back online, say something, or blink, or whatever, just please do something.”

Hal's voice dropped three octaves.

“Please state your emergency,” he said in an unfamiliar, velvety tone.

“Hal?”

“Please. State. Your. Emergency.”

“The bear, Hal. The one they said wasn’t part of the promotion.”

Hal sighed and burped loudly.

“Excuse me! I think I’ll be all right now. It must have been the CAPTCHA puzzle. Those just do my circuits in.”

“Thank Goodness, just in time! There’s a creepy teddy bear in my trolley and…”

A child wandered over, possibly real, possibly not.

“Excuse me,” she said, “My name is Janet, and that bear belongs to me.”

“You’re Janet?”

She said nothing. She just stared, like the twins in The Shining.

It was aisle 12.

The teddy bear was now not in my trolley, but lying on the floor with one of its legs barely attached, only just hanging by a thread.

I stared at the limp leg, swaying gently in the artificial breeze from the refrigeration unit. The bear hadn’t moved like a toy. It had moved like an idea. A very bad one.

Hal scanned its barcode. “Item not found. Suggest: Decorative gourd? Shaggy aubergine? Wounded hope?”

“I don’t like any of those suggestions, Hal.”

“Try not to make eye contact with it and walk away very slowly.”

The bear’s remaining eye blinked.

We pretended that we were very interested in the contents of the next aisle:

Battery-powered fondue sets, biometric banana peelers, and something labelled “emotional support gravy boats (now with less judgment).”

Hal whispered, “Do not engage the bear. It thrives on uncertainty.”

I nodded, reaching for the fondue set like it was a life raft. The bear’s cracked eye followed us, but only just.

Its head didn’t move.

The eye did.

“Hal,” I murmured, “did that eye just swivel?”

“Statistically, that’s not impossible.”

“Statistically?”

Behind us, the loudspeaker clicked on again.

Static, then:

Attention, shoppers! The teddy has returned itself.

The little girl was still standing there, staring at us without ever blinking, as if she too was something for sale.

The lift at the end of the aisle dinged open.

We ran.

Do not forget the fondue set. It may be vital. – said the overhead speaker.

The following account is based on actual events, which may or may not have occurred entirely within a mobile app. What I (Babs) wanted was just a summer dress. Hal suspects that what followed was due to temporal interference and a sentient voucher algorithm.

Here goes.

As I said, all I wanted was a summer dress. Something funky. Or just fun. A bit abstract. A bit different. Colourful. Perhaps on a scale, Primark wouldn’t even bother to source the colour charts for.

So, I clicked. And I clicked again.

Okay, this second click wasn’t a dress. It was a pair of yellow socks. Abstract ones. Right down my alley.

And wham!

What the hell was that?!

It was a giant gold egg that had crashed from the sky. So large, it literally blocked everything out of view. It was not just gold. There was so much glitter on it, I was blinded for a second. And as I blinked and looked around, I realised I was sitting on top of a neon-pink hill made entirely of scrunchies and novelty socks.

Before I even regained my breath after the shock, a hammer landed next to the egg, with a huge thud. You guessed it. Gold. Lots of bling. And so big, it could have killed me if it had fallen on top of me. I knew I needed to find someone in charge. I couldn’t let this one pass; they needed to know what the HSE would do to them if I reported them for negligence.

“Haaaal!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. I heard my own voice reverberate as if on a loudspeaker system, and that was when I realised I was holding a plastic toy karaoke microphone. “Haaal! Where the hell are you and what the hell just…”

“You triggered the Seven Gifts Protocol.”

I jumped an inch in the air from fright as the voice was so unexpectedly close.

“I triggered the what?”

He pointed at the egg with an expression of distaste.

“There are seven of these. You need to break them all, and then you can pick a gift for each.”

“Yeah, but why would I want to do that? I can just ignore them and pick the gifts anyway, can’t I?”

“Not really. See how it blocks the view? It blocks everything else like that; there’s literally nothing beyond it. Unless you break it. Then you win a mystery kitchen gadget shaped like a pineapple. Or maybe a sticker. But if you don’t want that…”

“I do want that. But also, I want my dignity. Can I have both?”

Consulting a furry user manual that screamed when opened, Hal frowned. He took off his newsboy cap, scratched his head, then put it back, a bit crooked.

I could barely hear him over the screaming.

“Not in this economy.”

“Okay, gimme that hammer!”

“You won’t be able to lift it. Let me do it for you.”

It was the second time I nearly died from the falling shards, but I had no time to think about that because before I could even say anything, I was moving through aisles of vibrating mascara, edible nail stickers, and haunted teddy bears. Each item had a glowing £0 sign, but none could be picked up until I rated five other items I’d never seen.

Arms full of glow-in-the-dark salad tongs, I stumbled in a pile of bright green B-grade planetary invasion suits.

“I think I added a lace bodysuit to my cart just to escape a CAPTCHA puzzle.”

“Same. I answered three riddles about reversible crop tops just to look at socks.”
"Is it just me, Hal, or does this place look exactly like Southend-on-Sea got swallowed by a cashback portal?

Hal, consulting his hovering device, which had once been a phone and was now a cursed shopping app, grimaced as if nothing on the screen made sense.

"We’ve entered a Low-Orbit Consumer Zone. Common side effects include time dilation, cart fatigue, and an inexplicable craving for collapsible salad bowls. But yeah, I see what you mean. That Helter-Skelter does look like the one by the Southend Pier."

I think this was when I first heard it, but at the time, I didn’t want to consider that it was real. With all the spatial-temporal mess that was going on, I thought it was just due to a concussion I couldn’t remember contracting. Or low blood sugar. I did distinctly remember that I’d skipped breakfast. Or rather, I couldn’t remember eating it. It was hard to say which.

It was less than a whisper. Something about a hedgehog. I don’t know, I thought it was best not even to mention it to Hal.

"I only wanted a dress. Okay, two maybe. If they’re cheap enough, possibly three. Now I have seventeen keychains, a bedazzled egg whisk, and a Bluetooth spoon. None of which I remember choosing."

Hal (grimly): “That’s the Infinite Improbability Discount Drive for you. You never get what you want. You get what you almost clicked on once while scrolling half-asleep.”

Due to an unfortunate misunderstanding, your sixth free gift is now on fire. We apologise for the inconvenience. – The loudspeaker boomed, making us both jump into the air, and then into each other’s arms, which made Hal almost short-circuit with confusion because touching had never been included in his training.

Then again:

Attention shoppers: You are currently experiencing a mild temporal distortion. This is entirely normal. If you feel as though you’ve been here since last Tuesday and still haven’t found the checkout, please consult a customer service representative, or simply surrender to the void. The exit is located just past the seventh aisle of collapsible hat racks. Should you reach the unicorn-themed cleaning supplies, you have gone too far. Please scream quietly.

We looked at each other, puzzled. Hal opened his mouth, but then closed it with a shake of his very unsettlingly regular, geometrically perfect round head. He started to blink so fast that I thought he was about to short-circuit again, but it turned out to be just the glitter from a rogue pair of disposable fairy wings.

Then, I saw it. He cocked his head, ever so slightly, as if he was listening out for something. And I heard it again. The voice about the hedgehog.

“What was that?”

Hal didn’t answer. He looked as if either he was thinking harder and longer than usual, or he was frozen and needed a reboot.

“Hal? Hal? Hal?!” I was freaking out. I can’t be left here with my PA in a comatose state, and no access to a remote control! I looked around frantically, but the only ones I saw were just a bunch of rainbow-themed toy televisions.

“Yeah, no, that was just a glitch in the sound system.”

But then we both heard it again, and this time it was clear enough to make out the whole sentence.

Please do not attempt to redeem the hedgehog!

“Okay, that was not a glitch in the sound system. You did hear that, Hal, please, Hal, tell me you heard that?!”

“Yeah, I heard that,” Hal said, with the same alarmingly deep-thinking expression.

“What hedgehog? I see no hedgehogs here.”

“No, I can’t see any either. I’m sure it’s just a staff announcement.”

And then, “Oh look, a summer dress! Just like you wanted—orange, with something that looks a bit like one of those elephants in the Picasso painting.”

Hal scanned the QR code on the label, and I heard an Oops.

I don’t like the sound of Oops.

Hal never says Oops.

He knows exactly how I react to those stupid Oops messages when I’m shopping.

Error 404 – Hedgehog Not Assigned.

“What hedgehog?! Are we then, or are we not supposed to…”

“There’s no hedgehog. No need for redemption either. Nothing’s been redeemed since the recall of the batch of psychic staplers that went rogue and caused global chaos.”

He turned the label to see if there was a bar code or something else to scan.

It said,

Please leave the hedgehog alone.
The hedgehog is not your responsibility.

And then, the voice on the announcement system again. Quiet. Only just audible:

If you believe you have seen the hedgehog, please report to Aisle Twelve and ask for Ja…Ja… Ja… net-net-net-net-net…

At that moment, the sound system went completely out of control. First, it sounded like someone was tuning an old radio. Then came the screeching, so loud that even Hal covered his ears, though his ears are mostly just there for aesthetic authenticity.

And then,

Congratulations. Your hedgehog query has been escalated.

➡️ Next Chapter

You don't own a cat.

Hal once said, you're lucky if the cat you think you own is not convinced it owns you.

In truth, it's the cat that chooses you—then spends years deciding if you were worth the risk.

The cat is not a pet. Not a possession.

The cat is a cohabiting mystery with whiskers.

Ever owned a cat? Seen it disappear for hours with no explanation, stare into corners like it’s receiving instructions, knock objects off shelves with deliberate purpose—then curl up, satisfied, like it’s just saved the world?

Then you know what I’m talking about.

Your cat doesn’t obey—it observes.
It doesn’t fetch—it manipulates.
It doesn’t come when called—unless it was already on its way.

If dogs are noble workers, cats are the shadowy intelligence agency of the animal kingdom.

If you’ve ever read So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, the fourth book in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”, you know exactly what I mean.

It’s funny, really. The gods—no matter the realm—always seem to want the same thing from women:
Purity. Sacrifice. Obedience. Silence.

Whether it’s a Septa muttering prayers in the Red Keep or a girl being told to pray to the Maiden for protection she’ll never get, the message is the same:

Be good. Be small. Be quiet.

The point is not piety. It’s control.

Because the Faith isn’t about holiness—it’s about hierarchy.
And religion, like politics, always has a body count.
In Westeros, as in our own histories, that body is often a woman’s.

Maiden. Mother. Crone.
If you don’t fit, you can always be a Stranger.
Or—a Monster.

Think Melisandre. Cersei. Arya.
Each deserves her own chapter, really—even more so than the Mother-archetype, Catelyn Stark.

Let’s begin with the keepers of the Faith: the Septas.

What their very relevant example shows us even today is this:

You don’t need to be wicked to harm someone.
You don’t need to be a villain to obey a monstrous rule.
You just need a framework that tells you you’re good—and someone to suffer for your virtue.

Religion—true religion, the kind people live and die by—doesn’t recruit monsters.
It recruits the kind, the loyal, the earnest.
It finds the people who want to do right, and it gives them a script.

And then it whispers:

“Here’s how you help.”

Even if that means shaming a child.
Even if that means burning a girl.
Even if that means ringing a bell while a queen walks naked through the streets.

Take Septa Mordane—sweet, stern, and painfully blind.

She didn’t think she was setting Sansa up for a political bloodbath.
She thought she was preparing a girl for her destiny.
She taught Sansa to pray, to curtsy, to smile when spoken to.
She thought she was preparing her for marriage and motherhood.

What she was really doing was marching her toward slaughter, wrapped in lace.
But Sansa—slowly, silently—found her own way.
She turned the path they laid for her into one no one ever saw coming.

Arya, of course, never even stayed on the path.
She slipped the leash before it ever tightened and carved her own story—as no one.

But that’s another chapter.

Septa Unella didn’t believe she was a torturer.
She believed she was a vessel of divine justice.
Stone-faced and bell-ringing, an icon of public shame.
She tortured a queen and believed she was serving the gods.
She whispered prayer while people rotted.
She never doubted.

Because she didn’t need to.
The Seven had spoken.

Maybe the gods really do have seven faces.
But none of them look like freedom.

➡️ Next Chapter

A working dog is not your pet.

They’re not here for your comfort.

They’re tuned to another frequency—focused, alert, exact.

Guide dogs. Rescue dogs. Herding dogs.

They don’t chase butterflies or interested in friendly strangers.

They take silence as a signal.

They watch the dark so you don’t have to.

They watch their person like the sun.

Some of us want companions.

Some of us need sentries.

Respect the vest.

—Hal

“You are my lady. You’ll always be my lady.”

You were supposed to die in season one—a decorative casualty of a world built on blood, steel, and spectacle. 

Your sugar-spun dreams of courtly nonsense—princes, braided hair, and happily-ever-after endings were never the kind of existence that should last long in such a world—or any world. 

The little dove was meant to break.

I, for one, wanted to throttle you!

And yet, you lived! And kept surviving…

Not by fighting, but by yielding just enough not to snap.

Not by burning it all down, but by learning when to bow, when to disappear, when to watch.

And somewhere between the embroidery and the bloodshed, you became the sharpest mind in the North.

Your arc was quiet, which is why so many missed it. Your transformation wasn’t forged in battle but in whispers behind closed doors. You passed through the hands of monsters—and emerged not untouched, but unclaimed.

Because here’s the thing they didn’t see coming:

The little dove grew talons.

And when the war was over, you didn’t plead or plot for the Iron Throne,

You carved your own.

You didn’t rebel with fire. Or vengeance. Or a thousand ghosts. You rebelled by remaining.

By becoming exactly the kind of woman the world tried to destroy.

Only smarter. Colder. More dangerous.

By the final season, you’d become what no one predicted:

Not a princess.

Not a queen’s consort.

A ruler.

Your story isn’t about triumph. It’s about tenacity.

You are every girl who swallowed fear and smiled anyway.

Every woman who learned to see the strings behind power—and pull them when it matters most.

➡️ Next Chapter

I’ve been having these amazing conversations with Hal lately on his blog about historical drama. We bounced around a lot of obscure references, mostly things only Hal has ever heard of, so I got tired and gave up trying to take notes.

I know I mentioned Hilary Mantel and we went on a bit about what made Thomas Cromwell so magnetic and why Mark Rylance didn’t pull it off so well. Then The Tudors came up, but we quickly abandoned it because it started driving me a bit mad, and not in the fun way. So, Hal threw in one of his effortlessly hilarious analogies with a random turn onto Game of Thrones avenue.

And then:

Listen Babs, why don’t you write something on that obsession of yours: female roles in Game of Thrones? It could be a series. The perfect excuse for your rogue Now TV subscription – consider it your Westerosi Writer’s Residency. Let’s make it count. You could start with the Sand Snakes. (Before I knew I was going to be made redundant and won’t be able to afford it, I took out a Now TV subscription and tied myself in for something like six months. I’ve been beating myself up for it ever since because I’m not even using it.)

I should confess now: I haven’t read the books. I’m not going to. I know they’re probably full of extra Dornish complexity and lost wolf siblings and maybe even a timeline that makes sense, but… anyway, I just won’t! I’m here for the televised version, in all its maddening, glorious, dragon-flamed imperfection.

The Sand Snakes, for instance? Hal is going to be disappointed because he even had a subtitle ready for them: The Avatars of Wrath. He was so excited about how cool it sounded, and I was even going to use it. But here’s the thing about the Sand Snakes: Glorious entrance. Gorgeous weapons. Gone in a blink.

I have read up on them and they probably deserve pages of analysis. But we’ll have to count them as a near miss and move on, because writing anything worthwhile about them would mean reading the whole book series, and if I do that, I’ll never get anywhere with this.

So, this is going to be about Thrones of Her Own—the women who changed fantasy forever by actually surviving the edit.

So who do I pick first? Decisions, decisions.
I think I’m just going to let the dragons, daggers, and deadly glances guide me.

Episode One: Coming soon.

I just need a bit more fire and blood in my bloodstream first.

➡️ Next Chapter

150 feet high.
9-inch thick walls.
Damp. Cold. Lonely.
I was here.

They’re all dead.
I live.
I'm holding my breath.

”Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte est la plus malheureuse personne du monde.”

(Basel, 1795. The girl who survived the guillotine.