I’m proud of myself for building a successful writing business from scratch. I’m also grateful to all the clients who have chosen to stick with a living, breathing human writer instead of switching over to AI. My work is varied, rewarding and – importantly – helps pay the bills.

But I’ll confess there is a tiny part of me that misses writing purely for fun.

It’s not just about finding the time; it’s as much a question of finding the headspace. I’m in awe of people who spend all day doing comms work and still write creatively after hours. That’s not me. I can only manage four or five hours of solid writing a day before my brain shuts down and I have to shift to reading or admin tasks.

The ideas are still there. But the capacity to execute them isn’t.

If none of these ideas will ever escape my drafts folder and make it into fully formed posts, I may as well give them a brief airing in listicle format. This listicle is, like me, a mixture of silly and serious. Here are some of the many, many blog posts I don’t have time to write, right now.

Of all the dogs in all the world, how did I end up with the very best one? DorkyDog is now five, and while she is by no means the goodest girl in terms of behaviour, she is absolutely the goodest girl in terms of being a sweet-hearted little snuggle buddy. I love her so very much.

Of all the teenagers in all the world, how did I end up with the very best one? Even if I did have time to write about DorkySon I probably wouldn’t, because he has his own online identity now, and I don’t want to embarrass him. Suffice to say he is an excellent kid, and being the mum of a teenager is hilarious, fun, rewarding and a thousand times easier than being mum of a toddler. HANG IN THERE, parents of non-sleeping newborns. It gets so much better.

Of all the husbands in all the world, how did I end up with the very best one? DorkyDad and I celebrate nineteen years of marriage this year. Bronze is apparently the traditional symbol, representing strength, stability and a long-lasting bond. I have already written plenty about how our marriage – unconventionally large age gap and all – remains a delight. But if I had the opportunity I would definitely write more.

Talking of strength… Maybe it’s just as well I’m short on writing time, because I’m enjoying my strength training sessions so much that I’m in great danger of becoming an annoying exercise bore. I promise not to post any gym selfies. I cannot promise there won’t eventually be a photo of me chopping firewood this winter with my HONKING GREAT MUSCLES.

Talking of bodies…  is it hormones? Is it an impending migraine? Is it a diverticulitis flare? Is it gluten intolerance? Is it Long Covid? Is it mid-life burnout? It is just… existing in 2026?  Wheee, who knows!? In this unwritten blog post, I will offer a glimpse into my group chats, in which 40-something women fantasise about taking more naps and eating bread without getting a sore tummy.

Growing up is hard to do. DorkySon has mentioned a couple of times recently how much he is looking forward to leaving home and living independently LOL. In this also-unwritten blog post, I will simply catalogue all the things that suck about being an adult, namely laundry, hoovering and dusting, tax returns, meal planning, dentist bills, buying Tupperware and somehow spending fifty dollars without buying anything fun..

Being alive at any age is hard right now! Covid is still here, anti-vaxxers and USAID cuts mean we are dealing with communicable diseases that were all but eradicated, and now bird flu is doing the rounds too. The climate, she is changing. The globe, she is warming. AI is being forced on us – and it’s not just unethical and environmentally catastrophic, it’s also making us stupider. There is an ongoing genocide. Grocery bills are twice what they were ten years ago. And Pauline Hanson is bloody everywhere. The world is awful right now and we are all trying to do our best but hooo boy it’s hard. It’s so hard that relative strangers now start conversations about it on work calls and in supermarket queues. Everything is hard and we don’t know how to fix it – but I guess it’s good that a lot of us are at least aware and still want to try?

But how cool is the world?? As a counterbalance to the ‘everything sucks’ blog post, this one will be a very long list of things that are brilliant about being alive on this magnificent planet. Blobfish. Mycorrhizal networks. Auroras. Ms Rachel. Whales. Krill. Art galleries. James Spader. Gluten free mint slices. Feijoas. Magpies. Mychal Threets. Yellow-tailed black cockatoos. Pick-your-own berry farms. Brie. Dogs. Hedgehogs. Thermal leggings. Bees. Vaccines. Quokkas. Second hand bookshops. Farmers markets. Art galleries. David Attenborough. Sunrises. Sunsets. Vintage cameras. Nice stationery. Tunnocks tea cakes.

How good are books? Maybe I should get a second hobby. But why would I, when reading is so much fun, I still have 60 unread books on my shelves at home, and there are a further 309 on the ‘must buy or borrow eventually’ list?

Long distance friendships are lovely. After moving house for the first time at seven, I’ve had plenty of practice. I’ve learned that friendships survive on effort rather than geography, and thanks to letters, postcards, emails, WhatsApp, Zoom and voice notes, some of my oldest friendships are also my strongest.

Local friends are good too! Sometimes I think I’ve accidentally ended up in the perfect place for my personality. Friendly people who’ll help without hesitation, but never crowd you. Two or three coffees a month and the occasional dinner or film is exactly my ideal level of socialising.

Car park mums. Someone (not me, I’m just a blogger not a social scientist) should do some proper research on the phenomenon of the car park mum. She is everywhere. They are everywhere. Dozens of them. Every supermarket. Every school. Every swimming pool. Every soccer pitch. There they sit, enjoying ten glorious minutes of uninterrupted peace, answering emails, eating a sneaky snack, or simply… existing. Cars have quietly become the third space of modern motherhood.

Things that keep me up at night. This one will never get written because it would immediately become the longest post on the blog. But I would quite like confirmation that I’m not the only person who still replays awkward conversations from 1998 at three in the morning.

Music snobbery. Get over that shit. Listen to the music that brings you joy, and let everyone else do the same. Doesn’t matter if it’s Stray Kids or Stravinsky, Boyzone or Bowie, Lord Huron or Lana Del Ray… there’s not a single reason to yuck someone else’s musical yum.

How much info is too much info? Apparently, the name for someone who develops a borderline obsessive interest in a subject is a completist. If your interest is a tangible thing – say James Bond books, or Beautiful South albums – then at least you stand a chance of completing your collection one day. If your interest is just a topic, and you’re trying to gather every bit of knowledge on that topic – hi, that’s me – it can be a bit trickier. A bit weirder. For example, YOU might remember that a submersible with billionaires onboard imploded a few years ago. If you’re ME, you spent hours learning about the flawed method they used to construct the carbon fibre hull, and you know the whole endeavour was doomed from the start. Similarly, YOU might remember that a passenger plane disappeared in odd circumstances just over a decade ago. If you’re ME, you lost several weeks of productivity browsing pilot forums and learning about all the systems on the plane that had to be manually overridden for that to happen. My superpower is turning innocent small talk into a deeply unsettling TED Talk.

And on that note, labels can be good, actually. There’s a lot of grumbling right now, especially in the right-wing press, about the AuDHD ‘overdiagnosis epidemic’. I’m sure it’s just a wild coincidence this grumbling is coming from old white guys right at the time when women and other minorities are only just starting to secure diagnoses for the first time. Anyway, if you’d asked me for an identifying label 20 years ago, I would have told you I was a Taurus. 15 years ago, I would have said I was an introvert. 10 years ago, I would have described myself as a Highly Sensitive Person – and within the last couple of years I’ve realised (with some relief – because it explains a lot) that even if I don’t fully match the criteria for autism, there is definitely some neurodivergence at play. There is a meme that does the rounds every so often that reads: not diagnosed, not undiagnosed, but a secret third thing – peer reviewed. I have definitely been peer reviewed and accepted into the fold, and that’s good enough for me.

Use the damn stickers. A post arguing that we all need to stop saving good stuff for a day that might never come. There is a trope, about women of my generation, that we all loved stickers as kids but never liked using them – because what if we stuck them in the wrong place. It’s the same mentality that creates drawers full of empty notebooks that are too good to write in, wardrobes full of nice clothes that never get worn, and cabinets full of wine that’s too fancy to drink. Stop it! Use the damn stickers.

Social media bans for kids are bad, actually. I have big feelings on this one. As someone who has been terminally online for 20+ years I’m aware of the many issues with social media, but a blanket ban for under 16s will – like so many political decisions – harm vulnerable people the most, without doing anything to fix the root issues. Meta, X and Snapchat will continue to rake in billions while doing naff all about their shitty algorithms, their lack of moderation, and their toxic and illegal content. While young people who used social media in a reasonable and sensible way – rural and regional kids, kids with niche interests, neurodivergent kids, LGBTQI+ kids, kids for whom home is not a safe space – lose the one space where they could actually connect with a community. If we absolutely must ban social media for young people, and I don’t believe we should, but if we must… then where is the accompanying conversation about funding other spaces where they can safely hang out without being forced to buy something? Where is the investment in libraries, youth clubs, parks, sports facilities and community centres where teenagers are allowed to exist without someone calling the police on them for being noisy.

Ending a friendship over ‘political differences’ is ABSOLUTELY FINE. I will die on this hill, even if I don’t have time to write the full blog post. Politics doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not an abstract game. It’s a reflection of your values. If you vote for a party that believes we should pay for social services by increasing capital gains tax, and I think vote for a party that thinks we should pay for it by increasing income tax, then our values probably still overlap and we are still cool to hang. If you vote for a party that opens school breakfast clubs but also thinks that young trans people shouldn’t have access to health care, murdering Palestinian children is fine, and that every problem in society can be blamed on immigrants – then it’s not just our politics that are out of alignment, it’s our core values, and our friendship has probably run its course.

There are others. Dozens of other. One lamenting the fact that high school PE ruined exercise for many of us for years. One arguing that we need to make small cars cool again. One about the joy of old photographs, and the anticipation of waiting for a film to be developed, which segues into a whole bigger, broader post about how we used to all be much better at being patient and not expecting instant gratification.

Maybe one day I’ll get around to writing some of them properly.

But likely not.

The nice thing about having more ideas than time is that it means life is still interesting. It means I’m still noticing things, still getting delightfully cranky about things, still collecting tiny moments and facts and observations that feel worth sharing.

My drafts folder is overflowing. My brain is too.

And honestly, that’s not the worst problem to have.

But if you’ve made it this far, then apparently a list of unwritten blog posts is, in itself, a blog post. Which feels appropriately on brand.

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Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash