She was never bored because she wasn’t boring.

Pet Shop Boys

The Orbiting Crowd

I’ve been thinking about boredom lately.

Not because I’m bored — I don’t have the necessary personality defects for that — but because I’m fascinated by people who can stare at a wall and feel nothing.

They say things like:

“I’m bored.”

“I have nothing to do.”

“I’m just sitting here.”

As if time itself has stopped visiting them.

As if they open the fridge, see half a cucumber and some old hummus, and experience a complete emotional shutdown. I cannot relate.

Even now, while I am unmistakably unhappy — the heavy, underwater kind of unhappy — I’m still not bored. There’s too much going on in my head: inner monologues, sarcastic commentary, replayed conversations, imaginary arguments, and constant background crisis management. It’s never quiet in there. Just badly organised.

Unhappiness and boredom are not siblings.

Unhappiness is loud and oddly creative.

Boredom is a beige wall with nothing hanging on it.

No one tells me to “slow down” or “do less” or “try being boring for a while.” They don’t have to.

You can see it in the way people look at me — like they’re not sure if I’m going to make them laugh or accidentally start a small emotional fire.

People orbit me like confused satellites. Not because I’m particularly warm or nurturing or spiritual, but because I’m entertaining in the same way that watching someone juggle knives on a moving train is entertaining: risky, stressful, but you can’t look away.

Being boring would require a complete shutdown. No internal comments. No tiny disasters. No emotional gymnastics. And that’s not me.

I’m a one-woman disaster management unit with a sharp tongue and no off switch.

Unhappy? Yes.

Bored? Never.

Boring? Absolutely not.

House of Little Heads

Leadership in the asylum.

I spend my days in a house of heads — young humans whose brains are very much still under construction — and yet somehow I’m the one responsible for keeping everything upright. I’m the grown-up. The authority. The calm presence. Which is hilarious, if you know me even a little bit.

The young heads are loud, unpredictable, occasionally sticky, but fundamentally fine. Their chaos is honest. Their meltdowns make sense.

It’s the big heads orbiting them that provide the real entertainment.

This week, one small member of the house marched into the classroom and announced at full volume:

“My penis is OK now! The doctor said so!”

No context. No build-up. Just a medical press release.

I nodded in that calm, adult way you do when a child shares far more information than you ever requested. Inside my head: Good for you, champ. Health is wealth, I guess.

Then there are the adult big-heads. The ones with allegedly fully developed brains.Some of them communicate almost entirely in the language of “OK.”

Are you upset?

OK.

Did you hear what I just said?

OK.

Do you understand that this is a problem?

OK.

Are you going to do anything about it?

…OK.

You can practically hear their mental nuts jingling in the background like a broken Christmas decoration.

One grown adult announced — on behalf of another growing little head — that he would be staying home because he had done “too much communicating yesterday and feels tired.”

Too much… communicating. So he needed a day off. I mean, same. But still.

If I ever sent a message like that, I’m pretty sure the universe would personally show up, slap me gently, and tell me to get a grip.

Then we have the spreadsheet zealot.

She counts working minutes with an intensity normally reserved for bomb defusal. She updates us with colour-coded tables, percentages, and time stamps as if she’s maintaining a nuclear facility, not a building full of small people and snacks.

And the finger-pointer.

She waves her index finger in the air like a magic wand, as though she might summon reason, justice, or dignity if she just waggles it hard enough. If finger-pointing could be converted into electricity, she could power the whole area for a month.

It’s been a week full of nutcases. Including myself. Because even though I proudly call myself a Bad Seed, I cracked in front of my daughter. Twice. First in anger — the sharp, unfair kind.

Then into a total eclipse of mind — brain shut down, emotions spilling out, logic gone on sick leave. Everywhere else I can keep it together.

Like my 5th grader, who once described life in the Roman Empire in her exam with a single iconic sentence:

“The life was pretty chill.”

That was it. The whole empire.

“The life was pretty chill.”

If only.

I don’t crack in supermarkets. I don’t scream in public transport. I don’t sob on the pavement.

No. I save that performance for home — for my daughter — like some twisted VIP experience. In the middle of one of these cracks, the question I’d been afraid to ask escaped:

“Am I a good mother?”

My daughter looked at me in the way that only a child raised on sarcasm and chaos can — calm, steady, a bit too old for her age.

“Well, I’m not to judge anyone because I do the same… but when you have a bad day at work, could you not put that on me? It feels bad when I’ve missed you and then you come home and crack.”

Direct hit.

No warning.

Straight to the heart.

And of course, this emotionally surgical moment was not happening somewhere poetic — no candlelight, no deep walk, no gentle bedtime talk.

It happened during her nail practice, with me as her test customer and financial investor, sitting under bright lights breathing in acetone fumes while having a minor existential collapse.

“Sorry,” I said.

She answered with silence.

In our family, silence is not forgiveness. Silence is the invoice.

“Sorry” is the preview.

Change is the actual payment.

Unhappy? Yes.

But bored? Not a chance.

Unhappy in Transit

London.

I arrived at Stansted Airport already running on emotional low battery. The kind of tired where even your soul needs a nap and a coffee.

My phone decided to zoom itself into microscopic hell. The screen was stuck on a tiny corner of an app, blown up beyond recognition — a modern art piece of pixels and stress. I couldn’t unzoom it, couldn’t open anything, couldn’t even guess which area of the screen I was stabbing.

So I did what any sensible adult does: I walked to the information desk, clutching my useless phone like a dying animal.

Behind the desk: a group of teenage-looking staff members from the Fast Show with lanyards and very hopeful faces. They looked like they’d been assembled that morning from a training video about customer service.

I explained the problem. They nodded, full of youthful confidence, then immediately turned to YouTube.

Three of them.

My phone.

One tiny catastrophe.

They watched tutorial after tutorial on how to reset zoom for people “who have accidentally magnified their screen.”

Which was me. I was the demographic.

Meanwhile, I was thinking of Timi, my personal tech support unit — the one who once fixed the same issue in three seconds at a bus stop while I yelled:

“FIX THIS! The bus is coming!”

She calmly took the phone, tapped it twice like a magician, handed it back fully functional, and resumed existing like it was nothing.

Now, at the airport, I had fifteen whole minutes before my bus. Plenty of time. In theory.

In practice, watching three teenagers attempt to collectively unzoom my phone with YouTube supervision was like watching a committee try to perform brain surgery with mittens on.

To make things worse, I was trying to manage all this with long acrylic nails my daughter had freshly created on my hands. They looked great. They also removed 80% of my practical functioning.

I couldn’t type properly.

I couldn’t pick up coins.

I couldn’t open a bag of crisps without feeling like I was using chopsticks for the first time.

It is very hard to be dramatically unhappy when your life keeps turning into slapstick comedy.

Eventually, by a combination of luck, poking, and perhaps divine intervention, my screen returned to normal. I thanked the entire youth of Britain and boarded the bus, where a British child chose this exact route to have a meltdown and then throw up spectacularly. He cried and wailed and shouted in an accent so politely tragic that even his tantrum sounded like a BBC drama.

Accommodation: The Porn Cave

My London accommodation was, in a word: Iconic.

In more words: a Porn Cave.

A basement room bathed in blue neon light from LED strips wrapped enthusiastically around the bed frame. The bed itself was covered in white satin sheets — the kind that slide off if you breathe too sharply. Every movement made a soft slippery sound like the bed was trying to escape its own history.

The mattress was heated.

Completely unnecessary, given that my menopause heatwave is running its own independent climate system. Between the satin, the neon, and my internal thermostat, I felt like I was being slowly sous-vide cooked for an audience that never arrived.

My host was Donna, Jamaican, a walking weather system. She greeted me like we were cousins who’d once survived a flood together. Loud, warm, present — the exact opposite of my internal emptiness, which made me like her immediately and also want to lie down on the floor.

Her son, Dwight, lived next door.

Dwight communicated mainly through music and sound effects. From his room came a steady stream of Isaac Hayes basslines accompanied by: Michael Jackson “hee-hee!”s Wild Wild West whip-cracks distinct rhythmic spanking noises

I did not ask for context.

I did not want context.

Some things are healthier left in the abstract.

The walls shook.

The bed vibrated.

The neon glowed.

I lay there in the radioactive blue light, on heated satin, listening to Dwight’s audio theatre and thinking:

I am deeply unhappy.

But I am absolutely not bored.

The Trance Resurrection

Age hits hardest under strobe lights.

After all this, going to a trance concert almost felt logical. If you’ve already survived LED porn cave, bus puke, and Isaac Hayes spanking remixes, why not add lasers?

I joined the queue outside the venue and looked around. Everyone looked god damn old. Not “mature and sophisticated” old. Not elegant silver-fox festival-goer old.

Just… visibly aging humans in neon accessories. Knees cracking. Backs cautious. Outfits screaming 1998 called and wants its dignity back.

I had imagined trance crowds as young — fresh, glowing, energetic. Then I remembered something devastating: This group started 25 years ago. When I was in my early twenties. So of course the crowd looked old.

They were my peers.

My vintage.

People were desperately camouflaging reality with glow: neon fishnet stockings clinging bravely to thighs that had seen things, glowing bracelets blinking like faulty emergency lights, crop tops clearly loaned from teenage daughters, glitter everywhere, trying to fill in the places collagen had abandoned.

I’m not judging.

I was doing it too.

I had acrylic nails by my daughter, makeup placed according to her instructions so that the club lights would “hit the right places” and ignore the others, and an outfit calculated to say:

“I still exist”

rather than

“I have given up and am wearing only fleece now.”

We shuffled inside at the speed of a heavily medicated herd. Some of us tried to move like we used to. Some of us remembered we now have knees.

I tried to dance like my skeleton was trying to escape. I realised my body strongly disagreed and ended up standing still, observing the human zoo. Then, I did all three in cycles.

It was ridiculous.

It was sad.

It was wonderful.

We were not young.

But we were not bored.

We danced like people who know exactly how much reconstruction it will take to get out of bed the next morning — and do it anyway.

Unhappy? Yes.

But boring? No.

Never boring.

View this post on Instagram

Camouflage

Style as survival equipment.

For someone running on emotional duct tape, I must still be doing something right on the outside.

At the British Museum, a woman stopped me in the middle of an exhibition. She gently touched my arm and said:

“I just needed to tell you — your style is absolutely classic. Perfect.”

She looked at me like I was a rare painting that had escaped the frame. I said thank you. Smiled like my life was in order.

Meanwhile inside: small fires, alarms, someone frantically pressing all the buttons.

Back home, on a bus, a young woman leaned forward and tapped my shoulder:

“Sorry, I just have to say — your outfit today is so inspiring.”

Inspiring.

Me.

An exhausted chaos engine wearing lipstick. Some people camouflage with silence. Some with productivity. Some with spirituality. I camouflage with style.

If the inside is breaking, the outside will be sharp.

If my heart feels like wet paper, my coat will have structure.

If my spirit is collapsing, my eyeliner will be annoyingly on point.

If I’m going to fall apart, I might as well do it in a good outfit.

Unhappy? Yes.

But visually coherent.

 The Return

A landing without arrival.

Coming home after all this should have felt transformative.

Like the ending of a film where the main character gazes out of a window while meaningful music plays and you just know they’ve changed.

Instead, I opened my front door and walked straight back into the same unfinished scene I’d left.

Same air. Same mess. Same everyday ghosts.

I put my bag down.

It didn’t thud meaningfully.

It didn’t symbolise anything.

It just sat there, like a potato in a fabric shell.

No choir. No closing monologue.

Just me.

My floors.

My life.

And in that extremely uncinematic silence, I realized:

I was still unhappy.

London did not fix it.

Trance did not fix it.

Neon, satin, porn cave, puke, glitter, chaos — none of it solved anything. But boredom had not once appeared. The chaos came home with me. Or maybe it never left. Maybe this is how I work.

I don’t know what happiness looks like right now. But I know who I am: a good problem. I make good mistakes and even though my spirit is broken my heart is not.

I am never bored because I am not boring, even when I am unhappy.