Welcome to Things We Don’t Talk About (But I Do)

I’ve taken the substack plunge

Hello! 

Welcome to my brand spanking new substack, Things We Don’t Talk About (But I Do). I am so glad that you are here. 

I’ve wanted to set this up for a very long time and I’m excited, hopeful and absolutely jangly with nerves. But sometimes you have to be brave and press publish. 

So what is Things We Don’t Talk About (But I Do)?

It’s a weekly substack where I write personal essays (some might say too personal, with a little crinkle of their nose) on a whole range of subjects like work, making money, finding love, writing, friendship, freelancing, recovery, the struggle to stay half-way sane and how on earth to make the most of your thirties. 

I promise to deliver honest writing into your inbox on a regular basis in prose as pretty as I can make it. The grand aim of this substack is to make you think, laugh, and perhaps - I do hope - feel a little less alone. Because really, isn’t that the magic of writing?

Why a substack? 

Since I went freelance - and it has been a road with highs and lows that I’ll tell you all about in a future newsletter - I have written a couple of pieces that I’m actually proud of. After eight years as a journalist, this was, I’m sorry to say, a foreign feeling. 

The first piece was about how taking the antidepressant Sertraline saved me from a hideous depression but wreaked havoc on my sex drive. The second was about how I could only afford to buy a flat in London with a humongous withdrawal from the Bank of Mum and Dad and that we needed to get honest about how we’re buying those first homes in the capital.

After these pieces were published, I received emails and messages both from people I knew and complete strangers who told me how reading these articles had helped them, that they were going through something similar or just appreciated reading an honest account of subjects people don’t bring up in everyday conversation. 

I realised this was what I wanted to do. I want to write personal pieces about things that we don’t talk about - things like money, sex, medication, loneliness, friendship and much more. Things that can feel ugly and icky and too revealing. Because I believe in the power of stories. I know that by honestly sharing your own experience with another person, you can help them. It’s the closest thing I’ve found to magic. 

Who am I?

My name is Isolde. It’s pronounced ‘is-older’ and it’s from an opera. The story goes that it was while watching this opera that my mother, heavily pregnant with moi, realised that she was in love with my father. This story raises quite a few questions. I suspect closer to the truth is that my father is a man of obsessions and when I came along, he was obsessed with Wagner’s operas. By the time my sister arrived on the scene, he’d cooled on Wagner so she escaped being lumbered with a name like Brünnhilde. 

I’m a journalist and I’ve written for The Times, The Evening Standard, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Post… all the biggies, baby! I came to journalism in my mid-twenties when forays into publishing did not materialise into a career. I was working in a bookshop and felt lost at sea. Then I met a girl at a party, she got me a week’s work experience at Woman and Woman’s Own magazines and, as soon as I walked into the office, I knew I’d found the thing I wanted to do. 

I couldn’t believe there was an actual job out there where you got to read newspapers every morning, discuss the most interesting stories of the day, talk to people about their lives and then write it all up into pieces that were published in a magazine. Journalism has definitely roughed me up since those halcyon days so it’s good to recall the absolute wonder I felt at having stumbled upon work that made me feel alive. 

I went off and did a journalism masters (would not recommend) and got a place on the Mail Online graduate scheme. I quickly skedaddled out of that newsroom to join the exclusives team at a press agency called SWNS. This was probably my most fun job - and yet, also the least glamorous. There’s a life lesson in there.

I had to manage the tip line which was flooded with stories from the general public. My job was to differentiate between stories that could end up in newspapers and the bulk of the tips that came from people convinced their moderately high phone bill was national news or, more sadly, those plagued with mental health problems reaching out to journalists because no one else would listen to them. 

Then the big bosses at the agency asked me to move to New York. Six weeks later, I was on a flight to JFK with no return ticket. I spent three years in the Big Apple and they were some of the happiest years of my life. It was like I stepped into technicolour when I moved to that city. I loved the people, the attitude, the fuss they made of my accent, the parks, the blue skies, the sense of opportunity - that unbridled American belief in opportunity and shooting your shot.

I worked on some juicy tabloid fodder while I was out there - like revealing that Jeffrey Epstein had an oil painting of Bill Clinton in a blue dress and red stilettos hanging on the wall of his Upper East Side mansion or interviewing poor Dr Dre’s daughter who was homeless and living in her car while her father was worth $800m. 

Visa issues and feeling like I’d done all I could in that job brought me back to London where I landed a gig as features writer at the Mail On Sunday. My favourite story I did there was an undercover investigation, complete with a secret camera hidden in a backpack, into illegal ayahuasca ceremonies in the UK. I went to one in Stockport, lay on a mattress in an outhouse and pretended to drink the hallucinogen while everyone around me vomited and tripped and the shaman who organised the whole thing prowled around, banging on a bongo drum, while his yoga teacher girlfriend wailed. Sometimes, just sometimes, the stories write themselves. 

But the Mail On Sunday merged with the Daily Mail and the features desk was sacrificed. I wasn’t devastated as I’d long wanted to leave, so with my redundo cash in hand, I embarked on that well-known lucrative and stable career path as a freelance journalist… with a substack on the side.

So how does this work, then?

Subscribe, sweetie! 

Once you’ve subscribed, you can read my weekly posts which will drop every Sunday. You can read them via email, in your browser or on your phone or tablet in the Substack app. And of course, you can unsubscribe at any time. 

I’m also going to play around with these fun-looking features such as notes and chat and these voice notes. I’m a big fan of rambling, over-excited 10-minute-plus voice notes but I will try to keep myself in check. 

In all honesty - after all, honesty is rather the theme of this substack - I want to offer two versions in time, one free and one paid. Because words are worth something and I won’t be told otherwise. But for now, while I find my substack groove and build what I hope will be a fun, fabulous and supportive community on this adorable app, I’m going to keep it free for all. Enjoy!

If you made it all the way down to the bottom of this long ole post, thank you. I appreciate you. And I’m so looking forward to doing this together.