This Is Not a Breakdown, I Just Forgot the Spring Onions

A personal update from someone who’s fine. Probably. Mostly. Let’s just say “monitoring the situation.”

Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash

I've been thinking lately that I should start showing up here a bit more honestly.

Not in the sense of bearing my soul or making this newsletter my therapy corner - but just writing a little more like the person I actually am, rather than the one you might assume I am from Twitter, BlueSky, or the various fights I get into with Telegraph columnists. The voice I use online is mine, yes. But it's also the voice I developed over years of working from home - a polished, well-paced, professional Bear tone that my husband likes to call, not unkindly, my "work voice." It's articulate, it's efficient, and it doesn't swear nearly as much as the real me. (Which, to be fair, sets quite a low bar for professionalism.)

But that voice isn't all of me.

I remember a few months ago, someone I care about was going through something genuinely awful - the kind of personal crisis that makes everything else feel trivial. They called me, upset, needing to talk. And I found myself slipping automatically into that same measured, analytical tone I use for everything else. Offering practical solutions. Breaking down their problem like it was a policy paper that needed fact-checking. Being helpful, yes, but also... distant. Professional. Safe.

It wasn't until they said, very gently, "Bear, I don't need you to fix this, I just need you to be here with me" that I realised I'd been hiding behind my work voice even in that moment. Even when someone I loved needed the real me - the softer, less certain version - I'd defaulted to the polished persona because it felt safer than admitting I didn't have answers either. That I was scared too.

That conversation stayed with me. Because the truth is, offline, I'm... well, a bit softer than people probably imagine.

I never raise my voice. Not at home, not at work, not even when I'm seething inside. That's not some abstract commitment to serenity - it's deliberate. I grew up in a house where voices were raised for control, and I made a choice early on never to wield volume as power. It stuck.

I'm not intimidating. I can be a bit short, yes. People who know me will tell you that I expect very high standards - of myself, of the work, of the people I care about. But I'm not rigid. Not really. Not in the way you might think if your only window into me is a 1,000-word post debunking the week's culture war nonsense.

I love cooking. I cook almost every night, finding it calming - chopping garlic, stirring sauces, figuring out how to stretch a half-used bunch of coriander into something vaguely impressive. I talk to the cat while I do it. She doesn't answer, which is probably for the best, but she watches me like I might eventually offer her a steak. (I won't. She's on a diet, much to her disgust and my guilt.)

I like Lego. I like sitting quietly on the sofa next to my husband, watching something trashy or excellent or both. I worry about my parents' health in a way that's constant and quiet - the sort of worry that hums in the background even when you're laughing. I'm not especially extroverted, but I'm friendly. If we ever met in person, I'd probably offer you coffee before anything else, and I'd mean it.

I have a very good job - one I'm grateful for and one that I love, even when it eats my time and occasionally my will to live. And then there's the writing. The political stuff. The endless untangling of misinformation. And that part's been... a lot lately.

I think people can probably tell I've been more active on Twitter recently. A bit more relentless. A bit more dogged. And that's because the sheer volume of nonsense, lies, and political theatre is becoming harder to ignore. I know that fighting misinformation is always going to feel like an uphill climb - but lately, it's been feeling like a sprint up a glacier while being shouted at by people who think "woke" is a policy area.

The messages that get to me most are the ones that start with "I don't know how you do it" and end with someone sharing their own quiet desperation about the state of things. People write to tell me they're scared, or exhausted, or feeling like they're losing their grip on what's real anymore. Parents worried about what world they're leaving their children. Teachers watching misinformation spread through their communities like a particularly virulent strain of intellectual food poisoning. Healthcare workers still dealing with conspiracy theories about vaccines years on.

I never know quite how to respond to those. Because the honest answer is that I don't know how I do it either, and some days I'm just as scared as they are. I want to offer something more substantial than "hang in there" - but I also can't pretend I have answers I don't have. Usually, I end up writing back something about how the fact that they're paying attention, that they still care enough to be worried, matters more than they probably realise. That we're all just trying to hold the line in whatever way we can.

But afterwards, I always sit with this weight of responsibility I'm not sure I asked for. These people are looking for reassurance, or hope, or just someone who seems to have their head above water. And most days, I'm treading just as hard as everyone else - I'm just better at making the drowning look dignified.

I also know I'm probably doing a little too much. I keep an eye on burnout. So does my husband, who's not afraid to gently nudge me off my phone when it starts to consume the day. And I genuinely appreciate the concern from those who've raised it - it means more than I can say. But I also think that if I have the energy and the ability, right now, to push back on the flood of disinformation out there... I should.

And then this morning, the news dropped that the US had bombed three sites in Iran.

It's world changing news, and it stopped me cold when I read it over my coffee. Because that's not hypothetical anymore. That's not some grim maybe. That happened. A real, tangible escalation. One of those moments where the idea of World War Three doesn't feel so outlandish - just a few bad decisions away.

I don't know how to hold that sometimes. Not emotionally. Not as a person. Because when everything feels so combustible, the natural instinct is to do something. For me, that's writing. Posting. Debunking. Clarifying. Shouting, without shouting.

But it's exhausting, too.

Some days, I don't want to be on. Some days I want to unplug entirely, cook something absurdly garlicky, build a Lego Land Rover Defender, and pretend the only drama in the world is whether I forgot to buy spring onions. And I think that's okay. I think part of what I'm learning is that you can care deeply, fight fiercely, and still need to breathe. You can believe the world is in trouble - and I really do - and still make space for joy, or distraction, or a deeply unnecessary dessert.

So maybe once a week, I'll start writing like this. Not about me, exactly, but from me. A bit less certain. A bit less strategic. A bit more human. Because I don't want to burn out. I want to last. I want to keep showing up - for the work, for the writing, for the messy fight for something better. But I can't do that if I pretend I'm made of granite and algorithms. I'm not.

I'm just someone trying to hold a lot at once. Someone who thinks things are getting worse in ways that we're not prepared to confront. Someone who still believes that truth matters, that decency matters, that facts matter. Someone who wishes we could talk more about how we feel about the state of the world, not just what we know about it.

So this is me, checking in. As myself. As best I can.

Thanks for being here, now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go yell at the oven about a Telegraph editorial and pretend it’s catharsis.

Best,

Bear