I started a project called Sort Craft Drawers which stalled at Nothing In The Drawers, Everything On Top Of The Drawers In Shitty Little Piles

On letting your boat sink

So a thing about Virtual Assistants is if you ask them how they can save you time, just out of interest, just so you can flirt with the idea that someone might have finally found a solution to the crushing pressure of unrelenting daily tasks, they will call you twice a day and send you unending emails and sell your phone number to other companies who will also message you as if the survival of their organisation depended on it and you will have even less time than you did before.

If you make the mistake of giving them your email address, the list of tasks they say they can help with are actually the things you really like doing yourself, like writing a Substack essay. It’s definitely not getting your children to put their washing away or filling in the returns form on ASOS or checking the use-by dates on dairy in the fridge.

I don’t know why I filled the form in - I have no idea how much a VA costs because if you get to that stage you will be forced to go through with it whether you want to or not - but I assume it’s enormously expensive. Plus I need someone who is in my house, not their house and intuitively knows about that jumper that can’t go in on forty degrees. I need someone who looks at my unfinished house projects and thinks, yup I’ve totally got this. I used the six days I had between chemotherapy rounds in the summer to prove to myself and everyone around me that I was incredibly well and capable and now all our sheets and towels are in the bath. Sorting them into piles of single, double and superking felt like the epitome of wellness at the time but now I absolutely cannot be arsed to finish them.

I started a project called Sort Craft Drawers which stalled at Nothing In The Drawers, Everything On Top Of The Drawers In Shitty Little Piles. How much does it cost for someone to test six hundred and fifty nine felt tip pens and throw away the dry ones? Who out there has got the balls to put my son’s year two 3D poster on kings and queens in the recycling? Not me, I didn’t realise when I started, not me.

On days when getting anything meaningful done feels completely overwhelming (every day) I like to think about Penelope Fitzgerald who was 62 when she won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979. She lived on a houseboat for a while which kept sinking, the final time with all her stuff in it. Her husband died and her children left home and she decided to start putting herself first, writing “helping people is a drug so dangerous that there is no cure short of total abstention”. Once she got all that out of the way she was creatively prolific and very successful and reportedly dressed however she pleased, in tweed jackets and odd smocks and she still had lots of friends.

It’s a tricky model to emulate. I need my husband, my children are too young to move out, I’m a social worker and like helping people. I do dress like someone who needs some kind of intervention though and I look at my piles of papers and think about the sinking boat a lot.

My therapist suggested I stop writing lists and spend the time doing some of the things on them instead, which feels like appalling advice. What I need is another me, but a better version of me. My 16 year old daughter made herself a pasta sauce today with double cream that went off on the 13th of October, something better me would never have allowed. I watched her by the hob, bare feet, her hair in a messy knot, wearing very small shorts and a t-shirt with paint on it. She’d seen all the art things on top of the drawers. Found her sketchbook. Started a painting. She looked really happy. She’s not writing a list or sorting out a drawer. She’s making a mess with cheese and happily not helping anyone and wiping her brushes off on a towel she found in the bath.

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Come and join me and Annie May Rice from A tiny little life. to find your erotic voice on our course Talk Dirty To Me, every Thursday in November!

Talk Dirty To Me

You can also ask me things about writing on Wednesday 12th November, hosted by Annie online, tickets here! Author Talks

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Footnote: I read about Penelope Fitzgerald in Julie Philips’ brilliant collection of essays The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem.

Painting: A Portal To Another World by Frances Featherstone (2025)