A catalogue of mistakes I've made:

Professional and personal errors of judgement for your entertainment and education*

*Not an exhaustive list, by any means. There have been more. And there will be more to come, isn’t that exciting

• Filling an empty wine bottle with boiling water and wrapping a towel around it to fashion a makeshift hot water bottle in a particularly draughty uni house. (Don’t ever do this.)

• Styling my living room fireplace before it was fixed properly to the wall to “see what everything would look like once it’s done”. Telling myself I’d just leave all the bits in place for now and come back to the fixing-to-the-wall later. Saying “oh yeah I must get round to fixing that to the wall” every time guests come over, and only just admitting to myself that I’m never fixing it to the wall right now, literally as I write this.

• Making more effort to fill an extended silence on dates than my dates do.

• Buying jeans online. I don’t know if it’s my proportions or my preferences or some specific curse someone placed upon me at birth, but, for me, denim is an in-store purchase. I know this now.

• Not starting a Substack sooner.

• Allowing myself to be intimidated by people who say things louder and with more conviction than I do. And more specifically, spending too many years thinking that people who said things louder and with more conviction than I did were inherently more intelligent, more worthy, or more interesting than I am.

• Sitting on an idea for a collection of stories that has now been conceptualised in the form of a hit Netflix series. Like, genuinely, everybody is talking about this series. And you can’t say “I actually had a really similar idea” without sounding like A) the worst person who ever lived, and B) a liar.

• Signing up for an eight-week total body transformation challenge at a local gym at the age of 19. Following a meal plan that was largely cottage cheese and green vegetables as part of that transformation. Asking the trainer, one day, if I could add a chopped tomato to my evening meal for a treat. Listening when he said no.  

• Thinking I needed a total body transformation at the age of 19 — although this one is more on society than it is me.

• Unblocking my ex. This one needs no context. You don’t know me or my ex or the story, but just reading those three words together, you know it was a mistake, don’t you?

• Delaying moving back to the hometown that I wanted to move back to because I was worried people would think it was a bit pedestrian of me.

• Delaying a lot of things I wanted to do because I was worried people would think it was a bit something of me.

• Not understanding sooner that, for the most part, people aren’t even thinking about me at all.

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About The Content Girl:

Opinions, insights, and the occasional marketing musing from a professional Content Writer giving writing in her own voice a go. You can expect:

• Commentary on pop-culture/regular culture and the like

• Insights/tips/information around professional Content Writing/Marketing and Digital Marketing

• Personal essays (I’ll try to make these not insufferable, I swear)

• Book reviews, recommendations, and roundups

• The odd piece of flash fiction

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