Relatable dilemmas for millennial women

Some relatable content I made up with my relatable brain

Earlier today I was browsing the ‘for you’ tab on twitter (i.e. posts from people I don’t necessarily follow) when I saw this tweet:

I don’t know this particular editor, and I haven’t done any work for women’s magazines since my early twenties, but my brain immediately started whirring, churning out potential pitches for relatable Gen Z/Millennial content.

That’s me: An unstoppable content machine. The sort of machine you might discover, say, bricked up behind a wall in an abandoned factory that’s about to be demolished.

[The abandoned factory. You don’t know what you were looking for when you broke into this place - a good story, you suppose? - but now that you’re here, you realise this is what you were looking for. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: perhaps the machine has been waiting for you. You hear a hollow click and a metallic lurch and you realise the gears are still turning inside it. Still turning? Has it been working alone this whole time? Decades? Longer? There’s no source of power that you can discern. The electric’s long been disconnected. And yet the machine grinds on.]

As subscribers to Strange or Beautiful, you get a glimpse behind the scenes. These ideas have gone straight off to the editor, and hopefully you’ll be able to read at least one of them in Grazia’s print edition in a few weeks.

birdpocalypse is always a possibility

• Yesterday seven pigeons in a row dive-bombed violently towards my face on the South Bank and veered off at the last second: Could they have been trying to warn me? Is there a birdpocalypse on the horizon?
  Alternative angle: Am I Tippi Hedren reincarnated? 

• I burned out at my last job, so I retrained and tried to change careers, but then my boss copied me and moved too. It turns out he is lord of the underworld, and in love with me, and claims he will not let me stay in the human realms unless I come back to my old job. HR have been unsupportive. This is the story of my search for an arcane series of incantations that can send him back to Hell, forever.

• I’ve always had a painful menstrual cycle, but in the last few months my uterus is expelling strange cog-like artefacts reminiscent of a primitively industrial alien civilisation. Could your womb, too, be a chthonic portal to an alternate reality? How doctors are failing us all by refusing to investigate.

• My husband doesn’t listen to a word I say. Neither do my co-workers. I thought it was straightforward misogyny - until I realised I was a ghost.
  This is my story of how I discovered what was keeping me shuffling helplessly back and forth on the mortal plane - and how I found the strength to move on.

• I’ve been trying to conceive (#ttc) for two years and now, after a recent meteor strike hit the Earth, it seems like everyone - literally, every other human on earth - is pregnant with the genetically-engineered, invasive spawn of an alien species. Except me.
  How I learned to deal with the loneliness of being the last out of my friend group (and, indeed, my species) to start a family.

• I'm a Libra but my new girlfriend is a Succubus - and I’m exhausted. She is a taker, and while I’ve tried to adapt to her relationship style, I feel like she’s eating me alive. It’s not her fault: I knew what I was getting into. But is this relationship doomed to fail?

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My career as a magazine feature writer will be kicking off soon, so watch this space. (And if anyone has any experience with the issues above, please do get in touch in the comments - I’d love to have some quotes for the article.)

In the meantime, I’m working on something longer/more earnest to come to you next weekend ;)