I'm Absolutely Fine! by The Midult

We recently received an email from someone who apologised for her delayed reply: she had ‘disappeared into the things’. HARD RELATE. We are constantly in danger of disappearing into the things: the sadness, the panic, the phone. So in this episode we talk about the strange things that are happening with our sense of self at the moment… plus all the mini identity shifts that send us from Diary Of A...

Who doesn’t love a solution story: the tale of a grown-up woman who had a problem and thought ‘You know what? I am not going to wait for some fucker to fix this – I am just going to do it myself’. This is true of today's guest. Joanna Jensen suffered from eczema as a child and, when her own children were born with the same condition, she decided ‘enough is enough’. In 2010 she created Child’s Farm...

Last night we slept so badly that Annabel put hairspray under her arms and Emilie put her contact lenses in twice. This week the podcast is dedicated to the recognition that so many of us are so exhausted. How many times - today - have you thought ‘I am so tired’? Did you wake up thinking, ‘I am so tired’? Did you spend ten minutes sitting on the side of the bed, wrapped in a towel, staring at the...

Are you being rude? Do you even know any more? Do you even care? This week on the podcast we discuss when it’s acceptable to ignore people (airports, for a start); what to do when you forget someone’s name for the millionth time; the question you should never ask and whether diary invitations are helpful or just annoying. And, now that it’s March and the sun’s a little bit out, our wardrobes feel...

Regular listeners will know that we often slip ’the patriarchy’ into the conversation around what holds us back. From diet culture keeping us hungry while feeding our self-loathing; to medical misogyny. So it’s a privilege really to have entrepreneur Sahar Hashemi on the podcast this week. Sahar has smashed through many a ceiling and is still busy opening lots of doors for women: she founded Coffe...

All those years trying to fit in. The energy wasted wondering if we were loveable enough. The box ticking: professional, ambitious, presentable. And yet here we find ourselves, at the sharp end of 2023, weirder than ever before. So, we did some…research, and it turns out you lot are up to all sorts of micro-weirdnesses. Maybe it’s time to unleash your inner weirdo on the world. She is bursting to...

So…January. Only 2000 years of it left. Just a joy of a month isn’t? Everyone is feeling fantastic, right? Well if, like us, you are wading through quicksand, then this is the episode for you. This week’s guest is a happiness teacher. At UCLA. To MBAs. Professor Cassie Holmes is an award-winning academic and social psychologist, who, nearly defeated by the grind, decided to learn how to have a mor...

Not to be dramatic but it’s nearly fucking Christmas...Anyone else feeling exhausted/deranged/burnt-out? We thought we’d share some of the best advice (and weirdest) we’ve received from you guys, from ‘Nothing good comes from a drink you have set on fire’ to ’Never trust a man called Tim’. We talk about all the modes we might slip into during the perineum of the year, from Goblin Mode to Donkey Mo...

So buckle up for the best kind of Christmas chaos…with our friends and yours, The Scummy Mummies. Helen talks about navigating the single life while Ellie owns up to a Christmas loo brush (is it acceptable to clean it in the dishwasher?) and a hefty midlife crisis purchase. And here’s the burning Midult question this Christmas: Bublé or Tucci? Only a few more breakdowns ‘til Christmas guys... Lear...

Do you feel as though you are about to explode with ALL THE THINGS? Ageing parents, health, money, a social life, trying to stay hydrated, sober and sane, and sleep for more than 45 minutes? Well someone else who understands the ferocity of the rush hour of life is novelist Fran Littlewood – she’s here with us today to talk about her brilliant book Amazing Grace Adams; the story of a perimenopausa...

Everything in the world is making us want to retreat to our beds with a book right now. But what to read? Enter our guest this week, Daisy Buchanan. Daisy is a writer of naughty books and heartwarming books and books that can help us to look at ourselves with more generosity – from her hot novel Insatiable to the most recent Careering. She also has a mini-book out with The Pound Project called Bur...

Bay Garnett is the woman who turned second hand into vintage. She is the person to talk to right now, when money is tight, fashion feels oppressive and we want to stop contributing to the fast fashion phenomenon that just feeds our greed for new…more…now. In this episode, the Queen Of Thrift talks to us about how to plug into the thrift circuit, how shopping can also be activism and why secondhand...

We all kind of agree that (despite the amazing skin elasticity and ability to metabolise alcohol) our 20s were the fucking trenches. So here we are in our 30s, 40s, 50s trying to decide which bits of our personalities to hold on to and which bits to let go of. Who to be, basically. Well maybe we could start with who we’d like to be in a very micro way. This week we start a campaign to be the peopl...

If you are anything like us, you will have been driven half mad tracking the chaos - the sheer wildness - of the last few months in politics. So have we got a treat for you. This week our guest is the sensational Hugo Rifkind, Times star columnist and radio presenter - his Saturday morning show on Times Radio is a must-listen. He unpacks his red box of weirdness for us as we talk about the maddest...

Here we all are, wrestling with the shifting sands of our identity. Who are we? What are we doing? Is this what we wanted? And alongside these panickings, there are times when our physical selves change and challenge us in ways that can make us feel desperate. Today’s guest opened the floodgates for people to take about their experience of hair loss when she started documenting her own situation....

Do you have a happy vagina? Do you even know what would make it happy? Content? Perhaps equal pay and a health industry that prioritises its well-being? This is why activist and advocate Mika Simmons wrote her book, The Happy Vagina, to empower us to talk openly about health, relationships and pleasure. In this episode we talk to her about why vulvas need a rebrand, medical gaslighting, the stupid...

So last week we posted a Gemma Collins meme about those motivational slogans - printed and framed - that are somehow too much to bear. You lot shared all of your love-to-hate motivational sayings and now we’ve done a podcast about it. As well as Emilie’s most recent undignified moment, how late-onset rudeness has crept on us and why you should never EVER look in a lift mirror. Also we chat to the...

Are you scared of mascara? Bruised by blusher? Disconcerted by dark circles? Do you want to look like you know what you’re doing with makeup? Or maybe you’ve set the bar lower, and you just want to look a little less corpse-like as Winter beds in. This week we called in our friend and general sensation, Nadine Baggott, to talk all things make up. Because Nadine – who seamlessly transitioned from v...

Most of us live in a constant state of despair around how to get dressed. Office clothes now feel like fancy dress. Trying to look a little bit swishy for a night out feels like a Sisyphian struggle. We want to look together but casual at the weekends but mostly we look like pile of old laundry. So the question is: how to look relevant and comfortable - and even a little bit dangerous - when you’v...

Is your social battery dead? The Social Battery is the latest excuse-slash-label-slash-diagnosis for why we are so tired and can hardly bear to see anyone, do anything. So this week we discuss all the different batteries we could use and what would happen if we actually became fully-charged human women. WHAT THE HELL THEN? We also offer some translations for every day sayings like "I’ve had a bit...

Paralysing grief, collective dread, crushing anxiety, acute self-loathing, debilitating panic - are you feeling it all right now? Well, we have an authority on the podcast this week. Donna Lancaster is a therapist, facilitator and healer. She has 30 years of experience in her back pocket: she was head of teaching at the Hoffman Institute and is a co-creator of the Bridge Retreat, a six-day persona...

How do you feel about your body? Can you celebrate its wondrous function? Do you high five yourself every time you tie your shoelaces or carry a heavy thing? Do you admire your favourite bits and embrace your other bits? Are you happy with your size and shape or do you often see yourself as a …before picture "If only I were thinner, more toned, had bigger/smaller/perkier boobs?” We have run the da...

We’re back. And we’re fine *laughs for days*. So fine. This new term does not have that hopeful September flavour, does it? What with The Great Exhaustion, raw sewage in our seas, Truss & Trump, energy bills, war, floods and all the other global horror. The unnamed dread we’ve been pointlessly carrying around for years has now become very much named dread. Oof. Anyway, to celebrate our return, we...

Maybe we should just refer to this period in history as "The Circumstances". Because, let’s face it, we have been around the block a few times (!) and we have never experienced a time when there have been so many “circumstances”. Doesn’t seem much point in listing all the things – personal, financial, ecological, socio-economic, cultural, political. Doesn’t seem much point in breaking them all dow...

Maybe you love your job. Or maybe you spend an alarming amount of time crying in the loo/working in the evenings to meet deadlines/feeling under-appreciated and trapped/hoping meditation will sort it all out. If you are constantly teetering on the brink or staring into the overwhelm – well we have a guest for you. Anniki Sommerville is an author and journalist, podcaster and woman familiar with… t...