I’m sitting in a cafe and have pulled a glossy magazine from the rack. The cover price is $9.99. For some reason this sentence jumps off page 32 at me.

“We bring you lifestyle tips every busy woman needs to know, from creating a healthy kitchen to relieving stress.”

It makes me think about how we got to the place where our lives are defined by how we manage the expectations and generalizations we have chosen to own. And own that choice we must, because we have opted to buy $10 magazines that reflect our imperfections back to us, while they sell us on their sisterly solutions which probably include portraits of two perfect friends wearing luminous complexions, behind a plate of tiny macarons and never, ever a generous slice of chocolate mud cake.

And that sentence makes me think of my paternal grandmother, who walked miles on warm summer days with her first six children in tow (a baby a year until her body said ‘no more’ and she died bearing her eleventh), to a fruit farm where they would all pick as much as they could. Sometimes before the farmer got wise to it they would weigh their haul down with stones to earn a few extra shillings. Then they would light a small fire and boil water to make tea before they walked home again. Her were choices few and far between.

The words and pictures on the pages of those glossy magazines are not our stories. But they are the ones we are choosing to believe and live because we have allowed ourselves to own them.

If you have everything you need to access these words online then you have more choices today than every back issue of Vogue can offer you.

Don’t be limited by the tiny frames of reference the world gives you.
Choose your own story.