I signed a two thousand pound a month subscription last week and I did it the way other people tap a card for a meal deal. No pause. No swallow. Necessary, I told myself. A service so specific that almost nobody I know even has a name for it. Then it landed. Not the invoice. The fact of me. I am one of them. The people who own access and call it a tool. The people who buy other people’s time in tidy monthly chunks and still post like they are storming the barricades.
I have spent years talking about the weak. Fascists. Racists. The men who treat women like inventory. I meant it. I still mean parts of it. In the background I fund things. I retain people. I move money into projects and out again. I hide inside the language of the left because the language fits my mouth and the audience already knows the chorus. Fighting the right is easy when you have a buffer. Fighting your own reflection is the bit I kept skipping.
I am not going to pretend I sit in some cartoon grove of old men in robes. I am saying the shape is the same. Distance. Discretion. A life arranged so that other people’s labour arrives already packaged. You will own nothing and be happy was supposed to be a threat we threw at billionaires. I own very little that can love me back. I own services. I own outcomes. I own the quiet that comes when a problem can be paid to go away. Happiness is not included. That is the part the slogan never mentioned.
It would be neater if I could blame the politics on hypocrisy alone. Something else cracked it. I watched a lot of women I thought I understood put on the soft colour and the soft voice and stand up for a mother who killed her children. Illness was the whole story. Context was the whole story. The children became a footnote you were not allowed to pick up. I cannot have children. That is not a bit. It sits in me. Some days it makes me cry in the kitchen like an idiot with a full fridge. So when a woman who had them ends them, I do not go to theory first. I go to the empty chair. I go to the version of me that would have taken those kids in a heartbeat and given them the stupid abundant life I keep buying for myself and feeling nothing in.
I would have taken them. Say that slowly if you need to. I have the money. I have the rooms. I have the kind of safety people write letters about. What I do not have is the thing that makes a house feel occupied. So yes, I was furious. Beyond the careful words. Beyond the thread where everyone reminds you to be kind to a woman in crisis. Crisis is real. Murder is also real. I can hold a medical explanation and still want to scream at the people who treated the dead as an inconvenience to the narrative.
That fury does not make me noble. It makes me a person with a hole looking at someone who threw away what I cannot get. Ugly. Honest. I know how it sounds. I also know the alternative, which is to clap along so my politics stay tidy while my chest stays hollow.
The two thousand a month is not the crime. The crime, if there is one, is how easily I can spend it and still call myself the underdog. I fight for women’s rights in public and then I move through the world like the bill is never the point. I am a bitch a lot of the time. People think it is ideology. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time it is the empty bag. You can fill a life with work and causes and retainers and still put your hand in and find nothing that holds you back.
I keep thinking about mothers who are skint. I know that sentence can sound like a sermon from someone who just authorised a luxury standing order. I still need to say it. You have no money. Life is heavy. The bag pulls your shoulder out. School shoes. The late shift. The partner who does not help. The nights you eat standing up. I get it more than my bank balance suggests, because I come from a house where the roast was the event of the week and nobody was performing abundance. Your bag is full. That is the difference I cannot buy my way across. Full is not the same as easy. Full is people who need you. Full is noise. Full is a future that is not just another invoice.
Mine is light. That is the joke. Light looks like freedom until you notice it weighs nothing. I can fund a project before lunch. I cannot invent a child. I cannot make the activism replace a life. I cannot keep using the right as a dartboard so I do not have to admit I have become a private version of the thing I describe in public.
I am not quitting the work. Women still get used. The right still sells fear and calls it protection. None of that vanished because I had a sick afternoon about my own class. What I am quitting is the costume that says I am only ever the fighter and never the person who writes large transfers and feels holy about it. The costume is how you end up defending any woman with a tragic preface, even when the preface is being used to cover a grave.
If you are a mother and you are tired and you think your life looks small next to people like me, I want you to hear this without the usual lecture. Your bag is heavy. I believe you. Heavy means there is something in it. I would trade the clean subscription and the empty rooms for the noise you are trying to survive. I cannot. So I will stop pretending the empty bag is a politics. It is just an empty bag. And it is why I go sharp. Not because I am better. Because I am not full.