If I Speak - 57: Do you really want to know about your partner’s past mistakes?

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Nicola Dinan returns to the show to talk about her second novel, Disappoint Me, and respond to Moya’s question about how to deal with a partner’s past mistakes. Plus, dilemmas about lip filler and bottom surgery. We’re now yapping on TikTok! Follow us @ifispeakpod Send us your dilemmas: [e-mail] Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to If I Speak. I'm Moland McLean and Ash you are. Nicola, Nicola Dynan. Thank you so much for having me back. I've never been invited back onto a podcast. Like I'm a real one and done. So I feel so honored. I was gonna say that you're a glutton for punishment. You're a friend of the pod. You've been called. I know I'm officially a friend of the pod. We get special cards made.

Okay. And then eventually I take one of your jobs. Yes. That's how it works. That's exactly how it works. Need to look at my contract again. Because you are a friend of the pod and you're our esteemed guest, that means when we now do 73 questions minus 70, AKA where we ask someone three questions, they are going to be directed towards you, Ash.

You know what, I've never broken a bone. I don't do things like skiing. I don't drive. I don't injure myself basically. So I can't even remember the last time I had an injury of any kind. So yeah. I've also never broken a bone. So, do we find that was his fault, not yours. That would make a great true crime duck as well. Did he did he bash the wall intentionally or was it just a tragic accident?

That's an Agatha Christie novel. That's not a Netflix true crime documentary. True crime documentaries like it would just be called The Clock. That would be it. That's what Netflix is. They just, that's an Agatha Christie novel. Anyway, next question. Um, second books are really hard. You guys might know that one day. I've, I think.

It's kind of shade. You're like. I think, you know, there's so much energy that goes into writing a first book. Like you're almost quite excited. And even though I wrote the bulk of Disappoint Me before Bellies came out, it felt like I was still writing with the weight of expectation and that sense of comparison and I think with a lot of creative processes, beyond the harsh conditions in which artists have to work, our own worst enemies are ourselves in terms of how we really fall into patterns of perfectionism and self-critique that aren't very constructive. And I felt it so keenly with Disappoint Me, which is why so much of the book is about Max being like a quote unquote failed poet, or at least seeing herself that way,

and working through those feelings of creative disappointment. It was very much a way for me to process like, okay, well, if these things don't work out, how do I actually move forward with enjoying writing again? Because I think, you know, when you have an insight into the publishing machine, things start to feel a lot less connected to the writing itself. I don't know if you thought that Ash? Yeah, definitely. Like very opaque. And these things are demanded of you, you're not quite sure what you're supposed to be doing, what the expectations are for how you promote it. So on that front, maybe it was a bit easier this time. But I think in terms of the work itself, I definitely found a career, the easier it gets. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for number three, that that one sort of starts to get easier. Oh, you lose your fucking mind.

You know, you're ignoring the things you shouldn't be ignoring. You find things that you shouldn't be finding lovable, incredibly lovable. And sometimes that's a really wonderful thing, but I think so much of the book is about kind of a deprioritization of romantic love. It's funny because I think I get described as being a writer of love stories. But that's so strange to me because in my first book, it's basically a breakup novel. And in my second book, sure, there's this relationship between these two characters in their thirties. But I think the whole over the course of the novel, I at least was trying to really de-emphasize the role romantic love plays in our lives.

Yeah, but do you know what relationship will be intact is that between Max and her best friend, Simone. And I think that's, you know, if there's one enduring love story of the novel, it's that between Max and her friend and looking how these friendships, which we often take for granted, sort of outlast and survive these relationships

that we give much greater weight to in our lives. And I find that really interesting. Wait, Ash, did you say what your sign for falling in love is? Because I'm kind of interested. Yeah. I think that's a good sign. That's just when I fancy someone. Mine is I notice the environment. I remember this so, as soon as I'm falling in love, I notice the environment. I remember this so, like, as soon as I'm falling in love,

I notice things, I'm like, wow, the pattern on that leaf is sensational. And when I went home one time, when I was falling in love with someone, I said to my aunt, has that tree always been there? It's so beautiful. And she went, are you falling in love? I was like, fuck, this is my tell.

Because you start noticing stuff around you and seeing the beauty the beauty in the small details anyway i have an intrusive thought and i'm making it your problem which is based on disappoint me as people can't see them holding up i'm gonna do asmr. My intrusive thought is this, and it's also coming from things I'm seeing online. I think, Disappoint Me is sort of, the plot point it puts forward is an extreme example of this,

but the intrusive thought is, how do you deal with a partner's past? How do you deal with a partner having a past life? And as we've said, you've got this book out, it's called Disappoint Me, it's novel number two, you can buy it right now, I have read it. And I think one of the key themes that runs through it is grappling with a partner's past life.

So this is thrown into really very, very sharply, the central dilemma faced by Max is about when she finds something out about her partner and how she then deals with it. And I wanna read this quote out from her inner monologue because I don't wanna spoil the twists in the book, but I wanna read this quote. So, quote, there is also a world where people,

often women, are doomed to spend much of their lives forgiving the errors of others and suffering for the sake of other people's growth. Sometimes there's nothing to do but leave and sometimes there's nothing to do but forgive. So the overarching question I want to explore is what do you do when you find out a partner has done something bad in particular or when they find out you've done something bad? And I guess I'd start by asking why did you want to focus on the past life of a partner in this book? Like, where did that come from?

Yeah, you know, I think it was partly in observing a lot of the guys I went to school with, for example, who weren't exactly like upstanding boys. You know, they were homophobic, at times like a little racist, definitely misogynistic, but a lot of them have grown up to be like, all right dudes. And it's like, how do I grapple with that change? And also the fact that if those are the boys I went to school with in a relatively liberal school, that is probably the reality for a lot of the men that I encounter in my sort of day-to-day life now, who I rather like. And there's a convenience that comes with, you know, presenting ourselves to other people in the present, where we can censor the worst things that we've done or thought or said in the past.

And I wanted to explore in the book what happens when we can't do that, when the past collides with the present in a really uncomfortable way. And also, you know, I think that question of how do we deal with our partner's past is as much a question of how do we deal with our own? Like how do, you know, I think censoring what's happened in your past doesn't mean you've moved on from it. In fact, it often means that you've abdicated

on your responsibility to confront it. And so the yes, Max finds out what happens in Vincent's Gap Year in 2012, which is I think from the outset, because about a third of the novel is told from his perspective in that time, you get a sense that something's gonna go wrong. It's like two British guys traveling Thailand

where they're 19, like what could possibly go wrong? And I know it is, yeah. But it is the beach. It's the beach. But you know, Max as well in the present is dealing with really strongly held narratives to do with her own history in her relationship with her father, for example, who has struggled with alcoholism

for most of her life, got sober when she was in her teens. And a lot of the novel is about her being able to confront what it means to revisit the past and the necessity of doing so in order to move forward. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It's so difficult, I think. So I'm going to answer that question in sort of two parts. The first being that it's very easy when we hear things about other people's past to make

those paths about us, to place ourselves really in the center of other people's past to make those paths about us, to place ourselves really in the center of other people's worlds. So, you know, with Vincent in 2012, there's this relationship with a woman who he meets on his gap year. And when Max finds out about this relationship 10 years on, there's the question of to what extent does this relationship play into my relationship with Vincent in the present? To what extent does it render my relationship with him meaningless because of these things which have happened in the past? And I think there's a centering of herself in that. And I think, you know, that's the risk with knowing too much about the past is weirdly we can even make other

people's histories about us as well. And it's hard to kind of draw the line of how much we're entitled to. I think the reason why I don't come up with a really clear answer on that is because, so my partner has a background in philosophy. He has a PhD in moral philosophy, which, you know, is fun for arguments. Well, how he and I approach sort of like these ethical problems are really different because if you think about fiction, you're really connected to how people live their lives. And you almost work from the ground up, like you think, okay, well, there's this very interesting problem faced by these very specific people. What questions does that raise that might apply more universally?

Whereas with something like philosophy or a lot of sort of nonfiction writing, you work with these big ideas and then you sort of work down these big ideas of how we should be to one another. And then you work down and there's a slight detachment, I think, particularly in something like philosophy from the way in which people actually live their lives.

And so as a writer of fiction, sometimes I struggle to give clear answers to questions like that because I'm like, oh, but it really depends on the situation, you know, the extent to which that knowledge is relevant, the extent, like the state of the mind of the person hiding that information, all of this stuff really factors into an answer.

And I'm kind of allergic to like broad sweeping statements about how people should be because I make a living on focusing on how people actually live their lives in practice. There's such a, something that's been thinking about a lot is there's such a level of like distrust around forming relationships and dating. And there's many reasons for this. But I think part of it that hasn't maybe been spoken about

as much is this idea that, you know, a partner's past, I see a lot of people on on social media saying stuff like, oh, if he's had a girlfriend before you, no go. Or then the other thing is, if he's never had a girlfriend, no go. Okay, what the fuck are we meant to do then? What the fuck are we meant to do? But there's also this idea

because we now live our lives out in digital media, these people on our generation, that the past is never in the past. Like there's always a tweet that could surface. There's always a message. There's always someone who can reach you as well, you know, come to you. I'm saying in like woman to woman in terms of like the heterosexual relationships that I think all of us engage in, but like the hey girly text, yeah, hey,

girly. There's always someone who can pop up and say, Oh, they were like this to me in say, it can be, you know, recent, it can be years ago. That is a fear, a fear that the person that you love has a past that will come up. And I think that's really difficult to deal with because obviously in theory, you're like, people can change, people grow, I've grown, I've evolved, all of this. But when you were in that situation, you're faced with someone coming to your knowledge and saying, this is something they did to me, and I'm bringing this to you. And they might not even give an expectation

of what they want, but you know that they want some sort of like action. They want some sort of punishment for this person to happen. And the question is, how do you then deal with this thing that kind of is irrelevant, but is also totally relevant because you're in a relationship with that person? Yeah. Ash, do you have an answer to this?

Let's think this through. Let's think this through. Okay, sure. I think, I mean, it's so difficult, right? Because we have like, I think we have really strong values and particularly if we think about like being a woman in a heterosexual relationship, like often strong feminist values that are often challenged

by the reality of the lives that we live. And that's where sort of slogans sometimes only take us so far of, and of like, for example, yes, believe women, of course, but then in practice, if you hear this random thing from this random person, it's like, how do you adjust your values to accommodate the reality in which you live, the fact that you have a romantic partner?

And I think we're often encouraged by, you know, the internet, TikToks, to dump his ass and to make short and sharp decisions. And that is something that's rewarded as an indicator of strength, making very quick decisions that often result in like some avoidance of the harder questions. And I think for me, I try to stay away from sort of TikTok relationship advice. I saw a video literally this morning

as I was sort of scrolling before we hopped on here, which was like, if you're paying 50-50 rent, you've got to leave. And I was like, what? But I think that's sort of like I see the strangest relationship advice that feels so detached from reality and sort of deceives us into not confronting the hard questions

or welcoming the fact that there aren't sort of easy answers to things. Okay. Hmm. Okay. I'm sorry. Okay. I've got two flip sides to this. But Nicola, did you want to come back in before I start flip siding it? I know, I was just going to say, yeah, that's really scary. I also, but just to add to, you know, phrases like believe women. And I think you see it with a lot of words that sort of circulate in public discourse. Even the word trauma, for example, or narcissism, it starts to expand and balloon to a wider number of instances and types of cases than initially envisaged. And so something which was created in relatively high stakes allegations of rape

in which it really makes sense when you look at the rates of prosecution for rape, the number of cases that actually even make it to court, the likelihood of a woman actually reporting rape to begin with, that phrase makes total sense, but you see it sort of appropriated to instances, to things which have sometimes nothing to do with sexual assault at all,

in which the stakes are lower, and it sort of warps the meaning, and makes me question if actually there are situations in which that sort of warps the meaning and makes me question if actually there are situations in which that sort of complexity that you talked about Ash is warranted or at least complexity of thought. The flip side of this obviously is that, and there are allegations that are very true. And two examples spring to mind

where people had accusations leveled at them. And in one case, those accusations were like flout and night, there was no willingness to sort of hear them out. And they actually went to trial, but that's a different different story. And the other case, then there was accountability. There was a Okay, where do we go from here? And I, in the first case, it was just, you know, that person, I couldn't, I couldn't engage with them anymore. And I couldn't engage with people around them. And that was a hard no for me, a hard line. In the second case, because there was this willingness to admit, it provided ground to start thinking about how to move forward. So like, there was a willingness there to engage. And the reason these problems are going to come up is because there are a lot of

people out there, not just men, but obviously predominantly men, who have committed sexual assault. There's a lot of people out there who've done that. And I think, like we've talked about a little bit here, we have all these hard and fast rules and slogans, but we have no way of resolving how do you live with these people? There's so many people who've committed sexual assault. You can't erase them all from the world. You can't lock them all up. And would you even want to? Is that a society that's functioning if we put those people away in jail the whole time? That whole time? We put those people in jail for something that unfortunately a lot of people have done. Um, that is not a society to me that is built on like a healthy culture of

rehabilitation, but the problem is rehabilitation sounds too forgiving. So people don't want to do it. And that's why I think this, this comes up again, when you hear about our partner's past, how do you know, like, what's the line of, I think we can work forward here and what isn't. And for me, it's the willingness to at least admit it and then start change. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's such a good question. I think punishment is so difficult

because I think part of maybe where Me Too failed women, for example, is in the punitive focus rather than the thoughts of how do we support those who have suffered. And so I think we have a really human inclination towards punishment that sort of takes the focus away from how to support victims. You know, for example, I don't think that people see a conviction of a rapist and suddenly everything is cured, you know, I think that that's what people tend to focus on, but it's really only half of the picture.

And so I struggle with questions of punishment. And I also on that basis, not that I don't think people shouldn't be punished, but I also struggle with how we assess what punishments should be. And I think that's what Max really struggles with in the novel because, you know, Fred and Vincent, they go on this gap year. They meet a trans woman who they don't initially know as trans and bad things happen to her for which Fred and Vincent are responsible

to varying degrees and to different levels of extremity between them. And it's really hard to know how one atones and to measure that level of atonement from one person to another. You know, in the example Moira gave, you have these quite clear-cut examples of two people, one of which shows a willingness to move forward, and the other of which hasn't really grappled with the realities of what he's done. And that feels very clear-cut. I think sometimes there are examples in life where you can't really grapple with what the level of guilt or shame someone has felt, particularly if we're referring to events that sort of happened 12 years before, there's sort of a leap of faith that comes with accepting

that someone has been sufficiently punished and reformed or has sufficiently punished themselves for something that they've done. And that's where the tricky part comes. Forgiveness, I think, is sort of much easier because then it's, well, firstly, there's a question of whose pace is it to forgive an act that, for example, if someone does a bad, person A does a bad thing to person B, why the fuck does person C think they have any right to give person A?

Forgiveness is sort of a tricky question because it's like, well, who's right is it to give in the first place? I think it's actually in a lot of cases, if we think about hearing our friends have done something wrong to someone else, it's actually a question of to what degree can we accept

that they've done that. And the reality is that you don't really have to. You can accept, for example, that one person has forgiven another, but that doesn't mean you have to then accept them and move forward with them in your life. And I think we see that in Max's relationship with Vincent, her boyfriend, and Fred, his best friend, and her assessment of how she can take each relationship forward in her life is actually really different, both because of what they've done, but also because of

her relationship to them. Some relationships are easier to sort of leave behind than others. But I think it's, you know, that question of forgiveness is sort of implies that we have the ability to forgive in situations where we don't because the forgiveness has nothing to do with us. It's more a question of acceptance. And that is really down to the individual. Have you ever read that book called Monsters by Claire Derderer? No. It's a really good book about, it's a series of essays about how we accept art made by shitty people. And particularly like, you know, how we reconcile the fact that Woody Allen has done the things that he's done. And one thing that really stuck with me from that

is that if something, a movie or a song for you is tainted because of what someone has done, you can't really control that feeling of taintedness. It's sort of just there. You can't will it out of yourself. And that's often really informed by your own experiences, whether you've been sexually assaulted, your level of comfort,

and that's not something you can necessarily change. And I don't think the actions of another person, someone sexually assaulting another person then puts an obligation of you to discard, discard of those discomforts and that you experience just because you think that they've been rehabilitated or reformed. Does that make sense? Yeah, it really does because at the moment I'm packing up bits of my house and I was

putting books away yesterday and I was looking at my Neil Gaiman books, who was formerly my favourite author. And the stories themselves still mean so much to me, but I was looking at them and I was because I'm taking giving a lot of books charity and I was like, do I give these away? Do I not give these away and trying to really wrestle with my feelings about what the stories mean to me in the storytelling, but also the person who wrote them and eventually decided to keep them. But they're forever tainted. Like I can't read them in the same light that I once did, but that doesn't mean I want to discard them altogether because there's still something I take from those narratives even though the context in which they're produced is very different for me

now. The other side of the conversation we're talking about, which is disappointment, we're back to disappointment, right? How do we grapple with disappointment in other people? How do we cope with disappointment ourselves? Because half of the novel is told from Vincent's perspective, and there is such a thread of shame that runs and fear that he will be found out for what he has done. Yeah. Yeah, basically. Yeah.

So how do we, how like, I'm interested in this as well. When I think of some things like transgressions I've made, one of my friends had recently, oh, every time you talk about this particular thing, like there's so much shame that you surround yourself with. Like there's so much, and she was like, it wasn't that bad. Like it really wasn't that bad. Like it really wasn't that bad. But what Vincent does is really bad. Like how do you then move forward when you're disappointed in yourself?

Like it's not your job. You can't forgive yourself. Can you have acceptance? Like what do you do? Well, I think what we see in the novel is sort of a level of running away, that Vincent engages in. One thing I always really struck by is how, and speaking in incredibly general terms here, but a lot of men I know can go a really long time

without talking about really serious things with their closest male friends. And I found it, the fact that Vincent and Fred never really talk about this horrible thing that happened on their gap year, felt very realistic to me. I think we all know kind of an analog in that, you know, with the people that we know just sort of, you know, a moment where you're like, what? You've never spoken about this? And I think in that is sort of a running away and maybe kind of a subconscious repetition

of that relationship that he has on his gap year through Max as a way to solve it and to relive it and correct it without necessarily confronting that huge amount of shame that he feels in respect to what he's done. And the reality with shame is that the most human instinct with respect to shame is to, you know, ignore it because it's shameful.

But I think with like most things in life when it comes to our own wellbeing, we have to move sort of counter-intuitively and actually sort of embrace and confront and most importantly, talk about the things which make us feel ashamed, so that we can kind of begin to construct a new reality in which we feel more comfortable than we don't deceive other people. You know, you see a much less or rather much more innocuous version of it in Max and that Max hasn't done

anything wrong to anyone, but she's sort of strapped with these intense feelings of shame. And that's everything from the ways in which she feels her body is something shameful. Her body is a burden to the cisgender men that she's in a relationship with, which I think a lot of women, trans or not, can relate to. But you also see it in terms of her narrative around her relationship with her father. She feels deeply ashamed that there's this incident that takes place in their house in Hong Kong

when she's about 15 years old and her dad was an active alcoholic. And the incident results in her dad getting sober, but also a distance growing between them. And because she's so ashamed about it, she is unable to talk to her father about it and therefore holds all of the responsibility for something she can't really be blamed for. She was a child, and her dad was the person who was supposed to look after her, and she was the one looking after him. And so again, I don't think it's until it's not until she

actually is able to talk about it, that she's able to reshape the narrative and the hold that her perception of these shameful events has on her life. Absolutely. I know. I used to do that job. I know. So I used to do a job where I used to sign off emails as a robot, pretending a robot had done contract with you. And I think the company had been sort of ambiguous with its clients. But in a way where I think some of the clients really did think of robot was reviewing the documents, but it truly was just me signing off with the robot's name.

And so lots of people often talk about like, like, let's talk about the critique of liberalism, the critique of the critique of like the encroachment of technology on our rights with respect to the book. And what's so funny to me is that I'm just borrowing from and observing from the reality of which I've lived, which I think is always funny, because I think when you're writing from life, and you're writing from London, those critiques are always just going to form naturally within your work. It's hard to write a contemporary novel set in London

and for it to not also in some way start to become a social critique and a critique of liberalism. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'm kind of both. I think, you know, as a writer, you're always aiming for specificity to like poke fun or to illuminate a really specific set of circumstances in life. But at the same time, you're kind of aiming that it speaks to something a bit more universal.

I was really interested in this cohort of, I guess I described them in the book as wealthy minorities who maybe fall back, send solidarity out the window and fall back and reflect on their own identities as racial minorities, for example, as part of their own race to innocence and to avoid culpability for the structures in which they're participating rather than as sort of a meaningful critique of society. And that applies to, you know, on the racial aspect, but also on sort of the queer aspect as well. And this idea of an actually I actually just

finished your book this morning. But one thing that I really liked in one of the opening chapters was about how when the as a minority of the world doesn't quite work for you, you often see more clearly the ways in which society should be restructured. And I think the allure of sort of assimilating and being accepted often squanders the revolutionary potential that a lot of groups have. That includes amongst queer people and trans people, where queer spaces have kind of evolved into something which are much less to do with organizing and much more to do

with like serving cunt. And there's sort of a change in there where I sort of maybe poke fun at how these liberated spaces that maybe once held so much promise have devolved into just another capitalist enterprise which just assimilates and participates in the structures we maybe seek, we should be seeking to dismantle. But I don't write about this from like a particularly morally superior position. Like I said, I observe myself and I usually start with myself and work outwards. And so these are all critiques at which I would aim directly at myself and writing a book is often a really good way to sort of to hold up a mirror to your own life and what my and the that. Uh-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's sort of bi-directional in a way, as in we judge others because we feel ashamed. We feel ashamed because we feel judged and therefore we continue to judge others. It's sort of like the cycle of judgment that doesn't really help anyone. I think, you know, we were talking about relationship advice on TikTok earlier, and another ridiculous one I saw was about how men being on social media is like an ick. And it often was from women who were intensively on social media. And I was like, what a fascinating example

of the ways in which we project our own disgust with ourselves and dissatisfaction with the ways that we're living our lives onto other people, even from, you know, we might, even onto men as women. And we might say different rules apply. But it feels quite flimsy when interrogated. And so absolutely. And I think Max starts the novel probably quite biting. And like,

sometimes and this is the risk of writing books in the first person, particularly in the present tense, because everything's quite immediate. And you're exposing the reader to all of their thoughts, which means you end up writing like nasty pieces of work. And she definitely falls into that category at some time at points in the novel. But I think towards the end, we maybe see her practice a little bit more gentleness with herself. And, you know, she's at this wedding, which she's basically with her best friend Simone ripped to shreds for the entirety of the novel. And then when she's actually the wedding, she's like, these girls, they're quite nice. Like, maybe maybe maybe me and Simone are just really mean people. And there's sort of a recognition of the ways in which her judgment

of other people is a function of her inability to accept and forgive herself. And I always aim for there to be some kind of emotional change within the characters by the end of the novel, because otherwise what's the point of focusing on that period of their life if it's not a period of change? But I think we see her soften.

And I think it's definitely a journey I've gone through in the last few years as I sort of, I'm now 30. And as I've moved towards becoming 30, I think there's been a shift as I sort of, I'm now 30 and as I've moved towards becoming 30 I think there's been a shift as I think maybe a lot of people experience. Yeah I've had a mellowing definitely. Yeah a real mellowing. It's been very accelerated over the last like two years now as I'm about to hit 30 I'm like I've never been so soft. We just talked about forgiveness and forgiving yourself. This is a perfect segue onto I'm in big trouble. Which is obviously our dilemma section, which you loved last time.

I can't wait for this. I love this. I was actually thinking, I still think about the woman who is seeking permission to get married, I think about her all the time. We've got two permission seekers today actually lined up. Really? And they're both surgically themed, which is interesting. Okay. So, if you'd like to submit a dilemma, if you'd like to seek our permission, go to Ash,

what's the email address? to Ash, what's the email address? Every episode we forget our own email address, which is Hmm... I want to sort of give you a hug. I think there's so much self-judgment and so much going on for you that I just, I think the messages of that things have to be empowering for us to do them can be so damaging because I think a lot of actions, you know, is lit. The question is lip filler of feminist act. The problem is it's like probably not, but it's also not that unfeminist either. It's sort of approach is a kind of neutral, something closer to neutrality. And in order to rid yourself of shame, you don't need to say this is super empowering. You can just kind of accept the really complicated circumstances

that you're in that sometimes means that you're a person living with the weight of expectation on you, particularly as someone who's 37 and having questions of fertility, that, you know, getting a bit of lip filler is it's okay. It doesn't make you a bad person. I have lots of thoughts. Ash, do you have thoughts first though? Mm-hmm. Okay. Mm-hmm.... Mm-hmm. I'm sorry. Okay. if I'm sorry. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Ready for my toxic take? Um, what did you say, Ash?

No, absolutely not. Right. Here's my toxic take. I don't think you actually wanted lip filler at all. I think you wanted to change the color of your hair or a facelift. I think you want to do something post breakup that made you feel like there's a delineation between the person that had the breakup and all that pain and new person in the past that would have simply been doing something crazy. Your eyebrows will change your hair because we didn't have access to

something like lip filler. It might have been going hog wild on Vinted and buying a load of clothes that you didn't actually like and would be in charity in five minutes. Just talking from personal experience. But the problem is we now have access to a wider range of consumerist practices that allow us to escape from our pain. And more and more, tweakments are part of that. us to escape from our pain. And more and more, tweakments are part of that. If you actually wanted to confront your fears of aging through cosmetic surgery, you would save up and get a facelift. And I say that in the most like, that's, that's sometimes really mental toxic. I'm not saying get a facelift. I'm saying if you actually care about aging and you wanted to target the,

what aging does to the face, you would get a facel lift. Lip filler, I'm so sorry to say this, for me lip filler falls into the same category as fake tan. 99% of people look shit with it. It doesn't stop anti-aging, it doesn't like combat any of these effects, it does nothing to things like wrinkles or anything like that. If you wanted to go like meld those goals of anti-aging

and slightly unhealthy response to the pressures in your life, you'd go Botox. You'd go Botox. But Lipfiller was there. It was there and as you say, it was an impulsive purchase. Lipfiller literally does not do anything to combat any signs of aging. It just makes your lips look puffy. And I don't say that to shame you. I'm sure it looks fine. But I personally see Lipf filler and fake tan as sort of expressions of the same thing. Yeah, you know, can I say? Yeah,

come in. Come on. No, no, no, no, please. Please, please keep going. So randomly tinkering with your appearance, and the more that you randomize the things that you do, the less satisfied you will be. And I think that's why you're feeling so much like shame and you're feeling so bad about it is because it wasn't like an intentional choice. It was a spur of the moment. I'm just going to do this. It's not even that it violates all these different principles you have. It's that there was no thought behind it. And so you couldn't back it up. It's like we talked about a previous episode. There's like, there's not the intention.

You don't have the reasoning behind it. You haven't said, okay, these are the reasons I'm going to do this. It doesn't matter if it's not like a feminist practice, but this is how I'm going to feel it's because you would just like scatter gun. What do I do? I'm going to do this. I dyed my hair blonde last summer. It looked fucking crazy, but I still did it. And I like, I had the reasons behind it. So I was like, yeah, great. Fine. I know I'm doing this. And then I got rid of it when it was no longer serving me. Got to get rid of the red when it no longer serves me because it kind of washes me out. But I feel fine about it because there's reasons behind why I made these choices. I considered them. I considered the options. I didn't just walk into someone and go,

this is going to make me feel better. However, when I do my vintage binges, when I buy three rugby style tops and vintage in one evening because I'm feeling bad, that does not make me feel good and when they come I feel ashamed and I put them away and I don't look at them until I get them out to take them to the charity shop. So I think you need to really consider the aims of what you're actually trying to achieve with this. I agree with everything everyone else has said about like not attaching morality to it but you also have to go in with intention. Don't just get the scatter gun lip filler. Yeah I think the last time I went through a breakup I did a half marathon and sustained a really bad knee injury.

And I honestly wish I just got that filler. But there's a sense of which, you know, floundering fish is expending a lot of thought regarding this. And I think, you know, thought isn't a bad thing. But I think you can have these thoughts of whether it feels right to you without the degree of self-judgment that's really wrapped up in the question and to free yourself from the heavy hand of your own judgment when you're deciding how to move forward. I think these thoughts are important and these thoughts that you're having in relation to whether, you know, succumbing to these patriarchal forces is worth it.

It's actually a step forward in learning how to accept aging and accepting who you are and how your face will change. But I also don't think that in order to read, you're not going to whip yourself into that point. This is a slow process in which you learn what you feel comfortable with, what's it right with you and what doesn't. And so just see the lip filler as another test

for how you should be feeling. And rather than thinking, am I a bad person? You should actually be thinking, how do I feel? And sit with your emotions and be guided by those rather than your judgment. It doesn't sound from your letter that you've enjoyed the process of getting lip filler. So get your nose pissed.

Let's do our next dilemma. Okay, I'm gonna read this out. I do want to read it out, especially because the opening has a great little like, I think it's a pun. Maybe I've got this wrong, but it's a good little joke, ready? Dear Ash and Moya,

thank you for giving me something to look forward to on my commute to work and for giving some solid advice. Your finger is so firmly on the cultural pulse that the culture is having circulation issues. I love that. Onto my dilemma. I am a trans woman, nearly 25, who has been on feminizing hormones for four years now. Due to obscene wait times on the NHS, I initially used private healthcare to supply my hormones, but have since had to switch to cheaper, shadier options as costs were too high.

Despite being able to transition hormonally and being widely accepted by my local community, I experienced a lot of dysphoria from still having male genitalia. This dysphoria means that I struggle to have sex due to discomfort with this aspect of my body and the mismatch it creates. I've only had sex once since I quit drinking 10 months ago and found the experience uncomfortable, my anatomy being a big reason why. This is on top of a general feeling of disharmony and dysphoria that having the body I do creates.

Furthermore, my genitals are a source of major transition anxiety. If I were to lose access to my hormones, for example, if the UK's law around transition changes, or if my method of supply goes under or is criminalized, my existing genitalia would produce testosterone again and undo my transition, an outcome I cannot tolerate. Similarly, having male genitalia means if incarcerated, I could be put in a men's prison

and likely denied access to my hormones based on current CPS guidelines I'm on the waiting list for gender identity clinic, which would in theory allow me to access bottom surgery to grant me the genitalia I want but my first appointment is years off with a surgery referral requiring me to wait even longer I don't trust that starmer's labor or future government would not make such a surgery illegal or hard to access while I wait as we've Already seen with the indefinite ban on puberty blockers. This brings me to my dilemma. When my grandparents died a few years ago, I got a decent inheritance, which I have stored

in savings. My mother, who has never supported my transition, but at this point accepts that I am going to remain a woman, told me very clearly the money is only to be spent on buying a house. My grandparents would not have wanted it to be spent on anything else. These are her words. But the money, in theory, would be good enough to give me good, afford good quality bottom surgery abroad, giving me a body I'd be much happier in, as well as greater transition security. If I had to choose between owning a house and having the genitals I want, I would honestly choose the latter. I'm single, work a low middle income admin

job and don't see myself being in position to buy any time soon. So this said being said I'm worried this would ruin any chance of I have of owning a home which is something that would bring me material security later on and it might ruin the relationship I'm slowly trying to rebuild with my mother since coming out. So what should I choose? Do I take the safe option and save the money for a house by doing time in the hope that I can get surgery in the NHS? Or should I choose my own fulfillment and brave the consequences? Sincerely, a special one with a very niche dilemma. What are our thoughts? What are our thoughts? What are our thoughts? So might I be placed to jump in?

Please jump in. I mean, it's a plot point in the book. It's a plot point in the book. Yeah, absolutely. So I, there's so much to that question. The first is the relationship to your mother, to which I will say the relationship with your mother will never get to the place where you want it to be if it's one built on resentment on your end for the ways in which your mother continuing on into your adulthood as a 25 year old woman continues to restrict your autonomy. And it's really her responsibility to accept what you want to do with your body. And I don't think you choosing to use that money the way that you would like to use it is going to cause long lasting harm to your relationship with your mother, though I can't

speak on that definitively. But I just think there's going to have to be a shift in her thinking regardless. And whether that shift in her thinking happens now or in two years time, that shift of thinking is going to have to accommodate you having a vagina, regardless of how you fund it, and accepting that you want to do that with your body.

And I think that the money is sort of the second question of that. The next part is practical advice. And what's also so funny is that when me and my, I have friends who have spoken about this with, and we always refer to bottom surgery as getting the basement redone and any facial, any facial surgery as like getting the living room redecorated. And so the loft conversion is your brow bone. So I think with this, I think I would honestly look into going to Thailand because Thailand has the best surgeon,

we're all aware of the soup horn clinic, which every girl wants to get into, but there are fantastic surgeons in Thailand who do it at a much higher standard or equivalent standard to surgeons in the UK at a fraction of the cost. And so it's possible that you will be able to have your basement redone and also by the cost. And so it's possible that you will be able to have your basement redone and also buy the house. And that's the practical element of that advice.

Double houses. Yeah, exactly. Double house. Yeah. Buy to learn. Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay. if if Okay. Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would add to that is, what is the point of existing in a house that you're absolutely miserable in? Like, what is the point? If you feel life is so curtailed by something, what is the point of buying then just four walls

to feel curtailed further in? Like, at the moment you say this is restricting your quality of life to the degree, you can't participate fully socially. And I also think from the sounds of it, if you use the money for this, and I'm gonna give you full permission, I'm gonna say go fuck and use the money as you wish,

which seems like what your letter's asking for. Yeah, it sounds also like that could change also the outcomes within your life and how you participate. You never know what is gonna happen when you start living fully. The only other thing I would say is a quote that stuck with me from Sean Fay's recent book, Love and Exile, where she says basically,

often you think when you reach the sort of like end or the point of a physical transition, that's it. You're like, that's it, my life is gonna come together. Actually, that's the beginning. So,, that's it, my life is gonna come together. Actually, that's the beginning. So, you know, this might not just be the point where you're like, everything's gonna come together and suddenly all these other things that we've talked about,

like the relationship with my mother, you know, my feelings, all of that will just be sort of like fixed and harmonious. That's the point when you actually have the permission to go ahead and live your life fully, but that comes with all these other bits that probably right now you're in like the survival mode and then you'll feel the full raw technicolor of emotional bits that don't actually have that much to do with

what genitalia you have and have a lot more just to do with you as a person that's the only other thing i would say gang do we feel like we've would say. Gang, do we feel like we've given enough advice? Do we feel we've discussed enough today? Yeah. Yes. And more importantly, I forgive myself. Yeah, I forgive myself too. A round of forgiveness for ourselves. This has been If I Speak with Nicola Dynam. Disappoint Me is out now. You can go and purchase it from any good booksh- bookshop? Any good bookshop.

A bookshop. And some of the more nefarious ones too. We will see you next week. Bye! Thank you.