The Head Girl Who Couldn't Pass English

Through July, we sat together in the tender country of healing from grief and trauma. We did not rush it, and I hope it left something quiet and good in you, as it did in me.

This month I want to walk us somewhere that will surprise a few of you — to technology, and to AI, and to the screens and tools so many of us in this community regard with a wary eye. I can already feel some of you raising an eyebrow. Faith. Really. That? Yes. That. Because for the next three letters I want to explore, slowly and honestly, how even this — the most modern, most suspicious-making thing in our lives — weaves its way into wisdom. Trust me a little. It always comes back to the same place: how we love, how we’re seen, how we stay close to what matters. It just arrived this month, wearing an unexpected coat.

So let me begin the way I always do — with the thing I am least proud of.

I was head girl.

Say it the way it sounds on paper — Head girl — and you picture a certain kind of young woman. Poised. Articulate. The one the headmistress trusts to speak for the whole school, to stand at the front on speech day and not let the side down. I was that girl. I had the badge, the blazer, and the responsibility for it.

And I had not passed my O-level in English.

I want you to sit in the strangeness of that with me, because I lived in the strangeness of it for years. The girl chosen to represent the school could not, on paper, prove she had command of the language she was representing it in. English was not my first language. I came to it, and it never quite came to me — not the grammar, anyway, not the rules that other people seemed to have swallowed whole in the cradle. I could think. I could feel. I could stand in front of a room and hold it. But ask me to lay a sentence out on a page with every comma in its lawful place, and something in me shrank.

I remember the day my headmistress found out. The particular quality of her surprise. You? But you’re the head girl. She did not mean to wound me. She was simply astonished, the way you’re astonished when two things you assumed went together turn out not to. But I heard it the way that other, older wound in me has always taught me to hear things — as exposure. As the tap on the shoulder, I had been braced for my whole life. There it is. They’ve found you out.

If you’ve read me before, you know I have a name for that feeling now. Impostor syndrome, the loyal companion of a woman who decided very young that anything good about her was provisional and could be revoked. For decades, I never connected it to the little girl I’ve told you about — the one left behind, the one who learned to keep proving, keep earning, never rest. But it was the same voice. It just wore a different costume when it came for my writing.

Because here is the tender contradiction I have carried my whole life: I love the way I write, and I have never once trusted it.

I do. I love my own voice on the page. I know its rhythm. I know when a sentence lands and when it limps. I have something to say and a particular way of saying it that is mine and no one else’s. And yet for most of my life I could not let anyone see it unguarded, because I was certain that somewhere in it there was a misplaced apostrophe waiting to betray me — to announce, in one small ungrammatical breath, that the head girl was a fraud after all.

So I did what the frightened do. I found someone to stand between me and the exposure.

For years, that someone was Mat. My partner. He is a fine editor, and he loved me, and so he became the pair of eyes on everything before it went out into the world — including, for a long time, our Silver Sirens newsletters. Every letter I wrote to our community of women passed under his red pen before it reached them.

And I have to be honest with you about how that felt, because honesty is the whole contract of this page. It felt like letting a man into the women’s room.

Silver Sirens is women’s business. It is the secret, sacred, slightly mischievous business of women in midlife and beyond, and I write to that room the way you speak when the men have gone home, and the good conversation finally starts. To have every one of those letters read first by a man I love — it was never unkind, and he was never anything but generous. But something in it chafed. I was handing over the keys to a room I’d built precisely so that we could be unwatched in it. I told myself it was the price of not being caught out. It was, I can see now, the wound choosing surveillance over exposure, every single time.

Then, about five years ago, something small changed everything.

I found Grammarly.

I know. It’s not a burning bush. It’s a little piece of software that underlines your mistakes in red and suggests you might mean ‘its’ rather than ‘it’s’. But for me, it was the first time in my life I could check my own work without handing it to another human being and waiting, heart in mouth, for the verdict. The correction came without a face. Without surprise. Without you? But you’re the head girl. Just a quiet, patient machine saying: here, this one — try it this way.

Reader, I could have wept. I had my room back.

That was my first meeting with what we now grandly call AI, though it didn’t announce itself as such. And it began the way the most important things in my life have a habit of beginning, not with confidence, but with the relief of no longer having to perform it.

So let me say plainly what this series is, and what it isn’t. I am not here to sell you anything, and I am certainly not here to tell you a machine can write your letters for you. What these tools gave me was not a voice. I already had the voice. What they gave me was the confidence to stop hiding it. The grammar was never the thing. The grammar was the excuse the wound used to keep me silent, or to keep a chaperone at the door. Take away the fear of the misplaced comma, and what’s left is just me, my rhythm, my mischief, my thinking, finally allowed out without a bodyguard.

Now. Some of you will want to know exactly how an old therapist uses these tools to write to you each week. And here I’m going to be a little bit of a witch about it, because every woman is entitled to her mysteries. I will tell you this much: the thinking is mine, the feeling is mine, the wound and the wisdom are mine, and every word still has to pass the only test that matters. In my AI editing, I always ask the question -Does this sound like Faith, or does it sound like a machine wearing Faith’s coat? If it’s the second one, it goes in the bin.

In my final year at school, the head girl finally passed English. Not by learning every rule. By finding, at sixty-something, a quiet way to stop being afraid of them.

The tool never gave me my voice. It gave me the courage to stop apologising for it.

A few questions to sit with this week, in your own good time:

Where in your own life have you loved something you made — a way of speaking, cooking, mothering, working — and yet never quite let yourself trust it? What is the small “misplaced comma” you’re still braced to be caught out by?

Think of a moment someone stood between you and being fully seen — a chaperone at the door of a room you’d built for yourself. Was it protection, or was it the old wound choosing surveillance over exposure? And what might it feel like to have that room back?

And if you could set down one thing you’ve been performing — one place where you keep proving, keep earning, keep guarding the door — what would you do with the quiet that’s left?

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

This week the ritual has been writing my morning pages by hand, on paper, before I touch a single screen. There is something I don’t want to lose in all this talk of clever tools: the feel of my own untidy handwriting, grammar be damned, nobody watching, nothing underlined in red. I write three pages of whatever is in me — misspelled, run-on, gloriously wrong — and only later, when it’s time to speak to you, do I bring in any help at all. The wild first draft stays entirely, unapologetically mine. It’s how I remember that the voice was always the point, and everything else is just the door I walk it through.