Alice Cowling | Getty
From behind the privacy curtain, a doctor is telling Sophia to take off her knickers and trousers. She obliges while taking great shaking sobs. Trembling, she lies down and opens her legs. The doctor returns and begins looking for a thin membrane of crescent-shaped skin a few inches into Sophia’s vagina.
This isn’t how Sophia thought today would go. Her mum had promised a day of shopping and lunch on London’s Oxford street, providing a welcome respite from usual life with her stern parents. At 19, her parents still wouldn’t let Sophia go anywhere without their permission, demanding she come straight home from school and making plans for her to be married to someone of their choosing. “They would have gone mad if they knew I had a boyfriend,” she says. “They were talking about me getting married to a different guy, but his family wanted to make sure I was ‘pure’. They wanted proof I had never had sex.”
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‘So, what do you do?’
It was Sarah’s last dinner party before lockdown, and someone she didn’t yet know had turned to her from their left, ready to engage in a predicable flow of small talk. Irrespective of her response, he would reply ‘Oh nice, how long have you worked there?’ and ‘Oh cool. What are your colleagues like?’ before proceeding to drone on about his long hours, big pay cheque and annoying boss.
Alice Cowling | Getty
Discovering you’re pregnant with your first baby in the middle of a pandemic is a surreal experience. There’s the frantic Amazon Prime-ing of pregnancy tests, the burgeoning bump growing out of sight on work Zoom calls, the necessity of delivering your giddy, life-changing news to friends and family over the phone. And that’s before I even mention the utter weirdness of an actual tiny human rolling around inside you while the world implodes.
Of course, when you plan to get pregnant during such a bizarre time (as I did), you have to take some of these inevitable consequences on the chin. Over the past few months, we’ve all had our freedoms curtailed. That’s the deal when it comes to keeping ourselves and the people we love safe.
Alice Cowling | Getty
Given that we re back in lockdown, it s easier than ever to slip into a cycle of doomscrolling, swiping and screen-staring morning, noon and night (same). Hey, it s not like there s a whole tonne else to be doing. right? But if you re starting to feel like your phone habits are more in control of you than you are of them, it could be worth seeing if you re showing any of the signs of phone addiction. Yup, it s a thing.
Pamela Roberts, a Priory psychotherapist at the Priory’s Woking Hospital in Surrey, explains that it s not only substances, but behaviours, that can leave you trapped in a vicious cycle. We are increasingly aware that behaviours, not just substances, can become addictive, and this raises the question of whether a phone is ‘addictive’ (and certainly smartphone apps are built to encourage more-ish behaviour), or whether the person has an addictive personality.