HeyJaredFlare and Flair
Real talk for the ambitious-but-exhausted: chronic illness, burnout, and still showing up.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 14
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Aug 4, 2026
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My Children Tell Me Everything. Unfortunately. (opens the original)
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There are things I know about my children’s sex lives that I firmly believe no mother should ever have to know. Things I cannot unknow. I’ve had to sit there with my face arranged into a neutral expression while internally screaming, because apparently that’s what being a supportive parent involves.In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to tell you that this is entirely my own fault. Sex has never, and will never, be a taboo subject in my house and my kids know they can ask me anything. Unfort
I Thought I’d Be More Impressive By Now (opens the original)
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I have spent most of my life with the absolute certainty that I am meant to do something big. I have no idea what this big thing is, which is… inconvenient. There was no prophecy at my birth, nobody held me aloft like Simba and announced that I would one day achieve greatness, and I couldn’t actually tell you what would need to happen for me to consider the big thing officially done. I have just always believed, somewhere deep down, that I have more in me.The problem is that I am 42 now, and I d
5 Questions with... Steph Cullen (opens the original)
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Welcome to 5 Questions with..., an ongoing Flare and Flair series introducing writers I think deserve a much bigger audience.One of my favourite things about Substack is discovering publications I might never otherwise have found. Some make me laugh, some make me think, and some completely change the way I see the world. This series is my way of passing those discoveries on.Rather than asking every guest the same questions, I spend time reading their work and tailor each interview to the themes
Some People Got Unconditional Love. I Got a Work Ethic. (opens the original)
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I am absolutely terrible at rejection. Not in a cute, oh I hate being told no kind of way. I mean it can properly fuck me up. Embarrassing, I know.I’m 42 years old. I have three adult children, a career, a mortgage and enough actual problems that whether somebody likes me really shouldn’t make the top 20. And yet rejection has always had a disproportionate amount of power over me.I learned very young what it felt like not to be chosen. There are parts of my childhood I don’t write about publicly
Motherhood Was Never Going to Be Enough for Me (opens the original)
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I have never, ever understood women who say their children are their whole world. I find it utterly boring, in fact. There you go. I’ve said it.I have three of them and I bloody adore them, would walk over hot coals for them, have lost untold hours of sleep worrying about them and spent an absolutely offensive amount of money raising them. But my whole world? No, ma’am.I’ve always wanted other things. I’ve always wanted more than being a mum could give me. I don’t know how much of that is just m
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